free write entries - 11,12,13,14

Week 11
Entry 1:
My dad keeps quiet and watches the same Hitler special on the History Channel
for the fifth or sixth time this week, gets up only to pee, opens mouth only to remind me
Hitler had syphilis or to drink root beer since he was a problem on the real stuff,
moves his hands only to pet the cat who is starting to look like him growing old
and white or to pat my shoulder and ask okay, okay? about nothing I’ve said out loud.
He keeps quiet, never said I love you to anyone I know, just the girl who is not my mother
in the pictures locked away behind Picasso postcards and Elvis collectibles. Never said
I love you to anyone I know, but he did give me a Janis Joplin cd when I was eight,
bought frilly socks for me and my sisters when we were too small to shop for ourselves,
the same socks I would shove into my backpack after getting on the bus, which he walked us to
every morning until I could drive. He started to keep quiet when his dad forgot English,
can’t speak anymore since words stopped making sense, since my grandma kept praying
and my dad never learned how, since nothing could possibly matter anymore. When I keep
quiet only my dad knows, shakes his head and says okay, okay.

Entry 2:
Jokes between punch marks on time sheets and dirty
dishes in the backroom did nothing but make me
curious, wanted to know if your skin would still look
the same against me or if it would smell better, like you
did something right, the way we all look better
when we’re not in work clothes or angry at people
for asking dumb questions or giving us quarters
where dollars belong. We would melt into seahorse
sheets under mauve wall-paper, by soft-white sixty watt glow
in a $20 room off exit 101, if things had gone right.
I wanted to be your dirty laundry, the eyebrow raise
after four missed calls, your morning after, your night
before, the everything behind your she meant
nothing. But I don’t even know what you look like
naked. I wore panty hose that night.


Week 12
Entry 1:
You cannot be beautiful in poetry
anymore, cannot be serene or
majestic, watch out for song
and dance, let the poem do that-
nobody has been allowed loveliness
since Neruda was trying to get back
an ex-lover, nobody can fall in love but
you can fall into other things like garbage
cans or down rabbit holes, can be hit
but no babies can die, just remember,
unless it’s funny, Jesus can only show up
if he’s in a t-shirt and your parents’
divorce will never matter. Unless
you can tell us in single syllables
and consistent s sounds or unless
you can have them decide over
sandwiches, who gets the house
and who gets the pet ferret. The men
who have taught me to write have
all failed for not teaching me to think,
Keats, there are no more bright stars,
no more fair faces unless they grace
clock covers, no delight nor wonder
because your opinion is free anyway,
you can’t sell a book if your work
isn’t worth pennies. I want to tell
whoever decided I could not be
beautiful in poetry anymore to
shove it up their ass, in pure
monosyllabic clear as rules imagery.
How’s that for poetry?

Entry 2: Woke up early for my hangover, had enough
time to vomit in my sister’s toilet, take some vitamin C
and still be late to work but only by ten minutes or maybe
a few hours but that was earlier so I can’t remember
anymore but I remember an empty bottle I could never
have dranken if that’s the past tense of any action
but I was never one for grammatics, never one for just
about anything, never anyone I could talk to you know,
really talk to. That was the night you were conceived,
they told me. I still don’t know if that was a joke or
not but it very well could’ve been either way since
I don’t know how my parents met or if they ever were
in anything other than trouble.

Week 13
Entry 1:
I think I’m bored without you. And the mornings aren’t as
fun. No clown in my bed to wake up to, except maybe my
self, the b12 has been doing something funny to the way
I dream- did I tell you about the one where you didn’t want
to have sex anymore? I called it intercourse in my mother’s
tongue, my mother like how we always talk about Freud,
like before you left, and I think I was mad in the dream.
But I let you build a home against my breast and that fat
part of my upper arm, you know? My bed turned into mud
or rain or more vitamin b12 maybe, but it felt like too much
like heartbeat, like speed, like gaining weight all together
at one time, like remembering how you got fat, like how
you weren’t before, like how you blame donuts or cheese,
or each other, like how nobody has sex like we can you tell
everyone and I never care. But we didn’t when you didn’t
feel like it, like a girl, but in the dream. You’re still you
but it’s that dream you with the lighter hair color that hates
when I wear make-up, the dream you that is fluent in
talking backward, the dream you that only has one head
and less birthday and more cake and less you. Dream you
is not the boy I fell in love with, but like you, I always believe
in your dream self, like he is telling me something, like how
all poems are about death, like how all poems are about sex,
like how your dream self is always nervous, like how I can’t
cough when I need to, like how I always hit my alarm clock
before it ever goes off, like how my cat likes the smell of my
computer’s heat, like how my roommate always leaves the
bathroom light on, the things I can depend on, like I can depend
that you won’t be here when I wake up, like you are still
a country away, like you are still a lifetime ago, like you are still
the only person I’ve ever met that knows all the words
to every cartoon theme song, like you are still the only person
who knows the words I carved inside bookshelves in the library
that one time you were here and everyone knew it was us.

Entry 2:
I wasn’t going to talk about it, but I got lonely. I’m sorry. I got tired of seeing
her, not that you know her, arms around you, know nothing could ever stand,
in the way of what we never completed, test of numbers and answers, the questions
numbered in alphabetics, is not a word they told me I was too small to know about
a difference when I lost the spelling bee and when my mom reminded me I was not
good enough, of this bullshit and ballroom dancing the only ones for me are the
sad ones like Shirley Manson or that kid who shops at Hot Topic with his friends
every Friday night of the eighth grade and wears a lot of black even though he loves
his grandma and has a pet cat named Ralph he would die without, any water we
would float we would not be full of wasted hydrogen, bombs going off going nowhere
no way to tell if that’s the way things were supposed to or not supposed to or
scholastically to go, black no sugar no milk don’t you understand anything, is possible
like that movie Mary Poppins with the nanny who I heard was a bitch in the book,
shelves don’t hold enough for me I read slow and not that much but I write a lot
between the pages like to keep a lot of bookmarks like to take a lot of pictures and
put them where they don’t go, away me, myself and I are a lonely trio can’t ever
keep company enough to love a washed out two bit chump like that guy who i
can’t learn from, can’t anything from, can’t can’t from, can’t stand anyone
who tells me what to do when I am always, always right.

Week 14
Entry 1:
My dad called my ex-boyfriend
Caligula, my ex-boyfriend shared
Caligula’s birthday, at least that’s
what my dad said, but in history
I learned Caligula thought he was
in contact with the divine, would
dress in public like Hercules and
appointed horses as his counsel-
men. My ex-boyfriend forgot how
to cry when he was four and his
tyrant parents made him ride
a pony at one of his too-many
brothers’ birthday parties, even
though he was scared, but this is
why I cannot love him anymore.
The boy who sounds like the way
it smells when anyone around me
smokes hydroponic pot, he is too
sculpted, too kind to love, too square
a jaw, too much goodness can
kill you. When my dad likes a
person, he gives them a nickname
but he called my sister’s exboyfriend
clyde, a name that in my dad’s time
meant, not a partner in crime, but
a square, like the checked floors at
Steak and Shake at 3 am because
you already had Waffle House twice
last night. A man lights a cigarette
in the wood, alone. Can anyone
hear him scream?

Entry 2:
I have never been a threat, boy who’s always known
me asked if I was still a virgin, never a threat because
my blonde hair never paired with large body parts
except eyeballs which on their own are like swollen
grapes, because blonde hair is natural, because nobody
can be jealous of me no matter how hard I try. Did you
know they make a new kind of Skittles that fizzes on
your tongue, different flavors too, like green is melon.
If I were any other girl, what I did would’ve been wrong
but nobody’s ever been jealous of me, so when I took
that boy from that girl who was having that thing that
they never figured out, nobody was actually mad. Girls
that are well-behaved would never get away with
a vitamin deficiency. I tried to stop them in their tracks
with white teeth and good shampoo but the thing is
men always know if you are good or if you are better.
One time, I did a bad thing and we got rocks thrown
at our knees, but I was only four or five and I think
I told them to stop anyway but nobody ever listened
to me because my voice was little like me, like I
would always be, like how people have always seen
me, like how I see me reflected in a mirror, bouncing
body like a seizing heart or animal, when I was little
before, it was called jumping on the bed, like monkeys
like the monkeys jumping on the bed, the kind where
they called doctors, called moms, called cops, called
corpses, called upon dead relatives in black and white
photographs that hang next to the picture of my dad
in a gallery because he could’ve made it big if we didn’t
ruin everything. you are good in this space. you are
good no matter how hard you try to be bad because
sometimes we cannot do anything but write our names
in the top right corner of sheets of notebook paper
hard in number 2 lead until our hands fall off.