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.