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“Poetry is a bird. Prose is a potato.”
– Billy Collins
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Sylvia Plath at 19
I’m not sure what I was expecting but I think the lining of my stomach has begun to deteriorate when I see her. The center of my abdomen gets heavy and feels swollen. It hurts. My grandmother hands me a tissue and I think she is being preemptive until I feel my neck get wet from the tears rolling off of my chin. I must have been crying for the past few minutes. Seconds? Hours? How long have I been here? My mind slows down like it does when I’ve been drinking. God, I need a drink.
Her hair is the same. Highlighted. They put her in jeans and a shirt I’ve seen her wear a thousand times. Her nails are freshly painted, her hands, seemingly resting but really fallen, on top of her chest. She looks the same, but I think of her mouth sewn, her warm heart now shriveled and blue in the empty case near where her lungs were. I wonder if they painted her toes, too. If they used her own eye shadow and hairspray, or if every dead body in this building was wearing the same shade of pink on their lids.
(via nordvind)
“as it has been said,
“love and a cough can not be concealed.”
even a small love.
even a small cough.”– anne sexton (via meganfalley)
(via yourpalmal)
Merlot is sloopy with marijuana. Sloppy and scotch-free. Synonymous with Jill, my beloved sister-
friend, little bird. Why don’t we sink together? I could stand in back-alleys with her. I could laugh.
Jill and her pink U.F.O. pants, her black platform boots. Shine on.
But I found out I was good enough. I found out I deserved something good. I started using the word again. Deserve, deserve, deserve. Deserving. Deserving of. Because you earned it. You did your best, you kept shit together.
Now I can get so stoned. Now I find love again, everywhere.I don’t have a pintrest account. I’m still not sure what pintrest is. I also don’t know what reddit or spotify is. Yesterday I had to google what YOLO meant. I don’t watch How I Met Your Mother or Parks and Recreation. In fact, I don’t have cable. I haven’t heard Justin Bieber’s new song. I haven’t read the Hunger Games or Harry Potter. The last clothing item I bought I’ve only worn to a funeral. I don’t eat tacos or sushi.
I love pizza. I’ve read more short stories, personal essays, and collections of poems than novels. I type fragments on twitter incessantly. I’ve been confronted with mortality, and it’s not mine that scares me, but every one else’s. I know every song on Taylor Swift’s newest album. I watch Breaking Bad on Netflix. I watch everything on Netflix. I feel a growing breach between myself and the rest of my cohort.
I dreamed that I was wandering somewhere foreign. I had, threaded through mine, the arm of a woman as we went from room to room. We were traveling with a group, near tour-like, when we would often break away and alone, but together, swim a scary, angry river or walk through an old, creaky ship to find something lurking in a damp corner. Terrified, I wait for the group while the faceless woman I had been clinging to went on ahead, into a dark room, only to come back a moment later to say she had traveled the journey alone, and nothing awful or frightening happened to her. When I look at her, I see she is much older than when our adventure had began, and that I was the same, looked the same at the end.
I have seen the neon lights of Vegas from the sky, looking down on the plains of glows. I have seen drunk girls taking pictures outside casinos, flashing their cameras like the lights on the slots. I have seen creepy men in t-shirts handing out cards with naked women on them. I have seen decent men turn them down. I have seen winners at a blackjack table turn ugly from red, glittered dice.
150 people are killed every year by coconuts. Annually, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens. In japan, 150 people die from hot water scalding each year. Hippos kill 2,900 people in Africa every year. In the United States, 450 people will die in 2012 from falling off of their beds. More often, though, people die on the cold floors of their kitchens. More often, people simply drop dead.
