i remember i used to claim that i saw something beautiful about everyone
and i still claim that
but not as often anymore because
no one ever believed me
and I think if i claimed it again, no one
is who would still believe me
and i’m not saying this to try to be special or corny or holier-than-thou
or whatever the roll in your eyes spells out for me
i’m saying it because it is what is there
i see a beautiful piece of something in every face i see
i even sometimes see it in myself
and i hold on to that piece the way you’d hold on to a smooth stone in your pocket that caught your attention on a dismal walk from the school bus
and you pocketed it and you clamp onto it and turn it over in your hand when you’re feeling anxious
like
there’s too much love in my handles but at least i have cool looking eyelashes
there’s all this hair on my body but at least i have all these wishes attached to my eyelids
so even when i have no hope left, i have a few desperate pleas to waste
built in gutters on my face, less salty water to taste
and my butt likes to remind me that it’s there all the time
but at least when my eyes get damp and i stare into the light, i can see stars in it that will keep me company until the real ones come out at night
and i sit here alone and i turn this piece over and over again and then i leave it alone and i look for more and sometimes they float to the surface of this
cloudy, stirred up thing i see in the mirror and call a person
and i hold on to each piece before i let it sink away again
and i’d rather not go on about what i can sometimes see in myself
illuminated by the lamplight in my room and the tired blue digits of my alarm clock
but i know that they are there
at 3 am when i sit alone in my room, i can see smooth stones come together in my face to mosaic something close to beautiful,
but i can’t hold onto them and turn them over in my pocket and bring them out and show you because i don’t know if you’ll believe me when I claim there’s something beautiful in every face to see
and I’m afraid you won’t see any of that when you look at me—
this is all just my alarm clock and the empty space in my bed talking
so i’ll just hug my pillow and go the fuck to sleep, because there aren’t any smooth stones in my mattress, they’re all inside of me.
But all I need is to know they’re there,
even when you aren’t.
I just went on a walk with my mom. I knock suburbia all the time because it really does get so monotonous. Sometimes I forget that suburbia is the structure imposed on a landscape, and not the landscape itself. The same can be said for cities, but to me, cities distract you from that because there’s so much stimuli. So many people to meet and things to do and ways to indulge in the things you’re passionate about. For some people that’s numbing. I don’t know, I’m not trying to analyze all of that right now.
I guess my point is that while I was away at school, I missed my family because that’s a given, but I didn’t really miss my hometown. I didn’t feel a tug for walks around my neighborhood. When people aren’t re-seeding or watering or mowing the lawns they never seem to step on, my neighborhood is a suburban version of I am Legend. I don’t walk with my dog, I walk with my iPod, and we’re the only ones with any sort of beat inside.
At least, that’s what it always feels like, because who counts the bees and the flies and the birds and the squirrels you know are there just by the rustling of the branches that smack you in the head as you walk by a tree?
When I think of suburbia, I think too much about the structure and not enough about what the structure disrupts. I assign meaning to picket fences and shiny cars and cold shoulders riding by on a lawnmower on a warm day
as they apply to my life and not as they apply to the wild life. I am painfully aware of the plasticity of my environment and not the environment itself, except to bat it away when it gets too close to me, or to document it with a photo when I get too close to it. Defense and documentation, and using the quiet to think about myself too deeply so that I rarely sense how deeply disturbing the quiet really is except for the moment when I let it turn into anger by blaming the people that don’t talk to each other. But I never really spoke to any of them before, either. I’m trying to be better. I hope I am better. I want to be better.
The city eliminated the things that made me angry about suburbia. There was rarely any quiet, but when there was, it was too loud because the pace was so fast that it felt like someone slammed on the breaks. Then you grasp at everything and everyone milling about as everything starts moving around you, because even though the pace picks back up, you can still feel the spot in your chest that your heart slammed into in the same way your head would hit a windshield in a vehicle that isn’t a metaphor.
So returning to suburbia didn’t feel like someone slammed the breaks. It’s like I went down a really big hill and I can’t forget that sudden leaping feeling just before my heart sank. You know that feeling? It’s weird. I loved it as a kid, sitting in the back seat of my parents car. But now I’ve assigned meaning to it. And when you can’t forget a feeling in your chest, you start comparing it to every beat that follows. You hear things in them that you’ve never heard before even though they’ve always been there.
This past year, I’ve felt some sort of eerie silence enter me and I’m not saying it was the city that did it, but maybe it was the way I saw people walking around and into and with each other and also all of the people who felt the same silence and how loud it could be, but I would feel it instead of hearing it and it was still deafening anyway. I had always Heard the silence of suburbia and I’ve Felt the silence of the city and now I compare my proceeding environments to the consequential feeling in my chest that I can’t forget.
Today I took a walk with my mom. I stopped to watch two robins hopping upon a well-manicured lawn. They were more than several yards apart, but they would chirp, pause, then hop closer to each other. They repeated it until they got close to each other, then pecked around at the ground a bit and flew off together. Simply put, it was adorable. Romantically put, it was beautiful. I don’t know. Nature, man.
But then it got me thinking about how perhaps, there was something cautionary about what they were doing. Some tactic they had perfected to prolong the time when they would become prey the same way whatever they pecked for in the ground was for them. It was too methodical to be as whimsical as we like to think nature is. We look at nature as a collective. This thing with cogs— parts of a whole that work together. But each entity is mostly trying to survive for itself. The strong eat the weak and the stronger eat the strong, and the strongest wipes everything out.
We aren’t the strongest. We’re just the most parasitic.
But I kept watching the birds and I kept thinking about how wildlife has a food chain because it needs one. It’s about survival. It’s what they have to do. We have the means to survive— to further ourselves and care for each other without feeding on anyone weaker than us, but when the time comes that an easier route to take to What We Want is to knock someone down,
we take it. And it’s become the norm. Social darwinism and stuff or something and whatever. We don’t even question it, because it’s a “dog-eat-dog-world-out-there.” But dogs don’t need to feel any sort of existential silence to reach out to anyone.
We shouldn’t insult the dogs by comparing them to us.
As soon as I found my way under the layer of silence and structure that suburbia imposes and tuned into its landscape, I am back to trying to figure out how to escape it, as my mom yet again talks to me about internships and the job market and the economy and how I Just Don’t Understand But I Need To Before I Get Old Enough For It To Be Too Late. I go to school but I’d like to teach at one someday. I read books but I’d like to write them some day. I write mediocre poetry, but I’d like to reach people some day. I feel too much and I’d like to keep feeling more some day.
I stepped on an ant that got in my way and then felt bad about it. I’m scared of what that means for Some Day.
home is where the heart breaks
over and over under your feet
until you’re stepping on sandy floors
but there’s never any ocean.
i think i do.
If your prophet moved back into the same neighborhood as your infidels
would you recognize Him?
Or would you chase Him out of the Gaza Strip,
strips of gauze wrapped around his wrists and thorns around his ankles,
His sun-drenched skin tough from wear and torn from war and filled with dusty wrinkles that crinkle
crinkle like dry paper scraping dry paper scraping dry
paperbacks and picket signs scraping the atmosphere just above your head
bouncing bites of sound back and forth, biting at a hanged head too scared to look up into the atmosphere just above your head and grab for cosmic hope, so
eyes on her shoes, she kicks up dust that fills her face with dirt,
so you can’t make her feel dirty first
And if you saved an aborted fetus that grew up into a crowd of camouflage and helmets sprawling on desert land, face full of wrinkles full of dust,
would you try to recognize him?
Or would you just chase him into the Gaza Strip?
Stripped of gauze, skin too soft for air that harsh.
Iran, Iraq, Liberty straining the vest upon his back
He ran, you wracked up the bodies until he couldn’t turn back
Twirl the privilege around your thumb like a ring
ring ringing of the bells that toll the dead,
ring ring ringing of the alarm that pulls you out of bed for
another day of scraping skies with signs
Sky scrapers concealing your view of the
skies scraping your eyes with blended amber into orange into red like blood
staining the alleys you shame women into—
if you would only look up at the sky without trying to see beyond it—
it reflects your colors back at you,
and I thought my own were enough but now I have to scrub your stains out of my clothes, too.
And if you grew up a Pastor’s son
with your opine and lead loaded gun
and rulebook for Love
would you move them aside to make room on the park bench next to you for the
underdog with the spirits as shattered as the seaglass in his pockets and under his nails and crinkle crinkling in the corner of his wrinkled eyes?
Would you love like your Holy Infidel once said you should?
But like, Love without defining it—
Love without conditioning it,
The kind of love that stings at your eyes or creases your forehead or pinches at your tonsils and leaves you feeling like a
dictionary
Fell on your head—
But it’s just a brick, or
might as well be, for all the
“Love” it’s chock full of
Chalk full of
Full of chalk
debatable and erasable, less than Divinely re-writable,
loose sleeves rubbing up and distorting it-able—
Scribes caught chalk-handedLET THE POWER OF GROUPTHINK COMPEL YOU
like, whoever wrote it put the Dick in Diction, as they scribed
these definitions for all these types of Human Beings,
Like,
PENIS is POWER
VAGINA is VIXEN
GAY is FLAMMABLE
NON-BELIVER is HOPELESS
But here’s an excerpt I’m writing in ink:
REAL LIFE ICUS 20:12-
if Penis is power, so is Vagina because it takes two to tangle
in the sheets
to giggle and whisper and create another life
or just merge life with life
husband and wife
husband and husband
wife and wife
and every label before and in between,
because Love isn’t a business negotiation requiring dozens of documents and binding agreements and crucified guilt—
it’s
flowers growing out of the cracks in cement
swaying in the stagnant air and
well, frankly,
I think
Neruda could explain that better than I ever could—
But
don’t condemn the people that look to the sky and only see swirling cosmos of pearly white, but no gates in sight
because
it takes too many days on this earth to lose Hope, but
There’s no one your book can save
the way warm hand on warm hand can
the way curled lips on melting eyes can
the way low croons and high notes and dancing chords atop an eardrum can
like the way love affairs swirl between breezes and dandelions, scattering their promises with the trust that whomever’s eyelashes it catches looks up to see stars, sending wishes shooting across the sky
Like when your eyes dart back and forth between city lights
between constellations that hover over skyscrapers and radio towers
between the lines on a page, back and forth and what if
every time your eyes darted over a metaphor, another shooting star shot across the sky?
Like, every line unrolls into the next and the next and the next and you grab on and swing across the gaps that you used to look to the stars to wish away?
Used to grasp at for dear life like they weren’t dead whites traveling at the speed of light?
Prose to prose knotted with allegory and braided with perspective and dripping with knowledge you can’t unlearn,
and you swing across the gaps and let go, splashing into the abyss
it’s not as deep as you thought
and if you stare in, it stares right back
but somehow, it’s not so hard to sleep when you know that.
So
stop thumbing through it, your book is just a brick
or it might as well be
for all the times you’ve thrown it at me.
And if your Holy Infidel moved in down the street,
looking less delicate than the Western depiction on your mantel—
His hair more like mud than it is like sand
His eyes as baby blue as the dirt under his fingernails
because He’s been digging you out of your graves,
while you dug the graves of the baby blues you’ve been trying to save.
would you recognize him without a cross more than resting on his back?
Would you recognize Him without his face trailed with tears of blood that reflect your own salvation back at you the way the
blood of the innocents cake the streets that your left and right winged televisions are too far away to see?
You mistake the Right Wing for the Right Thing,
and the Left is left tugging right back,
Muscles don’t ache louder than hearts, but
they harden much faster, and
we feel the strength in our arms first,
so let’s pull away from each other instead of aching together,
right?
His tired head is drooping under his hoodie,
The Man in the Moon
light aches alone,
kicking up dust to fill the crinkling crinkles of the wrinkles on His face,
your Holy Infidel carries your “Love” like a burden
would you let Him pass?
sometimes i think it’s the only thing that keeps me wanting to be alive. Not because I’m a total escapist, but because Art magnifies all the small parts of life that are worth it and the dark parts of life that need exploring.
I never understood why people like to rid their lawns of dandelions
like it’s acne instead of a splash of freckles—
Each yellow fuzz and puffy cotton orb
an ugly blemish instead of a sunspot.
And you only see gardens overgrown with them for a day at a time before an anxious nine-to-fiver wants to blow off some steam—
make their lawn look more like their cubicle,
because that’s become Home.
The dandelions don’t disappear gradually they way they do when a handful of kids walking to school stop and pick one or two or a few to tuck into their knuckles
to deliver to their teacher or their mom
or between their teeth, sucking the faint traces of nectar from the stems
because handfuls of kids with hands full of gadgets and heads out of the clouds and down at their palms tuck nothing between their
knuckles that are clenched with the instant gratification of popping technicolor and broken-up text as fleeting as the Sun that ruffles the tops of their heads before ducking behind the clouds again,
playing a lonely game of a hide and seek
What happened to the popping colors of yellow on green on blue on fluffy clods of white?
You know, that idealized color scheme as fleeting as youth itself.
And the dandelions continue to multiply, but you have to wonder how long it’ll take before even the wind stops making wishes on puffy whites scattered in a sea of green
and sticks to blowing overcast clouds across the sky
scattering nothing but showers.
saving up little coins of karmic acts in my piggy bank
never to spend them because they crash to the floor at the first quiver of hesitation
coins scattering in places i’m too lazy to bend down and snatch up but
someone will pick them up and cash them in when they need a pint or
need a hand or
need a body to hold in the night or
need to feel the clink in their pocket to remind them that music still exists
So, take that, Universe.
I don’t owe you as much as I owe the people still alive enough to smile at an anxious kid on the sidewalk that keeps tripping over his words
still alive enough to see hope in dropped acts of kindness
and cash them in instead of hoarding them away
too much music in your pockets means forgetting what life sounds like
and life sounds like stillness interrupted by nature interrupted by machinery interrupted by humans interrupted by sorrow, but in-time to clinks carried in pockets
and cymbal crashes of kindness hitting pavements and shooting off in every direction spinning on the edges in a spherical blur of
heads then tails then heads then tails then beds and wails then dead as nails
before settling down at feet attached to bodies slow enough to be out of tune
but hopeful enough to pocket some music and play some kindness anyway
little coins of karmic acts and the street is my piggy bank.
Here’s what humans are:
We’re plants inside glass encasements, and when we’re inside the encasements, we don’t get a lot of dirty air, and the water is filtered through the top for us and the sun keeps us warm, our insides are always warm. Growing up is merely just us wanting to leave our little green houses and get our own water. We want to do it ourselves, so our vines snake out through the top and our twigs become branches and our leaves press against the glass in desperation, because a taste of fresh air is not enough. The sun becomes merciless in its burning, and gravity lends its hands into pushing back and our roots stretch out like legs
and you know that part in Alice in Wonderland? When she drinks that juice that makes her so big that her feet stick out from the bottom of the house? That’s what happens. The glass shatters. And for that split second between Encased and Escape,
we defy gravity for the only time in the lives that we spend trying to defy it again.
But no one shakes out all of the shards. Sometimes they’re a layer or two under the bark and sometimes they make it dangerously close to the heart, narrowly missing an artery. And sometimes they make it to the heart. And you only feel it in the moments when you’re feeling too much or afraid of feeling too much and your heart tries to run from the feelings but it can only stay in one place
because that’s why your heart races. it’s trying to put distance between itself and you. it gives up when it realizes it can’t. trudges along when it’s trying to decide if it still can, never knowing that it never can. It’s the little shards of glass still embedded in the heart that prick as your heart pounds pavement. Sharp pains that leak the blood that flows to the cheeks, leaving you to feel the way you did the first time someone told you they didn’t love you
or told you they did (but you didn’t love them)
or when you want to play house with Alyssa and Marie and Katie but they say that they already have a family dog so you can’t play
or when Nate hurt his leg and wanted you to go to the nurse with him because there was this one time at show and tell that he brought his batman toy with him and you were the only one who smiled at him as he spoke about it and that meant friends
but you were so used to fat jokes that anyone that wanted to be your friend was only pretending, so you didn’t go to the nurse with Nate and it continues to haunt you, another sliver of encasement you used to have that pokes you uncomfortably when you’re sitting in your room by yourself at 1:21 am after watching someone you knew was your friend cry and couldn’t do anything about it?
or that time that Stephanie broke her arm on the playground and you were the only one with her when it happened and she was crying but Mr. Bug came to yell at you for dawdling and so you ran back to get in line without yanking Stephanie by the good arm and taking her to the nurse
what is it with you and going to the nurse?
you don’t have to be able to fix the problem, you just have to be there. you just have to let someone cry if they want to, grab your sleeve to steady themselves if they want to.
You don’t always feel the glass until it gets in the way of your blood flowing to where it’s supposed to go. It diverts it to where it’s not supposed to go
the cheeks, the tips of the ears, the popping colors in the eyes that become a kaleidoscope that spins the room around your head until your mind is where you thought you didn’t have to go anymore because your hands are bigger than they were then and your your teeth grew in straighter than they were then and your skin had shedded itself dozens of times since then
but as you watch your friend cry and you say the last thing you should say and you let them walk off and you sit on the stairs banging your head on your arm because
what is it with you and making things worse?
We can never extract all the slivers from our bark and we can never find all the pieces that left the slivers behind and we can never put them back together again and recede back into our little green house glass encasements where we could see the world and know what not to do to it when we break out because from inside, the air is clean and the sun is warm without making everything hazy glazing decisions with ambiguities like the sweat that collects in the heat of the moment that the glass used to protect you from
and everything flows where it’s supposed to
nothing will ever flow to where it’s supposed to
just where it wants to.
We stretch our branches to the sky, but we still sprout buds.
Layers of bark overlap us as we age, scar tissue over the tender places.
we can never be as whole as we felt as kids,
but the pieces that made us up are buried just deep enough to make their presence felt in moments that resemble the ones on the playground.
i’m too big for the swingsets, but I still want to fly away.
i think sometimes, i project my own fears and feelings and delusions onto people and think that i’m empathizing with them when i’m really probably trying to resolve those fears and feelings and delusions in a contained situation where i can control them.
like right now, my dad fell asleep on the couch watching the news and i kind of want to go upstairs to my room but i don’t want him to wake up by himself in the living room, disoriented and seeping into the couch as the news flashes tragedy in his face because the news never takes a rest
because that’s depressing. and i hate when that happens. and i don’t want my pops to have to wake up to that. even though he does every night when i’m at school, which makes me sad and reminds me that life at home is still life at home even when i’m not at home, and i’m missing so much. like being there when daddy wakes up feeling like the last person on earth.
by Jess Rizkallah
“Tracey Winters?” a clipped voice called my name out from across the clinically manicured waiting room of Jettison Transmissions Inc. I tried to peek into the room behind her, but she didn’t waste any effort opening the door more than she needed to. Just enough to fit her petite, well dressed body in full view. I eyed her pant suit with it’s embroidered accents and little golden buttons and felt myself getting self-conscious about my Macy’s knock-off. I straightened out the pleat in my own pants and flicked some lint from my arm before I smiled and nodded at her, straightening up out of my chair. She didn’t waste any time either, because as soon as I was within arm’s length of catching the closing door, her perky ponytail was bouncing down the hallway and into a room at the end of the hall on the left where she, once again, held the door open just enough to let me in, waiting. Only this time, she couldn’t afford to waste any space, as the room was smaller than the receptionist area in the front where I had seen her rolling around in her chair answering phones that competed over each other with their ringing.
I guess I haven’t been candid in a while. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it. But here I am and I’m not trying to fit anything anywhere that it doesn’t belong.
I go through weird fluctuations where I will do nothing but bleed words everywhere and not bother to mop them up because they’re sticky and vivid and satisfyingly cathartic in a way only I don’t find disgusting and self gratifying. Then when I dry out, I keep looking for a vein and pinch the words out in spurts. Then the spurts become trickles. The trickles leave crusties on my skin in their wake as the holes scab up, and I’m itchy and overwhelmed and left with nothing to drown in. I don’t like it.
I’ve been stuck in my room more than usual, because of my stupid glassy foot. If there’s a metaphorical cosmic reasoning behind this, it’s probably that I’ve spent all year taking walks and letting my eyes get greedy with city lights and distant strangers instead of getting greedy with numbers and textbooks and lecture halls with ivy on their outside walls, so these stitches are to keep me from walking too fast and letting my eyes stray too far before I take in what’s in front of me.
Or maybe I just need to clean my room so glass stops breaking everywhere.
I’ve been listening to the same artist for weeks now and the same song for the entire day now. Over and over and over again. I keep finding a new meaning in the words every time and a new emotion or another layer of the same one peels back in me every time I pick up a new way that his voice carries the words. Then there’s that moment he stops plucking at the strings and his voice carries out into the silence, suspended and grasping at the air and anyone listening that’s trying to grasp right back. I feel like my mood has calibrated to this song and I can’t stop my feelings from going through the filter that comes with it. Everything is sharper, more vivid, and I can’t pretend not to see the details.
But the song has stirred all the stagnant thoughts I was trying to avoid. I thought that if I avoided them they would eventually go away. The thoughts of the people I miss would go away just like the people themselves did, because that’s how it usually works, right? And the memories attached to those people would dull, because that’s how it usually works right? But it doesn’t. They just get pulled to the surface, sticking to the thought you were trying to fish out and gut, hoping to throw the carcass to the side. Maybe triumphantly pick your teeth with a bone or two.
Only you’re the one who gets gutted and what’s stagnant suddenly isn’t anymore and you’re floating around in it, staring up at the ceiling and you’re too empty to bother filling yourself up with anything else to distract the hollow feeling with the styrofoam sensation of anything that isn’t what you need.
I miss my best friend. I feel like I’m filled with styrofoam that I didn’t realize was there until the stagnant pools of thought tried to soak me through but could only trickle over the surfaces of the flimsy filler, leaving little drops of moisture like the drops of rain you cheer on to race each other down the windowpane on an overcast day. That’s all I have left of something that used to fill me up with the warm fuzzy stuff that cliches are derived from. The dregs of an essence that used to be a presence, and every time my eyes get moist and my glasses fog up, I’m losing a little more of it.
Losing a little more of you, I guess.
Then there are my clavicles, I can feel them now when I curl into myself. And my waist. I can put my hands there and my elbows don’t go out as far anymore. This is new, and I don’t know what to do with it. I guess I feel good about myself, but I still feel the big girl I’ve always been wanting to tear a seam in these new clothes I wear. Kind of like
“ha ha, I’m still here. Don’t forget what you were. What you still are when the right light isn’t hitting your bathroom mirror. What he really means with every glance, smile, and nod of his head. No arms will drape your shoulders unless they’re drunk on moonlight. You don’t get the punchline because you are the punchline.”
And this is stupid. I don’t believe it lot of the time. But a lot of the time, I find that if I’m not entertaining the thoughts, I’m also believing them.
Then I meet someone who drives the thoughts out, but they already have somebody else that drives their thoughts out, so I just pass the time with their smile whenever they send one my way. And I feel okay with that because, I don’t know, I just really like when people smile. The kind of smiles that make the eyes do that twinkle thing you only ever read about and the lips curl up on one side more than the other and the teeth peek out and they’re crooked in the best way, because that makes sense in the way that things you can’t explain usually do.
I’m okay with myself. And I’m okay with the smiles, even if they’re not meant for me. As far as my feelings go, I’m okay with convoluted metaphor being the closest to sense that I can make.
I can make sense of other things. Like New York, and how much I’ve realized that I want it. I want to be there. And it’s all I’ve been thinking about, the more I’ve thought about the ways to align all the opportunities I’m finding to get me there. I want to drown in the work I love because I’m feeling myself slip away from it and into the place it usually saves me from. I want I want I want.
I want too many things and I have too many things and I talk about feelings too much and rationale too little and I sit here on my bed replaying the same song over and over again, letting it play me almost as well as it is being played, itself. But I let it, because feelings, remember?
Every time my phone buzzes, something in me perks as a list of who I want it to be runs through my mind. It gets shorter every day, because I end up reminding myself that my list doesn’t make sense. It’s a list of crossed off names with the edges of the paper curling in and a tear right through the names I most want to see light up my screen.
And then there’s a list of who it would be, and this one is written in ink more fresh and paper that’s still bound to more paper that waits to be filled with history. I am okay with this list. I am more than okay with this list, actually. This list wrote itself. And nothing perks, but it is comfortable and secure and that’s all I can ask for.
I dwell too much and I expect everything around me to dwell with me, but that’s not how it works. Raindrops never dwell in place on the windowpane. I don’t know if I should cheer them on, or join them myself. I was going to pull my shade down, but it’s raining outside right now, so maybe I’ll listen to some of that instead of this song one more time.
i remember when i was little (can i still start stories like that? does this make me sound juvenile?)
whenever my mom would yell at me, like a lot, (shit, i said like oops)
her eyes would get really wide and i could see the make up around them crack and i knew i would think about them staring out at me in the dark even when they weren’t there
‘cause that’s how wide they would get, and she was taller than me then, so i would look up at her face and when she yelled loud enough her mouth opened really wide and when it opened really wide, i could see the bottom row of her teeth and they were all pretty straight except for one in the middle, but more on the right-ish side, you know what i mean? that one right there. yeah. well, that one was a little crooked. not like, (oops) really crooked, but just enough that you would notice it
and not crooked in a slanty way but more like crooked in a “hey i’m the tallest one here so pay attention to me” kind of way,
(which is the opposite of how i felt about being so tall because i always felt and still kind of feel quiet and small and friendly with the shadows)
but it only when she yelled really loud
and sometimes that tooth made me angry so i would just stare at it and wish that the things i couldn’t yell back would create some invisible sledgehammer forcefield thingy and knock it back into place, but they never did, they only festered inside of me because they knew that most of the time i was wrong (this is mature, right? i don’t remember half of the things i was angry about but reflections mean i am over them anyway i think maybe, yeah let’s go with that because i don’t remember where i’m going with this story oops)
she still yelled and i still deserved it and sometimes i didn’t but like (oops,) whatever, you know?
now i run my tongue across my teeth and they are smooth and they are straight (well not totally because sometimes i forget to wear my retainer and also I think I grind my teeth a lot which makes me mad and I end up grinding my teeth some more until i realize that between that and coffee grounds my teeth are going to grind me right back so i stop until I forget and then I start again)
and when I see my smile I see that my teeth are dull and they are small and funny shaped and they are trying to stay straight, especially the bottom row except for that one tooth
it’s kind of in the middle, but more on the right-ish side, you know what i mean? that one there. yeah.
it sticks out taller than the rest in a slanted kind of way, but kind of like it’s on its tippy-toes and the wind is trying to blow it over but it’s waving at me in a “ha ha fuck you inhaled gusts of wind, i’m the tallest one here so pay attention to me” kind of way and so I do and so I close my mouth and so I don’t smile and so I think of all the times I was yelled at and the eyes went wide and the make-up cracked and the tooth waved back and i wanted to push it down the way it sneered and wanted to push me around
and i don’t think i have anyone to yell at except for everyone that disagrees with the claim that any human is less than human but i wonder if they don’t take me seriously because i am a teenager or because i am a woman or because i always felt and still kind of feel quiet and small and friendly with the shadows but i have a tooth that stands taller than the rest, waiting to sneer at anyone i smile at that doesn’t agree with me (i don’t know, does that make sense?)
so when i laugh i notice that i catch myself chancing whiplash by looking over my shoulder at the slightest gust of wind that carries any invisible angry sledgehammer forcefield thingys from a person I have spited with my words but mostly with my crooked tooth because
i don’t know, genetics man. that’s about it, i guess. (can i still end stories like this? does this make me sound juvenile?)
I tied ribbons around my ankles today and then i walked to class
wind that was too friendly, mass ave and the sound of sun
just kidding, the sound of acoustic music and a melancholic man bounce atop my eardrum drum drum drum drums
because who walks down the street without wires sprouting from their heads anymore anyway any day
except maybe the day the battery dies and suddenly listening to the sound of sun has become a drudgery because if i can feel it, what’s the point of letting it speak to me
except sometimes i can’t feel it because i wear layers of scarves and fleece and ribbons on my ankles that keep my feet bouncing ing ing ing
“look” written on one foot, “up” on the other and i did that on purpose but now i’m wondering what the purpose was because we all have a great purpose in mind but sometimes feeling like you have a purpose doesn’t really mean you have one but i guess i wrote “look up” on my shoes because i stopped feeling the sun awhile ago
and i stopped seeing it reflected in other faces passing by awhile ago go go away
and i stopped listening to the sun awhile ago go go away
but i still stop and smile at flowers because they’re soft and i like to touch them
but i still stop and smile at dogs because they’re soft and i like to touch them
but i don’t stop and smile at the people walking behind them, attached by strings attached to telephones that don’t ring ring ring around the
dozing pedestrians along the street, walking the concrete tightrope between awake and asleep, attached to metal boxes that beep beep
metal boxes that sing melancholic notes
because we’re all stars and we’re all in our movie and this is all so becoming, but none of this is real, no,
real life comes after college just like it came after high school just like it came after junior high just like it came after elementary school just like it came after we started wearing bras and learned that kissing didn’t lead to babies and high fives and matching pokemon bandaids didn’t mean best friends forever and grown ups got shorter and books looked smaller and the silence following mum and daddy’s arguments didn’t mean that they were finished, because they were never really finished, except when they were
and we were never really finished putting off the beginning of that real life we’re always convincing ourselves is hidden behind that sunspot just beyond the concrete tight rope we’re content with using to walk alone, wires sprouting from our heads, but we’re still up in the clouds
ribbons around my ankles, i’m tying myself down
and the wires fall out of my ears and the sound of the sun bounces off of my eardrum drum drum drums and
my shoes say look up but the sun says look down and my legs say “don’t worry, you’re still on the ground”
And there are dogs tied to strings tied to people walking down the street
and i don’t stop but i still smile at the people because i know that underneath the layers of scarves and fleece and scars that they are soft, and I want to touch them
just like I touch the sunspot with my finger until i blot it into shadow so i know that real life is now
and it always was.
I wore black jeans to the beach once and even though I can’t feel the sand anywhere on them, there is a dusty tint clinging to the fibers, and something is different here
and now I wear a belt because they hang off my butt and slide down my hips if i don’t
I don’t really know what I’m trying to say about these jeans
but there’s something disturbing about them
like I’m wearing skin that isn’t mine but it used to be mine like i’m wearing a scab that i kept scraping off every time it reformed but then it just fell off one day and gathered dust in between the little loops of thread that make up my carpet because the vacuum cleaner never picked it up and okay, i don’t really vacuum, but sometimes I comb through carpet loops looking for stardust that i didn’t catch on my tongue as it fell in the night during which i was sleeping
for once
sleeping too often or sleeping too little or seeping limbs into my sheets until i’ve dissolved into my sheets and where i’m going, we don’t need jeans
where i’m going, we don’t need to leave,
where i’m going, we leave because of the stardust that collects at the bottom of our stomachs that swirl around inside of us every time we toss and turn like snowglobes full of sparkles that never really settle because we never really settle for every really letting them settle on the bookshelves, coated in the dust that settles everywhere else
and where i’m going i never really settle down because i dream of people i love settling down with the dust and not shaking themselves about
and that to me is unsettling and so i toss
and i think of my jido sleeping soundly at night but not soundly in the conventional use of the word that means he is sleeping well, no
he is sleeping soundly, he makes sounds and sounds put him to sleep
the sounds of beep beep whoosh beep snore beep cough whimper whoosh beep grunt beep sigh beep beep and these sounds are just enough while he sleeps to rustle the stardust in him that isn’t sticking to the phlegm in his lungs, isn’t slipping through the tube lasso under his nose
and that to me is unsettling and so i turn
and one time my eyes snapped open and
all i hear is the sound of bed creaks and quick breaths and coughing and panic and moonlight through wrought iron windows doing nothing to help while the mountains cast shadows on the walls and so i jump out of bed and run to him and he is
he is shaking the stardust like i’ve never seen anyone shake anything before and i am shaking watching him shake like he’s trying to break the clods of dust that settled at the bottom of his gut and he quakes and i’m afraid he’s going to break and i and i and i shake myself awake and
i turn on his machine
and he settles back into his sheets beep beep beep cough beep whoosh cough whimper cough beep beep whoosh
and his stardust swirls again and i don’t sleep again that night because where i was going i almost settled down and where i was going i dream of people i love settling down until their stardust is settled down and i can’t shake them awake
so i stay awake and i make sure that i shake and shake and toss and turn and i when i wake i comb through carpet loops looking for stray stardust to keep inside my pocket but instead i find old scabs that left their scars behind
and maybe if i paste them on, i won’t forget the puncture that made my skin want to fall off and maybe if i wear these jeans i’ll feel some sort of something that i felt back when
i settled into the carpet like i settled into the sand, inhaling the stardust embedded in the threaded loops like the grains of sand fused into the fiber of the denim skin hanging off my butt and loosely hugging my legs as i
tightly hug my legs to my chest to keep this stardust closer because where i’m going, i don’t need to leave and where i’m going i almost want to settle and the more i lay still the less unsettling that seems to be and
i’m still trying to decide if that’s unsettling to me.