when dolphins are born, they burst into the water tail first.
within minutes, their mother herds them up to the surface
for a first breath of air, sharp and dry,
as they exhale a spray of water into the sky.
when dolphins are born, they are born smiling.
when i was born, i opened my mouth before i opened my eyes
and screamed for thirty minutes straight,
my young lungs choking on the unfamiliar taste of air, sharp and dry.
by the time i blinked through my first spray of tears,
my mother said there were enough to fill the pacific ocean twice over.
she said she hoped that it would be enough to last me a lifetime.
in 1966, a twenty-four year old brian wilson began recording
a teenage symphony to god.
smoke in his lungs and fire in his heart,
he transcribed the california dreams that kept him up at night,
held his breath underwater until he saw constellations in the pool,
built a sandbox beneath his grand piano just to bring the surf inside.
even after wilson shelved his SMiLE in favor of
pillbox teeth and bedsheet sunsets,
the world never stopped searching for it.
in high school, my nickname was "smiles"
because it's all i ever seemed to do.
i navigated campus like i was being showcased in a tank half full,
jumped through hoops of
fire,
boys,
and college apps alike
without ever showing an ounce of discomfort,
like perfect was indeed possible without practice,
or even possible at all.
it became easier to dive deeper, move quieter,
bury my insecurities beneath a wide-eyed grin.
no one notices an overabundance of skin or body or
words when confronted by a hundred-tooth barricade.
i went through boys like storms go through ships,
my fingers springing accidental leaks into each of their sides
until they fell,
captivated,
captivating,
capsized,
spiraling into the depths below.
yet i was always the first to hear their cries when the tides withdrew,
the only siren in the world capable of regret,
the eye of the hurricane that granted them safety.
even after i emerged from the fray,
soaking and breathless and alone,
my eyes were dry, my smile buoyed in place.
staring out over the wreckage behind me,
i did not know it was possible to feel anything but relief.
it is 2016 and brian wilson is seventy-three years old.
he has felt every vibration, good and bad, and now chooses both,
now understands that every summer must eventually come to an end.
on the days he feels alone at his grand piano, he wanders down to the beach,
buries his toes in sand still warmed by the sun.
when he smiles, the ocean roars in approval.
as he closes his eyes, it calls for an encore.
these days, i have stopped ornamenting myself with illusions,
though sometimes i can still feel them tug at the corners of my mouth.
i am too wary, too large, too loud to be sealed behind glass anymore,
to either save or be saved.
some days, i wake up and there is not ocean enough in the world to contain me.
when dolphins are born, they are born smiling.
that doesn’t mean that they are always happy.
even when tossed by a sea of its own blood,
surrounded by the gaping jaws of
mothers
and brothers
and daughters
who can no longer sing back,
a dolphin cannot frown.
i have long learned to be grateful for my ability to.
my smiles come and go,
brought on tides i can no longer control.
but each time one washes ashore,
i cradle it in my arms before letting it go.
just another wild thing that needs to be free.
Jan 14, 2016
Jan 14, 2016 at 2:21 AM UTC
sext: it is a sweltering august night and we are caught up in the music of our own naked bodies. it is not 1969 but i feel woodstock in my bones.
sext: finger me like i am the strings of your favorite guitar, until my vertebrae vibrate with the melodies hidden in between the spaces of my spinal cord.
sext: the needle touches vinyl and i can’t get my hands off of you.
sext: our breaths quicken into quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes. we crescendo to a chorus of carbon dioxide and then begin again, panting.
sext: i’m stevie nicks and you’re tom petty. remind me that there is still a way to translate love into music. remind me that a heartbeat can be shared territory.
sext: even my name sounds like music when wound around your tongue.
sext: save your forevers for a stadium packed with screaming lights. i just want your now, amplified loud enough to shatter my stereophonic rib cage.
sext: come closer, i want to map out your body on a mix tape and press replay so many times that you can hear the smudged fingertip traces.
sext: whoever they are, wherever they are, they are singing about us.
sext: they will always be singing about us.
Mar 27, 2014
Mar 27, 2014 at 12:01 AM UTC
I.
i was fourteen when i learned that columbus brought
guns and shackles to the new world instead of turkey.
last weekend, when you told me what happened to you
the night of october fourteenth, i had to check both of
your wrists to make sure they weren’t bound together.
i had to grow sea legs in the backseat of a parked car.
II.
sometimes hands are not kind.
sometimes hands explore people like diseases invade towns,
choking the distance between breath and body in seconds.
when he touched you that night, you must have confused
the cobweb of lines across his palm for transatlantic cables.
you must have forgotten that each year, the ocean spits out the
skeletons of ships who rattle the tides without her permission.
III.
when christopher columbus hit land, he wanted gold so badly that
he excavated it from the hearts of natives, took a midas hammer
to their spines until they bled pools of light around his ankles.
that autumn night, it happened to you too, didn’t it, golden girl?
except afterward, the stain you left on the white sheets was red.
IV.
in 1491, no one thought that the earth was flat.
sometimes history tries to rewrite things that make no sense,
that should never have happened to cities carved from trees
or girls whose bodies sing electricity into the midnight air.
if you listen, you can still hear the hiss of sparks on cold flesh.
you won’t forget the smell. they can’t remember anything else.
Jan 8, 2014
Jan 8, 2014 at 12:22 AM UTC
for nine years, you’ve starved me of words,
trading syllables for meaning like candy on
an elementary school playground. there are
thousands of entries now, scraped a to z and
in between from the alphabet until it bleeds.
but who cares, no big deal. you want more.
hours past midnight and the tea in your red
mug has gone cold again. lately, you’ve
converted to a religion of definitions but i
still hear you praying for truth in your sleep.
when we walk together, the sky feels more
like a region of atmosphere than the basin
your sister tried to bury herself in last fall.
when they found her crumpled like a lace
dress promise under the tree in your yard,
you wouldn’t watch the leaves dance for
weeks. it think it reminded you too much
of the way we play in the tears of clouds
every time it rains, when you should be
thinking of *gravity (noun): the force that
attracts a body toward the center of the
earth*. you see, that’s all it is to you now,
words paraded as equations and locked
between the pages of your very own bible.
but some nights, you are god only over
my hands. some nights, we extinguish the
candles and leave the words alone, watch
them dance like embers from a flaming tree.
when you ask me the meaning of love (noun),
i draw in a breath but let the words firefly on
above me. i do not regret letting them go.
i still do not regret you.
Nov 14, 2013
Nov 14, 2013 at 2:46 AM UTC
i. on our first date, you ask if i want to learn how to fly. guiding my trembling fingers over the yoke, you introduce me to an old friend, a mechanical anatomy you’ve had memorized since you were sixteen. the first time your hands leave the two of us alone, you watch my terrified eyes and laugh. flying is the easy part, you say.
ii. there was a time when explorers would name new lands after people they loved instead of themselves. somehow i’ve never found that idea comforting. it worries me that places out there exist that can wear my name better than i do. on nights when you’re gone, i spend hours trying to picture what an island looks like when it smiles.
iii. even as she was bathed in the icy blood of a dying vessel, rose sang a love song to the stars. when i think of romance, i think of hands that dissolve into air so that hearts have to sprout wings just to find each other on the way down. i think of ships of dreams and flying machines.
iv. these days, i have stopped waiting for the silhouettes of planes to paint demolition across the sunset. when i’m lonely, i play fleetwood mac records and spin around the apartment until i exorcize all the ghosts. i try to convince myself that when loving rhiannon, no one gets to win.
v. on our last night, i ask you what the hardest part of being a pilot is. you unstitch your eyes from the cerulean-sewn skyline and look at me. landing, you say. your hand feels warm in mine.
Oct 29, 2013
Oct 29, 2013 at 9:19 PM UTC
the last time i waited for life, it hit me like a car crash.
glass ground into dust, bones playing off each other like
a skeletal rockshow; i was a human kaleidoscope.
when i finally opened my eyes again, i saw clouds in
the cracks on the sidewalk, found pieces of myself
smashed into concrete like a chalk-drawing anatomy.
skin met ground easily, like it always belonged there.
life must be the hit-and-run type, because i never saw
its eyes leave the road ahead; i never even saw it look
back. accidents happen, they will say, when they find me
unfolded like a street art snow angel. and maybe they do.
but more likely, the car windows were obscured by dirt
or the roads gave up on storing rain for the springtime.
or maybe it’s just me, a permanent fixture of boulevards
that smell like regret and missed chances, trying to predict
changing street lights like they are signals for starting over.
just another halcyon disaster zone, entertaining the collision
of twin headlights on skin, the iceberg that devoured a ship
just for declaring that it had dreams to carry across the sea.
i will never stop turning myself inside out to see if the future
is something inscribed on dna, to watch the pieces of my soul
bleed into each other like wax in a technicolored lava lamp.
i will never stop filtering life through a maze of mirrors and
colors, tilting it this way and that until i can turn the pieces
of broken glass into keys that fit the lock of an escape car.
i will never stop.
Oct 16, 2013
Oct 16, 2013 at 6:37 PM UTC
there is an old persian legend of a man who falls in love
with a woman and goes insane when he cannot have her.
even after she is married to someone else, he spends his days
composing love songs in the dirt, building sandcastle hearts
just to watch them collapse again when the tide rolls back in.
years pass, and the girl never writes anything back.
i still wonder if she was ever given the chance to.
i was twenty-seven when i learned that you could fashion a
stethoscope out of a cassette tape, broadcast the sounds of your
heart to a double guitar riff that screamed desire. you pressed
play and in an instant, i was priest to your deepest confessional.
i never asked about how you looked at me on the days that my
husband was too busy finding god to join me in bed at night.
i never wanted to know that you sinned in the color of my eyes.
i never thought i’d be remembered for the moment that i traded
krishna for ******* and the thousand days that followed:
day 176: we mix love and self-destruction in an old hotel room
until they go down my throat as easily as sweet red wine.
day 472: you turn watching me get ready for a party into an
excuse to make love to my reflection with the windows open.
day 894: you spend the entire morning restringing your guitar
but i can still recognize another woman’s voice in its tone.
day 1000: i loved you but never had the instruments to prove it.
we’ve both realized that obsession is a drug best left to legend.
to this day, they still call me the greatest muse of rock and roll,
but each switch of the radio dial is just another reminder that i
once tasted like music in the mouths of men, that their words built
me up like a flower-child mona lisa in all the permanence of three
minutes of vinyl, that though i inspired the most beautiful lyrics
ever written about love, they never called me onstage to sing them.
i was once told that if you love a woman to the point of madness, she
will become it. but any insanity i have remains etched on the insides
of my veins; i walk beaches now, much too old for sandcastle-building.
years pass, and the girl has never written anything back.
i still wonder if she will ever be given the chance to.
even the world’s greatest muses sometimes want to hold the pen.
Oct 7, 2013
Oct 7, 2013 at 8:47 PM UTC
you always ask me about love when i think that we are creating it.
when our entwined legs mimic the twin quotation marks encircling
a silence, your fingers tracing out crop circles onto my chest as if
they're attempting to communicate every scar across the galaxy.
i will answer with an alarm clock heartbeat and a tongue that glides
through your ear like honey: some people only love in the dark.
it's guarded with a harlequin smile but what i wish i could say is this:
i believe that people's hearts meet like plane engines on landing pads,
crashing down just long enough to leave trails on the concrete before
they realize how much they miss tasting the air between their toes.
i believe that when sid first saw nancy, his bloodstream confused her
smile with the iv that supplied his starving veins punk rock & poison.
i believe that love either leaves you to bleed or to wish you still could.
but i also believe that love can last. for nine long years, hachiko
nuzzled against packed concrete and waited on empty railway cars
because the odds were, his dead owner would have to come home.
there is a man who serenaded his shower walls with the name of a
disappearing girl; i hear he still makes love to her ghost every night,
surrounded by a stadium-lit choir who wouldn't recognize her face.
the last time you asked me about forever, i realized that stars don't
even last that long, let alone feelings we shove inside pericardium.
what we deem unsinkable can hit one glacier and send a thousand
into the sea; forever is three syllables that even titanic can't touch.
my nineteen years are a paper anchor if this ship ever goes down,
but i'll be ****** if a psychic's visions of fire and ice and endings
stop me from falling in love on deck until the band stops playing.
Oct 5, 2013
Oct 5, 2013 at 6:37 AM UTC
i. i've always loved the way the earth looks from an airplane window, small enough that i can filter through an entire city with my fingers and never encounter a single face that inhabits it. but this time, i looked out and could see nothing but green for miles. it was as if god himself could put his infinite hands together and they would still fill with trees and branches and coffee-stained rivers instead of people. i didn't know it was possible to drown in so much color.
ii. a man who spoke in splintered english and carried a machete told me that he could survive in the rainforest for a month without supplies, that the jungle ran through his bloodstream as he imagined gasoline and city lights flickered through mine. the day he took us hiking on the trails, he glided through the understory barefoot, pausing just long enough each time to see if we were keeping up.
iii. some mornings, i lay in bed still wishing i could turn the chorus of car horns outside my window into the songs of howler monkeys echoing across the treetops and into my dreams.
iv. at night, we walked down a beach, dragging sand and weariness in our socks and watching the waves crest along the shore. i looked to my right and the stars leaned so close into the forest that they simply became twinkling electric lights atop palm tree lampposts. my feet even tasted the stars beneath them; when i kicked up sand, tiny constellations startled scurrying ***** into the tide.
v. you will always be the first country that trusted me with a bottle in my hand, as i stole through the midnight streets of san pedro with the taste of *** mixing in with the laughter i felt hidden under my tongue. and in the morning, i awoke to a faint dizziness and the memory of boys who bought me drinks and asked for nothing more than a dance and a handful of stories in return.
vi. muy exótica, they murmured as i walked down the road, my heartbeat syncing with the wheels of my suitcase as they rolled over the uneven dirt. a pair of enamored scarlet macaws held no magic for them now; the real exotic specimen was the girl whose almond eyes were filled with desert sand, whose skin only became mocha when the sun stared at it too long. they couldn't turn away.
vii. i still have countless bug bites that dance across the backs of my legs in tingling trails. i hope the scars stay long enough for me to trace them back to the place where they were choreographed.
viii. only one of a thousand sea turtle hatchlings will reach adulthood, yet i watched one of eight make its way from my hand to the ocean until it caught the sunrise and disappeared. i kept my palm open as i waved goodbye, hoping he would someday be able to read his way back home.
ix. the last night, we danced under a shower of stars and you told me about a time that you smoked until twilight and saw sea turtles dancing on the beach to bob marley. while we were sitting there wishing the storm would swallow up time, i imagined piro beach was littered with the shells of sea turtles using the moonlight as it pulsed off the waves to teach each other how to salsa too.
x. i've never written a love song, but i spent my days in a hammock wishing i knew enough words in spanish to weave together one for costa rica. i wonder if i will spend my life falling in love with places and scattering pieces of my heart across the continents like turtle eggs without ever finding the one location i'd like to bury them deep into the sand and wait for life to dig its way back out.
Oct 5, 2013
Oct 5, 2013 at 6:31 AM UTC
every three seconds, a plane makes
a landing somewhere in the world.
still, i wonder whether the hundreds
of people perched inside each belly
are coming home or merely touching
the ground before leaving it again.
and i wonder if i'll always be the one to
memorize time zones instead of faces
and leave a carousel of empty suitcase
hearts forever circling ground behind.
i only take what i can carry and a love
of that size has no hope to cheat gravity.
eighty percent of the population has a
fear of the world beyond the altitudes
but somewhere down the line, my heart
was made a compass pointing due north.
in another life, i think i would've worn a
perky blue hat and crimson lipstick smile,
pouring drinks and charming passengers
if it meant that i could call the sky home.
when i was a child, my mother was made
to gate off staircases and barricade the
stepladders so that i would not mistake
them as pathways leading up to heaven.
i used to imagine she'd open my chest
to find nothing but clouded blue air and
hollow bones, my pulse tapping out in
morse code the only wish i've ever had:
please, make me a bird and let me fly.
Oct 5, 2013
Oct 5, 2013 at 6:14 AM UTC