write about a moment when your body finally said ‘yes’.
i thought my body had finally said yes
when the affirmatives rushing out of my mouth
ripped through the walls
and woke up everyone in your apartment complex
like an evening train.
the next morning we found the yesses scrawled in pen on our faces
printed in the pillows
fluffed in the scraps of blankets on the edge of the bed
in dirty clothes fallen spilling out yesses where we’d thrown them in the dark.
but not knowing that yes
was more than not no
could be more than something said in increasingly higher octaves
left in the linens
i didn’t recognize the shapes the weight of a yes
when i was bent bound backward
buckling under nos
nos that tickled my esophagus like dandelions
gone to seed
nos like wishes on flowers in girls hair
nos like heat and power and bouquets and snickers
bars and dripping molasses
nos like the space between a chest and the heart
beating empty but heavy filled with yes like all the plates on a nautilus machine that i’ve never been able to lift
lifting me up overhead clean and jerk
nos like galloping, mutual contradictions, pinky swear secret orations
growing louder and deeper and deeper like voices in caves on beaches
nos like my own voice getting further and further away from me
nos like redolent echos
no
no
no
no
yes.
describe a hand in great detail
dora, if i think about piano lessons
and your hands on my hands on clementi’s thirty sixth opus
i want to vomit.
i think about staring out the living room window to the right of the piano
at the empty lawn and the sun streaming setting on the street
on my sheet music
for ten years
and how in all those years my feet never grew long enough to reach
the pedals without sitting on two telephone books
my mother yelled from the kitchen
over my indignant fermatas and the evening news
behind a steel stock pot of boiling spaghetti and frying meatballs
“Feel the music!”
and i could feel her mimicking what feeling the music would feel like,
waving the slotted spoon like a blind conductor.
and i want to vomit.
i hate vomiting.
i have a fear of throwing up– the last time it happened i was eleven and had strep throat and didn’t eat for four days and then the swelling came down and i swallowed some soup and i threw it up twenty minutes later over and over again– in the bathtub, i kept looking at my reflection in the bathtub spout, shiny and clean in the curved metal, which my mother almost never forgave me for having to clean up
but I would vomit the print of your hands on my hands on my minor waltzes
off if i could mute history
with a mouthful of my own sour bile.
your rings, and your boils,
the fear that my skin was going to fall of my bones and my husband would die and i’d have to leave russia and i’d be alone and smell bad
I’d sit here for a week head cocked under porcelain
if it would mean you’d never insisted on teaching me proper hand position
and i’d never learned the book of clementi’s sonatinas
and it had been just me
and mom and the meatballs and the sunset and
the music
of the 6 o’clock news instead.
an old freewrite i found this week, maybe there’s something here. sometimes i just want my writing teacher or classmates to just say yes or no. and sometimes i ignore the voices in my head and type everything up because it makes me feel like a real writer.
tidbit of the week: pinocchio translates in italian as ‘pine head’.
back when snooping was an acceptable hobby i spent an awful lot of time hiding under sofas, flipping through old photo albums trying to find images of myself. so much time that the memories of the years contained in those albums collided directly with what the albums themselves looked like: 1995 was as much about red and yellow and purple watercolored flowers as it was about a fourth of july pool party at my neighbor’s house. 1994 was blue and maroon paisley the same way it was about girl scouts and my sister’s bad haircuts.
most of the albums were fair game, but given my entirely self-serving mission, i needed to crawl under a piece of furniture to feel safe. it pleased my mother to find me nestled under a chair, taking interest in our family. i did enjoy the evidence of my most recent birthday party, photos that had a glare when the tv was on because they were still so shiny, photos of my first elementary school band concerts. looking for one of my legs sticking out of the trumpet section, seated somewhere in the back behind the flutes. my real passion, though, was for albums whose status as public fodder for collective memories was questionable. they were already falling apart, the albums from the early 80’s, years before i existed that i associated with brown pleather, gold lettering, and a four box set of scaly maroon volumes, rather than george bush or the Rangers winning the stanley cup, or a particularly devastating hurricane. i liked to imagine my mother back then with the newly developed prints,
ordering, filing, and dropping them into their plastic slots in a thoughtful, playfully chronological order, photos that ended the year of my birth and resumed six years later, at the incidence of my brother’s birth.
most of my time under the furniture was concerned with this absence. Running my hands over what I liked to think was maroon snakeskin, looking for the record of myself, over and over again each time thinking some photos had gotten stuck together or fallen out. That i had missed a pull out leaf, that i had forgotten to pull out the third or fourth book in the series. That I would miscount and not notice myself in photos I had ignored in order to make a point.
There were so many others. My parents. My parents on a boat. in a car. My mother smiling in a bikini, my father reading a newspaper, flexing his muscles like a muscleman. My parents hugging in a dark, woodpaneled bar, drunk. Wearing sweatshirts, swollen apple cheeks, immortal. My sister. Screaming, crying, sleeping across my mother’s dark eyed swolled sleepy chest, covered in spaghetti in a high chair, in a baby seat on the playground, a bowl cut running naked through our grandmother’s house. Standing on a park bench in the rain, standing next to a clown, sitting on her father’s shoulders. Wearing garfield the cat facepaint, hanging upsidedown the three of them, endless portraits of the protofamily.
At the end of the fourth book I make my appearances. A newborrn asleep on a table. And then a two year old sitting next to my aunt, holding a newly born cousin, an amusing crown of blonde but big jewish curls. Smiling at my sister’s kindergarten graduation. A happy, smiling baby. Easy blue eyes, in no rush to talk or walk, a sleeper. a happy baby. There are never any other details. I asked often, for clues, an oral history– who was I? But even my mother remembered that time as one obfuscated by sister, colicky until the age of nine, and then a late term miscarriage shortly after my birth, and the ultimate arrival of my brother, sire to the throne, a ten year absence of sleep.
I was born to be happy with the fact of my own existence, an odd birthright. I was born from two people who barely stopped feeling like they were pretending to be adults, an august night drenched in potential, the mosquitos knocking into the window screens, hoping to find a way into the house they were renting near the racetrack. I was a long day of work finally over, a month without rain, a settling of ease into night after the baby finally went down. I was a moment on a porch swing between two people who could no longer remember why they had ever lived a life without the other, two happy people and their baby.
“Mom, why are there more photos of everyone else than there are of me?” The beginnings of politics, favorites, an iron forged identity (my seventh grade english teacher called me Hephaestus, the blacksmith of mount olympus), histories that would boil over and burn two decades later. A daughter eating eggs in her kitchen three thousand and twenty six miles away whom no one has seen in months, who has never remembered to send thank you cards, who didn’t fly in for the wedding.
And now I imagine who I might have been then. how they might have looked at me in the swing on the playground, a mid morning sun lighting up my onesie. what my first words might have sounded like on film, and how my stroller squeaked, damp with my baby drool. how they would have captured a baby with a personality all her own, like all parents say, bewildered that this child who cannot hold up her own neck yet can have patterns and thoughts and trademark looks and a reliably funny way of telling jokes. pictures of my best baby faces. I imagine what I might have looked like covered in cake on my first birthday. Or spaghetti, an oblivious mess, playing mr. magoo with my noodles. I hold out a small sleeve of hope for a still stuck together fold, a bias in my own vision, a family member coming home on a vacation with a cardboard box, here is the proof, this was you, don’t you remember?
But it is best to find myself, my earliest self, by imagining the night I was crafted. The moments of my conception where I was the cool side of a pillow. The blue of white bedsheets in moonlight coming in through the window. A babysitter asleep on a couch waiting for the parents to come home. When I was the unspoken promise of never dying. When I was the smell of someone else’s barbecue, the sound of a car parking on the gravel driveway next door. A winning ticket from the racetrack fluttering in my father’s shirt pocket, a glass of white wine with ice. When I was that more intimate kind of laughter that opens your chest cavity. When my cells were grafted with the summer just before it began to end, just before a chill surprised them, made them wish they had a sweater when they sat on the porch swing at night, rocking back and forth in each other’s arms, camera lying on the kitchen counter next to empty canisters of film.
ten minutes: write about a hidden talent or something you practice in secret.
a talent for lies.
lies like embellishments like seed pearls on prom dresses
like hyperbole like all the time
like were-objectivity, the truth.
a talent for yes,
yes like probably, like next week, like almost certain, yes like silence
an inconspicuous absence
of no.
a talent for no,
no like never, like maybe, like don’t think so, can’t didn’t,
like not answering a phone, no, never.
a talent for lying,
too early in bed
lying there with a someone else,
a talent for fucking
with, for saying that–
was great.
a great talent for exits, impossible escapes,
walking down hundred year old sets of stairs in silence
on big toes
sixth stair skipped slid down a banister slipped out a screen door,
i’ll call you tomorrow,
a talent for lies.
ten minutes: write about a beautiful error
a beautiful error i have been
i have been mistreatment
mistreatment, i have been years of time
of time spent lying flat in a bed missing
missing years of education and obligation, other women.
myself and an other woman, years of us,
us our smiles, drooping
photos of our droopy smiles, bruises, scratches.
scratched, infected gangrenous photographs of smiles in the sun.
in the sun knew how to love each other,
other wise forgetting on days it rained or snowed or it was night.
at night, sleeping to the soundtrack of what we think we are
we are each other’s superificial scars and photo sets
set wounds and colors, gorgeous sunsets
sunsets red and purple woven like that only because of years of pollution.
bronx zoo
in march the giraffe house was empty:
a single bench, bolted down
straw spread over the ground
a backdrop of still clouds on sky blue, a tall, empty room.
a pen moving in my lap, on the bench, bolted down, scratching
like a lottery ticket
like there’s a one in ten chance i would
uncover something good
about the way i write about being here with you.
at first three shadows, and then
three long necks stretch
over my shoulder,
watch me de-etch ‘i miss who we used to be’ for the ninth time
in my notebook.
startled, six wet, brown eyes take my pens in their teeth,
bend at the hips
to restructure my line breaks;
remove references and
add visually interesting rhymes, space
for my silence to breathe
words back into my own life.
they stop to munch on hay and revise,
through lanky sighs,
they tell me i can’t write that i miss her like spinach misses eggs in the refrigerator’,
that maybe i should think about doing something else if my best is an allusion to frittata.
there’s a great new exhibit about bats in the Hall of Darkness, they say,
black tongues licking my looseleaf.
or maybe the lion feeding at 2.
But I want my pen back, I need that notebook,
I thought I was alone in here.
They stamp knock-kneed and bony, move to eat my crumpled cross outs,
we would be at the top of the food chain if the food chain was all about editing poetry
they screech, reach for the buttons on my jacket
but I am zipped up and gone
off to the butterfly garden
the sun in my face
to see what the world of invertebrates has to offer.
reasons to stay
pluots.
pacific standard time.
because there are three months left on my bus pass; and i have been known to sit stolid in my house if i cannot find quarters for the bus.
crocuses and tulips, but mostly daisies. the way the daises around here all know that i’ve been looking for them all summer. the way the daisies have been talking, passing notes, giggling about the lovers they’ve had their petals pulled off for. the way i found that last clump waiting for me like teenagers, waiting for a ride home outside the movies. the way the barista pulls my shots, pours my rosette and says ‘nice flower’.
july. babeland. the croissant breakfast sandwich at the starlife on the oasis cafe and how i fell in love with a girl in a city over a sandwich on a saturday when we were sitting on their green couch and i was wiping greasy eggs off of my chin between bites.
the view of puget sound from the viaduct:
water– looking at herself in the mirrored sheets of high rise glass just beyond the shipyard, practicing her marilyn monroe face in their windows, tickling the corners of the office buildings, begging the men inside, pulling them by their neckties, to come out and watch her sunset. and me, moving submerged through her reflection, in my car like its a submarine holding my breath until to we get to the tunnel, because water is falling all over herself to come and tap upon my windows and whisper into my ear ’stay a little longer’.
fear.
the act of waking up in a room full of open windows without a sunrise and no longer feeling its absence upon my breakfast tea. this is the place where i learned i liked breakfast tea.
a climbing return on investment. time. olives. ease.
because i have departure-induced asthma. every time i think about leaving, i wheeze.
reasons to go
Autumn. the way my mother says ‘i love you’ during our phone calls. because the leaves back home need me to come and watch. they’re starting their show without me and i don’t want them to grow up and go to therapy and talk about how i was never there.
because ‘i love you’ is starting to sound like ‘you’re never there’.
italian food. bagels.
himalayan blackberry. because I already promised my backpack that i would, and the novels on my bookshelf are starting to make fun of my guidebooks who worry they’ll never be good enough to open.
the way people move here because they think they can escape things that are difficult, like their families. or racism.
inertia. ennui.
the temperature of the water– what good is an ocean you can’t swim in, no matter how hot she is for you, you can never submerge yourself between her kelpy, undulating legs; when she shows her sandbars i need to be able to stray from her shores.
let me be open
let me tear
a wet, brown paper bag hearing the lunch bell
spilling forth chicken salad sandwich cheese nips and juice box
barely holding it all
in, clutched by a warm hand
bathed in the light of the cafeteria.
let my ribcage irrupt
on the airplane
let oxygen masks drop down from my sternum
so that others can calm
themselves down first, and then their children
during a pressure change in the cabin.
let my dead branches bear fruit
buds and flowers and green in the spring
the smell of new roses and soap
astonishing the neighbors.
let me be the blackstrap molasses in your peanut sauce
stir me in,
let me bear weight
let me have a metallic aftertaste.
make room for me on the ground,
let there be two spaces for my feet.
let my hands fade in the evening
without trepidation.
let me be dizzy and limpid.
and let the grass tickle my arches
when i move.
dear liz,
i think you’re in thailand. maybe you’re in indonesia? i forget. in any case, why are you on facebook? and googlechat? i don’t understand. i wonder what it will be like to travel to a far away place and be reminded of home when i look at my gmail inbox. is that why you are in an internet cafe? i am so confused.
last week i finished working at the coffee shop and began working at farmers markets full time. in the span of a week, my life no longer involves waking up at 5 o clock, having three bosses all of whom are the kind of bumbling folk i always seemed to get paired up with during junior high school math class, or making lattes with coffee that reeks of oppression and colonialism with lopsided rosettes on top for anyone. my hands smell like broccoli instead of coffee. you would think broccoli doesn’t have a smell, but everything in the brassica family smells a little bit like hearty, older gentleman farts. it is like recognizing the scent of an old lover years later in a weird place, except it happens to me every year, and they’re vegetables. not lovers.
which reminds me, i am very much without love. of the four people living in my house, three of us are single, and we talk too much about wanting. we want to have terrible relationship drama, like our fourth housemate. we want to get bad love poetry sent to us by post, we want to fall asleep during morning sex, we want someone to put sunblock on our backs at the beach without making any jokes. i guess you would tell me to shut up and go on a date, because i’m in a country full of queers, and next weekend is pride and i’m going and i’ve never been to pride and if i threw a rock into the crowd and said ‘kiss me i’m lonely!’ someone would probably oblige me (if i remembered to brush my teeth, which, truthfully, i work on). really, i am not without love at all. for the first time in my life, i feel like i am constantly surrounded by people who want to love me. if i was really lonely, i wouldn’t complain about it on the internet.
i can’t believe you’re wherever you are. that is so far away (wherever it is)! do you think about that? do you think ‘right now i am x thousand miles from where i had my ninth birthday party’? i feel like i think about that sometimes and i am only in seattle. for example, it is three thousand and twenty six miles to my parents’ house. actually, they moved last week to a house four miles down the road in the general direction of i-90, so it is three thousand twenty two now, but i think about numbers and facts like that and i get mired in all of the statistics. my head might explode when i am in new zealand. i know you saw it on facebook, and i swore i’d never update my friends via facebook, but it is so easy, and i am officially one way ticketed to new zealand! i am leaving four months from tomorrow, i have saved enough money to actually pay off most of my student loans in one lump sum (again with the boggling) except i am going to spend it slloooowly on things like transportation and hostels and trinkets for all of those people who love me (you’re all getting postcards). things i feel a lot of: pride, initiative, lucky, crazy, afraid, and like i’m indiana jones, without all of the training and special skills. for two years i think the people in my life thought i would never get the cojones or the dollars to do what i’m about to do, and now that i have a little from column a and a little from column b i feel like i’m saying ‘i told you so’ to folks who would respond ‘well you’re still an idiot’.
on saturday i wound up with 20 pounds of strawberries (things like this happen to farmers market workers more often than you would think) and with the help of two friends, made a dozen large jars of no sugar (as per the marne friendly diet) honey maple strawberry spread. this references both my new job schedule and my wanting love (ergo wanting someone to spread strawberry spread upon) so i put it in its own paragraph.
and that is where i think i will end.
come home safe, liz. and tell me everything.
marne j
a one way plane ticket to new zealand costs 638 dollars and 16 cents, if you leave from seattle on october 24th. i know this because i just typed all of the numbers on my american express gold card in the right order in the right place on the cheap tickets dot com website and now i have a spot for myself on a big plane, a boeing 777, to auckland, on october 24th. i will be away indefinitely, or until they start denying my credit card.
