February 2012
5 posts
Middle Ground
He said, “Wear blue. It’ll make it better.”
I knew he was laughing at me, but I actually considered it. I thought about it for a long time, but I did not wear blue to the party. I wore an ugly colour that was not blue or green all the way, but sitting somewhere squeamishly in the middle. I wore it, and maybe it was the sickly colour that made me lose my appetite because I did...
Loyalties
blue like the sky is blue absolute motionless but on some days a drawn out gradient resisting itself elongating hesitating
Procedure for the Cultivation of Love
You must dissolve your love in a container. It can be anything: a vial, a glass, or test tube filled with water (or whatever goes down your throat the easiest). You will have to stir it until no trace of it remains — no visible sign of it, no sensation of its grains mixing along with your stirring stick. You must not mix it too quickly; the trick is gradually letting it disappear so that...
What I Do When I Am Not Here →
The Disappearing Act
He wonders how he did not see it in the slant of her shoulders or the hollow of her back. She had always been a slip-through-the-cracks kind of girl, but he never imagined that she would ever sink all the way to the other side. He had seen her walk to the end of numerous corridors, and wondered where each farewell would take her. Nobdy had expected her to evaporate the final time that she looked...
January 2012
1 post
1 tag
Jack, in a nightmare.
I dreamed of a long hospital corridor and you at the other end sitting in a wheelchair crumpled over crippled
“He’s never going to walk again.”
and my head in your lap unable unmoving
December 2011
7 posts
The place where nobody else has been.
It is not as bad as it seems. They fear that you will make me into your hymnbook, your prayer call, and your talisman. But I am none of these things to you. They don’t know that you met me when you were sixteen years old. I was behind the spine of a yellow hardcover volume, and you had searching eyes that drank everything up, so you found me and swallowed. You swallowed, but I took you down...
Just because the fairgrounds are closed in the winter doesn’t mean that you have reason to be blue. Even though the light is white outside and it bleaches the red from your skin, there is no reason to be blue. The summer will come again and a weary old man will be serving cotton candy while the children scream and scream and scream. You will turn into a blur of colour (a smudge on the back...
I didn’t need anybody to teach me anything but they kept my eyes pried wide open. They played paranoia on the film projector and asked me over and over, “Wouldn’t you love to shut your eyes now? Wouldn’t you love to go blind?” And I think that I must have been going blind too. The truth is bright enough to introduce you to absolute blackness if you will let yourself...
1 tag
Visitor (who used to live here)
After the longest absence, there you are, Jack. I see you on my door step as I am leaving for work. Your hair is slicked back and your eyes are bright. You look good, and I tell you this smiling. You look well, Jack. You look like you’ve really been doing well. You tell me that things have been better where you are now, but you came because you had this nagging feeling that something...
8 tags
Conversations With The Real Imagined Boys (6)
“The worst feeling in the world has got to be the one of feeling used.”
“Really? I’d say it’s far worse to feel like you have used someone. It’s just that most people in that position somehow escape feeling their own disgust.”
“Disgust. That’s it. I feel used and it’s disgusting.”
“What would you rather feel...
Double You
You have the key to everything, and you aren’t afraid to wield it just in sight and just out of reach. When I met you, you drove it into my back and wound me up like I was yours — yours to command, yours to send forth. And I went forward like your soldier, feeling like nothing had fit quite like your lock pick in the base of my back. Had I known that you were a master pilot, I would...
Dressed to the nines, but not going anywhere.
It was a problem that we had every weekend. Elise and I would dress up all proper and sit down on the couch (wearing oxfords and all) and think of where we should go that night. We’d exchange suggestions for every type of activity — dinner, dancing, art galleries, films, or any combination of these, but we’d never really be able to pick anything. Usually it was because as soon as...
November 2011
10 posts
1 tag
Jack, do you not love me any longer because you were my rain gutter? My ash tray, my catch-all. I’m asking because I still love you, Jack. And I promise that it isn’t just that I need you (but I do). I’ve tried everything. I went down to the bus stop many times where you had asked me to wait with an umbrella. But now the monsoon is over and my clothes are dry, yet I don’t...
curvesthewords asked: Hello! I'm Erin, pleased to meet you. I got your link from Trish's tumblr & liked what I saw. Are you in the middle of your 365 or have you finished it?
The 52 Hz Whale →
You should look this up.
You were right.
In September, I was at this all-hours diner at the kind of hour where all the people wouldn’t really be there. It was the sort of place where they keep the tabletops clean to make it seem as though it would be alright to eat there, but it really isn’t and all the waitresses know it. I was sitting in one of the booths by myself thinking about how every single place like this chooses red...
Diamonds Are Forever by Arctic Monkeys
For when...
Nobody ever said it, but they were all thinking, “What a charmer! What a charmer!” And what a charmer he was. He was good with introductions and even better with good byes. He feigned love the way the rest of us feign interest (because interest is all we can manage). He taught me that sincerity lies in the pauses rather than the actions — that people will believe the gaps in...
I bet the fall came like a breath of fresh air. Its whistling winds took away the heat of the summer and lifted my heaving body off of you. You must have grown tired of all of the warmth, and all of the days we spent laying in the sun — our just-bathed bodies turning into little puddles of sweat on picnic blankets. You told me that you hated how you could never feel clean in the summer, how...
Speed
We were firecracker riders. I was strapped to you like dynamite. Everything blurred by and in my mind I sent every carousel that I had ever been on spinning a million miles faster than it was built to go. And I pictured an army of children all lined up like tin soldiers until they all shot down slides at the same moment like magnets racing to opposing poles. I put every memory I had managed to...
Hollow,
and hollow, and
hollow, hollow
words
that have holes
bored into them
by tongues that have said them
carelessly
too long,
too often.
Drilled into me
like cylinder bullets
(middle-less)
that sit in the flesh
not piercing through
without substance to push them. Full,
and fuller, and
heavy, heavy
your hand
that has weight
resting on my head
with fingertips that terrace ...
I woke up in a bed of iris flowers that had all of...
And a voice ringing from sky to sky above me that asked me when I became such a faithless girl.
October 2011
1 post
1 tag
Wedges Are For Keeping Windows Open
I’ve become caught in between the window and the window sill — half-in and half-out (like you used to be with everything). The window frame is crushing mine. I can feel my ribs nearing tessellation.
You’re calling over your shoulder to me, “You spread yourself too thin.”
All I can think about is whether or not my ribs could be folded on an angle where they would...
September 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Answering Machine
“I just went by your house, Jack, and you weren’t there. I knocked three times and then on the way down the steps, I tripped and almost fell completely over — but I didn’t. I caught myself mid-fall and I think this is the problem with everything. I feel like none of the words are really coming out the way I want to say them… but Jack…
[silence]
Hey, do you...
This is about as poetic as you can ask me to be.
He is not the type to take a raincheck
A dash of diamonds
And a handful of sunlight bedeck
His eyes like islands
(What if I made him up and feel nothing?
What if I am telling you a good bedtime story?
What if I am telling myself a good bedtime story?)
1 tag
jack, the jig is up, blown up like an atomic bomb like a picture going on the front page of the newspaper
An Attempt at Being Personal
lamarionnettiste:
When Alice went through the looking glass, she left behind her reality and found a new one. I’ve been Alice for far too long, and thought I should climb over to the other side. Most of the time I write about things the way I see them through the prism I’ve built myself as a writer. This blog is going to be the place where I write about things just the way they are. If you’d...
His laugh sizzles like something crackling in the pit of a dark pan — a reminder that cooks my ears red: this is the voice that gave birth to me. He drew the outline and I filled myself to the shape, filled it to the brim. He rains words and I race to catch them. If he is the leak then I am the pail where it will come to rest, if he is the siren then I am the sound. I am his loophole and he...
August 2011
4 posts
True artists have to tell the story.
Palm trees mean vacation and A is always for apple. You’ll learn the language soon enough. It’s the secret handshake they’ve been printing on flash cards and broadcasting in every pulpit speech, pamphlet, and billboard advertisement. There’s not a single soul that isn’t familiar with it by now. Everybody will know what you mean when you draw them a cross or a light...
8 tags
Conversations With The Real Imagined Boys (5)
“Don’t ever grow up to be well-adjusted. Anything but that.”
“Why? What ever could be wrong with being comfortable and settled down?”
“You’ll end up married to a man who only knows some shadow of you and the title of your favourite book. It won’t be enough.”
“You know, passionate people sometimes also do exactly what society expects...
Growing Up Spectator
In photographs it was always only a fragment or two of your lover. I knew his name and the corner of his eye, his back sometimes, and rarely his sleeping face obscured by where the shadows fell. He was the only mystery in your albums — the rest I understood. The rest was a testament to a place we had both been. We had a golden childhood spent trapping sunshine into the folds of our skin at...
Time does not matter to fiction.
A picture from 1995 is 16 years old now. That’s a decade and a half more than every unborn baby sleeping in a mother’s womb. Images from 1995 don’t look as though they’re as far away as snapshots of girls in 80s’ leotards and muted-matte 70s’ magazine covers. 1995 just looks like a good memory — not too far, not too alien (yet).
Someone who loves you...
July 2011
8 posts
The night misses you, so I am sending this message along. It misses the way the hairs on the back of your neck stood up in its mint-leave-magical cool. It misses the moon multiplying itself in your irises, and it misses the dusting of street lamp light on your shoulders like settled sawdust. It asks over and over, spelled out in the stars, “Wasn’t that you lying in the middle of the...
backtocheyenne asked: i read every new entry and re read your blog quite often, whenever i need some good prose in my head/inspiration xxxx
What if I were to tell you that Eloisa never loved...
Would you call it love if she would have loved any other man in the same circumstance the same way?
Paralysis
This is not writer’s block, nor was it ever. I am not a clogged up pipe in the drainage system that is simply backed up with too much garbage to bring forth the gush of words. And I am not a large swirling body of water limited by a dam. My problem is not one of dead ends; they are such obvious obstacles. I am held back by something more subtle, and perhaps stronger. My whole body is...
Here is the deepest secret nobody knows.
I remember the way your face looked when you told me. It was opened up in a way I had never seen it before, and I felt you churning yourself into a blackhole as you said it. Your eyes grew wide and grew sad like the eyes of lovers when they have seen the stain on the back of a collar or the center of the heart before it is announced. “But it will destroy you, M,” you said, sounding...
While I am arranging refrigerator magnets, there are girls up on their roofs and out on their patios doing any number of fascinating things. They are painting pictures or dancing riddles into the pavement under clear skies. There are girls on trams and streetcars waiting to go places, waiting to go home — wanting to go home. There are girls sitting in lecture halls at Sarah Lawrence and...
Little Did I Know
learning to love you
again
like I knew to love myself
once more
living liquid longing
anew
June 2011
7 posts
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise...”
– Walt Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass
Something I needed to learn again.
8 tags
Conversations With The Real Imagined Boys (4)
“You die when you stop writing.”
“I would rather take death than write words with gaping expanses in between them.”
“Pauses are not death.”
“Perhaps not the eternal kind.”
“What other kind of death is there?”
“The kind which revives you over and over only for you to die again.”
Your name in someone else's poetry.
I’m taking the train home and the strange faces are like flashing lights or signposts. They are provoking feelings in me that I don’t care for when the day is done. My eyes dart from passenger to passenger and I try not to focus on anyone too long before they send my mind spiralling. I see a man with his dry cleaning. I see a woman with her hair like coils cut short. I see a man in a...
agarnette asked: You can be absolutely positive that people still read your posts.
under-your-spelll asked: I am absolutely in love with everything you post. <3
Our love is a quiet one. No television broadcast or picture-plastered wall. No news of our love letters and time spent together blaring from loudspeakers. We don’t wear lockets or carve each other’s names like emblems on our bodies. The relatives and casual friends string our names together occasionally, but they don’t sparkle like pearls or diamonds on a chain. Most have kept...
Empty promises are heavier.
The private schoolgirls kept coming through the turnstiles while I was waiting for you at the station. I must have seen flocks of ten or twenty navy skirts swish by — pleated lamp shades with legs for stands. I couldn’t tell them apart, and the only diversity marker amongst them was the occasional orange popsicle in one of their hands. All of them had flushed cheeks and their hair...
May 2011
5 posts
To notice the way the voice builds to a teetering height and wavers when it reaches its most important syllable. To notice the slight hesitation in the mouth and the quivering of the elbow. To notice the ebb and flow of conversation. But most importantly to interject where it is most opportune, to teach your hyperventilating enthusiasts where to pause and how to breathe.
Darling April
It would be dishonest to say that your voice no longer catches me off guard. You made it from the upstairs bedroom onto the radio while I wasn’t paying attention. I was too absorbed in my mystery novels. I plucked them from the local library shelves until the suspense section was entirely deflowered. I read until my eyes threatened to strip me of their service, and you sang until your voice...