And this is it, the frost protecting a slush lip The sky scowling, here they are, As mythed, our penny days Everything between us can be counted, taken But yet something forms, is gained Witchcraft on the mountain, fencing on the moor Sparks! And another tooth lost... Something made up and vicious flows beside us in the river Who is that carving a canyon with a stack of days? And when the water comes it's bitter, the bitter water of a polluted life. Why hope to be pure, why hope to purify? I hope to thrive, even in irritable murk, and I don't mean win. I can offer this full moon, this glossy once. The rupture rupts, and with effort I can turn the anger into a clever fish, Letting the mermaid's tail exit the day.
Author: catedesens
rounding out for fall
Outside the MIA with a headache so overdone Can barely reason for words but here boymoding the twisted skin brown oak art oak the cicadas beat the odds still kicking the crickets start in early tonight ushering leaves to their seats leaves surrender dim the lights everyone's getting a move on "the living need light the dead need music*" and the feeling needs a table to carve the sun is a coin falling between flats of clouds the students in hair that precedes them knotted to each other faces' close as knotted shoelaces the shudder and the break outsider, something is wrong a shadow on the lash, a splash disrupts the waves in space I feel myself opening again dance with fluid the sharp marble whittles my headache into a round stone why shouldn't I throw it? I feel myself opening again came last night to the image of myself, round and huge and beautiful as the earth self rounded to a stone why shouldn't I throw it?
the quote is reference to the film “The Living Need Light / The Dead Need Music” that took many people to make, but was written by Sáng tác and Trịnh Công Sơn. Full credits here https://www.the-propeller-group.com/thelivingneedlightcredits. Showing at the MIA in Minneapolis in fall 2022.
poppy and green poem for me
the sunbelly fish rolling in the clear pool so fat but restless the leader leaf dips fingers twitch tongue on the dew on the apple skin tunnel eye contact green need eats sun then rocketing away coins rattle on the seat the senseless interstate paintbrush investigates button a breath is too much my breath slapping the backdoor shut never said. I want a family with you I love you as you are. wanting makes a self of me, but I want to fling myself relaxed on the dawn keys the spinning sea will swallow a single salt tear the warm green fabric we tear pelted with salt the poppy sun sprouts, bleeds ease, horizon relief, I love as I am.
island responsibilities
What’s good y’all, please enjoy this short fiction. It clocks in at 2,624 words, which is a 10 to 15 minute read. I wrote this piece to experiment with how much tension I could create with just two characters as foils who have different and inadequate responses to a crisis. On the spectrum of fight/flight/freeze/appease, how might we become proactive rather than reactive? I owe a lot to Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. So, here we go -cdz
We need food. We need food to move and in order to get food we needed to move. The planes arriving at MSP hung in the air forever like mobiles. The moon spurned us for better deserts. The ivy on the house shivered, brittled, failed to breed. Our shared shared space smelled like French fries from three days ago. Fruit flies materialized from the trash as Tassel threw away another family-size yogurt container. She gets so gassy on dairy.
I sit across from her and hated that she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She plays with her spoon, tries to balance it on her nose, it slips off, she leaves it on the floor. Yogurt flaked on her lower lip. She has a single long hair that curled under her chin like a pubic hair: either she had stopped plucking it out every 48 hours or she hasn’t spotted it yet. She was making me work too hard, and I can already tell she was losing interest in going to the island. It’s the arriving that is unbearable. But we’re not all determined to survive on no effort like Tassel. I won’t eat corn and yogurt until it makes me sick.
So we’re going to the island. We’ve already waited for the best of the sun to expire. We’ll need the rest of the light to navigate the channel on the way back. I make to go, knowing she’ll follow me, I cross the strip of trash grass between the houses and mount the dock. The water reeks of algae: there are no other boat wakes: our neighbors, as far as I can tell, eat drugs, or each other. Tassel trails behind me so she can vape four or six times on the dock before getting in. I am reminded that the adjective form of vape is vapid, it occurs to me that I am being mean, it occurs to me to check my teeth in my phone camera, it occurs to me to encourage her to stay behind. “So exciting! The island!” Her voice is like a little girl’s. She reminds me of my sister in that way. My sister is in rehab.
I grab her hand to help her down into the boat. It is hot. She will not help with the knots. She doesn’t know knots: it is a sore point between us that I am bad at teaching her to make knots.
I am grabbing the oars when a youngish white guy waves at us, coming down the dock. I am instantly on alert because he is a stranger. He has blue butterflies tattooed up his arm and his face is smooth, taut, like he hardly uses it. I hand Tassel an oar. I can’t make out his eyes and in looking for them I almost get lost.
The man points at himself. Then he points to Tassle. He raises his eyebrows suggestively. He points at himself and sticks his tongue in his cheek and then raises his hands, palm-up.
It is hard not to laugh at him, because he performs all of this completely silently. I stick my oar in the water. I push the boat away from the dock with my oar. Tassel is not following suit. She may be troubled by our present circumstances. Could this man be someone she used to know? Nobody is born a Tassel. Regardless, I wrangle the boat with one oar until the head, where we sit, is facing away from the dock.
“I’m sorry for making you come with me,” I said. “It’s nothing. I like the island.” “Did you know that guy?” “No.” “Well, thanks for coming with me.” “Fucked up, isn’t it?” “What now?” “He’s still there, staring.” After a silence, she adds, “I would have been more likely to suck his cock if he used his words.”
“He looks like an economics professor, they’re all like that.” “How do you mean?” “Little.” “Don’t be an ableist.” It isn’t like her to reprimand me. I have to check myself.
I don’t mention the blue butterflies, although they were beautiful, and I don’t bother to look at the man again. I feel uneasy. We plunge forward. Tassel syncs her oar with mine. We tear the warm green fabric. We are going to the island.
We arrive at the same time as a whole bunch of other unfortunate suckers. Three Hispanic teenagers in front of us are talking shit, and one girl is holding court. Apparently, to wear foundation these days is to admit your desire to appear pornographic. “It’s not like eyeliner, which is amplification.” Then follows a long description of another girl’s porn ad: “A cock-and-titty cyborg dominating you, BUT it has no face. That’s the sexiest thing I can imagine right now.” “But isn’t having no face kind of the goal of foundation.” “Foundation gives you a perfect complexion, which is the opposite of having no face, no complexion.” “It just sounds like you have trouble reading people’s faces and would rather verbalize with your body.” “Your honor, tell the bitch to quit reading into it.” “Well, what do you think Serena? Who’s right?” The two of them round on their friend. “I didn’t even say I was listening!” She protests.
I am happy Tassel doesn’t understand Spanish. It was weird of her to make that comment about sucking that guy’s cock. I used to know her cycle, but I lost track of it a while ago, when we stopped menstruating at the same time. I do remember her saying that progesterone-only birth control makes her want to “get bred.”
An Asian sailor shoos a seagull off his dinghy and loads an air fryer onto the seats. There are a lot of young moms with children about, because it’s August and nobody’s in school yet, and all the summer camps have just bussed their brats home. As we’re coming up the island dock, which is painted red, and I am feeling sun on the hair of my arms, grateful this dock has guardrails, unlike our private dock at home, I hear someone say,“We got a runner.”
There he is, a security guard, off to the side, a white guy in a groutfit holding his walkie-talkie an inch from his flabface. It’s always unnerving to remember how tight security is on the island. It’s nearly impossible to steal from: if you do, you won’t get through the facial recognition software next time you’re at the entrance. I see a portly older man in a shabby suit speed-walking away from us down the dock with a blender under his arm. At least he got something good for his trouble.
At last, we make it through. I am now deeply uneasy. I wish I could be squeezed back into myself. I instruct Tassle to touch nothing. I am nervous being in charge, all the more that I have to control her, she makes things more difficult for me. It smells like waxed fruits. A woman with a baby asks us for change and Tassel looks to me. I change aisles even though we should spend more time in the produce section. There are toddlers in self-driving consumer-in-training carts moving with more assurance than us.
The island is not a person. We pillage the island. The island is the land of ease. Everything on the island came from somewhere else. It is detached: it is not a place unto itself: therefore it is clean. Our hands select and purge and rotate. Tassel is noticeably more hesitant than me. I consider telling her a knock-knock joke to keep her spirits up, but I only know one knock-knock joke and need to save it. Tassel is a bleeding heart and she’s gumming up my process. I brought her along so she would take point on absorbing the feelings of the other islanders. I consider what poundage of rice to buy and accidentally tear a hole in a twenty-pound bag. I put it back, hoping the cameras didn’t catch my mistake.
I see her hesitating over different types of shrink-wrapped tomatoes. Plastic is cancer and everything is cancer on the island. The fruit looks like plastic toys. She’s probably forgotten how many tomatoes we eat in a month. All she can cook is toasted bread, and she’s negligent even with that. Yogurt doesn’t need to be cooked, and she eats corn raw, too, even though that’s like a cheese grater on your stomach. When we run out of bread, when I throw it away because her infrequent meals are not enough to prevent the runty butt from molding, she either whines, eats cereal with chocolate milk, or starves. Tassel cannot handle coming to the island on her own. She needs me: it is to my advantage that she never learns to cook.
We are in the egg section. We are leaning over on cliffs, showing off our round asses, lifting our skirts and sunning our buttholes. We dig our perfect hands into the nests of gulls. Everything tastes of salt spray. Or so I imagine. We are in the egg section, where we get most of our protein. Everything is styrofoam and fluorescent and smells like menthol nasal spray. We need 48 eggs a month, and even then we run out halfway through the final week. Where is Tassel?
I go back to the salsa section and she is entertaining a little white kid who’s climbed up on the second shelf of the grocery store and is rummaging around among all the glass jars of Pace and Tostitos and tabasco sauce and where are his people? He must have climbed up the special endcap display of animal crackers. She’s sticking her arm in the shelf, trying to coax him out. He’s so small he could stand up inside the shelf: must be like three or so: he looks just like my sister when she was that age, it sucks to remember she was once a human child.
He looks like he’s about to jump down from the shelf, thank god. Those things are not stable. She is nodding, promising she’ll catch him. He’s only three feet off the ground, but still. She’s probably cooing. I’m leaning over my cart longwise, the carton of Fatboy ice cream is leaving a wet spot on my smock-shirt. Where are his people?
He jumps to the left of her, avoiding her arms entirely. His face finds and enters the ground. There is a crack that changes everything after. I will remember the crack of his face vs the ancient linoleum, because it was so deep, it reverberated in my vertebrae like stone tearing, like stone being shaved. Any nose would be flattened. Afterward the hum of the refrigerators audible at last, some of the customers alerted, but for what? Looking around, sheep in the open, nervous looking for a gun, although there hasn’t been a shooting at the island in at least years.
He shivers and doesn’t roll over. Tassel stands over him. Why didn’t he put his arms out to catch himself? She looks like she expects him to get up. Then she looks away and screams around, braying her screams out like she’s a sprinkler. The consumers that were still unawares are looking up annoyed now, nobody has approached. No crowd forms: accidents do not bring us together. She screams at them like they’re supposed to decipher the scene from her noises. Her eyes are very white and skittish like flies. She still hasn’t touched or helped the boy. She promised to catch him! Her screams are saying, not me, not me, this was not my fault.
Here comes his mother, hurtling down the global foods aisle. Here comes consequence. Mothers exist so the rest of us can hurt ourselves and watch the pain bloom on someone else. To become a mother, first give birth to a blade of bloody glass, it slides through that baked apple flesh like a miracle, a mirror to her, a dagger to the generation she dies for, a subject coded for the first time is coded twice. She hurries forward, two more kids following her steps in the radius of her overcoat. She ignores Tassel. She goes right for her boy. She lifts him up. He has no face. His face is a mountain pass sealed with a purple boulder. At last comes the anger. She turns to Tassel like a nurse turns to the doctor, for information. Tassel screams, not at her. But an abuse of feeling all the same.
The boy’s mother says something to Tassel. If they’re not screaming, I can’t make out the dialogue, so I make it up. Something scathing like, Stop screaming, Go call your own mother. She will think of that comment, accompanied by the crack of face breaking, from now on several times a day. Then Tassel, she the inciting incident, she who has no mother to call, her screams wilt to cries so that she might be readopted into the crowd of uncomfortable consumers, she unfortunately is still a loud crier. I am so right in hating Tassel. Getting herself involved with other people like this.
I don’t do anything unusual to connect me to Tassel. I back away slowly and make her cries go reverse Doppler. I keep my movements minimal and I do not deviate from my original plan. I just need some distance, so I move. I smile and send good karma to the teenage cashier with the infected nose ring. I accept my gifts of life in plastic. Once I’ve paid, I look around for Tassel and don’t see her. Whether you kneel or not, in the end you are always abandoned. The island is already recovering. For the unlucky acting manager, it is not about the boy, it is about saving face with Caution Wet Floor signs.
I unwrap a Fatboy and give it to a boy on the dock who is not fat, but could be one day. I have seven bags of groceries. I have to leave the second round with the cashier and come back for it, taking a huge risk by leaving four bags in the boat. They’re all still there, though. A speedboat goes by and makes spray. Could someone have called the Emergency Health Services? The spray lands harmlessly on my hair, crowning me with proximity. It occurs to me that the water is not cold.
I fish through the bags until I find the tomatoes Tassel picked out- practically the only thing she did- and chuck them in the water without unwrapping them. Then I start for home.
The island gets smaller as I row the filthy waters. I need to take care of myself and my food. It will take all afternoon. Tassel calls me five minutes later. I am unsnaring myself from a soggy diaper caught on a log underwater. She is waiting to hear me say I’m sorry, for ditching her, as if it were like that. Instead I make a promise with wine and dinner tonight as the bait. She’s waiting for me at the other end of the dock. Can I promise to forget what happened today? I can. No, I’m happy you came with me. Really. More fun with you around. And do I mean it? I do. I think I forgot your tomatoes with the cashier, I tell her.
She hangs up before making me work any harder, thank god.
I make a play with myself, dangling my fingers in the water, dangling my whiskers in cool joy. Forgetting the pollution for a moment. We got in and out of the island with only a few incidents. A minor run. We will practice our ritualized forgetting tonight. We have a lot of practicing to do. The leaves in the cotton trees along the river shiver like they’re wet, too, and gold.
Argument
I smear toothpaste on my fingers I am hasty a skateboarding dinosaur bandaid I come down undone Fall will warm and spin and set us New friendship loses its dampness, dries in a ditch when the rains freeze Circumlocating exquisite don’t look at the beam gleam in your eye it is heartbreaking in the hydrating light of the mood funny how you still scare me I come down the curtains suck and blow our teething conversation our billow threads over me light a coin rolling over oak I wish I could give you weight and comfort I am my intimacy forethought, I am preproduction never without angles never ever without scuttling I am crippling my lizard I am making a mistake it is the season of eating thistles No I am right to hold to hesitate This is how I reason with my fingers
ethics II
What’s that gone-peached
breeding-fly warning smell?
Ripe skins blown taut,
Am I a taut rope, am I convenient for your laundry?
Lovers for a week doesn’t mean lovers this week
Desire nets us like black birds at the purple time
Black walnut tree cut from haze outside my window
But the cicadas can decide to die,
With relief, at last, winged rain
In a forest in Atlanta I loved to bat at a branch that hung over the bike path
Come to find it was poison oak and that’s why my hands were all flesh-bumpy
That’s how I feel, needing play with someone that makes me itch pinky
I am authorized to act autonomously
I know the ground of my body: knowledge is a product of geography
House of cards collapsed into combat boots
You smear, you cook twice with butter
Flies play chess in the musty kitchenette
And the leaves leave us: to come down is sacred
I don’t govern you
but we can govern us
ethics I
for Rose I am whole. I tap my elbows. Ethics is slow She got off the bus at dusk outside the child prison Turned her back on the cages Followed the bats The revolutionary girls compacted, herded with slurs behind her. I hold myself. My mother at my back, My overnight baggage, my backpack. She came into the forest with open hands, with no data and no contacts The pine needles hung like rusty whisks A knife in the cinch in her belt. The soggy bread splashed against the cell wall like milk from a raped cow empties into the empty dirt, beyond the pail, the urge to laugh when crying. She points out black butterflies And blue moods at the mother tree She said, this is the only place I can be me, I could never abandon the dancing caterpillar. She asked me to straddle, stay. The concrete lamp shot out with a slingshot. The creek runs rash. Ethics is harm reduction. On the way home, it’s true: I can’t. I don’t have enough love to feed you all. This makes me whole. And rewilding.
visiting illness
It’s a double feature tonight folx. This is an experimental piece in four parts. Part of the reason for the run-ons is that the period key on my computer is stuck. 🙂
Part I
If I drank any more water that would be it and I would die. Already whenever I rolled on the paltry bedspread my belly rolled like a Jeep rolling off the highway in slick driving rains, with a great mass, I must have drunk two jugs of water by now, by the cupful, and still she kept on, gentle on the door, never exasperated, I wish she was, imploring me to drink more water in the middle of the night, well I won’t, I can’t any longer, my tongue has rotted in all that water like bread forgotten by the ducks, all that sog sinking sour to the bottom of my throat, an urge to cough brings the water back lukewarm, back up the throat, I cannot sleep because my best friend is coming tomorrow and I am not prepared. Must drink more water. Must drink more water, she said it again from the doorway, the insistence of water coming in from under and around the door, she never seems to make a door that creaks to creak, nothing obeys her, peering at me now Grandma always delighted when someone is sick, well I won’t play along, her powderblue slippers and her powderblue hair which glows and leads lines of hair like tired horses down to her cracked lips looking at me looking at me struggle I roll my eyes catching the moon outside like a reminder drink some more water, Munchkin it’s just nerves after all my best friend is coming tomorrow Grandma sits by the bed always happy when someone else can’t sleep old women never sleep I don’t know what I will do without dreams I’m sitting up though my belly is fit to burst if only I was pregnant instead of bloated but never could I best friend said never will I and I am not one to go first into that dark woods am I Grandma’s humming her powderblue veins absolutely shoved with blood like a fucking hero straining to lift burning logs off the house but it’s just her reaching over me stop Grandma you’ve gone too far let me take it the terracotta mug with more water set it on the nightstand with the books and the bookmark with the peony watch not to spill on the books so nice of you to bring it she looks so creepy sitting on my bed what is she doing so close to me we never touch smoothing down the bedspread limiting my thrash why isn’t she happy anyway her children love live near each other and they all dote on her like an old turtle lives in a hole dug for it by lizards I wish she would leave let me thrash to feel my belly push against itself like shaking a like plastic water bottle half air she’s petting the bed beside me involuntary throbbing to be Little! I hate that I feel that I could cry because the moon floods out her face when she looks to the window I can see clearly in the corner the people in dresses which reminds me I am dreaming the lucid way where I have to be careful not to open my eyes haretrigger Grandma says from far away a scolding rinsing over the dinner plate after we’ve eaten the warmth of the dream she washes it clean I do wish you’d stop catching the baby toads Emma-love it scares them so you’re torturing them and then she goes at last I take half the water in the terracotta in one gulp the nausea is so bad waves of blood more than needed migrate to the highways in my knees and beat there I can hardly breathe my body is so tight with water I was told to drink water every time I want a drink of liquor and now I cannot stop drinking water fuck them all. Making me drink water well I won’t anymore. I fall asleep again and when I wake my legs are wet with urine and my brother is standing over me evil as dogs in the glare of the moon.
Part II
The softness in my brother’s face is all my mother’s but it doesn’t mean he has a weak character. The room was silent as I cannot have a ticking clock whittling my sleep hours to crescents as I am powerless against it so who knows how long he was standing there, although he is not particularly patient but I usually wake up, and now him standing over by the windowsill occupied by the roof where my tar-trampled reading blankets lay out dirty and wretched and I saw he was lining toads upon the windowsill I sat up and gave an awesome burp that made him approve of me he looked so much like our mother that it occurred to me to hate him by proxy Why aren’t you in bed, I said It’s morning he said and I looked and so it was, not the glare of the moon after all but confused clouds edged pink like baby’s hats are default gray until some unmistakable revelation comes and he said Morning dawn best time for frogs I asked him what will you do with these obedient frogs, also, they are toads, lined like soldiers on the windowsill with triangular wet asses pressed down all silent and moody like the old men we passed while walking with Grandma always intuiting her story wrongly from the way my brother and I followed in her footsteps and the way she held herself in high regard at least attempting to point towards the truth but that’s just the way they teach you to walk in a hospital you have to look like you know where you’re going or you’ll get stopped and in church too, you must hurry to obey when we should I hate it so much the frustration rubs on me like something awakening and it just makes me hate it more but the truth because I can’t stop it waking up truth was was we were just stupid and had to follow behind her exactly or else we’d get murdered by a passing Chevy never do what we can when we should I took a sip of water excitedly and then remembered I was wet with urine the room collapsed Go out on the roof I need to change I whispered to my brother You wet yourself he said in triumph not believing I’d hand him something like this Go I said sounding just like Mom when I said it and he removed the screen and crawled out between the row of frogs and he took one in each hand as he went each frog had golden eyes the likes of which I had never seen on a boy and I felt myself around and realizing I didn’t smell urine and I brought my hand out from the covers and it was sticky with the slides of brown blood more and more of it came sliding out of me and clots too everytime I moved even a twitch of the thigh and hot waterslides and wet packaged ovals too like bugs get caught in the wax of a candle and slowly liquify along with the wax and I stood up I was so weak my legs shook and it was cold relative to the bed I piled the sheets so that the blood wasn’t visible thank god I hadn’t lost control and wet myself after all and I dried myself with a towel and then wet the towel with the remaining water from the terracotta mug and rinsed my legs with the other half of the towel unable to go slowly and take care of myself properly as my brother had come into my room without me letting him in starting something I was behind on and now he was on the roof anxious to be out there and see the sun rise and all those frogs looking at me and I still did have to pee so I relieved myself in a kombucha bottle with a wide bottle cap and shoved it under my bed and put on a new nightdress that was still clean leaving the bloody one in heap atop the towels and leaving that disgrace behind me like climbing out of a dirty pond I joined my brother on the roof he told me as I was coming through the window Hand me two more fellows, please and so I did ducking back inside to take another drink of water and getting two more toads. For we were throwing the fellows off the roof to hear their soft bellies flunk on the grass.
Part III
My neck was cramped Here she comes Oh goody Princess Munchkin said Mom in reply The last one awake Like it’s an offensive hour, I said, my neck is cramped like I took a swan dive off the roof and fell directly on the knob of my neck killing whatever controls me there Well good morning to you too said Mom and Grandma didn’t deign to respond to such lowballed rituals at all, pushing a terracotta mug into my hands the boogers in the eyes would need to be addressed the knots in the bushy hair. The woken women fixed on those like wrinkles in a bedsheet smoothing to be tugged first one way then the other finally taut with technique never pull too hard. Inevitable after sleeping so long I had the feeling I had walked into the wrong void as if the kitchen where I sat should really be Grandma’s bedroom such were the intimacies that passed between them: Mom with her back to them doing dishes passing historical objects with chipped rims from one shoulder to the other Grandma sat at the table as the idle old are wont to seem to do but she was doing so in an irritating way: the cloudy light protected any one of us from harsh temper too early in the morning: it was a shrouded sort of day with a warm wind at the best moments and yet she really pissed me off, Grandma, with her snide backwards way of saying, The cousins are out, What did she really mean, As is your brother, they went off on bikes again we probably won’t see them til lunch Ah said I, But isn’t there any coffee You’re drinking it, said Mom never one to carry the conversation finding more power in correcting that which brings itself into existence like a referee and sure enough it was watery coffee It’s too watery, I said, I literally thought it was water, Ah Emma, said Grandma, I know you’re awake when you start making complaints, please wake up a little bit more and see you’re hurting your poor mother who brewed that coffee for you, if she made it the way she likes it that’s nothing to sniff at, Help us in the garden this morning Mom said as a statement of fact sip of coffee Ah but Oh yes and when will Taylor be arriving recoil Grandma felt her move back like animals do when the sense some kind of sleight of hand, a false treat, the barrel of the gun unseen but looking down from the canopy, I don’t know she said furious to be made to admit it gazing without gazing at the white wood of the kitchen table full to the brim with the three of them like an eye fills with tears but does not spill You know her it could be anytime Why don’t you help us then you’ll be relieved for work a creeping rose her freedom shrinking she needed time to brood and to write decorative idiosyncrasies for her for Taylor these two glaring old women she took a sip of water fine so it was coffee Grandma turned back to other politics with that settled We shall tend to the grapes and the huckleberries today but Taylor liked best the smell of strawberries with their unlikely little white flowers and she smelled of drugstore vanilla always so she would tend to the littlest flowers in the vast green glade under the brim of the sun hat of both her mothers one old and one older she would be free to daydream fairies under the petals a secret world of anguish in the mulch-hill when it was besieged by fire ants and the fairies clung to the underside of leaves and cradled water perhaps freeing the bugs caught in spiderwebs perhaps they were too lazy for that and her nipples getting hard under her nightdress to dream of her best friend the last time she had seen she had screamed at her or had she been screamed at? And Taylor’s mom’s house shook to pieces and the Coke can she had been holding she squeezed it all because Taylor wouldn’t shut the fuck up about her Emma having tunnel vision and sabotaging her to keep her forever squeezing and soda sprayed her face and soaked her dress in the worst spot and razored her hand the sharp edges of aluminum can and her blood had mixed with the red wine on the foot of the stairs and Taylor had said she always did have a gift for eloquence If you go you’re never coming crawling back and she said Fuck you and she said Good riddance and she drove home drunk and was laid up for three days with fever from slicing her hand open and losing so much blood luckily Mom and Gram didn’t believe in doctors and the whole drive home she saw deer with gunshot wounds in their necks and the people in dresses again along both sides of the road with their eyeless lidless smiles would Taylor remember that? Except she had driven home alone Yoohoo there she is! said Mom giving a royal wave to Taylor coming up the drive with her sunglasses on.
Part IV
As Taylor approached graceful in her navy dress in her knit cardigan up the drive never one to disavow the pleasure of pine needles on the ground she stepped feeling a thousand crackles under her feet in the dirt that was first red and then black meanwhile Emma (I) stood there like a stupidhead with a white daisy in my hand like the fly trapped between the screen and window unable to go anywhere but shrunk to the function of a compound eye she came she really came Grandma and Mom both bemused they knew the whims of young women are never still like the waters of the creek moving on one after the other ceaselessly becoming without comment on what was well I went to her at last Taylor with her stepping stone manner after beaming at my Mom the smile she flashed over her shoulder making them fall over themselves in laughter the two crones they didn’t even have to hide their hysterics from me I’m too wrapped in Taylor to care she came, she came I’ll take her from here, I said anxious to get her to herself someplace we could inhabit and grow wider within slow down perhaps such relief now that she is here at last everything will be ok again I will make happiness fall out of your ears, she remembered her promise looking at Taylor but then she remembered more, that she was meant to be angry, and that cancelled her words entirely, so that she stood before her, wanting mutely to kiss her cheek, but Taylor didn’t do that kind of things, a cousin had hit her before Emma had known her, before she could do anything about it or kill anyone with a scissors across the throat, Taylor still reenacted it sometimes with a scissors across the wrists, she resisted an urge to look but yes, Taylor had covered her arms in bangles and saw her looking at her wrists her own craning reflection in the dark sunglasses which Taylor still wore, did she have the same eyes under there, to not know was almost unbearable these were the signs that not all was right with the world and this is the suffering they bore. But to make it right at last Taylor said Hello and that was all and Emma said at once Come and see the toads, which was not what she meant to say but she was here and now do let the squirrels make their complaints again everything could move now that she was here again a ghostly hawk passed overhead the green bars of the sun bent towards her The power she has over her, said Mom to Grandma, You never have friends like the friends you have when you’re young, said Grandma, and what else she meant would kill Emma to know. Let her be, let her follow, said Grandma, and I followed Taylor past the green glade to the back of the house where the lawn was wildest where the mint had gone to seed and the clouds had relieved themselves of duty and shoved off to break among the high cliffs in the mountain country to the north leaving just a speckle of dew on the face of the house in fact Taylor had never before come so early and I hated her so she made everything better with no effort she just simply was and the smell of vanilla and everything was better but what to say I must give her something wishing suddenly I could take a sip of water This is where the toads are I said pathetically and now that they were alone Taylor removed her dark fashionable sunglasses to see the toads and her left eye was as swollen as an overripe blueberry What happened! I blundered before I could stop myself Just an accident said Taylor in a way that made me wish I had said nothing for now she knew I cannot keep silent and Taylor now choosing to look not at me but at the overturned bellies of toads littering the yard You did this didn’t you she said turning to me the unreal attention made me giggle How did she know? Say it now while she’s here say it to make her stay say it in front of her here in the sun with the sunlight purple on her eyelashes and the left half of her face dead as an eclipse how horrible You did this didn’t you said Taylor hysterically You killed these frogs, They are toads I feigned to defend myself Why is she accusing me? Of course I did, You’re capable of anything Taylor said you and that little bastard, if only that were me, Thank you for coming I said instead of saying what I should be saying and everything was still strained between us because of course I had never thanked Taylor for coming over before Would you like a sip of water Taylor said Say it give it to her Yes I nearly shouted and I took the waterbottle from Taylor’s purse because Taylor is never liked to start these things herself although she brought them along and the bottle was heavy with hot sweet wine not water and I said I missed you and Taylor said I know. Say it Say it I don’t ever want to be like my brothers and cousins, said Taylor, and I said, we can’t be. We have already killed that part of ourselves, or it died on its own, but we are forgiven, We are forgiven? The mint leaves moved as if they were water falling. We are forgiven by coming together, me coming here for you, my favorite person, Taylor said, kicking at toads and giggling, to keep from crying, having a favorite person is so dangerous, I will never tell you how I feel. You’ve changed everything, the course of the day the wind on the lake, I’m like a little boat, lead me, I missed you so. I’ll eat you whole.
Playing chess in your mind
The auditorium is tense he has been taking too long at the mic. Crowd favorite but not mine. I like someone who needs it more, this being a competition it’s important to have unique opinions. The microphone cord makes a tripping hazard on the ground luckily the school pep band has packed up, all the staff with the conscience to mill near the West basketball hoop are embarrased by their slavitude to the bell and their corresponding lack of twenty minutes of end-of-day curriculum, the gym doors are guarded but we I like this game. Watching is a part of playing. If they keep us in we play. People are whispering unfavorable things to each other, makes for intimidating non-silence, the favorite is biting his lip, everyone wishes he’d just get it over with, otherwise heckling perhaps.
Finally he leans it in: after an almost unbearable thirty second delay in game play: bishop to F6. His opponent laughs: in a hurt way, like you laugh when the dentist gives you the news: both of them look like such boys then, unaware they could hurt or touch each other: the favorite has snuck the knight out from under him.
Amused decades pass like this, minutes, constrained time can only expand inwardly, infinitely, we are not allowed to leave the audiotorium early. We give advice to the favorite, I give advice to my favorite, we laugh with or sometimes at. I am grateful for the mind-games. We played along. We forget who won, we were always losing time.
Anyway! Now: the wind in a bad way, legions of reaction grass marooned in their own smell, in their own breakable arms, with faces too small, if only! To be carried lighter along the impossible lime… the people who are mine forever have left, pockets of people tucked in behind me, tucked in town, the wind flapping their excess doors, I don’t know where they hide, my people, every mouse must move his home… every squirrel I pass eating his misgivings, here I come, my misgivings are too big to eat, August is roiling, even in the belly in the forest in the ship even thrusting myself forward to be looking through space and time unavoidable that I hear the clouds come down cursive illegible cows driven by hooks the size of mountains that sculpt the sea and, forgetting that, give lifts to the peaceful the the old albatross… the desire for archipelagos nearly ruptures us but on we go… the cloud shade sitting on us now we can smell better in the shade makes the mud bluer yet feel the smell of wet frog skin the burst pod through roots the fertile the fertile worm waits for death What are we all waiting for? Some signal? Some lesson that can never be escaped? Only once in a moon’s time am I exactly where I want to be… but I value the moon all month long…
Dun dull soft of feet in sand, river moves on without comment, the wheel turns and I seize the sensation handed to me, holding it, opportunity to emote, the moment swells and falls on my scalp as a glob the size of an auditorium, between my roots icicles of dread So is this my life without my people? So immediate, so periled? Running water then sand takes the beating I lay down with the sand in my mind Did you know you can play chess in your mind?
The broad recieving silence I throw in my breath among the high disc chatter of locusts What are we waiting for? Would rather die for something than of something. Would like to be inside a talk we had starting from a central intimacy like the trunk of the oak tree that frames town and branches going everywhere the town cradled in the branches of the talk we had look at it but hush, the wind’s in a bad way pacing the ears with rumours the eyes move the deer Is life to be lived for a few moments? When everything conspires to feel? Like you could bear anything else. Too gone to cope. Going back, downhill, someone has to get me home, there might yet be people. Only way to get down the hill at equal speed is to take bigger strides, condense more time we get faster at this as we get older.
Moral Study of Tourism by Body
I have found my sense of direction intact. The same boys tag the train stations of Córdoba as Madrid as Toledo as Bilbao. Outside Madrid, nobody lives in the middle of Spain, it’s the most desolate region in all of Western Europe. War too recent, angle to the sun too acute. Nobody leaves the train. Are those olive trees? Are those?
I’m tired, I’m proud of this exhaustion, why shouldn’t I be. It proves I will die of genetic exhaustion after hurtling myself a piddling distance through time, and a hundred years after my death, no one will ever know I existed. Which mountains are those? Suffering slight inconvenience on the principle of moneyed curiosity. I must see this country because I must see. It’s the least I can do, self-sophistication is a hell of a drug. It’s the most I can do, ever, for right now, myopic youth, learn to see with discernment. It’s so virtuous, has anybody been sainted for alertness? Discerning which is the correct receptacle in which to deposit today’s plastic waterbottle. Those sweet cows, I’ll go vegetarian for real this time, when I go home. Nodding to the homeless winos in the cellars of Toledo and then averting my eyes and blushing. Do I make the Spain better by being here? Why would I? Cross-language exchange and a successfully defended Mediterranean reputation for hospitality. Tourist dollars. The anarchist in me groans.
Do I make it worse? Environmentally, yes. But I would be consumer no matter where I am. Guilty, guilt, a byproduct of futurism, and very stabilizing, that’s why they breed it, if guilt moved us like spite did, all the governments in the world be slaughtered, for making us sin on their behalf. But then what? O science, O fiction, you are so stingy with the utopias. O life with your petty, petty victories.
If Spain didn’t exist, I would still see my own desire, a chained thing encircled by beaten-down grass. My duty to move the stake when I can. Stroke its chin. Starve it? I’m not capable of thinking of that. Yet. My pet desires!
But O I’m tired! The solar romance of Spain! Why do we get tired so easily, half a day, forty-five minutes of concentration in the shade? Futile, tragic, but what a relief, to briefly submerge. In puzzles, in worries. That’s your personal history: your bath of filthy hesitations.
I missed the lilacs at home again, as I do every year. I will have to make do with lavender in my soap, as long as it smells purple. And I missed so many birthdays. Is there anything more tragic than a grandmother waiting for you to call?
Why is it so much work to rest? I rest my case. I rest assured. A headache digging holes in my lobes, I hope it finds what it’s looking for. The rest of what it’s looking for.
I’ll invent rest. I’ll go back through recent memories, see what story I can extract and put to bed. The incense burning in the blue tiled reception. The overhead of umbrellas
the handpainted flowers. The mosque-cathedral with the candy arches, Mezquita-Cathedral de Córdoba. Brown and white. I can’t see the forest for the delight of Suess pillars on a grid.
Spin, parallel, spin, perpendicular, spin, spin, spin, arched tunnels of mathematical purity, vision therapy, the eye glides into gloworm REM behavior.
The arquitecture of the body submits to sublimity, ascends. The ten-storey foghorn organ bellows disciplines. The most beautiful building I have ever been in. The most perfect place I have been, the Mezquita-Cathedral in Córdoba.
The synagoge dressed all in white, Santa María Blanca. Ecstasy, on the creaky wooden floor, before El Greco’s thirteen apostles in an air-conditioned room.
I’d like to write a book with a potrait of each character painted by El Greco. Not that I want to write a book about the thirteen apostles. I want to write a book and have El Greco paint the characters.
The impossible always seems perverse.
Now I want a sound barrier of trees between the farm and the highway. Perverse? Need to study conflict resolution for twenty years. Need to study land back. Deeper and deeper into the books. If you love somebody, ask them a question.
A budding interest in carpentry, peeling the bark of cedars with a spoon. I want to raise from the ground a compost toilet. I want to be old in my old place and to know everyone at my deathbed. I wanted a daughter yesterday. I want to work again. The Earth is strong in those who work it. So not me.
Isn’t this why I came? To want to go back? Looking for the pleasure of anonymity, until it was no longer a novelty, wonder on, wander principle, is there anything less original. But I really did grovel and marvel at every bridge-by-Romans. Every ruins-by-Visigoths.
I dreamed last night of a weeping orchestra, a chick flick, friends clutching hats, I can see their back teeth as they say, Please let me come back. Please let me stay. I will make happiness fall out of your ears. Hugs for thank-yous, I guess that’s all I really wanted.
Then the back of a taxi, in the leering square at nightfall, yellow light on the stones. Tattoos of bears on the chest, hairy and flattered to see you looking. They bat their claws, oh stop it you. Friends in unlikely places.
Really, really unlikely, as in, guess what, tomorrow my best friend Sarah arrives in Bilbao. !!!!!!!! And we take on the fashionable cities together. Together is the cradle of comfort. Just in time, too. This season of solo backpacking is burning itself out. Yes it’s backpacking, even when I take trains. But soon, so soon, it ends. Bilbao in sight.
cdzhouse 