9:08

I found a ghost under the bed that looked like me as a child.
She was crying, fluid shining on her round face, holding a stuffed animal that had fallen apart while being washed in my past, her future. My childhood cat was curled near her soft stomach and I held my breath looking at his fur and when I reached towards him he growled and scratched my palm, trying to keep my skin away from the little ghost. I could smell the dirt of where he is buried in my parent’s yard. 

"Who are you?" she asked.
"I think I am you."
"Then why aren’t your eyes blue?"
"They changed color when I grew."

She stared at me, her long curly hair sea-waving over her shoulders.

"Are you a boy or a girl?"
"I don’t know."
"Eyes do not change color. Girls do not have yellow in their eyes."
"I think I became an animal after I watched an animal die."
"Where is your hair?"
"I wrapped it around my brain to keep it from breaking."
"Why aren’t your eyes blue?"
"They changed color when I grew."

I heard the snapping of her bones as they lengthened into my body and our cat chased the insects crawling out of his mouth while the noises of birds came from the morning and the lining of his stomach, which was slowly becoming grass. She screamed and I covered my ears while her face lengthened, her teeth falling on the hardwood floor, clacking like marbles. Her hair gathered around her fingers in circles and mice that came out of the cat’s ribs gathered it to build nests in the walls, where they died years ago. 

I looked at myself as I am now underneath my bed, the long arms and tattoos, wearing my lover’s ring. Her eyes were lighter, clearer, a resolute shade of blue.

I watched myself shake, the soft jaw trying to push from beneath the skin.

"There is someone on the mattress pretending to be me," she said. 
"How do I know who is who?"
"Her eyes are no longer blue."

I crawled closer to her so that she could recognize the lines of our face.

"They changed color when I grew."

7:28

I walked outside this morning with coffee and my aching breasts and I stood with the cat in what is left of the garden and our bodies were pink from the September sun and I immediately understood why he cried for me to come outside and rest my feet in the rain-dirt. I felt everything there, everything alive and calm. The words were coming up through the skin on my fingers and they were not much different than my veins although they were dark and scripted, but tubes that carry blood can change color with different limbs and my body could have broken its bones while I stood there (perhaps I was the cat or one of the birds) and the words were nothing more than flesh and biology, the cat's strong voice a pentameter, as language is the same as dead leaves and the beauty of the upcoming winter, where my culture decorates the frozen soil with artificial light.

There are crows and ravens in the pines near where I sleep and I want to look like them, their long black bodies and deep songs, every part of them spread out over the break in color where the tops of trees lose their density, like smudged, breathing paint, paint that moves and glides, aerodynamic oils, large invisible hands with magnets moving pieces of metal like a child's toy.



Life is obscene in the sense that it is excessive and that is why I feel words have to layer words until they are too sweet, running over the edges of a sentence, decaying your teeth. Writing is the most anarchistic art form because it requires no formal training, no callouses on the hands from years of holding a horsehair bow. I feel that communication through beauty is my only prerequisite and I love the obesity of paragraphs, the icing of adverbs and alliteration that crawl acid up your throat after you finish reading the work because you are too full, exhausted, your organs and blood full of sugar.

12:29

I told the person I love last night that my chest and bones are full of them. I am not scared to admit that I feel them in my eyes, which are watery, aging, and exhausted. My eyes, once blue, now green gray yellow and brown, eyes that mean nothing: muscles, blood vessels, a nerve, and jelly. Three coats encompassing three transparent structures, poetry, soul, illness. A conscious sense organ. Words that mean nothing, like my heterochromia, these words that are confusing you because they are my personal language that I am using to translate all of the parts of me which communicate with their own voices: ribs with expansion, liver with detoxification and protein synthesis, a subconscious with movie reels, the blood that bathes every organ in my frame. All of my organs have a say in the story of my limbs because they whisper to me while I sleep that they are autonomous, self-contained, and one said that if a surgeon searched through the upper left of my small intestines that they would find the bones of animals I once ate, etched with runes, resilient to acid.

7:25

I sat with my friend while they spoke about themselves and their soul, high on the edge of the road, listening to the traffic below us and the animals around us, my fingers tapping against the sidewalk because my legs were hanging sixty feet above the ground and I am terrified of heights, but I tried to listen with the early September night wind in my skin and ears. 

They asked me what I had dreamed and I told them about the burning trees and old apartments where I walked inside my bedroom to find it covered in grass and moss, mice moving through my mattress.

I asked them about nighttime-thoughts and they only told me about their broken heart.

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Why are your eyes blue?" I replied.

"I feel heavy metal around my neck," they said. "I am trying to crack it from my body, but my flesh-fingers are not strong enough. I have to learn alchemy to melt the silver and gold."

"I do not see my mind as an organ," I said. "It is electric, dark water, full of sea plants and amphibians; if you cup your palms and drink, you see visions from the mold growing off of the feathers of drowned angels."

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Because I have too much love," I replied.

"Love is not horror!"

"Then your heart has barely been broken."

I tried to tell them that even when the leaves were becoming ash in my dreams that a young boy helped me save the branches. I gave them memories of Los Angeles, standing in an old black coat beneath of neon sign, alone and my skin cracked like fins from the January ocean and watching the blinking green-glow and laughing to no one, because there was no one to laugh to but myself and god and friends on a different coast of the continent. I told them how I sat on the roof of my car and drank gin from a bottle and stole food for a homeless dog that rested beside me that night, watching the sun roll up the Pacific.

"Why do you write of horror?"

"To break free of slavery you have to disgust your masters."

"That is not an answer."

"I want to be able to truly kiss my lover."

I kept my back to the ground after they left, letting the insects crawl into my clothes to be next to the songs of Solomon that have survived thousands of years, in my blood and in theirs, the words of ancient people falling asleep together in silence, listening to the mechanical rhythm of the cars below.