a stage set for catastrophe

“Before I watched you leave, I watched the snow geese go first, the sky lost in clean bone and ink pinch shut. I let what I buried stumble through open door and paw this chest into two halves of a grapefruit. And that is how we abandoned it: with a carving knife, with the watermark from our hands digging deep into the bitterness.”

“Do not weep when your daughter first learns the word “pretty.” Weep when she discovers how to spell it backwards until the word “ugly” is the only shape her mouth knows. But do not blame yourself. Teach her how to forget it. Because when she tells you her skin is the crumbs of an old language no one wants to learn, her body left in pieces instead of at peace after wars no one should ever have to fight, tell her that “ugly” is a four-letter adjective her name should never wear. Say to her that her spine isn’t supposed to be a piano for boys to play sonatas on, that the king vertebra of our spines isn’t called Atlas for no reason. So the next time your daughter says she isn’t pretty, do not say she is only that. Say this: there’s nothing wrong with wits.”

“I stand in the heavy fields like a still life. A misinterpreted dream. I try remembering: What is it that makes the sky look carnivorous? What is it like to be innocent, unapologetic, and my own again?”

“History builds itself close to water. It always has. It pulls civilizations in, tugging at them like magnetic fields for migrating butterflies. And they follow. Like I followed that body of water with your name. Praised it in the drought. In the desperation. I built cities there. Had my skin in it. Called it love until the moon heard me. But I didn’t know. Didn’t know that when the big one comes the only way to make it out alive is not to be there in the first place? That when you see walls made of water, run?”

“I know nothing of calm. Here, I worship entropy in the dark and everyone knows I am full of it — full of wanting to grow old with you and into you, full of this aching and shaking and adoring you so fiercely that it makes my hands unsteady from fear of spilling it all. Even the ground knows this: and it only creaks and creaks and creaks, so saturated with our rainstorm tenderness that I wonder how it carries it all without folding over but it is not me, and somehow it holds.”

“Know that those who leave their homes behind often don’t depart quietly, that I’ll probably be more like a foreclosed home in need of repairs than the kind you’d want to settle in. And granted that the human anatomy is a synonym for art, you’ll most likely be spending more time shoving my soul back into my mouth than living with it because sometimes acts of vandalism don’t always show up on the skin the way bruises do. It won’t be long before you discover that I am more of a safety hazard than an escape route, that my fingertips are flint strikers and everything else tinder. So if you are lonely and just looking for home, do not look here. Do not invest in these bones because people are not homes. I am not home.”

“Our mothers taught us everything. How to become every space we weren’t supposed to take. How to make ourselves full on empty & to swallow all the quiet until it became loud. They came dressed in lion’s skin & roaring, carrying us over one mountain so we could bring them over ten. So light the match: there is no bringing us back to ash and dust. We have become too good at burning.”