Formerly at Metahaven
Sometimes writes
Also at: Boros Collection
Formerly at Metahaven
Sometimes writes
Also at: Boros Collection
Notes
I’ve always been afraid of being messy because I guess knew I was. I bring it now with me so tight in my buns, sealing my hair to my scalp so it won’t breathe, or at least with some difficulty, a thirsty sleepwalking child. I jump on my own belly, stepping on it, making it flat. A constant and continued tantrum against my organs, fiercely performed, a beauty queen who lost, passing on her banner.
In the train home, I let my mouth be slightly open when looking at the window, trying to be a dog, or a poet maybe. I touch my throat like a lover would, waiting for my neighbour to notice how lengthy my fingers are. I caress my collarbones, somehow firmly believing that this will make them stick out a bit more — like petting an animal to induce trust. These are real things that happen.
Taking revenge on the child I was I morph into someone that I think would have to wear glasses. The thick ones. I would be forgetting them in between couches and in your beds, removing them slowly before wiping invisible bugs out of my eyes. I would have a wardrobe grown brown, rested and indifferent. Parents expecting the upmost, the very best, the delighted and the delightful.
Stuccoed in the middle, like peas served with boxed wine, I am learning to accept the seat I took. Craving to be filled and flat altogether, my womb focusing on not hearing the children I think I want or the children I think I deserve. Thinking about body distortion and time consumption, desperately fixing my feet on the floor, attempting to belong to my time, and to my leisure. Not fully realising no one can see inside my view.
Writing is the thing of games
The obligation of dialogue
With itself
could have got me
a grateful lover
whooping
and standing
hissing
and tooting
but like easy wives
I expect nothing
my woman is unyielding
she wants long hair
like hash browns
perfume-choked,
her belly is a tyrant
weeping for labor
she’s birdlike
combed and nested
plays dumb
today I got her a lovely coffin
made of chalk, fruit
and white cream
my boyishness a mantlepiece
sleepy yet irreversible
pursed in between my lips
neither sloppy nor mobile
she’s a real working man
rawboned, jagged and serious
with hollow cheeks, ropy guts
and a hanky in the back pocket
rigid and embarrassed,
only one morning I have been myself
trying hard to love ribbons
lace and baby dogs
the amassing of things is my god sent
a wish jolted by time
like remains of confetti
and their slightly wounded look
once I had a body
I could choke you with it
carefully hidden
under lacy bodice
a pale and large girdle
the most well-guarded secret
I have ever had
my squatty,
low-husk voice
made me preserved
and alive
as i fold my breast
into manly nipples
I learn to chop
my curves in halves
pretending that my body can be silent
I too am learning to have a good time
without necessity and without importance
My screensaver a wooden piece, a loud case against having any loved one displayed where I get my bank notifications. Another revenge on my incapacity to read time, the right and the left, as my own emotions.
Who do I care for
Munching my words
And my stories
One must love somebody I suppose
My homeless mouth
childhood
a humiliating body without importance
dog walkers unknowingly keeping me safe at night
other lonely women knowingly so
feeling so undesirable
between youth and strictness
holding my jaw a certain way
attractive to me but to who else
but the older man reading further
in the patio where I lay
ageless, or rather
age-full
like a dog walking the aisle of the bus, looking for anything but a bone, breathing heavy and forced to look in corners: the foreign yet familiar language of being told to search
I think I always want my fist to be open
scooping
For Arts of the Working Class, Issue 20: Over My Dead Body
Adorning Ourselves on Burning Ground
The water that burned my chest
sleeps under close, ripping flesh.
It is still there, underneath the ceiling of your bathroom where bored, we used to stargaze for hours. Looking longer, the white tiles of the plaster would turn into kingdoms and the fan would rule the laws of the tiny houses of the dome. The furniture would gawk at our little goofy eyes googling at the washing powder and shampoo like gemstones. Puddles of water would form on the nippy, one-dog night floor. Our bouncy castle built on a numbing stage.
A few years later you dreamt to flea the house, to forget about sunscreen and bath soups.
To wear sneakers and logo blouses.
You wanted the edible, the sticky, the meat and the flesh — all bombs and bullets all flesh and stones, all flinging bits of dead animals turned into jackets. You asked for it several times as I kept telling you to look at the softener once more, begging you to analyze the scratches of the sink again. But you grew feeble to leave in the lurch our mellow home and its smells. The plexiglass of the kitchen table too small for more than two plates. Mustard pots turned wine glasses, and the luxury of slammed doors.
The fuzzy gap that was the age between us became the bitter pain of watching you grow. One time you listened and the story you heard was yours. A seasoned tale of muscles and steel. Suddenly all in the world was looking at you and merging in your own particular form, mimicking your angles, brushing their hair like yours. Twinning your allure without shame. The deluge of the masses took your emblem and squashed it in the shambles of everything you thought you knew.
Clinging like ivy the feeling never passed and everywhere you went the jam-packed air danced like you. Pasting your skin — filtering your teeth, clogging your throat. The phony absurdity of our lives came to your morals. Truth hit you as a blood-drunk dog. You told me your name rested in clammy ponds, in the foolish screams of the heartbroken, in open wounds we all scratched too many times.
Maybe that was the call back that made you regret the loafers on the doormat, the humid air desperately brassed by the crackling fan. Continuously floating dust bunnies sultry from the sweat of passing men. The loud and foggy breath of our horses waiting for the night to end. I say to you: I’ll be eternally sorry that you were raised by crows of sugar. I think to myself: I got reminded of it because of the way you loved broken glass so much.
The wreck.
The eyesore of the places you go to.
I know it is just the sweetness of you.
I do know it very well but even then, every hit is still sagging my breast. Even if balmy, even if nectarious, even if saccharine.
Cutting breath because so raw, so umbrageous and crushed between a silent sob and unknown waters.
I say to you, again : i’ll be eternally sorry, and I’ll try to keep in mind the jam that you never had. The smells you never got because your nose was too busy being disfigured by the ones around you at that time. A hodgepodge of miniatures egos, tight-fisted and oh so green-eyed of your ability to weep.
And so you went and sang lemongrass to your kids before they went to sleep because you knew wildcats and their need for boredom. You knew the pleasure of letting hay leave mark on our bodies when lying too long in the fields. There, the skin on our knees would eventually get back in shape but for a moment, for a small glimpse, the crust of ours had the allure of lilies and we were the soil, we were the humid clouds and we were the loud voice of water between stones. Like tiny filaments of barley and wheat. A thrill.
For this moment we knew no history and death was only imagination. Flakes of dirt were our only surrounding and no scream, no pamphlet, or no howl could get to us. The catterwaul of simply being here was just too loud. For this moment only we were creatures of the wind, pocket-sized critters and burly trees.
Bobbing up and down, silk strollers and baby booms. You left me with no embrace but a cold hard look,
like the one fathers have when they buy cigarettes.
Sitting in the dark with strangers I often think of the spongy shorts you wore that morning. I always wondered if you wore them these entire years of absence. If the fibers of the fabric got shabby from the road, turning like the old rope of the tired gardens kids play in when the sun is almost down and women start drinking.
The shorts became a peephole, lingering into my own boredom and into my own childhood. The fabric was calling to a time that was once habited with golden but that juice got squeezed in so many lonely times, vanishing into the confluence of our separate lives. Emptying out cheeks from blush when looking back at my stones collection.
Like a geologist I would search for details of a past that was never there, drilling your absence all over my shoulders like the agave syrup gliding on wet cherries, bathroom tiles inevitably welcoming your water soaked hair like shaken pebbles.
Bobbing up and down, silk strollers and baby booms. You left me with no embrace but a cold hard look, and three coyotes would build house better than we did you said.
And somehow your absence ended up being the strangeness without which romance cannot be. Plucked and stained, my pillow felt like the burned giant, the one who tried to be good so hard it ended up like the salt stuck behind your nails, the reminder of good memories and the fuming failure of their complete abstraction over time.
A few years after, unreliable spices became my habit. The same way I would tell the alphabet upside down, the awkward wrongness of my state was your name spelled backwards.
And as I eventually learned, your silence was nothing grandiose. Looking deeper it looked like it was almost devoid of color. Only a rough domestic order, tightly sprung and inhibited. Un-celebrated birthdays and a way too big motherhood would mix together like taking pills and plucking eyebrows.
Pears silently rotting in the back of the garden, I would listen with sparkling cold fingers the tale of the lost boys. The ones believing in the Italian blood turning cold hard like lava rocks, the one bringing good luck and appetite to the braves. Drying and dying in the sun like involuntary single car wheels.
A timed light where no one looks when the dog is gone.
Back in my moon palace, I would blind eye to anything that smelled like it could be broken, as if egg shells would give me bones of foam just by looking at them. Mainwhile stains of macadamia nuts would stick to the ground for centuries and peanuts still tasted the same — And how frustrating and useless things are when not touched by the biggest events in our lives.
Later you came back to yourself without ease. You had grown stiff and heavy and the skin of yours became weak as an old man. My jumpy gestures came to be dusty and untouched when confronted to your mopes. Your hips would not spin except for the stodgy rhythm of your morning train.
Your jade face ended up like a leather jacket you forgot to wear but still smells strong, used lips that chapstick cannot fix. That morning the air was purple and filled with smoke, pine trees would smell like caramel custard and burned chickpeas. And somehow, at that point, the unbridled endlessness that would evaporate from the oven suddenly faded. Yogurt cakes and indistinct barking ran down through the mist. Distorted children sounds grew pale back in the red mountains where people crave their names and the ones of their lost loves.
That morning, I did not believed what I saw, and so I forgot it. That morning your spongy shorts never left. And because boats did not made you sob anymore I just thought I lost you forever.
I dream of growing loud
Heavy trinkets
And the violence of them meeting each other
Passing slowly through the moving hallway
Looking for nothing
Touching with the tip of my finger
The head of the train seats
The same touch we use
When consoling a child
Flicking through their hair
The way you would have embroidered your chair if we would have let you. Only understanding others in loudness, in repetition of banal things. Talking about heating or fibres or the right shampoos. You would discuss the most dramatic events with me as if it was the evening news: a sad story sure, but a story before anything else, that starts, climaxes and ends. Collecting tales of domestic abuse, rudeness, or suicide as if they were pins, to throw on the table after one too many glasses for people to see, for people to gasp.
An arranged wedding, a life in between twelve or forty walls. Remembering dances, and the one lover you could not marry, who’s now being made fun of at the table, between sons and daughters. It made me think of J; thinking he would be happy in such an arrangement maybe. I think about how can you not be disgusted by the reflection of your own hands on someone else’s body.