dreams where i am stretched into the sky

When I watch the world, I try to feel it spinning beneath me. I try to be the most alert I've ever been, my fingers and toes splayed, eyes wide and squinting, attempting to see everything I want to focus on. My back is straight and fragile so the wind can nudge it, the way it blows around me. I stop breathing even. I slow my pulse and listen for the frequency of the earth. I listen to the subtle cracking of the soil beneath the pacing feet. I can smell the lava scalding the core and I see it sparking in the fault lines and worry lines of the world. I touch the smoke of the clouds and rake my fingers through them, streaking the atmosphere in weightless condensation. I feel the earth; I know it is alive. But I think it may have stopped spinning, just to feel a different pulse traveling along its skin. And maybe as I try to feel its rotation, it is relishing my heartbeat and my absence of vertigo.

averted vision

Things we wish would fade quickly often take longer, mostly because we are accustomed to staring straight at them. They fade, but we are watching them disappear pixel by pixel.

Someone told me averted vision opens your eyes to the things you cannot see when you stare into the brightness of something. But it's the same with darkness. Staring at your hand in campsite blackness, simply because you can feel it pressing against the air, does not make it easier to see. Sometimes you have to look at the dim glimmers of light in the water, the bioluminescence of the soft creatures, edgeless beneath the ebbing waves. When your pupils open to let in these shreds of light, you can catch your thumb waggling in the darkness, a sign of life amidst the black.

Sometimes we must look away in order to see what is in front of us.

you handed me a wordless rose, clipped from a letterless bush grown in a sentenceless garden and I was unbearably silent in return. you uttered a grunt, your tongue in your hand and you wanted to tell me something. but you found yourself caught in a whirlwind, with bloody hands to write with and no words to write, and empty mouth to speak with and brain full of ghosts of the words we decided not to say. the blood dribbled from your mouth in cherry strokes and the petals fell from my flower to the ground of our silent world.

my body is a bag

my body is a bag of marbles, shifting in your fingers as you toy with my shapes and inspect the swirls of my intestines.

my body is a bag of stones to be cast in the ocean with a splash and a sprinkle of stinging water.

my body is a bag with a fish, wide-eyed and frightened, lurking inside.

my body is a bag of bodies, diced and muddled so the coroner needs a moment to count the arms and legs wrapped in each other.

my body is a bag of rubbish to be tossed into a dump truck and to be split down the side, putrid cocktails beading on my skin and dripping onto the other bags crowded around me.

foggy places

your eyes are like honey oozing from the hives, like chocolate I lick from my fingertips, sparking on my tongue, golden and warm and fattening; a drop of ink pooling in the midst of the sickly sweet concoction God sculpted your face into out of the sides of the riverbank. the ebony of your pupils bleeds into the color, if you can even call it such; a color the painters cannot bottle, a color with a fabricated name stamped onto my brain, onto a little place enshrouded in fog where I’d call you my own, look into the depths of those eyes (try to look at both of them until my own colors cross and I fall into your chest) and forget my own face until I see a dusty reflection of it in those discolored black holes. and then I would be an Adam-ish Eve and find the names for your hues under rocks with the centipedes and their black mud; in the leaves when the sun filters through and tattoos a shadow onto my skin, so pale and spotted against yours. 

untitled

You asked me to write something for you. How do you say anything to someone who robs you of breath and of speech?

There are no words yet to describe you. All of the words in all of the books in all of the languages of the world hold no perfect weight. When I am with you, something inside me grows quiet and listens for your own soul’s hush. I can feel the faint buzz of human electricity circuiting through the air when we lay perfectly still. When we stare into the sky on clear or cloudy nights, I can almost hear the hum of your heart. I think the constellations hide behind the clouds because they want the people who truly yearn to see them seek them out.

When you look at me, I know that you see me. It’s terrifying, to be so exposed simply by holding a glance for a fraction of a second longer than we are used to. I do not know what you see when you look that way, and I think I’ll never know.

When I look at you, I like to take a moment to see you. And I love what I see. It’s a beauty I’ve always dreamed of but never expected to find. It is a canvas of peeling paint. So many coats the canvas sags on its wooden frame and the layers peel back to reveal colors that are only imagined outside of you. You have colored my world with pigments that exist only in your soul. I try to be gentle and peel away the thick slabs of paint, each layer more complicated and dimensional and beautiful than the last. When I think I’ve scattered the last of them onto the black and white of my world, I find new chipped layers beneath my fingernails. And certain flecks of my gray and white match the colors of you. I see you now. And when I see you, I realize you’re seeing me, peeling back my paint, coloring your world with my shades, and my terror is palpable. Never has such tenderness touched my skin, slowly shedding my layers of painted-on until my soul is naked in front of you and I stand pale in a world of the brightest browns—the muddling of our colors. I see you seeing me and I have to close my eyes for fear of falling in love with the portrait we’ve painted

and as my fear multiplies, I am coloring my soul again, scribbling furious red and aquas and ebonies. And as soon as I finish, you peel it away with such grace and I realize you have always seen me.

And I realize there is no point in tattooing myself in crimson and yellow, because you’ll simply take the murals I paint and break them apart and show me how to build without fear. We are building a city of broken bits and we are finding wholeness in each other.

When I see the constellations between phases of clouds, I hope that whoever is seeking them sees them, too, because no better feeling exists than seeing things you’ve always hoped to see the instant you planned on turning away.

Untitled

we watch the train pass in front of us
the aluminum bell hammering against the air, the train cars
speeding past, shaking pine needles from the trees
the red lights winking back and forth,
dim in the afternoon sunlight, the candy-striped arm vibrating

rippling along the rails like a horse tearing through a racetrack
and I can feel the blue of your eyes pressing into the flush of my cheeks,
the palm of my hand a child’s in your grip, white knuckles and scarred knuckles

it passes still
the moment is so fragile and I do not want you to speak
so I hold my breath behind my teeth and hope you understand my cues

something else passes in front of our clasped hands and our worn shoes
it rises into the air above us
it is the shape of our shared dream

your eyes are aphids devouring me
your thumbs press into my skin
and I can feel your fingerprints encrypting codes,
embedding your touch into my external hard drive
and I do not think you will be forgotten

and I think the people watching us pass will recognize our colors
and they will watch our bright eyes blinking in the brightness of our joy
they will wait to cross our path until our arms are raised above our pigeon-toed tracks and
we run along the voltage rails like stallions

april isn't as cruel as we suspect

"that secret that we know

that we don't know how to tell

i'm in love with your honor

i'm in love with your cheeks"

~"Blood Bank," Bon Iver