Bajo,
I stack plates on the shelf. This way I know where to go when I need one.
Working with string in so many ways, I hear the noise it makes when moving now,
I have paid such close attention to its feature I can literally hear it change.
Yesterday Alysia said she likes rainy days, and today it is so. She has the gift.
I call her to help move rocks and she always does what I tell her,
I have to be careful. We used to do this right? Listen to each other. Meet at this place every once in a while to melt. I propose to you, lets come again.
Caridad
Responding
Bajo,
His face on light and his hair long fast like I remember it. Hours of compliments and questions of how my heart responds to the saying of someones name. The repeating of someones loss. I do not remember some things, this is something I forget.
He asks where you are, what you do, and I think oh my god. I don't know. Where you are, what you do, if something is happening, where you get money and who you give it to, and of course why. This, I tell myself, justify, this I say is life. Things float in different directions. Perhaps this is correct, perhaps I am right. Never the less I am sad.
This little piece of land, my mothers mini paradise with a greenhouse on the porch that glows in the dark with green hangings, and clay pots overflowing with lavender. I want this and I have it. I have it for now. I see her husband in the morning taken so well to role of farmer. He feeds the chickens and ducks before he gets in his large red pick up truck to go to work. They flock to him and they love him even though he does not love them.
The children. They grow, like all of us, and they form into small pasts and traumas. They collect their patterns and put them on display. Because they have yet to encounter the necessity for shame in their imperfections. They understand they are just alive.
So I have arrived here to the comfort of my beginnings and I pet my dogs and I feed them well. I crawl out of bed in the morning trying to maintain a schedule, I make things with my hands, I hook and knot and I stack and paint and write, always. I collect old letters and he suggests responding to the emptiness that they have inside of them. This seems like a good idea, like a fine idea, and yet I cant imagine what I would say.
I tell myself not to fall in love with christian boys who can not speak well. I tell myself this does not make sense. I tell myself my lover is coming for me soon and I tell myself to be patient with my confusion. But then I hear myself saying things like I do not want this part, I do not desire, and I am a passionless woman as of recently, I hear my hands get achy, and I hear my legs still, they do not shake bent over sinks or tables or beds they do not bend at all. I am a paper box and am being choked by the weight of my analyzing. I am a paper box with writing on the sides that do not resemble anything of a practice. I do not do this, I lie, and I erase.
Caridad
His face on light and his hair long fast like I remember it. Hours of compliments and questions of how my heart responds to the saying of someones name. The repeating of someones loss. I do not remember some things, this is something I forget.
He asks where you are, what you do, and I think oh my god. I don't know. Where you are, what you do, if something is happening, where you get money and who you give it to, and of course why. This, I tell myself, justify, this I say is life. Things float in different directions. Perhaps this is correct, perhaps I am right. Never the less I am sad.
This little piece of land, my mothers mini paradise with a greenhouse on the porch that glows in the dark with green hangings, and clay pots overflowing with lavender. I want this and I have it. I have it for now. I see her husband in the morning taken so well to role of farmer. He feeds the chickens and ducks before he gets in his large red pick up truck to go to work. They flock to him and they love him even though he does not love them.
The children. They grow, like all of us, and they form into small pasts and traumas. They collect their patterns and put them on display. Because they have yet to encounter the necessity for shame in their imperfections. They understand they are just alive.
So I have arrived here to the comfort of my beginnings and I pet my dogs and I feed them well. I crawl out of bed in the morning trying to maintain a schedule, I make things with my hands, I hook and knot and I stack and paint and write, always. I collect old letters and he suggests responding to the emptiness that they have inside of them. This seems like a good idea, like a fine idea, and yet I cant imagine what I would say.
I tell myself not to fall in love with christian boys who can not speak well. I tell myself this does not make sense. I tell myself my lover is coming for me soon and I tell myself to be patient with my confusion. But then I hear myself saying things like I do not want this part, I do not desire, and I am a passionless woman as of recently, I hear my hands get achy, and I hear my legs still, they do not shake bent over sinks or tables or beds they do not bend at all. I am a paper box and am being choked by the weight of my analyzing. I am a paper box with writing on the sides that do not resemble anything of a practice. I do not do this, I lie, and I erase.
Caridad
two ways
Being locked away. locked up. locked behind or before something happens. This is hard to imagine for you. The body so connected to islands and waters. No, you do not stand before any lock. I stand here now, and tomorrow, and for a while now to give these thoughts to the airs and they carry them through different temperatures until hopefully they reach you free, and perhaps with a man sitting at your bedside saying something like smiling because fifteen years seems like nothing now.
always moving. down south now and then over to the mountains. i have not had my things in over a year now. starting to make me wonder about materialism and how much i love my collections.
If it were, that, you gave a dam
Dearest Cari,
They are trying to put me in jail. They are trying to get me deported. My language does not belong here, this, we know, we write about. Saturn is grinning at me. Last time he was in my bed, he said, see you in fifteen more years. Saturn is made of desires held from youth. I love the way he kisses me, and how that's what it is between us. Text.
-Bajo
Iron and Wine have a song like this...
I spent most of the morning explaining my pilgrimage away from relating. Can a pilgrimage ever be away from, instead of towards, something holy? The truth is that I am trying to go towards something. Closeness. Nearness. Away. In session I figure in and out of resolutions, in and out of clarity. As if under the tide. Where are our fathers floating? Michelle Puckett has begun to blog, though timidly, about water. I think the ocean's influence is inescapable. Somehow the Mediterranean keeps getting dry. I keep re-filling it with my own mix; salt, water from the tap, words of encouragement. I am relieved to know that everyone is as confused about sex as I am. The Oedipal trumpets sound, the Electras of the world respond. How is it possible to live in archetypal mode? Are we all to partake in the narrative? What I am finding is more reasons to part with the narrative; as in away. As in from. Men, sex. Now that I have become (for the first time) the other woman, I have truly earned my title. The work begins like this. As a woman. But I choose, I choose everything from a simple gesture of "no" upon my body, in mouth, to awkwardly stepping into a bed, completely. Jezebel, now who was she? Is she really holy? I thought of Southern men and SoCo and felt that chivalry for the first time. The kind of voice, gesture, that undresses you despite your efforts to remain decent. He took me. We were across a counter, an interaction 24 seconds long. He took me because I am female, because he could. He drew a smile out of me and it might as well have been my nakedness, I mean it. Now that I have crossed the threshold of honest women and traded it for the hearth where women lead men to infidelity and secrecy, I am scared of what I can do with this body. So I decide to walk away with this sense of dejavu. Of having, certainly, had this dream.
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