NaNoWriMo Day 1 final “Small Parts”

word count: 2,382

SMALL PARTS

I sneak up on him, crawling across the nappy green carpet in my scratchy nightgown.  Sometimes staples stick up from hidden ridges and prick my knees.  The carpet is smooshed like fields after a storm, with mysterious, stitched rivers dividing the landmasses.  I crawl to the end of the dull and sticky table.  Two owls with glassy, yellow eyes sit on their perch, holding up the dingy lampshade.  A glass ashtray reflects golden light.  I watch his profile as he smiles and talks with his brother—my new uncle—who sits among empty beer cans on the other side of the dark living room.  They’re talking with words I don’t quite understand yet.  He laughs, so I laugh.  I like his dimples.  I like everything about this strange character.  My sisters and I are learning how to spell his last name.  He wants us.

He hears me laugh and slowly turns an annoyed, oily face in my direction.  My hair is still wet from the tub.  He puffs a large cloud of cigarette smoke into my shiny face.  They laugh.  I cough and laugh, too.  They keep talking.  It means go away.

Sometimes I get sick when I walk by him in the house.  I don’t know what I say but it is always wrong.  Everything I touch or do is wrong.  I need to be more like my sisters.  I hide in my bedroom and shake, crying as I play with Miss Piggy’s string of pearls.  Mom hugs me; she looks far away because she doesn’t know what I’m doing.  I tell her I don’t want to have babies; I don’t want her to die; or I want to die.  I won’t let her out of my sight.  I’m terrified when she’s away.  Sometimes she takes me with her to clean the urinals at the Rectory.  But most of the time I can’t go.

He chases me with boots and fists and belts.  My feet sweat and slip around in my jelly shoes when I make my dashes for the nearest door, even though I am never fast enough.  He is huge and takes up all space.  After awhile I don’t feel so afraid anymore.  I propel across rooms like a boomerang—a strange mixture of euphoric flight and humiliation—and crash into the prickly walls or squeaky dressers.  Upstairs my sisters sit on their ruffled sheets, waiting for my screams to stop.  I didn’t know I was screaming.

It’s best to get it out of the way early in the day.  One swift black boot coming at my head means blackout, and I can wake up and be left alone for the whole day to play with my Hug-a-Bunch and Barbie dolls.  He locks himself away in the garage, chain-smoking Doral’s and sweating over an engine to Deep Purple.  I try to offer him a coke or Kool-Aid, barefoot in the driveway.  I think my sisters and me should clean the house to surprise mom when she gets home.  I want to shine for her.

I don’t tell my mother about what happened.  I don’t tell her my new Daddy Scott touches me.  I don’t tell her how my stepbrother and stepsister are forced to sit in a tire swing while Daddy Scott videotapes, his pleasant voice telling them to touch each other.  They’re wearing white tank tops over their tan skin.  They look scared, yet somewhat somehow blank, as if they were dead.  They do as he says.  I’m watching.  DO I join in?  Am I doing it to?  I don’t remember.  Then we’re in the water and it’s warm and I am nothing but this empty vessel filling.  I don’t know for sure if this is wrong, but the looks on their faces—dead children.  I’ll never stop seeing their eyes.  Their mouths turned down, silent.

It happened during afternoons when the yellow light came through my mother’s curtains like a stain on the bed.  Faceless entrance, in on something, special–special just for that moment, until the hitting would start.  I am becoming nothing.  I have no

Alone

I hate how you’re always

in my way

bent over in the hallway

as I carry all the laundry

I hate how you’re always

in my way

legs splayed across the bed

sound asleep as I twist

I hate how you’re always

in my way

like when I dance

you get too close

I hate how you’re always

in my way

leaning for a kiss

when I’m trying to write

I hate how you’re always

right

I hate that you’re gone

I hate that I never leaned in,

I hate how I never make room

Habit of Silence

In the mornings, it was excused for sleepiness.  We’d pass each other in our own floor patterns and habits, maybe say good morning.,  My cigarette smoke leaked into the morning yellow on the back deck where I’d wake and listen.  Birds and wind and traffic and exhalations.  Then my brain would squeeze as the sun rose higher and the dreams cleared, knowing it was time for the day to begin, wondering how it would go, if it would last, if we’d changed.

We dressed at different hours–I, with the comfort of time suspended, unable to work and trying to heal–and he, in the rut of unemployment and agitated fingers buttoning his shirt.  The hush of clothes as we passed in the hallway to the bedroom, maybe a polite ‘excuse me’ to break the air.  I sought space at this time, for meditation and thought and perspective.  He sought with hot flesh and prodding fingers and a tired way to love me.  I couldn’t be touched.  The possibility of my lover touching me quite thin, as my skin was too awake and afraid.  I wondered if we had anything else to give–what was left to receive from each other when we needed such different things?  One day I had said “space, Justin, space…I need to be alone because I’m broken.  I need to take care of this mind”  and I could never tell him how my soul wept for him in loneliness.  I could never tell him he could have my soul if he tried to take it.

The year before, when I was healthy, he proposed through a poem he had written, down on one knee, his hands shaking.  I cried the moment I understood, and the ring glittered like snow; I was really loved.  We’d lay in silence together be and making love, our minds lax and limbs jello.  How I could love him then, in the floating hours of the day, and I told him through my fingertips how I loved him.  We’d laugh and touch our lips together.  We’d flirt with argument.  Later, in the kitchen

Memoir Piece 2: “Ashes”

Ashes

The land is in pools, mirrors. As if there were a flood and only islands remain, islands with the trees from my earliest memories–the wild apple blossoms, their pink and white petals falling like snow. I imagine him under there, in the shade of the silky blossoms, leaning back on an arm, picking blades of grass, his long legs muzzled in by the sweet alysum growing. His blue eyes look up through their long, long black eyelashes–the lashes I’ve inherited–and into the blossoms, into the purple sky. His reflection is still on the water. Peace. He’s found peace. He still wears the cream colored shirt with the brown vees from the shoulders to the chest, heavy in his strange scent that I can still smell if I remember really hard.

The white farmhouse, falling apart and filthy, stood on a sunken, lush lawn with wild apple trees that snowed pink petals.  He built us a swing under one of them, taking turns going higher and higher into the pink fragrance.  There was a hammock tied between the two trees and we spent afternoons lulled in it by the bees, fat and humming.  We picked from the plum tree, he pulled us in a wagon behind the rider lawnmower, we climbed ancient tractors, we walked in the fields with the big, round hay bales.  There was a pig in small barn, I loved the thick mud and even the suffocating smell.  Family came and went as if they’d never grown up and left home.  Most of them were alcoholics, some of them were borderline pedophiles but they were eventually pushed out of the circle.  My grandpa Leo was an old white haired man with a huge gin blossom nose, sitting in his chair.  Drinking.  The kitchen was warm and old, with a large wooden fork and spoon above the oven.  My grandma Helen had chipped, blue China plates.  The floor rolled in hills and we road our trikes around.  I don’t remember him ever leaving our side on those weekends he had us.

In Your Absence by Judith Harris : The Poetry Foundation [poem]

In Your Absence by Judith Harris : The Poetry Foundation [poem].

In Your Absence

In Your Absence

By Judith Harris Judith Harris

Not yet summer,

but unseasonable heat

pries open the cherry tree.

It stands there stupefied,

in its sham, pink frills,

dense with early blooming.

Then, as afternoon cools

into more furtive winds,

I look up to see

a blizzard of petals

rushing the sky.

It is only April.

I can’t stop my own life

from hurrying by.

The moon, already pacing.

Poem copyright ©2007 by Judith Harris, whose most recent collection of poems is The Bad Secret, Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of Judith Harris.

My Wild Child

Play is the poetry of the human being.   –Jean-Paul Sartre

For Justin

because I want you to remember

how I was once kind of beautiful

I will paint you pictures

and etch on glass                                                         

who I want to be

once this sickness of the year

leaves my poison breath

I so infected you with.

Oils in blue black dripping rain from my fingertips.

A house in the forest with one light on.

A scratched eye with a glint to tease

beneath long, lovely lashes.

I show you palette after palette

the mix I’m desperate at–where’s the right colors,

how would you like it, how am I sense?

I urge you from the door with blank canvases,

and I’m not one for persuasion.

Your hidden eye, your hidden pity

and goodbye.  I paint for myself.

Did I Show You, Love, the Moon Last Night?

Photo from Etsy

I haven’t stopped writing
for four days
then
a moment,
in its glass jar, holds a voice
that calls me–mommy? mommy?
and my breath is held–
did I forget
to show her the moon last night?
To show her the silence of the snow outside?
–so slow and pretty–
or the maps that the stars make?
did I answer her–Yes, my love,
I’ll live a long time–
I watch through glass–
her tiny silhouette among her quiet dolls;
I want to tell her
how time, like water, can slip through your fingers,
how sometimes we forget to look,
how days can pass like a sleep.
I take her to my desk
and teach her how to write
a poem, and she writes
one for me–I love my mommy–
and for a moment I’m pricked
with a fact–
one day, she might stop asking for me.