Oct 22 — Maison Writing 〇

There's a play I want to write in here. There's a story and a floating shoe and a crack in the wood. In the slit between parquet, wasting where dirt and soil and where micro-things lie. And my play. Or my poem. I know it's hiding there: In that guy's Nietzschean mustache waiting to be sneezed out for me to inhale like airborne inspiration. Yes, that's where it is! : In the space between taps of the jittery foot across the room or in the soundwave of the desk’s screeking joint pain. I only need twist my ears like knobs to snatch the right tuning. It's flying around here I know. I know because there's a flyer that screams WRITERS CIRCLE. So if not here then nowhere. Not in the car horn outside and not in the drone of the wheel to pavement. It must be in the room with the sign. They promised me! They promised me something good! A space for words like a decapitated fire hydrant. Writers circle. Barely a circle, barely a writer.  

for luck  

To expand your surface area
for luck, sweep the front 
steps 
every morning

and catch a passerby’s comment. 
Visit  the same café 

				like a Sunday ritual. 

Clear  the seat beside you 
				   		for a stranger. 

Ask them  

anything. 

                                   Conservation

Where words are sung not spoken. Ø’s circle my eardrums, the flute hum of this Norwegian grassland. Undulating stones watch helical bird feathers from below, stirring the windy coast while I perspire pearls in the sea. My limbs tire in its grasp as the moment emits from my pores. The fondness in my flesh floats to the surface. Foaming. The vagary of this sweat. It was like the Great Wall when I was ten. I plucked hair from my scalp and sowed strands gently along its wearied body. Between crevasses of crackling skin. Rugged kiln. Air scorches dry against a new hand. In its fissures, transient fingertips set cells down for burial. My bones won't remember this; the body molecularly replaces itself every seven to ten years, so only a trace of existence will be dust in the end. But I've been scattering my ashes since I was born. One day, I will be buried or burned; all I know is the earth makes itself again and again and maybe my child-self lives in my family’s soil or our linen cloth. I know she’s sailing Chinese air and floats atop Tjølling’s water. I know we never really leave this earth because today I felt her in my inhale. 

Nature poem [long form/ first draft of Things I am Reminded  of in my Empty Bathtub published in Ahoy]

This summer, I lay my body on a perfectly ergonomic rock, immovably carved in the river between Varely Trail and the infinite mountain abyss. I brought an orange which I slurped and bit into with my hands like a chimpanzee—like a human. The juice pods—vessels—burst over my chin, ran down my chest, breaking off into streams of their own on my skin; systems of citrus veins flowing along my forearms to drip from my elbows into the busied water. Cheeks wet, lightly stinging cuts along my lips; stinging jealousy at the remorseless orange for spilling her entirety until dry. She lies there after me, quartered skin rendered clean again; basks on the rock in contentment.

This autumn I am at Segal’s in the fish-stenched back aisle. The quiet tension in my gut whispers that I am bleeding all over ivy green linen. Woman's intuition trickling down my leg as if a raindrop; but much greedier than that. I stroll out with my carton of eggs and a loud, prosperous stain on my skirt. After a decade of thunderous, ear-splitting displays of unpregnantness, I have learned to rid myself of the panic. While stranger pedestrains are made visually aware of my pleasantly vacant womb, my hand is suddenly grazed in solidarity; a serous slime accompanied with a heavenly glucking chorus from the dispersing white clouds overhead—yolk.

Two cycles prior, permeated in the scent of orange, I lay my naked body on the human-shaped rock;  my blood rivers down its mineral limestone spine from the restless molting of my disappointed, grieving uterus. I sink myself into the river as it wraps me in its movement and I am continually made clean again; my hair made limp from its relief, my body no longer a visitor to the water. The hen ovulates, releasing yolk from her single overactive ovary every twenty-seven hours; my egg releases every twenty-seven days while we are punctually orbited, uterus shedding at every new moon. The running yolk and I parade down the city pavement—hen and river’s orange. 

Spine contorted unnaturally in my non-ergonomic, empty bathtub, knees bent staring into a distorted reflection in the silver knob. The shining dark wine river flows on marble craving its passage as if sculpting boulders. When I sit to write a nature poem, I write instead about chickens and my thundering menstruation; yet I think about my bleeding body like a hens, yolk painting edges of rocks on Varely Trail and wonder why I muse only on swaying trees and whistling wind; while I bleed on the city’s concerte,