Genre

The only thing that can be written about is love and being in it.

An octopus, a tectonic plate, a president.

A man or woman or both.

A platonic cave and longing and longing and longing.

You refill my fountain pen with blue black ink and there are all my future words compressed.

The DNA of the soul you own.

Letters coiled together like Christmas lights in a hot August attic.

Waiting to be alphabetically unwound.

Struggling to plot the space between us and how I hate it.

I stretch blue black into lines and curves when you aren’t watching and read the code.

How did you shape me into this story.

You refill my fountain pen with ink that glitters.

You ask me to choose and then practice your delicate witchcraft.

Crystal bottles and silver nibs balanced between your fingerprints.

Inject my thoughts into a slender barrel so I can find out what they are.

I can only write about love and being in it.

That’s all there is as far as I can tell.

I’ve checked every book in the library and I’m not wrong.

Every page strung out on limerence or else never born.

Every genre a subgenre of romance.

Every author yanked along by the aching center of their chest.

A spaceship, a needle point, a tower, a fang.

Objects that rise and fall like heartbeats.

They rush in like ocean waves.

Love I love I love.

Do you.

Love me love me love me.

I enter the aisles to worship.

Bend my spine among the spines.

This inventory of obsessions.

Aphrodite hushes patrons who cry broken ecstasies.

Turn the page.

One more chapter.

I could never reshelve you.

My journals are labeled by year until the one I met you.

After that it’s just your name writ vertical.

The marble columns I walk between.

Sometimes I nearly approach the altar but my pen keeps coming up dry.

Put the words back in please.

I have more to say.

Venus shrugged.

Railroads and mountains and dollhouse collections.

Of course you’ll never finish.

Has anyone.

Ever.

Origin Story

Sometime before you and I were born
Before our continental ancestors were even conceived of

By their mother’s mothers

Who at the time were just little girls in prehistoric pinafores

Way back then

Someone fell in love for the first time

And they learned that that love means down is up

And dark is sharp

And sunrise means the end

In between the scramble of inventing crop rotation

Avoiding the plague

Minding the flock

And skinning rabbits for stew

One pair of eyes kept meeting another over an open fire

And since no one yet worried about particulate matter inhalation

Or the rising cost of premium daycare facilities

The human heart still had time to leap and swoon and twist itself into knots

Over that other pair of eyes

That were watching and waiting and seducing

Fixed on nothing but her

Nothing to click on

Nothing pending a reply

Back then people were just starting to understand the confusion of senses,

That meeting someone, not just anyone

can make you feel like you just breathed for the first time

Like you just sloughed off the amniotic fluid of singledom

You cry out in a gasp of inarticulate virility

And suddenly know

The definition of paradox

The agony of joy
The intimacy of separation 

I knew I was falling in love with you when I didn’t look at my phone
Or even remember I owned one
From the minute I entered your apartment

until the minute I needed Google to get me home

Thoroughly captivated by our interaction

Utterly disinterested in the typically addictive fleeting digital stream

Realizing time after time

you were the only reality I wanted to be mine

In my bones’ marrow

where the secrets of romance are engraved by time into my matter

I felt my myself grow strong in your hands

And I saw all the contraptions and distractions of today grow small

In the presence of something undying and unyielding 

Nothing was ever as beautiful

Not as the way you made me feel

But as the way I wanted to make you feel

Safe like my flock

Hot like my fire

Confused like the body in love

Like down is up

And dark is sharp

Like sundown is a wake-up call

And sunrise means the end

Until next time

And I prayed for a next time

In a time when I had forgotten how to pray

Somewhere awakened in my reptilian brain or in my genetic codex

A woman with strong shoulders and rough hands

was teaching me to feel you like she had felt him

Her love story lurching across millenia to tell me

that this distraction with you is called fate

That seeing the night as the brightest part of day is called passion

That wanting to follow you without knowing your destination is called loyalty

That wanting to give you myself until the bank of my life had a negative balance

Wasn’t just a sign of intense but passing infatuation

It was a rite of passage into the ranks of our progenitors

Who had also forgotten to keep a watch on their phone

Or flock

Or fire

And instead kept watch on each other

Inventing words for new sensations

Whispering prayers about forever into the silence

Writing into their bones the origin story of love

(2018)

Outcome

They always say

“Mom and baby are doing fine!”

just hours after she splits herself open

to pour out bony flesh and writhing soul 

with vesuvian indignity,

bodies baptized incarnadine,

lungs wailing, one for the first time

and one like never before,

trembling, sweating, spilling

primordial fluids across existential thresholds.

Mom and baby are neither fine,

shocked by light and loss and brand new fear,

being ripped apart,

pain enough to maybe kill her,

heartbroken now or eighteen years later,

every unknown in the universe

cradled in her naked shaking arms.

Heedless they hurry

to light the cigars

while blood is still drying

exhaling words like blessing and miracle. 

I think they mean that forgetting it is.

We were all broken by the beginning.

We should take time.

When I turn thirty-five and feel happy one day,

if my mom is still healthy, 

and I’m feeling brave

and the paychecks are steady,

I’ll send out the announcements

on creamy white card stock,

in envelopes stuffed with rose-colored confetti:

“It’s a girl!

66 inches, weight undisclosed.

Mommy and daughter are doing fine.

Today, at least, they’re hanging in there.

As for tomorrow, sorry, no promises.

The doctor declared both of them human.”

Ode to a Night Owl

The other day I killed a night owl with a single shot

It was easy

I just asked it
To help me catch a bitter worm the next morning
And it rolled right over, underbelly revealed
Too soft to handle hard surprises
Too selfish and delicate

To witness harsh sunrises

That was when I let you disappoint me for the final round

Of inconvenience meaning more than our friendship

You know no means no

But so does yes when delivered with a groan

I heard the night owl’s complaint piercingly clear

So mom drove me to the airport instead

And I didn’t I realize it yet

But I was already over you then

While I was losing my father to empty bottles

You were losing me to hollow promises

Of brotherhood and being there

I shouldn’t have to tell you

Calling yourself my last resort

Doesn’t count as showing up

And I’ve got more love on the line

And someone else will always volunteer

To hug me goodbye

If you aren’t feeling up to it

If you can’t get up for it on time

I guess you thought I’d understand

Since it’s how you’ve always been

It’s all cute and quirky until someone’s getting hurt

And needs a ride to save her father’s life

Or maybe just her own

You don’t know that he wasn’t in the van

That I flew home alone

Shattered and still shaking from the threats that he leveled

Gas pedals and sirens and lies that he leverage

And cops that saw through it

And the moment I knew that I couldn’t

You didn’t ask if it all worked out

You let the nights lengthen and that’s how it lasted

And you haven’t changed your password

Or your agenda

Or your lack of compassion

I guess I’m just your history now

I once fought for your trust

While you sat in the background

You didn’t answer the call

When I asked you to stand up

You acted like it wasn’t

The worst two weeks of my life

Like I didn’t need you

Like hell isn’t a place that I could possibly wind up

Like you wouldn’t sweat for a friend who was burning

It was hot in the kitchen and you turned on the TV

Left a pot boiling dry on the stove while you kicked back

And lit another bowl so you could just check out

Remaining calm in a crisis is simple

When you decline it with silence

Guess you got off easy

But definitely early

I thought we had years left in the making

But now I’ll take credit for calling the score

I left the ball in your court and waited to volley

But I set down my racket when the ref finally told me

That you never bothered with picking up yours

I once broke down your walls

Never thought that you could break down my patience

The sheep that broke the collie’s back

Only cried wolf when it truly mattered

Turns out wolves work all hours

And I’m sorry to tell you

That love doesn’t call in sick

When it's not in the mood for taking the morning shift

The flock lost a few members

I don’t think you remember

The love that broke down your walls was a gift

I thought there was something worthwhile to get to

Turns out all these years

It was just an empty pasture

Of unruffled feathers

And the ghost of a wolf-haunted lamb that once grazed there

Am I Being "Good"?

 I've been asking myself lately if I am willing to do whatever it takes to achieve my goals. It seems like the answer is usually "no", and I hate that. Especially because "whatever it takes" is usually something as small as not eating so much bread and peanut butter.

Ever since college, I've aspired to create and live within a perfect routine, to be like a robot running on a programmed loop of habits. Wake up, get dressed, workout, eat breakfast, shower, get dressed again, fix hair, skin care, go to work, eat lunch, work more, clean the house, write, practice piano, practice German, practice for choir, do chores, spend time with my husband, read, journal, go to bed on time, over and over and over.

The problems come during all the little moments when I deviate from my perfect program. I'm not a robot. I want to stay in bed and cuddle. I want to put extra peanut butter in my oatmeal. I want to bake cookies even though I didn't allocate time or calories for cookies. I want to spend an hour on the phone with my sister or my friend or my mom. I want to watch Netflix. I want to fill in a coloring book page. I want to deviate from the path. I want to rebel against my own plans. I want my dreams and my immediate desires to have nothing to do with each, to create no conflict, to require no sacrifice.

I can say "no" to things for a week, maybe a month. Eventually I no longer feel alive and I have to throw off the chains I wrote rules about and throw handfuls of figurative confetti into the air, snap my fingers, watch them burn, and dance with abandon on the ashes. As much as I want to build, to create, to grow, I want to destroy, to neglect, to deteriorate, to take risks, to flaunt my mortality, to whither daintily, suffer dramatically, and die beautifully. I am rubbernecking in the slow lane, watching my own crash unfold. At the same time, I'm changing my own tire and driving my own tow truck and bootstrapping myself into a better life. No wonder fall asleep sometimes telling God and the darkness, "I wonder who I am." I can't quite tell. I sure look like the picture of domesticity. I sure clean up nice. I sure want to buy another motorcycle and ride it too fast in the rain. I sure love drinking too much coffee. I sure love being a know-it-all about the ways unhealthy food is going to kill you, even though I don't follow my own advice 30% of the time.

You know that story about the two wolves, the dark and the light? Mine are both quite well fed and always ripping each other's throats out. And there aren't just two, it seems. It's a whole pack, and they're howling confusing directions and competing priorities until I'm deaf with their noise.

In high school, we used to say to each other with righteous smiles, "Consistency is the hallmark of ethics." I thought it was true. It's not exactly true, although I won't talk about why right now, but it's also even more important than I realized back then, so it's good that we said it and tried hard. Sometimes you learn a lesson, and then twenty years later you find out why you learned it and then you think, "Ah, now I know."

Sometimes I wish my day to day ethics weren't quite so wrapped up in the miles I run and the grams of peanut butter I eat. It's hard to measure, unfortunately, how polite I am on Zoom calls when I'm tired and whether I'm too harsh a critic of my family members and if I really listened attentively to the story my husband told me or just nodded along. When days end and I ask "Was I good today?" I think too quickly of things I can put into spreadsheets and not often enough of things I can put on a tombstone.

I mean, I guess you could put

"Loving Wife and Daughter

30g oats, 10g chia seeds, 18g peanut butter

Ran 2 miles on mornings it didn't rain hard"

on my tombstone. I won't be coming back to complain.

In the meantime, can I be a bit more of a good little robot who doesn't pick a new workout and diet plan every two weeks, and also, at the same time, a bit more of a good little human who keeps love and truth first, where they belong?

There are two wolves inside all of us, and one of them really likes tracking things in spreadsheets. The other one likes cookies, cuddles, and motorcycles.

Published in Havok!

 I am very pleased that today one of my short stories, "Fostering the Goddess", was published on Havok's website.

You can check it out here: www.gohavok.com

(After today, it will be behind their paywall -- Havok is a subscription site.)

Spring Again

The hawthorne is in bloom
and the wisteria and lilac
Your hair grew long, your eyes soft
I am tripping through my life
you are always catching me

I am waiting for the tadpoles to arrive
I fill teapots up with wildflowers
I fill my head with stories
I fill my heart with sailor songs

Life is pushing up everywhere
and I am learning names like Adam
and I am eating fruit like Eve

I'm trying to dodge a flaming sword
I'm trying to understand the story
I'm waiting for your hands to harden
I'm learning to stop waiting

This is my face and everyone knows it.

I hardly ever wear makeup. I’ve never had a daily makeup routine, and until embarrassingly recently I didn’t even have a daily skincare routine. While my dry, sensitive, blemish-prone skin appreciates that I now take better care of it, my morning and evening cleansing, toning, treating, and moisturizing isn’t followed by foundation, contoure, blush, shadow, mascara, or lipstick. At most, I might apply a coincidentally tinted lip balm with sunscreen.

The fact that I have never been a regular consumer of makeup started with my adolescent self-identification as a tomboy. Tomboys don’t wear makeup. I didn’t like anything girly after about age ten. I eschewed flounced floral dresses in favor of t-shirts and cargo shorts. I think I did this mostly to separate my identity from that of my more delicate-looking sister, but I was also much more likely to be found playing football with the guys at recess than hopscotch or four-square with the girls. Being told “You’re such a tomboy” repeatedly reinforced the stereotype.

So while my girlhood friends were learning how to do their makeup in their pre-teens, it remained an irrelevant mystery to me. My mom did take me to the mall in my early teens to one of the many department store makeup counters, where a nice lady “did my face” and then sold us a bag of nearly two hundred dollars worth of product. I followed the routine the makeup counter lady taught me for a while, but not daily, and then eventually only for special occasions. I still have the small eyeshadow palette, nearly two decades later. It’s perhaps half-used.

By high school, my friends were all experts, it seemed, and had defined “their look.” Meanwhile, I struggled to put on eyeshadow and blush symmetrically and never looked like myself in the mirror after I did. People were surprised when my friends didn’t wear makeup. People were surprised when I did.

Putting on makeup felt more like playing dress up than like a normal part of my day. Even though I knew that my mom did this every morning and wouldn’t leave the house without lipstick, I never got to the point where it seemed like it was time for me to do the same. Wearing makeup every day was what adults did, I guessed, and I wasn’t an adult yet. I still got sweaty playing frisbee with my friends between classes. Who had time for running to the bathroom to power their nose? Why did it even matter?

I felt the same way throughout college. Nobody seemed to care that I didn’t wear makeup. I think nobody did. Yet the other young women in the seats around me had faces full of color, darkened eyebrows, overdrawn lips, and often false lashes. I never understood why. Nowadays, it makes sense to me that this is normal. Every day is a series of selfie opportunities, so people want to have their Instagrammable faces on, but when I went to college the world was barely on the cusp of influencer-driven social media. Instagram didn’t exist yet, so what were all these women spending all that time and money on makeup for? I didn’ t know, and I hardly thought about it.

I graduated college, got my first “real” job, went to grad school, floated around the gig economy for a while, and eventually started my career in the high tech industry. All the while, I showed up to class, to interviews, to work, with a bare face. With rare exceptions, I was the only woman in those settings who had nothing on her skin.

These days, I enjoy trying to make myself up for special occasions. Makeup can feel like part of a well-considered outfit, and that is something I do understand and value. But on ninety-nine days out of a hundred, my face is naked.

I find freedom in showing my true face to the world. I know that many women find freedom in the self-expression that makeup allows them. They can literally look like a different person, from a different era or a different culture. They can be unrecognizable, if they want. I understand why makeup is a tool in their toolbox. It enables self-transformation.

It’s not a kind of self-transformation I value, though. I want to be recognized for me. I have seen many examples of someone being unrecognizable without having their “face” on. People might say they look weird or even ugly. “Wow, that’s what she looks like without makeup? Gross!” go the comments.

I don’t want that. I want to be seen as me, always. I don’t want washing my face at night to be like taking a mask off. I don’t want to go through the world in disguise. I don’t want to spend time and money every day on the illusion of changing the shape of my nose or the set of my eyes.

Not wearing makeup frees me from the time that would otherwise be consumed by it. It frees me from the expense of having to buy the products. More important to me, however, is the freedom from the social pressure to have a face that is on-trend. My eyebrows are my own. They do whatever my genetics tells them to do (with a touch--I’ll admit--of unibrow maintenance now and then). I don’t change them to be thicker or thinner or darker or lighter depending on the cover of Vogue. I don’t change the shape of my mouth or my nose with contouring, and because I don’t do these things, I don’t worry about whether I look the way that influencers and movie stars do. I can’t look like they do because I don’t put on a face like they do.

I don’t judge people who wear makeup. That would be silly, rude, and, well, judgemental. Those are not things I want to be. I see other people’s makeup routines as normal. I also see my own lack of makeup as normal, just as it is normal for men to be bare-faced. Both choices are fine, depending on what you want.

I do feel, though, that the sense of requirement to wear makeup should be consciously revolted against by some women. Wearing makeup should be a choice. My mother is not free to leave the house without makeup because it makes her too uncomfortable. She feels naked without a fake hue to her lips. I don’t blame her for that. She’s a product of her culture. My culture just happened to be the boys I played soccer and football with during recess in grade school. Most of them probably don’t wear makeup these days either. If they do wear makeup, they are trend-setters. People might call them odd, queer, or brave.

It never occurred to me until recently that choosing not to wear makeup as a woman was not only freeing, but also an act of bravery. Many people see a naked female face as unprepared or unfinished, as though I left the house in nothing but undergarments. I’ve certainly been passed over many times in my life, in conversations at parties, in job interviews, in bars where other girls were getting picked up. Was it ever because the alternative to me was a young woman with false lashes and red lips that made her look doe-eyed and sultry at the same time? I don’t know, but perhaps. I certainly could be seen as not trying or as not caring. Perhaps men or other women have looked at me as someone who didn’t bother, or someone who didn’t want to look pretty.

But I do care, and I do bother, and I do want to look pretty. Just not like that. So not wearing makeup, if you are a woman, seems to be a small act of bravery, just like wearing it is brave if you are a man.

I’ve always hated wearing makeup, so it’s not a difficult type of bravery for me. Makeup is uncomfortable. It works its way into creases. It gets smudged. It gets in your eyes and makes your lashes stiff. It makes me feel heavy, dirty, and mess-up-able. I want my skin to be free to breathe. I want my husband to know that he can reach out and touch my cheek without consequences.

Sometimes I do worry I will be discriminated against subconsciously, just a little, for not looking as pretty or as “put together” as other women who clearly spent a lot of time on their routines. But I have to trust that whatever I am bringing to the table is more than enough to make up for what I didn’t.

This is my face, and that’s all it is.