July 2012
21 posts
8 tags
| II |
Stumbling through the doors, I felt like the mouth of the elevator had spat me out. I had missed the day in girlhood where they taught you how to walk in high heels. I could feign a semblance of knowing how to do it most of the time, but there were moments where I clambered through elevator doors like I had been ejected. I was staying in a hotel room with three other girls. I had worked really...
8 tags
| I |
Kate was already waiting for the elevator when I got there. She saw me and said, “What you’re wearing is fantastic. The cravat collar and all. Very classy.” I thanked her and hoped the elevator would come before she realized that I was very bad at taking compliments. Kate was the girl that Bill was in love with and that was almost all I knew about her. I’d heard that...
6 tags
The fisherman’s wife waits for her husband at the harbour every evening (except for Fridays). Her husband tells her that there is no watch at sea, so she arrives at six o’clock each night and waits until she has to. She waits in one of her seven cream-coloured dresses and thinks of new ways to pass the time. Some days she looks for faces in the clouds and on others she presses her...
5 tags
A Hobby
He liked words without the letter ‘e’ in them and beaded bracelets. He collected both — the words on a waiter’s notepad in his back pocket and the bracelets on his wrist. He’d share one once in a while with an interesting stranger who made his acquaintance. He’d offer up ‘tryst’ or the yellow-red-yellow-red-yellow-red-blue bracelet, whichever he...
4 tags
your days are spread smooth like apple skin and butter your days are drawn long like dancer’s legs and uncut grass
but your days are numbered like summer and slumber
5 tags
Her lover was a wood-carver and that was all that I knew about him. Even this I had only extrapolated from the scent of wood shavings and sawdust that always lingered on her skin. She was made like a column with almost no change at the waist, and I often wondered if this is why he would have loved her. The line of her body seemed like something only an artist could appreciate because there was...
6 tags
Jack, I
hit you like I hit the brakes take you like I take pictures and give you up like I give blood
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5 tags
Grac(i)e
“Are you coming to the drive-in later, Gracie?” He asked with his hands in his pockets. He was a tall boy, but hadn’t grown into his own height yet. He stood awkwardly under a cap of ginger hair, speaking into the sky without looking at the girl for whom the question was intended.
“You know I hate being called that.”
“Sorry, I guess it’s a bad habit from...
5 tags
Maybe somebody's writing about you.
All the statues will tower over you. Your eyes will be wide when you look into the stone faces of people who conquered the world or had the world conquer them. You’re just that kind of girl. I know because I have seen your hands jump to cover your ears at the smallest sign of trouble. Everybody’s going to say that you leave yourself too vulnerable, too open. But I think you know what...
5 tags
Too Tired for Fear
I always seem to see men on the subway who’ve been worn down further than I thought possible. I can never know what it is that’s pushing their heads against disk sanders, shaving away almost every shred of selfishness. They lean back in their subway seats with their eyes closed as though they have to save their energy for something they haven’t done yet.
The man I sat across...
5 tags
The more you write about anything, the more you’ll realize that words are the greatest traitors of all. They betray so easily the feeling of hands in your hands, smother so easily the tones in voices, disguise so easily the colours of flesh. The best liars have been your best friends since you were just barely learning to read. You can tell yourself it’s alright because they’re...
5 tags
Everyone's got it better than everyone else...
Bay St. is full of young professionals and I am the change that falls out of their pockets. I am a quarter rolling down the sidewalk till it tips over the edge and just barely misses the gutter in the road. I haven’t seen this part of town before because it’s the part with suit jackets and work-appropriate high heels. I see them behind the glass fronts of every cafe and restaurant I...
6 tags
oed und leer das meer
By the way we carry on, Jack, everyone has started to think that I am the villain. They do not know that you have eyes that are the hardest to look into. Small black chasms that ask me for everything I have to give if I look long enough. I get tired of filling them up sometimes and I am afraid that you will suck me dry. You chase me down like a shadow cast by streetlamps when I am walking home and...
5 tags
You want only my willingness and not what comes after. You want the “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes” like a string of pearls on your wrist that you can take off. You know that I am ready when you are, even though you never plan to be. You keep me like a shade of red in your closet that you never wear. You like the way it makes you feel. It says that you had the audacity to choose such a...
5 tags
Gamble
He said, “Darling, do you have a five on you?”
Usually, I would have hated the way he called me darling. But when I thought about it there was really no reason to. It was not as though someone had laid claim to the redness in my veins and the darkness in my hair. It was not as though there was somebody waiting for me at the next light with an uneasy eagerness in his step. It was not...
9 tags
4 tags
Instead
This is the year that you realize you don’t need very much to be happy. You can live out of a backpack if you have warm water to bathe and a clean place to sleep. Nice things to wear and fashionable things to talk about are no longer of concern. Take the sunshine and frost instead to line your body with, to fill your mouth with.
Send someone you trust a long letter saying that you two do...
infinitefunk asked: your writing is beautiful
5 tags
Jane
I wonder if your heart stopped the first time that you saw her. Mine did. You had finished with her months and months before. Or rather, she had finished with you — asked for the ring back and everything. But my heart didn’t recall any of this and it stopped when I saw the girl you had been in love with for the very first time.
She was sitting many rows ahead of me. As though the...
5 tags
The tape is there to make sure you can't...
“You’re sure about this?” He says, throwing open the door of the medicine cabinet over the sink in his bathroom.
I have been standing in the doorway behind him, eyeing my reflection in the chipped mirror of the cabinet door until it swings outward, taking my face with it. I watch him remove a matchbox from the corner of the topmost shelf and slide the container open to lift a...
