Liberated Lines Week 2

(Liberated Lines is an Instagram based writing course I am doing for the month of June. It focuses on “quick and dirty” poetry and prose, coupled with photography, and it has a mantra of “we don’t edit.” It’s been a wonderful experience so far!)

 

I open in dreams:
dried up paper thin flower
spread-legged on the page.

 

I open in dreams:
an empty nest crawling with
ghostly ambitions.

I open in dreams:
the rain is Technicolor,
but I’m always dry.

I open in dreams:
face pressed against my wishes,
and I listen there.

—

Every morning, I open my mouth to receive the communion of the air around me: their bodies are the bread, limp and heavy, the sweet smell of deep sleep drying down in their pores; their love is the wine, a holy trifecta of father-son-daughter, a vintage year that tastes like grace as it rolls across my tongue. The curtains are closed against the earliest light but every profile reads like Braille, and under my fingers they spell out snub noses and bristling beard and rose petal cheeks; I can read them in the almost-dark, every detail as dear to me as my next breath, and I lie in the stillness of that space and let it all pass between my lips, the way we are together, the way we start our days.

 

—

 

What it feels like when I open is: this face, her face, the face that exists on a plane of perpetual wonder and endless exploration, the way it reminds me to see things without the jade filter of drooping skepticism, to hear the way a train whistle sounds like the loneliest doom and a birdsong takes on the cascading notes of melting icicles. She’s wide open every day, we all are before eight hour school days and ten hour work days and accrued vacation time and retirement savings; looking at her throwing herself into the next breath because it’s all she knows, watching the way her inhalations catch on her xylophone ribs, running my hand through her sticky sunscreen hair, it’s this, and it’s here: watering these small people, keeping fingers crossed they grow tall and straight and sweet, adding stakes where needed, letting their roots reach down and around the heart-soil in our breast, and they bloom over and over again, and every time is an opportunity to turn our own faces to the sun and fly with our feet in six inches of dirt.

 

—

Just you try and stop me when these words get going,
when they bypass my breath,
and explode from my chest,
these feathered, furry beasts,
these monsters and gods made up
of all my own longing.

They don’t care to be legible,
aren’t fenced in by appropriate spacing
or a carefully crafted semicolon,
reject the cage of defined creativity;
they stomp out across my sternum,
hoof prints mingling ink and blood and mud,
and in the middle of the page,
with no regard for margins,
they thrust into each other,
intoxicated by the open space
of a miscarried muse
and thirty-two unclaimed lines.

—

1.
Honey moon,
slung low in the belly of these sweet June stars,
hung heavy in the place where my pelvis starts to spread,
pushed up against the space inside my sacrum,
lit up along the length of my spine;
the hem of my dress is wet with the cool breath of evening grass,
and under the eye of the watchful sky,
I let it slip from my shoulders.

2.
My hair smells like sage and smoke,
like my skin is an incense I’m burning
in the blackest part of my front yard;
widdershins, I’m dizzy, drunk on the way the air feels
as it settles in my thirsty pores,
intoxicated by the bewitchment of my breath,
mad with the silver shine on the shadows of my bare feet;
this is who I am when I am open,
a maiden in love with the world as it moves around her,
as it moves inside her for the first time;
a mother, a belly full of moon, a midnight moaning song
that sways side to side and calls forth life in dark canyons;
an old crow crone, wrinkled fingertips that gather magic
in the beginning dust of a brand new month,
bones and breadcrumbs and stories like a living pulse.
This is who I am when I am open:
standing seen under a moon as big as everything,
sleepwalking while I’m wide awake,
dreaming with my eyes full of honey.

 

Liberated Lines Week 1

(Liberated Lines is an Instagram based writing course I am doing for the month of June. It focuses on “quick and dirty” poetry and prose, coupled with photography, and it has a mantra of “we don’t edit.” It’s been a wonderful experience so far!)

I open up and unfurl under the watchful eye of a sky clouded over with the kind of hot and heavy summer rain you can smell on your skin hours later. I bloom like dandelion dragging itself up through the cracks in the pavement of our driveway, stubborn, insistent in my right to exist, and her feet are filthy, chipped polish showing pink through the wet grass and dirt that cling to her tiny toes, and he yells across the yard at me, lacking self-conscious censorship for another blessed day, and the soil and her skin and his freckled nose and the birdsong and soft rain are the gifts of my undoing.

—

Just over fifty steps from my front door, the barbed wire that once caught on my shorts as I scaled it sagging close to the ground now, ripped open and pressed down by the passage of time and animals and big heavy boots. I love living with this little bit of wilderness all wild around me, two sides of tangled up trees and vines, and there are abandoned nests in the high up spaces, and empty turtle shells by the bracken summer water, and one winter, I found the skeleton of a doe, and it was holy holding it in my hands. Coyotes sometimes gather in the inner chapel of its green cathedral and sing alleluias’ to the moon, and I’ve prayed to myself with bare skin pressed up against cypress bark and blood surging through trembling thighs. There are broken branches, and broken bodies, and broken fences here; and I bring to it all my broken memories, because we’re at our most beautiful in our vulnerability, and I am most wholly myself with all these barriers buried underfoot.

—

I break the earth open under my hand and hold a heavy palm full that smells like sun-soaked soil. The thrust of the spade and the eventual give, soft sigh, the desire of the dirt, how it longs to lie under my nails. Seeds and roots and all the wet heat of mulch, and the scent of deep dark things that grow as I sleep It opens to me, under me, and I meet it there, wide open and slick with sweat, broken things in full bloom.

—

That summer we made love, starting on the stairs. The storm set up around us, the way he moved like lightning striking at the softest part of me, how I burned from the bottom up, a fury of fire caught up in the tendrils of hair held in his fist. And in that pulse of flesh, deliberate and hard, thunder rolled along the lining of my throat, and I gave that hurricane my own name, let the wind blow out on the force of my breath, tropical and hot. And there’s always that moment of utter surrender, when you’re weightless and formless and floating outside of the bones that are anchors, and it’s an empty space to expand into, until you take up every inch of it with your nails pressed into your palms and your mouth full of galaxies, and that’s a gift, that opening up and falling out of your skin, and I think of it every time it storms.

—

If tonight I let you crack open my chest, you’d find the space between my spine and my sternum crowded, maximum capacity, all these straining spirits desperate for attention; a whisper of wind might catch their upraised open palms and pull them from their secret spots behind every organ, exposing them to the air of the living, an evaporation of emotion. And while I lay there empty, I’d let you fill me up with the way you tell ghost stories, how they settle on my skin like an early morning spider web, how they sink down to the bottom of my bones and sit there like they own the place, and there’s space, too, for the grasshopper that was dying in the corner of the kitchen; I caught him up on a square of paper and went outside in the soft sunlit rain, and I put him down in the grass because I wanted his last breath to taste green, and maybe that’s how I taste to you, an expanse of meadow set against the sky, a curl of chlorophyll underneath your tongue.

Dear 95% Of All Advertisements Aimed At Women

You don’t see me. I am a demographic, a percentage, a market, a 35-44 year old with some college credit, no degree. I am White, I am Married, I have 2-4 children, I am a Homemaker or I am Self-Employed, depending on when you ask. I have four TV’s in my house. I am average height. I exercise moderately. You see all of these things, yes, but you don’t see me. From the back of your modern day medicine wagon, you seek me out in the crowd of curious onlookers. Surrounded by snake oil and mystery elixirs, your eyes meet mine, and all that I am to you is reflected back to me: the scars, the stretchmarks, the crooked nose, the extra weight around my middle, the dark circles and the stubble and the softness. You peddle lotions and potions in my direction, million dollar mustache-twirling commercial spots, and your pitch is a whirlwind of words shaped like arrows, but I will send you away empty-handed today, because nothing you see is anything that I am.

What you don’t see is everything.

My scars are the history of my skin, a body of Braille memories, stories mapped out in irregular lines — here, NYC in the empty street early morning hours, this, fifth grade playground and an oppressive blue sky, there, a bike under streetlights and swarms of mosquitoes. There are shaky lines from a shaking hand holding dull scissors and mourning the loss of something unnameable, and there are decisive lines of long-held anger, an ugly anchor dropped deep down in my belly. There’s the small star-shaped burn on my wrist, a reminder of the way my parents fought, hot oil and slammed pots, then worried eyes and whispered apologies, and that was the first time I knew certain kinds of togetherness can be toxic. My hands alone hold nineteen marks of misadventure and I can read the backs of them like a book. The small dimple chicken pox left behind just south of my temple, the smooth patch of skin under my big toe a relic of a summer day and a boy and a creek and not being afraid of snakes under the water — my scars are a tangible way to touch my past, and I would never attempt to erase all that backstory.

The timeline of my stretchmarks follows me from my earliest marked days as a woman, waking up to pink pajamas soaked through with scarlet. Twelve summers and a body that didn’t feel as though it belonged to me, or belonged anywhere really, except for those sometimes moments in a hammock hung under golden stars and thick green boughs where I was both weightless and impossibly heavy with contentment. Skin like a thin layer of dirt over new roots, bucking and shifting, quiet groaning, moving small mountains of earth for the sake of all that wild new growth, a process that was repeated twice over as I slept with my arms folded protectively around the world of my womb, bumping up against our palms with the soft watery corners of elbows and knees. Alternating bands faded into the silver of well-loved ghosts and tiny fish racing just under the surface of sunlit water, a labyrinth at the center of me, circling around my trunk like the growth rings of a tree — in certain tribes, it is said that young women undergo scarification of their abdomen as a sign of their readiness to bear children, and so, these marks are the ritual scars of my initiation into the role of woman and mother, a source of pride, never shame.

My face is a Roman coin profile held at an awkward angle — the strong interrupted line of a long-ago broken nose, a stubborn chin, lips of uneven fullness — “a handsome woman,” someone once said, and that’s perhaps not such a stretch on a good day. An interesting face. A face I have worked hard to cultivate kindness in, to make into a soft landing place for those who need it. For six out of the last nine years, I have nursed babies throughout the night, and the half-moons under my eyes are a testament to endless days of interrupted sleep; still, it has been worth every dream cut short, those small bodies, curled up like commas against me and smelling of slightly sour milk, fine hair like feathers tickling underneath my chin. As I age, my face takes on more of my father, a shadowed specter I catch out of the corner of my eye, a legacy I never asked for but can’t bring myself to resent — in the mirror I see my mother’s eyes and inside them, a generation of dark women, and I am glad for their touch upon my brow.

This body. I don’t need Solomon to write a love song for it — these limbs sing for themselves, an echo of ancient stone, all breast and belly and fat thighs, broad hips made for holding up babies. The long bones of my legs folded up at night, wrapped around his, an infinity-shaped muscle memory of the way we all fit together under moons and out of clothes. My arms lift and stir and comfort and knead, hold close and push away, pull plants from the ground and dig deep in the dirt. I’ve grown two big babies and my skin is soft and loose and warm, the way fresh bread is after the first rise, and I remember watching my mom in the bath as a child, how beautiful she was, and my body is now that body, and it is beautiful, too, in the way of women, in the way of mothers. I am strong where I need to be — I feel the thick ropes of muscle when I flex, stone under cloud, a mama bear just stretching into springtime. I move the way I want to move — I run when I want to feel the wind on my face, I do yoga when I want to breathe down into my bones, I squat over clover and bend to pick violets and wander the wild outside my door when I want to connect. Sometimes I shave. Sometimes I don’t. I love the way hair feels on a body, the soft springy curls, the slightly matted pelts, like sleeping wolves in the wilderness. Some days I stand in the sun, feet planted firmly on ground that smells like green things and rain, a sturdy shape in shadow, head tilted up to catch the scent of the wind, and I feel wild, and I feel good — and I feel like I don’t need to buy into a single thing you try to sell me. 

 

First Love.

Every time I closed my eyes that summer, we were raising chickens in the backyard and chasing barefoot babies around the rusted out husks of old Fords. I’d be baking biscuits in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon while calico cats rubbed up against me, their fur sticking to the thin layer of sweat on my legs; you’d be out by the pond, casting your line and catching us supper. We had one boy and one girl and they were wild and sweet and dirty and after we tucked them in and kissed them good-night, we’d lie in bed, my head on your heart, and marvel at the world we’d created around us. Life was simple, all homemade pancakes, and country music crackling out over our old radio, and swinging on the porch under stars so thick they settled in our hair and lit up our love like paper lanterns.
—-
I was thirteen when you were fifteen, and I was so in love with you that it hurt to even breathe when you were in the room; your smile sucked up all my oxygen and set my soul on fire, leaving me choking on ashes in your wake. I was barely a year out of my awkward phase and still trailing insecurity around after me, weighed down with what I saw when I looked in the mirror. I thought you were impossibly beautiful – an Apollonian cowboy, running after Daphne in a pair of dusty boots – and I both longed for and was terrified of you seeing me there in the shadows.
—-
You went to camp, and after a week, your mom handed me a note from you, smiling softly at my creeping blush.

“I haven’t for got about you as a matter of fact I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”

“If the tape is off the letter tell me when I get back.”

“I have really missed you and I hope you get to stay here.”

“See you when I get back.”

You spelled my name wrong, but you underlined “love” twice and right in front of it was a spot you’d scribbled out; I spent hours holding it up to the light, convinced you’d started to write “I love you”, desperate to see it there under the strokes of your pen. I unfolded and refolded it a thousand times, reading every line in between the lines, tracing every word with the tip of a gently kissed finger. I fell asleep thinking of us holding hands, you pushing my hair behind my ear and leaning in to brush my lips with yours, folding me in your arms like origami. My dreams were a tangle of tall grass and crashing hips and flocks of birds exploding from me, taking to the sky as I woke with a start to flushed cheeks and silent want.
—-
There was a party at my house while June melted into July, a slow sliding of clover-scented air and fireflies dancing under the sweet-gum tree. As we were cleaning up afterward, I found the hat you always wore, and slept with it under my pillow for a week; it smelled like the sea, it smelled the way I imagined your skin would taste illuminated by moonbeams. After Sunday night services, I sat on the trunk of my grandparent’s car, hat in my lap; you stood under the streetlight and pressed yourself into me, pelvis to pelvis, so close I could hear your pulse and then there was just your tongue, and my teeth, and fireworks pinwheeling off and away behind my eyelids, and nobody could tell me we wouldn’t last forever. You pulled back, licking my cherry chapstick from your lips, and when you dropped a lazy wink my way, my heart burst into flames under my skin, burning me from the inside out.
—-
Every time I closed my eyes that summer, we were something more than we ever were; but every time I look back, it seems like just enough for what it was. You loved me back, at least a little, until I didn’t need to hold that note up to the light anymore to know what you were trying to say under the scribbles. Years passed and the paper grew tissue thin, the ink bled and a hole opened up in the center; still, I keep it tucked in a pocket in a folder in a cabinet, and pull it out from time to time, remembering longing like wildfire and kisses like rainfall. There were never any chickens, or babies, or rusted out Fords littering the front yard, but there was a gentle initiation into falling in love, and a sweet schooling on falling out of it.

3-21-2010