her sleeves ripped open
her lips parting
her trembling palms raised high up to the ceiling
to let the heavens shine
but her heart still cringing
with the sound of each beat
and her tongue still choking
the words she would speak
Tabloid articles are short. Episodes of kids’ shows are short. Grocery lists are short if you’re a poor college student with very little spending money, and patience is short if you have to work a full-time job just to scrape up that little bit of cash. Mini-skirts are short and goldfish’ memories are short and the time it takes for a larvae to change into a fully grown bug is pretty short, really, but life is not short. Life is anything but short.
dry heaving
it’s the stale taste in your mouth when you didn’t brush your teeth the night before, the same taste as love gone on too long or relationships gone sour. it’s the endless scrubbing to find some fresh start, the scraps of crusty toothpaste you take to work, and the embarrassment when you realize all the implications of white specks by your lips and
it’s the abuse, the not-so-gentle prodding you subject yourself to, and then like a candle flame it all extinguishes and you are nothing but a quivering curl of smoke
and all the channels show the same movie on endless repeat. they show it but at different intervals, so you flip from station to station and watch the same scene 16 times and then the doorbell rings and for a while you think it’s just a ringtone in the movie but no, that’s your doorbell
it’s the expectations and the letdown, the pathetic way you stare longingly after the mailman as he trudges down the asphalt maze of suburbia. all you wanted was a conversation, some smalltalk salvation, but you retreat to your house like a scorned child and realize that your rhythm is off and your lone movie scene isn’t playing anymore and
in the end, it comes down to your father, who is gone forever despite the pulse and the breathing and the dejected little neurons sick of firing. it’s the guilt of ever leaving your mother’s womb, it’s the curve of your stomach over the scale, it’s the desperation with every bite you can’t resist. it’s not even enticing, it’s just you, knees pressed against chest as you huddle on the sidewalk, and you think if you ever get a tattoo it will say “a long day it’s been” because sometimes it feels like your whole life is just one day. each moment is a monotonous sliver of routine, a second ticking away on some irrelevant Tuesday afternoon, and when you put the thousands of them together all you get is 24 hours, enough to make a TV series out of but not enough for a sequel.
in the end, it’s not even enough to write a poem or spawn a painting. the more you think about it, the more you realize that this is failure, this moment, this apathetic dry-heaving of sorrow where nothing really comes out, that you have already failed, that you are losing something even as you blink so why fear losing a little more, so what are you even afraid of? it is your arms as you press each key, heavy and habitual, the only changing pattern the bruises and cuts, and even those you have to circle to really notice. you have to mark you own wounds because
in the end, it is not even noticeable. you can’t even place it because it has no name, and you can name it, but you don’t want to. if you name it you start getting attached to it, and some things are better left wild.
Maybe this is how it starts
your eyes a faint reflection in the water
the fish swimming through your pupils
they feast on mosquitoes, lillies,
one tear trailing your cheekbone
you fled
maybe if you hadn’t shut the door so hard
maybe if your shoes had been tied
maybe if you’d said “thank you”
on christmas, 2005
or paid a tax on karma
then you could stop crying
and the fish would stop growing
their opposable fins
and filling their gills
with disposable sins
My thing about Amendment One
is that if people in favor of it just said, “Religiously, I oppose this.” Or, “I have moral issues with it for whatever reason, and they might not make sense to you, but it’s just my personal ethics,” I would disagree, and I might make a comment about separation of church and state, but I wouldn’t keep arguing with them because I DO firmly believe that everyone has the right to their own opinion and people should be allowed to believe and vote how they want.
But it annoys me when people put up flimsy, irrational legal arguments in favor of it and then, when those arguments are clearly debunked and picked apart by details of the legal text, the person gets upset and says they’re being “attacked.”
I’m not going to attack your personal OPINION, but if you pretend your reasoning is scholarly, secular, and objective then don’t get upset by a scholarly, secular debate.
Also, I really want to make this my facebook status but I generally try NOT to start flame wars.
The Twins
In the train station lobby, the woman watched her targets from behind the obituary section of last week’s New York Times. She liked to do her scrutinizing privately so that she could judge without being judged in return. She would hunch her shoulders and squint her eyes and stick her nose out really far, as if somehow she could hide her face behind the nasal protuberance, and if anyone tried to strike up a conversation she gave them such a condescending glare that they quickly remembered how late they were running and left her alone.
Her targets this morning were twins, a boy and a girl, maybe seven years old. She could tell they were twins because they both had identical one-dimpled smiles and the exact same habit of biting the left side of their lips when they were concentrating. They looked like street urchins, given their ripped jeans and oversized flannel shirts, but you could never tell with kids these days. Fashion was an irrational and fickle lord.
What the woman liked best about them was that they didn’t seem fussy. They were just wandering back and forth, going from the ticket counter to the sandwich shop, occasionally bending down and picking up a ticket stub or a soggy magazine or a soda bottle. The boy kept rustling his hair and gnats would fly out, but he didn’t squeal or get grossed out. He just shooed them away and, on one occasion, pointed out to his sister, “If I had wheels instead of feet, I could be a garbage truck.” The woman liked that. She liked it even better when the sister responded, “You already are. You’re full of crap!” and then giggled maniacally at the forbidden word she had spoken.
The woman liked the way they looked, too - they would look good in the back of a minivan or framed in a family portrait. They had scruffy auburn hair, ramrod straight, not those pretentious blonde curls you always saw in movies or magazines, and they were skinny without ribs poking out. The woman was pleased, yes.
She adjusted her hat, trying to think of a good way to lure them over. They didn’t seem to be paying her any heed, and if she called out a policeman or pesky Samaritan might take notice, but she also didn’t want to wait too long. Little kids were prone to disappear in the three seconds it took you to yawn. They were always so antsy.
And just then, the boy looked over at her. It was eerie. His eyes were tired, nervous, not nearly as calm as she had expected from the careless way he wiped bugs from head. He mumbled something to his sister without taking his eyes off the woman, and the girl looked over, too. She seemed downright terrified.
And then, of course, a train came by. It was so inconveniently timed, so cliched, the woman couldn’t help but feel like she was in a B-grade movie written by an unoriginal grad student after a long night of drinking. When the freight train had passed and the tracks were quiet again, the children were gone, but it wasn’t even the loss of her prey that bothered the woman. It was the feeling that somehow, the boy hadcalledthe train. That was preposterous, of course, but still. The woman shook her head and mentally scolded herself, muttering that reading obituaries was no excuse for believing in the supernatural. Why, if she wasn’t careful she’d be going to church and buying stocks and paying her taxes.
No sir, she thought, beliefs were dangerous things. Better to avoid them altogether. She sighed, feeling exposed, and gathered together her things. She could pick a new target some other day.
