tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68334369441900248902024-03-13T17:15:37.869-04:00oh no. let's gosquawks, scraps, and a round of scrabble.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-80772396994984454522012-09-17T01:37:00.001-04:002012-09-17T01:37:53.906-04:00“When it dies, Love draws it upward into oneness. But when Strife tears the oneness apart again, then Fire Water Earth Air get separated and from their separation come monsters, animals, fish, bushes, girls, boys, and all the parts of the cosmos created from these. Also swans, of which the male is called a cob and the female a pen, according to Flannery O’Connor. Not a hen? No, a pen, she maintains. She kept swans.” -Anne Carson on Flannery O’Connor<br />
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When your lover wings a wine cup at your head, don’t think, monster, notice the angle at which the crystal arches through the air. Your tongue may taste the space it displaces. The cup does not move through distance, but merely executes a series of shifts of its possible location in which it exists, growing ever nearer to your temple, growing ever nearer to the wall it shatters against when it misses your face.</div>
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He always had terrible aim.</div>
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These days I do not trust my own language – borrowing the breaths of other lips. Breaths that have travelled the same trajectory as that wine cup – taking me back to your fingers which I kiss. Which I bite. Which I put inside my mouth that I might understand what you mean when you say hand.</div>
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Your hand, like a female swan is a pen, hedging in the limit of infinity, holding back complete dissolution, for which there is no word in the Southern dialect – but we do have the practice of stirring sugar into tea before we divide it into four separate glasses, four separate words: mine, not mine, not mine, not mine – which, if you will excuse me, is seven words, not four, but I find it easier to spell love with this alphabet. With this division of space. This exercise of limits, because where do we find desire if not in a span of distance?</div>
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To be correct has never been my drive. I have only sought that first world of undivided light which we taste parcel by piece by pressing this clumsy form up against the truth. It has taken many forms but once smelled like tar and took up the space of a body.</div>
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Destruction is love’s handmaid. She comes before her baring teeth sowing the ground with salt that one might set a table and pour a pitcher of tea into two glasses, forming two words: this one and that one.</div>
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When a lover tosses a tea glass at your head, don’t think monster, he has always had bad aim.</div>
jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-32425244257878790142011-07-14T11:44:00.002-04:002011-07-14T11:45:44.509-04:007-13-11Have you ever felt<div>like a wizard</div><div>whose cloak </div><div>is always</div><div>in the wash?</div>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-72984758202649002162011-07-13T17:19:00.002-04:002011-07-13T17:22:24.478-04:007-12-11"THEY SHOOT THE WHITE GIRL FIRST."<div><br /></div><div>Mama always said this</div><div>and seemed to know</div><div>because her best friend had been shot</div><div>when they were just girls.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mama had been with her </div><div>when it happened</div><div>at a miniature golf course</div><div>in a sequence</div><div>that jumps like a dream</div><div>and ends with Mama holding Sue Ellen,</div><div>propped up against a wind mill</div><div>with Sue Ellen bleeding out</div><div>in her date-night blouse.</div><div><br /></div><div>They had both been white.</div><div>They had both been girls.</div><div>But I never have corrected</div><div>Mama's saying.</div>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-68854537624559447842011-02-26T08:42:00.003-05:002011-02-26T08:46:18.238-05:002.25.11<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">As I was falling asleep,</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">I half dreamed a future</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">where women scooped out both their breasts</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">and rooted rocket launchers in their stead.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">They were sensual; powerful,</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">and it was terrifying</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">That is to say,</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">when you put your penis in my butt,</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">it feel like a rocket ship blasting off.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">And sex is much better this way,</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">because no one gets blown up </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; ">accidentally </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; ">.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:black"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-61236617937619342742011-02-24T23:25:00.001-05:002011-02-24T23:25:55.403-05:002.24.11<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">If <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I have learned<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">anything from the internet, <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">it is that there are <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">plenty of people to fuck.<o:p></o:p></span></p>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-30360701381422032722011-02-23T17:57:00.000-05:002011-02-23T17:58:08.706-05:002.23.11<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">1<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">At your first birthday mother caught three cardinals and cut them clean across their throats. She set them on your windowsill, an offering that she said he been performed in our family for generations.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">2<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">I have remembered this, sitting at my kitchen table this morning, watching the birds jockey for position at my neighbor’s feeders. There are flashes of red in the bustle, but I cannot count the cardinals.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">3<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">On the night of June 17<sup>th</sup> in 1936, outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, one of the carts on the Ferris wheel of traveling carnival tore away from its bolts and hung from the girders, the slicing shriek of steal shearing away cutting above the din of the midway. One side of the cart held fast. One passenger crouched inside, clinging to the side of the cart while a woman held to the lap bar, flung out and swinging in free air. Her legs wheeled wildly, brown wrinkled stockings searching for a foothold. When her fingers slipped, she sprang from the bar, casting her frame into flight, arms beating for the air and finding it unforgiving. The midway had hushed and so the wet slap of her body against the dusty ground bounced back from the tents around.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"">The men of the town came back that night and demanded the carney in charge of the wheel. They tarred and feathered him there at the entrance, in front of the other performers and cut him clean across his throat. The performers watched him spilling out in the headlights of the men’s trucks. The clatter of their engines, the tick of their pistons droned out across the prarie.<o:p></o:p></span></p>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-64939989901311769302011-02-22T15:49:00.000-05:002011-02-22T15:50:00.346-05:002.22.11<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; ">Last night, in my sleep,<div>my underwear got twisted</div><div>and this morning</div><div>I had indentations</div><div>around my thighs.</div><div>I picked up the phone</div><div>to call and tell you,</div><div>but heard the ocean</div><div>instead of a dialtone.</div></span>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-81794212987663770002011-01-31T14:55:00.001-05:002011-01-31T14:57:20.801-05:00Rabbit Punch<span class="Apple-style-span" >This piece is my half of a collaboration that appears in the first issue of <a href="http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/cottonmouth-pilot/14455392">Cottonmouth</a>.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br />1<br />She snaps pole beans in the deep basin of the kitchen sink. She looks down at her hands and watches the gnarled fingers move among the beans. Veins lattice the back of her hands, her pinky on the left is far too small.<br /> “Oh, that’s just my pinky nub,” she’d tell every grandkid the first time she noticed them staring. “I was helping my sister shuck corn. You even know what a corn shucker is,” she’d ask.<br /> “No ma’am.”<br /> “Well, it’s dangerous. I let my hand slip in there and my sister was turning the wheel, and my finger caught in the gears and the machine chewed it right down.”<br /> <br /> She is wearing a brown dress that makes her white hair look yellow in the kitchen’s light. She looks down into the sink at the colander of pole beans and tries to remember if she’s snapping them or just remembering one of the times before. Bowls, basins, beans, blur in a memory whose twists and turns are like the tunnels of a rabbit’s warren.<br /> “It all starts to run together after awhile. There’s just too much. Like the ocean churning up the small shells as the waves crash on the shore – everything dances together, swapping partners too fast to keep up,” she mutters to herself. “Do-see-do.”<br /> Behind her at the long wooden kitchen table, the women pay April no attention. She is their Mother April, Great Grammaw, Grandma, Great Auntie, Momma and Aunt April – but never Mawmaw or Nana. She saw to that. The women work on an army of side dishes: Baked Beans, Collard Greens, Mashed Potatoes, Fruit Salad, Potato Salad, Pasta Salad, Jello Salads, Garlic Rolls, Cheddar Rolls, Butter Rolls, Corn on the Cob as sweet as Gold, Squash Casserole, Fried Okra, Chicken Pastry, Cornbread Stuffing, Cornbread, Creamed Corn– The older instruct the younger, initiating them into the alchemy of nurturing.<br /> They pay April no attention and let her prattle.<br /> “I remember one bean crop, the hugest I’ve ever seen and the worm got to it and ate it all. Oh, Lord, Mother was so glad she didn’t have to can a single bean that year. Hell, I was glad too. Canning’s awful hot work in the summer.”<br /> April stops snapping beans and rubs her hands. Her joints are knobbled, fingers warped with years of work. No one would call them beautiful. Her wedding ring sits next to the sink basin, picking up the light from a square of sun coming through the white kitchen curtains. The small diamond sends light laving out across the counter. It catches April’s eye.<br /> “Charles,” she murmurs.<br /> He had courted her for three years before proposing. She had loved his quick mind and quiet way.<br /> “His folks owned all this land,” she began. “Pine all over these hills. A forest full of deer and birds and raccoons and squirrels and rabbits under the ground. I’ve not had rabbit in some time. I’ve half a mind to take off into those woods and come back with a brace of them,” she said, gesturing towards the hem of trees on the edge of the field. Can’t have that farm-raised rabbit – the meat’s got no taste. Might as well eat chicken,” she laughs to herself.<br /> He had cleared the land that belonged to him when he asked her to marry him. Sold all the timber and bought her the tiny diamond. Axes rang for weeks, a dull ache spreading across the land. He had built the farmhouse in a meadow, the only clear plot that had been on his land. They chased out scores of rabbits the first few years.<br /> “See, what you do is,” April continues.<br /> No one notices the shift in topic.<br /> “You, you, you gotta take a bucket and you put sunflower seeds on the bottom and fill it halfway with water. Now you can do this with a big washtub, which is what I’d do. Now you got your water and your seeds sunk at the bottom and you put a ramp going up to the bucket. And the rabbits, and the chipmunks, and the what-have-yous will come up to the edge and jump in the water trying to get the seeds and drown.” She laughs.<br /> “What happens to the rabbits, grammaw,” a small voice asks from the doorway.<br /> “You eat em!”<br /> A dim recognition flashes on the small face and it turns and darts down the hall.<br /> “They gotta learn where it comes from sooner or later,” she says.<br /><br /> Charles had left her some years back. A life of work and a long sleep. She had found him in the field next to the house one afternoon. He hadn’t come in for lunch when she called so she went looking for him and found him in the cut grass that was still waiting to be baled for winter hay. “His eyes were just filled with sky,” she’d always say. She had closed them so he could keep all the sky in. She had wrapped him in a bed sheet and drug him to the little cemetery on the edge of the woods. “He gave me the forest,” she’d always say, turning her ring on her finger, wagging her fingers so the diamond would snatch the light, “so I gave him to the forest. Just seemed right.”<br />2<br />She walks into the kitchen. The light from the rising sun crashes against the windows over the sink and drains into the room, spreading across the aged orange linoleum. It splashes across her slippers and the hem of her nightgown. Her shoulders are hunched, her pale green robe spills down the slope of her shoulders, tiny waves rippling down her arms, frothing at her wrists. The sun warms her legs. Her legs have not been warm since the warren. Her legs have not been strong since the warren. She bends her knees and does not ache for the first time in mornings. She pulls her arms in to her side and crouches down. She can see the sun just now rising over the bottom of the windowsill. It burns against the curtains. White with little red strawberries. She hums in tune with the refrigerator. She feels the sound in her chest, thrumming out along her arms. She pulls herself in tighter. She sniffs the air, feeling the warmth in the scent. She unfolds and walks over to the door in a crouch. The waves on her nightgown rise and sink and rise and sink again. She is lost at sea as she moves down the stairs. The wood creaks – her joints do not. She moves across the yard and into the waist-high grass that the pastures have grown over with. It whispers against her nightgown. She does not remember the way back to the warren. She does not remember the lay of this land. She moves through the grass slowly. The grass whispers against her gown. “April, we remember you. This is where you are to be found. Follow our sound,” it says to her and she extends her arms and jumps. Landing one-two-right-hand-left-hand and the legs gallop up beside and she jumps again. The grass is speaking all around her, and she must move to hear what it is saying. She picks up speed, her jumps growing to hops and then leaps. Her feet and hands fall like fingers on a piano, a delicate touch under which a bird might rest. Her nightgown billows out behind her. The sea is raging. It lashes at the grass. It snaps. The backs of her hands are covered in fine brown down fur. It rounds along the fingers and spreads up under the sleeves of her robe. She sniffs the air. Her shoulders slump. Her leaps grow longer, faster. Her fingers fold one into the next as her feet lengthen out. She feels them stretch, the ache in her old frame melting away as her bones rearrange. She feels her white hair knit together to cover her ears. She can hear. She can hear. She can hear the sound of the blue jay’s heart beating as he flies overhead. She spots a falcon overhead and zigzags across the remaining field and into the forest.<br /> She stops, resting on her hind legs. She sits up, listening, twitching her ears to pick up every sound in the forest. She cannot find her family, cannot hear them.<br /> They find her later that afternoon, curled at the base of a pine trunk. A basket full of dead rabbits rests at her feet. They had woke that morning and found her missing – made the usual calls to neighbors and then the police. They fanned out, passing over the fields in formation, combing the grass for their April.<br />She had been sleeping when they came upon her. She startled when they woke her, eyes flashing open with a catch of breath, and then softening.<br />“It is that which is forgotten that is important,” she chattered, “the present, though relevant, is worthless. Oh I could tell you a thing or two about dawn, there’s something I know about. I remember when I first came to the warren. The others were suspicious. Would sniff-sniff-sniff with distaste. They were rigid and awkward around me. So stiff. Little muscles stretched taut, ready for action. Fight or flight.”<br /><br />*<br /><br /><br /><br />*<br /> She spends the night before Thanksgiving in the kitchen. It is dim. She cooks by the light of a lamp and the light over the stove. She leaves a wake in the light as she moves, a ripple refracts behind her. She moves like a lamp swung by a hunter in a field, walking back and forth, the swath of light cutting across the dark and herding rabbits toward a longnet the hunter has staked in the ground.<br /> <br />Her memories scatter before her. She catches the hind legs and tails darting out of the lamp light. She skins the rabbits, severing the front legs across the wrists, like her mother had shown her. She works the skin from an incision across the hind legs. It pulls like the husk of an ear of corn. The heads of corn nod in a hot wind that rolls through the stalks and they crab-claw rattle. April walks along, picking ears, peeling them clean, the husk slipping with resistance. April cleans the silk from between the kernels. Her fingers snake around each ear as they work. She cuts the head of the corn off, small kernels, no use. April places the cleaned corn in a basket. April fills the basket. April turns on the faucet and dumps the basket of carcasses into the deep basin of the sink. She washes the rabbits in hot water. Then, the soft shick of her knife slitting down the front, the meat curling away at the edges. The last life leaves the rabbits in a sluice. April watches it melt in the soft light of the kitchen. She has drained life in this sink countless times. She cleans the brace of rabbits, saving the hearts and livers. Eleven hearts. Eleven livers. April rolls out wax paper on the wooden kitchen table. Eleven rabbits set out on their backs. She takes a cleaver. She cleaves the two hindquarters (back legs and thighs). She removes the two forequarters (front legs and ribs). What remains is the back strap – the loin meat that runs along the backbone, below the ribs, stomach and above the hind legs. April’s memory watches from the doorway. She mutters to herself as she tries to count the number of times she’s dressed game in this light. Her memory chatters in the doorway, sentences from the past floating up through the muck to legibility.<br /> <br />April pulls her nightgown around her as she glances through her note cards of recipes. She pulls trays from under the stove and sets the rabbits in them whole. It takes three trays. She covers them with bacon, places them in an oven at 350 degrees. She slices onions on the cutting board and crushes twelve whole heads of garlic. She throws them in cast iron pans and sweats them over low heat. April has a pan on each of the stove’s four burners. She leans against the oven’s front as she stirs the onions. Her body moves towards the warmth. The onions skitter in their pans, bleeding off translucent white in the heat of the skillets. She adds sherry when the onions are pale and limp. The sherry froths in the pans and settles to a simmer. She pours a coffee cup half full with whiskey from the freezer. Frost sprouts around her hand on the bottle. She steals a cigarette from a pack someone has left on the kitchen counter. She walks out the back door and eases down to sit on the porch steps. She lights the cigarette. She sips her whiskey. From inside the house, the smell of meat, fat, and bacon mix. She sips her whiskey. She gets up to check on the rabbit and pulls them out of the oven. She tears as much meat as she can and adds it to the cast iron pans. She adds the bacon, and parsley, thyme, chives – greens that rabbits crave. April pours cream into the pans and covers them. She rolls out pastry dough a quarter inch thick and brushes it with egg wash and places the crust over the rabbit mixture in the pans. She lines the shelves of her refrigerator with the rabbit pies. She always chills them before she bakes them. Her mother had taught her the same, claiming that chilling the food allows the flavor to settle. April still doesn’t understand what that means, but she chills her food before she bakes it. She returns to the stoop. She sets her mug down and starts to sit.<br /> “Goddamit, forgot my cigarette” she says halfway down, and uses the railing to pull herself back up. She walks inside and takes the whiskey from the freezer, steals another cigarette from the pack on the counter and returns to her seat. She lights the cigarette and places it next to the butt of the other. She sips her whiskey and watches the smoke stitch out across the pale green of her nightgown. She waits for morning and thinks of trees in a storm, limbs pushed to one side, leaves flipped and quivering on the ends of their branches. Leaf bellies.<br />3<br />The screen door claps behind April as she hurries down the back steps. She stops at the bottom and crouches, holding her head in her hands. The light from the sun rushes at her from across the fields. It pushes at her eyes, a dull ache spreading back from her sockets. She vomits. Day-old cornbread and milk. Breakfast. The light braids between the branches of the trees and presses against her eyes. Cords of light. She sees the light refract in a haze around her. It pours down from the sky.<br /> <br />She remembers the rains that fell that one spring. The litters had just been born. She had eight kits that year, but the rain came early. It soaked through the ground for days, dripping in the tunnels and pooling. Her kits were caked with mud.<br /> The farmer, deciding to take advantage of the deluge drug hoses out across his field, placing the nozzles in the ends of the rabbit holes. They curled like snakes in the grass, canvas slithering over the hill to the nearby creek where the farmer hooked the hoses to the irrigation pump. April’s ears twitched as the sound of the generator roaring to life travelled through the ground. She heard the rush of air the water pushed out the hoses, rising in pitch as it neared the warren. The rush out the nozzle, silver snakes slithering down the tunnels. A snap of teeth in the froth licking at the walls. She positioned herself in the entrance to her den, baring her teeth, daring the threat against her young.<br /> <br />She kneels at the base of one of her pecan trees. “Oh, you’d think we’d make poor fighters. You’d be surprised. Legs for kicking, claws, claws, claws, that tear,” she mutters past her fingers into the dirt. She rolls over on her back. Her white sundress is stained with dirt, stuck with leaves. She clenches the fabric at her sides and stares up. Her head feels heavy. She cannot remember where she is.<br /><br />April snapped at the water as the level in the tunnel rose to her den. It did not relent. Behind her, the kits mewed for milk, calling out for their mother. She shook, brown fur quivering in the reflected silver light of the water. She backed into the den and the kits took to suck. The kits were so absorbed in their meal they did not notice the snakes slide into the den and curl around their naked pink bodies. April’s whiskers dipped under the surface and she twitched them up. She felt her young pawing at her stomach, but still they sucked, seeming to draw oxygen from her milk. And then one by one she felt them fade. Not quitting all at once, but dimming. Glowing softer and softer, like fireflies in a clump of grass. Then nothing. She was alone and let the serpent take her too. Her tremors quieted in its coils<br /><br /> April stares up through the branches of her pecan tree. “It’s almost time for your harvest,” she says. They sway in the pale October wind. Her vision blurs slightly and the branches seem to double in number. New limbs sprouting from the trunk and filling out with leaves.<br /> “Good crop this year,” she says, sitting up to one side. Her body hesitates as she pushes up from hands and knees, half crouched she sways and falls. The dirt settles around her where she fell as her brain swells past its banks. Her blood rushes and pulls at her, dragging her downhill towards the lake at the far edge of the woods. She will escape from the press of the trunks there, the bark crowding in as she flies past. The grooved surface of the water fills her vision, muddy green stretching out and held back only by the line of pines far off and the blue of the sky. The forest presses in tightly, pushing the lake into a narrow run of olive, the sky shining off into the distance.<br /><br />Her brain swells again and the sky pours down, filling her eyes.<br />4<br />The bones of the house settle. Every room is full, children dream, sleeping on the floors next to their parent’s borrowed beds. The house holds them against the cold of November. He has been alone for over a month. She no longer sweeps the halls all through the night. The television sits silent, no silver static or chatter of salespeople washing over the wooden walls of the living room. They have come for Thanksgiving and to sit beside her grave out by the forest. They buried her next to him, her Charles.<br /> <br />*<br /><br />One of the Aunts had found her out in the yard later that October day. She had walked in the front door calling out to her. Glancing out the kitchen window, she called to her kids, “Y’all go out there and start picking up those pecans while I find grandma.”<br />Later they filled bag after bag with shelled pecans and filled April’s freezer and the deep freeze chest out in the carport.<br /> <br />“It’s as if all the branches let go at once,” the Aunt told her husband as she pulled down the sheets later that night. The lawn was a carpet of pecans and the chickens and Guinea fowl were walking on the nuts, picking between them at the grass beneath. They looked nervous. Do you think they know she’s gone?”<br /> “They probably didn’t like walking on the nuts,” he says, climbing into bed next to her.<br /> <br />She dreams that night of an oven full of burning pecan pies. Smoke creeps out the white mouth of the oven and pools on the kitchen ceiling. In the doorway, April yells at her. She wakes up and slips out of bed. Padding to the kitchen, she opens the freezer. Brown paper bags are stacked, full of pecans. She pulls them out and pulls out her pie pans. She bakes pecan pies til the morning, setting the egg timer lest they burn.<br /><br /><br /></span><br /></div>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-87166604125199437062010-06-20T18:09:00.001-04:002010-06-28T12:01:59.935-04:00blarf saucethe light spills across the kitchen table. it comes from the soft yellow of the oven hood light. it comes from the bulbs above. it comes through the big bay windows through which the setting sun is seen. The periwinkles and pink are overpowered by orange.<br /> “pass the potatoes,” dad asks.<br /> “why is the sky so orange,” chuck asks.<br /> “do you like it?” mom asks. “i found the recipe in the Friday food section this week.<br /> “pass the potatoes,” dad says.<br /> “i’m a fucking moron and i can’t write dialogue,” mom says.<br /> “where the hell did that come from?” chuck asks.<br /> “excuse me,” dad says and backs his chair away from the table.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-14865727680648266752010-06-06T00:39:00.000-04:002010-06-06T00:40:22.695-04:00carry on, carrionThe wind comes in through the branches of the cottonwoods first. The rustle of their leaves sounds like the crunch of tires on gravel. He turns to see if a car is coming. The buzzards circle to the left, rising on an updraft. <br /> He imagines finding a body. It is lying in the bushes. The eyes are open. The blue of them flashes against the grass. He takes a stick. He must take a stick. He edges to the body. He pokes it. He must poke it. The stick pushes against the thigh. It is soft. It yields and the stick slips inside. Bacteria has entered the venous system. The blood has hemolyzed and traces out green. He knows that eggs of the Calliphoridae family stud the corpse. Blow-flies. Carrion-flies. Bluebottles. Greenbottles. Cluster-flies. The body is fly blown.<br /> The buzzards fly down, banking left and descending, each one a feathered do-te-la-so-fa-mi-re-do.<br /> Choir room. Fifth grade. Mrs. Meyers who always stomped when she wanted a crescendo.<br /> Youngstown, Ohio, Seven years old. He doesn’t understand why his cousin is not crying at their grandmother’s funeral.<br /> “He just shows he’s sad in other ways,” his mother says. Already there is a gap between himself and other boys.<br /> He navigates this gap: rising on updrafts, flight feathers twitching as the feel out the currents. Shift the pronoun left from He to I. Attach a list of events. Attach a train of memory, pulling steam wrapped out of the station. Sketch out a skeleton with words. “They are a strange and docile wheat,” but they will hold, twisted and knotted together. He has been crafting this frame for some time now. He must make sure it can bear the weight of “I” before he slips it over the head and shoulders.<br /> His father always claimed that Africans has avians in their ancestry. Hollow bones. Weightless frames. His father claimed this is why Kenyans always won marathons. Kenyans. Nigerians. Ethiopians. Zimbabweans. Their names rolling out of the mouth, vowels jostling to be next to one another, separated by a slight suggestion of consonants. In his mind they are carried off in a surge of vowels. a’s. e’s. i’s. o’s. u’s – even a y every now and then, all drifting in on the wind and collecting under the arms of the Kenyans. The Nigerians. The Ethiopians. The Zimbabweans. They are buoyant. Only the balls of their feet meet the earth.<br /> He stays up at night and whispers vowels over his frame of words.<br /> “a. a. a. a. that’s right, nice and easy e. e. e. e.”<br /> He speaks the vowels into the braid of the frame. They bump and settle into creases. Bends. Folds. The cleft between the forearm and the upper arm, the sweep where the body rests on the legs. Vowels curve. They roll the mouth, sound sliding from the throat. They smooth the frame of braided words and he slides the flesh of “I” over them. It settles into the creases. The bends. The folds. The clefts on the insides of the elbows and the sweep of the thighs.It spins out soft and new and glows golden in the reflected light of the vowels.<br /> Gold like the coils of the toaster oven in the morning – all heat that cannot travel by word.<br /> Gold like the rush of wheat in Kansas, curling in the wind like a wavehead.<br /> Gold like this and like that and also this ting. You cannot understand the first gold I have told you, so here are several more. Can you touch against them in the dark and understand their shape? Can you now know the first gold? Can you now know anything I have told you? All the dark fumblings that are spoken. The sound of words like the fall of a mouse’s feet on a rafter.<br /> The rain that comes silver slither through the leaves. The oak has watched him and those before him. The rain falls against its leaves. The rain falls against his wings. His arms stretch out, the beta keratins of his hair braiding foreign and wrong. Feathers between his fingers. Feathers in the cleft between his forearm and his upper arm.<br /> He begins to mutter, “a. e. i. o. u. u. u. e. i. o. u. u. u. e. a. a. y. a. a. y. a. i. i. i. e. i. o. u.”<br /> He rocks up onto the balls of his feet and the vowels gather in his armpits. He speaks down the length of each arm. The arms stretch further out. Silver like the feathers of a buzzard catching the full light of the sun. Silver like the feathers studded with rain from the oak tree. <br /> He quickens, “aaaaaeeeeaaaaeeeaaaaaeeeeiou.”<br /> The feathers fill out. Vaned feathers. Down feathers. Contour feathers. Filoplumes. Flight feathers. He leans forward, the vowels jostling out beneath his arms. He pushes forward and runs down the hill of the backyard. His strides grow longer. He leaps to the roof. one. two. steps and then pushes from the peak.<br /> “aeiou.” his feathers shift, feeling for an updraft. “aeiou.”<br /> An updraft of warm air washes over him and he circles left, riding it. The clouds spill out like gravel, mica glinting in the rises of the cumulonimbus. <br /> The wind comes in through the branches of the cottonwoods first and his mouth fills with the twist of gray.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-82219487442751217632010-05-11T21:03:00.000-04:002010-05-11T21:04:13.295-04:00This is a metaphor you cannot ignore.I am sorry.<br />I am dripping blackberry jam<br />on your living room floor<br />and it is past the time<br />for me to be in bed.<br /><br />The finches call as I leave<br />your house, confusing<br />the orange-gray glow<br />of the city for dawn.<br />I do not like the sound <br />of them, or the noise<br />of the 2 A.M. train running by –<br />all deep bumblebee rumble<br />and metal scream.<br /><br />The metal of your doorknob<br />was cold as I turned it.<br />I have been walking <br />out that door for years.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-74564395534394770862010-04-09T12:02:00.006-04:002010-05-11T21:06:15.674-04:00ChicagoThere is no forgiveness<br />to be found along<br />these sidewalks.<br />The hands of men<br />have poured them straight –<br />the angles of intersections<br />cut with precision.<br /><br />Back home,<br />Summer stuck <br />in the minds<br />of southern city planners,<br />and their boulevards<br />gently drawled – <br />buttered grits in bowls <br />and slices of coconut cake<br />sliding out the icebox.<br /><br />Sherman’s armies<br />crashed along<br />Peachtree St. –<br />a swell of amber froth<br />licking up the sides of buildings,<br />a spray of char,<br />a touch of the torch.<br /><br />This is to say<br />that the shirt I borrowed<br />smells like you in the armpit<br />and I wish <br />you would<br />talk to me<br />about architecture.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-22660646429963501452010-04-09T12:02:00.005-04:002010-04-21T13:10:34.271-04:00you may break both your legsI was once a wolf. I was once wild. I knew the smell of the forest. Now it rings as a vague sensation of coming home. I remember the pines that stretched for miles, undulating across the land. I know the shape of the oaks, their trunks all thick and grizzled. I wove through these for hundreds of years and you tamed me.<br /><br />No, no, that is not what happened at all. I am the one who tamed you. It was I who came to the edge of the wood to live and built my house and settled quietly. <br />The earth gave me fruit of my hands, my labor, my sweat. The forest gave me you, trotting out into a clearing and blinking at me in the bright daylight while I smudged a line of dirt across my nose in erasing an itch. You would come to me like that from time to time and in time I learned more of the forest and forgot my field with its young vegetables. I hungered for meat and you taught me the hunt. You taught me the thrill of the flesh, all form and fabric. How it would work. Strive and bend, in the hunt. I forgot my field of vegetables. I forgot the light and the cabin and the quiet settling. I lived in dark and silent places. I rushed headlong into the night but it rubbed raw against me. I did not have your toughened hide. I was all soft pink with curves in my hard lines. I worried. I worry. <br /><br />You are gone to the forest and the shady reticence there. I cannot live without the sun. I cannot live without the dirt on my hands and in a line across my nose. We lived like this for years – you, blinking on the edge on the wood and I in my garden. My fields spread out over the years, rolling across the meadow. <br />I shaped the earth, planted rows, tended time and drew forth trellises of vine, laden with fruit. The land begged for the order of my hands.<br /><br />Your pack came in the afternoon as I tended to the grapes. They flowed down the covered rows of vine. I saw them from the end crashing like the white froth of a wavehead. I waited and then they came upon me and tore and rent and crushed with their awful jaws and left me there guttering and piled. Spiders lowered themselves from the vines above and wove me tight around. The dirt sprouted roots that waved in the golden light of evening and then rushed across the ground. I felt the fingers of the roots passing through the webbing and tapping into my skin. They fed me until my body mended. My bones set in casts of silver web. My bruises faded and skin patched. I passed the time watching the grapes grow. They swung all about me, growing fat and swelling with the luxury summer. Time tended me and I mended. I counted the seconds with the sticks the sparrows carried to their nests. I learned the lattice of their pattern as they passed above me. The early morning weave of brown feather and sharp cry against the blue of the sky. I once watched a flock of finches fight a hawk, baiting him to fly into the glare of the sun and then attacking from the sides. On the ground, underneath the vines of grapes I felt the wet on their beaks, the sharp taste of iron flashing back along their tongues. <br /><br />I mind my rows of vegetables with a limp now. My hip stutters in its articulation. <br />You catch in it. I wait sometimes on the edge of the woods for you to appear out of the shadow of the oak and pine. For you to come to me and press press press your hand against my ribs with the fingers shaped like the blade <br />of a knife. Tilt the tips so that they pass through my skin like hot wax and pass between the ribs, they will move to allow you entrance. There is light sleeping here. It huddles like the newborn rabbits we found, mewling and blind in their burrow. Press your hand to there and I will breathe deep and even, my chest moving around your forearm. The light will approach and you must be still, a movement will startle. If you are quiet and if you do not mind waiting, it will brush against your hand and then you will know. The shape of your skin rests against it. I feel your thrum out from my ribs, reverberating.<br /><br />I remember the tension of the leeches as we would pull them from our skin after swimming in the lake. They gripped in my mind with creamy filaments, all hard cartilage. I imagined the tiny rends in my skin as I would pinch it by the tail and try to remove it without breaking it in half.<br /><br />I remember you vomiting on the beach as I pulled one from your shoulder,<br /><br /><br /><br />“Hold still, it slipped out of my hands.”jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-85205791212865016392010-03-17T19:28:00.002-04:002010-06-20T17:59:03.295-04:00Dog LakeIn the middle of June, every summer, <br />my father buried his fishing shirts in Canada,<br />rowing out to the middle of the lake early in the morning,<br />— the water all fog, wisped like a pot coming to boil.<br />Those shirts would sink, wrapped around rocks<br />my sister and I dug out on the shore.<br /> <br />I have wondered what those stones did <br />to the architectures of the pike and walleye below, <br />fish-sized boulders hurtling down <br />through the grey green of Dog Lake<br />and crashing into those mud towers <br />we dreamed rose from the basin;<br />all soft curves and suggestion, shaped by fin.<br /><br />Tartan trunks grow up through these towers<br />and pierce the silver surface where all fish eyes gaze.<br />Bolts of flannel flutter in the breeze,<br />the branches spreading across the water are heavy with plaids.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-60100101052038690592010-02-15T19:26:00.001-05:002010-05-11T21:06:48.727-04:00A blend of nylon and spandex.My grandmother told my sister and me,<br />the one summer we stayed with her,<br />"anything but Nana or Mawmaw."<br />We called her “pantyhose” for several years<br /><br />I speak of her now as if she is dead.<br />It's funny how things happen.<br />Funny like a squirrel,<br />flattened on the road, at the edge of the white line,<br />so close to the grass, almost to a tree.<br />Funny like the way an incoming storm<br />pushes all the trees one way<br />and turns the leaves over, <br />revealing the curve of their underbellies –<br />Beautiful like my grandmother that summer, <br />while she tucked my sister and me <br />in to sleep, in her pale green night gown.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-12938398476297484602010-01-26T20:13:00.003-05:002010-03-11T09:55:24.847-05:00every branch, every wire is frozen clean aroundi cannot spell strathacona. <br />i left that language in the steam over the city,<br />cumulo-nimbus pulling out from smokestacks<br />and bleeding off into the white,<br />the white of the fog,<br />the white of your skin,<br />the white of the drifts, the flakes, the banks.<br /><br />white fingers out across the road as we cut <br />an insistent streak of grey, travelling the wrong way.<br />the white waves over these hills, <br />over these stands of trees,<br />over those clumps of hedge.<br />i do not understand the speed at which we crash<br />through the troughs of these swells.<br />i do not understand the geography that pulls the land into unfamiliar shapes.<br />where is the distraction of green pines?<br />where is the distraction of faded grass? <br /><br /><br />there is more truth in these hills than I am accustomed to;<br />the sweep of white frothing out like a sheet of static,<br />settling over the slow curves of the ground.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-16760092757118746622010-01-19T08:36:00.002-05:002010-01-24T15:32:24.472-05:00noli me tangereMy dearest sister, my Margaret,<br /> You must forgive the scarcity of letters from me. You would not believe the hardships we have had to endure. This winter is unlike any I’ve yet to live through. The snow piles up to the base of the windows. It’s as if the house were built down into the earth. It is peculiar this year in that the snow not only blankets every surface but also smothers each extremity; every branch, every wire is frozen clean around with white. The stand of trees outside the kitchen, the old maples seem studded with feathers. I was watching them this morning as water boiled for coffee. I kept expecting them to shake off their soil and beat their branches into the sky.<br /> Prices are rising sharply for every supply. I’ve not had butter or sugar in almost three weeks. Luckily, Charles and I have been able to keep the children sheltered from the understanding of how harshly this season is affecting us. We’ve plenty of firewood and a surplus of canned vegetables. If nothing else, we will struggle through this season.<br /> I have been having that dream again. The one with the wolves. In this most recent one, I am in the kitchen punching down dough for the day. I am wrapped in the soft light of the morning, the perfume of yeast, and the occupation of my hands in something simple. It is not my kitchen here, but the one of the house when we were girls, all expanse and grey stone. I remember how chill the stones would be as we slunk in to steal cakes after cook had left. I am barefoot in my dream. I am wearing a simple grey dress and a muslin apron. The stones are cool on my feet. The dough is warm beneath my fists. Gasps of air escape it as I strike it. The ceramic bowl rattles against the rough wood of the work table. In my dream I close my eyes and imagine that I am Mother. Oh, how I miss Mother. She is the one who taught us to bake our first loaves. I close my eyes and feel that I am Mother. I have her hands, the pinky finger ground down by the corn mill. I have her simple flowered dress, her ravenous laugh. I feel the weight of her history, but cannot recall it. In my dream, I know I am not alone. I turn around, keeping my eyes closed. It is important that I think that I am Mother. If I opened my eyes I would check my hands and see my pinky stuck with bread dough. I would see it long and slender instead of the compressed shape left by the corn mill. I reach down and feel the fur of a wolf, grasp between his shoulders. I take a clump of fur in my dough-stuck hand. I follow as the wolf walks. I leave the bread dough behind. Out the door my eyelids flare weak red in the morning light. I hear the clamor of the geese as we cross the yard. I hear the gasp of the goose girl. I hear the grass rustle against my skirt.<br /> I feel as if I have been wolf for thousands of years. I can recall moving through the pines in pursuit of prey. I have felt thousands of nights in the dew on my fur. I have hunted deer, cattle, sheep and in leaner times smaller prey. I have lost myself in the rush of paws through the undergrowth, the saliva slavers from my lolling tongue. The woodland floor moves underpaw as I track, sunlight dapples my fur dark and light.I have run for countless hours, always ending in the kill, the metallic flare flashing back from my muzzle, rushing down my throat. Margaret, you must believe me when I say that I do not want to stop when I eat the heart, the liver and the lungs first. I do not touch the contents of an herbivore’s stomach. I do not understand how I know to eat the leg muscles next. I remember the past smells of brothers and sisters. I do not know how I speak in strings of vowels, chill and mournful, slipping from my throat. The strings of silver from my pack move off into the sky and splash against each other. I watch them weave in the moonlight. The worst part of this, Margaret, is that I take pleasure in losing myself. It feels like coming home – as if I can almost remember how to move a part of myself I had forgotten existed.<br /> Do you remember when Father decided for us to move out of the city? How Mother resisted. Of course you don’t, you were only an infant then. It was my duty to hold you on the long drive out. You were silent the entire time, your eyes opened wider than I had seen them. I held you up to the window so you could take in the change in landscape. Expansive swells of grey-green grass nodding in the wind beneath that endless grey sky. There always seemed to be a forest on the edge of the horizon. Pines hemmed us in. I remember how lonely the house looked as we pulled up the drive. After the crowd of the city, Hillford Shire seemed a sentinel against the surrounding wild. Why did Father choose to move us so far?<br /> Margaret, I know all their names. To call them names seems so crude. Each name is a collection of sensation, a bundling of memory, or narrative. To call another was to pass through that memory. Margaret, my eyes glinted gold in the light. My name was in those eyes. They held the last light of the sun as it sank beneath the treetops. I flared with that final burst, all urgency and passing. Margaret, I know all their smells. I remember all the twists of scent. I remember Charles, and the children’s scent, Mother’s, yours. Human scent is soft. It is like the bubbles in a glass of beer, pale and passing in the gold and then the cannonade of froth. I remember you in the scent of school desks and needlework. I remember you in the smell of cinnamon buns in the oven and conversations by the light of a lantern. I remember you in the smell of snow. Have been thinking of you often in this winter.<br /> You were old enough to remember when they found Mother. Do you remember? She has resisted our move, but took the land instantly. Do you remember her garden? She was satisfied with the neat rows at first, but started to venture to the forest for its herbs, its fungus, the seclusion of its shade. She took to the land, but the forest took her. Do you remember the quiet that crept over her? It clouded her eyes, ate at the edges of her laugh. She had trouble remembering us. Your laugh could always call her back. You were the one who found her body. You came running to me, in a fit. I was punching down dough, helping cook in the kitchen. I always felt guilty for slipping cakes. I went with you and we found her torn and red. We buried her alone in the trees and at supper told Father what had happened. He stopped eating and understood.<br /> In my dream, Charles comes to live on the edge of the forest. I come to him from time to time, but always melt away back into the woods. We pass the years bound like this. His patience carves lines into his face. I have felt a thousand lives, Margaret. I have had gallons of blood pump through these veins. I have tasted meat, just killed. I have brought litters upon litters into the woods. I have taught the young to scent, to stalk, the hunt. I have gone off to die countless times. Age dusts my pelt with grey. I meld back into the briars, the brambles, the clump of blackberries.<br /> You must believe me, Margaret, that I am entirely beside myself when I awake. Usually I have startled Charles in thrashing in my sleep and he is there, holding me as I awake. I do not know what I would do if he were not clasping me about the shoulders. Each time I wake, it feels harder to remember who it is I am. Please do not mention this to any of the Aunts. I have enough of their attention as things stand. This winter will pass as will these dreams. I hope this letter finds you well and peaceful. They are both luxuries in this world.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-70792223699811979102009-12-22T13:52:00.004-05:002010-01-24T15:30:57.028-05:00fuck buddiesthis is the green and brown of the trees as we smeared out against the december sky. how my mouth filled with the aching taste of blue as we learned to fly: your wings shaded like the jay you rescued in my front yard. mine spanning out like those of the albatross .<br />this is the way i have rolled you in my mouth and found you sour.<br />this is the way the hair on your chest sweeps along the ribs, looking like a flock of geese in flight.<br />this is the corner of my eye where you flash flannel plaid in the peripheary of my vision.<br />this is my reflection in the glass of your sunroom doors, pale and insubstantial with my face warped by the glasses weft.<br />this is the rush of wind as the hawk falls towards its prey. this is the silence of a wolf in the undergrowth. this is the clack your claws make on the linoleum as you come up behind me while i am making potato salad.<br />this is a lonely night in the kitchen with only a lamp on. i will remember this in a radiator popping at my feet. i will remember this as the dull sound that drifts in the window as in the backyard you carve a cave out of the night. it is winter. a drift is forming on the sill. your paws track snow when you make your way in, early in the morning. i am sitting at the table playing solitaire. you ask me what’s to eat as you settle into the chair across from me.<br />this is your hand splayed in my chest hair, your knees bending mine. i will remember this in the stunned seconds i wake up in. i will remember this in you breathing deep and even, clutching me. my fingers follow your spine, a line of breadcrumbs.<br />this is a cricket’s song that only i can hear. a chorus of a thousand thousand calling out in a wash of silver.<br />this is the rush of startled quail bursting out of the long grass.<br />this is the way you’ve lost the past tense, sloughed it off like a snake’s skin and left it in my bedroom. a pile in the middle of the rug.<br />this is the clatter of your engine, the unique tick of your piston’s pump. in my dreams, i am blinded by your headlights as your engine brattles behind them. each blade of grass, each brick of the driveway leaps out in sharp relief. i will remember this in urgency.<br />this is the quiet hour of the night where you seek me out. your snout guides you true to me where you nuzzle against the warmth of my flesh.<br />this is the scrape of metal against the inside of my ribcage.<br /><br />this is the letter i mailed:<br />when i say <span style="font-style:italic;">you approach me</span>, do i not mean<br />that my understanding of your hand<br />comes against your understanding of my back?<br />the wake my fingers leave trailing across your chest<br />is sentences in your mind.<br />when i say <span style="font-style:italic;">i miss you</span>, do i not mean<br />that i have not seen the particular aperture of your pupil<br />in quite some time?jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-40745366303601013942009-11-12T16:15:00.000-05:002009-11-12T16:18:03.602-05:00Leuconostoc Mesenteroides dominates, producing a mix of acids, alcohol, and aroma compounds.He stands in the open doorway of the fridge in his underwear. The chill light spills out behind him in the dark. Fog curls from the walls of the fridge in response to the sticky summer air. He fishes a pickled peach from the jar in the fridge. A bit of juice escapes and runs down in his beard. He closes the fridge door and pads through the dining room into the sunroom. He sits on the old woven couch and watches the long street. Headlights play across the windows as gravel in the driveway crunches under wheels. The headlights cast shadows, foreign and long, against the far wall. He listens to the car door open and close. He fishes another peach from the jar. The dogs run out of the bedroom and stand at the door, heads cocked at odd angles. The clicking of the deadbolt echoes through the house. He watches Eric walk by and into the bedroom.<br />“I’m here,” he calls.<br />Eric walks into the sunroom.<br />“Want a peach?” He asks, holding out the jar. The brine in the jar sloshes. The peaches swim in circles. “You look handsome in the dark, suits your complexion,” he says, taking a bite of peach.<br />“What?” Eric laughs, sinking onto the couch next to him. He wraps an olive arm around his chest and pushes his face into his neck, in the curve above the shoulder. “What are you doing out here?” he asks, his words muffled.<br />“I was just thinking about Canada,” he says, taking another bite of peach.<br />“You just dribbled peach juice on my face.”<br />“The porcupines like the taste of the glue used in the plywood, so they come out at night and I remember the sound of them chewing on the eaves of the cabin. Your tires in the driveway sounded like that grinding.” He takes another bite of peach.<br /><br />He smells lilac bushes in a dream and wakes with a start. The wine bottles rattle as he tosses them in the recycling bin. He checks the mail and finds six notices from the bank. He cuts himself while doing the dishes, the good knife, the Christmas gift from his roommate’s sister, finding the soft meat of his palm. His shoes creak. He seals the envelope. The cards clatter as he shuffles them. He takes the film off the frozen lasagna, the heat rolling out from the oven and coaxing a ring of sweat from the base of his hairline. He brushes his hand across his thigh, dusting his jeans with the orange powder of the Cheetohs. His phone lights up as he types on the keypad. He organizes the book case in alphabetical order first from a to z and then the reverse. The doorknob to his apartment comes off in his hand as he turns it. He passes the stack of past-due library books as he leaves, the pile tilting against the wall, a mountain of dimes, growing slowly. The marshmallow burns the roof of his mouth as he pulls it off the stick. The tea kettle hums a low chord. He pops the top of the bottle. The sounds waves reach him, soft and golden. He places more spinach than he thinks necessary for the dish in the pan, knowing it will wilt down further than he expects. He bends down to tie his shoe and remembers his childhood friend, the one that got the tennis shoes he wanted, the ones that pumped up, and how he had burned to own them.<br /><br />He hadn’t planned for tonight to turn out the way it did. He hadn’t expected the drinks being as strong as they were. He didn’t know he would turn the corner and see him. He didn’t anticipate getting loud and pushing through the crowd out into the chill of the evening. He left his helmet at the bar. He left his debit card too. The fluorescent lights of the gas station bathroom play across his face, drawing out gaunt shapes. He vomits in the sink. Sweat crawls down to his nose and hangs there. It’s a bad idea to ride your bike this drunk. A pain fires between his third and fourth ribs. He holds his hand to his side as he breathes. “Fuck, I’m out of shape,” he says, spitting into the sink.<br /><br />The egg cracks unevenly as he taps it against the side of the bowl, several small pieces of shell crawling down the side to the batter. He scatters the crumbs in the bottom of his paper bag under the table, watching as a few finches work up the courage to dart under and claim them. He peeks out the bottom right-hand corner of the living room window, sneaking a look at the person ringing the door bell. The eyes of the fresh-caught squid seem to follow him as he passes the fish stall at the market. His oar cuts into the water, the canoe rocking gently with the shifting of his weight. He puts a pot of coffee on. He eyes his grandfather warily as he accepts the plate with a pimento cheese sandwich on it. The waitress stands over him, tapping her order pad with a pencil. He picks up his roommate’s pumice stone in the shower, and thinking of her, rubbing it against her foot - one hand bracing against the tub wall - sets it back and rinses his hands in the water. The car’s thermostat dial clicks as he turns it to defrost. In his dream, he finds a manatee while snorkeling, several ribbons of red curling out from her back where she met with a motorboat. He sets several pieces of bacon in the skillet, the fat spitting as it hits the pan.<br /><br />“I rode all the way over here with a fucking cast-iron skillet – open the fucking door.”<br />The deadbolt clicks and the door swings open.<br />Eric is standing in the entryway. He crosses his arms and doesn’t move.<br />“I couldn’t call. I don’t have your number.” He stands on the stoop, bike resting against his hip. “Can I come in?”<br />Eric steps aside.<br />He wheels his bike in and leans it against the fireplace. “Can I get some water?” he asks.<br />“I’ll grab it,” Eric says and walks out of the room.<br />He sits on the couch. It is deep and his legs stick out. He hears the faucet shut off and scoots forward so he can bend his knees.<br />Eric returns and holds out the water. He remains standing.<br />“Do you wanna sit?”<br />He sits on the edge of the cushion at the far end.<br />“So you finally brought my skillet back.”<br />“Yeah, I cooked some with it, but didn’t wash it.”<br />“Only took you, what, two of my skillets ruined to learn that?” he asks, smiling.<br />“I’ll never forget it.”<br />“I bet you won’t.”<br />He pulls the skillet out of his bag and sets it on the ground. Eric’s dog ambles over and sniffs it. He reaches over and scratches between his shoulder blades. The dog starts licking the pan.<br />“I also brought your Roseanne box set,” he says, pulling it out of the bag, “it’s just too good.”<br />“I’ve been relying on reruns on cable,” Eric says scooting closer on the couch and snatching the box.<br />“Damn, can’t wait?”<br />“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” he says. “What else you got in there?”<br />“I found your Jeep’s service manual in a drawer the other week,” he says, pulling it out and setting it on the arm of the couch.<br />Eric leans over and fishes through the books and notebooks in the bag. “You getting rid of this too?” he asks, pulling out a plastic zombie figurine.<br />“That just stays in my bag,” he says grabbing the zombie away. He drags it in a lurch across the couch cushion. “He’s been watching my back. Eating brains. Living the life.”<br />“The undead life.”<br />Silence grows between them, broken only by the noise of the dog still licking the pan on the floor.<br />“You know that’s gross, right?” He says, nudging the pan with his shoe.<br />“Doesn’t bother me.”<br />“Well, let me be the first to tell you.”<br />“I’d still go back in the house for you,” Eric says.<br />“What?” he asks, turning to face him.<br />Eric scratches his beard and looks at him from the corner of his eye. “You heard me.”<br />“You need to work on your nonchalant act.”<br />Eric laughs.<br />“Do you remember the time,” he begins, “we were playing zombies and I got so mad at Victoria?<br />“And so drunk,” Eric interrupts.<br />“Oh, come on, not that drunk.”<br />“You’re talking about the time she got the skateboard and made it to the helipad and you flipped the board over?”<br />“No, the other time.”<br />“When I used dynamite to clear the helipad?”<br />“Yeah.”<br />“You were drunk then too.”<br />“Ah, well.”<br />“I’ve lost about half my zombies from you flipping boards over.”<br />“I’ll buy you a new pack. Don’t worry, It’s a small price to pay.<br />“Zombies and cast-iron skillets?” Eric asks, raising his eyebrows.<br />“Worthwhile.”<br /><br />He holds the banana to the side of his head, mimicking a telephone. He picks at the scab above his left eyebrow. He grabs an old woman’s shoulder, bracing himself against the lurch of the bus. He picks at the apple seed stuck between his two front teeth. When it’s quiet, he can hear his sunburned shoulders crackle as he moves them. He watches the man’s jaw line move as he talks. He wakes with a start as the bookshelf next to his bed crashes into his dresser. He watches as his roommate embroiders a tiger. He pours the frosting over the petit fours. He quickly counts the bartender’s freckles as he orders. He picks up the tissue paper on Christmas morning, folding it and placing it in the gift wrap box in the closet. He buttons his cardigan. He moves his queen to take his opponent’s rook. He moves left on the bench as the girl across from him blows smoke in his face. He pulls a fudgesicle out of the freezer. He swears as the train terminal rejects his swipe card. He eats pancakes, dipping each bite in a pool of syrup on a separate plate. He twirls his fork, trying to break the string of cheese traveling back to the plate. He throws a book across the room at the roach. The chickens in the back yard, pecking beneath his bedroom window at pebbles and insects call to one another and wake him.<br /><br />He rolls over on his back and pulls the Afghan throw over his head. The light from the lamp next to the bed winks through the spaces the crochet hook did not braid. Even though he has just washed it, it smells like the old house. There, underneath the April Spring Fresh is a smell less commercial: old, dog, a comforting must. He stretches his arm out from under it and pushes the fabric across his teeth. It squeaks – the fibers of the wool vibrating against the stridulations of his teeth. He pulls his arm back under and wiggles his fingers through the holes – rings on his fingers, no bells for the toes. He knows it’s a matter of time until the smell of this house will settle on the blanket: the onions his roommate always cooks with, the peach brine he spilled, and the cut of chill he swears is from whatever’s haunting the house.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-72079947680934180372009-11-12T16:09:00.000-05:002009-11-12T19:35:06.851-05:00what are poets but vultures, circling for the choicest meats<a href="http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y196/tossturn/untitled-1.jpg"></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><div>i am sitting on the beach with you,<br />where the land bleeds off at the seam into the water,<br />and the water bleeds black into the night.<br />you are just a silhouette,<br />silver backlit by the easy moon as you say,<br />“i know it’s cliché, but those boats on the horizon make me feel lonely.”<br /><br />i have felt this same aimless longing<br />standing in the velvet of the waves<br />as the foam snapped out along the sand.<br />why is it that you and i and everyone before can feel this<br />here at the sifting of the water?<br />in the rain on a window upon waking.<br />in the smoke of a cigarette stitching out from your hand.<br /><br />there is truth in that which is trite,<br />a clumsy filmy light groping along what it illumes;<br />yet we dare not speak words so bare and bromide,<br />we confide as an aside or beneath the night<br />that moments in our lives are significant.<br />we are all a crude poetry,<br />the long days, moments of metaphor sliding past before we can hem them to us.<br /><br /></div></span>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-23395028084082667162009-10-28T21:22:00.001-04:002009-10-28T21:22:41.724-04:00Michael Maestlin Called to Say that It's Just One Decimal Place Offdo you remember what you've dreamed? the notion is silly. It resembles a clown-faced tenderness. do you remember the blackberry bush in the backyard that would bloom in spring. do you still have that scar from slipping in the brambles? do you remember late nights with just the kitchen light ? there is a longing for you, for those afternoons and evenings. it was new for a moment. everything dissolves in days. i have come to you across thousands of pines. you were a finger width away last night as i checked the map. mexico was periwinkle stretching out below. does distance signify endless desire. have you been back to the island in the river we camped on? there's a woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch. do you still agree with Hass about each particular being the falling off from a first world of undivided light? we caught in the muddy places. the father's body is the numinous flesh. do your r's still look like m's when you try to write in cursive? did you send your elegy by correspondence? did you save my drawings? the words are hanging on one thousand walls. my hair is in your hands. the places remember how love was made. did you manage to braid your beta keratins? did you take to the sky on feathers foreign and wrong? i love the orange silver of your shoulders. the leaves are turning a shade reminiscent of you. it is all about the old. after a while, I understood. do you hurt? do you still wonder at the grief? i have drunk my weight in wine one thousand times. have you been thinking? are you at a loss? this world is almost a boat. sometimes i can feel the small fish beneath the willows. was there a woman? i felt her presence like a thin wire of salt. it hardly had to do with her. do you feel you have your justice? you've been lingering in my whiskey. have you found continuing pleasure? who rests their weight full against your collarbone these days? does your voice still sound the same, a soft rumble washed out by the noise around it? i'm still allergic to bee stings. i've been roasting pumpkinseeds this fall. do you ever remember the taste of the shoulder? do you think of the scent of the arm? is your thirst still tragic? i am still drunk. are you still querulous in the mornings? do you still take that tone? i felt dismantled in the thing you said. have you made friends? do you still bake your own bread? i've stitched you in the cotton running out beneath the floorboards. did you find your clarity? i've only got the general idea. i swear it's been that way since childhood. are you still sometimes violent? would you still mock me when I say words like luminous? where are you holding on?<br /><br /><br />if it comes to blows, i will lay you out.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-64865013017483904122009-10-26T14:36:00.000-04:002009-10-26T14:38:17.519-04:00i have carved my hame in the kitchen table, the "j" drawling out beneath your butter knife.<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">i have stayed up late</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">smoking joints with my roommate again.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">we lost most thursdays this way,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">burning it from its end</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">until all we have left is a handful of vowels and hours before morning’s light.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“home is where the heart is,”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">i say, setting my bourbon on Aubrey’s desk, “and the thing about that is,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">how do you find your heart before it’s too late?”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the ice in my glass catches the lamplight</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- sending it out in flashes again and again,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">laving across his face, and before i reach the end</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">of my statement, he turns from his computer and rolls his eyes my way.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">this is the way</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">things usually go between us, and it is </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the closest i’ve come to home since the end</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">of my first one: coming home late </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">one night and fighting with my father again</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">in the kitchen, the bulb over the stove, under the hood, the only light.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">i’ve yet to forget that light,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the way it seemed all soft yellows,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and if i could do it again – </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">well, it doesn’t really matter, the reality is</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">that it’s far too late</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">for that. regardless if you expect or want it, an end is an end.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">i have had too many ends</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">already. watched the snuffing out of too much light.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">it feels as if i am arriving a moment late,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">that if i had taken another way,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the shortcut i’ve been meaning to try, i’d show up before everyone is</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">saying goodbye. again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">again,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">i will come in at an end.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the truth is,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the light</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">only ever illuminates the way</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">that seems to make me late.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">i’d like to not be late again</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and for my wandering way to end.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">aubrey’s light is still on.</span><br /><br /></span>jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-80363145847603529462009-10-03T04:21:00.000-04:002009-10-03T04:23:47.606-04:00over the next seventy years, you'll probably only store one hundred twenty five megabytes in your memory.there was an open field next to my father's church in missouri, and i remember<br />how, after service, i would wade out with the other boys<br />-awash in weeds, padding silently in penny loafers - watching as their bodies shone<br />in the afternoon sun as we would hunt for grasshoppers.<br />i never was able to catch them, to hold them<br />between my hands - something in the way they ate grass terrified me.<br /><br />that church was demolished a few years ago, the sanctity leaving with each pew<br />the movers loaded into the truck. the baptismal pulled out by a crane through a hole<br />in the roof, and finally the bulldozers and backhoes.<br /><br />they built a race track there, asphalt sprawling across the nearby open fields<br />- and the roar of engines, the chambers igniting and pistons pumping sound much like<br />the grasshoppers' stridulations: the well-defined lip being moving across a<br />finely-ridged surface and vibrating as it does so.<br /><br />like my corduroy slacks, one thigh against the other as i would run into the grass, peppered with blooms of clip-on neck ties.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-56122022110941841202009-10-01T16:40:00.000-04:002009-10-28T10:26:15.201-04:00I Owe a Cock to AsclepiusHe moves among the chickens. He wears jeans, a v-necked white undershirt stained with the memory of work, and brown cowboy boots. The hens protest his presence with the din of their collected clamor. A jerking roiling mass of brown feathers, beaks and stuttering feet, punctuated here and then suddenly there with the lustrous gleam of a dark eye peering between the action to catch his. And he leans down to catch the chicken by the neck, and he rolls his hand in a sudden flick. Barely registering the dull snap of the vertebrae, the heave of the soft body as the life abruptly dissipates. Not lost in the languid motion from the veins or snuffed in the entrapment of the lungs, but like a brief flash of energy, a firefly’s lamp deep in a clump of weeds. There and then the next moment, lost. Life is different than you think. He culls for hours. He rolls the right and left wrists, freeing the birds of their burdens. He sets them in piles of fifteen. He sets ten piles of fifteen. His wrists hurt, the dull ache spreading back from the heel of his palm to his elbow, brightened by a shock of pain now and then. He sits in the grass away from the chicken house and the ten piles of fifteen. His shirt sticks to the sweat that spreads across his chest. The stains deepen. The sun stands overhead and he has been working since this morning.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833436944190024890.post-29343790045557185722009-10-01T16:35:00.000-04:002009-10-01T16:39:11.462-04:00“Felis Cattus, is Your Taxonomic Homenclature, an Endothermic Quadruped Carnivorous by Nature?”Aubrey leans back in the high-backed antique chair he's sitting in at the desk,<br />"So this lady at work today, she always has a glass of wine by herself and today she had this like, bag with all these kittens in it. <br />He pauses as Shenise and I laugh <br />"All these," he continues <br />"What!" Shenise interrupts. <br />"Kittens!!" I say, pulling the afghan covering Shenise to lie over my legs. The air pulled into the room from the window by the fan is chill and carries the call of crickets.<br />Aubrey huffs and continues, "They were all gold and there were all these purples and teals . . ." "Wait wait wait," I exclaim, waving my hands, "so the pattern on the purse was kittens?" "Yeah." <br />“I thought you meant the purse was full of the animal.” <br />Shenise begins to laugh, the mattress carrying the shake of her body to where I sit at the foot of the bed. <br />“I wouldn’t have been attached to it then,” Aubrey says, cutting his eyes from the embroidery hoop he’s working on to glare at my stupidity.<br />“But when I complimented it, she said she had eleven cats.” <br />“Ohhhhh, she’s a crazy cat lady,” Shenise groans <br />“Eleven?!” <br />“Yeah, eleven does put you in crazy territory,” Aubrey agrees. <br />“Yeah.” <br />“Totally.” <br />“Is she married?” Shenise asks <br />“I don’t think so,” <br />“I don’t think soooooo,” I say overlapping Aubrey’s facts with my conjecture. <br />“And then she told me about this puppy someone had - a Chihuahua” <br />“Ugh, no.” <br />“Now, she was watching it. And she wore it. At the bar. Under her blouse. It’s little head would poke out here,” Aubrey sets the hoop down and grabs the neck of his t-shirt, pulling it down and flapping it.” <br />“Ahahahaohmygod,” Shenise says, rolling from side to side, tangling the afghan around her. “Are you serious? And you listened to her?!” Aubrey sighs and begins stitching again. <br />“You’re way too nice.” <br />“She’s ollld,” he chuckles, “I don’t know. I was like, waiting for my tables to finish eating. Everything was done. I kinda wanted to hear what the crazy cat lady had to say. She’s hilarious. She went on forever. And she told me if I ever. I told her that there’s cats. That the neighbors let their cats run wild. And she said ‘You should go play with them. You know what you should do? Get some catnip and rub it all over your body. Lie on the ground’ . . .” <br />Shenise bursts over Aubrey’s story, hooting <br />“. . . and they’ll come play with you!” <br />We all laugh, Aubrey setting his head on the desk. My eyes water and in the tears the lamplight sets his hair on fire. <br />“I’m serious,” he continues after catching his breath. <br />“There’s. no way. that’s true,” Shenise punctuates her sentence with chuckles. <br />“I’m so serious. She told me to do that. And I just thought about claws like,” Aubrey swivels the chair to face us and rakes at the air, a feline snarl pulling his lips back from his teeth, “cats jumping on you . . .” <br />“Rubbing on you,” I add. <br />“. . . she had this look of ecstasy.” <br />“Wow, using herself to get her cats high,” I say <br />“Yeah, but it’s just like, ugh, something about. There’s something crazy cat lady - there’s something about the physicality of it . . .” <br />“Yeah,” Shenise agrees. <br />“Rubbing,” <br />“on her,” Shenise finishes my sentence. <br />“. . . all over her. It’s like making love to a pack of cats.” Aubrey rubs his hands in a flourish across his chest, the movements growing more exaggerated as our laughter grows, the fan blowing it out the door where it spills into the living room and fills it.jared dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883203455522677915noreply@blogger.com0