I'm surprised I haven't mentioned my love of writing on this thread, especially since it is such a defining part of who I am. Plus, I consider Stevie Nicks my catalyst, the writer who showed me the written word's capacity to not only emotionally sway a reader but also to change him or her. I have very poor confidence in my abilities as a writer, seeing myself as incompetent in some form throughout every piece I write. I am truly invested in literature because I LOVE it, because it has provided me with a medium of communication that no one can really take away from me. It's as vital to me as breathing.
I'm hoping to be a creative writing major in college. My top choice is currently Kenyon College in Gambier, OH but I might list all of my top schools in a future post.
I am almost done with a short story that may become my favoite piece yet. I'll post that when I finish it.
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"Old Habits Die Hard" (August 13th, 2009)
I eat and I sleep so I can eventually
spin:
My arms to span east and west
To their corners of some sea,
my legs to launch heart and mind to heaven
and the Souls of my feet far in hell.
And the rotation begins,
I do time in suspension
all the time I gave up
So as to pollinate you.
So I spin and I spread
and I learn to live thin
Since loving you isn’t enough and
you’re so good at hating me first.
This is my body, given up for you.
(and I don’t think I know your name)
"Gold Dust" (July 18th, 2009)
It makes the pocketwatch far from
My pocket
Tick against my thigh
At the type of speed
My heartbeat misses. It's like
The rain can't be wrong today
If it's dropping gold for me
From the hands of a man
Birthed in foreign fields--
Expelled from a womb
That still tells her wives' tales
In terms of pesos and siestas.
It's "adios" to that
For the man
Who now loans me the dollar
So I forget how to nap--
Forget how to eat in a world
Taking it too easy
In a world
That won't stop moving
In a world
Bound to a clock
From some world
That can't tell when time's up.
I choose to roll in gold dust
In a world
Where I can't be golden.
"Death Row is a State of Mind" (May 22nd, 2009)
The day I decided that I was no longer living for you, I started my slow descent to the bottom of the Dead Sea. Buoyant force doesn’t do **** when the atmosphere feels as heavy on your head as it actually is. All this pounding in my ears and implosion on my skull makes “light as air” simply not good enough; I want it to be lighter. I want a long drive at its best with somebody who has nothing to talk about, a Yuletide most celebrated without plastic garlands along each banister—but I crave casual conversation all too much now, and Christmas just can’t be Christmas without halls decked in holly.
You have come to show me that death row is a state of mind, a sense that cannot be shaken by that feeling you’re supposed to get when he holds you, or when your little boy paints a pretty picture and tells you to keep it. I’m the one of the two of us who sees beyond the plank, searching for heaven out of a seven-forty-seven window and finding solace in the wiser words of foolish men. You’re the one with September nights that have morphed into witching hours, blankly tapping the heavyweight bag twice with your left fist, soon after swinging around with the right.
And the truly amazing thing is that I can watch you without sensing each blow now. I’ve got a heaven and a hell to find and a way to find them: through midday moons and gasoline, red-tailed cardinals and dogwood.
The truly amazing thing is that you’re the only one with sore fists while I can finally see every star as the Northern star.
"Bonne Hiver, the Third Chapter" (April 28th, 2009) [about a conversation I had with an old teacher)
My name rolled off her tongue like honey. With her, the four letters that constitute who I am didn’t have to puncture the sweet still of silence lingering between us. Her tongue twisted the word just enough that it eased between her teeth and lips and into the emaciated air, her breath flowing freely to me from across our desks. The quiet was interrupted by something far too beautiful to consider a burden: the softness she expelled from her lips became my mantra; it rang to me in that transient moment and rings to me still.
“Dani,” she said, her voice slightly quivering, “tell me everything.”
And I did. I shakily recalled the worst moments of my life, choking in my attempt to exhale each syllable and string them together in a way that might make sense of my desperation. I told her what I knew of that sickness she had studied, the one so ancient and cross that no crucifix could ever fix it quite enough. I told her that I was happy and healthy and free, all while my heartstrings stretched and eventually shredded under the mere thought of return into open empty arms. After minutes of the most honest communication I can remember having with another, I made a point to assure her that I was just fine—plain old fine, one big step ahead of it all.
Yet, she still asked the question: “Are you afraid?”
I hesitated, and then my eyes climbed from my feet up to her face, and then inside of their counterpart within her own: “Yes, I think I am.”
I tattooed it to the inside of my mind, the way she looked at me after I was finally revealed. That stare targeted my eyes and spread like wildfire, the synapses between my every thought and bone firing signals left and right until my toes were alight. I fueled her somehow, resonated to something inside of her that I know someone else riled up a time or two. Her eyes held no questions of whether or not that moment was the one in which she should expand herself to some greater purpose; she knew it, her certainty emanating through the most convincing of charcoal irises from beneath a velveteen layer of tears. I could sense that I was being analyzed to every intricate detail of my makeup, for eyes like that discover scrolls of scripture, witness the crumbling of our modern Egyptian Alexandrias and always feast upon the simplest mechanisms of a beating heart.
It is in that stare that I fell in love with being loved.