Paperweight Poetry

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green, ...

I am in the backseat of a station wagon, and I feel like a crime scene about to happen, like tender skin, you can already feel the bruises rising from, like a flock of birds who know when it’s time to come home. I can hear them rolling out the yellow tape, it is Death’s variation of teenagers scratching into tree trunks and walls to say, “I was here.” The car walls stiffen with the click of the car keys like a belt going up a notch and the air feels thinner like I could poke it like a paper with a wooden pencil and enter another dimension, even the slit leather beneath my body tenses like a quivering muscle before an immunization shot, full of unaccommodating anticipation. The car walls nudge in closer and folds itself away into a corner like a vagrant dog who hides under the back deck when it knows it’s about to die. It feels like origami, a swan, an origami paper swan. I hear the officer say “DOA” just as a floppy-haired intern shows up...

I want to write you letters, to buy you flowers, to run my fingers through your hair. I know nothing about love, but I know how to do if perfectly, I think I would be a really good lover, I would be good at loving you. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings from watching films and reading books. I wish we could love each other without our bodies. My body can't quite fit around this soul, it is too large in some places and too small in others. I stretch and pull like taffy but there are too many miles of skin. I wish our souls could meet without our bodies, so you wouldn't know the tragedy of analyzing my eyes, the glances, the motion of limbs or lack of it. I wish you knew the buzzing ball of light and energy that is my soul, before you knew the vessels, skin, and hair that cover it. I want to draw you over me like a blanket and whisper to the universe in the space between our souls; and write you letters, and buy you flowers, and run my fingers through your hair...

I have bought every loofa, exfoliating glove, scrub brush, shave lotion, and hair removal cream, but I can never scrub or shave some things off of me. I cannot scrub the shame of my body, no matter how hard I push, I cannot scrub off all the miles of looping skin and lumpy cellulite, the gnarled twists of varicose veins, the deep swells of bruises rising from unknown places like ravens, I cannot shave off all of the hair, it just keeps growing back and coming back like a daily reminder pinned to the world's bulletin board of my tireless grotesquity in my raw and unadulterated form. I cannot scrub the stench of sexual assault off of me, or all the purple perfect fingerprint impressions you left on my skin. I cannot scrub the feeling of you off of me or shave away the shame that I wasn't strong enough to fight you off, the helplessness, I cannot scrub the feeling of weakness, of my body being powerless against yours, my voice, my protests, only eggshells to yours....

Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons, calling them by their names of apricot, instead of what we see, orange. Let us peel off their paper coats and draw sailboats in the inner wool, so now we can roll them against the pages we tore from the backs of books, making wide inundations of color that mushroom across the page, so that we forget that the rivers we created were once only a stiff rivulet between a child’s fingers. Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons, as fastidiously as Renoir dismissed his brushstrokes from his hand to the swathe of canvas as vast and ballooning, liberated and pregnable as the tract of a whale’s belly. Let us choose our words like a non-native speaker, who dares not call a fountain a toilet, and takes care in plucking words like searching for and paying full price for unbruised pears. Let us choose our words like a crayon, a Renoir brushstroke, an unbruised pear, and pay full pri...