After Gertrude and Opal
Fireflies
The Ayahuasca hit her hard wobbling back down the concrete street, the Amazon. They held hands, the bisexual the Canadian and her, a silly white gringa with hair sapped maple brown. She saw worms, Technicolor worms and worlds like never before. The world wasn’t so fresh, it was strange and black and it was silhouettes against a starving sky, lush with lights. The lights flickered on and off around her, more peeping than warning. Maybe she should’ve known. She lay on the pavement, reaching out to hold them, reaching out to hold their hands, to grasp at something. Butterfly. They called her. She felt the layers of earth, the door after door after door of new worlds below her. She was propped up, she was supported by all that stuff. And then she began to sing.
Post-its
She left them everywhere, those little yellow squares of memory. They filled and filled and filled with words she liked, lists she needed, other people’s genius. The words spilled down the cube, too heavy, weighted at the bottom. That toomuch fullness that crowded them together like garbage collecting. She left them on the mirror, to stall the drunk, to halt the tears, to save her figure. She left them lonely on her desk, piles and piles of them, waiting to be used, waiting to be filled with that long pen. She left them on the walls, the ones around her desk, she left them on her computer, 3×5 wisdom, he said. Nuggets of, Remember this, Remember this, open up the frame to look through at the world. See what’s inside. Now write.
Alarm
Consequential sound bites. Howling in your dreams, I was walking down the snowbank hugging my tired frame wondering so hard why how could it be? My birthday? Fuzzy morning, don’t open your curtains, the shades of your lids, if you open it begins. Snooze. What was it I wanted to write about? I squinted and sought to squeeze the genius out, lay back, arms over head did I wear clothes to sleep? Howling wake up snooze. I’m getting there, I’m getting hotter. If you concentrate on your own skin you can make the temperature rise. It helps if you’re naked and in company. Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. Searing sleep, wake up.
Hands
His were never as soft as his but I suppose that never was the point. His were round like pillows against any harm. He gestured so rapidly I suppose the wind may have calmed them, puffed them out like sails blowing towards morning. They were the type you liked to hold and pet and touch. You’d call it sensuously, electric. Now his were harder, calloused with climbing chalked and spicy from Cajun music all night. He had freckles and wore rougher stuff, those were the ones you liked to rub, they were the ones you wanted on you. The ones that didn’t let go so easy.
Age
I thought of him with his books. He sat still all day, didn’t own a couch. Something hard to sit on, maybe an old chair but none to cushioned. He sat with that funny hat on, one hand poised on his cane, looking at his walls. His piles of books, the mountains of dead white men with a few colors struggling in between to hold up the piles of books. He stuffed himself inside them, teetering on his moving ladder to get to the best, the one he really hankered for. He didn’t eat much, maybe celery and cold soup, something easy on the palate, something easy for his slight frame. He knew where they all were, every one by touch. He ran his fingers over the spines of his friends and whispered their names, blind man. He read to me, never coughed when he spoke. Have you ever read Eliot’s Four Quartets?
