The Breath

I have this idea in my head
about holding my breath
I held my breath underwater in the hot tub one night
for about 45 seconds the first time and 50 the second time

and I wanted to fall asleep on the bottom
green, golden green, blue bubbles
warmth sensation tears
it was all there

So this idea
about holding my breath
I want to resurface
I think
with my life re-stretched like a canvas
I'm looking for the sea, the pool, the pond
the warm, wetness of your eyes

The Ghost

Ever since my bed shook violently ( first thought: dog; second thought: ghost - a ghost! A real live ghost!
It's really happening
) I've been waiting for another.
The back of my neck turns red when I am stressed. The insides churn and muscles twist. My eyes feel sour. I'm only floating, then, as a last resort to survive. Holding on to something floating.

So I sit and wait for the room to shake. For the water to reach over like a fathers hand, peering into my windows, splashing and gnawing at my nest, pulling my hair like worms from my head. Sanitizing (death cleans the surface, shines the china).

It's almost like the time the rusty red truck slammed into my passenger side. I didn't see it coming and the next minute my little blue was facing the sunset and the huge crash echoed over and over in my head. For weeks a bomb dropped next to me, my eyes winced, my neck braced. The smell of gasoline, the faces, all the same looking at me from behind the glass reflecting the big blue.

The Boyfriend

Oh my goodness, ohmygosh. I have just pulled the blankets and sheets out of the dryer. They are so warm and filling. My arms reach around and squeeze. This bundle is my true love. Their warmth presses against my body, against my face. I hold on tightly and spin around until they are nothing but cold blankets and sheets in my arms that fall to the floor.

It is a like a drug.

In the morning I fluff my comforter and wrap my arms around it.
"Good morning. I am glad you are here."

"Oh! I am so glad you are here!" he said. He kissed my face.

Diving headfirst into bed, pulling the blanket up and around, face under. It's dark underneath. The sheets are still cold. I roll into a ball and wait for the warmth to take over.

The winters in Missouri were so cold then. Ice formed on the inside of my windows. The blankets were so heavy, layers weighing down at night so that you couldn't move, not even a bone. The pulse slowed, then.

The Skin

The skin on this hand is so new, it is relearning the surface of things. With my right hand I brush over my face to feel soft cotton. With the new hand, the ridges, the new nerves, explore the unrefined aspects of the terrain, it inspects (harshly) the small bumps without the care one would put into a priceless object.

Yes, this skin is strict. In it's newness it will edcuate itself without stop, surprising me at odd moments, like a child discovering the world.

Wet, lashed, bright, flurries of answers float down from the black sky.
"Do you have a secret?" she asked him. Her breath was visible in the night.
"Do you have an answer?" he shot back to her quickly.

There was a pause in the time. It simmered, out of season. The hairs rose on the edge of their becoming.
He was quick to catch her when she started to fall. The wildfire caught her hair, singed the edge of his sweater, but, it was too late. They were lost already in the heat of the storm, they were locked in with no escape. She brushed the flakes off of her shirt and held his hand.

"There are no answers."
"There are no secrets."

The Century

It was the end of the century. There were no roads in sight, each one peeled up and off the earth like tape. Each one rolled up like a ball and tossed into the corner. Except, there weren't any corners, so they lay like huge boulders strewn about, oozing the spilled blood of a thousand years worth of machines, oozing the liquid marrow of the dinosaurs. In between the boulders lay the cities, shrunken down to small patches of mushrooms. Above were the eagles, their silver feathers like sharp knives cutting at the brown sky. Inside, we were all mothers holding on to something lost, like lace on the edge of an ancient dress. Our hair filled the rooms, golden waterfalls, brunette streams, black rivers, red kelp. We were submerged, surrounded. Under the water we could speak freely in the lost tongue. The men held their bellies and timed their heartbeats. The women chewed slowly on the roots of the Aarak tree, mending their cuts with watercress milk fresh from the animals. The centuries had piled so high, the edges of the mountains were hard to see, though, at this time, most of them were flattened, except for a small cluster located 23 kilometers north.

The Kiss

This morning there was an unusual knock at my door. It was the kind of happy melodic knock, the good mood knock, the about to have fun knock. It was around 6am and I was still in my weekend birthday clothes ( jacket, scarf, smudged mascara, bruised legs).

I thought about ignorning it. But, after the second round, I decided to inspect this unusual arrival. The morning was grey and cars were on their Monday work parade. It was alive all around in mystic grey fog.

When I peered through the peephole, I saw a happy man. He must have heard my floorboards creak, because as I looked through the tiny window at his bulbous face, he kissed it. He kissed the air in front of the door eye. He smiled and danced (slightly). On the ground were black belongings: a helmet and a few bags. He was dressed all in black.

I laughed.

I slowly opened to door to watch his face move in suprise and slight embarassment. Wrong floor, your darling lives above me: the girl with the snakes around her neck, good skin, white cowboy boots, and a bright smile.

The Cells

The ocean has been violently loud these past few nights. The air has been heavy with salt and tough skins of fish. The wildfires are ravenous, purple plumes drape the bony vertebrae: the soft fleshy fur crumbles in the hot wind skirt of the dance. The ground beneath seems like its trembling. At night the waves are louder, the sound of hard wind blowing through hard trees. There is a battle pulling the skin of the earth taut and tart.

Does anyone smell the air and hear the waves, or is the change local, internal?

There is dirt beneath these nails, a calm, settling, age, cells: division, growth. The waves are so loud they sound like thunder.

The Infant

I did a fast and this is what happened: my body and I finally became separate entities.

This has always been a known fact.

I broke my hand before the fast. First, my hand became my child. Then the rest of my body followed suit.

When you start to look at the world around you as a child, your life turns into something else: liquid, gas, light. Now, I'm just hovering around, trying to nurture, converse, cradle deep in my wet eyes everything I encounter.

I'm slipping out of my bones, body folding like a thick blanket to the floor. I gather the folds, the warm skin, the loose fingers, and carry them to the bed. There is a warm light spilling from the lamp in the corner of the room.

The Daughter

My mother came and filled my home with Home. She filled the drafty corners, the uneven floorboards, and the spaces between the cabinets. She made it smell like warm curry, fresh baths, coffee and tea. She brought home rum raisin ice cream and hummed in the kitchen. She washed my back and brushed my hair and laughed; her tiny body curling up into wrinkles, her tiny bones full of joy.

In the waiting room at the hospital we laughed at her bottom dentures. She pulled them up to look like vampire teeth. When she took off her top dentures to reveal her only two teeth, caving in her face, expecting me to laugh (like my brother would), I cried so hard it swelled like laughter. The tears would not stop. The doctors thought it was pain. My beautiful, radiant mother: toothless and aged. Her youth did not match her body; every year I could see my grandmother in her face. Every year her grey spread like a lions mane.

I showed her off. I photographed her daily. I recorded her banter. I was completely in love with my mother, she was all mine for the first time, and every moment I wanted to savor. I wanted to preserve her youth before she boarded the plane and pierced the sky.

The Broken Hand

“Do you need self smoke?”
“What?”
“Do you need some smoke pot for self?” he said pointing to his hand, looking concerned.
“Oh, no thank you, I don’t smoke,” I said gently.

In the hallway light, the small Mexican man with his shiny taut skin looked angelic, crystal, fragile. All the other times I had seen him, he was drunk, and as much as I tried, I couldn't understand his English. There were metal pins writhing beneath my flesh like silver snakes, my hand covered in a cast. The door to my building needed two hands. He lent his. He knew about the pain and tried to offer me his medicine.

The Janitor

My janitor was a tall man with a small head. His balding black hair was slicked back and his moustache was well trimmed and fine toothed. He wore a grey and black striped shirt tucked into his high black pants and back supporter. His name was Pierre. As I recall, he had a red bandana tied around his neck and a black beret and walked delicately, dancing, through the halls, around silver puddles, his face twisted like a braid.

Since he was the only janitor, he was my janitor. We only needed one and he was broken into 300 small parts, depending on the size of the child. You would think the grownups would have larger sections of him, but, the children required the most physical cleaning while the adults required spiritual cleansing, that which they received from outside sources. My section of my janitor was located on his left hip, right above the bone. It was a small fleshy area on the rise of becoming a prominent handlebar-perfect for my future spills, psychic even.

My janitor had a small smile and a tiny twinkle in his eye. Somewhere back behind the stage was his small office. I imagined cocoa and wooden walls and one squeaky black chair he would lean back on with a cigar heavy in a musky wood scent with notes of cinnamon. Brooms, dustpans, brown paper towel rolls, and cleaning supplies yellowed and aged amber against the walls. The twins, red-headed Courtney, and I would talk to our janitor after lunch by his office. He always had jolly ranchers or gum to give us. The louder of the two twins was scandalous and full of mischief, Courtney was the pretty rich girl with large gums and new shoes, the quiet blonde twin spoke sweetly but in needles, like a snake. I, luminescent, dirty, plain, smart, saw him as a playful character. They saw him as a man toy.

My memory recedes away from the three girls in the dark hallway. I am watching them flirt mercilessly, the other children are playing in the sunshine outside to my right, his large hairy pink paw rests on their shiny curls. After a while we were not allowed to talk to our janitor. Then, simple Pierre was gone. The girls licked their lips at the boys in the corner of class instead. I remember seeing my janitor years later. His hair had frosted and thinned revealing his shiny red scalp. His eyes were blue sapphires. A thin black moustache stretched over his upper lip. He looked at me and smiled a beautiful French smile. In the distance an accordion player stepped off a curb.

The Windows

The Windows

Fried pork wafts in through the east-facing window. From this window, on clear days, you can see the mountains against the silhouette of palms and rooftops. Rare dark clouds in the distance, and the new cold wet, gives this view a tropical tint. I could be in Brazil, children running barefoot below, or China with banana trees dipping into the mud. I’ve seen these clouds before on different continents in different times. My age shifts with the season, flight schedule, moon phase. Later, the smell of pot wafts in through the window.

The South facing windows are tricky. They look straight into the building next to me. But my floor is a few feet higher, so my hierarchy is pre-established. On hot days, BBQ smoke fills my apartment from across the alley. Later, in the darkness, drunken men hang off the railing and a blonde child with large buckteeth peer into my space through the bottoms of their bottles and with red laser pens. I give quiet discerning motherly scolds and shut the bamboo shades.

The other east-facing window is not allowed to be open anymore. For a while it had the most freedom and allowed a silky breeze straight passage from sea to land. It allowed all alley sounds in. Drunken homeless men would sing in my ears and the morning clanking of glass bottles in black bags would be the normal schedule of summer. Eventually the heat drove the flies up into my apartment through the screenless mouth, and they would swirl in geometric patterns in the center of the room. This cloud was unwanted, bagged, released. The window was silenced once and for all.

When laying on my bed, the view from the south facing windows is poetic and space age. The sky is blue and silver planes slowly pierce fluffy white clouds silently. There is one grey shingled rooftop slanting against the sun with a field of silver mushroom tops: pipes piping nothing. One large palm tree is always moving. Its dread head with golden dying leaves shakes slowly reflecting the sun on its flaxen skin, shimmering like the surface of an Indian summer pool. At night the moon moves through clouds and when everyone is still, the ocean waves crash.

I can see a man on the top floor of the building with the squeaky metallic garage doors. When we sing, he spies on us. The girl below sings into her microphone a long droning chant, a pop song gone flat. I can see the back of her head. In the alley someone has painted with white paint “I love U” for someone above me to see. I spy on the old Mexican woman that digs in the trash and the dog walkers heading for the park. I play my piano and pretend I am a man in the alley looking up at the east-facing window, listening in awe.

One evening while I singing and playing my guitar, a man yells up from the street below the south facing windows.
"Lady with the guitar singing?!"
I stick my head out and see nothing but a black mass in the alley.
"Yes! I'm sorry, am I being too loud?"
"No, I wanted to tell you that you sound beautiful. Good luck."

I close all the windows and continue playing, quietly.

The Cast

The sheet, the doctor, the neighbor, they all tell me to hold my hand above my heart. High in the air, they tell me. My fingers frost like testicles at night. The cast, heavy ice on bone branch, is not as easy to hold high. It wants to pull my hand down toward the ground where both can rest. A winter storm taps stilettos on the glass. Barely, blindly, I pull this cover over my head and brave the night. Slowly, warming, my arm creeps closer to the beating heart mother, and like a sudden gust, I'm forced to push it back out on snowy sheets. Nature must first decide, while man cowers inside.
Today we will cut open this fruit and mend the bone, the first sunny day. Then, back to winter white hand.

The Snowflake

The snow fell softly over the grey city, dancing from one treetop to the next, like ashes or alien creatures invading the night. In the distance the factory light shone like a frozen bomb halfway to destruction, creating a snow globe of tranquil malice. If you held your breath you could just hear the tiny sound of crystals colliding. If you breathed a heavy heat, you could see the lace melt and drip invisible droplets down from the miniature cloud.

The green radiator had knocked and clanked earlier in the day so that the entire building was full of its presence. Standing outside, I’m sure you could see the building, pale yellow eyes staring straight out at you, burning with a fever in the winter, and just above, a mirage. Horses danced near the edge of the roof with a fury. Inside the beast, we were all squirming, tossing, kicking blankets and propping windows. I was standing on the balcony looking over the calm, climbing the iron railing to cool my feet. You were leaning against a shelf, hand on hip. It was tropical. Sweat glistened on your forehead. Green palms grew out of the walls and quivered from elephant stomps. Somewhere down the hall a thousand ants were building a castle, brushing their feet against one another so fast, we thought we heard a stream. We ran to find hot, humid steam, bursting from the end of the white radiator, fogging the kitchen window.

The snow didn’t look so cold after all, just a million feathers drifting into the cracks of the sidewalk and nudging, sweetly, into the bark of the trees. If just one snowflake would land between an eyelash, behind the ear, on the ridge of the collarbone, and stay a while. Tell us about the cold, now we wanted to know.

The Railroad

The railroad cut through the city like a rusty razorblade. It sliced at the land mercilessly and hacked at the city's weakest points. Against the steel track and past the initial gravel, uneven patches of weeds grew high next to chainlink fences protecting mowed backyards and barking dogs. Or, there would only be a weed here and there mixed with broken green bottles and the rusty red dirt would spread out like a desert of car-part cacti and end at battered warehouses and shattered, dusty windows of the past.

I never found a love in the railroad track or the train that followed. The sound of the train brought back cold autumn nights and rainy sick days - of poverty and lost dreams. That lonesome howl echoed through the quiet, crickety, streets. I was awake during those times laying in bed while it made it's nightly appearance, and felt a surging pain of desolation. I was trapped in this small town, in youth, and the dreams of the neon glitter and laughing faces of the east were taunting in the notes of the whistle.

Something about the dirt, the grime, the rust, and the rotting wood brought back the tarnished faces of the railroad workers: oil mixed with grease creating large pores on silver skin that dug cracks into the earth, into their wrinkles, under dirty black hats and a scorching white sun sky. No one smiled but they knew how to drink and fight.

Once, I knew some kids that decided to play on the train track and all three of them were sliced to pieces on a hot summer afternoon. Once, my brothers young friend went to play on the railroad bridge over muddy storm waters and drowned.Once, we put pennies on the track and later, after the grumble of the train was far enough away, we found them shiny, flat, and hot.

The Tea Kettle

At first it was just the sound of chirping. I thought: orange beak, flimsy pink, and a skull you could pop like a grape. But, baby birds sleep at night, so it didn't make sense. Eventually it panned out, stretched like taffy, their skulls turned into one long silver line of sound that grew in pitch as it thinned to just a silken spiders thread. This fat bird was speaking to me from the other room. When I came near it slid up next to me and whispered in my ear, breathing hot, humid secrets down my neck. I couldn't help but to close my eyes and let it kiss me, drip down on my shirt, flatten my hair against my skin. And, just like that, it was over. The kitchen light shone a white period on its black surface. The beak had lost all character, all of its seductive flair. I was stunned and slightly embarrassed. A breeze through the window told my skin a cold truth:the affair was over. The bird had flown.

The Blanket

I have this blanket. I’ve had it for a couple years. My boss gave it to me when I first moved to California with my friend. Peggy and I didn’t have any blankets or pillows or beds or dishes – we slept on the floor in the living room of a big house with many rooms for a while. The blanket was so soft and ugly that I immediately adopted it and named it mine. The blanket was a dark night blue with a smiling sun face and stars and planets (Saturn) all over it. I easily overlooked its design. It was just another cover of a Relationship By Stars or Birthday Horoscopes.

The other morning, laying in my white apartment surrounded by white blankets and the morning light, I pulled this out of the ordinary ( my ordinary) blanket over my head. I had been sleeping a lot that week. I had been sleeping in since I moved in two months before, but it was one of those weeks that turned into just another one of those weeks where I would pull the blankets over my head and sleep the day away and try to find solace in dreams. This day, I created a romance. With the blanket over my head, the sun shone through the stars and planets and glowed on my hands. The night sky was just above me, and it was more beautiful in the daytime. The blue sky dropped with sadness.

A discovery:
This was something I wanted to share with someone that slept next to me. This was something I wish I didn’t discover so soon, so we could discover it together and then, when we woke up in the morning and complained, we would pull this blanket over our head and put our hands up to a blue star and smile and it would start to get hot under that blanket with our heavy, stinky morning breath, but we would pretend to not smell it and close our noses on the inside.

I felt cheated, like I had cheated on myself with more of those moments I was creating to share with someone else. The tears were lost in that blue blanket sky and I had no choice but to wipe them away and try to breathe even as I was pounding pounding pounding on the inside and the stars were falling and crashing into salty waves, sizzling up and fogging my windows.

The Librarian

The librarian was a yard sale. She smelled like old dried up perfume, the yellow kind that stuck to the openings of glass bottles with metallic labels peeling off. The kind of empty perfume bottle you would find at a thrift store for 25 cents and wonder who donated it and why would anyone want to buy it.

She had a long river of silver hair halfway pulled up, much like a librarian should, and an old purple shirt tucked in so high on her waist, just below her saggy breasts. Her skirt was flowery and swooshed when she walked. Her glasses were large and brown, almost fashionable again, except, they had layers of green grime in the corners. She had turquoise rings on her fingers and different stones on her pinky. Her fingers were rough and ink stained, one of person who has many books in their house with cats, and sits with her legs wide open reading and scribbling notes under a yellow old lamp while a cat meows at her window. She would say something like: “ Oh don’t make such a fuss Gogol, you’ll only make Shosta (short for Shostakovich) annoyed,” and look over the tops of her glasses at a lazy fat tabby lounging on some old magazines licking his thigh. Her hands looked like my hands: a little dirty.

I looked at her, at her crooked teeth while she spoke to me, and imagined her young again. She would be wearing the same exact outfit and it would be 1982. Her firm breasts would be bra-less and her legs would be freshly shaven with toes exposed and one silver toe ring. She would be sitting in the grass with her friends, the same men that are fat and wearing pink polo shirts now, and laughing. Just laughing and laughing and laughing.

As she kept talking to me, I listened with a friendly face, but her hair was swirling up above her head and mixing with the palm trees and her wrinkles smoothed out with every word. But, she found the urge to open up in the quiet library and break the silence rule by talking to me about a pianist and violinist that was half-Japanese. I told her that I also played the piano and violin and was half-Japanese, and she told me that she had ESP sometimes. This exchange was necessary.

Later, I tried to say goodbye to her, but every time I turned down an aisle, she would turn to someone or shelf a book down the next. For some reason I felt embarrassed to go up to her and say goodbye, as if she had just given me a stone confessing her love for me, so I wanted to make it as casual and friendly as possible. I didn’t want to imagine her hands caressing my face. After the third try, I had to give up. She had turned away from me and her bracelets were bangling like crisp words, and, I think, in the back of her mind, under that silver waterfall, she was laying in the grass laughing.

The Marriage

The separation was easy, and the divorce was even easier. Just as we had coasted into our marriage, we had coasted right out. Our philosophy was to ride the wave to see where we would go and wherever we went, we went, and whatever happened, happened. We had met at a dinner party full of couples and singles looking to be a couple. We sat on a tan couch and drank red wine and talked about Murakami. Later we laughed at the sculpture on the fireplace, and later, at everyone in the room that we didn’t know. We broke apart a few times, engaged in random conversation in different pockets of people and then met again. We left together.

It was just like that. Our relationship went the same way, the days in and out without regret and in and out without worry. We didn’t think about falling off a cliff, and never asked to be caught.

When we married, it reminded us of the party where we met. Secretly I wanted an ice sculpture of the same sculpture on the fireplace; secretly he wanted to invite those people we didn’t know. Secretly I wanted to kiss the first man I met at that dinner party in the hallway after the ceremony just to see what it would be like to crash into a ship that would eventually dock.

We moved into a house by the sea. It had high ceilings and wooden walls and floors. It was airy and the sun shone in every morning. We filled it with plants and old books, papers and sauces. We kissed goodbye in the morning and hello in the evening. We ate dinner and drank wine after. We made love tenderly and touched each other’s bodies like clean sheets. And when we stopped kissing for years and moved further away at night when we slept, we adjusted.

I started to look for a new apartment in the city, closer to the university I would be starting in the fall. He helped me scour through the papers and drove me to meet landlords. They suggested the apartment may be too small for two people and we smiled and said it was just for me. I pointed out the windows and he remarked on the wooden floors.

Then, he would be gone for weeks at a time. The house was empty and cool. I would put my feet up on the couch and lay naked. I would stay in for days and never put on anything. I packed slowly and threw away old letters. He would come home from his trips and kiss my cheek, and I would be wearing something old.

When we signed the papers we were fair. We knew what was ours and what to give and didn’t mind either way. He had found a smaller house to rent in London, where he took up a position at a new firm. I said I would visit, but I didn’t think I would.

When we finally started to break down our home, the newspapers stained our fingers and the cardboard boxes shed strips of brown skin. The last piece was the big wooden bed we had found at an antique shop. It had flowers carved into the posts and delicate cracks. It used to creak at night when we were laying still, longing for something, wishing to splinter. We had assembled it on our own, parts of it were broken so the nails were random and dug in deep. When we took it apart, tenderly, and slowly, beads of perspiration formed on my upper lip and on his forehead. Standing in the center of the frame with just a few more nails to pull out we looked at each other for the first time with a sense of urgency and he pulled my face to his and kissed it. We started to cry, started to shake and splinter and crash. Large waves were splashing upon our ears and our grips tightened. We held each other tight, sweat churning and foaming, and jumped.

The Shirt

I had a dream about you last night.

We were in your car; it was much like the time you picked me up from the airport: I remember your big smile like a happy puppy when I came down the escalator and instead of running up and kissing you and laughing and being in love, like I dreamed about doing later, I just walked up to you and we walked to the luggage. The carpet was a brown mix, like your brown pants, like my brown suitcase that had ended up on another flight. You were driving home, my new home, down unfamiliar streets thousands of miles away from my old streets, and talking about what I said when we first kissed. I didn’t remember and you got quiet. A little bit later, I kissed your ear and told you I loved you and you squeezed my shoulders so tight it hurt.

So it was like that. That part was real. This part is the dream: we were in your car driving through swirls. You looked different, more saturated, and you were smiling. I reached over and hugged you while your hands were on the steering wheel and I said: “I’m so glad you are here! I missed you so much!” Later in that dream your sisters baby cut himself and was bleeding black blood and everyone was screaming and running because it was the Black Death, and you were a man with a young blonde girl on a horse riding away down a dirt path lined with tall reeds into the sunset.

The BBQ

The colors of the buildings were brilliant and strange like summer oranges plucked, then left to rot on the grass. The buildings of the city shot straight up like syringes piercing the blue skin of the sky. The heat was unbearable, lazy, lounging in every corner. Even the shade could not escape.

From above we watched the grill battling with the sun, and the people, trying to hide inside with warm beers, slowly, slowly laugh. We were in the middle. In the middle you still receive smiles and plates of hot chicken with cool potato salad, but the currency of conversation is unnecessary. In the middle you find patterns in the ceiling and look at your phone constantly.

The paint peeled off the walls as the party went on. The phone changed only when it moved off the table and into my hand. The oranges sunk deeper, melting into the ground.