What is it to be clean? (Collaboration Piece)

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I am it.    

I am a map of skin covered lace        

I am something you may call a remembrance

Organs covered with the stretch of plant membrane

Of a mind once untangled—

It would be a shame to admire the

Not knowing

Picking up dismembered wisdoms   

The sewing of uncertainty into the brim of   

Beginning when I have confidence     

On how to arrive                        

When to leave                       

Remembering to begin again.

The séance of smiling and knowing that anything

Of for from by or related to the earth makes me smile that way

Eyes open, shoes on, I collect words

Strewn like old sea glass along the coastline.

And say that my mother suffers from the consequence of

Eyes closed— recall upon an image of the ocean at night

Reactions, sections and captions like empty words falling from

A body of stone carved mud,

This is the 4X4 compartment for the memory of vastness.

I am something that crawled out of a hole

Clattering on the floor that sounds like the consequence of silence

Plunged into warm water

Unknown, incalculable, impossibly small, incredibly profound

A bathtub.

She held me and promised only joy

Ranging from birth to death, the caress of a

A lie that drips chocolate so you lick and lick and lick.

Cloudy morning tongue across my sleepy cheeks

Mother was the most beautiful

She hangglides in the nude and laughs a lot

Awaken with the ache in my center that extends because

I don’t know how to organize these recipes for disaster

Pointing and smiling at the way we all strain to see.

the plaster from the ceiling falls when you walk above me

You (I) are (am) responsible

filling the birds nest of my hair with

the way she scrubbed and scrubbed

pieces of a whole that form significance

Hands covered in soap

together, I am the map of

plantlace membrane pulled skintight over mouth nose ears face

and I love to disintegrate.

What is it to be clean?

-The Shutter Muse (special thanks to my friend Sophia for doing a cut-up piece with me. this work is as much hers as mine.)

The Edge

There is an edge within me.

I saw it once two Decembers ago

When my lips were blue and my fingernails

Were hardened by cold, purple like ink stains on warped wooden desktop.

The edge was cold, but maybe it was just winter.

The edge was

The edge was

The edge was like the broken record of a tinny memory.

Like ducks circling your temples, bobbling up

and down like thought balloons, caught balloons secured by

the string of a kite

Slip the knot between forefinger and thumb to pull tight with numb limbs and lips but not from

Novocain, not cocaine, feeling the membrane of the

Parchment layers, onionskin eyelids,

If you cut them off you could pin them like butterfly wings.

Hold them up to the sun and admire the glow

Admire the different perspective

A collective of things that can’t shed any more tears.

The edge wasn’t warm, but as long as you stayed on your side (the side you started on) the edge was comfortable.

The edge was not a ledge for you to dangle your feet over, shoes dripping off the toes of feet, secure in the fact that it would take more than a passing breeze for you to try your hand at flying.

The edge was for remembering embers burning

Smoldering coals of bonfire I was conned

Into pretending nothing was wrong when we sat holding hands

My arm, a leash, connected to my heart which

I imagined

Would stop beating with your leaving,

if I stuck my hand through the ribcage, extracted the organ, would it feel like

anything? What would nothing feel like?

The edge is walking, inching towards dark abyss, cliff, gully, chasm, valley, volcanic

rock bottom and sinking without stopping you

                                                                                                Leap.

The edge is loving            leaving             begging            pleading            following             

hollowing out the inside of your cheek with teeth biting,

blood filling mouth

with a good source of irony, not knowing

what you’ll find

when you leap.

When you finally leapt, wept last tear, call it fear,

            The cold empties you pulling down

And sometimes your wings unfold, fully grown, you realize despite the cold

Your feathers needed airing out, the wind feels

Right to lick your cheeks, you might remember

How to speak clearly like the song of birds, to hear the meaning, not the words

But

Sometimes

            The wind is strong as you leap and when your body quakes

Your wings are not unfurled to fly, they aren’t strong enough to hold your weight,

            So they break.

The edge is after broken too, the unspoken, the tokens of kindness and wisdom, given to you like change from strangers, warding off danger with nothing but the will to smile still

            Beyond the hope of dodging consequence or one last dance or tragedy brought by happenstance.

The only thing I’ll say to you when standing on the edge poised, arms outstretched, lines of uncertainty

Call it fear of failing

Fear of falling

Fear of flailing

Fear of lies

Fear of flying, I’m dying to tell you

            That the only thing worse than the fall,

                        Is doing nothing at all.

To Ghost and To Be Ghosted

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To ghost is to release your self like tar from lungs

out into the universe like a cloud unraveling from the night sky.

To put on the jacket of the invisible man, flipping up the collar to shield yourself from the whistling of the wind through

His two front teeth… Stepping out into the street

and feeling the grit

of gravel beneath your feet, keeping your eyes

at least two feet in front of you so that you don’t

miss the tiny landscapes and roadside attractions

between your toes: a shriveled worm, a half dollar coin, a ring

from a vending machine, broken glass that looks licked smoothed

by the desert and at least 5 dried flowers dropped from the diary

of a young girl who walked along this path not 15 minutes before you.

            To ghost is to guess how far away the ground is and then to leap,

            Keeping in mind that if you die, no one will remember your

            Smile or the sweetness of your shampoo that lingers like

            The smell of rain. Feel the disdain

            When you land with a resounding shock—the reverberations

            Rattle your molars into the back of your mouth,

            Swallowing them despite yourself, like when you learned

            To stomach the smell of flesh, the feel of it on your tongue

            The fleeing of life from another being

            Hoping their soul made it somewhere after its body was processed

            Compressed into shapes that we might find appetizing

Dodging our instincts to dominate our inner beast

Deepening the divide between our spirits and our minds.

            To be ghosted is to stand behind her, listening to the way

            Her fingernails sang over the grooves of vinyl,

            Tiny mountain ranges like the silhouette of her spine.

            It was divine to run my tongue along the topography of

Her body, I remember

Her cool salty taste like the sea in December and the gravel cutting

into my palms like

            The night we locked ourselves out of her brother’s apartment so I

            Stripped my shirt off, slipping it around my hand before

            Punching it through the glass window, feeling the crunch of

            My knuckles on impact. Red ribbons of pain cinching around

            My wrists like zipties cutting off the circulation, the sensation of

            My body thrust into the cop car and I could hear her sobs, wracking

            As I plead for someone to help her, hold her and simultaneously searching

For something to thrust into my eye socket,

            To hear the white noise, feel the static, dissipate this sensation

            Anticipating the return of musical memory, humming the melody into my

            Skeleton, vibrating my bones so I can remember

            Her breath in tune to the music, her hips

            Swaying somewhere between bass and vocals in a rhythm you can

            See but not hear, having the words form in my mouth

            And letting them fall flat, watching her move with the sway of

            An African belly dancer, cigarette smoke hanging around her limbs

            Like the fog caressing the peaks

            Of a mourning mountain.

           

Othering Yourself

We are all a sum of our experiences
but if you experienced my life
slipped off your mocassins and into
my pink heels you would feel no healing.
No mending or bending of the scar tissue
no realligning of the stars
the lights within us shine different vibrations
this is no labyrinth-- all paths are one and they all
lead to different doors, more like portals
windows to our mortality, the brief tangibility of my reality
the ability to say I see the sky and its above me
but so are you when I have my fingers buried in the earth
your face a pale moon hanging like paper lanters
strung outside the alter that I've built around my poetry
the words I worship, they give life to this basic body
keep my sole on the floor, my head on my shoulders
but my words mean nothing to the sweet song of Spanish
that lead me when I refused to follow
my comfort became the cage of language
used in lieu of our senses
but when you run your tongue along the bars
can't you taste the metal melting?
    in the back of your throat like right before you puke--
regurgitating the familiar urge to say
when you see the moon and these stars
       don't you feel small?




-The Shutter Muse

Chewing Change: Poetry about Me as a Writer

My words are like cheap plastic jewelry
    showering down from circus vendors
with painted smiles and dripping eyes
    like city-women.
Candy worn by ravegirls with
shallow values and high expectations
wanting a quick fix,
their dreams served up like picnics
on a silver platter.
Tiny pills like tic tacs
        (splish, splash)   
    pink
        and blue
            and white

like dotted highway dividers at night—blank white prayers
paid for with plastic
    paper is only for
postcards and pamphlets sent from
somewhere South of the Milky Way
        signed
Sincerely,
    Alice

When I was little I wanted my words to be perfectly polished
offered up on gold-tipped-tongue like
Swarovsky crystals, or maybe diamonds
mined by angels,     nursing their addiction
the affliction to the silver spoon
that tastes like copper,
 the flavor of blood on the inside of your cheek
like chewing change.
the smell of something strange on the wind

    and I would be the world’s oyster.
Proffering in my palm the plastic pearl
for you to keep
    (or disregard)
discarded like used
condoms or cigarettes unsmoked
curled like snakeskin in the
reflection of the constellations. 







-The Shutter Muse

An Assignment for my Creative Writing

           He was standing with his back to the sun, and where Sarita was sitting he looked like a shadow that had come to life, his top hat stood out like a square of velvet that was cut clean out of the pink and purple horizon. It’s a strange sensation to know that someone is looking directly at you, you can feel the eggshell whites of his eyes and the inkstain of his pupil trained on your every expression, but you can’t see anything but the outline of their body, the impression they’ve left in the negative space like the pointed cookie cutters that Sarita and her grandmother had used to make Christmas cookies two years ago.

            She could remember the smell of simmering Sangria on the stovetop while she and her grandmother kneaded out the cookie dough, slipping tiny tastes into her mouth when her grandmother’s back was turned. She knew she never got away from it, her grandmother could see her in the darkened windows and her lips curved up on the reflection of the night sky like a crescent moon. They would wait for the cookies to rise, the heat breathing life and depth into the shadowed forms and then they would paint them with layers of clothing, sweet lacy butter cream, tart ruffly lemon curd, sparkly taffeta layers of sprinkles and tiny candied drops.

            The man looked like he was painted with layers of dark chocolate or charcoal. An imperceptible shift of his body brought his features into focus and with a movement that was too quick to be human, like mercury pooling together after she dropped the thermometer and it shattered, scattered across the floor. Suddenly he was kneeling in front of her, his breath hanging like a familiar flavor of cloud in the air between them, his palm outstretched.

            His hand was large, worn with the calluses of a traveling gypsy who ties knots like a sailor but has never seen the sea, and cupped in the palm were seven tiny stones. She could imagine how the texture would feel rolling over her tongue, and wondered whether it would taste like cool mountain air or like the salty breath of the ocean. She knew that she should choose one, but each of their tiny polished surfaces reflecting the changing light looked perfect, as if he’d plucked down seven stars, and offered her the sky.

            Reality seemed to begin to unravel, and she finally wished she could speak, could ask this man she knew but had never met the answer to all that she was wondering but the words caught in her throat like popcorn kernels. She felt a sense of urgency as she sunk into the ground like footprints in moist dirt, and his fingers closed over the tiny white angels, and he reached his arm out from behind his back and offered her his hand, empty and cool like the whimsy of the wind licking clouds out of the sky.

-The Shutter Muse (who is thoroughly enjoying her classes, although promises to be more diligent about updating in the future)

Let Us See

Let's see if, in between the galaxies
   we could imagine a space where
no space remains between us.
        A place where we were nowhere
  and everywhere, poignantly weightless.
And finally there I could lick the darkness
   from beneath your eyes
and capture raindrops in the dip
       of my clavicle.
Finally there I could fall into the pleasure
     of relinquishing the reigns of my responsibility
and we could gallop like stallions
        between the pinprick stars
into the sheets of night.

Character Intro: Meeting Casper Fowl

Casper Fowl was a painter. He wasn't making any money at it. He was very superstitious, so he went to an old gypsy woman who told fortunes for spare change and spent the money on food for her cats, and she told him that if he wanted to make a living as an artist he should soak his brushes in jars of gold coins. Angrily, he stomped back up the dusty road to his tiny room above a garage. Someone might describe it as a studio but to him it was just a prison cell, a physical manifestation of his lack of success. What a fraud, Casper muttered to himself, if I had a jar full of gold coins then what would I need to make money for. But if she was a fraud then Casper was none the better, an artist who couldn’t make a dime. And so he pulled out an old box of golden costume buttons and he soaked his brushes in those instead. As a result, many of his paintings had a shiny tint, like tapestries with gold thread stitched in, visible in only the right light.

            It hadn’t worked. Casper Fowl sold just enough paintings to continue on a stable diet of diner food, black coffee and tins of beans and tuna. He sold his fridge to pay for his prison fare and board, and refused to admit that food should need to be chilled or cooked. So, Casper Fowl became a thief. He abandoned his idea board where he stuck polaroids of developing art: a road kill at sunset, a dilapidated church, a greenhouse with a tree burst right through the middle, a crying child, and an egg frying on the pavement on one particularly hot day. He took them down and put them in his someday drawer, which was really just a shoebox, and imagined one day taking them out and hanging the back up with care, touching each one of them and saying don’t worry. I didn’t forget about you. He replaced these ideas, just as he would begin to do in art museums. He covered his walls with Pablo Picasso, Monet, Warhol and Dali, ripping the pictures from magazine and printing copies at the library, always at different locations, always with different names. And all of his replicas, while they were good, were mockingly fake in the proper light when the costume button gold would glint like bad highlights.

            Casper Fowl has never been a good judge of character, but he really fudged up when he chose to go into a partnership with Jeremiah Fox. Jeremiah was not an artist. He was a greedy, conniving, clever snake who had been stealing since the day he left his mother with nothing of her life savings, but a note on the coffee table to tell her not to bother searching for him. She didn’t bother, and who could blame her, for Jeremiah was as slimy as a toad, and she had three other children to worry about, not that she could feed them anymore.

            Jeremiah Fox spoke with a slow drawl and wore expensive suits and paid for the attention of not-expensive ladies. He and Casper Fowl met when he was passing through, when he offered to pay Casper a sizeable amount of money for a replica of Dove with Green Peas by Pablo Picasso. He posed as a curator, taking art, judging its authenticity, and then he would swap them, taking the real for himself and leaving the replica in its place. Casper Fowl had no sense, no wits about him, and though he would never intentionally bring people harm, greed is contagious like a yawn. Greed is the yawn in the middle of an airless city that fills your lungs with tar and multiplies like so many flies. Once you’re bitten by greed you’re as gone as a rabid animal, selling your morals at a pawnshop to buy liquid fire to qualm what’s left of your soul.

            And so a partnership was forged, Jeremiah in the lead, with Casper Fowl trailing along with his hopes and dreams stuffed in a shoebox.  

- The Shutter Muse

[A Note From TSM: This is my newest story which does not yet have a working title. The other MC will be featured in my next post. I've been focusing more on writing so a few of my posts will likely be photo-less. I appreciate your understanding <3]

we all have many chances

The first chance is usually fleeting.

Puffed out from between the lips like oxygen

we forgot we needed.

A cloud of air on a frosted wintertime morning

something we’ve released before we knew it belonged to us.

Like sand wiped on derrieres of ripped denim

you would laugh to know that just two palm’s worth of sand were yours

could you find your crystals on the beach?

The second chance is drawn out,

ripped like fabric from the sewing machine.

You know that the glass is broken

because you hear the scattering of teacups on tile

and when you tossed the pieces in the trash

you wore a ring of beaded blood

because shards of glass are not beautiful jewels

until the ocean washes them smooth with her tears.

The third chance is a gritting of teeth,

seeing the sand slipping like water down through the hourglass.

hearing the clock tick ticking…

like your grandmothers wristwatch so many years ago

as she smoothed the sweaty curls away from your forehead

mapping out her love in the constellations of your freckles.

The inevitable knowing that each moment is irretrievable,

and that using up your chances like layers of Kleenex,

is like collecting fistfuls of water, and calling them the sea. 

-The Shutter Muse

after remy was gone

The day Remy quit smoking I smoked his last cigarette. He sat across from me, pale blue eyes glowing like phosphorescence in the dying day.
      Could I describe it? He asked, his hands shaky. He was a mere shadow of the statue he'd become in my eyes. Finally admitting that it was time to move on.

It feels... It feels like trying to breathe in a volcano.
Finally succumbing to all the fire sweeping around, tunneling through
sneaking into the crevices of my body...

I paused to look at him. He was looking at the smoke, touching it with his fingertips, tracing the wrinkles of his addiction in the cool face of nighttime.

Which is why I never quit. He left that night, leaving an impression of himself, the cylinder of cigarette ash like snakeskin on the pavement. He left that night and unknowingly offered me a piece of himself that no longer served him, the habit that had made a home somewhere northeast of his heart and had promised him the ability to hold fire between his fingertips.

After Remy was gone, I wandered about for weeks in a daze. Wondering, like a broken ballerina, when I would regain my rhythm, my grace, my zeal. It came slowly. Unraveling my depression with a gentle tug at one of the loose ends, pulling through the stitches until all I was left with was a lap full of sad yarn.
The night times were my safe haven. The lost souls all gathered to share, like offerings of peace, the pills like confetti, pink and red, blue and white... All a silent promise to be easier than sobriety. When the morning would break, the sweaty babbling phantoms would scatter into the street like so many cockroaches and I would sit, bathing in the melted butter sun, the fire between my thumb and forefinger tasting like

Remy's smile. His booming laugh.
The crinkles next to his eyes
and the subtle ache that he left inside me,
when he'd finally remembered how to love himself
and forgot to teach me.

The Space Between (NaNoUpdate II)

[The Shutter Muse apologizes for the delay- she has started editing recently and is on the first round of painful cuts and correcting. There will be more updates to come, hopefully in a more polished shape. Stay tuned! Also feel free to check out The Shutter Muse's second blog: nakedneon.tumblr.com]

            I leaned closer to the mirror. There was nothing beyond the first joint in my fingers. If I stared long enough so that my vision became blurred I could imagine them, the nails painted rouge, a polish I’d bought at the drug store while buying my vitamins, the hangnails a bloodier red due to the absentminded nibbling throughout the day. However when I focused my eyes on them they were completely disappeared.

            I remember wondering whether I wasn’t still asleep as I turned, confused, and padded down the hallway, the wooden floors and then on into the tiled kitchen. I reached for the coffee grinder and remembered that it was cool and plastic and when I turned the dial in whirred and buzzed and heated slightly under my touch. A simple action, something I completed daily without fail.

            This morning the surfaces didn’t exist. My feet felt the cool tile but when I crouched to touch it I could feel nothing. To my utter amazement my rings hung on to my fingers as if they would fall off with mere suggestion, exhaling themselves off the curve of my knuckles and clattering onto the floor.

            The panic followed the numbing realization that I couldn’t still be dreaming. My heart jumped into my throat like a small creature clawing its way out of my ribcage. I could feel the tiny nails scraping inside my chest, the muffled cries rose into the back of my throat and I heaved up fire, choking up the water that I’d risen to drink in the middle of the night. Through drowsy eyes I’d held the cup and tested the water trickling from the faucet with the tips of my fingers before wiping the drips hastily on my pajamas. The acidic bile burned my throat and stung the cracks in my lips and I could taste blood. If I’d smiled the blood would have pooled in my lip and dribbled down my chin like ripe strawberry juice.

            As I ran the water, washing the remnants of my panic down the drain, the morning sun cascaded in through the window like a golden waterfall. The water felt like melted pearls, playing over my palms like mercury. I wiped my hands hastily on my shorts and retreated to the bedroom to prepare for my day, shooting a glance at the rumpled bed sheets.

           

            You had left early that morning, slipping out of bed like a whisper of silk. I vaguely remember rolling into the indentation your body had left, curling into it like a body into a shallow grave. Had you noticed that when you kissed my fingers they were merely a memory? Or did they have a shimmer… What does something look like before it disappears?

            Do you remember our first date? The sides of my mouth twitched into a smile even as I stood in front of my closet, fingertips curled into my palms so I didn’t have to wonder about their existence, thinking about how you had arrived ten minutes early. Your fists were stuffed into your pockets and your scruffy chin was tucked, like the neck of a bird, into your chest. Later when I tried to fix your shirt which was buttoned incorrectly, you closed your hands over mine and kissed my fingertips, thumb and pointer, telling me not to worry.

            I could still feel your lips in my hands and as I dressed myself methodically, but as I quizzically examined my new hands I wondered where fingertips go when they run away from home. I pulled out some gloves, despite the heat, and I almost even chuckled wondering what my coworkers would think when they saw my new fashion statement. In my daily routine I evaluated the facts. I could still touch things therefore my hands were useful and existed. Because people don’t just disappear, it would seem I’m imagining things.

            How does one contemplate their own downward spiral? How deep will my insanity eventually reach? When I reached deep into the crevices of my own imaginations, I couldn’t bear to consider which part of my body I might forget next. And the doubt that I knew myself well enough. Were my eyelashes a little longer the day before? Was my hair an inch or two shorter? Was I missing a wayward centimeter on the tip of my nose?

            And how well do we know our bodies? Could I reconstruct myself from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head on a piece of paper if that was the only way I could recreate myself? How well would I be able to map out the constellations of my freckles?

           

-The Shutter Muse

Stolen Flowers

remember that time

when you tapped out the rhythm of the bass on my wrist

so that my pulse synchronized with the music 

and traced the lines of sweat down the back of my neck

like chasing raindrops on the windowsill.

the air smelled like

stolen flowers

and your fingernails 

were full of earth.

-The Shutter Muse

And on it goes

Collect the tiniest treasures

and keep them tucked safely in the grooves between your fingers

to remember the fragility of life 

because

despite our brittle bones

when all the beauty has crumbled

crushed in a deity's fist and

 puffed with ballooned cheeks

onto milkweed dancing in the breeze

 

 

the world spins on.