Dorset, United Kingdom, December 2013

 

shot with iPhone 4

“It is not a secret…”

“It is not a secret
that other women terrify me.
We are always competing in a contest
I don’t understand.
I don’t know how to be beautiful.
I don’t know how to be gentle.
There is a right way to be this gender.
It has been taught to me
since birth. I have failed every class.”

by Clementine von Radics
http://clementinepoetry.com/

 

 self-portrait, iPhone 4s, 2014

Climb Out.

minimal

Haiku for the Clinic

I am letter “Q”
In this piss-soaked waiting room
All empathy, lost.

On Solitude

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Epilogue, May 18 2013

White.

Where the fuck am I? I reach out, press a hand to the wall I’m facing and startle at sepia smears of dried blood on the back of my right hand.

I wince as I crane my head to the right, upwards, recognize the peeling frame of the Puyet litho that hangs above the bed.

It floods back too fast and the adrenaline is an avalanche into my veins, my heart thuds in my chest. Panic is circling like hyenas. I can hear it’s laughing cackle. I can feel the muscles in my legs and arms tighten as I fight the urge to bolt from the bed.

My hands shake so bad they seem to flutter and they are pale as parchment as I draw my purple-spotted knees and thighs to my chin.

My Mac is a secondhand refurb, crisscrossed with scars, I wrench it open, wait for the familiar green light next to Matthew. Dread is a tide pool of dark water that grows deeper around my legs as I type.

I mainly focus on the lilt of his accent when he speaks. His words have taken on an unfamiliar slowness. He is careful. His normal coloring, peony, quick to blush, has blanched so white the color seems to have drained from his eyes.

My parents are next. Their reaction, pure vitriol and blame. I cry until my throat aches, until I dry heave. The disgust in my mother’s voice is palpable. In my gut, under thousands of peeling, burned layers of shame and fear a hard, little seed of hatred splits wide open and sprouts.

I find my budgie, Irish, crumpled on the floor of his cage. He is still warm. I sit and stare through the panes of the French door in a tee shirt, still bloody, holding a dead bird against my chest.

I am a skeleton draped in skin and sinew. My mind is a field of fresh snow. In the distance someone is screaming.

On Mercy

I am suddenly awake, as if shoved through a door, and the only thing I’m aware of for a few brief, swiftly fading seconds, are the sharp needling sounds of his toe nails on laminate. Then the sound bleeds out of my head and into the suffocating blackness, replaced by this monstrous ache that builds up in my chest, sprouts legs, and then crawls into my throat.

There’s a wet rage in my sorrow. This feeling of flailing futility. I am sitting bolt upright on a secondhand mattress. I am staring into an abyss of nothing. I can hear the patterned thrum of the window shaker AC, the rats in the walls. Occasionally, the sharp intake of my breath through my teeth is startling. There is nothing and there is no one here. I am wide awake, wild-eyed.

Grief, regardless of whom or what it concerns, reaches a point that makes others uncomfortable. Grief has a definitive “healthy” shelf life in polite society.

I have yet to see any new flesh form over the axe wound in my chest. The gash is angry, oxblood red, rimmed with pus. Until then, I’ll seek solace in a bottle or a cigarette or driving fast and recklessly down dark roads.

Occasionally, my brain will spit out a little comforting staccato soundtrack of my dead dog coming to bed.

It startles me awake. It is dirty fingers digging in the wound.

I am still grateful for the mercy.

Orient Express

The blooms on the salvaged lily are burning and bleeding emerald as my mind aches with this memory. I am lost in it, near oblivious to the storm rolling in from the north, only slightly aware of the drops that prick the burn on my scaling shoulders.

You stayed thin no matter what I did, doctors owed it to genetics while I blamed myself. Consumed with worry, unable to fight through a quicksand pit of fear, I nursed you constantly. Murmuring the chorus to “Little Ghost” in the cool gloom of your bedroom, my crossed legs on the cold, ancient terrazzo forming a nest for your spindle frame.

Your cough was deep that night, rattling the avian bones that seemed to stretch the skin on your chest to the point of tearing. I carried you from room to room in our isolated house. The avocado green kitchen. The Swedish table set that was our only good piece of furniture. The birds ruffled their feathers with each round, your cough only quieted by gravity pulling the mucus deep into your exhausted lungs.

Around and around, my feet padding on the poured, confetti floor. In the background the BBC was playing a show about the Orient Express. A southern English accent, perfect pronunciation. The distant, soothing clatter of an ancient train.

Another pass through the kitchen where the scratched melamine plates are stacked in the strainer. Chipped rainbow coffee mug that once contained a floral bouquet in 1986.

I am here now, sitting on a damp plywood deck as the storm reaches me and I fight the urge to look back through your handprints at your closed bedroom door. The silence that engulfs me now is paralyzing my ability to form words. I go days without speaking. The scale spells out my breakdown in glowing double digits.

That night the redtail hawks peered through our half drawn drapes. They watched, heads cocked, as I circled endlessly until sunrise and you shifted a small, downy, platinum head back and forth on my soft, fat shoulder. In whispered words I promised you London and Paris. A sunrise east of Zurich. The rise of the Austrian Alps.

The rain is hot on my back now as I remember, this sorrow so strong and deep I am grinding my teeth against it, swallowing contempt.

You are prisoner to my impetuous choices. For now bound to the same state I was as a child. This landmass buoyed by OxyContin.

We are lashed to aluminum siding, rusting cars and beer cans bobbing between the flashlight eyes of watching alligators.

The storm has blown over me. I watch a redtail shake her feathers and catch a thermal as she bursts towards the sun.

In the distance a whistle blows, it is waiting.

His voice, like dozens of rainbow Lorikeets.

“They always say it doesn’t much matter if you STAY up. The main point is getting up.”

So, that’s what I do. I peel my eyelids open and wince against the thud of my steps on the tile. Brush my teeth, put on yesterday’s pajamas, found hanging on the edge of the medicine cabinet. Twist my dreadlocked curls into a bun. Turn down the AC. Death march back to the comforting gloom. Burrow into the center of the bed.

My ears are pricked and turned towards the front door. I am waiting for his father’s hand on the lockset, the rattle of keys.

“Mom!”

It’s like a dozen rainbow Lorikeets have swooped into the room. His voice is winged, it’s in primary colors, it’s eyes pin when it reaches me.

The Velcro on his shoes screams in protest as he rips them off. I hear his sandals thud against the back of his closet, underneath my twenty four year old Schwinn. Then he is lumbering up into the bed, all elbows and knees.

My son has seen me cry so often this year he is not frightened by it. It is his normal. When he asks, I tell him that Mom and Dad have a sick friend. My mind does a little pirouette and realizes that Fox’s likely met him. I do not explain who it is.

My arms are long. He has his face turned against my chest and I’d swear I could wrap them around him and them back around myself. Tie his wrists in a knot. His chest is thin, we are bone on bone. The slow run of my tears is darkening the ephemeral, white-blonde crown that is catching them. I can feel his heart beating and it is slow and calm and regular. He is untroubled by my emotion.

I am a pendulum swinging between guilt and pride.

Shoving Off

She meets me outside. She said she would. When I see her I know it’s too late to retreat now. Too late to continue to fuck off home and under the covers. I’m committed now, goddamnitt. She knows I wear glasses. What possessed me to tell this woman what I look like?

I launch myself out of the car and into the lot like I am spring-loaded. If I stop walking I’ll only start again to bolt in the opposite direction.

She’s smiling in this soft, completely non-threatening way. Her hair is acres long and board straight and for a wild second I fight this insane urge to reach out and touch it. I stuff my hands in the pockets of my jeans, rock back on the heels of my boots and approximate what I figure a willingness to be open looks like.

We are wordless as she shows me the sign in sheet. For another insane moment I contemplate aliases then writing in the names of sworn enemies. The ceiling tiles sag down to get a better look at what I’m writing. The Dracanea plant, sold as “lucky” bamboo and quietly drowning in the glass vase on the receptionist’s desk, implores me. Fuck it. Too late, anyway.
Cue Cohen. Everybody Knows.

I write my full name in neat block letters under hers.

I am sitting at this long table and my mind catapults to absurdity. I wonder if I could borrow it if I start doing festival shows again next year. I’m doing anything to avoid the literature, the pages of positivity pinned to the walls, the expecting smiles of my new seat-mates on this bullet train to Surrender To It, USA. I start to wonder where the hell they got all these office chairs.

I’m mentally cataloging which booze would go best with a big thermos of coffee and the ethics of drinking it here when AnnMarie clears her throat, throws that enviable mane off her shoulders, and asks us if we’re ready to begin.