[inspired by the story of an Argentinian man reunited with his son after 30 years apart - from the POV of the kidnapped mother]

There are so many things that I want to say. Thinking on vulnerability, my mind crunches down and pushes against my temples--leaving a space and building a pain. It won't think anymore. I won't think anymore. Vulnerable is weak. Have I written that before? The girl is grinding her teeth. I want to hit her so hard, until I can't tell the difference between her tears and my own. But I also want her to touch me, to lay her hand on me and not know what I am thinking when our heartbeats match heartbeats and our tears touch in a different way. But this is weakness. Have I said that before? I have sinned--unlike these men have sinned--but I have sinned nonetheless. I have felt danger in the pit of my stomach and instead of turning away, I have run toward it. Feeding another life can either feel parasitic or celestial. And I felt neither. I only felt myself, and what I believed. Now I sit here--griding teeth, breaking water, swelling anger--and I realize: I am not a vessel and this is not a temple, and my body cannot keep you safe.

Half a World Away

1 a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection
2 chandeliers tangle and untangle
5 miles into the heavens
5 there they revel in the endless stretches
5 half a world away
4 "you are a very special young lady"
1 she had a big yellow wig that made her face look too small and smelled like
6 her cigarette changes position and her face changes expression
1 "I do this, this, because it feels good"
2 toxic
6 in a mad rage
5 ruggedly beautiful
7 "remember remember"
7 her voice has a strength that is a metered by a calmness
8 "we are being punished"
9 tell us
7 "sometimes I wonder where we would be"
9 tell us
7 "if he hadn’t failed"
9 tell us
2 "never stop fighting"
7 my entire world was erased
5 absolute isolation half a world away
2 fragile without breaking it
4 "burn burn"
9 tell us
1 "boiling wet insides"
9 tell us
2 "you’re only given a little spark of madness"
5 half a world away from their homes
3 two houses shall be sitting
1 they walk away with another fleeting memory that almost got away
8 "am I in the place of God?"

[ask about my process]

Thinkwonderimaginepicture

I rest my head on the crusty yellow bedcover and think about how many angry mothers have tossed their babies down on it to change their shitty diapers, how many long-legged girls with tattoos on their butts have sat on it, bent over, and painted their toenails, how many big hairy Wall Street guys have grunted and pushed their way inside some girl they gave a big wad of cash to.

I wonder how many people like me, afraid and alone, lacking any sort of control over their own thoughts, have scrunched themselves in the corner of this dirty hotel room, trying desperately to block out the scraping gnawing roaring thoughts. Pushed themselves tight between the nightstand and the squeaky bed. Laid their heads right where my head is laying now.

There’s a dark yellow spot under my cheek, and I imagine all of the dirt that my tears have dissolved, all of the disease they’re carrying back into my body through me eye. I imagine some dude with HIV splooging all over, falling asleep on top of his boyfriend, and forgetting to clean it up. I imagine some chick with blood positive for that baby-killing virus squeezing her palm over her bleeding wrist but some still getting out. My mind is like one of those CSI black light things. I can see it all. You clean up your blood with everything under the sink, and I can still see it in my mind.

I picture my mind being a ferocious lion that all the zookeepers are trying to pull away from the limp body of some kid small enough to fit through the bars. They’re roping him and choking him and using the tazer, but he bucks and rears up and roars a roar so loud even the mom and dad want to run away. I picture my mind something not just out of reach of my fingertips but so fucking far away it looks like just a speck on the smoggy horizon.

buffet.

Her pink sausage arms jabbed into his ribs and nodded vigorously at the rows and rows of sliced deli meats and cheeses like brightly colored decorations in front of them. She licked her lips and drummed her pudge fingers on the plate pressed against her thick breasts. I look one way and I see magic. I look the other and there’s more magic. Oh, Mr. Yeast how I love your All-you-can-eat Feast! Her indecisiveness ended as soon as she saw the sweaty brown and pink glazed ham smothered with sugared pineapples and melting butter. Her wide eyes were like two bits of coal in a fleshy pink snowman. Jackpot, she thought.

He rubbed where her meaty elbow had struck him and frowned down at the stacks of small plates on the table in front of him. How do they expect me to pile all I can eat on these shitty little plates? His mouth was set so deep in his face that the flesh around his lips and nose and eyes reabsorbed any facial expressions back into his face. He set to work. His thick arms couldn’t bend at the sweaty joints of his elbows. They simply curved to accommodate all of the quiches and crust rolls and bacon-wrapped hot dogs and rump roast and macaroni and brownie bites he scooped onto his plate. He shook off his food-covered arm and looked down the row of horrified faces. "What?" he growled from the hole between his two huge cheeks.

raven.

“This is called scene setting: where everybody is, who's alive, who's dead.”
- Invisible Monsters

She had escaped her higher-than-the-heavens friends and wandered through the soggy drag of the air thick with body odor and pot smoke and fake fog. The sound was oppressive, pushing down on her head and shoulders, breaking her neck with the weight of its bass lines, pounding on her spine every time the speakers shook. The beat beat beat her down deeper into the pulsing crowd.

She marveled at the bodies, swirling through the beams of colored light shooting down from the ceiling. They ran barefoot over crushed beer cans, sticky wristbands, and 3D glasses. They danced in circles, spinning on their sticky heels, on their cut-up heels on broken beer bottles and melted Sno-cones. Dancing and spinning on their heels, black with dirt and beer and bile and grime tracked in from the asphalt outside. The girls with pacifiers, stolen from their baby brothers, and their bracelets like armor filling up their skinny arms.

A dull-thud-ache began at the back of her head. She closed her eyes for a moment—and looked up to a wide-eyed girl with shock pink hair. The girl kept throwing Smarties into her mouth; she could see her teeth grinding on the little candies, her jaw muscles rippling. "Want some?" she shouted, pink spit flying out of her mouth.

She turned away from the Candy Girl and pushed deeper into the sea of bodies—almost tripping over a boy sitting cross-legged on the dirty floor. He looked up at her with ice eyes. He parted his dry cracked lips and breathed sourly into her face, "Wanna party?" His voice was surprisingly audible for how low he was speaking. She found herself drawing closer to hear but not really needing to. His eyes grabbed at parts of her that made her sick. She moved on again.

A she-skeleton emerged from a hole in the wall of people. The sweat on her bony neck mingled with a candy necklace and left pink, purple, blue, yellow stains that dripped to her collarbones. She chewed the sugar loops down to the string until it broke and the candies hurriedly followed one another dropping off of her neck and to the floor. The hunger in her deep-set eyes was so intense that she expected the gaunt girl fall to her knees and to gobble the candies from the floor. Instead she just wrapped the wet string around her finger so tight the skin turned purple and she could imagine her blood.

"You rollin’?" she screamed, repeating herself several times, as if she was attempting to ask every person moving around her. Before she could open her mouth to answer the girl, she was shot forward, her shoulder blades caving in from an impact. Pain radiated through her back and connected with the pain in her head. A boy in a rainbow scarf flailed his arms and legs, gyrating past her, sharp elbows swinging in all directions. His disco dance world had consumed him. He had no idea she even existed.

The crowd was completely alive, a separate entity, a living organism, pulsating and throbbing to some internal digestion of the music. Her body, squeezed so tightly between so many other gummy hot bodies, was caught up into the dense air. Her limbs pasted to her sides, her neck crooked at a harsh angle, her body was caught up and her feet lifted off of the ground. Dizzy, in her own whirlwind, she crushed her eyes shut.

That deep in the crowd, there was no light.