i am a cabin in the woods

Inside of an old log cabin by wurm9 on Flickr

I am so little of what you assume me to be. I am not this skin, not this mole, not this flattened foot arch. I am a cabin in the woods that you come back to in your mind, and I am never the same. I mask mosquitos with noise from creeks and freaks and shagging. I work the gravel through the hands of the earth, work it so it turns to salt, work it so you die a thousand deaths in your head just trying to get closer to it. I am a friendship forgotten, and remembered. I am a swallow on a sweatshirt. I am the musky smell of teenage boy and his awkward constant inadequacy. I am a tangled rope, sipping water until it swings low and heavy like a belly full of watermelon over the edge of the air, threatening to submerge.

What are you?

What are you, really?

Are you the feeling close to the skin of your toes after you’ve stubbed them? Do you miss them? You are so gentle, like a hangnail praying to be left alone; I am all frustration and impatience, you are a sliver stuck under a nail. Undisturbed, festering. You are the hiss of humidity, the perspiration of your pores as they fall closed into a fretful sleep. You are a fretful of sound, struck like a gavel, with intention, you are wafting like acid into the noses of teenagers, burning away nerves. You are the cough that burns your throat, the puff that grows you into a real nationalist. You are all taxi cabs and garbage trucks and tan lines. You move your feet to an uninterrupted hammering of wood, dance like you hear a chopping block, sway like an elm.

What am I?

What am I, really?

I am a landscape. This is not a game. You have 2 more questions.

-A

1:34 am, wednesday, may 18th, 2011

Lightning by Pete Hunt

“You have been cheating on me” is an impossible situation in a very possible world. You are never who the other person thinks you are. You think from this inside out, not from the outside in.

sickle:
hammer and
cell disease
wheat
hook

you are a connotation
interpretation
assumption
dissertation

watching you kiss her

You are an early morning craving, when I get woken up by the fog on the ground, the water hanging in the air, waiting to get pierced by sunlight and transformed into shadow on your west wall.  First, I only see a blur of eyelash, a little prison for my dreams that keeps them tucked into the same warmth that I cuddle into under my blankets throughout the night.  My skin is flush and kings and aces all down my thighs, but my toes are always cold.  I hold my breath in my arms. The soft woven cloth of my bedspread lifts hairs on my arm while a draft makes its way up my lower back – there is a break in my fortress of down.  I shuffle my hands and tug my shirt over the now-goose-bumped skin.

I watch the curve of my bed stand, the heaps of books, the spilled change, the hair clips and my phone playing the part of alarm clock.  I am sideways and travelling right, which is to say, up.  I try to hold in the soft moment of the silence, but there is a far away grinding of coffee a banging of pans a sizzling of eggs and a bubbling of porridge.  I hear the smells dictate the rhythms, the decisions of the people outside of my closed door.  If the tea is ready brewed, I’ll brush my teeth after. A flapping of wings with printed words as feathers. Teacup meets saucer.  Murmur. Discussion.  The cars change possession several times.

I rub my nose into a daffodil and then a daisy, feel my neck stretch into the cold air outside of my blanket.  I can feel where the humid hotness of your breath would be.  I can feel the coolness of your inhale synchronized to the transfer of your hands to my stomach, to help me cup the warmth in.  Your eyes won’t open if they need to.  I crave you like a cigarette I haven’t had a drag of for years – the right smoke that you pass by on the street and think about all day.  The smoke that sticks to your thoughts, that I can smell in bars a town away.

You are the slightly buttery croissant that breaks on your tongue and the sweet bite of espresso that you breathe in as much as you sip.  You are the almosttoohot water in the shower that washes away the shiver.  You are the light, sharp, ohsodesirable kiss of the air when the ground hasn’t warmed yet to the sun, which makes me reach for wool.  You are my morning craving.

So sate me.

-Arina.
Inspiration song for no lyrical reason.

secrets left behind in istanbul

Old, old, new.

your face is chiselled from war wounds and eyes broken-in from trenches. nothing on your back but muscles lacking weight and all the little lines on your palms, facing downwards, are gritty with sand mixed with hair gel.  you shaved your beard- you left a window open in your past life, curtains blowing out when a gust rushed the apartment in a fury of you leaving. your socks hang out of a cardboard suitcase and your money is stuffed hastily into a back pocket of a pair of knocked-off jeans from a shady market. american.  canadian. north.  the great white.  you sold your car to buy the ticket, now sell your soul to buy your life.  it works different here, pouring water in a jar just turns it into swamp, the winter freezes the jar and makes it crack.  the plant never survives until it does.  the spring takes from you more than it gives back.  march chills freeze your toes because your socks fell out on the plane ride.  you are obsessed with pavement.  you count the footsteps people take in front of you.  you count the number of people who stand in front of you and watch.  zero is a lonely nothing. it’s not even a number.  it’s hard to look nothing in the eye and bow your head in prayer.  you wonder about the celery eyes, where you saw them last, on whose feet and which step it was, 10 295 or 12 509.  you take your right hand and feel your spine.  your jeans are still bought from a shady market.  your apartment has no curtain. you are writhing on the sidewalk with your jar of broken water.

it all passed so quickly

I live in my head, huddled around campfires on the edge of a lake somewhere South.  I live with a bead of perspiration perpetually gliding smooth down the back of my neck across baby hairs that tickle my entire body into spastic jumps that feel like orgasms.  I live for real smiles. I live without the fear of losing you to hurricanes or thunderstorms or busses on the wrong side of the street. I live how it’s meant to be, how you make things in your head more real than touch to pass the bad times by.  I live with these people -these flawed, cruel, deflated people every day and I know they are the best of their lot – but I want to be better. I want to stare my fear of curving lines into its spinning face and say that “straight lines build houses, and I want a home”. I scare easily but I am determined to adopt change, fluidity, and acceptance into my daily bread.

I know some great people that have graced this earth.  This Earth.

My earth – the same one I sleep 6 feet above, the same one that furnishes our dreams and gives us reasons to believe in the miracle that’s around us – is a breeding ground for caring.  It is compassionate and stern and forgiving.  If we do not live together, then we will die alone.

I live in my head, huddled around a campfire on the edge of a lake somewhere South – humming a song many people know the rhythm of and sing in their heads as they’re slowly planning their deaths.  I’m here to tell them the meaning of the rhythm that keeps their brains beating. I’m here to tell them that they’ve got it all wrong; it wasn’t meant to be like this.  It wasn’t meant to be clocks ticking down to manifestos of freedom.  We have no Clocks.  We have only Now. Only here. Only ourselves and This Earth.

And the same campfires that you can see from a lake away, somewhere South.

-Arina