if we move to vermont

i wonder if some other girl might choose my bedroom because it's

blue

blue the color of the ocean.

might as well dye the carpet if it means the house won't sell, and you know

my blue hair didn't fix me.

girls here ignored it anyway--they don't wear their collars up.

they don't dress in darks but they gob on mascara and pull their buns so tight

you don't have to wonder where open mindedness went.

it's in there cinching somewhere.

their hair is blond and brown and red and light, even though it's not sometimes

and belonging is a construct but they've got it constructed as an add on to their homes.

but if i move to vermont, i'll have to box up the black shirts and the pink in the same box

i'll have to use the dye or leave it for some other girl who wants to drown in

blue

blue the color of the ocean

blue the color we paint the chesapeake bay over

brown the color we see the chesapeake bay as

they'll never see me get into college,

raise my longest finger at graduation and i'll splatter my cap and gown with

blue

i'll never ever be changed

i'll never ever be kissed

i'll never ever belong in one place

and if i move to vermont with my faded blue hair i wonder if it'll be easy to forget

the way me and him talked about picking flowers on the water

the way he said my flower was a daisy

if i move to vermont i'll bring him a bouquet on the way out of state,

dye them

blue

(blue the color of the ocean)

dye the water

blue

(blue the color of the ocean)

and if i move to vermont maybe it'll be a second chance to be all alone again.

✂ cut my hair real short so i’d have less to dye red, with the same scissors used for those paper hearts i snipped in half; yes, those words we pinned with our photographs are scattered in perfect edged pieces along my bedroom floor.

✂ can’t regift scissors ’cause i can barely stand looking at them, seems only fair to destroy our life together with them; perhaps, you’d understand the irony too (if i cared enough to ask you).

last saturday, i poured faucet droplets into a pond so i could watch the ripples and

this week, it caused a tsunami and i swear i’m sorry sorry sorry

there’s a chrysalis of hourglass sand staring right at me and i dare not

try to heat it up and turn it into glass because i know what the shards will do but

there’s a tree in the backyard that i fell from and broke my wrist and i wonder

if the person who planted its seed would give me a splint of apologies

silver caterpillar on the kitchen counter: would you tell me what it means?

when a tornado breaks your heart, does the cocoon help you breathe?

i jumped into converse sneakers, ran out the door with a backpack, and

i sprinted to the eye of the hurricane just so i could use it to see

the wings of a butterfly are paper thin, yet their gentle flutter commands the wind

the past is the past, but if you don’t rinse your sins, at the end of the day, the clock still spins

i slipped and snuffed out the dining-room candle, and next saturday, a wildfire came

and all the pretty little blue delicate butterflies mocked me as they brought the rain

i looked into a crystal ball and saw a kaleidoscope of milkweed fields

pupae rested on every leaf and warned me: little girl, don’t you tamper with the future just yet

so i shut my eyes and ran to the garden and waited for the butterfly effect butterfly effect 

butterfly effect

Enter post-2007 J.K. Rowling, most notable for inventions such as Pottermore and the nightmarish Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Broadway play.  She has been noted too for the uninspired, un-fantastic Fantastic Beasts screenplays, as well as her ever-raging, ever-controversial Twitter account.  Suffice it to say, it has been a downhill road since our beloved Potter books were first published in 1997.

Few fans, however, have traversed the largely uncharted territories of Rowling’s post-Potter novels.  There are five, in total––The Casual Vacancy, a long novel detailing the happenings of a small English town; and, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, the Cormoran Strike crime fiction series, consisting of four books as of yet and concerning the title detective and his assistant Robin Ellacott.  This week, I finished the Cormoran Strike series’s lengthy latest installment, Lethal White, which means that I can celebrate the not-very-celebratable milestone of having read every book J.K. Rowling has ever written.  Before I discuss this week’s read, I should provide background on the other works of this non-Potter phase of Rowling’s career.  She kicked off her exploration of the larger writing world with 2012’s realistic fiction The Casual Vacancy.  In one word, the book is unpleasant––it reeks with bitter, bickering conflicts and horribly unlikable characters.  The book feels as though Rowling had felt liberated from the constraints of children’s fiction and delved deep into the nastiest renditions of adult life.  Gone mad with the power of her new adult fiction abilities, Rowling confided all of her worst fears about the darkness of the adult soul to readers with raised eyebrows, and sought to strip every character she imagined to the very worst of their person.  She managed to mellow her tone in the following years with the Cormoran Strike whodunit books––The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, published in 2013 and 2014 respectively, contained their own multitudes of glimpses into adult life (this time alongside the lurid corpses of crime victims) but the characters here had much more heart than the characters in The Casual Vacancy––they felt like actual people, as opposed to Vacancy’s cruel, callous machines.  Rowling quested for darker plots again in 2015’s Career of Evil, which was much grislier than either of its predecessors, featuring Jack the Ripper-like antics, the worst of which included gorey glimpses into the murderer’s collection of women’s body parts and a severed rotting toe taped to a wedding card.  But again, the characters were lovable and the relationships were endearing, and so the few Potter fans who had dared to venture this far into the darker recesses of Rowling’s troubled mind forgave her for the nightmares that Career of Evil caused.

By the time Lethal White rolled around in 2018, the whodunit narrative felt a little old, particularly as this book’s question of “Was it a murder or was it suicide?” felt like a direct copy of The Cuckoo’s Calling’s case.  At this point, I would enjoy the novels much more if the entire mystery were cut out and was instead replaced with a soap opera-like view of Strike and Robin’s forbidden attraction to one another.  They’ve had their closest call yet to admitting their feelings for one another when Strike, to quote the final pages of the novel, “pulled [Robin] clumsily into a one-armed hug.”  Who knows, what with Troubled Blood coming out later this year, maybe more hopeful fans could expect a hug with two arms next time.  I’m certainly getting my hopes up that the upcoming novel will feature more character drama than plot drama, because I cannot for the life of me follow and enjoy the actual mystery, and I’m sick to death of elongated scenes in which Strike stumps around the London streets, brooding about the case and complaining about how much his amputated leg hurts.

Here is a quick run-down of Lethal White’s plot: 

Jasper Chiswell, a wealthy government minister, hires Cormoran Strike to investigate Jimmy Knight, a young activist, and Geraint Winn, husband of another government minister, who were blackmailing Chiswell for a cause unknown to Strike.  Strike agrees and places Robin Ellacott, his assistant, in Chiswell’s Parliament office undercover to keep tabs on Winn.  Robin meets Chiswell’s employees, including many of his children from various marriages to younger women.  Chiswell is then found dead in his office from overdose and then suffocation.  The death is believed to be suicide, but Chiswell’s daughter Izzy hires Strike to investigate further, hoping that Chiswell was instead murdered by his current wife Kinvara.  Strike discovers that Chiswell was being blackmailed because he built gallows for export, one of which was stolen by rebels in Zimbabwe and used to murder a British teenager.  Strike identifies Kinvara and Chiswell’s illegitimate son Raphael as accomplices in the murder, and Robin’s detective work reveals that Raphael’s motive was to steal a painting of Chiswell’s valued at twenty-two million dollars that he recognized as a work of George Stubbs.  After Strike and the police agree that the murder was the combined work of Kinvara and Raphael, Robin is captured by Raphael and held at gunpoint.  She survives long enough to be saved by Strike and the police.

The case is interspersed with scenes from Strike’s and Robin’s personal lives.  For Robin, this means a rapidly deteriorating marriage that climaxes when she discovers that her husband is cheating on her, continued suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after being attacked by a murderer in the previous novel, and fending off her attraction for Strike.  For Strike, this means dealing with his nephew’s appendix bursting, breaking up with his girlfriend Lorelei, fending off his attraction to Robin, and––of course!––the endless complaints about how much the prosthesis attached to his amputated leg hurts him.  And there are many, many case-related plot details that I neglected to mention in my summary, because I think if I tried to mention everything of importance in the novel, my summary would be longer than the actual book.  I’m still not sure what the significance of some of those details were.

I have read four of these Cormoran Strike books now, and each time I read one I start out by adequately understanding what is being talked about.  I get into such high spirits about understanding one of the mysteries that I completely miss the next wave of information being thrown at me, so that by the time the case concludes I’m drowning hopelessly in a sea of plot details that were lost on me.  When I was two-thirds through with Lethal White, I confessed to my sister, who has read the Strike books as well, that the ocean of plot had me drowned again, worried aloud that I might never truly enjoy detective fiction, and then added desperately, “But I understood Agatha Christie!”  To which my sister told me that she never really had a grasp on Rowling’s plots either, and then she said that I could follow Christie’s stories better because Christie was simply better at detective fiction.  To which the indignant Harry Potter fan in me rushed to defend the hero that we all know J.K. Rowling is, despite her lack of showing it over the last thirteen years.

Despite my naivety at the details of the Strike cases, I would easily recommend Cormoran Strike to a friend.  All of the books in the series are more or less the same––confusing plot, intense and interesting looks into the lives and personalities of the characters, lovely prose, fairly satisfying conclusion.  They’re not perfect books, but they’re solidly dependable and easily readable.  The language and style of prose is heavily reminiscent of Harry Potter, and an astute reader will notice little exchanges between Strike and Robin that are worded exactly the same as exchanges between, for example, Harry and Hermione.  Therefore I enjoyed Lethal White.  And more importantly, I was so glad J.K. Rowling was filling up her time writing detective fiction: it means that the next Fantastic Beasts screenplay just might be slightly delayed.

*

oh darling, can’t you see all that worth and strength in your body?

you are so much more...if only, you could see

that gorgeous, beautiful hope and brightness you hold even when you are so low in the dark

that glint of defiance and determination you keep even at your lowest

how you get up & try again and again

despite your failures and exhaustion

as you laugh in the face of destiny and tell me because someone has to

because someone has gotta save this damned world

no, darling, no I think you got it all wrong

no one could except you

you, who stepped up, despite and choose to save it

a hero.

young boys, young boys, take a look young boys

this right here is a young girl’s heart.

right on her sleeve is where this organ stays, 

it’s where she keeps her emotions and feelings at bay.

notice how it’s fragile and soft and sweet

and it looks just like yours, if not a bit weak.

young boys, young boys, this one here

is a chart of a broken, young girl’s fears

her beauty is mellow, her sorrow clear,

the young girl lost her innocence, here.

young boys, young boys, look real close

this picture shows the young girl’s dreams as ghosts

she was shot down so many times, you see

that she gave up on herself, even you and me.

young boys, young boys, you and i know

that a young girl’s beauty lies deep below

the skin, the scars, the boxes and jars

of years of ugly emotion that mars

not only her skin but that beautiful mind

that was once so sweet, so lovely, and kind

but the world told her that she was just lost

that her warmth would soon be covered in frost

and young boys, young boys, heed my words

don’t let the young girls be caged like birds.

they love freedom and desire it strongly

so don’t allow the girls to think that they’re faulty

their imperfections are the roots of their beauty

and i say this because i believe, truthfully

that under the thorns and the spite and the scorn

is a girl that longs for the world that was born

of rainbows and unicorns and dreams everlasting

before she bragged about “diets” and “fasting”

hidden under thin skin and ribs that peeked out

of red skin and tears — a decade of drought.

so young boys, young boys, i beg of you dearly

when you see a young girl suffering clearly

reach out a hand to the heart on her sleeve

and take your other arm, let it weave

around to her back and pull her in

for a warm hug and give her a grin

because the young girls, young girls know so much pain

with the binds around her limbs and brain

help her, young boys, this i will ask

as someone who was a young girl in the past.

What Is Fear? It is an emotion, state of mind and body induced by threat or danger, pain which causes consequences like hiding, fleeing, running, panic buying.

As I glanced outside my window, I could only see people endowed with the fear. Sadness and tears covered the sky. The air was filled with negative thoughts. A blanket of fear seemed like it engulfed the world in it.

Fear of COVID 19

Fear of separation

Fear of hunger

Fear of pain

Fear of goods getting sold out

Fear of Staying in Home

Fear of Social Distancing

Fear of Death(Thanatophobia).

Change is only a permanent thing.

Understand your fear

Face your fear

Confront your fear

Fight your fear

Annex your fear

A man is considered brave when they have the courage to conquer fears.

                                                         Nelson Mandela

We need to conquer these fears, It is not only your fight, but it is also ours.

let's make a small change.

Face your one fear and you have made the world a better place to live. Be it small. Try it out today and comment on how you faced it.

i want to desecrate the louvre with you,

set the towers of the notre dame ablaze just to see how tradition falls.

i’d streak the walls with sin and lost dreams

and scream at the sky until the smoke clears.

( we are not prone to torn throats and bleeding hearts,

we are angels after all /

not quite divine,

but our wings are aflame /

we carry justice in one arm and in the other, /

a hand snaked around a willing waist )

you are the only one for me.

i want to steal from museums,

to eat pages of manuscript for breakfast, lunch, dinner;

we will make it a history worth telling, love;

when they say, “what happened?” we will say,

“us”

and the world will spin itself anew.

they're / clients

stale breathes of those left unbreathing; their skins pale but there’s something about it. fingernails kept growing, you urge to clip the secrets off of them. as the tongue’s dangling, trying to taste what’s left. when things are left unmoving they seem so pretty-there’s an innocence to them. 

t i m e / d o e s / d a m a g e

are we willing to admit, things are better left unsaid? we’re dressed before we’re buried--why’s that? we can’t face the world without pretense, so we can’t face an afterlife with playing pretend. if i had a nickel for every time i faced a dramatic event i’d be a rich man; then i’d make you promise i’ll be buried with my riches hidden in the folds of my skin so i have something to offer the heavens.

cold / blooded / viruses

disease embraces the cadaver before crawling its way onto your skin: claws chipped and naked, tips dipped in desire; skin slime and laced with poisoned promises. “too close for comfort” the saying goes, something you only know when your bones have burned and pieces of you lay in ashes picked up by wind. hand a broom the corpse’s hand.

part / of / the / job

if the fountain of youth existed, it’d put you out of business. that’s why you stained the maps by your blood and took small pieces of them, sewing them into your skin and braiding them into the bits of your hair. after you’ve bathed your life in test results revolving around the dead, nothing messes with your head. when you’re asked to take the teeth of a dead man, you start collecting them in your hands, and their clattering sounds like bells of a marching band.

I;

Stuck in the desert, sand blowing through my lungs

and it burns under the moonlight

colder now in the winter when the stars drop their sorrows

for us lonely creatures to swallow

them up.

In this long dead ghost town I scream out my heart with coyotes;

come morning my brittle bones will be theirs to chew.

I never knew when to stop.

[There’s tales of treasure in these parts. What is it that you suffer for?]

Snake bites in my ankles -- always there, always oozing slow running blood,

if I could wish for eternal sleep I would

but in the distance is the smoke of something hopeful;

I keep walking.

“Why?” I weep.

There is no answer.

My throat is made of sand; salt lines my figure -- sweat or tears, the Sun will

swallow them before I can figure it out.

[This world is full of ghost stories. You never know when you’re in one.]

Campfires and cacti.

I follow dusty trails and trampled grass that snaps under my weight;

even in the spring, the dry leaves them yellow and weak.

I know I’m close, but I’m losing more

now than ever.

[Are you the ghost or the teller?]

Wind bites at my cheeks and strip me of my flesh --

the mountains never get closer and I am so so alone.

My skin cracks and bleeds;

I know I am losing myself;

what’s forgotten never lingers long

and I can’t recall my own name.

“Please, please,” I whisper, “Do not leave me.”

But the heart never listens,

and mine is no exception.

.

.

.

& You;

There’s a story you always tell us, at sleepovers and campfires.

We can never figure out what it means.

You say: “Years ago, before this place became what it is, there was a ghost who wandered the desert. There’s never been a name to call them. Just distant memory. And so few of us still alive remember.”

You say: “This wanderer has no past or future. They came from nowhere and their journey has no destination. They came in the winter and they died in the winter, under a cold sun and isolation.”

You say: “No one sees them. No one really knows them. But I can hear them weep.”

This tale you spin always fades from our minds come morning and you have to tell to

us all over again the next time. We never remember the ending.

When you disappear one winter, your last words are this story.

It’s the first time we remember it.

It’s the first time we hear how it ends.

.

.

.

“I tell this story because I fear oblivion.

And I know what awaits me.”