Edie, I feel dizzy

Edie's feeling dizzy from the carousel.

Leant so far over the railings that she almost fell.

It's nice to hear her laughing 

without that screaming sound

that, even when she's silent,

seems to follow her around.

Edie, I feel dizzy, it's those pills I took.

The sun is such a colour, I find it hard to look

at something so beautiful, 

yet just unspeakable. 

So much that I need to say

is just unspeakable.

Edie becomes busy and changes face.

Becomes something else to take her own place.

She's running so very fast

to keep up this pace.

Becoming breathless but still

rushes with grace.

Edie I feel needy, can you just slow down.

I need somebody to put my arms around.

But she doesn't stop for me,

I didn't expect her to.

I have to stop, I think.

Someone needs to protect me too.

Edie now feels sleepy, and she's slipping away

heavy-lidded, limp, and there she will lay

I hope she wakes and thinks

I'm going to stop today

I'm never going to keep this up,

there is no way. 

We can find somewhere to sit together.

Sit and fold like wings, soft as feather.

Edie is more needy than her faces show.

I don't know much about her

but that much, I know. And that she likes

the ride on the carousel.

The way the world spins under a magic spell.

The way you can stay on and not feel well

but that's the best place to be because no one can tell.

We are unable to hear you

Going to and from somewhere not far,
I pass a couple of children on scooters
shouting, Ice Cream!
from across the street.

When I dare to raise my eyes to look out
instead of down at my shoes as I walk
I instantly see faces of strangers,
crying- Eyesore. I know they are right.

But nobody is selling what I want.
It does not seem producible.

It is not a house on a corner, the size and charm
of a dormitory, with window treatments.
It is not those shoes my sister likes with the red soles
or sunglasses my mother likes with the diamonds
or the endorphins or the caffeine or the career ladder.
I do not covet Ice Cream, the biggest or best thing,
and I don’t have romance for pipe dreams either.

That is someone's else’s dream,
unexceptional, formless, but probably fulfilling.
I hope I am never fulfilled.

In my hand there’s a digital map that orients me
in a roundabout. I am a breathing oscillating blue dot.
I can’t get anywhere from here.

Why do I not want Ice Cream or summer dresses?
Why do I not want to be out on the town, meeting new people?
Why do I not participate?

I watch people on television, traveling.
I am so scared.

I listen to Neil Armstrong radioing from the moon.

I scan the transcripts over and over of
Earhart circling Howland Island:
We are unable to hear you
to take a bearing.

Intermittent despair- what can you make from that?

I look up to see the sun caught in the tail end trail
of a jet. I wave:
Do you hear my signals.
Please acknowledge.

And then all my thoughts are frostwork and blue
with parachutes and windows on walls
and I am filled with clouds and I can’t see.

We cannot hear you.
We cannot see you.

Now I know I begin and end with images,
how far across this field can my voice spread out,
extend and reach in singing, in screaming?

Mumblingthoughts

August breathing down my neck // tap tap tap // nervous hands // firecracker vision // soft shallow breath // life is stop motion inside a cardboard box // knock knock knock on the front door is the cue to be still, hold it, pretend nobody is home, pray he doesn't come to the window // life in a fishbowl, tables got turned, and there was never going to be any pleasure to be taken in that because I let it go, someday long ago, and decided upon forgiveness and endless chances and accepting the risk that I'll be made a fool or get knocked about // that's what life does, it rattles you and it's all you can do to keep yourself together // but now I'm mumbling // don't make a fuss // speak up, nobody can hear you, say it again // what if I don't believe it this time around because words can just be the cement to fill empty spaces with no real meaning, no real language // there are no words in this language to communicate what I feel, how I think // thinking hurts, sometimes, it actually hurts // flowers withering in a vase, don't know where I got that vase // spine feels cracked and brittle like an old atlas // everyone is sleeping but you and me and words here flow efforlessly and they aren't light, they are heavy, and that means they matter // i'm so uneasy, i'm so undone, everywhere but here among my books and my mess // like Neely O'Hara, swallowing my sleep, time no longer works in a forward-moving line, it jumps back and leaps forward and turns over on itself and you weren't even asleep by then // the first few bars of Fur Elise on the keyboard // two more of us are gone and that sickness must have been right there growing inside him while he was making his speech at his daughter's wedding and I was watching and laughing and angry at my mother for being an impolite audience // just listen listen // you will learn so much more about the world when you are listening than when you are battling and clamouring, waiting your turn to be heard.

Voices II

Lorelei 

To keep him in my memory hurts. He locks himself in a room and how his loneliness and his fear rattles my brain like an electric current. He changes the matter around the concrete parts of my life because he wants a safe place, he wants a deeper blanket in a confined space and in such a space the only way to create distance is to be small, inconsolable.
Glowing and desperate, somewhere still inside me, come out where I can speak to you and tell you that I love you without blame. You dear disease, I will show you the big empty house we live in together and what has filled the spaces and the spaces of you that will never be filled.
It can be wonderful until I can't stand it and now I can't stand it, and I am still living. You must be too, wherever you are. You believe me, disturbed by your own unbearable position in nature, nowhere and yet everywhere, at least for me. I have given it so much thought, more so than anything else I ought to be thinking about. The youth and dark gravity, the memory and how it stutters, sobs, shatters, shines its refractions. The future is uncertain. Uncertain future has arrived, by default, and I work to perceive your absence, constantly, tenderly.

Sadie

It happened when I was thirteen. It was taken care of, no questions asked, no disagreements or agreements or any words really at all. Once I was in a position to put it behind me and could easily go on believing it never happened, I still felt there was something wrong. Something fundamentally wrong with me. Maybe it had nothing to do with that mistake. Maybe it had everything to do with it. Sometimes it’s painful to look at Sal because he’s my mirror image, except he’s a boy and I’m a girl. We ought to have turned out the same, at least as equals. We shared a house, an upbringing, an environment, an education. He wasn’t the favourite. I think I might even have been. But now, I look at him and he moves about effortlessly. He doesn’t need to try, to smile or to get serious. He’s got this strange crowd at school. They are like his disciples. While he’s out sitting on the hood of Colby’s car drinking beers and talking about nothing too important, I’m counting the pills I’ve still got left in the shoebox under my bed. I’m crawling up walls, staring out of windows with every urge to climb out and not come back, counting down from one hundred backwards in my head, or wondering how long it would take someone to recognise my absence if I just disappeared. I’m fundamentally malfunctioning. Sal is running smoothly. Perhaps it’s the difference between boys and girls. I’ve tried to fit into so many costumes I couldn’t tell you what really exists underneath them, what I’m really like, or was like before finding that seamless image and the ability to wear it as your own skin became such a priority, such an arduous task. He’s never been anyone but Sal. I have to love him, but at the same time, I hate him- it’s so easy for him and he doesn’t even know it.

Rudy

Sometimes I think my father a deranged glassblower because of all the fragile he builds. If he sits with me at breakfast he’ll make mountains out of salt and pepper across his eggs. He’ll fold a pile of laundry lint into a dollhouse. He’ll build a rocking chair from straw on the front yard. I like to think no one’s scolded his hands yet. No one’s bruised his palms or crushed his fingers out of anger, out of sadness. And I think to myself, why did I not learn that, how to create beautiful and delicate out of nothing. I want to puncture a hole through my stomach and use the air to fill a hot air balloon. My body is a series of sharp angles and overexposed photographs, left in some solution for quite too long. My body regurgitates everything, chewing driftwood, swallowing a mixture of cinnamon and sand. How can someone create something so beautiful? How is it that there are people who try to vomit new, vibrant land into the ocean, but only end up leave a hot oil spill in their wake? And out of some nondescript frustration, I ran away once. And left my father a paper animal at the foot of the shed door before disappearing into the woods behind our house. But he, with his inventor’s hands, created a hundred of my little paper animals to leave a trail through the woods, ushering me home.

Oliver

Milk teeth and coffee powdered nose. Birds scraping seeds off the small carved table just beyond the window. Sometimes the air is so thick at night I’m afraid to breathe it in. It’s like asking my lungs to swallow all these secrets that aren’t mine, these unspoken words that don’t belong to me. They look my way strangely, quizzically, as if they want answers to questions they’ll never ask. I know what happened here before I came. Or at least I know why people are looking at me and my parents and the house and its windows and doorsteps and rooftop the way that they do, even if what happened didn’t happen between these walls. I mean, if it had, someone would have found evidence. Someone would have found motive. Someone would have found the solution, the key that locks the door behind us, a means of closure. Nobody has that. I didn’t even know him or know the events that surrounded when it happened or know his family or friends, yet it feels like they know me, because here I am, sleeping in his bed, walking in his hallway, sitting watching the birds at his window, while he’s not quite there but not quite gone either. I have a sickening feeling that unless this ghost, this echo of a person, the shape they left behind that sits like a vacuum right beside me- until it’s exorcised, there won’t be room for the both of us.

Lorelei

Too much self on the small slice of a voice, all falling off. We looked at onion skin under a microscope and it looked like everything up close. Do you remember when we did that kind of thing for school. and everyone did it, all of us in a room and then the next class and the people next year, this was what they did. If that was there it makes me shake. Maybe we should go home now, let’s get out of this room and go home. There is something tender that holds me by my elbow and lets my head fall down but i’m still moving clumsy as someone that doesn’t know yet. I don’t know yet. I was a kid and I thought i was the same as every kid but a little more scared. You can only be a little more when you have a little body but i grew out like the rings of a tree. I don’t like the metaphor of trees. I like looking at the places dark birds fly over in pairs. They move in and out. They are the air. We look at them and think they are ribbons. We are wrong. We think it sticks. We are wrong.

Edie

Voices

Matilda

A boy just moved in across the street- his name is Oliver but he looks just like Ben Willoughby who has been missing for two years now. His family packed up and relocated seven months ago. I remember the day I saw them fit their entire family home life- or what was left of it in the absence of one of the four family members who once shared that life- into the back of a moving van, I remember it so well because the same day I stepped on a bee and saw hundreds of dead bees littering the lawn. I've had a dreamcatcher above my bed since before I met Ben even. Ever since Oliver moved in there with his stepmother and father and their cinnamon-coloured dog whose name I don't know because I've never cared to ask, ever since then, I've stared at the feathers and beads dangling from the dreamcatcher before I close my eyes to sleep, fixed my eyes on their slow rotation until I felt dragged by the tides into dreamless slumber. Last night I made the mistake of looking at it before I lay down. I saw right through it's middle and out of my bedroom window. I saw Ben Willoughby, standing on the lawn. He was dripping wet and his eyes were glowing amber and he was watching me. He was accusing me. His eyes said, I know. Oliver is in my class at school and even sits close to me just like Ben did, because my name is Wittenstein and his is White, but I can't look at him. He might know something too.

Bernadette

I died falling headfirst over the banisters of my stairwell at home. My life, the way they tell you it will, flickered in the forefront of my vision as the floor grew closer. I watched my boyfriend's shoulders slowly rise and fall with his snores in sleep, I watched and felt him kiss me, the sensation warm on my lips, I watched him shave from my perspective standing in the shower, and falling I felt the hot water falling with me too. I saw my mother applauding from the eighth row of the audience as I collected by Doctorate degree. I saw my cousin holding her newborn baby in her arms in a room crammed with flowers so thickly I could smell them, I had a tickle in my nostrils. I saw my father bandaging my foot after I'd injured it while rollerblading  and the floor was so close my eyes already shut. When I opened them I was sittting on the bench, poured all over with sun, in the park where daffodils swarmed, spreading like yellow oceans. A sea of light-petals to swim in. And my father was taking pictures of them with his black and white film. I didn't understand that at all. My ankle was smarting and my father was bald on the top of his head as he dropped to squat and meet my eyes, said, 'Ready to go again' and he pulled me up by the hand. I began to rollerblade again and this time I didn't fall.

Dalton

I always watch people, feeling slightly out of place. There is something so fascinating about people and their wooden hinges, metal teeth, and leaking eyes. They lay with lovers in cold beds and they catch their children, cradling him or her in their arms. They push shopping carts and purse their lips. When it is cold, they tuck their arms into sleeves. They are much like me, and that is why I feel out of place, for I am watching a ticking reel of browned and borrowed film. It is passing my eyes and plugging the cracked basins somewhere inside or underneath but that I can't locate, I just know it's part of me. My strip of film is scratched and I don't belong and nobody wants to see what I have accumulated on my reels. Damage just doesn't work for people, even if they pretend to be okay with the idea of it. It took me a while to reconcile with the actuality that the episodes of my life are just as worth watching as theirs, my scrolls of film just as valuable. Not even in spite of the scratches. Because of them. Not many others see it that way, but it's okay now I do.

Lorelei

Benjamin is weary from being missing, from nobody looking. He's brooding and cracking his knuckles in the house and in the woods on the walk to the lake and behind the shed where the bikes are locked. His eyes might be dark, reminiscent of a cult, which worries me so I daydream of bringing him soup and berries and The Jungle Book. We sit together on the roof not eating or reading but looking off to the past first days of spring when it was better. He pushed the hair out of my eyes, said the valley was vague and gaping like a nightmare. I had hoped he wouldn't say things like that. Every night afterwards I took to tucking a pill under my tongue and pretending I didn't know what he meant, but I knew. I had thought it first. Body bent in half and voice blank. One day is harder than most to leave behind, I know the date, it doesn't need marking on my calendar but comes by every year, as he comes by everyday without being here at all. He comes with red eyes and won't look away. Darkness overtakes the room. Inside of myself a flower blooms in illusory blood with wet heavy petals one by one falling into what I understood in the language of the empty, but have no translation.