1. 2
    30
    Jun

    here’s to the curly-messy hair you wore
    and the pretty things you did
    and the saucy winks and violent words
    and fingers held with tongues between them
    here’s to smiling, here’s to laughing, here’s to pain
    here’s to crying alone in a bed too empty
    and the confessions of a podium after dark 

  2. 4
    29
    Jun

    it’s just 
    that
    sometimes
    you get
    what you
    asked for
    and you realise
    it’s worse than
    no result
    at all 

  3. 2
    28
    Jun

    I get the feeling no one actually likes my blog. 

    Maybe I’ll just shut it down.

  4. 1
    28
    Jun

    Mind on Fire

    You’re sitting cross-legged in an auditorium folding chair, bolted to the floor. When you get up, approximately seventeen minutes after this snapshot of vulnerability, they will return to their universal uniformity, stiffly upright. But now, currently, this very second, red-faced boys, overheated but happy, share breathing space with a hodgepodge of girls. Some wear jeans, some skirts, some dresses, smooth-skinned girls, rough-skinned girls, no makeup or running makeup or miraculously intact makeup. They slouch, lounge, spread out as much as they can on the eighteen-inch-wide chairs with affixed armrests. Their backpacks and purses are littered around them, holding multitudes of words, some of which have just or will be shared. There’s a list of generic names on a whiteboard, which serves as the back wall of the stage.

    But you are not looking at that, are you? No. You’re looking at something, no, someone, else. Who, incidentally, if you were in a bad tween sitcom, would be lit with golden light as the camera panned up and down her body, lingering on smooth calves, thighs, midriff, chest (tween sitcoms usually show a remarkably built bust, though the actors are usually no more than sixteen), and finally they will show her carefully made-up face. 

    Or maybe not, if only because something’s getting lost in the computation of the thing. She’s got untamable frizzy hair, falling around her face in kinks and abstract curls and a few tangles. They are spots she must have missed with the comb. Her posture’s not the best, as she stands with her mouth almost obscenely close to the small microphone, one elbow propped on the wood of the podium and head cocked to the side. No one’s told her the proper way of public speaking, explained to her that you should stand straight and don’t shift from side to side. But that doesn’t matter, does it? It doesn’t dispute, lessen, or cancel out the fact that your arms feel heavy and strangely electric around the shoulders. How the foot hanging in the air is tapping erratically along with the moody rhythm of her voice. The way that you can hear your heart in your ears, and it doesn’t go with the cadence of her fiction. You see the beauty in her canines, sharper than the norm, in her hair and eyes and clean, covered skin, and in the sharpness of her words, the rebellion, the tongue-in-cheek tone she always speaks in.

    The director of this whole operation looked uncomfortable with her very existence, as he has done since the first day that all of these people and you and her were pushed together in this high-ceilinged, horrible-acoustics room. Each person was supposed to tell their name and their state, since you were all a melting pot of different statehoods, cultures, dress styles. A great many spoke their homage to North Carolina, where this gathering takes place every day. A few say that they’re from overseas, the Honduras, one from England. The rest scattered across America’s cities. But you still don’t know where she’s from, do you, because on the very first day she stood up and grinned saucily before stating her origin as Hell.

    What she’s reading now isn’t too edgy in terms of content, though, which should serve as a relief to the director of the place, whose name rhymes with Bitch, though he’s not one. It’s about her organs twining up, how they can rebel against her, how she believes you can commit suicide without even knowing it, and you think that both she and her words are unfairly and unearthly and unconventionally beautiful. You wish you could tell her this. But you do not think you could find the words for it.

    And so you’re watching her, watching her in her amusing t-shirt and good jeans, her small breasts propped in front of her against the podium because she’s too short to truly reign over it. Or maybe these podiums are just oversized. And you’re thinking that she’s gorgeous, and that you’ve never really met anyone like her, and you recall the conversations you’ve had one by one and it hurts a little.

    No one else knows. Your friends are around you, along with the girl you fake-married for fun in a feminist-angled writing class, who texts you I love yous that of course don’t mean anything. She really does like girls, tells you about her ex-girlfriends even as you tell her about yours, but you don’t think you and her would really work out.

    You don’t think you and this beautiful girl onstage would work out either, but it does not stop you from thinking about it, doing the inescapable human thing where you imagine yourself with someone for the rest of your life, even if you have only known them for a few minutes. It is unbearably human-like, and of course it hurts because a lot of human-like things do. The dull pain doesn’t stop you from thinking about her lavender jeans and her popular-band phone background and her good-movie shirts, blue tee with a rainbow-shitting Pop-Tart cat residing diagonally to her shoulder, and the one skirt she brought with her, a good pencil skirt that fits her curves and thighs.

    She’s tiny, sort of. And yet bigger than everyone here, bigger than you, with the power of her words and the way she speaks and the way she tosses her head back when she laughs. And you think that there’s a lot of people who would do well to watch this girl, finishing her reading now (clap, remember, it’s the least you can do to pretend you’re not head over heels for her), taking a ridiculous, flippant curtsy and dismounting the stage with a bounce in her step and a flip-flop momentarily separating from her foot before she recovers it.

    On the second day here, she for a total of one minute and forty-three seconds, and you think that was quite enough time for you to fall in love with her. 

  5. 2
    27
    Jun

    methothresh

    You’re scratching at your unshaven face and it’s itching, it hasn’t stopped since you watched the last bit of dirt fall and be smoothed over, the painful reminder that there was nothing more you could have done.

    You can’t resist picking up the trash bag at your feet, opening it up in front of this dumpster that smells like moldy hot dog buns and unidentifiable slime. You can’t resist staring down at this motley collection for the very last time.

    There’s the violin, oh, the violin that you remember buying for her on her fourth Christmas; she’d shown interest in playing it and she was already proficient at the piano. You did not quite know what to do with a little girl so interested in music so very early but you tried your best to do all you could. Your girlfriend who you broke up with two days after the funeral had advised you to sell it, sell that little violin, but you couldn’t do that. Tried to post the internet ad and then just couldn’t do it.

    So you laid it in this trash bag, right at the top, this half-full trash bag. Papers litter the bottom; her sheet music. A mix of piano and violin, able to be told apart only because of the number of clefs on the page. All dumped unceremoniously to be dumped in a Dumpster, driven and dumped in a dump and God, there’s nothing you can do about it but look down at a child’s simplified version of a Mozart sonata and choke a little on your own bile.

    There’s her duvet and sheet set, both pink and flowered, furled and curled and crumpled up, cushioning the cardboard boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch that she’d gotten too sick to eat eventually, so they’d sat in the pantry for two months, never opened, but never moved. It might have been silly, but before you tossed them in this bag you brushed the dust off of them with a dishtowel and made sure they looked like you had just picked them up from the Aldi’s down the road that sometimes the two of you would walk to. Before all of it. Before alone.

    And the metal box in which you’d held her reports, her receipts, her sno-cone wrappers from the machine down the hall and the last hospital gown she had ever worn and a tissue she had used and it makes a clang as you throw the whole damn thing into the moldy-hot-dog-slime dumpster and you turn away. When you turn away and walk back into your apartment and sit on the afghan she had liked and choke back tears for not much longer before you have to let them go. 

  6. 2
    26
    Jun

    sin x2

    the clock of life;
    the pig of death
    the reason, the tart, the endorsements
    never made

    the earth standing still
    a dire strait that shakes the soup
    these ardors of our lovers of the party
    the trembling champagne in the hand of a girl
    the nuances of travel anew

    divide the port of boys’ chants…

    the finite soufflé without brawn

  7. 10
    25
    Jun

    Angel

    NSFW under the cut. 

    You’re walking down a deserted, pumpkin-orange-streetlamp lit street when you meet an angel.

    You’re twenty-one and you’ve had two beers and you are bored, and she claims the last flashing months of appearing nineteen when you talk to her, really talk to her, because you’re twenty-one and bored and her wings are askew and she’s really very pretty in the dimly twining light around the both of you.

    Her voice is high and light, effervescent in the way you and your friends used to pretend when you were imitating obnoxious girls in your high school class. But there’s something mystical about hers, something in the tone that enchants you instead of makes you think she’s a ditzy blonde, though she is in fact blonde. Her hair tumbles in flaxen, abstract waves and kinks around thin shoulders. It could use a brushing, but you can tell it was beautiful once. She smiles at you sweetly as you please, though the image is made somewhat more disturbing by the dirt on her thin, knobby knees and the wings on her back, the elastic kind that go over your shoulder, falling to the side. She tells you she’s an angel with a slight giggle you don’t know what do to with in your mind, and you ask her if she has a place to stay for the night. Not because you’re turned on by her (though if you really admit to yourself, you are), but because there’s something in her eye that looks hopeless, like the end of something.

    She hesitates answering by saying simply “oh” and then “wow,” and then she takes your hand in hers, like a little girl might hold on to a mother. “I don’t think I do,” she says, and feeling that this is the strangest night of your life, you lead her cautiously to your apartment.

    Read More

  8. 4
    25
    Jun

    bones

    you reflected on the fragility
    of slipping-slacking bones
    as you glanced down
    at the corpse in front of you
    the hourglass was carved from bone
    and it ticked down the marrow
    until the end was near and the fear was eminent
    amusing how sheep
    will present for the butcher’s block
    and how bones will crack given due stress
    and a dash of good luck
    go escape and say it was terrifying
    hold your stomach and say it was horrible
    wrap up your finger-bone and say it was beautiful
    laugh up your blood and say it existed
    listen, listen
    hear that breaking sound?
    it’s bones, it’s hearts, it’s sucking-out-marrow
    and it’s shattering before the crying birds
    no sun, no moon
    in the green eyes encased in bone
    time’s run out for this one…?
    let the radio break the silence as we die 

  9. 1
    24
    Jun

    preview

    You’re walking down a deserted, pumpkin-orange-streetlamp lit street when you meet an angel.

    You’re twenty-one and you’ve had two beers and you are bored, and she claims the last flashing months of appearing nineteen when you talk to her, really talk to her, because you’re twenty-one and bored and her wings are askew and she’s really very pretty in the dimly twining light around the both of you.

    Her voice is high and light, effervescent in the way you and your friends used to pretend when you were imitating obnoxious girls in your high school class. But there’s something mystical about hers, something in the tone that enchants you instead of makes you think she’s a ditzy blonde, though she is in fact blonde. Her hair tumbles in flaxen, abstract waves and kinks around thin shoulders. It could use a brushing, but you can tell it was beautiful once. She smiles at you sweetly as you please, though the image is made somewhat more disturbing by the dirt on her thin, knobby knees and the wings on her back, the elastic kind that go over your shoulder, falling to the side. She tells you she’s an angel with a slight giggle you don’t know what do to with in your mind, and you ask her if she has a place to stay for the night. Not because you’re turned on by her (though if you really admit to yourself, you are), but because there’s something in her eye that looks hopeless, like the end of something.

    She hesitates answering by saying simply “oh” and then “wow,” and then she takes your hand in hers, like a little girl might hold on to a mother. “I don’t think I do,” she says, and feeling that this is the strangest night of your life, you lead her cautiously to your apartment.

    When you key open the door and usher her in, she looks around almost warily, like she doesn’t know what to do with an actual place with four walls and a ceiling.

    You tell her she can use the shower to clean up a bit, since she looks like she could use a hot shower and a little bit of food. It’s past two in the morning at this point and you don’t really even remember why you thought it was a good idea to be out this late, but now you’re tired and hurting a little and you’re listening to the sounds of her running the water in the bathroom, and when you walk by the door on the way to take out your contacts for the night and put on your glasses, you can hear her humming a half-familiar tune, dipping into singing every few notes. Her voice isn’t fantastic, but it’s not bad like yours either.

    You open the door just briefly, to toss in an old t-shirt for her that goes down to your mid-thighs. She’s shorter than you, so when she comes out you think it will probably come to her knees. And when you catch just that glimpse of the bathroom floor, the sad, dirt-streaked angel wings are carefully laid over the sink. 

  10. 2
    23
    Jun

    families have secrets

    there was the room that no one went in
    in the house we had last year
    the door shut tight and locked up smooth
    to block away our darkest fears
    and you of course
    had to open it.
    so thank you for screaming
    thank you for running
    thank you for turning to the second-sex page
    and wicking away a degree of sharp rage
    and drying the shrimp to leave at my feet
    thank you for hanging the clothes on the line
    and leaving the dirt on the lino
    and scaring the measure of hair locks away

  11. 1
    23
    Jun

    old piano

    she sat on an old piano
    and looked at an old violin
    and waited for something old
    to eclipse the newness
    of the pain seeping between her ribs.

    she sat on an old piano
    and pictured him there;
    twirling a horse-hair bow
    between deft fingers meant for caressing
    and stroking out melodies of unearthly beauty.

    she sat on an old piano
    and wished for the accordion
    she’d seen at a yard sale when she was six
    said “daddy, I want it”
    but a man with wrinkles had already carried it away.

    she sat on an old piano
    and the appassionato gave way to queer silence
    the melodies in her head ceasing
    as she watched the drop of a tear
    fill itself out on the ebony surface.

    she sat on an old piano
    and craned her neck towards the windows
    in an effort to see the first hints of stars
    breaking through the too-bright fabric of day
    and covering her with their easy darkness.

    she sat on an old piano
    and thought that one day she would die
    and it struck a wrong chord
    plucked at her ventricles
    and she wondered when that day would be.

    she sat on an old piano
    and tried not to think at all
    because when she remembered him laughing
    it was a knife flung across the room
    put in the freezer first to hurt all the more.

    she sat on an old piano
    and looked at an old violin
    and waited for something old
    to eclipse the newness
    of the pain seeping between her ribs. 

  12. 2
    22
    Jun

    about four thirty-three

    there’s dew on the grass already though it’s not really morning yet and you’re looking at a bead of moisture and thinking about death.

    and she’s beside you with her arm around your shoulders but it’s not comforting, it’s not sweet, it’s sour and you wish the milk would just go bad already so you can break up without feeling guilty.

    then you think you’re waiting for something in the petulant silence between you but then you realize you never really waited for anything at all.

    so you simply lie and look at the dew on the grass and identify the falling-fast constellations and think about death. 

  13. 3
    22
    Jun

    a study of the female body

    if you put your fingers
    at the place where my shoulder blades meet my spine
    and peeled back the skin
    peeled back the time
    you’d find a lot of things i wouldn’t tell you any other way.
    there’s a touch of ambedo
    twisting my spine into a fanciful stairway
    not to heaven, not to hell, not to anything in fact
    just an artist loft’s staircase and a bundle of nerves
    petrichor blinding in the cracks of my bones
    a body-storm, lightning, rain and fire
    and the wishes of rainbows deep in my cells
    languorous lynching of fanciful curls
    a little girl, jaw set, and trying not to cry
    a few drawings i can’t bring my hand to print
    an ectype of a carnival
    and a dash of deep sadness i’ve never shown anyone
    not even you.
    not even you.
    not even you. 

  14. 4
    21
    Jun

    hellhouse

    you’re entering the house full of hell
    with doors that claw and knobs that catch
    forks that cry and a sticky-white match
    candle wax glued
    candy wraps strewn
    and hair on the lino in the house full of hell
    the ropes on the counters do nothing but lie
    mirrors that crack as you die
    tiles that clean as you cry
    weeping for anyone who chooses to pry
    with the lime on the faucets in the house full of hell.

  15. 3
    21
    Jun

    map hands

    i’ve got a house with a region of lies
    and a map in my hands and the forest of eyes
    and an atlas open to a dock and a beach
    and friends who have left me and parents who preach
    and a cup of dark coffee made later this year
    a pinch of her hair-braid and a dash of her fear
    i’ve got her name under pins in the wall
    i’ve got her phone under that, ‘case i needed to call
    time to kill and people to bill
    a house with a region of filthy-sweet lies
    and a map in my hands and the forest of eyes. 

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Savannah. I like books, writing, blogging, and girls.
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