Pocketing the Anvil

home wrecker

thecolorofsad — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:52:37 +0000

i want to whisper in her ear
i have seen your boyfriend naked
but i don’t because they just look
so damn beautiful together

why ruin a good thing. the table is covered with linen and we all look so nice in our sweaters and it’s been so long since i’ve seen you. the chiming glasses are filled with dark wine that would make a terrible stain on the carpet. we talk about the snow and people we know who are less successful than we are. cigarettes are lit on the balcony, where our breath comes in plumes that seem to crystallize in the night air, and she comes up behind you and slides her arm around your waist and i look away towards the lights of the city, which is filled with millions of people just like you and me, people who might have once had a shot at it, but that all happened a long time ago and we are not the same people we used to be, but i still wonder who we were back then, who we are now. she laughs at some lame joke i make and gives me a hug, then goes back inside to the warmth and portishead on the stereo, it could be sweet… drifting out through the half-open door now fogged with condensation.

i want to whisper in her ear
i have seen your husband naked
but i don’t because she’ll discover
his ugliness soon enough.

egg shells

thecolorofsad — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:57:14 +0000

you incubate inside me. or i thought you did, but you were really just unfertilized, waiting for my mouth to take you in. i settle over you to keep you warm through the chilly nights. you settle over me like layer after layer of plastic wrap. we lay next to each other, cold. suffocating. i want you to turn the light off but then i won’t be able to see what you do with your hands. what they will be holding: a knife, a hammer, a frying pan. make me a story. make me a story of a girl and a boy where only one of them falls in love and you have to guess which one. skip to the last page. i think of hearts being factory-farmed, each one reduced to a matter of expendiency, which heart is the biggest, which heart has the richest yolk. which can be digested most easily. this is not the story i wanted to tell, but what happens, happens, or does it? put my heart in a carton but close it, don’t say it’s cracked. we lay in bed and our bodies are perfect in their unblemished whiteness beneath the fluorescent lamp. i want you to turn off the light. we lay there silent, thin-shelled and so easily broken. you don’t turn off the light.

why i don’t write to advice columns anymore

thecolorofsad — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:51:35 +0000

dear abbi:

this october night finds me lucid and sober, and by sober
i mean i haven’t taken the benzos yet. i could write you
a pharmaceutical history but it just begins to repeat over
and over, the way the pills sometimes repeat in my throat,
along with so many other hard foreign objects. sometimes
when i stand in the shower i open my mouth and try to inhale,
as if through drowning, i could relearn how to breath again.
what do you do in the shower?

–stands in the shower so long my heart starts to pucker

—-

dear stands in the shower so long your heart starts to pucker:

i am glad for your sobriety, and yes, the days pass in such a blur!
i’m not sure what a ‘benzos’ is but i’m sure you’re a nice girl too
and did you ever think that maybe you ought to transfer
all that negativity? when you cry you should wear a raincoat!
here is a pamphlet where you can teach yourself and others
the heimlich manuever. thank you so much for sending me mail!
i always make sure to wash behind my ears and could send
you a sample of soap that smells of lavender!

–abbi

fireworks

thecolorofsad — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:23:56 +0000

it doesn’t really matter now, whether i remember your eyes as black or as
brown, just like it now doesn’t matter how white your neck looked beneath
the dark blue sheets or how your chest glossed with hair tickled my nose,
or whether you smoked all my cigarettes, or whether you loved me or just
had this thing about being alone. and who i was to fault you, i knew what
it was like to be in the middle of summer watching the fireworks all by
yourself and secretly hoping one of them would be fired right into your
gut, your chest, your mouth. my heartbeat was in your mouth, always in
your mouth, firm and red, red like sparklers and roman candles. and i
always knew just how to set you off. but nobody talks about the ash after,
the ash that falls from the sky after the lights are gone, that settles in
your eyelashes, this dirty snow that falls during a memory that always
ends abruptly after a sparkling vermilion flash brighter, in that instant,
than the surrounding stars. and gone just as quickly.

oil light, on.

thecolorofsad — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:02:38 +0000

85,967 miles and i need an oil change.

i remembered you the way i remembered freezing
when another car rounded the corner,
my hands still locked around the back of your neck

if you’re patient you’ll become familiar with
the backseats of cars. sometimes we didn’t even wait
that long. gearshift digging into my calf.

pick an empty street.

they can actually give you a ticket for that.
(he didn’t even need a ticket to get in.)

the green audi, the red solara.
the silver honda, the black honda.

i need an oil change.

when my mother was in college a girl she knew
turned the car on in the garage and ran a pipe
into the interior.
she didn’t drive anymore after that.

and the oil light’s still on.

the guy at the valvoline station laughs when
he sees my car pull up. he leers at me as he checks
off all the things i need to get serviced.
they don’t teach girls to negotiate things like that.

so i keep pushing the car the way i push myself–
relentless, without mercy,

always in such a rush to get somewhere.

i need the light to change.
i need my battery changed.
i need a goddamn oil change.
i need
i need
i need a change.

hands

thecolorofsad — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:27:14 +0000

i am the smudged phone number on the back of your hand
i am the phone that rings and never leaves a voicemail
i am the one who never requests but always demands
i am building a cross on the hillcrest, and i am the nail
through your palm. there used to exist a requisite
goodnight kiss, they were always goodbye kisses,
when it was the hello that was always the culprit
that incited the riot of hands and mouths that missed
the mark when it came to saying what we really meant
and fingertip to fingertip, we tried to send signals
to each other’s brains that never really got sent
quite the way we wanted, always garbled, and it pulls
at my heart like the static electricity of thunder,
or maybe just hands trying to pull me under.

arms dealers

thecolorofsad — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:09:24 +0000

wooden boxes, styrofoam filling, most of the pieces are there:
we take count once again and then sign off on the shipment
the truck rumbles off into the night, past the cinderblock
walls, past the barbed wire, and we motion for the packages
to be lifted and brought into the compound. spread out on
the tables inside, they look so fragile, so so red–these
organs that we trade for, this business of ventricle & aorta,
the arms race of the heart. we separate them out, discard
the bad ones–the ones turned brown and dried out, the ones
that have already been through too much heartbreak, the ones
too scarred or the ones that give too easily when touched,
rotten. we work quickly and efficiently. we plant them
in people’s cars, in the elevators, in their briefcases.
we put them beneath the pillows of sleeping post-adolescents
who still haven’t gotten it yet, who still don’t know how
to love. and we always, always leave the wounded behind.

songs of paralysis, part 108

thecolorofsad — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:46:35 +0000

you prick me into silence. my mouth that opened to you
and let you inside, split my whisper of a frame into two
halves– it no longer works, it is wordless and frozen shut
but still hurts like a bloody, bloody cut.

you sting me into stillness. my hands lay dead at my side,
hands that felt the bird-beat of your pulse that hides
beneath your skin, your vulture’s wings and browned talon
that tear into my heart, collect my insides by the gallon.

you lacerate me into numbness. my body is now without
any feeling, empty as a promise, and there is no doubt
that you have turned me into nothing more than a plaster cast
of who i was, just a discarded thing of your past.

my father’s brain

thecolorofsad — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:30:34 +0000

i drive with my father’s brain
wedged between the seats. we go
to get coffee and i sit with it
for a while in the car, listening
to its insistent questions
“can you get me a glass?
can you get me a pudding?
can you get me some ice?
can be a good daughter?”
i know how to do all of the above
except for the last one
somewhere, wedged in the back
of my brain
is an image of my father
standing in the garden
and letting me use
the hose and miracle-gro
on the plants.
i didn’t grow much that summer,
or maybe i did.
somewhere, wedged even further back
is the memory
of unemployment
of slamming doors
of thrown objects
of screaming
of broken things
but mostly i think of my father
now
of the wadded-up napkins
on the radiator next to his
favorite chair
and the strewn newspapers
pudding cups
empty glasses
and his blue eyes
that are always tearing
for some reason.
i carry my father’s brain
on two shiny compact discs
to the neurologist.
“here is my father’s brain,”
i tell the medical receptionist.
she probably hears that all the time.

sweetness

thecolorofsad — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 01:45:54 +0000

i swallowed the hive of bees to keep from eating but it was no
good. they stung my lips, my bee-stung lips pouted and pressed
against yours, my teeth nibbled at you like you were a chocolate
easter bunny (always the ears first) then swallowed capsules to
ensure you would be expunged from me later. my fingers gripped
the rim of the toilet and it has such a bad rep but then it is
light like emptiness, empty like lightness. but i am still swollen
with need, my lips are stained like plums that have too many carbs,
i want to cry the fat out of my eyes, i want to vomit up my organs
because they are so heavy inside me. i slowly lick the magazine
covers to taste what skinniness tastes like, which is like nothing.
i eye you where you lay spread out on the bed like the sweetest
banquet, your head like a soft peach, your heart dripping caramel.
and i am a hungry girl.

spigots and ingots

thecolorofsad — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:42:48 +0000

i strangled the veins in my neck until my face blackened and fell off
but you still knew me anyway by the ink in my skin and the length
of my nails, they matched perfectly to your bloodied back and when
will i feel clean enough to get out from beneath the spigot of regret
and when will my brown hands whiten and stiffen like the most perfect
sculptures that would cup over your ears so that you might hear the sea
where floats the world. a half grain of sand closer and you might fall
into the space between my headboard and pillow, where i kept a dream
too wizened to be called beautiful, too secret to be spoken. you smile
with gold teeth and i pluck an ingot from beneath your tongue but it is
only pyrite, and who is the fool now.

the sexy femur

thecolorofsad — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:15:03 +0000

who knows how many bones lay beneath the sea. there’s a fish swimming
round and round my femur, when skin was there he said i had nice legs
who knows how many children the escalator has eaten, i do not wait,
i walk up the escalator when i can, maybe that is why i have nice legs
who knows how many landfills are made up entirely of scratch-off lotto
tickets, i used to go dumpster-diving behind the dunkin donuts, my legs
sticking straight out–here i hit the jackpot, i saved you a chocolate
one. i look at pictures of myself when i was a girl, how skinny my legs
were, thin as fish bones, how i didn’t know that men could (and would)
like them, that they were something someone would want to touch,
now whenever a man grips my leg i just think of the bone inside, hip
to knee, flesh stretched over (i suppose in an attractive manner)
and though it may be the longest bone in my body, don’t think you’re
going to go that length because behind that scratch-off there’s only
a hand waving goodbye.

songs from the shells

thecolorofsad — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:42:16 +0000

the bright urge of her summer-shocked patch of sea in the cape
lay as immersion naked but for the solution of salt–she shunted
sand, castle-like delusions of grandeur (formed, of course, by dyed
plastic, the hollow turrets radioactive) and found no shells this
season except for the conch of his ear, delicate spiraling
into unreachable blackness that her tongue-tip could never touch,
and something had to die inside it for her to be able to cup it
with her palm and whisper the siren song of madness and rage,
of breadth that cannot be measured except by thumb, of stars
that willfully trace their own paths across the sky, of love
in the curl of a wave that always, always breaks. and somewhere,
she blows softly and a mollusk dies, and he can hear it.

the ark (for irene, august 2011)

thecolorofsad — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 13:37:08 +0000

for irene, august 2011

she told me to build an ark, and since she was the size
of a continent who was i to argue. there was a prize
inside if you could reproduce, because after all,
it was the reason for pairs. i made a phone call
and we were off. i gathered pine and oak and beech,
and though i knew nothing about ship building as such
i was confident i could build a vessel worthy
of weathering the hurricane’s flood with surety.
the rain began to come down and the parade moved forth
in went the giraffes and elephants all ready to give birth
followed by the two cockatiels with clipped wings
and the duo of raccoons with their eyes all ringed
in went the wolves, the frogs, and the domestic
animals, the cats and the dogs and ferrets, the pick
of the litters, and we were just about to close
the door when in some others came poking their nose
in came the alcoholics with their huge packs of beer
followed by the depressed pair practically in tears
in came the drug addicts with their needles and pipes
and the hookers with herpes and vaginal wipes
in came the catholics demanding seats at the front
and so the homophobics moved over with a grunt
but not before making sure of the gender of the former
when it finally was settled and everyone seemed to concur
i closed the portal and we settled in for a long night.
with all this cargo i knew everything would be alright
and everything would be back to normal at first light.

alignments and calibrations

thecolorofsad — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 01:07:26 +0000

realign your spine, count the red cells, hold fingertip to
fingertip because you could chew out the side of your mouth
but i heard every word you said and i’m holding you to it.
measure out your inconsistencies, all the feigned innocence,
measure yourself out like flour but don’t forget to sift.
i made you a cake with a dull saw inside, i used a spoon
to slit my wrists, measuring out blood by how strong you
like your coffee. sugar dissolves inside us but doesn’t
make our words any sweeter. i string your words together
but rearrange them how i want. rearrange how these events
happened and you might have a different opinion. rearrange
these tangram pasts and connect these thoughts with the vein
i ripped out of my arm. check the pressure of your stare
and recalibrate your heart. it’s always so inaccurate.

hearthenge

thecolorofsad — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 19:27:30 +0000

boil your heart down to the stone. line them up between
the hedges. for you i called down the moon. the foam-
ringed shoulders of the sea did more than shiver.
the silver lining of your mouth glinted in the light,
shed its lips and what was shadow went unseen
i wandered your coast filled with white shells and loam
where i buried my journal and ink in a watery blur
there were too many prophecies hinging on what might
happen, how just the flick of your wrist could clean
the shore of debris and i couldn’t go beachcomb
for moonlight anymore, drunk on frankincense and myrrh
looking for something hidden like a pearl so bright
and how many times must i be held and submerged beneath
and how many hearts must i pluck from between your teeth

stellar

thecolorofsad — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:19:04 +0000

dark comes like a pinhole opening from underneath
into a gaping abyss lined with red clover and heath
i have grown to love the feeling of being beneath
i like the way your spine feels between my teeth

we do not fly, we do not float
where we end up will be some place remote
this poem was for you, that’s why i wrote
so take my hand but don’t forget your coat

it’s not a rabbit hole, it’s a wormhole
the truth is written on an already-burned scroll
and though i am fallen, at least i am still whole
and i’m never giving back the heart i stole

it’s the best kind of falling
inscribed stellar messages scrawling
through endless space we are sprawling
so tell me you love me and stop fucking stalling

we meet together below a digital sea
a universe is handed from you to me
you breed thoughts that spiral into infinity
what will come of this, we shall see.

a long walk off a short pier, or, how i discovered i could walk on water

thecolorofsad — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 02:41:20 +0000

what if no one held you for the first three months of your life. what if the back of your head was so flat from days and nights spent lying in a crib, with no one to cradle you, no one to hold you close and sing softly in the delicate shell of your ear. what if the artificial peppermint flavor from your first kiss never washed from your mouth and now every day you eat mint flavored steak and mint flavored bread and mint flavored dick. what if you had to take ten (sometimes eleven) pills a day just to convince yourself that you aren’t on the precipice of madness, that all that therapy and all that time spent in the hospitals was for your own good, so you wouldn’t hurt yourself, they said.
what if you’re damaged. what if everybody is damaged. you can’t change what happened but you can change what’s going to happen. what if there were no boundaries, what if you spilled yourself out all over the place, holding your nerve endings up in case someone wanted to tease and twang them, what if you decide to stop replaying the past over and over again in your head and cut the reel of all the bad clips, what if you stood beneath this shock of sky and realized that you’ll never truly be okay, and you’re okay with that. what if you lived your life as more than just a metaphor. what if nothing happened for a reason and that was reason enough. what if you were stronger than they said.

songs about death, part 96

thecolorofsad — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 02:15:59 +0000

draw me into the conspiracy of your arms and i will tell
you everything, how closely i listened to that shell
for the sound of your voice calmly telling me everything
would be okay, back when my only belief was nothing
that ever set foot upon the soft muscle of the heart
planting a flag, one giant leap that made my body start
to know what it felt like to be encapsulated in the fur
of your mind that wrapped itself around me, that would stir
within me something heavy and scarred, something old
that had been lying dormant waiting to be told
that we must take a break from suffering, at least for
a while, that in fact there is something more
to be discovered, to be fought for, that the universe
is held within a drop of dew and that while i may converse
about death, at the end, everything goes in reverse
and you’ll see me waving with a smile from my hearse.

the bearded lady

thecolorofsad — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:23:29 +0000

i want to grow a beard. i want lush, curly hair growing on my
cheeks and my chin, which i’d stroke when deep in thought,
which would be all the time. this is not to say i wish to be
a man. i would like to be a feminine lady with a dark-colored
beard, long eyelashes, and curls at my forehead. annie jones
was born in 1860 and by the time she was five she had sideburns
and a mustache. annie, tell me, did your husband love to stroke
your beard as he stroked your long brown hair at the same time?
did he pull you by the beard when you were being difficult, or
give you oils to massage into your cheeks and chin? did you sing
in the bath as you lathered, did you feel bad when people came
to point and stare? your beard lay nestled between your breasts
as you slept, and i am jealous as i look at your picture, your
heavy lidded eyes and all that dark hair flowing from your face,
and when they buried you they threaded gold in the soft locks,
queen of the circus, king of them all.