thedustwhispered

thedustwhispered

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you are thinking of the way her hair falls in the low light. the specific heat of her nape under your hand as blood and neurons move beneath the surface. everything pulsating, everything waiting for a beat, then another. you are thinking of the silence between you as it stretches, the threat of rebound. your hands laced together. your hands stirring the ice in your drinks. how her face is the same, but just slightly altered, just enough to be altogether familiar. the years an untraversed territory, time made a physical and weighty thing. the compulsion to cup it in your hands floats to the surface and dips back under again. strips of fly tape hang from the ceiling, half-filled, swaying under a lazy overhead fan. her wrist rotates as she talks. her voice is carefully cavalier around a tight throat. you consider the way the earth is filled with shallow graces, the unglamorous real estate of death. how lumbar that could have been a ship’s hull is made a coffin and returned to the earth. you think that every tragedy possible has played itself out before, all that changes is where you’re seated in the audience. the body degrading, language becoming inadequate, the way we ask “were you close?” as if death were a blast site.

life is messy and i don't enjoy it. every day, another wine glass. french names too shy to leave my tongue until forced. meanwhile, i am 22 and washing behind the ears seems more and more a cultivated lifestyle. you, who still vacuum under the bed, consider the way the days swell and fatten under the spring sun.

in the dream i am walking through the field by our childhood home where corn used to grow some summers ago. wondering as i go, fingers just grazing the uncultivated grass–if wildflowers have found their way here, if the dirt knows it can make something of the dead, if the dead know the field does not know want even as it wants. in the dream i walk upon myself, my strange eyes that peek through the holes where seed would be sown heavy with waiting, aware of the burden of desire.

in the dream i am walking through the field by our childhood home where corn used to grow some summers in the past. wondering as i go, fingers just grazing the wild grass--if wildflowers have found their way here, if the dirt knows it can make something of the dead, if the dead know the field does not know want even as it wants. in the dream i walk upon myself, my strange eyes that peek through the holes where seed would be sown heavy with waiting, aware of the burden of desire.

pawn

leaving girlhood is not yet knowing to look back taught the bite of desire, someone's blunt teeth, gnawing, and the pain is newness, you think this is love a ring of bruises around the neck, you think the wet heat of your childish name what stays, is molded

drop

i close my eyes and picture my heart, imagining i might find some glimpse of the elusive self. staring through eyelids flushed red in the light, they tremble as the heart trembles; the heart, a misdirection of inquiry. (the mind conjures diagrams of bodies, arteries and gristle, carefully indexed. something in me falls away.)

self reinvention: i took a hammer to my ribs, precisely, pounded until my chest was an empty cavity, dry and wordless. at my feet, a horrible mess. i did this to myself; it was my hands gripping the hammer. on my best days, i recognize this as a lie.

ferry

growing up is stress crying; crying to cry; crying from the panic of sudden existential crises; alone-at-4-am crying, using eye drops to flush out the blood; weeks of waking from meaningless nightmares, crying over lovers you’ve never met; remembering singular moments in time without any certainty—and crying.

folded in half on a thursday night, breathing deep. remembering the feelings you’ve lost (even that feeling of loss). times when all goodness meant you hadn’t yet thought to make contingency plans. your lungs are bigger now. childhood: the corner of the local library, painted to look like the sea, the lighthouse column a solitary rising giant. a warm afternoon spent writing apology letters in detention, on the side of a kindergarten class learning their “then” and “than”s. mother, on her knees before you, asking you not to be angry anymore. drawing pictures of little girls in little dresses at po po’s; she stuck them to the walls with the stickers from her fruit. the hallway you learned to run down, where you also learned to sink into dark. waiting to talk about your day until the sun set, until you couldn’t find the words anymore. the misuse of memory; trying to convince myself i existed in someone’s heart, trying again and again to feel whole.

god

i was born from fire. my tears turned to steam as i wailed, gnawing fragile tissue with dragon's teeth. the delivery left scars on my mother. her skin crawls, she said once, nails raising welts down her arms. almost two decades later and it rains. she still feels the ache deep inside her, body a temple left to ruin.

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