the verduous hours - pt1

Green was not just the color of home. Green was everything.

There were plenty of shades to choose from, with the monotonous hum-whir of the commercial airplane beneath her feet; the center of the spectrum had been poured in neat little squares all over the landscape. Each shade had a different meaning, as if Bird’s-Eye Iowa was a photo album of her past based solely on the memories of frolicking with nature as her backyard.

Yes. Green was the color of home.

But it was more than that:

Green was church every Sunday since she could remember. It was the white slip she wore under a layer of tulle, then the stiff cotton of a periwinkle dress on Easter. It was the same families —- they all referred to one another as neighbor, although all of their houses were separated by several acres of farmland.

In the summertime, her parents would sit in the cab of her father’s beloved pick-up truck, and her two older sisters would sit with their baby brother in the backseat. She would climb into the flatbed with her two older brothers, settling within the canyon between two pairs of broad shoulders that jostled her as the truck galloped over the dirt roads leading to town.

The town was at the center of everything, and the different patches of farmland lined the dirt-veins that branched out from City Hall. Everyone attended the Lutheran church that was adjacent —- Green was the same Sunday faces that she recognized since she had a memory; and the Sunday-morning versions of the youth-filled faces she saw every day of the week in school.

Green was the color of the fields in the periphery of her scenic bike-ride to school every morning. And in the afternoons, on her way home, she would abandon her bicycle at the edge of road and take off through those fields of leaning grass. Green was the stalks of the dandelions that covered the hill at the furthest edge of her family’s farm. It was the husks in the cornfields that were her backyard -— at dinner time, she would sit on a stool in the corner of the kitchen with her sisters, and they would peel these husks away to brown in crispy, straw-like piles on the floor.

She loved to peel corn like she loved peeling the rogue rubber cement from her hands after hours spent pasting collages all over her personal corner of the bedroom she shared with her sisters. She used mostly pictures from the discarded magazines that piled up in the garage: images of flowers and trees, some pilfered from the out-dated encyclopedia set on the top shelf in the study.

Green was her favorite color. She spent most of her time immersed in it, even during the winter when it may have deigned to lightly snow. It was mint green then; it tasted mint green, and she made mint green snow angels right beside her back porch.

Green was her sanctuary, whether she was playing outdoor games and trying to keep up with her brothers, wandering the loess hills just beyond her family’s property, or exploring the creeks even further into the horizon from her back porch… And green was in the sunset too -— she had spent plenty of her days watching the sun fall from the sky at its ever-lax pace. With perfect timing, perhaps when the first fireflies decided to glow, she could find the rainbow that haloed the neon fireball to the west. Just at the edges, where the night’s indigo with its many stars began to creep upon the dissipating day, there was the faint rim of green, then the brilliant pinks and oranges that would bleed away with the sun until tomorrow.

Yes. Green was everything. Every memory she had, every good and every bad, could be found within the patches that were beginning to disappear under the cover of white clouds, like winter making an early appearance.

She turned away from the window, her breath leaving a circle of steam near where her lips had been. She was leaving it all behind again, but even so, green would always be green. There were some pieces she would never be able to escape.


What about the color of his tee shirt from the first time she had met him?

It had been a dark, rich green -— like the forest. She had first seen it hanging limply from the fence that outlined her mother’s garden. She had mistaken it for a rag, with its many rips and the darkened sweat stains. Pieces of twisted metal from that old, rusty fence seemed to have punctured even more holes in the cotton that was worn to its most weary.

She approached, cautious. She did not recognize this tee-shirt as belonging to one of her brothers.

“Abigail!”

Her mother’s voice came sharp from the back porch.

But she did not turn back. She looked forward, towards the collection of voices connected to no entity, but buried within the many rows of corn behind her house.

It had to have been late in the summer because the field had been a behemoth wall. At age eleven, she could be completely concealed within the stalks that rose beyond even her father’s height.

Her older brother Walker was the first to appear; he came bursting from between a row of stalks now disrupted, and leaves of green husk flew upwards in his wake. He was shirtless, his skin baked golden from all summer spent outside. Eighteen years of age at the time, that was the last summer she could remember him with long hair. The unruly curls pasted themselves to his forehead with sweat adhesive, interrupting the flawless amber of his bright eyes in thick, dark locks.

Jameson was seventeen, and he had the same curly hair in a raven brown that bordered dangerously on black, but he had their mother’s hazel eyes -— amber with a green marbling. He was right upon Walker’s heels from the field, shirtless and drenched in sweat; there were smears of dirt across his shoulder blades that had become stripes of mud.

“Abby!” he shouted when he spotted her standing beside the fence with one hand on its tattered metal.

She was startled by the sudden attention, and her smile in his direction was fleeting before she returned her gaze to the green tee shirt that was emitting a scent she could not seem to place, even after all of her play amongst nature’s many flora.

She knew every tree and flower that God had ever had the mercy to bestow upon the earth —- she was sure of it at eleven years old. Some of the encyclopedias in her father’s study only contained half of their pages by then, as diligently as she had ripped the others out for her artwork. She could have been a perfumer from how many different colored roses and daisies and lilies and carnations and violets she had sampled from her mother’s garden alone… but none of them smelled like this.

And just as her innocent fingers greedily gripped the gauzy fabric so that she may press this garment to her face for a real assessment of the rich green that was surely the source of that glorious scent, there was suddenly a shadow settling over her own so that the two were joined as one.

Her hands came up empty, and she spun around, jamming them behind her back and guilty.

He was not green. In fact, the sun had rendered him such a dark shade of gold, she immediately knew it was not one of her brothers who was suddenly just inches in front of her. He blocked the sun from her view, but she could not think far enough to search for it behind his pillaring figure. Slowly, she adjusted her line of sight so that she may see what was above the center of this broad chest blocking everything else.

The second telltale factor separating him from anyone that could have possibly been an extension of her family, from anyone she could have possibly ever seen before in her life, was a pair of the clearest grey eyes. Up until that point, she did not even know that eyes came in that color, and swore that he must have been someone very special. Surely his eyes were the color of diamonds, but she did not know -— she had never really seen one.

She felt small in his presence. But it was not just his towering stature making her feel this way; it was his large stare.

She cowered inside herself, inching backwards towards the fence as his arm extended towards her in a shelf of sinuous flesh. And just when something was about to happen, as her heart pounded in anticipation of his skin making contact with her own; just as she realized that the scent she was looking to place could not be found in nature because it was the scent of a man; her brother’s voice startled her.
“Abby, this is Sebastian,” Jameson provided, already working his white tee-shirt from the inside-out ball of cotton that had been discarded a few feet before the wall of corn.

That shelf of taught muscle was no longer obstructing her view, but a large hand was extended towards her face. She stared at it for a moment as Jameson was explaining something in the background: “college…” “father has a farm… two miles west…” “family business…” it was all just white noise.

His eyes were so startling in his face… like wintertime must have looked like in places where it really snowed. They were so cold compared to his warm complexion, and the dark mop of curls atop his head that were even more unruly than her brothers’.

Abigail said nothing, suddenly feeling cold in the shade between the three boys before her. They exchanged words that echoed when falling down to her ears, the same jovial banter that she was used to hearing when it was only Walker and Jameson and she was just tagging along. And then they were gone; she watched Sebastian’s tanned back disappear behind the side of the house, dirt streaked across his shoulder blades like angel’s wings.

“Abigail!” her mother shouted again, but this time there was only sheer exasperation in her tone.

She turned and ran towards the back porch, where her sisters looked out at her from behind her mother’s shoulders. Finding her place on a stool between them in the kitchen, she peeled husks from the cylindrical mosaics of yellow tiles that felt smooth and pebbled in the palm of her hand. And while Jenny and Diana discussed another year in high school, impending as the air grew crisp to make way for fall, Abigail surreptitiously brought a strip of husk to her face, inhaling deeply but inaudibly, to see if perhaps she could find his scent on the moist inside of the leaf.

twenty five years old

I am a baby, fraught with terror and distress. Bewildered, wide-eyed, slack-jawed -- I am learning to self-soothe.

I am hungry, thus hysterical. I am tired, but cannot articulate my malaise. I am frustrated, unable to differentiate need from id.

I am unsure how to communicate my desperation for connection. I am comforted by familiarity in this ever-novel world. My hands know only to reach.

I am helpless, but I am determined to grow strong -- to hold my head up, to sit, to stand, to walk, to run.

"Slapstick or Lonesome No More!"

Steady now
under the weight of decay
Don't let the debris keep you down!
Come back to the light,
the spring where the sun stays
lingering in the foyer, tentative
then smoothly sliding coat from shoulders
headed back to the bar.
Remember your voice on high
appreciate the volume, the mass, the frequency
Let it break glass
Leave a trail of shards.

Chin up,
a silent moment to mourn wasted time
is still wasted time -
Perfection knows not to be born
on its own.

"target practice"

Return to life now -
open your eyes, grip your pen;
document your fear.

Summer of Interlochen

We were confined to four invisible walls: nature, creativity, nurturance of ability, and mandatory knee socks. These walls were called Interlochen, Center for the Arts, and within resided a cornucopia of culture, passion, and imagination. We came from all over the world: from Namibia to Iceland, California, Australia... yet despite the differences - as a cabin-mate from Poland turns to me, eyebrow raised, and inquires: "What means pee-pee?" - we shared a common goal. We all possessed a certain drive toward cultivating talent, whether we worked with our hands, our bodies, or our minds. Despite four walls confining us, we gamboled from hall to hall, through the forest, by the lakes, searching for a sense of self, for meaning in our art, for perfection in our work. We had dreams. Big dreams. In a place where everyone was so different, where there existed abound individualism, we were uninhibited. We all possessed that same passion.

Music wafts through the air from morning until night, as if an opus has replaced the singing of the birds. On my way to class, my shoulder bag beats out time against my hip. There are watercolor paints in the grass, and at lunchtime, the musical theatre majors burst into an impromptu performance of Orphan Annie’s "Hard Knock Life." I lie supine in the grass, laptop propped on my stomach. A Macedonian cellist croons in a language that I do not understand. I stare directly into the sun and listen. I am inspired.

Gaia

In the wintertime she sleeps with Toss and Turn,
stirred by nightmares as Cold
     chips away at her face
She squints against the white static
     of crystalline neurosis,
her tears frozen and snatched by Wind
     before reaching the ground.

Reawakened, reinvigorated, revived
     she is in spring
Gasping warm breath to weep in the ecstasy
     of fertility
Her cheeks bloom robust hues as blood
     melts to flow free
Virility and Vigor -- her cobalt eyes widen
     to illuminate her face.

She is lazy with orgasm when summer arrives
her back arched and legs strewn
     across emerald bed sheets
Listless and content with the heat
     of a boiling son
she rolls away.

But autumn is the most beautiful death
     I ever did see --
She screams cold and loud, stripped naked
     in the inferno,
her martyr’s arms ablaze in Citrine, Coquelicot,
     and Magenta;
Then she collapses into infinite slumber
     with a crimson gasp.

august

A piece of you lies with me always
from when I wake to when I sleep;
You are the sweetest smells of the season--
and I close my eyes and sigh...

Wool sweaters in the wintertime,
lavender in the spring;
the august presence of a figurehead
draped in perennial lilacs and memory.

The heart of the house:
All hail the goddess!
And long for her with lonely lips
and aching hands when she is not there.

For when the year has run its course,
whether winter, spring, august, autumn;
You are the sweetest smell my nose has ever tasted;
I close my eyes and sigh.

Eli Winter (otherwise untitled)

I remember walking Eli halfway down the street in the wintertime, my Birkenstock clogs crunching footprints into the snow that was a thickly packed layer of diamonds over the cement. The air smelled different in winter, and that smell alone made me think of my first love and sigh. At midnight the moon hung high and bright, the clouds only a few feet above my head. In the morning before school, I would walk down to meet Eli at her house for carpool, and I would smoke a cigarette on the way, my fingertips magenta and wizened when I could no longer feel them. I would stop before the evergreen at the corner of Eli’s lawn, lest her parents see me from their living room window, and I would stare up at the sky of seven-thirty in the morning. My mind would wander back to my first love, and I would exhale smoke along with my own breath. Those were the days when I still spoke of him in every word I said.

the warrior and the snake

There was a serpent that hissed and danced as the warrior struck him to the earth. Thumbs poised upon his weapon, his feet were parted and planted on the ground as he watched the asp trickle to the grass in fragments that were like droplets of dawn. He smirked as the sensation of victory and relief flooded over him, inhaling the stench of death suspended in the air.

The strands of gold fell cater-corner into the crabgrass blooming at the edge of the lot where litter decayed to dirt. The warrior did not qualm about the murder he was so carelessly committing; he did not think about those who may have watched him in the midst of battle -- he maintained his focus, watching this beast crumble with the majesty of all other myths that had transpired epochs ago.  In his awe, the warrior cocked his head to a slight angle as if to cogitate the meaning of his life and other such questions that asked more of him than knew he had to muster.

Then, in a display of sunset perhaps, the serpent released a final whisper of defeat and was gone, leaving behind only the stench of his demise. The warrior bucked his hips with finality, hands trembling over his weapon as he replaced it behind the button and zipper along the front of his jeans. He looked to her where she sat watching all of this occur, her legs sprawled in a drug-crash around her and her eyes gaping at where his sword of flesh once hung from his grip.

"Wanted to see the show?" he asked, perking just one eyebrow as his zipper whined into place. He smirked then turned and walked away, leaving her there to question the phenomenon she had just witnessed.