Friday, June 19, 2009

Ten Tales of Domestic Disturbance


10 Tales of Domestic Disturbance

Deconversion

God has his eye on the cherry chocolate cupcake. This is why I make a break for it. Blessed is the gal who shoots chickens and leaves them in your backyard.

Just Married

Home is where the night bleeds. You feast the front porch I’d dreamed of for so long. The tides cannot help themselves, but after dinner there will be a little light again, a little crème fraiche from a box.

Promise

I returned to the tool shed, but only to steal all the screwdrivers. I know we’d said we’d meet there if we turned 67 and neither of us was divorced yet, but. I leave six teeth in the box of nails: countless things I’ve held onto all these years.

Fantasy Vacation

A family travels ten hours from the Midwest, having won the Total Ocean Immersion Package. The children wanted volcanoes, although they’ve never seen the sea. A mother’s thighs laid waste under anemic sun; a father pats the left one before disappearing under a wave.

Diet Season

The teenagers are funoodling around in the attic so the whole household can hear. Bellies flop and slip. Pleasantly. Like vegetables I make a wish.

Scarlet Letter

There was some desire milling about the barbeque, so I brought you up to the roof with me, where we could see everything at once. I wore a mask, and you: waders. The sprinkler scattered burning liquid over the universe of lawn.


Sunday, April 5, 2009

We

flew off the roof holding hands

weeded oceanward, forgetting to hold our breath

scraped each other into bloodshed via thorny bouquets

fell under the aspirin’s spell into the tub (my soles pillowed your cheek as I flubbed)

climbed into the backseat: exhausted, mouthlocked, scavenging the pipes for ______

guzzled that gasoline like beers. The police found you facedown in peanuts; me heaped under the table

hung like matching chandeliers in the library, relieving ourselves on the rug. (I could not make out
your last words; locked inside your stubborn throat.)

[I am sorry I did not suck the venom out of your hand. I am sorry you did not bandage the papercut that split my thigh wide and gangrenous.]

fed one another TNT by the forkful because you said it was wheatgrass

dragged daggers along snow-white throats

had not planned on bludgeoning each other with The Unabridged Tolstoy

had a blast with grandmother’s shotguns, twinned sparkling bloodmasks: fit for a ball!

crawled into the abandoned cellar, then into the core of hot, wet earth.

‘d known it was arsenic, known it was quicksand, known there was no

followed our ragged petals over the

were uncertain who went first

Friday, October 26, 2007

Conversation Between the Lovelorn: an Attempt at Something New. (An Excerpt)

(Enter CHERYL and STEVE, stage zero. STEVE lifts CHERYL’s finger via her wrist via her elbow via her shouldersocket. STEVE looks underneath the air.)

CHERYL: Hardy har. I tricked you! You thought you would find the enmagicked word, and what is there but the nauseated cotton candy of regret?

STEVE: Why did she go away after all, after I left her on the prairie roadside?

CHERYL: I made a little pick-a-nick for us, see? Something is growing out of the ground and we shall eat it and it shall take us over.

(CHERYL unfolds picnic blanket full of holes and lays it on the ground in ditch next to I-90 W.)

CHERYL: See, Steve, how the sky is wrapping around itself in preparation for our divine pick-a-nick?

STEVE: Warping, you mean. Warping around itself as we do, spending its bones. I thought you were bringing boiled chicken, my favorite, but now I see this was just another womanly ploy.

CHERYL (pulling Steve onto blanket, awkwardly straddling him): Wasn’t there more underfoot, underhand, then? Wasn’t there “transcendence”?

STEVE: I thought she meant to pull me up by the bootstraps into glee. It is our human responsibility, isn’t it?

CHERYL (staring off into traffic while grinding on Steve): He acted like my father sometimes, like when he’d upend all the furniture in the night and I wanted to stab his eardrums. You will certainly be the same. You were certainly separated from him at birth.

STEVE (staring off into ditch of impotence): What was her name anyway?

CHERYL: The quilt fell away in the night. The cold put its spell on my lips. Nobody was there in bed with me.

STEVE: The guilt? Prairie roadside is not so bad—do you think?

CHERYL: Listen. The treetips sound so distressed and unruly now.

STEVE: I am waiting for something again. Stupidly. And I do not know what it is. Therefore someday I shall purchase a condominium. Someday soon. It will have no shutters, as condominiums refuse all resemblances to Home. I will live alone in the condominium of grief for all eternity.

CHERYL: That cannibal on the news ate his victims in order to make them part of him, you know. To make them the closest ever. It makes me feel that I, too, could be a cannibal, and proudly. What a strong identity: Cannibal!

STEVE: Someday soon I shall purchase a condominium by the sea and someday later I will die by getting swept out into it.

CHERYL (sobbing into Steve’s armpit): I am getting to be an old woman. Creatures and people in movies, they mate and go out and get their condos. I do not. Therefore, I am not people. Why gingham? Why romance? No, I am not people anymore.

STEVE (petting Cheryl’s ribcage): I spent 98% of myself on her. Now nothing makes sense except waterfowl and artificial ginger-lemon tea.

CHERYL: She was a cunt. He was a cunt. What else is left to say? C-U-N-T. We have got to move out into the shine—it is waiting for us to stop repeating ourselves.

STEVE: Someday soon I shall…

CHERYL: The treetips sound so distressed and unruly…

(TRAFFIC NOISE enters stage right, louder and louder and broken-sounding. STEVE and CHERYL keep lying in the ditch as RAIN moves in.)

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

excuse the draft

Therapy-Story, Revised

Time up and quit me. Meats hung stranded in the windows. I reinvent paper dolls out of disappointment: for Gary: the therapist. His idea. You can imagine the satisfaction.


EXHIBIT A: Paper Discoball

Medium: inside-out feathers, soaked in blood and lumpy Hollandaise X made each springtime, while en route to Tasmania for the air-guitar playoffs.

Description: X could not follow recipes, and preferred the imagined sound of the air guitar to notes of the actual instrument, which he played sloppily and with so much melodramatic grief. My discoball does not shine, is not mirrored, and bleeds all over Gary’s carpet, which is gray as X’s sensual demeanor. Gary examines his fingernails. It is a general rule that all X’s prefer the wrong thing.



EXHIBIT B: Paper Kittycat

Medium: Oceanfall, together they made a pain in my throat, ash saved from hundreds of cigarettes I smoked at four in the morning, waiting for X’s return.

Description: Did you have pets at home? Gary inquires, mistaking kittycat for koka nut. Bats, perhaps, or silverfish like those your mother squashed in childhood? No, Gary, there were no pets. He demands names and shoe sizes of the pigeons that roosted on the el stop outside our bedroom window, of the cockroaches that lived in our dishwasher. “Pet,” like everything else, has limitless definitions, says Gary. But I do not believe he understands the infinite combinations of ideas the universe births for no reason, all those accidental conceptions. X, for example, birthed by sixteen-year-old mother. Gary says: yes, I can see how important those pigeons were to the two of you. How you ingest cockroach residue at each meal because it is so impossible to fully cleanse the palate of longing.


EXHIBIT C: Waddedloveknotofpaper, exploding out of Paper Molotov Cocktail, followed by abstraction of paper peace.

Medium: Shards of plump red heartbeat: mine, spattered on bedroom wall. Residue of accidental appearance of stranger in my bedchamber.

Description: I do not mention X and Heloise out on the lawn before our window, “necking,” or any of the others. I recount The Stranger’s overall perfect genetic makeup, residing most especially in his seashell-like toenails. Is he a robot? Gary says. If he is a robot, this is fabulous. A robot is what you have needed for so many moons. Yes, Gary, he is a robot. Oh yes, I am drowning so deep in the blameless, predictable quicksand of robot-love.


EXHIBIT D: Consecutivelinked3-Dquestionmarksofpaperechoingwaythefuckoutinto…

Medium: Unknown.

Description: Campfire love, kitchen table love, drunken love out on the balcony in front of the neighbors. When it was so easy to achieve whatever I desired? How is it so easy to lose?


EXHIBIT E: Paper Magic Wand

Medium: Purchased at discount magic shop across the street, while Gary takes an “emergency call” from X. The wand is transparent as childhood, so full of water and purple glitter.

Description: I plunk Gary in the head, hoping to turn him into anyone who can tell me how to exist. Gary says: ooh, can you turn me into Neil Armstrong, floating weightless and untethered around the moon? Can you turn me into Sacajawea? Make me famous, and loving, and kind, and not-myself? Yes Gary, yes I can, I say, and he morphs into Liberace, Julia Child, and his biological mother before my eyes. Later, I will plunk my robot repeatedly while he sleeps, plunk him human, plunk him flawed and understanding. And Heloise, repeatedly, as if with a lead pipe. I will plunk X into his best self, which existed so deep below the surface that nobody but me could see it. I will plunk myself into somebody blank and whole, who has known no grief.

Friday, October 12, 2007

hey, i wrote something today

My Guru

1.

This morning my horoscope advised me to look at the world as it is, without imposing my beliefs on it.

A man stands on the streetcorner, chewing glass like candy, blood waterfalling out his mouth. Arms of steel: literally. Sign says: Guru of Blood and Pain.

I am no revolutionary, I say. I’ve just been feeling unbearably sad lately.

Hong Kong, he says, and tickles my left armpit with a metal hook, draws blood.

When I’m not looking, he pushes a clawful of bloody glass toward my face.

I would really rather have a cookie. A nice soft cookie full of peanut butter, or Minnesota, or nothing.

Pretend it’s a cookie of glass.

I don’t believe in cookies of glass.

Then don’t pretend.

He opens my jaws wider, wider yet, so wide I’m not sure whether I’m screaming or swallowing myself whole.

2.

Later, in bed with my guru, I have a lot of questions. He allows me no bandages, no aspirins. He is cruel, my guru, cold and silent, but my guru can fuck. My mouth is an open wound, and I write questions for him on a chalkboard.

WHY THE FUCK WOULD ONE CHOOSE TO EAT GLASS?

Because one has lost his arms.

WHY THE FUCK HAVE YOU LOST YOUR ARMS?

Since childhood, I’d wanted a hook for a hand.

THAT STORY IS BULLSHIT. TELL ME ANOTHER.

Gurus do not have stories. I will tell you someone else’s. Once there was a woman. Once there was a man. Etc.

A WHOLE STORY!

One night the woman cut the man’s arms off while he slept. She ran off with them, and buried them in the core of the earth. The man wandered the earth, searching for his lost arms. He never found them again.

WHO WAS SHE????

She liked to wander the markets with beetleshells in her hair, with fires writhing underskin. In other words she was a cunt.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MAN?

He got distracted. He got distracted again. He forgot he’d ever had arms, or a woman. He became a guru, because gurus have no stories. Now shut your mind and go to sleep.

FUCK OFF.


3.

I am trying to make my guru jealous by telling him a story about a dream I had about another armless man.

In the dream I was the only woman allowed to touch the arms. I removed them, and rubbed a golden ointment into the shoulder sockets.

In the morning his arms had branched and bloomed. In the morning he had soft flowercups for hands, and their petals stretched like fingers to receive my softness. Each time he touched me, petals fell off, so delicate he was. But at night they grew back again, even softer than before.

My guru said I told too many stories that weren’t true. He told me to go to sleep and have a different dream.

But my dream was always the same. What I did for him in the dream was the only thing I had done for anybody in such a long time. I was in awe of my facility, my strength, my faith.

I awoke to my guru touching me, to cold metal on my back, cold metal deep inside me. It was not just the arms: my guru’s whole body was like metal.


4.


That bullet came a century ago, said my guru. Yet you still hold it in your heart. Get over it!

Why don’t you reach for it? I said. For me? Why don’t you try saving me with some wisdom like every other guru?

He shot me in the foot and whistled himself deeper into the woods. He was always whistling Schoenburg, my guru, so that I wanted to tear open his throat with my hands.


5.


The night I was ready to leave, I tugged at my guru’s arms in his sleep. We had supped on whiskey and stale bread and he belched in his sleep without flinching.

The arms were fused to stubborn tendon, hard bone. They would not change, the arms. They would never be the arms he was born with. I would not remove them. I was capable of no salve. They could not save me.

At that moment I fell in love.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

remedy 2

Typed meditation. Cereal meditation. Off-the-hook telephone meditation. Meditation of bloodletting, loss-of-marbles, soufflé. (I have burnt the edges off this one, burnt em clean off.)

Molly would say I am making a meditation out of a moleskull, but her Larry meditates only on fishhooks; lover Reynaldo on discoloration of elbow.

Clothespin meditation? I-love-my-mother-in-law meditation. Meditation via harassment via diabolical dogtooth.

Stranger X, of course, did not meditate at all, thinking it tyrannical and too trendy.

I have always wanted to slash Larry’s jugular meditation. Meditation-in-peaces while driving off that (stranger X enters, stage left, wearing holy mittens, hands more brutal than any I remember) cliff again.

The grand idea of meditation!

Ommmmmmmmmmmm.

Stranger X has always been an asshole and always will be, therefore I love him all the more; therefore I behead the paper dolls for him and him alone.

If only the world were disinhabited entirely, meditation could be such a jiffy! I weave a meditation out of tinfoil and leave it in the street for somebody else to weather.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Betrayal-Story

True: my brilliantine laugh pirouettes autumn-leaflike through midair, but I was never a geometrical numbskull nor a harpsichord wizard like the rest.

Across the table there is nothing to say. Later I whip myself silly over it out behind the shed where you chopped our cherrytree with plump neighbor Heloise, sharing cherries until all hours of the afternoon, staining your mouths by the facefull.

Run a-sea with me? you said at dinner. Run amok?

The uncertainty of your chewing motion promised we would never again love each other like we had at noon sharp the day before.

Problem: I've forgotten the correct dimensions with which to construct a tear. (I believe Mother used romancenovel-cornstarch-laced-with-celebrity-obituary. But hers turned out flat and unintelligible as razor blades.)

You come outside, wrap yourself around myself like a string around a finger, rope around Joan of Ark--depending on who's doing the telling.

I'm doing it.

Solution: the scars will go on being hideous; the moon doesn't illuminate anybody's mistakes.