Lemons in his head (an Eleven poem)

In the elven grim I picked a sun-bloom;–

Such a sin to leave the gloom to envelope

Him whom I had loved. Yet even heaven falls

Prey to strange designs at times — this mine death knell

Itself fell from grace, weed-siphoned, enveloped

In melanin’s grass-grey cloud, a song of six

Even storm pawns and kings, who stormed the fortress

Ere its forestine quills could quake in revenge.

Magellan measured this place with earth-length thread

And found it no more deviant than lemons.

Note: This was a self-created writing exercise I invented for myself on a whim. I imposed the following rules to create boundaries within which to draft a poem. The rules are 1) Eleven lines total; 2) Eleven syllables per line; 3) Use one word that contains some permutation of the sounds of the word “eleven” in each line.

a little nighttime wordplay

Destitute

Prostitute

Institute

Constitution

Restitution

Resolution

Dissolve

Solid

Soluble

Solemn

Solar

Solitaire

Solitude

Solace

Malice

Malware

Malevolent

Fe{(mal)e}

Animal

Malfeasance

Obeisance

Seance

Rinse

Mince

Words

The girl who was sort of magic: chapter 4

For a few months after I died, she sent me postcards. It was nice, kind of bittersweet. Sometimes they were the store-bought ones from the corner pharmacy, with rosy images of the pier sunsets and cutesy streets I knew better than anyone. How are you getting along? I’m ok, I went to the zoo yesterday and saw the river otters. Smelled them too. When the pharmacy closed, she made her own, cardstock with ink drawings: elephants, butterfly-faced women, trees that seemed to move and dance across the grain of the paper. Hi again, hope you’re well, still wish you were… you know. That only lasted a week or so.

The intervals between postcards began to stretch. The ink drawings disintegrated, each new generation containing more white emptiness and less of those specific, thin black or blue lines she made with the pen, encompassing reality to fit her mind’s eye. It was like watching her let me go. Let me float as the reverse gravitation of After wants to do, let the strings of not-breath pull me through various layers of cloud and ozone until the atmosphere became a dream, or my body a dream to the earth and what we all know as real. Before. Eventually the mailbox by my parents’ old house was devoid of the postcards for a full four weeks and I stopped coming to check. Feeling the emptiness every day seemed to make it more so, though I know that’s not how it works.

I should have been proud of her for being able to let go, to move on, but honestly I felt a bit miffed at being left behind. As the living, it was her right and her best interest to focus on herself and the other living; while I was alive I used to marinate her in sermons against the kind of obsessive neuroticism she tended to engage in. Talking for hours about some rude stranger she’d never see again. Tsk-tsk-tsk. But now it seems, the way things are, my existence is exactly contingent on the ever-diaphanizing string between her memory and my coughed-up cloud. I sense that when she forgets me totally, I will forget how to keep my molecules together in this form.

I can already taste them drifting farther apart, in my tongue. My morning nectar is bitter in one part of my mouth and then at a thunder-count’s distance it seems another part tastes it as sour, and sweet in an island amidst a sea of — nothing. And — I don’t feel ready to move on. I don’t feel ready to forget. I know it’s not about me, anymore. But there’s just something — I don’t know. I feel this itch in the space where my collarbone would be, like there’s something I’ve forgotten, some loose end to tie up, some mess to clean once and for all. But I can’t remember what. My parents are gone, the house empty and overgrown, all my stuff sold, given away or burned. Except the things I gave to her, if you count them. Like the necklace.

The necklace. She still has it. That’s why I’m still somewhat cohesive, here. As long as she keeps it, I’ll be able to stay. Is that the thing I’m forgetting? Tying up the ends of the necklace? I don’t know, but if I meddle a little with the string/glass/box, maybe I’ll at least buy myself some time to figure out the answer. Construct an answer satisfactory enough to let me dissipate in peace. Honestly sometimes I think the reason I’m here has nothing to do with her at all. But everyone else from Before is already escaping like watercolor in the wash, it’s all white sheets circling in my raining mind. I stashed the postcards in an abandoned pigeons’ nest behind the roof tiles of the old house. Some of them are written in a language I can no longer read. Later there are no words.

 

** inspired in part by The Line Tender by Kate Allen

yet another last address

hard to stop apostrophizing you

when the other options are two-hundred years dead

and you’re still in my head guiding my breakage

of the rules,

telling me i’m worth it or not

hard to stop second personing

when you were the first person i came to

when i felt like a third wheel on a bicycle.

i know you aren’t the monster; —

it’s inside

like a paranoid old woman hunkered beneath her bulletproof parasol

so hard for every word i write not to decompose

into a letter to you

and all the music i compose

draws me into my seashell

there is a television in there

where i watch pictures of humans who care about each other

and don’t stop loving each other and even if it’s a lie

(even if the truth is a lie)

it gets us through the day, right?

don’t answer that.

Flashbacks

I wanted to go away…

Let’s cut the caveats, who’s been shot and what do you want

from me? Don’t be like that; we both know I don’t

care don’t test me.

Sue me arrest me break my arms I’d break my legs if I had a stage

I’m a rocket with lost metamorphosis

I’m over this, don’t need to see war for bliss.

I wanted to go away…

Let’s cut the butts and butter, cigarettes rescued from the gutter

break out of the city limits just to see us break back in it

probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to me your lies can be

as thin as buttercups under the chin as bland as watered-down gin.

Are you falling down?

I’m crawling to keep homeostasis

Romeo’s faked it, don’t need more than one deep-fake kiss.

I wanted to go away…

Hey it looks like we’re staying for the summer, staying for the summer

and the curtains wash up on you like the ocean or your mother

trying to brush your hair…

did she ever get it straight?

How much did that hurt?

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.

Amyrinda 6

On this question much ink has been spilled. In fact, you can hardly make out the question anymore; cloudy black-purple words coughing to be heard through clouds of purple-blackness, a page that screams so loudly it hardly says anything at all. Kind of like babies, or my father.

I’m hanging laundry in broad noon, accroching the flighty white cotton blouses and underslips to a line that divides our sky from the neigbors’. All of these cloudy white cotton underclothes, yearning towards the sky, flapping as if wings were all that held them back. The line, in the bird-brain, is really an academic concern. If you can’t understand something, such as a physical principle, it’s much easier to work in direct contradiction of its confines. At least that’s what I’ve read.

They say Debussy was a God, but I saw the sea snails in his beard the day Poseidon came to fetch him and I saw the nimble tongue slip out between the chapped lips, capture one of the creatures and bring it back to crunch between his crooked teeth till lemonesque goo rolled down his chin. I’d like to think the snail tasted like honey-moon. I’d like to imagine they got married not in the prison hold but rather amongst the open waves, rolling between tides like blankets, blue and purple. But that makes me think of my mother’s skin so I turn my eyes away. There are so many aways it can be hard to find a place to stay in focus.

I wanted to tell a story, but I opened up my Mixolydian drum and all that stirred inside was a handful of autumn’s eyelashes and a song. They say Sappho invented the mode to fit her voice, much the same way I woke up naked in the grass and wove a robe of tawny cloud around myself, rather than searching for something in the forest to fit me. It’s the way we change our environment. It changes what makes us up. They say our bodies are full of bugs or stardust but when my lungs turn raisinly in the late sun it begins to dawn on me that really it’s all the same. I thought you were different. I cast a scarecrow to the Gods: Please, please, let me stop thinking.

Images in order of appearance:

“Astronaut Scott Kelly posted this photo of the Perseid meteor shower taken from the International Space Station on Instagram with the caption, ‘Space weather forecast from @ISS: Moonless with a chance of Perseid meteors! YearInSpace space spacestation wx weather meteors meteorshower constellation astronomy nasa.'” By NASA – https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/20791498394/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43269826

“Monacobreen Glacier Calving, Svalbard, Arctic.” “Taken on my Silversea Silver Explorer Arctic cruise.” By Gary Bembridge from London, UK [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D

“Perseids over a Windfarm.” ” All the red lights are on top of windturbines, but one, that looks a bit different is the antenne on Chasseral.” PiConsti [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D

Olive Ridley and Sally Lightfoot cosponsored today’s teatime censorship

There’s a long-standing land dispute between coalitions of arm-hairs on my arms; both sides think the skin to the northwest of the second scar belongs to them.

On my desk lies a cat in treble clef: polydactyl, polyphonic, polyglot, gluttonous, nerves shot. She composes better music than me but not faster.

The second star to the left is probably a vocoder.

Remember that moment when you switch from first person to second or third? It takes a while to get back on the train — you have to first remember which train you’re on. There was a small rabbit on mine, pulling the plug for times square.

The homeowners’ association put a monster on the Internet and now it’s ripping the heads off lantern deer and fish that can’t be encountered except in the deep woods of the dark web.

Square times, we’re living in, my grandmother tweets as she cuts her lemon bars into tiny bird-beaks. They open and meep in small voices: “key, key, key.”

I heard a song I hated but I loved too much to remember the words or why.

that flea-market winter from years ago

when it’s night and it’s late and you’re reading

and you can’t help but notice

every drop of blood on the page resembles

the ink from your daughter’s windowsill

where passing eagles dip their talons

so when they shriek against the sky

they leave contrails of deep purple scars,

scrawling unheard-of dreams

in an incomprehensible language, in plain sight.

grocery store; isle of the apples

i know the ball is in your court but

here’s me nudging it with the extended seven-league ghost of my foot

levitating it without touching

i could drop it anywhere but i won’t.

so many things i wanted to ask

so many things i wanted to tell if only

if only i knew what they were really.

half the time when i’m in my right mind it becomes clear to me

i am a creep, a spider’s shadow behind your shoulders, i am behind bars,

it is on me. the other two-thirds of the time

lost somewhere in the half of my mind i left behind

in a safe nook between mussels at the ingrown toenail of the pier

the other one-quarter of the time

it becomes clear to me

i was paranoid about being a creep and you were the obvious open flower

and i was the stinging insect waiting to be invited in but

you see flowers don’t talk except to the eyes

and honeybees are colorblind. is that offensive?

moments flash past

between corpulent forms of watercolor-splashed

apples on their mountainous island

in the produce aisle of the grocery store —

moments: warm alley light,

anemones bursting from crooks in rocks

and shriveling back at the touch of a thought’s

finger, the slow outflow of the mind when one is old

that way, the way

you could have almost hugged my body with your words

but would you have dared to touch me,

or were you afraid of catching some disease? dis – easy

in planes, dizzy in the band room

between bass drums no one plays

i am afraid of some disease catching you

sometimes i think i’m already in the web struggling

sometimes i laugh at my romanticized images of a death that truly would smell odorous

sometimes i think i use too many dead metaphors

sometimes i think i’m out of the woods

sometimes i think too much

i wish so bad i could get lost. this letter, though,

will never be written, or else it will be lost in the mail.

can you imagine a time when paper reinforced oceans of distance

and left a resistance net to catch the little words we spill from keyboard fingers

too fast and then can’t take back? across the apples

there is another man eyeing me suspiciously.

his girlfriend looks like me if i was pretty and cut

out of a magazine and blonde. sometimes —

half the time, let’s say — it comes to me that i half-believe

that if we could walk down these gray sidewalks together and search for good apples together

they would seem less gray

that we could go shopping at this grocery store every day and fall into a

routine that, while infuriating when repeated with our parents,

becomes nestlike and wanted when repeated with our newfound liberty

or semblance of. and that you could possibly

love me, or that you already did,

and the ship has sailed, sold

the sharpest lightbulb in the drawer. and i want to tell you everything

so your ears can absolve me and i don’t want you to be poisoned

by my thoughts and i want to just hear your voice just hear your voice

saying anything really but it would be nice if it could include the word

wonderful and my name in the same sentence

could we trade the inhabitants of our skull? i think my voices

respect you, though they sometimes want to hurt me bad

and i don’t know who’s in your head but if they are even thinking of hurting you

my mind knows martial arts and is excellently strong.

a guy the other day asked me to climb into a tuba case

and said my voice is a mating call (long story) and a dream he had

where a random thing such as myself appeared

and i felt suddenly like a creep

because he said he wanted me to spend time with him

and i want you to want to be with me

and i just want to be wanted

and i know when i walk on the sawdust trail some things were definitely off

always off like our parents and such

but is there any such thing as love where nothing is off and everything is on?

even my head sometimes doesn’t seem to be on, or else it’s on

some countertop in a flustered restaurant kitchen rolling between turnips and earless onions, narrowly avoiding the steak knife and the overscheduled chefs

and sometimes i wonder if you feel this way but i hope you don’t

because hoping that you are doing better than i am

seems to be one of those rare things these days that sparks something

in my fictitious heart: something bright and close

to purpose, to wanting

to be here.

and i just wanted to know

how wrong i was, objectively,

to imagine such a thing as

holding still and dancing at the same time?