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.