December 2011
99 posts
2 tags
Let me speak to you in my small voice.
The one with the pleated skirt.
I am an affront.
When the whirlwind comes,
you’ll feel it in the little home
of your body. Something to reap,
something to lift you up.
Nothing up my sleeves but my arms,
dove-like, insensible:
This armature of breakable bones.
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Remy the Dog-Child
1.
Remy the dog-child is full-up on crystal and every time she barks she
coughs up white crystal fungus in the sharp shape of pine trees. She
runs through the diamond mines barking and sending the shapes into
the sky. Remy the dog-child runs.
2.
When she gets to the bottom of the diamond mine she sees three
caves. Cave one reads: House. Cave two reads: Window. Cave three
reads:...
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2 tags
snip
At fourteen a boy touches your hair—twists his fingers in its brown
and pushes it gently behind your ear. Your hair belongs stuck to
the sides of your face: slim, pointed, shiny as ice. But instead it’s
long and looped under your chin and so he touches it—puts it
behind your ear where it gets stuck on the pewter back of
your earring. You ask him to leave. This is not loneliness; it’s
...
staying up remembering how she once said,
“it must be awfully lonely to be a bottle, to be made with a space that longs to contain.”
i would have shoved a thousand ships into those thin glass necks just to know she had said, but could still say.
2 tags
Alice Pretends to be a Museum Exhibit Display
The aftermath of the photo-op was more complex than she originally
intended. Not “surprise” as in: Happy birthday we’re all here
wearing fun hats in your living room, but “surprise” as in: I’m real, look,
I have cells and I am soft to the touch. She feels a compulsory need
to stay in the Ice Age. Mangy wax mammoth keeps her warm all night.
A long line of twine keeps...
“Can it be that in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a...”
– Elizabeth Grosz
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the little lantern girls with their cords
plugged in are far too radiant.
let only glow worms light up their thin skin.
let them trip through the skip-rope intestines
of their funny little dreams
and chip teeth.
2 tags
Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now… like an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that’s why she spent so much time staring at me.
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Adolescence
The winter her body no longer fit, walking felt like swimming in
blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Everything stuck to her skin: gum
wrappers, Band-Aids, leaves. How she envied the other girls,
especially the kind who turned into birds. They were the ones boys
hand-tamed, training them to eat crumbs from their palms or sing on
cue. What she would have done for a red crest and a sharp...
