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.

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.

death of a log cabin

being that which was inherited ages ago by the mcNally's - they'd owned the property in the rural alcove of jungle-like trees of New York State. boards now rotten, gone sweet with decay and the delicate lacy maggots that squirmed among the wood. and it was quite beautifully shaded with bars of light from the listless northern sun. Some of the McNally's siblings traveled west - and where else? escaping the gloomy winters and the frail, miserable people. Several of them stayed, out of obligation or crippling low self-esteem: they sent their children to country school, and hid their cigarette habits in the strangest places (the creek, the old sandbox, the bottom drawer of a dresser nobody used).

The woods behind the McNally's house was a sort of Terebithia to their children - and grandchildren, in turn. In the creek the slippery rocks and the wide hills of the gully were foreboding, so deliciously. They hidden in the lob cabin for hours, counting childish aspirations and poking at small, helpless animals with sticks. Sarah, the recluse, she was the dreamer: winding herself joyfully through the spires of trees, extemporizing: the glory she sought in the most basic and immature of matters.

For her older brother Sean the cabin was an indolent place to smoke pot, hook up, lead young women astray. He felt their bra-straps so carefully, that look of empathy so well manufactured onto his vaguely handsome face. And of course the fucking and the pained expression of those girls' faces and the weak begging -

(Sean would go to jail, in seven years, charged with three accounts of first degree rape)

And poor Sarah, a rare beauty, came back to the property after her parents died. She and her partner (Alanya - mahogany haired, level headed woman) helped her get the house onto the market. And on a chilly damp day in spring they hiked back to the log cabin and solemnly, tremblingly set it on fire. The heat crackled in the impossible mist in the unseasonably cold air. Sarah lay her head on Alanya's shoulder. Really the fire was quite beautiful: all those yellows and blues and oranges: melting and competing with one another over the old lace-like maggots in the boards.

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.

vast water

there was red nail polish smeared on the vodka bottle. and it was empty, tipped over and sad in the dirt. the label was crumbling softly away from several nights spent out in the rain. the moss curling up in steaming pale green tendrils; that moss taking the vodka bottle away.

out in the distance it was miserable and blue. a dark cold violet where the mountains stretched, pale and white coming down, touching the stream, recoiling. the stream rolling. through rocks, touching them with its unsteady tongue, breaking clear in some places then going on brassy green dark forest gray with the movement of sediment.
noises of screaming (from the mouth of) the sky

that brilliant white sky so thick with fog,
colder than the water or the mountains or the earth colder than -

energy slowed to sludge matter, slowed enough to collapse the horizon.

the pressure was coming, and why? the mountains still strained furious and purple against the sky. the water crashed faster and faster outrunning yet never advancing, the same three waves breaking over the same boulder over and over again. the pressure should have cracked the trees. still? they stood tall as steel blades and unwavering stared disdainfully apathetic; not screaming.

the vodka bottle splintered to pieces beneath the pressure
and some little red flakes remained beside it.
there was possibly a woman's t shirt and pair of blue lace panties
near a little clearing in the grass where it happened.

but found never neither blood nor bone and investigations all proved inconclusive.

erratic symptoms

word cluster:

[mucus, coalesce, felt-tip, grainy, desperate, lethargic, violent, violet, ambivalent]

if loving cannot be helped? subconsciously she had an affinity for men whose names began with J - especially Jared, Jason, Jacob, James. they would of course have to have hazel eyes; they would of course have to have hairlines perfectly intact.

Emmaline made tiny gashes in the leg with the side of a pushpin out of desperate boredom. halfway down the shin, directly into the ankle, in the mockery of a shell's curve. each a contrived, jagged reminder of the smell of winter wind coming east to a lonely person. winters under the trees neatly glazed with ice, the cheery blinding sun peeking up over the library. the heady crunch of salt under thick boot heels.

she was ill in December: she spat mucus into the porcelain bowl of the sink for seven days. lethargic and bleary, she went around wiping her nose on her sleeve, curling into deep library cushions to read endless tragic love narratives.

In January, just after the holiday, she met Jacob. He had a very solemn peach colored mouth and a stern way of holding his back straight. he wrote her a note on a yellow slip of legal paper with a blue, felt-tip pen. she watched him write it - his remarkably defined wrist, hairless and tanned. of course his hazel eyes. he appeared grainy though the snow like a poorly developed photograph, moving slowly, and from so far away.

(loving of course being not so easily helped). he bought her a bunch of violets. she sneered, he became petulant - then violent. smashing a vase against his own kitchen sink. she tried to feign a mask of neutrality but her eyes sparked, ribs tensed, ambivalence curled inside her.

in March, the snow began melting, and Emmaline was happy, looking at the hazy rise of the sun over the library at dawn. Jacob called her, kissed her back, touched the tender spot on her shin where she'd bruised from so many cuts with the clear tiny pushpin. somewhere on a path in the woods, they touched elbows, and coalesced.

subconsciously and loving, Emmaline helped herself. she leant back into his arms and started into the blank, misty sky. behind her his chest was breathing: moving: in and out and in