It’s Possible
That there may be a person who, while innocently sleeping next to someone, may or may not reach out their hand and intertwine their fingers together, all the while sound asleep. That same person, who may or may not exist, might also hold said hands the entire night.
It’s possible that it might be one of the cutest things that someone may or may not have experienced. Ever. 
Happy Valentine’s Day, world. Remember that it is a day of love, and as such, not reserved for people you’re dating. Love your family, love your friends, and shower them with the affection you know they deserve.
(Or bitch and moan about being single. Whatever gets you to February 15)
Ceremony of the Bracelets
Your bracelets will be my undoing, I’ve decided. Not the delicate wrists they weigh down, but the silver bangles themselves. If you had less of a fashion sense, I may have survived you.
When my body lays decrepit in the corner of a dark room, and I start to smell like rot, it won’t be you I’m thinking of. Though your smooth, dark skin holds power over me now, and though, in this moment, I’m held captive by your almond eyes, they shall lose all their sway once I’m lying in that room.
Not lose–they shall give that power away, transfer it into the silver you’ve adorned your body with.
As I lay in that corner, trembling slightly while I feel myself decay, my mind’s eye shall torture me with your bracelets.
Just your bracelets, I wish to make clear. While right now I dive into the deepest throes of ecstasy picturing each bangle slide past your fingers, over your wrist and down your slender forearm, once in the corner of that shit-hole room, your body will have no control over me. No, I’ll picture your bracelets in a dark mid-air nothingness.
My mind’s eye will trace the curve of silver; it will follow the reflective shine go around in circles. I’ll take my time, lying in that room’s corner. It takes a long time for the body to decompose, so I know I’ll be in no rush. In my mind, I’ll trace every bracelet you’ve ever worn in my presence. I’ll linger over those heavy, chunky ones, the ones that looked too big for your tiny wrists. I’ll remember the weight of those large bangles until the last of me is turned over to the maggots.
There will be no flashbacks to those moments before bed when you’d hand me your bracelets, one by one. My present self is too greedy to share those memories of your body, naked but for the metal on your wrists. Now is when I see those moments, feeling the sacred weight, the metallic proof of your heritage in my hands. Amazing how the smallest of ceremonies can become the most powerful.
First Generation
My father was always a very polite man. Moving to a new country in the middle of life affected him in ways he never fully overcame. He never let go of that feeling of foreignness, the feeling that he was perpetually a guest in someone else’s home. It made him polite. Unbearable so. It was as if every citizen he met was the one who decided to grant the green card, even if they just wanted to know if he would like plastic or paper bags.
Also because of his permanent status as a guest, my father was an incredibly shy man. This shyness prevented many possible bonding moments between him & I, purely because he refused to ask for information
“I don’t know how much the carnival is, boppy. It might be too expensive. We’d better get home to your mother”
“Let’s just ask! It looks like so much fun…”
It wasn’t just prices he refused to ask for, but everything. Directions, assistance, support. They all had to be attained through subtle and indirect means by myself and my mother. I’ve often wondered if this shyness extended all the way to his wife. I suspect it did–it extened to his son, after all.
A Proper Eulogy
“Her name was Suzy, officer. She just started showing up one day, a few months ago. No—no I don’t remember her last name. I don’t think she ever said it.”
Don’t make it traceable. Just make a story for her, not a real life. Nothing documented or researchable.
“I think her mom’s name was Jewell, but I can’t remember. She’d just stop by around eight most nights, hungry but not starving. The first night we found her scrounging around in the trash. I think her mom… I think she worked nights, you know? Turning tricks?”
“We fed her and let her sleep on the couch. She was gone when we woke up. Didn’t talk much, just mumbled something about her mom being busy.”
“She started coming pretty regularly, once we invited her. We didn’t mind—kind of felt bad for her, you know? She needed a bit of normal. She’d come around eight or nine and we ‘d feed her dinner. Sometimes I’d give her a bath, and then she’s go to sleep on the couch. We met her mom a couple of times. No, I don’t think I could talk to a sketch artist. Just brown hair, brown eyes, looked tired.”
“She stopped coming by, for maybe two weeks. We didn’t know how to find her—she found us, after. Then tonight, she showed back up. She had lost a lot of weight, we could tell. We worried because se didn’t eat a whole lot—she fell asleep at the table. We thought she needed rest more, so we put her on the couch and figured we’d feed her when she woke up.”
Why am I crying? She’s already dead—now she died warm, with friends, feeling loved instead of outside next to our trash. Now she has a story, now people know her. What’s there to cry about?
To tell the truth was too cold, too brutal. She needed a story. To simply allow them to take away the body and bury it in an unmarked grave with no flowers was wrong. Humanity had to amount for more than that.
“When she didn’t wake up, we didn’t know what to do, so we called you guys.”
The Little Ghost
There’s a little ghost peering out a window, the window where she died a couple months ago. The room that window belongs to has become her haunting grounds. She sits, blowing frost on the windowpane and making little marks. It’s hard to distract the little ghost; so closely does she watch and wait for his return. He might, after all, return. The man who murdered her might return to the scene of the crime. Don’t they all, in the end, return to the scene of the crime? She ticks off days in the frost, and doesn’t notice when it turns into years. She doesn’t notice when no one, not even her murderer, returns to the window, to the room. She doesn’t notice when they all disappear. The little ghost is so intent on her marks she doesn’t notice the gray dust thickening over the tables, the chairs, the books. She glances up when they take the books away, but only to search the faces of the movers. None of their faces were his. She fails to notice the cobwebs, and the crumbling edges of the window frame. The little ghost is so intent and focused she doesn’t even feel it when the building falls, and doesn’t even blink when her window looks out only into rubble. He’ll come, she’s sure. They always return to the scene of the crime, don’t they?
More Old Stuff!
I am the Rain
3/07
It’s raining. I’m sitting in his room, alone, listening to the rain (such a level of comfort—in his room without him—it hasn’t been like this in a long time). I’m listening to the rain, and it occurs to me—I’m falling in love with the rain all over again.
I know the rain in the same way a blind man who sees for the first time knows color—confusing, scary, and yet completing. “This is what they meant,” he might think, but it’s not what they meant—it’s what he sees.
It might have rained in the desert—it must have—but it didn’t in my memories. For me, the desert was always dry. It was choked with dust and it grew beautiful with gold color, but there was no rain. The desert was empty, and dusty, and beautiful.
Then, when I turned six, the world was colored-in with big fat strokes with a green crayon. Everything was green—the trees, the yard in front of my knee house, the plants that were big enough for me to hide under—even the neighbor’s house was green. People find Washington gray and lonely. I think it’s crowded with the color green. Especially after it rains.
I first met the rain when I was six. A real rain, big enough to consume my six-year-old body. I was little, and drenched, and dancing with my sister in the pouring rain. We didn’t know the rain before that, but we did then. Rain was beautiful, it was life, and it was reviving. We stomped in puddles like the children we were, and stayed out there until it was dark, long past the streetlamps turned on (which was the sign we had to go inside). Our mother stood on the porch, dry, with a light above her head, and watched her children meet the rain for the first time.
Every time after that, whenever we moved, Carol and I would meet the rain again. Every new house, new apartment, new cul-de-sac, we would meet the rain. We always moved in September, it seemed, right when the rain started to pour. We stopped meeting our neighbors—they were too wary of the new teenagers dancing in their soaking clothes outside the house with the “For Sale” sign in front of it, the fresh “SOLD” sticker stamped across it.
I would learn what the rain was that way, dancing and laughing with my sister as our bodies, which are already 70% water, swelled with the raindrops and became 80%, 90% rain. I learned what water was when it splashed on my glasses, when it coated my tongue and left iridescent circular patterns on my skin. Every time it rained, my body became less and less dust—the desert was slowly turned to mud, and then just a river, in my body. I became rain, and water.
I thought about this as I sat in his room, listening to the rain pour down outside. It was heavy, a downpour, a rain so far from the misty drizzle that comes down that it’s hard to believe they share a noun. I thought about the most recent time I had met the rain, but it was more like a brief passing of ‘hello’s as I made new friends in the rain—just not with the rain. I thought about the rubber boots I was wearing that day, the ones I had bought to protect myself from the puddles around Red Square, and I felt ashamed. I felt like apologizing to an old friend, but who knows where the rain hides its ears? I didn’t know how to make an apology, how to tell it, “Yes, I have missed you.”
I wanted to be outside in that moment, not working on his computer. His window is too close to his computer, so close that I wonder how he ever manages to write when it rains outside. I’m so close to walking outside, to leaving my homework for the night, untouched, and dancing in the rain. In my mind I’ve already put my boots on (while promising the clouds they’ll come off soon) when he walks in.
He walks in and I’m suddenly sure that my love affair with the rain will have to wait. He’s much too practical, I’ve learned, to go out with me in the rain, and if I leave without him I know his disapproving stare at my untouched homework will ruin any fling I could attempt with the raindrops.
“Rain,” I say, hopeful. “Lets go dancing…”
His hair is wet, he was just walking through the rain, and I’ve never wanted him more. I want him to come with me and run through the rain with me. Yet he nods. He nods, changes into drier clothes (a reasoning in his head beyond mine—that only confuses me). We strip down to the bare minimal for remaining “decent,” and leave. He grabs my hand and we start running, full of excitement, through the rain. I can barely hear him when he shouts, laughing, “This is so cheesy,” but I don’t care. It’s perfect.
We run until I can’t anymore, and we stop holding hands—meeting the rain is personal, and it’s hard to share it with someone else. I’m already surprised he’s stayed with me this long. I take off my boots, and stomp, legs high like those of a soldier, or a marching band, through the pond in front of Carver Gymnasium. I’m in the middle of that puddle, that puddle that becomes a pond, or a lake, or an entire ocean, depending on the size of the creature dealing with it. I’m in the middle and he comes to me, meets me, and kisses me. I’m covered in rain drops, my bare arms covered in the second skin of rain, and he’s kissing me.
Last time I was running through the rain, with friends, I paid no attention to the rain. This, though, this is all inclusive. This is me, and him, and the rain. I feel like I know that the rain knows I apologize, that I’m sorry, and that the rain missed me, too. We walk together out of the puddle, feeling cleaner than a shower makes you, the rain pouring down his hair, off his face, and making me want him even more.
We walk a little further on, still not cold, soaking wet. He finds a spot to hide our shoes, and I keep my promise to the rain—I’m barefoot. He is too, which surprises me, yet makes me smile on the inside (there are pretenses to be kept up in this relationship—mustn’t let him see too much too quickly). I start to dance, and it’s been a long time since I’ve danced in the rain. Since I’ve danced at all.
I dance and shake my hair, the raindrops flying off of me and finding their way back to the ground, their original destination. I pray that my ankle doesn’t give out, that my knee takes pity on me, that my entire legs let me fly for just a little bit longer, and I dance. He’s watching me sometimes, and others he’s distracted by a new puddle, and then he’s not there any more—there’s only my flying limbs, movement meant to praise the rain, and the rain, calm, receiving thanks the way God must look in the middle of a Catholic mass.
In that moment, I am wild; I am not on my knees praising quietly, but moving, celebrating the rain, remembering it and loving it. I know the rain—I know what it feels like to have the rain pour down on my body, hitting my skin and melting into my flesh. I know what it feels like to be 99% rainwater, to feel as fresh as the cold drops. When I’m out of breath from dancing and spinning, I fall and sit on the ground—the middle of a puddle, actually, and stare up at the sky. I’ve already abandoned my glasses, and I let the raindrops fall directly on my face. He calls to me, he found his own connection to the rain, and he calls to me to share it.
He’s standing on a park bench, staring at the sculpture in Red Square that looks like a hollowed out cube. It’s a sculpture designed for you to look through, but he’s not looking at the sky. He’s looking at the rain, and the art it makes on the sculpture. He’s looking at the lines formed by the rain, and how they converge in the center and drip down—a ready-made baptism. We take turns standing under it, letting the water fill our mouths and our faces, and we even kiss under it. We are baptized by this water, the way we both thought baptisms should happen, and we are reborn through the rain.
I know the rain with energy, instead of calm observations. I know the rain because I am the rain, because I’ve spent so many nights and days standing under it and letting it fill me. I’ve known the rain since the first downpour when it washed the desert out of me, and I’ve had rendezvous with it since, secret meetings where we embrace like secret lovers, washing each other with each other until I’m tired, and cold, and need to warm up, because that one percent that’s left of me needs warmth and towels.
Older Stuff
Looking For God
5/07
I’m looking for God
And I think I’ll find him in your fingertips
He might be there, tucked between the end
Of your nail and the rest of the world
I’m pretty sure that tree is heaven and God,
All mixed in one
So let’s climb
And see if there really are angels at the top
Because for tonight, I’ll believe
In demons and angels,
In dreams,
And in you.
It might not be God, but it’s something close to it
That escapes my lips ever time I exhale
When it’s cold outside
And I’m smoking on my balcony
Because it’s 3AM and I’m down half a pack
About to go for my fourth pot of coffee
It might not be right
But it’s the closest to God I can get,
Sometimes.
Because my soul isn’t like yours,
It isn’t this glowing fire
It’s a white sheet
With traces of being Catholic streaking it in black
It’s a white sheet
And with every day, it becomes a little dirtier
Sweat and blood and tears staining it
But I’ll try to make it pretty
Write poetry across my soul
Make it into something worthwhile,
Something more than just a white sheet.
Because I might look for them forever,
But I haven’t seen angels since I was five
And I’m starting to believe
They might have been spider webs,
Like my dad said
——–
(PS–I miss you a little)
Why I Read
She’s drowning, except she’s sitting in a chair, anywhere. Could be the middle of the desert, for all it matters. It’s not water boarding, but that might be a closer description than drowning. Instead of plastic wrap, though, it’s a book. Her nose is blocked by pages, by line after line of text forcing its way in, keeping her from thinking about anything but those pages of writing, about anything but the witty dialogue and developing characters, about the captivating plot, about anything other than this.
For one second of her life, she just didn’t want to worry about anything other than what the author would do to rectify the plot hole she wad digging herself into. She didn’t want to think about any sex life apart from the secondary character she wasn’t even sure if she liked just yet, or any problem if they didn’t belong to the charming, handsome and one-sided hero of this book not worth the precious pages it was printed on. She didn’t even want to worry about the temperature of her tea, and if it was still to hot to drink. It didn’t matter. It would always burn, regardless. Better to just turn the pages as she turned over the plot defect after plot defect, fixing each crappy line in her head as she went along.
Better to drown in between black and white than in the real world where drowning means water and no air. If she kept turning pages and skimming transition after surprise plot twist, she wouldn’t have to get dressed into an outfit people would use to pinpoint her on some section of the social map, listen to music that would undoubtedly mark her as the sell-out she didn’t care she was, and, worst of all, deal with the complex workings of all the different social networks she’d managed to get stuck in—the same way you walk out of an attic covered in cobwebs you hadn’t noticed. Flashcards were required to keep it all straight—which friends you smile with, which friends you frown with, who were the ones you “shared your emotions” with, and, of course, the ones you needed to write their names on the palm of your hand. All of those not to be confused with the ones you actually liked, and actually cared about, but couldn’t say that to because, trust me, it’s not you it’s them, but they just don’t have that kind of emotional availability.
No, better if she just stays within the suffocating pages of crappy plot twisters, where all the characters are just like real life, only with wittier dialogue.
Oh and be careful. The tea is still too hot.
Old Stuff
Dancing
12/06
I want to dance for you
I want to be in a large room with a big black stage
That echoes when my feet land from flying
I want you there, the only face in a hundred seats,
Watching me
I want to dance for you,
To show you how beautiful my body is,
How beautiful the world is,
How beautiful it can be when I’m dancing in it
When I dance, it’ll be quiet
But I’ll be dancing to whatever song is stuck in my head
And to your favorite song
At the same time
And if you listen really carefully, you can hear them both
Dancing together
And if you listen with more than your ears,
You can see them
Waltzing across the stage together,
The different notes making love to each other in a way more primal and natural
Than we could ever dream of
I want, so badly, to dance for you
But a gym teacher destroyed my knee a long time ago
So if I dance, it’ll only be to one song, my song, and maybe that won’t be enough
Because your song would have made it magical
So maybe, I’ll read to you instead, and my words will pour into your ears like a
Waterfall
Flooding you with sounds so
Beautiful that they fill you up
Until you’re so full it comes
Pouring out your
Eyes
And cleans them
Erases
All the dust and pollution that’s been blinding you and your
Tears will clean them, until you can see again
See like you did when you were five
And the world was wonderful
And you can see for yourself how
Beautiful
The world is
How magical
Because maybe, you forgot.
But maybe my brain is just as damaged
As my knee
So all I can give you
Is this list I wrote of sparkly things,
Because really, what can be better, than that.
∑ Freezer frost
∑ Glitter
∑ Frozen pavement
∑ My suitemate’s makeup
∑ The pencil I’m writing this with
And my eyes
Right after I cry
But maybe that’s not your style
Maybe you don’t like sparkly things
Or maybe your ears are just as destroyed as
My knee
And my head
So instead, let me kiss you
And maybe, when our lips touch, you can
Feel the poetry burned on them like
Tattoos and scars
And you can read me like Braille
And feel the poetry
On my lips
My tongue
Down my throat
All the way down to my belly
Printed across my organs
Like the tribal tattoos you get some places
When you become a man
And find meaning in that
When we kiss, maybe you’ll finally see all the
Beautiful things I see
All the time
And we can sit on the rooftop of the chem building or the library
I’ve been on them both,
So I’ll let you pick this time
We’ll sit
And we’ll breath, calm, as the sun falls asleep
And you can tell me everything I showed
You,
So I can see it
Again.
From A While Ago
10/06
If my grandfather wrote poetry,
he would do readings in small coffee shops,
In Bellingham,
Near where the Harley shop is
About a block away
He would read from a little cheap notebook
One he picked up at a gas station
This side of the mountains
Or maybe the other side
The side with the gas station
That sold the earrings
Shaped like Alaska
That he bought for my grandma
Or almost did.
But didn’t, because she’s gone
Scattered, across the last frontier.
He would write about those earrings
And the weight they had in the palm of his hand
Maybe
The weight of other earrings
the small bulge in his coat pocket
That weighed less than it deserved,
Those cheap earrings
He had found
Just for her
At a gas station
At a rest stop
On this side of the mountains
Or maybe that side
He can’t remember any more,
He would say
It was a long time ago,
He would say.
And the crowd would believe him
After seeing the truth written in his eyes
They would listen to his words
And see the truth of them stretched across the lines of his face, one hundred miles of truth for every wrinkle
And he would turn a page in his notebook
And read,
A time shift
From finding earrings to
Standing next to his bed and
Staring
At a lifetime of earrings sprawled across it
And trying to decide
Which ones had the most value
The most memories
But of course none did
It wasn’t about one pair
It was about all of them
It was about having a lifetime
To find them
A lifetime
To drive to this side of the mountains
Or maybe that side
To find them
A lifetime of weight
In his coat pocket,
He would say,
A lifetime of driving.
Reduced to
A pile of earrings on a bed
And one man
At a coffee shop
Reading from a cheap notebook
He picked up
At a cheap gas station
Smack between here and there
Stopping for a cup of coffee
With his granddaughter,
The one with pink hair
The one he doesn’t quite understand
But tries
Because his wife understood her,
He says
A coffee shop smack between
Where he’s been
And where he’ll go,
He says,
A break from a long drive,
The only company an old truck,
an empty seat next to him.
As he travels to the next rest stop
Driving to nowhere
Looking for a woman,
He says,
Always on the Last Frontier
