Lost and Found

Blog moved

2009-02-10T09:46:00.001-06:00

This blog has moved to www.uncoveringcrystal.wordpress.com

Come visit me there.

ROSI Zine Cover by Jason Michel

2009-01-18T15:14:00.001-06:00

I am not

2009-01-07T08:24:00.003-06:00

Writing on the Window

2008-11-14T23:59:00.001-06:00

I'm determined to move us into the woods, so deep your lips chap and crumble like dry leaves on the forest floor. I promise I won't mind them on my cheek. Going home, that's what it will be like for me.

It was dark when the baby and I came home tonight. I sat in the truck with the radio loud, wishing you were here to open my door and shine the flashlight before my feet as I carried the baby into the house.

I'm sorry I don't miss you enough until you are gone for a couple of days.

I thought about country boys this evening. I sat down with a cold one and tried to remember the last time I popped the top on my own beer when you were around. I tried to remember the last time I changed the oil in my truck. I tried to remember the last time I replaced a fuse in the box.

It's hard to remember life pre-you.

There are nights I don't wake you, even though the loneliness within me holds strong like the hay bales we curled into the first night you took me in the barn. I know you want me to roll over, mash my palm against yours, but I let you sleep because you have to work in the morning, because I'm proud, because I like the way my leg twitches and my stomach lurches whenever I get sorry on myself.

'Am safe. Love you,' you sent through the phone tonight, when you used to write to me in the dirt on the backdoor window.

I'm determined to move us deep into the woods, so deep cell phones have no service, so deep that I can stand on the back porch with a cup of coffee and call you in, so deep you roll over and hold my leg still during the night.

Isolation

2008-11-13T09:48:00.001-06:00

Sometimes he says things he thinks will keep me from withdrawing into the quiet.

It was my night, my friends, my interests.

I don't think he can handle me connecting with others.

We have a group.

Anyone outside of that group is threatening.

He says things.

Over burritos, he says he fears what is behind my pretty face.

It's not empowerment.

It's isolation.

Sandstone

2008-11-13T09:30:00.001-06:00

Nothing could stand this much rain. The dust churned up in the fields today is stripped from the house. The rain seeps through holes in the gutter and pushes soil out of the hanging baskets. I should have been in bed hours ago but the screen door closes so softly when he's sound asleep.

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "I wish I could paint her so as to interest others as much as she does me."

Day to day, it's easy to forget that I can't be smoothed. Only when I'm replete with time to ponder do I remember that life grits me like two pieces of sandstone struck against each other.

Midnight Fog

2008-11-13T09:28:00.001-06:00

She's finally gone. I deadbolt the front door so she can't get back in. If my mother returns, I'll tell her I didn't hear the door. I was afraid. I was sleeping. I'll never tell her I was lonely.

I stand before my hazy bedroom mirror and check off my inventory: a Fuck the World poster; dead flowers in a dirty vase; and tiny strings of incense ash dangling off the bookshelf, dangerously hovering above thick red shag carpet. I unwrap the white towel, dingy and stained from the black dye fading out of my mohawk, and lie down on the bed. He always liked it when I got naked before I called.

"Hello?"

"Come see me tonight," I say into the phone.

"Crystal?"

"Come see me."

"Where are you?"

"Back at my mother's."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

Anxiety awakens in my heart. I don't want to be like this. I don't want to know that I'll only have tonight, but I have to. I need a lump to rise in the back of my throat. I need a pain in my heart that draws up my stomach. I need to feel like I can never have him again. I lie to myself and say this will be the last time.

I go to the mirror. I want him to see me and ache. I pull my hair over my shoulders so the freshly shaven sides of my head are covered. I want to look innocent and helpless - at first. But even under the cover of hair, the rings in my nipples catch the light of the lamp. He'll have to use his imagination.

He'll stop at the park three blocks away. He'll trot down the sidewalk on the north side of the road where there are no streetlamps. He'll hold onto the latch on the gate, push the gate closed, then gently lower the latch, without raising sound or suspicion.

I hear a grunt below my bedroom window as he climbs on top of the iron railing and grabs his key. He slips open the door. The deadbolt locks behind him.

He doesn't say anything when he comes through my bedroom door. He slowly undresses, watching me, searching my face. I smile, and he climbs into bed.

Every midnight meeting with him is new now, despite the routine that brings us together. The moon reflects off his black hairless chest. I kiss it. He buries his nose in my hair, and I chew the end of a dreadlock.

He is so sweet when he cries. A hint of heartbroken-induced wrinkles curl around his eyes and white teeth gnash between beautiful full lips.

I wrap my arms around his body and feel for the long thin scars on his back, scars put there by me when I was young and selfless. My thumb brushes across the ripples and he grins through the tears, remembering that night at the park, in the backseat of the blue Lincoln, shadows of the trees dancing across my belly. Beautiful, white, perfect teeth in a grin I will never see again.

We don't have sex or make love just yet. We remember emotions. Every sour word ever passed between us lies in the bed. We toss it back and forth. What made those words slip over our tongues? What caused us to separate in anger? How could we so easily tuck away our relationship - this relationship - and pretend as though we could go on forever without each other?

When I was young and selfless, he used to pull me against his chest and surround me with his arms. I was helpless, completely dependent upon the steel cage he built around me. Tonight, I pull him to my chest. His breath fogs the metal rings in my nipples. He sobs. Without me, he says, life is lonely.

But I know he is just like me. Without me isn't lonely, just as without him isn't lonely. Finality hurts. Finality is a song you've heard but only remember two words of the lyrics. You can't explain what you remember clearly enough so another can help you find it again. That final kiss, the lips you know you'll never feel again, the wet pillowcase, the rush, the anger, the hate, the absolute goodness of being out of control are why you look for it again and again.

The newness of the first lingering kiss has worn off, and I know I'll never feel those emotions again until I convince myself it's the end.

Mirrors

2008-10-31T09:37:00.002-05:00

Within the first hour of coming back to him, I knew it was only for the night. He didn't hand me the single helmet hanging on the handlebars of his motorcycle. Instead he pulled back his red hair and secured the strap behind his goatee.

I unfolded the last dollars from my back pocket and wrote my name in the motel registry while he sat outside flipping his keys in the air. Stepping back into the night, I noticed the stars were prettier than I had been in a long time; I wished for tar clouds, or hurried rain, or a warm hand to cover my eyes.

He turned on the porno channel and muted the volume. He fluffed a yellowed pillow and propped it up against the headboard, below the cigarette burns and next to the chipped wooden post, then relieved the top two buttons on his jeans.

I saw all of this in the mirrors that lined the walls like a fancy department store dressing room, so I undressed. Eyes on the dirty television screen, one hand in his pants, he motioned for me.

He was an arrow, wounding me then sealing his infection inside the wound. I stayed under the covers long past the cleaning lady's knock on the door, long after I heard the chrome shiver on his motorcycle. I climbed out once to look at the empty parking space and noticed myself in the mirrors. I was naked, smiling, pale as a star.

The Sphere

2008-10-01T12:33:00.001-05:00

Check it out.

Secrets

2008-09-21T22:04:00.000-05:00

I used to tell him stories. Lying in bed, the touch of his skin made hotter by my beer buzz, I told him about the first time my mother hit me, the tampon I threw behind the dumpster the night I lost my virginity, and the gun I found under the sofa cushion hours before Doug committed suicide.

Years later, I can recall every story I told him, every secret he knows about me, but cannot, no matter how hard I try, remember him ever having said he loved me.

He must have at some point, or wouldn't I have quieted my tongue?

Stories

2008-09-21T21:46:00.002-05:00

Scars

2008-07-11T09:48:00.000-05:00

She overheard, while dressing after gym class, that it stained. Lying in bed that night, bare arms shoved under the pillow behind her head, she thought about thin lines of pink on white cotton. A pain much deeper than she was able to give herself without having to focus on toys or weapons of choice.

She had always inflicted her own pain so she could control taking it away. She couldn't cut; she didn't like to look inside. Burning. The threat, but not assurance, of her soft meat erupting at the flick of a lighter or the strike of a match was usually enough. That another could so easily bruise her soft, untouched creases left a dull thrill that kept her up half the night.

She had played around with boys but had never gone too far. She wasn't a tease. She didn't want them to want that from her. But it was hard to keep them content the older they got. The steady stream of attention she had received from boys since junior high was dwindling. No longer happy with gazing, rubbing, and touching, they stopped waiting for her after school in the parking lot. No more rough kisses over the consoles of suped up Javelins and Mustangs. No more groping on sofas in the glow of MTV's Liquid Television.

So on her third date with a man, not a boy, who picked her up in a car he owned and took her to dinner at a restaurant, not a buffet or pizza joint, she handed over her control.

He was easy. He talked to her in words not intended to coerce. Loved her without saying he did. He never mentioned the rush to take her home. He never mentioned a curfew, hers or his. And afterwards, he turned on the shower, scalding and steamy, as if he knew, and washed the scent of sex out of her hair.

He didn't find it funny or sexy when he caught her in the kitchen later that night with a lighter in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, but his kissed the burn anyway before smearing a glob of A & D ointment on her thigh.

The Three Little Pigs

2008-07-11T09:47:00.002-05:00

Jake was the first to do everything. The first to steal a pack of Lucky Strikes. The first to smooth pot into a long slender line and lick the rolling paper. He liked to test the drugs before giving them to Emily and Allison, his girls.

Tight, studded with the coolness of Anthony Kiedis and the angst of Eddie Vedder, Jake walked them down the hallway the first day of their freshman year and quickly became their in-between man. Jealousy only existed in relationships outside the trio, and jealousy often forced loyalty.

He snorted for three months before inviting the girls into his bag. Emily had giggled. Allison had waited to see what happened to Emily before shocking her nose with the burn. Two hours later, Jake pulled over into a Thorton's gas station, and for the next hour, snubbed one butt-less cigarette after another into the curb while Emily and Allison detailed his car.

He only supplied them on the weekends; eventually starting the weekend on Friday morning so they could crash on Sunday, then adding a Thursday to make it a four day weekend. They didn't worry much at first, even after Emily's nose started running pink and Jake's tawny cheeks became flecked with scabs. They had each other and a loyalty to the bag.

Allison was the first to find the smoke, the good stuff; the better quality, the less Jake would pick at the imaginary mites on his skin; the better quality in smokable form, meant the flesh in Emily's nose might have a chance to heal.

She tried it first, a taste with the dealer, but unlike Jake, she was anxious to share, anxious to help her friends, and couldn't get over the fact that when she sucked the pipe, it felt like she was smoking pot. She wasn't over the edge after all. She was slowly backing away.

Allison spent all her money on the smoke. It was more expensive, but it was healthier, she told herself. If it had just been her, she would have kept it up the nose, but she had Emily and Jake to think about. Still, she couldn't afford a good pipe. And she didn't know the right people to tell her where to get one, besides the guy who told her she was too young to smoke but still sold her the bag after she said - while leaning against the door frame, all prettied up in a dull haired, crank sweating kind of way - that she was buying for her dad.

Allison was always the smart one though. She unscrewed the bulb in the bathroom since it had a vanity light and an overhead, tapped and twisted until the silver bottom sat in her hand like a popped off button, sucked the smoke into her pink lungs, then offered it to her friends.

Alone

2008-07-11T09:47:00.001-05:00

She's finally gone. I deadbolt the front door so she can't get back in. If my mother returns, I'll tell her I didn't hear the door. I was afraid. I was sleeping. I'll never tell her I was lonely.

I stand before my hazy bedroom mirror and check off my inventory; a Fuck the World poster, dead flowers in a dirty vase, and tiny strings of incense ash hanging off the bookshelf, dangerously hovering above thick red shag carpet. I unwrap the white towel, dingy and stained from the black dye fading out of my mohawk, and lie down on the bed. He always liked it when I got naked before I called.

"Hello?"

"Come see me tonight," I say into the phone.

"Crys?"

"Come see me."

"Where are you?"

"Back at my mother's."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

Anxiety awakens in my heart. I don't want to be like this. I don't want to know that I'll only have tonight, but I have to. I need a lump to rise in the back of my throat. I need a pain in my heart that draws up my stomach. I need to feel like I can never have him again. I lie to myself and say this will be the last time.

I go to the mirror. I want him to see me and ache. I pull my hair over my shoulders so the freshly shaven sides of my head are covered. I want to look innocent and helpless - at first. But even under the cover of hair, the rings in my nipples catch the light of the lamp. He'll have to use his imagination.

He'll stop at the park three blocks away. He'll trot down the sidewalk on the north side of the road where there are no streetlamps. He'll hold onto the latch on the gate. He'll push the gate closed and gently lower the latch, without raising a sound or suspicion.

I hear a grunt below my bedroom window when he climbs on top of the iron railing and reaches above the kitchen window. The key slides into the door. The deadbolt locks behind him.

He doesn't say anything when he comes through my bedroom door. He slowly undresses, watching me, searching my face. I smile and he climbs into bed.

Every time with him is new now, despite the routine that brings us together. The moon reflects off his black hairless chest. I kiss it. He buries his nose in my hair, and I chew the end of a dreadlock.

He is so sweet when he cries. A hint of heartbroken-induced wrinkles curl around his eyes and white teeth gnash between beautiful full lips.

I wrap my arms around his chest and feel for the long thin scars on his back, scars put there by me when I was young and selfless. My thumb brushes across the ripples and he grins through the tears, remembering that night at the park, in the backseat of the blue Lincoln, shadows of the trees dancing across my belly. Beautiful, white, perfect teeth in a grin I will never see again.

We don't have sex or make love just yet. We remember emotions. Every sour word ever passed between us lies in the bed. We toss it back and forth. What made those words slip over our tongues? What caused us to separate in anger? How could we so easily tuck away our relationship - this relationship - and pretend as though we could go on forever without each other?

When I was young and selfless, he used to pull me against his chest and surround me with his arms. I was helpless, completely dependent upon the steel cage he built around me. Tonight, I pull him to my chest. His breath fogs the metal rings in my nipples. He sobs. Without me, he says, life is lonely.

But I know he is just like me. Without me isn't lonely, just as without him isn't lonely. Finality hurts. Finality is a song you've heard but only remember two words of the lyrics. You can't explain it. You can't explain what you remember clearly enough so that another can help you find it again. That last final kiss, the lips you know you'll never feel again, the wet pillowcase, the rush, the anger, the hate, the absolute goodness of being out of control are why you look for it again and again. You know that once the newness of the first lingering kiss wears off, you'll never feel those emotions again until you convince yourself it's the end.

Dirt

2008-05-18T16:25:00.002-05:00

He lies awake in the morning under a tent he made with the top sheet, listening to the early morning noises.

His father sings while he dresses and hums while he brushes his teeth. The bathroom door creaks open and Sunshine drops the sheet. He curls his toes around the thin material and listens to his father. His father does this every morning - swishes the bathroom door back and forth and says, "I need to fix that creak." But it's forgotten as the day passes, and maybe isn't as noticeable in the afternoon when everyone is up and running and stomping through the house. Early morning noises are crisp and clean, like the line-dried sheet he once again balances on his feet.

Water runs into the sink after his father leaves. Coffee cups clink and silverware tins. His mother isn't quiet like his father. She bangs cabinet doors, pours dog food into the pets' bowl instead of scooping it up like his father does. She brushes her teeth, and never mentions the creak in the door when she leaves the bathroom.

Her feet sound like a basketball being dribbled down a hardwood court when she enters his room. She climbs under the covers and pulls the sheet over their heads before pushing a carob ginseng kiss onto his cheek. They lie under the covers, plucking blackberries out of the little clay bowls his mother bought at an art festival. Juice runs down his finger, and he wipes it on the bed sheet. His mother laughs, rolls over onto her belly, squishes a berry, and draws a sun on the white cotton sheet.

They lay there for a while, drawing pictures on the sheet, until they hear his brother climb off his parents' bed. His mother flings off the sheet, jumps from the bed, and calls for the baby, "Acorn!" She calls the baby Acorn because he's always popping up under foot, but she says that means he will be strong someday.

His mother is full of sayings like that; happy fairies leave wet kisses on the grass at night, and when the maple leaves turn over and show their petticoats, it's going to rain. He doesn't know if she is pulling his leg, or if she is wise, but the grass is always wet in the morning and he can't think of a time when it didn't rain after the leaves turned.

She puts water into a kettle for their oatmeal and places it on the old stove. It doesn't fire by itself anymore so she lights a match and holds it under the kettle. Stove lit, she uses the match to light the candle on the kitchen counter. She does this every morning so his father will stay safe while he's away.

They sit at the table and make faces at each other while they wait for the kettle to whistle. Acorn makes several faces but his favorite one is picking his nose. Mama makes him wash his hands - with soap.

After they eat, they go outside to water the garden. Sometimes, when the sun decides to get warm a bit earlier than usual, Mama holds the water hose up in the air and lets Sunshine and Acorn run under it. The water weighs down Acorn's curls until they stretch long and straight to his waist. Grammy thinks Acorn's hair is too long even when it's all curled up so Mama never does this when Grammy is over.

They sit on the front porch steps after the garden is watered and watch the trucks pass by. Mama pulls her skirt up to her thighs and stretches out her legs. Sunshine glints at her through the sun. The sun turns her hair red and draws out freckles that only dot the right side of her forehead. Acorn sits between her legs, peeling the bark off a stick. Mama wraps his wet hair around her finger and blows on it, setting his curls.

Acorn lets out a yelp and holds up his finger. A splinter. The screen door slams behind Sunshine as he runs into the house to get the jar of drawing salve. He pulls himself onto the counter and stands on his knees. Underneath the herbs hanging upside down in the window, and right next to the jar where tiny salad seeds are sprouting, he finds the pint-size jar of white comfrey salve. He opens the lid and the bitter scent reminds him of autumn, and Mama standing at the stove, stirring melting beeswax in the double boiler.

Mama smears the salve on Acorn's splinter and wraps it with cheesecloth. Sunshine sits next to his brother on the porch swing while Mama makes them all a drink. He keeps his arm around his brother's shoulder, waiting for Acorn's sniffles to stop.

Sometimes he thinks Acorn smells like Mama, like nothing. He presses his nose into Acorn's curls and takes a deep sniff, then he draws a piece of his own straight white hair up to his nose and breathes in.

Daddy says they all smell like dirt and tea tree oil. Every night when he comes home from work, he picks them up and tosses them into the air, incensing the house. "My dirty little hippies," he laughs.

Mama brings them peppermint tea in little earth-toned mugs she bought at an art festival. She presses her bare toes against the concrete and starts the swing. A breeze comes by and picks up their scent. It drifts over the garden and settles into the dirt.

Voices

2008-04-30T11:44:00.002-05:00

It’s easy to take another’s voice as your own when you feel your own words aren’t good enough, or when your feet can’t find the world’s rhythm, or when everyone around you speaks in rhymes.

I had this idea once that if I listened Whitman’s voice inside my head, I’d be able to say what I mean; it is so easy for me to slide into his head. Maybe he was doing the same thing when he wrote though, and together, we were just dancing the same old dance everyone else danced, and writing the same old words, with the same worn out meanings, that everyone else had written before.

It’s difficult to find your own voice. Sometimes I take a tape recorder on my walks and tell stories or think of words I’ve read that have stuck in my head. Later, when everyone sleeps and the tape turns, I hear someone else’s voice coming out of that black box. She stumbles over words, repeats sentences until they are incoherent thoughts.

They are only my words when they are in black and white, and when there is no sound except the scratching of a pencil, or the tap of a key.

Frank O’Hara wrote, ‘It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so…’, and I try not to use those words. I try not to think his thoughts. I try not to hear his voice inside my head, although every part of me wants to take him by the hand, lead him onto the floor, rest my cheek against the coarse wool in his sweater, and dance the same old dance.

Breaking Routine

2008-04-22T10:26:00.009-05:00

It comes on so slowly, this change in routine. Yet every season I find myself fighting to hang onto habitual tasks. I need another summer morning to pin clothes to the line while still in my nightgown. I need another autumn afternoon to sit on the porch and listen to dry leaves skitter down the road. I need another winter morning with shoes overturned and toasting on the heat vents.

When it's a couple of weeks into spring before I notice they're gone, I know something has happened to me. On Monday morning I go to the back door to put on my shoes, and they aren't there. One morning, I've forgotten exactly which one, I woke up with the sun warming the bed and a foot hanging out from under the covers to cool, and left it bare.

Spring came while I was sleeping, without a fight, without an upset in routine, without a yearning for twenty more minutes under an old warm quilt. Spring came, and I changed with its first dewy breath.

It's the subtlety, the unobserved abrupt change, that inspires me; always controlled, conforming to nonconformity, and now a foot finding its way out of the bedsheets, willing to step on a piece of glass or a rusty nail if it means freedom from restraint, seems to have changed it all.

Spring

2008-04-21T13:45:00.004-05:00

Today is the kind of day I like. The yard is mowed. The house is clean. The baby is napping. The windows are open. The plants get to sit in the outside.

It's spring at its finest.

Exercise: Personal Ritual

2008-04-17T11:10:00.001-05:00

Long before she bought her first pair of fishnets and rolled down the waistband on her skirts to raise the hemline, there was a nakedness in her eyes like swollen blackberries on a leaf-barren vine.

She looked for it in other people, touching strangers' arms in passing to lure a glance and thumbing the brows over young eyes, soggy with whiskey, until one night there was a wicked dance between the conversationalists in her head that lasted well into morning.

Her ugliness was unique.

She wore it in embarrassment, like stained panties, discreetly, always glimpsing behind to ensure invisibility. She tried to calm the pain by holding in her stomach. Jutted hipbones, concaved stomach, fleshless between her thighs, she fumbled around like a skeleton, a skeleton with bulging ugly eyes.

Gypsy Rondo

2008-04-16T12:47:00.015-05:00

In the front room, three feet from the wall, the polyurethane coating has worn off the hardwood floor - not a large spot, just about the size of a child’s heel. A piano once sat there, a black grand with stiff keys and gold etching above the middle ‘C’. Kimball.

Twenty years ago, a girl sat behind the piano every afternoon for two hours; the first hour, required studies; the second hour, free play. Sometimes she would turn the knob on the timer, playing Hannon finger exercises with one hand to cover the click-click-clicking as she inched the dial towards the second hour.

She played Haydn’s Gypsy Rondo until her fingers held the memory, and her mind was able to wander. On quiet afternoons, she reflected upon her morning in the woods - the creek water slowly rinsing the bank, the clouds chasing each other like lovers amputated at the hip - and kept a mindful tempo. On afternoons when contentment filled the house, she listened for the bobbing of the needle on her mother’s sewing machine and kept a steady rhythm.

But most days, she leaned into the piano, back rigid, shoulders hunched, and thumped the keys until her mother’s screaming rampage was deflected from her siblings. Her mother would charge into the large room where the fireplace was never lit because it might leave soot on the furniture, upon which no one was allowed to sit. She would close the drapes that framed the large, welcoming picture windows, which opened up to a world the girl wasn’t allowed to experience.

She would stand next to the piano, salmon-colored cheeks huffing, fingers knotting themselves at her waist, and the girl would say, “I just want to play for you. Sit down. Sit down on the furniture I will never sit upon. Look through the windows at the world I will never experience. Listen.”

And she would watch the girl’s fingers cross and her wrists slightly turn towards the ceiling, while from memory she began a new song. Her mother would back away towards the Victorian style loveseat with rose-colored velour fabric, and stare out the picture window towards the highway which led to places she should never allow her daughter to go.

The girl would press her heel into the hardwood floor, her fingers keeping a slow, steady, comforting tempo while her heart furiously pounded ‘The Dance of the Demon’.

No Title

2008-04-03T20:49:00.004-05:00

I imagine the baby I killed had red hair. I can't say for certain since I was nineteen, and that was a long time ago. I only saw him on the monitor at the abortion clinic, and I didn't want to embarrass either of us by staring.

Heath had red hair with ends that were split and curled from being whipped around in the wind. Always once, during every motorcycle ride through the back roads, a lock of hair would catch the corner of my mouth. I'd spit it out and laugh in his ear, and we'd ride.

Five years after I left him, I confessed my sin on a short line next to the question 'Is the your first pregnancy?' Sitting in the doctor's office, watching the receptionist eye The Price is Right while waiting for a copy of my insurance card to slide out of the printer, I felt certain that question was one of those 'true or false' questions; otherwise, the line would have been longer.

For the next six months, people I didn't know rubbed my swollen belly and asked if the baby was my first. I smiled, asked them if they could feel the baby kicking, and lied like the Virgin Mary to save myself.

I imagine the baby I killed had red hair like Heath’s other baby. I saw her at Christmas one year. His mother had put a bow in her long red curls. She jumped off the curb outside the mall, and the wind picked up a lock of her hair, whipping it over her shoulder. I stood at the corner, holding hands with my blond headed son, and watched them ride away.

Pleasure

2008-04-02T10:36:00.001-05:00

Pleasure, a thought, then the slow drape of my leg over his belly. In the morning, physical pleasure isn't misused or attached to emotions charged by time, but passes lazily between us.

We work in the garden throughout the afternoon. Side by side, we pull weeds and pinch herbs, speak of bills or the kids. Because of love, because of time, we spend the rest of the day holding the morning under our tongues.

The Heart of the Woods

2008-04-02T09:23:00.004-05:00

At Harmonie State Park, everything green stretches its long restless limbs towards the orange morning sun.

I inch down the backside of Sycamore Ridge. Behind me, the leaves rise up delicately, like the fuzz on the arch of a woman's back after a hot shower. I veer through the belly of the woods until moss mounts the trees and dips its roots into the gray bark.

It's barely April, two weeks before the tiny morel skulls will sidle through the leaves, and the thieves have already come to poach her. The chest of the woods has been ripped open, leaves swept aside into great piles, exposing her heart. They come to steal life but they never leave death, only untidiness.

I climb onto a low hanging branch, sit on her shoulder, and drink my coffee while looking into the sun. Later, I will consider whether or not to straighten her up.

Lost

2008-03-06T10:28:00.001-06:00

I know what I’ve done wrong. You aren’t supposed to end a sentence with the word be. I have to be a mother or not. I have to be a thinker or not. I have to be a worker or not. I have to be a lover or not. It isn’t proper to just be.

I thought I was a seeker, or maybe that’s just what I wanted to believe. Now I know I was born to lose the world inside myself, and that’s the problem. The world doesn’t want to be lost. People strive to be found. There is no stability in not knowing what to do. There is no comfort in waiting. All around me, problems, complaints, urgencies.

I open the windows when the tractors hit the field, and spring’s powdery coat wraps around town, leaving golden dunes to gather in the creases of the bedsheets. I stand in the window, breathing in the grit. A nuisance, my neighbors say, after bragging about finding fresh corn on the cob for twenty-five cents an ear.

It’s difficult to believe I’m wrong just because my thoughts aren’t clustered in the collective, but the alternative is frightening.

Shallow Breath

2008-02-15T21:35:00.002-06:00

I lost my footing yesterday, and I thought this is it. This is how I will be found - sprawled on my back, skull denting the ground, looking up at the grackles flying overhead like they do everyday.

My balance fought back just in time, as always, and gripped the earth. I survived with only a sore muscle in my back, one that hadn't been used in a while.

Later, I ground the muscle into the cold rim on the claw foot tub and massaged the lump under my skin, slightly embarrassed by the fading agility of youth. There had been nothing foreseen to cause the unsteadiness; no branch on the ground to stumble upon; no stripped spiky corn stalk to grab hold of my skirt, only the earth changing expressions beneath me.

Identity

2008-02-08T14:55:00.002-06:00

She withdraws from her name, wondering why, as a child, she wrote it on everything she owned - black magic marker on a backpack, silver paint pen on a leather jacket, the image etched into her flesh by a man named Shaker. There aren't statues of cats, at least, posed and lined up on wooden shelves hanging on the wall. She never would have gone that far.

She forgot how it started. Maybe a joke or a boyfriend's observation about the shape of her eyes? It wasn't long after she heard the name in the hallways that she began painting her eyes thick and black, and started wearing stockings that left red crisscross patterns on her knees.

Then the nights came when her mother was gone, and her stepfather played solitaire next to a row of beer cans at the kitchen table, and she sat behind the locked door of her walk-in closest, taping pictures to the wall that had been drawn by boys with steady hands. Sometimes she would stand under the bare bulb, lick her finger, and smudge the lines until fine bits of gray paper peeled up, just to ease the time away.

She liked the name mixed with liquor in the mouths of sweaty boys, but even more when they screamed it through thin gaping lips. Naked, except for their tight black jeans and studded belts, they cursed her name until they forgot it, all of them.

It seemed fitting, she thought one day, while painting her eyes beneath the glow of a bare bulb in the dressing room, that the DJ should call out the name whispered in love so many times but soon forgotten.

A Lonely Moment

2008-02-07T11:01:00.000-06:00

We hear him skulking in the backyard. He lingers over the snapped branch, and I imagine his eyes brittling like ice. We don't know when he will speak so we stand in the backyard with our fingers entwined, listening to his heavy breathing and the rain misting the treetops.

It occurs to me that I haven't been this still for a very long time, and I think if I could reach out and touch them both, I could mold this moment like a piece of jewelry to wear a groove around my finger. Then the rain comes down hard and soaks the trees until they are black and wet like my insides, and I know I have to move or shake or let go of his hand.

We walk up the hill together, one of them on each side of me, and I want us to keep walking past the parked cars outside the barhouse, cross the road, and stop for a moment at the pond. There, we could stand beside each other and stare at our distorted reflections as the rain comes down and laughter leaks through the windows in the bar. We might be happy, the three of us, gawking at the smiling faces in the water. I know I would.

Instead, we go inside and sit at a round table. They talk about the noise on the tin roof, and I buy the three of us double shots of whiskey. I should feel caught or busted but I don't.

The waitress brings a shot of Jagermeister, compliments of the gentleman at the bar.

They shake their heads as I drink it down. Cold, black, and wet, it coats my throat, feeling like victory inside.

Then there's just us, the empty shot glasses, the last of the acorns pouncing on the tin roof, and the man patting the stool next to him at the bar.

Calypso

2007-12-15T10:00:00.000-06:00

The connection that killed space between us as children once again wakes me in the early hours, only now I don't want to be there with you. I hear your heart pound. Your dread rigidifies my muscles. Is the numbness that prevents me from running mine or yours?

I curled up on the bench seat and laid my head in your lap. It was only two in the morning. We still had four hours before your mother got up for work and you had to be home.
"You'll always belong to me, even when we're old and married and you have wrinkles around those pretty eyes of yours," you said.
"You'll forget about me one day," I said. "Someday you'll be busy coaching ball, or troweling back some archaeological site and I won't be anywhere around."
You cupped my chin in your palm and brushed my bottom lip with your thumb. "What we have isn't about marriage or love or being together. We both know that."
Your tears fell on my face. Neither of us wiped them away. We knew they belonged there, in that moment, acknowledging the truth.
"How will we know?" I asked.
"It'll just happen on its own. We'll drift to other places. I don't worry though. You always with me in here." He pointed to his head.
"We're dreamers," I said.
"We're poetic souls, rhythms of the calypso. We need that yearning and not knowing at the same time. That's what will get us through life. That's what will keep us coming back to one another whether in life or in thought."

Anxiety washes over my body like the sea. The bedsheets grit against my skin. Your heart pounds in my ears, rushed, rhythmic like bare hands on the leather pad of a drum. My tears fall, wet the reed on my horn, and we play a duet.

Silence

2007-12-11T08:03:00.000-06:00

"You have to find a balance between the music and me," I tell my husband. "I won't be lonely. I won't go to that place again. You have no idea what it is like sitting at home every weekend with the children while you are out playing music."

He tries to mask the smirk that bares his teeth but the black night hanging over the country road isn't dark enough to hide what I've become accustomed to seeing.

"Every time we have this conversation it comes back around to the same question. Do you want me to quit?"

His grip tightens on the steering wheel. My oldest son's sleeping head falls softly against the door in the backseat.

"I don't want you to quit. I know you need to play. The only reason it comes to that question is because you make it. You make it black or white. Not me," I say.

"Okay, babe." He shuts down, maybe because he knows I'm right, or because he isn't ready to go there, or maybe because he doesn't believe it isn't me doing this.

I know loneliness doesn't ride on the back of silence. With the children asleep in the backseat, and the gentle jostling of the truck rocking my body like a Bill Withers vocal, words that will be written, never spoken, form in my mind.

You're away even when you're at home. You want to hit the snooze button again and again so your mind can chase a dream shared between old friends. I've never had dreams, only memories of a time when I could hold the pit of another in the palm of my hand and be loved for it.

I think you believe I'm asking too much when I'm only asking for just enough.

You don't like to read about intimate moments I shared with others because you know that you aren't creating them with me. You need a dream. I need a memory.

Beautiful People

2007-12-10T17:18:00.004-06:00

There is a place between my gut and my heart that hunches my shoulders whenever it longs to connect on a deeper level. I've used the strumming of a guitar or the tone of a voice to relieve the guard around my emotions.

But then it isn't enough anymore and I'm left raw, hands cupped, holding vivid images of people from my past.

It isn't easy to touch them in my mind alone, and sometimes I wonder if I am supposed to remember them at all. It doesn't seem right that I should relive pieces of their lives without consent. But I guess we all do that. I'm not as separate as I think I am.

_________

"You don't belong among pretty things," he told me.
I kissed the patch of white skin below his eye.

He picked up the guitar and stretched the skin that had been grafted onto his hand sometime before I met him. I spread my legs across the thin plaid fabric on the couch and tucked my feet under his crossed leg. It was Saturday night and we had nothing better to do than hide in his house with our demons.

A voice like rain drizzling on a parked car filled the living room. He tried to tuck a loose dreadlock behind an ear that wasn't there. I relaxed and let a damaged spirit escape a beautiful body.

This had to be the place I was born...in a house where neither of us cared if the lights were on. He was physically scarred, carrying a dead wife and child in his heart. I hid my damage behind flawless skin and taut muscle.

I needed to show my ugliness. He needed to feel beautiful sitting next to someone else.

Purging

2007-12-08T09:28:00.000-06:00

The pain starts in my heart, presses against the back of my teeth like
the morning after. I want to walk. I want to hear my Vans slap the
pavement, feel broken bits of blacktop grind under my feet, but I
can’t. The children are sleeping. The coffee pot is set for 5am.

He wants me to come to bed with him. I’m not me tonight.
Sometime after supper she danced around me, brushed her fingers across
my thigh and begged me to let her in. In the front of the house, the
box springs give under his weight and I stare at the computer chair.

My emotions are dull, analyzed, and understood. I let her into the
hollow to run like a wild stallion. From behind smudged black eyes the
feelings dart, dodge, never meet head on. She takes them from others
without knowledge - theirs or hers. And I want that back. I don’t want
to understand. I want to feel desperate, consoled, abused,
loved…..real.

She seeks salvation from winding roads and dirty white tiles; collects lies in amulets and broken boys in an old green backpack.

I let her sleep with me tonight. She lifts their faces out of that
backpack, strokes their hair, touches her cheek to theirs but the pain
doesn’t come.

The children are sleeping. The coffee pot is set for 5am. And I don’t want to be my own savior.

Sixty-Seven Cents

2007-12-08T09:24:00.001-06:00

The best place to find money was outside the coffee shop early in the morning. Herded through a maze of nylon rope, people quickly get their morning fill and squeeze through the door. A young lady, about the same age as myself, stood outside the door, balancing a cup of coffee and her change in one hand, and opening her bag with the other. A coin hit the ground next to her pointed-toe high heel, and rolled to a stop next to the waste basket.

Her pause was brief. She checked the time on her watch. A dribble of coffee ran down her jeweled fingers. Time worth more than a dropped coined, she zipped her bag and walked off. Regardless that it wasn’t stealing, I waited for the clicking of her high heels to fade into the morning traffic before picking up the dime.

Unlike the coffee shop, The Golden Nugget was alive. Clusters of fried egg dotted the carpet beneath a highchair. Silver spoons clinked on the rims of lidless ceramic mugs. Linda waved me to the counter.

"Coffee this morning?" she asked, uprighting the mug before I could answer.
"I’m three cents short," I said, scraping a piece of crusted muck off the pale countertop.
"No you’re not," Linda said. She slid three pennies out of the Styrofoam cup beside the register and dropped them onto my napkin.
"Thanks, Linda. I don’t know why so many people line up in those upscale coffee shops. I’d take great service over gourmet coffee any day."
"Eh, let them stay there, for all I care. I have enough people rushing me around, and they don’t have to be anyplace," she laughed.

Occasionally, I caught men watching Linda as she shuttled around the dining room, whisking up bits of food and straw wrappers with a little broom and dustpan. I wondered if they recognized her from the photograph that hung above the payphone at the strip club like I had. She got out before the pole and the drugs wrecked her body and mind. If I could shuck off some of my pride, I would ask her how she did it.

"Thanks for the coffee, Linda." I pushed the coins across the counter.
"That’s your change. Hang onto it for when you really need it."
"I don’t want you to get into trouble, Linda. Just take the money." I pushed it back her way.
"I don’t need it. You do."

"Will you accept a collect call?" the operator said.
"Yes."
"Jordan, I’m ready to come home," I said into the phone. "I don’t have enough money to buy a bus ticket."
"How much do you have?" he asked.
"Sixty-seven cents."

Through the graffittied payphone booth, I saw the strong hands that had once held Linda above the dance floor, while her body arched before paying men, wipe scrambled eggs off a highchair.

White Wicker and Wrought Iron

2007-12-08T09:22:00.000-06:00

He stood on the front porch and professed his love in a long winded curse. The words, ready to be spat, sat on my tongue. I took it in; the white wicker, the wrought-iron railings, the gardenias, and shook my addiction.

The wind burrowed under the hairs on my arms, created a cold the shivers couldn’t disperse. Had it been that long ago that I left myself to the elements, walking into the hot damp of a New Orleans’ summer night? Yet again, I found myself exposed, my life lugged around in a green backpack, orbiting to the only place I knew to go when the moon hung low in the sky.

"You shaved your head." I hung my bag on the hook above the arranged row of sneakers.

"What do you think?" Van rubbed a hand down his smooth head to his sleepy eye.

"Makes you look too tough," I said. He looked splintered. The untreated curls had always masked the self-inflicted pain behind his eyes.

He arched his back, stretched his lean belly muscles. "You’re a softy under all that garb," he chuckled. "I’m going back to bed. There’s towels in the bathroom if you want to shower." Van followed me to the back of the house and swatted me on the rear before dodging into his room.

I stripped my clothes and dropped them to the floor. I stared at the long skirt, the tights, the torn Sonic Youth tee; studied them, then scooped them up and sat behind the door. I mixed them into the pile of jerseys and ribbed white tanks, tucked the tights under a pair of Girbaud’s.

Van cracked open the door. I shrunk against the wall in embarrassment.

"Crys?"

"Yeah?"

"I’m glad you’re home." The door shut.

In the shower, scrubbing the numbness from my skin, wincing with soap in my eyes, I whispered, "Me, too."

I rolled Rico to the cold side of the bed before getting in.

"Did you dry your hair?"

"Sort of," I lied.

"Get the towel." he pushed himself up and leaned against the headboard.

I sat between his legs, covers wrapped around our waists, while he rubbed the length of my hair between the towel.

"Will I see you in the morning?"

I picked at a loose thread on the quilt I made for him two birthdays ago. "I need to be here a while."

He wrung my hair out in the towel one last time before dropping it over the side of the bed. Under the covers, my nose pressed into the pillow, a soft kiss lingering on the nape of my neck, I thought about the white wicker, the wrought-iron railings, the gardenias, and saw them for what they were; chipped, rusted, and wilted.

O You

2007-12-08T09:21:00.003-06:00

O you whom I often and silently come where you are that

I may be with you,

As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same

room with you,

Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake

is playing within me.

WW

He called the first time at 10:30pm. "I followed you to the club Saturday night. Those kids are weird." Why the hell was he calling me?

"You aren’t one of them," he noted, an impressive observation.

"Why do you think that?" I asked, pushing the flowered sheet to the end of the bed with my feet.

"The way you lean against the wall, speaking to no one yet reading them all. I can see it in your eyes. I’ll bet they are beautiful without all that crud around them."

Up on one elbow, I looked down at the black smears on my pillow. "You’re an ass."

The Priscilla curtain clung to the back of the rotating fan. "Wanna pick me up?"

"Um, sure. I’ll be there in twenty." He didn’t ask for directions.

The watermill that greeted visitors and the homeward bound at the front of the apartment complex had been hit again. The foam shimmered beneath the spotlights at the base of the fountain.

I stretched out in the grass, pulled a Camel from the waistband of my black mini, and cursed the mudflap girl on my Zippo. Out of fluid again.

The blue Lincoln turned onto the street, lights off. He made the circle, opening the passenger door before bringing the car to a complete stop. "Where you wanna go?"

I saw only the whites of his eyes and the braids twisting from the top of his head like the tree branches in winter. "Wherever, Baby."

The streetlights cast shadows across my fish netted thighs. I tapped the smoke against the armrest until he offered a light.

He drove a couple of miles away to the park, unbuckled my seatbelt, and pulled me to the middle of the seat. Taking my chin in his hand, he looked me in the eyes, and before kissing me said, "Next time wash that crud off your face."

I wasn’t his regular any more than he was mine yet we had a sickness for each other that killed time. After the shows every weekend, I scrubbed the black putty eyeliner off my eyes, and he lied to his girlfriend about going straight home.

He used to tell me I wasn’t created equal…that there was something about me that frightened the shit out of people.

I dreamt of him the other night….sitting at the park, legs stretched out beneath the picnic table, listening to me ramble about a picture I’d seen of Egyptians shooting up, and woke up wondering what it is about me that scares the shit out of people.

Theme

2007-12-08T09:19:00.000-06:00

"I read your latest journal while you were gone." He leans back in the computer chair, brings up his legs, and rests his head on his knees. "I don’t know whether to puke or take your face in my hands and kiss you."

Immediately my mind scans the pages of that journal grasping for the pictures that go with the words.

"I don’t know what to tell you, Cory. I wrote it like it was. That is all I can do."

"I feel dirty, Crys. I feel like I stepped into a very scary place that I don’t want to leave. I’m so sorry I invaded your privacy but I had to let you know that I did it."

"I’m not upset that you read it. It’s that reaction I feared the most, the reaction from you." I curl up in his lap knowing the only way to remedy this is to let him hold me.

"It’s hard for me because I know them, even with the changed names. The chipped blue escort, the shelter house….I know your life because I was there. But I was left with this feeling that I’ve been sleeping next to you all these years and I never knew. I never asked. I couldn’t know."

I run my finger down the inside of his palm, willing myself to let him purge instead of making excuses for what I feel.

"Our lives are so interwoven. Not too many people have what we have because the background isn’t there. But that is also what makes it so difficult for me to read. I can picture Denny’s and the yellow Triumph and…..why did you make him out to be so caring? I know what you felt when you wrote ‘Road Trip’. You were shamed. You had taken yourself from Chicago and you were getting out. Then you walked back to him. I know this. I think I would have sensed it even if I didn’t know the background but I know this."

I slide my bare feet under his leg and twist my hair up into a knot. "You don’t get it. We all did what we had to do back then to feel special. You did it too with the guitars and the bare chest and the singing. You needed attention from girls and praise from the boys. You wanted to be known. You did what you had to do. I wanted to be loved."

"It’s my pride, Crys," he sighs. "It is difficult to read about you sharing an intimate moment with someone else. It repulses me, not you, the thought of it happening. How would you feel if I wrote about a passionate moment from my past?"

A smile breaks on my face dimming the blue light on the monitor. "I think you’ve forgotten your past," I smile down at him. "You slept with half my friends."

"Fair enough," he laughs. "Our lives can’t be separated. The history is too deep. I realize this."

I take the baby out for a walk and think about how I was sucked into that life, how at thirteen I ended up dancing in the middle of a house in Howell while two twenty year old men sat on a mattress playing ‘Simple Man’ on acoustic guitars.
_____________
Before bed, Cory wrapped his arms around my waist and told me not to hold back because of his pride or mine. It was a time, a life that many kids shared but no one understands. Maybe that’s part of the story I need to tell.

Wasted on Her

2007-12-08T09:17:00.001-06:00

Two pair of hairy legs hang out the back of the escort. My heart drops, floating on the contents of a forty ounce. Jenny isn't here.

I toss my bag onto the seat behind their heads and crawl in. Jeremy rolls to his side, exposing a welcoming nook. "Where's Jenny?" I ask. He gathers my hair in one hand and pulls the bundle tightly, seeking a bare bit of neck to rest his cheek. "She's with Mosh Boy."

"Look what I found in her pack," Adam says, unzipping her pack. The front flap opens, and a new copy of Mein Kampf tumbles out. His eyes stare us down until Jeremy boots it out of the car, its contents too filthy to touch.

I want to shred the image of her in Mosh Boy's arms, eyes open in fascination, hanging onto his hate the way she used to suck Whitman's free verse from my mouth. Jeremy's bones feel sharper. I try to sit up but he pulls me closer, digging his fingers into the soft flesh under my halter. "Let it be us tonight. Not her, too. She doesn't deserve this."

She does deserve this, lodges in my throat, but it's all or nothing with Jeremy. Tonight would be nothing.

Adam's mom left the hall light on for us. He waves us to his room before disappearing up the stairs to let her know we made it home.

I want to talk about Jenny but Jeremy will tell me to let her go. He's never had anyone worth hanging on to, except Adam, and me. A wheeze escapes him as he sleeps. At seventeen, the nonfilter cigarettes are already turning his sweetness black. I untie the laces, tug the boots off his feet, and toss an army blanket over his thin frame. "Not us. Not tonight," I say to Jeremy, cupping his calf in my hand before turning to Adam.

The backyard limbs stretch and sway, beholding the moon's gaze. Arms reach out to me, drawing me down to the ground. Lips parted, he searches my face for those tears that were sure to come. Adam always knows.

He never minds the dampness on his back. I slide on top of him.

"Is this jealousy?" I ask, running my fingers through the crevices between his ribs. What I want is in his shirt pocket.

"No, just concern. She's not like us. She wants the thrill of being defiant. We are defiant."

Tugging his bottom lip open with my thumb, I lean over and blow the smoke into his mouth.

"It's all about what you need, whom you need, and knowing where to find it," he chokes out. "She's still searching for all of them."

Bugs

2007-12-08T09:14:00.003-06:00

It took five guys to load the jukebox into the back of JR's pickup. We had to switch club spots fairly often. Neighbors complained about the noise, the drugs, the kids weaving up and down the country road. It wasn't until that kid who wore the bullet around his neck wrecked and killed his girlfriend that the cops closed us down.

That day we were moving spots to a shelter house at the park. Five dollar cover to watch three bands. I took this seat on the ledge of the half wall where I could lean up against the wooden post and not risk falling through the top screened half of the building.

The kids filed in, black eyeliner sticking out of the top zippered pockets of leathers. The girls with lips perfectly outlined in black and hooker red lipstick smeared on the inside always stood in the middle of the room. Their eyes darted over the crowd, heads turning, looking for someone to claim.

The kids all knew me by name. They watched me dance. Occasionally a girl would come up and dance next to me, grinning like she was part of a party of two. Most of the time I just smiled, kept my distance, and nodded my head to the beat.

I sat in my corner all night watching these kids. Knowing that the following Monday I would be sitting at a desk at college and looking at the students there with the same amazement. They sported thirty dollar Chuck Taylors and wrote down a leather on their list to Santa just to look like the kids I saw every weekend; the kids who dreamed big but took pride in never finding a way out.

This night, a couple of kids showed up in brand new leather jackets, no fuzzy gray worn elbows, or broken zippers on the pockets. And the other kids laughed at them.

In my head, I thought of all people to be laughing, these kids didn't have a reason to laugh. They were stuck. They were stuck in a world of violence and abuse and dead end jobs and welfare and having kids before they were old enough to take care of them and they laughed because they were better than someone trying to fake into their world.

The thing was though, I came from wealth. I had the education. I had the means to get out and I was getting out. And they still, they always took me for one of their own. In my own way, in my own place at the back of the room or on the ledge, I was always one of them.

I don't know what they sensed in me. I rarely spoke. I kept to myself and my bottle. In my world, the time they shared it with me, I was never really with them. I knew I wasn't like them. I knew I wasn't like the kids at school. I knew that I would never find a mirror in any of them. But I loved them. Because they were there, and WITH me, and experiencing this part of my life that was real, alive.

Johnette's voice smothered my ears, my heart rose to my throat, and these kids closed their eyes, moving to this stirring from a voice that I felt inside myself.

No Expectations

2007-12-08T09:14:00.001-06:00

We ran across the gravel and into the graveyard, leaping over the rounded headstones in a wild dash to the corner by the woods. Lindsey, drunk and high, stumbled into the briars that shielded the trees from knife-bearing engravers like us.

After we settled into a circle, Adam unrolled the flimsy cigarette wrapper and took out the joint. Legs tucked under him, balanced on one hip, he dug the lighter out of his pocket. The smoke popped and snapped as he inhaled. A spark disappeared above him. I took a big hit and laid my head in the middle of the circle.

There she was, peeping out from behind the black clouds like a dancer's knees beneath her skirt. My eyelids fell. The cicadas were climbing out. I lay there, my body too alive to move, listening to their spiked legs rake against the bark at the base of the tree.

A hand palmed my belly. My ribs rose in staccato under the perspired warmth. "What do you think?" Jenny asked, her black hair shining white under the moon. "Mmm, about what?" I mumbled. "Driving to the club. Do you want to go or not?"

"I'm cool. Just pick me up later, okay?"

"Whatever you want, chicky. Come on boys. She's staying."

Feet shuffled. Mike Ness's croon faded away with the old chipped blue escort. Belly still warm from her touch, I thought about Jenny's room with the little pink flowered wallpaper, the vase of dead roses and moldy water sitting on her desk for at least the three years I'd known her. She was so naive, wanting to be what she wasn't….rich and thick, hurt and injured. She had a good life, a good family but wanted to come from destruction.

"Taste?" Adam asked, extending the bottle.

"I can't move," I grinned.

"Open up." He poured it into my mouth, a warm trickle ran down my neck. I tried not to gag from laughing, letting it slowly fill my mouth before swallowing the two shots.

"Why didn't you go with them?" I asked. He pushed me over to my belly, lying down next to me.

"Why didn't you?" Blade of grass between his thumbs, whistling at the night creatures.

"Didn't need to," I plucked the spear of grass from his fingers and gave it a toss.

"Me neither."

That closeness with no expectations. There isn't a word to describe it. The occasional innocent brush of skin on skin that we fear, hide from as adults but crave as teenagers. Locking eyes and not turning away. Heart pounding in your head knowing you won't dare move and ruin the moment. It isn't sex. It isn't love. It's intimacy. It's coming as close as you can to another living being with no expectations.

Road Trip

2007-12-08T09:13:00.001-06:00

The sweetness of the corn mixes with musty soybeans and sticks to my skin. One-stop towns decorate the open fields with marquee signs announcing births, engagements, and six piece chicken buckets for $4.99. Every town is my home.

"Do you want that?" Heath nods.

I turn the Billy Idol ‘Rebel Yell’ cassette over in my hand and think what a silly question. We haven’t had a cassette player in months. I’d have to stash it in the saddle bags for later. "That’s okay." I drop the cassette into the bin.

The lady behind the counter smiles at him, at his thoughtfulness. "Ya’ll have a good night," she calls out.

"Thanks. You do the same," Heath waves before guiding me out the door by my waist, inches away from the plastic case tucked into the band of my jeans.

The bugs are violent outside of town, stinging my cheeks, but the darkness pushes us forward. I bury my head into Heath’s back, hunched over, the corner of the cassette case jabbing my belly. Left hand on my thigh, shoulders spread broad, he windshields for me.

He steers the bike onto a dirt path. I dismount and follow him a ways off the road. My legs, tired from the long ride, tremble as my boots shuffle over the rutted ground.

The moon spots us from straight above. There’s no point in setting up the tent. Farmers rise early. The first whir of pickups passing and Heath will wake. I climb into the sleeping bag with him, resting my head on the chest that had become my pillow. The scent of oil and wind is intoxicating.

Lying together, the sleeping bag zipped tight, I ask the dreaded question, "Where are we going tomorrow?" My fingers play with the flesh hanging over his belt. At least he isn’t drinking as much.

"I don’t know. Keep heading south for a while. D.T. has a place for us in Florida. He has a buddy who owns a bike shop. I need to find some work. Our funds are getting low."

"I could always dance somewhere. Just for one night." Just saying those words coats the back of my tongue with bile.

"I told you….never again. And I mean it." He sucks in his gut. The flesh disappears beneath my fingers. "Why do you even bring that up?" His eyes slit and he drops his arm to the ground which was as far away as he could get in the confines of the flannel wrap.

I fumble for the zipper on his blue jeans, letting the crickets speak for me. Their incessant, involuntary cries for companionship fill my ears and I know there isn’t any other language I know how to speak.

Lake Michigan

2007-12-08T09:11:00.000-06:00

That night we wet our feet in Lake Michigan, right before we were arrested, I was going to tell you that there isn’t always a lesson to be learned in sorrow. Sometimes we create our own pain. You wouldn’t have believed me though. You never did listen when I tried to tell you life didn’t have to be so hard.

I realized that night we wouldn’t work out. From the back of the patrol car I watched you throw your body onto the concrete beside the five foot marker, manipulating the officers into giving you what I wouldn’t.

Later when they visited, the fresh officer asked if it was the drugs or if you were always that way. I assured him it was the drugs. Then the doctor asked if I wanted to go to the shelter. I told him I didn’t, but you know I was never very good at lying.

The Memory Sprig

2007-12-08T09:08:00.001-06:00

I went for a jog this morning with the baby. It was still dark out. I knew we couldn't stay out long but we both enjoy the air, even when hung with a wet chill.

The herb garden is desolate in the winter. It saddens me. In late fall I walk past, slightly brush my leg against the greens and the last scents of summer cling to the air. I grew up on an eighty-three acre farm in Kentucky….yellow two story house, black shutters, windows open until nine in the evening.
I spent my childhood in the woods. My father used to wake me early in the spring and take me out on the rounds. He hunted with the boys, but with me, he passed down his own father's passion for all that grows. He taught me how to watch the mayapples, how to have patience like the delicate morels anxiously waiting to rise up from under expanded leaves. He taught me to be mindful, unselfish, to take only a few and leave the rest for the animals that depended upon the mushrooms for survival.
The trees and plants that grew in those woods received more time and patience from me in childhood than anyone or anything I've met since.

Something caught my eye when I jogged past the edge of the garden this morning, green, rising up from under the dry leaves. I pushed the baby to the edge of the garden. His cheeks were flushed, blue eyes wide. I lifted the leaves, exposing a small bundle of lemon thyme. I plucked a sprig, and carefully covered the bundle with bedding. I rubbed the tiny green leaves between my fingers and held it to the baby's nose.
"Smell, babe."
He took it from my hand and stuck his tongue to it. Lips protruding, possibly a dim recollection of summer forming in his mind, he tucked his hand under the blanket, enclosed in it, the dying sprig.

Why Not?

2007-12-08T09:05:00.000-06:00

'Alone And Drinking Under The Moon' by Li Po

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

I want to surround myself with people who have nothing better to do than be with me, no demands, leave your baggage at the door.

At nineteen, I quit college. I tossed my knee high Doc Martins, a green hoodie, and Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' onto the pile of cassettes in the front seat and drove south.

Nothing changes in rural western Kentucky; the picket fences get a fresh coat of paint, dead dogs are replaced with replicas, pickups powder into rust next to leaning gray barns. It would be the same when I returned.

The house sat two acres off the highway. The front porch sagged. The shingles turned over like leaves before a storm. Cindi smeared blackberry juice on the front of her shirt before wrapping her plump arms around my waist. It wasn't home, but if you are going to squat for a while there's no place better than in the kitchen of an old friend.

The barbecue began the next evening. He strutted through the smoke like a warrior after victory. He didn't need game, or lines. One look in his black eyes and you knew he had never once doubted he was beautiful.

We hid behind the barn.
"How long are you staying?"
"A week, a month, never leaving, I don't know," I said, spinning before him.
He reached out for my hand. "You're beautiful."
"What does that have to do with how long I'm staying?" I mumbled into his curls.
He laughed at me. "I'll call you a toad if you'd rather I did so."
I stood there, biting my lip.
"Do you want company?"
"Tonight?" I asked.
"While you're here."
"Why not?"

I just want to be with people for no good reason.

Perfect Timing

2007-12-08T09:03:00.000-06:00

The singer's boot heel pounds the stage. My hip rocks, skirt swirling around my knees like smoke rising from a cigarette left in an ashtray.

Bottle to my lips, I watch the people at the table next to me instead of the empty dance floor. The girl with the shell necklace slides her feet out of her sandals and wraps them around the boy's leg. His eyes follow the curve of her neck while he talks to the man who grimaces with each sip of imported beer.

Tell me, Baby. The singer backs off the microphone. You got to tell me what's going through your head. The melody lures me onto the dirty white tiles.

He thumbs his bass, eyeing the crowd, watching their reaction as I ride the voice I've heard so many times at home.

I need you to tell me.

Barefoot on the front porch. He coaxes the swing back and forth, a silent bass accompanying his guitar.

What's it gonna be?

Lights of the highway hidden behind the cornfield. I catch the screendoor with my foot, two glasses of iced tea in hand.

You gonna come back home

Stop in front of the swing. Wait for the rock forward.

and stay with me?

Ten years. Perfect timing.

Maple Leaves

2007-11-15T09:17:00.001-06:00

Her hair fell like maple leaves in autumn when she released the clip. It brushed across the arm of the young man sitting next to her. He forgot the brass band and the place he had gone to behind closed eyes, and turned to her.

She didn't know why it worked. A rehearsed glance or a soft hip jutted while standing at the bar and the room owed her attention. She parted her lips. The nervous stammer sat on her tongue.

The piano lulled the saxophonist. The boy in rolled up sleeves led the girl with tattoos onto the dance floor. He slid his hand under her waist length hair and pressed his thumb into the small of her back.

The music and the weight of his arm resting on her hip summoned the memory of a Louisiana bar, and dancing tippy toe on a wood plank porch in the arms of a man whose name she left on a napkin at the bar.

Uncovering Crystal

2007-11-13T12:59:00.001-06:00

There are many things I've done in life that most people would hide. I've never believed that my life turned out better or worse because of the road I took as a teen. Three years ago, I took a pickaxe to the lock on the cover that held the pages of my life. I looked over my life as I would a friend's. Holding myself accountable, accepting myself, and giving myself the admiration that I should have long ago, has freed me from years of self doubt. I am a strong woman. I have much to give. And I want to share it with you.

My alter ego exhibits no fear. I wonder if she even knows it exists.

Ten years ago I passed by New Orleans. There was this little bar that lit up on the weekends like lightening bugs in July. Conversation was loud, half the time filled with profanities and insults tossed in jest.

These two cats were playing acoustic guitars this one night. The old man in the stained Sunday shirt thumped his guitar while the younger man's voice melted into the smoke.

In between songs, the singer would reach up and tug on his short beard, probably some habit he started because he thought it made him look intriguing. This one time I caught his eye. He didn't smile at first, just nodded, acknowledging my presence. So I waited until 'Sugar Mama' poured off his lips before I walked onto the dance floor.

Anyway you look at it, it is performing; because it is never me. On the stage I hide behind routines and makeup and on the dance floor, my alter ego takes over. She is confident. She has this way of making people want to be with her, lean into her, want to be close to her. And me? I do well to look people in the eye and speak without stumbling over my words.

I like to converse without speaking. And that is what happened that night. He stopped singing, just played his guitar while I danced. The couples moved to the edge of the dance floor and the lone inebriated lady finally gave up and left too. It was his guitar and me and we controlled that room. When that smile moved his lips I knew that he knew.

I caught a glimpse of her that night in a mirror. Underneath the red Budweiser paint this chick stared back at me, sweaty hair, eyes rushing like a summer crick. She winked at me.

That part of me has no fear. I want to draw her out but she stays far away. Waiting for smoke filled bars with little lights that flicker like the lightening bugs in July.