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my name is eris and i belong to the hurricane. i want the word for 'to not map, ever.'
I.
I faced the river today. All 18.6 kilometers of it. Twenty two major rapids spaced between stretches of still water. I almost died.
II.
So that’s how water kills. It tugs at your feet and folds in above you, tucking you in every time you try to surface. It’s like an overzealous lover, crushing you from all sides in a tight hug, preventing you from breathing.
III.
I was looking for the words to describe what had happened between us. I found the words today. I faced the river, rowed downstream, and found the words.
IV.
Ears filled with fury of the river and with lungs devoid of air, the body fights. The body kicks and stays afloat. Too strong is its instinct to survive. I have tried to write to survive, but the words won’t come.
V.
Your embrace pulled me out of the water, then you threw me back in again.
“After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry. You don’t try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it’s nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death. After the briskness of loving, loving stops. And you roll over with death stretched alongside you like a feather boa, or a snake, light as air, and you … you don’t even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it’s obviously your own damn fault. You haven’t been able to—to what? To open your heart. You open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anymore, to open your heart.”
—Susan Minot, from “Lust”
Art Credit Sandra Gamarra
“We find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer… If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing.” —Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’
FANCIFUL LIFE — Nydia Lilian
San José del Pacífico - Mazunte - Punta Cometa
Oaxaca, Mexico, 2013.
When you want to fall — fall.
Evaporate and condensate,
but when you rain, come down
as a fucking hurricane.
If the birds stop chirping, if the sunlight forgets
you, if you’ve got your shirttail caught in the fence
of your spine, and you have no way of getting
loose,
remember that I am here, that I will bail you out of
your own prison, that I will lay with you the morning after
you fall in love and tell you that it’s okay to love,
that it’s okay to trust another human being
with more than you knew you could.
I will tell you how I held you as a child, listened
to your heartbeat on those sleepless nights, that I
loved your small body and your pebble fists and blessed
the skeleton inside of you —
that you are not beautiful because
a boy tells you so, but beautiful because
you exist.
And I apologize for giving you such nervous hands and
a sine wave heartbeat. And when you start putting question marks
after everything you say — know that
I may not always have the answers, but
together, we can try to make sense
of it all.
I’ll show you what the August grass feels like. I’ll
distract you with tree roots, with atlases, with lessons about the
sea, and until your question marks are bent into
arrows, I will not stop.
So shoot them blindly. Hurt and be hurt. Be the bird
as much as you are the hand.
For I will stand behind you, breaking every vow that I made
to protect you. When I notice your wings are peeking out
from beneath your shirt collar, I’ll tie my hands back from clipping them.
I will hide every rope
in the country so that the love inside of me doesn’t
tether your ankles to home.
You are seventeen, and you are free.
But when you want to come home, I’ll be here.
In the wind chimes, in the small moths that flutter
towards your light, in the way dawn still breaks the same
blue eggs in every place that you decide to
go,
I’ll be here.
Less a ghost than the wind.
Less the wind than a soft hum in the back of your
throat, telling you that it’s okay to sing, that it’s
okay to bray,
that your song is a song that you’ll spend
the rest of your life trying to understand.
That when the birds talk you into flying south, it’s okay
to pick up
and leave.