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.

wish justwrite nightwrite writewrite

Reach into my pupils and pull out your lunch, dark as a lake beneath the reflections. Hold it between your lips like I would hold the stars between my fingers if I could, gently but without wavering because if you drop a star it falls and then all you have is a wish. I repeat empty prayers when everything is hollow. I trace my name over and over on your back with my finger, try to scrub away the holes in the walls, scour the same plates each minute because the air is filled with dust and I need something to be clean. In the midst of movement, I stop. The room is spinning and the sky is passing over my head. One half of my face is deep blue, and I see you get lost when you look at me. I want to be able to find the sun and tell you what time it is. I think I said this aloud once, but you didn't hear anything. You were folding stars into my skin like eggs into dough. I want to take in the shadow on the horizon and know how many hours I've been alive. I said this aloud once. You told me there's a constellation called the big dipper and it's like a spoon sinking in a lake and still believing it's empty. When I picture you, your lips are paused in the middle of words like "spoon" or "alone." I hold you between my fingers, gently, thinking of my wish.

things I never said justwrite

I'm the one you throw back. I have seven hooks through my lip, dust on my teeth, and I'm waiting for the moment you touch me just before you let go. I've lived in this forest as long as it's grown. I've talked to more trees than people. On Tuesday evenings, I nap in pine needles and come to the door at dusk wearing a fir coat that smells of firewood. My hands and feet are warm. You have a song rising from your chest on each breath, and in this light, I think you're a cardinal, or maybe a crow bleeding from its beak. I used to have nightmares about teaching birds to talk. Now I am topless at a stranger's dinner table and have no voice to give anyone. You are whistling outside my window. The trees are scratching their knobby fingers across the panes and hissing whispers that sound like wind. I'm awake and searching for words. My bed is made of pine needles. My hair gathers around my eyes, the ends feathered. On a morning like this, I jumped into your hands, my mouth caught open, a paused vowel stuck beneath my tongue. If you would turn into a tree, I'd press my face against your trunk, your bark scraping my cheek, and say the things I never said. But you can't be a tree. You open your hands and let me go.

collapsing justwrite

Dance across caverns because they always told you air is too thin to hold your weight. I am a grape beneath your heel. I am ripe, swollen. My skin is splitting. In my mouth, there is juice that tastes like springtime. There are stars behind my eyelids. I can dance. In my dreams, I am losing all my teeth. Their roots slice my tongue. They fall into my cupped palms, leave gaps the size of oceans in my gums. You tell me I taste like salt. I want to bury my teeth, round white seeds, but nothing grows in this earth but thistles that tangle themselves in my hair like your fingers when you have nothing else to hold. I reach for your hand, my face to the sky. I used to stand in a half-burned house wondering if the floor would collapse. You used to dance across that floor. I told you once that birds have hollow bones, bones so light air can hold them like cupped hands hold sprouting seeds. This movement is so slight my eyes see only teeth, detached and fallen in my palm. You twirl to me, one arm around my waist, your face tilted down to the earth. You say you're dancing while we wait, and even if the floor collapses, we won't.

true story justwrite

I am missing my flight on purpose. I'm getting off three weeks before I got on. I have bootstraps to pull and a knapsack full of hard tack. I had a dream I've been dreaming someplace new instead of leaving this town where the streets drown in autumn leaves every springtime when it's time to begin again and I think maybe a seed will sprout another day, things my brother tells me weighing down my tongue, my voice broken like ice skates the hour you need them most to conquer this lake, fish sleeping beneath your blades. When the light is off, I'm afraid to open my eyes. When I'm moss, I grown on the eastern side of tree trunks because if you go east you'll find more of me, two or three pieces I left floating in the tides for you to find and then bury like a small handful of lost teeth, the kind we take off when we're young so we can forget how frail they are, my fingers unfurling banners that all say your name in capital letters because of emphasis because tone is important. It's all dogs understand, you know, except when the cat chases a moth under the door and it escapes through the crack but still flies as if it's frantic and the dog looks at me as if to ask if my wing is broken too. When I cry, you tell me the cat was only playing, that no one told her the rules or how fragile a moth can be, with legs like thread and thin paper wings fluttering in the darkness. It lands by my foot, choking on my tears, a flight ended, a seed planted, two lives joined plus the cat's, the dog's, and yours.

something justwrite

You look at me because my bones are antiques you want me to dust off and sell. You look at me because the gold rings in my eyes would fit around your fingers perfectly, if you could only reach them. You go in through my belly button, come out the soles of my feet so I'm knee-deep in your memories, burning off my skin in billows of steam so white the people down the street think they're sails and I'm standing in a crow's nest searching for my new world that is neither new nor mine, and I think maybe I'm just searching for the crow, standing in her house, my big toe smashing her bed. Suddenly, I'm a wax doll in summer sunlight, my limbs losing form and gaining fluidity. You are so close to me your breath leaves ripples on my surface. I try to run but fall instead, land in the ocean choking on salt, a gold ring caught in my throat. I haven't felt air since then. My body is under water, the sunlight bent away from my face, my whole world above me and distorted by the tides so even pictures of myself look like dreams I can't quite describe. I wake up happy and alone but wake up again with no bones and empty eyes. You fingers are fanning out from my belly button like petals on a thistle. There is a gold ring on each one, and for a moment my body is the sun until it's so cold I'm numb. My skin is sprouting a pine needle for each memory and every time you touch me I taste blood, copper pennies, gold rings.

first non-private August justwrite

People are not pictures of trees on your windowsill. I water my potted plants on Tuesdays because schedules are natural to me--tides, revolutions, lunar cycles, all of them circles I slip onto my fingers like promise rings, turning my skin green then swollen red. I chew on my arm like a wounded dog, but to you I look like a hen preening, my feathers dusted with earth, a girl turning to her grandfather and asking whether or not I have a tongue. I have at least four limbs, carved with initials and worn smooth by bare feet. I have a beak that was sharp once. When the moon comes again, I will have a thought that becomes a dream. The next morning, I'll call you and tell you because some things are significant until they're given words or placed beneath glass and framed. On my windowsill, I have my fifth grade rock collection, a funeral announcement, and four forgotten photographs framed and upside down. Outside, there are trees leaning in, straining to hear my secrets I whisper from behind these panes. I think I see you in their bark, your initials at least. There is a knife in the grass, dew resting on its blade. Nearby, a spider plucks a lullaby from her web. I try to catch it with both hands; I want to frame it for tomorrow. But in the morning, my hands, the yard, and these webs are empty. You're standing in the doorway to my bedroom. I think I'm saying your name, but the walls are leaning in close and their faces are blank.

moving on justwrite

This sounds like a revelation, and I tell him I have a whole book of them, pages and pages that leave my fingerprints riddled with paper cuts, my hands like torn lace. I stare at them and scream that I'm unique, hope I leave bloody handprints on your shorts, tell you to test the DNA and see if you find yourself. You won't. You'll find blueberries, swollen and warm, bobbing in bowls of cream, tiny life preservers floating like dandelion wishes on a whispered breath. You'll find fingers full of language, eyes that speak more than they blink, a pale, round stomach that has forgotten what it is to live for no one but yourself. I am trapped in a room with no door and no roof. I'm stacking books like stairs but haven't written enough to climb out. The dirt I'm sitting in fell out of your bones; I feel it in my lungs when I breathe. My voice is full of dust, an old photograph of dead relatives, a whole picture with empty space that's hard to realize but easy to feel, the colors off somehow, the shadows filled with noise. When I cough, storm clouds race from between my lips, but the rain they bring is mud, clay that sticks and dries, my joints stiff afterward, my features frozen. You call me statuesque, then bring a hammer down against my skin. These tiny cracks look like paper cuts, my body shredded lace, and from within me come skinless blueberries, oozing into each other, falling in motionless clumps by my feet. My stomach is round and pale, sheltering a thought, a dandelion wish, an old photograph torn in half. I face the sky and tell him I've had a revelation. I crumble. You pack the dust from my bones back into yours, hammer them shut, and move on.

chasing children justwrite

Each of my pupils is a seed. I try to see under water but sprout nothing until the sun comes up. By then we've already decided that frozen peas are quieter than sun-dried raisins. I scream while I shrink. There are roots clutching the folds of my brain, tight, like how I used to hold Dad's hand in the parking lot, knuckles white, snowflakes time-stopped on my skin, in the folds, stuck. When I can't see, swimming and drowning sound the same. I am a flightless bird perched on the edge of a skyscraper. I'm new to the city. The first person who ever held me was a farmer's wife, her hands rough and bloody, her face creased and kind, my eyes blind except to light. Your skin is like bread crust, at least according to Elizabeth. I think about crumbling. I remember feeling whole and then learning about broken plates, how you throw away a plate when it shatters. Always. Even if it was your favorite. Even if it's the only plate you'll ever have. I save broken dishes in the back of my top drawer, behind my underwear. I wish my hands could do anything besides write, wish they were made of glue, wish I could find all the pieces. There are vines feeling their way across my eyelids. There are branches tangled in my hair and birds' nests in my cousins' open palms. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, after the sun comes up. I'll let go of the skyscraper and call this city mine, knowing that really I'm a loaf of bread and the seeds in my eyes can't see anything but light.

deep creek dreamer justwrite

In my dream, Mateo's room fills with water and no one is concerned. We can wipe the writing off wet walls with our fingertips. In a few days, you won't know it was ever there. When I close my eyes, my bed has tides, and I almost fall in just before I fall asleep. Taylor is on solid ground, his feet planted, growing roots. There is a watering can in my left hand, a seed in my center. Walking down a dark street at night, I see someone familiar. She asks about my life as if it is a story worth telling. I like her hair and need another bus ticket, for Taylor, realizing his roots don't reach the state where I live. When I am awake, I know this room is empty, void of water except the condensation on the window, and that Mateo is in a place that isn't mine, isn't ours. I touch the walls with my fingertips and they look the same afterward. I touch these pages and their words don't smear. There are still tides, rocking my organs like wrinkled arms rock newborn people, whole people who have nothing but what others give them. I don't remember learning to sit up by myself. I only remember people carrying watering cans in their left hands, walking through gardens as big as small continents, trying to find the weeds.

waiting for laundry to finish justwrite

You embroider your name onto flower petals, pluck them one by one and ask the hot, still air if you will ever be loved. In the mornings, the teapot in the kitchen is out of tune and I hear you whistling in the shower when really you're hours away, days if I walk, my bare feet pounding asphalt until my arches are gone. Sometimes I think the world really is flat, the frozen surface of the pond sticking to the snow in January, the tops of biscuits before they rise, soft, pale breasts suddenly full of breath. I write down my dreams so I can walk away when I find you. I stitch your name into my pillowcases and sleep with my cheek flat against the mattress, pillows on the floor. Today the sky smells like church, full of dust and hope, too much music and not enough words. My mouth tastes like flour. The tadpoles in the pond are slowly growing legs, and I wonder if they will walk before they jump. I string what I've seen today onto a chain, each image a pearl, hang it around the neck of the moon and wait for tonight's first star. The teapot sings mismatched lullabies in the kitchen next to a bouquet spelling a name I can't remember. Tomorrow I will pluck petals and leave them in the wind, hold the curved face of the earth in my hands and tell her I feel nothing but love. In the moments after, the air will taste like hope and dust, sunlight falling across my skin in lines that I can almost read.

no teeth justwrite

I want to be a sharp-toothed creature who will leave you bleeding and scared if you touch me again. Instead I am a timid child who bows her head, cringes at your voice against her skin, watches your fingers pass through her. I want to believe there are flames wild in my center, a fire fueled by any thought of you, but there is only wet sand in my core, cold, heavy, immobile. You pick me up in six large hands and pack me into molds, form me into what you want then wait for the waves to take me away. There is a reason the whole ocean tastes like tears. I want to be a tidal wave, to cover you so fast you don't know I'm coming until you already can't breathe. I want to leave you wet and naked, alone and afraid, surprised that you are toothless after all. I forget that teeth can not pierce water, that any sharp edges I grow might cut nothing but my own gums. In my memories, you are solid, too solid, like marble pillars, easy to shatter. But my fists have no bones and my fingers are filled with prayers so soft they are hardly words. My dreams are laced with the mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives I don't want you to have. In my dreams, they have teeth, sharp teeth hidden within bowed heads, ready to get stuck in your hands when you try to pass through them. In my dreams, they leave you wet, alone, naked, and afraid, then they turn to me, blood on their lips, on the tips of their fingers, and ask me how I let this happen. Suddenly they are bruised skin, sad eyes, and all I taste is salt. Each of their faces is a round bruise on my chest, my thighs, my wrists. I see their cheeks in my curves, their hairlines resting in the shadows between my toes. I hope that soon I'll find their teeth.

justwrite feeling literal June 22

When my cousin Victoria can't see the dolphins in the ocean, she makes up her own, points at the horizon and tells me to look, right there! She can't see the dolphins because she can't think of them as just fins. She imagines whole dolphins floating just above the waves. We look for shells together and I find none. She brings me the smallest clams, scattered in the sand like faraway stars, barely bright enough to call light. When waves come up to my ankles, she says they're big, asks me to pick her up, or runs to dry sand or the safety of the umbrella. The whole ocean looks small to me, like I could swim across if the currents were going my way. I point at the dolphins just offshore, tell Victoria to look. She squints behind her smudged sunglasses, her forehead creased in the middle. She points in a different direction. "Look! Dolphins! Right there!" I wonder what she sees.

midnight justwrite

Sometimes my stomach remembers things my mind can't. It aches, and when I look down, it seems to be a person separate from myself. I tape photographs of birds to my walls. Their wings are spread wide and I wish I didn't know about the people who measure them, who clip them, who tear them from the sky. I think I used to know the taste of clouds. My skin remembers droplets and wind, but my tongue has no words left. My lips form silent syllables, then give up, parted slightly, sucking in warm air. You tell me I look like I've lost weight, but really my feathers are gone. The soft down on my chest, the smooth wings beneath my arms, measured and torn away. You think I've lost weight, but I feel heavier than ever, my chest full of rocks with so many names carved into them, names that I believe one minute and then are so wrong I want to reach down into my stomach and pull them up through my throat, hurl them into the ocean and watch these letters sink beneath the waves. But my stomach is too loud. When my fingers are close to it, they hear these memories and bring them up to my eyes, my lips, my silent tongue. So I clench my fists and swallow more stones, my face pointed skyward, searching the air for feathers heading toward the clouds.

strong justwrite

I am not strong. I'm a newspaper discarded in the rain, tearing each time the wind touches me. I am sandstone, ground to dust, scattered, ground beneath your feet. I'm a shallow puddle steaming at midday, almost gone. You tell me I am strong. I want to show you how easily I bruise, shed my smile so you can see how hollow I am, that the skin around my eyes is decaying. I want to scream, tear open my ribcage and show you the ink drying on my brittle bones, the ashes in my stomach that burn my throat like ocean water when you tell me that I'm strong. Not strong enough. An infant holding up the eastern states, about to be crushed, not strong enough. A moth caught at sunset, wings rubbed bare, left on a porch railing unable to fly, waiting for the birds to wake up. I want to be a hermit crab, to curl up against the cool curved back of a seashell, hold my claw across my face and dare you to pry me out. But I am clawless, without a shell, lying open and exposed on the sand as they gather around me, licking their lips, pondering which beer would taste best with me, their eyes piercing me, tiny and trembling, unable to run or fight, weak.

sharp justwrite

A beak pierces my finger and I realize I am the only one here who knows the beach is so much sharper than it seems, sea glass pressed against my throat, the same blue as the ocean and the arteries in my legs you can see behind my knees, bruised blue from kneeling. They think I pretend to pray, but I have a prayer for every grain of sand and they all sound the same. I want to be a jellyfish, deep red like the ones that float on the currents the ferry makes. I want to be a red jellyfish, not having to hide, anyone close enough to touch me knowing they will be stung, fearing me, remembering me. Instead I am a girl, freckled and pale and not quite untouched. Forgettable and easy to clutch. They stare at me and wonder how I'd taste, fear nothing but my voice which they doubt anyway. So do I. The crashing waves outside are louder than my screams. Each shoreline is different but the oceans are the same, water like tears, the places where my skin has torn stinging like I'm entangled in jellyfish. When I open my eyes, a seagull is piercing my finger with its beak. I pull my hand back and there is blood coming from a tiny hole, a cut so small I can not complain now that I'm grown. I walk into the breaking waves and wash it in their crests, salt mixing with blood, something familiar, stinging. I glance from ocean to sky and see nothing but the same sharp, unwavering blue.

finding out (again) that it's distracting to write on beaches

Teal says we are waves trying to see the ocean. I sit on the shoreline, a person with the ocean in front of me, and I still can not see it. The horizon is too flat for me to believe it isn't resting at the tips of my toes, too calm against the sky that tells me wind is invisible unless it is carrying something, like how I feel I could walk into a liquor store where it is illegal to be 18, 19, or 20 years of age and walk out five minutes later with my palms empty. For five minutes, the woman behind the counter in the black tank top with a plastic snake around her neck would watch me and then forget. I tell this to the sand while it is holding my footprints, packed so tightly there is no air between the grains, and I wonder aloud if they are each trying to see the island.

May 24 short camping justwrite

The skin between your teeth is glowing in the dark, and I plant mushrooms in your footprints and tell stories about growing in shadows but really just want to remember where you've ben so I can find my way back to the intersection of our identities, where the sand beneath them is crossed out and I dance chalky fingerprints up your arms like lace. There are moments when I can only hear wind. There are moments when the blood pressing tides against my eardrums sounds like the ocean, the salty water I poured onto my bruises, trying to wash myself back into myself, wash off the sweat of strangers. Minnows dash by my feet, silver shooting stars, coins falling like a wish into a fountain. Their lips are tickling my toes. You catch them in your teeth, laughing, your mouth swallowing the sky and everything below it in one gulp.

Russell Justwrite 9--finals justwrite

A bunch of tools in my belt, at least one of them a spade, or a spoon I use to rip apart the roots of two sweetpea stems sprouting too close. I tear them apart gently, the way I cut through seams or pluck daisy heads or snap the damp necks of butter beans, summer beans, smelling like rain and bitter soil packed down by bare palms and bare soles. My father edges his garden with mums because it keeps pests away, but I think it just fences them in, traps them in the middle where I find tomato leaves chewed to lace, squash blossoms casting shadows like the old screen door. I still hear it slamming at night, know how the wind sounds like visitors, rushed, or angry maybe, letting go of a spring-hinged screen door and only thinking about the eyes closed above the kitchen the next morning, when a woman slips down the stairs while the lights are still out, wonders through the pain why her foot lost its way and decides that adults don't cry. I remind myself of this when I press my dry cheeks against my window screen and focus on the darkness outside, wonder if this taste in my throat is what the bugs feel when they find a row of mums, and I swallow, searching for the bitterness of summer beans, damp summer air, finding nothing until I reach the ocean, tear my spade from my belt and start piercing roots with its blade, not wondering how I've grown so close.

outside blowing bubbles justwrite

Bare mountain is the one you can't see. I tell Lindsey this while the wind takes her bubbles and brings them to me. My palms are open, facing the sun, thinking about how light can pass straight through wet hands. Mine are dripping soapy water on my thighs, drops that look like rain until you teach your eyes to focus, realize you're closer to everything than you imagined; the space between the trees is almost itself a tree. There is nothing separating us but skin that melts like frost on an April morning just as it meets the sun for the first time. These days, I think about fading, about watercolor landscapes where I can't find my footprints even if I squint, where the soil looks like sand looks like sky. I thought I saw your face once, but it was only a cloud. Lindsey looks up when there's shade, searching, and I think about her footsteps every time a faceless stranger in the hall walks by with keys that sound like bells that sound like winter is over. This is the season of fading. I wake up expecting rain but find sunlight shining through soap bubbles and wind that imagined it is colder than it was last month. This is the season where what is warmest rises first and all I feel is what swoops in to take its place. Lindsey thinks her ivy grew leaves before mine. Birds land in the vines and cough up notes that make me smile and then startle me four minutes later when my ears have moved on. A tiny bee lands on my knuckle. Its wings are transparent and look like empty space, look like wet air with light shining through. Every day lately is a new season, and all of them are fading.

weird intense day out of it justwrite

Sometimes I think the smoke is a part of you, and I remember how breathing something into your lungs is really breathing it into your bloodstream. When my dad took his chainsaw to the woods to cut the limbs off of trees, he never wore a mask. I imagine the bark growing on his veins, tiny roots holding his tongue against his teeth, wonder if that's why he didn't call. Kyra tells me her parents are still in love, and I know Grama is thinking about Grandpa now, and his wife, resting by his bed in the hospital, her hand on his because she's already rearranged the lilies three times and doesn't know what else to do with it. I used to wish I could play the piano so I could watch my fingers practicing, cutting through air like my feet slice Bay water, toes curled under, my eyes closed. Lately, my dreams are full of smoke, but I breathe anyway, my throat burning, my teeth embers, my tears soft. Too many fingernails have tasted my skin. I want to cut them all and plant the opaque crescent moons in the pot with my sweet pea, dig them up sixteen months later and read the cursive their roots have made, see if I can finally learn my name. I used to think I could find it in my arteries. I would stand naked at the mirror, arms stretched up like branches bent slightly in the middle, my skin pulled so tight it was transparent and I could see straight to my organs, see my pulse everywhere at once. All I learned is that there are more shades of blue than I can count, and all of them smokey, my veins curling up through my chest, grey-blue tendrils, my lungs expanding like two matching hot air balloons tethered to the Earth, my fingernails purple at the base, almost black when I'm cold, and my heart at the center of all of it, murmuring a name over and over, syllables collapsing into themselves, and exhale that I can't understand.

wet tired justwrite

I press my fist against my sternum and know that my body is a locket full of photographs. I remember how my mother's tears could have flooded the basement again while she peeled our soggy smiles out of albums and pinned them onto strings like white sheets waiting for wind on a Saturday afternoon clothes line. I think about lines melting into each other and how streetlights fan outward at night, as if my eyes are watering like they do when I try to watch the sun move across the sky, horizon to horizon, predictable, a heartbeat beneath my palm, my pulse keeping me up at night, reminding me that nothing beneath my skin is ever still. My little brother has outgrown me twice, but I remember singing to him the song I learned in chorus until he fell asleep just before my favorite verse. I remember taking showers with him because he was afraid to be alone, washing his back with a green washcloth, drinking from the shower head while he laughed. I remember how white his hair was in the summer, thin corn silk fanning up from his cowlick like light. It's almost summer again. My skin is aching for sun and my throat is thirsty for home, creek water swallowed accidentally, iced tea and blueberries, the damp Bay breeze. I want to sweat so much I become water, evaporating into the still August air, my edges blurred, my body dropping stacks of soggy photographs onto the grass.

19 years old justwrite

Lindsey's dorm room is a time machine, and every night feels like the first we sat side by side on her bed feigning adulthood with dollar store champagne flutes, talking about ex-boyfriends and once girlfriends and someday lovers to wake up with on Sunday afternoons, brush their hair away from their sleep-weighted eyes and finally know what prayer feels like. I tell her sometimes I think she doesn't exist, like the girl who really lives in her room waits pacing in the corner while I lean on her pillow and talk to myself. I don't mind as long as I don't know. Lindsey picks weeds for me and calls them wildflowers. I hang her birthday roses upside down so they blush all winter while Kyra squeezes the stems, her fingers sticky, asking me about my skin. I say it's thicker than ever, freckles tunneling for months until they reach the surface, my sweetpea seeds still dormant in this pot under the clingwrap, the only ones who know whether or not they're alive. The sun is stronger than ever these days, but my roots are still asleep and haven't learned to stretch, are just beginning to taste with their fingertips, to discover what they already hold. The water here leaves white rings of powdery minerals on the inside of the cup I use to water my plants. Lindsey drinks from the sink now but tells me she thinks her cactus is dying with watery eyes, more salt than tears, wondering how anything blooms in the desert and how long that spiderweb was in the corner above her bed before she found it. I have her counting dust particles, tell her that spiders would rather move on than clean up, while the clock on her microwave blinks at me with three zeros, me leaning on her pillow laughing to myself, two plastic champagne flutes drying by her mirror.

Russell Justwrite 8 Stop for a

Stop for a breath on the cliffs in your dream last night, tossing bread crumbs over the edge and praying they'll find a stomach somewhere. Beneath my eyelids, there was smoke and there were sirens when they opened, the thinnest skin on my body holding in so much. You whisper in fields so I can't hear you above the wheat rustling, my hands full of bread and my ears full of wind that sounds like the ocean when I trap it in my cupped palm, bringing salty water up to my lips and feeling myself crumble into sand, dust, powder that you whisk across your cheekbones with brushes that look like clumsy ballerinas, still learning to navigate your face. I could got lost in your eyes for hours, which sounds like romance but is really drowning, my lungs filling with irises, my chest bursting when they bloom. I can still find my shadow at the back of your pupil, still as a dead squirrel on the sidewalk, mouth open like a word, stuck, and I find I don't remember how to spell. You tell me the birds hatching between my teeth are singing songs about fertility, but to me it sounds like starvation, bread crumbs snatched by the wind, salty water, wanting, gnawing at the bottom of my cliff.

Russell Justwrite 7 The sign is not

The sign is not true, and I don't have a word for this direction. I would drive six and a half hours to see you if I had six and a half hours, if I could drive, if I remembered who you are. I stare at the surface of a creek, expecting it to slow enough that I can see my reflection, but it only stops when it freezes, ice as opaque as skin. In the summer, I sprout freckles, like a thousand secret touches invisible until now. I expect them to melt like snowflakes on my tongue, sugar grains dissolving, my grandmother tossing salt over her left shoulder, the storm clouds coming in across her right. You told me once that you'd draw me a map if I needed it, but it's only showing me where I've been, my footprints fading, my footsteps an echo, my body a sunset on the last day you could see. I hope that I am warm enough to reach inside your skin, coax your secrets to the surface and tell them not to melt. When the rain comes in the summer, it falls hard, slamming itself against tin roofs and tender, closed heads of daisies, their leaves reaching up, one to cover their blank faces, one to catch the drops. I want to fall gently, a creek flowing down a hill that is almost flat, trickling, every movement a song, never quite slowing enough to reflect.

April 6 poem

Lessons

I can't forget
the way your hands press dough,
as if they know
what it wants to be,
your fingernails dusty with flour,
your palms leaving prints
that look like muscle and bone
on the countertop.

You told me once
that time is like a heartbeat,
different for everyone.
You said mine murmurs
and placed your hand
where my breasts would bloom
someday and asked
if I knew what it was saying
anyway.
I stared at the sliver of your teeth
like the moon between your lips,
your face the daytime sky,
silent.

You feed stale bread crusts
to the blackbirds. They come
like angry clouds,
bringing their own wind.
I hide
behind the kitchen window pane.
You laugh,
your face framed in feathers,
your voice a broken song,
your arms outstretched
like wings.

Birds are hollow
with bones like bone china.
They crack when they hit glass.
I found a dead robin
on the porch once,
carried it to you wrapped up
in the corner of my dress.
You buried her
with your bare hands.

April 4 found poem

Dakin F211

No loitering
not trusting her
intelligence
priority mail
with antioxidants and
seahorse
This is a
tribute

things fall apart
hugs and giggles from
Jenny
Jenny Jenny
sexy, unmentionable, taboo
unmentionable
taboo
slippery
beautiful

thanks for the
knock
are in here
with a grin
for domestic and international
heart,
blessed
My name is Jenny
Jenny
That's what you get

April 3 sestina

A Sapling Song

My father's hands are rough like bark.
I try to grow in his shadow,
pretend the roof he sculpts is glass
when really I'm a music box
that hasn't learned to be open.
If I sang I could call you home.

I used to know when I was home.
The door would close. The dog would bark.
I'd step inside, my palms open,
felling Dad's five o'clock shadow,
our only key tucked in a box,
all of our walls dusty stained glass.

He pours iced tea into a glass
and tells me he's glad I came home.
He asks me what's inside the box.
My fingers are stiff, sticky bark.
Silence surrounds my mouth, a shadow.
I pretend the lid won't open.

Time grows rust and lids won't open.
My skin is smooth, translucent glass.
Today I lost my last shadow.
I told her to go find our home
and watched her crawl beneath birch bark.
I scraped it off and built a box.

My father's hands explore the box,
curious why it's been open
since before I made it from bark.
I see him through windowless glass,
facing the direction of home.
I squint, the distance a shadow.

Beneath each eye is a shadow.
In each open palm is a box.
I tell him I will bring them home
and that my door has been open.
He worries what can slip through glass
and hide in the dark folds of bark.

His shadow grows warm and open,
his chest an old box of cool glass.
His hands were home, rough wood, pine bark.

April 2 rushed haikubricks

watching Misery
four minutes until midnight
my leg keeps yours warm

you laugh your teeth clenched
smoke rising toward tomorrow
through your cracked window

April 1 poem

Summer


Today is like summer and I
see you. I see
you in a room
full of poetry,
a lamp behind you like
a halo, your face framed
with light the color of muscle.
My heart murmurs while
yours beats

full of bleach.

I think about the poets
at the reading, how they stood
away from the microphone.
Their voices were enough
to hold us like
the cupped hands of God
hold people, open and aching,
how my hands hold
your hair or dandelions,
my fists full of
wishes,their voices
full of poetry that echoes
off the walls,
off my bones, their chins,
eyebrows,
expectations
raised like their
voices.

but their hands
are shaking.

Lisa justwrite 1

You tell me that pine trees have needles. My skin is paper, light shining through and seeming brighter on the other side. I used to believe the sky at night was cloth with holes chewed by moths, their wings clogging the air like ash so I'm afraid I'll breathe them in, a million tiny feathers on my tongue, my throat like chalk, my lungs aching. Yours do too. I can tell by the lines around your eyes, your laughter eroding like the banks of the Monocacy. I'd follow it to the Bay if I could, sink knee-deep in the marshes and feel the Earth exhale into my pores, come out smelling like sulfur and looking like a blue heron, my neck stretched so high I look like I'm flying when I'm still on the ground. Fish will fear me but still be so mesmerized by my grey they call blue that they'll gather at my ankles, waiting to be plucked like daisies with parched stems and petals whiter than my mother's stretched belly, skin that has seen no sunlight but so many hands, grasping for heartbeats so deep they are drowning, but all they really need is hers. My father has fingers that feel like bark, the hair on his face like needles that can't pierce skin. He smells like firewood. There are moths gathering around his limbs.

Russell Justwrite 5

The birthplace of my identity, where rivers intersect and the banks flood when it rains, hard, like the clouds are breaking hearts next to shattered vases, spiders in the cabinet covering their ears with four of their legs. Sometimes my hair is sticky silk, a web where your fingers are caught. My hand flutters to your arm and I tell you I never learned how to fly, but I can land anywhere. You tell me to look at the sky as if I'll find something there. All I find is myself, uncover her in the sand and remember why I left, trace the fingerprints on her thighs and tell her she still has more healing to do. When she tries to explain, I gather sand in china teacups and pour it down her throat, fill her to the brim with sand and watch it gloss at the edges, becoming glass around her gaping lips. I tell her she is a vase I never want to break, a fragile teacup chipped at the rim, a crack down its thin spine, my fingers on either side, trying to close the wound. The people around me are shouting, but I don't understand their words. My hands clamp over their mouths, and I am close enough to count their eyelashes. Rivers converge on their skin. I back into the ocean, deep enough to taste the salt. I think about the last time the banks flooded.

during a lecture justwrite

"There's nothing wrong." You tell me that gender is a universe and all of us are stars. I think about the space in between. I think about watercolor soaking into paper, not finding any edges until the white ends and the table begins. I pluck flowers from the Earth, gather them in bouquets and watch you stare at them during dinner, the wide, empty throats of daffodils gaping, open, like silent screams or paused laughter or hunger, hunger, their spines thin, fragile, green, snapping between my fingers like slivers of almonds. sometimes the world is a walnut, and we haven't even cracked the shell. Sometimes the world is a watermelon split through the rind, our feet up to the ankles in juices, your mouth watering and mine, full of sky, brimming over with watercolor. You tell me we are stars in the universe. I stare at the empty table, my eyes blank, my eyelids transparent, waiting. Your eyes sparkle. I wonder what's in them. They point skyward, searching for the moon.

Russell Justwrite 4

Lazy Sunday morning with no water but fruit, half an apple in my abdomen while I think about the shape of your heart and try to name it but can never think of anything but the pulse in your neck that I try to taste with my fingertips, but always from too far away. I tell you about the lazy Sunday afternoons playing scrabble with my grandmother, and you never call me back. I stop waiting. My childhood is a heavy bucket full of rocks, a can pulled from the weeds and kicked all the way up a mountain, tunnels in the snow, and hot stroganoff because it's a weekend and we had to do something with the egg noodles. My dad calls me to say he has to go. I call him to yell but end up laughing. He worries about my future. I ask him where he's been. The page turns and it's tomorrow, just another Monday, notebook paper and half-hour lunches, nothing to think about but the knuckles in my fingers, how they turn white when I clutch your arm, how they bend all day but I'm never impressed. I used to hate them. Now we barely think about each other. I can tell they're dwelling on the past. My phone vibrates during class and I don't look down to see who it is. I have nothing left to say.

Russell Justwrite 3

In the dark, dandelions are less like weeds than I am. In the dark, I imagine stems so thin the wind can break them being strong enough to life rocks. In the dark, there are streetlights that penetrate nothing but my skin, leave me open and glowing from the inside so it's impossible to hide anything but my voice. I bury it under piles of sand like I used to bury glowsticks when my cousins and I would play with them on the beach. We could never find them again, dug too many holes to count without at least six afternoons of standing, the sand branding the bottoms of your feet like lightning carving its name into the sky, leaving blue streaks on the white walls of your hotel room that are only white when the light is on and your eyes are as open as my body, cameras flashing morse code across my skin. I try to answer but my fingers have forgotten how to spell. My eyebrows can only lie. My voice is not a factor, and not even air can slip between the fingers across my lips. My mother spent months making this body, years tending to it, a dandelion planted with purpose. You tell me that a weed is only a flower where you don't want it to be. In the dark, I am more like a weed than your dandelion. I feel your breath across my cheeks, trying to blow all my wishes away.

Russell Justwrite 2

Straight from the crooked lines I draw on pages when I don't have anything to say, I am still thinking about spiderwebs, how male spiders pluck their silken strands like a harp, like they're teenage boys whose upper lips quiver under the vague suggestion of a mustache, thumbing awkwardly at acoustic guitars the afternoons they taste their first cigarettes. I'm untouched by their efforts, watch spiders so tiny they are shadows of themselves gliding on cables from the towel rack in my bathroom. I wonder how long it's been since I've hung a towel there, how long it's been since I've laid naked in the sun and felt myself grow six more legs. The trees look taller today than they ever have before. Their roots whisper to the soles of my feet when I stand near enough. Their leaves have veins that pulse along with mine, look like your forearms when the light shines through. I think about the spider vein on my left thigh, how you pretend that I should hate it when really your fingertips are aching to introduce themselves. I see words forming behind your lips, then rolling back to fill the cavities in your molars. I see the jagged lines carving themselves into the corners of your mouth, thin strands I want to pluck, weave a song that will bring your voice forward.

Russell Justwrite 1

The color of fading, like how I don't fit in my mother's arms anymore and I imagine her with grey hair sometimes, eyes like raindrops on the dirty window of our car, wondering why there's traffic on a day when everyone feels like staying in bed. I fold blankets to elevate your feet, imagine the swollen ankles of a pregnant woman, the hollow bones of my grandmother, aching when the clouds come in. I have a scar on the top of my right hand that hurts sometimes, but I haven't learned to use it to predict the weather. Sometimes the internet tells me it's snowing before I've opened my curtains for the day, shadows caught in the fabric folds like jail bars that can't be broken, with lace in between so thin it is a spiderweb, sticking itself to my memories so all I feel on my fingertips are the tingling ghosts of tiny footsteps, eight at a time, reminding me that I don't have a compass and the north star looks like all the others, fades before my campfire, hides behind my smoke signals so I have no light to read them. My skin feels like smoke sometimes, my stomach like steam, a raindrop rising again from the asphalt, my atoms repelled by each other, refusing to let me shrink.

nasal congestion justwrite

I have paper cuts on my tongue from trying to taste poetry. My dad sent me a Valentine's Day card, and his handwriting looked like shadows cast by foreign veins, clutching my heart with roots I can't pull up, squeezing until my pulse barely murmurs at my fingertips. I read the braille in your skin, trace the lines beneath your eyes and memorize their arc, match it to the whorl in my left thumbprint and tell you I've never seen anything like it. My eyes are so new light forgets to reflect off them. It sinks like the rocks I try to skip across the pond in your backyard. I pretend water doesn't know how to be anything but ice. I pretend my lips froze while embracing each other, that frost crawled up your hips while you were dancing. Cultured somatic cells of humans divide a set number of times before all dying at once. If you freeze them, when they thaw they continue as if time didn't stop. I tap this onto your eardrums while you sleep. I think of only this while I press snow angels into the hillside, only this and the sky, speckled with white as if it's still night time, me counting your dreams as though the sun will refuse to set this evening, will dig her orange fingernails into the horizon and cling like I do to the image of your earlobes, of the lines beneath your eyes. You kiss me and taste blood, poetry scratching at the corners of my mouth. My lips embrace each other, pretending to be frozen, pretending their cells aren't counting the minutes until nightfall.

dreaming justwrite

In my dreams, I have aerial roots, but you already knew that. I told you on the side porch that evening when we bought cheap champagne and mixed it with expensive orange juice, sat on the porch swing and pretended we could see the moon through your neighbor's roof. I still have the ticket stubs from that movie last summer, the one I knew I wouldn't like but took my little brother to see anyway. I didn't like it. The popcorn was okay. My brother has eyes like an old man carving lions out of wood, eyes that know cedar grain more than they know themselves, eyes buried in sagging skin, heavy with laughter, heavy with light, so full I want to catch what is about to pour out of them, hold it in my palms that are open and aching, hold it like hands hold other hands like my mouth hold thoughts that are ugly like my thighs are ugly, in the way where they aren't really but I've called them that so long it's all they know how to say. Every fall, I press leaves in books, thick books--the dictionary, Joy of Cooking, Mom's dusty wedding album. I'm afraid to open them in the spring because the colors might have changed. I watch the veins darkening in my ankles, cracks full of shadows, telling me I've been walking on them too much. I try to run sometimes, in afternoons like the ones when we picked peaches that looked like newborns from branches so old they had more knots than leaves, and the leaves they had were pale at the edges like my brother's irises, like the ring around the moon.

leaving justwrite

I keep pebbles underneath my pillows, grind smooth, round stones into towers of sand, pillars I would wrap myself around if I were a vine, my fingertips sprouting when they touch you, my tongue aching for sunlight. I trace your shadow onto the tile floor in my kitchen, tell myself you've never looked so beautiful when really I'm thinking about the oranges in the bowl on the counter, wishing they were blueberries at the end of June, swollen and purple and as warm as the air. I cough all winter. You tell me it's because there's frost in my throat, creeping up my vocal cords, spilling cursive patterns along the dome of my mouth. My breath is cold. My palms smell like soil. I press them into the earth and expect something, maybe music or silence or something in between, something both heavy and light to dance across my arms. Instead, I have two dirty hands and two unimpressive handprints, so small they will disappear in a few seconds, as soon as the rain comes. I am waiting to grow more skin, thicker or softer or darker maybe. I am waiting to grow a shadow. I feel it peeking out from the soles of my feet some mornings just after I get out of bed. I feel its fear, then cold tile, then nothing but skin. You told me once that I was the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen, but you were staring at the apple tree in the yard, wondering if the fruit it would grow would be red or yellow. I whispered "yellow" while you screamed "red." I ground my words into columns of sand while you walked away. I'm afraid you'll become salt sometimes, but you don't look back.

mateo's room

Yesterday, there were butterflies, thousands of tiny legs prickling like needles so small they can't break skin. Just slip through the cracks, find the air seeping out from my lungs, bubbling across my lips and out through my pores, steam rising from my open palms, caught beneath the ceiling. When I sleep, I dream shoe prints across my eyelids, probing fingers searching for a thinner piece of skin. He has a nose like a proboscis, curling into itself like an embryo, forehead creased with concentration, face serious, trying to focus on growing ten fingers because that's all that parents think about these days. You hear their voices muffled through fluid like you will through drywall years from now, the same wrinkled syllables leaving their harshest vowels clinging to the carpet fibers. In my dreams, I grow wings. They sprout from the backs of my hands. I feel them fluttering, curtains on breezy mornings, a discarded grocery list caught in the wind. In the winter, we use novels as kindling. I wonder why we spend all year writing so we can burn them when it's cold. My father tells me you have to destroy what you love in order to feel the flame. You look up at me from the chair across the room, tell me I'm so deep, you want to go fishing in my chest. I tell you the water there is still. You forget to listen, reaching toward me with all six of your arms.

almost midnight justwrite

There are envelopes on your open palms. I know what's inside, but I'm afraid to look. I spill seeds on the floor behind me while I walk, but nothing ever grows from the linoleum, at least nothing with roots. I imagine your fingers reaching deep into my chest, curling themselves around my ribcage like it's a fence trying to keep them out. My heart will watch, ignorant, letting you convince it my body is a prison. On the mornings when there is fog thick outside my window, I'm always surprised when it doesn't swallow my screams, when the strangers on the street stop and look up at me, their eyes glossy marbles behind a lace curtain, a tablecloth hung on the clothesline. I only ever learned to take out stains with scissors, and I hung each on my wall so I could memorize its shadow, like trying to draw a snowflake before it melts away, recording a heartbeat haphazardly as though the next one is a sure thing. I keep pictures of you in my music box, but it still won't sing unless you're in the room. I tell it to give up its fantasies, but it turns toward the wall, still silent, its tears leaving rings on the table. My mom never taught me to use a coaster. I seal these secrets in an envelope I hope you never find. I hang it on the clothesline to be dampened by the fog, hope I can learn to stop screaming. I used to know your name, but now I just know your fingers, gripping my ribcage, roots deep beneath my skin.

knitting for you justwrite

There are petals beneath your eyes in the morning, when you wake up in my bed and I try to remember falling asleep but only remember dreaming about stains on floral print dresses and about long blonde hair tied back, trying not to catch the light. In church, the sun streaming through the stained glass always made the skin on my hands look blue while I prayed, as blue as shadows, as ink, as babies the moment they're born, people just before they've tasted air for the first time. I can't remember that either, can't remember if I felt the cord being cut, the ends of yarn falling like snowflakes around my footprints. I knit you hats because I don't know how to talk to you. I knit you hats and leave them on top of the basket in my closet because I'm not sure which color you'd like best. I never ask. You asked once to see the fingerprints laced across my thighs, the blue skin looking like blue light, like shadows, like a newborn face. I try to convince myself bruises are ink that won't wash away. I tie knots with sticks and fold my voice into them, hoping you'll hear me in the patterns. When I finally show you my closet, you ask why I wasted so much yarn, say you've never been cold. But your breath is frost against my neck. I break the icicles off your lips before you wake up in the morning. I pour my sun rays into your skin and watch the petals bloom beneath your eyes just before they open.

short tired justwrite (2010!)

I still have feathers between my teeth and my glasses get so foggy when I breathe that I learned to take the oxygen from your bloodstream when I'm near you. Your fingerprints get stuck in my head, nothing but swirls, the light caught in your eyes like a firefly in my hand, peeking through the cracks between my fingers, wondering when I broke away from myself, losing all my change between the couch cushions. The coins in my pockets used to tap against each other when I walked, wanted me to remember they were there, wanted to leave their imprints on my mind like halo silhouettes on my palms. Now no one hears me coming, so I call out my name, throw it into the air in front of me, but it is a birdsong, noise that is part of the silence. I'll be a shadow some day. I'll have so many holes in my stories that I'm lace, the first part of a tablecloth to be worn away, yellowed with age and tearing against itself. For now I'm stuck in the nicotine stains around my father's fingernails, the way raindrops race each other on my window, and with the light within your eyes, watching the world through this curved lens, seeing only the reflection of my own face. If I reach out, I'll learn I'm not trapped, but my hands are deep in my pockets, searching.