1.
Creative
Writing
“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.”
– Dorothy Parker
the fox
A woman in a silver suit asks me, “Who are you trying to be?”
She has my mother’s eyes and my father’s hands; my sister’s grin, but my brother’s sense of humor. For the first time, my answer doesn’t fall between ‘myself, but more’ and ‘myself, but less’. Instead, I tell her I don’t remember. I tell her there is something inside of me that echoes with a resonance I don’t recognize. There is a folded piece of paper at the bottom of my bag. It has been there for weeks. I hand it to her.
i am looking for things to keep me here after
the things keeping me here right now are gone
She smiles. When she tells me it will be okay, her voice sounds like mine.
missing poster
There is nothing but the faint glow of an electric toothbrush charging in the adjoining bathroom. For a moment she wonders if she is still sleeping, if this landscape permeated by a blue pulse is part of a dream. Lying on her back in the almost-dark, she focuses on the ceiling. The oblivious figure sleeping next to her sighs. They are so close to each other; close enough that she can feel heat ricocheting between their bodies. But they are not touching. She considers moving her arm, repositioning her torso, shifting one leg slightly to the left. Skin against skin –– the idea haunts her. It is trapped below her fingernails. She sits up, lifting herself out of bed. She has learned how to move without anyone knowing. Behind the closed bathroom door, she quickly changes her mind about turning the light on. Instead, she watches herself in the mirror as her face flickers in and out of view, in time with the rhythmic flash of the toothbrush charging on the countertop. She washes her hands with the bar of soap that rests in a porcelain dish. When she returns to the bed, she does not immediately lie down. She sits with her back pressed against the headboard and lets her face fall into her open palms. As she breathes in, a feeling like warm cider begins to thread itself through her body. The pale bar soap in the bathroom, she realizes suddenly, is the same brand her mother buys. She inhales. The familiar scent is pressed into the grooves of her fingerprints. She sits like that for a long time, taking deep breaths and thinking of her mother. For a moment, she thinks her hands have transformed into her mother’s hands; soft, clean, strong. When she opens her eyes, she wonders if anyone will ever hold her the way her mother can.
snapshots of a past life
my cousin wears shorts and sandals in the winter,
even now, after he stepped on a silver industrial nail
in the park behind the house he grew up in, even now,
after he pulled it from his own foot and imagined bleeding out,
trailing blood across the monkey bars, even now, after
he went to the doctor every week for a month,
my cousin wears shorts and sandals in the winter.
in fourth grade we have a substitute who talks about reincarnation.
someone from the back of the class whispers that really it’s just
another way of dying. we never have the hippy substitute again.
the old man who lived at the end of the street always smiled
when i saw him at the mailbox. i thought maybe he was santa.
my mom says “he drowned himself. can you imagine?” and when i look
out the window, the lights are still on in his house
down the street but the police cars aren’t flashing anymore. i wonder if
he pushed iron spikes into the flesh between his toes to weigh himself down
or if he became a fish and thought he was flying.
Do you remember when the water sprites stopped showing their faces? Do you remember the summer you waited by the sea, hoping they would return? You sat in the sand long after sundown with only a lantern to keep you company. You had forgotten what they called themselves, so you cried out every name you could think of. No one came. Sometime after midnight, someone went looking for you. Your skin was cold to the touch, so they wrapped you in a wool blanket. Do you remember how it smelled? Like something bitter buried beneath a layer of earth? They guided you back to the house and tucked you into bed. When you woke, there was a bottle of seawater on the table.
graveyards and dictionaries
i wonder who you would haunt, if you were a ghost.
sometimes i mistake my imagination
for my memory.
i let it paint you silver with iridescent hair,
and realize i can’t recall what your smile looked like.
haunting is one letter away from
hunting.
a linguist would show you the symbols,
neatly caged between two boxy parentheses,
but i will show you how one sound
in the back of a throat
means
‘pale blue crescents below tired eyes’
and a different sound means
‘red champagne makes foolish hearts beat faster’.
i wonder who we would be,
if we were not ourselves.