these things are mine
the following was featured on the Hello America Spring Collection, 2024. You can listen to me read it on their bandcamp, here.
A penchant for storytelling. A tiny pink vial of sutures I pulled out of my wounds, packaged with the coagulated blood still tangled thick in the knot, crusted over and dried by now. Dead and wilted flowers on my altar. A baculum necklace my father wore as a teenager.
These things are mine.
Dreams I have where I’m not myself. sat in a 50’s style diner, ordering crepes, a flooded Seattle, an erupted volcano, a San Diego on a dried up ocean. I dream on canvas, on silkscreen, on cardboard, with my words. I wear these dreams on my body like glittering scars.
Flesh I wear, with the alterations to make it fit, taken in here, let out there, surgeons in tailor shops. Bones, cartilage, a backwards sleeping schedule and a colony of fruit flies circling the glowing screen while I write. Buckets in the backyard, seeds and dirt and sprouts and cayenne pepper and squirrels disregarding the order of it all.
Blood that doesn’t know me, blood pressure so low the nurses are worried I’m not waking up, blood pouring from my hip when they ripped the stitches out, swollen, when the blood doesn’t want to be there but doesn’t want to leave. Leaves and change. Towering jalapeño bushes, succulents and nurture.
An immense grief, a stronger compulsion, bread-meat kneaded and coiled into a rope in the rice cooker. Timers, a blinding light as an alarm clock, a cat screaming at noon because she gets two treats when I take my pills. Half full pill bottles under the sink, a fundamental misunderstanding and a tendency to misname things with what few words I know.
Dodgy translations, skimming for the gist, a swelling pride at the accomplishments of everyone but me. Late blooming eggplant, skirts I stole from my girlfriend’s closet- shrinking and squirming from the velvet hangers. Herbs hung to dry, stands of ceiling beads we’ll never hang. Memories of a very old noose in an older closet. Divided attention, great voice and diction, grit and merit.
An armchair to recover in, the rafters in the attic where I used to write in the summertime, fan blaring and the heat noticeably worse than the main floors of the house. A series of toast apartments, a few teacake apartments, a house of many balconies and a motel.
Joy. Rip your heart out and the world is beautiful and I’m taking pictures of the cut lime that’s been sitting by the sink for three days because of how striking the color is next to the speckled countertop that’s in a Schrödinger’s limbo of clean and dirty. Mold. Another cup of coffee. A sadness that chases joy- a bitter feeling that this happiness is wasted on me.
Shoes by the door. Pins on my jacket. A p.o. box key for mail letters I don’t write anymore. Reminiscing about the bad old days, a new lease on life and a job I can’t pay it with. Drying clay tablets, invasive clovers and more asshair that I had accounted for-
All of these things are mine.