some fragments of experimenting:
sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a woman, the shape, the soft layers of trouble, the slip into night, the bar bathroom duck-out late shift uncertain step into mist, to slick my lips with stolen teenage paint, to twirl my hair between my fingers as I lean against a wall pretending my telephone isn’t buzzing my father’s name in my pocket because something as outmoded as a father dissipates like steam when older boys are biting their lips at each other or maybe at me
I want to have a dad and then leave him to have a daddy and then leave him for a better one I want to know what it’s like to hate the patriarchy from the outside not this constant picking out of sick from inside me
and I want to know what it’s like to ride a motorbike with slim hips
I want to balance on my toes like knives I want to stride out onto the dance floor like a goddess like Kali I want to set the club on fire with my lips
it’s not so much that I want to leave myself behind but that I know my body can do more than I have been given the instructions for
I am taking pieces from an Ikea bedroom set and rearranging them, trial by error, except I mean myself, myself, the woman who blossoms out of me in late-night text messages and into your arms.
fyi I haven’t been writing here because I’ve been working on two chapbook projects that will be available by the end of the year, which is rather exciting (!). I’ll post info about those up here in the near future.
I dreamt there was a building, recently leased, perhaps after the death of an elderly someone, still filled with furnishings but being rearranged, prepared for new occupants. And so a sigil was removed from a door. And so at this something awoke, something arose from its waiting. Three figures slowly appeared under long swathes of red cloth, rising up from the floor like a magic trick. Without being able to see their faces I knew they were women, very old, so old, but they were the size of children. They were gliding across the floor toward me, I skirted around them to leave the room but they followed. They were whispering about what I had done, some sin I had committed. That wrong, of course, occurred long before I was born, committed not by me but by some other, but here I was to play the part, the sacrifice in some reenactment of justice imagined. It was pointless to deny it; we were all guilty, all. I said the words I was meant to. The three women turned into three small snakes with long fangs. I tried to tangle them in the long red robes, but they would bite me through the cloth. My hands stung, I feared poison, I feared worse. But then somehow, the snakes were becoming pencils, their fangs becoming graphite points, long and sharp. I snapped them into pieces, kept the pieces apart so they would not grow back together. I wrapped them in the red cloth.
April 30, 2015 - sidbranca / thisbedisaship
thanks so much for letting me be a part of this y’all. i’ve really appreciated it. happy may. <3
my last poem for the month over at many mistypes.
April 29, 2015 - sidbranca / thisbedisaship
on feeling a lot of east coast feelings, or: that’s not a typo that’s how you gotta say it
April 28, 2015 - sidbranca / thisbedisaship
(I like that I got the songs mixed up
so that he had the chance to correct me
with the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard…)
April 27, 2015 - sidbranca / thisbedisaship
on how there’s a time and a place for making things about my feelings, and how often I suspect that a poem is one and a protest is not.
April 26, 2015 - sidbranca / thisbedisaship
~*~on creating personas designed for ego-death~*~
