writing | emilyiscreative

WHAT IF

I was a room for eleven

months. The books piled

neatly, the dishes washed

every evening. Then,

you came back

again. You pulled my chest

from your jaw in one beat. Chin

tipped towards table corner, eyes

trickster fire, saying: what if?

The next day waves crashed

my room. All the way up to my

collar bone. I heard the ocean

swallow cars on Portland Avenue.

I walked fears into mud by the river,

cicadas my witness. Our memories now

too close, almost drowning their chorus.

That night the rain chanted Leave

the room, leave the room. What if?

NAMING

I want to cut off my arm. Sometimes.

When the steps of Coltrane’s notes grab me,

threading themselves under my skin.

They start soft: a child peering

around the corner of an open door,

then quickly padding away.

Slowly building, their crescendo

a warm buzz on my skin.

Or when the fuschia splatter of clouds

like magnetized forms on an etch-a-sketch

hang above the Lake Street K Mart

on humid summer nights.

When metal clanging down city streets and

pieces of children’s afternoons

ricochet off house walls into kitchen windows.

How do you tell people that you ingest every

snatch of song overheard, every glimpsed sway

of skirt, every shade of the prism your eyes consume?

That you are a river of electric current?

How do you name the color of sky

ignited by fluorescent etchings

of a downtown at the moment after

a silent cascade of rain --

Is it inky? Is it mauve?

The petals of water cycle their own orbit

in the streetlamp pool, barely possessing

the weight to touch down on cement.

How do you name the meeting of lips

to skin in the triangle between hip bone

and abdomen? Or the cackle of saliva

against tongue and inside of cheek -

oral mucosa - in a kiss?

This precise naming of things -

baptizing moments

in language - is this

not prayer?

CHICAGO LAKE LIQUORS

How are you doing? Surviving. Two older men with six packs lean in. Yea, I’m in the same boat. One, a shaved head, grisly beard, Harley shirt, hunches over as he picks up his Milwaukee’s Best. In the check out line, a green mohawked kid speaks Spanish to two guys with work still on their jeans. A grandma tells her nephew the stories knotted in her back.

Now this chapel of indulgence and mosaiced liquid no longer vibrates with elder laughs nor commerces in shit talking. Brighter lights and new linoleum don’t favor gray heads nor lined faces the way softer tones did. A shiny new neighbor with heated underground parking and a necklace of balconies has arrived. The block grins with Uncle Sam teeth and tells visitors that the changes are worth what they hide.

FALL GLINT

On that drive east

down 36th street

the summer’s last sun

glint arrowed a shard

across the windshield.

The breaks: not quick

enough. The squirrel’s

dart: too direct, kissing

the wheel with a

deliberation its heart

couldn’t sustain. Still,

the veins sent blood.

From this side of

the steering wheel we

shouted, burst doors

open. The car: now a

winged dinosaur stalling

in the road while the

equinox curled

its spill around brick

apartments to ask,

is it time?

Its flame: the blaze

we didn’t know to

prepare. Our arms

found cardboard and

gurnied the rodents’

shuddering frame onto

alley grass. In unspoken

rhythm we altar boyed

and auntied. Pulled

mother tongue from

dirt. Whispered psalms

and threaded death

rituals our hands learned

as young bodies. When

the cadence of truth

was known by

observation. In

refracted light we

are all earth dust,

spirit, and

bone.

Emily K.

a documenter of feelings. shapes. colors. stories

audio producer | writer | teaching artist