there are measures we can take. there are steps, procedures to put in place, ways in which I can learn when to bite and when not to bite my tongue, when to walk away and when to assure you that I’m coming back. more essential: there are ways in which you can admit that parts of you are broken, that parts of you are breaking me. because while I may chose to stay, while I do love you, this responsibility is not mine, and cannot be, because the choice to pursue change is yours. I am reaching for a drowning man, and his fingers are going not for my arms but for my eyes. his words cry help, but then cry murder, and then convince me so seductively that it is water that our lungs are aching for, not air.
A little girl learns that sometimes when her father is angry, he will yell and yell, make himself hoarse with names and swears, kick and throw things at the walls but never at her, but if she waits until he is done, goes quietly up to her room to cry, and waits, he will come up those steep stairs, remorseful, every time. I’m so sorry. He will grovel, and the peace will be made, as long as the temporary storm is weathered. His anger grows less frightening with time, not more. But then, sometimes, a woman still pretends to be a child, but this man is not her father nor does he act the same. She loves him in a different way and he rages in a different way and now when she sits there and listens, until it’s time to cry and wait for the apology, she feels as though she’s doing something wrong.
found on the street in Chicago
TO: Kristen C
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
You still never call me, I cry. But I still love you. My lady your gorgous. ***-3084, I will be waiting. We have to chill naked with zebra’s. P.S Nice Ass, I Love it, I mean U.
FROM: Alex F
null
in case you were wondering what I do with my time.
(shooting the trailer for For Profit)
in a Western Massachusetts barn, we are on the see-saw. try so hard to keep still, keep still. we just want that good flat line, that peaceful bit. we are screaming. the music is loud, i don’t remember. i remember her face, streaked with sweat, like mine, like mine. under the white gauze, under the hot sun, i am fainting. the realization crowns; we have set ourselves an impossible task. we are being difficult to be difficult, but we don’t know how to stop. we are yelling into the wood, we are yelling into our bodies to be mastered–please, please, let the physics of this world simply yield to my demands. my temples burn. i have shorn off all my hair. my skin is burned. my shoes are torn. we have done this to ourselves for our own good. i want to return, i want to flee. the ache in my feet from those barefoot woods was better than this echoing chest. two half-filled balloons try desperately to balance. the beam does not know mercy, an object can only be honest and so i fill my room with things. i climb inside my seat, i climb inside my life again to learn i am betrayed–no matter, no matter. i spend six years on a bus across town; i see you and i nod. we are trying so hard to be still, because someone we thought—
the struggle to stay cogent remains throughout all seasons. spring slowly bleeds to birth itself, and my stupid head is caught in winter. the night life of my small mistakes crowds around my bed, a hoard. the horses pound the earth. i bend. i keep my woman’s back curved in supplication to my doubt, i keep my child’s teeth yellow like the day. in a half-dream my mother turns to me, sobbing, and I have nothing to say.
you can stop, he says. just stop, he says. you can walk away. walk away, walk away. my legs have fallen off with every lash i pulled. i wander the cosmetics isle, hoping to– nothing to be said, I said. nothing to be said. once I start I won’t be able to stop, I said. once the dam breaks the river knows that it can win. and who are we to try.
in a Missouri motel cigarette bed, I am overwhelmed by the sweetness of you, the fellow child with whom I gladly share so many of my hours. i do my best to push away the fear that edges at me nightly, before my legs wrap between your ankles, the worry of all the days that come after and after–when I am dead, what will I have done? when I am old, will you have loved me well. it matters little in the day. I am laughing, I am ignoring family phone calls, I am making daydream plans for all the coming months of art and pleasure. I am riding in this car across the country.
Kansas is long and flat and makes me nervous, but even now it is behind us. I make my promises again that yes, yes, soon I will work hard, I will turn the machines in the basement until my dreams come true.
the past few weeks have been a haze. booze and sex and pills and hospitals and bad news and more bad news. vision going in and out, stumbling through white halls, waiting for someone to prove to me that i’m not going blind. i must not be–since the clouds cleared once I swallowed everything they gave me, once I took that shot like a champ even though it ached for hours. and he, his taller body that somehow has a face like mine but younger, he is walking in white halls without me.
i’m sorry. my writing all feels cheap these days– either incapable of grappling with the severity of experience, or petty for addressing some young folly in light of graver matters. my younger brother has been in and out of psych wards for months, before and after someone attempted to murder him and my father. my cousin dropped dead, suddenly, in her 30s, leaving two young kids behind to be tended by an alcoholic ex-husband. my parents’ marriage has been falling further and further apart, each into their own private thoughts and barnacled resentments.
I know it’s in poor taste to be so direct, and so self-pitying. I blush especially when I acknowledge that, while these things affect me profoundly, they are not truly my troubles. Despite my well-wishing, these labors are not my life.
And my life is, really, not so difficult. The love of my life is in off-season, I’m broke all the time, and from time to time my eyes and head are overwhelmed by pain, but all in all my life is fine. it’s better than it has been at many, perhaps even most, points in the past. I’m just struggling a bit.
“Do you realize how important this next year is for you?” she asked me.
“Yes.”
a memory, because the things that are close to me now are too close. the ones I love now are in such a storm. the last three months or so have held a lot of tragedy for me, a lot of fears and losses both petty and great, and I’ve been struggling with the task of how to address them, both in writing and in life. so to force myself to say something, some faded talk of things behind.
time for a few words I’ve heard before, because I spoke them, and now years later I pull smoke in and spit them out again.
oh, you pearl skin girl, you were the only thing I wanted when I was bursting, catching fire and falling apart all over the highway divider, getting stuck in the beach glass and broken bottles. in those years when my hands shook, your little shoulders were what I wanted to be steady on. the lines and circles on my arms they were for you, for you. I tore my hair out, burned it in my hands in a high school cafeteria, orange and white, orange and white. your black boot, cracking a small square of plastic–all I could give–its injury echos even now, even now.
you took my little girl’s mouth and swallowed it. you took your body to my bed as an apology. or so I took it.
oh, I’ll write when work calms down, when I get back to town, on the weekend, on the weeknights, I’ll write when rehearsals end, when my nose stops bleeding, when I quit feeling so damn sad, when I quit drinking, when I am not so busy trying and failing to accomplish some trivial sexual conquest. I’ll write as soon as I get out of this taxi cab, out of this dentist’s chair, out of the blankets on this mattress on the dirty floor. I’ll write when people I know stop being sent to the hospital, when I never again have a reason to dial 911. I’ll write when I stop feeling afraid walking around late at night, when I stop needing to keep telling myself and everyone else what it means to treat somebody right. I’ll write when I stop pretending I know all the words to a song everyone else seems to like, when I stop pretending to be a lesbian when I don’t have the balls to tell some guy that I just don’t want to talk to him and the word boyfriend isn’t enough. I’ll write when I’m fiscally responsible. I’ll write when I floss. I’ll write when I don’t cringe every time I think about everyone I dated in high school. I’ll write when I’m dead. Or… no, that’s not it. I’ll write when the stereotype of a female writer does not include only posthumous success. I’ll write when I have something to say. Forgive me.
Forgive me, it’s late, early, malt liquor’s no dinner, and I rarely feel completely at ease.
In a record store on the South Side of Chicago, the clerk told me I was the first person he’d seen buy a Sam Cooke record in seven years. For a moment this made me feel awful, a sadness perhaps inappropriate, but genuine.
The name on my birth certificate is Samantha Branca Cook. One of many reasons why I no longer go by that name is that Sam Cook is not a name that belongs to me. It belongs to that man’s beautiful voice, and his tragic young death.
I bought the three records they had, and I gave them to my boyfriend for his 21st birthday.
So I just want to make sure that every single one of you has heard this song at least once.
The scientists of The Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials (LDSM) have prepared for your examination Mirror City: A Phantom Experiment, a confusion of medical case study, living room slideshow, and amateur variety hour. Like the LDSM’s Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment, which dealt simultaneously with physics, Shakespeare, and architecture, Mirror City conflates the city with the body, suggesting courses of treatment for three divergent case histories, each of whom present with personal sites of loss in the city of Chicago. The LDSM holds its odd theatrical mirror up to these anonymous subjects in order to sort out how it can still ache in places that no longer exist.
To be presented at the 2011 Rhino Fest, February 4-6
I will be involved in the turning on and off of several lights, come see.