A Visible Wind

I'm stretched out on my bed belly-down, listening to a voice mumble to itself from inside a wall.

Yes. A voice sounds different when it's talking to someone else. Less muffled. Less solid. Less likely to dissolve. I listen to the sound and imagine water sliding jagged rivers of glass through drywall.

The title of my memoir will be A Grey Wind, and my black-and-white-photo face, eyes turned down, a comma of hair slashed over my muddy skin will sit on the cover.

You can't see my hands. Or maybe you can. They're holding a small, purple flower, and I'm tearing off its petals with the tips of my fingers. Behind my back is a flat field the color of lips, but in the photograph you can't tell, because colors don't exist here. You can't see the frozen color of the sky or the clouds smeared and piled and whipped up like milkweed seeds.

But there will be a visible wind. Charcoal and fiberglass. You'll almost be able to feel it when you see me there dressed grey and my name striding over the page like footprints. It will tear my cheeks and fill the part of my eye where I'm supposed to be green.

The page is where: I pray heavily for my family. Chart a timeline of their deaths. Remember when I used to braid their hair into shiny ropes, how I wanted to tie them around my wrists forever.

The photographed sand is warm and dirty under my feet like old carpet, and it shoves me back in my bedroom, blankets pressing up beneath me like hot water. The voice of my sister, singing to herself from the adjacent bedroom, is gone. Only her fan and its whirling lungs is heard through the silence's din.

A clock, its numeric red letters flicking forward, tell me to sleep. In a few hours, I'll pull myself into the darkness, one foot still slung in a hammock of dreams, and crawl. Into concrete. Steal. White rooms crowded with disease. I should sleep.

No, I say. I want to press the earth against my lips and suck out all that is good. I say it to the air, the fan, my sister behind the drywall, and I know she can hear me.

Conversation of Waves

E: Inspiration wakes up at night. It won't let me sleep.
I should be a bat.

C: I want to be the ocean.

E: Beautiful. Just think...
you could hold the moon.

C: And I could be free and violent...
with no consequences.

E: You could carry pearl and lava treasures
in your deepest places, fragile pieces
no one can steal from you.

C: I want to be the ocean.

E: You just were.



-Emily Engelhard & Carissa Ruiz



Note: The most beautiful poetry is conversation, because it's woven between a gathering of people.

Final Notes Before the Tide

Charcoal shadows
ripple over a girl’s thin arms,
and patterned skin’s like water spliced
by paddles. The trees blow by
like curtains and the world’s
rush slows
as gravel crunches a film of dust
over her eyes.

She ties back her loose hair and lets it
fall down in sweaty knots, dripping
on each smooth board of a dock,
leaving trails.
A canoe’s hauled into a cellophane sea.

Beating sun with her elbows,
paddling, she wants something
that makes her feel like a cloud,
and the clouds resemble piles
of warm cotton, unburdened.

She is a stone sinking

long blue sadness into morning like the seeded
excrement of sea gulls.

Fishermen laugh from a bay,
bobbing dreamily on a sailed boat,
their pole’s silver lines cut water.
Drifting, voices filling empty
places, they care less for fish,
more for one another. They fill the girl.

Her silence is
shattered glass bearing down
no longer, and she leans back, leans away
from this life. She’ll feel safe floating,
sinking
into bodies of dead harbor seals,
but is it enough
to soften

the blue granite of low stones flickering
in the sea’s icy eyes, or lips
touched by strangers
after drowning?

Dents in the canoe refract light.
The girl steers east towards grey waves
reaching between boulders like hands.
The wind paddles west, grows blustery
when it cannot win against
the calm, unbiased S of a black bird
poised on piles of wrinkled lobster cages,
beckoning from a jagged island.

The girl bites into an apple, the salt
of cashews, clean water from a stainless
steel canteen. Clean sits in her mouth
as cold, wet fish. She washes her lips
with Atlantic’s
glass-colored salt water,
does not want

the flesh of her tongue to be
unburdened by the stain of blueberry mountains
when she dives

blood into rock, ocean in her wet lungs,
cold again
beneath wide, black cormorant wings
with its clean eyes watching

her sink into
flooded cove, tongue swollen
blue.
Dock drops dry. There are no dotted lines
leading home.
Thin arms reflect
seaweed alive at the bottom,
impatient
for water’s recession.

I've Been Painting

Before I reach for another tissue, let me explain why my fingers are splashed and splotted and dotted with black spots. I'm sick with the flu. And I've spent the last three days, since my fever broke, grumbling under the lingering ache and fatigue of the virus. Every morning, I've struggled awake, one leg still stuck in the hammock of dreams, and rolled out of the covers, trying to breathe through a clotted nose. Throat scratchy and on fire. Mind a foggy dome of NyQuil stupor. I look in the mirror at a frizzy, brown head. Never get a haircut under the influence of antihistamines, I think and flip the new bangs with my fingers.


I swallow my pill and shove down breakfast: a big bowl of too much shredded wheat and a sliced banana, and one mug of black tea. For a few moments, I gaze at our newly dug vegetable garden, huddled in the grassy ground above the septic tank. The romaine lettuce isn't wilting anymore. Normally, on a day when walking from couch to kitchen doesn't leave me breathless, I'd clean or worry or go for a walk or try to read but worry instead. Today, however, I don't care how many cookies I eat or how long my ass stays plastered to the couch. I'm sick, and I'm sitting all day. No question about it.


After the first two days of fever have passed, however, that energetic itch is scratching at my body to GO GO GO!!! I try to clean but collapse. I try to worry but don't care. I try to go for a walk... no, I don't. I don't try to go for a walk. The sun is out and I can already feel my organs boiling over with fever again. Regardless, my mind needs something to wrap itself in for a few hours. Something slow. Something easy. Oddly enough, I don't feel like writing. It's painting I want. I want brushes. I want watercolors. The last time I poured over a piece of artwork for five hours was four winters ago, when it was too cold and too deep to venture outside. Now, on a warm day with trees frisky in the wind, one which I'd usually partake in, I'm at the table surrounded by paint brushes, cups of water, white trays stained rainbow, sheets of spread newspaper, pencils, and two old erasers.


First, I sketch and erase. Sketch and erase. Sketch and erase until a dim, graphite figure is stretched out over the rough paper and I'm ready to stain her body blue, and the liquid sheet wrapping around her hips, orange. There are seven different brushes, all with translucent red handles that remind me of candy, spread out over the newspaper, each tipped with different size bristles. Some are fat and long. Others are the size of a single flax seed. Two are shaped like raindrops.


The first layer is the easiest, and I'm sitting normal at the table, with an almost-straight back, clutching a long-handled, fat-headed brush. My arm moves quickly. Thoughts skip around in my head like a flat stone over water. I get up to pee or latch Elmer to his lead or drink orange juice. On the second layer, however, my eyes must become more intimate with the page. I'm stooped low over the table with a finer brush. My fingers rest on the thin handle with precision. Arm moves slow over the dampening figure. The paper goes limp with dampness. It curls as water evaporates. I grumble when my bladder tells me to go the bathroom. The third layer is for shadowing and depth and dimension. My eyes go blurry, but I blink, rub my aching neck, and continue adding roundness to the left arm.

Time drops by. Eventually, adding layers and shape and perspective to the figure doesn't matter. The piece becomes less of a painting and more of a being. A living song. Warm flesh with a past and future. Something that breathes and moves when I lean close to smear shadows between her fingers. I'm lost in this growing figure, speaking to her, touching each curve of her body with streaks of color as thin as feather quills. I discover magic when I line the purple body with black acrylic paint, and I realize it's been too long since I last felt this power.

In the rush of life, a place where my real body must be carefully fed, exercised, cleansed, and perfected, where deadlines force my writing to grow faster than it wants to, and where schedules and routine build walls and canyons between me and my desires, this week with the flu has kept me moving slow. It's kept me home with nothing to do but shake free the knots of my cobwebbed mind and explore it. Simplicity isn't what I normally strive for. It's what I'm afraid of. My whole life, I've been taught that nothing is simple. Everything is a challenge. I must work hard to fulfill my desire to be a writer and an artist, toiling over pen and paper until an entire day is exhausted under the weight of my strain.

But during these last three days, couch-ridden and stuck at the dining room table with a pad of 90 lb Canson watercolor paper, I've learned that none of this is true. Today, I painted a woman, a simple, purple woman cupping a yellow sun in her hands. Yes, I focused and measured, erased and painted over, cursed and sneered, but in the end, when she was finished, I realized I'd moved slow. I simmered. I relished the smell of water, the feel of acrylic spots drying to my skin, the page corners curling against my palms. Each second lingered. Ginger snaps never tasted better. Work didn't call me in. My father came home and convinced me to stroll through the woods, un-rushed. Life felt long and full and slow. Like it would last forever. As if I had forever. I loved the way I created, and I loved the way my body fit perfectly into the figure I painted, the one with black splotches on her hands.

Pulling Off Wings

Dreaming is what she did best, when she was young and unburdened and capable of clinging to the present like the life short-lived by a butterfly, but she's old now, thin-limbed but heavy with eyes that are always bruised. She scrapes fat tent caterpillars from tree limbs and crushes their silky white homes. She wants to burn them, protect the flowers that blossom pink and fragrant over the limbs of weeping cherry trees, and the cruelty has tugged her inward. Her senses can't collect the textures, smells, sights, tastes, sounds of the world to pack into dreams.

She's left with nightmare.

She remembers dreaming of her mother, another version of her mother, one tall and blond with smooth arms and legs. They sat cross-legged on her mother's apartment carpet, necks craned upwards towards an illuminated screen that fell down over the far wall like a sheet. The film projector hummed and clicked from somewhere in the room. Astrological signs, images of a Leo lion and Aquarius, the goat with curled horns and a wide fin, filled circles. Strange symbols crested the waves of empty space looping around the curved, black lines.

It happens in a moment of heightened emotion, she remembers her mother explaining earlier, and now her mother says, "This is what I was watching when it happened to me."

The girl wants it, too. She watches the screen with hunger but feels nothing shift inside her body.

She should be watching the three toddlers sitting in the corner of the room rolling colorful plastic blocks across the floor. They're dressed in blue, and their eyes are the eyes of older people. They flick them towards the girl, yellow and irised marbles in their balled skulls, and continue plucking at the blocks with stunted fingers. The couch is sitting uncomfortably to the children's' left. The girl should've placed the toddlers on the couch, high above the floor.

But she forgets about them, absorbed in her envy, and she and her mother stride down the hallway to the apartment's only bedroom. A large window is filled with blackness and the moon. Everything becomes silver in the bright shadows, and they fall asleep.

When the girl wakes, she smells water. The moon is burning like a cool light bulb, and darkness is muffled daylight, a silver and translucent ghost. She stirs up in bed, the sheets cold around her limbs. Moon-drenched water curls through the apartment, rising almost as high as the top of the mattress. The covers are like sand and she's trembling on a soft island when she realizes the children are still huddled in the living room corner, now drowning. Her mother is awake, with azure eyes and her left leg tilted into the water, slick and grey. Mother's right leg unfolds and slips into the domestic sea, melts into the other like candle wax. A fin blooms where her toes should be, and she slides off the sheets, her face the last part of her body to submerge. The girl leans over the bed and watches her mother's nose grow long and grey-blue, her eyes spread apart, her neck tilt back. Mother is a dolphin, and she swims away towards the ancient-eyed children.

The girl wants to be like her, but she's not. She must trudge on legs through the black hallway. When she dips her arms deep into the icy bottom and lifts the children free, they are wrinkled and snarling. Grey. With hollow sockets where the eyes once were. They are bloated, dead, animal-like bodies. She can do nothing but drop them into the water, wade back to bed, and sleep.

She wakes. Daylight shows a clean, dry floor. Three scuttling shadows dash past the wide crack of the closed door. Shadows of small, naked feet spread over the carpet, and beams of red light move ahead of them. Their eyes are the glowing eyes of red vermin. She let the children drown, and in their suffering they transformed into river rats. Wise-eyed, snarling rats of the water. The girl wants what they have.

Her organs grow hot and cruel with envy.

She follows her mother into a building, hoping to undo what's happened. They move through a white hallway smelling of alcohol, her mother striding ahead with blond hair and the girl craning her neck to the right as she notices a roomful of scientists in baking soda-white lab coats. Vials and tubes and tunnels of enigmatic, sparkling, burbling liquid steam and drop one particle at a time into clean beakers. The scientists scuttle back and forth across the room, quick and with pursed mouths and furrowed brows, scribbling in notebooks, dribbling beads of sweat. Small mammals are in cages, she thinks of the children, but the doors of the elevator open to her left and let a stream of white-clothed humans tumble out into the hallway. The girl's transfixed by the elevator. The elevator with a heavy wooden door looming black against the back wall. The door that suddenly opens like the throbbing, hot walls of her hormone-infested heart.

Her skin grows prickly at the sight of a tall, ragged-faced man blowing from the hidden room like a storm wind, his black coat billowing, his skin a wrinkled, cloudy mass beneath disheveled hair. From his shoulder sprouts the mutated, dead face of a lion, its paws jutting out into the cold air with sharp claws. They are reaching for the girl, and this man is a failed experiment. Her experiment. She's hot and burbling inside like lava. People in white coats flutter toward her like frightened sheep, but she won't peel her sight from the grey-skinned man. He turns towards her. His eyes are old. He is a storm cloud billowing and swelling with skin cold as ice. And the world is silent and suddenly black.

Diagonal slashes of red. Three times across the black screen of her vision. She doesn't know what's happening, but, finally, she wakes.

Glass shattered. Paper loosed and violent. Shimmering liquid dripping from remaining shards of smooth tubes. A ticking sound. Dead scientists drooped over sterilized counters. Red staining white, and the hollow tunnel of one man's throat exposed. The girl's mouth and hands coated in the acrid, sticky presence of blood.

One scientist with his ribs gashed open is still alive. He looks at the girl and holds out his bloody hands. "You didn't do this. You didn't do this. We just have to convince them that you didn't do this."

But she knows the truth.

She is the lion.

She is envy.

She is the one, the killer, who pulled wings from the moth before they grew.

The Season of Beans

Line breaks, spacing and indentations are skewed.

The Season of Beans

I

The farmer drinks real milk,
thick and fresh from the cow’s udders
with that pudding skin on top
and flies wobbling around, tainted by the acrid,
addictive aroma of manure and sweat.
He only knows
the roundness of spotted melons in moonlight,
dark-stained mornings awoken
by the trumpet of a rooster, summers of cold creeks,
earth tilling, wild animal smells, hay bailing, jarred peaches,
the wisp of warm wind carrying dust,
a sun-browned woman’s yellow hair and thin dress.

II

I once knew this lady, this beautiful, lost lady wearing petals
for a dress & a smell like nothing I ever smelled before.

III

Rain
and then more rain. The woman leaning with the wild
flowers and wet wind over the farmer
and the blanket swelling into a lake, caught in a sun-drenched
morning by love, unable to be carried away.
Her father in the distance with amber
whiskey and slick rifle, lightning spear from clouds
and wind heavy enough to hide his rough voice, her name,
the crack of a gun, his body falling face-down
limp into a stream, a woman’s breath caught by her hands
when they find him.

IV

Here I am, once again
all alone on this hot & beautiful
summer Monday. I’m cooking in the sun
but a cloud just covered it & it feels
good. I wish the entire blue sky were filled
with sun-covering clouds right now. I talked
to Dawn this morning. I miss her. I miss walking
together, heads together, our voices together & then her voice
singing alone. I want her
to come down & visit me in August.
It’s so damn hot out here.
Even the ink is dripping.

V

Chicken eggs piled high in a brown
woven basket, collected by his girl covered
with wood dust and feathers. He hates them but eats them
for the morning with her and the molasses-thick coffee she pours.
Unplowed fields and the horses, sweaty in their stables,
will not wait for the farmer. He kisses his girl, touches the valleys
of her ear with the tips of his soil-stained fingers, and leaves.
She watches him whistle towards the barn, sun blanketing his back,
and fills the sink.
Her porcelain face and pretty yellow hair slips in completely.

VI

I was thinking how I wished that I’d saved this journal for another
time. This isn’t the summer I hoped for or the one
I thought it would be.

VII

She was only always a mirage,
an illusion built of beer and the ache
of loneliness that comes when night leaves
him nothing to do but watch fire crackle in hearths
of brown stone, the mud and ash of wood beneath
his heels, an imagined memory as pungent
as the burning smell of cherry and birch smoldering it smelled
like her hair,
he tells himself, she is not real,
over and over until he tastes the salt and wet soil in his palms.

VIII

I’ll say it again. A nice big cloud over the sun
& everything not going in the direction I desired. It smells
like rain.

IX

A ghost
floats beside him as alcohol slides into his throat
and he sits on a wide machine, moving slowly, chopping
heads off wheat stalks, the kernels like nuggets of fools
gold. Let water wash over it, watch colors
disappear and all the smells
slip away with it.

It would come back after a rain. She smelled like sunflowers
in her dress, her thin dress. I’ll follow her
thin dress. It was
real.

X
Soil in his hair, soil in nails, soil
in the splayed creases coming from the corners
of his eyes where he begins to grow old
without her,
the crevices where he collects liquid like rows
in a cabbage field or the dip between two graves.
He wants to wash himself clean
in the pond beyond the tall, flaking barn where he tosses
hay into cool evenings.
He’ll dive headfirst into a stone,
crashing through moonlight – her face
when he found her lying still – and rise lifeless.
But he hears her, sees her
eyes glowing in the daisies at night,
the grass like her dress around his knees, the dress
she wore when she first found him bent
over a milk bucket alone and knowing nothing
but the season of beans. It is August.

Restless Eye Movement

You won't notice the sudden flux of pain
when a burning, flame enshrouded foot is severed from the ankle
with one clean swing of a sharpened, singing blade.

Only the tone of your voice will change as you jolt backwards, gravel
digging into loose palm, sky rocketing away in red and head smacking
into a smooth stone, lights snapping out.

Waking will return your lost appendage, numb, naked and bound
under cotton sheets beneath the other, sadistic ankle.
It was just a dream but you can still feel it burning as you stumble
down a flight of stairs, crooked fingers clawing air, for a cold swallow of water.