55

You hold out your cell phone, showing me a picture of your motorcycle. It's blue--my favorite color. At first I don't recognize the woman sitting on the bike, grinning at the camera. You've lost about 30 pounds since then. And you've died your hair red--one last time before it starts to fall out.

I tell you that I love your nail polish--teal with that crackle layer on top that I used back in high school. You make it look classy, even in that faded blue hospital gown. You tell me how badly you want to go to the makeup class they're teaching for oncology patients on Monday. I tell you that I hope you feel better soon so that you can go. I really, really hope you can make it.

I say goodbye, and promise to come back soon.

Later, I look at your CT, a mug shot of the cancer growing in your belly. Hidden inside, it managed to move to your liver and lungs before anyone knew it was there. I feel my throat close a little, that heaviness in my chest. I know that we are reaching the end, that there is little more we can offer you. I want to see you on that motorcycle again, your red hair blowing and those teal crackled nails clutching the handlebars, somehow outrunning the cancer.

You're 55. You're so young. It's not fair.

Bricolage

The pain of being used and discarded
Every drop of nectar wrung from my body
lapped up greedily
like magnetic ambrosia
until nothing but a pile of bones remained.
My abandoned skeleton
has now the most insipid of sweetnesses left to offer

My parents' hair has lost its color, not its curl,
but who were all the crows
that perched at the corners of their eyes
and etched the wrinkles into their faces?
What were the sweets and the genes
and the memories
that make their wounds
unable to heal?

An egalitarian whim:
that I were a person
before this gendered body!
whose purity is assessed by penetration
whose virtue is found in the the one at her side
whose potential is realized when the empty space within
forms another gendered body.

Tortuous torrents of fear flow underneath
For there is no operation for cataracts
of the third eye.
What is written
I no longer know

Their shrinking spines,
the vapid sugar of my veins,
my hollow womb, clotting like a hardened heart,
all fill me with unease
my clouded intuition cannot dispel.

Punctuation

Sometimes the silence is too much to bear.

A moment stolen
from intolerable rigmarole,
embodied in my smile:
relief, anticipation, creation
the neurotransmitter floods the synapse like
the dot of the exclamation point the sparkle in my eye
(!)

I could share
this with anyone.
I could.
But breath arrests action
and the mere act of inhaling
is a reminder that life is about accepting
being alone.

Smiling alone is sometimes too strange.

So:
turn on the radio,
listen to that pop song,
envision movement,
suppress the pining for the wish that
loneliness
could be put to rest earlier than
my death.

the streets of my old neighborhood

Tonight I took myself out
and had a vegan mocha cupcake
for dinner.

And then I walked myself home in the dark.
It was a perfect evening
in many ways.

I walked the streets of my old neighborhood
and passed that old house with the cluttered porch.
There are still more chairs
than inhabitants.
It makes me smile.

There is something healing
in putting one foot
in front
of the other.

But I must say
there is a deep ache within me
for that sacred space
where I can exhale
and know I belong.

For now
I will keep walking.

To Remember

To remember is to imagine at a particular moment,
a particular place,
and perhaps
nothing more.

My longitude and latitude may predict hypercognition of grief, anger, betrayal,
the bottomless pit in my left ventricle draining my blood
when my mind conjures up his face,
or his,
or his.

Slovenliness and the historical record join hands to make me into
an archaeologist.
Unearth from a messy drawer
a picture frame with pressed dried flowers
collected from the mountains of Colorado
labeled with genus and species

My nose recalls with ease what my mind does not.
The teasing scent of blue detergent
the comfort of a warm burial in a pile of freshly laundered white shirts
next to someone who adored me

Those milliseconds challenge the veracity of my narratives
that prioritize their vile ways.
How much easier it is when the truth of your disregard for me
does not confront the Truth
of the complexity of human interactions.
The Truth we shall never know.

That I too am remembered
am imagined
am measured by moods
by meaning
by a need to make sense of this life
cannot stop my imperfect memories

so maybe it is better to have none.


--Anita
inspired by Julian Barnes "The Sense of an Ending"

stranger

You are a stranger, even though
I am sleeping at your side, your arm resting on my hip
pulling me closer.
We are breathing in step, hearts aligned, fingers crossed
but even now, I feel so far away.
I am a girl at the bottom of a well, staring up at the sky.
I want you to know that I’m here
trapped in the darkness
but my voice is quiet. It does not carry so well.
I feel like I’m screaming, but I know it's just in my head,
in the way I look at you and hope to see you looking back,
in those ambiguous comments that pass by you like signs to places you have no intention on going.
I need you to ask--
to look down into the well--
to see me.
I don’t want you to join me,
to save me.
No.
Just to recognize that I’m down here
and not just the warm body at your side.

appetite

Inspired by Sarah's latest Wislawa Szymborska post and life.

--

appetite

How easy to love the ones who love us back!
To crawl through the eons that separate face from face,
to fight with such intensity that your wounded
hearts only grow closer on reconciling.

How hard it is to love the ones
who do not love us back,
whose battles become permanent wedges and tight smiles.
How many of them life hands us
until to love becomes
a duty
an obligation
a responsibility.

A weary hand feeding its body
purely out of necessity
with food that lost its taste
long ago.

How this heart craves the flavor
this palate is denied.
How this mind longs for meanings
this throat wishes it could choke down.

Instead,
this shell lives in seas
of cold oatmeal and spoons clinked with haste.
The machine requires sustenance
to keep loving
without receiving
(with a secret hope
that one day
the clouds will thunder into existence
machines who love back).

-Anita
--