le chevalier-poisson

le chevalier-poisson est monté sur son cheval sablonneux. Dit-il, tout recommence avec ça. Et le sable devint malveillant//et les rochers devinrent malades//et la toute petite maison au gré du bois s’empêtra dans un filet conçu pour les papillons en papier jaune.

The fish-knight mounted his sandy horse. Said he, everything hereby begins anew. And the sand became evil//and the rocks became ill//and the tiny little house at the whim of the woods became trapped in a net intended for yellow paper butterflies.

i like boys

i like boys who promise things, and then do the things, or fail to do the things but make it up to you with something better or fix it next time.

i like boys who aren’t afraid — well, maybe a little afraid — to tell you you’re amazing, — but they ultimately triumph over that fear, tiny moments between moments, and they risk sounding stupid or cliché in the name of just saying what is both true and good. i like boys who aren’t afraid to let you know when they’re afraid. i like boys you don’t have to be afraid of. i like boys who know when to just silk curtains. i like boys you can tell gently. i like boys

who don’t leave, as in, you can sit with them on the porch overlooking the oregon coast or on the couch between cats and guitars, and you can feel that while it is physically possible and he’s totally free to, if he wants to, get up and walk away, weave himself into some tapestry that excludes you, you feel the honey-warm-hamstrings entrail idea of staying and you don’t even have to spam your head with the question because you just feel that he’s still there. and if he does get up, he doesn’t leave. he takes you with him, or leaves you a vital piece of himself so you know he has to come back. or if he doesn’t, you still believe he will come back because he has earned your trust and you the same.

i like boys who play rough but gentle, who you can have a real argument with over philosophy or politics or art, but in the end, you know the argument can bay outside like a wolf all it wants to the moon and you’re inside snuggled cozy warm within quilts shaped like great white sharks. i like boys who don’t deceive themselves into thinking

you’re perfect, but when they notice your imperfections, they notice them as perfections, unexpected daubs on a painting or fragrant yellow-lily night. i like boys who can love you now, believe in your ability to change, and say you’re all good but your life could be better. <<it’s not you that’s wrong, if something is, it’s the way the world and you are interacting, and i want that to get better so my perfectly imperfect beautiful friend can have just a little more joy.>> i like boys who will only taste joy out of the relationship if they can tell you’re also tasting joy, who won’t accept a one-sided euphoria no matter the conditions. i like boys who aren’t afraid of a whole woman. i like boys who aren’t too politically correct to take care of girls, because we all need to be a nautilus sometimes, just held, chambered inside. i like boys who like long, involved conversations — that’s conversation as in with-versation as in both people do about equal parts listening and being listened to. i like to both feel at home.

i like boys who know they’re flawed and know their flaws.

i like boys who don’t expect anything will ever be perfect, but we keep fighting anyway. or maybe fighting isn’t the right word. i like boys who would rather be honest than resentful and rather combat than avoid, but who would prefer garden-growing to combat. i like it when the things he has to be honest with me about are things i can assimilate into my truth and still be honest.

i like boys who admire you as a real person. i like boys who appreciate your admiration but don’t demand anything. i like boys who don’t demand anything.

i like boys who never give up, or, when they do, they don’t really, because no one ever really does.

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.

Post(?)-codependency

It burdened you when I loved you too much and it was a big burden and you were a big strong mountain monster to bear that burden on your bison-ground shoulders while I fluttered around the question, trying to find the answer that would dissatisfy both of us least. My excruciating crucifixion on the fences inside my brain was really a pain in the ass for you, a hailstorm of texts begging for redemption, a weak yet steady erosion of your immutable truth, whispering questions into ears made of gorilla glass. I’m so sorry now that you’ve enlightened me. I’m sorry I was a costly sinkhole of your energy. I’m sorry you were victimized by my disenflourishing dramatically flower, cut of shiny blue satin. But have you ever thought — if it’s not too much again for me to ask — but — if it’s not too cliché — have you ever considered the possibility that it came from something bigger than both of us? And have you meditated at all upon the pain — yes, pain, believe it or not — the pain that consumed more than just my ass or my neck, that arraigned me down like a crane for war-tired trucks into the mud, that took away the substance and meaning of every zero and one in my definition and scrambled me, erased my arms and legs and made the rest of me watch as my identity, my reason to stay alive, my hopes for the earth and the future and you and me and those we love, my sense of balance so as to stay upright in accordance with gravitational law, and even the doubtful voices of howling cliff-dogs in my head get shoved aside by a thrashing wave of tears, tears to lose breath, tears and then nothing at all?

I didn’t do this shit because it was fun.

Dear Diary,

so i’m feeling kind of like a cantaloupe right now, not sure if that makes anything out of you, but the blender was already dirty with last year’s peanut butter laundry. i can’t tell you anything anymore because you’ll only ask for everything, including my little self that i keep on a mirror in my box of blush, like an idea. i just want to wring my bones until every drop of lemons-edge is gone and down the sink, but i would clog the sink. when andrea asked me to define bouché, she didn’t like what i said: ‘but it doesn’t make sense, that’s got to be just the opposite of what stravinsky wanted!’ i said ‘it’s jargon then,’ but i looked it up later and it still means plugged, stopped. the saxophone player must be equidistant from ambivalence and equitation. but my cat had whiskers like dandelion meringue pie.

quite honestly

i’ve been meeting up with other boys, in my dreams. Saturday night it was Jackson, scarecrow-walking between the college dorms stepping over trash cans and stray cats. When we reached the top of a spiral staircase to some sort of wizard’s shop or telecommunication center, there was a door, closed. Jackson pushed me up against the door so the ivy drooped from the hanging plants onto my bare shoulders. Suddenly I was in a bathing suit. He sculpted the lines of my imperfect body with his hands, pearing down past my cotton-white ass to my upper thighs. I thought I made it clear I didn’t want to be touched that way, but I suppose I didn’t, or he didn’t hear — scarecrow ears. “I’m getting so filthy now,” he said and pushed me again to kiss my neck or something — mercifully the scene seems to cut there or else the censor in my brain has blocked it from my waking mind for security reasons. Last night was different, last night it was Peter, who is engaged to be married to his fiancée later this summer, I think. But that’s in the daytime world. In the nightworld of dreams, he was alone inside an Internet devoid of the necessary streetlights, he was waiting on Facebook for a ridesharing service to pick him up. He was happy to answer my questions: How do you write music? How do you get past that brick wall? And he answered a few that I didn’t ask, which prompted me to ask more. By the end of the dream I understood that he was grasping gently in the current, a carrier crab devoid of lettuce or love. And I had come along, and I was worth a try. He wanted to hitch a ride back to eyes-open life with me but I was moving too fast; the taillights and headlights drawling now slippery boundaries across the highway… When I awoke I wished I could reach back for him to pull him out, but the wish was more for him than for me. I felt no mourning. Not like I did for you. And you were quite honestly never even there at all.

Amyrinda 7

Some of these bodies are trapped in themselves. Mine, gratifyingly or not, is not. The sea turtle with the snapdragon beak has been following over my shoulder all day, hanging from a hot-air balloon he must have fashioned from my mother’s admonishments, over my left shoulder always, always reading. My eyes slip from right to left and I read the wrong words, but they’re not the words wrong. At least, not necessarily. When I open my lips to speak to the grocery clerk, the consonants and vowels come out in a braid that mirrors the windy road of my readings. The clerk’s head shakes, uncomprehending. I do not know what it means to have a gender. I do not have a gender. I think a gender has me, but I have not been sure. For a while. I was standing in the cereal aisle, shopping for ice cream. I found, instead, a man who might have been my father, once. Do not look under the feet where you stand. The eggs may be hatching, the baby sea turtles poking their delicate obsidian-rosepetal heads into the blue air for the first time. Your glance could be too heavy. Just let them emerge like the sun, or my daughter, unquestioned.

time travel

Remember that day — it was day of the fifth or the sixth night of Hannukah — the sixth grade trip to Six Flags had been cancelled because of the rain and the cafeteria had been swarmed with sixth graders toting $20 bills so by the time I got to the front of the line the cafeteria guy had no change and I couldn’t get ramen so I was hungry until you came to pick me up — in the car by the gate with all the other parent-cars and I ran across the sidewalk and didn’t trip in any puddles but almost. And I was wet and hungry and achey until we got home and then I put on clean socks and the floor (which was papered with white termite-preparatory ribbons) seemed to blow like air under the tongue of some great white dragonlike creature as the heat came on (stuttering only once like it did back then) and you showed me again how to make hot chocolate and we watched a movie I think or maybe a program about the alligators in the monsoonlands and everyone turned out right and I felt okay eating. It was a good day, but only because it was an icky day up until that point. It was warm inside.

And today it came sneaking in through the radiator and up my baggy sweatpants leg and curled around my sock like the tail of the cat we lost since then and since it is alone I still feel cold. But that’s a lie; I don’t even feel cold. I’m having trouble feeling at all (except maybe sorry for myself). I miss that fucked-up little girl, and I want so bad to go back in time and tell her not to fuck herself up. Tell her she’s worth it. If you go —

The thing about being an island

The thing about being an island is, you’re indelibly alone and at the same time you’re entirely surrounded. Encapsulated on all four sides by unimaginable vastnesses of undulant blue; relentlessly open to imprisonment that could encroach from any direction.

Though the horizon stays empty most of our lives, we have to keep scouring the great featureless rind for impending forms. Eventually, we go blind from an excess of exposure to a sinking star that never intended to know anything about us.

Image: “Patiria miniata – Pacific Grove, California, United States.” By Ed Bierman from CA, usa [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Earthlings

I like to imagine the pimples on my face are citizens of a dermal topography, little rosy microcosms — of pain, yes, but also of fright and joy and mirth. And love, even. From deep in the angular grasslands of the eyebrow, one sends long-distance messages to another, who waits anxiously amidst the crowd at the shoreline between jawline and pinna’s drawbridge. The lip-hinge drags under the weight of an eyeless lover’s sorrow as the beloved blip kisses towards another one. The single ruby drop right where the angel touched under the nose to take away my knowingness a half-second after birth is lonely but doesn’t have much of an idea what to do about it, if anything. Still I like to imagine, as the erroneous forms wrack their roadways into my skin, as they cringe the wrinkles on my forehead and deepen the sun damage on the mountainous pores they have commandeered, silently still I like to imagine that they at least are happy, blissfully unaware of my eyeballs rising from the backyard, counting the marks in the mirror, and despite everything I pretend to believe they think they are people, capable of love.