In the alley behind, Jack smoothed back his wet mop.
And tightened a belt around his upper arm
Only to find the devil had switched his needles
With ones from behind a toilet at the bar.
He forgot who he was.
Which is as good a place as ever to start
Writing someone else’s poem, badly
To sabotage all their dreams of print
To make them cry late at night, punching their pillows
And cussing at trees and calling the homeless snakes
Out into moonlight, with their heads to the ground.
Author Archive for Naomi
I pass the mural on the seawall.
It has faded into streaks of green.
I tighten my collar against the wind.
Tracing the cracks with my fingers,
I feel nervous in the uncertain light.
I keep walking, stepping over garbage,
Clumps of algae, tangles of wire.
I pass the pier where men
Cast lines for catfish, the sun sinking,
The first of them leaving, shaking their heads.
My father took aim out the window,
Following, with his gun
A dark shape moving
In the Queen Anne’s Lace,
In the goldenrod.
My father came in from the field,
Ahead of the dusk, swinging
A groundhog by its black paw.
It was as big as a two-year-old.
“Nathan, Naomi, Stephen,” he said.
“Come out here, on the porch.
I’m going to show you
The chambers of the heart.”
1. The deer was a list of lichen, stripped from trees.
2. He scraped the skin off the rabbit, I mean, the hairs from the skin.
3. The owl ate the discarded intestines, that we removed from the rabbit.
4. The hive was crafted, cell by cell, corrugated, a feat of geometry.
5. There were worms and I wept.
I am a trilobite.
Or, the hollow shape of a trilobite
Engraved, a prisoner in patterned shale.
I have become limestone.
I have become a picture in a science book,
An image clicking through a set of slides—
The State Fossil of Pennsylvania.
Is such fame, such reknown, a triumph?
Am I trampled in the mud? Crystallised
In a bituminous vein.
So for lack of anything better to post, I’m going to put up some of the products of in-class exercises—or the exercises I do with my writing friends. Feel free to dislike anything, or like anything, or to do anything, or to not do anything.
I liked writing on this thing better before people actually read it. Now I’m self-conscious about my posts (which is why there haven’t been any). Will I be held responsible for what I say?
I’m feeling inspecific lately, like a balloon in space. I think the best thing to do in that case is to write (using a pen with a thick, inky line) lists of very specific things, that exist in a certain place, at a certain time, in a certain way. And then orient the self, according to those points of reference, in the particular.
As I am typing, I am observing the veins in my hands, which are almost transparent in this light. I like seeing my veins, I always appreciate evidence of my circulatory system. It’s reassuring to know that I am full of wires and tunnels, it makes me feel less vague about things.
When I was eleven, a year before I became vegetarian, I was eating a piece of chicken and a vein slipped out of it. It had lost its color and was like a piece of rubber tubing. It was stretchy.
As blood is supplied to every cell in the body—especially the muscles, I wonder how many capillaries and vessels the average meat-eater consumes…laid end to end, how far would they go?
Sometimes I like to look around a classroom and try to guess how many of us are heavily drugged. I like the idea of a great mass of artificially normalised people, who can only function when they are in perfect chemical balance. It makes me feel like a scientific creation, with wires for brains and a petri dish instead of a heart. I really do not think I can write this final. If I was a robot, I wonder if I would run on batteries or be solar-powered.
So Nathan remarked that my recent posts have been a little emo. And he is right. I apologize.
I guess if you don’t have anything uplifting to say, you should keep your thoughts to yourself and not drag other people down into your sad and bitter world. I’ve been low on creativity lately, but I don’t believe in not working just because you’re out of ideas. Even though I’m busy with finals, I’m forcing myself to write for about an hour each day. I think if you don’t maintain your practice daily, your work loses its focus and becomes dull and weak. You lose confidence and it shows. So anyway, if I come up with anything interesting I’ll post it here, otherwise I’ll try to keep quiet until I have something nice to say.
If I had the choice to be beautiful, I think I’d rather be invisible. There’s something really horrible about being looked at. I think beautiful people must suffer tremendously all the time. Beautiful people are constantly being corroded by other people’s eyes, the skin probably prickles and burns from the toxicity of the gaze. I’m sure it’s like being a fossil scraped out of dirt with a tiny polished pick. I think if I were a fossil I’d rather not be exposed to light and air. I’d rather keep my secrets hardened to myself.
Everyone always tries to be more beautiful. I think this is a very serious mistake. It would be better if people tried to be more invisible. Everyone would be safer from each other, and there would be fewer accidental deaths.
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