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.