Part one: Prenatal love

Demeter stuck her stomach to the refrigerator engine

She wants to get married 

                       to the man who wrote the moon

he slit her ribs, her intestines

and to make space between the spine

 he pressed.

She said she could feel him 

            down her throat

Do you believe her?

She herself had not been born yet. 

Part two: Patricide

 How do I even begin my life?

She asked the man 

who slid inside her mother’s belly

perhaps in silence. he replied.

On the day of her birth

she screamed and tore Kronos apart. 

the coroner wrote that at 9:30 a.m. 

his body was wheeled

 into the examination room in three parts:

His legs were too large to fit in the building

they deteriorated in the parking lot

In the margins of the report 

scribbled in blue ink, it said 

he had long claw marks

 running down his body 

This was not on the official copy. 

Part three: A Mother’s curse

You must remember this is before Persephone was born

before she came crawling out of the birth canal

splitting it like a flower

The man who wrote the moon

 never married

Demeter

but bound her legs to the earth.

When Persephone was born 

after thirteen years

      of waiting

Demeter whispered into her: 

We are just a body.

We feel hollowness in bones

when arms devour 

us

                           Broken Arrow

“Now that you’re there, where everything is known, tell me:

What else lived in that house besides us?” 

- Anna Akhmatova

There were stories of a town lost in the shadows of the five mountains.

Mountains that had sprouted like weeds from the flat lands of North America. 

But the children did not believe them. Even if the stories walked across their dreams. 

———————————-

He watched her scoop the broken bird into her palms. She lifted it to her lips. 

A kiss. A whisper that he could not hear. 

She set the body gently back down on the earth, and walked away.

George was in love. 

————- 

She kissed the little bird’s feathered cheek. 

When she was a young girl her mother told her

that when the colony first came into existence they were able to communicate with the outside world by pigeons.

But eventually the birds died,

 or lost their way in the treacherous mountain passes. 

And the rest of the world ceased to be.

No one had told her that feathers were dirty, that even touching them was somehow wrong. 

She liked how they tickled her skin.

“I love you” she whispered, and she felt what must have been apart of herself seeping through her hands into the little bird’s broken body. 

She noticed the Shepherd’s boy watching her.

Six years later they were married. She gave birth to a son with hard black eyes. It was a difficult pregnancy, and no more children followed.

——-

George loved his wife.

He loved the way she had cradled the broken bird in her hands all those years ago.

He loved her for how she held him when his father had died, and he was expected to bear the responsibilities of his family and flock.

He loved her for how she had held his son after carrying him through a treacherous pregnancy and hard winter.

That’s why he couldn’t tell her that occasionally he saw something dark

stirring inside Matthew’s eyes, and he knew something was wrong with the boy. his boy.

——-

Matthew cut the smallest toes off of each of his father’s dogs.

He hated this small town. He hated the mountains.

He imagined ripping them up like pieces of paper.

He wanted to force his mother, father, Alena and the whole town to see the world

that he was sure existed outside of Broken Arrow. 

——

In the night the Shepherd and the priest slaughtered the sheep. 

The shepherd howled, but the priest told him that it must be done.

They were possessed. No flock under the lord’s protection would have bitten the feet of the  shepherd’s dogs. 

——-

Zeus lived next door to the Shepherd’s family. He had lived next door to the Shepherd’s family, even before the time George’s father was the Shepherd.

 He had heard the sheep scream in the night. 

It had sounded like the screaming of women. 

Alena.

Twelve years ago his dog had died, and he loved it more than the Shepherd had possibly loved anything in his small and mundane life. 

Or was it ten years ago?

His dog went to the market to buy milk. 

His body was found stiff on the roadside. 

The police officer who picked him up swore his bones were made out of driftwood. 

Zeus was nearly blind, and the small town had no optometrist.

To him the dog looked like a sandy yellow blob, and he would have never found the body without the officer’s help. 

But everyone in the town knew it was Zeus’s dog. He was the only animal who knew how to purchase milk.

If he drank enough beer that sandy yellow blob became the hair of his ex wife.

And sometimes the dog licked his feet when he was half asleep in front of the fire.

 He got a tingle of sexual excitement.

The kind you get when you’re twelve, eleven, or even four years old. The kind you get when you first realize sex exists, and you want to press your body down on another body, or have a body pressing down on you, until it’s inside you, until it is you.

So he stopped masturbating when the dog died.

Not because he couldn’t imagine his ex wife, 

who even in his imagination hated him, (because that was so real and solid it could not be denied). Who at the end of his fantasies was always so filled with longing she swallowed her pride (among other things), and begged him to “put it in her.”

He stopped masturbating.

Because, while he could imagine his wife without that sandy yellow blob, he could no longer hear the dog breathing, panting, slurping, and gnawing. 

He could no longer hear the dogs organs and liquids sloshing in its 

hollow carcass.

It was the soundtrack of his sexual life. 

liquid against skin, skin against bone, bone against bone. Shadow against nothingness, against secrets. Against some ancient and deep thing that makes us human. That makes us poetry.

The sounds of shallow and young desire,

were contained within the mouth of his golden retriever.

When he stopped masturbating a tumor began to emerge from his forehead. It split his skull.

And he swore he was going to die.

And his neighbors, (which back then consisted of the Shepherd and his father), swore he was going to die. 

And the doctors swore he was going to die.

No one knew what to do, because no one else in the small town had ever had cancer. A special committee was formed - it elected to cut Zeus’s forehead open.

Inside was his daughter Alena, curled up in a magnificent ball of pale feathers to protect herself from the rest of the world.

———

—————————————-

At first they thought she was a bird.

 Maybe a giant pigeon who would reunite them with the outside world. 

Some in the town celebrated. They thought they were saved

(even though they and their ancestors had never once thought that they needed saving).

 Others spoke of ominous tidings, as if they were well known and had been passed down through the generations, but no one could remember hearing them before. 

Both sides claimed it was an Act of the Gods.  

But eventually the feathers fell away to reveal a girl.

 And the outside world was forgotten once more.

———————-

——-

Alena heard the sheep scream.

She covered her ears with her hands.

She dreamed she was a fish.

She dreamed they were all fishes.

That it never stopped raining.

—————-

George was no longer the Shepherd

and he had watched over the only flock in Broken Arrow.

He grew old over night.

His spine was beginning to split. 

His wife remarked that he looked like an gnarled old oak.

But there were no oaks in Broken Arrow,

and they wondered how they knew that it wasn’t just a tree,

but something beautiful and old 

that guarded the world from something more sinister. 

———————-

To Alena guilt sounded like the screaming of sheep.

They followed her through her dreams.

occasionally whispering horrible things in her ears,

sometimes they only asked to be loved

but Alena didn’t know what that meant. 

———————-

Matthew saw her cupping the dirt in her hands.

She was listening.

His father and the priest had slaughtered the sheep on this land.

He had heard them screaming, and they sounded like women. Like Alena.

Alena’s hair fell against her back.

She was wearing a thin shift,

but her bones betrayed her shape.

He figured he might be falling in love with her,

by the way he looked at her bones 

and wanted to run his fingers against

their smooth whiteness. 

But he knew what love meant. 

—————-

A body pressed down on her, pushed her into the dirt, and she thought she was going to fall through the earth. Until it was inside her. Until it was her.

—————

By the time Alena’s son was a grown man, the old Shepherd and his son were long since dead.

Zeus was hibernating in the basement.

The Shepherd’s wife had stopped cradling the dead

her hands were gnarled and overworked from writing poetry

And the outside world had remembered Broken Arrow.

It seemed to have occurred overnight,

but in all likelihood

it was a long time coming. 

Alena’s son became a builder with massive hands 

that seemed to enclose the sun. And in three nights he built a wall around the mountains 

shutting out the light, the whirring of helicopters,

the noises of the outside world.

————-

Zeus was deep within the belly of the earth. But even there he felt the rain begin, the rain that covered all their heads before

 the women could scream.

————

The largest mountain in the world sits in Oklahoma. 

Legend has it that its filled with water. 

Children press their ears to the rocks.

Sometimes they hear the tapping of ghosts,

telling them to go away.

writersandkitties:

Jean Cocteau and kitty, all noir.

writersandkitties:

Jean-Paul Sartre and his existentialist kitty,

This May Or May Not Be A Letter To The Editor

Its been years since I’ve known beauty, and many more since I’ve known love. But I still ask myself, why is it that when the lights begin to dim I can feel the world expanding, and myself stretched thin across all the places I’ve ever called home? I think ghosts can come from the living as well as the dead. They’re the pieces of us we leave behind in old houses, towns, dreams, and within the people we’ve loved before, who have perhaps not been forgotten.

When I left this world I was old enough to have fallen madly in love once, but too young to realize that one can fall in love many times, with many different people, and it will all feel the same. 

Like many children, I saw another aspect of life that moved slightly faster than the eyes, another world within this one that I could almost grasp, but would nevertheless fail to comprehend. Even when I grew away from this world, and saw no hope for its existence, I would still seek it when this life disappointed me. When beauty failed, and when love possessed nothing but sorrow, I would reach into the darkness hoping to brush against the unexpected with the tips of my fingers.

Then came the next stage of life, in which I no longer tried to escape through the twists and turns of the mind, but simply accepted what was before me.  In this aspect I was ordinary, because I became exhausted. I had lived so long within myself, that when I resurfaced I found no where in this world that I belonged. Even more troublesome was that everyone else seemed lost too.

Many had been letting go. They simply stopped moving forward. They sat down for their morning cup of coffee, with the paper in their hands that they didn’t quite know how to read. Then for an unknowable reason they decided to remain in that moment, and that moment alone. When they stood up their skin was a little grayer, their backs were hunched, and their eyes dragged across the ground. It was like a disease that was inherited, a despondency that grew with the passing of every generation. 

I caught it from my father.

I still remember walking with him on the shore. 

Occasionally, the lights from the shrimping boats swept across the sand causing thousands of little crabs to go skittering toward their holes, while revealing any lonely figures who still remained near the water’s edge. Our neighbors used to whisper about the man and the little girl. Very few people knew he was my father. But they were more startled by our late night walks. It wasn’t safe to be near the ocean after sunset. At the end of the day thousands of colors grew like weeds from the pastureland tangling together in the sky, and it seemed to be the world saluting the quiet life we chose. But after the colors faded, darkness would settle down. And along with the darkness came the stars. Thousands of them existing above the roar of the waves. During the night, the ocean and the sky would come together to become infinite, to become heaven, to become whatever great unfathomable concept you currently had stuck in your skull. And that’s why it wasn’t good to go near the sand. You would only be reminded of how small you were, how short your time here was. And your skin would begin to itch for something else beyond this small life. But every sort of life seemed small compared to those stars. 

The town turned up their noses at those individuals spotted near the shore. They knew we were contemplating something long gone. Perhaps it was lost beneath the surface, but most likely not. Most things were lost to time, and not to the sea, but both notions are for romantics. My father was one of these men. He was a businessman, but he always fancied himself an intellectual of sorts, thus he was usually drunk. He always carried a scotch glass and wore a black suit, the kind only seen in those city sky scrapers that seemed to mock our small town progress. In our quaint rural life, he seemed perpetually out of place.

Often he would scratch his scalp and chew on his tongue when he was lost in his own contemplation. It was a sort of weird tick  that I was beginning to inherent before he disappeared. On our last night he was quiet, but I knew he had something to say by the way he twisted his lips and his fingers released a cloud of dead skin from the wisps of his hair. 

 
Finally, when we were out of sight of the last house, and it was just me, him, and the waves,  he said what was on his mind: “Your mother doesn’t love me, and I don’t love her. It’s too bad you came out of that. There’s no one to teach you how to love, and I think it’s too late. You’ll grow up to be one of those people who are too smart. Too smart to believe in god. Too smart to believe in anything.”

The words were slurred, and he must have had tears running down his cheeks. But I do not remember. It wasn’t words passed down from a father to a daughter, but an unspoken sadness handed down from one generation to the next. 

I always wanted to tell you that story, but I lost you before I got the chance. I don’t know if this is a letter, but I once heard that a writer holds the image of a single person in their mind as they put each word onto the page. Today this is true. My story needs to be told, but I have nowhere to begin. There is no possible audience for the dead. 

And I don’t know if I loved you.

 But I still want to feel the texture of your fingers one last time. I want to bring them one by one to my lips and suck the dirt from underneath your nails. And I think that emotion is strong enough, that it would okay that I write this for you. I don’t even know if you exist anymore, but a small part of you must, because I still hold onto the image of your hands. And at least that is something. 

When I died I returned to that beach. It’s as gray and lifeless as my father, and the stars are gone and the sun neither rises nor sets. Yet the shore expands for miles, and somehow the empty space fills me. Beyond that I can see the lights of the city; a city bigger than New York. I can hear booms, screeches, and howls, but rarely silence. 

The silence is always eerie.

 I imagine that it’s the moment when millions of souls have nothing more to say. 

Strangely, it’s when I hear that stillness that I vaguely remember what it is to be alive. The first silence I experienced seemed to span forever; it wasn’t silence so much as an absence of sound, in which isolation crept beneath my skin. I realized how lonely I had been, even when alive, and how much loneliness stood before me. Time seemed intolerable. A sadness took hold of each of my limbs one by one until I surrendered my body, and I felt my skin turn gray and my eyes drag across the sand. 

I realized simply living should have been enough. But what I was doing when I was alive wasn’t living, it was existing. I was just as dead then as I am now. I was a presence in space and memory but nothing more. I lingered in my home, my town, and even on my shore as no more than another face out of thousands. 

I admit that I knew this truth when I was younger. It existed half realized, and tucked away in the pocket of my dress. Whenever I felt my fingers brush against its edges I jerked my hand quickly away, flinging my palm into the air, so that it could meet any other fate but the one that possessed only a thin piece of cloth between itself and my thigh. 

Ironically, I embraced anything else that wasn’t life, because I didn’t know enough about what was beyond existence to be afraid, I could only be mystified. Something about death was intoxicating and desired. But I can only vaguely remember when my obsession started.

I was just a small girl when my cat died. He had a slender body, with fur the color of sand. I told my mother that god had forgotten to color him in; to shape him into who he would become, so it must be up to us. After his death, I cried for days. We put his body in the freezer, and whenever my mother wasn’t looking I held his body, stiff and frozen, in my arms. When they buried him underneath the sand I became afraid, until someone whose name or face I cannot recall said to me:

“You know there are thousands of bodies, the dead of all sorts of creatures, buried beneath us. When they’re gone beneath the earth, out of our sight, their bones all inch together and mingle till they either all become little specks of dirt, or they harden into a mass so they will never be separated. That way even when they’re dead no creature of this earth is ever lonely.”

 I could never throw these words away, and I imagined cupping them in my hands until I was sure that I had absorbed them into my palms. I stared at the lines running across my skin into which these words had disappeared, and wondered what they had become within me.

As I grew older and became a romantic like my father, a dream came into existence within me in which I imagined that I could hold the dead in my arms. 

I wanted to give them something of this world to hold onto, some last drop of comfort. Perhaps one of those soothing, “it’s going to be okay,” that allow you to close your eyes and sleep through the night even though both the dead and me would know that it’s a lie. But back then I didn’t think all lies were bad. I liked them. I pretended that they were little birds whispering some other possible reality in my ear. 

Perhaps I could have taken the lines from my hands and put them in the pocket of a dead man’s coat as if they were flowers. Maybe these flowers would prove to the world that he was loved. Or maybe I could have tied the lines around his neck like a scarf to protect him from the cold, but that would only work if the dead felt such things. 

I realize now that the dream was only to comfort me. It was something I could hold onto, a purpose that I possessed that had to be kept secret from the rest of the world. It contained remnants of magic, which existed in the idea that there would always be someone to love, which is almost the same as being loved. 

But more importantly in such dreams I could hope to see you again. 

Yet you are gone. Because I am gone. I don’t know how many years it has been, only that the city keeps moving, but I don’t know if it is moving forward, or if forward is necessarily better. 

Perhaps one day you will stop moving and see a shore and remember the sea, or think of the girl who loved the water. Or maybe you’ll recall that when you were little you liked to scoop the foam off the top of the waves and hold it in your hands, until whimsy caused you to scatter clumps on the sand, where the light would hit them just right, and colors would bloom until they were absorbed back into the damp grayness of the earth. 

Maybe your memory will bring you back to me, or the others like you will find me. The men and women who still find joy in existence, the ones who reject those of us whose eyes drag across the ground.

But no,

 no one else has walked along this shore.  And I am alone.

 I have relived all of my memories, yet I can never find the same one again because my mind and my sadness always distorts them. And now I am writing letters to you in my head. Why you, and not my family, I do not know. Except perhaps in this world they exist in different forms for me, because if I am going to remain here alone, I need some part of them to be eternal, so I can find something within me that is lasting as well. 

For instance, I recreated the sun. 

It’s a memory of my mother leaning over the deck, waving and smiling at my brother who was walking along the shore looking for sand dollars. This was back when she was beautiful and had red in her hair, which turned to copper and gold beneath the Texas sun. When she was younger, the sunlight bouncing off the tips of the waves was enough to make her return to us from her own sadness. Like my father and me, it consumed her until she decided to fight it. 

But she became broken and gnarled in the process. Her voice barked petty complaints, because she was barely human anymore. Her eyes were small black dots that were barely perceptible beneath folds of flesh that she stapled to her forehead, so that she could see the world which she still stubbornly occupied. 

I used to think that her fate was worse than giving into the sadness. And that a fate like the one I found was beautiful and possessed some odd sense of poetry.  But she exists and her feet can walk along this same beach in her world, only she will leave behind footprints in the sand.

She can look upon the stars and feel that her life is small, unjust, and unreasonable. She can bark her orders and snarl at the world for giving her the sadness that she still struggles to keep at bay. 

But as long as she holds onto life, some part of her being will possess a meaning that I now lack. 

But I do not know what. And I think that’s what the worst part of my existence is: not knowing what  I miss or what I desire, but still wanting.

This is badly written, but something I must confess. I love the water. And I miss my home. I wish there was a version of it here in New York that would reveal itself to me when I am a bit too wounded for the world. I could hold a cat in my arms, flit through old photographs, and read my favorite childhood books. I could curl up on the couch pressed against the window and look at the sea, the stars, and the christmas lights until I was ready to go back into the world again. Then it would dissipate into thin air, until I needed to go back again and it would find me. 

They liked to walk slowly beneath the trees or the shadows of skyscrapers, even when the wind was cold and sharp. I think they imagined themselves to be elegant birds, the sort that are weighed down by their feathers and have no choice but to sulk in their plumage. But they were human, and even when they lit their cigarettes and toughened their lips, their skin still shivered. They still looked weak and brittle. 

We are of the disappearing kind. I’m just like my dad before me, and so is my brother, but he disappeared before I was born, so I guess he doesn’t much matter. He would be a man now. But I can’t help but think ofhim as a boy, existing solely in my dreams of the way things should have been, as someone who would whisk me away from the family and its strangeness. But that never happened, and one day I disappeared too. 

I thought I saw him that night, his face peering from the woods that lurked, unwanted, behind the clean cut suburban back yards. But to be honest, I was already pretty drunk from a mixture of scotch and vodka, the rest of the damage done by what is best forgotten. 

Usually when I’m drunk I lie on my back and watch the ceiling tiles swirl. I’m very calm at this point and my thoughts sound exactly like how I write: melodramatic and robotic, as if I’m a cog spinning from some old machine that stopped working in a whole different era. 

You can see how I easily become annoyed with my own mind, but more importantly, you can also see why I gave up being a writer. 

Maybe not being able to stand yourself is another symptom of my kind, but I’m not sure. I’ve never gotten to talk to anyone before they disappeared. From what I understand life just chases them around, until one day they’re fed up with it and they walk out the door with nothing on their back, and return twenty or thirty years later. I swore I wouldn’t leave my family, only to return as a burden, but things work out differently than what you expect out of life when your younger. I’m sure the kids of drunks, addicts, and all sorts of other types of messed up parents swore the same things, but found themselves to be the same types of people their parents were before them. Luckily, at the end of the day we all have our excuses.

I’ve been where my brother and father have gone now, but I still don’t understand it. Sometimes I wonder if they were just as confused. Disappearing might be the wrong word. I think what happened to all of us, is that we got lost inside our own meandering thoughts, and when we returned to reality we couldn’t make sense of things – so I guess we just stopped coming back. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this, to try to make sense of the night when the act of my disappearance started and I began to pull away from this world. That’s one thing I never expected of all this, I thought it would be sudden like a shot to the head, and then I would be gone. But instead its gradual and you can feel it happening inside you, like its another person growing their own bones and slowly replacing yours one by one, but the first thing they take is your will to resist. 

That night I was at a party, and perhaps despite the alcohol, I was happy for the first time in many years, with the kind of happiness that comes rushing into your life like it did during the morning of your youth; something that comes deep from the bones, unwarranted. But when you’re older it comes as a shock to your system, because you have forgotten that some things exist without reason. Yet you still need them. You need to laugh those painful laughs that leap from your lungs and cloak you in something strange. I don’t know if this is an important detail of that night, but it caused me to laugh a little louder and made my skin itch.

I bet when you try to imagine the other twenty some odd people at that party, all you see are faceless forms. And I suppose you think this is some flaw in my writing, or that I have a small artistic vision or some bullshit like that. But to be truthful, I don’t really remember most of their names, much less their faces. So by now they really are faceless to me as well, but in a way they also weren’t really there that night. I don’t realize how fully alone I am, until you put me in a room with lots of lights, food, and the laughter of people I know to be friends, but who, by the end of the night, will all inevitably seem like strangers. 

We were drunk, stumbling, and dancing. I broke two beer bottles by ramming my knees into the corner of a chair. The glass scattered on the tile floor. Some girl stepped on them and laughed, they didn’t cut her feet, because she was wearing shoes but the possibility of pain seemed to amuse her. 

Someone kissed the wall. Someone kissed a girl who didn’t belong to him. Someone kissed each of my fingers. 

And I think I saw my brother again in the obscene pictures I drew on the white washed walls of Hannah’s living room, his face staring beyond mine from the clumsy and thick lines of a black sharpie. 

However, none of this is certain.

I remember running, my bare feet greeting the asphalt. It’s a beautiful thought isn’t it? Running on darkness into darkness, towards something more meaningful. But what? even now those two questions exist as small beings who have created their entire lives within my ears. 

But again, I was drunk, and I didn’t get very far before landing in the grass. And that’s when something happened: I saw the world unfurl itself. Streaks of gold darted across the sky. They were snakes of some sort who knew the way to a different world. Somewhere that I could make sense of things. They were slicing open the sky, or perhaps the world was an egg being cracked open by their teeth. Maybe we were a meal for something more than us. At this point the metaphors get messy, and my explanation goes to shit because my mind gets sloppy or it remembers being sloppy because it remembers being drunk, and in a way that’s like being drunk. Regardless something changed in the way I saw things and I wanted to crawl towards the opening, and disappear forever inside the mouths of snake. But at this point I heard someone scream, “FOUND HIM!” and the next moment someone’s lying beside me in the grass as I stare at the ceiling of the world thinking god knows what.

Snaggletoothed cat
with smoking gums

running down the side of sly streets.
Her figure reflected
in our glass sliding doors
that we slam shut as she blurs past us.

We watch as
the moon falls
on her spine.

Her back is broken.

She lies there dying.
She lies there dead.
Time asks for her
coat and hangs it by the door.

Waiting.

But her teeth remain 
intact.