I’ve been taking long walks and drafting stupid little pretty bits of prose that don’t really mean anything. When I read, I’ll also jot down excerpts I find stunning—low-voltage shocks to the system that make me stop in my tracks and reach for my notebook to record in deference, in awe that someone had concocted this exact elixir of language—and then I’ll return to them as a font of borrowed inspiration. These are the working cogs of my interiority now: turning over words and pairing them with others until something clicks and I locate the low hum of a satisfactory rhythm. Poor-person’s poetry.
This (modified) collection is a writing exercise, just combinations of words that I think are pretty. In the way this triteness has been claimed by those before me. Call them literary darlings we should’ve killed long ago, but we’ve all written some version of: bruises, salt, the sun.
bruised banks
i had blood drawn and watched a bruise form in my inner elbow and it made me think about the most delicate, accessible parts of the human body. now playing: “bruises” by chairlift
to be bruised from within. lumps of words, crawling to carve out spaces where they shouldn’t exist, where there was no room to begin with. lodged within and malformed. impaled. vicious mortal spear. i fear we have been made to see inside ourselves. impress upon it, punishing grip. tender blossoms beg for a bouquet arrangement. (not to be confused with the following: an ache, a wound, a scab)
in the solar
*two months later, i found this draft; written during an amtrak sunrise.
(what does the sun look like?) dazzling. cosmic. blinding.
looking at you; like, looking at the sun.
overloaded. unapologetic.
never stare directly into the sun. see how those solar rays destroy another spoke of the cornea. it is a pulsing, accidental hurt. it will take years to reveal.
(what do we do around the sun?) orbit. trace a familiar path, over and over, about ourselves. contort the forces that hold one together just to trail after you. one foot, then the other; one day, then the next. until the days accumulate to a year and the orbit dips into another calendar. revolutions.
you do not thank the sun. for what it offers, freely; for what it may take.
saltlick
sometimes i read things like “xyz smells of salt” and i’m like what does that even mean?
smells like salt. salt in the air, in the water. so much of it, everywhere, always. coarse, rustic. leftover from the last, after the sun lifted the brine from the seas. born from lack. concentrated from the source as bitterness made volatile. find it: saltwater hair, salt-crust skin. trickle-down tears. taste it too, familiar on the tongue. sharp and steely. in the wilds, not unlike a doe-eyed deer drawn to the bedrock. needy, necessary.