diary entry #2: i must be sure of earth before it goes
feel the dirt beneath your feet before microplastics cut into your soles / Souls
5 february 2024
A beautiful day. One that is perhaps not meant to stretch over this last month of winter, insulating like a well-worn sweater. But I feel so lovingly content in this moment, and I wish for it to last forever: the trill of birds’ breath and wings, the holler of owls, the grazing of goats, and the way that warm, later afternoon sun cuts through the air and silhouettes the first budding bugs. No void to fill here. No yearning for elsewhere. The air is sweet and woody and heady. I think I shall roll a cigarette and lay in the moss.
*
I must be sure of earth before it goes. The line rolls around—echoes, vibrates—about my skull like a dissonant chord delicately thrummed and thrummed and thrummed. If She-Who-Came-Before-Me rattled about in her bell jar (grasshopper trapped beneath glass), then I sway about in the bell tower, hands clutched to my ears and jaw dropped in silent Munchian ecstasy. I touch the moss beneath my skin and yearn for a mossy and webbed swaddle—to be cradled, swathed in the womb of Mother and cast into the void of Father, floating upon that gentle push and pull, rise and fall, that gentle tide of time.
I trust the hot caress of Apollo upon my skin. A lick that drips saliva and sweat down the neck, where my pulse thrums and thrums and thrums. I trust the stone beneath my feet, my soles, my soul[s].
I must be sure of earth before it goes.
It’s in my blood, it’s in my blood. Infection, pure and simple, so lazy and insidious. The lump that grows upon [my] Mother’s breast, that spreads upon [my] Father’s liver.
A strong desire to eat dirt, to claw at it with my hands and shove it between my teeth, form a cool mud in my bowels. Grit and gritty teeth. A macabre grin. Soil falls in chunks, tumbles down the protruding veins of my forearm (thrum, thrum, thrum).
I must be sure of earth before it goes.
It’s in my blood, it’s in my blood. A gripping gasp of noxious gas, a spray of dye divine against quivering leaves, a Saintly toxin that rots in my belly, that binds all Product. I lick it from a spoon. Delirious swallows of chemical cocktails, of mechanized flesh—the body and the blood, a meal to bring me closer to contaminated and predestined death. It manifests in bulbous protrusions beneath the skin. Hard rocks eat away the bone. A material, industrial servitude that devours. It bites into my veins and colors my bile a putrid purple. I flay against this body, this body infected—
It’s in my blood.
I must be sure of earth me before it goes I go.
*
early summer 2023
does lust’s scent trail thick in my wake or am i beauty for beauty’s sake the velveteen rabbit’s been caught by the wheel no notice of death aside from a squeal mud squelches between my wiggling toes i must be sure of earth before it goes and so i crawl from my grave suck clean the rib from which i’m made for only a corpse would not slap the blood-sucking leech from her lap with my thumb pricked by the thorn i face the immortal ridicule of scorn sticky juices dribble down my chin let her fruit be thine flavor of sin
*
3 october 2018
The slow move of water. Wet.
*
26 july 2019
“Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.”
— Angie Sijun Lou, “Jessica gives me a chill pill,” published in Muzzle
*
10 february 2024
The sound of rain.
I am dry.
Yet blood flows through my body and saliva trickles down my throat and my lymphnodes are full of fluid and my eyes are leaking tears.
I am told to think of my happy place.
My mind turns a blind eye unto itself. I pathologize the initial rendering of fields and flowers and sunshine as the result of cultural conditioning; for traditional notions of Heaven have never felt true nor safe to me. The boundless space terrifies me. I find nothing freeing in the broad expanse of sky. That ever-arching blue beyond implies an Otherness to space that I cannot reach, that I do not have access to. I find myself much more drawn to soil and water. I am envious of the worms that wriggle through mud. An open field is not a place where I would like to be alone, and one’s interior can only be penetrated by the lone Self; strange, these boundaries of imagined worlds.
I am told to think of my happy place.
I am in a courtyard. It is long-abandoned, with doric columns of deadened vines and faded/chipped/patina-d paint. The soil floor is wet, but the central fountain has been long dried out. There’s an ambulatory—with pockets of forgotten rooms, filled with weathered pottery (these which hold my memories of gentle whispers and melodies).
The sound of rain.
I am wet.
Water fills this courtyard. Engulfs me. My hair fans out (concentric tendrils, spirals), and the vines come alive and reeds sprout from the soil and the water fills and fills and fills until the courtyard is a pool, until it is just me in this embryonic fluid, ensconsed in this murky water that thrums with the vibrational hums of my memories.
*
15 may 2018
He has a tumor in his eye. It bulges—loud and ugly, like a steaming bitch underneath a magnifying glass. It’s gotta be a heavy burden to carry; his head lolls to the side.
He tells me that it’s from swimming in infected waters in his youth. Brown and muddy water comes to mind, but he tells me that this pond was a clear and vibrant blue, like you were swimming in the body of a goddess “or some shit.” He tells me that the nearby plant dumped waste there, and it made the water so beautiful and bright that you couldn’t resist—a modern siren’s song.
*
27 july 2023
“death must be so beautiful. to lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. to have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. to forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. you can help me. you can open for me the portals of death’s house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is” with such ease? to touch my soul so casually?
— Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost
*
25 august 2018
“I’ve lived half my life in darkness,” dad says, and I laugh because it sounds so pretentious (between the rise of day and fall of night), but I come up short at the sight of liver spots stretched against the tanned skin of his hands, the snake-like, yellowed whites of his eyes. His arms and legs look like thin needles pushing into his gut that gleams a crescent moon, just visible beneath the pull of his shirt.
“I just want to sleep.”
*
end of july 2022
Panic: guts and organs spilling from a soft belly as I, hands slick with blood, fail at holding it all in; every vein and vital slips from my fingers like water through clenched fists.
Like time.
Aubrea: “I’ve made a goal to befriend time.”
A rock sits deep in my belly at the thought of time. I’m nauseous, I’m sick. My energy is being eaten by time, like yellowed, sharp teeth gnawing through strings.
I bite the stem of a flower with my teeth; nature is a balm for my soul.
*
21 november 2021
Notice: how the trees’ limbs burrow through the sky as our veins burrow through our body.
*
7 may 2020
I dream that I am eating crushed screens in a sea of milk. The bowl breaks, shatters. Blood spills over my lips. The waves turn pink. I look to my mother at the head of the table; only she is not my mother, she is Mother. Her skin is peeling away, revealing decaying cartilige and acidic bone.
*
31 may 2022
Was staring at a piece of infrastructure, pondering on the strangeness that, as sturdy as it was, it required maintenance and eventually replacement. That everything was like this—except for biological constructs that could perpetuate themselves. But they mutate. So—what if we could build everything out of biology? Our sinks and bridges become immortal—yet destined to become eerie, shifted, unrecognizable things within thousands of years.
*
31 october 1971
Is it true, Lord, that even today You love the sight of water, wind and light? Is it a fact that You are still affected by birds, by flowers, by children? What I am sure of is that You love, just as much, to see what keeps emerging from the hands of men with whom You have shared your creative power. – Hélder Câmara
*
7 january 2024
My mother once snored something mean at night. It was a howl, a longing call through the dark, a snarl. They strapped a machine over her mouth to push the air in and out, and when that didn’t work, they cut open her scar-strewn chest and inserted a little machine and gave her a button to press so that when she falls asleep at night, her breath is just as automated as the tick-tick-ticking of a clock.
*
Diane tells me that her shins are made of steel and that I could kick her over and over and over again and she would feel nothing. I ask her about her nerve endings, but she said that they were lost to the radiation: fried and sent to the ether as nothing more than atomic dust. I ask her how she feels, and she smiles and shrugs and says that memories sense for her. Her bottom lip quivers as she says this, so I figure that she feels as well as any defected human can.
*
I watch Mohammed in the daycare; the chords dangle from the cochlear implant behind his ear. I ask him to put them back in, but he writes in crooked lettering, blue and shaky crayon: I LIKE IT NO SOUND.
*
sometime in 1985
[In] our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.
I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
The cyborg would not recognize the garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.
– Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto
*
spring 2021
i sit here by the ocean mouth full of chalk the color of burnt sienna i fight the urge to dip beneath the waves and let the ocean rock me to sleep sink like a rock nestled amongst forgotten treasures i see an island off the coast not a mile’s distance and i wish to rule it as a wild thing with my lonesome, ecstatic laughter a crown made of twine successor to mother Circe i grind the jagged rocks between my teeth i eat the earth to become one with mother i drink the salt of the ocean inhale the breath of Poseidon until i shrivel like a prune i sit here by the ocean mouth full of chalk the color of burnt sienna i offer my blood as a sacrifice an apology for humanity’s sins and my own ridiculous righteousness until i spit dust
*
8 december 2015
There is a holiness to the morning. It is 5 am, maybe just cresting over to 6 am. Everything is still. Quiet. The scent of the nighttime air lingers. It’s fresh; I shiver a bit.
Slowly, the first rays of sun peak over the edge of the earth and everything is bathed in foggy, golden light.
Eden awakens.
