for mistakes, for being born the very best kind of cosmic mistake, never supposed to happen but so stupidly happy it did – so that I can shed fat sobbing tears for the most stupidest of shit –
for burning the cinnamon rolls, for the smell of menthol rolled onto an aching back corded with knots, for promises made and just as quickly forgot, god, thank you for the forgetting.
Thank you for mistakes worth regretting, like stones splashed into lakes, standing shoreside and that perfect rock catches your eye, just begging to be thrown – thank you for the times I didn’t say no. Thank you for the letting go, for the soaring across the sky, for the certainty of the fall –
thank you for simple forgivenesses that I’ve learned how to grow, like small smooth pearls I can hand myself, string into long strands, thank you for this opaline gown I drape myself in like an oil-slick glow –
thank you for making me so uncomfortably tall, chaining me to this broken body like bricking me up inside a lighthouse – casting out light I’ll never see, but I’ll keep it close – just listen to the wind at night, I’m singing – I’ll tend the lamps; I’ll call you home
How can I tell you I’m holding this moment gently, so gently, so delicate and scared like cradling a perfect spiderweb freckled by the morning dew, terrified I’ll twist threads but I had to show you. I had no choice. I saw it and I thought only of you
Hang me on some new skeleton, give me a ribcage polished gleaming to cage up my waiting-room soul – stress dreaming sprawling airports, lost tickets, forever just too late and rushing towards some perfect dread, the plummeting lurch in your gut that rips you awake. 3 AM, panting. Outside it’s silent. The world sleeps.
Remake me, small as my dreams. Most content in corners – watchful wisher, breathing deliciously shallow breaths, borrowed air sweet honey mead, I’ll drink deep, I’ll make myself sick – known glutton for punishment, friends gather for interventions, all terrified of how I’ve romanticized the ache. I drink deep. I make myself numb.
Turn me opaque, now, I’m ready to be seen. Arms weary and stretched wide desperate to hold on until all strength finally gives – ecstatic heart thrashing in a cage of creaking ribs, cracked teapot still desperate to pour, there is so much more warmth left to give, remake me strong enough, someone worthy, I’m ready, I’ll drink deep, I’ll pour
Look around, take stock. Count crows feet and smile lines. Count the missed calls from mom, six, now, since you blocked her
paper-white, crying shaking cold in July – the laid out reasons why looking back like holding a mirror. Count your breaths, how many days. Delete six missed call notifications.
Write all of the wretched poems, get them out. Go ahead, rhyme heart and apart, write it down because you can’t crumple up thoughts – we’ve tried – get up and look outside. Fireflies glow –
slowly remember calm nowheres you used to know, they glimmer inside your chest – lightning bugs flickering beneath umbrella bows of the tree out back, rain pours in steady sheets down the glass, whispers go to sleep on windows –
Listen. I promise it will all be here when we wake.
Cameron Martin, returning client – six foot three, underweight, vitals normal, old enough to catch classroom chickenpox – my gender? Snowy mornings & flannel sheets, no option for that so I’ll just check ‘other’ – no, I lack any significant history from my father and no fleas from my mother, but heavens, the stories I could tell… And sure, I’ll concede for all intents and purposes I’m doing “well.” (Yes, I am seeing a therapist.)
Past medical history significant for some ear infections at three that screamed louder than the rest of the world, now I hear too much; midnight brings soft whispers. Bullies peppered me with scars, there’s four that you can see – skin a tapestry of cigarette burns, freckles, road rashes – heart thrashing out an irregular beat – I’m told it’s concerning on ECGs but just familiar and sustaining, to me. My bones tell stories, ice patches that snared me – the hills I’ve rolled down, carelessly, the compounding cost of chronic clumsiness pre-arthritic joints confess my true age, this soul has slogged through centuries.
Oh, lots of concerns, doctor. Innumerable and nothing that’s present to check on your form, but I’ve left you my memoir in the margins. No new medications, just some vitamin D since I’m still learning to step into sunlight – it’s harsh and it burns; I shy from spotlights – and I meant to ask, have you ever wept from the impossible glow of a springtime sunrise? Signs the antidepressant is working too well or not enough? Can you validate my surprise that the sunrise happened at all? Or at least my parking?
My upbringing prepared me for cuts. I check corners for traps, watch my feet while I’m walking. I’m waiting for the fall. My father used to perch around corners and leap out to frighten me, bursting out from behind doors, ignoring my begging to just please come out, please come out –
hard lessons. Ceilings were all riddled with swords of Damocles, I learned quick how terror was all theirs to manufacture, all mine to manage. My better self left me messages written in wounds on my skin, keloids all cleverly conveying concerns – antsy letters to the editor. Please advise.
I’m just trying to explain why peacefulness feels to me like the setup to sad punchlines, leading to jack-in-the-box pits in your gut – I can paint murals of melancholy, of hate, I’ve practiced in each medium of grief, but joy leaves me lost for words. Dumbstruck by the stark gentleness of my own hands.
You see, the other day I nicked my arm with my fingernail – to my wonderment reflexively I apologized – contrite and polite like I had bumped into a stranger in a supermarket – never had I offered myself such a stupid and simple kindness. Never before had I seen myself as someone worth protecting.
I can show you all my scars, stitch lines to navigate night terrors – but what words for uncovering love I have never known? Like stepping out into sunlight, feeling light and a primal warmth which my skin has never felt? Standing at the threshold, soul crying loud to just please come out, please come out
When the love you’re born into is a vacant house – what then? Love only used to be found while latchkey, ferreted it out from inside the absence of fear – no fathers looming around corners, waiting to scare you – no, love was a quiet hallway. An empty room.
Your inquiry was forwarded to me – our department handles those questions of more existential caliber, and yours has fallen into my eager and open hands.
I must confess, it’s been quite difficult to nail down this “love” concept, after all humanity has had it’s best people chipping away these past 6,000 years and so far we’re
still just scraping against the very skin of it. I’m but a humble clerk; this feels inadequate. But here’s what I can leave you with, figures to hang your ruminations onto, late at night –
Love lasts longer than the sunset and well past the certain sunrise, longer than seasons bleeding, calendar pages falling like autumn leaves gathering into impossible innumerable breathtaking mounds –
well past rosy childhoods, past silly little crushes and the parking lot breakups, stripping bare at midnight on the beach, dorm rooms, backseats – lasts longer than scars, longer than crows-feet –
longer than the marriage, past the eulogies and dull echoes of sobbing sitting at the wake, longer than grief that guts you, hollows you out empty and retching, shivering like flu, longer than that –
love is something we get to scrape up against. Nobody can hold it, or place it soft into your arms – no, love is the sun, it rages hotter and brighter and longer than our brief, childish hearts understand –
you find it when you hug. That space between bodies, what gathers in the valley between two heartbeats – it’s gravity will always pull us in. Inevitable, immense; love lasts longer than I could try to explain, endures
past when humanity’s best and brightest will give up chipping at the skin of it. I’ve tried to tuck it into these lines, letter writer – question asker, love seeker, lingering lonely and doubtful in the cold of night –
yes, love lasts longer than the night terrors – longer than the heartbreak, than longing, than humanity’s wreckage of poetry, music, longer than we all deserve, maybe, but still it lasts. It lasts.
I’ve filled up that yawning vacancy inside of me with words, again, the old problems reappearing – how paper pages make for thin skin, or haggard veins circulating ink which cannot carry oxygen –
but I’m consuming them nonetheless, starved for touch and reason and all the hearth-fire comfort of skin just beside you, sharing warmth inside and out, pulsing like an ebbing tide between the two,
but now I’ve filled up vacancies with distractions. I’ll pay no mind to skipping beats, no icy pangs of DSM-diagnosable panic, no sleep-wake disorder of waking up to the nightmare. No. It’s all too real.
Do you feel as though you’re stealing time, too? How many of your dreams survived past twenty? Or does each sweep of the second hand shock you like it astonishes me, still – how my composition is
melodic and not dissonance, not screeching, nor silence which would permit the whispering leech of old voices not our own, poltergeists conjured as children, campfire stories that should’ve burned,
instead now I stack notebooks. I sing loudly. Sleep beside a faint video glow of fake fireplaces hissing, whispering warm wishes in the dead still of night – in the morning I’ll write something new. All too real.
You are on my mind. Often. I had wanted to write you a poem but I found that I’d already written one, fourteen years back – gushed all my gratitude, already, even employed better words than I had planned. I just found my final portfolio, you see. That Happy happy life! you penned out behind the final page, the holy mantra I carried under my breath through the years.
And what should I shout to you, now, past mortal planes, years after enduring my reckless free verse – mewling, fawn-like poems, those clumsy, first footsteps of grief and rapture scratched on page while you wielded forms like a surgeon. Ice cold. I was taken aback by your precision – finely faceted sestinas cut like prisms, let us see heartbreaking spectrums of language, whole kaleidoscopes of words.
I’ve tried to be happy, Dr. Bridgford, but I wrapped myself in words, I mummified my heart – embalmed the calm inner voices light-years deep and far away, now I must carefully excavate exhibits so I can see myself in sunlight, again, a patchwork sewn from bones and poems – oh, but the happiness? Well, you saw those reaches, professor – back when I thought identity was what you wrestled down onto the page,
I believed all contentment had to be proven, filed with cover pages – an explicit, bullet-pointed résumé, faithful testimony through words that yes, cosmos, I’m paying attention, those sunbeams down my back are warm like each hand I ever held, yes, I’ll flail – fight back the years of dissociation – I was certain you had answers, professor, knew poems spoke with a sacred power, pierced all foggy veils so finally – you see.
I’ve tried to be happy, professor. I try to keep writing myself out, see how enjambment, twee slant rhymes dancing past bone white pages help a soul cope while time erodes, but even the most ardent poems cannot build up an identity, you can’t construct a person from words and now, I know – my golem of notebooks still walks beside me years after I gave the pain structure and form, you can’t just take those back.
Now I find that I don’t want to. You passed away, just five years back – stark loss which struck me with a sudden knock of clarity – now I see why, my earliest idol had died – I felt that springtime air, again, years before that approaching drumbeat of grief and loss, a kid with a page behind a final project where a remarkable woman offered up her words – said yes, I see you. I hold such soaring hopes for you. I loved your poems.
In this new year I shuffle my tarot deck, fray the edges, no more wincing. Accept wear and tear, welcoming all wounds like old friends; indulge their rambling about each terrible fable, catalogue stories and no more smothering them out silent like hiding bodies under the floorboards – this year I allow myself to be found.
I lost myself in the echoing hallways of loneliness, canvas-white empty rooms strung in a web of hope and longing like veins and arteries just under the skin, like hiding under floorboards – struck blind by possibilities, bright like a sun. I’ve only just stepped outside. Ready to take my own hand – no more wincing.
I’ll fray all of my edges, ramble, abandon endings – I’ll omit the shame, just the joy spilling over my lips like gems, silver coins, they’ll strike the floor like church bells ring, twist open the handles to each lonely door, spilling light down every darkened hallway, sing empty rooms full again, lost, now found
Today I move slowly; gentler mien. Inner voices ranting, patiently listen but I don’t take ownership. Quiet startle realizing I’d forgotten what my father’s voice sounded like until I heard a voicemail – desperate, older, now – familiar headmate. I listen but I don’t take ownership. I gave up self-flagellation five years ago, dropped all his familiar wounds. Same ache, roiling guilt sour like hunger pangs, almost can understand the flailing – cornered, feral, but today I move slowly. Gentler. Loose grip, drop the feral terror. I don’t take ownership. Familiar fear and fangs, nostalgic pangs all never mine. Voicemail ends, silence echoes – free, now. Listen to new voices, slowly.
A glance out the window, struck suddenly by the realness of the tree leering outside – picturing your bones deftly woven into the tangles of branches, like cradling fingers, rain falls, whispering windowsill promises to let go, let go, trailing down the glass and rivulets through the bark, fractal shadows of long tree limbs cast onto the wall, dark dancers celebrate letting go, letting go – but all I’ve ever had is a jealous desperate grip; I’ll rake raw rivulet claw marks before I go
Tell me that snow-covered hill blends perfectly into clear sky – that I was right to be breathless when morning horizon vanished into a clean page, empty canvas
Tell me that love doesn’t vanish, that it has a comfortable seat in some cosmic waiting room, one ear listening for that right name to be called out, ready to return
Tell me that it is never too late – that the nightmares are all gone but the dreams are real, always, tell me how things will work out and mean it, no furtive glances –
Tell me what happens after the happily-ever-afters, tell me that the stories keep going – tell me how endings are only beginnings; another author picks up the pen
You started this year speaking to me, again – we looked into each other’s eyes, embraced – and then you fell silent, quickly – afraid, maybe of how sickly-thin and frail I had become in the intervening decades – scary, how traits will echo across time. Both of us still counting our ribs. Calories. Hours. Minutes.
It’s tempting to try to stay some tender age but I think I’ve grown with you, mine were the other set of white knuckles beside yours – when we anticipate those swells in symphonies the hairs on my neck also stand, that shudder of ecstasy rolls through both of our hearts – if you sing in the kitchen, we sing both parts –
well, we used to sing. Used to skip, spring down school corridors, used to wave batons to conduct invisible orchestras – six A.M. on the cold morning bus we sang out loud. We knew each sinful way to stop caring, and we’d weaponize the correct ones, not this numb, drunk, dark room middle-distance –
we used to choose hope. In high school the cafeteria table turned to nihilism – a half dozen queer kids banded together, exsanguinated, already, not even eighteen – all dutifully tying our own ropes, building our own guillotines – we’d already jumped out of the plane, but I chose the parachute.
My heart sang when you saw me, last year – oh, how close that coffin was to nailing shut, how simple to silence a voice, surrender to tumbling down the mountainside; one must imagine Sisyphus defeated, resignation like a crown of thorns – to arrest that fall would tear out an arm, and to chase the boulder –
stopping a spiral means choosing to hope. You avoided mirrors because that’s where you always caught my eyes, remembered the counter-harmonies in the kitchen, or becoming an altar boy for the dresses, or choosing the parachute. Stopping the fall. Believing in better yous, mes, everything –
don’t do this alone. Take me with you, now – not strong the way that stops a boulder, but I’ll push, too, when the climb gets steep; I glow bright, like how I painted stories on the ceiling late at night – you have never been alone – fix your eyes forward, take my hand – no more nooses, guillotines; no more secrets to keep.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
♦ Zen koan
Surely better than all I’ve discarded, but what are my hands left holding, now? The power vacuum within broken cycles, cults of personality with no charismatic center, a child-shaped hole born when I became afraid of losing barbs, of missing the fear if it ever left – infant macaque clinging to the wire-mother –
but still better than barbs. Better than shallow cuts, better than a familiar fear, better than the blur of decades – the pale shock of realization, how two years becomes ten, better than nothing. That’s all it was. Starved body with no charismatic center, nothing, better than toeing slowly around the no man’s land of child-shaped holes, too many to cover up, not enough sheets to hide them all from sight –
at night I sit vigils. I don’t sleep. The subconscious throws anxiety dreams that have lost their sting, fading out like beloved cassette tapes played too often, (to be loved is to be changed) I recite litanies for the living, pray safety for the dreamers, softness for the waking, strength for the shell-shocked amongst us, those also staring blankly at empty hands – motivation to keep tiptoeing around child-shaped holes, courage to peek underneath the sheets, fill space with something better –
all the love these hands can hold – better than nothing – shell-shocked to be a something at all, oh, to know how much love these hands can hold. If I could cling to the wire-mother – lean into barbs, learn to love the cuts – how much love these hands must hold.
For the kneading claws on cat paws, like ragged rakes reaching around your neck, for your sweatshirt’s heavy hood cowl of armor – for those speedbumps littering all the roads just outside your apartment, close enough together to jolt you from derealization, for steering wheels steady underneath fingertips, no cause for alarm, for sleeping past the alarms – for buying the second box of Mallomars, and the hot chocolate, and the bag of marshmallows –
for that time you put down the knife, decided to be disappointed, one more time by a society that should have embraced you, deciding that twenty years terrified was still worth more than a gorey Irish goodbye, an epilogue written across the tan tile of your dormitory’s shower stalls – you hate phone calls but you dialed campus security, anyway – transmuted total terror into complete shame when the bored uniform scolded you, some child in the patrol car backseat interrupting his night – for the way your stomach rolled right in time with the nurse’s eyes on a cold infirmary table – I suppose I didn’t cut deep enough for them –
for not cutting deep enough. For the privilege to witness each horror that has followed, decisions made daily every lonely dawn – stilling the tremors, putting down the knife, saying the words, for desiring the disappointments, for seeking out new cracks to fall through – for buying the second box of Mallomars and all of the battered hope that entails
To hear it all explained by my son while I fumble with the housekeys, arms overfull with grocery bags and he spins in the foyer like a flywheel, there’s just three types of parent, you see – the normal ones, strict ones, and mean ones – I’m stunned to be counted as normal. I crack the front door, he darts past my legs – another day debating disclosure. Debating demolishing this well-constructed view – detailing painstakingly how some parents embody all three – that’s how they get you – but he’s already stolen my bedpillow, made a chrysalis out of a comforter – who am I to shatter this kind of peace? Like toppling over a tower of blocks, like kicking down sandcastles, like piercing the shell of hatching eggs too soon, too soon, I can’t. I can’t. I afford myself the space he’s left for me, the sliver of cushion beside his cocoon – I reflect on the virtues of normalcy.
I used to fit in broom closets, contort to whichever shapes twisted best into basement blanket bins – I found the quiet corners, slipped inside, hiding, holding breath until forgotten. Safer to be discarded. Safer in stasis. I recited strange prayers listening to that silent dark – let me fly away from here, smallest, scared songbird – make me invisible, please make all of me bleed into the weight of these blankets – safer to disappear. Safest to not be anything at all.
The truth is more direct – the void doesn’t call. It has never needed to – no siren songs, just a chasm aching, empty open air that lurks outside the periphery, darting across the street – a dive-bombing starling oblivious to windshield, or tire, the quiet is the lure. Just one jerk of the steering wheel, a careless step off the curb, one step too many towards an edge, just the solemn promise – soon you could be all stillness, too, nothing else. Nothing else.
I am twenty-two streetlamps, sodium-vapor orange spotlights counting the way back home –
I am the home that never was one. Warm comforts were made, or found, but never a room for me in the heart of those timbers, that steel – windows rattling in hurricanes – they never broke, until they did
I am what remains, what’s left after everything I gave away – much easier to be pecked apart like blue jays at the bird feeder feasting on their entitlements with a calm show of force, bullies belied by cornflower feathers
I am what couldn’t break, so it bent, it crumpled, it folded, I took the branding iron and held it against my own skin, I’ll accept all of the sin so others need not carry it, I like the weight. It sits heavy across my shoulders like my father’s duster, lost once I left it behind –
rounding a corner, cowering quiet in the backseat, counting streetlights silently in my head – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…
Look to the leaves, how even the trees breathe – slow, deep sighs before that first blanket of cold, leaves orange and gold, painting desperate blazes against a cloudless October sky; baring thin fingers all pointing home. Rustling voices, whispering choir, sing divest from the past, make room for new growth. The coming dawn is inevitable, the wheel turns anew.
CALL ME BELOVED 