We Exceed Expectations Here

Oval altitudes trip over my map of crushed velvet oceans in sapphire blue and cheesecloth in green, the ever wrinkling land. In my mind, a black sea brewing. Ships cross the oceans, zigging and zagging among hurricanes of my private, inexplicable fury. I place my finger on an old island, drowning it. My life is waning like the moon, a cold, cream colored abyss of dimly reflected light from a sun far away. The tide pulls away from every crumpled continent all at once, leaving them to parch and perish. The rich blue sea reaches up to the moon now, as if to say, “ We exceed expectations here. Especially exorbitant ones.”

Fearsome and Hard to Believe

Crusted criticism flakes off me like the delicate, fragile layers of a fluffy croissant. My sugar is building snowmen, selling death door to door to the depressed and broken, offering itself a sacrifice. In a cold place, my body will be sleeping. The cliffs carouse beside the sea. I miss my husband while he rubs my back. I am cheerful, living like lightning. Burn bright, then in a flash, gone. Nothing left but a faint, sticky smoke. I do not need criticism. I need the white sacrifice of a discipline I could not understand – like it’s been 36 years and after He saves my life and seals me I still say, “No one loves me,” because unworthiness is in my blanched bones. The sunshine is, to the shadow, fearsome and hard to believe.

My Novella

The eccentric novella brewing and screwing her way through the sizzling synapses across my brain is hard to catch. Pick up your plot and follow me! The sun over my house judges my unproductive, polychromatic day. Language was my first love. I try to harness my words as they sparkle defiantly, trying to escape the little woman controlling my tongue, who snatches them up and places them on it to be conveyed. The novella, being an angry, unwilling confederation of words, tries to escape. She puts up a fight. She’s feisty. Still, the woman in my voice box, the one I abuse, dictates her from plot to syntax into the phone. Afterward, I answer the phone and hear the rush of my own blood, a private sea. And somewhere, the eternal hammering of nails.

The Circle and The Sphere

The little circle marbles down the glass streets of my imaginary universe. She is purple and mystical scented and smooth and spoiled. The squares till the fields, picking despair off crops that will be burned by an army of disenfranchised futures. The triangles, red in their harshness and love of good wine, stand on the porches of their crystalline cottages, watching our little circle travel. Until she meets a sphere, and she blooms with possibility.



My Old Personality

Feral, calendar scented clouds claw their way across a luxury ultramarine sky. Twilight – and the storms are tucking in for the night – typhoons sleeping off shore, waiting to pounce during union working hours. I sit on the porch smoking memories of multidisciplinary Mondays where every day was a synthesis of time and color. I am not on speaking terms with line, but texture knows my home phone number. The used Mondays are aromatic like my old personality, years before my diseased mind wiped my name off my birth certificate. What is the most effective way to move a mountain through my veins?

My Heart

Rushing rivers of reverse psychology spill from pharmaceutical sources. I used to be a gummy bear. Now I’m just juicy. I have to believe that Language, digging the shallow grave in my yard, doesn’t mean it for me, but he constantly sneaks up behind me with measuring tape. My hollow chest contains a snow owl for a heart, digesting always a scurrying sin that squeaks on the way down his gullet.

Snow Owl for a Heart

Rushing rivers of reverse psychology spill from pharmaceutical sources. I used to be a gummy bear. Now I’m just juicy. I have to believe that Language, digging the shallow grave in my yard, doesn’t mean it for me, but he constantly sneaks up behind me with measuring tape. My hollow chest contains a snow owl for a heart, digesting always a scurrying sin that squeaks on the way down his gullet.





Friends With No Benefits

Careful correlations kiss causation in the school bathroom. My youth was an opaque thing. It always is. In my eyes, many memories are stored alphabetically by aroma. I remember pencil sharpeners and friends made of knives, sharpening themselves and cutting into me. They told me the shivs were diamonds. I didn’t believe them, but they glittered, so I bled cooperatively on a table meant for autopsies.

What Was I Made For?

I wash my hair as most wishes do, with sea spray. My alabaster legs stick out at desperate angles as I trip in the surf.  I think I was made by a 22 year old for whom graphic design is their “passion.” Or perhaps a logger, running from the ancient aliens in the woods. Either way, my eyes slice the fruit of man’s labor like an orange, dividing it up among the jackals. My hands are oxygen, a dream of sublime strangulation. My name is the river flowing backward, flooding her banks. I am a wish, a need, a woman varnished and unverified.