“What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

The click of her fingernails against ceramic, drowned out by the faucet of the kitchen sink. The red tiles digging into the dingy yellow sponge. Suds spilling out of the cup in her hands.

“Hmm?”

“What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

The question floated past Ron again. Brenda looked up only for a moment, but her eyelids fluttered, and it intimidated him. A teasing twitch. It was a friendly sort of glance, but it was undercut by the intensity of her movements in the sink. Lots of sploshing. Little splashes spotting her undershirt — white ridges stained. Rusty smears, made impressionistic by dirty water.

A strip of tomato, clinging to her right thumb.

“You’re leaving?”

Brenda’s nose crinkled. “No, silly. I’m just sayin. What would you do without me?”

Pink spots on her cheeks. But it doesn’t look like blush, he thought. It looks like rosacea.

It couldn’t be rosacea. She doesn’t have rosacea.

“You’re just saying things again.”

“I could just walk away,” Brenda said. “Right now. Walk right out the door, with my wet arms and no shoes on.”

“You’re trying to be cute.”

“Better yet, I could drop this plate on the floor behind me. Bring a whole armful of plates, and chuck them all behind me, leaving all these shards of plates behind me, and you couldn’t follow me, you’d be stuck here, picking up pieces of dirty dishes, diggin them out of the carpet.”

As she murmured on, he couldn’t stop staring at her. Her profile was fascinating to him. Her back bent, curved steep and high at the top of the spine. A bit of back fat spilling out of the top of her jeans. The pale and insignificant bulge. The whole frame shakes when she hits the older dishes, he noticed, when she scrubs harder, when she works that sponge, scraping against mealy dobs of mess.

Ron’s left hand hovered near her elbow. Tingling. He should just grab her from behind, yeah. Kiss her neck, turn off the faucet, dry off her hands with the towel on the counter; kiss her nubby little fingers and taste the lingering remains, the unpleasant yet comforting mixture of crisp lemons and mildew from an old sponge. She could hold his face. He longed for her to frame his jaw with those elongnated silverfish. Tap my skin with that red bric-brac. Let me feel those damp acrylics.

“I wouldn’t be so helpless.”

“Oh, so you wouldn’t miss me, then?”

“No. I couldn’t take it if you left. I mean– well, I wouldn’t take it too well. But I could manage without you. I’m not helpless.”

He finally dropped his hand. It felt like his fingers were leaving trails. He felt no less tense.

“You need me, Ron.” Her voice was still carefully balancing over a teasing lilt.

“You know I don’t.”

Brenda hesitated, the last dish in her hand, as she calibrated what she could say next. Digging under my skin, she thought, whether he meant to or not, well, even if he didn’t mean to, he needs to be more considerate. Bringing that up while I’m doing chores. Taking responsibilities. I’m taking responsibility. Sneaking up behind me while I’m taking responsibility. Lord knows someone has to do it around here. Ron and his responsibilities, his mixed-up priorities. She noticed the continuing stream from the faucet, and reached up to switch it off. A measured move, but not a gentle one.

“You know I don’t care about those girls,” she said. “Really. But stop pointing it out.”

“I’m sorry, does it bother you?”

“A little, yeah.”

“Ha!” He turned on his heel. “I knew you were never fine with it. Just stop acting so damn cool all the time.”

The clunk of a fridge door opening. Brenda turned around to look at him; her body contorted strangely, as her dripping hands were still reposed above the sink. She saw only his arm, stretched across the counter, a ramp up to his back which was itself stretched across the kitchen. His head poked into the fridge. Like a goddamned tilde, or a smidgen of something left over from some meal months ago, a scrap of old noodle stuck behind the oven. She’d never get him out.

“I don’t know how you want me to act, then. You’re lucky you have me around,” Brenda said. “You need someone to put up with your bullshit.”

Out of the chilly mechanical hum came his tinny response. “I told you not to throw out that horseradish.”

“Horseradish is disgusting.”

“Ranch is worse.”

“Not buttermilk.”

“I can’t believe you like that stuff.”

“I was practically raised on it.”

“Get out of here.”

i know some interesting people

In the past few weeks, I have had in-depth conversations with people about their academic/professional passions — ranging from electronic circuitry, computational chemistry, urban planning, graphic design, mysticism, poor theatre, reification in Victorian literature, and social studies concerning racial connotations.

Which is pretty neat, considering that I have a very shaky, near-non-existent grasp on most of these things.

*pounds table, screams:*

objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! objectify me! OBJECTIFY ME

ahem:

folding brown; tearing white. green green red.
to be crisp; to be moist. whole grain bread.

Placeholder for Something Less Dramatic

when it comes.

everything reminds me of [____]

oh! i remember her. her little snub nose.
matches his little snub nose.

an upturned nose. expressing permanent disdain . . . delicacy.

sickly sweet soda, trickling through my lips;
buds pressed against the cylindrical edge;

a potent moment. only remembered because the sensation was so intense. drug-induced, probably.

bland girl.
bland summer day.
bland date.

blond girl;
blinding sun;
bleary-eyed.

above the too-short philtrum, a damnable snub nose.

a buttoned face.

sleight of mind

overcome by a fear of lacking insight

Horace’s Advice to the Young Person in Need of Editing

. . . although you have your father to guide your judgment aright and are yourself wise to boot, cherish this lesson and take it home: that only in limited fields is mediocrity tolerable or pardonable. A counsel or second-rate pleader at the bar may not rival Messalla in eloquence, nor possess the knowledge of Casellius; yet he has value; but mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by gods, men or — booksellers. Just as, at some pleasant banquet, ugly music, coarse perfume, and poppy seed mixed with Sardinian honey offend the taste, because the meal could have passed without such things: so a poem, created to give delight, if it fails but a little of the highest sinks to the lowest.

If, however, you should one day produce something, pray submit it first to Maecius the critic, to your father, to me; and then put the manuscript back on your desk and let it stand for over a decade. The unpublished may be cancelled; but a word once uttered can never be recalled . . .

In days gone by, whenever you read a piece to Quinilius he would exclaim, “Correct this, I pray, or that.” If you replied that you could do no better, that you had tried twice or thrice in vain, he would bid you cut out the ill-turned lines and bring them to the anvil again. If you chose rather to defend rather than to mend the faulty line, not a word more would he say, or waste his efforts. Henceforth you might hug yourself and your works, alone, without rival.

A kind and sensible critic will censure verses when they are weak, condemn them when they are rough; ugly lines he will score in black, will lop off pretentious ornaments, force you to clear up your obscurities, criticize a doubtful phrase, and mark what needs a change . . . he will not say, “Why should I take my friend to task for mere trifles?” — it is such trifles that will bring into sad scrapes the poet who has been fooled and flattered unfairly . . .

http://bit.ly/Ld0mi

mouth

Two chapped petals. Inconsistent hues of pink. They fold. Purse.

Little chips of porcelain cups, lined up in two neat rows. They gleam.

That tricky tongue, snaking down the bottom of each throat.

All the senses meet here.

(It produces/hears/feels/tastes/sees sound.)

It is lined with flesh like the rest of us.

Of all things, the mouth seems the most irritatingly there.

too early.

gray light of dawn seeps in through slatted blinds. the pale streams wash the salt from my wounds, the gashes that run through me, body and mind, inherent and acquired.

merritt loops around me, an aural towel, rubbing me down, scrubbing the morning into my skin.

my blanket remains heaped.

i have always been afraid of the dark. i’m older now. it should be better. it was better, for a while. but the night terrors are returning. unfriendly shadows! menacing trees! evil mirror worlds! dreams that spiral out of control. i am never in control of my dreams.

i’ve heard a few tricks to create lucid dreaming, but i can’t master it. the dreams control me. that’s the way it’s always been.

a psychic state of arrested development. the dreams and nightmares of a child, amplified by an adult vocabulary:

I can’t remember much. But I’ll tell you what stuck out the most. I was in a room with Jon and Abe and Ashton, maybe a few other people that I know. I was asked to watch a horror movie. I vehemently refused. They insisted. And before I knew it, we were in a horror movie, and everyone was getting killed, and the bodies of everyone I knew started piling up on the floor. I was immobile. I had a vague urge to “find the killer,” but nothing could uproot me. I hated the situation, didn’t want to acknowledge it. So the bodies continued to accumulate.

A face fills my field of vision. Huge, white, Japanese, you know, billowing black hair. She shrieks at me. Maggots spill out of her mouth, a sea of little white ones, growing into wiggling black centipedes. It washes over me. I can feel them under my skin.

I refuse to acknowledge it. I close my eyes tight. I hate her. I hate this stupid dream. But I can still feel the bugs, still hear the screams. I want to yell, but when I open my mouth, they push on, down my throat.

I flail, clawing the air in front of me. The insects start fading away. The woman laughs. I open my eyes and see the bodies of my friends, heaped on top of each other like old photos from the Holocaust. An arm reaches out from the pile and the end of it opens up; the arm becomes a devouring limb, and starts swallowing a nearby body. Jon’s arm. As it munches, it becomes distended, full, crunching bones and mashing ligaments. Then a leg jumps out, gulps up the arm. Each body is slowly digested by another body. Every body part opens up. They are more vacuums than mouths.

I close my eyes again. It’s too much. But as before, when I close my eyes, the room roars, and the other sensations double. Waves of blood lap at my feet. Offal wraps around me. Guts and skeletons and ghosts and demons.

It’s Halloween. It’s a haunted house. It’s a low-budget film. It’s a yawning abyss, it’s all too real, and it returns to me, night after night. These stupid images…a ventriloquist’s dummy, tying up someone I love, pointing a gun at their head. Raptors tearing loose from a museum. A fun house in a county fair that goes on forever, that I can never escape, where each room is more horrible than the one before.

It’s juvenile yet mortal terror, and it’s constant.

barely coherent, but i couldn’t sleep. so there’s that.