038: fetishish.

Once I wrote a poem about a fly I found dead on the windowsill. I was probably fourteen. Ever since I’ve been fascinated by dead insects.

I sound psychopathic.

But there’s something weirdly beautiful about a frazzled moth on the porch at night, a beetle paralyzed on the pavement.

Tonight I killed a fly—somehow managed not to smash it. Glued to the magazine with gutsmear. I held it up, turned it in the light. Emerald, perfect, legs curled and still. It took restraint not to run through the halls displaying my murder, my museum piece.

Why is this mesmerizing.

037: on friday night the heat broke [part 3]

My room.

I turn on the dim oil lamp. The old one, my mother’s.

I pull seven pins from my hair, torn loose when wind

gusted me home. Work through the tangles, gently.

Windows open—

I love when doors trembles in frames, when papers are blown

and tousled, when corners lift.

Pale shapes billow. A handtowel, draped at the foot

of my bed, beckons and wriggles, falls still.

The sounds of things stirred.

Eventually I must close the west; I feel rain on my calves, the sash only cracked.

Water pools on the sill. Sighing, I press the window shut.

036: on friday night the heat broke [part 2]

The planet’s changed since I’ve been inside. I slip out again, barefoot, clutching a rinsed, ripened peach in my hand.

The downpour has lifted—now the air stirs. A darkness so eerie I wrap my toes over the edge of the porch. Then the first lightning flashes—I run.

I find the strangeness immediately. Five seconds: that scream of white tears the sky. Then it’s gone. Wind gusts and tremors in the trees.

There is no sound. Nothing. The storm fires on—galaxies crack over my head—trees toss, show their pale underbellies—

Silence.

Faintest brushing of wind. Nothing else.

035: on friday night the heat broke [part 1]

I drive home with the windows down, pouring in night. Rain soaks the earth like oxygen, lungs in a firestorm. Old anthem thundering down in the wheels.

I go slow, let one hand fall out into the rain. Slashing rain, like a warm, reckless hail, thrown from the heavens, too long imprisoned there. At home I step out into a downpour, and my God, it is cool. Door slams. I walk toward the blurred porch lights, lift my face to the water. Feel it coursing down my neck.

The earth: I hear it breathe again. This storm’s everything we’ve wanted.

034: heat.

Not even trying to be poetic about how much I hate this heat.

Well, thank God for air conditioning. And for a short commute equaling a total of twenty minutes in the fires of hell, driving to and from work.

Deep, aching cold, midwinter, I can survive in. Romance is easy to conjure when skeleton trees howl and your ankles ache with seeping snow.

Ninety-degree heat is just I can’t breathe and I feel like I’m being attacked and I’m sweating and I might be hallucinating and I just want to die right now.

Good thing I’m moving to England?

033: things I am afraid of.

- running alone to sit in dead grass and listen to 

that music weave over our heads

like slow motion sparks

- growing up to lose this fire lit 

under my lungs

because mediocrity becomes 

irresistable

- lifting my feet to run far and looking down 

to find my ankles caught in roots I have planted 

unconsciously

- forgetting everything that has ever 

happened to me

- writing for so long that I sound like everybody else

- the spaces in the world shrinking so I cannot find 

places to dance

- never feeling like my soul and my body 

match each other

- running out of time

interim: here, this blog. read it.

my longtime cross-border sister and dearest friend sophia (who also happens to be a flippin' fantastic writer) has her own 100 words, 100 days blog, and it is lovely, and you should read it now. kay? kay.

the magic begins here.

032: ears

The house is silent—just puppy and I awake. He lies spread-eagled on the empty floor. His black eyes look through the dimness of the sole kitchen light.

I stand at the counter, peeling the seal from a new jug of milk. It comes off in scraggled bits. As the foil pieces fall, his head tilts. His right ear moves backward at the tickle-swish sound of silver skating on countertop.

Every detail fascinates him. He hears far-off sounds, sees the things I’d never look for.

I smile at this foily, scratchy sound I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

Secret puppy music.