Little Ghost
I don’t remember what happiness is. I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy. I think the only times I come close to being happy are when I embrace my sadness.
I think of my body four years ago. I’d knock back half a bottle of pain pills and lie on the ground in the dark, carving up my body and touching my blood and floating away. I always felt like their were two of me, a body and a ghost. A specter of myself would sit on the side of the bed and watch my body lie and shake on the floor. My best friend, my witness.
I’m happy now. I’m medicated. I was medicated then too. But now I don’t overdo anything. Now I make clean calculations of my emotions. I keep my blood inside my veins, though sometimes I still ache to see it.
Someone once asked me why hurt myself, and I told them that it didn’t hurt, that opening myself up felt like happiness. What kind of happiness, he said. I said, Happiness. Like throwing yourself out of plane as it’s crossing the ocean.
I’m better now. If better is measured in the number of open wounds in my flesh, I’m better now. Though I miss my audience, my the witness. I miss my apparition.
I didn’t feel scared then, because I didn’t feel alone.With her I never felt alone.
The night I realized all my cuts were healed, I felt more lonely than I ever had in my life. I ran my fingers across my scarred arms, and saw my specter for the last time, standing in the doorway, whispering, are you willing to sacrifice what you are for what you will become?
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
Over-eager got my stomach pumped,
still-faced and taciturn and all the people
stumbling around me, my mother walked her fingers
along my forehead like butterfly kisses.
I felt I could breathe fire, spitting up bursts of fuel,
launching my guts out of my body like fireworks
and everybody terrified of me, a dragon
bloodthirsty, unconcerned and losing her mind.
I have the impression of being drawn along
by a long conspiracy of coincidences that move
me closer to the worth of all my work –
holding my breath, counting my toes,
cutting each line parallel to the next -
work that stops car wrecks from happening
and keeps my fingernails from falling off.
Waking up again reminded me of some circle of hell
where the over-eager were banished, near-comatose
tapping out each of their hiccups and laughing
to keep from screaming.
I just want to sit next to myself,
a ghost holding the hand of a body
full of oxygen.
There are ten million ways to love yourself
and I could only think of one.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
First day of spring
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn
-Basho Matsuo
I want to look at the world the way a bird eats a berry,
to hear the perfect sound of a bluejay again
and beat my heart along with the spring.
You knew me better as a cardinal
on a backdrop of snow. Here I am now
broadly disappointed and biting in half these moments
like inevitable fruits. They split and whisper of a soul
that didn’t turn out right, the crunch of the husk
still vibrates in my ears and the juice stains my teeth.
I could never be the right bird in the right tree,
always hiding in the sleeves of my coat,
clutching at my throat, killing the spring
to punish your patience. I took you by the elbow,
bellowed low over the bridge: No one comes to carry us
away from winter.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
The Machine That Changed the World
Here’s the thing about God.
I don’t believe in Him or It or Her or ‘all at once’ or ‘ever-present’. I don’t believe in unwavering faith and good-intentioned prayer. I don’t believe that doubt will hurt you, and I know that our false idols help us save ourselves.
But it’s possible that because every scarecrow has its purpose so do I.
Dear God, I want to make you a lot of pretty things and shyly offer them to you one at a time. And please God, let me be a machine that changed the world.
(And at the same time screaming “You don’t exist!” and “Choose anyone but me!”)
What can a writer be, but born again every single day? She is the text that creeps through the cracks between the red bricks. She is the thoughts that thoughtless breaths exhale. She is Es muss sein! and the words that describe the sound colliding bodies make. She is only as good as being born again each day with the single wish to be the machine that changed the world. She is the treasure-hunter.
I have been digging for gold most of my life; and I have found one nugget.
It is nearing the end of 2007 and I feel as though I have swallowed an umbrella and someone has just opened it up. My mother is sick and Es muss sein! feels foolish now. When once my deepest wish had been to write down my soul for the rest of my life until I was at peace, I can now only wish that it were my body deteriorating, not her’s.
She had been the perfect body, even where her emotions had failed; never sick, never coarse, never a wrinkle that wasn’t beautiful. She loved to walk and had planned a hiking trip in Ireland that year, her motherland, her spirit’s house; now her legs drag, a numbness that doesn’t let her feel anything but pain. When my cat climbs up her body she doesn’t feel the scratches and the blood trickles down the back of her knees unnoticed.
I want to find the person who has stolen her limbs and replaced them with these weak machines. Every part of me is anxious and grieved watching her try to move.
I sometimes sit in class and feel as though I am looking at a photograph of a photograph of a photograph of her forever in my mind. A body in trouble, an essay of decay.
What gives us the strength to avoid our bodies? I use my words, what I write in my notebooks to avoid owning up to myself and the world. I have a love affair with searching, constantly looking away from myself. The only thing I know how to own is words. And I feel panicked because my mother does not know how to not own her world. She was born fierce, and has not lost the fight. She did not stop to love one thing and own it for her heart; my mother loves broadly and owns everything. She is compassionate for more than carefully placed words.
I pray, for the second time in my life to something I don’t believe in, but she does.
Dear God, help my mother from monsters.
I’ve been digging for gold all of my life. And here’s the nugget: just like every scarecrow has its purpose, so do I.
The amount of faith I must have in myself scares me. To be born new everyday and still own my soul completely means passion must be in every step. I am not passionate in the way my mother is. I do not understand my body like she did her own, yet mine is still in working order expecting to be kept and used.
Becoming the writer I hope to become is like a public surgery with everyone’s hands in my gut. I will have to love the world, be intimate with the world in a way that never speaks. Writing will be the mountain of my life. I will give up the expectancy that comes with being born and being loved. Like my mother once trusted her body, I will trust my heart to this.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
The Day of the Weak
You don’t get to make the clocks
or keep the time, you only get to define
what’s yours. From the frame of your body,
that screaming fabric, the big heart beats.
Who are you without it and what’s killing you now?
You might end up alone or confused; but there’s no use
for a big heart if you have a weak soul.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
Starfish
love in these times
during these days
when everyone is breaking down
and breaking out and breaking news
you’ve already lost our interest
and the disasters keep accumulating
slow starfish creeping cross
to collect the rent
it’s not the absurdity
but the suspense
and who else is feeling that tense
knot in their shoulder blade
like dollar bills for sinew
and centennial quarters pushing
against the bone, on the fence
even the cats seem worse for the wear
humming and grooming like they know
the rally’s over and now we’re free
if freedom means choosing
your burden
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
Pisces
If I could wish myself away
I would. As the beating heart of a star
folds into herself and disappears
so am I, water lost in the sea and rushing
waves that break on the shoreline.
I always try to swallow my world
in gulps of air and headlong sprints
with palms outward. I could be part of it all
and gone too, fused with an ocean
that lets me be alive and dead all at once.
I stand instead, pink and shivering with cold
and the heaving breaths born of my body, all reminders
that I’m one and not all, I am alone in this skin
I am swallowing up myself
and not the world.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
Star
I was so lost when I moved to this city,
willowing and wide, dirty like a dial tone.
I thought I’d find out the truth,
like when we got into that car crash
in the parking lot. I knew what was important,
what was true, when I felt the blood pool up
above my eyelid, and you swore and slammed your fists
against the steering wheel.
I remember thinking about stars and solar systems and the lights
on my mother’s Christmas tree,
as you unbuckled my seat belt and pulled me out onto the grass.
I think I must have been a star once.
The blood trickled all the way down the side of my face,
little drops on my sneakers, and running down my hands
But all I felt was light.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
I Think I Might Be Nearing Sainthood
“I love you exponentially.” A sentence invented for him alone. A kind of gift, for someone that doesn’t exist, not really. In my mind, we stretch under the tropical lung and read all day long. I kill the world when I see you.
Dimly I might remember your face, in the flickering light of someone else’s fireplace. I will remember how I wanted to be wearing a blue coat when I met you, but instead I was wearing green and that is not how it was supposed to happen.
I might feel something important when I hear your name, something that could travel through my bloodstream until I die, but most likely I will feel nothing.
You will feel it when the last thought of you drops from my tongue into the cracks of the floor, so shallow and soft, it seems to have crept in, rather than been spoken. You will feel it like an itch on the back of your ear, no one is speaking your name.
Maybe on my lips I’ll keep the quiet wishes we had for each other and whisper them into the desert. Maybe I will shout our secrets into mouseholes and fill up the walls with their chattering. (“Well, I’m promising now that I’ll think of you never.” is what I actually said.)
You were a hole that I was always falling into so I buried you under my dirt, so that it became the tallest mountain on my heart’s horizon. Bodies always understand each other even when souls don’t. I think your body understands the crushing weight of the mud that makes up my mountain.
And what am I closer to now?
I might better know how I’m made: to have holes poked into me with each new love, and I’m falling in love all the time. Pieces of me are always falling apart.
There was a time when I was willing to slice myself up like a birthday cake and serve you each piece. There was a time when I would have bought you a lot of pretty things and offered them to you one at a time for the rest of my life. But the planets are devouring my youth now, more quickly than I first decided and I’m willing to be the loser. I no longer respond to my guilt when it knocks on the door.
I think I might be nearing sainthood.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
Loser
I’m not into the lawns being mowed or graves being dug.
I’m just into getting tongue and smoke-free lungs.
My father was ashamed of me, covered in tattoos
I inked his name behind my ear and said, “Daddy, some you win
and some you lose.”
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
