An Invisible Corset

I invite you to sip coffee with me at my desk. I am dressed as gray as the day. I have discovered a kind of algorithm that makes writing possible at work. Sometimes, after being interrupted by a phone call, I return to my fiction and find something I don't remember writing. Most of the chapbook I've been working on is written this way, a kind of re-remembering, a constant reach towards an abbreviated memory, like feeling the shape of a word you've just forgotten inside your mouth. This is a haunting. How are you haunted?

Speaking of haunting, find my friends Marissa Ayala and Catherine Borders online literary magazine called Omnia Vanitas it is a space for New Narrative and Écriture Féminine. It is a journal exploring the architecture of eroticism. Their first issue is called The Invisible Corset and shoul go live any day now. Until then.

Pre-Fall Outline

Take the skin from my lips and bury it.

This is my favorite time of year, the pre-fall. I built a house within the boundary of a dying season.

Ask me what a border is.

"A Border is mainly and first of all a word that can be used in all
directions—painful and essential, beautiful or disastrous, sane or
hysterical. I admit to borders in my works, natural borders: the sea […],
structural borders like house, hoop, container. I expose them, question them
and embroider roots of invisible borders, […] Borders are our definitions…
while helpful in retrospect—in hunting: memory, frustration, trespassing,
seduction, violence, beauty, politics and religion… In a way—borders are the
"skin" of places and also a [rough] skin to most ideas."
—Sigalit Landau, studio note (2009). Accompanying Barbed Hula (2001)

*Thank you Maggie*

When I crossed the border it stuck to my body. When that sentence came to me while writing I wasn't sure what it meant. I had to figure it out through context. I write my way into answers. Please point my to the bathroom. When language fails you communicate through gestures. Language has always been married to the body.

And just like that, I have forgotten what I wanted to write here today.

I think of this as the pre-writing before my real writing. This is distorted thinking.

This morning I went back to an abandoned notebook, one I stopped writing in because it was too heavy to carry around with me. I like large thick notebooks, hard cover, off-white porous paper. I found that is really wasn't as heavy as I thought.

How do I swell the absence I left here?

I could write about my trip to Israel, about the shootings there. I could write about my boyfriend waiting for me in Tel Aviv, or the discrimination I experienced in customs when I admitted I had left my country to visit him.

But I do not write about these things right now. I'd rather stay buried there. Sometimes my stories hide inside.

As I wrote that I was holding my breath.
Now I am breathing.

I have been working on a project that will be finished this fall. This fiction has accumulated a particular gravity on my face. Despite this anchor, I will be finished with it this fall. In the meantime, What is your first memory?

Leaving

1.

Morning Filament

I find writing at length in one sitting is impossible. I have always had to leave in order to know where I've been, leave and come back again.

I had to get off the subway early this morning and walk to work. On my way, I passed the Metronome's smoking magician hand. I saw a boy lit like a memory of my first boyfriend, and tasted skin in my mouth. Memory locates the way ghost do, a kind of haunting, like the prints of furnature in the carpet of an empty house.

Today, I am leaving the country, feeling something like paint dragged off the edge of canvas, border thinning.

I have been awake for approximately 3 hours, and waking still.

Sense Making

I feel like a dog let in from his evening pee, an emptied thing a bone suffices. I am curling my body in the corner, inverting my under shape. If you think closely you will see me there beside you, as still as a stone.

I was sitting in Union Square when she noticed me. she said I looked like the kind of person that could sleep with his eyes open, I told her she was right. She said the wood from Noah's arc is piled in her apartment, that she had been cloned once, that God chooses who to shine his white lights on and lets the others rot. She said my name was Donnie. I told her she was wrong, she didn't seem to notice.

I thought about filming her with my phone, recording the thoughts her mind chased away, a kind of eating. Recording the crude curve of the eyebrows drawn across her brow, her wooden rosary. Through the space where her bottom teeth used to be she sang to me. She asked if I was depressed and I offered her a cigarette.

This is nothing more than a noticing. A reach to make order of my day. A collection of sentences the computer rests on the page, rendering them even and straight, a kind of sense making.

From a Blue Day

I want to write a delicate word
something to rest my name on without breaking it.
It occurs to me that I am writing about refuge.
I am seeking a line that matches the curve of my spine, supine.
On this blue day I am disturbing the still with my toe, rippling.

I am re-figuring, my breath rising like smoke from the ashtray.
I am as raw as a newborn bird
opening its terrible mouth.
I am fed and fed and fed again.

Sunday Notes

I am writing to you about something grown out of, or from.

The measure of your toe against my wet print.
A reach that happens when extension is impossible

Today,

skin stopped being skin, and turned
a kind of dishrag
Something hands dry on
and hang from the refrigerator door

I am handle held
bending the way a tongue bends

tasting itself.

I realize I am revealing a kind of encounter to you, reader.

Right now, there are two lighters in my pocket
mine and his
this happens when you forget what you are carrying

I am taking his fire and my own

and writing beneath their light.

Writing to you.