the other side of midnight

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“Have you ever had a nervous breakdown?”

what share of the blame was hers ?
she would not look back.

careful directions
found
The house
as impregnable as a fortress.
“Come and see,” she said

but nothing
moved
her

She
lay there, bewildered,
she
remembered

The outside
is a palace,
the inside is a museum.

S he was too nervous to be angry.

desperately
lost.

“I’m willing,”
S he
said.
“I am a different girl.”

The truth was
There had been no word
only a deep, foreboding silence.

How would
S he
be satisfied

One slight mistake
shut out everything

It was a ghostly enemy,
an impossible destination

She could feel the ground rushing up to meet

h e r

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME

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WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME

Manipulative monkeys can fool one another
Humans are not alone in having
a sense of self-awareness;

there seems to be room
for every possible
kind of
deception.

As a child, her experience

consisted largely of singing
illustrated songs at
film theatres, and
doing occasional mimic routines.

    – the sure way to win a mate

The complex courtship
messages of
rivals
Waiting for the
right signal

Is Your Body
Recognizing a mirror image – or the mirror?

LOOKING FOR DANGER

The typical
American male
is constantly
mucking things up

Only through the
patience and
intelligence of a
wise and understanding
wife
does life run smoothly

Her one good part
in this period was
usually as the other woman.

Among courting animals,
the correct signals
or a handsome display
are generally
essential for finding
a suitable partner

Animals fight back if flight is impossible

When threatened, some animals
take on attackers far larger
and stronger than themselves
in a last-ditch stand for survival.

    — after all, she was
        a verbose, bad dame
        trying all sorts of schemes
    And what made the more bizarre

domestic highlights so believable

was that in her own way,
she still retained
enough semblance
of humanity
to be a living caricature;
an object accepted as normal

Reading the intentions of another
Human beings appear to have a much better grasp of one another’s thought processes
than do other animals.
This ability enables them to deceive each other in skilful ways.

the perfectly
matched couple
are still
disappointed
but all the pieces
fit together

however long the light may last

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I have settled into the idea of there being power in delicacy.

So much of the physical scale of the media landscape calls for being louder and bigger,
and it took time for me to recognize the boldness in something small, packable;
a great view intimately scaled.

Most of the time when I go back to the source for inspiration
Pulling painting and sketches from between the leafs of my journal,
studying other artists in old books and textbooks,
in color choices and brush strokes

I can revisit it with a feeling of tenderness, which surprised me,
given my penchant for in-the-moment choices,
physically moving until I find the purpose in those first views

I have discovered purpose working toward small vies of something “better,”

The pace set by looking
seeking
living,

however long the light may last.

early diagnosis

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It started slow: we went walking and my mother, normally so chatty, was uncharacteristically silent on our turn around the neighborhood. She closed the door in my face once we reached her condo. I thought she was mad at me.

Later: her kitchen covered with sticky notes – labels on everything, handwriting meticulous. Scissors, cabinet, ladle, milk. Ice cream melting in the pantry, her knitting stuffed into the breadbox. No explanation for the living room disasters – photos smashed, books thrown everywhere – or the clothes ripped down from the bedroom closet. The glass in her wedding portrait cracked, a jagged line slashed right between her and Dad. She complained about music no one else could hear.

I found specialists. I kept reading the test results: each new pass over the paperwork felt like the emotional equivalent of the sound helium makes, slowly draining out of a balloon. The last doctor was kind; his shiny bald lightbulb of a head reflected the harsh fluorescent lights as he said, It hurts, but some people become ghosts long before they’re dead.

We sat in the car afterwards, my whole body numb, just one big untangleable knot. The heater rattled as it kicked on, fogging the windows.

“I saw Michael this morning,” she said suddenly. “He wants to take me dancing.”

My father had been dead for eight years. Behind her, two large handprints rose up on the inside of the glass, framing her face. The palms dripped condensation.

When I blinked, they were gone.

(don’t be afraid to go) up the ladder to the roof

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“Excuse me! Hey! Hey, assholes!”

Val cranes his head reflexively Val cranes his head reflexively toward the sound and there, leaning out of the dormer window of the duplex he’s been working on, is a gorgeous redhead, a scowl on her otherwise pretty face as she glowers at Val’s crewmate, who is halfway through his lunchbreak cig; Nick twists, confused, and freezes in the ice-cold blast of her glare, but she doesn’t miss a beat.

“Could you losers please stop smoking in front of my window?” she snarls, and Nick, wide-eyed, pitches his cigarette over the side without a second thought. Val finishes the climb and the window slams shut – without even a thank you! – as he raises himself off the ladder and onto the rooftop.

Nick claps a hand over his heart, beaming. “That’s her,” he says, clearly smitten, “That’s the mother of my children.”

“If you swoon straight off this building I am not going to catch you.”

“I am flying on the wings of love, man, I won’t need catching.”

Val snorts and cracks the seal on the bucket of roofing cement, wrinkling his nose at the sharp rubber tar smell. The cement has the same texture as the bowl of yogurt he had for breakfast, slopping off the trowel and into the bucket with an audible splorch. Val grimaces and scrapes the excess off the container’s edge, holding it out to Nick and met only with empty air: Nick is halfway up the higher part of the roof, circling carefully around the chimney. Val sits on his heels and watches Nick stalk toward the birds they’ve been studiously avoiding all week.

“Doves are a sign of affection, right?”

“That’s a pigeon,” Val says.

“Same difference!”

“It’s really not!”

Nick ignores him, and in the blink of an eye somehow, impossibly, manages to snatch an unsuspecting pigeon out of its nest.

“What the fuck –” Val starts, but Nick is already coming back, the freaked-out bundle of feathers held tight between two unsteady hands like it’s a bomb, not a bird. He raps on the glass with his elbow, banging until the woman finally opens the window, and in that moment it becomes excruciatingly clear to everyone involved that Nick has no real plan.

The woman stares at him expectantly and Nick swallows hard, and without any warning or explanation just thrusts the pigeon at her.

She shrieks and flinches, her high-pitched “Are you kidding me!?” drowned out by the angry cooing of the bird sailing past, desperate to escape, disappearing into the depths of her apartment. Nick stumbles backwards in the upset, arms pinwheeling as he tries to keep his balance, and Val scrambles, somehow managing to catch him before Nick plummets to his untimely death. He hooks his hands tight under Nick’s armpits and hoists him back onto the roof.

“Amazing,” Val deadpans, setting Nick upright with a grunt. From inside, something heavy crashes to the floor; they’re definitely taking a pay cut on this job. “Wings of fuckin’ love, right?”

There are worse things to want

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i can do everything a normal girl can do except shut the fuck up

there’s a part of me that thought it would end up correcting itself you know like somehow things would settle and my stupid heart would listen to my stupid brain and just this once for once in my stupid life i could love the right person

but i couldn’t even manage that

i don’t think i can say this
i don’t think it works like this
i don’t think this is something i should want
there are worse things to want but not like this

you called me important and the realization of what that meant startled me more than anything else
you told me once that we were a matched set and if people didn’t see that they were blind
no one else ever wanted to duet in my car no one else got my stupid references no one else ever wanted to commit to the bit and it felt like building a scene it felt like improv it felt like yes and yes and yes and and and 

and god who wants to hear about this
i already spend so much time sifting through old hurts and new pain unearthing all these old traumas like some sort of emotional paleontologist excavating wounds from the mesozoic era
who in their right mind wants to hear about all the black spots on the map of the life i used to share with you

maybe i could pretend i have a brain injury
maybe i could actually give myself a brain injury
maybe i could drive my car straight into a ravine
maybe i could lay down in the street
maybe i’ll get lucky and get struck by lightning and the resulting injury will give me the type of amnesia that erases you completely from my memory

i wish one of us had the courage to say what really happened
i wish i could tell you
i wish

something fun that i do is make bad choices

i am no longer looking for an exit sign but god the worst parts of you made me want one
choking on the laugh caught in my throat because it was so much easier to be compliant than it was to lose
our song was a one-hit wonder about a woman loving a man who could never ever love her back and jesus fucking christ that is way too on the nose even for me
your wife came around the corner and when she introduced herself i have never in my life wished harder for the earth to just open up and swallow me whole

you look like a young richard dreyfuss which weirdly kind of does it for me
you look like winona ryder if she was caught in a wind tunnel
you look like a young david duchovny if i squint and tilt my head to the side
you look
you look like
you look like every boy who ignored me in high school
you look like you listen exclusively to the arcade fire and have extremely strong opinions about neon bible

another fun thing that i do is never learn from my mistakes

i looked at you and thought who the fuck is this clown
i looked at you and a wave of affection hit me so hard i felt like i was getting a nosebleed
i looked at you and i realized that there are worse things to want

you know that sort of glow you feel when you’re driving back from a really great time with people you care about and who care about you

i just

i thought you had taken that from me and i thought it would never happen again
but the feeling settled into me on the way home last night and it was like i had the sunset in my veins

and it was the closest i’ve felt to poetry in so goddamn long

we ran out of words, and so we drank.

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After the breakup Kevin threw away all his records, just threw them away, and he tells her about how just looking at them, piled up in plastic milk crates under the window in his living room, it made him sick, made him want to puke. He boxed them up three days after his girlfriend told him that she wanted to see other people and Green Is Blues and Hello Nasty and Frampton Comes Alive!, everything, everything, it all went flying into the trash when he realized she wasn’t coming back. Kevin’s hands rattle in his lap as he talks, picking at the bandage tape wound all the way up to the knuckles of his left hand, and just looking at him makes Holly want to cry.

Holly knows Kevin the way you know anyone you see maybe once a week, that sort of localized osmosis that comes from shared social contact, occasional occupation of the same space. Kevin smokes Marlboro reds; Kevin drinks White Russians; Kevin spent an entire evening two weeks ago putting nine dollars’ worth of borrowed quarters into the jukebox, playing Green Day and Springsteen and Modern Baseball and exactly one Stevie Nicks song, just because Holly asked him nicely. The girlfriend was there – Layla? Lila? Dark eyes, lovely, distant; she sat apart from Kevin and his friends, far from Holly and hers, staring at her phone in the corner by the dartboard. Holly glances over at that space now, the big picture window fogging from the bodies crammed inside, momentarily distracted by the darts sailing toward their target: double ring, triple ring, bullseye, wall.

In Kevin’s pockets there is only: ten dollars, lint, guitar pick, keys. He pats the front of his shirt and comes up empty; Holly slides her Camels across the wire table they’ve been sitting at, leans over to light it for him when the spark doesn’t catch, his hands shaking too much to be steady. “We were friends,” he says, keeps saying, palm opening and closing, the tape around it dirty. “Like you and – what’s the fuck, that guy, whosit, fuckin’ Jim, the one you used to –”

Holly chokes on smoke, coughs through it. She’s three drinks in but still painfully sober, and what can she say? She already spends so much of her time sifting through old hurts, new pain, unearthing all her traumas like some sort of emotional paleontologist, excavating wounds from the Mesozoic Era. Who wants to hear about the numbers she can’t call, the places she can’t visit? Sitting on the tile floor of the shower, the water cranked so hot it feels cold; sitting at the table, head in her hands, music drifting down from the apartment upstairs – I have my own life, and I am stronger than you know. She wishes she had a better story. She wants a better story.

Holly stubs out her cigarette, finishes her drink. Kevin slumps forward, taped hand over his face. Beyond them, in the parking lot, the lights flicker.

a lot can be said about a girl and her dog

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Bel shifts her grip on the flare; it sparks like a firework, the sick green glow flickering wildly in the darkness of the empty hallway.

A growl, a sniff. It stops at the edge of the ring of light: long claws click against the grating, the venomous stinger at the end of its tail scrapes against the metal ceiling. It waits, panting, drooling, while Bel moves her hand from side to side, a dozen eyes intent on the light in her palm.

“Fetch,” Bel hisses, slamming the airlock closed once the creature leaps forward, following the flare through the door.

amber

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The door to the trap is open. It’s always been open.

This is what it feels like: the pinch and press of it, the sharp snap of teeth over a limb. Mousetraps, bottle traps, box traps, bodygrips. A Saw trap, riddles and keys and blood, panic, mental anguish. Tear yourself apart to live; what is a pound of flesh, what are fingernails, what is another bruise, another scratch, another bruise, another bruise, another –

This is what it feels like: a disappearing act, carnival smoke in your hair, rugburn on your hands and knees from hiding in back panels, beneath trap doors. Being sent into the ether in a puff of pink smoke is nothing; magicians make their assistants vanish all the time. Why bother with the reflection in the funhouse mirror if you can’t recognize yourself?

This is what it feels like: a wave crashing against a rock, an insect caught in amber. Erosion, acceptance. You can get used to anything after enough time. She has been in the trap since she was nineteen. The trap can be gentle. The trap can be kind – look how it cradles her boys, how it strokes her hair. Look at the flowers it left blooming in the vase in the kitchen. Look how it cries when she makes herself sick, how it sits across from her in the visitor’s lounge, how carefully it slots the puzzle pieces together on the plastic table.

The door to the trap is open. The door to the trap has always been open.

Her life is the trap. Where else will she go?

extremely specific things in songs that i love (an incomplete list)

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  • the key change at the end of country roads, take me home
  • the “she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” at the very end of all you need is love
  • this live version of fix you where the audience overwhelms chris martin in the last chorus and finishes the song
  • the part near the end of somebody to love where it climbs and climbs and climbs
  • the “dearly beloved” section of  jesus of suburbia
  • this one line in push: “And I don’t know if I’ve ever been really loved by a hand that’s touched me, and I feel like something’s gonna give”
  • “peace up! a-town down! (yeah!)”
  • the charango and the flutes and the panpipes in the instrumentation of whenever, wherever
  • the fact that we as a society loved kesha’s verse in timber so much that someone, somewhere decided that we could edit out pitbull completely, so that there now exists a version where kesha sings the whole thing herself, and it – as the kids say – absolutely slaps
  • the electronic interlude in twrp’s synthesize her
  • the fact that i listened to i know i know i know so many times on a music trip my senior year of high school that even now, in my thirties, i still can only associate this one particular song not just with how i felt as a heartsick, disaffected teenager, but with the entire city of chicago, full stop
  • the live version of harry styles’ two ghosts that he sang as a duet with stevie nicks
  • prince’s guitar solo in the version of while my guitar gently weeps from the rock & roll hall of fame’s tribute to george harrison
  • the absolute, unbridled joy that is the entirety of whitney houston’s i wanna dance with somebody
  • dolly parton’s cover of stairway to heaven. just – the whole song.
  • “i was born in düsseldorf and that is why they call me rolf”