My spine was the most unappreciated part of me. You had never seen it in its bare nakedness, satiny skin stretched tight over a sensuous serpent of bone, but now, while the moon squirmed in the sky like a bug struggling feebly in a puddle of ink, you could reach across the cushioned expanse of the mattress and touch it.
You brushed my unclothed spine with your fingertips, examining each curve, each crevice, as gracefully as an art fanatic handling a rare vase. You could feel all the beauty in the world, a lone daisy growing in a festering swamp, a premature baby’s first intake of breath, a freak oasis in a desert full of wandering souls, epitomized in a single stretch of interlinked vertebrae and cartilage and milky white bone.
Beyond the window, the night trembled, like an alive thing. Your breath caught in your throat.
You wondered how it was possible for me to exist. I was as vulnerable as a naked flame in this world, this world full of gunpowder and venom and melting ice caps, this world where the sound of slaughter scratched desperately at the glass bubble of the atmosphere with bloodied, ragged fingernails. I belonged in fairy tales; I should have been fluttering my delicate tissue paper wings in a child’s dream-cloud somewhere, not lying here with you beneath blankets that smelled of sweat and mildew. it didn’t seem real. it didn’t seem right.
You told yourself that one day you would climb my spine like a ladder, use my ribs as rungs. You would clamber up into my head so you could see how you looked through my eyes, with your corkscrewed hair and your shadow-ringed eyes and the coarse stubble fondling your cheeks, creeping up the column of your throat. Maybe I could do the same for you, feel the ache that you felt when you looked at me, because I was the closest thing that anybody could ever come to seeing an angel while their heart was still beating.
“Why can’t you see how beautiful you are?” you whispered into my hair.
Unaware, I dreamed on.
I found my way into the land
of milk and honey,
and soon learned the horrors
of heaven.
I have lived in liquid gold, and
fallen into the darkest
nebulae.
I have died everyday for a
year;
the fate of swallowing the
blood seed,
and loving the false wolf.
Dreams of wanderlust boil my
blood,
and I have awakened to a
new world.
There is magick bubbling up
everywhere.
I want you to come in the summer.
Leaves a vivid green across heartbreak-cerulean sky, and feet bare brown against scorching pavement. It would be nice; me in short-shorts and bikini tops, you with sun tan shoulders and that summer-boy scent. We could do anything.
There’s a shaved ice place in downtown; we could run there barefoot and holding hands, smiling like it had been too many years (maybe it will have been). We could buy two large cones in our favorite flavors and gulp them hurriedly, before the sun ran the juices down their sides and it was lost in the long-long grass, sweet and temporary like so many things. I could lick the syrup off your fingertips and kiss you, finally, and we’d taste like tiger’s blood and lemon-lime, and it would be wild summer love, like nothing else.
We could hop into your old pickup and drive to the ocean, just because. I’d pack us a cooler of chicken sandwiches and cherry tea, and fold towels in the back seat with worn out and tattered edges. We’d drive all day with the windows rolled down, blasting rockabilly songs and eating sunflower seeds; cracking the shells with our teeth and singing along. It would be a little slice of heaven between two metal doors, with my feet on the dash and my hair gathered up on top of my head, light-smeared and sun-warmed. I’d paint my nails hot pink, and we’d stop half way there to buy sunscreen and popsicles. The cashier at the gas station would notice how I ruffled up your hair and the special way you put your hands on my waist as I leaned into you, laughing in the candy aisle, and she would think that we were lovers who would grow old together, until we were frail and wrinkled and gray. And she would be right.
My mother wants to know
if I’ve had anything for breakfast
and the way she talks splits through me
like an axe in a melon, nervous
like she’s talking to a man with blood
that stains his teeth. And the kettle sings,
too loud, that ugly old whee-oh-whee
that makes me feel like a poet or a
native, nervous wreck, a girl dragging
her toes and drawling
as she snaps a cat’s
neck. She asks me again, more
impatient this time because I am
the kind of person that is hard
to put up with, the kind of person
that never begins to listen, and there is
a beating heart sewn into the back of
my head where my hair meets
like a cleaved moon in the middle.
The stitches hurt and the room is
frightening and sad as I pick
myself free with my nails,
wishing the pulse would give out.
He used to take me behind his father’s garage and light cigarettes for us, he made me inhale his first so that it would have my lipstick stains around the thin death stick. I would inhale and exhale while staring at his shoes, big stomp boots that used to crush the life out of flies and beetles.
“Why do you kill them?” I’d ask, every time his foot smashed on the poor life form and made it sound like he was stepping on sugared cereal and not a non dead insect.
“I like the sound it makes, I imagine it’s my father’s skull.”
He fucked me in the garage under his father’s wooden table, and afterwards he’d point to the corner where there were spider webs growing.
“He used to beat me there, with a pole. The bastard.” But he was smiling.
Soundlessly I thought that it explained the old scars on his back. I looked around, inhaled the silence mixed with the scent of lust and dug my nails into my veins.
“Why do you take me in here then?” I uttered impulsively. His eyes were dark, dark stars. Stars ready to fall.
“My father ruined everything in here. I think it would be a waste, a waste of everything, not to fill it up with something other than hate.”
My breasts are growing ever-tender and I can feel the pain initiating below my belly button.
Mother says it’s womanly. She said that soon I’ll be a sliced meal ready to sit plattered in front of another man, delighting him and the room with other joys.
But I don’t like boys and being sliced for dinner is painful.
I remember the afternoon my insides fell into the toilet, a vivid red that sickened me to my curled toes. My insides were being carved and shaped by the gods, taking what they could from my innocence and childhood. A tormenting ache that never ceased to ripple me to the comfort of my bed sheets.
“I want my insides back,” I told mother.
“He will do as he pleases with you,” she said.
And I remember when the first man entered my womanhood, pushing his grown manliness inside of me until it was caressing the tip of my uterus, slithering in out of my precious as he wished. He carved me even more than gods did that night, and when he left he took more than just membrane and cells.
“I want my soul back,” I told mother.
“He will do as he pleases with you,” she said.
It was four in the morning and I could still taste beer-grit in my mouth when I heard you fucking him. The same sound, over and over, a broken record and so loud that I couldn’t put my hands over my ears and make it go away. I crushed my elbows in against each other, pulled my knees up to my nose, folding into myself so firmly that I thought my spine would split through my skin. Just one soft touch, the smallest bother, and my skin would burst, I would flip inside out, damp stripped muscles itching with the cigarette smoke and sweaty breath that was in the air. Someone ordered pizza, someone turned on the stereo. Sonic Youth blasted through the house, and even though I could feel it through every inch of me, even though I was quivering with it, I could still hear you, raw crying fuck-noises, and my face crumpled and I bit my tongue and tried not to breathe. The sausage and cheese on the pizza was heavy and sweet in the air, and thickening in my throat, turning my stomach. Factory line slaughter pushed its way in through the drug haze and I could see sows getting their throats slit and skittering and squealing on the blood-slick ground, guts and blood metal in my mouth and in the background you crying. Soundtrack, repeating track, no change in pitch or timbre. I could picture it, coiled up pain-tight, higher than I’ve ever been, I could see you with your skin turning purple putting nail marks in his back, your fingers swelling, him a bruise, bursting like fruit, inside of you, moving like the springs in the bed beneath you.
I saw you sweating tar and your teeth growing longer and him, he didn’t know better, his eyes wider and wider and they burst, flowing through the mattress and the air and the floor and onto my cheeks and my exposed shoulders, his eyes raining down on me while I lay half fucking dead at this stupid party, trying not to die, breathing faster and regretting those last few pills, gritting my teeth gritting gritting you gritting your teeth as you moved on top of him faster. I could feel myself starting to black out and hoped, maybe, maybe I’d die there, my heart would shatter and blood coming out my tear ducts and I’d never hear you again, guttural throat moaner touching him, let him go, let him go, autumn goddess temple with your soul pit eyes breaking his and I’m lying down here with cracked skin I’m probably dying and in my last instant he will still be fucking you, and when I’m dead he will still be fucking you and not me, second choice, second prize, sucking his cock wasn’t good enough, almost passed out then, his arms around me, against the wall, who is this? And it didn’t matter then.
Patron Saint of the dying, of girls with skin that cracks open, big round glossy eyes, bramble hair, hearts beating until they catch a rib and burst, Patron Saint of first overdoses, of going too far, of falling in love with someone in a glass-walled porch a few hours after you’ve met him, Patron Saint of not moving fast enough or moaning loud enough, Patron Saint of bruised breasts and bathing in vitreous humor and pissing yourself and you can’t scream and he’s ten feet above you, not fucking you but fucking her, her who is you, Patron Saint of waking up one day later with a tube down your throat and fresh flowers on the bedside table, can’t move, can’t throw it out, hate him, hate him, throw it out, and the sound in your throat as you start to cry, and you cry harder, and can’t breathe, and hear doctors, and finally a smooth cold rush in your throat and your arms and then you sleep and you dream of his face.
I fell in love with the puzzle of your veins
and the sound of your heartbeat. I lost vital
bits of me between the brick of your
walls, and yet I found myself a thousand
times in the chaos of your tales and the
gravel of your skin.
You moaned mysteries in my hair and
I laughed like ice cream, and all the
scents and all the flavors that you taught
me are now iridescent pigments in my
larynx.
It’s in your hold that I was sent to sleep
with tiredness dripping from my lips
and pleasure nestled in my limbs.
I came to you to escape from the things
that have settled deep
inside my bones,
and I cannot run without my
bones so I cannot run from them, but they
did not matter then because you were my skeleton
for the week and nothing mattered,
absolutely nothing mattered
in your embrace.
I love this world.
I love it even when it’s so exquisitely achingly lonely that I can feel the drum of my pulse pounding just under my soft skin, an eternal reminder of the hollow center the veins connect back to.
Sometimes I think I want to build my future in the forest because the trees are so lovely — but then I realize that I would be missing out on the immense, measureless blue surfaces of ocean water and the sound of the waves lapping at the shoreline. And then I think of the view from the mountains, or the honey golden tones of the desert at sunset, the neon colors of the great cities, all the beautiful places in the world I have to choose from, but which one is the most beautiful in the end?
I think about the end of the world, how the forests would burn and the seas would dry up and the mountains would crumble and the cities would collapse, and the destruction would still be hauntingly beautiful because it’s a reminder of our own impermanence. A soothing memory of that faint pulse and hollow center.
I think I want the world to end, my world to end, in the place where my future should have started. I think I want to fall, because for a few seconds I can dream I’m flying and that the future is never coming. I can pretend the fear welling up in the pit of my stomach is proof that I’m not hollow anymore, that I never was.
I love this world too much to ever let go.
But I think I’m falling out of love.
Mulholland Drive, 2001 (dir. David Lynch)
“It’ll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else.”
