Words Various Attempts at Communication
Table of Contents Paris
2
Words
3
Dear Man Two Tables Down at the Coffee Shop,
4 5
Ritual 6 17: War of the Worlds 7 Geodes 8 Grandmother 9 Lonely
Dedications: To the men who have slept with me and never tried to make me their wife. To the cute baristas who tolerate my stammering. To the man who cannot make me his.
Paris npr fills us in we discuss in hushed voices over over medium eggs as if talking too loud might make it worse half a world away from france it hurts to go to work i find solace in my role library front line protector of the books of the magazines all i want to do is break things at the injustice i want to snap every pencil snap the halves in half until they are nothing but i do not break the pencil in my hand in wars past we have shipped our support in bombs wrapped in yellow ribbon i am mailing my pencils to paris
Words Freshman year of high school my blonde boyfriend drank forties of Mickey’s past coherence and then spit angry in something similar to German. Senior year of high school my new boyfriend and I went to a church he had been invited to attend by a woman we worked with. It was a holy roller church. Everyone was using their throats to make sounds of gratitude, getting on their knees. The faces were white, many obese, yet their voices were pleading to the Universe and rang of hunger. At twenty-six I sat at an Episcopalian funeral, hearing for the first time the words and rhythms they used to send everyone off to the grave. It added a stability, somehow. Predictability. To know what was being said was tested, even without any measure of validity. Last year a woman killed herself at an apartment complex I worked at. The family arrived and the air filled with silence and sound. They made noises that no human can handle, these adult daughters finding their mother’s suicide scene. We hold more than our voices can express. We haven’t taught ourselves the right words yet, to make sure the person next to us knows the depth of our emotions. Human tongues keep trying to find the words to say “lonely”.
Dear Man Two Tables Down at the Coffee Shop, I notice you staring at me. Not casually. With eyes that don’t blink. Even now, as I sit ten feet from you, I can feel your eyes on my neck. It is vaguely leering, but also your eyes watch my like my dog watches rabbits. My dog knows, with his inept little corgi legs, that he cannot catch a rabbit. He doesn’t even try, when they are so far out of his reach, but he stares with rapt interest. Wonders how it would taste to sink his teeth into them. You watch my ass as I walk past you. You wonder what it would be like to sink your teeth into me. He once found an already dead bunny, my dog. He pranced, it’s bone spine body flopping from his face. He reveled in the closeness he felt to the hunt, even if he had not be able to catch it himself. He resented me when I took it’s soft fur corpse away from him. I am not your rabbit. I am faster than you. Quicker. Go on staring. I will sit here in the meadow and know that you are no fear. There are threats, wolves, but you are not one. Your only chance is to find my spine already shredded.
I would have to be dead first,
- Amber
Rituals Adult decisions come lumbering towards us. Wallets demand that we stop, fancy coffee is first on the chopping block. With drip coffee, the bitter is unveiled. Honest on your tongue, milk your only friend, and hot your only option. No more drowning the averageness of the morning in service, options and smiles. No more painting over our proletariat skin. The barista adding cream to cut the solitude. I will give up this incarnation of the morning ritual. Indulgence. For you. - Release flirtation. But first - You must pinkie promise a lifetime of drip coffee mornings.
17: War of the Worlds Twenty-four hour non-stop news cannot compete with War of the Worlds. See power in words? War of the Worlds changed the game. Welles dropped the beat. Ticker tape rolls across your screen. Fear! Fear! Fear! Welles would still fit in. Martians are coming. Or illegal aliens. Fan your in-group pride. Young Orson was hot, in a baby faced genius rebel-rouser way.
Geodes When we wander on walks, we pick up certain rocks, and smash them down against the creek bed. We pull the apart at the new jagged edges, exposing the geodes, the crystals inside. Tiny pieces of sparkling, they are not just a product of time. They grow through submersion, the universe washing through the rock. The rain and murk and dirt, the meandering of minerals over millennial, give us the beauty to find. Virginia Woolf’s personal library consisted of four thousand books. Each word, nothing more than a drop, hitting, creating a slightly different surface than had existed before. When the words drop over you they find your hollow spots. The salty water rests there, for a minute - and then drains through. I peer down at the tiny geode in my palm. This one is finished. But where our feet land, others must be just beginning.
Grandmother My king size bed wears a coat of many colors crafted by the hands of an unknown grandmother. Her hours of careful creation were intended for some other family’s family tree. Undervalued, it ended up at the DAV. She surely would not have invested so much time just for me. Love sometimes breaks down, when run through the rusty colander to a new generation. So I fall asleep under the blanket’s safety nestled in the pieced together remnants of the branches of another family’s family tree.
Lonely He woke up to the steady high-pitched whine of canine communication. The dog was standing on the bed, nearly over him. The dog needed to piss nearly as much as he did. He stayed, face down in sweaty boxers, half curled under the ratty quilt. He tried to block out the sound for a minute. The dog put her bristled brown and black nose against him and shoved. He stood up, wandered into the adjoining toilet, and took a long piss. He grabbed a pair of sweat pants, a coat, a dog leash, and a pair of dirty house slippers. She peed twice on their walk, and pooped once. He was grateful that she had opted to take a shit on the yard of one of the vacant houses on the block. It meant he didn’t have to feel guilty when he left it. The day was grey, the first day of the new year. The small houses on his street all had Christmas lights up still. There were piles of wrapping paper and brightly colored crushed toy boxes sticking out of the trash bins. It was not a wealthy street but the residents embraced the holiday as best they could. He and the dog spent a few minutes contemplating the importance of the dead possum that was beginning to bloat in the street near their little house. The dog was in favor of further investigating the possum, the man was not. The man, by nature of his position at the handle of the leash, won the conversation. They went back inside. The man swapped out his sweatpants for jeans, and pulled on a faded t-shirt that had been free at some college event nearly a decade before. He brushed his teeth, he put on stick deodorant that was cold from sitting out on the bathroom sink. He pulled on old sneakers, and the same coat he had
worn against his bare chest when walking the dog. The man drove to a diner near his house. It was not the attractive small hip sort of diner that graced the gentrified downtown. It was the sort of diner that sold lotto tickets, had a Keno screen playing, and somehow smelled of Pall Malls even though the city ordinance against smoking had passed eight years before. The waitresses all had large unnatural hair and called him “sugar”. He came here every few weeks, but nobody ever asked his name. When he walked in the door there was a square black sign that read “Please Wait To Be Seated” and a few groups were positioned behind the pole. It was New Years morning. Grease and coffee were in high demand. The two girls in front of him wore tight jeans and boots with fur. It was clear that their evening was just winding down. One of them, he could not tell which and tried not to focus on it, smelled faintly of vomit. He sat alone. He was not hung over. He had drank a couple of beers the night before, but had not been drunk. He had spent the evening at a friend’s house, driven home shortly after midnight. He had slept in his boxers with his dog on the bed, her long Shepard mutt body sprawled angular over the quilt. It had been a good nights sleep. The man pulled up Facebook. Facebook told him that all of his friends had danced more, drank more, enjoyed life more than he had the night before. Facebook told him that everyone else had more social connections, more friends, more exciting lives than he did. He wasn’t convinced, but wasn’t willing to challenge Facebook on the point. He put his phone away. The waitress brought him bacon, eggs, toast. He drank coffee with too many prepackaged creamers added. He opened his phone again and began reading through
Google News. About all the people that had died in stampedes at New Years celebrations the night before. About the airplane that was in the ocean, full of bodies. He read about death mainly. That wasn’t because he was choosing those articles, he just started at the top of the page. There was an old woman at the table across the aisle from him in the diner. She was also alone. She had thick gray geriatric shoes on. She ordered lunch. There was no newspaper on her table, no cellphone. Just her soda and then her food. She ate her small iceberg salad with it’s dried out carrot slices and the too generous French dressing poured on top. A few minutes later the waitress brought her a deep fried steak, in a crunchy peppered crust, nearly floating in gravy. The woman smiled, made eye contact, and thanked her. The woman ate more than she needed to eat, a habit she was aware of. Her body didn’t quite fit in the chair that she was seated in, as it was, but the woman didn’t want to waste the food. Every few weeks she would try to switch to the smaller grilled chicken lunches but they did not make her feel as good when she ate them and she always came back to the fried steak. As she worked her way through the steak she chewed slowly. The waitress came and refilled her soda. She asked if there was anything else, even though the waitress knew that there wasn’t. The waitress called her by name, Marla. Marla wasn’t called by her name very often, and it pleased her to hear it in the waitress’s voice. She smiled at the waitress and said that everything was just fine. Marla spooned the gravy off her plate. She stood up, slowly, and felt dizzy for just a minute. She waited
and it passed. The dizzy spells were common. They didn’t worry her when she was out, in the hum of people who didn’t know here. They were not her friends, but the waitress knew her name. That was something. The spells worried her more when she was home alone. Marla pulled on the plasticized blue jacket that had been draped over the back of her chair. She walked slowly to the register, paid, took a mint, and left the diner. She checked the small clock on her car’s dash as she pulled out of the parking lot. By the time that she got home it would be time for Andrea Mitchell to host on MSNBC. She always liked that show and barely noticed that time passed when she watched it. The mail wouldn’t run today. That was a drawback of the holiday. It always made her feel a little better, seeing the mail come, saying hello to the postman. He also knew her name. The main would run again tomorrow. She would try and order the grilled chicken tomorrow, she needed to be thinking of eating healthier, and then there would be the mail to go through before Andrea came on. That was something to look forward to.
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a chapbook by: Amber Culbertson-Faegre
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