This is the company I keep: long-limbed, tree-climbing ankle-biters, sugary sons and dangerous daughters of the fruit canners.
There they are in the mornings, sprung from the mud of their forefather’s factory, a plum firstborn holding a string of rose hip sisters, rough mulberry brothers. Sweet-talking fire-breathers, bright as vegetable skin, intestines clean and dark purple, organs encased in endocarps. Feeders who reach into golden boughs, feeders of flower ovaries. Some, maybe a plucky baby or a pair of pomegranate twins, will live forever.
You stand in the front where you can be seen, carrying oranges in the folds of your hiked-up skirt. A sea captain leagues away will open his window and smell you. Your scent cures homesickness and scurvy, your scent makes summer month festival gypsies fall in love. None of your sibling’s superlatives fit you; you are neither the prettiest nor the wiliest, neither the snake-charmer nor the double-crosser. Pithy, you wake up the lime burner’s children and the tanner’s babes with your harmonica. They will wade through salt solution and rawhide to get to the citrus of, the citrus in your hands.
I see you sometimes, seated on school steps, when you are peeling fruit for the young. Your eyes are on the mountains, and your hair is in your eyes, and the pucker of your lips is steering you off-tune, you who are tone-deaf already. That knife finding the core, both mine and the orange’s, you hum hurruming jazz, a harp bop, double drums, alto sax. The juice that stays on my neck when you tip me back, catching me in an alleyway, holding me upright as the oranges tumble and strike the backs of my knees. You cup your strong-smelling, sticky-soft fingers around my ear and say let’s blow this city.
on
8 February 2010 with 1 comment
(a) Upon sensing the presence of the subject within the immediate vicinity, the following bio feedback is registered: acute feelings of abdominal discomfort (somewhat akin to moderate indigestion), slight nausea, lightheadedness, accelerated arterial palpitations, excessive perspiration and exaggerated sensitivity to environs. The simultaneous and involuntary manifestation of these symptoms when observing a specific individual is known to the scientific community as “limerence”. It can also be termed “infatuation”.
(b) The subject is a male adolescent of normal height and weight, well-developed body structure, no profound physical alterations. All evidence points to the subject possessing reasonably good health. Please allow for a marginal amount of error, as the obtaining of medical revision results is at this time highly improbable.
(c) Where the nervous system is concerned, the subject appears to have above-average reaction time and cognitive ability. The subject is capable of learning with considerable speed, prioritizing tasks, remaining alert for extended periods and extensive problem-solving. The subject’s somatic reflex arc is also fully functioning (the autonomic reflex arc remains untested). It can be assumed with sufficient certainty that the subject is, in a word, intelligent (we apologize for using this imprecise umbrella term, but we believe that further delving into the still-controversial realm of human intelligence is not necessary). Though the full capacity of the subject is still unverified, we are satisfied that the cerebral magnitude of the subject is beyond that of the majority of the populace.
(d) The subject’s visual perception is somewhat faulty, but has been enhanced due to correction devices (exempli gratia: eyeglasses). Other than the myopia defect, the subject’s eyes are otherwise satisfactory (the sclera is free of discolorations, and the melanin content of the irises has produced a pleasing color). Despite inferior sight, the subject’s audition, gustation, olfaction and mechanoreception seem to be in working order. The subject gives all the appearances of being a lively, sane organism. Were the subject a canine, we are of the opinion that he would make an excellent companion.
(e) Unfortunately, the subject is not a Canis lupis familiaris, he is a Homo sapiens sapiens. By Homo sapiens sapiens, we of course mean the subject is an anatomically modern human, not an archaic Homo sapiens, such as Homo rhodesiensis. We cannot determine what the subject’s genetic make-up is with any precision, as we lack the funds to construct a proper lab. In any case, it is improbable that we will ever be able to obtain a sample of the subject’s saliva.
(f) It is towards the subject that we direct the “affections” mentioned in (a). This indicates that the subject, a healthy adolescent male Homo sapiens sapiens, is the “limerent object” or “object for which we feel affection”.
(g) It is not possible to determine, without a direct consultation, whether or not these “affections” are reciprocated.
(h) A direct consultation would involve total self-disclosure, and the distinct possibility of rejection. It has been decided that the unilateral termination of limerence would be unappealing for both parties involved. It would also affect scientific proceedings, and is simply not part of our modus operandi, which is primarily concerned with utmost discretion. Therefore, it is out of the question.
(i) Data has been collected during a significant amount of time to ascertain whether or not the subject has his own “limerent object”, and whether or not that “limerent object” coincides with our own objectives (id est: what are the origin and nature of the subject’s “affections”, if these exist, and do they by any chance have to do with us?) Indications of “infatuation” include pupil dilatation (note: all attempts to approach the subject in his natural habitat with the objective of measuring pupil widening have failed), pallor, behavioral confusion, body language and, in severe cases, syncope. The attainment of accurate information has proved inordinately difficult, as we are prone to extrapolating from insufficient data, which leads to premature, subjective conclusions.
(j) Subjectivity is the enemy of any scientist, but it reputably a boon for all seeking amorous ends.
(k) We have also been analyzing the females within a certain radius to conclude if they pose a threat to our attainment of the subject our study. Though the gender ratio of the environment favors males, thus granting the females a wider array from which to choose from, there have already been three recorded instances of displays of amorous interest towards the subject. The situations we envision when considering the subject sustaining a relationship with another female involve severe disagreements, and are not what one could call reasonable.
(l) In general, our own bias has made this study excessively complex. Any neutral gesture or conversation involving the subject is recalled in detail and interpreted in totally illogical manners, often leading us to believe outcomes that have little to no empirical basis. Intrusive thinking concerning the subject begins realistically but often ends as a departure from the probable. We are embarrassed to admit that, in this case, intrusive thinking is synonymous with “fantasizing”.
(m) Progression towards limerent mutuality involves a delicate, generally maddening game of social fencing. Despite various double-entendres and neatly hidden exposés of “affection”, the attainment of the desired goal remains inconclusive and, to be perfectly earnest, far-fetched.
(n) We employ the clinical scientific method, we weigh mercury in silver tablespoons, we gut the wombs of dead sheep. Though alchemy was largely abandoned in previous ages of history, it is the only branch of science we can liken our study to. This is because something (and we do not know what this something is, which disturbs us greatly) very odd happens to our bone marrow when the subject brushes past us in the corridor.
(o) The feeling this slight physical contact provokes in us is decidedly unscientific.
on
27 January 2010 with 4 comments
Each and every girl thinks she is the first to invent rebellion, the first anarchist Eve. She is the first to force open a basement window with a crowbar, the first to act for the superlative language of attachment. She is the first to hold up the tissue of intentions up to the light and to her scrutiny. She is the first to have her hair cut with sheep’s shears, the first to rip out a page from a library book, the first to preserve an opium addiction gracefully.
Each and every girl believes she is the ultimate authority. She controls the three feet of space in front, behind, and to all sides of her! She makes all definitions in the fortress of her head, all the signs in the hooker of her body!
Each and every girl has a paprika-colored, octopus ink-staining heart and an eventual pap smear. She is neotenic, retaining juvenile characteristics in adulthood, choosing to metamorphose long after the arrival of her teeth. She is a carcinogenic, releasing spores into the air, be they poisonous, be they benign.
Each and every girl may never necessarily put away childish things. Sometimes she continues making and imposing her definitions on anyone who will listen, and a few who will not. Eventually, however, she will begin checking the gas in the middle of the night, learning to accommodate definitions of cruelty, space that is not her own, language of ripping and knuckle dusters and feather dusters. In turn, they will learn to accommodate her.
on
15 January 2010 with 7 comments
He has tied the dog’s lead to the door handle of the Videorado. The dog, shimming up to the soda machine, keeps a colorblind eye on his master through the plexiglass. The room itself is unremarkable to the animal, who looks into the store with the sole purpose of safe guarding the boy. Watching over the boy means watching over his eventual dinner, which today may include a soup bone. In this way, the dog is much like the boy’s myopic girlfriend, who also watches over the boy, and thus her eventual future with him. The dog thinks of bones, and the girl of babies.
The boy takes in the selection once, twice, chewing one of his sweatshirt sleeves. His taste in movies is a statistically regular taste for males: Fight Club, James Bond, Sparta. Occasionally, though significantly less in recent years, he strays towards the statistically irregular for males: Before Sunset, Makoto Shinkai, Paris. Now that he has a girlfriend, he’s more disciplined with himself when it comes to romance. He’s embarrassed to have ever thought of lovers, and of loving, especially considering that as a college student he cannot be possessed by such adolescent flights of fancy. He can only be possessed by a schedule, and by his girlfriend, who gratefully assumes the role of his keeper.
The dog neatly steps aside as his master opens the door and ties the lead around his wrist. His colorblind eyes move towards the next obstacle in the obtaining of his dinner and soup bone: the three blocks home, filled with pitfalls only known to the astute canine. It is dark out, and the streetlights illuminate the sculpted rhododendrons in the garden of a house next door, where a girl will wake in the morning thinking of love letters.
on
6 January 2010 with 6 comments
It’s T minus forty-five minutes, and I feel like I should say a few words about this year. Yes, thank you very much for the croquets, no, I’m afraid I’ll have to decline that glass of champagne, Miss Applebaum. Yes, I’m quite sure. Can’t afford to arrive home tipsy, you know, Miss Applebaum? I’m wearing a party hat, after all.
2009, you weren’t much of a looker, and you kicked me in the ass when I deserved it, and a couple of times when I didn’t. Economically weighing the pros and the cons of 2009, I’d say this was the worst year of my life. All iffy fifteen years of it! Good thing, I guess, that you don’t weigh years that way.
I’m pleased with the things I learnt from you, 2009, like how superior plaid pajamas are to other varieties of pajamas, and how to deal with bipolar II in a parental unit, and how to write without over-using dashes and fragmented sentences and adjectives like “ebony”. I’m less happy with the aforementioned ass-kicking you dealt me, but hey, that’s how it goes, I guess. I’m sorry I can’t be “profound”, or mention anything “game-changing” (one of my father’s famous phrases) or “miraculous” that happened to me this year. I’d say I don’t really care about New Year’s anyway, it’s just a flip of the digits of an intangible number, but I’m wearing a party hat, aren’t I? Gotta live up to it, right?
I hope we can part on good terms, 2009, good in the “I’ll pretend I didn’t see you in the supermarket check-out line” way, good in the “no more goddamn croquets, Miss Applebaum” way. Yeah. Just let your buddy 2010 know that, next year, I’ll be dealing out the ass-kicking.
on
31 December 2009 with 2 comments
On the way back from Tarragona, my mother informs the rest of the car that she wants to buy tomatoes. Her body is built into, but not limited to, the space of the driver’s seat. In quantum physics, observing an object changes it, due to the instruments used in observation. How can we know anything, when observing an outcome changes it, and does an outcome happen if no one observes it?
Outside of the car: road, and mountains that seem constructed, faulted and folded with full intent. The burst of a timeline, igneous matter compressing underneath welts of dirt, proving that yes, you are, you have been, yes, you are stronger than rocky engineering. Mountains here are low and complacent, letting green fester and producing folksy air for the tourism industry, placing the little traveler in it’s trust and wake. Mountains here are giant Repenomamus, are prehistoric mammal, and the places where a rolling plain flat lines a bony dinosaur-filled womb.
My father says that it’s not worth it to stop for tomatoes. He’s produced a map from somewhere only he knows, and is holding it to his face, nose brushing the monuments marked in red and the highway letters marked in bold. My mother is speaking in the voice that always makes me feel like I’m in trouble, like she’s discovered the pornography collection I didn’t know I owned. Someone, a female motorist, has tried to overtake her on the car’s left side, un punto ciego, she says, gesticulating and spewing a number of insults towards the foolhardy female. We drop off the highway, away from mountains and into more familiar territory, quaint factory and apartment territory, where my mother can loosen her grip on road and motorist and pull a hand back to adjust her dyed brown hair, her sunglasses. In quantum mechanics, enough experimentation will allow us to know what will occur when we observe a result. But we don’t ever really know what will happen until we actually observe a result, do we? Turning onto our street, my mother asks should we go rent a movie? more a recommendation than a question, evidently having forgotten the tomatoes. Un punto ciego, a blind spot.
on
30 December 2009 with 4 comments
One of my favorite poems: Caminante no hay camino, by Antonio Machado.
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
I am pretty much in love with the Spanish language. My mother would say that this is remarkable, considering the distaste I’ve regularly shown for other singularly Spanish things, like Spanish housewives and Spanish parties (both of the festive and political variety) and Spanish public library systems and Spanish slutty bathroom mirror pictures (OH MY GOD THE LEVEL OF OBNOXIOUS) and Spanish late-night soap operas and Spanish temperaments and Spanish supermarket dairy aisles.
Antonio Machado makes up for all that, though, as do Federico García Lorca and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Vicente Aleixander and Miguel Hernández. I know that sounds dreadfully pretentious, like I’m some kind of beret-wearing, chain-smoking 1900’s CHILD OF THE BOHEMIAN REVOLUTION, sleeping in opium dens and defending all poets as divine creatures of the new century, but I like to think that sometimes you’re allowed to be a little pretentious. That’s what I like to think, anyway.
Soneto de la dulce queja, by Federico García Lorca:
Tengo miedo a perder la maravilla
de tus ojos de estatua, y el acento
que de noche me pone en la mejilla
la solitaria rosa de tu aliento.
Tengo pena de ser en esta orilla
tronco sin ramas; y lo que más siento
es no tener la flor, pulpa o arcilla,
para el gusano de mi sufrimiento.
Si tú eres el tesoro oculto mío,
si eres mi cruz y mi dolor mojado,
si soy el perro de tu señorío,
no me dejes perder lo que he ganado
y decora las aguas de tu río
con hojas de mi otoño enajenado.
Translated conveniently into English, Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint:
Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.
I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.
If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,
never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.
on
24 December 2009 with 2 comments
At two o’clock in the morning my mother turns on all the lights in the house. She wipes off her shoes and shucks off her lipstick. My mother breathes like the bogeyman, leaving shell-shaped marks of perspiration on the walls. She opens a drawer to tuck in the silk grey scarf and the matching elbow-length gloves that I sometimes steal from her. I spread the stitching open and sleep in her clothes, familiarize myself with the missing perfume I coveted as a babe, the velvet-lined pockets she keeps her peppermint candies. I imprint her milk sea smell onto my skin, and it feels as warm and as intimate as a scream, a womb.
My father pokes a searching hand, and then a head and a belly, from out of the covers. My parents had bought the covers in a furniture store off Dolores Marquez for cheap. I had found them tucked into their mattress upon coming home one weekday: cotton in ugly purple and yellow geometric shapes, vaguely reminiscent of a lava lamp. I couldn’t believe a household purchase had been made that I hadn’t been informed about, let alone one that screamed bachelor pad. My father had insisted that they had been my mother’s choice and my mother, from her perch in the living room, had yelled “Liar!”
My mother sits on the side of the bed and wraps a Chinese-print robe around herself. Her eye lids are baby raw and baby thin, the heliotrope of a halved plum. She starts talking about the restaurant she and the bus stop mothers had gone to. My father makes a sharp squawking sound, opening one eye, sclera glinting in the dark. He is woken up by the careening external factor of my mother’s white arms, my mother’s thick, black voice. When I was young, the rule of the house was that if I wanted a glass of water, if I had had a nightmare, if I had burst awake in the night with the conviction I was going to die then I’d wake my father up and not my mother. The knowledge came as I slithered out of a birth canal, with the perfume of my mother’s dizzy body.
She doesn’t have a problem waking up my father. He rubs his neck with his fingertips as she gets to the part about the drag queen from Ribaroja named Cruella Bin Laden. My father, the man in the corduroys and the neat crushed strawberry shirts and the glasses, does not know what a drag queen is. The next morning, as we’re brewing the exotic chocolate tea my mother had bought on a whim in a bazaar (it’s dank and unpalatable; we later have to drain it down the sink), he’ll ask me. When I tell him, he smiles. If it had been me or my brother at a drag queen venue he would would raised his sparse cat-like eyebrows and been uncomfortably, privately horrified. But it is my mother, so we know to look at each other with the understanding of compatriots. He opens the dry, brown mouth that built the sky my mother birthed for me. He lets his inside voice bloom into laughter I coveted as a babe along with my mother’s smell, sound I followed through halls like thermoluminescence. We watch my swimming, growing, baby mother, frictionless, careless creature be.
(image source)
on
5 December 2009 with 4 comments
All of a sudden, there is a burst of music. It’s less an unwelcome intruder and more an unexpected friend. The noise, pushing against the interlaced ossifications of my skull and, in a final effort, managing to break through and fall against grey matter and into my wholly satisfied arms, a lover who always leaves me first. I am a citadel of fixed proportions. I am a citadel, but sound never has to put up very long of a siege.
It’s Kishore Kumar. This means my father, but it also means something else. I find him in the office, sitting as neatly as one possibly can, hands folded like a schoolboy, back wide and rigid as though it were it were not the chair that was supporting his temporary leave from gravity but his own faulty body. I feel like finding every photograph I have of him and laminating them. He is wearing his new headphones, ones I recall cutting out of a hard plastic box with safety scissors. He’s plugged them into the wrong jack without realizing it, he doesn’t realize because he is completely deaf in one ear, he is smiling. In the next few seconds, I will grab his skinny arm and laugh at him, my ancient baby father. I will point out the right socket.
I think about mistakes, often. I like to address two parts of myself: a maker of mistakes and a corrector of them. I like to hear them fight it out in a trial where my two hands in sock puppets are LAW and ORDER, and then I like to play executioner. Here’s to shoving them both out of windows. I like watching a face evolve, and I think of the way mine did, when I made that breach between a moment where I thought I was fine and a moment where I knew I wasn’t, where time had stepped in and taken away my role as executioner. It’s a small mistake, not putting something in the right place, and why does it take something as silly as this for me to relate and fluctuate and detonate. And why did all those word rhyme, I didn’t want them to. There’s still Kishore Kumar all over the place. There’s still my father smiling. So I take a step forward.
(image source)
on
27 November 2009 with 2 comments
You know that triangle puzzle you learned in grade school one Monday when the teacher forwent the lesson plan for something a little more “out of the box”? Or maybe when your uncle Wallace drew it for you on the back of a shopping list, getting the proportions a little wrong, rounding the corners a little too much? Or maybe when you were twelve, in the last section of the children’s menu at Romano’s Macaroni Grill, underneath the maze and the crossword and the drawing of the yellow crème brulée? Or maybe you saw it scrawled on a bathroom stall in Magic Marker, taped above a dorm room microwave, used as a major plot device in a paperback you bought in the Charles de Gaulle airport?
Yes, that one, the one anyone with a soul screws up on the first try. I like the premise, but I am not quite sure why. Graphic puzzles involving repetitive motifs are somehow enjoyable to me. I think there is something very gratifying about the patterns. Patterns are pretty, because they are recurring and as such peaceful to the human eye, but they are not as safe as they seem. They multiply and evolve and build and live forever, like 1 divided by 81, which is admittedly an unaesthetic number, yes, but it’s lovely because it continues a connection, it never dies: 0.012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679012345679…
Chemical elements and crystallography and bee hives and the Vitruvian Man are shapely and regular and as close to perfection as nature can get. There’s something alluring in patterns, in the similarity between the two halves of a woman’s face, in that repetition. Sometimes there’s infinity there too, shrugging a shoulder in a background, constructing circles of an infinite number of sides. There’s something scary in patterns, to me at least, something very unsettling.
I think I will write a Lovecraftian horror story someday, and it will be about how marvelous and simultaneously horrifying the symmetry and beauty of patterns can be. If you think about it, everything that’s wrong about the world started because something deviated from the norm, turning the regular march of a pattern into a genocide. If you think about it, everything that’s right about the world started because something deviated from the norm, turning the regular march of a pattern into a revolution. I would like to know how these things happen, but I know I cannot. There comes a point where you cannot walk anymore. You bump against the walls of the world’s soft amniotic sac and you cannot do much more. Insurgents may cry, pressing the curlicues of their thumb prints into definite borders, wanting the space behind and in front and above and below and everywhere in between, the galaxy of things we cannot explain, the galaxy of things that don’t want to be explained. But we can’t guard over the creation of a nebula, or the coding of the proteins of an unborn human, these branching structures fracturing from the embryonic tree, the apex of a flower extending and and slicing and moving into a realm away from us, and the security of a pattern.
on
20 November 2009 with 2 comments
