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.

Weddings and Then Happy Endings

Dean slides sideways and slaps his hands together, yellow button-up shirt matching my silk dress, smile and shoulders rising with Electric. He moves back, fists punching the air in slow motion, feet weaving in and out. Coming forward, he does a little spin. He's my one-time date at my cousin's wedding. I'm the skinny maid of honor with a crazy up-do and thick-rimmed, brown glasses. He moved the car so I wouldn't have to step in the mud, and then opened my door, explaining that he's still an old fashioned guy. I told him to stay that way. There's not many left.

The bride sits beside me watching with her cake, lace dress and regret. Her mother smoked a joint before the ceremony. We're not dancing to the electric slide again. Soar feet strapped with heels are difficult to maneuver. I'm champagne buzzed with an aching neck. The muscles tensed when I tried to prevent myself from blacking out while standing close to the altar, watching a tall man put a gold thing on my cousin's finger. After the ceremony a photographer snapped pictures and the rest of us headed to the fire house for the reception of salad and ziti and tradition. I was forced to walk in dramatically, arm linked with the burly best man's, all eyes watching and sappy music playing over the speakers. Later I collected money from strangers who danced with the bride. I was supposed to shuffle each person along, keep the long line moving, but I have a problem talking to strangers and an even bigger problem telling them what to do. Someone took over for me. The hell ended and dancing began. My cousin's new husband smashed cake on her face and she smashed some back. A sugar-coated foreshadowing of what was to come later.

Best time we ever had, Dean says two months later, face illuminated by fire light and the flicker of mosquitoes.

I'm draped in a lawn chair by my family's fire pit in the back yard, bare feet dangling over one side, loose hair flung over the other. We're cooking cheese weenies and I hadn't seen Dean since the wedding. Now we're rekindling memories while my parents sip beer. I smile, remembering the red helium balloon bouncing against my knee after the reception, the dancing, the bride's long face and her lace gown soiled at the edges. Two years later divorce will slip from her lips over burrito dinners, and I'm glad I have no need to utter that word.

Dean and I were dressed in yellow with no commitment or shiny bands tinting our fingers, no delicate designs sweeping over rented room floors, only singleness and blueberry soda by a fire pit later. My cousin picks her husband's empty beer cans and sweaty socks from the floor. In summers Dean and I embark on walks down long country roads, sunlight splashing our backs and the wide, yellow fields specked with cows, free hands swinging un-synchronized.

Contains Antioxidants

I remember when I pour the hot water over my hand around nine o’clock. Flesh puckers into chicken skin, and I have to sit in the sticky chair of an emergency clinic’s waiting room for the rest of the night. A nurse argues with an Amish family, breathlessly trying to convince them that the doctor’s machines and bagged liquid will save their daughter’s life. This is going to be a while, the receptionist tells me, peeking from behind her bifocals.

Now, nearly ten years later, I sit at the dining room table, pink sunlight spilling on the stained wood, waiting for the stainless-steel kettle’s whistle. Already steam is puffing from the spout’s small hole as the liquid grows hot, but I never pour water into a mug until it comes to a complete and messy boil.

My cat plods down the stairs, stretches, and winds her tortoise shell body against my leg. I reach down to touch her, and she nips at my hand. I call her a bitch and continue flipping through a collection of Scott Cairn’s poetry. I read about a dune and a moon’s blue light bleeding over red sand. No one the poet encounters believes that the hoofed mammals live in the desert, but Scott watches his moose howl to the moon with round, furry mouths. The cat swats at my leg, nose scrunched and ears pressed against her head. I kick her away, and the kettle whistles.

I push back my chair. Its legs sigh against the black and white checkered floor. Kit Kat, back arched and tiptoeing sideways across the linoleum, continues swatting at my ankles as I cross the kitchen. I can’t help but laugh at her ridiculous pose, puffed up to the girth of a rhinoceros in her mind, but about the size of a squishy bug in mine. I jump and land hard in front of her, dishes and cookie jars rattling on top of the refrigerator. She leaps, fur standing on end, and slides away into the basement.

Clouds cover the sinking sun as I pass the sink window. Looking past a wooden angel kneeling next to an olive dish and the brown leaves of a hydroponic plant, I watch snow clouds roll in thick from Lake Ontario. The snow-laden trees turn inky black as shadows creep over an already aging day, their prickly branches like twisted arthritic hands in the cold. I click a knob on the stove from HIGH to OFF and pour hot water over the tea bag. Even though I’m afraid of the burbling, fizzling, spitting water that sputters from the spout as I tip it over the cup, I keep my left arm tucked safely by my side. Clear liquid grows dark as the bag swells and drowns. Cupping my hands around the warm, yellow mug, I carry it to the table and resume my pondering.

Tea is supposed to cure cancer. I mean, it’s supposed to prevent cancer, but sometimes I wish it cured. The bitter drink is the blood of western tea leaves, thick with antioxidants and blessings from the monks. I drink it every day, sometimes three times a day, but never not at all. I wonder what would’ve happened if my stepmother drank it all her life instead of spending most of it parched and parked in front of the television with beer and pretzels. Last year she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She’s fine now, recovering well as far as we know, but sometimes I still wish I could pour warm tea all over her body. I wish tea would flood the world and cover everything that I love, everything I don’t.

I tip my head close to the mug. Steam fogs the lenses of my glasses, and I inhale, chest rising until it won’t rise any more. The warm dampness fills my lungs. Already I can taste the bitterness of soaked leaves. When it cools and is safe to swallow, the liquid slides into my throat, past a malfunctioning thyroid gland, and down into my belly where it settles like hands over an aching wound. Kit Kat saunters into the room like nothing happened.

Stapled to the end of a white string trailing from the folded bag of coagulated leaves, a paper tag is printed with the evening’s inspirational quote. Unlike Salada tea, which makes a poor attempt at humor, Yogi’s messages are profound, and I stash them in a little white drawer beneath a mirror. I am beautiful, I am bountiful, I am blissful stacked on top of Compassion has no limit. Kindness has no enemy. I save one Salada tag. It says that Real intelligence is like a river; the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. I slurp down the last bit of tea and stare out the sliding glass door.

Dad’s going in for a colonoscopy. Doctors poke at my mother’s lumpy uterus and suck her blood into plastic cylinders. My stepmother’s still waiting to find out if the radiation treatment was successful or if there’s nothing else they can do. Snow floats down, thick flakes covering the brown lumps and footprints scattered throughout the yard, and a silver spoon clinks against glass. The tea’s inside me, swimming in my veins. Kit Kat curls around my legs, lets me touch her. Scott Cairn’s book lay silent on the table. And as I reach for the teabag’s paper tab, I notice that the snow is glowing blue, blazing like a light into darkness.

The Distancing Properties of Perpetual Noise

I sit curled beneath where he sits crumpled on the couch, his eyes locked into brightness coming from the sliding glass door beyond my shoulders, and my fingers tug at loose strings from his robe. My canvas bag overflows with books. The air's stuffy and full of dust and cold. It's mid-afternoon and I spent my entire day here, wishing I were someplace warm and sandy with bodies of water spanning endlessly. He wants to know if there's still a place for him in my crowded future. He wants to know why I've suddenly drifted away like soil carried from slopes of a river bank. He doesn't actually say that, but I'm trying to make poetry out of this moment, give it a piece of something that's good.

Earlier today I leaned against the sliding glass door like rain, looking over the city from his second story apartment on the hill. Sun splashed brick-red tops of buildings, budding trees, the point of a steeple rising above them all, but I watched a fat crow bob down the sidewalk with dark feathers. I wanted to see the bird spread its wings and step into the air, leave behind the hard concrete of the looming city, and take me with her. Ever since I was a little girl, I've always wanted to fly.

I wait for him to look at me, and when he does, it's as if he sees me from a great distance. He knows that I'm already gone, drifting north to my unfinished stories and final semesters, waiting patiently for the letter that will take me away, let me migrate south. You won't even let me follow you, he says, and I look down at my hands. I won't say anything to comfort him. It would be a lie.

Outside, children's voices break what he's placed between us, and I mention I heard the kids walking down his steps again last night. For months he's pulled on his boots and flung himself from the front door, leaned over the steep flight of stairs leading down to the main road, and yelled at the kids to find another away around. They never listen to him.

More than anything I need to walk. I need to leave. Essays are waiting for me. My sculptures of dreams still need to be chiseled, scraped, smoothed out and baked in an oven so I can finally paint them with colors. But he holds on to me, wonders why everything about us still feels new. It's been two years. Things should be better now. I listen for the sound of a crow, the flapping of her wings.

Later that night, after I've gone home, he calls me. I tore down those steps after you left, he says. I finally tore them fucking down. He tells me he's sorry and I say it too. We mend the broken fabric of what we have for now, but I'm still thinking of the crow leaving the city streets, the cold corner of this part of the world, and the earth that's held her for so many years.

The Backwood

Pale dusty pathways
rimmed in pin oak and white pine,
Brawny red maples,
Old oaks and cream magnolias,
soft white birch shedding
sweet marbled skin.
Lined leaves,
ribbon sunshine
a liquid luminescence
pours purple checked valleys,
floods wild reed,
silent pools,
sparkling showers and blinking scintilla.
Slanting pillars of celestial light
where black flies and star bugs
flicker as dust

Felicitous ferns bent in prayer
Chiming, singing,
whispering Ashram.
Arc of noble dens,
humble stones,
pew boughs.
A world more forgiving than the rest

A place to breathe,
to sleep and to wake,
to begin and to end
To listen closely for the wild geese coming home

False Layout of Hell

Oral presentations are, by far, the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I sit in front of sets of eyes, lips pursed into bored frowns, folded arms. Lights pour down from the ceiling, and I imagine that every flaw of my pale face is highlighted and shadowed like an old map. Three pages of carefully typed, thoroughly contrived, lengthy notes suddenly look as if the rain has found them. I'll read a word here. A word there. Skip over the main points. Lose my place. Forget what I'm talking about. I'm numb but aware of the regret simmering in the back of my mind, ready to sprout like a weed once I've found a clear moment to think. Emily becomes a stranger, someone I thought I'd left behind between those yellow walls of middle school. I'm twelve years old again, uniformed, blinking behind large, round, metal-rimmed glasses, afraid of what's going to happen next.

I tell myself I'll sink into the softness of this negative approach to silence, let it wrap me up the way spiders tie up flies. But that's absurd, a cruel trick of the light. It's a conclusion casting out everything else that matters, like love, the steady movement of walking down an isle smelling of books, embraces, watching waves roll in, or clouds. Earlier today a plane crashed into some one's home. People died. One man said that all of a sudden, there was a huge bang... and the whole sky lit up orange. Imagine all those tears.

Life's about clinging to what we have, scooping up more, and spreading the good seeds over everything else. It's about that first brilliant day of sun, and the snow melting off rooftops and tree branches. When someone looks at me, holds onto me with their eyes, I realize that we're both still here, still drenched in life. It's in silence that I find these things. Why should I let it go?

gem

It's the perfect day for a walk.

The early sky, a watery mix of yellow and blue, tastes like spring.

Already my tongue savors pastel-coated chocolates, soft bright fruit, iced tea.

My feet miss wet grass, sand of trails, each other.

I miss warm wind braiding my hair into knots, skin against skin, flesh of emerald leaves.

I move slow, hoping patience will let this day linger.

Tip Over

Teetering, calloused heels barely touching cliff stone,
I tumble from rock into river, the concrete
world grows abstract. Orchids unfurl
into asymmetrical faces, sky drips
into swirling cosmos, stones droop over stilts,
Botticelli's fine lines swept away as dust.

People, splayed stars spinning on oily surface, join hands,
churn sapphire, emerald, charcoal blues, puce, mango, lemon lime
yellow into hypnotizing curls, question marks
braiding into mud.

Fingers to wrist.
Fingers to ankle.
Shapes moving towards End,
coated in the same armour, touching bare skin,
feeling for foreign textures
on river bottom, waiting to sink.

Flip

I can't leave the day alone without giving him a word. Orange or rouge or basking in silver. But lately our conversation's grown foreign, two tongues rambling in language I don't understand. The ones I gave him with my tongue, the auburn and lime green, the blue horizon glinting from his eyes, are slipping into parched air. Droplets suddenly forgotten in what was once dampness. Rain. Liquid that broke them from invisible shells and flung them against skin in lavish colors, bled over dead land. Tickling my ear with his silent teeth, I don't know him. Can't feel his breath. He's only a mirage. A slipping away of something sweet I never tasted but always crave. I know the colors, but some days my favorite one is grey.

Guitar

His thigh pressed
against her round
hip
Calloused fingers
flutter over
thin neck
urge Canon in D
from wide
hungry
belly

We sit
with mugs of
Mate while
outside
the bruised sky
laughs
a wide mouth
splattering stars
Pine boughs droop
under wet of winter
Coyote paws puncture
snow

I watch steam
from red mugs curl
pages inked
in silent symbols
his eyes closed
stretched hands
issue steady march
of copper music

Coyote yells at
yellow moon
pinched between
crooked fingers
of naked trees

The Healing Tree

My jaundiced eyes
boil in
pallid
weeping flesh

My body

drawn
to the spotted tree

Naked knees
wet palms
burn in drifts
of bitter ice

I crawl to ring
of brown heat
warm halo of
dry leaves
around roots

My body

against
the dying tree

I hook purple ribs
over weak limbs
feel the dark bark
cover me
grow thick
heavy
spill blood
and drink

I too
taste sap

This oak and I
grow strong
again

Following the Botanist Through Cemeteries

In a place where the dead lay
life blossoms
and we spend our days strolling
through this land in search
of orchids

Bernhardt traces flower history
scrawling from northern Australia's
orchids winding
around thick trees
down to the southern tip
where they flourish
in thin soil.
He notes helmet-shaped heads,
sac tuberoids, curled purple
sepals, and slender stems
shooting from untouched earth

I walk behind him
lapping up the Diuris corymbosa,
acianthus, chiloglottism, caudatus
and lilac spilling
from a mouth.
The words, too, roll
from my tongue as I swat away
bees and wasps with pollen-
coagulated fur,
noting how some orchids
spring from shadow

His hand cups
a pale blue head, stem, like liquid,
streaming through fingers.
I give words to the frosty impression
left after Bernhardt's heel tilts
as he kneels to breathe in
the flower's pollen

Light comes washing over us
with nectar on our lips,
orchid roots cracking free
from smooth seeds

Socks

Here it is. That reminder. That little statue in the storm, palms pressed together or held up high, eyes empty or with pupils dug into the stone, but unmoving regardless of the pose. I pulled my feet into his socks, the grey ones, and the heels stuck out like Achilles wings, ready to fly. And I'm sitting here in the old man's footwear, thinking of his widowed wife on her couch with the reading glasses in her hand like always, my hands flickering over white-lettered keys, eyes darting like marine fish suddenly submerged in fresh water. There is NOWHERE written on the page. The clouds coming in, carrying water, wet the footpath for something to sink in.

Washing Dishes

I struggle when trying to describe the pine and hemlock in our woods layered with snow. Boughs stoop low, ready to spring at the tap of a walking stick, puffs of snow shimmering like shattered glass. In the morning after a heavy fall, when the snow is still fluffy and unpacked, the needled trees look as if they withstood a storm of soap bubbles blown from the kitchen sink. Globules and globes of froth coagulate on their limbs. I feel like washing my hands or leaping into a valley filled with bubble bath snow. But this description never fits the story I'm trying to write. The tone and imagery are acres away from the theme. What in my life can be connected to soap bubbles? I like this picture, though, and I continue walking.

Being There

School started. The mind that dislodged itself from its hard corner, grew loose and multifaceted as sand carrying seashells, became a lump of dry clay today. I sat under the unbearable blood of fluorescent lights, listened to deadlines and page lengths, smiled at the people who I neglected to remember despise my presence and finally washed myself away towards home. Migraine punching my right eye. Neck in a vice. Three hundred dollars worth of books by my side in a dirty blue book bag.

Two semesters left and I'm outta this joint and heading northeast for a state nestled in New England. Or perhaps I'll venture west, living in the shadows of old cowboys and purple mountains. It doesn't matter where I go, just so long as I go.

And then we drove to Sue's, a sweet old woman who's husband passed away three years ago, to pick up some clamps my dad purchased for a couple hundred bucks. As we carried them from the basement and out into the snow, I imagined the old man's hands easing two by fours through a whirring blade. I imagined the nails and hammers and wood glue. I imagined him building things, putting loose ends together. Sue's house smells like cinnamon cookies. When I walk inside, I feel as if I'm wrapped in a blanket.

"I think of you all the time," Sue said as we embraced. We spoke in the kitchen, decided to take a trip to Flo's in the near future for 10 cent coffee and blueberry pancakes.

"I'm glad I went," I said, plodding down the steps in my black, rubber boots after saying our goodbyes.

"That's what living's all about," Dad said, turning around in the snow, face drawn into a slight, sorrowful smile, eyes deep and covered in light shining from the bulb on the front porch. "It's about being there."

coffee

Slept two hours last night. That's a lie. Slept about six, but the point is that I've been writing furiously, tearing up paper like a rabid squirrel. This morning the sky glowed pink. Liquid cotton candy swelling into a big, sugary bubble. I had to settle my excitement with a sobering mug of bitter coffee. Half a dozen hours at work permits no time for writing, little time for creative thinking when I'm busy answering people's questions about Fiorocet and Viagra and Bisoprolol and Metformin and Atenolol and Levothyroxine and... Grab the faxes. Answer the phone. Smile at the red faced man huffing and puffing over the counter, ready to punch someone over his co-pay. Hurry to the window and stand in a blast of cold air while someone writes a check - slowly. Count dusty little pills by fives. Recount the narcotics. Scrape them along the green tray with a spatula into a little rubbery vial. Pause. Look at the vial. The vial the color of an amber stone. A honey-hued vessel. Yes, it reminds me of those canyons I wrote about last night. Those rusty-walled canyons cupping the rivers I left unfinished.

Tea Time

Morning is my favorite moment. I love waking to the idea that my dreams are real. The man with his bubble farting skunk and the woman with a million colorful scarves twirling on a barber shop chair come by my house once and a while to share a pot of tea. Flying through the loop of red stone is just another daily routine as I wonder what happened to that man who fell in love with the mermaid in that purple sea. Perhaps the scientist with the lion head growing from his shoulder knows. Once I blink my eyes a few times, I realize that I've just left a world that exists only in my mind. But it doesn't matter. I'll visit again.

I love the hour between swallowing down an orange thyroid pill and breakfast. It's the only time I explore the Internet, looking up acrylic paintings of the forest and checking my e-mail to see if Bayou finally returned my inquiry. Even if they didn't, I love looking out the upstairs window at the frosty cars sliding behind the snowbanks. Sometimes I know the person sitting as a silhouette in the front seat, and I wonder where they're going. Perhaps off to work. Hopefully to share the morning with a friend.

Then there's the meal. The heavy, round bowl of morning heaping with blueberries, banana, cereal and soy milk while dark roast coffee sputters from my basement bedroom. I read books. Poetry is the best side dish for breakfast. But sometimes I flip through issues of Isotope and read about birds and radiation and the man who fell in love with nature.

Only the hum of the refrigerator, the purr of a cat, a knocking at the top of the stairs as Elmer itches his floppy ear on his bed by the closet door echoes in an otherwise empty house. Morning is the moment that I truly love people. The drifts of snow arching up the glass door show their blue bellies, their little secrets, and suddenly something inside me, too, opens.

mud

i couldn't. i couldn't see Tuesday clearly without being swallowed by the fact that he was my child. i couldn't write about the blood trickling from his mouth with the sharp teeth the color of pearls. the way the course fur, the black-striped pattern circling over the color of slate on his back ticking in the wind was once soft and smelled woody like burning leaves. Those tiny, stiff paws resting on the asphalt once kneaded my chest in the early mornings when pink light spilled on the lace curtains. I tried to write about his body in the road and the golden yellow of his eyes fading, but the lump of guilt, of sorrow, of regret stuck in my throat like a pill. All that I could say was that I remember his grey and his yellow. His red. They came together for the first time. The road was a stony river rushing him away from me. The road was a stony river biting my ankles. The road was a stony river swallowing us both.

shelf

This new thought. It entered my mind after vegan chocolate chip cookies and a mug of soy milk for dinner. Two cups of tea. The sky coming down as snow. I'll collect people on the shelves of my heart. Building bookcases with wood gathered from the swollen rivers the beavers helped raise. The rivers they raise after collecting trees, dragging them to the trickle of water, packing them together with mud. The trees that gathered sunlight in the summer, leaves in the fall, snow in winter, the pungent white flowers in spring. Where they sprouted from the earth. The earth that gathered their ancestors, turned them back into soil. I'll gather the sturdy, chipped branches gnawed to points at the ends and hammer them over the edges of two by fours. Varnish. Let dry. Fill my shelf full of people and trees and small mammals changing geography. I'll thumb through their pages. Understand them. Never forget them. Collect the profound details scattered in their lives and make stories of my own. Put them in a book. Pass them on for others to read.

The First Word

All day I've been lounging in my pajamas reading poetry and novels, drinking tea, and pretending to chip away at the pile of scholarship applications sitting blank on my desk like a stone. I listened to music, washed away the bold lines of consciousness as I lost myself in others' lives. Pale light coming from the frosty outside bathed my body all day. I crept down to the darkness of my room and fell into a somber, waking dream.

Already 3:30 and the day is nearly done. I could write essays for scholarships, scribble down poetry, sneak away into the woods coagulated with snow and let adrenaline spark the cold wick of my creativity candle. If this will be my life as a professional writer - silent alarm clocks, a laptop blinking on a white desk with no one but myself encouraging me to open it - can I bear it? This loneliness?

I'm allowed to curl up in a little grey ball of coffee and chocolate and unwritten words and let a day drift by like smoke in a wind. It's beautiful. And even now I'm plucking the last few sweet crumbs of ambition from the ground.

Dad is snoring on the couch and our black cat Cletus is basking in his breath. The heater hums from the basement.

At least I've collected the papers, clipped them together, and placed the stack by my computer for another day's work. The pastel sky and clouds like a river of steam make me want to cry.
I've begun to gnaw at my lips and wonder if I really want to be a part of this world built of words.

I want chocolate.
I want lace.
I want that pattern from the sun when it slices through the blinds.
I want to crawl under the warm, dark covers filled with feathers and dream every last breath away. I have no favorite word now. Just sleep - like death - blooming in the back of my mind and my fingers digging into the cold, dark soil after a rain. I claw through the grass of this dream, cold and green glass glimmering in salty wetness. The earth will cover me and when the soft, churned soil hardens under the beat of rain, the heavy body of snow, the strange footsteps, I'll perish. I don't want a stone marking my grave. I want a tree. An oak or something fragile like birch. My skin will grow swarthy in the soil. Worms and the white, rumpled bodies of grubs will find tunnels and slits and rotted places where they can slip inside, begin to taste me, help my flesh decompose into my mother earth. Roots will wind around pale bones. Crush them. Squeeze them into powder. I will disperse after years have tumbled by like boulders set free. One great leap is death. One great leap and all these blue words will mean nothing when this language is reformed and replaced, reconstructed as dialects and cultures sweep their heavy arms over these delicate bits of language, like wind scrapping the shingles from a house.

They will be nothing. Just ink spilled onto paper in strange symbols.

But I won't give this up. I'm in love. And that's worth living for.

frozen rain

They are drifting down like dreams these snow speckled clouds veiling the star pointed sky, and we spoke over salad and lemonade-tinted water wishing we were wading through the clear, calm waters and black sand of an exotic beach. We were hoping to find something tonight, and we did as the snow clouds grew furious over our little world. We grew small in this big place. This frozen rain. This wind-bent world. This night.

the first step

begin. the hardest part of moving foward is the first step. all you have to do is begin.