"..Electricity and all colors were mine.."

He put me in photo albums;

Said,

“this is my favorite page.”

Three photos:

one sunset that made a melancholy town somewhat of a wonder, even for a few brief moment

one epic day his life was saved after a broken heart

one of him and I.

And, like most things in my life, parts of me feel I don’t deserve to occupy that space

*

I dwelled there, in his life like those photos, but like them they are just moments in time, forgotten, dusty with new experiences, I’m fading like those squares of paper in sunlight, out of his life quickly.

I can feel myself giving happy couples who share their dinners dirty looks, scowls of jealously of something I once had.

Or maybe I never had anything.

The night before I left he drank too much and flirted with boys. I wasn’t at the center of his world anymore, and I wouldn’t be from there on, and I knew. So I told him I was just going to go, expected him to chase after me because most boys would have.

But he is not most boys.

Fits of passion were ours every night for a short intense month before I moved on to a new life. I remember thinking…this is bad…why are you doing this to yourself when you’re about to move on?

So instead we spent nights exploring things new to both of us. His kiss was hesitant at first, unsure and unfamiliar with the taste of a woman, but he grew hungrier for it, insatiable and I loved consuming him.

*

“I’ve only read this poem aloud to one other person.”

I’m lying next to him, breathless and waiting for the first words. He flips open to a section of an old book with a damaged spine and stained pages, a photograph bookmarks it, a photograph I had taken with my Polaroid, of him. He cradles the book in his palms, almost as if he is holding a baby chick or delicate egg before breaking it into a pan before poaching. His fingers are nimble and careful, the way they are with cooking, and holding chopsticks, the same way they are when he holds pieces of fish between them to feed me. He is grace incarnate.

*

And now I’m angry, I’m sad and angry. Angry that the things I want to write about, I cannot find the eloquence to, but with him, words flow like blood from a fresh wound, in the way blood does, pulsing from an open gash where the heart pumps it through the body and out past severed skin.

Baby Blue Cont.

***

Bedroom doors seemed unreachable in the abyss of a dark hallway when I was younger. The ten foot journey was dark and confining, enveloped me until I reached my parents bedroom where my father would be flopped on one side, the sheet barely covering his shoulder, mouth open, exhaling sighs of exhausted sleep, my mother curled beside him, silent. The searing panic in my throat would lessen but the itch of apprehension hovers in from of me. If you blink, they may disappear. The warmth of two bodies on either side of me was my only consolation, the same warmth that penetrated me in their embrace.

But I did not have the same options anymore. “You’re a big girl, Halle,” my father would tell me. Pillow under my small arm, I pulled Baby Blue off of my bedspread it onto the stiff carpeting. Baby Blue absorbed the rest of the worry from my conscious as I there pillow situated towards my parent’s door so if I opened my eyes I would see the rise and fall of the bedding to know they hadn’t left me only waking if jostled from my father scooping me off the floor, Baby Blue wrapped like a sarong around my waist. He would swipe the bangs off of my damp forehead and out of my eyes, tell me he loved me and return me to my own sea of sheets.

***

I like to forget I’m an adult and that day I was 20 years old, alone and wandering through the children’s sections of Barnes and Nobel, see silhouettes of a little girl with a bob haircut ending sharply at her chin in blissful ignorance. The reading corner was a glare of reds, blues, yellows and greens, like a yard competing for the best Christmas lights display. Dog-eared books with thin, frayed bindings littered the alphabet carpet amongst the various sized pillows. The space between my eyebrows ached from sensory overload but the small of young breath kept me there.. Feeling displaces I picked a purple corduroy pillow to sit on, ignoring the unidentifiable stain near the center. I still wonder what made me sit there: maybe searching for the same excitement I had as a child settled in those spaces with my parents, where they would read books they could probably recite from memory.

“Ok, ok but Mommy has to go home to cook dinner soon, so make it a short one,” ten glossed pages of watercolors dotted with a few sentences of large, bold font. My mother would roll her eyes as I’d approach because she’d know the cover better than anyone that worked in those bookstores. I never even noticed if she bothered to pretend to read what she already knew. Wandering those spaces induces homesickness for a place that doesn’t exist anymore. We find ourselves wishing for simpler times of sidewalk chalk and sugary drinks. Maybe I’m full of shit because I can’t handle the thought of leaving the child in me behind.

***

Anatomy Cont. 4

*

You’ve come to know yourself through the touch of others, through the tongues of men and the hands of boys, through the embrace of friends and the singe of indifference. But as the water rains down on you from the showerhead you open your mouth to the falling droplets and close your eyes, sensing each part of your body. Water makes your skin slick, moves in all the angles and crevices that so many others have touched but you have hardly explored yourself. So your own fingertips begin at the fringe of your hairline moving down your temples and over the sweep of your cheekbones, stopping at your lips. You taste the salt of your fingers even as they are saturated with tepid drops from the falling water, your nails outlining your lips, bottom lip full and swollen, engorged with the flow of blood your heart pumps. The palpitations you feel with the heel of your hand as the water from the shower numbs your skin, and now both hands encircling your small breasts which you’ve grown to hate but now seem thriving and supple, imagining his larger hands upon them then moving down your waist, over the firm protrusions of ribs, and to your hips where you trace the outlines of black ink that is now skin. The water flows. You explore.

-*

It’s easy to become infatuated wit strangers. It’s easy to look at someone and imagine what their skin would feel like on yours. But I am most interested in taste. How would the inside of his mouth, his lips taste of the tip of my tongue where sensation is most sensitive. I cant to know how his sweat feels on the corners of my mouth

When I think of him I think of his lips on the back of my wrist, the tip of his tongue tracing the outside of the small tattoo below the line my thumb draws where is connects with my wrist, his lips in small movements and puckers, feeling their way up my arm, pausing where my elbow connects, where he will smell the scent of my perfume that catches there. It will be that way.

-*

If, perhaps, someone were asked to describe you, Halle, what do you suppose they’d say?

Well it depends on who you ask, a man? A woman? Someone who knows me or is sitting at a various angle of that coffee shop where I write? IS it a love? A friend? Someone who loves me but that I don’t know loves me?

That’s step one, Halle. You complicate things; twist them into little knots that won’t come undone, like a tangled necklace.

Well, shit, that defeats the whole purpose. I want to become undone, for someone to undo me.

She likes to let her underpinnings show. Wear shirts made of sheer fabric so that the shadow of dark lace of a strap or curve shivers throat the fabric, just enough so that when she bends or maneuvers a certain way, parts becomes more defining and others hidden.

She wants someone to capture her sadness in a photograph, so beautiful that is makes someone think about crying when they look at it but are unsure why. They get that sensation at the back of their throat when they see her face.

She is a girl who hates to wear shoes, finds them constraining as if her soul wants to burst through her soul. Takes off her sandals even when she is in a place where she knows she is staying for the time being, slips them off one next to another and sits crossing one leg under another one, outstretched, resting on whatever is available, chair, table, sometimes someone’s lap.

But she hates her feet because they have become her own personal stress ball, leaving them scratched and cracked heels, callused and tough like a man’s. ‘Sometimes she is embarrassed by them and sometimes she just doesn’t notice.

If you were to ask her certain things, things that could potentially draw up negative feelings and an even more negative answer, black and inky, she would avoid the truth.

“You’ve graduated, now what?”

She would tell you and her supposed plan but be terrified of the perpetual circle her life seemed to be going in thus far.

In her mind she’d look around the coffee shop and wish she were anywhere but here because she hates her “hometown” whatever the fuck that means be cause she wrote Sandusky off as her “home” a long time ago.

She hates how this place can douse ever her best moods like two licked fingers pinching out a flame.

-*

She thinks she ponders too much about her quirks…and what makes her happy, which, consequently, isn’t that much. She came to this perplexing conclusion like a hiccup.

She thinks about her quirks in terms of ideas for her writings. Because, as a writer, she know most material comes from life experience, but too infrequently her own,

She cannot go to sleep without knocking on wood first, of the headboard or bureau or leg of a chair, whatever seems to be around. In the darkness of her room, perhaps her own, she fumbles until she raps smooth wood with three knuckles.

She is afraid of her father and wishes her mother would accept or at least pretend to respect her output of creativity on her skin.

She enjoys the “interesting energy of obsession” because it makes her feel as if she has faith in something substantial, concrete, something to grasp onto.

She loves the eccentricity of foreign-ness and foreign men, accents like melted butter under the heat of flame.

She is unsure of the direction she is traveling in. Sometimes it frightens her or gives off the sensation of how to ride a bike with no training wheels for the first time…with no one holding onto the back of the rubber seat to steady her, help to keep her balance.

*

She likes the comfort of her own skin, walks around in her underwear when she’s alone in her apartment, or not alone as well. She cleans topless, letting the sun nestle on her bare shoulders and stoke her naked back.

Baby Blue

Baby Blue is gathered at my ankles when I wake up in the indigo darkness. The blue yarn is soft like the skin on the underside of my arm, right where joints meet to let it bend. Crocheted by my grandmother, its stitches are infused with the heat my body diffuses. Baby Blue swathes the bends of my body when I lie in sleep or sleeplessness, draped over my hip, wrapped around my arm, enveloping my legs. I don’t even let boys who are lucky enough to share my bed, share my blanket. The folds remind me of my grandmother’s forearms, the flesh supple, like rice paper, bathing me in the temperate beat of blood pumped through her body. In my twenties now I am still am constantly told it’s cute that I’ve named my blanket. I hate being called cute.

It’s hard to tell if the dampness on my cheek is from saliva that escaped my open mouth in deep sleep, or from leaking eyes. Searching for my cell phone lost in the furrows of the afghan, my fingers get tangles in the looped stitching but I find my phone and flip it open. The familiar cinch in my gut coils my torso in on itself as the ache of anxiety moves to my throat. I raise my head far enough off the pillow to confirm that my roommate’s bed is empty, un-slept in. The ache in the back of my throat turns into a dull burn. It’s quiet, too quiet for a college dorm suite and the repressed fear of abandonment begins to rise like froth on the surface of polluted waters. My blanket always lures me back to the loneliness of an empty room, as if the seclusion has become part of me, a thirst, and Baby Blue satiates it. A faint hiss and beep of a walkie-talkie moves past the other side of the door leading to the hallway. I pull Baby Blue over my head and curl into a fetal position.

***

As a young girl, falling asleep at night was a nightmare all its own when I was younger. When I finally did succumb to heavy eyelids, I’d wake up hours later with the legs of my pajamas wrenched up to my knees, purple with ruffles on the ankles. Those nights my bed felt too big, drowning in the swells of sheets. Teddy, my stuffed bear, would be missing so I’d have nothing to nuzzle under my chin for comfort. dart around the room. Unidentifiable masses and shapes creeping closer in the splotches of shadows on my walls every time I blinked, feeling misplaced. The cheap fabric of my pajamas stuck to my back.

A sound just short of silence during those restless hours was what terrified me the most. The echoing whirrs, pings, scrapes, the wails, moans and howls. I commanded my ears to recognize some sound, any sound: my mothers quick padding around the hallways, scurrying from one room to another, or my fathers, slow, methodical gate that paused every few seconds. I wanted to hear my mother’s sneeze that sounded like an exclamation mark or my fathers grumble as his pager stirred him from his sleep, rustling around to hurry to a 2 AM emergency room call. But when time ticked by with no familiar shuffles, sneezes or murmurs, worry balled my little fists around the bed sheet until my knuckles went numb. Finally, my legs would untangle themselves from the blanket and make the 10-foot journey to my parent’s bedroom door.

***

I still tiptoe into their room when I’m visiting home. The white blue wash of light from the digital clock reads 3 AM and it mixes with the wash of moonlight through my bedroom window. The pale glow is cold somehow, as if a draft has made its way through invisible crams in the wall. The edge of Baby Blue barely reached the crook of my knee- joint and I make my way down the hallway, pausing there in the open doorway. My father still snores like a motor in water and my mother is somewhere next to him, secreted by his large frame. The don’t touch and I make my way back to my room. Climbing into bed, I pull Baby Blue closer to the crook of my chin, feel childish and crawl back into a bed that’s missed me almost as much as they say they have.

***

Anatomy Cont. 3

Hair

It fell graceful and smooth down my back like a sheer curtain against a windowpane, just long enough to shroud my bare chest, ends resting barely below my small breasts. It was a part of me more than my fingers or toes, my limbs, a thick mass of stories and smells, touches and strokes. It made strangers linger, fingers dancing at their sides. Some hesitated to reach out and grab a handful of it, and some didn’t hesitate at all. I didn’t mind. I was interested in attention paid to a part of me that was actually dead. Because that is all hair is isn’t it?

*

The fragment of hair was braided into a small, woven line, fastened with a pastel ribbon, the color now undistinguishable from aged fading and the peripheries of it fraying. My eyes barely reach the open drawer that held old, small cardboard boxes once used for gifts or jewelry, maybe from my grandfather for my grandmother on her birthday or for anniversaries, compiled like the odds and ends that are stored in them. Little boxes, medium sized ones, and one so large that it barely fit in the drawer. The medium sized boxes held old letters with the larger box held newspaper clippings that I rubbed between my small fingers until they left a grainy dust. But the smallest boxes were my favorite. I could barely reach inside to play with the tarnished odds and ends that rested on top of tissue paper that my grandmother would replace every few months. She kept the lids on the bottom, the insides exposed. And that’s where the braided hair would lie.

The Internal

You think the pink pen is giving you bad luck. Pen color has become a mode of blame for another failure. You could construct a list of failures, things you have no one and nothing to blame but yourself. Not even the pink pen you are writing with, or rather writing nonsense with. Now it seems all that dribbles out of your pen is silly, contrite and full of blankness, ugly and smeared with ink stains from tears. You can almost smell the cliché and stagnancy that wafts unpleasantly like old laundry on the page yet you return to the same coffee shop every day, stare at scratched out words, sentences. You scratches out a part of yourself. The words of other authors frustrate you now because you know you can create work like theirs, one with your own loopy signature, writing that you would get both praise and criticism for, because you believed praise was nothing without rejection. It feels like sun on the back on your neck, this possibility for new words.

“I should have used the purple one,” you say to yourself, thumbing through your old notebook as pages of purple scratches of writing that you could be momentarily proud of, until you find some way to make it better, using words like “lithe” instead of “flexible”. Words that kept people reading for at least one more sentences.

Flush rises when you feels the professor in the chair across from you lift your head to stare. You know the professor is staring at you because you can feel it and because you have a sense for being a negative focal point. You realize you said that out loud, about the pen, and that other people are staring too. You live alone and have noticed that you have been talking to yourself much more. Or maybe someone you wish was there. Especially at night. You sing yourself to sleep.

You do not sleep in your bed anymore but on the floor atop a mound of pillows and a down blanket, sometimes a sheet or two, and always Teddy and Baby Blue. You will lie there at night, on the floor, next to your bed and curl into a ball. Sometimes you wonder what it was like in your mothers womb curled that way. Your hands almost cradle your breasts, rest crossed, your fingers tucked into your armpits, “to keep warm,” you think. Because no one will be keeping cold away tonight. You say this aloud often, into the creases of the blankets where the words become trapped, cold and blank. And try to imagine of someone’s pulse against your back in hopes that maybe the blood circulating through his veins would breathe life into your flesh, work through your spine and seep into your brain, maybe that warmth would short circuit whatever faulty connection was flowing through it now, so that you could just start over. You wish it were that simple, that all of the answers were locked away somewhere inside someone’s embrace. You have been so cold lately, so cold that it’s painful, sharp and gouging in your joints, blades on your skin.

You think of the nursing home where you must spent brackets of time with shells that were once people. Guilt nauseates you like the smell of the place, a smell and a sensation that makes you aware of her gag reflex in the back of your throat, so pungent you can taste it; your stomach wants to react violently. It is the guilt of a girl who consumes guilt for fuel. Guilt riddles you when you waves to Susie and smile, when you nearly vomit as you pass the cafeteria, banana cake that day for desert, and macaroni and cheese. The guilt stays when Tiny, with her violent tremors races up to you to kiss your cheek with a sloppy mouth; guilty because if you had a choice you would never spent one second of your life in a place that houses impending death. Guilty because you are frightened when you notice Susie’s roommate is absent, the opposite side of the room like a blank piece of paper, stripped bed, white walls, empty closet, cold. Susie tells you she died last night in the bathroom. You feel guilty when the old women take your hands, fingers white and stiff at the ends, dead cold. You don’t want to think about your skin someday being that warm and malleable, almost oily like dough. You don’t want to think about regressing back into child’s mind and body. And you don’t want to think about moving forwarded only to eventually, inevitably move backward again, because that seems to be a recurring theme in your life, and you hate those.

"The Wonder Years"

The matchbox house, color of melted butter, sat on the farthest edge of the patchy yard. My childhood home in Erie, Pennsylvania was just close enough to the stretch of road where the traffic interrupted its potential quaintness. Sometimes I hated that main drag of pavement. I want to remember that house lolling in the partial shade, a housecat curled in cutouts of sunlight streaming through half open shades. But the thick, saltiness of exhaust and the hiss of rushing traffic contradict that image. Still, you can’t help but let your attention linger when you passed its charming form, just enough for the yellow to hover in your memory.

Our yard was secured with a flimsy chain link fence, sagging as if made from wax. Tips of drooping branches grazed the metal looping the way my hair brushes the surface of pages of books I now hunch over in dim library light. My parents knew the fence wouldn’t hold back a meteor-sized motor vehicle but I’d like to think they believed I was the kind of child who wouldn’t dart into the middle of a busy street. How small my home looked from the outside; it always seemed to be veiled behind a partial shadow, a child shy for a photograph, concealing what ever they can with small hands and body parts. Did passers by see it the way I did? Was it as small to them on the outside as I knew it was on the inside? Almost impossible to live in because of its size. But that’s what made it cozy; it could be my own nook, when I wanted it to be.

A wooden deck hung off the side of the little house in such a way it was as if the weight of it would have sent the entire structure tipping to one side like a seesaw. I used imagined my home was my own life-sized playhouse when I was a toddler. I was its figurine, a dollhouse girl. Now I think of it as a memory box. When I peer inside, images rush back into me like currents of air that swirl around in the atmosphere. I can’t see them but they make themselves known in their own way.

Ink

Skin and Tattoos

Addiction, mutilation, defacing, unnatural, distasteful and appalling—my parents don’t see my skin as a private canvas the way I do.

Their bodies look like street art, graffiti on skin. Some look like modern versions of an Indian tribe with stretched earlobes, miniature tires fill the spaces where the hole was once small. Metal balls protrude from cheeks, lips and the crescents inside their ears like silver birthmarks. The man who is performing the operation on me has a ring through his eyelid. I can barely look at him without my eye twitching.

Little notes to myself in hieroglyphics, in code. My tattoos are symbols engrained. I may forget them, do not want these physical philosophies, reminders, to be rinsed away. I need them to be entrenched and extolled into my flesh like children’s handprints in dried cement.

I lie on my back and try to imagine the needle, the hair thin, ink filled needle and each individual puncture, curving, pivoting in and through my skin. My flesh is papyrus, rice paper and slate. The black soaks into the lines on the surface of my skin, unifies and combines with my blood. The ink is my blood and the blood had become ink. The traced contours will harden later, pink and rouge swollen edges from a protective shell because that is what flesh does. The crust of black will peel away and form something new and thriving, breathe in new air. It will be gummy, glossed. Ombre will be my new skin tone.

Heart Sublime- a doodle of a heart I created when I was in middle school littered all over my notes, notebook, desks, skin, other people, what have you. Uncomplicated, just a warped version of a heart with curled edges swirling into itself, intimate with its own shape on my left lower hip. I branded my skin for the first time October 2006 a few weeks after my birthday.

*

There is something sacred about flesh that makes us nourish it and abuse it, preserve it and make it vulnerable. It is clothing, shelter and life. It is a thriving canvas. It is eroticism incarnate.

*

Eros-a tiny heart with a bird-of-prey-like wingspan where my hip and right thigh connect, intersect. Sometimes if the light it just right it looks as if it will lift and take flight off the plane of my body. This one was an accident at the end of November 2006.

*

The smell of vanilla and wet bark trying to burn has gathered in my nostrils. With each inhale, some kind of spice, cumin maybe? Or ginger? Tickles the back of my throat and leaves the corners of my mouth tasting like Indian Tea when I run my tongue over my lips, flaking from the dehydrated November air. It’s the smell of something manufactured, unnatural made to smell natural. The kind of smell that seeps into clothing and settles there. My hair will soak it in and smell like a spice rack. The tender skin on the underside of my arms and the crook of my neck where I dab perfume will itch with it too long after I’ve left this place.

Lo

vE and Heart Sublime Jr. were both engrained into me simultaneously summer of 2007, during the last week of July. The heart on the inside of my right wrist is a mini version of Heart Sublime. Accompanying the first tattoo on my left hip is my signature Lo/vE.

*

Someone will tell me I smell like his mother’s gingersnaps. Or maybe snicker doodles. And I’ll shiver from the proximity of his nose barely grazing the top of my head then lingering behind my ears. His exhale will be lukewarm against the backs of my ears when he tells me I smell like baked goods while he rubs the new inky scar on my foot. It’s supposed to be bandaged but I’ll let him remove the greasy ointment gauze, pulling skin with tape that held it there. I break rules to let him touch me. And what is it about his nostrils inhaling the aroma of my hair that suggests an intimacy more tantalizing that is palms gliding over exposed skin?

*

Agape- I borrowed the image from a street artist named Bansky who is a well-known pseudo-anonymous English Graffiti artist. His work is usually encompasses a dark satire that speaks to issues like politics, culture, and ethics. I think we are supposed to take what we want from his art, make our own definition and that’s what I love about him. On my foot is a stencil-ish figure of a little girl letting go of a heart shaped balloon. Anniversary of my first, October 2007

*

I recognize the burning cannabis laced with the tang of spice that still lingers around me as it trails another customer who plunges into the bulging couch inches away from my thigh. Black dreadlocks, and a ring through his nostrils, he is a human bull. My inhales send me back to the night before as my nose becomes used to the fumes and I finger the fresh blister on the knuckle of my thumb, stretching sore over the creases of the joint, raised begging to be burst like a puss filled bubble. The though suddenly nauseates me because it reminds me of the wound about to be left of my foot. My last one bled black ink and mixed with milky secretions of my skin healing itself. He cracks gum between his teeth. I don’t even flinch.

*

Infinite Love- I was in a lucid state of consciousness when I made the appointment for my freshest one and didn’t realize what I was doing until the needle punctured and vibrated on my skin. The infinity, figure eight symbol barely grazed the side of my left breast and lays diagonally on a slender rib. A blip of a little heart hovers above the center of the symbol where the lines curve into each other. I remember being afraid that the needle would scrape against the bone surface. One trail of dampness slid down my face when he was finished.

*

I’ll tell you I've always lived my life by the idea that love can set anyone or anything free. There is no better way to express that for me. Think about it. When you love someone, or something for that matter, a transformation occurs every time. You become more aware of yourself, more vulnerable, and that vulnerability makes you subject to change. The change we experience every time we love and lose love for anything or anyone in our lives, is priceless because change involves a gamble but that risk that comes with it, for me, has become more and more worthwhile every time. And that's just the beginning of what love can do. Anne Carson puts it best when she says “It puts wings on your soul.”

*

Didn’t their mothers tell them not to listen to music so loud? The shriek and moan of guitar rifts are vibrating the wood floor my feet rest on. The skin on my feet is brown, the color of a paper bag, flawless. Not for long. I don’t like this music, can’t understand what they are saying or singing, no, screaming. It’s a car crash to my ears. The notes and lyrics collide with each other, shattering the musician’s voice in to shards that pierce the air. I wonder if the volume is set at deafening to mute the buzz of the machines, to calm nerves, or eliminate the option of changing my mind. I’ve been here before. When I hear the motor whir my pulse thuds in time with the bass, making my ribs quiver, or maybe that’s just the stereo system. I like the buzz, the whir. It’s intoxicating, releases adrenaline, feeding my heart, my nerves, my senses. Everything is magnified.

*

Twenty minutes to sterilize the pieces that will pierce my skin a million times, puncturing layers, tearing pores, discoloring pigments. The minutes fly because I’m observing the people, the cubicles with blinds drawn and the hardware in the glass case. The same three people move back and forth. They all work here, I think. Shuffling behind the counter back to the cubbyholes, an artist’s office with closed blinds.

*

I’ve been through this before so I didn’t need the speech about lightheadedness or nausea. I didn’t need the test round on my skin to get used to the sensation. He tells me I’m a pro and I roll my eyes. I like it though, no one expects me to be this kind of girl.

Breasts:

“They are the right size for your body, Halle.” He tries to remove my arms crossed in front of my chest, hands cupping the small masses that sat there, full but hardly filling my palms. I can tell you about my breasts in the negative, what they are NOT. They do not sag but they are not perky. I do not have the cleavage that peeks over low v or scooped neck lines like two swollen fruits ripe and plump with juice, quivering with each movement.

*

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful but if you want your tattoo there,” he points a round pinky to the swatch of flesh I’ve exposed from lifting the hem of my shirt. “You’re probably going to have to take it all off.” And with that I peel the thin cotton t-shirt the rest of the way over my head, turned my back to him and reach around my chest to flick the clasp of my bra. The garment hangs loosely around the crook of my elbow joints like its hanging on a close line as I cross one arm over my small chest. Letting the straps slip over my wrists, the bra falls to the floor at rounded toe of the black leather army boots belonging to the man who is about to see more of my body than many boys have. Barely a reaction crosses over his face as he turns to hunch over his station preparing the ink and needle. Somehow it is easier for me to be exposed to strangers.

Music to My Soul

But that is how lives go, I suppose, in full circle, in spires that whirl around each other, like those propeller leaves that helicopter to the earth spinning on silent notes. I suppose I see my life in refrains and chords, improvised at times, jumping off the scale, cleft curling into a question mark. Where is the little girl who sings with her father? Belting into the air uninhibited by untamed notes, out of tune. A girl, I think, a woman becomes untamed that way through inhibitions and best friends, singing with her father and then her best friend, driving on the highway to nowhere, where the windows are open and she sounds and smells beautiful like humid air after it rains and damp flower petals, where confidence looks, tastes, and smells the same, like setting sun and rain and leftover perfume, where her best friend and father have the same effect on her, where music spins back on itself and has made her emerge from a cocoon of girlhood to womanhood or somewhere in between…she thinks…and sings.

The road streams by in streaks of color, as if my fingertips out the window, sailing on the high def air are painting the greens and aquas on a canvas of atmosphere. The weather is on the brink of perfect, sun peeking behind clouds, then emerging to cover my bare feet resting on the dashboard. Becca snaps her fingers with a lose shoulder roll to the beat of the music that surrounds us in an aura of rhythm. Nothing matters, the campus is far behind the exhaust we’ve left in our wake and the open road greets our voices and gyrations on leather interior.

“What is this?! I love it!

“Girltalk. They are coming next month, the big concert.”

“Holy shit. They are amazing. And this” she points to the radio “this is our song for sure.”

Girltalk’s song Bounce That blares through the speakers with its familiar melodies that blear together, songs of other artists mixed into a sound garden of rap, R&B and pop. Every beat is different and a bit off but perfect for our style, our newfound “filthy gorgeous, I don’t give a shit” confidence that we could always taste on the tips of our tounges but never indulge in until now.

Becca makes me think of my father, the way she sits with her collarbone raised, chin slightly up, mouthing words to the songs we know, itching to remove herself from the confines of the car cab when the music becomes particularly body moving, an air of confidence that is intoxicating. But that is what music does. That is what a best friend does. That is what the open road, open windows, the smell of exhaust and a hint of sweat all do. And when it all becomes aligned like planets in the sky, you feel as if the music you dance to, you sing to, you live to, has all been written with you in mind.

*

You go back, Jack, do it again

Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round

You go back, Jack, do it again…

My father’s 1997 black Porsche Carrera cut through the atmosphere like wire through clay. The salty aroma of new leather was ever present each time I slid into the curved passenger seat, as if the car had been bought newly furbished the day before. The sound of the leather creaking and cinching as my father adjusted his body behind the wheel, hugging the arc of his slightly reclined body. He babied the metal creature as if it were his second child. The black finish had an iridescent tone that shone like a peacock feather in the sun, where the body curved like the tattoo of silhouette of woman’s body on a man’s muscular bicep, streamlined with every maneuver. Glossed like fresh sweat I always hesitated in reaching for the door handle, afraid the color would rub off on my skin. But one inside and accelerating through the atmosphere, my father and I squinted through the wind that left our faced stinging and pink.

“Dad, play the song!” My voice straining over the accelerating engine. My father was not a man who was unbridled. The muscles in his face always clenches around his jaw, temples and neck, straining, bracing for the next source of anxiety or stressor. But when he sang, something melted away from him, his muscles softening like wax of a lit candle. I never remember singing with him. I knew the words, saw them if I closed my eyes, glowing like neon lights. But I just wanted to watch my father and hear his voice, melodic instead of stern. The music seemed to un-thaw a section of him that had rusted over from neglect. Signing rubbed the tarnish away. And now when I hear him sing the tension in my chest that sometimes comes without warning in his presence, releases like stretching fabric.

“Times are hard

You’re afraid to pay the fee

So you find yourself somebody

Who can do the job for free

When you need a bit of lovin'

Cause your man is out of town

That’s the time you get me runnin'

And you know Ill be around.”

Steely Dan was my father’s favorite band. Plastic CD cases of their various albums were always stacked in the glove compartment when I released the latched looking for a piece of gum or sunglasses to borrow. There was a kind of life, vivacious energy in the songs Dirty Work and Do It Again that my father embodied when we listened to the music. He became the lyrics curving his mouth over each tone and syllable, became the tempo, the zing of electric guitar, clang of piano, drone and squeal of the trumpet and sax when he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel, sometimes dropping one and to his knee to switch up the beat. I tasted that music on my tongue, bitter, sweet, salty, sour, the notes hit each taste bud, and part of my father fed into me with it.

Don’t Take Me Alive and Deacon Blues fill the space of my RAV 4 when it’s warm enough to drive with my sunroof open. I can smell my father’s cologne even when the melodies float audibly, transforming into a trace of him. The thickness of the harmonies like dark chocolate in my mouth. Other lines are smooth with a bite, like a glass of white wine. Some are dark and earthy, rich, more like a rouge, nearly plumb red. I drink it in until I’m tipsy from the music and I forget the day I might have had. The songs have never changed. I have.

“I have one for you, Dad.” Deacon Blues scrolls across my iPod screen. My father waits for the first chords. When they come he slaps the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and smiles.

Ill learn to work the saxophone

Ill play just what I feel

Drink Scotch whisky all night long

And die behind the wheel

They got a name for the winners in the world

I want a name when I lose

They call Alabama the crimson tide

Call me deacon blues

Anatomy Cont.

Legs

Stature is an illusion. I fool people with my height. They believe I am slightly taller because of a long stretch of lower limbs, but my stature is held in my torso. Sometimes I wish I had longer limbs, to balance out my proportions. But I like how my legs seem to paint the air when I walk, how I slide through space and if I were to turn around I’d find a path of color behind me. The amount of strength they must have. How they support the weight of my whole body on them.

My legs can run for miles through open fields in the rain, they outlast my lungs and keep going even when I can no longer breathe. Synchronized swimming molded the muscles into ellipses. In the water they held me buoyant, spinning like eggbeaters beneath me. I loved to lie on my back in the water and watch my leg stretch straight above me, see the water glide down my calf, drip off my pointed toe in a ballet leg.

Willowy and bowed they are powerful, store their fuel in my hips that I can feel seep down my muscles when I’m dancing, or when I have my thighs locked on either side of his hips.

“God I love it when you do that thing with your legs.”

“What thing?”

“This thing.” He pats sides of my thighs that wrap around his hips and squeezes my calves that cross over one another behind him, trapping him so I can keep him for myself. I grasp his waist with my legs.

“Yeah, watch out they are stronger than you think. Try to get away.” He makes a feeble attempt.

“Nope, Can’t.”

“You didn’t even try.”

“I don’t want to get away.”

*

They grew curled inward before I learned to walk. My father noticed how I sat on the floor with Bunny in my lap, toes pointed into each other, heels out. In my walker my knees butted together as I attempted to stand or shuffle a crossed the floor or grass. He never discussed details but there are photographs of me bound in casts from waist to foot to make my stubborn legs grow outwards. And now, sometimes I find myself standing with my big toes facing each other, knees butting against each other as I fidget. I like the way it feels, my own skin on skin, the nubs of my kneecaps smooth from baby oil and lotion.

But they are unreliable and stubborn, go weak at times I need them to support me, carry me away, hold me erect. They can’t keep balance on slick ice and send me back first slamming into the ground between classes. They aren’t friendly with stairs and instead of carrying my body up them they become confused, miscalculate the distance from on step to the next and I trip up then thump down a flight in front of faculty members.

My legs were never graceful enough to be a ballerina, couldn’t jump high enough for volleyball nor were quick enough for track. Sometimes I would hide them, became self-conscious about the circumference and jiggle of my thighs, the deep lines from skin stretched too far. The skin on my shins and outsides of my thighs is sensitive and supple, bruises easily like a peach or other too ripe fruit.

Torso and Stomach

Two lone freckles placed to the left of my belly button, and another just above it, make a constellation of birthmarks. When I am naked and bare I pivot in all directions in my reflection to scrutinize my torso below my chest, flat and smooth like someone ran their hand over a pile of sand to level it. Blocks and striations of sculpted muscle from years of early workouts make my muscles show through my skin like a piece of meat covered in cellophane when I lie on my back or toss and turn in bed.

It begs for fingers to prod at it when it is flexed, begs to have those same fingers trail down the length of my stomach in some near future bedroom encounter, his callused grip around my waist maneuvers me where he wants to blow a trail of breath down the curved and lines of my torso and into my bellybutton.

But I wont let him venture further because I hate the sack flesh that lies across my hips. I hate the mound that lies just below my belly button so when I sit down my arms automatically hug that space in case someone were to see it peeking over the waist of my jeans. It is impossible to get rid of even with 2 AM sit-ups when I can’t sleep. Something about it makes me pray his eyes are closed even if he says, “A little pudge is cute.”

Feet and Toes

Men find excuses to rub their thumbs across the permanent black silhouette. They ask me why, why there, what does it mean? I think I may enjoy their touch more than their interest. They are touching a part of me I’ve tried to hide. It is their touch that cultivates my acceptance to my ugly feet.

But I hate them, convinced they are abnormal and deformed, knotted and twisted, with toes shaped like suction cups, like I’m an amphibian. I burry them under sheets, pillows, blankets when others are in the room. I’ve meticulously shaped and paint my toenails cherry chocolate at an attempt to make my feet more attractive, but I fail and pick at my toenails when I’m nervous, so much that I am missing a few on each foot. My second toe is longer than my big toe, which has been pointed out to me numerous times, and I curl them into the sole of my foot to hide them.

I wish I could be the woman with beautiful feet who can wear silver bands around their her third toe. But the shape of my foot is blocky and rigid, as if I’m looking at an outline I may have traced of it. They are weak, flat and sore from an inherited arch defect. My classmates made fun of the plastic orthotics I had to wear in my shoes when I was first starting school. Even with the apparatus long since lost or stored away, my feet are no better.

The shades are pulled up in the room he leads me into. I can see out into the main room. The man behind the counter is peering into the cubbyhole. There are stars on his cheeks. My feet are ticklish. I forgot about that until he is rubbing my foot with liquid disinfectant the color of urine. I twitch and giggle. He looks at me and smiles, the mint colored snakes stretching on his neck. “Ticklish?”