late luminescence

There is something cathartic about talking into nothingness. Into something that always gives you an answer, unsatisfactory as it may be.

photo: sunset and phone lines silhouette in Arcadia, CA 

photo: turtles at the Santa Anita Westfield Mall Promenade in Arcadia, CA

Middle, origin, we all start at (0,0)

and extrapolate outwards, Heartbeats and limbs and splayed hair on our pillowcases, My fingertips kiss my eyelids how soft sleep, rest, blinking, is. It’s hard to tell if we’re ugly up close. I eye the mirror and inspect the eclipses

Of my eyes, matte I don’t understand how some people’s glow-- maybe they’re all werewolves.

I’m in a phase right now
more moon than sun,

Spastic wrecks when they realize
that they are tired of burning.

My graph paper catches on fire,
& I make a wish before I blow the candles out

old iPhone cameras and beaming faces.
once, every year this day,

self-centered.

Don’t mind me too much--

I don’t know if I believe in angels anymore.

I poured Cupid into paper wings and when the origami butterfly didn’t fly, I gathered rainwater from my eyes and tucked heaven’s silence into my ribs. But ire metastasizes, and my blood now cries pearls for the fallen angel, risen cynic, an odd metalloid of child and higher being.

I metamorphose subconsciously, and the half of me that is my mother’s hair and cheekbones tuck away my soft parts in fear that I will metabolize them and self-destruct, utterly alone. She needn’t have worried. Fly away hairs are cherubs that hold their bowed promises to baby skin, powdered sugar that tastes like superfluous nothing.

So I will still have my brownie, if only in teenage defiance.

I imagine my ancestors’ blood trembling beneath my skin, graveyards roiling as they look down in disappointment clutching their paper money and incense tangerines. I run dizzy going outside myself while trying to be present, because I am afraid of only knowing life from afar. Of painting waltzes I will never dance, of becoming an eager sacrifice for people who don’t care to know my face. Reflect in my stream of consciousness, a ribboned mirror in which I split reality into ripples that will never lead to anything but dead flowers and a shriveled aisle of petals long gone.

There’s an old riddle with legs of 4 and 2 and 3, and though obsessions with “underground music” are futile, I excuse myself because some boxes aren’t worth losing myself in. It is all I can do to put warmth in their crinkled eyes, a small lift in the edges of their lips. Lies, lyres, lying still. I look over my shoulder and there is no one.

I used to want to write a memoir, because it would mean I had a life worth reading. Would a teenage girl look up to smile at a wall, eyes shining with lamplight, screaming in all the silent ways one does when they see themselves articulated perfectly in poetic prose? But now that I finally have stories to tell I gather them haphazardly to my chest, and feel a vague sense of loss as they silently waterfall from my overflowing arms to the abyss, making each leaflet more precious by the second. I will forget, and I do not know yet how to forget gracefully.

I tell myself I like the way my brain is, cluttered and disorganized, like my bedroom and my desk and my life. I am complacent in my sheets, but it is a rainy day and nonograms (which the Notes app apparently cannot fathom at this moment) make more sense than God.

People spend lifetimes folding experiences into paper, into abstract sculptures of origami and nonsense.

I don’t know if I believe in angels anymore. But when I become drunk on the night, hiding from starlight, I really wish I did.

Because I don’t know if I like being a skeptic anymore, either.



Posted on: https://youngwritersproject.org/node/38857

Another old piece I wrote in January for the 30th episode (I believe?) of Line Break with Iris. I used three kernels of her ideas (and she used one of mine for a different poem) to make this. They were the first line (I don't know if I believe in angels anymore), the idea of ancestors disapproval, and something along the lines of "I wanted to write a memoir, but now that I can I don't wanna anymore". Still ridiculously proud of this, although honestly magic 2 am deserves the credit :)