Something Shiny

A dark kitchen in a crowded place

A series of figures snipped out of paper

Spanning out in front of me then

wrapping around my neck

Jagged little edges around oval heads

The length varies the hair varies but in the kitchen in the dark at the party where you are

where you are for the first time in months,

all the bodies look the same.

Sleep cues the chorus of a thousand greeting mouths

A thousand coiling hands in that valley of my back

And I wish I could find myself when I was fourteen
and kick myself in the face.

Track myself down to the cusp of the inlet

At the edge of the gravel at the end of my jog

And push myself into the water.

Myself when I was fourteen

and content to be destroyed.

Waiting for the ocean vacuumed up

For a swing set ground to chalk

Sitting in dramatic places, imagining the chunks of them

The morsels discarded in the wake of some satisfactory atrophy.

Because I thought then that I knew then

that sadness was a tunnel-

a link from one place to the next.

That sadness was a cellophane wrap of circumstance

and with probing fingernails I could release the innards

from their wicked sealed constraint

I could pluck out something shiny.

And here I'm looking into a dust that will not rediscover form,

Being forced into the understanding

That sometimes love, when fastened to loss, is not cathartic.

That sometimes destruction breeds only

Irrelevance.

In a dark kitchen in a crowded place

I struggle with a wrapper to distract myself from you

From you from you from you and your cheerful disregard-

The projection of your smirk on all the paper dolls.

The wrapper nags at my hands, catches at my teeth and finally slices open.

I navigate the inside edge but cannot find its contents

And I know now what I know now what I don’t want to know now

That sadness is the pocket of air

inflating all that I could have sworn 

was solid.

Synching

I keep gnawing at my own hands
My teeth lined and at the ready
gathered up like school children to march with
shells to dig with
a body to live with
And you're shaking me while I yank myself like a wishbone 
at the end of the night
at the end of the dinner at the restaurant where we've gotten so goddamn dressed up
self-made nooses pausing at necks
and my waist squished into circles
under bands
like a twist tie, synching me together
holding in the contents
fighting back my urge to scatter wild across the tile
Stop it. Stop tugging at my arm.
Stop stitching up my fingers
The gauze bleeds in rorsharch flashes
and i'm guessing at the ink
i'm trying to see what you want me to see
but it's just blood
and you're just a man
a pair of lips
and crisp suited edges

Jessa

Jessa uncoils her tightened bow-legs, the tenseness of her muscles coursing with every moment. The Westminster County Library has a bizarre buzz at this time of night, and the fluorescent square lights checkering the ceiling seem rudely dishonest as they parallel the darkened windows. Atop her desk, a pile of unopened textbooks, and beneath it, her ratted sneakers wedged together in the dip of a chair. She stares at a misshapen apple and contemplates motion. Yet with the prolonged ache of her thighs from her mid-morning run, she has barely enough resolve to fidget in her seat.

The last time Jessa had been to this catacomb of books, she had sworn never to return. She had sworn to reverse her unwilling memorization of each aisle, each bug-slaughtering bulb of light. Her tiny body coated in cold droplets of crystallizing sweat and panting across fields of puke-colored carpet. Panting towards nothing, no one in particular.

And yet somehow the boomerang universe has spoken. Somehow she is here and she has always been in some state of here, it seems to her now. Even in the years she’s tried to label “healthy” and far-removed. She snatches the apple and plunges her asymmetrical teeth into its flesh. The satisfying crunch fills the void of the buzzing, open room.

Jessa has never been a devout fan of silences. In cars, in hallways, in choppy, forced conversations. In the white noise moments of radio leading into a new song. She has made it her business to fill these spaces with often embarrassing monologues, much to the discomfort of the more socially-relaxed witnesses around her. The propagators of intense introversion, the window-looker-outers. The well-adjusted friends.

But here, in the nakedness of etiquette, Jessa has no choice but to crunch bits of fruit in the rivets of her teeth, praying each morsel will harness more decibels than the one before.

What caused her swift left turn into the humbled library parking lot, she cannot venture a guess. Past the tattered elementary school, past the strip mall where she’d once bummed cigarettes from any and all sunken faces that passed by. Past the asbestos-ridden cinema and its halfway-lit, halfway-fallen sign, like alphabet soup on fire. She had remained in her car in the lot for a minute or two, relishing the roar of the exhaust as it blended with waves of electric guitar. But then she’d jumped, she’d rushed through automatic doors, as if by a force of nature, and crash-test-dummy collapsed herself into the nearest wooden chair.

She must have been sitting directly across from here when it happened. Neon murder mystery novel splayed carelessly on ripped jeans, pinks and greens framing pages of bubbly text. Her father resigned to his maroon armrest, leaning over his laptop across from her awkward, pre-pubescent body. Jessa was stuck somewhere in the plot. Somewhere she crouched in a wetted back alley alongside the narrator, the two of them panicking and watching the approach of a shadowed suspect, an exaggerated figure beneath trench coat and wielded knife. Jessa swallowed hard at the three borders of concrete wall and the narrator’s feet quaked aside a rusted dumpster. They had no route of escape, no plan. They had no choice but to wait on the crux of all that was inevitable.

And suddenly Jessa looked up from her book, her father’s lengthened frame catching in the corner of her eye. His body was contorted, pushed all the way to one side of his chair, a tremble running through him as slight as glass bottles on tables. Jessa rushed to him, novel crashing to the carpet, taking in the white moonscapes of his eyes as they locked on the ceiling. He looked just the way no father should look. In dreams or in waking, rounded chairs. Screaming. Now she was screaming. A crowd gathering with fingers trickling over phones. A mushrooming bomb in the base of her gut. 

Was there a second, a ticking of some merciful clock on some merciful wall, was there a chance for you and your hollowed-out voice? Could I have saved you, preserved the spots in your brain before they melted in your head? Could I have asked you a stupid question from a twelve-year-old mind, something insignificant, something that was anything, a cause for you to speak before your body forgot how? -- to get ice cream, to spell a word, to leave the library and go home and read at home and be at home. 

Could I have bound up all your words and bordered them in neon? 

It’s getting late and people are starting to stow things in backpacks. Jessa returns her sneakers to the floor and curls the lip of a sticker from the apple’s spotted skin. Her eyes travel like a search engine through rows of leather bindings. Past families of encyclopedia, past gold indented letters and ladders balancing on wheels. Past published thoughts collected and then scattered once again.

Through a rectangle of space, between two dusted shelves, she catches the subtle sight of maroon fabric. And with her apple browning in hand, under mountain ranges of bite marks, Jessa crunches one hard, final crunch and again contemplates motion.

Two Suns

When you're talking to someone-- an acquaintance, maybe just a stranger--

when you're pretending like it's not too much,

like you can't feel each muscle of your face assuming position,

throwing a net around your social responsibilities, holding them in place,

and preparing you for the script of white lies.

When the someone mentions a drink you two should have, a movie you should see,

Or a stranded day at the beach,

And all you can do is think of this plan in a certain twisted sadness because you know,

even at the start you know,

you will never care enough to follow through.

And yet here is so-and-so detailing a restaurant or a scene,

a thing you will never be a part of.

And suddenly you have this sense of two lives at once

the happening one and the not-gonna-happen

both of them spanning out simultaneously

both of them vividly alive and present

with colors and houses and little bent plants.

Sometimes it is all you can do just to separate these worlds

to know that they are different, to wonder if they should be.

He and you, you lived in both.

For a second there, you marinated in both.

The grasses and the sands still stick to the crevices of your body,

still catch within your ears and pour out onto your fingers.

There were two suns melting and dripping on your towels.

Two tables, two waiters, two salted rounds of drinks.

Two subtle tugs of gravity, magnets for your bones,

and time wanes as it all starts to tear you in half.

And of course it would not last-- these things, they never last--

But for a second there, you almost thought you were able

To live in the place where everything is real and everything exists

and to visit, from time to time,

the place where nothing hurts and everyone always shows up..

Fossils

You keep kissing me and you keep not knowing that

You’re interchangeable. A Friday night. A light streak of bubbles and chapstick residue, crawling across my face.

We sprawl on the wrinkled face of sheets, the tired eyes of the striped black pillows blinking shut beneath our locked heads. A world turned sideways. A different plane altogether.

And here I am in the physical boldness of the font, the screaming act of action.

Here I am feeling myself apart from myself. Again. Criticizing myself. Again. Sitting up and above myself, the hesitant judge at the singer’s audition as her throat quivers and her fingers curl in landslides of sweat. As the thing, the only thing, she has stirred in the corners of her organs, the scales of voice and muscle, as it all pours out before her the wrong way.

By returning it, by the subtle pursing of my lips towards yours, I am trying to prove something of the weight of it all. I am trying to convince you to be unconvinced, to show you the secret before you’ve noticed the mystery.

But maybe if I spread it out, donate the sections of my head, maybe I could crush us all. So I shutthefuckup and I suck on your neck.

You keep smashing your canvas of skin into me and you keep not knowing that

we’re only fossils.

We’re only hollowed imitations of something alive. Intricate rivets of rock and bone and place and time. Wanting the wanting that has long left our bodies.

We are only fossils.

A presence derived from an unmitigated absence.