Boarding a Bus

Before she boarded the bus, she looked her mother

in the eye and lied. She had never lied—not about

pocketing the pack of Wrigley’s, not about the dead mouse

in her brother’s bed. But she lied about Jesus.

“I know him like a hand on my neck and beads which have slipped

through my fingers as prayers.” But she lied

about Jesus. Her mother didn’t know she meant,

“In the night like a moth flicking its wings against

the porchlight.” Her mother knew Jesus for years

before the first child, back when she scrubbed pajamas

in a birdbath and rubbed her sagging eyes. Others talked

and murmured in the corners of her ears, but she washed

until her fingernails split and her knuckles flaked, and when

her daughter lied, she believed, because she had forgotten the smells

of the market, the fabrics in their colors spilling, baskets

erupting melted jewels, the tang of the foodstands mixing

and hanging in the nostrils. So she believed, not knowing

her daughter meant, “A man in the attic, hot and metallic

in her teeth, hand sprung like small brown bows.”

I’m Stuck in the Old West

I brake and turn for the Shell Station on the cusp

of town so I can buy rolling papers, a Hundred Grand,

and pump some gas. The cashier smiles at me with ancient

elbows and two missing eye-teeth. The spot on her left breast

for a nametag is bare. The hill out back behind

the Grub Mart props up an ungrateful Windstar, rusting

on the too-green grass like a wounded

animal or a beached whale. A man in a hat opens

the door, the bell smacking its lips at me, and I hear

a strain of “God’s gonna cut you down” murmur

from pump three. I imagine the Windstar

crumble to a chrome, sparkling dust and sifted through

the grass and gone, obliterated by the sun until

the grass remains and waves and

flowers, stretching toward the air hard and fast like a

boy escaping the school bell.

The world begins again, hooves press the carpet

of the hill, battles cascade the slope in rifle balls and

bowie knives, husbands and wives recline with terriers

and kids. I row my boat through the years

until I boomerang back around. The clock hands

circuit enough times that the hatted man yanks

the door and Johnny Cash ushers the first clangs

of “Green River.” The heat squeezes my neck, and I

take my change, the cashier’s tongue pressed through

the holes, back, forth, tick tock.

Free Write

Johnny Cash got stuck in my head for some reason

practice makes perfect

why do I hate everything as soon as it's written XD

ugh D:

zeiss-manifold:

there’s an ice cream truck near our house and it’s playing a loop of Yankee Doodle interspersed with sounds of children going MA-HAAAA

he;lp

Our ice cream man was a Jamaican guy with a shotgun.

I bought the shit out of some ice cream. Even though the song was “Oh Susanna” interspersed with dog barking noises. It was way weird, man.

Huff Puff HUFF

I want 3000 words today, self! Now get down on the ground and give me… uh. Three thousand.

Guys. Guys. Guuuuuuuuys.

WRITING IS HARD D:

I’m pretty pleased with myself so far, though. A tidbit for all the people who don’t give a shit:

Speaking of queens, she decided she must look the part of one, if the stares were any indication. She tried to ignore them as she moved toward the auciton room. A familiar voice stopped her short, however.

“Hey, Princess — I mean, Lady Kisaragi, you look like hot stuff tonight.”

Yuffie turned, and to Reno’s visible surprise, delivered him a shallow bow. “Reno,” she said, unable to keep her genuine pleasure and amusement from her tone, “and Elena,” she added, bowing to the blonde woman who trailed behind her redheaded partner.

She heard shutters clicking and knew the press was going to have a field day with her deference for the Shinra dogs. She didn’t care. The world needed a reality check — she had respect for the ex-Turks. They worked for the WRO, and she would not tolerate any more bad words for them. They had done good work for a number of recent years, the world was not black and white, and she was tired of animosity, tired of games and grudges.

“Where’s Rude?” she said in the slightly awkward silence. Reno smirked, his scars stretching, no longer off-kilter at her actions. “He drew the short straw. Then again, he never really was much for parties, the big guy.”

She didn’t question it. She guessed Rude was probably perched in some high place with a very slick gun and a high-powered scope. Yuffie felt a little better knowing it and entertained, not for the first time, thoughts of training her guards in some of the Turk methods. They would do well for it.

—

Yeah. Hot off the press, so highly unpolished but damn if I’m not going to enjoy this next scene. 70,000 words, here I coooooome!

my lame-ass fanfiction

writing is hard

nobody cares lololol

yuffie

tseng

leviathan

current projects

El Vaquero

El Vaquero

When I woke to find you staring from behind a mountain

of smoke, framed by the riotous orange wallpaper and

the delicate bedposts, I knew our story would

never be told. I knew I could not speak your name

the right way, curling from my mouth and through

my arched, frenetic fingers. We would be a story in thirds,

scattered and incomplete like gunpowder, told in your

saloon’s shadow and transfigured by high noon, melodious

footsteps, and a horse. The horse is important.  I’ll

recall your hand on the flank. I’ll recall

the three nights’ ride and the foam on your knuckles

and the sweat clinging to your yellow whiskers.

Afterward, after the lies—25 years of nothing and

Our story is nothing—afterward, go back to the

beginning. Part the smoke like a woman’s hair and smear

your lips down my braid, my arms still covered and proper.

No jacking my petticoats with your sand-bitten nails, I say.

No flicker of your pupils in the fire, no heat in the

heat. I tell no nights soaking in stars and snake venom.

Just of three-feet distances between and spitting out grit,

blood, bits of sky. Above, it stretches

over and around to beneath you, so long, so old.

We tread clouds and cornbread, fingers licked, locked

in saddles.

Watched True Grit today

Westerns are Awesome

First draft

Free Write

Junkyard Quotes

“Can you hold this robot? It’s too heavy.” — Boy in the furniture salvage store

“Feeling pressured to do something by the eyebrows of others?” — Dana, reasoningwithvampires

junkyard quotes

reasoningwithvampires

heavy robot

Drafting, Calisthenics

(Selecting lines at random from The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, then crafting them into something entirely different, then stringing it all together in an attempt to actually write something decent for once. Don’t really think it worked, but oh well. Practice is as practice does.)

It takes a special obscurity to rot
bananas like this house does, all
flapping, gummy rinds spotted
in the window, hungry deer gazing
in, then fleeing at the creak on the stairs,
the percolating coffee. 
My flea-bitten hip bumps the fruit bowl atop the dish
washer, and in that moment, I can’t tell what is a
good war or a bad war and whether my father likes Ann
Coulter or just likes
brown, creased apples.

When I run over the oppossum tonight
I smell hot, wet pavement and, curiously,
watermelons.
My brother rains at times, feels unwanted and beats
his shivering, brand new puppy when it pisses
hot and fresh
on his bedspread. The puppy comes back thick and grateful,
all cow spots and pink belly. My brother will smoke
until his hands become wise, until his fingernails
wither. Nicotine and tall tales and thieving for drug-money.
I don’t want to write about death — they all do —but
then the bananas blacken and Aunt Fran shrinks
beneath cancer from the waist up, and I beat
a single drum on a oppossum with my tires, smash
a cricket for singing
too loud in the stems of the peace lily
and some muggers kill Steve Gale, a friend of a friend
on the internet, and a motorcyclist lies prone in
chunks of plastic as I pull over
for the ambulance. 

calisthenics

Riffing

Improvising

Drafting

Scrabbling for anything useful to write

really

Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

by Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. 

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Howard Nemerov

Great poems

The masters

I wish I could write like this

Opossum (a work in progress)

Late in August, when the summer wears thin at the seams, and the patchy clouds have scrubbed the moon bright-eyed and clean, I run over a opossum with my twenty-year-old Honda Civic. The thump rattles my crooked front teeth and my mind. A quarter of the mile down the road, I yank a hard u-ey and return to the junction of Whitesville Rd and Upper Big Springs Rd. I get out of the car.

My brother’s puppy puked on my passenger seat an hour ago, a livid orange protest painted in Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O shades. An hour ago, I dropped off him, his dog, and his pregnant girlfriend. She is sixteen and wears a bow splashed with buffalo checks in her short red hair. Probably my seat will always look like I beheaded the worm from Tremors there. I’m so tired — of my mother and my brother and his pregnant girlfriend and the way he dropped out of school and his feather-light promises of GEDs and working at the Happy Stop. 

I cannot find the opossum for several minutes, but it’s there, somewhere.