The Sound Of Forgetting
A poem about me....
I am more than my thoughts that pop like bubble wrap,
Chewing gum,
and jaws, coerced to align with beauty,
Fifth grade science project I never did
and sunday school lessons,
Mentos and diet Coke in the church parking lot
Is an example of god's love,
How it bleeds into the cracks of hot concrete
Down our legs at the dinner table
“This is why we don’t drink soda”
because it rots your teeth,
Like the pictures mounted on dentists walls
That would haunt my brother and I’s dreams
It molds your mind like the television
In the hospital corners
And late night projections that danced across my attending face
My decaying brain is patched by ducktape discussions.
Decaying brain, bandaged in tape measures
and weighed by screens.
“My destiny is my destruction
my god is my stomach”
Habits and thoughts assure a preacher's tongue.
“Broken, that’s how the light gets in.” says the one my father wishes he was.
There are so many I wish to be.
So many souls to reflect,
I’m a one-way mirror with a self on each side.
I am the way the world moves
The French lyrics I do not understand
Growing shadows
And chipped driveways
The hard wheels of skateboards
And the cotton Sunrise.
I am the end of summer that freezes at night
The sound of forgetting
flowers in the windowsill
Bending with the weight of sunlight
I am crying poets
And sinking paint
I am the eruption of vinegar volcanoes
And the blood of fizzing Coke,
Filling these chasms of asphalt
empty and broke
Adjectives of Flavor
I don’t know, maybe I was never really that hungry anyway.
Jalapeno cheesy bread from that woodfired place on third used to haunt me on nights we’d get drunk in the living room. This was after my going out phase.
“I don’t drink to feel alive anymore, I drink to feel dead.”
“Deep.” As you took a long chug of your watery beer.
And I tried to contemplate the ashe of smokey bread on my taste buds. Anything to take away the bitterness of this nasty, nasty beer. Anything to fill the holes of emotion the alcohol can’t seem to reach. Fill it with the chalky sweetness of my mother’s fondant hands, the carbonation of my grandma’s orange, sodapop pool. The ninety nine cent tomato soup cans I ate in my dorm room, the clamour of being alive, dwelling in the hallway outside, as I stared at the gibberish of my calc homework and the poster above my bed, Sublime 40oz. To Freedom. The way the ripped corners scratched my wall from the air of my open window, and the taste of metallic tomato against my cheeks served to inundate me with unforgivable nostalgia, with pain, longing.
Now the longing returns, but in different forms, and I am hungry, but not for anything I’ve chosen, I never choose right. My cracks of feeling are sealed up and glued together by the meat I requested extra tender, the fluffy cake, the savory shrimp, by the adjectives of flavor. I push my plate away and contemplate how I’ve always been full, until now.
Just
When I enter the basement laundry room the warmth from several running dryers settles over me like summer as a child. The bleach we use on the rags, the humidity from the damp linens fills the room with thoughts of the swimming pool. The plunge that saturates you in blue, and as you lay, drying off on the concrete, everything’s quiet. The wind places your hair across your face. Like a sheet on a clothesline, the wind has the potential to blow you anyway it wants and all the people you love or loved in the past will keep you pinned to the mental souvenirs you have hammered into the ground. These are the thoughts that comfort me when I can think of nothing but dark.
“Morning” mumbles Ashley from the corner, she is filling her bucket with gloves and a bottle of liquid Commat.
“Morning Ashley”
“How are you?” Like someone who is trying to speak English, or a child who is trying to talk, Ashley is difficult to understand. I assume she says a one syllable word for “I’m awake, I’m alive, and I’m here”. I assume she says “good.”
“That’s good. how many units do you have today?” I ask.
Without looking up she pulls her crumbled worksheet from her employee jacket “oh three” she says.
“Not bad.”
When she looks up I can see the bright blue drugstore mascara that is coated on her eyelashes like an oil painting. If she told me she was forty, I’d believe her. If she told me she was twenty one, I’d believe her.
I wait for her to ask me why I’m here.
“How many do you have?” She putters out.
I unfold my worksheet, I have three, but it will only be two if I’m lucky. “Three”
She nods her head and I wait for her to ask me why I’ve chosen this place. I wait for her to beg me to run back to you, to go write down what I know, all the wisdom I’ve obtained in my years. For the chili recipe she had on New Year’s Eve.
She walks to the fridge and places her tupperware of casserole on the bottom shelf, below Juan’s six pack of Diet Coke.
I stand still by my bucket of cleaning supplies and wait for her to ask me what I know, for all my fleeting advice. I wait for her to hug me, to reassure a preacher’s tongue.
“Have a good day.” She says as she creaks open the heavy door and exits, letting in the nine below temperatures with her. What a crummy, generic collection of last words to hear.
There are wooden lockers on the opposite side of the dryers, I take off my boots and feel the cracked concrete below my cold, sock covered feet. I put on my white tennis shoes, they remind me of my grandparents. I place my boots on my backpack in an upper locker and secure it with a deadlock. I trust everyone here, but “it only takes one” as my parents would say. Then I place the key on the counter beside the refrigerator. I wonder who will find it, who will claim my five year old boots as their own when I'm gone.
I yawn quietly to myself and ponder the morning. Who am I? What’s my name? I don’t have one, not really. Are these really the last pair of jeans I’ve decided to wear? I almost cry over the thought and think about the all pink leotard and piano key leggings I tried to wear every day in kindergarten. I think of the blue of Ashley’s mascara, I think of my mother. I think of my last word…“three.”
“Three is the number of artists.” You told me, and now I sit here, it’s not profound, I’m just trying to find all the places where thirds fit together. Paintings on coffee shop walls, my two siblings and I sitting in the backseat of our childhood vulvo. A clover. The trinity. Our two bodies intertwined, our one soul in the middle. The panel of windows at my grandparents cabin, so large they let in the forest. Carly’s cigarette everyday at three o’clock.
“Something to take the edge off” She’d tell me.
Jesus’ death.
I stand up and grab my cleaning bucket, my list says Unit B3 first. This is all the way across the snow blown property. Maybe I’ll finally let the wind blow me wherever it chooses, just for a moment, just for a second, just.
Mother’s Captured Breath
It’s odd, how things have fallen into place. How they fit together like legos. How this has been erected from the ground, several balloons. My tenth birthday party, Tony Mendisco’s sweaty unibrow and the prepubescent facial fuzz that looked up to the sky as he cut the red, white and blue of my mother’s contained breath from their chair stakes.
“Quit it, Tony!” his mother, a fat lady sitting at the pic-nic table, slurping up ribs from her flimsy paper plate.
Sharing a birthday with America has always resonated in a frequency of inconvenience. My dislike of barbeque and neighbors that scattered against the backyard, eating my American flag birthday cake with plastic grins.
“You’re a true patriot aren’t ya, kiddo?”
“Cállate la boca ahí dentro!” A man yells out.
My cell is filled with an empty moan that comes from next door. What they have done finds its way through the cracks of the ceiling and drips onto them, I assume it stings.
The things that I’ve done accumulate in a puddle on the floor. Murky and cryptic in nature. At first this mystery did not frighten me, but as it grows, fills the cell slowly, threatens to suffocate me, I’ve grown afraid of it’s ambiguity. I thought this was a mistake, but as the hours grow longer, I’ve realized it’s not, that I am here for a reason. My body shakes with remembrance, while my mind sits in wake.
As the language of the unknown swims around me, I feel myself forgetting even more words, even more times. The darkness, the coldness of my cell, the Mexican flag hung in the hallway, is in exact opposition to the only memory sitting in my brain. The town park where my father is leaning over a public grill and the small light from the coal glows up his July kissed face, my breath playing over the screams from the other children’s game of tag which I’ve climbed into a tree to hide from. The fireworks will start soon and I like to be alone. Where has this day gone?
These memories find themselves in the spaces of my head that do not hurt, they pound too, but in a different way. The yelling from the guards down the hall frightens me when it approaches suddenly and slams me into the hallway.
“Levántate!” He kicks me. “Levántate!”
Him and another bring me to my feet, I begin to feel all the wounds that have been inflicted on my body and I feel frightened over what I do not remember, how I ache. All I can see in my eye is my parents and their friends and their children’s heads from the tree up above, how they speak in whispers of summer.
The men fling me down the hallway. One man holds a gun to my head while the other puts a sack over my face, I weep behind the veil. How far have I fallen from this tree I was perched in? The fireworks will start soon. Beat in time with my headache.
“Oh cállate y dinos!”
Somehow I understand this, but I do not speak.
“Dinos!”
“Que que?” I say
They grunt and punch me in the stomach, “Ya sabes.”
“Yo no.” and then I do, how I’ve fallen from that tree into my pool of unknown. How it’s cleared. How I remember what I’ve done.
“Si?” And I feel the gun press into my forehead. “Si?”
I know what I need to say, what I have to say, but I love to be alone too much, I love the way they sound when I’m in the trees, I love the way they look through the silhouette of leaves and branches, how they illuminate the sky into day. The only good part about my birthday being the same as America’s, I pretend it’s all for me.
“Si?” and the gun presses in even further.
“S-” and before I can finish the fireworks have cut me off. They’ve popped like buttery popcorn. They’ve lit up the sky just as I used to remember. Looking down I watch the bright eyes of everyone else looking up, they’re beautiful too, truly, they’re free.
My Legal Name
“Hello,” my voice comes through the line in one of those fake ways, like the person on the other end could never know me. I have secrets, I don’t have any secrets.
“Hello, may I speak with Jannet?”
“Speaking,” I say. This is what people in movies say.
“Hello, Jannet, how are you?”
I know this woman doesn’t know me. No one uses my legal name unless they’re trying to sell me something. I’m my middle name to most people, Scout. Yes, like from To Kill a Mockingbird, no, I’ve never read it, stop asking. “Fine, how’re you?” The nervousness I felt picking up this unknown number has subsided into the soothing woman’s voice.
“I’m doing well. I’m Nancy Cooglar with USC, in Denver, I see you are interested in attending our college, I’m calling to answer any questions you might have.”
“You know what? I don’t think I have any at the moment, thanks though.” I didn’t remember looking into USC anyway.
“Of course.” she says, “we’d love to have you at our school.” And I can feel her smile traveling over the miles of wire, or satellite, or whatever, right to my ear.
“Thank you,”
“Of course, call me back on this number if you need anything.”
And before we hang up, “why would you like me?”
She hesitates for a moment and I know I’ve cast my line in a pond full of fake fish, but she’s here and I’m listening, and her voice feels good in my ear.
“Well, Jannet” she hesitates, “here, at USC, we’re always looking for the most upstanding students, you’ve clearly proven yourself to be just that.”
A wind up my line to find a shiny, plastic piece of uniform response hanging from my hook. But I’m Jannet to this woman, I am not Scout, the average grade student who pretends not to be overly sensitive. I’m not Scout, who never cleans her room and sits on her couch watching TV on the weekends. I’m not aimless, or pointless, or “lacking a structure” as my dad would put it. I’m not Scout, who’s going to community college down the road next fall despite my parents' sighs. I’m Jannet, I’m upstanding, valuable, and I mean something to this woman.
“Really?”
“Of course,” she says, “again, if you need any questions answered, I’m happy to help.”
“Could you tell me about the campus?”
“What would you like to know?”
I think, “what does it look like?”
She laughs a bit, “well, we have a website with full access to photos of the building, if you give me your email I can send you the link.”
“Big library?” I say.
“Yes, we have a large library, with so many valuable resources. Our librarians are top notch.”
“Is the food any good?”
She laughs, “I eat it every day, and I bring my kids to enjoy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says, “and you know how picky kids are, but they love it.”
I nod to myself, and slowly the academic buildings, the large ceilinged cafeteria, the long library, old professors standing in front of white boards, small dorm rooms, loud with the age of college, sketch themselves onto my brain. But along with this thrill comes the enormity of the slanting classrooms, the guilt that will eat me alive when I get my grades, the expense of the vast campus, yellow in the fall, the judging eyes of my unknown roommate. Suddenly I’m back in the cloistered restriction of my room with the phone pressed against my ear.
“Anything else I can help you with, Jannet? Would you like to give me your email so I can send you that link?”
“Scout,” I say.
“Pardan?”
“I go by Scout.”
Beautiful Disaster, Horrible Masterpiece
We’re so uniform. So obsessed with lines, with symmetry, with perfection. I often wonder if the gods meant it to be this way. If when they placed the particles of an atom together they knew it would grow into the square lines of property, mowed in straight, differing greens. “This one’s mine, this one’s yours.” It’s ambiguous, and then it isn’t, and then it is again when I ascend further into the black of the universe. Suddenly the symmetry is gone, blurred into the white and green and blue of that little marble. The rules, the regulations, the science that has always strapped me to the floor of the earth like a seatbelt has dissolved into nothing. Nothing but the arbitrary life of what I thought I was existing for.
I’m leaving. I’m going to ask the gods if they really knew what they were doing when they introduced a proton to a neutron, if they can break down all the parts of a cell, if they can explain to me this disaster, this masterpiece. Even if they did, I doubt I’d understand. Maybe they just threw everything into a giant croc-pot like my mother’s chilli recipe. Always hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
I want to sit at the dinner table and ask if it turned out how they thought it would. If the January wind that blow by frosty windows was part of the plan. If the smell of wet sidewalks, stamped with the paws of stray dogs and wandering children was in the divine. I want to ask if it looks, if it smells, if it tastes the way they thought it would. If it was worth all the trouble. This beautiful disaster, this horrible masterpiece.
“You’re a Person”
Hanging the ghost sheets on the blue sky and I wonder how time has decided to spread across your face. May it be even and inviting like the PB and J’s we made at our old house, may it be comfortable like the blanket thrown out against the green lawn, we liked potato salad on the red blanket, my mother’s recipe.
I know time has decided to slash me like an ex boyfriend's car tires, only, it’s worked slowly, patiently cutting deeper and deeper wrinkles, making sure I really understand the pain of growing older. I understand it more than perhaps anything else. When I look into the mirror my mistakes are carved in small lines beside my eyes, around my mouth, below my chin.
I vacuum the rug and play pretend, but along with your football jerseys, TV- coasters, and the toaster we bought together, you folded up my imagination and stuffed it in your suitcase. I’ve searched for it and this is the only explanation.
“You’re a person,” my kids tell me. But I’m not, I’m just a shell that time is trying to get rid of. Of course, this is not your fault. Once you pulled the plug, drained yourself from me, I only realized I was never anything anyway. Just a box for people to put things in. Just a dishwasher to shove last night's plates into. All I am is a bedsheet that time is folding up slowly.