Washing My Hair

washing my hair
in the kitchen sink.
Sand leaves its
grit on my scalp.
There is no
scrubbing the
sea from my skin.


I will be born again
unto the waves and
undertow.
The seaweed will take me,
as it had at
first birth.


But this new birth
of my seafaring soul
will be a bright flash
against the white caps,
my back will be 
pressed to the sand
and the shore
will kiss my
lips


like no one else
ever could.


While washing my
hair out,
seashells, small 
castles and worlds
fall from the blonde
depths. 
And I know,
the sea will come
calling 
again,
soon.

Pink Curtains

Through the curtains
I erase your morning form,
its softened edges
blur and waver
as I squint my eyes
to abandon you.


You are gone
in the abyss
of my eyelids.

Lacrimosa

Lacrymal 
she cries,
to the sea
and the east.
Its whispers 
in her ear
threaten as the
zephyrs. 


She is lost,
to the sea
an aching of
return. 
The calling back
to birth
and watery disillusion.


Oh, salt water.
Your beauty,
ceaseless and boundless,
the wounding cure 
for all lamentation.


Lacrimosa,
and in the sea
are its tears,
a perpetual bond,
the waves in
her eyes, 
echoing sea.
The return,


awaiting.

Carp, Tub, Yellow

Dear carp in the tub.

Languid fish

long and yellow 

leaving a murky

waterline.

Dear carp, 

bearer of wealth.

We will eat you,

your heart

will swell and burst.

With pride for 

your dull scales

and mythic ways.

Oh carp,

I will watch you in

the shadow of the laundry line

across the apartment bathroom.

Your own shadow 

a flickering of

ancient.

It lies in your bones.

I will scatter them

as an oracle.

I will read your 

death, soft

and sedate.

Fish in my tub,

nowhere to go.

The winter breeze

through the window

grazes your

body, sleek and 

fat. Scales in order,

placed by god. 

Never undone.

Dear carp 

in the tub,

With yellowy age.

Please bear witness

to our talk,

as above you,

a glint of steel.

French Indochina

Dead deltas

from the mountains,

their waters

blackened flumes

to the sea,

strangulated and sour

it spits on the shore.

A misted coastline,

jagged and neverending.

This state of perpetual 

before the mountains.

In the tall reaches

the dark swallows,

the birdsong is dangerous.

On the plains near

the rivers, pushing their yellow

waters up onto the bank,

the rice grows.

Somehow, carp swim between

in the muddied water.

Dead space,

murky fish, with faces flat

and foreign.

The nights oppressive,

no breezes,

dead children in the street

-magnolias in the gated gardens.

Some creeping mist

in the lungs, it settles deep.

Rooted tree, centuries old

to hold into place

the neverending death

in the dying deltas.

[Inspired by Duras' The Lover.]

Cigarettes and Stars

A short fiction piece. I love writing so late. 

Cigarettes and Stars

The park was exceptionally dark that night. All the street lamps had burnt out over the course of the past three weeks and now we were forced to walk through the tangles of jungle gyms and monkey bars in a vast void. Our hands swung freely by our sides, our left hands with cigarettes bobbing from them.

It was my first. And the taste was horrible. But it made my lungs ache in a good way, like I had just ran for a few miles. I watched the smoke on each exhale, the shape it made as it drifted into the night. He stood there next to me, close, and flicked the cigarette more than he actually smoked it.

The two Camel lights had come from the pack I’d bought on my 18^th just because I could. I didn’t know anyone who smoked, and I didn’t plan on starting. But apparently the cold and the companionship of him changed things.

He’d been the one to ask. As we were walking out onto Winter street, our hands sometimes brushing:

“Do you have a cigarette, by chance?” He looked sad and nervous. The bandages on his wrists agreed with the look on his face. I nodded and dove my hand into my bag, grabbing the full pack of Camels. I hated the little camel on the front. I felt like horrible people had distorted the animal and that somewhere someone was sticking cigarettes into the mouth of one of these weird lumpy animals. But I tapped the pack and one little cigarette slipped out, I handed it to him, grabbed the zippo lighter I had inherited.

He took it and we paused on the street long enough for him to light it and suck in a deep breath. He coughed a little- “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t.” it was quiet as I said it, only the sound of far-off traffic to back me up.

“Me either.” And I believed him. Even as he expertly puffed on the weird thing, I believed he didn’t smoke. He wasn’t that type, in any context. “Only when I’m nervous. And they’re usually Marlboros.” He coughed again, it was a quick and raspy cough, his white bandages gleaming.

He was nervous. As we stood on the corner, waiting for the little glowing pedestrian to lure us across the walk. I reached out for his hand. “Please don’t be nervous.”

And then I felt stupid for the whole action. His hand, fitting in mine like watermelon fruit fits into the rind- like it had always been there. It had grown this way, our hands must have been the same thing at some point in the cosmic history of things. He looked at me, scared and wide-eyed. It made me want to cry, his face, too much like a teenage boy, too much like a reject, too much like a broken soul. I wanted to take off all the gauze and kiss the stitches and the bloodied skin that had been broken there. But instead I felt his pulse and he tightened his grip on my hand as we walked. My cigarette had burnt out, half of the white bit was still there, intact. He had finished his, and had put it out on a brick wall.

“Why are you nervous?” I asked, so softly I thought I’d get lucky and he wouldn’t hear.

But he looked at me and shyly said, “Only because I’m with you. Because we can be out and we can do this now. We can walk on the streets and smoke our cigarettes and talk or not talk. We can look at the stars now and walk through dark swing sets. You don’t have to go home. I don’t have to go home. We can hold hands. I could kiss you. We can do anything now. I’m nervous because we can. I’m trembling with this vast opportunity, and I’m afraid that now, because it’s here, you won’t like me anymore. And I won’t be able to kiss you and tell you how to find Orion’s Belt.”

We’d stopped walking as he told me this, and he started crying. It was subtle, soft and shy, as he’d been lately. After the accident he had shifted, and sometimes I couldn’t figure out where he was. But here he was, all of him in front of me, crying on the sidewalk at two in the morning on a Tuesday in July. The entire situation seemed bizarre.

But he was slowly crumpling in on himself, leaning further into the brick wall of a bank until I thought he would disappear into it. I held his hands and began to cry. His wrists made me so sad. These skinny things, which I’d seen bleed so much over the bathtub. I reached out and rubbed at his wet face with the sleeve of my sweater. He made a sniffling sound and coughed, he was shaking and pale.

I handed him another cigarette and helped him light it. He shivered and his face glistened with salt water. We sat down along the wall and he looked up. “There.” The word fell limp from his dry lips. “Orion’s Belt, look… isn’t it beautiful up there?” He took my hand and showed me where the constellation lie. I leaned against his shoulder and told him it was really the most beautiful night I’d ever seen.

And it was. It was the most beautiful, but the saddest. Because I had sworn he’d been put back together. But it was not the case.

He began to unwind the bandages.

“Juniper, stop. Please stop.” My words never really came out, I just tried to put the bandages back on. He was still crying, but he looked at me and was so gentle.

“I have to see how close I was.”

The last pad of gauze came off and I wanted to scream because this was how he wanted it to end. These angry, unclean slashes, so precise I knew he had planned the exact lines. He nodded, slow. The lines were deep, took so many tiny stitches to close. There would be scars.

We sat in a trembling silence- the air around us so still we had to move it ourselves.

I reached for another cigarette and finally understood his strangely occasional smoking habits. I lit the thing and inhaled so deep, wishing it was weed. Wishing I could get off the ground and fly and make myself a constellation. I wanted to take him too, I knew he wanted to be up there. The smoke reached up into the sky and I cried soft and slow because this was not my life.

“I wish I hadn’t fucked this up.” His voice was raspy and sleepy and cold. He leaned back and laid down on the empty sidewalk. I laid next to him, curling into him and hoping I could keep him here.

“You didn’t… you didn’t fuck this up.” I stuttered and wiped at my eyes. I grabbed the corner of my sweater and dried his face too, again. It was an oddly intimate gesture I liked more than holding onto him. It was such a solid movement. Gentle but all encompassing in its simplicity.

“I’m still here.”

“You don’t want to be out there. It’s cold.” So feeble was my answer. How to tell him I was selfish and had called 911 just to keep him here with me? Of course, the flashes of his blood against the white porcelain blossomed in my mind, his ragdoll body next to the shower curtain was an image tattooed inside of me. It was an ugly, poorly drawn one- but tattoos are forever.

“I love you. Can we take the bus to my house?”

He turned to me, on the sidewalk, our hips all awkwardly angling into the concrete- trying so hard to disappear. “You’re still here. And I’m still here. It’s scary because now we’re free to do whatever calls to us. But there’s a starting over. I can feel it, when my wrists throb I know it’s healing. I’m still sewing back together all of my insides, but I’ll do it.”

I cried and finished the cigarette, smashing the lit end of it into the cement. He was still here. I did not have to label him as a shape in the stars, because he wasn’t there yet. He was going to get up and get on the bus with me. We’d go back to his house and probably watch old Saturday Night Live reruns. Sometimes we watched Seinfeld. He still laughed, I didn’t know how, the way he looked to be hurting.

“We can have more time. It won’t move if we just lay here, we can’t see it, it isn’t moving. I feel like we could just lay on this sidewalk for the rest of whatever our lives are. I feel like I want to kiss you, still. I’m glad I get to. I’m glad I’m not gone and I’m glad we’re where we are.” He didn’t look at me, only looked up. Forever starbound were his eyes. I squeezed his hand.

“Please kiss me.” Maybe I’d kept him alive for this reason. Maybe I had cradled his head in the crook my arm as he had lost consciousness for this reason. He had lost too much blood and then he was asleep in my arms, bleeding into the linoleum. I cried over this, over his scrawny limp body and over what I swore was lost. Maybe all of that blood was still living in my mind because we were working for this.

I’d waited all night in the ER for him. I was supposedly over at Maggie’s, but I really just sat on the floor of the ER waiting room and cried. My parents never found out I’d lied.

Nobody knew what had happened.

I had found him. I had called them to save him. We didn’t tell anyone. Nobody knew I was there. Nobody knew he had tried to die.

His eyes glistened like stars, his whole body burned like it was meant to be cosmic.

And so he did lean in and there was a moment of eyes closed, teeth hitting as we curled up on the sidewalk.

We smoked another cigarette, a shared one, and then we got up, walked to the bus stop.

The roll of fluorescence came down the street and we climbed aboard like sailors, or astronauts, or something important. Sitting in the back we stared at the street as it passed away from us.

“I would have missed you too much.” He whispered, touching his wrists. 

Interstate Ghost (Take 2)

Please, 
your form as it
weaves through the 
glittering of traffic.


There you stand
strange specter of
my longings, holding 
emergency flares
in the shoulder.


Scattered metal,
smoky shoulder doused
in rain. The strobe
of red-purple-blue
-the accident my
eyes blindly wander to,
the rearview mirror
full of your form.


Those stray blinking lights
all along the I-5,
your shapelessness
through the tetris of cars.


You, ghost-pale.
Deathly shimmering 
on the yellow lines.


The rain glitters
on your soggy shoulders
-you are everywhere,
unescapable even in
the mind's blind spot.


White knuckled,
the two of us 
with fists clenched 
and teeth grinding.


I shiver as your 
roadway spirit 
passes through me.

Hotel Lamps

I flick on the lamp

on the particle board

night table between

these two beds.

Left; full.

Right; cold.

Under the starchy

space blanket linens

our chilled feet

avoid touch.

We squint

in the newfound light

and yawn,

our strange figures

so desperately distant.

You turn to the window,

sit up

in your cold sweat.

Outside there

is an April storm,

some rolling thunderous

note to the night

as the stoplights change

for phantoms.

You are one of them

in your thinning white t-shirt,

no touching,

fingers should pass through

your ectoplasmic soul.

Your shivers

are riveting flashes of lightning

at the edge of this hotel bed.

The wind whips the dark rain

against the third floor window,

and you make a small sound 

like distance, and I cannot 

turn, I cannot look.

I flick the lamp off

and plunge us into 

the swallowing depth

of this cardboard room,

your shaking soul

sweating miles

away from me.

1

2

3

4

Your shaking,

so far and unknown to 

me.

Anxious Birdsong Lips

The ashes of your cigarette
float in wisps to the floor,
settle into the rug and 
burn slow.


I open the window
-you shiver with
the breeze running
down your chest.


A twist of sheets in
your small apartment.
The mirror across the
room showing in reverse
our bodies- made
up of cosmic dust.
Our lefts now right,
your half is now mine.


I will take you
and make you
into me. Give 
my right side 
to you. 


Together we listen
for the night calls
of birds,
but only sirens 
return our anxious whispers.


Frightened by
the omen
we brush our teeth
for three long minutes,
bent over the 
small white sink
which leaks to the 
crackling linoleum.


Our rabid mouths
not speaking,
for if we rid
ourselves of this 
illness we would speak
in tongues. Sweet birdsong
dripping from our pink lips.


In return the sheets
are chilled, our celestial indents
cooled and cemented
as we unravel the nest 
of linens to brood in.


My right again my own,
your left wandering 
elsewhere.

Centerfold

My dear drunken centerfolds, 

what has been wrought in 

your glossy lifetime?

Where have you gone?

Placed between the

ads for lonely people-

teenage boys' wet dreams.

The sad women you've 

become, plastic skin

painted orange. 

Your souls lost

in the pages.

Covers blacked out

behind the counter

of the Quik Mart.

Next to lottery tickets

and cigarettes.

The ungodly

trinity at its best.

Crumpled dollars

on the formica,

meaty hands.

And your sad eyes

lustful for-

what?

As they peer over the edge

of the plastic black censors

hiding what you choose to 

show.

The racks of you

above the head of

the cashier peer

down and whisper

sweet nothings.

Shadowed.

The candle wick
died in the
gusts, as 
across the thresholds
passed shadows.


A dark spot on 
the floor, these 
long castings 
without shapes.
They are shadows
without owners,
no one claiming
them from the lost
and found.


They tread heavy 
across the wooden boards,
hewn rough and grey.
Standing in boots 
and sighing in 
my kitchen.


I offer them tea,
and seat by the window.

Trampoline

Oh cosmic

calm of

bodies in the winter.

So the stars move

in zigzagging waves

above this film which

should catapult us

to fall in 

constellation figures.

Our arms gracefully arched

to hold up the heavens.

We shivered with the

ethusiasm of a coming spring

its warmth in the breeze,

in our laughter

in the dark.

It rang in infinite airwaves

to mingle in the darkened fields.

We were exalted

into the celestial 

ceiling

to forever dwell in stars.

Interstate Ghost

Please, 

your form as it 

weaves through the

glittering of traffic.

There you stand

strange specter of 

my longings, holding

emergency flares

in the shoulder.

You are the accident 

my eyes wander to,

can't look away

from the blood-spattered scene.

Stray blinking lights

along the interstate.

You, ghost-pale,

deathly shimmering

on the yellow lines.

The rain glitters

on your soggy shoulders;

I am fighting back

years of swallowed emotions

behind my sterring wheel.

White knuckled,

the two of us

with fists clenched

and teeth grinding.

I shiver as your

roadway spirit

passes through me.