The Non Bite

I have always wanted to swim with sharks. If I had a bucket list, which I would title "The Last Day I Do My Hair," swimming with big sharks is paramount, the kind of sharks that could rip you apart with a smirk, the kind that sneak up on you and take advantage of your weakness. I don't attribute this to fear or the desire to conquer, to tempt fate. In fact, I dream of this scenario often and wake slowly with a calm and measured breath. A dream I had last week where I couldn’t taste the chocolate and my boyfriend pinched my calf, I woke up in tears pulling at my leg sure I'd find it tender. I am still haunted by that one.

According to my dream research on swimming with sharks, I must be feeling resentment in my life or having bad feelings towards someone or something. Though I take these kinds of definitions with a 5 lb bag of salt, I must say some validity lives within the statement. I'm moving out, moving on, coming to a crossroads and want to blame everyone but know the fault lies only within my tiny (shaking) hands. My dream last night is left up to many interpretations. I was swimming in clear water with two amazingly spotted and frisky whale sharks. I felt calm and beautiful and I breathed whatever way they did as I did not have to come up for air. I would lay on their backs and without holding on, glide effortlessly with them as they circled each other. Then suddenly, a man entered the water, as if he had been dropped from a plane, and the sharks became nervous. The larger one came from behind me and opened his jaw so wide at me then took only a nibble from my left thigh. I don't remember pain. There was no blood. Later in the dream, hours, seconds, I was showing my leg to my father and there was a deep fresh scar from my hip to my knee. We marveled at how I didn't have to get stitches and he said it would heal nicely. Then there was some sort of apocalypse and fire, no one spoke English and I was trying to save a colorful Korean lady and her small boy from a rich girl I went to High school with all the while knowing I was late for a wedding I didn't want to go to alone.

The dreamer is the author I believe, the dreamer has the rights. If I am to place any resentment or find ill feelings in this I put them on the diver, even if he was trying to save me. I didn't need it. What I need is to taste the chocolate. What I need is to be full.

small fragments

The hail is falling, threatening a place where ice belongs in bags; it falls, hard shiny glass ice pearls,through my kitchen ceiling

patience is a virtue, she says sweetly and lightly flips the soft curl on my forehead

wishing the sound of rain smacking the shakey roof was instead the sound of rain dropping subtly on tough sand. and the echo of the ocean

Restive

Restive: impatient, uneasy, or restless




I cannot deny my need to be restless. It is unfair even to use it as a descriptive word when really it has become its own being, an impatient and overbearing adolescent growing inside of me who grates at my every nerve, yet evokes the love only a mother can dote upon her child. I’m restless with lectures, uneasy with long dinners, impatient for results. I must make a shift in comforts, the length of my hair; I am deeply restive in relationships. This bothers me, for though I do create a purposeful splash in calm and tepid waters, a large part of me, the part I dare to love the most, does want to go a lifetime with one person without every feeling the need to disturb it. This year’s resolution is not to kid myself and say I will destroy restlessness, but to save and keep it safely in a way where it is still a part of me. I will displace it, lock it in a room and feed it only uncomfortable lunches and awards ceremonies. On holidays, just to be kind, I will let it come out when we unwrap presents from family seen twice a year. It can come to any party where large crowds anxiously await for me to catch cooked food flying in the air towards my mouth, and I will always let it help me blow out the birthday candles.

But, I insist it be far away when we kiss, impossible to sense when we embrace. It must be tucked in and already fast asleep when you throw your heavy legs and arms over me and silently beg me to lay still and dream beneath you. This year, I beg for the strength to find my restiveness less obtrusive and more innocent, less garish, less of a spoiled ending, and much more like the tug of a child at the hem of a skirt.

Guileless

Guileless: free from moral wrong; not corrupted; simple and naïve

Uncle Steve was a congenital pervert. Whether this infallible trait was present at birth or established by firm and dirty habits, we are not confident. But at every family holiday, he crept behind the curvaceous women of our nearest and dearest and pinched excess meat around the waist which had escaped a snug skirt, or spilled out of an unruly pair of hosiery, and had far too many obscene sex jokes to tell the much too young and guileless nieces. The pictorial maxim of the Three Wise Monkeys has always been a wildly misused, yet adored proverbial principle to define my father and his two brothers. Trust, it is really a notion for my widowed grandmother to coo over, or a tried and true theme for any last minute Christmas gifts; It is an excuse for a staged annual photograph. The oldest and by far most unpleasant of the three, Uncle Steve, places his soiled hands over his eyes to “see no evil,” and without fail peaks through one and waits for our practiced sniggers. Uncle Mark, whose eyes dart from bosom to derrière without pause throughout the course of the evening, often lingering on the younger and more taut, puts down his 12 pack of Busch to cover his ears and “hear no evil.” My father, estranged and wonderful, is quietly coaxed by my mother to stand in and place his hands over his mouth to complete the perverse simulation of the Japanese legend. My father, however, is his monkey. He says little and laughs quietly. In a room of boisterous drunks tearing through Christmas wrapping and boxes, he sits in the corner almost in another room all together, another world. He sees Steve take me into the kitchen to talk about my budding poeticism and provocative maturity at 15 and takes a sigh of relief as I evade the conversation without him having to step in. He sees Mark’s eyes graze too long at my sprouting breasts in a revealing top I insisted to wear though I knew he would rather me not. He sees my mother’s glass empty and refill itself time and again. He sees the clock reach midnight and knows nothing good comes with hours after ten. And I see him. I see him, concentrated and passionate, cautious, anxious and sweet. I see him alone and want to save him but don’t, because the fear that I am becoming him more year by year is closing in and I must shout all the nonsense that I can before it silences me.

Prevarication

Prevarication: to speak or act in a dishonest way

I wanted to clean the dishes. I wanted to take every dish we shared and dirty it so foul that I had to scrub for days to make it clean, till my hands were so shriveled and white and gummy I could shred layers of skin back with my nails. I wanted to dry them till they shrieked, till they were new again, and stack them up beside an empty sink so you would know that I was someone different. Someone you hadn’t known before.

I wanted you to find my floor beneath soiled and forgotten clothing, aimless papers, unfinished canvases and tiny empty boxes, so that you had a new surface to lay me down upon. I wiped every shelf, moved every book, washed every shirt and changed the sheets, so you could see that I was someone different. Someone you hadn’t seen before.

And then I wanted to be pretty, so I ran a bath for queens, made hopeful bubbles that floated high in the hot steam. I roughed my skin pale and shaved every hair, every part of me hidden I hoped you’d find. I wanted to be smooth, so instead of a towel I covered my body in lotions and stood completely still, arms high and reaching, legs spread, and waited for the fog to clear, for my body to dry on its own, for my skin to capture and steal every spot of moisture my intentions could muster, so that when you found me I would feel like someone different. Someone you hadn’t felt before.

I have lied to my teachers, to my mother, to ones I have loved. I have told prevarications that feel so real you could scrape the wax on the apple. I lied to you for weeks. I became who you wanted; I looked just like her; I moaned by your slightest touch. And with my curse you fell into a place deep inside me, the home I had slaved over making you. But on my way to meet you there, I found, once again, I could not lie to myself, there exists no fabrication convincing enough to change me.

There are dishes in the sink, piles of clothes our sleeping dogs lay upon, stacks of unfinished poems, hair on my legs you could twist, and the fridge is bone dry. I lay here on the bed, cold and fearing the mess I have made, while you nap over there in the dark on the couch, at home in a house which looks so different from the one you first moved in to. But you loved me then and it was everything you wanted, and so you wait for someone different. Someone you thought you had a hold of once.