I wrote this:

This is what happens over time: you become afraid to make leaps, however small, as if your routine of sleep coffee work coffee dinner wine sleep could really ever satisfy, you become convinced that the cycle of buying sensible shoes and selling yourself and buying atom-powered netbooks and selling yourself and drinking dirty martinis on date nights and selling yourself is inescapable because how else will you buy buy buy but to diminish your true soul.

Eventually what was inside you a sunset is scraped away to a mass of pastel colors and fading lights: heliotrope and cerulean and you tell yourself that if not today, tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, well then it wasn’t really meant to be or to be me. One day, at a picnic, you meet a girl who is bright and shining as a new copper penny and she tells you something: her plans. And you no longer burn and rage inside but think oh, that’s nice.

You think: house. You think: babies. And you think within the skeleton of house and babies, think of building a legacy this way, not that. Think that it doesn’t matter that the only true telepathy is art. Think that it’s irrelevant that once you’re gone you lose those small silent moments: alone in your car on the highway, the radio stuttering in and out, the noise inside you louder than any truck that rattles on without you. You convince yourself that it’s okay to lose those moments. That everyone loses those moments. That we all must resign ourselves to becoming irrelevant. Because you have.

This is how the light inside you might change without your ever really realizing. This is how you unbecome yourself. This is how you forget to talk about what the hallway looked like at night when you were young. This is how you forget to speak for those who have gone before. For Chuck, and for Frank, and for Francis, and for Frank, and for Louise and for Richard and for Freddie and for all of those dogs and lizards and guinea pigs gone. You forget. And you are silent as they are, even as you breathe. Worse, you are reticent.

This is the story of getting out. But it’s not a simple story. We will not talk about the shoulders that you stepped on to step high and over. We will not talk about how easy it is to fall back. Health insurance. Ballet flats. Comfortable. We will talk about what happens inside you when your argue, when you write. When the people inside your head start to breathe and get insistent: make time for me. No one else will.

He said it better: It’s living in and writing your own story, and yes, yes, you nod, that’s why you married him and if it’s possible for you to do that, you should.

Lord knows it happened to me when I was eighteen!

To highlight the brief course of action, Seas Run Dry doesn’t have chapter breaks. It has scene breaks, and also “day breaks”–the larger section headings are named “Thursday,” “Friday,” “Saturday,” and so on. I feel like this structure is a little risky; I’ve learned how to place tension at the end of chapters in my other manuscripts to propel the reading forward, and I can’t really do that here. But it’s fun to try something new, and it gives me an opportunity to shift tone a bit in the middle of the night. At first, I was worried about this; would it seem abrupt or unrealistic? But so far, I’ve found that it really just feels accurate. In the words of my favorite Ferlinghetti poem, we think differently at night.

So, here we are. Loril, in the earliest hours of Sunday morning, thinking differently:

(Teaser removed)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Doctor

I

Among twenty snowy planets,
The only moving thing
Was the heart of the TARDIS.

II

I was of thirteen minds,
Like a body
In which there are thirteen Doctors.

III

The Time Lord waltzes at the end of the world.
It is like a metaphor, thinly veiled.

IV

A Doctor and his companion
Are one.
A Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor
Are one.

V

I know that I prefer
The beauty of innuendos,
The milky-white discharge of bio-energy,
And the Doctor sleeping
just after.

VI

Naked branches filled my long window
With barbaric cracks.
The shadow of my future self
Crossed it, back and forth.
The potential
Found in the shadow
To become someone else.

VII

O thin men of Gallifrey,
Why do you tell your children
To look into the Time Vortex through
The Untempered Schism
Or the Eye of Harmony
Or whatever it’s called?
Do you not see how that shit
Is crazy?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the TARDIS
Has telepathic translation circuits.

IX

When the Time Lords flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of the Doctor
Flying in his TARDIS,
Even the Dalek Emperor
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He flew over London
In a blue box.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of coral
For blackbirds.

XII

Mutter’s Spiral is turning.
The Doctor must be traveling.

XIII

It was today all tomorrow.
It was snowing
But it wasn’t snow.
The Doctor watched
From a box in a scrapyard.

I have to say, one of the ways I think that an MFA was not helpful for me was that it made me more afraid to take risks in my poetry. I have a very loud, very vocal internal editor already. In my very last workshop, I quite literally made apologies for emotional content in my poetry.

And I love emotional content. In 2007 and before, before I came here, I never even considered sentiment a risk.

This might have something to do with why I hardly write poetry these days. I’ll get an idea (I think of ideas in my head as seedlings–admittedly a hackneyed metaphor but I think creative ideas germinate in exactly the same way) and think “How can I make this a good story?” rather than “How can I distill this into a poem?” Part of this, sure, is that I’ve gotten used to having space to develop my ideas–poetry forces you into a sort of conciseness that fiction, even spare, sparse fiction, doesn’t. But I know that part of this is fear. I can take risks in fiction that I don’t feel comfortable taking in poetry. I’m undoubtedly more skilled, more controlled, but to be an effective artist you need to be able to forgo control every once in awhile to make an emotional impact.

I’m not sure what the cure is for this, except, perhaps, time (and maybe intoxication? That’s helped in the past, but I’m too busy these days to be drunk, which is probably a shame). Right now, I’ve been focusing on fiction–and sitting back passively, waiting for the poems to come. Victoria’s vlog is a nice reminder that sometimes, you have to grab these things, to be proactive, to be rash.

(Oh, and if you’re not following the yarebels, and you like YA fiction, you should be.)

In related news, Jordan’s been playing Europa Universalis III all day today. He named his army The First MFA Army, so that he could say things like “The MFA Army has no leaders! The MFA Army is underfunded! The MFA Army is starving to death!” to make me giggle. Life is all right, I think.

The Lives of Insects

sometimes when walking down the stairs
in the dark at night you’re mistaken in
believing you’ve mis-stepped, the sensation
of falling without going anywhere like
toeing the edge of a light house, a steep
stair case, the viewing deck of one of the
world trade centers, a cliffside at night
with your boyfriend and you’re stoned you
have sex believing you’ll fall into the
lights of suburban families sitting down to
vegan dinners or beating their children or
going to separate beds–lights which are really
stars. belief begets sensation but you
don’t tumble or tuck your body into yourself
which you learned in a book will save your
your face and your ribcage but maybe not your
spinal cord but who doesn’t love a para
palegic you just watch as his shoulders move
up and down and up and feel the blood drain from
your fingers.

i’ve built a wall for myself out of intelligent
fiction, books about primate biology, existential
ism, little girls discovering what those-folds-are-
for in chicago apartment complexes, pottery, poetry,
and the real meaning of those flowers in through
the looking glass. my wall is strong. it’s guarded
by insects: mosquitoes smoking exotic cigarettes outside
of concerts without paying the cover charge, fire
flies in coffee shops, dull and dim and drowning on
espresso, and you, a green fly, and me, a mantis, and
i don’t know who we really are any more, apart from
justification for my theories. i think in stanzas,
relate in five paragraph form, a strong thesis and three
supporting arguments and a conclusion but i always lose
myself around the conclusion

and you, you’re still standing on those stairs at night
barefoot and breathless and believing that if you open
your eyes you’ll be bloody on the carpet, banister
buried inside your ribcage. i’m still waiting for you
to take that first step, and hear the old boards shift
beneath your toes. walk past those walls and stop
talking in your journal about it.

there is really only one insect in this story.

Love and War

He wastes time with whiskey on the ancient couch
swallowed in a throw she had composed for him out
of blue and yellow yarn a little jewish ingenuity
the smell of her sex; once they built shelter from
pillows and blankets, lamplight fireworks filtered
through pale threads. She fought her wars with her
fingernails, left rivers of blood along the geography
of his ribcage and he retaliated, bruising her throat,
her pulse scored with napalm burns; they took off a layer
of skin and they starved, the radiation fallout poisoning
of love–

love was a treaty of bodily borderlines, the taut skin she
never let him taste, the tributaries that rushed out from
his navel at night while he waited for something better to come
along well of course he loved those grey grenades she called
eyes, her aK-47 cup. He was a veteran envisioning god
in limbs that were only phantoms, flash backs of bullets
raining like first-kiss passions, wrestling, groping gunless,
streaked with her lipstick and her orgasms, her orgasms,
her orgasms were silent as a solitary shot
glass on a Saturday night.

Something happened after I graduated from college. Part of it was growing up. Part of it was going on birth control that made me less crazy, but muted my emotions, over all. Part of it was loss and fear and fear of my own mortality: my mom got sick, my grandfather and my cat died, I became terrified of the idea of my own death. My journaling, and writing, changed–it was something panicked, preoccupied. Before going into the MFA program, I tried writing fiction which, I recognize now, was just a mass of sad wish-fulfillment. My second livejournal, which I also won’t be linking here, became a record of unhappiness and stress.

I’m happy with my writing these days; the fiction I write feels good, productive. But I miss that nineteen-year-old poet girl. There are days when I’d like to call her back to me, to coax her from the guarded walls of myself. To be brave and bald like she was. But I don’t know if I have it in me to be her, anymore. To put it all out there. To risk pain and censure.

I’d sure love, at least, like to write poems like she did, though. Because she really was a lovely little prophet-girl:

ideally, yes, i’d watch the sunlight spill over his pale back every morning; the green sheets would come to memorize our indentations. we would sweat together in august with no air conditioning and take showers just to cool off and sit on the fire escape with hard cider and popsicles and sing into the sunset.

ideally, yes, in winter my nose would turn blue when i’d dig my car out of the banks in February; at night after long dark hours deprived of vitamin e under fluorescent light we’d leave our boots trailing mud across the foyer and our socks over the radiator and our fingerprints on each other’s flesh as we rediscovered fire and the meaning of the words “body heat.”

ideally, yes, the cat’s name would be shroedinger and would curl in siamese curves against his belly as he read, one finger to his lips, the other poised between the creature’s ears; i would play music and dance by myself and take photos of my feet standing in the bathtub and draw pictures of him in green marker on the backs of napkins when he wasn’t looking.

ideally, yes, we would be true to one another, pen dry erase poetry on the refrigerator door, make love and only sleep on the couch because of insomnia; naively, yes, ideally, yes.

and i don’t care about the spaces in between but I want you to be the last thing I see when I sleep and the first thing I’m sure of when I rise. i want i want i want

to belong
to you.

(A few weeks back, JT Glover posted about chapter themes. My chapters generally aren’t themed, but this, the sixteenth, clearly is. It’s about nudity, bodies, being naked emotionally and physically. Which is, I think, the only way my fourteen-year-old narrator, in fact any fourteen-year-old, can be naked; there are no exposed bodies at that age without emotions being likewise exposed.)

Other writing news of note: I finished a series of mutant turtle poems, which I started back in my last semester, so that I could submit them to this superhero poetry anthology. Even if the anthology doesn’t work out, writing poems–not just motes, but honest-to-gee-dash-dee poems–feels good. In celebration, here are the four best TMNT things I could find on youtube:

and this (click on it–it’s worth it). Good god, what is coming out of Donatello’s face?

(In other-other news, ten days till matrimony. Weird.)

Fiction: And This Also Has Been One of the Dark Places of the Earth by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan. This is a gorgeously written, slow building story. It reminds me of one of my favorite ever speculative fiction scenes: the killing of the cat in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in that both present situations that feel undeniably real and immediate and scary despite being essentially fantastic.

Claire, if you’re reading, you should submit to this one, too. They’re pretty much fantastic, and I think they’d love your stuff.

A one-month hiatus from writing poetry does not make one not-a-poet.