The missing comes slowly, like aging does, comes quietly in the night while sleep clings to my lashes and cheekbones and mouth. One day I woke up and everything was different. I could see people I’d run into by accident, snatches of grass or dirt or hair or more skin on an arm or calf after stepping out of the shower. I am made of missing, of constantly reaching and yearning for places seen but never visited, people thought of but never met. I am a half-finished crossword puzzle, a ten letter word for ‘a deep, pensive, long-lasting sadness.’ The words still get caught in my throat, still cause cramps in my fingers and lodge themselves in my knees and in my ears like cotton balls. All I can hear is the faraway chorus of the ocean just barely beneath all that cotton. I am the red lipstick stain left behind on the cooling cup of coffee, forgotten for the sake of a child’s cries. The pieces, the shards of glass, the snapshots of a life, scattered and ripped and swept up, swept away. I am homesick, seasick, peoplesick. I am all ghost, hardly any girl. I fade.
I am still wandering, though ambling about this website, picking up my pen and setting it down again. I’ve been quiet. I don’t know where the words hide, you understand. I don’t know where they run off to. Even this is a struggle to write. I tango with vowels, shimmy up against the soft spine of consonant. Slowly, it comes back. But it’s nice to be here, nice to see the velvet soft inside of Annie’s heart, the organized chaos of Shinji’s frontal lobe. Lovely to see that lives are progressing onward, forward, diagonally, even backwards while I’ve been gone. Keep your spare keys under the mat for me, please.
The problem has to do with everyone editing themselves on here. I do it, you do it, we all do it. Sentences get squashed by the ‘delete’ or ‘backspace’ keys, by the blade-like tip of the ballpoint pen as we cross out sentences, words, names; whole feelings, whole experiences. I send words to their death several times a week and it isn’t out of kindness. How many memories have I killed mid-thought? Hundreds I suppose, and the unfortunate thing is that words like to haunt you long after they’ve faded from the page. They bury themselves inside of you until you’re brimming, until your joints ache with the pressure of the soft th, long a, short e. Every letter weighs an ounce. Every word, a pound. So then I have to go back. I need to dig up each little grave; each small, significant death. I have to ask myself why. Why do I write? Why? It takes a moment, but it comes, and I know. I know I write because I want to make someone bleed, I want to make them cry, to make them look away because maybe what I have to say makes them a little uncomfortable. I want to make someone out there in the world tremble. I want to kidnap the breath from a set of lungs. I want to rebuild a heart. I want to bring the rain with my words. But lately the closest I seem to get is a partly cloudy sky, a crisp fifty-three degree day. I can’t thicken the clouds. The sun won’t refuse to stop shining. She lets down her golden hair and I burn, I burn, I burn.
If you say something often enough, it begins to lose its meaning. Things like, “you’re beautiful” or “pass the bread” or “I miss you” and even “I love you.” The letters, the syllables, it all begins to run together until the language itself becomes undone. How many times can you say it before that handful of words become nothing— the air in your lungs, pushing out against the back of your teeth? How many times before you say them so often that you’ve gone and taken them right out of existence? I love you means, of course, I love you. It means courage. But how do you know when you’ve taken too much? Do the words start to feel hollow and stale in your mouth as you roll them onto your tongue like sugarless chewing gum that you’re still searching for a patch of artificial sweetener for? But the words, goddamn it, the words, they build up the way plaque does, causing cavities and heart disease if I don’t get to them fast enough. They pile themselves up, up, up, all the way up to the edge of the sky, the cratered cheek of the moon. And if I say my name, or any name, out loud enough times, can I make myself disappear?
(I)
When you’re young
it’s your mother’s arms,
that solace of fleshy comfort;
your security blanket, your rock nestled
in the middle of the sea.
It’s her perfume,
the soft powdery feel of her skin.
It’s her hair, not yet cut
out of frustration in the typical “mom” haircut;
still long with love, still swinging
between your grabbing hands.
It’s her fingers setting sail on your shoulders
when you’re first learning how to walk,
her loving mouth kissing each scrape,
each cut, each black and blue bruise
from the kids on the playground
whose mothers didn’t teach them
the meaning of the word “No.”
It’s the way she checks under your bed
for things that crawl or go bump in the night,
her hero’s grace, her refusal to see
you off to the land of dreams without
a kiss on the forehead and maybe,
on those special nights, a glass of warm milk.
You’re four, maybe five,
and all you know is your mother’s love.
You were weened on it.
How, you wonder, can it get any better?
(II)
You’re twelve, thirteen.
You no longer understand your mother.
But she understands you,
and you hate it.
She still packs your lunch,
still slips a little note inside your lunch bag
for you to read at the table with your friends,
still knows the importance of a balanced
meal, the grains and the dairy.
You throw your lunch away without reading the note,
your mother’s words ringing in your head about
all the starving children in the world who will go hungry that day.
You reason with yourself as you hear the heaviness
of food hit the plastic garbage bin:
You never knew these children. They certainly don’t know you.
And, anyway, this is America. People don’t go hungry.
But mothers do. Mothers go hungry for
the love of their twelve year-old children.
Mothers starve to death every year.
(III)
You’re sixteen. Almost seventeen.
You’re in love.
It’s in full swing, this dizzy love affair
with the boy who lives across the street,
the boy whose face haunts you
every time you go to sleep.
Your mother still waits for you to get
home from school,
eager to hear about your day, about him,
about all the secret notes passed between classes,
the secret kisses in the lunch line and
how you showed him a breast
beneath a tree in the park on the way home once.
You want to tell your mother
how he says your name like it’s a benediction,
and that he knows where to fit his hands
so that they curve around you exactly,
that he plays the cello and he knows
how to make your strings ache.
You’re in love,
but you want to keep it secret.
No juicy details for the mother
who waits.
(IV)
The day you move out.
College. Freedom.
There is crying, some arguing:
your mother wants you to take the
goddamn sweater your aunt
knitted for you. She wants you to take
the pictures of six year-old you,
another book, some more socks.
The sweater is hideous,
you were too chubby at six, chocolate
dribbled all over your mouth and chin;
you haven’t read that book in years,
and you could swim in the amount of socks
you’re already carrying.
But this is how she loves you, your mother—
in old, folded up pictures and the amount of socks you have,
in dogeared books that smell faintly of vanilla and open windows.
This is all she has.
(V)
When you realize that you need your mother for the first time,
you’re twenty-three years old and you’ve just gotten
your heart broken by a boy who promised you forever.
You’re crying on the phone and
as your mother’s voice crackles to life on the line,
you find yourself wishing that you could be five again,
that you could crawl into her lap and demand
that she kiss every fracture in your heart
before sending you to bed.
Your mother is patient,
kind, understanding. She knows this kind of pain.
She wants to know if you’ll come home,
for a little while. Just a few days, take a long weekend.
You feel the bars rattle and then come down,
locking her out again. You wipe your face
and tell her that you’re fine and you hang up.
But you sleep with your thumb
in your mouth that night,
wishing for warm milk.
(VI)
But you do, eventually, find a boy who
says forever and means it.
There’s a wedding you can’t really remember
and your mother, of course, she’s there,
adjusting your dress, smoothing a lock of hair into place.
You look at her, really look at her,
and you’re surprised to see the lines near her eyes,
the gray hairs that she refuses to dye coming up
from her scalp.
She sees you looking, smiles, and kisses your cheek.
“All in good time.”
And your throat closes up at that word, time,
because it’s happening all around us, not stopping for anyone,
not even for your mother.
She’s getting older, and you hadn’t even noticed it.
(VII)
When you find out that you’re pregnant,
she’s the first one you call.
At first there is silence, and then a scream,
and then laughter, gloriously loud and bright:
you forgot that the sun lives in your mother’s laugh.
The conversation is a blur of baby name suggestions,
color palettes for the nursery, plans for a shower,
how you’re hoping for a girl
and your mother’s brief silence that you ignore,
the silence that says,
“Be careful what you wish for.”
Eight months and two weeks later,
her silence comes back to you
as your husband hands you a beautiful
baby girl, bloodied and slightly purple.
She is the Earth, this baby girl,
and you orbit her without really knowing how or why,
But you know that it will always be this way.
(VIII)
She is seven, your baby girl.
You still call her that. Your heart squeezes
every time she calls for you, for “Mama”,
each time she laughs
and reaches for your hand to show you the
butterfly she’s trapped in a jar.
But it’s the first time you go to smooth
down her hair that she flinches and runs away
to hide behind your mother.
“No. No, no, no!”
You are a mother who taught her child
the meaning of the word, and
it’s the first time she’s ever said it to you.
The blow of it knocks the air out of your lungs.
But you run after her anyway because
this, too, is love.
And there’s still a handful of nights
left for warm milk, still all those monsters under her bed
that you have yet to send away.
sweet talker, adj. You spun words together to create a world where the idea of us could exist without limits or bounds. The lilt of your voice pressed against me like a corresponding part, a phantom limb; the seduction of the mind. How all I needed from you were a handful of words wrapped up pretty with a bow and card with no return address. But I knew. I knew who it was from. I knew that you, only you, could fill me up to the brim just enough so that it all wouldn’t come spilling over. Brief, we were so brief, a dream really, one I could reach out and touch and cradle to me like some warped Egon Schiele painting, where bodies blend at the joints and the edges of skin are blurred like watercolor. I slept in the idea of you, of us, we, ours; that ripe sweetness of something new. I sank my teeth in, let the juices roll down the corners of my mouth, my chin, smearing everything the color blue. Blue, the most human color. Crack open my heart like one of your books, go on, feel the heaviness, all nine ounces, its blue weight, its veins. Pick up your pen. Write me back together, fill in all the blanks. Create a world where I become whole and swollen with your soft denim blue. Make me into a moon, a lunar body. Fill my craters. Let me call your orbit home.
For Shinji
I still don’t know exactly
what it means to be
beautiful,
but I imagine that Roald Dahl
got it close enough:
Crooked noses, criss-cross teeth—
happiness so loud and heavy
it rearranges the position
of bones, muscle.
But then there are people
who are quietly, softly beautiful,
like a summer rain,
and you want to stand beneath them
and tilt your head back and
whip the clouds into shape
with your hands; collect
fistfuls of water and
drink until the bowl is empty.
And it’s lovely, the bowl,
deep and edged in 24k gold,
with a rose painted by a careful
hand on the side;
still warm from the kiln,
still smelling of sky.
You want your Lolitas,
your black coffee,
your anonymous trysts.
You want cigarettes dangling
from pearly white teeth.
You want clean bed sheets
and to redefine the word ‘virginize.’
You want to collect hip bones
like some girls collect charm bracelets.
You want bodies,
the soft, smooth bodies,
the bodies worried down into
trembling leaves, budding forests.
You want, too,
the mermaids lost at sea.
You want to be the Captain,
the sailors, the Skipper,
the first mate.
You’d make love to the boat if you could—
anything the mermaids might have touched, loved.
You would drown yourself
trying to reach the hull,
trying to curve yourself around
the keel like a lover to a sleeping body,
the moth to the old flame.
They’d find fish scales in your folded up hands
like the unspoken prayer you tried to say
before the water got in and bottled you up.
Wanting, look what it does.
It can sink a ship.
It can sink a man.
homesick, adj. This is what you left behind: open windows and the smell of orange rinds— the sickly sweet tang of forgotten love that didn’t get a chance to stand up on its own two feet. Then the rain got in, staining everything: the pillows and sheets, the books we’d dogeared together, the ink from our looping script in the margins running, running, gone. I hold the pages together up to my chest like I used to when I was nine, back when books cured everything: stomach viruses, the flu, the boy who laughs at the note written to him out of clumsy, orange-peeled love. You didn’t leave anything behind. The books were mine, left out on the line to dry, the blankets I had to twist the laughter out of, the pens whose words I had to refill, the clothes we’d burrito ourselves into: mine. Everything, all of it, smells just like you; everything is stained indigo-blue. I don’t know what time it is there, I don’t know if you’re just sitting down to dinner or going over the day in your head; I don’t know if you ever stop to take a breather and tilt your head back and admire the sky through the ceiling at the same times I do each day. All I know is that I keep the windows open, all of them, hoping that when the streetlamps come on you won’t mistake them for the moon but that instead they’ll lead you, one by one like stepping stones, back to me. Bring the peeler.
It was the wanting. That goddamn aching, awful, feels-like-a-sore-throat wanting that consumed everything like the sun will eventually consume us. But you were so beautiful, so goddamn beautiful with your hungry eyes and greedy fingers, wishing for the world when no one, not even me, could give it to you. But I tried, didn’t I? I tried to braid a rope long enough to wrap around the Earth, tried my hardest to get it done in time, no matter if my fingers were numb from all the braiding, all that rope that never got tied. But you changed your mind, decided that no, you didn’t want me to try to give you the world, because I couldn’t even braid all that well to begin with. Again, I should have known better. You, you, it was you and those glorious five goddamn seconds that you looked at me, really saw me, really thought I was something special, beautiful even maybe, the want on your own face, sealing me up like an envelope, stamp not required. It was everything, I said that to you, I did, but you didn’t really get it, I knew you didn’t—every time I spoke you got that faraway look in your eyes, the “okay, but what about me?” look, but yes, it was everything, the wanting, you, the brevity of the affair, where a slice of my hip and a corner of my elbow were enough to seduce you. Still, my fingers curl for the shape of you, the nape of your neck, the ghostlines of your body sighing against mine, the suppleness of it, us, the unrelenting hunger in my belly from your absence. Then the goodbye of it, the lazy wave across the street, not stopping to ask if we could be friends, if we could salvage that, at least, from this goddamn awful trainwreck of a situation. You thought I would be okay, out in the daylight, with children running and falling down and scraping their knees and crying crying crying for mama and her antiseptic spray and band aids. You thought all it would take would be a few stitches and some Advil, a good night’s rest. You thought that the sun would save me in the morning, that she would blaze through your betrayal, scorch the whole thing up into scar tissue, a memory. But that was your first mistake. You thought I could be saved, that I goddamn wanted to be.
topography, n. (1) To scale you like a mountain, stretch myself out on the banks of your thighs, swing from your veins, climb your ribs, lose myself in the humidity of your eyes, yes, to make a landing strip out of your spine, familiarize myself with the color of your bone marrow, wave hello to your liver and pancreas. Will you remain at 98.6 degrees, high summer, if I can stop and take a photo with your heart? (2) The mapping of you. Every hair on your head, the entire forest, the soft feather down of it against my cheek; the exact placement of your collarbones, shallow pools to drink from. I want exact coordinates of your shoulders, your sternum’s flat plain, all that thinness, all limbs and skin and eyes and hands, you are all hands. Skeleton, you are my friend. (3) Keeping you in my head is the easy part. I crawl out of you, clutching a bit of your left coronary artery and there’s a bit of wisdom tooth in my hair, one of your tears is caught on an eyelash, and in my pocket, like a child, I’ve got some of the veins in your wrists tied up like licorice and a small spoonful of cerebral cortex rests beneath my tongue like sugar: souvenirs. This land is your land, this land is my land.
Daddy, there’s so much you think you know about your little girl. Let’s start with that. I’m not that little girl anymore, daddy. I wear lipstick, I wear heels, sometimes I leave the house without a bra on in fifty-degree weather, I stole two cigarettes from you that one time you took mom out for a drink. I ended up replacing them, but still. Didn’t you warn me about lung cancer, daddy? Didn’t you say it kills? It doesn’t seem to stop you from pulling all that poison into your lungs. You forget that little girls are impressionable. Cancer is chic to the permeable mind. It sounds like a flower. You blame mom for your habit, but don’t worry: she’ll get a letter, too. Last year, I climbed the roof of a girlfriend’s house and we stood on the very edge so that our toes hung off the edge a little, like icicles, and we threw our heads back and laughed hard into the purple bruise of the night. “We are young,” we chanted, fingers linked. “We are young.” I never felt more beautiful than I did that night, daddy, with my hair streaming down my back and my eye makeup smudged, never felt the exhilaration from risking my young, beautiful life on the roof of a two-story home at three o’clock in the morning. Daddy, I know you thought briefly that I was gay in high school because I never brought home a boy, never told mom who would tell you that I kissed my fair share of boys, that if I got too close to them I could set the air on fire between our bodies, and that you didn’t have to worry about having “one of those” under your roof. I hated you for that a little, daddy. Why do you hate them so much? Is that really the worst thing that could happen to your little girl? Love is love is love is love. Don’t you want me to fall in love? Don’t you want me to have what you and mom have, even if it’s with another daddy’s girl? But no, daddy, I’m not gay. Girls are beautiful like oil paintings, beautiful in the swing of their hips and the sensuality of their thighs, but it’s boys that drive me mad, tall boys with coffee eyes and pale skin and shadows in the cheeks that never go away no matter how much or how often they eat. Boys on the brink of death, daddy, that’s what I like, because I want to be the one who brings them back. Something else you should know, daddy: while I always love you, no, I do not always like you. You, who always like to be right, you, who establishes your dominance over everyone else in the house, you, who like to come first. Your temper, your impatience, all the anger in your heart. You’ve been living on this earth for 51 years. You know how ugly it is. I’m constantly surprised by your surprise, and you get mad because I never am. That’s one thing about my generation, daddy: we’re all aware of how your generation fucked things up for us. We know we have to fix your mistakes. But it’s okay. I’ll lower my blame, direct it towards the White House, overseas, at everyone else’s daddies and papas. It might break your heart to know this, daddy, but the minute I step foot out of this house, out of this godforsaken town, I’m not looking back. Expect post cards from Rome, Vienna, Paris, London, Egypt, Prague. I’ll call you collect from New York, send picture messages from the Floridian coastline, write you two sentence letters on the back of receipts for alcohol and condoms. I won’t look back, daddy. I’ll miss you, but every time you ask me when I’m coming home, the line will crackle, fade out once, and then disconnect. I’ll break your heart, daddy, because it’s the only way you’ll let me go. But don’t worry, daddy, you won’t hurt forever. One day I’ll come home, with an engagement ring, a Bachelor’s, a baby, or a book that this letter will be published in with my name on it. Maybe all of the above. And you’ll smile and cry a little, because we both know that a true daddy’s girl always comes back to her roots.
It doesn’t matter
that the moon is
moving away from us
3.8 centimeters a year,
or that one day the sun
will swallow us whole
and every single
thing we love about our
tiny speck-of-dust planet
will be reduced to ash.
They’ll say,
“The sun loved the inner planets
so much, she consumed them.”
It’s almost romantic, our fate.
Mars will bow his head
in shame at not being chosen,
but he’ll bear the scars from
her radiance like medals.
The outer planets
won’t be able to tell
a difference—
they’re used to the
sun’s cold shoulder.
But still, none of this matters.
Because the moon is
still close enough to reach out
and take between your fingers,
still close enough to hold it
in your palm like a quarter and that’s
twenty-five cents worth of love,
right there in the sky for anyone to take.
You can buy love.
It’s just going to cost you the moon.
apprehend, v. My name, your tongue— two almost-strangers who’ve got nothing in common except each other. The notches in your spine, all seventeen of them, a through q, moving beneath my fingers in a long sigh, the body’s alphabetic diminuendo. It’s the pretty parts of you that got me hook, line and sinker. It’s for the ugly parts that I’ve stayed, strayed. It’s the fixability of another body, the number of skeletons hiding not just in the closets, but the attics and basements, too. It’s the bare shelves, the dust. The skin-dust, the bone-dust, the eyelash- and knee-dust. It’s the readability of the body. Bold print, several languages, and caution! warnings get their own chapter. Newspaper clippings line the inside of my skin like paper mache, announcing every insignificant event of this life so far. Still, I feel that I am something like a sonnet when you start to read me out loud, as you dog-ear certain pages as you go along, highlighting and making notes in the margins, smudging the ink with your thumbs. It’s the words we leave, the brief affairs had and remembered, the small volumes of ourselves we leave behind like beloved first-editions of poetry hidden on someone else’s dusty shelf. It’s looking at your skin stained by everyone’s stories, the alphabet dancing the tango on your fingers, the dust caked in the lifelines of your hands, how we’re libraries of everyone we’ve ever met.
