Memory 2 Week 5

When I turned 13, my parents checked me out of school in the middle of World History.
We hadn't gotten yearbooks yet, but the girls in my class crowded around me and started crying.
It was the last time I saw that school.
It was May. It was raining.
We sat on dull hardwood floors on empty pizza boxes while the moving men unloaded into different rooms. There were three upstairs and a basement still above ground.
The horizon broke with four mounds of dirt in our backyard, and a empty park filled with oak trees
where the neighborhood hid plastic eggs on Easter, begging four year-olds to fight with teenagers over candy.
I shared a bathroom with my sister. At night, we would scramble to the vents and whisper to each other about how mom wouldn't let us stay up to watch Nick @ Nite because it was too adult.
And on the weekends, I would count footsteps across her room and mine, making sure that my room was bigger.
One summer afternoon, I perched myself on my desk chair, mulling over multiplication tables in a bridge workbook, eavesdropping about my father.
That would be years before he sat us down on another summer afternoon, in a different town, and clipped the fraying thread of our family.

Junkyard 3 Week 5

The light splices the red and creme couch arm.
A green blanket lies balled on the floor.
A coaster sits under the table and the cat scratches at the underside.
Andre the giant laughs as he lobs a boulder off a mountain.
The cat leaps to the windowsill.
A dog from across the street, wanders into our front yard
and leaves a nice pile in the leaves.
Ewan McGregor goes square dancing in limbo.
My roommate pours quinoa into a bowl on the counter
and mixes butter into the pan on the stove.
And my sister, in Alabama, buys sunglasses off Amazon
for herself for Valentine's Day.  And tomorrow,
Heath Ledger skateboards with sixteen year-olds.

Memory 1 Week 5

He said I've gotta have a routine.
But I watch James Franco play Darl
and cannot take Anse Bundren seriously--
Tim Blake Nelson's got no teeth,
and all I see is Dr. Pendanski.

She said she'll be okay, but not right now.
And I smiled to myself, thinking of you,
swimming to the bottom of the lake,
hat floating above the ripples, bobbing
with that sniffling grin, too selfish to say
you were wrong.

He said whiskey was lucky, and shoved
the glass under my nose, burning by gut
and throat for a minute. I said I didn't want
you, or him. I remember the cats outside
my window, whining. The blinking lights 
of someone's car. A half pulled down sock.

Junkyard 2 Week 5

So It Goes

Someone told me fear was a sin.
Well, baby, watching you crash
like a telephone pole in a lightning
storm, and wishing in my gut
that instead of splintered wood,
bone crushed on pavement. Asphalt,
mixed with brain matter, my shoes
splattered crimson. Fear,

unless the fear of God or some shit said
in Sunday School, means more
than a piece of stuck gum on the bottom
of new sneakers. The blue ones,
with white stripes on the sides, that you
bought for my birthday that year.
Less than the jumping off buildings,
or the petting of a feral cat in the backyard.
Baby, your fear kisses ass and sits
in the back of my head like calcification. 

Junkyard 1 Week 5

Beforemath

The thing is,
I feel about average. The inextricable
relationship, Greekless reader,
between articulating phenomena
and the day the Bastille fell,
is a crime. Unfortunate lower clerk,
a minor nation celebrated,
the horizon yawned, and no refund
removed. Instead, it drifted back inside you.
Back inside the mass if unobtrusive. 

Original post 2 week 5

The Ten Commandments of self love sit on a bench outside the TLC lecture halls, repeated in the minds of the girl in purple upstairs, who printed them out before leaving the house this morning. 

1. I shall lovingly accept myself as I am right now. 

2. I shall regularly give thanks for all my blessings. 

3. I shall appreciate the beauty that makes me who I am.

A boy in black understands nothing, but sits in class discussing his personal life, using it against Emerson and Thoreau, or Morrison and her book Beloved. Because he's beloved by his mother and forgets to set his alarm each morning. 

4. I shall trust in my ability to take care of myself. 

5. I shall not criticize others. 

6. I shall forgive myself when I make a mistake. 

My mother drinks to forget my father, her mother, and the empty beds downstairs. Her car leaks fluid in the garage while my father drives around in the backseat of a man in a suit, sucking on a mint, discussing children he barely knows. 

7. I shall not criticize myself. 

8. I shall be kind to others, without sacrificing my own needs. 

9. I shall take responsibility for my life. 

My sister pulls into my driveway in her best friends truck, lugging a duffel. She sits on my kitchen table, cross legged, eating a piece of chocolate cake with yellow balloons. 

10. I shall love myself to the best of my ability. 

I almost fall asleep to the sound of my hamster running on her wheel, while a bottle of apple flavored wine sits half empty in the refrigerator, echoing something I can almost hear under the silence. 

Original post 1 week 5

This came from the pre-workshop prompt put on the board using the lines: "to take the wrong road/is to arrive at...." 

To take the wrong road

Is to arrive at the end, where a man 

In a dark red hat smiles with crooked teeth

And those crooked teeth smile at each other

And no one knows where to look to find the beginning again. 

We wish for frost. For a yellow summer

Where responsibility doesn't quite absolve who we are

And who we are contains an other beyond the marks 

Of seagreen white. And nothingness is a hollow ring 

Thrashing the air, like a pelican caught in plastic. 

To take the wrong road

Is to arrive with a man who frowns at nothing,

At everything, and to whom tears are the rivers

On a map in his closet. Forever is an ember

On the asphalt of infinity. And the road, 

The right road, takes us on a dotted line.