the girl who was sort of magic: chapter 1

“So then, where’s the line between trust and codependency?”

You jumped off the front porch of the treehouse and rappelled down the tire swing. “Between good need and bad need? There is no line. I mean, not — really.”

“But then –”

{When you foliaged a burst of auburn hair behind your bespectacled ear it was almost like you were tucking my own hair behind my ear and your eyes flashed brighter than I thought they

could in well-forested daylight} “You’re just supposed to kind of feel it out. You know, like walking down a staircase backwards. You taste the edges of the steps with your toes and trust your somatosensory equilibrium to keep you from falling.”

“I’ve never tried to keep from falling.”

You looked at me funny, a smile awninged over with triangle-sewn eyebrows.

“I mean,

— I’ve never tried to go down a staircase backwards. Why would I?”

“I don’t know… to carry boxes…” You were fashioning a pinwheel out of a broken dandelion stem.

“I don’t carry boxes. I levitate them.” I grinned as if exaggerating.

“Show me.” Two Belize blue holes of your eyes staring up at me,

staring hungry — for a scrap of information to scrawl

into the ever-dancing net of lights

playing on laughing water? for a diver to swallow?

And how did you stare up at me, when you were already taller?

I was tearing up the shelves in my brain for a lie, a distraction — I needn’t have worried. Obelix came bounding

through the grass and before we could react he was on your chest, licking your face and neck and you were on the ground, and your ticklish garble was a cry for help, so I knelt and the retriever helped me the rest of the way down. I surrendered to gravity and canid enthusiasm. Between the blades of grass we could see each other’s faces like incomplete windows snaked with uneven frames; freckles like geese dotting the sky and flying behind a green slash and coming out again at slightly different latitudes, increments in skin. And I saw from your eyes that you had not forgotten the question. But I also saw that you were not going to press it any more — not for the time being, at least.

“Let’s go get pancakes,” I said.

Today quivering in the corner of this shed, I can hardly believe I said that. Just said it, no caveats, no question marks. {“Do you still love

me?”} And I

know that today more than ever I need your gaze, your hand in mine trembling, your forkful of blueberry pancake angel-craft-landing into my mouth and your lips closing on the spoon of chocolate syrup in my hand.

And I will never get it, because I need it too much.

Funny how that goes.

Amyrinda 8

I don’t want to end up like my seashell — rusted, cornered, fat and undustworthy in the liver of a locked wooden box, tucked safely six feet underground, obsessing over keeping myself alive. I’d rather be unkept —

a phrase at the edge of a cliff-dash, that just keeps running even knowing each step each letter might be my last before falling into —

emptiness. I thought you were the remedy. You were the disease, packaged by pharmacists and recommended by bestselling authors. All in my head. But you said in your own song about some other girl, you don’t want to be empty. Am I the emptiness you unshod from yourself, a rocket losing heaviness in order to attain the stars? Does emptiness have any weight? The traffic lights that warn us to wait —

do they know what their lipless voices are saying? And when you told me you cared about me, were you really speaking to the cloak of a shadow of a doubt of a memory, a glowworm-encrusted streetlight on the edge of the canal, paddling towards the waterfall into oblivion? And when you told me you were wrong about me, which of us was really wrong? And when I took all the trust from the velvet box inside the box inside the box inside my left lung’s prison cell, when I deposited it on the shore of you like a wasted kraken and asked you to keep it well, when you let the sea yawn and eat it all up again and fall myself down the drain for another ten years or so, did you know what you were doing? Did any of us know what we were — ?

¿

Tears are like they tell you in preschool about love: you give away all you thought you had yet in the giving you find yourself boomeranged with more, and more, and more, until the room is ready to drown you with pennies.

unstrangely

… to feel

hungry and full at once

stuffed to the brim and flooding out emptiness

will that child come back

running down grey sand

her cold blue dress biting at her heels

like dogs with foam for teeth

& i’m frightened of her

because i have been inside

once, her desolation & despite

the dull pain at once i screamed and swore

that i prefer

still to feel …

help me i don’t need help

“i think

i’m going

crazy,” i said

to a frenemy’s uncle.

“Going?” he repeated incredulously.

“I thought you’d already gone

long ago.” i think

~÷~

i think

his neck will taste good

in the spinach pudding

with the maroon(ed

curtains

Upon a rhetorical question you hope to God I don’t answer

Like all my problems,

this one is invalid,

signified especially by your interruptive assurance that

“I’m not trying to invalidate your problems or anything,” before

I have even said anything.

Because you have seen a country collapse,

you tell me the fact is that the collapse of my rib cage

is small – “I wish all the problems in the world were that small.”

Because you have been told you play viola well,

you reassure me that perhaps things will change in the future

and besides it doesn’t matter that the masterclass teachers don’t care

to hear me play, because I’ve stated that I don’t want to play, so

where is the conflict?

Because your family has seen starvation,

You teach me about starvation

and I know something about starvation

but I prudently

do not attempt to teach you about the collapse of my little isolationist

nation of one

and the physical starvation it incurred not because of

a grand-scale crisis but rather because everything

in that mind was extremely small

because I was privileged,

my problems were small and pink and rhinestoned,

but remember that the kitten that ripped a hole in a wrestler’s trachea

was also small, pink and rhinestoned

and stop accusing me of being small-minded

when your mind is the one that can’t seem to imagine

any nation, language, or sex drive other than your own

as if there were one continent on this planet

lonely and united.

human lefts abuses

If I throw these clichés on the page will you let me stop carrying them around in my heart? Jeez, they’re as heavy as a Sisyphean sack.

And the funny thing is, I know the heart is not where emotions lie. In truth there is no such thing as thought

If I let the bridge of human rights abuses collapse onto my spine will you use the fragments to build a sea sponge skeleton where the black baby on the corner of Hot Lips Pizza and Rack Attack can take shelter with the starfish-mongering shrimps?

In my dad’s car & leotard-caged I worried about cancer and the gray followed us past the Los Angeles Chinese Christian Academy

Saturday.

In the school’s car & ice-blinded by your opinion I broke down and the sound of Portland irritated flagellating the red I’d held hidden in my gray

Friday

In your human rights fog you flogged yourself left and got us all very lost. Your argument broke down and I was buried in the rubble

While she hugged the body you used the shards to scratch your itch for ignominious ignorance.

I hate this poem; it’s one of the ugliest things I have ever written

Metaphorically, it is your heart.

Image: “Uherský Brod, Czech Republic, 1980.” By Ervín Pospíšil – Self-published work by Ervinpospisil, scan, camera Pentacon Six TL + blitz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1404487

See the other chapters of this story:

The Commute With Cronan

homeward bound through fire and rain i

The Commute After Rain

i fail to write

The only thing i ever

music. Flesh + silence =

finished without giving

my prison. Mind wanes

up too early

lizard brains strain to hear

was this

a salad. Can you hear a –

poem and even now

–

valid or not, the fact is it’s falling

and my leaves with

it

noitulove

A jellyfish can live a million lives

and never miss one

as it dissolves

into blue

nothing

With our precious heads, our necks collared by jewels and crucifixions

our heavy brains inside our heavy skulls, our heavy coats

we forget we are mostly water, as is the planet

beyond our tiny cities

beyond edges

into forever,

untouches, unasserts itself, the blue

ocean

You should write about this, the teacher in my head scritches pencilly on my inner eardrums. You should download every face and glance, every word and what it really meant, every unknown you meet and spreadsheet them and massacre a blank page make it bleed with named names with impossible truths

You must take notes: Lexie melted into a hospital bed

and calmly asked the nurse for assistance

Giancarlo was beaten into the Utah sands

from whence reached up a shattered hand, searching

for a father in the clouds

as they rained toxic dust onto his rusting

Jillian says forgiveness is the greatest gift but

Beatrice says, to fuck and back with that shit

white as cobwebs, cotton candy, black as night outlining

a figure left behind.

Humans: we are all so burdened by the pain

that we inflict upon ourselves

that our taxonomy decrees

but it is our species who invented taxonomy, yes?

We are the most broken things

on an earth being constantly broken

by things larger than we can imagine, by fired rock and the clash of bullets

hurled from Saturn’s wing, by the steps of giants

and the final crack

of their jaws upon the hardened dirt.

We humans are the bearers of the immensest pain

not because the pain came to prey on us

but because we stretched our neural

paths and bumped into walls

and we chose to study them

while building an eternal

ceiling, sealing us in

something out of

nothing

 

Peter Pan Syndrome

in an eggshell bedroom painted unicorn blue

in the carnival cave beneath the bed

he chopped off each branch as it grew towards browning

into a grown-up man. his Mother

called him for supper, but she dared not brave

the scarves of gibbon-songs streaming from corners

of his ceiling, nor the forest

of pinching crab-soldiers

strewing his floor.

there in his eggshell

bedroom painted unicorn blue

he axed off the flesh and bone as it sprung

as it tried again, once or twice, from his young

shoulders: the forested legs, the ganglion arms

the humiliating protrusion – a useless, fireless torch

between the thighs – no mercy, he sliced that off too

and when his scream in soaring over

the crevasse of

impossible

pain

dipped, its feathers craving a taste of the low waters

that whisper between walls of baritone-tenor,

then

the knife went to his mouth

the vocal cords gutted as if preparing to fry a trout –

and when

they placed the coffin six feet underground

before the dirt followed you could see

his lips blood-sparkled, upturned in a near

smile-

which should have been

impossible.

Image credits in order of appearance:

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=971071

By HumMelissa_Glee – Peter Pan – Magic On Parade, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37024076

J. M. Barrie (as Hook) and Michael [Davies] (as Peter Pan) on the lawn at Rustington, August 1906. By Unknown, presumably Sylvia Llewelyn Davies – http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2193622

Five Years Out

You wake up feeling like a hairball. In the mirror: a eucalyptus fairy, frazzled by mud-bark and bed-hair. You wonder if it might be okay today to like yourself.

You put on your capris. Do they fit the same as last week? Last month? Last year? Can you trust your memory? The tag is slowly branding the skin where your hip bones should be but are buried under an aggregation of melting candle wax. You have committed the ultimate transgression – you have awakened, and you weigh a million pounds.

You walk downstairs and start down the sidewalk between the cherry blossom trees and the 2.5-kid sedans. The birds are above you. If anyone sees you, they are thinking you are worthless because you are fat. They shoot their thoughts through the air at you. Sometimes you stop walking and just press against the air, trying to break the wall.

You complain to the one person in the world who really knows, or half-knows. You say, into the phone, “The thoughts just come and I’m trapped inside my body and I’d rather be anywhere but here but I can’t – can’t – die.”

She says, “You know it’s in your head.”

You say, “I wish I could ask other people sometimes, just for a reality check, but I can’t.”

She says, “No. You can’t.”

You say, “Why can’t I?”

She says, “This subject bores me. Can we talk about something more interesting?”

You show up to class, and the star student is a snowy plover with a swan’s neck, dancing without knowing it across her page of musical notes and into the tortured graphite sprawling your own notes in your composition book: lopsided arms ripping at the sun in agony, gaping mouths swallowing or spitting balls of flame, feet crammed into pumps that would blister their skin,

if they could feel. You did like her, once, but today there is the wall, and you can’t tell who built it or how many there are. You hate her today because there is the wall.

You lie in bed and realize you haven’t taken off your bra. So you sit up in the bare sunlight, toss off the t-shirt and disentangle the undergarment from your body. It slips between the cracks between beds. When you wake up, you have magically risen like a layer cake in the oven; a gigantesque buffoon ballooning with cloudy pound cake flesh, cheeks chipmunk-stuffed with the invisible marshmallows of dreams of self-acceptance. You hate yourself so much that you can’t think about it anymore.

You show up to class. People are writing essays. Essays about pathological paranoia, about electroshock therapy, about being the object of inhuman laws. You are not writing essays. Your chipmunk is full; your brain is empty. You need to sleep. Again. You need to stop sleeping. You really should stop eating, too. If you stop eating, you’ll go back to the old days when all you needed was the absence of eating – no honors society, no music, no publishing poems. If you go back to the old days, you will fail under the train of time and get caught like a sleeve on a doorknob and you will embarrass God. You can never go back. You need to keep eating, even though you need to stop eating.

Everyone and every sun of every day is out to get you. They leave you standing, a husk, still eligible to attend class. But they’ve taken the buttercup from under your chin, and they eat it and leave you missing vital organs. But you are still not sick enough to miss class. Maybe you should make yourself sick again. Your selfishness makes you feel sick. Your body makes you sick. Your flesh force-feeds bitter apple and cottage cheese to your brain until it wants to vomit, but you catch the words in your mouth and swallow them again behind sealed teeth and closed lips. No one else needs to hear about it. But if they are all trapped in their own personal hells –

Today a boy asked if you wanted to hug him. You said no. This evening you feel like a fairy, disheveled, teetering on the edge of a flowerpot twenty feet into the sky. This evening you will not be trapped. Just don’t let the sugar of experience poison your knowledge that

it is not okay. It needs to be not okay. If it was okay, that would really not be okay. And when it is not okay, you are afraid of dying beneath the whip of your own brain. But you can’t –