The Day I Was Born

Maybe it doesn't matter, but maybe I wish that it did.

Traffic trickles in clumsy patterns below the main room window.

The colors are careless and clouded. 

There's something so strange to me about the way a bar looks in the morning-

It's basic structure exactly the same, the stools in place and the tile swept up.

But something in its bones is so utterly misplaced,

a shell of its own scene.

You're still asleep and I am cupping a margarita glass up to the light,

observing the cold curvature of neon-

A string of faces close to the concrete are like the beads of a rosary

A prayer that I haven't yet heard enough to repeat.

My lips curl into motion and then recoil.

Today is the day I was born,

years ago in the dead hours of the night,

and the date repeats itself again

in montages and dusty flashes of the mind.

A cracking cone of light beneath your front door.

A lazy morning song of headaches and dehydration.

You kissed me and you told me not to care.

But you're my friend and he's my friend and the two of you

are best fucking friends.

And I don't understand what you mean when you speak to me,

when you coat me in your blue covers and shiver into the lines of my chest.

So it doesn't matter- so none of this matters-

Here, let's all swim together in one big pool of our own chemicals.

Let's jump from bedroom to bedroom, like superheroes

ascending buildings in the midst of a sleeping city.

Let's kiss everything and love nothing at all.

If it doesn't matter, then tear it all down. 

This room and this street and that bar outside your window.

Hand it all to me in crumbs and pieces

and show me it can be devoured.

Because I don't want to do this again,

I don't want to pick up shells and pretend that they don't make me sad.

Just because something can be both created and destroyed,

doesn't mean the acts are the same.

The Portraiture Alphabet

Do you think maybe it's alive in there?
Like a little creature in a corner in a crate?
The whole of the sky bleeds a white canvas and
my parents smile in their miniature ways.
I think it's still breathing, a hint in the chest.
A pause and a frame, but still movement within itself.

My sister stands like she's seen this before,
her matted shoes hugging onto porcelain ankles
and her torso inverted, flipped away,
like she has already envisioned something apart from us.
And then there's me, a cannonball through the white,
plunging through the afternoon with no regard for my own gravity.
And I can't help thinking that I am something apart from us.
I am the trickling ink from a pen explosion,
not the format, or the intended, tilted cursive.
Not even contained in the pocket of the shirt.

My mother starts, twitches her hands,
like she is trying to pool together the mess,
to bottle it up again,
and pause it in frames.
She wanted to write it out in her own way. Within her own margins.
I think she must have felt the way then that I feel now-
like it's all so fucking terrifying.
Like the planes of ourselves keep layering until
they're too hard to sort or catalog.
I think she must have envied the alphabet.
And it's published, translated, understood permanence.

Maybe the two scenes are synonymous,
pausing and playing,
photographing and feeling?
The way a child grins when the A's and the B's and the C's spill into words.
But can still be taken back out again. Extracted.

The paper corners coiling on the picture lend shade to our bodies.
All bent in alternate directions..
My sister's are the only eyes within clear view,
and they shoot through the texture of the canvas,
away from the puddles of the ink, like they are unafraid of forgetting.
Like they see the letters and they see the sentences and paragraphs,
and they accept them all.
and I envy her for that.
I'm not sure if it's still breathing,
I'm not sure if we're still held within the ribs at all.
But in any event I continue to gather up all the planes
in a corner in a crate
and puncture tiny little holes for air.

Urgency

Let’s pretend you are holding a box. A frustrating box. Your fingers claw at its ends and corners and somehow they meet no entry.You seek out sharp objects and you growl out guttural noises and the box won’t open. You begin to stab at it in a repeated dance of arms. 

Somehow the creases of the cardboard make up an endless surface, a merciless platform for failure. Spectators gather and gawk. You start asking your friends to help and they’re asking their friends to help and no one can open 
the goddamn box. 

In this example I will be the box.

Between your fury and flesh lies the repose. 
A fluctuating chorus of fragile heat and hesitant sizzle and
I can’t feel anything at all.

Your hands turn purple. 
After hours of pushing and pulling you start to beg me, demand me, to open myself or at least split one of my edges, to slice myself into reason. The cardboard crunches into a false sense of hope and the spectators continue to look on. 

There is something that you expect, some response to urgency that you think would be more fitting. A natural order- the contents that follow the box, the flow that follows the ebb. 

More hours pass and your questions turn around. Their shapes flip in cubic rhythm. You begin to check your mailing records. You begin to wonder what you mean to find, or if this box was ever intended for you at all. You begin again in your repeated dance of arms.

I’m sorry, I am. But is there another way of saying what has been said one thousand times?
Is there another space to hold our truths as they fall like bodies?
In chants, in posters, in whispers, in letters,
but never in boxes till now.

When the outward voices crawl in 
And the arms above your head lay like figurines at your side,
Maybe you will see. Maybe you will see.

There is a kind of desperation that transcends the push and pull.
That wraps and bends around itself until its ends are endless.
And knows the silent nature of its space.

Dear Kirsten,

This is Kirsten. 
Maybe I seem to you a dreamy figure, with briefcases and bookshelves and boobs, but I think at this point you have so much more that is foreign to me.

You think of me now as an icon, a milestone to reach, but someday you will find that I am amorphous. That the vision of your 20-something self will never be constant and can never be mapped out. I remember the way you sit and imagine your freckles spilling out across adult features and flirty smiles. And eventually the image shifts and you picture me as edgy, unpractical, spontaneous. You have named me many things, tried to form me in many ways. You put so much pressure on me to have it all figured out. But Kirsten it can't be done.

Pretty soon you will wake up on a family vacation, with Mom and Dad's spherical faces hovering over your morning vision and whispering. Behind them you will notice a blinding sunshine through the sliding glass doors. You will hear them ask why you are smiling, you just woke up why are you smiling, and the hotel sheets will smell of citrus, your tiny body exploring their shape. And then you will hear them say that this is what you always do, this is how you always wake up, and for the first time you will have a sense of the only thing impermeable, unwavering, that you want to keep.

Stop thinking about that mocking question you're always asked. Assholes who ask 8-year-olds for their future professions are still just assholes. Stop spewing out that you'll become a ballerina or a vet or a singer. We both know you don't mean any of it, you're just scared that you need to grasp something and call it yours. 

But stop worrying and pulling your own hair. Because one day you will have the citrus on the bedsheets. And the rest will follow.




<3 Kirsten

Castle Kirsten

Reverse the car and start again.
Run me over and start

again.

You and I, we're always going through the motions

of this doll parade.

Synthetic hair entangling neon lace.

These figures sprawl out on the floor

In their motionless attempts to fill us up.

To act out scenes.

I find myself positioning plastic limbs in ways

we may never move ours.

It's weird, isn't it?

The way I thought up a house and named it my own.

I thought up a family and named it not yours.

You can hardly annoy me if you don't even know me. 

Sloppily sewn flags atop a painted castle.

And gilded picture frames with Barbie portraits.

Your shoulders curl away from me and

the red car traces beneath your hand.

The zig zagging tracks on the tattered carpet look so much to me like passports 

and diaries and college degrees.

Sometimes I have this image of you, torn and ground into clumps of pixels on my screen,

trying to talk to me over miles and miles of white noise,

but the sound goes mute on my computer.

and all I want is to click you back into place.

You're married now.

How the hell are you married now.

Your limbs aren't plastic any longer.

And I'm happy but I can't shake the feeling that we did this all wrong.

Maybe we did this all wrong.

Maybe corvettes and castles are the same fucking thing when you break them into these pixels

and rearrange the colors.

Red over gold. Gold over red. A fusion of the two.

And maybe the elemental squares sprinkled across screens were always the only thing we really needed to fill us up.

Reverse the car and start again.

Pick me up and start 

again.