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