we would be full of tobacco and chaff and after we leave the tracks, our shoes will have no soles and we won't mind. the notes pinned into our skin only leave beads of blood, for which we feel some thanks and heartbreak, all at once.

blood orange slices

i want to live in a construction of fiber and guitar strings woven together and balsa wood because there is no wind and there are thistles, and honey and we drink good beer and whiskey and swim in the creek and see the mossy rocks in the water and live on them and in them and he is there and you are there and she is there and the rooms are all small and full of books and old leather stuff with tobacco and our best stories are pinned to the walls and it is september eternal, we sleep outdoors and awake, entangled and dewy in the morning only to have days of cursive letters and typewriter keys and humming while you whistle or moan. we don't have to fight or wrestle. we have no fear if wearing our hearts on our sleeves, because our chests are pinned open and exposed and beating. we just live with what we are - skin and hip bones, relying on arteries and never again batteries. all fabric there is old, all faces soft, and we will all stay there until something sets the fields on fire and then we will stay until we can no longer see the moon, for the smoke has put us to sleep

of thistles and bees

you'll know when

i'll miss reading your mind and when you really looked at me, looked right at me and into me and through me and pointed out the green spots in my eyes.

once, you were vibrant, joking, loving, doting and full of fluid caresses in new forms.

and i will miss that

and i am happy that i was able to see at least some of you like that, before it all went away.

i hope it comes back


i hope that you will feel joyful and full of life and happiness once again, and i don't hope this for me and you and i don't think i can give that to you, but i hope you stay both tender while adventurous and unruly and plucky, like i heard you had been

and sometimes i will think that i will miss you

or the idea of you

but i will write notes about you or for you and fold them carefully and pin them to my chest

our bodies

this is going to be a continuing project amongst friends...and you?

my new body

my core would be a mandolin
my heart would be a pomegranate, with a locket pinned to it
my legs could be asparagus
my arms fiddlehead ferns
my mouths would be made of typewriter parts
and my eyes of stained glass
my intestines constructed of paper and thread
my blood could be made of tea, oolong and smooth

my ears made of jasmine and jade
my fingers - piano keys
my brain and mind would be made of wire with beads and bells, and old camera lenses, so that everything i see through stained glass eyes is captured


somewhere i'd like a persimmon and a blood orange

3.

The hawthorn tree was my lookout over my innocent secret garden full of violets where I found treasures in the soil – colored glass marbles and tiny porcelain figurines, and where I spit out seeds from the concord grapes that grew on the antiquated arbor in our back yard. I would squeeze the juicy organ out of its purple skin with a satisfying burst to better locate the seed. I had mastered climbing the hawthorn tree without falling prey to the pins and needles growing in thick clumps. From the nearby blossoming walnut tree, I would gather the unripened fruits – walnuts are covered in a fleshy green casing that later rots away, revealing the rigid textured shell.
The walnut tree left hundreds of brains in their casings, in various states of decay scattered in the overgrown grass of the house on Prescott Street. I would collect them, the greenest, freshest ones from the branches of the tree before they fell, and peel away their coverings, smelling the scent of unripened walnut – far more pithy than freshly cut grass or immature olives. When I scraped away the their skins, it would stain my fingers and nails a faded yellow, the scrapings caught under my nails would turn black, and its smell would permeate my fingertips in a way that only oils can.
Once I fell while climbing onto the grape arbor in the middle of August, when the grapes were ripest and their mild scent strongest. In the tumble, rusty nails that protruded from the structure ran across the uppermost part of my thigh, gashing the entire back of my leg open. I screamed underneath the grape arbor, lying on my stomach in the slits of light; howling and pounding my palms on a bed of twigs and branches that had fallen from the grape vines, adorned with their perfect barky twists. A phone hit the floor from inside the open door, and my mother’s bare feet rumbled down the back porch stairs. Blood made its slow trajectory down the back of my downy leg, bristling every hair as she rushed me into the house, where I lay on the cold beige linoleum floor. She trembled to say she couldn’t stop the bleeding, it was close to my femoral artery, her brief stint as an EMT in college wasn’t adequate to deal with this, and that I would have to lay on my stomach in the back seat of the car on the way to the hospital.
The doctor in the hospital, whose skin looked like melted plastic, spared me from the terror of stitches or staples, employing a new special kind of “medical superglue,” as he explained. Was this supposed to be exciting?
I was glued, taped, padded, poked, patched and sent home. Fresh skin forged my leg back into one piece eventually, but left an unusual scar. Puffy. It was puffy, a soft white line of texture. I was told at Crossroads Christian Academy the next month that hiking up my skirt to show my impressive scar was unladylike, and no one wanted to see my bottom. Not appropriate material for show and tell. I was conscious of the scar much later, when my legs were stems, when my body fleshed out like a fig, or a bow-back mandolin. The strange sensation of the scar never escaped notice from a lover’s fingertip. My mom told me a few years ago with a new callousness that she would have just glued it herself, with superglue, if the same thing happened again now. The thought settled uneasily in my stomach.
After the fall, I nervously eyed the grape arbor from my safe perch, up in the hawthorn tree near the cyclone fence. Plucking and squeezing the clusters of lush fruits was markedly less enticing. The various trees and vines in that yard knit together overhead, a quilt of various foliage, a soft canopy that fell leaf by leaf, piece by piece, to the ground once autumn rolled through, first grade came, and the rain whole-heartedly began its chore. For that summer, or rather for some immeasurable dewdrop in time, that plot of land had been a simple sort of delicate Eden.

baby say yeah

so, my new apartment is actually probably the most favorite perfect place for me i've ever lived. and its nice to actually be satisfied by something that is really good, and not have to convince myself that its good or ok or perfect.

" sarah palin was set up "

" the english major and writing is a racket, its an incestuous and ingrown perspective and i want you to break out of it "

" internships are a waste of time "

" call me over the weekend to wish me happy thanksgiving so i feel like a mother "

" writing won't earn you any money. earn marketable skills, and try to get a corporate job and make some money or you are wasting time "

happy holidays

love

my mother