writers i am in love with [a very partial list]

jenny boully
selah saterstrom
maggie nelson
juliana spahr
danielle dutton

i'm fucking tired.

i'm fucking tired.

"stories"

1

Her favorite part is in JJ's car at three in the morning on the freeway headed North. They’ve got the bass so loud her hands have gone numb. God knows what they've taken and they're going too fast. JJ says: If you puke in my car I’ll kill you. She's plastered to the seat, watching the needle pass 90. thinks: We could totally die. They're speeding on the overpass—the lights of the city blurring—trucks honking—bass throbbing through her body and: God, we might really fucking die.

The stars look like lemons. The buildings are invisible. She's waiting for the sirens. She's waiting for the impact, then the air. So she can think: Oh, well.

2

It would be better if I was thirty pounds thinner and had cheekbones like Justine. The girl is climbing all over the room. It's here somewhere, she says. She keeps coughing. Kye's eyes look black, jaw tense. His hands move like wings. Do you remember, he says to her. I glance away.

I go upstairs. I try to keep level with the top stair which means I get shorter and shorter. Finally I am crouched but my head is taller than the step. I should squish it. When people go by I close my eyes so they can't see me. To get to the next flight I have to lay on my stomach and slide. Realize I'm dying, but don't mind. I get to the blue couch.

I lay with my legs hanging over the end of the blue couch and stare at the ceiling. The light flickers. I kick my feet on the edge of the blue couch in rhythm with the flickering, on the off -beat, trying to guess when it will do its hop-skip, its fancy step. I'm always just behind.

3

Candy asks if I want to go to Church with her and I say Sure, because I'm bored, and also to piss off my mom. She's Wiccan. She waters her plants with menstrual blood and says that Christianity is oppressive. So I say OK to Candy, go to Church. We sit in back so they won't notice when we fall asleep, but I don't fall asleep. I sit on that bench and listen. Then I decide to convert.

Candy's preacher is fine about it and gives me a white Bible with gold letters and asks me Do I take Jesus in my heart? And I say Yessir. I don't mean it, but who cares. I know Candy doesn't have Jesus in her heart. She tells me she doesn't even think she has a heart cuz she never feels bad about anything. I tell her Me Neither, but it's a lie. I feel bad about everything.

I go every Sunday now. There are so many people in that Church that they have two TVs playing a video of the preacher while he's preaching, and Candy says it also plays on channel 8 so people who can't get to Church won't go to Hell. She says her Dad takes the portable TV to the bathroom and watches while he takes a dump and shaves. I like the TVs. They're pretty funny.

After Church me and Candy smoke roaches and listen to Blondie. She tells I'm pretty but too fat to be a star.

4

I'd swim at my grandma's house. On the island. I hated it. The sea smelled like death and swimming made me angry. I'd do laps to the buoy and back. Rickie'd sit on the beach and throw rocks whenever I was within range.

In Girl Scouts they warned us that salt water could kill if you swallowed. I'd lift my head in time with my strokes, limbs beating the surface, gulping. Jaws grinding sand.

They'd say I had gills, that I belonged to the sea. Skin raw, chest tight, jaw sore. Seaweed in my fingers I’d kick to get away.

Belonged to the sea. Gramma spit and said I was an idiot child, daring it.

The water was warm and the sun shone. Rickie ate tuna salad on the sand. He poked sticks in the tide pools. Whenever I came near he stood up and threw rocks. I came right up to shore before I turned back out.

I wrapped both arms around the buoy's red stripe, rested my chin. He stood up and waved, the blue in his shirt the same blue as the sky. I let myself slip so the water was around my chin, and then a little further. I stuck my tongue out to taste the salt. I opened my mouth and let a little in.

5

It was a good time to be alive. Everything smelled like blood and sun and dirt, and when I opened my eyes the sky was blue. There was rubber hitting my face and knees in my back and elbows in my stomach as I gave my body up. Gerald Vladnier stumbling back too fast and Corrie Elise spinning around and then somehow flying, and there was yelling, and impact, and limbs. Alyssa Jenkins could be seen in the background, one hip cocked sideways, pretty hair tossing in the wind. The outfield rushing in.

A stunning curve. Flesh against flesh. Bone behind it.

Gerald spun the ball on his finger and winked. He said something in a low voice, smiling.

Wha'd you say, Gerald Vladnier?

Corrie Elise, aka Barbie, pushed up her sleeves and swayed to center field.

I was thinking how muscle feels when it's working. About the whistles from boys who whistle at girls like Alyssa. About the satisfaction of a body stretched, beaten, sliding into home breathless, satisfied, the pure pleasure of skinned knees.

Hey, Barbie.

Gerald spun the ball in his hands and scowled.

I was waiting for the ball, the impact on the inside curve of my shoe. The moment everything comes together before it flies apart. Knowing how the ball is flying as I'm flying, hitting the pavement, lifting off, rounding the bases, the closest thing to free.

I stepped up to the plate.

Corrie Elise Meyers, nicknamed Barbie for her angel face and giant tits, who'd bat her eyes then punch you in the stomach, had kicked the ball. She was at first when he went down, rounded second as they called foul, never stopped.

Not my fault the idiot didn't move.

At the bars the girls did tricks, ponytails whipping. I was faster than their laughter, faster than their ponytails, faster than the smile Alyssa Jenkins flashed at Aaron Coover that left him staring stupidly as the ball came flying at his face.

They called me Kickball Queen. I could kick a ball clear across the playground to the bars, and round the bases faster than Pandy Fackler could give it up. If there was pro kickball, they'd have scouted me. I was always picked first.

6

He brushed my hair back and called me Baby, and my knees went out from under me, and that was the end. I have a weakness for men with swords, who say from the start that they're going to break my heart, so stay away.

He brushed my hair back and said: Baby, we leave tomorrow; the ocean is a cruel mistress; I'm not the settling kind.

Another, I said to the bartender, fluttering my eyes. I had taken, lately, to drinking whiskey and wearing knee high boots, hoping to turn myself into the kind of woman who doesn't flinch. That's not a problem, I murmured, as he leaned in.

I have a weakness for wide-shouldered men who can lift me with one arm. Six shots later I was upside down and holding his hat, watching the sidewalk lurch by.

Geirmund flapped behind us: He'sgotawhore! He'sgotawhore! He squawked.

Gerroutta here, damn thing. He waved an arm behind him and I tilted madly at the ground.

He had to set me down for three different brawls. I smoked cigarettes and played with my curls. Killthebastard! Geirmund flapped happily. Gottalight? I fed the bird a rum ball and he hopped up on my shoulder. Whosanicegirl. He nipped my ear.

I have a weakness for men twice my size who could kill me with one hand.

Back in his quarters he took off his belt. You want me to choke you? He asked. Call me a wench, I whispered. His skin tasted like salt.

Never fall for a sailor or a soldier, Gramma Silva always said. A pirate is the only way to go.

7

The house has white walls, and if colors can echo they echo white, flat white. I've got the headache again.

We watch action movies in the day, drink as people explode. Chain smoke. My body feels hot and bloated and I'd like to take it off. I look at him. He looks old.

I have this dream. I'm really old, like a hundred years old, and have spun white hair and wise eyes. Or I'm sixteen and the car is flipping over the median. The point is that it's the moment I'm going to die and suddenly I'm so sorry because it's over and I've missed it. I feel like I should apologize. Those nights I wake Bennet up kissing him and hold on. Babe, he says, and pats my back, still mostly sleeping.

Bennet pounds the ball and it bounces hard past me and I dive but miss and go down. The impact is all on my hip. I scream without meaning to then roll towards the ball. The scream isn't a normal scream and it doesn't really come from me. I get the ball and am back in, cherry bomb John and move up a square. John's forehead creases. It's forty degrees out and the leaves are turning. The ball is flying at me but straight at me this time. I swing at it using my arms as a club and slam it hard into Bennet's shoulder. Fuck, he says. He twists sideways, face white. What the fuck. The ball bounces into street. We all stand breathing hard and watching.

What the fuck is up with you.

The court is resonant, a flat sound that keeps going. What the fuck is up with you. My hands prematurely arthritic. In summer the ground absorbs the shock, in winter throws it back. Hey, John says. He says it half soft and half commanding. It fades away but stays, too. Babe, Bennet says. What the fuck is your problem.

The Zombie Apocalypse

He's waiting for the Zombie Apocalypse, he tells her. He can't wait for the Zombie Apocalypse.

I'm gonna get those mothers, take them out.

He shows her his machete, the two headed axe, the silver-bladed sword he keeps on the wall.

Used to be easy. Used to be you could just chop ‘em, whack, whack. Now they run and climb. Some of ‘em can almost think. These days it takes skill.

Baby, he says. And Oh, Lord she starts melting. Can I take you out sometime; buy you a Slurpie, throw bread at the birds.

When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, this place will be like Detroit, without Welfare. Zombies won't be the only problem. People will eat people. You'll have to learn to shoot.

He shows her his gun, thick and mean.

Wow, she thinks: This is better than I thought. She bounces it in her palm. Rubs the metal with her thumb.

Or we can go live in Alaska. We'd be safest in Alaska. But we'd have to go now, get acquainted, before word of the Zombie Apocalypse gets 'round.

She spins the gun on her finger. Ain't they got Vampires in Alaska, she asks.

He eyes her. Who told you that, he asks, looking hard.

Nobody told me. I saw in the theaters. Vampires, they move fast.

9

Both bottles are on the table, and her chin too. She doesn't look good. “Justine.”

I pick one up and shake it. Rattles. Do you have juice? She squints. I go to the fridge and look in.

There's lemon meringue pie and chocolate milk. I bring both to the table. Pick a bottle up and shake it.

“Oh, that kind.”

“Looks like.” We have some more.

Sometimes Lucy's here. “Lucy, go to your room,” I tell her. Her mother is obviously in no condition. “Get off it” she says back, taking a smoke.

Sometimes my legs are gone. I'm at the grocery and I can't remember what I need. Justine, she says, pulling my sleeve, Where's our legs? Our chins dissolve laughing.

Sometimes the door's too small and Lucy grew up too fast. Kate doesn't look so good now. “Slut,” she calls the girl. “Hussy.” Her mouth twists up when she looks at her.

“Used up crack whore,” the daughter says. I throw pie: “Learn some respect.” Kate laughs. Throws pie too.

It gets later, dark, sticky. She picks up a bottle and rattles it. Justine. Where are our fucking legs. I laugh but when I look up she's not laughing. “These aren't real tears.”

9

I think I'd be happier if I was a paper doll. An outline of something, she says.

She leans closer to the mirror to put on lipstick. Her shadow translucent beside her on the floor.

Yeah, I say.

It looks broken, bending onto the dresser at the neck.

How do I look?

Gorgeous. You always look gorgeous.

Good.

I light a cigarette and look away as she pulls off her shirt. She sits on the floor painting her toenails Harlot Red. Her breasts push against her bra as she leans forward.

Or maybe just a story, she says. If I could be a story.

Her shadow is short and close to her, head bent forward. In it her head touches her knee; in life there's distance between them. I shift, look around for mine. The light's getting thinner, fast.

She looks up and smiles.

The way the light hits, she looks about thirty. Then she turns her head and she's sixteen.

My cigarette's gone. I light another.

It gets shorter, comes closer.

I don't know what's happened to the time.

10

Clementine, he called me. He taught me how to handle a gun, how to shoot.

It's damn hard to hit a moving target. If you've ever got to run away, don't run straight.

Be unpredictable.

He spread the map flat and pointed. That's where the winters got cold enough to crack your teeth. That's where they have roaches the size of lemons, where a foot-long centipede once crawled across his wall. There's where they have the Northern Lights, and I only ever seen one thing prettier. When you're older, I'll take you.

He told me about Bear Island, where him and Sean and Shane and Mark went every year in August, got liquored and shot guns in the air. There's no bears on Bear Island, and it ain't an island either. Sometimes in the night I'd wake screaming and he'd come lay with me. He smelled like tobacco and Dial soap.

He kissed my cheek. His face was rough. I touched his closed eyes.

He kept his promises, and when I was older, he did take me. It was all different then, though; mixed up.

I was a wild thing, barely speaking, running hard in the fields. They couldn't keep up. They'd fall off some twenty yards back, hands on knees, breathing. I'd throw myself belly down in the tall grass. Clementine! I'd dig my nails into the dirt, lay my face against it, tasting him.

11

The game was to hold it all day. You couldn't answer the teacher's questions, not even when they asked why you wouldn't speak. Unless you found a way, with your mouth full of water.

We had ballet together, too, and eventually it extended into that.

You were aloud to get fresh water as long as there was no pause between mouthfuls. Sometimes I cheated and just didn't talk. Ballet was hard with your mouth full of water. Sometimes I swallowed it on accident in arabesque.

It really pissed the teachers off, but the thing was to do it anyway. I felt guilty when I cheated, but also proud of my guile.

I wanted to swallow. The desire ballooned the more I thought about it. I got so full of wanting to swallow. The minutes got slower and slower and the water got smaller and thick like spit, and warm. Whenever I gave in, book held up to cover my face, I was flooded with relief and sorrow.

The thing was to do it no matter what, no matter if the teachers got pissed or the kids rolled their eyes and called you stupid. Because it was about withstanding. We were making ourselves strong.

I practiced the balance beam and she did the climbing ropes. Then we switched. Miss Milton approved us to come in at lunch. We did unicycles, tennis. She was the unsurpassed dodgeball champion, a snake, quick and ruthless. Say what you will, I knew her better than anyone. It was all of her right there on that court. She took them out without smiling. She took me out first, left a bruise the size of an orange on my thigh. You can't let me do that, Suzy Q.

It started off blue then turned purple. It spread. Eventually it was a sick mottled brown, reddish brown, burnt sienna, wider than my palm. It stretched, ochre, rust, cerise. Violet at the center. Spots of white like in sausage. Tender for weeks, except tender is the wrong word, it sounds slight and this thing was not slight, when I poked at it I caught my breath, teared. When I dug my fist in deeper everything came clear and sharp and sweet.

Miss Milton dribbled the ball. It echoed. It was an asphalt room and everything echoed. We called it the cage: three cement walls and the fourth chain link, so the only light came through crisscrossed. Everything echoed and echoed and echoed again. She bounced the ball and called our names to assign us to one side or the other. I was always the first one out because I was the one she went for. I liked the cool air, thin light, the shouts and the sound of the ball smacking flesh, concrete, howls of victory, loss. I stand center court, absorbed. When you hit the ground here nothing will soften the blow.

I've read too many stories about sisters in tough circumstances and I'm sick of them; I want us to have been different, but we weren't. There is always the one hurt worse and it's never the one you first think. There's always the one that fights and the one that disappears and whichever one you think is which, you're wrong. One parent is mean and the other distant, or they're both mean and both distant, it's are hard to tell. There is the horror of the house, mentioned. A setting sun. Air, hard and clear. Nights of secrets. They smell of pine and buttercup and grass and you will never love anything as you love this now. I a lust for scrapes and bruises, she for guns.

12

It started in the kitchen. Next to the stove, but not the stove. It moved the wrong direction, along the counter, towards the window. For the first time she understood words like licked and leapt. She let her hands get too close. From outside, when she got there, it was stunning. It was winter, and the cold that crystallizes time, feeling. The fire was a living thing, mythic beast, burning inversion of that world.

The sirens were part of the frozen world. They came from far away, too late. Men in heavy boots ran through the snow toward the creature, its tongues. Their motions were blurred and slowed. They dragged their hoses behind, raised them and let fly. Neighbors poured from their own houses to see. Some carried tea in sturdy thermoses, others cigarettes. An old man sipped from a glass of brandy, squinting. He told the story of another fire, a far off place. A few of the boys hung off to the side with a joint, sweet smoke mixing with the rest. She breathed in.

This was a new world.

She stood, looking at what was left.

13

Everything smells green, then closer to the sea it gets salty. The ground is warm even at night. Year round people sleep in tents on the beach, eat sardines from the can, grow out their hair. Child, they say. It's a new world. You're free.

I can't walk barefoot like the rest, rocks cutting one way and bones the other. The kid shows me a shortcut I can never remember. It doesn't much matter.

Summer smells like lilacs.

The house is set off the road, up a gravel drive, purple with moon. The kid's on the front porch watching his cigarette glow.

Frogs sing and floors creak. At the top of the stairs there's a bathroom. It's next to the woman's room, so I am quiet. I hear when she turns over, says soft things to the husband. Night comes in where the windows won't close.

The kid doesn't sleep either. Our faces are twin vampires at breakfast. I steal his cigarettes, he takes my favorite eyeliner. You look like death I hiss over pancakes.

Sarah knocks one day and asks do I remember her. Her hair soft brown. The way she tucks it from her face makes me want to cry. She wears bangle earrings, no shoes. I try to smile. Disappointed, she goes away.

The bathroom doesn't lock. Sometimes the window frames the moon and I look for his face. Summer lingers, windows kept open, doors unlocked. Lilac. Twenty minutes down the driveway, down the hill to town.

Town is one pizza parlor, one ice cream shop, many bars. The men call me Sister and whistle through broken teeth. Their eyes frighten me but their hands are all the same. I remember this place but I was different.

On my knees in the bathroom. The towels soft. Everyone sleeping, I hear them breath. So dark that dark is a presence. The moon framed by the window and I look for the man in it. Warm air on my skin I close my eyes. The kid smokes, watches the glowing tip trace towards and away.

14

After, we walk, her slower than me. We walk to the corner and she stops and says Which way, and I say Left. She takes a drink and passes it to me and we walk down the block and when we get to the end I say, Which way. She says Down. We notice things—cherry blossom trees, a house with a too-big door. Everything gets worse every minute, especially the sun. We walk down the hill a ways and then stop and sit on somebody's step and pass it back and forth. Shit, she says. Fucking shit.

When we're done she plants it neck down in the grass and lights a cigarette. I take a couple hits. They come by and yell and we give them the finger and Ella says Suck mine.

We walk through houses that are too big and too close and weird trees and people who look wrong. Everything's inside out, I tell her.

She says Yeah. It is.

When I was a kid the monkey trees were surreal and now having been a kid seems surreal. I saw them on the way to the swimming pool, hot days. I'd stop and reach up while the class kept walking. I'd grab a monkey-tail and say, See, you're standing on a side-walk in the summer with a branch in your hand that should in a jungle, feel how it prickles and presses, feel what kind of air there is today.

15

The boy down the street thinks he can walk out his window and walk on air. I like his eyes. Don't look down, he says, but I can't help it. His window looks into the street. My street. Hey! I throw rocks up at him in the night, he serenades me with his stereo. We have a secret together. We lay together in his magic-box room. I am one of the boys, one of the girls. Look, he says. Look how gold the sky.

Maryanne and me go to the water, watch the birds. Feathers slick with oil, sewage, who knows. It breaks her heart. Look, look at us. Pixie Stix, Diet Lipton's. We stop at Roger's Corner Market to see what's going on. Nothing, says Ronnie. He's missing two teeth and puts his cigarette in the gap. You want somethin' to happen? But Ronnie's got nothing and everyone knows it. We keep going.

There's nothing to do between three and nine PM except this: Pixie Stix and Diet Lipton's and seeing what's going on. Sometimes it's Pop Rocks and Diet Coke or Nerds and 7-Up. Sometimes we go and get our makeup done at the Mall. We tell the girls we want to look like Donna Reed. They don't know who that is. Some days they paint us like Lucy Honeychurch, some days Marla Singer. Then we smoke cigarettes at McKee's and the boys tell us we look goofy. But they like it. We get them to take us to the theater and buy Diet sodas and Zots. Maryanne's prettier, so she only gives handjobs.

The movies are my life. The plush dark of the theater and flickering lights and the way it's like diving under, plunging. I go down for so long that when I get back up top it's strange.

All I can see is the side of my nose when I close one eye. The tip of my tongue when I stick it out. The round part of my cheeks when I smile. A peripheral fan of lashes.

My lashes are butterflies, are felt.

wild horses

today i watched the Misfits and it made me so sad.  i'm so lonely today.  i think i've been all shut up in my house too much, not talking to anyone.  the misfits makes me sad because i think Gay (Gable) is right, that there's no way to not be a killer in this world.  and i think Marilyn's right, that that's horrible.  and what are you supposed to do with that.  every time i watch the movie i get a different angle on it.  Marilyn hated it because Miller left out all the things about her he didn't like, like that she could be a monstrous bitch.  and she wanted to be seen for what she actually was.  and loved for what she actually was.  this time, watching the movie, i was so, so mad at Gay, for convincing her that she could trust him.  it gave me that awful sick feeling.  she looked sort of tired and fragile and at her limit, this time.  and it was like watching a horror movie where you know what's behind the door and you're like, don't open it, don't open it, but you know she's going to.  one thing i'd never really noticed before--I think it's because i usually don't quite watch the end scenes, they're so rough--the one thing i noticed this time was that Clift letting the horses go was like, this senseless act, but it righted the world.  it made it bearable.  that someone would do something so useless out of love.  i love love love marilyn monroe.