creek write

Inside their ears, sounds pool like water you cup in your hands and raise to your lips while your mother yells, "Don't drink that!" because it comes from the creek and we only trust tap water, and I watch a thin film flow off frog's eggs down to the rapids and hope it's not the glue that holds egg to egg because when you have no hands or feet except as a thought deep down where your heart beats, how can you stop yourself from floating away? I get nervous when my ears ring, like its the distant shouting of forgotten things. I try to remember how my grandmother's hands unfold over mine but am almost sure I'm making it up. I wonder what she's doing now, but my mind always stops at the torn hem of her rag quilt, lingers on the crystalline handle of her second favorite cane, pauses at the protruding hip bone of her best friend, her cat, Paddy, and can't move on to her eyes. I look at my own sometimes, orange bursting out from the pupil like a thirsty sunflower grown inside, the winter blue of ice framing its head from behind, out the window, while it wonders if cold is something made up, and why anyone would think of that. I pretend the blue is my grandmother's, but hers is really more of a forget-me-not blue like the blue blue blossoms she embroiders onto her own handkerchiefs. I question what she fears forgetting, wonder how anyone can remember eighty-two years worth of loss, love, babies, conversations, late-night snacks, creek wading, the water colder than you think it'll be, passing by your ankles and surrounding frog's eggs like a palm holds water, like your ears hold sound. When I close my eyes, I think of this and float.

not sleeping writing

You talk about justice. This is a just world. A just world. I've tried to answer, to tell you what I've seen, but I still don't know how to speak. My windpipe was a flute once, wood worn smooth by fingertips, the way the oil in our skin dissolves the ridged edges of stones we touch over and over, pebbles that were part of the mountain when I was born. I look at these hands and try to remember the time before they learned shame. Now they cover my mouth and wrap around the thinning muscle of my heart to quiet it and ask me questions with no space between for answers. I tell myself I am a mountain, trying to forget the roots that tunnel deep into her skin, the claws of cougars that run across her naked back. The ridge above our house makes me think of a spine beneath skin, the way it dips into shadow then sweeps up to the sky, over and over until it disappears without reason. Even so, I've never thought twice about climbing it. I dig in my toes and pull myself up, clutching handfuls of moss and never falling. At the top, I expect to see myself, but mountains have no mirrors but the clear cold water seeping up from the rocks and it's frozen white this time of year. I expect to see myself, search for my face but only find my fingernails and the dirt underneath them, then looking down toward town find a road I almost recognize. I wrote a letter to you once and said the mountain is the only place I don't need a mouth. I wonder now if she feels the same way, my feet against her backbone, footprints all around.

christmas eve write

I pretend every doorway is a window and step through like a bird who hasn't learned to fly. I wonder if my heart would be louder if it beat more often. I think of Emily Dickinson and her gingerbread. The white folds of her dress hid the flour like my skin hides diamonds and bone dust. I am more hollow than birds most days, and the others I am filled with cement, broken sidewalks, prison walls. My skin is fighting its way in. I am not white only where I'm red or blue, the distant, glowing red of my lips, the blue of my veins like road maps or how I imagine rivers will look if I ever learn to fly. The blue spread across my chest once and down my thighs like shadows at dusk when the sun is slipping away so slowly you haven't realized what you're losing until you can't see anything. Sometimes I break the things I love. The smooth slender trunk of my mother's porcelain elephant snapping off between my fingers. A photograph of my grandmother, grey curls whipped back by the wind, crumpled on my desk beneath books I dropped without thinking. I wonder if the hands that broke me understood this. Sometimes I smile at mirrors because I think they're a stranger passing by, then I have to stop and ask if I've always looked like this. The blue of my eyes is seeping into the skin around them. My lips are cracked bark, my hair an empty bird's nest stripped of feathers, my skin like ivory, smooth to the touch and reeking of death. I peel my shirt from my bones and touch the blue, blink and watch it disappear, wonder who did this to you. Some days I can't remember my name, so I pretend I'm a bird who hasn't learned to fly and I'm not so heavy I never will.

only the one squishwrite

Only the one with empty pockets and the other with a broken wrist came home today. I was waiting by the window sorting lint on the window sill. The tulip poppler in our yard was shedding petals like paint chips flecked onto the grass. When I look at them up close they are yellow fading to orange to pink to white, but from here they look grey as the ash in our fireplace, or the moths dancing and moaning beneath the porch light when I'm pacing the house searching for sleep. The floors are wood and I can see faces moving in the knots, like how bark feels like cold palms of hands against mine. I talk to trees when I'm alone. I talk to trees and press my ear against their bellies, listen like I listen to my three-year-old cousin, carefully enough to pluck the words from her lips and run my fingertips over them, to understand, to know what to say back. In my dreams, she cracks eggs into tiny cups made of wax. She cracks boiled eggs into the runny ones and my whole family glares at me for laughing. It's hard to know when not to laugh sometimes. There is a crack in the window that looks like a silver spiderweb. You're afraid to touch it, you told me once, because you might stick, might fall in and stay, waiting for a spider that moved on months ago when she reached all eight of her hands into her pockets and pulled them out empty. I touch your arm and hope I stick. I touch your arm so you come home. When the wind blows petals from the tulip poppler, you pull away and run to the yard, trying to catch them before they touch the ground.

running out justwrite

Run out of my shoes and leave them behind so I'll find them one day on a barefoot walk by the farm and wonder why they left, then find you sitting cross-legged in the brush with dirty toes, your palms against your forehead, your chin touching your chest. You'll tell me your heartbeat feels different, and I'll hold you in my arms and murmur lullabies that smell like lavender until the old rooster falls down in the yard and all I can think of is my grandfather weeping. I can't picture his face, but I memorized the poem he sent on a postcard of a field of flowers I couldn't name. He looks like my father, my father with his eyebrows bent in concentration, shirtless and sweating by the porch in July, measuring wood. I don't remember what he built. He built everything. My hands weave string into blankets, make scarves with pockets at the ends, but can't frame doors or refinish windows. I tell you I'd keep everyone warm if I could, and the wind picks up both of us and carries you east and me south. You're smiling, waving goodbye, and I'm halfway across the ocean before I notice how cold my feet are, and I wonder if you have my shoes. Three months later, I'm in the living room with my mother and she's telling me the story of my birth. She always skips the labor and says the word "happy" a lot, her eyes full of tears, the corners of her mouth turned down. I want to hold her hands in mine, but I don't want her to see they fit. I slip her bare feet into my hands and rub them, wishing I could remember.

woods write

People walk through here a lot. They carry peanut butter sandwiches wrapped in paper, or umbrellas, or their secrets folded into lace handkerchiefs. I used to hide here, pretend I was a snowflake, but the people walking through over and over would stop to question me, introduce themselves, ask why I never change. I'd say I'm just pretending to be a snowflake. They'd hand me a million tiny mirrors, all different shapes, bite into their sandwiches, open their umbrellas, drop their lace-wrapped secrets in the stream, and keep walking. One Sunday, a girl ran through. Her hair was braided with clover and swinging about her neck. Her fingers were stretched apart, reaching to her sides. From where I was sitting, it looked like she wasn't wearing shoes.

pouring down justwrite

Pouring down the drain like discarded water from last night at two a.m. when I was dreaming about trains whose steam becomes large dogs and there was a tunnel and then I was awake, thirsty like an afternoon in church not talking. We'd always nap afterward, like prayer was so exhausting and the joints in our fingers ached from our hands clasping each other and patting the shoulders of our neighbors. Peace be with you. We said this, our tongues dry, but I've never felt closer to God than on afternoons we skipped church, the Sunday when four-year-old Elizabeth and I ate peanut butter sandwiches in the clover field next to the airport. The airplanes would come in just above us, the air around us shaking, Elizabeth curling up into the ground, her cheek pressed against grass, one eye gazing up from the space in front of her elbow, watching the sky. Summers feel like prayer, when you and I sit together beneath the slow-swinging grape vines, talking about birch trees and waiting for the rain as if it is a sure thing. The day I came back to school, half the sky was grey, down to the horizon where the mountains were throwing shadows that looked like home. I grew up on a mountain, the air clear and thin as lace. Now I sleep in a valley and try to convince myself I'm still higher than the ocean, that the earth coming up on all sides isn't trying to swallow anything but just wants to stretch, to reach up as far as possible and never fall back down. Peace be with you. My throat is so dry only God can hear me.

the best place to justwrite

The best place to hide my footprints is underneath your kitchen floor, the one that creaks at night when nobody is awake and throws shadow figures onto the unseen earth below it. The tea kettle is whispering mismatched lullabies in the morning and I am outside in the garden behind the blueberry bush. The roses died months after Mom planted them, but they still have thorns piercing the hot summer air like a scream in a field full of grass. Grass is so quiet. You're so quiet I can hardly see you. I learned to whittle last year and saw your face in every knot, your fingerprints in every imperfection. I stopped buying sandpaper and told you it's because it reminds me of the beach, the type of walking that scrapes away your skin and tries to see what's inside you. And by you I mean me, of course. I've spent my whole life trying to see my own eyes, in the unrippled surface of a lake, in my little brother's fingernails. The last place I looked was your pupils, but all I saw was a sunflower, its seeds all fallen, its petals wrinkled like my grandmother's hands. This summer walking to lunch, we saw two praying mantises. Their heads were tilted up to the sky and their voices were quiet, clear. I told her she's my luck, and she nodded without hearing me. I left my footprints under her kitchen floor. I pray.

carbon justwrite

No longer than branches, no deeper than roots, my fingers reach across this room and touch the strand of hair loose on your shoulder. Your gaze meets mine, your eyes dewy. My body, you tell me, was a mirror once. My stomach was the surface of a lake with no tides, your face reflected in my skin, in the crooks of my arms. I smell like the sun-parched end of summer, a smell that is almost smoke but has never been fire. A star, that daffodil, the book I borrowed from you, a pile of ash; there is really no difference, you tell me. Carbon, just carbon. The word unfolds on your lips and rests there. My fingers unfold from each other and try to show you my secrets. I am not carbon. I am bone china, transparent in the bright hour of noon, cloudy when your eyes finally stop staring down the horizon, daring the moon to rise again. Every night it does, and every night you look to me, grinning. Every night you sweep your arm up toward the sky and say Look! Look what I've done! I nod, my fingers folding into each other. I would tell you I'm proud. I would tell you you're stupid and that the moon rises because I breathe because of oxygen, but I am only carbon, a silent, distant star, a wilting daffodil, the unturned pages of this book, a pile of ash.

who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?

It started with an apple. They told me this when I was very young. They planted pictures of rounded hips, soft skin, seeds you can't taste because they're poison. I thought of old men on wrap-around porches in rocking chairs, full bushels beside them, a cup in each hand. They don't eat until their wives cook, hands dusty with flour, sweeping a bit of spilled cinnamon from the counter with two damp fingers. My mother cut apple slices for me to take to school in my lunch. They left the inside of the bag dewy, like breath on a spoon you pull out of the drawer smudged. I never ate my apple slices. The air turned them brown and soft. I thought of rust. I threw them away but kept the bag, folded it three times and brought it home, my lunchbox smelling of apples. On afternoons like this, I am planted. I have roots growing from poison to fruit, can not lift my feet without pulling some earth loose. A stranger told me once that I taste like blueberries. I looked straight through his eyes and wondered how he knew. In each of his pupils was an apple pie, the steam rising and leaving dew across his forehead. I thought about his wife, her flour-dusted hands, as his fingers reached toward my skin.