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.

the melted ear

THE MELTED EAR

freckle, little on large yellow thigh
wonders?
very, indeed quite hungrily
beneath pants:
to see longingly questionable sun?
sun-tastes, to see browning disasterfeet
in long bare chortles
making dust happen,
then cotton-smothered hidden long
winterly long.