hunger

sometimes it takes a week to rip off a band-aid. sometimes more, because you ripped it off so fast, because you were trying not to rip someone else off, and you ripped your self off in the process. now there’s this raw-red welt where fawn-brown skin was, sticky and bitter as a bruised apple. now you have a bellyache, but you never took a bite. here’s the scabbed-over bite / mark in your heart to prove it. see?

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vanishing point

we finish our dreams, slippery, push each one into each other’s mouths like warm berries. there are only two stories, he says. a small, wet knot holds him together. someone new shows up, or someone goes on a journey. it’s the same thing, i think. our blueblood hearts, the horizon berry-colored. he squeezes it, and a dream drops out. there’s only one story, he says, and looks right at me, which is like looking away. someone loses something.

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"One writes out of one thing only...

...one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art."     -James Baldwin

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18 when i saw him, my heart lurched, but he just walked right past us both.

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7 finally, it’s raining. i come down with a faint case of vertigo. keep tilting to the right. heart side, other side. maybe i’m trying to get some distance. hard to win a stare-off with your failings. “if you get wet,” she says, “couldn’t you be electrocuted?” cherry blossoms gather in plastered pink on the sidewalks. everything smells like blossoms and rain. my valentine won’t stop throwing up. i’m trying not to fall over.

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3 it looks like a giant manta ray. swimming through my small insides like they’re the open ocean. that manta ray has a big mouth. Breathe in, he said, listening, Again...Again... “the imagination,” says the novelist, “is like a muscle: the more you use it, the better it performs and the quicker you get ideas of higher caliber.” bright metal snaps where soft brown skin should be. maybe i’m stable where everyone else is electric. my heart is like a muscle. my heart is like a muscle. my heart is a muscle.
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