I’m dying to watch parks and rec now that I moved out of the states I can’t hulu newer episodes. Anyone have a link for streaming?
[A Fleeting Scrap of] Self
Licking lily of the valley scents
Slurping sunburnt horizons
Water, water, water cities
Babyhood
Tickling silk
Archipelago dotting black beauty
Grace grasping curved birth-place earth
Childhood
Wave, wave roughhousing
Tumbling, home in chaos
Slipping into salt
Adolescence
Pooling to fill in where we forgot to smile
Land of ten thousand lakes lapping up sorrows
Thimble sized dimples piercing razor sharp shoulder blades
A poke from each previous tenant of the womb that was once home
A lesson in resilience
Reconciling big feet and flared lashes
Thrashing, thrashing, hold still, Honeybun
Waiting will fill
And pins and needles are only one sided mind games
Flicker, flicker brashly abolish finger nail polish
Twinkle, twinkle little girl how I wonder who you are?
Synonyms and cinnamon swirling sweetly
Toes and elbows always at odd ends
The odds and ends drawer always was the favorite
stacked high with holy trinkets unsortable
sort of a crime
Flittering across cloud nine
Soaking in champagne baths
And boa constrictors bind limbs
Hissing fairy tales to comprehend
Dead bolting death in leather compartments
Unhinging jaws
Unbuckling bras
Leap, leap, leaping into the arms of the headstrong
Dipping toes into the thoughts of the long gone
Spoon-fed a cherry of pop culture
Pop pop, pop pop
popcorn and bullets
Lipstick roaring defiance
Or compliance; blow kisses, baby
Or blow minds, lady
Or blow boys, tramp
Or blow a steady stream of air, ma’am
Damning dame
Damned devil
Dance, dance, dancing disco inferno
Infected the mind
Sweat and bass distorts the view
Beats convulsing within, without
stranger danger subsided
even without extra substances provided
although contraband and favorite bands go hand in hand
Swirling particles
Swinging physical laws, ethical cause
Where’s a pen? Where’s a page?
This tabula rasa is getting full again
Trying to keep the riff raff out
Face the fact
The riff raff is the Elmer’s glue holding your glittery, second-grade-project self together
Wrapping hips and heat in the loaded gun of squeaky beds
Bedridden baby, sleep more, get well
Bedroom eyes sublime
Bedding boys is game
Subletting blame
Avoiding fame
Baring breasts is a thrill
Baring burdens, count the till
Baring teeth, in for the kill
Bare feet in backyards
Boots in blueberry floored woods
How much wood would a wood-chuck chuck if a wood-chuck could chuck wood?
Sleazy, easy can’t compare with the motherfucker cheating at Parcheesi
Corrupt morals
Currency makes the world go round
Currently stilled ‘cause the economy’s down
Except this is still a dizzy planet
Excellent excuse for another drink
Contend with the bartend
Lined up like pretty props, hands callously wrapped around the next waist in line
Assembly line girls,
Swapped Rosie’s cause for showgirl pride
Switched sturdy for svelte
That isn’t sexuality, it’s for show
Not enough to call them hoes
Pink shapes where skin caught your ahhs and ohhs
Waiting to blossom into tomorrow’s bruise
dental imprints mark the forearm,
you said be quiet
swallowed myself,
and swallowed the universe, stuffing my face
regurgitate perfection in its place
fixing space
between continents, lovers and thighs
Abide the rules of playground slides
Wait your turn, feet first, wave at mom from the top
Don’t ever let the youthful rush stop
what You are like
I have found what You are like
melting Popsicle
complete with sticky Fingers
licks licks licks
arriving at Nothing but
Cold
and Sweet
and Stains
drips drips drips
Lips part to winter
and I wither
and Dye rings my Lips
so I naively believe myself Pretty
this flavor is not a taste but a Color
like You
Navy Blue
or Twilight
or Ink lining my Wrist
like all those moments when your Brow furrows and I’m no longer Your Yellow
and when we aren’t in passionate fits of Fuschia
no, the Blue we become when
I am just not Sunshine enough
when I stumble atop a pedestal of Stars
each hand torn from the perfection of Heaven
Brighter and Bigger and Better than I
I’ve never liked competition
but We melt into this Blue
this is, and We are,
a Dream within a Dream
Looking
I wish you wouldn’t look back when I look at you
I’m penetrated by blue
I am
Whimsical wisps wanting
And you have to go reminding me of tangibility
Of reality
And this isn’t like you
Laughing and poking
This is you looking at me
Have I ever looked at you looking at me?
Or let you look at me looking at you?
I don’t know what you’re seeing
That’s what forces me to break away
Realizing you could be disappointed
I don’t know why I want it
I have the good sense to know I shouldn’t
And not to act on it
But I’d like to curl up with you
Eventually you approach me and I’d like it if you stayed
You’re not heavy on me like other arms
And I wonder if for every pair
There’s the heft and the bearer
And I’d say sorry for the strain
But I don’t because you wouldn’t understand
And I couldn’t explain
Still You
I wonder if I dipped my toe
Just ever so slightly into your soul
If the sheen would be silver
If you let me read your palm
Could it be?
I was wrong all along
That devious smile melts
With me in mind
Your eyes are darting
No longer, I’m found
“You’re fine”
I’ll coo
All the okays
And pretend it’s true
I daydream and daydream
But you are still you
Yo Se Mañana
I’ve had to say goodbye to a lover before
But not like this
We are in transit
We are rushing
We are late
What’s new?
A Mexican and the only Swede in the world with a malfunctioning internal clock
Wind whips
I pray
Probably to whatever god your mother gave us a blessing by last night
I am busy
Fast steps
Don’t feel
You said, “Try to remember you have a boyfriend before two a.m.”
Try to remember?
Try to forget
The magnitude of our love takes up the majority of my consciousness
Around the sharp vertices I shove cotton pads of small talk
Try to laugh and smile and relate
And be everything anyone bargained for when meeting me
“Dance with me,” You demand
Your hips swaying in little shapes of exoticism that frighten the xenophobe in me
No matter how green your eyes or pale your skin
You are not white in your lightness
Spanish is your first tongue, dialects and slang of Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Venezuela
“I am a citizen of the world,” you once told me
I am white in all senses of the word
The pink in my cheeks speaks to all shouldn’twouldn’tcouldn’ts pulsing through me
The Nordic shy tells me to decline
The American pride insists I do
But you take my hand
And I fumble
Feet everywhere
Hips nowhere
And arms dangle
I am white white white
In that I am awkward
In that I have to swallow the syllables of your second last name
And regurgitate them measuredly
I pick up the words you drop hastily
Short and hot
Coño
I imitate, a toddler to her father
It carries all the red I need to throw into the world for a moment of disdain
I stubbed my toe
I spilled my drink
You a lay a cold mano on my back
We walk
“I wish we were naked in bed so I could-”
Tell me how much you love me?
Make me bite my screams into my skin
Blood trilling when my voice shouldn’t
“-put my freezing hand on your back”
In these moments of tear lined solace
I laugh
Once again you are giving me what I need
Like I have struggled and failed to do for you
“If it’s too hard for you, tell me now”
Like I could back out
Like we would drop this and not shatter
“You’re only nineteen”
It is a diagnosis, an accusation, a threat
I want to be more than just nineteen with you
I want to be novia and sleeping and perfection
I’ve never been good at having my long limbs bound in marionette strings
I loathe the tangle but you just want to know
I’m home. I’m safe. I love you.
And I am, so I do.
But it’s not home, it’s empty.
“Eleven days,” you say
We will spend an accumulation of hours together
between my doting on best friend
“Three months,”
You will graduate and I will be there
In a sundress and a smile
“Three years,”
I will be free of academic obligations
Something like an adult
We won’t be bound to anything but the whim of our conjoined adventurous spirits
You teach, teach, teach me
You tell me that the lone freckle on my right breast is a lunar
The smattering across your shoulders are pecas
I point out the words I know pollo asado, semaforo, dedos de pies
You laugh laugh laugh
sí, mami you say
or niña bonita
or amor
I call you what I know
Snygging
Älskling
Love
Yo no se manana, I hum
During dishes, in bed; absentmindedly
You agree
“You do not know tomorrow”
I do
Tomorrow
I will still be mourning
Waking alone in a tear drenched pillow
The soggy imprints on my cheek will paint me older
I will be sore and I will send love in the little ways I know how
Dear Lover (1)
Dear Lover,
Remember me?
We were friends in eighth-grade at the painfully awkward age of fourteen. Well, painful for me.
Look, I’m sorry. I know I’ve said it before since then, but your ears were muffled with contempt and my words slurred with confusion. I knew what I did was wrong but I couldn’t really explain why I did it.
I was so scared. I wasn’t supposed to feel that way about you. I wasn’t supposed to like what we did so much. I couldn’t parade it around as practice, not even in the private confines of my mind. I loved feeling your body against mine, your soft curved body. I loved your mouth, so warm and wet on me, always moving perfectly. I loved how private it was, our touches purely ours, the kisses a secret actually kept.
I liked it until I got scared. I liked it until I realized others might have to know. That if you liked me you might not just settle for cuddling too closely under the covers while we discussed boys.
Did that hurt you? God, I was so ignorant of your emotions, such a bitch. I talked about boys all the time. Why would I kiss you, then flirt with him? I had something to prove. Obtaining a boyfriend was all the rage. Kissing girls was not yet the thing to do.
And now? Now it is okay to kiss girls; if you’re drunk at a party and there’s a crowd to impress. If you’re shot gunning smoke or you’re craving the attention you so rightly deserve. But I don’t desire this. I’ve never wanted a girl like I wanted you. Maybe it was because I hadn’t yet learned the correlation between the term ‘desire’ and heat trickling through my abdomen, hadn’t learned to steer it in more simple directions. All I knew was that I needed to be ashamed.
I didn’t mean to out you. That wasn’t the intention. I was scared and young, not ready for the implications of your poetry, not ready to be held that closely by a person who also revealed her deepest, darkest secrets to me. I was only fourteen.
Even now it sounds like a frivolous plea, the thing I cling to because there is nothing else. I fear I stole something from you that was never mine to have. You unveiled something in me, awakened the woman within when my hips and breasts sprouted and I was unsure why. You answered my questions with caresses and kisses that the puberty books never seemed to cover.
I think I killed the same thing in you. I cradled it and subsequently choked it. Frightened by the monster I had created, frightened by myself when I was with you.
I’m sorry.
I hope you don’t remember me,
Skai
Morning After Bath
I throw myself into the tub.
I attempt to pull the lever with my foot. Success.
The warmth encompasses feet first. Soon it will spread. Soon my hips, belly, breasts will share in the pleasure. My knees and shoulders will not. I remember how I hardly fit in a tub and shove the sour tangibility of the notion away.
I am small, like my worries. Soon mom will be in to shut off my personal waterfall. Soon dad will lift my slippery body into a towel (I’ll squirm but never slip). Soon it will be time for lullabies and kisses.
But it is not evening, I am not small.
The tap runs as urgently as I did from his bed.
I turn it off with super strength toes
I was furious. Why didn’t I matter?
I am washing away shame and attempting to soak away the headache, as if the alcohol’s residual toxins are coated across my skin instead of within the folds of my brain, as if dehydration can be cured through osmosis. A couple Tylenol and many cups of water will cure the ache, but the shame?
I wanted to tell him that he is wrong, that I am not disgusting.
But here I am
w a n t i n g
o n l y
t o d i s s o l v e
Waters of Me
You are innocently egocentric
I want to bathe you in the waters of me
Teach the trivialities;
the shape of my taste buds
I swirl in different ways
And chuckle morbidly
You cannot fathom a function
Not programmed to suit your needs
You cock your head
and I cock my tongue
Easy now, he’s just an egg
I want to explain the ways of the world
Dunk you in my waters
Shock you into heliocentric realism
New perspectives are scary, but brighter
I’ll fill you with omniscient light
Enlightened with equality
Wise beyond your genders’ capacity
I want to drown you in the waters of me
until you understand that I am God
Chill you into the theology
Shaking and shivering, praying
but only ever to yourself
Dripping in the waters of you
is God too
A Belated Introduction
You told me that I danced with every person there. Naturally. I dance with strangers, get the boys on the fire escape to vie for the honor of bumming me a square, which lucky guy’s got a light? I chat up the bathroom line. Flirt equally with the pretty girls and guys and pair them to dance. I kiss someone a foot shorter than me. I don’t see you during the duration of the party even though we came together. I don’t notice the music even though three bands play. On our way out the door I tumble down a flight of steps then laugh. I lay my head in your roommate’s lap and sidle closer when he slings his arm around me. I chat on the phone with your friend, my voice just subtly hinting at everything I have to offer, you take the phone back, “Yeah, I already have…She’s wearing my coat right now…”. I giggle into your roommate’s thigh. This is not a single night’s worth of cheap-liquor induced behavior; this is me.
I am not the girl who doesn’t get to come. I am not wet, this is not sexy. Friction, friction, hurt. Blood. I give you my mouth instead. You want what I have deemed forbidden. You come near where you shouldn’t. Inequality is wet and resentment is hot. I flatten myself for the second-best of a half-hearted embrace. I slowly slope into you, forced under the heavy darkness of sleep.
I wake to find you playing the guitar in your striped t-shirt and boxers, a frayed bit of cloth hugging your wrist, foot bobbing. I’ve awoken in someone else’s fantasy. You are a flavor of perfection I haven’t requested. Still, I want you. You leave your love for me; your fingers are less tender along my skin. I am not afraid to remind you that you know what I need. But where ever you broke me before, I break again. “There’s blood. That’s disgusting”. I am white hot. I am up, out of the peaceful cocoon of blankets and limbs. I whip up my skirt, snap my bra, tug on my shirt. Swallow the acidity boiling within me. I hear you, confused and pleading. Have you tasted my toxic hatred yet? Drink up. I am not this.
I go home to headache and churning belly. I let my anger steep in the lukewarm bath. I lay with wet hair. I awake in a cloud of fuck yous and I’m sorrys. Who is this?
