eight legs

I think it’s time to spill. Drippy brain ink spreading blue planets in my pocket. Surely there is something to say about the maple who’s changed into her tie-dye dress in the front yard. Her leaves are taking turns at green, gold, and umber, and the sparrows cannot stop talking about it.

A spider has rappelled from the gutter to the evergreen shrub outside the window. One strand of web splits the glass, and it bothers me a little that it’s not exactly a 90-degree turn from the frame. I want to fetch a protractor and measure its angle. I bet it’s more like 110-degrees. It’s not a triangle; I can tell you that. I have seen enough spider webs to know any spinner knows her angles. This one must be frightfully embarrassed at her shoddy workmanship. Maybe she got distracted (or eaten) and could not finish. I can relate.

I have my own half-spun webs dangling around crevices. The only pattern, the only angle: wide, gaping, trailing-off-edness. Songs that stop mid-bridge. Stories that go quiet mid-sentence. Colors that fade mid-line mid-canvas. All eight legs of me, and I cannot get to the end of the block. Tragic, all this start and stop. Hair-raising (and then falling).

I could take a lesson, maybe, from the relentless forward roll of Season. “Finish what you start, Dear. Shed your leaves, snow, grow, and burn until you shed again.”

I think it’s time to spill.

island

“…for even an island isn’t an island, dear.”

you know this, right? that surrounded by water,  it grows or recedes depending on tide.

an island is always occupied.

and so this thing you’ve built

this isolation you’ve constructed

your own sweet brain, please follow

has turned on you,

folded itself into a very private note.

that thing you think you hold secret, is not

secret.

not private.

it’s on my note, too.

and hers.

and his.

we are the same poem over and over, and our

stanzas connect

and repeat.

isolation does not exist. open your note.

you are not floating. rest.

you are carried. even when you are running.

so you might as well not.

and besides which,

if you are only your illness,

only your isolation,

only your resignation to separate…

you will sink, (but not really)

because you cannot rest all that you are on that which does not exist.

charcoal smudge

It should have been peaceful, but it wasn’t–the view outside the picture window, trees in silhouette, charcoal lines against charcoal smudge houses, two charcoal stamp cars parked against the black street. The sky was losing its blue, and the neighbor’s light was on, orange through the front window and the porch.

Why was he awake, she wondered?

He thought the same sitting in his chair in the front room, staring across the black street, through the charcoal trees, to the one charcoal stamp car sitting in front of her house by the mailbox. Why is she awake?

They’d never met. Six years, and not a single exchange. Houses like cubicles on a fading block, the people inside rarely groundhogging up through the chimneys to say hello or ask for kleenex. He’d helped her dig her car out of the snow once, buried fender-deep at the end of the driveway. Why hadn’t she asked his name?

Long gray hair in a pony tail. Blue-collared shirt and work boots. He wore three fingernails long. Maybe that’s why. She hated long fingernails. But still, she should have asked.

He knew her name was Margaret; he’d kept a piece of mail arriving in his box by mistake. It wasn’t important mail–just an invitation to a book fair somewhere on the east side. He went instead. He bought a book about gardening and had half of a mind to leave it with the invite in her mailbox, but he didn’t.

Curly brown hair that hung just to her jawline. She wore glasses and could not keep them up when she shoveled the front walk in her man’s winter coat. He never helped–only once with the car. He should have helped more.

Should have. But six years is a long time to live with should. A window closed, took with it an invitation to connect. And now in the pre-dawn, as the neighborhood relearns its color, charcoal trees line a black street, where unnamed people nail their front doors shut.

be the ball

Formidable, fortuitous, forceps. There weren’t nearly enough f-words. The -f- is sneaky, makes you do obscene things with your lips.

Fuzzy.

Flaming.

Fandango. She could dance if she wanted, wind her body into the shape of an -f- then a g, an h, an entire choreography miming letters into sentences. “Be what you speak:” an instruction. “You become what you say:” a warning. It was never enough to write them.

I will climb into the juice of this word, she thought, a pencil dangling like a spent cigarette from her mouth. I’ll drive it from the inside.

She would compose sentences from forearms, couplets out of phalanges; she would run with entire paragraphs hidden in her femurs. She would channel epics through the pores of her forehead. She would be epic, if only she could write it all inside. Be the pen!

Be the ball!

Eyes on prize. Shoot from hip. Are what eat. Become what say. Bloom where grow. Amen.

tributaries

Tiny tiny tiny, like the misplaced fuzzy tuft of carpet lint in the middle of a crosswalk, she there with her toes in the weeds under trees as old as mountains as old as sky as old as God. Make me smaller, please. She could not get minuscule enough.

Her thoughts too big, voice too loud, hands too clumsy, disaster too widespread. She left craters where there were anthills, and she breathed apologies. Everything was wrong; at least were she as small as Nothing, the wrong would shrink. It would fit into a baby mouse’s thimble. A flea on a baby mouse’s thimble. An atom of air on a flea on a fly on a baby mouse’s thimble.

She crossed the street and into the parking lot where cracks spread like tributaries on a topographical map. She followed them, counted them. She itemized her surroundings when anxiety started to swell. Too many to count, and she stopped. She stopped enough to wonder how the cracks formed. Did they pop up all of a sudden? Not a speck on Tuesday, but suddenly, at 6:23 on Wednesday morning, crack: There they were? Or did they rip slowly through the tar and concrete? Rising from white to gray to black? Had anyone thought to snap their evolution frame by frame?

Of course not, she said to no one. Things like this take time to break; we just wait to notice.

fresh.

“Let’s start fresh,” she said.

“No such thing,” said he.

dead jelly

The radio was on, and she pushed the chalky blue line of pastel into a smooth arc toward the top of the paper, nearly full already. The line fanned into a pocket of orange, left chalk dust in the shape of the moon or a planet.

“A jelly fish?” he asked.

She felt him standing in the doorway, heard the crisp of his apple. He slurped juice. “Uh huh,” she said. She blurred white along the outer tip of each tentacle forming indentations in sand.

“It’s dead.” Another bite. He slurped.

Too much white. She chose brown.

“Why do you keep drawing all this dead stuff?” The step creaked when he adjusted his stance, leaned, heavy shouldered, against the door jamb. “It’s creeping me out.”

“So, don’t look at it, then. Sleep with the lights on.” She blew another pool of chalk dust from the paper and grumbled when it left a tiny smear.

“Hilarious.” She heard the lid of the trashcan open, the thud of his apple core, and shut. “You know,” he said from the kitchen, “you painted me live jellies once. Do you remember those?”

She did.

“I liked those. Maybe you could go back to painting shit that isn’t dead.”

A sea lion.

Three pelicans.

A dog on a bridge.

A deer in the median.

One whale that never made it off the beach–during their Florida trip–despite an army of experts with their hands at their sides.

These impromptu memorials, tucked into a Dead Wild Things portfolio. She didn’t hang them, didn’t frame them. “Those jellies were in an aquarium.”

He reappeared, sat on the piano bench. His tennis shoes nearly toed her box of busted pastels. “Yes? And?”

“And so, they were behind plexiglass. I don’t want to draw anymore through a TV screen or a picture or behind plexiglass.” As if that should explain everything. “I only see them dead.”

insubordinate

“Insubordination?” He read the words on her termination papers but barely believed them.

It would surprise him, she knew, if he learned it was not the first time; but she wouldn’t tell him. On the surface, she was willing and abiding–aiding and abetting, she called it. “I sub-ordain for as long as it makes sense to.” She picked the olives out of her sandwich and left them in a crooked pile in the smudgy blob her water glass left.

He heard pride and watched her chew slowly, turning pages of the newspaper.

He could not know the full story. Full stories did not exist.

“I don’t think sub-ordain is a word,” he told her.

She shrugged and swallowed.

electric bubble

She tried not to think, just listen. The man with the long greasy hair had looked so nervous. He was still, but his eyes paced, and his energy knocked its elbows on every hard surface in the room. She did not grimace when he described his neck surgery, the video he watched, the surgeons peeling him back like double doors on the front of a church, esophagus a center aisle surrounded by muscle pews.

The nurse could not get blood, poked at both arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” another. “I’m sorry.” Again. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” He shook his head at the marks in his arms: some hers, most his, and said it used to be easier. He grimaced at that; she felt sick and blinked 20 times at the smudgy blot on the metal clip of the clipboard in her lap.

Every needle poke, before, now and since, tiny perforations in his electric bubble. How could a soul be so damaged?

The nurse tsked her tongue against her teeth, sat back on her haunches and shrugged. “I don’t want to make you my pincushion. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“I can’t really feel it anymore,” he told her and shrugged. Regret regret regret spilled from his pockets like loose change and lip balm. It rolled across the linoleum and bumped her toe, the heat of it pierced her shoe and traveled until it settled in her right wrist. She drew a circle on his record and scribbled it in.

guppy

The lights in the pharmacy were spaceship bright. Her head hurt from a triangle glare off the Mucinex box. A man wore sweat pants and a turtleneck and stood half in dirty slippers in front of the toothpaste. He smelled like smoke and kitty litter, a thick cloud of old sweat and body odor. She held her nose and breathed through her mouth — more difficult than usual, considering the heavy anchor pressing against her chest and cinching her air.

She gasped and her neck cracked. Breath so violent, when had life become such an impossible obstacle? Every inhale stopped short just at her breastbone. It would not travel all the way to her navel, into her limbs. Her bones felt deprived, and she gasped like a guppy.

The man looked at her. He wiped his stubbled face with the side of his hand. The stubble scratched against his hand, and she heard it like sandpaper. She cringed and gasped again. He scowled, said, “Ehh,” and plucked at the elastic of his waistband.

She hated standing here in the sick aisle with the sick people and their weak sicknesses, like all the fibers in them stopped connecting, transmitters too feeble to transmit, and they shuffled through — infirm. She tapped at a Sudafed box. She should be able to control this herself, this struggle for air. Should open all airways through sheer will and blunt mental force.

Her neck stiffened, esophagus constricted. She yanked air again and felt… empty. Nothing.

The man scratched at his face again. Pulled a toothbrush from the display case, repeated, “Ehh.”