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.

Because I Would Not Sleep With You

Just because I would not sleep with you, this does not make me a bitch.
There you go again pretending there is a source, an X that marks the spot.
Pretending I hold your world in my callused little hands. Or in the space between my legs.

But it’s like putting a planet inside of a blender. 
Condensing a world to a form more easily held. More easily understood. 
More easily blamed.

Beside me a man pours his problems into a bottle.
Pretending they will fit inside a glass and yeast getaway.
Bright eyed girls on sidewalks, crushing a sky into a wooden bracelet,
riddled with patron saints
and tangible order.

In a pile of sheets/ in a fitness routine/ in these scripts that you write out carefully in your head.
In a word/ label/ curse/ hyphenated name.
In these anchors to ourselves that we come to rely on.

So now I’m a tease because you’re alone and looking for a villain in your story.
But you owe me more than flat characterization.
It is more it will always be more we will always be hungry and we will always pretend that we are full. We congratulate the substance in our stomachs in our guts for its so-called help and we play elaborate games of dress-up with our own philosophies.
An enemy, an addiction would be a luxury wouldn’t it?

But we were not made to be as constellations. 
We were not meant to be definable and immovable.
We are polka dots on a slab of black altogether circling something that may very well be nothing. 
And we don’t connect in sensible/ scientific ways.
The void in your stomach in your gut it is bigger than us it is bigger than blame and excuse,
Than the trite descriptions in the lines of your script.

Lose the pity party/ your theoretical universe/ your fucking “reasons” and “rights”
Ditch it all and-
Be honest.
Listen more.
Be nice.

These are the galaxy. These are the only gravity.

Pretense/ context/ elemental blocks-
The echoed calls that “everyone has their own story”
This all means nothing to me anymore.

I am not a bitch. You are not an asshole. You just want so badly to be.
Cruelty is cold and hard with pointed, measurable corners but-
We’re running off the script and it’s so so much harder for you to accept that
Language is fluid
Sexuality is fluid
History is
Parenting is
Politics and bodies and what you ate for lunch
It is all fluid and
We are all hungry.

Put these all in a blender all at once
and then you will see
what I cannot unsee.

Semifluid

I think I might be underwater.

A crowd screeches overhead, counting back from three,

giggling at my solitary jump with grins 

sewn to their cheeks like yarn.

The pool momentarily condenses, the liquid splintering into wood.

And I keep picturing middle school dance floors 

Awkward limbs stick to sneakers and are pasted, posed in corners.

The chemicals in stasis and not one child dares to move.

I keep thinking of this substance, this thing between liquid and solid

and how we waver between the two but feign definition.

Cell phones light the pathway to my house,

while lightning bugs drown alongside me in the pool.

Rules are rules are rules they say.

So dress nice, smile pretty, scrub your mouth out with coarse soap.

There are so many better words you could say.

I keep wishing I knew how else to speak to the sleeping.

But fuck it, fuck you, fuck your insistence that language is the enemy.

A splash of cold water across your proper face.

Step on me, scathe my skin, 

contort your body into pictures of rooms of people 

who you’ve talked to for years but you’ve never even met.

Yeah, let’s talk about the weather and my course load and the boy across the hall.

Let’s stitch together unicolor faces and yank at all the knots.

Filing cabinets filled with shit, empires filled with cruelty.

But the fit of it all is pleasant, everything is cute and nothing offensive.

So if it sounds like nice and looks like nice, then when is it allowed to just be fucking nice.

I’m glad that I jumped. I’m glad I danced. And I’m glad my mouth was made out of filth.

The water and the wood and my skin,

and pinocchio crying from the shelves of my mind,

begging me to reclaim my flesh, to choose reality.

Bodies around me all sculpted into shapes, rigid and exact,

and the poor dreamer has no idea what he’s saying. 

Count it with me, count it down,

the calories the test scores the boys that I have slept with-

the number of words I can’t say in public,

the venom of words that I say instead.

The measurements that then become the distance.

They push me in the pool and they laugh 

and we all forget, all at once,

that we are already

bodies of water.

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.