Grass stains.

Little brother had five medals hanging from his neck on colored ribbons when he squared off on the grass for one last competition. His opponent was a tall, tan boy; undecorated. And as they wrestled, little brother paused for a moment, thinking of his medals and the boy’s barren neck, and wondering if he should crumble and let the other walk, victorious. Instead he brought the boy to his knee, and walked away with six medals clanking from his chest.

But in the car, winding home as the sun slipped away, he was not victorious but ashamed and he cried for the other boy, imagining the defeated boy in his own mother’s car, wondering if the boy's friends would tease him, wondering if he, too, would cry when he arrived home with nothing but grass stains to show for the day.

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The Receptacle of Everything Unsalvageable

I, too, am the receptacle of everything unsalvageable, unwound dreams circulate in the vessel of me. Deposit in me: your dead ends, scrapped projects and lost lists. I am the expanding hole in your nylon tights, popping and stretching back over your bare skin. I am the faded jubilation shared with some extroverted stranger, sloppy intentions dissipated in cold morning air. I am the space between the mouths of your bickering parents. Deposit in me: the words you should have said, the long glance you did not return, the mold on leftovers from some beautiful meal made for you and not eaten. I am the blackened bottom of a neglected pot, the cracks running all through your grandmother's old dishes. I am the invisible aching hole in your slick tooth. Deposit in me: the health crumbled and dissipated into your unfaithful body, the naivete that you outgrew along with your high school jeans. I am the dream that slips away in the blue light of dawn, the sick brown leaves of a shriveled plant, dry as bone.

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The Most Lonesome Thing

Creaking and rocking, I am making little echo noises in the void of my own self, the only thing that exists. The world is an undulating thing, made of sand and hope, made of gritty fear. I am a red desert, stretched out in perfect dunes, as far as the eyes can see. You are a ghost, with whispering footprints that are swept away when I breathe in. I never hurt you, you are no solid thing. I can slip through your skin; there’s nothing there. You are a dream, a fragment, a wish, a passing thought.

I am floating in the silent certainty of only me. You cannot reach me here, you cannot touch me, because your fingers are made of white sand, the dust of my own internal experience; nothing.

I wonder what it’d be like to pour myself into you, to spill over you in little particles, slip through the cracks of you, enter your pores. Imagine us in a rusty VW bus leaking sand. We’re in the desert, dunes rolling and rippling and sighing as far as the eye can see. We live in a bus, with teacups, full of sand. We make love in a bed like a dried up sea, fine, orange dust that billows all around us like steam, makes your face look far away, I can see you dissolving into it. We sit cross-legged, naked and dusty, and I paint your body with wet strokes, trying to feel your skin, my fingers hopeful and searching. We stand in the desert hand in hand and watch as a huge dark wave comes rising up and crashes over us, rains against my flesh, your flesh, these flimsy little forms. We erode in seconds, dissolve into the absolute chaos, swallowed up into the explosive whirlwind of fiery sand.

I am the most lonesome thing, the only thing, heaving in the dark black void, the things that can never be known. I am writhing, in a bed. The sunlight is begging to crawl through the windows, through the cracks. You are not real. I can slip through your skin and find nothing.

Spring

Spring comes like honey, dripping, soft, sweet, golden yellow. Little blossoms appear, white and innocent, virginal and quivering, open to the sun and wind, and I am aching for these whispers of green, the sighing roots all down into the earth. I am ready for the clean wriggle of something pure and new to burrow into the stained and scarred earth, into my impure bones.

December

December is cold, cold bones, hope and waiting, that impatient movement in my knees, closing my eyes and standing up on big old bricks, arms spread, fantasies like you on your back, balanced up there under a blanket. December is a deep sigh, mottled gray skies, holiday promises, layers of cloth. December is one more inch up, one more year turned gray and expired, warm things and spices, a month long desire, a smoking candle wick, the moment before the lights come back on. December is a worn out favorite sweater, a white and silver time, thin as paper, hands pressed together, a far-off fireplace in the redwoods. December is the tense ache from holding yourself together, rushing or not moving at all, forest green and mahogany red, extra layers, steam, in cups and out of mouths, in the damp bathroom. December is sleeping long hours, kitten kisses on my chin, blank walls, stagnation, cuddle up indoor days, words spilling out everywhere, wishes. December is one frozen snowflake on the windshield, your long legs stepping into white, your steely eyes fluttering.

Love Is

Someone recently read my blog Love is Not and asked me what I thought love is. I told them that I would think about it "when I have time" and then half way through my Spanish Lit class, only a few hours later, as the unfocused drone of my mumbling professor began to invade my soul, the question came back to me, and I wrote this in the back of my notebook:

Love is more than a light bulb moment—it’s a slow flood of heat from toes upward. It’s a backward black hole blinded dive; love is a decision, a mixing up and sorting out of self, a process. Love is negotiating skin and soul, a chemistry, all the feathers of a drooping phoenix, a thing that lives and breathes, goes up in flames, and is reborn inside you as naked and vulnerable as an egg. Love is made of steely bird bones. Love is an inconvenient tumor, the most beautiful disease. It’s holding hands and growing up, words, warm blankets and low light. Love is learning, reading flesh and eyes, a kind of literature, history, psychology, it’s manual labor. Love is a place to cry, an open wound, a puzzle piece, an ocean. It’s an accumulation of little things that stack up in your bones and hold you up, weigh you down, peek out of your pores. Love is dissolving voluntarily, a jelly soft shudder through your stupid, incomplete soul, a contract, a pathway, a box overflowing with dirt and twigs, rusted nails and bits of cotton, cardboard, glue, wood and temptation. Love is a child’s toy, something made with care, it’s a thing that’s not been practiced, drawn, planned; love is an accident as startling as the Earth. Love is gray clay and warm hands. Love is a dirty habit, groggy contentment and messy hair, the taste of sweat, an unraveling.

Love is Not

Love is not a vapid, complacent creature, but some kind of monster, cracking at my bones. You are a small thing in my veins, raging up and down from heart to cold hands, every day. You are the second in between breathe in/breathe out.

I am not the girl I want to be, nor the girl you see when you breathe into my neck, nor the hand that writes you letters. I am not a person made of cloth and yarn, I am not a person made of paper and ink, a person made of lists and half-dreams, made of scattered aspirations. I am not cold feet on tile at five am, not a person who collects animals and ideas. I am not made of stranger-smiles and fragmented conjectures and uncomfortable laughter.

I am not complete, mathematical, coordinated, sure.

We are made of the same recycled energy and stardust; I am nothing like you. You are a person made of gold and bitterness, a person made of love as winding and green as jealous vines, you are sweet transient blossoms, a vague taste of honey. You are a brand new thing, woken up everyday, a brand new thing, working out and up from a seed fed on the nectar of delay, love that hits you like rays of sun that have traveled through the silver-speckled blackness to splash all across your body.

Everyday your skin falls off, everyday my skins falls off. At night I see you naked as pliant bare muscles. At night I drift out of my skin and reach to you with invisible hands. You are a pair of luminous eyeballs. I am not a person made of perfect vision. I may be a person soft and indefinite as a cream-colored blur reflected through your steely blue-green gaze. Every night my skins falls off, every night I wait for you in the in between places, in the layers of dusk and dawn.

Love is not a patient creature, but she waits; but we wait.

Rainy Morning Musings

In the clean, cold air of rainy mornings, dreams come through; these are the things that emerge from my still-pond mind in the dark, heavy hours when the city is washed clean, ruffled like a wet bird.

Your hands slide over my body, polish my skin like warm marble, shadows flutter all about my face, white sheets silvery in the low light roll and undulate like a sea of milk. I was wearing my black silk dress with soft gold running across the hem—you worked it off like snakeskin. I felt it peel back like from a sunburn, like filaments of skin pulling apart, that transparent lace of discarded flesh. Underneath I was soft and white as the surprising inside of a ruby red lychee fruit; raw.

Autumn Cocoon

I feel autumn in my bones, a kind of leaf-like fluttering shivering all through my skin; it’s time for a change. It’s time to bring my eyes inside, it’s time to close up my flailing limbs and sit careful to listen. It’s time to breathe deep into my insides and feel myself reverberate, what skin is growing all around me?

I am not a single, whole person, just a collection of human snapshots, just an accumulation of busy cells and shades of consciousness. I am spinning silk for my autumn cocoon, hopeful silk, filaments of a searching self, made of all the requests I have whispered into the universe. I am spinning silk for my autumn cocoon; it’s made of the memories of beautiful things, glimpses of love and naked humanness, the kind of honesty visible in the collar bone, in chewed fingernails. These things are my request to the universe, I want to wrap myself in reminders of falling leaves, worn books and thrift store boots, music and the people that make it with their bodies and their souls, candle light and soft yarn, the sweetness of strangers, cold feet and warm socks, beautiful brains humming together at similar frequencies. I want to wrap myself in the thoughts of these things and bring them to me, bring them to me.

Sleepy Saturday

Sweet end of week nothing, how beautiful and still, how false. Spanish time feels like a sleepy mirage, slow swimming to sudden places, the days feel infinite, the weeks as short as hours. I am the most comfortable misfit, at home in the white sheets and cobbled streets, yet strange as black sand, lost as a fish in the sky.

Something in the heat is glazing over my baby pink skin, my raw flesh, I feel that softness of home without a structure to place it in. Home is a dust in the air, laying all around my skin. I feel the softness of home settle across my own shoulders, coat my body, penetrate my veins.

A Certain Sensation

Spanish singed and anxious, I feel electric. Squatting in the sun, roaming tongue, waiting. The hallways voices reverberate off the marble, sneak into my siestas. I feel thrills, a thin layer of humid air, laying on my skin expectantly; something out there. Bursting from the chest, I feel a split in my ribs; hollowed out, space to be filled.

Digging

My dreams keep coming, cloudy and verbose; they bite at me, spiders and ants, little legs scurrying beneath my eyelids, clothing, in my skin. I am becoming a self-conscious sleeper, navigating through the rubble with my eyes closed, constructing big labyrinth nations where my tongue is broken in half. There are so many trials to face.

4am—I sit up, squinting into the darkness for a creature with six legs I suspect is crawling across my pillow, but it is black, so I fall back heavily, into a field where you’re tugging off your shorts.

I am churning excitement from anxiety, and then laying in it, the mornings long and hot and grassy. I want to dissolve in summer heat, then maybe, I can become pliable and spread out, among the selves I’ve been, want to be, am destined for or expected of—then, maybe, I can settle into the cracks of yellowed paper, black ink. How contrived, the divides in land, and why can we not drift between them, wide-eyed nomads, why must we be bureaucratic, paper-bound, sludge through the fine print for month-long headaches.

Sometimes waking up is exactly like a sigh, like giving up, losing hold of some mystery place, losing grasp of the most important secrets. I wish I could write in my sleep, wake up and find the words in neat rows. When I wake up, I feel soggy around the edges, like my subconscious has been sweating from hard manual labor—digging. Digging for old clues, linguistic tricks; I’ve got to have something worthwhile buried down there, some faded map that will remind me how to find that self-certain part of my self, some calm self that’s ready for anything at all.