a boned commitment
I love that you’ve mem-
orized the bones I’ve hoarded
behind other bones.
Tag Archives: bones
forgiving.
on the way to you
was writing verses about you
done with writing realized
was headed in the wrong direction
done with writing realized
was headed in the wrong direction
……Vera Pavlova (Translated by Derek Walcott)
So instead of inserting your name against the one inch line where words go, I added mine. I have spent these months learning my way out of your presence, but it is my own that has left me this alone.
Last night, I sat beside another and we spoke about forgiveness. When your syllable came up, I could feel the noise of your teeth and spine. This used to make me curdle, but I am learning that to move on, one must move through.
There are humans out there walking out of marriages. Leaving children behind or stains of sterling silver on fingers. A poet recently asked me if I ever wanted to get married again. Again. As though I have already. And now I realize that I have. If marriage is a union, I have engaged in such. And if the opposite is separation, I have felt that as well. So would I do this again? Yes. And no. I am housed inside that no, until I forgive. All this time, I thought it was you, but it’s been me all along.
I need to forgive me.
Years ago, I traveled to the Netherlands, hunting. With weaponry of tiny red notebook (given to me by a handsome dreamer) and black ink pen, I spent every day searching for something in me to care about. I wrote poems with strangers, smoked pot with a beautiful German who gave me strict directions that life is about getting lost. Maps are meant to be written on, not listened to. He told me lost is where one is found. So each day, I hopped buses and walked new streets, misplacing direction. I gathered stories by people in need of sharing them. I ate an expensive meal with a stranger who wanted to know all about poetry and life in New York. I sang a memorial of candlelight and tears in a church. I was desperately trying to forgive all of my selves.
None of this is easy and when love leads us on, it is distracting. And terrifyingly beautiful.
I forgive you.
All this music I distract myself with and the food I fondle with my teeth and tongue and the poems and long walks in cracked air and the conversations with strangers and the ways in which I grow addicted to chaos and grey……..leads me here.
Just a few days ago, I articulated [one of] my trauma[s] into a box and sent it toward the west. I am writing my way out of these bones. Metamorphosing into something I can connect to and trust. All those years I called myself an atheist because I could not believe in myself (so how could I possibly believe in an other).
I’ve inserted my name into this meditation. Repetition will lead me forward…closer to who or what I want to believe in. A different kind of union between self and love.
the bone structure of yesterday.
“you’ve got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sidewise
for a while
and have your guts
scrambled by a
bully
and the demonic
ladies,
you’ve got to run
along the edge of
madness
teetering,
you’ve got to starve
like a winter
alleycat,
you’ve go to live
with the imbecility
of at least a dozen
cities,
then maybe
maybe
maybe
you might know
where you are
for a tiny
blinking
moment.”
—–Charles Bukowski, from Bone Palace Ballet: new poems
Where you are may include obscurities but if the footnotes are still attached, one may find clarity in what is further explained.
Where you are may be damaged or sprained.
Where you are may require a chest x-ray or formal apology.
Where you are may include a defend of language and after all the booze has been broken into, you may mumble out: ‘you’d be surprised what stalks inside bodies’.
Where you are is a desert in the west of what is central. You thirst for articulate shoulder blades and coffee.
It was only yesterday, when you offered up your waist waste. It was intimate only because you read that poem but in all of your nude, you realized that line breaks and italics can be far more intimate than exposed bones. A spectator will call this a rough-up, when you finally come to terms with the discrepancies on your body and come out about what is no longer true about you. And it’s ok if you decide to forego political vocabulary and just call yourself human from now on. Where you are is forming.
false memories.
I have been dreaming. There is a camel bent into a mathematical quandary. It carries Latin in its hump, hungry for the lost languages bartered away. In this one, I am woman and when I drip sun from between thighs, I learn of pregnancy. I have been warned. There is a hanger made from desert sand and railroads which gut me. Here in this part of brain stem, blood gasps into clouds of self-cleaning exhales. I am getting married to a midnight roofwalker. On our first date, she eats the revolution out of peaches and spits them into nearby satellites. Without words, this music becomes a biblical rant of slayed tongues. These are all facts and they have been documented into stained-glass soliloquies lies. How far along is this education. How tender is this snowstorm which buries several men and preserves the sick they have yet to learn in their bodies. There is a cracked spine, deliberately severed in order to use the bones for ores. When all that snow melts, someone will need to lead us out from the cold and drown. I meet a woman dressed in passport and what I thought was lipstick now calls itself Syrah. She gathers up everything that falls from me and we head into a cloud shaped as instruments. Her kiss erases every scar from beneath my body. And then knuckles rap against front door and I am told that there has been a mistake. With fingers stretching miles, this human unzips me out from all the skin keeping me in and transports me into another torso. This is where you were meant to live, they speak. The blood is still warm and my limbs appear in tact. But the cells are harder here and though there is blood, I do not bleed as frequently. And yes, I still have hair, but it covers me more. And here in this body, I am called elsewhere. How much of this is believed; how much of this is drunk. How many books must be read in order to understand the symbolism of announcements. Are you a doctor of your skeletons, yet.
within each human, find salt, stone and strength
It can be difficult to bend.
At a certain age, knees knock themselves out like aggressive boxers. And as soft as this earth is from its deepest breaths, what we rest on can be like crushed up graves, digging into available bones.
You will love more than once. There may even be some months or years where you love many. Some will live beside each other and then there are the ones who live on islands too far to contact through wires and wails.
When you find a pattern in your sadness, look to your left and the one who has remained may be referred to as planetary partner or moon dweller.
Never apologize for all that salt traveling from webbed sight. Humans are meant to float into the fissures of body’s drips.
Ignore doors and windows. Remain…even when exit signs tempt you with their neon wander.
It can be difficult to contort into the kind of person who survives especially when the night is far too angry to permit you sleep. But bend. And breathe. And stay. All of this aids the elastic in you.
wound collector
We met on a heatwave where our freckles floated right off of our bodies and it took several blocks before we could find a sturdy bench to house all of our moistened, loose skin. She asked me questions like: when was the first time and how long before the last and what feelings did it release in me and how does it feel when people touch them or ask about why they exist.
I rested each arm– one at a time — against the cold, soiled concrete ledge. She wanted to know about my tattoos and loved the way that they appeared like sliced-up stories on my flesh. She kept apologizing for her camera. I told her that I no longer apologize on behalf of my bones, so she shouldn’t have to pardon the plastic used to point and click me into focus.
All of these things are how they are supposed to be, I said.
She photographed my creases. The places on my forearms and wrists where I tried to disconnect. I was going to mention my hips to her, but they were so quiet, I forgot all about them. While I remained still, the mosquitoes took advantage of my sugared sweat. I watched welts pop up like internalized kernels, which began to itch my skin into a new color.
We stopped calling this summer a week ago, I screamed out to the slender flies. These scars are mine; they are not meals, only poems now.
This was the second time today I converted my scars into sentences.
Before we parted, we hugged and I wonder how much scars weigh and which one of us is heavier. She told me the color of my red is so beautiful and suits me. I wanted to tell her the aroma of her history moved me in a way that would drip into many poems to come.
a poem should not mean/ but be
a poem should not mean/ but be — Archibald MacLeish
Early on, s)he] troubled those brave enough to listen. Teachers contacted hir parents, worried for hir safety. Suddenly, the poems were jumping off the page, growing sharp from tumbling through the air at fast speeds and forming sharp angles. These poems split hir wrists open. When s)he] was newly sixteen, several poems turned hir forearms into a gingham criss-cross pattern. s)he] horded several bottles of poems and swallowed over forty-two of various milligrams and side effects. Doctors attempted to pump hir stomach. s)he] threw up the poems and they splattered against the floor like scattered bone particles.
In the years to come, s)he] began to experiment with various forms of poems, some digested through nose or ignited and inhaled. s)he] learned the power of serving size. s)he] grew loud, rather, the poems grew so loud, it was almost impossible to remain silent within the pain of hir body.
In an interview by a New York Times reporter after the release of hir third book of poems, s)he] said:
“Of course there is an urgency in my work because there is an urgency to live. I spent years tearing into my body, swatting it away as though it were a swarm of mosquitoes. I wanted to make an imprint. I wanted to make an impression beyond the scars, beyond the jilted lovers. In life, I am a liar. A pretender. I am not very good at being alive. But when I write poems, or when I perform them, it’s like I’m taking a giant seam ripper and undoing every scar, every lie, every emotion. If I could only live inside my poems, breathe off the fumes of their intentions, I could make it. I could last.
think of poems as suicide letters
press into carbon and oxygen and choke
To exit: how it feels to be entrenched in these poems, write the pain of it, the journey, trauma, translated
{how to} walk off a stage or poem and be normal.
strap magnifying lenses against pupils detect hidden fibers defining each line
feel it before
shedies and no clarity can be given.
Look away. Diagnose. Crush pills onto tongue repeat daily. Repeat daily. Repeat daily.
Repeat daily.
Quiet the crazy creative emotive
familia
Some things can be explained.
The indentations on cheeks like puddles also called dimples.
Curve of hairline, similar to low tide.
The elongation of your toes.
The intonation of voice. It’s pitch and peaks.
When you are around them, it is easy to assemble where your parts came from. Skin tone. Body type. Strength of shoulders and inclination to laugh during the sad parts of movies. Every root can be labeled and tagged as an offshoot of someone else.
In the morning, when I am alone at my desk– which used to be a piece of scrap wood balanced on plastic crates and has since been replaced by a yellow fold up table purchased at summertimes stoop sale– I think about the parts that cannot be explained. And I search for these parts in lovers too. Because I want to decipher the mannerisms swiped from family tree and the ones which came much later.
We arrive and we watch and we learn as we watch and we do as we watch and our opinions are like a giant garden watered by our parents or guardians. It is difficult to decipher what is chosen, when nothing is its own anymore.
I’ve done some things that were not mentioned at suppertime or holiday gatherings or through school research of family history. I follow the dust, bred from the chalk-marks surrounding these things to figure out its true origins.
Where did all this arrive from?
Youth is something we push away and push and smother with a pillow because we want what the grown-ups have when we can’t have it. We let go of overalls too quickly and imaginary friends and nap time and excitement over snowdays or water-slides. We put on make-up when our faces are colorful and dramatic already or slick our hair back and replace wide-open laughter with brooding glares.
Then when we are real adults (which I am still researching), the bills arrive and suddenly we are judged by our credit score instead of how many U.S state capitols we can memorize. Our status is marked by how many computer friends we have and the latest phone upgrade glowing in our skinny pockets. We surround ourselves with things, similar to when we were young, but our things are plugged in and flashy and everything must match including underwear and whatever happened to those faraway days when life was marked by play-dates and tree climbing?
In the olden days, we played a game on looseleaf paper called MASH. This light-hearted game was like a scratched out fortune teller.
Mansion. Apartment. Shack. House.
What is your fate?
And you have to name who your future husband would be (before we knew we were queer). And what we wanted their job to be (because we control that, right?). And the car we’d drive and the name of our kids and animals and even the place we’d honeymoon (for those of us legally allowed to marry).
I remember even as a kid, I never wanted the mansion and I wasn’t too keen on a house either. For most of my adulthood, I’ve lived in an apartment without a wife or kids, had a perfect pup for some time, and I never dictated my partner’s job but I always wondered when I’d get the one I always hoped for.
When I am around my family, I study them in a way I never did before. I do this in order to understand myself a little more. Someone drilled into my mind and stole so many of my childhood snapshots that many years are blurred. Kind of like how it looks when I take my glasses off….but worse. I don’t remember full years. So I try I try I try to be present now because this moment is loudest and the ink is still wet and the words are at their thickest.
Maybe I should address the calluses on my feet from all the paths I’ve taken. They know where I’ve been, recalling each time I’ve gotten lost. Perhaps all the answers to our selves can be found in the hardened formation of tissue decorating our unseen bones.
body is a fireplace for rummaging ashes
There is a strange aroma that arises with each burn. And nothing just disappears. Because if you look within the crumbles of fire, you will see each woman devoured through external glances, the men, the books, the meals, the water, the leaves, the mountains, the spices, the bedframes, the silence, the sliced animals, the musculature of eardrums, the roads.
Sky is a cannibal. And the sun is a combustion of yesterday and the decades that wait backstage. Are fingernails flammable. Is the belt you whip your pages with fire-proof.
Save the world one spit at a time. Hoard saliva as though it is a remedy. When you see something worthy of keeping, hiss the liquids off your tongue and gyrate to the sizzle.
Not everything is a metaphor for something else. Sometimes a fire is just for warmth or a need to extinguish evidence of life.
When one sets a body on fire, the only thing left are the bones, hinting toward the remains of existence.
and don’t forget to exercise
Apparently, my body is changing.
Years ago, things I ate disappeared upon final bite, whereas now, the weight of what I eat lingers against particular parts of my body. My eating habits really haven’t changed, but I am unapologetic of what I ingest (my body / my choice) though I am a fairly “healthy” eater.
I crave farmer’s markets and the vegetables they sell with soil still stitched to their rind. I crave quinoa and brown rice and avocado and peanut butter. I yearn for meat sometimes and always bread. I love cake and rainbow cookies and chocolate. I don’t really have restrictions and diet-er is a word I’d never want to label myself, in addition to heterosexual or republican.
I am aware of the bones hidden beneath thick layers of loose skin. I don’t really need them to jut out to remind me they are there.
My memory is ruptured, though I am quite sure there was a time my belly was perfectly flat and I had no cellulite or stretchmarks or what is commonly referred to as a “spare tire”. That time can also be referred to as as years 0 through 11.
Billboards of women reveal hipbones and breasts so perfectly erect and elevated. There are no hangnails or beauty marks moles or calluses on toes or oversized labia or crooked, coffee-stained teeth or pimples.
We are inundated with smooth, tiny, emaciated, bony, and breathless.
So I hide what I’ve got until I realize I have to show it to let others know what else exists.
One of my breasts is slightly larger or smaller than the other and my toes are long (they have been described by lovers as monkey-like) and I am a scar covered in body I have many scars and when I smile, some of my teeth are crooked and I don’t have a six-pack or a two-pack or any resemblance of a container of defined belly and I have cellulite behind my thighs and sometimes 1 or 2 hairs grow on my tits and I wonder why they choose that spot and my ears are large and my earlobes are meaty and and and and
I didn’t forget to exercise, I just choose to write poems instead.
Aimee Herman 