I could plunk it down for you, a yellow rose, petals opening like labia. Roses are brazen hussies, though, and like a high fashion photographer shooting a fourteen year old girl, we inject a sexuality more like our own with every glance. Roses don't care. "Pollinate me." But red ones mean this, and orange ones these three others things, and don't forget yellow, a most complicated color. Roses, with all those gazes bouncing around, those miscommunications, they're bad for friends.
No, when love is like a stone, a hard thing you can touch, what is a friendship? Forget flowers. A bridge? The wooden frame of a house? A shadow, maybe. Something that doesn't stay behind when you leave. Maybe friendship is a Virginia creeper winding round a blasted oak stump: some verdance after the lightning strike. Leaves that conceal and heal.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Lit Bit: Inspiration
These words aren't about you. They're about me. I take all the tender moments I have in my life and reduce them to char, and every now and again, a piece might look like a femur, but I assure, it's all so mixed even with everything else that I can't separate you from my sister, my dog from my cat. You're all the same... and not. I use little details to stand in for other things. I might hold you up as a lens through which I can safely explore a dark corner that's been terrifying me. But that's about as far as it goes.
That tree? It stands in for all the other trees I know and love. Your face, ("your" being the disjoint you, the multiple you) that you could project onto anybody? You can project it onto anybody. There's a reason for this. We all want universals and we all want specifics. That's the point isn't it? To crossbreed enough experience to come out with strange hybrids of characters that still read true. It's all a strange and ill-funded project in narrative genetics.
You're in there and you're not. Just as I am. Just as my mother is, and my cousins. Just as the gerbil I accidentally starved and the mockingbird outside my window during high school who never learned to shut the hell up. Because you wanted specifics, I will sift and invent, and in the end, I have a grafted olive, a grafted apple, perhaps three colors of hibiscus on one bush. But they grow. They grow strong. And they taste right.
That tree? It stands in for all the other trees I know and love. Your face, ("your" being the disjoint you, the multiple you) that you could project onto anybody? You can project it onto anybody. There's a reason for this. We all want universals and we all want specifics. That's the point isn't it? To crossbreed enough experience to come out with strange hybrids of characters that still read true. It's all a strange and ill-funded project in narrative genetics.
You're in there and you're not. Just as I am. Just as my mother is, and my cousins. Just as the gerbil I accidentally starved and the mockingbird outside my window during high school who never learned to shut the hell up. Because you wanted specifics, I will sift and invent, and in the end, I have a grafted olive, a grafted apple, perhaps three colors of hibiscus on one bush. But they grow. They grow strong. And they taste right.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The Problematic Girl
Birds are a problem. Up there, the air is dense with up-fluttering, wheeling 'round, down drafting. It's deafening. The rustle beat of a thousand ruffled primaries striking a syncopated rhythm that cocks asymmetric after a moment or eight.
The smears on the screen of my cell phone make the shape of a bird skull in oils. A crane's bill smudged on plastic. It's well enough. I am a bird some days myself. Not a crane, but a shocky little screech owl...
I should tell you the tale, better this time. It would be easier. He was only my whole hand in size. He did not have flight the night before, struck from the air by a passing something. The good Samaritan who brought him in wouldn't say, maybe didn't know.
I thought, I'm not all that different from you, when I reached in with my gloved hand. I thought, you must be terrified, and he blinked.
Birds are a problem.
There were feathers everywhere when he exploded into the room. There were feathers everywhere in the nest he'd left in the back of the kennel cage. He circled the trailer on little wings, silent except where they collided with lights and cabinets and trays full of medicine and meal worms.
Up there, the air was hot because the hospital trailer's AC was out, and the owl could not be calmed. Don't open the door, I thought, and the door remained closed a moment more. Don't open the door, I thought, when the handle, held, turned down.
He wheeled 'round and down, and then there were tiny talons in my scalp. He wound 'round my hair with his claws, and I was deafened with needles; no sound but the chorus of prickles. I could not hear the words the vet spoke as she entered by the door, only the rustle of the owl on my head.
After a moment or eight, I caught the cock of his head in the silver of a tray before he leaned out and down to glide to the operating table. He stood there trembling when my gloved hand caught his tiny legs, those talons that had drawn my blood a moment before.
He knew not what he'd done. Birds are a problem. He and I are not so different. We are, for instance, not so stately as a crane, instead are shocked by the awkward world around us, caught off guard by something which plucks us from the air. We, unable to fly, can only sit at rest, heart pounding, until we test the measure of a wing, or the space in which we're given to fly.
The smears on the screen of my cell phone make the shape of a bird skull in oils. A crane's bill smudged on plastic. It's well enough. I am a bird some days myself. Not a crane, but a shocky little screech owl...
I should tell you the tale, better this time. It would be easier. He was only my whole hand in size. He did not have flight the night before, struck from the air by a passing something. The good Samaritan who brought him in wouldn't say, maybe didn't know.
I thought, I'm not all that different from you, when I reached in with my gloved hand. I thought, you must be terrified, and he blinked.
Birds are a problem.
There were feathers everywhere when he exploded into the room. There were feathers everywhere in the nest he'd left in the back of the kennel cage. He circled the trailer on little wings, silent except where they collided with lights and cabinets and trays full of medicine and meal worms.
Up there, the air was hot because the hospital trailer's AC was out, and the owl could not be calmed. Don't open the door, I thought, and the door remained closed a moment more. Don't open the door, I thought, when the handle, held, turned down.
He wheeled 'round and down, and then there were tiny talons in my scalp. He wound 'round my hair with his claws, and I was deafened with needles; no sound but the chorus of prickles. I could not hear the words the vet spoke as she entered by the door, only the rustle of the owl on my head.
After a moment or eight, I caught the cock of his head in the silver of a tray before he leaned out and down to glide to the operating table. He stood there trembling when my gloved hand caught his tiny legs, those talons that had drawn my blood a moment before.
He knew not what he'd done. Birds are a problem. He and I are not so different. We are, for instance, not so stately as a crane, instead are shocked by the awkward world around us, caught off guard by something which plucks us from the air. We, unable to fly, can only sit at rest, heart pounding, until we test the measure of a wing, or the space in which we're given to fly.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Lit Bit: Recycling
One of the best pieces of advice I have been given as a writer is to never get rid of your work. NEVER. GET. RID. OF. YOUR. WORK. I don't care how bad you think it is, don't do it. Don't consign it to the flames. Don't toss it out in frustration or delete it because you don't like it. It's fuel of a different sort.
A text, every text, is its own beast. You can write the same idea down on different days, and the words will come out differently each time. Each text is unique. You can't write it the same way twice. That is why each iteration is so important. The record allows you to see foundational weaknesses, underlying strengths, rich bits of alliterative glory, sagging spots of adjectival drag. But if you get rid of it, even if you keep the idea, the words are gone forever. And the words are all that matters. There is no text, not without your words to give it flesh.
Once you have a text, it is editable. Changeable. Once you have the mold, you can make new castings and shape them any way you like. But beyond that, once you have a text, you can always come back to it to mine for more ideas.
There are a million unvoiced notions in each of your writings. And you'd throw them away? Please don't make me cry like that. Even if your original words never see daylight, you can at least go back to them to harvest new notions as they grow. Your words started in some notion. Your words lead to more new notions. By keeping them, returning to them, you can only expand your ideas.
It's a form of recycling. Keep your brain green. Don't get rid of texts.
This has been a public service announcement on behalf my inner child crying for you.
A text, every text, is its own beast. You can write the same idea down on different days, and the words will come out differently each time. Each text is unique. You can't write it the same way twice. That is why each iteration is so important. The record allows you to see foundational weaknesses, underlying strengths, rich bits of alliterative glory, sagging spots of adjectival drag. But if you get rid of it, even if you keep the idea, the words are gone forever. And the words are all that matters. There is no text, not without your words to give it flesh.
Once you have a text, it is editable. Changeable. Once you have the mold, you can make new castings and shape them any way you like. But beyond that, once you have a text, you can always come back to it to mine for more ideas.
There are a million unvoiced notions in each of your writings. And you'd throw them away? Please don't make me cry like that. Even if your original words never see daylight, you can at least go back to them to harvest new notions as they grow. Your words started in some notion. Your words lead to more new notions. By keeping them, returning to them, you can only expand your ideas.
It's a form of recycling. Keep your brain green. Don't get rid of texts.
This has been a public service announcement on behalf my inner child crying for you.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
We Are Connected by More Than Silken Threads
I know the spider can't be greatful to me. Gratefulness is a human emotion, as far as I can tell. I wouldn't want gratitude. I want the spider to be a spider.
She tickled me. That was how I noticed her, me sipping coffee in the mall, she crawling through the forest of the tiny blond hairs on my arm. I watched her for a bit, making her way, an awkward lean to her spinnerling gait. She was missing a front leg.
I don't like pity. Pity implies power. Condescension. Her cousins could kill me. She? She was too much like me when I was injured, limping along, but still present in her moment. I'd known successful spiders less a leg, so I carried her from the table in the mall food court to the door, and let her drop on her rappelling silk to the white railing, where she steadied herself as I pulled my anchoring arm away.
She was smaller than a freckle. I felt like her equal in the face of the universe, and really, there isn't much difference between the two of us. So much shared DNA on this planet. We are both about the same size in comparison to a star.
After? I feel grateful. I am a human, after all, and it was a moment shared.
She tickled me. That was how I noticed her, me sipping coffee in the mall, she crawling through the forest of the tiny blond hairs on my arm. I watched her for a bit, making her way, an awkward lean to her spinnerling gait. She was missing a front leg.
I don't like pity. Pity implies power. Condescension. Her cousins could kill me. She? She was too much like me when I was injured, limping along, but still present in her moment. I'd known successful spiders less a leg, so I carried her from the table in the mall food court to the door, and let her drop on her rappelling silk to the white railing, where she steadied herself as I pulled my anchoring arm away.
She was smaller than a freckle. I felt like her equal in the face of the universe, and really, there isn't much difference between the two of us. So much shared DNA on this planet. We are both about the same size in comparison to a star.
After? I feel grateful. I am a human, after all, and it was a moment shared.
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