June 2016
When your lover leaves you and you slide down the tilted tiled shower wall, know that you weren’t the first to do so. Embrace tradition. You’re part of something wider.
I want to swallow my hurt whole but as I’m flying over the Pacific above the sienna roofs and blue swimming pools of Malibu, I can only take one swig at a time. I hurtle toward a bridal shower all the same.
Whole hurt of what? Mine has not left me. Sometimes I feel as though he might and I slide because it makes me feel tragic. Isn’t that what’s so special about sliding somewhere? You take part in the beginning, but it flows out of your control eventually – tilted tiled slide rush.
I feel his voice in my ear when I’m away and the absence of his palms on my waist. Is he beginning a slide? When he slides inside of me, he grabs my hips and tells me Ass up.
I anticipate Mine leaving me because foreseeing a tragedy is not the way to prevent it, but instead to become so encompassed by it that there is no other road except toward it. I do not want him to leave me, I don’t want to lose everything we could be. How do you let go of the whisper in your ear, his haunting Leave.
I left the gasping August humidity of central Pennsylvania valley for the switchblade switchback Rockies. I had no direction but Mine. During the drive under swallowing Kansas night, the wind turbines formed bright grids, each tip with its own light, ready to connect, to be made complete, welcomed into something larger, a singular point in the whole.
Colorado means more to me now that I live under a wide Texas sky than when the mountains were my stopover home. I stepped out of the car, cramp cold sweat of arrival, at the blue bungalow Mine rented. There was something about the Flatiron peaks piercing the canopy that menaced me, but they were never romantic to me that year, only some sort of wall rising up, and that is how Colorado and I felt to each other, like some thing larger than we could see was rolling into place, and I knew then it would take a leaving to understand what grew between us.
When it was time to head south for winter, Mine left those peaks behind, too. The skyscraper roofs above the Colorado River cutting through Austin rise too sharp for him, there is not enough green around, and now he is menaced.
I anticipate loss because when a place starts to loom instead of shine, there is little to do but walk away. From my own bungalow in Boulder, I could see the Flatirons from the front window we always left open because the shrubs were too tall to bother with shades. I remember when the mountains became menacing to me but I can’t remember when I stopped looking at them entirely. Perched high in them, I forgot what brought me there, what could be, what was, what would never be.
When I first arrived in the foothills of the Front Range, it was impossibly hot and the sun glared so bright, I forgot I was the one who traveled 5,400 feet closer to see it. I blamed the sun.
I tell you about the sunshine because one day, it will become too bright for you and it’s okay to turn around with palms open and say, This is what I wanted, but it is not what I want anymore.
I believe Mine will say this to me because the city skyline reflects the sunlight back into his eyes and he says he can’t see around here. What will I do if he goes?
When I said I can’t swallow my hurt whole here above Malibu, I was trying to tell you that making pain seem large and tragic only validates it for a few minutes at a time and instead you have to pull from the fire inside of you, a flame a little every day, to remember why it’s even there at all.
I want to go back only to grip the tops of the Flatirons and shake the mossy cobwebs from the nooks and crannies so the sunlight can shine through them when it sets in the summertime, the sunset pink and blue with those tiny bits of yellow from behind the green rock. I want to show Mine that I tried to love the land. When he and I climbed in cars to drive toward Texas, I saw the sun set in Colorado and we have not seen those menacing peaks together since.
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August 2014
24 hours ago, there were 128 miles to Denver. I looked at the low rolling humps of the plains more Kansas than Colorado and a voice in my head, Home. Single syllable gristle in my mouth, tearing tough meat.
Now, I sit across from Mine and as I sip my beer, I imagine him aged twenty years. I try this view on for size, this sitting-sipping-smiling. The vision doesn’t resist but I can’t bite cleanly through it either.
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March 2015
Leave the coast and come inland, he did not ask me. Tie the sack of my loneliness together at four corners like this. Mountain west aspen air, ridge lines through a lens. Leave the baby shoes, he and I won’t be needing those. Bluer rivers boil in the center of the earth. I was unaware of the price I would pay for my body. Its cursed clumsiness. Into which blue hue should I place my anger?
Yes I did my open my eyes to a late afternoon sky and yes I did breathe cool air deep and yes my breastbone did stretch to meet Mine. I agreed to all of it. Under snowfall moonlight I begged him for it. We rocked each other slow and close as fat flakes fell. Forgetfulness invincibility miracle accident magic. When did his tenderness end and my cruelty begin?
We closed the window to cold Front Range wind.
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April 2015
Heartbeat low in my stomach, and not mine. It can’t be real, except it is. Soon I will be lighter.
There is guilt here for not telling Mine but I couldn’t pick the stones from the riverbed. I tried.
I write this now not to forget how close to the blue flame I am. Oh little girl, unsure of you and so much save the small tangle cells of you, I may never have you back. I smell my grandmother’s perfume around a growing number of street corners and no one knows my darling secret. It is nothing I can name.
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October 2015
Fears: Make the wrong decision. Leave when he’s right. Stay, but stifled. That we’re not in love anymore. Growth, then a want to return. That he wouldn’t have me back. Cave uncertainty. That this will end. That it never will.
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May 2016
Pluck me like a piano and tune me back by ear.
When will fear no longer linger between our bodies like a bass line humming some human rhythm, this piano whose strings would slit my throat into 230 slats of skin. Worry stretches tight over me like a membrane weather-resistant but not repellant. Does it block the sunlight too? This can all be punctured by loss.
It demands me to sit as it coats me, slick congeal of who says what we should’ve done and nobody said it’d be pretty so stretch my body long and wrong, just give me something to wrap my fingers around. To deny the pain is to say it won’t kill me, the knife twists a centimeter deeper and this time I won’t be the one with palmfuls of blood, time will do with me and Mine what it pleases but a body does choose its battles.
When the vehicle of desire is booted and want must travel, when does it go?
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July 2016
I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died. Nothing here has been lost. I will not always be able to write this. No one has been born. No one has died.
Nothing here has been lost.
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September 2016
Intimacy: privacy and privilege of answers to questions asked.
A river lush, velvet-bottomed and sparkling. One of us is afraid of the water. Half-living who we might be. How could I not expect all of this to collapse when we slapped a shared address label on it. Where we go from here is somewhere I no longer know. I try to remember there are a pair of freckled arms attached to the cruel voice that would wrap around me at night.
I must clarify the delusion. If I take too much comfort in him, I will lose him. He won’t hug me if I ask. Once as I sobbed. He tells me he loves me before I leave the house. In the breath just before, that I cramp his style.
I bring myself to bawling imagining his death in this Southwest city far from certainty. Death the only way I foresee the end of this cavern, despite how much I want to implode the walls, and each imagining shatters me. That is the consolation, the tears a sign of life left in the fight.
Until this morning under a humid Austin sky. We fight. The idea of metallic splicing, terrible timing, the worst accident does not shatter me. A voice small and clear in the gaping place, Home.
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July 2017
To the side, there we go, the kind of time and space apart Mine loves and the closeness I crave, that split-second firecracker flash follow. I made these years so, these Dublin Blues and Mad Dog margaritas in Chili Parlor bars Mine would never step foot in. Guy Clark said it first, there is no need to forgive me for thinking what I thought.
Mine with his thick thighs and sunstroke heat I yearn for miles away. I did not estimate the distance I’d walk to meet him at the foot of the bed. To slip a strap from my shoulder, slide a waistband over my hip. The ache in the ask betrays my want. His disgust circles the ceiling.
Oh, go as far from me as you please. Forgive me all my anger, forgive me all my faults.
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March 2018
Say you could stop time for a moment. Who would you grab onto?
My questions lack a heat, the kind of honesty that’d make the people who expect the truth of me to just shiver away; trust a web of slivery strands and with enough stress applied, a snap. Stress doesn’t mean an action, it’s not a reality. I am still trying to apply the meaning of impermanence and the length of my body it runs when I’m flush with something warm and my kneecaps tingle.
I drift in limbo between splatting sunbursts and solitary interstellar frost. I do this to make sense of it and when I inch closer, all I want is to pull away. You have to understand, I am writing this so I don’t do it. I imagine doing it, taste it. Smell it. Do you want to implode your life, too? When do you do when it creeps over you long and dreadful?
In the bathroom mirror, the skies over all those roads we traveled flash. This life changes drape and weight and shape, who says what I’m supposed to do when it’s too heavy to lift.
I’ll ask again. In the blanket tangle laundry clean of spring, who do I grab onto?
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July 2018
In dreamland last night, I was mounted by a bison in red clay, elbow and knees orange. A hawk landed on the beast’s body as it thrusted. Hooves broader than any hands I’ve known. In the dirt I writhed, Pasiphae with her ass up, the raw back of me from the wiry chest hair of beast body. Later would come a minotaur. In our bedroom, lightning cracked. My fingers curl, thin flex clit wet and warm. The most touch I’ve known all year.
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August 2018
Mine throws out a three-pound roll of ground turkey because when he cuts into it, blood and pink-grey coils assault him. Or, I throw out the turkey because when he’s so disgusted, he tantrums off the linoleum about the groceries, what I chose, planned for, how difficult even dinner is. I clean up the ingredients, store the open can of beans. He sits on the couch and, absorbed in more screen, tries to forget the smell.
His idea that you could leave a place and return to it, the grey bloody bits of plastic. I want to leave. I don’t like it here.
On the bus the next morning as the University of Texas crew team slices across the filmy steam of Town Lake, I vow to the window I won’t leave Austin. An idea of mine, this taking ourselves with us wherever we go.
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October 2018
Commit to the friction. Step into Mine’s arena. My hands and corner of eyes, soft. I search his closet for patterns of him, anything to tell me what he’s thinking. I spend time waiting for his smile, this love a long slow march uphill and for what? To arrive at the foot of him?
Over time, a steeling of bones. The coldest winter I ever knew was a frostbitten Colorado April and no part of Texas has threatened to freeze me since. I loved something so intangible, it was necessary to kill it. I take in the déjà vu of this moment, this red plaid shirt of his and these red polished nails of mine, this existence and the one before it those imagined moonlit roads and arms to hold. How slow I’ve worn this welcome out.
Last night’s dream, cold frozen prairie. Blue world, sunbeam blue light, and a coffin out there for me to find, a small girl with blonde ringlets inside and the coffin purpling in the distance, blood. I did not make it in time.
I was charged with life and I made a decision. I’m still searching for the heartbeat I sacrificed for mine, unable to catch the slipping shouldered body of it. Mine spends his days fearing his spirit will be snuffed out over the stove. Which of us careens toward the frost and which the flame?
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December 2018
I hear it phantom now, his whistling his way home no matter the walk or distance. I confuse it with an airplane high above the city zeroing in, a fire truck barreling down the neighborhood road. Latchkey slide, his tones hurtling toward me.
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May 2019
Power in collection but to collect, one must commit to collecting it all. I am unsure if the limestone aquifer below us can sustain this love or if pure mountain snowmelt is all it can take. I focus on feeling small and engulfed these days under a skyline of my own making. I am in wonder of wondrous feats, Mine cannot fathom the gratitude in it. The streets he sees carry cars careening into bike lanes and fist fights on the buses. I learned gratitude thanking these highrises. The farthest for us I’d planned was Austin, I left the next directions to Mine. I don’t know where to go from here.
Take a chance, buy a ticket, buy into anything. I ache for eyes on my body, arrive at the bus stop twenty minutes early to count the stares in the wakening Austin light. Quivering, that’s the motion, rolling vibrations long and slow. Just a touch, any touch will do.
Except Mine’s disdain. His need for my dispensability. How does one break assumptions? A series of facts believed to be true, though not mutually agreed. Should we apply new rules? A new set of wheres. Thens and ifs never suited us. We’re unaware of what feeling something means and maybe if we start there, we can inch toward it. I do not feel included or accounted for.
No matter how many times my body has spasmed in pleasure with his inside me, I only have myself.
Plan accordingly. There are no instructions, I will wade through water until I find high ground, but will the wading ever stop? Puddles grow wider until soon I know I won’t make it out, that is how I’ll know to swim across the widening rush and as my pockets fill, I’ll get on my hands and knees at the bottom of this riverbed and crawl my way to shore, feeling for the rise of the bank, measuring my buoyancy. How one survives unexpected depth in fishing waders.
No, I don’t know what surfacing feels like.
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June 2019
Days filled on end with him. Sometimes me. Sometimes hungry, blotted, sleepy delirious drunk high mourning heartbroken buoyant. Mundane and usually nothing at all. I blur time to avoid powerful intensity, internal combustion.
Every Saturday a reel on repeat. We fight before noon. I ache for romance, to feel seen. He sees a white liar, shifter of facts. Storyteller, jezebel, architect. Manipulator of lines. The flame leaps. Things accumulate out of their places.
Each late summer we swell and each late summer we endure. Have we not been one late, agitated summer? What am I enduring? I sense the stench in the raw ground meat, something he will never rise to tell me. I want to hate him, want to blame him for this quiet dissolution. He is as unsure as I am and I do not allow him this because he does not allow me uncertainty.
A relationship is a contract on which hours rest tentatively inside a language that doesn’t run between tongues but bodies and those caged minds inside.
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September 2019
Have you ever seen a fever from the sky, the tops of your feet dangling below and your waist clipped in tight with impossible sunlight bounding white across indigo Gulf ocean? The ride above the sea is fine, then fever.
Rays upon rays stacked eight rows deep and sixty bodies wide. If you had a body like a stingray, whose long and flat warmth from the pack would you seek at night? Creeping cold slipping over you and thousands of open gripping mouths on bellies, yes the word for this is fever.
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October 2019
Three dogs died drinking lake water this summer. Mine broke up with me in a Red River bar. Guilty of a slimmer and sharper truth: that I wanted to leave, that I’m no longer his. I longed for him to drive into a clean Northwest sky, Texas sun rising in his rearview, my voice the death rattle: Go ask him, go ask him, go ask him go ask him ask him ask him ask him. In the morning he chooses to stay.
This is duration.
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January 2020
The coming cull. Slash and burn abandon, fire branding. The accumulation of these scraps I could not tell Mine, tried to tell Mine. He culls every weekend by throwing shit out. I have trouble saying goodbye to the idea that his constant ridding is practice for how to get rid of me.
When Mine does not love me, I spend my hours searching for his smile until I collapse into bed beside him. People reveal more of themselves over time. It does not stop. Perhaps when we talk about duration, we should begin there.
Begin with the hottest days of the years and the coldest. In the deep sobbing moments between fights, the elation of realizing the mundane does not need to remain the same. That’s where the heat is. Repetition.
I wanted the sum of us to equal something greater than these thoughts that don’t string together. Mine likes the rules he creates. I will spend a lifetime writing the code of conduct, waiting on him – to answer to speak to finish to leave to start. The arrangement torments me. The hours I’ve wasted hovering over him.
The highway signs flash orange. He finally sobs himself to sleep. No, I’m not proud to have made this so, but that doesn’t change the fact of my want. I wanted to send him out to sea on mattress alone. Watch his lips shrivel and crack in the open saltwater air. I believed for a long time that one day he’d come back parched for love.
Now, I live in a little green house with a swing in the backyard. I cry in the mornings openmouthed free in the Austin air between utility installations. I will swim this ocean of want and satisfaction double across and sometimes three times a night.
Any ache that asks, I answer.
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September 2020
I lived in the caves for so long, I believed the cold slick of the walls on my tongue. A snake’s tongue reaches out, tucks the water, the tide, the location of its warm prey back in. Do I not yearn to suck every last ounce of something from the atmosphere? I taste it all. I believed agreements of love were a series of claims. Mine is not mine now as much as he was not Mine when I barreled toward him on a highway cut straight across the country.
The difference between love and desire is the length of the look. I wrote this sentence seven years ago, falling in love with Mine from a thousand miles away. Phone calls, Snapchats, texts, Skype, thin cold flex of my fingers on my clit on webcam. We always end somewhere. I didn’t realize the truth of my look until it leaked so much, it spilled over I opened my eyes.
