tsnoteliot

[tsnoteliot]

a breakup poem

already i must scramble to remember the sound of your voice, its faint echo a warbled, static-busted radio, & me pulling at the antenna, which bends against one star and the next. my fingers slow-turning the grooves of the dial, hoping to find your right frequency. if i leaned backside out of a window, your laugh would become a bird floating belly up, and the sky a ground neither of us can grasp.

[tsnoteliot]

checking

dad clambers into my passenger seat right as i’m about to leave. he wants to survey my tail light as i click the turn signal, says something about getting my tires fixed before the big move, those worn black flats breathing nearly out of their husks. i think about how love is checking, checking in again even when nothing is wrong. how loving someone is always anticipating doom. on my parents’ anniversary card i write congrats on 26 years and i think of what a large child that could be, still unsure, with tears always threatening their brims. then i walk to the garden to call you, and when your small black-white voice finally blinks back, i let out a breath large enough for the trees to stand a little taller, i swear, i swear it, for the yellow blooms to sigh open. i’m just checking in, i type back. watching me pull away, dad waits in the street, silhouetted by my tail light, which burns a sure, unfaltering red.

[tsnoteliot]

anna🥺 ur actually the best

“new normal”

what is it young women love about dancing in clubs, alleyways, dark spaces outside of themselves? i’ve designed my room to be a corner i can shelve myself away in, like a book. my spine eternally closed. when this whole thing started, i cherished a reason to hide my face. the first time i slept with someone, i held the covers over myself until my partner peeled me back, and my heart offered up all its answers. what happens when a heart comes up empty? a year into this now, i’m eager to strip myself clean. teeth flashing white, bearing all their  roses. what i love about dancing in a room full of people is being swallowed by light, by the lives of others, until there’s no space for me left, only empty buckets. what they don’t tell you about the heart is it’s not a book; it can’t be shelved.

[tsnoteliot]

on indecency

of that kiss i remember         concrete      i remember      you swore     i’ll remember

         both of us                  tumbling

a smoke screened love                      will prick your eyes

        these bruises aren’t meant        to speak               and i never meant to bite,                             just needed a way to                                                   name you

[tsnoteliot]

isn’t it amazing, you begin, naming the roof over our heads, the brimmed bowls of rice in our laps. september, above us, turns its last leaf. my blue house and its paint-peeled porch envelops our legs, our half-bodies. i haven’t seen you in months, so the gold-green of your eyes startles me as if for the first time. you’ve quit your job, finally, and i don’t say how i’ve missed you terribly, terribly, instead just wash your bowl in the sink twice, with each of my hands.

[tsnoteliot]

what things might jump

i only notice two minutes into my bike ride that i’m not wearing headphones. halfway down rose, the breaths fall out of my body all at once, and the bike’s gears hum their soft whir. i consider pulling up to a curb to dig the earbuds out of my backpack, but decide better. for so long i’ve been afraid of the sound of my own voice, what things might jump out of it. at the crosswalk jutting into kalmia, the cars blink their pink glow, and a group of friends wait across the street, vibrating with laughter. none of us could know what the year might bring, but we stand still like we’re supposed to, and watch the numbers blink down. when the walking man appears, i press my foot down hard onto the pedal, and listen for the full circle of its turn.

[tsnoteliot]

“new normal”

what is it young women love about dancing in clubs, alleyways, dark spaces outside of themselves? i’ve designed my room to be a corner i can shelve myself away in, like a book. my spine eternally closed. when this whole thing started, i cherished a reason to hide my face. the first time i slept with someone, i held the covers over myself until my partner peeled me back, and my heart offered up all its answers. what happens when a heart comes up empty? a year into this now, i’m eager to strip myself clean. teeth flashing white, bearing all their  roses. what i love about dancing in a room full of people is being swallowed by light, by the lives of others, until there’s no space for me left, only empty buckets. what they don’t tell you about the heart is it’s not a book; it can’t be shelved.

[tsnoteliot]

after a man OD’d in the church yard,

i drive home watching dust motes eat up my view of the road. the stereo croons a song my friend texted me earlier. i think about which deaths we remember and which we decide are worth forgetting. in the book facedown on my bed, susan sontag wrote, ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death. surely, i picture it now—a man sprawled in morning grass, buried only by air. a body eating god with its questions. there are those of us who have laid down our lives, the speakers sing. jesus took my blood and washed my sins. my eyes well up with images they didn’t see. sontag later wrote the witnessing of war is never a solitary venture. the sun haloes each mote, dazzling the road white. i mist the windshield till it’s glittering. soon and very soon, the song promises as i click the wiper on, as it drags dirt lines across the glass, we shall meet again on the other side.

[tsnoteliot]

moving out

first i worry about how the desk and mattress will fit in spaces not empty enough for them— i’ve picked the smallest room in this house for its fireplace which is so brown it’s like the earth, and the house so green it’s like everything that grows in it. then i worry who i could fit in that mattress with me, my life with its big empty spaces. sometimes i worry my skin has gotten too dark and how it might look against the white ghost of a mattress, how my darkness could force a space empty. my skin the smallest room in the house. my skin so brown it’s the whole earth, and everything growing in it.

[tsnoteliot]

the aftermath

i’ve been drawn to churches lately. this morning i drove to one where a man OD’d in the yard only hours before. i passed by the coroner’s truck on my way to get coffee down the street. i wish nothing scared me-- not the skull-cracked sidewalks, not the two men who watched after me, not their lead eyes. our office is in a low income area, the lawyer clarifies an hour later, during our meeting. the skin beneath my thighs sticks with sweat. we’ve had people pass out before, but not die. i hope you didn’t see that. maybe the aftermath is just as bad. how i press three keys between my knuckles. how i lock my car door in seconds. how as i’m leaving, a man in the downstairs hallway sings lord, have mercy.

[tsnoteliot]

waning gibbous

if there are rocks in my bedsheets, they’re yours. look at the moon, you say, your face a small bright screen. so i leave my book open- mouthed on the bed, let my bare feet carry me down the stairs, out onto the driveway, only to see the sky scraped clean. the stars sparse, mocking me with their dim blink.

i climb back into the covers with tiny gravel-shaped skulls lining my soles, wondering how many more times you’ll make me search for something that isn’t there.

[tsnoteliot]

john says the very worst thing i can do is think about my condition, so i will let it alone and talk about the house

each night i leave the blinds wide-eyed so the sun can fling itself through them in the morning, bleach the walls yellow. yellow is the quietest violence i endure and something about this makes it my favorite color. in fact, there is nothing to be unhappy about when the sunlight stripes over your handwritten poems on the wall yes, even the ones about death, how the neck bends beneath a black boot, even the ones about breathing. some women marry houses it is true-- my back pressed against the corner, into the carpet. i tie gold threads against the ceiling fan, leave them there til death do us part. they strain around my room out of and in through the blinds, like another kind of skin. and faithfully,                                          faithfully, i wash myself down.

[tsnoteliot]

2/17/21

i’ve never liked the snow the way it bites, daggers off trees.  but the other night i made the first footsteps in it with you, as you walked me home. my shoes half the size of yours leaving long shadows. the night you talked me down, pulled the edges of my winter cap over my ears, left your hands there. your pupils swallowing the moon. you could fill anything to the brim, if you tried.

[tsnoteliot]

my once-best-friend’s father is dead. we just saw him last january, just a year ago. he liked tamil movies and fixed hearts for a living, stitched them up to keep them beating. we used to laugh  at him, me and my old friend,  when he made funny faces.  i haven’t spoken to her in years, but i remember her laugh so well, because it’s the kind that spills out like it can’t help itself, the kind that always needed to be cleaned up after. every day i wonder about dying. what it will be like, when it’s my turn, if i should go ahead and get it over with. i take walks, find flowers i am okay with. yes, i think, i could be this one. i could come back as that one, yes, the rose that reappears without fail on our front lawn, yes, the dandelion, a life so stubborn, so bent upon survival, yes, this child’s wish, yes, a field of clovers. this is the kind of stitching it takes, i suppose, to live forever.

[tsnoteliot]

12/14/20

today’s delight is that the previous owner of this poetry book underlined the same line which held me arrest just now, and i am imagining our breaths catching together in the narrow white margins, this home of shifting bones. my friend asked me this morning if we were twin flames-- not as a question, but more for confirmation. for 9 months now a virus, a tiny circling thing, has demanded we stay as far apart as possible, cover our smiles with cloth. this is enough time for a baby to be thought of and realized and planned out and wrested out screaming. of course we are, i told them, there’s no other explanation. and as little as i know about astrology, or the things that stars can spell out about who we are, or who we’re meant to be with, i really do believe it. i believe it the same way i believe in holding doors open a moment too long, until the person entering does a little jog to lessen the waiting, the time given up for them. the same way babies grip your finger with their entire hand, like you’re the only thing worth tethering to.

[tsnoteliot]

hopefully, holding

we’re touring a house right outside of an elementary school. its porch sits right by the crosswalk, where each morning the little crisp faced children will wear bright colored coats, tread across in neat lines, their hands, hopefully, holding another’s. this is how i imagine things. a friend and i watched a mother grab her son by the elbow, get low and mean to his face, her own: twisting, animal-like. we won’t be like that, we said. some days there are knives at the ends of my thoughts. i tell my therapist this and she wants me to dull them, or at least see their pointed ends ahead of time. someone hurt you when you were small. i want you to look at her now. she’s got all that hair that springs up in the wrong places. look how she’s folded over in her chair like her wings are bent, her eyes trained on nothing, and look at her hands, how they’re already curled into fists.

[tsnoteliot]

in another world i could be walking home from the drugstore late at night and the roads would be slick with rain. something orange and rattling in my pocket. a telephone line could be dangling, receiver half empty. in another world i could answer it and fall in. hold hands with someone across the still river. in another world i could be a dancer. there could be a god worth talking to. in my bedroom, a few blocks away, somebody beautiful could be turning. in another world i might have stayed. there would be 80,000 cuisines left to try. the street vendor would know my name. in another world you’d know me too-- i’d be worth knowing. maybe i wouldn’t have done it. the buildingtops wouldn’t have glared at me. in another world i’d climb up them and peer below. something could pull my hand, but in this one it won’t.  god in those moving streets. in another world  it’s right there, and i could step into it. god in the nothing. god in the wide eyes. god in the phone receiver, saying, hello, hello, hello.