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an imaginary novel
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This was her trip wholly
__________so says she
__________so says she some more
__________she tells me so she says to him “this is my trip wholly”.
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She doesn’t say anything anymore.
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Cool as calm as winter brush shaken aura. Clean strokes of fiber-lined ligaments. Weather for the disaster in a fevered pitch – pounding on her door for things past due. She had not been in a hurry and barely even thought of the modest light. Her father was a doctor, you see, and some things are better left alone.
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This was her trip wholly.
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Someone had called out to her before the fall and she hadn’t realized how they said okay. How often could the word mean move, how often do people like to hear their name mispronounced by strangers? Beth and Angela and Rory and Tuber (not her real name to begin with, but still).
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Her mother had died and her father had wrinkles. He now longer practiced his practice and sent her checks made up her mother’s holdings. She could not remember the last time her mother had held her and she was not there when she died. She knew how it happened and was sorry and punched at her pillow from time to time – really just to fluff it.
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This mean triumph of rats, fat little cows moving toward her as if willing an anxiety of gait that she could not shadow; tempered sounds of water that matters. She turns off the lights the moment the train hits.
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Chapter Two
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How could she imagine to be afraid still? the door clamps shut and locks for good.
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Her father, the doctor, could not help the women in his life; he lays for a long time pretending his name is Harvard Alexander even though his name is Richard. Richard, he thinks, makes a better name for a dog, a dick, a poor man with no power or imagination. Harvard, on the other hand, speaks of good breeding and background, not something that a man of lesser prowess would stick in a hole and call it a good day.
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And then at night it rains and darkens the roses he planted for her to coo a dark-blood blister. This was the first time he appeared happy, or happy enough, and he turns on the lights to look at his reflection in the glass.
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He doesn’t see anything but the roses, sagging like sacks of sinew, weighed down by the very thought.
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Chapter H
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She grows tomatoes in her garden and calls them perfectly inadequate.
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She vanished rapturously into the yellow thicket and the summer’s heat hurts her all around. If there was rain, her garden would be a better shade of red, blossoms of fruit bursting like cornucopias of flame and redolence. Instead of the weak bulges, anorexic in size and shape, unable to let even the sharp blade she holds in her hand break the skin.
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She calls these beasts her muffled griefs. She pouts and whimpers along the aisles like a fractured bride. She considers her hell a lesser spell of waste – of time & energy. And she is so tired of so many lights.
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Captives of her approximation with sputtering liquors of self-control; her original ardor just a forgotten folly. Shades of wonder and truancy of darkness were her own body’s analogy of the dry dust beneath her. This is her own frilled clock of desire and she wants nothing to do with it.
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Instead she wallows in the mire, memories of limbs like flutes playing a theme of imitation velvet and with a belief-like technique of synapse and gout – treasured spots where the lights never leave, leaving only streaks of satin sun-licks that only too quickly turn to wisps, then scars, scabbed over like the earth she lies in now.
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