June 3, 2013

  • To My Old Loves

    I remember late-night walks

    damp grass and eyes
    muddy shoes and 
    sliding laughter
    slipping into a new place
    of adolescent, forever-love
    I remember the colour orange
    and promises so meant but not kept
    I remember pebbles at my window
    Talks of elephants and possibilities
    of how love can suddenly be so
    big and
    real and
    exciting (for once; for every time)
    I remember cigarettes and 
    how you made my breakfast
    so gently
    Every molecule from you 
    was love
    When I think hard enough
    I can remember jealousies too
    Insecurities and bitter, self-conscious fights
    but I do have to think 
    hard about it now–
    Because what I want to say
    to all of you
    is 
    thank you for the pebbles and the mud
    the letters and the mix-tapes
    the full truths and sweet goodbyes
    the unused cameras and the well-worn nights.
    thank you for the love
    I use it every day.

July 27, 2012

July 11, 2012

  • Rehearsal

    I love you in a silent place
    between window panes
    and in the corners of stairways
    where the handrail–a barre–
    steadies me, a dancer
    before her music,
    about to stretch
    her way into collective breaths
    held gently,
    like my waist:
    your fingertips, too,
    a Degas.

April 27, 2012

  • Twenty-something

    These lines on my face
    are in only pencil:
    erasable
    preliminary sketches.
    Twitch the slightest twitch
    and they sink back into my
    paper
    skin.

    These are my pre-creases:
    prep for my
    forehead mountain folds
    eyeline valley folds
    mouth-to-cheek reverse folds
    which still easily smooth away
    with my expression.

    My paper face is just
    trying some lines out
    before it gets out its markers
    and deliberate origami fingers
    to make some
    real
    art.

April 1, 2012

  • One of those weekends when my every word drilled deep into my teeth and echoed through my skull. The reverberations give me headaches and I can’t see straight. Can’t I just stay home and not need to be liked?

October 5, 2011

  • I am assertive
    but I
    am
    not
    bold
    and I am
    angry
    that 3 years later
    you’re still right:
    I am a response.

    I may be the first in the room
    to point out an elephant,
    but I am never the first to shoot
    (and I never shoot
    to kill).

October 4, 2011

  • I really only like the first paragraph

    I melted in the shower once. It was a surprisingly quick process. First my hair slid out, then my eyelashes and ears slumped down to my neck, my shoulders, my knees. The last things to go were my teeth and fingernails, but it wasn’t long before they’d dissolved in the steam with the rest of me. Before I knew it, I was gone, careening through the pipes. I won’t tell you about the sewers, but the filtration process afterward was wonderful. All my rocks and hard bits settled to the bottom and I felt lighter than I have for a very long time. Eventually even my old regular dirt and silt were separated from me and I was my pure self, clean. I know I wasn’t, I know I was water, but I felt like air must feel (but what a silly thing for water to say, really, and I hope no air ever reads this because I’m positive it would be embarrassing). I was so light and so pure you wouldn’t have recognized me, even if I hadn’t melted into a little puddle.

    After my filtration, I sped through the pipes again. I was pushed for miles (probably, it’s hard to care about distance when you’re something as unceasing as water). I somehow made it to your house, your pipes, your tap. You were thirsty and you drank me up, with ice. You had never been filtered like me so there was a little dirt and a couple of rocks, but that was OK, I was bound to make it to a person eventually and I was glad it was someone reasonably honest and clean like you. I glided past your tongue and into your stomach. Your bloodstream, your heart. I realized I’d been shrinking—water molecules can’t stay grouped together forever—and now I was just a little drop, even though I’d been an entire person taking a shower just a day or week or month before (time is hard for water, too).

    I’m not sure how long I stayed inside you as my little droplet self, getting to know your every nook and cranny, nourishing you and keeping your cells hydrated, but eventually there was a hot day and I was pushed out through your skin to your forehead, just above your eyebrow, where I glistened for a moment before you wiped me away and flicked me to the ground and that was that. I wasn’t sad or bitter because by then I was really, truly water and water doesn’t feel; it just is.

    Now that I’m a person again I do have to confess I like to reminisce about that time once in a while. About how you never knew I was there inside of you, helping you stay alive and healthy. About how you were so warm and how I could know so much about you, know everything about your movement and shape, without ever knowing your name. Sometimes I wonder how you are, and if you’ve ever had the experience of melting or shrinking to live inside of somebody else. I hope you have, or that you do someday. Water may not feel, but people do, and you were the warmest, safest place I’ve ever lived.

August 28, 2011

  • When I have an idea, I think about it nonstop. I roll it over and over in my mind, prodding it, testing it. Hours go by–literally hours–and I’m still thinking about it, often without a break other than a few minutes here or there when something more immediate presents itself (the phone rings, someone asks me a question, etc). I run the same scenarios over and over in my mind I don’t know how many times. If the internet is available, I research. For better or for worse, I am immersed. I obsess. And obsess. And obsess. I give myself headaches, literally–headaches from thinking too hard.

    I’m not saying that this makes my ideas infallible. Absolutely not. I’m just saying that what is a few days to you feels like a few weeks to me. I forget that.

    I need to learn to keep quiet for longer. I need to learn to keep to myself a little better. I don’t think I’ll learn to stop obsessing any time soon, but I could at least give my ideas a longer incubation period before I start letting them out to squawk around the place. It could probably save some stress.

July 11, 2011

  • Friends

    There are some people that I just get a “feeling” about. I bet you’re like this too; I bet we’re all like this. I meet some people and in their eyes I see a sort of sameness or at least an interestingness that fits perfectly with my curiosity and I think, we could be friends. I see a potential for a bond and great conversations. And even if that never happens, even if class schedules don’t match up or no one proposes that cup of coffee, I always hold that person warmly in my memory, as a person who could’ve been my friend.

    And it’s always sort of nice when you realize they thought the same about you. That, after a couple of years of not waving at each other in the hallway anymore, you get a surprise email from an “acquaintance” who could’ve been your friend. He asks where you are, how you’ve been. You give a cautiously in-depth answer (the years have taught you that your intuition isn’t always right), he replies with a real in-depth answer, and boom. Friends.

June 22, 2011

  • The truth is, I am a peony not a forget-me-not, and that is why I cried at the airport that day.