shimmytwist

* these days sylvia, he makes me laugh again. we discuss cooking and the weather as though they're the only things that ever bound us together. i tell him how the last thing i placed in the oven was my own head, and how i'd hold it there waiting for something to happen, when not even my hair could catch fire. but sylvia, everything i touch these days seems to burn no smoke, or cinders just slight red flames at the tips and edges of people and things - wherever my fingers happen to linger. and sylvia, i think i'm in love with the one man i swore i would never let near my heart. i call him my husband sometimes, but only in conversati

* i had that dream again, virginia i thought i was dying but they said no, you are not dying. it's your child that is dying. and i think about my husband, i think about the father of my child and how neither of them must ever know. i am not an accomplice, i comfort myself as i make plans to dispose of the body. so i tell my husband that i did a bit of gardening, and i tell my lover i was digging for buried treasure - and they believe me. i tell them i gave my rock collection away, virginia and they believe me. guilt is a useless emotion unless it weighs you down enough to kill you, and no one ever thinks to check your pockets once you've

* i want to write to you, i want to write about you the way i used to when your body was my anchor and my head was underwater - before my life became defined within the space that separates diving and drowning. there was something then in the way you'd make me laugh spitting up blood - it felt like death from a ruptured lung. and how sweet it tasted from all the sugar-binges of self loathing i had to swallow back down with it. (i never despised myself with more enthusiasm than when you held my hand) and remember the day you tied me up in the darkroom and spilled photographic developer on my back to watch your image appear and super

* first, cut your hair short (but not shorter than it's ever been) so you can grow it back over the years together with your grief. leave your eyes alone for the time being - you'll need them to see everything clearly like an animal corpse decomposing in slow, slow motion (scorch the lids if you think you'll want to close them) unhinge your jaw - you will need to do this in order to swallow more (of your own pride, mostly). leave the rest of your face intact so you can lose it piece by piece as you go along. your neck needs to be broken at a precise angle to make it appear as if you are laughing while in pain from having your hair p

* it's the way the world looks on the other side, you know how water would be sky, but for the ripples so i see her in the smooth black pools of coffee cups the creases of my bed-sheets like fingerprints on glass and you here, where my collarbone meets the shoulder our lives, just as they are, but folded

* my palms have grown too cold to be read, according to my sisters. they hold them up to the light to see if my skin is frozen over. they call me december, say that i am lost to the frost. my sisters don't know that i am bloodless, and i don't tell them that i let you in, and that once you flowed through me hungrily, i don't tell them how i traded my breath for that soft current and that there is nothing left now that you are gone. i don't tell them how my fingers can no longer bend or how my veins are hollow, waterless riverbeds and that not even the wind moves through me now. my sisters and i still own the night, i change their pillows i

* i divorced my husband this summer it was a long time coming he took the baseball bat, the leather belts and the children that have his hair or his eyes (some of them are yours) i kept the guitar and the cookbook and the bruises (some of them are yours as well) my husband now lives with a woman whose lips are shaped like half-eaten olives they have that in common. i haven't gone out on a limb ever since i broke my arm though the pine is still there with the empty nest i go every day and check the hollow,   but all i find is hard amber, eggshells and not a word from you. not a word from you.

* i fell in love with you a long time before i decided to love you. and by falling i mean breaking both hands against the concrete street, and by love i mean feeling your body ache instead of mine when i sleep.

* my sister worries i carry too many loaves of fresh white bread when i speak of you she says they keep falling to the floor and it's a waste she tells me they love you so it would hurt more when they leave and that i shouldn't feel so much it's a sickness of the lungs, my sister says, that quickly spreads to the arms and you find yourself holding on to things until your nails bite through the skin and you get blood on your hands sometimes it's theirs, sometimes your own always always this happens and the days curl around your body like rusted pipes and you suffocate if you ever try to laugh again my sister says i was born without a rib c

* michael, i don't know where to begin somewhere between your pills and my love for him and the years that parted our summers we became strangers and now the days are melting mid winter and i begin to remember who we once could have been although we couldn't have there are dead birds in my arms when i think of you and i never liked the way you looked at me when he wasn't around really i didn't like i was a stray cat, starving and abandoned about to claw your eyes out like you might take me home if only i would crawl into your arms   michael, you couldn't even save yourself. and where are you now? you walk in and out of our lives mine and