The Cormorant

The cormorant is the long, lean and limber bird that I remember from rides in the rowboat on those summer days at the beach. They were discernable in the water only by their long black stalks of necks poking and stretching out of the water, the long thin orange bill forming a near perfect right angle to the graceful curved "w" of the neck. It was only while they were sunbathing on the rocks that they could be seen in all their glory. Unlike ducks, the cormorant does not possess the oily feathers that make it immune to the cold cold water. Like human hair, the cormorant's down absorbs the water and takes a long time to lose it--to dry off. They don't look too happy about it: it seems like an arduous process.

My Red Shoes

I don't own a pair of red shoes right now, but I did back in high school. And they were pretty much all I wore. Made from some cheap synthetic material, they were surprisingly comfortable. Topped with red ribbon tied in a bow, they were as shiny as the pair of ruby slippers Dorothy wore in the wizard of Oz. They were a splash of color, just bright enough to appear inappropriate under a sober uniform skirt.

~~~

One time, on a trip to New York, I was stopped on Broadway by a bespeckled, paunchy bald man in a trench coat. It was one of those classic New York moments where you, the out-of-town Pollyanna, are shaken out of your tourist daydream by a screeching person pulling his hair out. "Chaos mathematics! Chaos mathematics!" he howled. Perplexed, I paused just long enough for him to comment on my footwear. "Wow," he gushed, suddenly, inexplicably calm. "I really like your shoes." Not in Kansas anymore, indeed.

~~~

I've heard that the walls of the newest mental hospitals are no longer practical white, but blushing pink. It's a soothing color, or so I've heard. Just a few shades darker and all hell would break loose? I wonder. But red is not a pariah of interior decorating in the public sphere. It's ubiquitous in diners--the plastic countertops that beckon from America's highways and byways. This is because the color red is notorious for its ability to stimulate the human appetite, or, once again, so I've heard. So there it is--in my grossly cursory explanation--the color red. The color that does not coddle, but startles, that does not satisfy but instills need. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to walk through life in red?

The Epigraph

Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.


-- Pablo Neruda, from 100 Love Sonnets translated by Stephen Tapscott

The Lemon

It has a mysterious red smudge on its side at its widest point, suggesting a lipstick smear or maybe even a slight hint of ketchup. Directly below (or above) this spot is a tiny brown beauty mark--one of those blemishes you see on fruits, not a bruise, but a tiny imperfection that you don't know the name of. One of its ends is pure yellow, but the opposite end is tainted by a tint of unripe green. The green end is puckered, like a pair of lips that just bit into it. The other end sticks out like a limb.

~

The lemon is like a freak tennis ball. Its almost green, but not quite. It's a teenager going through puberty. It's almost adult (ripe) but not quite. It's still green around the edges. It has funny spots that it doesn't know where they came from and many, many pockmarks on its leathery skin. The lemon is me.

~~

The lemon is almost ripe. Almost. It would be a perfectly edible, delicious, juicy piece of produce were it not for that impudent splotch of green around its puckered rear end. How much longer before the lemon will be able to serve its intended purpose? Why does nature insist upon mocking its fruits with such an unsightly adolescence--not wholly green, but not ripe, either.

~~~

The day I was born: I'm told when it happened; but I don't remember it. Yet, I'm supposed to celebrate it every year. I don't know what there is to celebrate. If anything, it's a cruel reminder of my mortality. Each day is a step closer to death, but birthdays are official. You let the whole world know. I guess more optimistic people might have an opposite opinion--that this is a way for them to achieve immortality, by reminding the world of their existence for as long as they can until they are most likely forgotten.

puddinghead

The wheels began turning in her mind as she walked into the classroom.

I am making a fool out of myself. She could never tell if it would be okay, if she would do okay. What if I'll just never be good enough or don't have the drive or whatever? 


She had had a fight with Quentin 2 hours prior and the stingy feelings of resentment still burned in her throat. Still such an asshole. He had been no support to her in the wake of her father's death.

She took her seat next to the girl with the beautiful eyes and the terrible stutter, who still insisted on speaking despite of the stutter, who did not care that it made others uncomfortable, who did not apologize for occupying that space.

I think it's funny how people dream. We just go out of commission. We have no control. It just shows how utterly out of control we are of everything. What if I have no control over whether I become a writer or not? Do I want it enough? I want to say yes. But what I really want is fame, recognition, acceptance. I wonder if this goes back to when other kids were mean to me as a child. I feel like I've had something to prove ever since then. Why? Why can't I just be happy in my own skin? I'm getting fat. I should go on a diet. I want to eat vanilla pudding with sliced strawberries when I get home. Yum.

for when you think you have not suffered

"Privilege" is something else.
"Privilege" is a judgment.
"Privilege" is an opinion.
"Privilege" is an accusation.
"Privilege" remains an area to which--when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later--I will not easily cop.

-- Joan Didion, My Blue Nights [76]

an epigraph?

"The tropics are not exotic, they are merely out of date."

-- Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

everyday a tea party for baby

Joan was trying to finish a book that year, and she would work until two or three in the morning, then have a drink and read some poetry before she came to bed. She always made Q's lunch the night before, and put it in this little blue lunchbox. You should have seen those lunches: they weren't your basic peanut butter and jelly schoolbox lunch. Thin little sandwiches with their crusts cut off, cut into four triangular pieces, kept fresh in Saran Wrap. Or else there would be homemade fried chicken, with little salt and pepper shakers. And for dessert, stemmed strawberries, with sour cream and brown sugar.

-- My Blue Nights, p. 28

Salvage the Bones

Epigraphs

"So now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me; I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand."
-- Deuteronomy 32:39

"For though I'm small, I know many things,
And my body is an endless eye
Through which, unfortunately, I see everything."
-- Gloria Fuertes, "Now"

"We on our backs staring at the stars above,
Talking about what we going to be when we grow up,
I said what you wanna be? She said, 'Alive.'"
-- Outkast, "Da Art of Storytellin' (Part 1)", Aquemini


Text


I glanced at his face, the sweat like a glaze. My lips were open. Another me would've licked it off, and it would've tasted like salt. But this girl wouldn't lean forward, wouldn't smile as she mouthed his neck. This girl waited because she wasn't like the women in the mythology book, the women who kept me turning the pages: the trickster nymphs, the ruthless goddesses, the world-uprooting mothers. Io, who made a god's heart hot with love; Artemis, who turned a man into a deer and had her dogs tear him cartilage from bone; Demeter, who made time stop when her daughter was stolen. [15-16]

He had never kissed me except like this, with his body, never his mouth. My underwear slid down my legs. He was peeling away my clothes like orange rind; he wanted the other me. The pulpy ripe heart. The sticky heart the boys saw through my boyish frame, my dark skin, my plain face. The girly heart that, before Manny, I'd let boys have because they wanted it, and not because I wanted to give it. I'd let boys have it because for a moment, I was Psyche or Eurydice or Daphne. I was beloved. But with Manny, it was different; he was so beautiful, and still he chose me, again and again. He wanted my girl heart; I gave him both of them. The pines seemed to circle like a ring-a-rosy, and I fell. It will be quick, I thought. He will bury his face in my hair. He will growl when he comes. I dug my heels into the backs of his thighs. Even though I knew all the other boys, I knew him and his body best: I loved him best. I showed him with my hips. My hair a pillow in the red dirt. My breasts hurt. I wanted him to lean down, to touch me everywhere. He wouldn't, but his hips would. China barked, knife sharp. I was bold as a Greek; I was making him hot with love, and Manny was loving me. [16-17]

Under the oak, Shaliyah waves at her face with a candy box, fanning. She rubs one arm and then the other, and flips her hand as if she is flinging off the sweat she finds there. She is calm and self-possessed as a housecat; it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree's roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don't uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty. [118-119]

When Mama was birthing Junior, she put her chin down into her chest. She panted and moaned. The ends of her moans squeaked, sounded like bad brakes grinding when a car stops. She never screamed, though. Skeetah and Randall and I were sneaking, standing on an old air-conditioning unit outside her and Daddy's window, and after she pushed Junior out, once he started crying, she let her head fall to the side, her eyes like mirrors, and she was looking at us, and I thought she would yell at us to get down out of the window, to stop being nosy. But she didn't. She saw us. She blinked slow. The skin above her nose cracked and she bit her lip. She shook her head then, raised her chin to the ceiling like an animal on the slaughter stump, like I've seen Daddy and Papa Joseph hold pigs before the knife, and closed her eyes. She started crying then, her hands holding her belly below her deflated stomach, soft as a punctured kickball. I had never seen her cry. But she hadn't said anything, even after Daddy called some of their friends, Tilda and Mr. Joe, to the house to watch us, even after he carried her and Junior out to the truck and she slumped against the window, watching us as Daddy drove away. Shaking her head. Maybe that meant no. Or Don't worry--I'm coming back. Or I'm sorry. Or Don't do it. Don't become the woman in this bed. Esch, she could have been saying. But I have. [221-222]

ode

We can never be alone anymore. Even at dawn in stormy weather with Destiny on our side. Even after we cut through the foreboding white caps and punched through endless angry brown hands of kelp and finally pierced the edge of the endless black. They still follow us.

I hate most of them, especially the ones on jetskis, but I can't hate all of them. Like the lobstermen. "They're doing it for a living," you say. Far be it me to come down on the working man.

They built the bloody pyramid, one pound of flesh at a time. Let us climb it now.

We can never be alone anymore. Even after we cut through white, punched through brown and finally pierced the edge of the endless black--they still follow us.

At last seated in the cockpit, I understood the height, the meaning of the foaming waves that pounded toward us with the power of god and the indifference of a machine. Caught up in an endless cycle of currents and tides.

Detention

He strolled toward her, black sweatshirted arched back low over the broom. She watched as three years worth of dust bunnies pranced toward her till they formed a furry cloud at her feet. There was a bulge in his black pants. Not throbbing, not menacing, as the romance novels had instructed it to seem. Just there. And his eyes...large, blue-green jewels framed by the longest lashes she had ever seen on a boy. A pudgy roman nose. A full, feminine mouth. Pretty white trash.

The realization of what was happening inside her elicited a slight gasp, manifesting in a noticeable hiccup. He paused his sweeping.

She followed him into the one-stalled boy's room that stank of piss and was adorned with crude caveman etchings of blow jobs. She shut the door behind her and clicked the lock and when he turned around to face her he didn't even seem surprised: he had won. And then her mouth was on his, sucking greedily, draining every ounce of sap from the gender-ambiguous peaches of his lips. He suddenly pulled away and she lost her balance, tumbling towards the toilet. She landed ass-first on the thankfully-closed seat. He was standing in front of the mirror, tenderly stroking his lower lip and it occurred to her that she had bit him.

"I, um, like it rough," she warbled, instantly regretting it the moment it escaped her. He laughed, but as he turned to her, she could see he was not smiling. He roughly pulled her off the toilet seat by her elbows and arched her body over the sink. She dug her nails into his forearms in protest, but then then he had her sitting on the ledge and her legs were wrapped around his waist and she was kissing and kissing him.

Five minutes later, she was running out of the basement into the crisp autumn air, relishing the sounds and scents not related to human excretions. She had just lived a fantastic story to tell her best friend, Dani, a story for them to laugh about and analyze in precise, graphic detail over clove cigarettes and iced coffee.

Dani was a diamond, she was so sharp and pretty. She loved her, or, she thought, maybe I just want to fuck her. She couldn't tell the difference in those days. Looking back, that might have the defining characteristic of that era of her life.

Genesis

It started at my naval, shot down to my groin, and then the jungle burned for five days. Like water on an oil spill, piss only added fuel to the fire. On the sixth day I made an appointment and on the morning of the seventh day I finally went to the doctor.

The flood came on a Tuesday in May. The cramps thundered and then the blood poured out effortlessly, like Spring rain. I heard Lars come in the door just as I lost consciousness.

I did not cry. Not at first. I wouldn't let myself react fully until I surveyed what was to be lost, like a realtor taking inventory after a hurricane. I stood in the center of the room for a minute, steadying myself, biting my tongue to keep from shaking. Then I slowly, deliberately removed every article of clothing and stood before the full length mirror.

I went to Jamaica, among other places in the region. Luckily, I kept a journal, for now I can not be sure of anything--what happened or did not. I am losing in bits and pieces now, not in the singular blaze of glory I assumed. I am visited by and am terrorized by nuns. It isn't a bad way to go. I am lucky. But I just wish I could be there--to find out the answer to the trivia question that everyone wants to know. Soon I'll be an official member of the least exclusive club in history. Lofty ideas for a liquefying brain.

for when you think about being important

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone--its ideologies and inventions--which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

"America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."

-- Susan Sontag

Tropic of Cancer

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Last night Boris discovered that he was lonely. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.

Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.

-- Henry Miller

for when you start to think this is not a legitimate vocation

"If the established society manages all normal communication, validating or invalidating it in accordance with social requirements, then the values alien to these requirements may perhaps have no other medium of communication than the abnormal one of fiction."

-- Herbert Marcuse