it is her heart we hear when we're hushed in the halls
hush
for today
it is silent
it is tiny, failing
and she's tiny, flailing
as she starts to scream on the sonogram screen
she is dying in green
she is born.
white
silent
still
so we whisper ariastillwe're singing ariastillwe're screaming arias in her ears
until
she hears
us
minds
poured in pens over the bends of the blue
lines
of her paper skin.
there is poetry in
her hands
and we ring our hands
painting drips in her eyes
till she cries
and the colors run brown
and the sounds
her eyes sing
strike her lung's strings
till they're burning
with the breath of violins
and the earth of creation

This nation
doesn't hear her
silent
anymore.

she isn't silent
anymore.
we hush
for
her heart has returned to this hall.
and.

We
call
her

"Art".

Labels: By Ana

As a child, two things seemed realer than anything she experienced later:
1. Her life was a book.
2. She could fly.

These were such compelling realities that she never stopped to think maybe they weren’t real at all. She became real in her dreams that she didn’t know were dreams. And when she noticed they were dreams, she couldn’t fly any more. She tried too hard after that, jumping off couches and constructing wings.

In her dreams, she never flew with wings on because wings were more than human and flying was more human than walking or talking and or other such modern contrivances.

Flying was human like breathing, like drowning.
There was nothing to believe in, and no beliefs to suspend. There was only looking up at things and wishing to be with them, and then floating above them, above the heads of bewildered parents. She could bypass blades of ceiling fans and ceilings altogether- beams and shingles so much less substantial than she. She developed a faithful kind of fear of flying. Of never knowing how high she would go, or how she would get back, but feeling that the sky itself was holding her steady, ready, unafraid, to fall. It was the fear that rendered her humble-enough, human-enough to fly. It was the fear she felt when she was about to climb a tree, fear she could always successfully, though never entirely, ignore, or diminish, or forget.

Adults would always forget she could fly, as she would grow frustrated and bewildered and sad. She’d patiently sit them down and rise above their heads, grace on her face, in the face of their frown. “You can fly,” they’d admit, shielding their eyes from the rising sun, as she rose, satisfied, and shamefully aware that they were chained to the earth by suspicion.

It was a shame they’d forget her flight so soon.

She flew every night as a child, though it seemed like everyday, and everyday, they forgot she could fly.

Adults couldn’t remember what they didn’t want to believe in.

There was little, in her life, that she forgot. In adolescence, she could still remember wrestling with sleep in rocking chairs and warm white arms. She could still remember humiliating things that were meant to go unnoticed: the way, when her car seat tilted sideways, and the car lilted back, and the steering wheel tilted all wrong, her mother forgot everything she knew. She looked down because she forgot her hands, and looked back to remember her daughter.

Sometimes the girl was once removed from her memories; she could only remember remembering. And she’d think that if she could just remember enough moments in which she remembered other moments, she could remember her entire life; she wanted to remember being born, this way. She had always hoped to remember being born.

Labels: By Ana

She’s just so strange.

Her nose defines her: twisted, skinny, asymmetrical, perverse. She’s perverse. She tries to flaunt her falsities but instead bares her innocence, and barely wipes it clean of inhibition. It trails behind her like toilet paper, stuck to her dirty shoes in her dirty mind. Her dirty face is covered in bad skin. Her skin is white like pale people on pale sheets in pale rooms, white like the empty papers she fills with empty mind. Her stomach, too, is empty. And flat. Like her chest. Flat like rats squeezing under doors.

She doesn’t shave her skinny little legs. She thinks nobody can tell while she’s draped in used clothes, in colors and patterns that have come to define her obnoxious brand of anti-sweatshop righteous indignation. She’s a goddamn hypocrite. She’s against violence unless it’s verbal, loud and obnoxious, when she’s ranting her beliefs to an apathetic crowd. She rages bloody, non-violent wars against apathy, but refuses to slice the hair off her goddamn legs. She thinks nobody notices when she wears the same pants or misses the train four fucking days in a row. But I do.

Her irresponsibility is breath-taking. She pays the least attention to what she cares about the most, and then re-pays all her attention in regret. Too late. She is reliable only in being late. Staying up late. Sleeping late. It’s like she likes to think she, in her 5-foot-two glory, can re-write the rhythms of the atomic clock in motion, can reverse the rotation of the globe in the sky.

It’s like she owns the sky. She likes to think it rains for her. I’ve watched her, face turned upward, outward from her emptiness, standing in the rain, as if it could mend her, fill up all her little white holes. She desperately wants to be mended, but not quite enough to do anything about it. She feels bad and she could bask in her misery forever, bash herself in the third person forever. But she likes to think she’s more than that. She likes to think she transcends her skin, even though she’s always slightly too aware of its existence, slightly too uncomfortable within its white walls, in white motion. She likes to think someday she’ll stop being irresponsible and empty and bad. So she writes pretty poems about it and takes pretty photos about everything else and they all come out pretty good. And then she’s not so bad.

But still so goddamn strange.

Labels: By Ana

There are feelings we acquire about years, vast clumps of time we can lend no words to, or atleast, no few words. We can speak of them only in volumes or sensations, for if some stranger on the street were to inquire, how were those 2 years or that 6 months, you’d know. You’d stare him dumbly in the eyes, but your mind would be bathing in the tepid tea of history. You’d know.
I know my life in a familiar map I can’t spread out fully in my lap, but can see only folded into little squares of feelings, easy to hold, but impossible to place into he context of a state, a world, a nation. I don’t know how long the rivers of my expectations flow after they’d dripped off the page of my immediate 28 miles. My life is patches of adolescence to examine separately from the patches of infancy. Yet the feeling of these patches, their over-riding color, is common.

I could call it awkwardness or humiliation, but to lend it a term is to deprive it of its meat: the ability to scare me, to slip too easily under my skin and, (my mind wanders), never come out.

It’s the feeling of being caught doing something we all do but don’t speak of, that somehow, in its universality, is more sacred:
Picking noses. Scraping the dust out of a paper cut. Examining our own shit. It’s more menial than masturbation. More self-absorbed than popping zits. It’s something I can’t give origin to any more than I can stop giving it my attention. I think perhaps it’s what allows me to so easily believe I am homosexual, clinically insane, anorexic, and then to so easily stop believing it. It’s the feeling of inexplicable 4 am hysterias that I transcribe into inevitably dissatisfactory poetry.

It’s digging fingernails into innocent skin. It’s pulling out individual hairs.

When I was a kid, a really little kid, littler than 3 or 4 or self-awareness, I thought I’d be a criminal when I grew up. It wasn’t a wish so much as an inevitability, something that, like growing breasts, was uncomfortable but unavoidable.
It was untouchable.
It was awkward.

I am fascinated by awkward.

I tried to write a poem about awkward conversations the other day. I wanted it to be hard-hitting slam poem. It went like this:

You breathe uneven and self-aware
You bare
Your naked ass to everyone
And they feel too bad to laugh at you.

That’s as far as I got. My (poorly written) righteous indignation at the enigma of the awkward conversation then tapered out.
I feel like tonight I’m picking it up again.

I began this strange, humiliating meditation to figure myself out but I’m growing impatient and a revelation seems neither fitting nor forth-coming.

I take comfort in the experience that uncomfortability precedes revelation, and discomfort in the proverb that a watched pot never boils.

Tonight, I’ll be up watching pots.

Labels: By Ana

Mitch knew her before she was born. They met inside a house on Cape Cod, inside himself. He was deep and quiet like the sea outside the window. He said he could remember nearly drowning as a kid, when he sank down to the bottom of the turquoise world, and everything was quiet and turquoise and peaceful. He said meditation is like drowning. He meditated for __ years. He meditated in Cape Cod in a cottage, while his wife was skinny with a baby in her belly, and he talked to the baby, inside himself, and smiled.

Then he told everyone what she told him: that she was a girl, a strong girl, and she was named Sarah. She would be a photojournalist, she said, and she must not go to the middle east in her twenty-third year. Because then they would lose each other.
He gained 28 pounds and gallbladder disease and a prophecy in those nine months; his wife, Rose gained twenty six pounds and a cup size and some fear. And together they lost a good marriage. And two good jobs, and a good house.
They would say it was worth it for an exceptionally good daughter, who, by the way, never believed them.
They would also say that was a time of great change: Everything old fell apart and everything new was constructed.
Old house. Old friends. Old marriage. Old Connecticut.
New kid. New friends. New affairs. New Florida.
Florida. They grew warm in Florida, and grew to despise Florida.
But she’s getting ahead of herself.
When her pointy head emerged from her round womb to a square room, she didn’t cry. Her mother grimaced as her baby fell grinning into the hand she’d just spent ___ hours silently holding, drowning with her husband, with ice melting in her mouth with unbearable pain in her body. She never cried. He never let go, except to get her some more soda-fountain ice. Together, they never forgot that, and often told that to their daughter, who grew to admire her mother’s silence, and grew to cry silently.
Crying was her only silence. She said her first word at three months, and it was book. The word foreshadowed her later obsession with the things: reading them, composing plots for them, discarding them. Book, she said, as she looked into the room with the shelves that were filled with them, little face, eyes big, room big. Book, she said every time they carried her in there. Book.

As a child, two things seemed realer than anything she experienced later:
1. Her life was a book.
2. She could fly.
She flew everyday, as a child, in front of everyone, but no one ever remembered.

Labels: By Ana

girl is afraid, is losing her footing on thin earth over coffins, is losing her eye in her camera.

she laughs at epitaphs and jumps on skulls and imagines a thousand stirring souls whispering legacies into her lungs, railing against her eardrums. she imagines she has desegrated eternity. she imagines her eternal retribution.
but she can't imagine Death.
though he is desperate, hungry for attention.
the young pretend they don't know he exists. the old pretend they've forgotten him
while
wild flowers sweep through whole families, aesthetic plagues. and heavy stones fall on thin wood propped up to restain them. old men. cheap canes. monuments disintegrate: illegible. erased. silenced by nothing in particular.

Even the epitaphs are dying.

Labels: By Ana

"i don't like to write things about myself, but i'm too self-centered to write anything else."

Labels: By Ana

The trees rise from muddy earth to muddled sky, and become lovely. They kiss each drop of rain to forget their greenness. They grow inspired by the wind, as you inspire me. They leave luminious stories rotting in their earth, as I will leave you my stories. And as the earth takes their oranges, you take me. They know they belong to the earth, as I thank you. Their roots encircle each worm casing, each seed, dark and lonely, and they drink and drown and are thirsty again. Thirsty trees. Thirsty me.
I love you.
I hate you.
The oranges have rotten brown and fallen black. You've fallen quiet. The wind forgets to inspire. The earth forgets to be dark and lovely. You are not lovely anymore. We are not lovely anymore. Concrete pours itself into the crevices of roots and hands till I forget how they were ever interwoven. The trees rise from asphault earth to granite sky. And they lose their innocence, forget their greenness in the gray. I have forgotten my innocence, and I wish to remember, but it’s too late.

Labels: By Ana