what i do when you're not looking

split up the deck

2012-02-09T05:43:00.000-08:00

all hail the chief

sometimes we find ourselves

on our precious knees

in a field of clovers

all of our

hopes

desires

wants

rise up like lacy steam

off of our

scalding

hot

bodies

we think if

we hack at our

own flesh

we spill enough of our

own blood

if we

tear out our hair

if we

make a river

of our tears

if we

forget the

names of

our mothers

we will be

forgiven

reborn

lovable

perfect

we will

you

it's only natural

2012-02-08T05:45:00.000-08:00

shooting gallery

i found a

dead baby bird

once

pink puckered

shiny

flesh

and

half feathered

broken body

limp in my

makeshift cradle

hands

and the starlings

laughed down

from the big

oak

where i thought

fairies lived

i sat alone

cross legged

with tears plopping

on the wet ground

until papaw

found me

and

pulled me in his lap

for awhile he said nothing

me with the baby bird

and him with

everything

then

he squinted

at the sky

and said

gravely

starlings

can't be trusted

they're

murderers

cunning

ruthless

(glorious)

he gestured at

his precious plum

trees

letting

his meaty

hand

fell back

on my shoulder

too heavy

for five

and

(softly)

some of god's creatures

are almost too cruel

to love

but we must find a way

to love them that much more

i've been watching

murmuration

videos

when they rise up

into their trusted

black knots

against screaming

blue

skies

i wonder if the

starlings

ever wish

for a

different

profession

and i know

i must

love them

that much more

my little honey bee

2012-02-07T05:07:00.001-08:00

letters from july

it always happens on a beach

your tumbleweed head

bobbing for jelly fish

as the

bandy legged

blunt faced

children

hold fast

the conch

to their ear

already feeling

the inevitable lonely

i peel back my dress

to sun my

thighs

shade my eyes

and smile

like crumpling paper

like our history

like all of the letters

i wrote when i was

twelve

as though

every courageous bee

shining in the sun

as though

every glittery crested

wave

as though

the death rattle

of the reading

woman's

maidenhead

next to me

as though

all of your

tide pools

filled with

best idea fish

isn't a goodbye

the one where loretta becomes famous

2012-02-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

I was sitting outside on my front porch, barefoot, and reading Octavia Butler when the mailman delivered my copies of Bay Woof. I wrote a piece for them about how I found my most adorable companion, Loretta Lynn. It just went live online and I'm just so pleased to be a part of their aesthetically pleasing and thoughtfully published paper.

P.S. On the paper version my name is only one name away from Lynda Barry. It's as though I got to tough the hem of her holy garment.

the end of the end of the beginning

2012-02-01T11:12:00.001-08:00

baby bizzarro

i remember when

you took me to the park

my fingertips

itching

to map your frame

and as you wandered

in a zig zag

across the scrubby

beat up field

i looked up high

and saw 3 balloons

tangled in a tree

i put my hopes

inside the slightly deflated

pink one

because it made me

think of

my own

breath

inside

my own

asthmatic lungs

and besides

it was cute

cradled

so gently

inside the

wizened arms

of our winter

dreams

in which i start writing about my mother

2012-01-29T17:00:00.000-08:00

This is poem my mother wrote. I found it tucked in an envelope filled with love letters and a picture of her in Hawaii, dark skinned and lovely, looking directly at the camera. Her cheekbone was pressed casually under my thumb as I read it.

hey girl

hey girl how you doing?

I’m feeling out of sorts kind of blue

unsure a

bit worthless

and boring

not good enough

blah blah.....

been thinking

bad thoughts again

d. dempsey

I have been studying mothers and children lately, the comfortable ways in which they exist without words, using eyes like cigarette smoke and hands like homemade blankets to cover and lift until the message is received. I've been thinking about what it must do to a person when this worn smooth exchange is vacated and left empty. Things fill up and now I think they must come out.

neil diamond redux

2012-01-26T12:21:00.001-08:00

toucher touching touches

things are less dark

here

where the rocks

became smooth

from worry rubbing

and my knees

became bloodied

little

hummingbirds

knocking

weeping

slowing

stopping

for five days

i wrote letters

each one

marked with a s

each one in ribbons

coiling sickly

on the sawdust

barn floor

i am not your

invisible friend

your wilted

forget-me-nots

in milk glass on your

shipwreck dresser

i am not your shadow

peeled away

from your soul

like photographs

of smiling girls

on summer days

when the sun

still

knew our names

i am not your

half-hearted

night kite

tangled

in an elm tree

i am quiet coral

in the shallows

as the moon slides

her collected

hopes

lovingly

along the

black

sea

sometimes we want more teeth

2012-01-25T14:16:00.001-08:00

always elaine

i held her diamonds

in my hand

pitched them up

for the light to catch

then i put the left one on

holding the right one

in the warmth

of my palm

languidly for awhile

before pushing it

into the same hole

that forgets it's

pierced

after all these years

as i felt the pop

of cartilage success

i wondered

if your momma

ever waited excitedly

at home

with diamonds

in her ears

for someone like you

to kiss her tenderly

and say

hey

baby

tomorrow there will be a soprano solo in choir

2012-01-19T08:34:00.000-08:00

The summer Paige lost her mind we were 14.

I don't know what happened that unusually cold winter that thawed to find Paige's thorny branches unraveling. I spent the school year being good friends with Paige. We had a telepathic connection very early on mingled with a wicked sense of deadpan humor that was rare and relieving. Paige was very smart, smarter than me, and prettier too. I liked that about her and never thought to compare myself in a negative way. I was happy to admire her. Looking back I think I love her, especially in sleepovers where the heat from my body must have surely scalded her as it pressed as close as it dared.

I used to ride my bike to her house a lot and we would hole up in her sparkly sparse room, headphones on to protect ourselves from the potential angriness from either of her parents for making any noise. We would move like panthers in her hallways, each step intentional and filled with fear. Her parents still had shag carpet, a dark depressing brown that met every wall with a thickening at the edges where nothing had ever tread. Paige's room did not have this carpet, but instead a perfect pink shorter carpet that matched the abysmal shock of pink that coated every surface. We started inventing codes around the new year. A language of sorts. Fairly innocuous statements about school events, practice time for choir, or drama lines meant something else entirely. This is how the abused learn to make their own world safe, to make plans, to escape a little.

Paige became withdrawn in spring, quit taking my calls, and made excuses about hanging out after school. By summer I was hustling and trying to make money, pretending I knew how to skateboard to get what I wanted from skater boys, and planning my first mohawk. By summer I thought less and less to call Paige until she finally called me. Meeting up with Paige that stultifying July day felt like being pressed down, suffocated slowly. Her hair was impossibly short, and parts of her scalp showed through in fist sized areas. Paige's eyes were wild and glittery, almost glowing. She spoke so fast, I could hardly keep up, and most of it made little sense. Her delicate brown hands plucked at the air in gentle bird sips, and her body seemed to be filled with an electrical current. She told me that she had started pulling her hair out, little bits at first, and then the bits became like pulling carelessly at grass. She held my hand when she told me that and I cried a little. It was impossible not to. It was also impossible not to find her so beautiful, maybe the most beautiful she had ever been, in that moment. She was filled with a light, a huge piece of sea phosphor, and she smiled more than I had ever seen her. My admiration for her could not have been greater, somehow Paige had found a way to release herself from her abuse, her stresses, her secrets. As I held Paige's perfect hand in mine, I said nothing, my eyes like lamplights to shine on her. As she gathered herself up from the wilted grass she looked back at me once and threw her shorn head back to laugh a musical laugh. I stood awkwardly knowing that the place she was going to would feel like magic to her and I as already dulling into the world she knew before.

So many girls that I have befriended over the years seem to slip through my fingers, sleek and stealthy. Some of them I still wonder about, some of them I know will come back again. Paige never did. But then again, I don't know for sure that she ever really left.

january in north carolina

2012-01-18T04:59:00.000-08:00

from the pitcher mound

this winter is weird

a month ago

the cat's water bowl

was frozen into

a disc of ice

for the mockingbirds to

pretend to be jesus

but the next day

my bare thighs

like twin baby seals

pressed lovingly against

the failing back porch steps

and the most perfect apple

found my vampire teeth

pleasing

a week ago

i walked to work

feet remembering

their own perfect drumline

and when i teased a tall man

carrying a crooked stick

our breaths rose up

like feathers

delicate

and soft

today i woke up

tangled

sweaty necked

hair bramble

twisted blankets

and outside i could

hear

schoolyard birds

chirrupping me

to come play

this winter is weird

all i want is

a cabin

pine sap hands

the snap of the

unlucky branches

under canine feet

and dante's

perfect

glorious

face

steamed up

from

love

if you put a marble in your mouth it makes you psychic

2012-01-10T10:39:00.000-08:00

ever tangled

even kids like me remember happy

wild stumblings in bell bottoms

at outdoor concerts

making friends with

doe eyed long haired boys

wearing nothing but cut off shorts

and headbands

jumping fences to swim at fancy pools

shame faced over my

too big

too last year

hand me down

swimsuit

because some stranger boy

put his finger

in one of the holes

at the high dive

there was some kind of magic

in wide mossy creeks

ankle deep salve

from the texas heat

wild stories tumbled out of

overturned rocks

and a rotting log draped by a lost flannel

was always definitely left by a murderer

abandoned tattered houses

made great clubhouses

or maybe boxes and jagged glass

pushed together to make

walls and roof

lean muscled flesh

could go all day

on a dream

just to have something

our very own

we lived the life

bruised up

keen eyed

knife point

forgotten

kids from rock and roll parents

kids from the projects

kids from god

for the femmes

2011-12-08T04:51:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking back to the 1980's when everything could be summed up by a popped collar, an izod shirt, or a pair of Guess jeans. I was a poor kid with a severe case of the new wave and a part time illegal job doing things you don't want your mother to know about. I would take these blow job dollars, those awkwardly stuffed-in-pockets bills, and buy myself pretty in pink moments, cutting up one thing and punk rock sewing to another thing. I wore hacked up prom dresses with converse. I wore men's suit pants, cut off and rolled up into newsie style, fishnets, and a Sugarcubes tee shirt under a miss matched men's suit vest. Already a survivor and a street kid many times over, this decade of fashion was dedicated to the covering up of all recognizable girl parts. This was the decade of being used, being dead to it, and rocking against it until it was over and I could get up and feel it slide down my shaky colt legs as I wandered into the blackout of Boone's Farm and clove ciggarettes, and the razor on my thighs.

I'm thinking back to the 1990's when riotgrrrl hit me like a ton of ladybricks, and spun me right into pissing on guys, for higher dollars, alcohol buying dollars, drug buying dollars. It was a time for skintight polyester waitress dresses, thick black glasses, white tights, and old lady shoes. I would layer slips upon slips, add tights, and call it an ensemble. Everything was overstated, revealing in an angry way, or way covered up in a challenging way, a look and see but don't you touch kind of way. My dichotomy was prim and slutty, it's not surprising that this was my least slutty moment in my fashion history. I was untouchable, stone, a fucker, not a fuckee. This was a time for uprising, revolting, resisting, and wearing a whole lot of Crass tee shirts.

I'm thinking about now, a closet of carefully selected vintage dresses, the waistbands torn out and re-sewn to add inches to accommodate the roundness of my body, the hemlines raised to accommodate the shortness of my stature, the plunging necklines that free up my tits, putting them on a very huge display. I'm thinking about those sweet little fancy soldiers, lines up in a walk in closet, in RGB color scheme. I'm thinking about the teals, the pinks, the reds, the wrong way for fat people but oh so right for me stripes, eensy weensy polka dots, mandarin collars, tiny little white buttons, cap sleeves, op art prints, and the joy of putting these dresses on my body, the shimmery feeling of a $5 vintage dress. This decade is about vulnerability as strength, kink as cartharsis and the most heightened and freeing pleasure of my life as a sexual being. My sexuality in this decade of fashion is a released Papilionoidea, glittery and sharp, flowing from my clothes like honey.

In 20 years I haven't changed a thing about my approach to buying nearly everything second hand, making it my own, reinventing what personal style means. I have dedicated myself to fashion without looking to magazines or books for help. I have dedicated my body to be a canvass, a color palatte, a target for material. I am a slave to a "perfect" dress, a perfect pink shell top, a kitschy vintage pin, a large and gorgeous clutch, a hot pair of heels, an accordion skirt in an interesting color. My eyes are on alert, always scanning, trained on certain fabrics, prints, colors, and size. My fashion is a divining rod for beauty, personal and to be shared. My sexuality and my fashion are forever entangled like eyelashes on the first girl I loved in high school, from my first fashion decade. The one I fucked in her waterbed, silent, sleek, and secret, still some of the sweetest kisses of my entire life.

your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

2011-11-23T08:29:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate to have my sweet Melanie Valera of Tender Forever in my car for a road trip to Olympia from Portland, directly after she recorded her latest music, Where Are We From. The weather was as usual in the Pacific Northwest, shadowed by rain. After I gave my strongest oath of secrecy and protection of her new music, we eased along the I5 we listened to this new music of hers. I love my friend and I love her music always but this newest is my favorite.

When she asked me to do her one page it was an immediate yes. Although I had never done one before, I was eager to sing her praises. I hope that you enjoy reading it and buy my friend's music please. You will be so glad you did.

http://shop.krecs.com/collections/all/products/klp237

this little life

2011-11-17T11:25:00.000-08:00

porch kitty

so you brought another

rat

sleek furred king

tail longer than my forearm

i held my hand over my mouth

danced a jig in the parlor

squeaked in horror

my fine hero

scooped his lifeless body up

but not his entrails

like tiny pink

garden hoses

coiled wetly

on our doorstep

you watched on

crooked smirk

steeple teeth

scarred over lamplight eye

one chewed off ear

and fur

like grey mists

you look so sweet

when you roll onto your side

vulnerable fat belly

alarm meow

murder

heart

25 years and he is still a battle chest of monarch butterflies

2011-11-17T05:23:00.000-08:00

you slumber on

if i stretch my soul out

iron it flat

decorate it with ribbons and bows

will it

can it

pass for very good?

if i run so hard

my legs become

long and sweet

streams of honey

will they

can they

run me smack into grace?

if i smile more at the unsuspecting

children in grocery stores

wicked eels licking at my ankles

grubby wanting hands

and already vacant eyed

mistrust

will they

can they

be safe from harm?

if i traipse across county lines

pearl handled guns at my hips

and a leather brow

old boots my papaw gave me

before he clutched his

precious

jewel

heart

for the last time

will i

can i

bring him back?

because

this weeping

lonely

unjust

and

warring

earth

did not know

long enough

my papaw

a piece of ribbon in case i forget

2011-11-16T14:21:00.000-08:00

my atlanta

rabbit holes

run along secret hills

where once the smell of

cabbage soup

whistled in the holes

empty

growling

baby guts

twenty

aggressive pointy mouths

grab handfuls of my skirts

fifteen

friendly faces

ask me things i know

the answer to

scarlet cheeks

toothy smile

apple core

big wide bodies

sweet potato spears

side eye glances

and honest palms

holding doors

gallantly

for decorated

war widows

old and worn fabric

comfort in my hands

belly ache

bare feet

on the well loved

steps

of the bookstore

i left my scent in

for a path is often glutted with thorns

2011-11-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

the arrowhead

little fox don't

slink down into the rotted tree

all because

your momma left

sickened by reynard lies

so she left you 3 teeth

perfect little slivers

lined up neat

little fox try

the weeds make no sense

your back leg insists it exists

even though it's been gone

many moons now

little fox listen

the moon

is whispering

cloaked in her own insulted

bloated

pride

little fox breathe

in the distance there are

sun floppy tender necked

wildflowers

waiting patiently

for your weary body

little fox wait

i will give you my left wrist

if only

to quiet your rage

if a girl walks the plank where does she go

2011-11-09T05:38:00.000-08:00

baby doll

you write like you are gasping

runners shin splints

side stitch

you write like you regret

rueful piano fingers

twisting in your

tangle of wary

you write like a butcher

delicate sinew

perfect shanks

terse lips

hiding kitten fangs

you write like bloody fists

of pink roses

stolen from mona's backyard

just because

you can

all of that penny pinching finally bought freedom

2011-11-08T07:15:00.000-08:00

everyday siren

down in the moody

sandy bottom

of my soul

you carefully slid your

toothsome tentacles

around my coral reefs

your expressive

golden wolf eyes

dancing slowly in

my distance

like squid ink

you bloomed across my

salty sailor heart

and gifted me a

parachute made of

black orchids

my darling

did you know

that

your love is

ambrosia

a wayward child isn't always lost

2011-11-07T09:29:00.000-08:00

my year of bees

red face pressed at the base of

french windows

painted over so much

they looked like

flaps of

diseased skin

feet like forgotten soldiers

at the end of unhappy legs

but

the bees hung in seemingly lazy

clouds

in the branches of the sticky tree

a motor of buzz

and one drunk stray drone

who lost his way

i pretended to be the queen

grown fat and lazy

thighs swollen open with labor

mouth raw and ragged

from too much nectar tears

in the wee hours of stolen morning

i spent one whole year

watching the bees be busy

heart dragging the ground

stomach empty

and i never wrote a sentence

but the bees

woke me up

for good

ticky tacky what else happened

2011-10-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

face not forgotten
thank you shirl
from tom thumb grocery deli
in 1989
for your on the sly
carefully prepared vegetarian plates
and soda
for your winks
over smudged counters
your obnoxious perfect laugh
like the peeling of a pungent onion
for your perfectly crisp brown
polyester uniform pulled taut over hips
that spanned continents
babies become adults
misremembered them
but not me
i wanted to rest
in the bowl of your generous hipbone
just because it was yours
for the blanket
and the gentle hand
that stroked my shorn head
while it sobbed silently
into my schoolbooks
thank you shirl
for not telling
anyone

the award goes to

2011-10-25T04:10:00.000-07:00

dilaudid
i pull
i tear
i raise my hands to the sky
fever
a believer
so
let this not be our last i love you
let it be instead the first story of the night
where we are the wind
my hair caught up like exclamation marks
skirt snatched up greedily
dimpled knees
will whisper secrets
you'll have to bend over to hear
let this not be our last mad rush of morning chores
instead let us build a boat of our love letters
smear them with viscous honey
and sail into the tropics
where you'll tell me
no no no baby
only ankle deep
just in case the sharks
let this not be the last sleepy fumbling smiling
instead let it be twenty mornings
all stacked up against each other
like soldiers
our sweet bodies pressed perfectly
lucky four leaf clovers
in the creaky bible mamaw gave me
when i was five

hold on let me get her for you

2011-10-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

smirking on monday
up up up
a red tangled balloon against
a bitchy bright blue
the sky
takes it for granted
one shaded eye
one sideways glace
throb throb throb
the aching sun
too hot to take a lover
pines for a sip from
the cool moon's buoyancy
she loves his
pockmarks and all
smack smack smack
the sound of those hard life heels
against uncaring pavement
the yellow man is pacing the block
again
stritch stritch stritch
my heart itchy inside its cave
mossy walls
and thumbtack stabs
it never learned
how to behave
like a good girl
does

but the brains tempt me

2011-10-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

one is one but two is another
i tell myself
when i stare too long in the mirror
at my stretch marks
that wind and race along every curve
when my imperfect body
doesn't seem
to measure up
when i covet the shiny curls on a girl
i don't even know
on the street
someday i am going to be rotting flesh
hanging loosely on my bones
i tell myself
when i feel jealousy rise inside my throat
like cleopatra's asp
pricking against my good nature
and good intentions
that someday
i will be alone as it was before i was born
curled inside my metaphysical chrysalis
to come back and try try again
i tell myself
when all of my hope seems to have become ash
and today unravels before me like my own intestines
that someday all of my secret writing
will be found
and a stranger will see a
mirror in my words
and will know
themselves

Reading an excerpt of my novel, Flinch, at the Lambda Literary Retreat

2011-09-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

Alysia Angel, 2011 Writers Retreat Fellow in Fiction from Lambda Literary on Vimeo.

from now on

2011-09-13T08:32:00.001-07:00

What is love?

Is it the smoky eyed courtship?
Is it their fingers wrapped around your face?
Is it the expansion of ideas after a particularly heated debate?
Is it their hand made card shoved in your underwear drawer?
Is it the slow dance of a country warble?
Is it picking up their damp towel off of the ground?
Is it the charms of the first fireflies in 10 years?
Is it the feeling of glass in your lungs from walking 20 blocks in the snow to their house?
Is it the drowning?
Is it the way your heart becomes a team of moths when you see then?
Is it the admiring half grins?
Is it the quiet porch moments?
Is it the letting go after a good try?
Is it the awakening?
Is it the bittersweet missing of the planes of their face?
Is it the fingertips itching to stroke their wrist?
Is it the pining and longing for the minutes in between the hours?
Is it the ebbing and flowing of the shared ocean?
Is it the scraping of the rocks against your ankles when you help them across?
Is it the long term or the short term or the chance meeting on the train?
Is it a kind act?
Is it coffee in bed in the morning?
Is it the warm hand against a limp neck?
Is it hope?
Is it the unraveling?
Is it the foreheads pressed together?
Is it the midnight phone calls?
Is it the dazzle eyed newness?
Is it the paperwork and security and gold bricks?
Is it the knife walking and glass eating?
Is it the loyalty?
Is it the wide smile across a crowded room?
Is it the charms and spells?
Is it youthful breasts?
Is it a photo of your head on their shoulder?
Is it sacrifice?
Is it an orgasm?
Is it a white picket fence dream?
Is it the chasing?
Is it the getting caught?
Is it the stroking of hair after a bad dream?
Is it the protectiveness?
Is it the intuitive knowing?
Is it the passion?
Is it the comfortableness?
Is it the joy of firsts?
Is it possession?
Is it secrets kept?
Is it the awkward footed dance?
Is it them?
Is it you?
Is it us?

i have one if you want it

2011-09-09T20:39:00.001-07:00

number three hundred and forty seven
i like a girl with a messy mouth
the kind that looks like

it's told off more people

than could ever be counted
lipstick won't stay on
lips like ripe

picked

berries

on the side

of a summer road
hard won smile

curving roughly

like the grooves

of racing tires
i like a girl with fucked up teeth
broke down

picket fence smile
wide gaps

for tongues to delight
wolf whistles

loud enough

to hail a lover

from up the street
shining silver caps

in the back

like chewed up knife points
i like a girl with pretty vocal chords
off key singing

in the shower

in the car
justice bells

ringing

clanging

rusty

warning
silky feline

motor purr

when everything

done gone right
perfect and ugly

when the tears

have scraped them

raw
i like a girl with a velvety tongue
kitten napping

in the afternoon

window seat
gentle comforting

when asked for it

(and sometimes when not)
silty beach sand

pounded by

muscled surf
languid

asking

seeking

wondering

curiosity
i like a girl with a messy mouth
sloppy drinker
cheap wine mustache

filthy

pretty

funny

red stained

beauty

forever

2011-09-09T20:14:00.001-07:00

Kicked Out Anthology Guest Blog

2011-08-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

I was honored to be able to write a series of three blog entries for the Kicked Out Anthology. As you read these please take good care to realize that there is frank language about abuse of many kinds.

Part 1. http://www.kickedoutanthology.com/2011/08/23/guest-blog-alysia-angel
Part 2. http://www.kickedoutanthology.com/2011/08/31/guest-blog-alysia-angel-pt-2
Part 3. http://www.kickedoutanthology.com/2011/09/06/guest-blog-alysia-angel-pt-3/

and for the record i never told you i would

2011-08-28T05:40:00.001-07:00

Here's the dance

The coffeepot is making plink plink plink.
The cursor is blink blink blinking.
The wind has finally stopped making the trees groan.
The joint between the top of the finger and the middle of the finger has quit.
The children are up too late and they might have pistols now.
The band on Sunday forgot to play for the old people with torches.
The clouds skitter scatter what's the matter.
The phone thinks about committing suicide.
The knees ache to know the weight.
The teeth slide across each other like a steel trap.
The cat is sitting on the top of the grassy hill and refusing to meow.
The person who understood the most has sliced off their own ears.
The prized glasses are in their coffins.
The wrist bone calls out for the first finger.
The first finger points to the closet.
The heart is dragging it's heels in the in the dirt.

Here is the model

Shiny shoes and perfect little accordion pleats.
Four books bound up in sinew.
Rows upon rows of shiny bright teeth that only smile.
Perfect orgasms multiplying like prize winning bunnies.
A set of hands playing piano for the queen.
Velvet lined boxes with baby teeth all in a row.
A brown throat, perfectly oiled, motor humming.
The last page of the greatest of all stories swallowed in the night.
Charming missus, guileless curls, baby bottle hidden under hoop skirts.
All of the answers, in all of the drawers, under all of the good things.
Charming posey, freckled nose, fat cheeks playing marbles in the night.
Fingers trailing in glass ponds while trumpeters bare fangs instead.

Here's the truth

I am the reason we can't have nice things.

this little dream

2011-08-05T05:43:00.000-07:00

There is something beautiful about the sound of your car's tires popping on the rocks of an unpaved drive as your car eases into a good spot at a drive in movie theater. The air is sticky yet and the bees swarm lazily around your shitty cheeseburger and previously frozen fries. Your diet coke tastes like regular coke and the sweet moon faced gal behind the counter forgot to give you a ticket. The hand painted signs are weathered, once cheery, now a kitschy offering of beleaguered snacks. The cuteness of it all choked your throat with a clot of cloying sugar.

In the near distance a handsome boy is trying to catch a ball and he drops it repeatedly. He shrugs it off and laughs at his more deft friend. He squares his shoulders in protectiveness of his masculinity, and as the night slips in like a thief, he finally catches one. His whole body dances as the pretty girl on the swing that was watching him smiles a sigh of contentment. Everything is okay if her boyfriend can just catch a ball.

A woman walks around barefoot and you wonder how her feet could manage so assuredly on the rocks under her. She's wearing studied painted on pants and a low-cut shirt. Everyone she walks past averts their eyes to the sunset and since you are in your car, you stare because she commands it. Because you can't help yourself. She is barefoot and beautiful. You feel your face make a crooked smile of admiration.

Suddenly the reel starts, sounding drunk at first and then like a sad chipmunk. There is an ad about the dying outdoor cinemas in the US. Pictures float by, graves of once grand screens. They tell you that your concession is what keeps their place alive and you are glad you bought the undelicious and curiously school lunch partial soy burger with the decidedly depressed french fries. You heard that they grill on the weekends and wish that they also grilled today, since today is your birthday.

Still, this place is great and the locals are here in the back of their truck beds, rocking together on the vintage porch swings, and doing dare devil tricks on the playground equipment. Everyone there is smiling and someone is playing an oldies station. You hear that on the weekends sometimes people bring their classic cars there and everyone hangs about and watches movies in them. You are already thinking about the next visit.

The movie starts and everyone settles, car lights popping off like sleepy lightning bugs. Your handsome date holds your birthday hand and strokes the back of your summer sweaty neck as a breeze suddenly graces you. He loves you and you love him back.

You smile in the darkness while the movie starts. This is the kind of thing that you hope never dies. You vow to buy concession. You vow to find more outdoor theaters. You write about it. You dream.

your turn

Guest Blogger: Size Positive month at the Sex Positive Project

2011-07-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

I am more than honored to be one of the featured bloggers for Shilo McCabe as she celebrates a month of size positivity in her wonderful sex positive project blog. Please read my blog (and many other amazing and hot entries) here: dear sweet body

david lynch did it

2011-07-27T05:59:00.001-07:00

I dream I am an embryo of the sea, curled tightly and buoyant in the waves. I dream that you find me and pluck me out of the sea like a giant and I cry salty tears, gripping tightly to the kelp limbs of the sea's floor. I dream I am a wanderer, fingers caught in a mess of herbs, feet bound with the hide of fallen animal friends and the teeth of great spirits around my contented neck.

I dream terrible things too, angry earth and shadowy demons. I toss and turn in my bed and remember when I used to cry out for you and how even names can be ghosts at four in the morning. I dream of forever muse and all I can see is her pretty back, her kitten heels, her dandelion head. I dream of calling her but my throat is glued shut with honey.

Some people sleep.

I build alternate universes.

if everything was in a glass ball

2011-07-17T08:37:00.001-07:00

this too

you said

"if i was a zombie i would definitely want to eat you"

with my foot held gently in your hand

and then

"you'd taste like a little perfectly ripe peach"

i squealed into the darkness with pleasure

no no no no

(yes)

the memory of the screaming children

holding onto their final moments of freedom

the sun's fingers losing grip on the day

your sweet head on my breast

and air so soft around us

it never looked like this

in the wild

3 silver dollars in her fist

2011-06-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

for renee

and there can be tenderness here

in your heart

where no one else gets to rest

where the drumbeat is so loud

bird fly up from their nests

and the does slide their necks

around their fawns to protect them

there can be gentleness here

where the fist clenches so tight

that the moons of hope

mark every year in your palm

and the lesson plan is carved into your

teenage thighs

there can be solace here

in the oak tree of your soul

where moss lines your branches

and devout ones come to lay their offerings

and tremble at your beauty and

pray for your forgiveness

against their sinning tongues

there can be peace here

where the battlefield left scars

zigzagging up your precious battle breast

blood washed clean from the rains of

new days

new hopes

new stories

and blood oaths made

and kept

Texan? You bet your boots.

2011-06-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

When I first tell people that I am from Texas it can go two ways. The first is usually "But you don't have an accent at all!? Why not?" and the second usually is "Oh yeah, I could definitely tell you were not from the Pacific Northwest." The thing is, I used to have one and it was a real humdinger. There was this tape floating around for awhile on which I was singing, telling stories, and addressing members of my family. I sounded like a tiny hillbilly.

I don't always feel like there is a space to explain why I don't have an accent. I had and still sometimes have a lot of class shame. I also have had shame from being from Texas, people often say to me "I'm sorry" after I tell them I am a born and raised Texan. It's not meant to be insulting, I suppose, it is a lot like being from a dysfunctional family to be from Texas and I am fully aware of what that looks like. I also know that there is so much good in Texas. First of all it has Austin, which is basically an oasis in a desert that looks like hell. Also, Texans for all of their faults, are a passionate people. They are so friendly and literally could make a best friend in a grocery store check out. They are deeply generous and would give you the shirt off of their back just to make you feel more at ease. They are funny and wild and unbridled in ways that I have rarely seen. Sure they do stupid shit like go muddin', do trick riding on an ATV, or do donuts in a parking lot on ice, but that stupid shit is fun. I have struggled my whole life with the juxtaposition of my intense pride of being from Texan, much of that literally implanted in my marrow as a fetus, and feeling deep shame from being from a place that fosters repression, racism, homophobia and really loves their guns.

I remember in my preteen years I would bike to the library and Miss King, who always had perfect diction, would gently correct my grammar or remind me to look people in the eye. I don't know exactly what she saw in me but she always had some sound advice for me, and often it was about brushing all of my hair, not just the top (it sort of created a Darth Vader helmet on my head, the baby dreads underneath the brushed pyramid of hair atop.) Miss King explained to me once that proper diction and good manners go a long way in the world. She also explained that you only get one chance to make a good first impression. It's weird now to think about how even though I was a kid, and just like any other kid, totally flighty, I can distinctly remember paying rapt attention to all of these little tidbits of information. Mostly because I was deeply in love with Miss King but also because no one other than my papaw ever really spent the time to speak to me in a way that was the way I liked to be spoken to. Like an intelligent person with feelings.

I was deeply ashamed of being poor, and like most poor people, I was acutely aware of it at all times. I knew my hand me down clothes were clearly hand me downs. My step sister was about a foot taller than me and a completely different build. I was acutely aware of how I presented, ragtag kid with a key looped into a sturdy piece of rope under my "i love rock n roll" half shirt and my cut off jean shorts. I was also acutely aware of how I could slip under the radar if I brushed my hair and modified my accent, adding better diction from the tapes Miss King suggested. Basically, I learned about how to create privilege. Since I presented as white and looked like most other kids, having very little accent and using my manners set me apart but not in the way that it made me more obvious, it just made me less suspicious.

In later years diction would become more in focus because of choir class. Using my diaphragm and shaping my mouth the way I was instructed, releasing soprano notes with perfectly tightened lips and erect posture created a whole new experience for my focus on diction and eloquent speech. By this time, through tapes and television and by emulating the soft cultured accent of my best friend (who was South African), I had already perfected my flat and boring not from anywhere way of speaking. I still had to work at it, though and although it was reflexive, it was absolutely a constant space of work in case I slipped and my class roots showed under my careful skirts.

In my early 30's I began to mourn my loss of accent. I looked for it everywhere, in the length of my shadow, under my heart, in all of my favorite constellations. I began to hunger for it, and in fact I realized that when I am working something out in my head, my accent is thick and southern. I started to relax some, I allowed my inner hick to come out more, especially around other southern people. I softened some, melting across conversations with buttery rich southern sayings and adages.

These days it comes and goes. Every single time I talk to a relative on the phone in Texas it comes out in full bloom. Every single time I visit my lover in North Carolina it slides into first position. Some days I talk hick all day, some days it's just when I have had a drink. But always when I am mad, my hand goes right on my hip and always without fail, my southern accent becomes a steady dagger. It knows where to strike.

in the morning

2011-06-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

catch the genius

i remember when you used to clamber up to the counter

colt legs kicking into the wood impatiently

everything was in a hurry or too slow

you would rake your mane out of your face

and stare lovingly at me as i did my chores

your face was like a row of opals

innocent

you faded off as most roses do

days stretched out long

and the world was decreed flat

then one day i saw your familiar gait

longer shadow

crisper coattails

i hugged you sweetly like you liked it

but alas

new york made you an asshole

Everything I ever needed to know came from reading Little House on the Prairie books

2011-06-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

Christmas 1980 was at my mamaw and papaw's house. At the time we lived there. My father had come over to spend time with my brother and me. He had a girlfriend he liked and told us all about her, me hiding off near the tree at my papaw's feet, wishing my father had never come at all. The usual unwrapping happened, too much food and talks of diets and well wishes hanging falsely in the air. Suddenly it was noticed that one present had not been opened. It was square and marked simply "love, your papaw". As I tore the paper off of it I saw that it was a whole box set of books. At that time I was already a voracious reader so the thought of having a box set of books of my very own that all led into each other and created a huge story line fairly boggled my mind. I remember the look on my papaw's face so clearly, he was I think, more excited than I was.

Ma always said that if you say "good morning", it becomes one.

I ripped through the entire series of books and at the end I cried. At that age I had not grasped yet that you could read books over and over again, and often find many things you missed the first time. At that age, the end of a book was so poignant to me and so important that I would hold the book in my hands after and just sit there, soaking it in.

It is okay to be round, dark headed, foolhardy, opinionated, brash, and independent. You will still be loved for who you are. In fact, you will be admired for it.

I didn't at first do this consciously, but that year I started a ritual. Every year of my life since the Christmas I was 7 and my papaw was still alive and healthy and smiling and winking at me, I read the whole book series. I don't mean that I go check it out at the library or purchase the books again, I mean to say that I read the same series. At first I was able to lug it around in it's original box but over the years the box tore on one side and split beyond repair. I still made sure to place them on bookshelf after bookshelf, move after move, in exact order.

Being short does not mean that you are not strong and capable. You can drag Mary over a wood stack if you need to when Pa does that mad dog thing. Hello, guns.

I don't have a lot of things from my youth that I carry with me but I do carry certain books. I have a large Dr. Seuss book that I've had since I was an infant, Charlotte's Web, The Nutshell Library Collection, The Little Prince, The Trumpet of the Swan, and of course the Little House books. Being nostalgic about books always felt like something I could always be cherishing about but would not fly on the radar. It could be my special ritual if I wanted it to be and no one would be the wiser.

A girl and her dog is basically one of the greatest love affairs ever. Especially if that dog is a bulldog named Jack.

For 30 years I have been rereading this series and every single year I am struck by the brilliance of the imagery that Laura Ingalls Wilder splashed across her pages and soaks into my heart. Every single year I am reminded of the kindness, generosity and spirit of the people in the books and also the complexity of characters that I have definitely taken heed of as a grown up writer.

Sometimes when a blond bitch is fucking with your game you can turn the other cheek and behave like a lady, and sometimes you gotta just toss off your hoop skirt and kick off your buckle boots and yank her hair. If that doesn't work, just use the hem of your dress to scare some horses into racing until she screams in fear so she backs up off of your man.

It often surprises me that I am so taken by these books and then I realize that most of the reason I know about ethics, love, decency, and family is from reading them. If it was not for these books I truly believe that I would be a different person, less enriched, less colorful and even less moral. Thank you Laura Ingalls Wilder for three decades of ritual, for teaching me something new every single time, and for your impeccable writing. I am only sorry you didn't live in a time where things were different for people of color. That part was and is still really fucked up.

Hey, do you know how to grow a prize winning pumpkin? Put a shunt in the base of it into a saucer of milk and let it drink milk for days as it grows fatter and fatter. Just ask Almanzo Wilder.

fresh off the press

2011-06-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Salacious 2 Magazines are now in stores! My story is near the back, where it belongs so go get one local or buy one online. You won't be sorry!

generally i don't

2011-06-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

your flowers are blooming

you tell yourself tomorrow is there

when you roll over in bed and hit the alarm

memory scattering across your pillow

in sunlit bumblings

while your phone rings

like cactus quills

in your ears

and you ruefully push back the hair

of your birthright

you tell yourself you'll visit

tumbleweed trash and dirty ankles

front porch rotting under

barely honest conversation

you tell yourself you've forgiven

three years old

and thirteen years old

and late december

you tell yourself

those night and days that soften once they've

become elderly pieces of folded paper

all of the pirate won

golden charms and brilliant coins

locked up tight in your left molar

you tell yourself tomorrow she'll be there

innocent eyed

kittens on every bannister

you'll scoop her up

tuck her under your heavy heart

and in a locket she'll offer you

these

idle intimacies

4, 5, and also 6

2011-05-31T13:23:00.000-07:00

in an instant we are shipwrecked
i was just thinking about my first kiss
with a girl that i knew i loved
and how it was quite possibly
the most radical thing i could think of
as though there was no zenith
beyond the softness of her kitten tongue
or the way her hair caught itself in my hands
or how our bodies snaked around each other
and made poison become dust
how her waterbed kept us buoyant
like a small warm ship
and her awkward body a perfect shell
against my mollusk heart

while we slept
i used to think there would never be
anything more radical than those stolen moments
of teeth and skin

and smell

and hands over mouths

to keep things safe
but i know better now

now wait just a minute

2011-05-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

Thorny fields where I used to belly crawl as a child just to get over to another abandoned building. Those wild bluebonnets licking up the other side, the easy side where babies would be laying on blankets and mothers would read romance novels and sigh hot little lonely sighs. Shredded magazines and trash and condoms kicked off into corners and saggy little sofas drug from an alley. I could roam each of the rooms like a live ghost, peeling wallpaper telling tales of murders and floods that floated bodies to ceilings. I would walk up crooked splintered staircases, skipping the creakiest steps lest I step on a crack and break my own back. I would find nurseries with bloated angry dolls and one lone shoe. I would cut open walls with my buck knife that my papaw gave me, searching for a note from a furtive captive. Sometimes older kids would show up and I'd hide in a moldy closet, the stench of forget sliding lonely fingers up my neck, tiny ghosts comforting my aching crouched knees. Sometimes those older kids would have sex and I could hear one of them protesting and the other one "come on baby" and then it would be quiet after like a tomb and I swore and spit into the dusty floor that I would never let a boy do me like that (but he did and he did and he did.)

Swampy creeks where even the dragonflies are too hot to skate across swollen throated stagnation. In the hottest of Texas summer days I would slide my dry feet into the muddy banks of any creek I could find and dare to drink from it too, the fear of the wrong protozoa making it slide thickly down me. I would slosh to the middle of calf deep water and stare right down the dark holes where bad men were surely waiting with red plaid shirts and bowie knives. I would slide my fingers around the mother of pearl handle of my own blade, my mouth set like a rusty snare and I would count to three hundred because three hundred meant I wasn't afraid (even though my ankles trembled out little waves for lily pads to push up against.)

The rows of books stacked up higher than god as I patted at my helmet of matted underneath hair and self mutilated angry fringe of bangs. I was ever careful to practice my diction and inside voice as I primly plucked out dewey decimal cards all about serial killers, brain surgery, and con artists. The precious walk of my favorite librarian with her gently crossed eyes and her perfect curls that sometimes sweated to her forehead sweetly. Those elegant hands of hers that would touch my arm and lead me to a stack of books she set out thoughtfully for me, about girls and what girls do and how to be a lady girl lady girl sweet lady. I would pick them up gingerly, the tips of my fingers carefully pulling back the pages of her intended and I soaked in how to eat with which fork and how to remember that men liked smart girls but not too smart. Sweet Miss King, never married, hands like lonesome birds, clutching her throat when someone spoke out of turn. Sweet Miss King with her incredible ass and her calves like cinnamon candy and her tearful black button eyes when I would show up with my raggedy hair unsuccessfully covering up another shiner.

These are the stories no one wants to hear unless they lived them too.

posy patch

2011-05-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

We used to meet each other on the crest of heartbreak. I would be rounding a corner and there you would be, penny hair wired across a wet cheek and we would press our psychic heads together and say nothing, simply exist inside the shock of our own crazy hearts. Sometimes we would say it out loud and without any bitterness just the recognition that our fate had met and this is where we stood, two extra long shadows pulled apart from our flesh and growing skinny across long winter days until.

I would see you on your bicycle in love again, the two of you against the scant sun, lean thighs pumping as you made an impossible hill. I would see you at the farmer's market with your flouncy skirt and cowgirl boots, overstuffed basket on your milky sweet arm. Your eyes would dance like barnyard fire started by a girl who just wanted something to remind her why she was alive. Your braids would crackle on your skull like pigtails roasting on a spit.

I would lose you again until the next heartbreak. I would sometimes think about your nutmeg eyes and impossibly precious two teeth overlapping just enough to drive me crazy. I would imagine that someone who was lucky enough to fall in love with you would do anything to make you laugh, just to sit on the edges of you with aching fingers wanting to swipe across those teeth.

I haven't been heartbroken in a long time, not like all of those times when we met on our hilltop and made blood oaths with the mist of our breath. Sometimes I think I made you up and then I see you in the distance playing your violin or flirting your skirt at someone handsome or under the greasy lights of the diner and me across from you like a stranger or worse.

I would say that I miss you but I don't think there are words for what we were.

okay so you moved me, now what?

2011-05-22T13:46:00.001-07:00

Who are you to grow up so angular with field hand eyes and spiky angles all puffed out to stop me from knowing you? Who are you with that lady john wayne voice, pistols at your serpentine guarded hips and goofy slapstick thighs? Who are you with your rat-a-tat-tat annoying laugh you probably perfected as a child to ward off bad guys who hate annoying women who talk to loudly or laugh like a sonic boom. Who are you when you make your eyes all big and your voice goes all simpering sweet? Who are you when you don't look at me? Who are you when I compliment you and you pat my arm like it is a piece of drift wood and you are a mole just trying to find a hole again so you can hide (baby honey little lamb) so you can be breathe again where I am not looking?

But I am always looking.

Who are you pretty casing of a shot gun talent that made me stiffen in my uncomfortable chair that smelled like moldy ass, my body like a giant had put his filthy toothpick in my spine? Who are you stroking heads like doll babies, looking off in the distance all hungry and maybe bored but mostly pretty drunk and probably more profound than anyone there? Who are you all dressy-bessy flimsy little sunrise claptrap caught in a doe eyed glossy headed game of hide and kill?

I (don't) want to be your friend.

News and more news

2011-05-20T10:42:00.001-07:00

Great news!

I was selected to be the gal friday intern for the gorgeous and talented Hanne Blank! I start in July after my big move and I am very excited to learn about the wonderful world of publishing (and let's be real, even the grunt work sounds exciting to a bright eyed woodland creature like me.)

Full steam ahead!

i am beside myself

2011-05-19T09:19:00.001-07:00

Less than 2 days ago I found out that I was accepted to an incredible week long writing intensive at UCLA in August. The Lambda Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices only accepts 30 candidates a year and has seen many incredible published authors hosting workshops, including Dorothy Allison.

As soon as I found out that they had an easy fundraising tool to use, I immediately set a goal of raising $1,100 and it happened in a day and a half! $450 will be for my tuition, some will go towards my flight, 10% of the total cost will pay back the third party donor software company and the rest is a donation to the organization!

Thank you everyone for your generous donations and for cheering me on. I have a powerful community.

dear gertrude, love, alysia

2011-05-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

I am always reading certain authors, soaking them in and setting them free. I am always smiling at photos of the dead ones and right now I am back on Gertrude Stein. She has flickered in and out of my life more times than I can ever count, lighting my way to knowledge of my queer self or expanding my ideas on what prose should look like. I dream of going to New York's Bryant Park just so I can rub more of the enamel off of her statue, like many queers and writers before me.

I think about my broken hearted body curled up on a red sofa in the Bronx reading Baby Precious Always Shines and how it split me even wider than I thought possible, grabbed up my skeleton and rattled me around in my flesh sack. I wanted to love like that, to be loved like that, to write like a child about the innocence of everything like that.

I think about the impossibility of the feminist statement she and her incredible partner Alice Toklas made simply by being impossibly in love and soaking the world with it, allowing the light of it to slicker around everything, existing openly. I look at pictures of them in glossy books and run my fingers over the planes of their stranger not stranger faces, across the perfect caterpillar fuzz of Alice's upper lip.

People analyze writing so much, break it into tiny edible pieces, chew it up and spit it into each others mouths like everyone is a baby bird. Everything must be unfolded, spread out, ironed flat and then carefully put back together again to make a whole. I never analyzed Gertrude's work. I never picked it to a bloody pulp. I consumed it whole, swallowed it down without water to lubricate its thorny sharp edges. I let her work scrape against my tenderest parts and threaten to bleed me out and then I ate more.

Some things are to be consumed like the starving beast that you are, in the moment you are hungriest. I am grateful for the nourishment of perfect meal after perfect meal that Gertrude has given me when I was starving and thought her piled high plates were the stuff mirages are made of.

There is an exhibit in San Francisco happening until September that I am dying to go to. You should too.

trembling little jellyfish

2011-05-13T11:00:00.001-07:00

When I was four, barefoot and brown from sprinkler leaping, I wandered into the kitchen to find my grandmother there. Her wide hips cloaked in chambray created curiosity in me. She kept herself just beyond my reach, her hugs with distance between us even though our bodies touched. I clambered up to the kitchen table and told her that I wanted to move to Wyoming. She laughed the way she always did to alleviate the fact that I just creeped her out and then hesitantly asked me why.

"I just like the way it sounds in my mouth."

A year later I hefted my tiny Holly Hobby suitcase out of my bedroom, packed with books and one pair of panties. I rolled past my Papaw in his big easy chair, the same chair I was known to tuck into with him and watch the news, asking question after question, to which he always answered honestly and with care. He said real easy "Where you goin' girl?". "I'm running away from here and moving to Laramie." I said. He arched a brow and said "Wyoming?" and said "Okay well send us a post card." and I looked at him sadly and my question mark shaped dramatic form walked out in a sigh.

I got half a block up, tears in my eyes that no one cared that I was leaving. I saw my elderly neighbor on her porch and she waved. I sat on my suitcase while the sun dappled slowly out of the hot Texas sky and then I slowly walked home. Papaw was on our porch waiting for me and I know now that he had called the neighbors to watch me. He pulled me up into his arms and made me promise not to run away again explaining that running away would never solve anything for me. He held me close and I felt his energy and love wash over me because he meant it.

Sometimes in moments of duress and even moments of extreme thoughtfulness I think about heading out to Laramie, Wyoming. I wonder what that town holds for me, who I would meet there, if I have lived there in a previous life. I don't know why it has been calling me like the tugging of a child on the hem of my dress or why I sometimes look at pictures of it and feel its desolation like a mouthful of dirty pennies.

I've been taking a class this quarter in which I analyze fiction, find its various symbolic wanderings and winking ironies. Wyoming somehow feels like my own version of that and yet the lock is still firmly in place and I still have no idea where I misplaced the key.

2011-05-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

"Alysia Angel’s writing is like if you walked around in springtime, stoned, eating all the flowers, wearing a dress you found in a freebox, and at last crumpled, exhausted, in a field of bluebells, and fucked yourself." - Carrot Quinn

I am beyond honored.

skin hunger

2011-05-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

Then

My lover turned out the lights (again) but before he did he looked at my expectant body curled into itself like a sea shell. I was trembling in real fear and also a huge ocean of hope. I had hoped that this time his hesitation meant he was actually seeing me. I released my body some, allowed my spine to unflex from the conch stance. My legs fell open slightly and he pushed them apart with one hand. As he looked down he were unable to hide the mild disgust at the way they were shaped, or perhaps the permanent rub marks from pressing against each other when I walk. His eyes flickered over my fat rolls and stretch marks. They never made it to my face as he turned away.

I curled back into myself and he turned the light out.

I would be servicing him again, unseen.

Now

Your face lights up in joy when I walk into the room. I am just coming in to get something but your face looks like it might have been struck by a jar filled with lightning bugs. Your hands reach out for me instinctively and expertly press into my flesh with insistence. I can feel my eyelids go heavy, batting down slowly like the sun sinking out of a perfect blue sky. My cheeks feel flushed and my heart beat staccatos as you tell me how much you love my curves, love my body. You call me beautiful and when I look into your eyes I only see beauty and love reflected in your pupils.

Your eyes are magnets and my body pulls them into it. There is no ocean between us to ferry across with a raft. We are the ocean and exist together in waves and currents and tiny creatures in our tidepools palpitate against our love.

You push me onto the bed and you take me how it pleases you and how it pleases you always pleases me. You give me these gifts and I accept them.

The lights stay on and we see each other.

an unpleasant gold rush

2011-05-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

and if a cat becomes a girl

after the long cold snap under the city of coral

i rushed topside to sun my belly against your charms

all of my tentacles rode high on your fancy waves

and your scratchy starfish made short work of my

winter barnacles and slickering sea moss

our murdered ghost schools twittering around my fins

phosphorous traitors with golden eyed limpidity

it was agreed upon that we would do it this way

one tap means "i love you"

two taps means "go back into hiding"

three taps means "i have killed again"

i woke with a start and prayed that i only dreamt

the three taps against my gilled throat

while fields of darkness sighed lazily among the waves

Salacious 2 Electric Bugaloo

2011-05-02T14:25:00.001-07:00

Salacious #2 bios are up!

Soon you can get your filthy paws on my silky drawers (or a smut piece I wrote) plus many more talented writings and visual art. Just look at that line up! Aroogah.

curve magazine? don't mind if i do!

2011-04-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

This is not safe for work and is about BDSM, so you know.

the days of swine and roses

2011-04-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

When I was a little girl my Mamaw gifted me a string of costume pearls. Pretty little shimmery balls to wind around my neck, to make my small tattered body regal against skuzzy apartment walls, in my sagging found for free on the side of the road bed, in my warped dresser mirror, in the sweltering fetid heat of another Texas summer day.

Wearing Mamaw's pearls gave way to first feelings of femme. My kind of femme feelings looked like a half breed ratty haired girl with fancy eyebrow cocked and lips pooched out all slathered with Dr Pepper lip smackers. It looked like my shirt pulled down all low and looped back through the neck. It looked like a grubby hand on a faded hand me down Jordache clad hip, Loves Baby Soft on my wrists and thighs and itty bitty tits. Mamaw's pearls looked like sliding between my legs giving up shivery feelings of nighttime gasps and oh so very adult blue lagoon the movie thoughts. Those pearls looked like hurricane eyed fist fights with boys who couldn't keep their don't know better hands to themselves, fists stinging like bloody bees and ankles shaking from hunger and adrenaline.

For 3 long and painful years those pearls gave me fancy in times of duress, they became a rosary of sorts when I needed someone to tell my secrets. One day the string on the pearls gave up, let loose and all of the pearls fell off of my neck, skittering around my meager room. I scooped them up as best I could, tearfully tried to restring them somehow, sweaty knees and gouged out wood floors.

Eventually I only had one pearl left, a single milky orb that I would place gently in my ear when in the bath, sink under the water and let my mermaid fins unfurl. It was how I communicated with deep sea creatures. How I blocked out the sounds of fighting and hitting. How I remembered that I was still a fancy debutante, worthy of beauty and grace and that my secrets were still safe.

Sometimes I feel myself emotionally patting down everything around me, searching for something lost, sifting like a gold miner. I stop still, tongue in the corner of my mouth and think on the wisdom of a set of pearls for a girl like me, born fancy, born femme.

about last night (i think i left my heart nailed to your door)

2011-04-27T09:05:00.001-07:00

i can count: one, two, three, and four

everything is burning

flames are licking up coltish legs

dazzling displays of oranges

(and reds and screams and bruises)

wind zig zag style across astonished breasts

huge fat irises growing balloon taut before

the silos out back open up

and let go their prized bounty

everything is giants

tearing through villages like earthquakes

using fences for toothpicks

raining down tears when

white picket splinters shred their delicate gums

everything is thunderstorms

(pin prickles cracking spines stinging hips)

rolling across huge planes of fevered flesh

undulating slowly little girl secrets in hissing gasps

whispered into the mouth of a hunting wolf

who ain't afraid

of a little rain

a blanket made with thistles

2011-04-10T13:18:00.001-07:00

A long tongue of highway slithered out ahead of us, the windows kept sticking and the air conditioning didn't work. I could feel my breath make a wave of lazy lines in front of me and yet we sang on for 15 hours until our throats creaked like a dry creek with sad frogs.

"I have a bad feeling" I said while dropping ice chips in your mouth while you stared ahead at swamp lined road in front of us. "Let's turn back." Your face turned back at me and you laughed a short brutish laugh and said "We're in Metairie. We have to." As we eased into the drive way of the dilapidated house, I listened to the night and the tires popping rocks like popcorn against the tires. My sweat slicked arm slid tenderly against the side of the door and I could see lights on inside with a gaunt frame sitting in a chair next to the window.

We hefted our suitcases up the staircase and a black dog met us at the door, skinny and mangy it seemed to be warning us with peeled back lips and rotting teeth. It didn't bark, though, and the growl sounded hollow like knocking inside a padded cell. Our friend came out wrapped in a sheet and nothing else, his chest so withered that it caved inward. I hardly recognized him.

It was hotter inside, stagnant and even the flies were exhausted, lounging in pools of spilled food and drink. You refused to look at me while my eyes searched you in a panic, your raggedy shorn hair matting to your nape. We all stood around saying nothing, eyes dragging the ground around us and I asked about a shower, towels a bed. There was no shower, a big bathtub, black ring around it like a choke collar. I got on my knees and scrubbed it with a brush until it was a sick grey.

You suggested we bathe together. I sat behind you and washed your back while you held a joint to my lips and I inhaled to forget. The cold water felt good as we scrubbed away the road and the unspoken fears that clung to our skin. We were only given one towel so we took turns drying each other like sisters and I asked you if you remembered why we came. You didn't.

In the morning the house was curiously filled with the haze of cigarettes and limp slender bodies curled around each other on the living room floor. Someone would stir and someone else would moan in protest. It was 8 am and already stultifying. We walked to the market nearby and had coffee and incredible beignets that still have not met their match. I stood and watched a boy practice tricks with his skateboard while his orange cat stared malevolently on.

When we got back people were awake and already shooting up right in front of us. My eyes tracked this activity carefully. My feet panicky creeping like alley cats. Our host had changed in the last year since moving away from our shared house and it seems he had neglected to tell us that in this time he had made new friends and a new vice. Heroin.

We packed out bags quickly and realized that some of our cash had been pilfered from a shoe and was slowly sinking into veins downstairs. As we crept out and down the back stairs I looked up and saw a small child in one of the windows of the house, perfect little bow lips, haunting eyes and scraggly black hair. She looked like a bruise that won't ever leave me.

Determined to see the trip through, somehow we met a nice lady while napping in the park. Our story seemed likely enough for her to invite us back to her cheery home where fans blew in every room, rose lemonade refilled in sparkly glasses and piled high chocolate cake was placed in front of our teary heads. Our last 48 hours were spent in her garden, walking through her strange walls and bare feet lifting up from white painted wood while rocking in her porch swing.

And that was the last time I ever saw New Orleans.

for a time everything is perfect

2011-04-10T08:47:00.001-07:00

été

i pine for

the undersoles of feet to sing

crackling cement song

hopping against them

giggling arms linking

whispered boardwalk secrets

the flesh on upper arms

to tighten and redden against the long day

cotton candy teeth

snaring bunnies under a ferris wheel

short slumber

after rolling around on blankets

grapes skittering in long blades

flipped up skirts baring

intentional meaty thighs

fingers making short of

droplets of river water

along heat languid wrists

and

necks stretched out like fat birds

to catch

droplets of candy colored

ice chunks

upstairs there was a creaking

2011-04-03T23:32:00.000-07:00

I can still hear my birth mother's voice the first time we spoke in 20 years. I was still using regular home telephones. I twisted myself into a nest of blankets and telephone cord. She sounded familiar but maybe I just wanted her to. The first thing she said was "You don't sound southern at all." a beat then "I thought you would sound more Texan" like she was disappointed in me for it. I had already done something wrong.

I asked questions. Where was she all of these years? What did she do for work? Does she have other children? She answered me bluntly like a robot with a twang and then got to the part where she was once pregnant with twins. Somehow they got strangled in the umbilical cord. I was acutely aware that at that moment the telephone cord was around my neck, loosely wrapped of course but the symbolism was uncanny. I pulled it away from my neck, suddenly hot with a panic. She went on to say that she birthed them, her two tiny creatures. She held their tiny blue bodies in her arms and sobbed. She wanted them so much, these two babies.

I tried to summon feelings for her as her voice became the escaped hole of air in a plastic bag. All I could think of was my brother and sister's bones somewhere with a tiny marker in an Austin, Texas cemetery. All I could think about was their luck for escaping.

These are the things you think when your fingernails make half moons in the meaty palm of your hand and you realize that you will never know the woman who sang to you and braided your hair for a spell.

artists and murderers

2011-04-03T21:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Puddin',

I have been writing strange fiction again, numbering it and sectioning it like plump little orange slices seems to help me understand its complexity better. Perhaps it's my own staccato heartbeat that can't seem to remember molasses days of summer. Is your spring finding your fingernails coated in oil paint and are your windows foiled up like you like them?

My hair is longer than I knew it could be, in my sleep it reaches out and grasps at my wrists, wrapping around them like seaweed. My face is older now, I have wrinkles that are badges of honor from honest wars won (and lost). My body cracks more when I put my bare feet on wood floors first thing in the morning and I smile because it's funny, getting older.

I dream I have lost everything and I am bound up and left to rot in a basement. I dream of tsunamis for months and then a terrible one happens in Japan. Except my dark dreams were comical and included ice cream and Japan is nothing funny. I dream of babies living in sea shells in my bottom drawer, babies that I feed live mice to and they swallow them whole. I dream of fish living inside a jar I swallowed in my ribcage that jump out of my throat when I scream or laugh too hard. I dream that I have a headache and I wake up with one, my mouth like an ancient desert.

There are times I want to contact you, I type your name into the to field of the email box and watch the cursor blink. I count 100 blinks and then I delete your name. I miss you, I suppose and then again I guess I really don't. You are like a ghost limb that still it insists that it exists.

I am in love now and you would like him, I can see you making up your funny nicknames, but only when you're painting. You do best when you paint. Don't come back from the cave grave again, the world has moved on since you last were here.

Love,
Osho

when we measure the earth we forget the oceans

2011-04-02T15:50:00.001-07:00

six by ten
love can make a fairy tale
birds tweeting around ringlets
songs singing in cloudless skies
the ground vibrating up dancing legs
love can make a jewel
sparkling wisdom
plenty of flaws
gleaming sets of teeth
love can make innocence
high up knobby knees
in ancient trees
scuffed up mary janes
and a smirking smile
love can make a journal
three thousand years or so
bound up in leather
rescued from a backdoor bin
made whole in honest hands
love can make a fairy tale
and reason
and faith
and hope
and this

when your knees give you hold onto a mongoose

2011-03-31T07:55:00.000-07:00

whatever lola wants
i love to watch you work
sinew rolling across
plains of feline shoulders
soft cupping of sweat
under breathless boulders
i love to watch you focus
arc of an arm in flight
the wind of history
shimmering behind
i love to watch your lips
press down into haunted
white picket fences
legs apart like saplings
growing up like champions
i love to watch you hurt
red rose thorn stripes
tomorrows oil and water puddles
breath caught in a gilded cage
pupils blown out
like late spring poppies
charms fanning out around you
like collected leaves
like rare feathers
like sandy clenched teeth
i love watching

dumbstruck

2011-03-30T09:34:00.001-07:00

This Hubble image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. As the two galaxies smash together, billions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. The brightest and most compact of these are called super star clusters.

fine time to be having a party

2011-03-23T04:44:00.000-07:00

vicariously asleep
precious veins and warming muscle
three times i thought to wake you
ask you more secrets
shake you up
three times i thought better of it
windmills in the distance on the hill
and bright flecks of gold fish in the pond
for centuries i have been trudging
not trudging
but sliding
not sliding
but careening
into thick earth
for centuries i've traipsed
charming boy (girl hips)
and woman ass
playing the same song
until the last note died out
but you
you made me forget
and think of picket fences
dinner on the table at six
frilly aprons on supple waists
and shiny knives all in a row
oh, wolf

well you should probably tie up the pony

2011-03-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

before there were diamonds
i am in idle
and things like a lawn mower
and barking dogs
are on the ignore list
somewhere there is a child hollering
twang and all
i am in stasis
buffeting against
churning under unrepentant waters
mermaid hair wreathing around my own wrists
sea kelp wound tightly around my slick seal thighs
i am in stillness
while a lone straggler brown leaf grips tightly
the new budding snake skin
housing flirtatious birds
gossiping about the new blood on the block
i am in quietude
while fancy frocks dance on hardwood floors
stamping out an sos with carefully blacked boots
cheeks fevered with rage filled day dreams
a suitor hand burning brand into velvet flesh
i am in repose
and if i am not careful
i might swallow my own tongue

spring in north carolina

2011-03-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

I want.

I want to remember this.

I want to remember this woman.

I want to remember this woman waiting

I want to remember this woman waiting at the bus stop.

I want to remember this woman with dirty running shoes on such long feet.

I want to remember this woman with an mandarin orange sash and scarlet turban.

I want to remember this woman with her wide body sitting jammed inside an alcove.

I want to remember this woman with her thick thighs splayed apart and unashamed.

I want to remember this woman with her white robes spread out like lotus petals.

I want to remember this woman languidly eating her first ice cream cone of the season.

I want to remember this woman with her square jaw and perfect questioning brows.

I want to remember this woman who looked up to find me grinning like a hyena.

I want to remember this woman who noticed me right back me at the red light.

I want to remember this woman who smiled back at me with every tooth.

I want to remember this woman waiting at the bus stop.

I want to remember this woman waiting

I want to remember this woman.

I want to remember this.

I want.

from the mouths of babes

2011-03-18T07:11:00.001-07:00

i can see you clearly.

standing on the edge of rushing waters, your shy naked body can't help but face the sun. i can see you dip your minky dark head under the rushing waters and become a strong sapling, your feet become roots in the silty softness of the river bottom. i can see your hair become branches and your smile becomes a beacon of all good things to come.

i can see you clearly.

dusty broken toys in your trailer closet of a room. small town dreams in a huge imagination. you grow out of doors and windows and like alice your arms and legs are the things that even giants fear. your fists batter down the largest of portals. your eyes are like tractor beams against the sullied hands of midnight atrocities. you are instead a god and the dingy room a mere silhouette against your ruby sunrise. you destroy no one and instead you heal everyone.

i can see you clearly.

and what i see, i love.

2011-03-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

the writer

2011-03-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

from the viewpoint of forgotten pluto

2011-03-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes everything exists inside the first time your hands meet.

The room around you is packed with people milling like shadows. You will feel lost for the briefest of moments, searching around you for them, for you. Electricity pulls and your hands become everything. They inch closer and pull back. You will stare ahead, away, at anything but each other. Your hands will be your guide and eventually, they will touch and jolt against the newness. In the coming moments of digital exploration a bliss will coat your body, your brain will become a hive of bees, your heart will become a particularly rain blessed waterfall. You will wonder if any human has ever touched another human like this, felt superhuman like this, felt quiet and silky like this.

They will then slide a note across a table at you with their eyes and it will be perfect. It will say "I like watching you."

You will never forget.

when beauty is involved

2011-03-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

I

I sat on the scrolling metal bench in the park.

My one hundred year old rose garden was nothing but rows and rows of husks that house dormant beauty queens. Each stalk knows that it needs much beauty sleep to prepare for the season of bloom. I put my feet up on the stone border that separates me from hurting them, from digging each of them up and ruining them. I pushed my feet against it experimentally and tested my ethical heart. Did I have it in me to destroy the very thing I love most? Did I have the cruelty to tear apart the very thing that I have fawned over, waited patiently for, coveted with a sigh hitched in my chest?

I pulled my jacket closer to my face, shielding the breeze that for now keeps cool, but soft too, spring is coming. I placed my feet firmly on the ground, pushed myself off of the bench and allowed my joy to remain another day. The roses rustled like whispers behind my back and slept on.

II

There are children running together, their legs pumping like pink coated miniature pistons.

One of them has a backpack and the other is holding onto it to slow her down. They have smiles plastered across their wind blown faces and teeth at all angles. They look like sisters if sisters are not made up of blood but instead of bonds and braids and a shared candy bar at the bus stop. They are curiously the same height and they measure it, standing back to back and using tiny paws to mark the tops of their heads. It almost looks barbaric when they miss, like perhaps they're secretly trying to gauge how swiftly they need to arc to lop of the pate of the other, scalping their friend all because of curiosity. I watch them under my lashes from a distance and use my esp to call out to forever muse. Does she feel the wind of my hand passing over the top of her head while she works like a robot? Does she feel me grabbing onto her backpack to make her wait, wait wait for me?

I wonder.

III

I have seen him before.

He wears these bright colors, so bright that no one seems to notice him. Dazzle camouflage. I saw him last week standing toothless and black mouth yawning, smiling bigger than the moon. He was petting that tuxedo cat with the twitchy tail that I like, the one who rubs against my legs coquettishly with insistence when I ignore her because "I don't like cats". His mouth was a perfect letter u when he pet that cat, a laugh pealing across the sidewalk and tumbling towards me. My own mouth pried open with bear trap quickness. Today he's not smiling as he eats a suspicious looking leg of fried chicken from his pocket and counts cigarette butts for safety on the edge of the picnic table. The trees are around him gently, dipping down their spiky green leaves in earnest concern.

I would know him anywhere, orange and all.

drones are colony too (for Hanne)

2011-03-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

Imagine, if you can, a sea of wooden puppet heads.

It's chilling, even after the many times I have walked past them. Each set of eyes fixes on me and then slowly slides back to the task at hand. I scurry with my packages to my flat in the industrial district, praying that one of them didn't see my zigzag double back way of finding my way home. Something about their mouths clacking in their head makes me wake with night terrors.

I bought myself something special today, three skeins of shimmery red fabric to make curtains out of. No one can see them, my windows are boarded up, but I can. Red is precious now and I intend to use every single scrap of this red, even the loose threads will be coveted in my fingers like fallen babies.

You haven't been home in weeks and although you have been on jags like this before, this one feels different somehow. The feeling of your heartbeat in the air is lacking, almost missing and the warmth of you in my bed has ebbed away, leaving me with two jagged rocks on your pillow and your wingtip shoes sticking out woefully from under your side of the bed. I think I miss you, or at least there is a hole where you used to fill. I stick my fingers in it sometimes and I can almost connect with the jolt of your desire but then again not. Our story unfolds and then crumples up.

I talk to myself more.

in a balloon we're safe

2011-03-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

The first time I lost my brother I was six and he was four.

We were in the Gulf of Mexico, the water flipping itself around flirtatiously while the sun beat down against it. I was hot dogging in deeper waters, showing off how far I could swim, gracefully swishing my mermaid tail out of the water. No one was watching, no matter how hard I pitched my voice over waves towards the shore. My aunt and my grandmother were in waist deep water, each of them wearing uncomfortable one pieces that they had rushed into the water until they were decently cloaked by dark ocean.

My brother was there, being tossed gently between their outstretched arms. He was laughing delightedly, a small wet seal spiraling in the spray of his feet dragging against water. I watched him trying to be jealous but instead a smile pushed its way past my petulant cheeks and I tread water silently like a mobile island, holding onto the rope of a buoy.

Suddenly he went under an obsidian wave, swallowed by the ocean. My female relatives stood for a moment, two sets of outstretched arms with two sets of mouths in a perfect round "oh". I clung to the buoy, a scream caught in my throat, my fingers gripping so tightly that I could feel them already going numb with pressure. Time became like long strands of taffy taunting children behind thick glass at a carnival.

My aunt dove under and came up with panic. She dove under again and pulled up a clear sac the size of my brother. As the sac came out of the water, it slowly peeled off and plopped into darkness again, as though my brother had been reborn while away. My aunt was screaming and my grandmother was shuttling while clucking loudly.

As they rushed up the beach with my swaddled brother I held the buoy, bereft of strength and waited. The sun sulked out of the sky signaling time to swim to shore and so I did, suddenly teeth chattering and aware that I was alone. I was so scared, too scared to walk the path to the beach house and so I sat on drift wood.

They said it was a large jellyfish and that he had somehow fallen into it. They called it a "man o' war" and said that the stung 80 percent of his body. I found him later grinning from attention and ice cream. My grandfather held me in his lap and explained how jellyfish sting, and that they are not to be hated as they are benign and have never hated anything in their life. I sulked into his strong body and thought of ways that I could carry a spear and kill all jellyfish, how they would give me medals from the president, how I would become the world's jellyfish killing champion.

The next morning I stood over his blinking awake body and said angrily "Don't do that again."

"I won't" he said with a naughty smile, his tiny body covered in small perfectly pretty red designs. I looked back at him once and stormed down to the beach with a large stick to carve letters as large as my body "I hate this beach", filled them with shells and rocks. I looked down the beach at a family there, the children bobbing up and down in the waves like bottle caps.

I pitied their shrieks of happiness, they hadn't yet lost their brother.

The great late Alexander McQueen

2011-03-06T10:05:00.000-08:00

Fashion. Who does it belong to?

I have never in my life "followed" a certain designer. I have enjoyed looking at collections from 1960's Vogues and making my own pieces out of their color palate or theme, but fashion on the whole seems too fleeting, too intangible for my writerly heart to grasp. Fashion also seemed for the gaunt and long bodies of my friends who could perchance wear the slices of cloth made for whispers of girls. My body has always and will always be small and round.

Style, however, was/is for me. It has always been personal, a mish-mash of layers from many decades. I don't follow fashion blogs, I don't read fashion magazines (or any magazines other than bitch, bust and makeshift.) I tend to follow a natural instinct for putting together pieces on my body that are flattering, colorful and bold. I don't flinch around pattern and I am a sucker for brooches, scarves and the perfect clutch. I am a sucker for houndstooth and green and gold. I am a sucker for teal and op-art patterns. I am a sucker for soft fabrics that lay on the body in sexy and yet structured ways.

I rarely pay more than $10 for a dress and I feel blessed to be raised southern and influenced heavily with the gospel truth that women are to always look fabulous every single time they left the house. My mamaw always says "girl you ain't gotta be rich to put a comb through your hair and use some soap." and "Pretty comes in all price ranges." I learned to garage sale and thrift from her too, and digging through the antique store she owned for awhile, her patiently explaining the eras where pieces came from and what was fashionable in that era. We would pore over old Vogue magazines together and she would proudly point out pieces that she had replicated on her sewing machine as a girl in Rockwall, Texas. My eyes became vessels, growing fat with color, pattern and shape. I was mentally organizing darts, hems, necklines and detailing. I replicate these now in my wardrobe.

I was content with rebuking fashion magazines and striking out on my own. I was happy plunging myself into thrift store chic and the occasional second or fourth hand designer vintage piece. It's not like I never noticed a new Louis Vuitton piece or that Chanel has incredible lines. It's not like I was under a rock. It's more like I don't know fashion collections by year, or very many designer names off the top of my head. But hell, I know what I like.

I like Alexander Mcqueen.

I saw one Alexander's pieces by chance online when looking up wolves sometime in 2003. When I enlarged the image something fluttered inside my ribcage. There was a flicker of recognition and something else. Joy.

I loved everything about this piece and it really spoke to my heart. I saw the designer name and saved the image on my computer. Over the next 7 years of Alexander's life I followed his collections, albeit loosely. I watched him grow and stretch out, unraveling himself across me in undulating waves. His love of the ethereal and clear obsession with the afterlife was thrilling. His concise point of view, wildness, pooling darkness and hunger was deeply palpable. It whispered to me, under my hair and curled into my heart. I was smitten.

For the first and perhaps only time in my life I was obsessed with fashion. Not that this made me look at other designers or compare his work against them. I was strictly an Alexander McQueen girl. His work was enough to satisfy me, make me swell with pride for him and to encourage me to step outside of some of my own comfort zones with color and layering. It wasn't that I started to dress high fashion, it was more that I drew muse from his incredible work. I fell in love with reinventing again in a way that I had never before.

When I found out that he had taken his own life it affected me deeply. The sadness of losing his mother and his own mental illness struggles felt all too close to home. I had never really read more about his life or who he was as a person before, content to enjoy his beautiful creations. I pored over pieces about him in the months following his death. I learned as much as the internet can provide about someone you'll really never know and I felt a profound loss for the creative genius and the energy that this one person provided in the world. I really saw his work as art, the people were simply living canvasses. Alexander McQueen taught me that fashion is art and can belong to all people.

Even me.

It's been a little over a year since he took his own life and I am still here, poring over his gorgeous work and in February I lit a candle for him.

Thank you Alexander for lighting my candle.

for when the string of pearls show their face again

2011-03-02T09:57:00.000-08:00

it had to happen sometime
i made a mistake
let my fangs out
bled the prey out too quickly
skittered around
trying to lap up the blood
i made a mistake
coming out of the dark forest
being seen on hilltops howling
moon mocking my
bristly heart
i made a mistake
belly crawling under you window
my panting breath
making fog on your fingernails
i made a mistake
arrow in my belly
snapping wood in my teeth
limping around my cave
i made a mistake
forgetting
that i am just a wolf
nothing more

you had my heart and soul (in your hands)

2011-02-26T09:02:00.000-08:00

forever
some people come into your life
and you can grow together
vine up and be thorns
when you need to
or blossoms when you can

and it works
because you are similar
species of plant
then tre says
or maybe
just the right kind
of opposite

Glossolalia

2011-02-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

He didn’t yet want to enter the world. His wizened feet beat into the red walls of his mother’s uterus. He yawned and turned on his lazy side, content to spend another month growing into an even fatter larva. The doctor fretted and paced in his clean office. The nurse stood around in glazed eyed readiness. They would make him come whether he liked it or not. He closed his eyes and turned to give them a view of his ass.

The mother was stoned; bovine eyes red rimmed like they had been dipped in tomato soup. She drifted in and out of rooms, stopping to place one young hand on the dark haired child playing with shiny butter knives on the shag carpet. The hand was heavy and thick with listless far away lack. The dark haired girl child was already making up stories, spinning them around the belly of her mother, whispering incantations of secrecy to the child who refused to be born.

A month later than was demanded, he decided to come. He woke his mother up with a flood of his readiness and she cried out to her husband, already sleeping on the sofa after coming home from slender women with loose morals and wanting mouths. The father cycloned the tiny trailer, sucking up the girl child and a ratty suitcase and the dimly lit mother. All were deposited into the hatchback, while the night still pressed ardently into the earth.

The hulking shit brown hospital greeted them with a furrowed brow of concern. The boy who didn’t want to be born was suddenly kicking like a dolphin to swim out. The girl child was left at the feet of the fat nurse on duty, her support hose pressing into mottled legs and her white nurse shoes impeccably unmarked. The girl child smiled sweetly up into the cavern of frowns, using her best baby witch spells on the impossibly monolith of woman towering over her. The monolith simply said “Your brother is coming, soon no one will care about you anymore”. The girl child was unmoved by the cruelties of lonesome nurses. She was not cared for anyway.

The night was chased out of the sky by the North Carolina sun and the brother was born. He was much too fat and much too tongue tied to be considered cute. The doctors and nurses marveled over his size and opened his squalling mouth to cluck amongst themselves about he dense fatness of such a tongue.

Once home the girl child remained at the brother’s side. She sang over him when he would wake, holding his fat hand in her own slender one. The girl child watched over him when all adults left the shell of a trailer and they were alone babies in the darkness. They began to speak to each other.

The boy would open his mouth; his pink candy gums would wetly frame his obese tongue, impossibly stuck to his bottom jaw. The girl child would coo at first, mimicking infantile mutterings.

They created a secret language in those months that became years, a hallelujah of sorts. Even when they parents took the boy child to the doctor again, strapping him down and allowing medieval torture metal to clip under his tongue to free him of his dumbness. This language of utterances and wild gesturing became everything. They would speak all day to each other about everything, learning and growing together. The adults around them would stare in horror and fascination, understanding slowly that it was not just babble and instead something that made them touch their own throats in fear.

Eventually translation became necessary. The adults would make the girl child speak in their language, ask her things. The adults tried to divide and conquer. The adults gave up, bored with the small creatures at their feet.

The parents’ voices grew shriller and shriller with each passing day, the dull red marks of hatred flowed over children playing with boots and shoes for toys. One day where were no parents. Another day became a week and still there were no parents. Then came the day when they were scooped up from faceless arms, separated into compartments and put into ships to different ports.

The pain would come at night, tiny bodies turning over in cribs and beds crying out in tongues for each other. The tight rope of psychic constancy kept them with each other, their language spiraling up and out of tightly locked windows, smoothing over brows and cooling fevered lips. Their tongues eventually forgot each other (almost), lying lazy in their mouths, hardly speaking to adult bodies looming over them.

Even tears took flight from their faces as their bodies became longer and leaner. The memory of each other became a shell in which a pearl lodged itself.

As the years stretched them older and life became a normalcy, their lovers would wake them in the darkness. “You were talking in that language again” they would say, panic on the edges of their voice. “It was the same frequency again” they would trail off, afraid to touch, to be near. “It’s nothing” the answer would always be.

It’s nothing.

a jury hung the man

2011-02-19T11:31:00.001-08:00

easier is harder
we want things to be ugly
tearing at trees
and
stomping on villages
we want things to be howling
claws against flesh
and the smell of torches
behind our blood wet fur
we want things to be gouged out
tongues heaving out of maws
the moon mocking us
we want things to be torn
jagged pieces
scattering hallowed ground
we want things to be precious
and so we are
instead

volumes

2011-02-19T09:33:00.000-08:00

tiny little
ghost baby
aching in my uterus
pulling on tits
falling out of my apron pockets
slice of sunshine
draped across a splintered
backyard rocking horse
crooked smile
solo dimple that i once
bathed in
carelessly
tiger cub
grown tired of cave toys
ready for killing
whisper of innocence
buffeting on yesterday's wind
dusty throat goodbye
in the desert where we met
strangers now instead
but you are my boy
forever

beyond infinity (no take backs)

2011-02-17T19:55:00.000-08:00

and if it was all just a dream
you are like the birds i pointed at
scattered across a perfect blue sky
polka dots in flight
fat clouds smiling indulgently
behind them
you are like the accidental flood
lapping at my ankles
like hungry animals
you are like ornate knives
mounted carefully on blue shelves
keen and present
ready to bite
you are like playing children
tinkling voices
floating up to steamed up windows
you are like dust storms
kicked up in twists
lazily floating back down
serene to find their earth home again
you are like the constellation in my right eye
because you were the astronomer
who first discovered it

and here we are (finally)

2011-02-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

a sestina about the boy in my dream

he pressed down into silt again a soothing for his feet
he got stuck as the fishes slid around his filthy guilty ankles
like silvery cats he reached down to trail his bloody fingers
amongst them and they shied away darting into the coral clouds
his clumsy feet anchored into the sun warmed salty waves
the seaweed ‘round his ankles was like sleek mermaid hair

the boy has been raking his hands through his long dark hair
it stood at all angles around him running like dandelion feet
his eyes sat deeply in his head all emotions and dancing waves
green like pine trees and ringed with blue poisoned root ankles
the medicine bag around his neck was filled history of clouds
and with the wisdom of the dawn he clutched in his fingers

the rings on his arm were growing, golden and proud in fat fingers
each represented a constellation caught in goddess hair
each one grew with his body like the shimmery lining of clouds
jewels were embedded in the handmade rope that snaked his feet
chains from a past life snared his legs, permanently abrading his ankles
the call of wildness and hope slickered around his heart in ebbing waves

the suns were changing places as they do in this time of great need
when all good warriors threw their kill over shoulders with trembling fingers
claw marks and angry forest welts marching dully over careful ankles
shells and fangs strung haphazardly in their bloodthirsty hair
dreams of maidens waiting and splayed open legs make for staccato feet
they would head to shelter where freedom says goodnight and the moon waves

the boy drug his kill all blood and gore, protruding elbows mingled with ankles
mists around his dangerous war painted face in cumulus clouds
seashells for every day he walked his path alone in his hair
the blueness of the ocean crashes out a pattern of warning in its waves
the evening sky screamed blood across it in jagged and angry fingers
the drumbeat was now in the distance, his body released all cadence to his feet

yesterday the boy killed a village, leaving only on posts only wrists and ankles
the day before the boy lost his father and his heart festooned inky madness in clouds
yesterday the boy made a necklace of not their knucklebones but full fingers

if you would then go ahead

2011-02-07T13:17:00.000-08:00

something different
the want is a yawning
in my soul
it stretches
me out like rubber
i think i can't take anymore
and then i stretch some more
teeth clamped into my own bicep
steady horse reins behind my head
the scent of sweat and wind
all around my innocent heart
the want is my genius head
thoughts
spiraling up and out
fingers scrabbling to take
possession
of lava
the want is a monolith
soon to be made to dust
by the shadow of the cowboy
in my sundown dreams

what sort of wolf are you?

2011-02-07T12:07:00.000-08:00

hot silver dollars
wild thing in the brush
velvet dreams forgotten
ferine
wild thing in the pantry
banging and clanging
and howling
caught
wild thing under the bed
scurrying and snickering
watching
wild thing in the tree
baying and gnashing
haunted
wild thing in shoes
awkward crooked knees
pent up
wild thing baring fangs at
pretty poppies in fat fists
longing
wild thing remembers love
paws outstretched to touch it
trembling
wild thing in my heart
forever feral but sometimes
for a minute
lovable

2011-02-01T21:26:00.000-08:00

every single day
well not every day
but every day that i walk to school
i see this pair of red pumps slung up on a tree
and for awhile the pumps were obscured by leaves
and i said to him
"i want to get a good photo of those shoes"
and he said
in his smilingly patient voice
"you have wait for the leaves to fall'
and then the leaves fell

Call for Submissions! Broke ass Femme tour zine!

2011-01-31T12:29:00.000-08:00

Attention all Femmes that are strapped/poor/broke ass/working class Artists! Performers! Writers! Activists! Wanderers! Seekers!

We are looking for submissions for our zine compilation of stories and art from the road that we are calling Bus Fare To Kentucky.

Show us how do you feed yourself artistically and otherwise. How you afford plane tickets, train tickets and gas money. How you make it all fit in your suitcase. Show us your tour romances, hook ups, art inspiration and friends you made along the way. We want your struggle and your triumph. We want to know your hilarious, raunchy, heartbreaking and fierce stories of touring and traveling with your art (whatever that looks like for you) and making it work while maintaining your standard of Femme in the process.

We accept all visual art, photography, stories as long as it can be emailed. Stories must be submitted in Times 12 point single spaced. Art must be a reasonably high DPI and viewable on a Mac.

Femmes of any gender and ability welcome and encouraged to submit. Tell your friends!

Deadline for this project is March 15th.

Please email kentuckybusfare@gmail.com.

Kiss Kiss,
Alysia Angel and Nicky Click

from the other side of it

2011-01-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

I still use the .99 cent lipstick you bought me.

Sometimes I find it buried in a bag I haven't carried for awhile. I still use that wet and wild lipstick you bought me when I have to answer the door unexpectedly or when I have to run to the market for a last minute item. I still use it when i am sitting at home and I need to smell the familiar smell of you and us.

I will swivel it up from it's ugly casing and smear it greasily on. I press my lips together and they look miserable and misshapen. The red is all wrong for me, goldish shimmer is infused in the ruddy red and the cheap glossiness makes it well up in the corners of my mouth in untidy pools. I will smile a little, and there will absolutely be a stain of red on my front two teeth. I will muse sweetly about how you were a Hanukkah and not a Christmas but you bought me an on sale stocking and filled it with practical things like nice pens for me to write with and at the bottom was the lipstick.

I was never that lipstick and it was never me but that doesn't make it any less a tube of red lipstick that someone I loved bought me just because they wanted to see me smile.

i like watching you

2011-01-28T00:16:00.000-08:00

the sun was setting on the lip of the day, trains had come and gone across the bone yard and i was resting against the old wood boat again. i could trace the cursive letters of the name of the boat but i refused to turn and look at it because every single time i did, i fell in love again.

some boats are made well, seaworthy and hearty. some boats are ready for the great sail, finely cutting through water like a jack knife. this boat was upended, splintered wide open, used and sent to die in flat tongue of sand.

you told me to meet you there and so i did, wrapping my arms around me for warmth even though the air around me was hot with expectation. you told me to bring the map and so i did, all of the creases ironed flat by my hot damp hand.

you told me to trust you and i do as i count the minutes until i see your shadow again.

2011-01-24T14:55:00.000-08:00

PDX! Come see me read some smut at In Other Words for the Salacious Launch Party! This Thursday 7pm.

whoa! such an honor from such a lovely project.

2011-01-19T10:41:00.001-08:00

lightning fast

a decade with you is diamonds (joyeux anniversaire)

2011-01-19T08:41:00.000-08:00

I open my photobooth to use it as a mirror to check my lipstick and I find you there, ancient eyes and secret keeping lock of a mouth. You are such a sneaky cuss, marking your territory with your scent.

How many indolent summers in grassy idle can we have? How many strawberry smeared faces can we point to the sun? How many romance novels can we fill our libraries with, all about us, all about you?

I look at this face of yours, like an angel you wish would go fuck itself. I look at your alabaster coating, your luminous marble eyes and your doll mouth. I think you think the creator goddess life giver paid you some funny joke giving you such a sweet face to wrap around such intensity, poise and razor wit. I think of you scrunching your sweet lips at your sweet face and wondering why you weren't born in the shape of a straight razor, because honey you are so honed.

You are a better writer than me, with your long and sprawling pieces that make the rest of us look like hacks. You are smarter than me with your load of classes like boulders on your delicate clavicle. You are funnier than me with your mouth full of bloody attack tacks. You are prettier than me with your glossy pelt and swishing tail. You are perfect for me with your psychic forehead and your sleek fingers.

These ten years I have watched you grow, me grow, us grow in the same blackberry patch. We are thorny and entangled and worth the trouble. In these ten years I have let go of fear of the words we and us. Above all other relationships, drunken nights of fucking, hilarious whispered bed fort giggling stories of marauding and looting that we would tell no one else, we are us.

How many people wish for a best friendship like this one? How many people reach out their fingers for just one trembling stroke of our Victorian lace wrapped around our cut off heads? How many people wish for hand holding just because it feels good or steel rods shoved into where spines used to crumble just because one of us needed a good slap around? How many people wish they had our romantic letter writing dearest darling and love eternally? Hoop skirt dreams with daggers on the thighs love affairs?

You are eloquence and a field of my favorite dreams. You are all of the stars and all of the constellations. There is no other fox I would rather hide in this jasmine lined hole with.

P.S. I cried after I wrote this and there is not a god damn thing you can do about it. Suck it up, Hargrove.

once the dream

2011-01-19T08:16:00.000-08:00

we played spy in your backyard. inky splashes of night wetting our legs.

i put your gift of a captain's spyglass in my pocket, beat up brass and hairline crack. i put your gift of war shrapnel in my shoe, letting it cut my foot until a pool of blood filled up and spilled over. i pressed my yes please lips together and watched you hide from the night on our old courting rock. bandy-legged and elfin you played knucklebones with sirens while i stoked our infant fires near the sea.

if everything is magic and magic is all around us, how come i feel like the stars have become tinfoil in my mouth?

ontogeny

2011-01-09T23:54:00.000-08:00

from the moment the idea came, whispering under kneecaps, sliding under doors. from the moment i saw my very first shutter slide apart to show a perfect hole for my tongue to fit into. from the moment the pink package left my hands and sallied into the ocean. from the first red kneed wonder of it all.

i was smitten.

things will shift and swallow themselves but for now they are bursting out of captivity. i try to stave off my fears as bird with blue beaks hit the earth and fishes suicide into floating discs onto the tops of troubled waters. i try to focus on sugarcane shoved down my throat when i wake up sweating to my sheets with another apocalyptic dream of tsunamis and lava lakes.

i cut out a row of paper doll girls and i am sprawled across my bed in the rare portland sun. waiting for you.

jeweled ankles

2011-01-08T19:35:00.001-08:00

i get my crooked smile from my father, half my mouth in a twist. i get my eyes from no one, maybe the mailman they said, maybe because i am a changeling. i get my soul from past souls patched together to make a warm quilt. i get my spirit from the cougar that showed itself to me when i was 12 under the spell of a willow tree and a voice carrying me across plains. i got my sense of touch from being left howling in the woods and held in the jaw of a black bear. i got my heart beat from a machine gun jammed up inside my guts in a war that i didn't know i was fighting. i got my tears from the well of the least traveled road, all coolness and sacred and rare. i got my walk from crocodile jaws snapping at my treading heels. i got my hips from holding orphan jellyfish across great coral bridges.

i get my knock kneed excitement from your voice across my heart.

chapter sixteen.

2011-01-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

i talked about you for the first time in months last night. your story (our story) tumbled out in a recited way. i knew it like a well worn creased map. every hole in our map for our every road trip, our every starry night giggling in the angry the attics of a stranger. after i uncovered you there was a silence and i searched my catacombs for the ghosts of our old haunted barn. i plucked at your memory like a broken lyre and found nothing but scribbled sheet music and a faded valentine shoved under a door jam. we are smiling photographs in a well loved wallet. we are one dimensional and forever. we are sticky whiskey tables and door jam whispers. we are history books i reference for importance, for honor. a great love.

you are not forgotten.

for science she said

2011-01-03T23:48:00.000-08:00

she will never run out of teeth, rows of them pining to be let loose on the world. she will never run out of sharp mouth glory, tongue tracing and racing along the edges of her knives. she will never stop swaying bodaciously up and down my block taunting me with her spit curl dreams and gimme shelter hips. she will never stop being soft mollusk against her abalone spine wild tentacles waving like dancing like joy. she will never stop her rare growl in a well groomed wrist. she will never stop her halo of angelic fingernails, slickering against my wet porch screen.

i will never stop whistling her tune at bus stops.

ever.

in another month everything will tilt

2010-12-29T08:29:00.001-08:00

since october a burrowing began. i keep bringing home ribbons and slivers and bits of moss to make the nest i need. i keep tunneling in and out and lately more out. they say it's good for me but the ribbons flutter and sigh when i go, stroke my cheeks on the way out. the plushness off the moss against the mud is so inviting and the tamed fireflies palpitate against the curved walls for me. they get so lonely when i am not there to read to them stories of fireflies past.

since october a slow fear began of tiny little weensy things you take for granted. my fingers found more locks. my eyes roll around in their sockets more scanning horizons. my body finds more solid surfaced to slide against in large vacuous places. my hair has become tentacles with vipers ready to kill if i need it.

there is also more sweetness since october. sticky honey all over my floor and i just don't care. there is intention since october. gold paved roads leading to wonder and delight. there are circus tents under a velvet black sky studded with your diamonds. there is a fistful of hope and a really great GPA. there is quiet friendship. there is slow burn.

and you.

well the baby is still swaddling so

2010-12-27T23:04:00.001-08:00

"can i just crawl into your mind?" you said while pouring out water from our tiny make shift boat.
"we are all just layers of horror with the good times holding us together" i said while secretly stabbing tiny holes in in my thigh.

we have been starving on lies and your mother's favorite coffee cake. we have been dancing when there was no music. we have been taking peyote again, making visions again. we have been bare feet on hot sand again. we have been calling out names that are not there.

"you'll do it anyway" i mouthed while holding a baby shark in my hands.

fumble the ball why don't you

2010-12-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

i try to think about what i learned knowing you. i put us in a snow globe filled with happy things and shake us hard for good luck. i try to think about your warm smile in the dark and your funny way of stroking your vocabulary like a well tuned harp. i think about your kindness on buses and your sense of humor that slickered around me. i puzzle piece us where things don't fit and then suddenly in the middle of the night i wake up smiling and knowledge becomes a crane against a perfect sunset.

you taught me modesty.

thank you.

nonsense it's a velvet rope

2010-12-21T20:08:00.000-08:00

dilly dally
i can see your legs under the surface of the water
stainless steel snicking audibly in my sea shell ears
i can see your breath as it catches in your net of a chest
red ballooning out like a parachute against the waves
i watched your hair swirl into perfect arcs
whip wire slicing past my gilled cheeks
i watched your submarine arms dive deep into my coral reefs
scratching at your barnacled sides
i watched you slowly ease your beautiful elbows
up past my kelp arms that longed to hold you
i flattened myself into my own sand
just as you reached up to the sun for solace

sugar baby there's no tomorrow

2010-12-21T19:19:00.000-08:00

"you're so sweet" you said with your fingers making a vee in the sky
and i built a castle for you out of sand
squinting up at your back lit shadow body
"yesterday i saw three wolves" i said with studied casualness
and you carved notches in your weathered belt
strong white teeth biting into your peeling lips

it has been 20 days that we have been on this island and my skin has turned into salty brine. i learned how to fish by using a safety pin attached to a piece of my own hair attached to a tree branch. you stride up and down the water line with your angel winged feet searching for something. all i wanted was for you to search for me.

oh stranger, i feel like i might have to kill you just to find any peace from your beauty.

iconoclastic

2010-12-19T10:59:00.000-08:00

from the barn of a believer
you've got diamonds in your mouth
i know because you opened up and sang
you've got layers sliding along layers
i know because you lifted your sweet flesh
and showed me a dragon heart
you've got muscles and brawn
i know because they call you goliath
you've got gentle waters
i know because i put my feet down in them
your tiny fishes sliding around my ankles
you are covered in berry bushes
i know because you let me kneel under you
berry stained hands and happy lips
you have diamonds in your mouth
i know because i am suddenly rich