I Stole Away to Clarity

One night, in secret, I snuck away.


My love told me he rode a high horse
called truth and clarity; I wanted the reigns.

I left my donkey, slow as he was, on the top
of my dresser.
I stole away to find my ride.

After two weeks, I saddled up.
Feet in the stirrups, unweighed down
by substance or distraction, I took off
to find
to find
the colors only visible from a steed sitting so high.

And, I saw—
The tall peaks of purple mountains
The low valleys with nothing but cold

And I didn’t see my love,
his pony surrounded in smoke, lurking in the shadows.
And I didn’t see my mother,
her camel’s hump stored with pills to take her higher.
And I didn’t see my friends,
swerving like drunk drivers and laughing the loudest.

I breathed the air of clarity,
without smoke, without gulps, without burns.
I breathed the air of truthfulness.
it stung my lungs in a different way;
put that whiskey feeling in my belly.

I breathed the air of loneliness, of betterment.
then
I climbed down from my high horse to join
the others on what carried them through the deserts.

I never told anyone what I did. And I never
argued
when they told me that they were riding truth.

flowers for my mother


the snow will melt; your heart will defrost.
One morning,
unexpectantly,
the wet ground will produce
the fresh green buds
of spring

flowers.

The green,
out of place against the gray,
(like the birds to ears wrapped up in wool blankets)
will make way for the

flowers.

Seasons, like moods, change
in stages.

First, the birds.
Then... the buds.
Finally,

flowers

{you'll find them in the fertile soil. you'll find them behind your eyes.)

i'm home from school for three weeks.

i was going to work and make money, but i decided proclaiming that i'm a minimalist and don't need money would be a nice thing to say to avoid being called lazy.

i'm spending my break rereading some of my favorite books from high school. i think julie calls it glory-angst. i call it that too, and love it.

i'm spending my break sleeping over at a dinosaur's house. It's a 45 minute drive, but so warm once i get there. he makes me feel real. i come home during the day to shower, change, and drive back. it's never the plan, but always how it happens.

i was going to spend my break writing amazing stories, but i'm not. i'm rambling in the journal i found on a cart at the library with a sign on it that said "recycling." i'm going on and on in runon sentences about being away from cassie, katie getting married, my mother falling in love with a man named michael, and the way my dinosaur smells when he makes me waffles the morning after he took me to a denison witmer concert to drum on my knees. it's good enough for me.

Heels. Pink. The smell of cigarettes. Make up. Hair Spray. Beer spilled on designer jeans. Vodka Cranberry breath. Dior perfume. It all stumbled home from the bus at half past two in the morning.

“I’m sweating my face off!” screamed Heidi as she dug through her sequined clutch handbag for her key. Her hair was straightened to spite her normally wild curls.

“My legs are killing me… no more dancing all night in these shoes. Jesus Christ.” Melissa said. I looked at her muscular, athletic legs and walked along in silence, feeling my curls that were once lovely and full sag down to my shoulders in a nappy muddle of dull brown. We walked up to the small, standardized townhouse that our college provided us as a sloppy, drunk mess. I turned the key in the door, and four of us staggered into the living room decorated with movie posters, old broken piñatas still hanging from the ceiling, and piles of shoes by the door. We were two down from the group of six that left the house all done up hours before. Kicking our shoes off straight away, we then marched directly for the kitchen connected to the living room.

It was large enough to hold a small round table in the middle, but barely. Heidi immediately started to boil water for her ritualistic drunk Ramen noodle pre-breakfast meal on the stove that the college had replaced that year. It’s blinding white shine contrasted heavily with the dull brown that the kitchen tiles had turned over the years. Melissa grabbed an almost empty package of Oreos from the pantry that was stuffed with slimfast bars and shakes, diet sodas, and high-fiber low-calorie cereals. Katie found a bag of half-stale potato chips on top of the refrigerator decorated with exams we failed and children’s colored alphabet letters arranged into dirty words. I snatched a jar of peanut butter and graham crackers out of the cabinet next to the sink and got to work.

None of us moved very far from where we kept our food. Heidi leaned her tiny back against the oven, her water starting to simmer next to her left shoulder. Her almost miniature satin top exposed the sharpness of her shoulder blades and spine. Katie was only a few feet away, sitting on the counter that stood between the refrigerator and the stove. She pushed the coffee maker as far back as she could to make room for her body. She kept pushing her long, tangled blonde hair over her shoulders as the potato chips got trapped in the strands. When Katie pushed the bangs that almost completely covered her green eyes and looked straight forward, she saw Melissa sitting on the floor in front of the pantry door, opening the Oreos and licking the icing before stuffing them into her mouth. Her legs were pulled up against her chest, and the cookies sat on the floor next to her. Her stylishly short dark hair that fell around the roundness of her pale forehead had lost some of its edginess throughout the night as the bobbi pins and barrettes began to fall out and point the wrong ways. I took a seat at the small circular table covered with notes and text books from our various academic pursuits and rubbed my tired eyes, only to find the black eye make up on my fingers when I took them down. I found an old hair tie on the table top and pulled my failed hair up into a messy and disorganized bun.

“Is Julie with that guy… what’s his name?” I asked.

“Yeah, she met him the other night.” Katie said as she dug into the bag of potato chips making loud crinkling sounds, “She’s so freaking gorgeous… I’m always just holding the door open for her to let all the men in.”

Heidi said, “It’s her collar bones. She has the most perfect collar bones.” She stupidly stuck her finger into the simmering water to see if it was close to boiling. She pulled it out immediately and stuck it in her mouth to cool it.

I started to add all the calories I had during the day. I always did this when I was nervous, upset, anxious, bored. In the margin of a literature quiz I had aced, I began to lazily write down all of the numbers I could remember from the day. 100 for breakfast, skipped lunch, peach as a snack… 45… or does that make the peach my lunch? It doesn’t matter, that’s 145. I wrote the foods that corresponded with their caloric value next to the numbers. Skipped dinner… how many vodka cranberries did I have? What kind of vodka did they use? How many calories is that? God, there’s 12 g of fat in this peanut butter. How many calories did I have today? The sound of my own voice interrupted my jumbled calculations and I drew a big X through the numbers.

Katie craned her neck from the counter top to see what I was writing, “Are you writing a poem or something?” She laughed.

I shook my head, “I’m just adding the calories for the day.”

Melissa didn’t turn her head or body to face me, but just said out to the air, “But Julie said you have a whole notebook that you use just to add your calories. Why are you doing it there?” My face got hot. Everyone got quiet and I tried to imagine the conversations they had about me behind my back when I dropped weight too quickly or gained it too suddenly.

I tried to shrug it off and continue with the previous conversation. I said, “I wish I could have her bones.” I lifted my fingers to my own collarbone and started to press my hand over and into the bone. I moved down to my wrist and begun wrapping my index finger and thumb around it, then moving the skin over the two bones that poked out on each side of my wrist. It comforted me to know that I could still feel my skeleton—the beautiful bones may not stick out as much as Julie’s… but they were there, I could feel them. I hadn’t lost them to fat yet.

I wished that I could strip my body of all the fat to make it better, the way we stripped everything to make it better. We removed the hair from our ankles to our belly buttons; was it so we could slide through the hands of men more easily? We lost the hems of our skirts, the sleeves of our tops to show more of our skin to the enemy. Behind closed doors, we took off the designer clothes that we bought to flatter the bodies we hated to expose ourselves to the men we tried to hide all of our imperfections from. I wished I could lose every fat cell like I rid myself of every rogue hair. I wanted to show and extenuate my every perfect bone as easily as I painted my lips red.

Katie crumpled up the near-empty bag of chips and threw it across the small kitchen to the trashcan sitting next to Melissa and looked over at Heidi fussing with the seasoning packet for her Ramen noodles. “Didn’t you say you were on a diet?” Katie didn’t wait for an answer, but just hopped down from the counter and opened the refrigerator to stare into its cold depths to find something else to eat.

Heidi looked up from her struggle and said, “Every time I go on a diet, I want more food. I always eat three times as much as I usually do if I’m dieting.” Every girl in the kitchen gave a nod of agreement absent-mindedly while shoveling food into her body. Katie pulled out a left over slice of pepperoni pizza, shut the door with a bump of her hip, and leaned against the cream white fixture as she ate the cold slice.

I swallowed a huge mass of chewed graham cracker and peanut butter, “I saw Jake there.”

“Yeah, I saw him too,” Heidi replied as she finally got the seasoning packet open and began to pour it into the pasta, “Did you talk to him?”

I shook my head. “I just didn’t look good tonight, I tried to hide from him.” I said after a few moments.

Katie answered instantaneously, “You should have talked to him. You looked great tonight. I mean, you spent like two hours on your hair.” I shook my head again and stood up from the table and walked toward the cabinet. Opening the door, I pulled out a glass and held it under the faucet. Though I had stopped drinking, I could feel the last cocktail hit my system suddenly. I leaned against the counter for support, my feet throbbing. I wanted to be light enough that my feet wouldn’t notice my body as they supported it. It was the same way that I pushed all of my weight into my feet and ankles when I sat on a boy’s lap; I didn’t want them to feel my weight. Men don’t want to feel the weight of you.

Heidi started to strain her noodles in the basin of the sink closest to her, but furthest from me. “That’s the thing though. If I think people are looking at me, I can’t strut and try to look good because everyone is looking at me and I don’t want to mess up. But… if I don’t look good enough for anybody to look at me, why would I walk around like I was pretty? I hate girls that think they’re cute when they’re not at all.” She poured her snack into a dish from the strainer, but just looked at it swimming in the green plastic bowl. I wasn’t sure if she had forgotten to get a fork or if she was just puzzling over the food. “I hate men,” she concluded.

Melissa threw her Oreos down on the tiled floor, “I hate food! God, it makes me so sick.” Nobody said anything; I think we all knew what was coming. She ran up the stairs that sprouted from the connected living room. Heidi picked up her phone and started dialing.

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged.

I sat back down at the table with my large glass of water, “yes, you do.”

“Craig, ex-boyfriend. I think I might go over there.” She mumbled, “No one even talked to me tonight.”

“I talked to you.” I said, but I knew what she meant.

“No guys did. God, I’m so fat. I need to go on a diet.” Heidi said as she lifted the cell phone up to her ear.

I gave the responsible answer, “You’re not fat, Heidi. You’re so pretty. Don’t you see how gorgeous you are?” When I looked at her, I always thought of “The Tiny Dancer.” She looked small, fragile, and breakable. When I watched her dance, I sometimes feared that she would shatter if she ever fell. Sometimes it looked like she was falling apart already; her fine, auburn hair pulled out of her head into the hair brush every morning as she arranged her hair into a tight bun. But, she never fell and she didn’t respond to my question.

“I hate men,” she simply repeated as she ended the call, deciding against leaving a voice mail.

“Me too.” I didn’t really hate them all the time… I only hated them when they didn’t like me. When one liked me, I was addicted to every single, word, touch, phrase, kiss. I tried to put them all together like an equation. How much does he want me now? What can I do to make him want me more? I needed their attention to heal my wounds like a little girl needs a kiss on her scraped knee. It makes it all seem so much better.

Katie finished chewing her cold pizza and said, “What happened to Tina? Where is she?” Nobody had an answer. Katie’s strong frame made her look like a warrior sometimes, her make up was her war paint. She went out into battle ruthless and drinking. I looked at the way her eyeliner started to smudge and give the appearance of black eyes. She had lost the fight tonight. We had all lost our fights tonight… I think.

Melissa came down from upstairs. The breath that once smelled of rum and cokes now had the distinctive mint flavor of toothpaste with a hint of stomach acid. Heidi threw down her phone.

“Melissa, you can’t throw up every time you feel fat.” The kitchen froze. I licked peanut butter from my bottom lip. “You can die from bulimia, ya know.”

Melissa shrugged her shoulders as she walked over to the package of Oreos still sitting on the floor, almost empty. Picking them up, her arm made a motion to toss them casually into the garbage. But she lost control at the last second and threw them angrily into the blue metal wastebasket so it made a plastic crunching sound as it hit Katie’s empty bag of chips. She jumped slightly, and I assumed that the sound and force surprised her as much as it surprised the room. “I’m not bulimic. I have irritable bowl syndrome… my digestive system is all screwed up. You know that.” She took a seat directly across from me at the table. I covered my crossed out caloric calculations with my hand.

“Irritable bowel syndrome doesn’t make you throw up…” I said without looking up into her eyes. I pretended to organize the books on the table to avoid actual confrontation.

“Everything makes me sick. It’s more painful if I let the food get past my stomach. Jesus… if my body is going to be destroyed by the food I eat anyway… why can’t I do it myself?” No body responded. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince her roommates or herself. Heidi finally went over to the drawer and loudly shifted through the piles of silverware in search of a fork. Melissa broke in, “You can die from being fat!”

Katie rolled her eyes, “You’re a swimmer, Melissa. You’re not fat.”

“You don’t understand.” Melissa said as she leaned her body way over the side of the chair to make out the numbers on the microwave’s clock.

Heidi spoke before I could get a word in, “I’m a ballet dancer, stupid. I think I understand not wanting to be fat!” Her tone was sharp. Heidi leaned against the oven, holding the bowl of noodles under her chin and scooping her meal into her mouth.

“Then don’t come down on me! I spend my life in the water, listening to this asshole on the sidelines yelling at me to be better, to look better, to swim better. I’ll get rid of anything from my body that’s tainted.”

I tried to speak kindly and softly. “But, Melissa, I thought you told us you throw up before meets because you’re nervous…”

“Throwing up calms my nerves.” No one said anything for a minute. Heidi stopped her eating and gave the bowl of tan noodles the same look she did before she began scooping it into her mouth. She threw the fork in the sink and started pouring her Ramen down the garbage disposal. The room was thick with tension while I filled my glass full of another cup water.

Heidi scoffed. “Just don’t tell me that I don’t understand, okay?” She started rinsing out her bowl and opened the dishwasher that sat right next to sink. I had to move my chair out of the way of the door so she could get it fully open.

“It doesn’t matter, it’s not my body anyway… and he wants it smaller, better.” Melissa said.

“Whose he?” Katie asked as I wondered who she could mean as she had dated several women, but no men.

“I meant my coach. See? You guys don’t understand. This isn’t my body; it’s a 30,000-dollar piece of equipment owned by the college. I’m like a car; I’m a tool to these people.”

Heidi slammed the door of the dishwasher shut, “You think dancers own their bodies? Are you serious? I stand in front of mirrors for hours every day while people tell me how to move my body, what to wear, how to perform, how to look, what to eat, how to eat, what to do!” Her voice started to rise and get more violent as she listed.

I tried my best to subdue the argument. “But, Heidi, your body is amazing… I can’t believe how well you dan--”

“It’s not what you can do, it’s how your body looks when you’re doing it!” Heidi cut me off. She was answering me, but was facing Melissa. “You girls wouldn’t get it.” Her voice had begun to get louder.

Katie was now starting to get offended and pulled up on her strapless, corseted top in a motion to join the battle and stepped forward, “No one has a perfect body,” she said harshly. Her skintight jeans had started to sag a bit below her hips. All of her dancing and walking must have stretched out the waistline a bit. It caused more of her mid drift to show than she had originally intended and I could see the lace top of her panties. I wondered whom she wore them for.

Heidi shook her head. “Melissa… you’re under water the whole time. At least you’re not on stage.” I could feel my strapless bra start to cut into my skin as Heidi continued; “You use your body to win medals, I use mine to sell tickets. All they want to see is my body and that’s all I wish I could hide!”

Melissa stood up from her chair to shout at Heidi. Her screams were at the top of her voice and drunkenly slurred, “Then stop dancing! If you don’t want anyone to see you then just get off the stage!”

Heidi walked toward Melissa and yelled back, “But my body is selling tickets!” Heidi’s voice broke off as she burst into sobs. She looked like a tiny child, so starved for attention that she had to make a scene. Heidi threw the empty sauce pan she used to make her Ramen noodles into the sink so it made an echoing metal on metal crash. She pulled the packaging from her meal from the counter started ripping them into tiny pieces and throwing them into the trashcan.

Melissa remained standing; her hands leaned against the table with a hard look on her face. Katie pulled her jeans up to hide the lace of her panties and I couldn’t help but wonder what her body was selling as she shook her head at the sight. I walked over and tried to calm Heidi, but feared that touching her shaking limbs and shoulders would spin her into an even more frantic hysteria. I tried to speak gently, but I couldn’t figure out how many servings of peanut butter I had. “Everyone’s body is working against us.”

He and I have the same eyes; light blue and tired. I looked at my father out of the corner of my eye, knowing he wouldn’t notice. His face was hard from a lifetime of tobacco and alcohol addiction, but just like all of the other times I had seen him, a full-faced beard hid most of the skin around his mouth. His glasses seemed to be exactly the ones he wore the last time we met; not because they were especially memorable, but because they were just as nondescript. In a tailored navy blue suit, he looked like a cold-hearted politician. With the pressed white shirt and plain-colored tie, it seemed that the only thing he was missing was an American-flag pin. He had the heaviness and bulky build that seemed standard for a retired college football coach. His most unforgettable trait was still the one I noticed first. My father’s canine teeth did justice to their name, his jaw seems to be set up just like the teeth of a dog.

We sat in the largest room in a Virginia art museum, which held the reception of my cousins wedding. We had not seen each other for seven years. My brother, three years older, sat on the other side of me completely avoiding any conversation between my father and I; he looked at everyone and everything in this grand ballroom but us. Though we were in an art museum, none of the works appeared in this large space, so my brother was left to lay his light blue eyes on all of the strangers milling about the room. All three of us practiced the family tradition brilliantly with our drinks sitting in front of us; whiskey for dad, wine for me, beer for Drew.

I needed money. I had cashed the last of the saving bonds I received from my mother’s parents the week before, but I still had two years of college left. I had sat down with my mother over dinner a few days before and asked her what I should do.

Sitting at the dining room table, we were surrounded by half a dozen unfinished sewing and tailoring projects for the sewing business she ran to bring in extra income. The clothes she still wore from her job as a school teacher looked wrinkled and drooped after her long day. “If I had any, I would give it to you,” she said.

I saw the financial wrinkle in her forehead. Every time my mother thought or talked about money, she had the same worried, anxious expression on her face. We never seemed to have enough. It was the same face she made while searching through the mail for child support checks that never came. I could hear her muffled telephone conversations with lawyers in every state, trying to get the money from him. Right after the transmission went in our car and she couldn’t afford to fix it, a karaoke machine arrived in the mail from his newest address without an occasion to justify the gift. I was nine years old. My mother was preparing lunch for my brother and I on that Saturday afternoon. Her smile was slightly bigger than her normal grin and she exclaimed, “Oh, that’s great guys. That’ll be fun for you, won’t it?” as her large kitchen knife snapped through the carrots and broccoli with an unprecedented force.
One year, my brother and I received ceramic figurines. A cheerleader for me, and a football player for my brother; we were given our specific gender roles early on. My mother climbed onto the roof in the middle of the afternoon, balancing the figurines as she made her way to the highest point of her rented house. She threw them into the air just to hear them shatter on the cold, hard concrete of the street below.

I looked over at my brother. I tried to imagine him as a football player. I tried to imagine him as any version of what my father had hoped for. On the way to Norfolk, Virginia the day before we listened to Hispanic-folk music and played the maracas that he kept in his glove compartment (just in case) to pass the time during a traffic jam. His second-hand shirt that celebrated a second grade class and his short brown hair all moved on his body as he salsaed in the driver’s seat. He was so skinny that he usually bought his jeans in the women’s section, because the men’s section didn’t have a waist size small enough to fit him. His fingers were long and sensitive and made learning the ukulele for his newest experimental music project easy.

I needed money. I deserved money from him. It was time for him to pay up. I needed to finish college. He raised the whiskey to his lips and I said nothing.

Staring at the two name cards sitting behind my food, I sighed heavily. “Sarah-Hazel Hermeling” and “Sarah-Hazel Jennings” gave an ironic and awkward juxtaposition that I neglected to subdue by simply putting one of the cards in my purse or face down. My cousin’s bride invited Sarah-Hazel Hermeling, daughter of Paul Hermeling. I RSVPed as Sarah-Hazel Jennings, daughter of Peggy Jennings. I had never formally told my father that I dropped his last name and took my mother’s when I turned eighteen and I wondered if he was going to ask about the discrepancies between the name cards.

I moved my attention to the centerpieces at the reception: roses, red like the ones on the table when I was five years old. Roses only happened after my parents had a fight. They sat on the kitchen table in a glass vase and my mother, brother, and I always pretended to ignore them. When my mother received a dozen roses from a friend for her birthday, she threw them away right after she arrived home. Immediately afterward, she pulled her dark brown hair, almost black, now accented with long grey strands coming from her temples into a rushed pony table to cool off her sweating neck. When I asked her why she said, “I hate roses. They always remind me of your father. You know… he always charged all of those dozens of roses onto my credit card.” She fanned her hand in front of her face to cool off her reddened cheeks and I wondered why anger always made us hot.

“I’m in college now,” I said to him. He nodded and looked at me rather blankly. “Halfway done!” I tried to give him a hint as to how far I had gotten in school, in case he forgot what grade I was in.
In fifth grade I wrote him twelve letters, one every month. I told him about the cake at my best friend’s birthday party, about how I played football with the boys at recess to make him proud. I told him to quit smoking so he would always be around to love me. He never answered.
“That’s good, what are you studying?” He replied as he looked over his shoulder at the bar behind us.
“Creative Writing.” He laughed and shook his head.

I was barely walking in the first memory of my child hood. I had successfully matched triangular, cylindrical, and square shaped blocks into their matching shaped-holes on a yellow plastic ball. I rushed from my upstairs bedroom toward the steps that lead down to the living room to show him, with pride, what I had done. At twenty-one, I can still see and feel the stairs cycling underneath my body and feel the rhythm at which my head hit them. Reaching the bottom, I cried out in hysterical bawling and saw him sitting on the couch watching football. My mother lifted me into her arms, and though I remember their warmth, I will never forget my father’s hands clasped between his knees, a beer on the floor by his feet.

He wore cufflinks with his politician’s suit to the wedding. I assumed they were expensive and, therefore, he should help fund my education. My mother had worked as hard as she could. Sitting on her bed one evening, I cried with her arm around me. My best friend in the sixth grade had told me that I was too fat to be her friend anymore. The student my mother hired to watch me after-school didn’t understand why I was so upset, and by the time my mother got home I had never felt more alone. “I don’t have any friends. I don’t have a father. And now, I feel like I don’t have a mother either,” I told her. I found out later that she cried herself to sleep for days after I told her how I felt.

I got up to get another glass of wine. I had emptied mine much quicker than I had anticipated. I wondered if I was going to get drunk tonight. I hated filling out forms before therapy and counseling sessions, answering, yes, my father is an alcoholic and, yes, I drink four or more nights a week. I can hear the therapist now, “you find the love you never felt from your father by acting promiscuously with older men. This is not a healthy behavior.” Anyway, I always thought it was better to be drunk in public than drunk and alone.

I looked down at my dress. I had bought a brand new one just for the wedding. But I looked heavy and awkward in it. Instantly, I wished for thinner arms and ached for a man to tell me I was pretty. I scrapped the wine and ordered a vodka cranberry. Returning to the table, I tried to swing my hips. There seemed to be quite a few dateless men in attendance.

“How’s the job going?” I asked him as I pulled my seat toward the table.
“Oh, it’s going good. Real good.” He replied, but paid much more attention to the last bite of steak on his plate as he finished it.

I needed to pull out something about how if his job is going well, he should lend me some money. This was my opening. But before I could make my grand request, he stood up to make his own trip to the bar. As he walked away I noticed a bit of a limp in his left leg. It came from his hip and was slowing down his pace.

“He’s so drunk he can’t even walk,” I said solemnly to my brother.

My brother took his eyes off the bride’s dance with her father momentarily to answer, “No. He’s been walking like that since last year when… you know, he had that thing.” After his vague answer, he turned again in his chair to watch the dance floor.

“What thing?” I persisted.

I could hear his curt exhale as he, again, turned to face me and used an open palm to extenuate his words, “He had that tiny stroke, remember?”

“It wasn’t even a stroke though, was it? We didn’t hear about it until awhile after it happened.”
He just shrugged in return and then, after a moment of watching him, “It was something to do with his blood pressure, I think,” he said before turning away from me again to watch our new cousin-in-law with her father.

I looked at my own father from over my shoulder. He was ordering his drink, leaning onto his forearms and elbows on the bar. I couldn’t tell if he was relaxed or trying to hold himself upright. Suddenly, he was older than I remembered. He seemed shorter than when I was younger, his hair more than half gray, and a body that had been beaten. He had put on more weight than I had first realized. None of his aging was especially unexpected, but it was interesting to see. I watched him start a conversation with one of his brothers and he turned away.

Unlike my brother, I had politely ignored all of the nonsense first dances and ridiculous toasts. I was relieved to see my brother turn back to the table after finishing his standard applauding for the last performance. In my experience, every couple seemed to make a spectacle of their marriage, but I was never concerned.

I tried to come up with a line to open the bidding with my father. Perhaps, “Since you haven’t been paying child support well, ever… I was thinking that…” No, No. Could I be as simple as, “I need to ask a favor”? No. It wasn’t a favor; it was my right.

I looked at Drew for a moment, leveled my eyes to face his and raised my eyebrows. “So?” I said to him with a casual tilt of my head.

He nodded as he lifted his glass, “Yeah,” he answered. We finished our drinks and got up to dance before our father returned. He and I had a silent understanding that making friends with rich strangers we would have nothing in common with and never see again was a much better fate than sitting at that table when my father had too much to drink.

Walking to the polished hard wood floor that would serve for dancing, I could feel the drinks in my blood. Rather quickly, more and more people began to make a detour to the dance floor from their normal track between the bar and their table.

“Are you a friend of Megan’s?” His skin was the creamy color of chocolate and he was more than a head taller than me. His eyes kept switching from two dark circles, to four, back to two. He put his hands in his pockets and leaned down slightly to address me.

I shook my head. “I’m Allen’s cousin.” Before I finished speaking, he had slipped his arm around my waist and begun to move my body with his to a song I found vaguely familiar. I held onto his shoulders for dear life. The wine and vodka made me unsteady on my red patent leather heels. The whole day made me a bit unsteady. As the music slowed, I rested my head on the stranger’s shoulder and watched my dad sitting at our table. He sat hunched, slouched. The glass of half-drank whiskey sat within his finger’s reach and he stared at the centerpiece. He looked like a homeless man who stopped begging for change, he had that quiet and desperate expression. The whole room, the whole world spun around him and he didn’t seem to notice. All three of his brothers were up and dancing with their wives and friends and he seemed to be concentrating on his breathing. I pulled back from my dancing partner, “I need a drink.”

I walked away from him quickly enough so he wouldn’t follow and ordered another vodka cranberry. “Are you sure you can handle another one, miss?” said the bartender teasingly. He was only a few years older than me, with dark hair that had been dyed blonde a few months before; the brown roots were showing. His two front teeth slightly crossed each other in the front. Unfortunately, I had had too many drinks to discern whether he was serious, flirting, or joking. Whatever his intention, I appreciated the familiarity bartenders always took to the drinkers that kept visiting them. I resolved to nod my head as I gave him a closed-mouth smile. I made my way deliberately, drink in hand, to our table. I would not let myself be ruined by a defeated man. I sat in my chair next to him, but his body didn’t move nor did his head turn to acknowledge me.

“I’m your daughter,” I said to him. “I’m your daughter and you have missed my whole life.” He was quiet for a moment, then lifted his glass and finished the whiskey. I heard the ice clinking in the glass over all of the music and laughter. I stared at the side of his face until he turned to meet my eyes. The wrinkles that started at the corners of his eyes looked deeper than they did earlier in the evening. He nodded.

“It has destroyed my life.” His speech was slurred, but I barely noticed because it cracked. For first time in my life I saw him cry. I sat frozen and watched the tears run down the fissures in his face. I thought that I should cry with him. But I already had cried. Plenty. I watched his weeping with an unaffected distance.

“There’s nothing in this world we can’t fix.” The words hit me like the mixing bowl I shattered angrily on the kitchen floor the evening during my first year of high school when I decided that I would never call him again, because they always went unanswered and unreturned. I thought about the way the yellow glass pieces of the mixing bowl scattered into a million indiscernible shards with jagged, sharp edges all over the floor. I stood and looked over them in my bare feet. “We can fix this,” he continued.

I remembered my mother putting her soft, round hands on my cheeks when I tried to explain, in a fit of tears, what happened to the bowl. “It’s not your fault,” she whispered in her softest voice, “It’s not that he doesn’t love you, it’s just that he can’t love you. He doesn’t know how to love.” We swept up all the broken pieces into the trash.

My teeth clenched together and my whole face started to feel hot, beginning at my jaw line and moving up through my cheeks. Boiling tears started to pour out of my eyes. “You don’t know who I am. You missed everything.” My body remained stiff and still as the words were pushed through my clenched teeth. He reached out and put his hand on my knee and I pushed it off with the same urgency as if he were just another inappropriate boy in my life. “I need the money,” I said. I looked past him as I said it, just over his shoulder, just past his left ear.

He looked a bit taken aback and furrowed his brow, asking, “What money?”

“For college.” I pressed my painted lips together into a stern, not sad or hesitating, look.
He stared at my face for a moment as the words hung in the air without acknowledgment or answer. Finally, he took a deep breath and I could feel his body move as he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. Reaching into the brown leather case, he pulled out five or six twenty-dollar bills and laid them on the table. “That’s all I’ve got,” he said.











[can anyone tell me how i can indent paragraphs in livejournal?]

this has nothing to do with my writing...

i just really hate when you're working in the morning before class, drinking coffee... and when you reach for your mug and take a long drink expecting to be greeted with that sweet, warm comfort-- and it's gone cold in your cup.

it just kills me every time.

I told Dr. Schiff that I didn't have a voice.

My voice was always what I thought my professors wanted to hear, what my friends wanted to hear, what my boyfriend wanted to hear, what my mother wanted to hear, what the strangers wanted to hear. I think everything fell apart last week because I couldn't speak the right words to everyone all of the time. I told him that I didn't think I could write well until I found my voice.

He told me that no one has found any conclusions in life yet. Every writer writes from the perspective of their struggles, not their solutions. There are no solutions.




"Stars just can't shine bright
with a fog standing in front of them"



I want to shine bright. I don't want to pretend to see the meteor shower. It's colder and lonelier without the fog, but I'm writing from my struggles. My solution put the strongest women in my family out on the cement curb, proving that it was all in my imagination.

Old couches and chairs that sank down much further than expected and a phone for local campus calls only were arranged amid three depictions of the Virgin Mary. All three holy women faced a hallway from the east with their eyes pointed downward. Their hair was covered with conservatively colored cloth, their expressions pulled down into frowns. Trapped under the weight of mourning, they held their martyred posture as students scurried passed weighed down by their books and academics, nursing hangovers, and swapping gossip.
The first virgin ministered to the pupils by clasping her smoothly sanded wooden cross decorated with sculpted dusty pink roses. The second wore blue and held the Christ Child as the wind drove so hard that her robes began to blend with the sky, with the ground, and with the air. The last had nothing and no one to hold, but her own hands. She interlaced her fingers and took a deep breath. Sunglasses, bouncing hair, heavy book bags; they all raced by without noticing their presence or tearing eyes.
A new freshman, her printed schedule in hand, hurried manically through the halls as they started to empty when class sessions began. An older woman, short hair and a denim jumper, approached her with a hand on the part of her shoulder not covered by the wide, nylon strap to her back pack. “I can’t find the Sullivan building and I’m late. “ The young woman’s eyes began to swell with tears and her schedule rattled in her hand as she begun to panic. The Sister of Mercy gave a smile and told her not to worry. As the sister took a deep breath, so did the student even her breathing. A warm arm wrapped around her shoulder and lead her to her destination.

The Perseids

Wool blankets and sweaters;
I couldn’t believe it was August.

Stars just can’t shine bright
with a fog standing in front of them

So, I replaced a meteor shower with
my imagination.
Laying next to me, he pretended too.

[birthday poem in progress]




untitled

cheap wine and closed blinds
I celebrate the depths of winter
as july begins to shine

sleep away the week
because the friends I dug
up from their ditches

can't be found now. they
left the shovel I used in
their war trenches, I suppose

I'll fight this war alone.







[i'm apparently turning 15]

I tried to actually write again this weekend at a French and Indian War encampment at Fort Ti.

Seeing as I haven't written anything of quality since May or, rather, anything but letters, I was happy for the start.




sections from this weekends writings that I found interesting or worth adding to/working on later:


"The mountains were all around the lake; they shot up sharp and green. I considered creationism. I sat in the grass, sprinkled with buttercups, clover-flowers, and purple, tiny blooms. There were a few spots of white daisies and I put one in my ear as I was sitting down. I wondered it it looked pretty. Surrounded by the most beautiful natural scenery I had seen in quite some time, I worried about the state of my hair."



"We could see the clouds lining up on our left. They were gray-blue and had dark uneven cylinders coming down from them to the ground. Rich told me it was rain far off. I tried to imagine how far away it was and what the town looked like; if it was even a town at all. Everyone looked around, either convinced or hoping it would simply pass us. I was so eager to believe them. I liked to watch every one get ready for the storm. It reminded me of watching the animals in my grandfather's backyard prepare for a hurricane. We were all huddling together under flies, securing canvas, and putting boxes and chairs in under protection. It made me feel real--connected to the earth. The earth were the people around me, the darkness and thunder foreshadowing an ominous event. Everybody was visible under their roofs and I felt that I knew them all. The rain coming was like a collective sigh of relief. We didn't have to wait, wonder or worry anymore. We all became closer as we tried to avoid a slanting rain under a single fly. I could feel the rain on the back of my neck."



"It rained again so my mother got drunk. I saw her dancing in the rain by the fire. "I just want to boil my corn!" she screamed and laughed. I loved her so much in that moment."

all the women in my family struggle with depression and anxiety disorders. when it gets bad, we call it getting through the rainstorm.


The Rainstorm

The catch of sobs sound just like
the crash of thunder.

The pressure in the air
is the anxiety of
my grandmother, Helen.
She’s shaking the trees
while looking serene;
tight lips and thin wrists.

The storm clouds are the
color of her eyes:
my mother, Margaret
is moving at the mercy of the
winds, afraid of disappointing.

It’s raining down the tears of
me, Sarah-Hazel.
countless, uncontrollable,
starting slow then soaking
the whole earth. It’s the uncertainty.

a name and a ring

My great grandmother left me
everything. Cabinets of dishes from
Italy and Asia. They sit upright behind
glass because she knew better than to eat.
I now know better and she left me an
unfinished

quilt. I’ll complete it with disappointing
hand stitching and she left me a
diary.

She rode trains drunk and so do I.

She left me a name and a ring.

this poem is about love and it kind of makes me gag.
and when i say gag, i mean smile.

Cold Feet

My feet have been cold since
you left for work. They,
like me,
are not independent of
your warmth.

Last night
they rested contently
on the tops of your feet,
under the twisted blankets you
wrapped around me hours before.

This morning
they nestled
between your ankles
as I covered your back
with small, delicate kisses
to remind you that the alarm had started.

But now,
they are huddled together and
painted red, curling
under and burrowing
into the inside of my knees.

(I take comfort in remembering the night I painted your toenails the same shade as mine on the foot of your bed, I controlled my giggles only enough to not smudge the polish)


This apartment is
a leaking faucet,
a clicking heater, and
a cycling computer without
the sound of your voice and television.

The skin on my smallest toes turn
a bluish hue; small and calloused and cold and sent
to the end of the line. I remember
the day I tried to convince you that I
was small and calloused and cold;
that I had a metal heart you couldn’t conquer,
that I was never going to need you,
that I was never going to be what
I thought you thought you saw.

But, now, my feet have been cold since
you left for work. I hug my knees to my chest,
(against the shirt I stole from your closet)
and need you
to come home and kiss the ugliest
toes on my feet, to tell me you love me more
because I try to read your mind
(and am usually wrong)
because I have hang-ups and cry into your shoulders
because I am everything, but
small and calloused and cold.

"The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing had been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since i can't describe myself I can't ask for help. We are alone in this quest. I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I'm missing the point-- perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself forever. But it is not difficult to lose oneself, or is it the ego they are talking about, the hollow screaming cadaver that has no spirit within it?

I think the cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a persom might live in peace and have no need for God. After all, He has no need for us, he is already complete"

-"Sexing the Cherry" by Jeanette Winterson.

poem for the waxes i hate the most

for forty dollars your
legs make a four facing
both sides.

In this way, little red
bumps appear.

powders, creams
small, silent, screams.

how dare hair grow
in sensitive places.

I wrote a lot in my journal while spending the thanksgiving holiday with my boyfriend. I rarely write in that venue anymore, so it's interesting to look over it. I found that many times I was writing fictional plots that used my current disposition as a base. I only once actually wrote "i", and instead referred to myself in situations as "she." Perhaps it was a way to disconnect myself to look objectively. Here are two excerpts that I thought were especially interesting.





Lying on her side, she lifted her body to support her weight on her hip and left hand that she placed on the bed, in front of his slumbering chest. She studied his face for a moment; he always looked older and less attractive when he slept. It jolted her romantic tendencies, but she loved him regardless. Sometimes she didn’t know why. Leaning her lips to almost brush the tiny hairs on his ear she whispered, “So close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.” As planned, it didn’t wake him and she gingerly crawled over him to place her feet on the floor, to walk away, and to work on her own writing.








There were some traditional manners she would never understand. When he opened the door to his house, she walked in and was left to stand awkwardly in this strange environment, to make judgments on it without his intervention. The house smelled like cigarettes, not the aroma that creeps across the restaurant table when sharing a meal with a smoker, but deeper. It was ingrained and stale, worn into the walls, the rugs, the furniture, and the sheets. Mixed with this were the remnants of a large complicated meal. She could smell a hint of onion, garlic, and the gas from the stovetop. It occurred to her that one could judge a man by how his house smelled: not the cobwebs in the corners, the piles of books on make-shift shelves on wood planks and milk crates, or how his clothes piled on the oversized chairs in front of an aging computer. From this point forward he was the smell of stale smoke and onion.

I wrote a found poem, or a poem you create from language found in a non-poetic forum, from an encyclopedia article on canadian public broadcasting. All of the words can be found in the article, I just rearranged them.

Character study of a nationality

The Canadian:
1) Small and linguistically fragmented
2) Private, he complained about the public
3) Responded to the problems
4) Successfully independent

sometimes i write poetry on dishes.










text...

"this kind cup will fight the cold, warm in my hands like a small comforting campfire. It's lonely in the city (the cliches of coming-of-age movies and post-modern literature come alive in my mouth now that I take a subway) so I need this morning kiss. A heated long greeting to my lips, my eyes closed, tasting the familiar sweetness that is there for me without question every morning. Holding to my chest, I crave this scent each morning. I know it from all angles, like the intimacy of knowing how your lover smells when he wakes"

The first time my high school boyfriend convinced me to smoke pot (or) reflections on eye drops

just because I wear glasses
doesn’t mean I wear

contacts, the contact of your hand on
my shoulder, the shoulder of the road

the road, the road, I read about this
in health books and bibles and in the
basements of my mother's church and
in the back seat I’m swimming

swimming, like I did through the
colors, the colors illuminating
from the CD player you installed in
the dashboard of a truck, I forget
I forget, I forget what it’s called.

I don’t know how to put in
eye drops, no no no—I’ve never done it.

just because I wear glasses
doesn’t mean I wear

don’t blink, he told me to keep
my eyes open. Hope.

don’t blink, don’t blink
like the lights on top of cop cars

shit, the lights on top of cop cars. The lights
the teenage amish girls set outside the barn
when they’re on rumspringa. They’re out, they’re out
they’re out and dancing and we’re driving past their corn fields

I’m dancing, not driving, dancing through the
colors, the colors illuminating
from the CD player you installed
with your bare hands

your bare hand is on my knee which
is disconnected from my body
“tilt your head back, trust me. Don’t let your eyes
close. You can’t let your brother see your eyes when you get
home.”

I’m giggling too much to not let my eyes
close. Just because I wear glasses
doesn’t mean I wear

contacts, I feel the contact with these strangers in
this truck and with the wheels on the road.

the road and the shoulder of the road and of me.










I saw three ships

I watched three boats go by, sitting on a cement wall during that part of the late afternoon in autumn right before the sun started to set. I don’t know how big a boat should before becoming a ship. Thankfully, you explained it to me.

I watched the first boat dock, people took recognizable form as they came closer, right as the sun started to set. The boat (or ship) was big and brown with three tall masts holding tightly wrapped white sails that twisted like the sheets on my bed. It was the first ship (or boat) I had ever been so close to, but I couldn’t tell you because you were talking too fast about what I should do with the rest of my life. You have seen dozens of sails and crow’s nests; memorized the many miles of rope, all the different kinds of knots and which are best.

I watched that first boat empty; the recognizable forms were harder to see now that the sun had set. I saw that boat lurch forward, but the tethers had it tied tightly to the stagnant land, just as you explained myself to me.






A Long Hike in Winter

This soft silence of a grey December
amplifies the sounds of my steps
on the scattered autumn leaves
that litter the trails they make.
Their hues of brown and evergreen
huddle around mounds of melting snow.

Clear, cold water splashes, rushing
south toward the Susquehanna,
shoving sticks and my water bottle back.
And I, crouched and shivering,
can still feel the sun shining on my hair—

telling me that the muddy charcoal colors
of this quiet cold see me truly
without the hesitation of heat.






I wrote this in the margins of a newspaper with a borrowed pencil

three head nods from long hair with glasses
one braid falling down her friend’s back

“it was my first time in a minivan; five adults and five kids… exactly”

eight comic books by a walking tattoo
ink-stained apple-laptop

“when did nine eleven happen?”

twice, she wanted a raspberry italian soda in black sneakers
to come to new york with her

“and that was when i had the best sandwich i ever had”

four pens, one pencil, speech impediment
biscotti bits in his espresso

“do you know an eight letter word for a baked good?”






more haikus...

Birds eye view of us:
you are smoking cigarettes,
I am running scared.


I saw three leaves turn
colors that remind me of
clothes I can’t afford.