merry justwrite

I unwind the wind from around about my fingers, let them breathe the cool, still air for the first time. The gingerbread people are anxious in my oven, feeling their edges begin to burn while their souls are still raw, chewy in the middle, a glass of milk already emptied and drowned in the sink. My pine needles fall to my feet, parched, almost on fire, watching the light leak out through the bottom, nothing to seal that hole. I tell him to stand here, to wait until he's done waiting. I hang shiny fish on hooks from his ears, comb his hair just right and tell him not to move much, to suck shallow breaths and pretend the noises aren't so loud. No use jumping. They're only echoes tunneling up from the basement, full of fury and those words I forget, signifying something that I don't want to understand because my organs ache when I think of it, playing low, slow carols that sound like dirges when I'm so far away, making lists of resolutions impossible so I can feel bad about it later, feel anything, and I forgot he was waiting in the family room so long the carpet grew up over his mind, clouded the room with clouds that I try to catch in my palms which are too flat to grasp, too empty to know what it is to be full. There is a spot on the ceiling that I chase with shadows because it's made of light, something I know how to hide, tiny footsteps in the corners, the voices in the basement ceasing, my unwrapped presents shielding their eyes with paper while gingerbread people feel their souls harden and beg for milk. I forget where I found it the first time, and I write myself a note to free him from the carpet before all my needles fall again.

club day justwrite

Herding cats in the faculty meeting, tile splitting apart like the plates of the Earth, things that seem small when you think of them without letting your feet tell you where they've been, which faults they've pointed out and scraped along the sand, dropping a rock into the sea from the ocean floor, knowing anything can float if you tell yourself it will. I break the light apart in my hands, not expecting it to crumble so easily, a battered shell pried from the boulder at the base of a hill, thinking it's holding up the whole world when really there's a lot of glue at the seams. The thread is just for show, spinning itself and unspinning upon the floor, running to the edges of everywhere I've been but cutting itself off before I can taste what the air is like on the outside, like my mind, like clouds caught in boxes, mist that disappears when you open the lid, but you wanted the emptiness anyway since I've always told you how great it is. There's nowhere to put the corners anymore, so I fill them with dust and watch them float away, the tides ceasing for an hour until the shadows meet the horizon, as untouched as my skin as I rest, my feet dangling into the sky, tracing symbols I like to trick myself into reading as if they mean something, as if I haven't already swallowed all of it, let it dig its way out of my throat, fingers pricking holes in the beach, expecting them to fill with blood but there's only starlight, and it's then that you realize the moon rose days ago, that it's been waiting for you to say goodbye ever since, not expecting a hello. In the summertime, I forget, let paint pour into my soul and trickle out the bottoms of my feet so the new ideas can follow me, teach themselves a new map of a new continent, free of waves, with lakes that rest silently under a sunny haze, reaching out toward the horizon but never quite touching it, waiting for the moon to rise, watching the rest break apart in your hands.

Quiet disarray of blankets tearing apart at the edges, but silently so you don't notice, like a ballet or a tiny waterfall caught be the sun and melted into air. I want to know what it's like to become the sky, to be unsure of where I begin and end, dropping feathers into my boxes so I can look at them later, frame them and let you wonder why, content in not knowing anything but how it feels to have birds drift through your arms, a needle through a hem, not as piercing as you'd think, just finding the holes that are already there. You tear up all your recipes and throw them into the wind, let your measuring cups fall against the hardwood, chipping so all the milk drips out, like tears but slower, distracted by the women in the field outside losing their keys and finding them again, always aware that the door is unlocked but trying to put on a good show, as if their fingers aren't trembling and losing their whispers, as if the cracks in the clouds aren't so noticeable, a red flower in a white room, the sheets clean, folded and crisp, as if laughter would bounce off of them and find its way through the window, sneaking between particles of glass, not realizing the dust has nestled in my mind, filling the corners because I saved them for too long, wanting to teach myself to sing or to fly without really understanding where I want to go, if my footprints are lily pads asking for more time, sending their transparent blooms as close to the sky as possible before they're plucked, beheaded, taken back inside. I only notice from the corner of my eye, leaving the rest for tomorrow.

To Miss Fannie Lou Hamer

Your road is lit by summer colors
as you carry a ballot and a pen,
ready to be freed by ink
with your signature, a scribbled work
that begins to speak but can only sing.
You fight fists with the force of a hymn.

Crippled by the law, you still wear hymns
on your lips, in your heart. Color
blank minds, teach them to sing
and to place their songs in awaiting pens.
They will listen, remember your words
and learn of the voice of ink.

Before you sketch your life in ink,
it's pictures, memorized like hymns
in the moments when thoughts mean more than words,
when peace means as much as prayer, as color
mixing with color, music finding its pen
so the world can find itself singing.

They cover your mouth but you have to sing,
more than you need paper or ink
while watching doors open, close, open,
taunting you with hard rhythms, breaking your hymns
as they broke your skin once, twice, coloring
you red, flinching at the harshness of their own words.

But you rise from the floor, feeling soft words
grown in your soul, still ready to sing
of the power of standing, the power of colors.
You give every person a bit of your ink,
give them your strength, your endless hymns.
I hum to myself as you fill my pen.

You still grip your ballot and your pen,
"sick and tired of being sick and tired," your words
heard and understood, clear as hymns
breaking through silence. They summers now sing,
their days long, illuminating ink
that speaks of the beauty of all colors.

I want to color my life with your words.
I clutch my pencil and can hear you sing
into my ink, my pages holding your hymns.

(gold)fishy justwrite

This is why there's a goldfish in her water jug and no mountains on the moon except one or two with mossy clearings where I stop to write in quick but not spontaneous moments, full of orange slices of orange, without the skin because as soon as it's broken it might as well disappear. The mornings come faster now than when I was young. It's as though time is one continuous morning, not the kind where I wear a black veil and pat handkerchiefs against my cheeks, only a yellow sundress with a red apron folded in the grass, pebbles in each pocket, spilling into the world. I sketch empty faces onto tree bark, tape it back up when I'm done, keeping out the cold like the newspaper pages in my sleeves, headlines crumpled against color, smudged so I think my magnifying glass is dirty when I try to read them. I sprout scales in the afternoon, search for water when I'm already submerged because I've been wet my whole life and feel that something is missing when you remind me so harshly, your breath smelling of the seaweed that grows from beneath your fingernails. I count the pebbles one by two until the time comes back again, reminding me to iron my pants and wipe the glitter from my face--evening is no time to shine, no time like the present, wrapped with a bow and nestled in my branches, soaking in the salts from the air, the sand from the puddles my feet refuse to leave. And that is why there's a goldfish in her water jug. Because the mountains were already full.

smallenvirosciwrite

I sit at the edge of my dandelion
wish, feeling wings
sprouting in my mind
beyond the places I can see.
I am as untouched as the horizon,
casting my seeds
into my own skin, watching
its colors change as the light
changes, as the seasons
blend into each other, fog
touching the ends
of my fingers, convincing them
they'll never need to feel
anything but the inside
of an autumn leaf, the petals
of an unnamed flower
that is only a flower
in the sense that I'm sure
it's not a tree
or a butterfly

or the palm of my hand.

new notebook, new justwrite

Good as new fireflies, flashing their taillights for the first time as if it's nothing special, but inside they're burning, not like lamps lit too close to the sheets or a cookie tray to the bare hand, but like tasting morning air for the first time in five months, finding a peace so calm even the wind seems still at first. She dances on sidewalk lines under the moon's pale face, framed by a crown of planets budding like roses carved out of gems. She digs into the Earth with each breath, planting emptiness and wondering why nothing ever grows, why the rainy season always brings ice, which isn't so bad because every time dancing in hail feels like the first time, tiny soft pebbles landing in her hair, thinking it's a wing and that the other one must be nearby because without two you can only glide, and even then you need to be somewhere high enough to jump off. When the ground races toward the sky, she slips and falls, thought only a few inches because one foot was already under the grass, planting its metaphorical roots in the dew, roots which she can think of later and wonder what they soaked in, brandy or poison or expensive perfume, though all are basically the same if you break it down to chemicals. She pulls herself up again and tells the cresting sun she knows how much time has passed. She doesn't really but neither does the sun, yawning, squinting at the harshness of the waning dark left over from the night before. I turn my thoughts inside out but don't like that side either. I give them all to her anyway, and she laps them up, says they dance on her tongue like saffron's sleepy steps and pepper's brief infatuations. I blush but she can't see it, decides my face is always that color, and it is really, as though poison has crept up through my soles and planted itself just below the skin. She knows what that's like, and she doesn't judge. I grab the end of her scarf before she can slip away into the dawn, not expecting it to tear because I've never noticed it's woven from leaves until now.

silly justwrite

Until the end when I let my ribbons go, watch the wind lift them and then leave them behind, I will keep my hair in braids because I'm afraid it will leave me if it tastes freedom. I set my marrow on fire just to feel my insides burn, not worried about being empty because my skin keeps the smoke from escaping, except the very edges that crawl out of my ears, send their cursive wisps to blend into the clouds then disperse across the atmosphere until they are hidden before my eyes, glowing in the darkness, trapping shadows without really knowing what to do with them. I'm still on the ground, shifting more than the plates I'm standing on which isn't hard because they really are very slow, slower than molasses in January as if I am my grandmother's mother, not a relative to me because we only share a name, and a middle one at that, while the rest is a secret on a black and white photograph, not sure if the women it holds are really as eccentric as you say because they have no voices since their words are candles that reaches their own bases decades ago, and their hairstyles and buttoned blouses are only as foreign as I want them to be. I pick up my sketchbook instead, draw zigzags and corners in every color I have except red, write a letter in the middle and address it to myself, can't find its place in the alphabet until I take all the numbers away, not by subtraction or division but by mentioning there are biscuits with jam in the sun room, enough to share while we rest and the silver rusts and I forget where I put the polish jar, decide it doesn't matter unless the company doesn't like us, in which case we shouldn't care anyway. I imagine notebooks opened across tables, my family sniffling not because it's a funeral or because it's a wedding but because people really grow so quickly until they're so old they shrink like my grama, except I haven't noticed because I've been getting taller all the while, but I take her hands in mine, wonder about the secrets that have made her bones so soft, listen to her lessons that she sings in the kind of whisper that a whole room can hear, and I can see dreams dancing behind her eyes, leaving muffled patterns in the grass until the stars rise and taste the next morning and set again, then I am so old I don't know what to do with myself other than set me on a shelf and write about what the world is doing, pretending I haven't already felt what they're feeling. But soon I have to give my grama her words back, altered slightly, framed by zigzags in every color but red, and I take a picture because someone told me once that it will last longer, but I'm not sure that's true because by the time it's developed and sitting on my counter I've forgotten why I took it, what my voice sounded like and how tall I was and whether or not those footprints behind my eyes were really mine, but I let it all go and wander to the next room to see if they have my favorite kind of jam, noticing the cursive the smoke left on my walls, nod at its message, deciding I will know the end when it's here.

[also, now my writing notebook is full]

A Fish Story

The children of the village learn what they desire to learn, which is often everything. Some of the youngest girls are endlessly entertained by the throwing of fishing nets off of high rocks into the sea, how they always come back full of plenty to eat or set free. Three such girls were so entertained by this idea that one day, while the adults in the village and the older children were back at the clearing eating lunch together, they snuck to the rocks and cast the nets repeatedly into the deep waters, pulling as many fish as they could from the ocean. They set the fish in hollowed rocks all around them, and soon all the rocks were full, and the girls laughed at how the other islanders would be so pleased that they would have enough to eat for the rest of time. However, the nets soon became lighter as they were pulled back. Fewer and fewer fish were caught in the fibers, and soon there were none at all. The girls desperately tossed the nets again and again and again into the waves, crying salty tears as the nets were always empty. Then, as the girls were becoming most upset, a large bird glided down from a nearby apple tree, shaking its head in disapproval to the girls. It explained that the ocean can only hold so many fish, and though there are a lot, they don’t last forever if you are greedy and take them all at once. The girls sobbed and pleaded to the bird to help them fill the ocean again. The bird opened its beak wide and they filled its jaws with smiling fish, watching them glisten like jewels as the sun reflected from the water below. The bird then flew over the ocean, dropping fish like raindrops back into the sea, and as they hit the surface, they waved good bye to the girls, who laughed in delight at the lesson they’d learned. They then tossed two small nets into the sea and pulled up enough fish for each villager to have half of one. When the adults returned from their lunch, they praised the girls on knowing just how many fish the world needs to survive.

mossy justwrite.

Mossy thoughts on my mind and on my bookshelf, stories where people grow wings and then nothing grow wings and then nothing happens, or at least nothing very noticeable. I let my hair down, not often enough but long enough to feed the wind its secrets, clean it of crude oil and lard, let the moss seep in, touch my skin with fairy footprints and deer footprints, instincts to turn away from the morning light, born without a scent, watching as depth melts from the world, an abstract watercolor or connecting all the wrong dots. On weekday evenings, I walk through the woods, feel like dancing but am so afraid the acorns are watching me that I can't, so I strip away my shoes, notice I'm not wearing socks, taste the Earth with the bottoms of my feet and the tip of my tongue, then wish for silence, just enough for an hour or a lifetime, enough time to rearrange my thoughts so I know the truth about myself, not my silhouette through a frosted window, not by interpreting the secret, quiet language I carve into the thinnest ice, not measuring the length of my eyelashes or counting the slaves I've freed, just something I haven't quite realized yet, or ever, it's possible. I weave blankets from the meadow grasses but miss my oak leaf pillows sometimes, the thick dreams they painted on my forehead, slow and rich like the smell of maple or pine or something else that's faster when it's warm, but not much faster. When I find my shoes again, the moss has grown over their soles, so I leave them behind and find my own way.

corners justwrite.

In the corner where I keep my handfuls of sand, tell myself I'll count them some day but am never really sure how to separate them from each other again, like birds falling from the sky or rising from the ground, meeting in the middle so you can't tell which is who and what this photograph is trying to tell you unless you look very closely, with a magnifying glass or a microscope, at the direction their feathers are pointed, pluck them away one by two by three, but that's all because the only thing you can do with so many feathers is to build more birds, but the originals were better anyway, not so out of tune or on the hour, just enough to remind yourself that imperfection is natural and it all works out in the end, or else it works itself into canopies of light, trying to catch the marsh air, unsure of where it begins, and ending up chasing shadows around the room, looking stupid in front of the video camera and laughing about it but only half the time. I unscrew the lid to your bottle of dreams, and you snatch it away from me again, not knowing that I was concerned it might be too tight, that I have my own to worry about, or not worry at all when I'm sure it's in a cardboard box full of feathers in a chest full of sand, no room to move, just to bend because the whole world is so soft sometimes that I'm not quite sure where I've been or where I'm going, and I figure it doesn't matter much as long as I've got my wings, got my cranberries and my bottle of dreams or something just as useful, and I'll forget about the corners sometimes.

tidbits

"Forget not that the Earth desires to feel your bare feet and the wind longs to play in your hair." --Kahil Gibran


oyster shell castles
sit proudly beneath the moon's face,
secretly waiting.


I am a shadow
knowing nothing besides the
stark absence of light


mud under my nails,
my hair smelling of marsh musk.
I let it remain.


By the time I realize I've never
seen the Bay in November,
December is already here.

ultimate connection

I strip plastic bark from the grasses, wonder where the trees went, remember home, remember empty oil cans and a twist tie or two, something I forget, wash from my mind like waves washing away the lines I sketch in the sand. In my dreams, they come back to me, drifting in the tides, bottles that call to me as they float, proud of how boldly they exist but still often invisibly. I gather them in my arms but find there are no messages inside, wonder where those important words dissolved, if the water stole them hungrily, but as the setting sun sends orange sparks across the glass, dimming the clouds, cooling the wind as it teases my arms, I realize the bottles are the message, the bags I clutch in my fists, lonely so distant from the secrets they held inside once, and I pour the excess from my skin, let my chosen color drain, have the world, all its sands and clays, mosses and trees, humming wings and frantically grasping fingers, write their poetry into me, dye me their own color which I will accept, refuse to blend in when I wait on asphalt islands, watching plastic skip across the parking lot, searching for somewhere to hold on.

the mark

Etchings in mud soak into my skin. The color washes away, the smell mingling a bit longer, but the feel remains, the gritty base of everything clinging between my toes, in swirls and splatters down my legs, coating my arms. I watch the movement of something that seems silent at first, minuscule gills and eyes weaving between the grasses. My fingers search for where they begin, find no end and no origin, only shrimp flinging themselves into the air, searching for freedom briefly lost, the taste of it still tangible, ready to be gathered into glass bottles bearing barnacles' footprints, bleached by the sun like bone china waiting, but not impatiently, for something to happen. The waves greet them at each moment, lick at the sand like a cold tongue searching, for time maybe but not too much, enough sand to fill an hour glass that will shut itself in a drawer for the sake of being ignored. The clouds have risen now, wanting again to touch the sun, waiting for the shore birds to desire their mist, to slice through them like canoes slicing through bay and fog in the same second, me being most free when I am not thinking of freedom, when all there is is the wind humming at my ears, the waves whispering to my feet, and the art of the mud forever on my soul.

after the marsh

Sinking words into the mud, watching my skin disappear, I become a puddle, let the silver dancing fish run freely through me, not as if I don't exist but that I exist more than I ever have before. Grasses reach up through my hands, not bothering to turn away because the sun streams between the cracks that dirt an bay wear deeper, crevices of time on my palms, a quiet secret that those passing by will meander right over, not knowing that if they had smaller steps they would sink into the Earth, scrape ancient trees and long-dissolved animals with the bottoms of their feet. I see the surprise absent from their faces, taste the wind and let it take my thoughts in return, let the marsh air kiss my eyelids closed and ask it all to soak in.

Expectations

When I am at Fox Island, my feet will be coated in dirt, the mud in the cracks of my hands deepening.
When I am at Fox Island, I will listen to the Earth at night, memorize its lullabies so I can sing them later to myself.
When I am at Fox Island, I will smell of marshes and algae, go three days without brushing my hair, let my clothes grow less colorful.
When I am at Fox Island, I will sit quietly and feel a world without time, let the water carry the ash in my soul away with its tides.
When I am at Fox Island, I will rise with the sun, glow with the moon, and leave everything else behind.

Introduction

Somewhere on the Earth is a small island surrounded by miles and miles of open sea, waves crashing on the stoney beaches, tidepools flickering in the sunlight, every day all day forever. The water is like paint, deep enough that it can’t be wiped away or spread out because it will stain everything, turn all the white into itself, not be happy about it, but not sad either. That’s just how it is. There are people on this island, who have no name for where they live because they believe it is the whole world on a universe of water, breathing with tides, a creature they stand upon and respect but do not wonder about. They know nothing about societies that live on concrete earth flattened and scraped, covered with dirt, light bouncing off of office buildings to the ground. They know nothing of the life where people debate about what others deserve, where everything is colored or uncolored, where everything is changing, where we laugh one day and cry the next. Living is simple, and it is what they expect. They gather and hunt food, tell stories around small fires at night, collect water from the leaves when it rains, which is often. There are no seasons on this island; there are occasional tropical storms, but because of currents and the placement of the land in the deep sea, at the top of an ancient, inactive volcano, these storms are weak and often bring more good, with their accompanying rain and slightly cooler weather, than destruction. Under a watchful sky, changing at its own pace, the village teaches its children to read to stars, to find the best tidepools for digging clams, and to be kind to each other. The sea and the land give the islanders what they need. Fish jump into the nets the most skilled women cast down from small rock cliffs a few yards above the ocean on the back, or front, depending on your perspective, of the island. Fruits, like orange grapes and smoky blue papayas, ripen on vines and trees throughout the land. The grasses and many leaves can be cut or picked to take back to the village and grind into juices, ointments, or broth for stew. The people live off of what is given to them, laughing and learning and assured in each other, in a small cleared area in the center of the island, surrounded by trees which are surrounded by bushes which are surrounded by grasses, surrounded by stone, surrounded by water, and so it has been and always will be.

because justwrite

Gentle ferrets or maybe just one, like the songs I want to have stuck in my head and to the bottom of my shoe. Slap some paper on top so the floot can slip away, teach itself to fly or maybe fall, since it's not as scary if there's nowhere to land. Ice climbs my wrists and tells me when it's time to wake up, wide eyes staring from a wooden trunk, a chest maybe, with a brass lock whose key is somewhere obvious, somewhere I forget to look because you can't lose something in a place you'd expect it to be. I'm waiting to break in half, maybe not my body nor my soul, but my pencil at least, or it will wear away. The chosen path doesn't matter because there will eventually be so many footprints everything will be flat again, the Earth especially, and I'll drop off the edges with starlight tied around my waist, wonder how far it stretches because I already know how fast it moves. Faster than me, faster than my thoughts, wondering if redundancy is really that obvious, but growing bark as I wait for branches, slip my arms inside myself and feel for a lamp because I prefer lamplight over highlights, want darkness confined to shadows as if it is something when really there's just one thing missing. My eyes adjust, or try to, but accept their limitations-- glass closing in, and I forgot how to break it, forgot about waiting until the pressure equalizes, or if that rule even exists outside of water. I know that I don't know, so I reach for red ribbons dangling above my head, the letters I can feel but not read; they feel like warmth, like sunlight at midnight, like music and fur, alive, pulsing against me. I will wake up and there will be an empty box, a quiet river, but for now I have this.

know nothing justwrite

No slacking in slacks or pants made of my dreamthoughts, somewhere to hide the secrets I spell on my lips with finger letters, mailed over several days to somewhere just down the street. I patch my walls with magic dust, but really it's just pepper, sooo sixteen-year-old boy with a cheesy mustache, a gypsy's tent that sits on a hill looking quiet, not like soft songs or the cracking of eggshells but like nothing, so quiet it's a silence not even an empty house can contain. I know because I've been there, something invisible as my breath fills the rooms, stressing the windows so the glass bends, breaks to stop people from holding each other in boxes, looking for answers that have no connections to the question. I shape your culture with my edges before ducking out of your sight, casting my net into the sky to catch some fish for the moon because she loves how they swim the fluid freedom, not holding the sacred liquid in cups, as if I am a fish and the sacred liquid is a metaphor for the knowledge I wrapped for your birthday, set it on your doorstep and knocked before running down the stairs and across the sidewalk like a raindrop trying to gather as much light as possible before spilling over its own boundaries. I am wet, and that's all I know, but then I evaporate and realize I know nothing, just one idea at one moment that I keep in a locket but can't hang on my neck because it's always too heavy. As the colors grow over my ears and I peel them off to give back to the world, you pick up the slack in my spirit and tell me it's all right if I'm not sure.

just a girl justwrite

I want to cry with you,
teach your tears how
to belong to the world,
to the hands that grab
at your breasts,
trying to tear them away
from your soul.
I see your wishes, the ones you send
through your thatched roof,
through your television screen,
through the cinder blocks in your walls.
I am old now,
you say.
It's not important if my life was happy,
you say.
I just hope things are better
for my daughters and their daughters,
you scream, their laughter
rising faster than your words.

I let the water soak
into my hips when it rains, the grass
clinging to my naked feet
as I urge my bends to grow,
the ones they try to iron away
with burning sticks, scare
with heat and scars
into staying within my body, reminding me
of how new and chaste and ignorant
they want me to be.
I strut instead,
all waist and hips
and the hanging skin on my arms
that you try to cut away so
you can sew it over my lips
or tell me to do it myself
since sewing is a woman's job.

When they plant their seed
inside us, we will turn it to our own,
recreate ourselves
in our own image,
sagging breasts
hanging light on our spirits
and dirt heavy between our toes,
sow the Earth with women
unfolded across pages,
carving wood into a brand new Venus
with five arms all signing
how important each one is.
I will tuck myself into the sky
and claim the world, give it all to you
before I realize
you've had it all along
and that's why they've been so scared,

and when your tears fall
onto the ground,
we name the goddesses
who sprout from them.

justwrite in the evening, justwrite all through the night

Rocking chairs puzzle about trees,
slice through them with their thoughts
while I dstract myself
from flashbulb lights,
wonder why I smile
and what my tears look like.
I imagine bits of yarn and paperclips,
winking at each bend
in the road where the tires coast right over the edge
and I think about how poetic it'd be
if only it wasn't real.
I grip the steering wheel,
grip pencils and some stranger's
eyeliner, can't figure out
what sounds the same
so I turn it all to Arabic, decide no one could ever understand
something like that
as I read your hands from across the room,
watch your fingertips
prance through the air
and your eyebrows become grammar,
while the backward words
on the screen fade into
green blocks with hidden lids,
a secret
I hide at the front of my lips,
thinking it's so profound,
like bricks crumblind
and my breath on a frozen window,
hair feeling my face,
feet searching for something
with no name,
but I can see it dancing, blocking
both light and shadows.

I slice myself
into smaller pieces so
I can fit through the doorway
that wouldn't be so exciting if it wasn't
brand new
and I once again distract myself, this time
letting the lights flicker
on and not quite off,
like shades of gray and black
circling each other, afraid
to touch, afraid
of the edges
and the things between them, afraid
of everything but being afraid.

I almost turn back
a few pages
but turn ahead just one instead
because though you can run backward
it's important to take your time
when you're somewhere you haven't seen before,
walk in ovals,
squares and stars,
pace on the floor until
it is worn through, finally settling
into a rocking chair
and puzzling over
why its curves fit so well.

living justwrite

Living funeral after funeral, shrouding my eyes with ivy when I can't stand to stare at the sky, waiting for the sun to pass over or the moon to find its roots and shoot them deep into my stomach, the figurative kind where I feel music and taste music and taste apple pie, cooling on the window sill because I don't like warm fruit or orange security warnings in the morning. I do pour myself some tea quite frequently though, let it soak into the soil that is my skin, my lips with sweat beading across them, not theirs but the air's, as the clouds spill their humidity in tufts of mist on the wind where I toss the paintings that were once on my windows, stopped the light from shining through quite so clearly. I try to avoid the scenes I've seen before, but I take pictures anyway, refuse to toss them out because there could be a face or a shadow in the background that I want to remember, to trace onto the soles of my feet and plant in the Earth as it loosens itself behind me, makes room for the air and the distant edges of sunlight to soak in, like water used to when the sky knew how to rain, to unleash its tears against the ground, scream that it's so happy you can't even realize the inches of flowers and centimeter worms peeling the starlight from their eyelids, tucking it beneath their pillows and into their teacups, saving it for another day, always another day but night sometimes where I unroll dark blue silk that looks black to you and let it cast its shadow upon my toes.

blue toes nightwrite

My toes turn blue
because I love you
so much in fact that the moons could collide
in my heart and there'd still be enough
room for all the cats in the world
to come in
and sit down
and curl up
when it's cold.
My lizards sleep at night
so the mice under my bed have no company.
It's hungry company, though, not the kind you'd want
like weevils
snuggling in baskets woven from the root
fibers deep in your soul,
fibers that tie
us to each other
so there's the tug in my chest when you run, telling me to follow at least with a letter stamped with forever, my mother's footsteps above my head and my grandmother's even farther up, above the clouds even
because she's dead
and that means she can fly now,
though I see birds on the ground every day.
A white dove nested in the highway overpass for a while, nodded at me in my car as I went by a bit too fast. One day, she was gone, and I wanted to cry because sometimes I'm sure no one else noticed her. She was so quiet, and the birds with songs are the ones peering ears seek, the ones netted and stuffed down pantlegs and caged, not free to leave like my one white dove, the only white thing that stood apart in Thurmont, and I know now why we cage the things we love
because now all the overpass tells me
is that I don't know where she went.

fat nightwrite

You say I need highlights,
but I prefer sunlight, lamplight
in a dimmed room, a pile of books
in the corner waiting
for my hands.

You want to pluck my eyebrows,
pluck out my eyes until
you've perfected my reflection
and it's waiting
to introduce me to myself.

nightwrite last night

All I need is to write.
I will sing, eat, breathe
later on.
Today hair swayed
in unison with fur and
I liked the way
plants branched out from their centers,
while the centers
of people change each moment.
There's no balance in that,
just planets
rolling down steep hills
to steeper hills,
and we never see what happens
next until we do.

tired justwrite

Stuck on the back of the bus, watching city lights turn to starlight that turns to me and asks just who do I think I am. I nod and smile, pretend I'm pretending I'm listening when the question marks really are tattoos on my earlobes, disrupting my frontal lobes that are so busy already, arranging and rearranging furniture, thinking it's so feng shui to spill water across the floor boards, set me on the bottom, set my free, like the piles of old books and their mold in a relationship that spews spores of commensalism, sucking words from deep within while half-broken spines hardly notice anything but the rings of coffee deep in the pages, the rings of ages, of years, deep in each tree trunk and each of my limbs, the ones who spell words when I tell them to draw pictures, but I can't blame their insensitivity because they have no ears to taste my voice, not eyes to read the ink spouting from my lips, nothing but fingers that could probe the insides if they wanted to but plant flower beds instead, heaping mounds over grains of life and wondering how the sun can float effortlessly through mud, tickle the skin on the bottom of my feet, move my hair from one side of the moon of my face to the other when there is a metal sky above me, an umbrella of stubborn metal sky that bends when I beg enough but never enough, not enough until I pray, but I only learned to prey, to crunch the individual between my teeth for the good of the population, telling the protesters to take their signs and saunter home--I've got a seed in each of my hands, mold growing across the front of my Bible--I've got it covered.

just now just write justwrite

Just write for a while, let ribbons of fire and steam pour from my eyes and spell the things I've seen, heard, built. There are splinters of ice in my fingertips that have been there so long they learned to read by the candlelight that spills from my mouth. At the beginning of time, there was no time, no human inventions of sand falling against glass, touching what it could be if it could only move fast enough, slow enough even, as the oyster shells run so long they crumble apart beneath the waves. I was dust once, lifting the sky with my infinite grains, laughing because your eyes can't travel everywhere at once, sobbing because it takes so many years to find gravity. The thin fingers of vines part the Earth, wrap their bony limbs around my sky and tell it there are only flat leaves in the trees, a circular orbit that breaks free at one end and sends the planets into freefall, glass beads from a string that's finally given up. Its sigh shook the walls of my bedroom, tied my ears in knots and caused the ice in my skin to almost lose its freeze, to halfway thaw and send tear-shaped puddles of motion to my floor, cause tides of emotion that are only tidal because the moon is always paying attention, paying lines of pearls to the men with their carts who pull lipstick from the veins of the sun to sell to other men, the faraway men who glance through me with glazed-over palms, the lines worn away by sand. I can tell the ice has taken over, and I wait for it to happen to me.

nightwrite

my culture melts
into yours, and I see
through the world as if it is a window, holding mist
against panes of glass. colors braid
themselves with the smell of
spices and a ripple on a pond;
the saffron falls asleep
on my tongue
and I know
it's time to count
the toes of the women dancing
circles around me,
to spread yards of silk on the dirt
and marvel at how soft the Earth can become, sit
by the fire and speak
of how all people
were woven from the same thread,
how we were a quilt
once but not we are just patches
mismatched on a vast bedspread.
Sometimes
I string myself back onto you, but
sometimes
we tear away from each other, a star
breaking into light, a daisy
ripping its petals open under the
angry sun.
Leaves fall from my eyes,
moss from my hair,
and I try
to remember where it all
began, forgetting
that I was so new
I didn't know how to see or hear, just to
feel.

nightwrite

Nothing but white noise
while I'm missing my blue noise,
my indigo and violet noise,
my red autumn leaf noise--
the crunch.
Like granola between my molars, like toothpaste
and nuclear waste recycled
into stylish lunchbags
while the ospreys bloat in the sun
and give birth to plastic figurines.

It's all hazy these days,
and I just remember
the mist hiding my eyes is
the spray of the ocean in the air is
the dew leaping from pebbles to your toes
while you search for color
amongst dead flowers
on a balcony somewhere
not so far.