science fiction meets nostalgia

In my rear view mirror I could see a girl behind me in the night. She was clicking her lock button so the car headlights would flash. In the dark it looked like a giant primordial spark of flint. She must of kept clicking her lock button because the flash would happen again then again, like a whip crack that she commanded. Looking into the mirror felt like looking into a story book. I am eight and reading about a cold boy on the wooden floor of an inn. He is about to place firewood in the furnace but until then he is honest, virtuous, and freezing to death. Meanwhile this girl in my mirror is calling the light out of no where and I want follow her, if she goes, to some house surrounded by palm trees. But also I want the light to keep ringing out as if it were hitting me each time. I wonder who is in control of the universe and if this girl is in the center and if this is a story of the safe or dangerous variety. Is this the future or the past that I see? How can it feel like both at the same time?

She learned to rue the day that she said the name of home like it was any other place.

The Day My Father Mistook My Mother for a Bird

She was pecking cornmeal on the table.

He said don’t touch her, the smell of your hand will cling to the wings, then no one

will touch her. We watched from the verandah the way she rustled in the yard than howled

like a cat locked in the laundry room.

I think that’s her whistle said Dad.

The laundry room is also a nursery for baby clams-- we counted them and found nothing but sand in their soft parts.

We tried to feed them to her, but Mother Birds do not eat clams. Instead

she takes tufts of our hair to fold into a nest in the kitchen, a shrine of bike helmets and science fair posters. Mother

sits on the rubble until she’s all of it: the bottom half meets her top half and a she’s a twister board that no one plays.

The pile is an ice dispenser and an emerald. Somewhere is her metal eye.

We do not touch her.

This Painting at the KMA Looks at Me While I am Look at It

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A white room is here and out there. Between is a painting’s faint space, which is looking to who? Me or you? I was trying to— I was looking for— but now I can’t remember. Your hands are at my waist and neck. Our feet find the carpet— your shoes, Dear, are utterly ridiculous. I’m not sure where to direct my apologies to, on your behalf— this small red flower in the center might do. If I could leave— but the door is just a line. The line is the floor and the ceiling and your mouth. What is more real in that room, this room— than the edge of a wall, an end table leg?

There were flowers then, and some rollie pollies under the log. Now nothing turns over and each shape is fixed. The thoughts I had exited the frame last year. I thought we were here to see the art I want to murmur not so nicely in your ear but I can already hear what you don’t say which is you are the art darling Get out, get out, the only thing left for some giant hand to pluck up is that cardinal on top of the pear tree. Not featured in this exhibit: that cardinal, the frog in my mother’s pond, things I dreamed about when I was eight, Garfield, there’s not room now for even the water drops on the corners of their mouths. I look out from the corner of my eye.

A Woman in White Significantly Shrinks Before Her Relocation— Is She an Egg?

The sink rim collects trinkets: flabbityjibbits, wire whisks, a mobious strip of smells

curl up the wall to watch fruit flies sputter for a strawberry leaf inside an eggshell.

In the kitchen, an organic death star floats in white curtains before the freezer.

This is our ingénue—in the air. Each of her ruffled steps fill the square inch of an eggshell.

Like white bread, she sops up the corners to bow out at 11 o’clock,

cramped for space, stepping on eggshells.

Someone has packed small suitcases for her move to the compost heap: juice &

tea bags pucker for a pattern instead of horizon-less eggshell.

Damp walls wheel out microscopic waterfalls from each pore—

what is a ladybug to a red paint fleck, or our Thumbelina to an eggshell?

The faucet drools over 12 cracked huts, a hedge of 6

baby snails chant oh no, it’s raining off my eggshell.

A small bloom descends to the floral armchair, Ponce de Leon rests panting

as a princess, then shoves on for carpet-colored jade & endless rounding eggshells.

Stephanie and the Museum of Appalachia

A Story:

When I was telling Stephanie about my really neat trip to the Museum of Appalachia (just 15 minutes away from campus)-- she shuddered and re-expressed through nervous laughs how it was at the Museum of Appalachia that she first developed her fear of old things.

I've always known that Stephanie has had this fear of "old things"-- a fear that she has voiced almost since day one of my meeting her; but I never fully understood before now the extent and origins of this strong aversion.

She was on a classroom feildtrip sometime in elementary school. Everyone was watching a reinactment of old-fashioned surgery.

"It was really real," Stephanie said, "The bed pan and the leeches and the blood." She started throwing up everywhere and her dad had to come, calm her down, and take her home.

"So now youre freaked out by old medical practices?" I tried to clarify.

"No." she said. Apparantly it was the setting of the place that reminds her of the instruments and body fluids that frighten her. Artifacts hanging on walls, things one finds in an attic-- these are the causes of unease for Stephanie: the backdrop of the fateful day.

"I couldnt go inside a Ruby Tuesdays or a Friday's for years," she said.

It is worth noting that in addition to "old things," Stephanie is also afraid of "old things on fire," "fire," and "Russians."

TOTALLY OBESSESED WITH MERMAIDS

TOTALLY OBSESSED WITH MERMAIDS

on relationships, after nietzsche

How is it, that when we are most happy in relationships, it is when we are least invested in them? Nearly everyone person, on once examining themselves, can admit, however secretively, that they feel a brighter fondness for their college roommate than what they do for their romantic partners, who with which they have journeyed higher peaks and abysses with. Of course this is not an overt preference that we make. But there must be a safety to these easier relationships that we prefer to rest on.

Once a relationship tips the boundaries from a cheerful friend to something more, anxieties and tensions arise. Now it is a matter of power. Who ever has the more indifference of the pair, has the greater power. According to many configurations, "the will to power" is the essence of organisms. So why is it that when one of two people makes this step towards what one could say is a greater connection-- that the other does not rejoice at their new leverage? Is it because we are cowards who do not know how to seize power? That is, we are newly aware of the danger that surrounds relationships when politeness fades and the stakes are hightened? Or is this a model of where the will to power rule is thwarted-- that we actually do not want power over eachother?

It is paradoxical that holding the fragile psychy of another, fluttering in our hand, is too unbearable a burden.

We are for the most part, in normal (?) circumstances, happier to coast on the superficial ice rink of relations, not plow through the swamp. Maybe it has ultimately to do with laziness-- a lack of desire to invest, and feel responsible for this new relationship. What if, after all, the other person changes, or it changes you? When things get "real," we back off.

This desire to become closer among superficial friends, is perhaps best manifested as a desire to dispell illusions one may have about the other. When you hardly know someone, or only interact with them on easy, agreeable terms, you may aquire a mythic appreciation of their character. They, wanting a closer relationship with you, may sense this and work to show you their underside so that they can be certain that you know them and not thier idealized-doppelganger. In a way, become vulnerable. This sort of revealing is what is uncomfortable and embarrassing for the other person. That is why people want to have engage in relationships that never reach this place, coasting on the shadows of feeling but not the feelings themselves. Or they want it before they have it, then not want it when they get it. Duh. Is there a solution? Take the time, I suppose, to not run away from an honest connection. For better or for worse-- "bite off the head of the snake."