love, enormous

I resent being called a "cradle-robber." My boyfriend is a year and a half younger than I. Gender reversed this would hardly be an exorbitant age difference.

Why isn't it people say what they mean "you are old, dried up soon unable to bear children and therefore worthless, he is too good for you, you are breaking the rules and we don't like it."

Honesty is simple and simplicity breaks the spell that cities and calculations and illness have over me. I am twenty two years old and when I am dead I want to be rolled beneath a tree and swallowed up by the earth while I am far away, laughing and dancing and being incredibly stupid in the place the Lord has saved for me.

the red herring

Kahlen is fast.

That is to say, she is a runner. She french kisses tree branches low hanging in the sweet spring and pounds pavement all winter long. There is constant warmth in her shoulders. Anna has kissed those shoulders. Mark has pursed his lips between those shoulder blades. And Leanne, well, that was a mistake too great to talk about.

Kahlen's freckles expand in the summer and contract in the winter like concrete and her muscle grow and glow under sweaters and t-shirts and tank tops. She is an upstate summer winter spring fall straw blond and perfectly perched on the edge of a trembling cliff. Not quite perched actually but fixed. Everyone knows where forward goes but she's afraid of that. And behind is a frightened mystery like the portentous wind currents in trees in the blackest of night.

Running is a matter of life and death, not unlike the carrion, the dead deer glassy-eyed with tongue lolling maggots in the belly and the rabbit still going for the open field where a barn owl waits for the oily night. She flexes her palms open and closed like clams and the tendons beneath the arm move, so every part of her then moves.

Her skinny torso bare lays a cover of thin white skin over muscle and quivering ivory ribs. Maybe not Anna or Mark or Owen but Sierra with her heavy dark head of Russian descent that will read the patterns in that cool, tight waist and knotted back. Sierra's heavydark eyelashes touch Kahlen's collarbone with such surreptitious wanderings and she asks if maybe Kahlen will help her get in shape so the muscle above her pubic bone can mimic the firmness, the small sliding triangle over which she spreads her hands, looking out with enormous dark brown eyes.

Maybe not Sierra either, then. Kahlen will keep running faster down the road and cut off onto a dirt path through the pine trees, with bursts until her lungs hurt and the rumors and reports and the terrors spew into the air and dissipate behind. Maybe not Sierra Mark Anna Aron Owen Leanne but someone far out beyond the horizon, behind the moon still spinning and waiting to for God's final push.

So Kahlen is fast and when she runs the broad smile resulting hurts her very cheeks.

Little ambient lonely. I want to fiercely disconnect. Savor the solitude. Get into my head more, get something done. Except the notknowing, it keeps me from experiencing, and I don't get the trajectory of lives right in my own head. Because of course I can't write about my own. Because of course the whole thing is stagnant.

I'm trying to figure out how important it is to work on Norah's story, because it relates a lot more I think to the timbre of where we are today, and it's more possibly important to what needs to be said, if someone like me could ever have the capacity to say what needs to be said.

And the nightmares of the windmills. Those violent fingers slicing torso in half, the black-eyed lidless children wailing for the unseen future. Is that really relevant? Am I fooling myself into thinking a selfish, spoiled brat like me can write anything except the stories of selfish, spoiled brats?

Either way, I need to finish "river island" and more on to the turbines. They're quite impressive to look at, those turbines.

Wicked Opiate and the True Femmes

Being living is OKAY. Day-to-day breaths are measured in small towns, in big cities, in extraordinary deserts, in clusters of the near-dead and dying. So she (Natalia I think I mean) will go off, shoulders stooped, carrying on bag for the things she owns and one bag for the things she's bought, looking down the tunnel of the street, the buildings blending together and the snow in the roads, the thick ice in shattered pieces on the sidewalk.

Come on, Dear Lord, please help me get by. I can either chose to face the hate, and overcome it and gloriously victoriously come out much stronger or I can wipe my brain, and I can hold apathy like a bitter cyanide capsule under my tongue (harmless now though; bitter but harmless - for now - ) and be maybe a little okay. Being living little is all OKAY.

Like Mr. Sufjan Stevens, I'M NOT FUCKING AROUND. I really do want to be well.

Characters come and characters do not go so please live on, little phosphorescence; I need you very much.

live on, live on

so in the worst of weather, do I dare to believe God steered me with great assurance to safety? Am I to believe that I've not died for a very particular reason? so what is folly, after all? I owe my Creator great thanks.

her story is finally coming along; struggling and screaming from the birth canal, swallowing air and bloating her stomach, turning blue, freezing softly, dead in the forest. there are worse fates: her's was an ugly one but there are always worse fates.

Now Things Will Start

See: I am a little girl. They can look at me and guess maybe fourteen, fifteen. It is easy to be waited on. It is easy to be pampered and consoled and fawned over because of your youth delicate youth fragile intentions and innocent thoughts.

But for once for now I think I want my voice to be heard.

It will come in the slow cracked hum of an old woman whose bitterness became fury with age. A lacy white innocuous pathetic even (that's what they'd think of her, wouldn't they?) bubbling under the surface with frothy heat. Not a lonely cantankerous old woman but possessed with a sort of psychosis, a schizophrenic delusion of grandeur pulled from the shape of a Dostoyevsky novel and crudely shaped into her own vaguely clever but most blatantly third-rate creaking stooped form.

Pity The Poor Alcoholic

she heard "I Like Your Peacock"
and she thought "Christ will come like that" (pregnant suns, how was that imagery even possible, could you imagine the sun mother bent over wearily, her back sore with light?)

the alcohol always catches her off guard. it's not that she does it every night it's that she does it at the most inopportune times like just before work or driving down the interstate. the exits are tight: construction is unpredictable. with ardor, shaky lean torso, it always catches her off guard because she's vomiting next thing she knows. under the low predictable light of the bathroom, the sound of other women's high heels clacking around her and their knowledgeable hush as the splash hits the water. always deep cherry red. it still smells like wine.

somebody stops her on the street and says, "I LIKE YOUR PEACOCK" and it takes her a second to realize that they mean the tattoo because she forgets that it's there. her head is too full all the time and she wants it dulled, dialed down, scrubbed away. the dead clean neatness of space. out there, she'll speak her thoughts aloud, because no one will be able to hear them.

comme ca, elle l'aime. it's this she loves: feeling infinitely sorry for herself.