Gusanos

Gusanos

I.

Mateo got me drunk and told me about his mother’s parties. I stared at my reflection in the half-empty glass and lost myself in the white organza and tulle, the light strings and floating lanterns. Teo masked his familiar scent with cigarettes and cologne, but I could still smell the sweat lacquering his forearms, Argentina moist on his dark skin. He bought another round of tequila, and we drank to Cash and the mountain, my throat raw and roaring, the drowned pink worm dancing against my lips like a second tongue.

The small room filled up with eyes watching this príncipe and his boyish gringa. I leaned on the bar and laughed like my father, Mateo spinning words into worlds and building horizons with his long hands.

He vomited later, outside in the dark, his broad shoulders heaving like great shuddering wings. I held back his long hair, the black strands ash against my rough palms. Standing, he rubbed spit from his cheek and looked at me. I found him beautiful, and the lack of a camera weighed on me.

There was a photo of him from earlier that week when we had met in Buenos Aires, another from the train where he had fallen asleep against his own hand, a third from two days before when he had tied a blue bandana around his head and grinned at me from under the shadow of his pack. That was a different Mateo, and I began to see the man who summited mountains.

We hiked out of the pueblito and turned toward camp. In the silence, I felt the finger light touches of the peak on my shoulders.

The wait was almost over.

II.

We forded the river, crossed the valley, ate dried mangos, and watched the sun begin its ascent of the sky. Under the weight of the mountain’s shadow, Cash rubbed his palms against his thighs and thought. I took his picture because of the look on his face, the lines around his eyes like striking claws. He flicked his head and the curling tip of his braid snapped against the gear on his back, asking to be touched. Behind me, Teo was singing, and if his Spanish could have been tasted, it would have lingered like caramel, elastic and soft.

Cash spat, and I framed the mountain in my lens, tracing the steep walls of the eastern side. Beneath the lightweight fabric of my clothes, the fine hairs of my body rose up, and Cash, who felt something like this, ran his knuckles over the smooth rock, tilting his head back as though listening.

III.

Teo came to the rock like a conquistador, but Cash breathed it, his body flowing in delicate surges up the mountain wall. I had documented enough ascents to know that Cash had the instinctive gift that every climber hungered after. He read the rock with the gentlest brush of his fingertips, rode its intricacies.

I rested in a shallow alcove above them, my slackened line allowing me to lean away from the wall face. I caught the wind ruffling Teo’s hair and his half-lipped smile. I focused on his thick and calloused hands and found dark markings on the pale stone underneath his palms. Tight lines etched like worms. 

Below us the valley spread and the three rivers doubled back into each other. I breathed in the beauty and lowered my camera, wondering after the feel of the fall.

Continued: IV-XVI at http://www.acm.edu/uploads/cms/documents/nickadams-2012-gusanos.pdf

"Gusanos" on "The Nervous Breakdown": 
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbfiction/2012/04/gusanos-by-clare-boerigter/

2012 ACM Nick Adams Short Story Contest winner: http://www.acm.edu/features/news/338

Discussing "Gusanos" at the 2012 ACM Student Symposium on Off-Campus Study: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RelTx7McZgI 

ACM article about "Gusanos": http://www.acm.edu/features/feature/349?  

4, 10, 14, 20

4, 10, 14, 20

On my fourth birthday, I said goodbye to Saudi Arabia by rolling. I remember the blue carpet and how it overwhelmed the white-walled and now empty room, how Tommy and I floundered like beached fish against it despite both knowing how to swim. Mom made me a coconut cake and steak. We ate it outside waiting for the sky to darken. I could hear them talking in my living room, distant, and Tommy and I sat on the grass, combing our fingers through the stalks in search of smaller things. Lying back, the walls of the yard rising up, I felt his leg touching mine. He told me about America and how it was a place with strange animals called cows, which were a sort of camel but not. I listened, not frightened exactly but bewildered, trying to imagine being far away from me. Then he was done telling stories and even though it was my birthday, he sat on me and smudged a dandelion against my nose just to prove that he was still older.

We left Indiana two weeks before I turned ten. Mom cried when we drove away from the irises outside the garage, and I looked out the window as we made the familiar right-hand turn off my street. It was a funny thing to do, crying. We’d left two pennies in the cement were Dad had poured a new patio three summers ago: 1989 and 1991. I knew where the scratches were in my closet where I would go to hide and how it would feel to collect white paint under my fingernails, pinpricks of dazzling pain. When I rode in Dad’s moving truck, he let me use the walkie-talkie. Tommy and I told a winding story between the two U-Hauls until the batteries died. Callie sat between Dad and I, numbed, her ears low and back, her smile loose across her jaw. She put her long nose against my knee and I played with the soft fur around her eyes, wondering if this was how Mom felt brushing my hair on Sunday mornings. Dad asked me what it was like to be so close to double digits. I told him I wanted to be eleven because that’s the age, Tommy told me, when you start to know things. Callie sighed and I kissed the crown of her head, laying my cheek against hers for a moment, her hot breath filled with grass- and dirt-things.

Three days before I was to turn fourteen, I sprawled on the hot rocky outcrop of our last campsite and looked up at the light through the oak leaves. My hair, thick with oil and stiffly malleable, smelled faintly of smoke and sunscreen. My skin had progressed to that point where dirt had begun to build its own little worlds, towered cities around my ankles, a lighthouse against my neck. I was alright with it. It was only a week but already I felt like I was taking on something more animal. My body leaned from days of nothing more than trail mix, apples and dehydrated pasta, while my muscles strained to paddle and portage. I heard my best friend singing as she pumped water into her dented Nalgene, and closing my eyes, it felt as though the sun were melting against my face. It was a funny thing to realize then, what time was doing to us. Indigo smacked the ground beside me, pressing the cool plastic bottle to my leg: “Drink.”

I spent my twentieth birthday waiting to cry. On the phone home, Dad talked to me rationally about options. He has a way of saying things that I won't, afraid as I am of where they might lead. When he asked if I wanted to drop out of college, I paused for a long moment, my fingernails biting into the skin below my knee. There was no simple answer to that. This place dug into my bones when all I wanted was Arizona’s expanse of sky and time to watch the monsoons break from the tiered clouds and the kinetic canyons bringing to me the sense of motion in waiting. I remembered telling Travis that all you ever had to do was move fast enough over the rocks and you’d never have enough time to fall. But I had. I’d lost myself in the dust running down trails again and again, scrapping little mementos into my skin, taking a strange pride in my own blood and the grit I would wince to wash out later. Sometimes I felt like nothing more than a pair of eyes. Inside, I was hungry for more skies and mountains and dirt making powdery patterns on my hands. Away in California, Tommy told me to transfer, transfer now, like it needed to be done rapidly, like the switching at the junction of train tracks. He lured me over the phone with pictures of Claremont-McKenna’s hybrid campus and the promise of robust financial aid. I tried to tell him that moving to his coast wouldn’t solve my problems. Sitting on the grass, Dad waiting on the other end, I knew that leaving would always be easy. It was staying, it was waiting and letting all the other places fall away, that was hard. Later that night, I held my face together with my hand and Amanda said to me that birthdays got to be like this when you were away from home. I shook my head, resting my arms gingerly against my lap and told her, “No, it doesn’t even feel like my birthday.”

TN

TN

The cicadas sang to me from the tracks, from the yawning station deck, from up underneath the awning. My skin responded as it was want on afternoons like these, and sweat slickened the hollows of my ears and neck, running curious blind fingers through my unwashed hair. Down in Macondo, I could hear the boom and crash of church bells. The reverberations took moments to react against the fine hairs of my body and each little crest and breaking was like a hand pushing me away.


It was, three months later, time to leave. 


What I brought and what I took had a tendency to vary but never exceed the backcountry pack and compact hardtop. There were usually poems and boots, letters and books, photos and lists of all the places I had yet to see. I kept some of Tennessee’s postcards in my pack, the rest in my shirtfront pocket, buttoned closed. Mum was present on my wrist were she had wrapped a woven band with some of her hair. I kept my father’s utility knife looped to my smooth brown leather belt.


There were pieces of people tied up all over me, if you knew how to go about looking for them.


Since the Ecuadorian underwater aquarium, I had the bad habit of looking for Tennessee everywhere. A niggling feeling persisted somewhere in the region of my upper spinal column. My last sight of her would not include the shadow of a sea urchin, distorted and sickly, dividing her face like a fissure.

The planned-ness of that encounter counteracted its surreal qualities, and if it seemed that my life cleaved to fantastical literature too much, then fault was not wholly mine. Because Tennessee did then appear, white-shirted and short of breath.


To the right of me, the platform.

Strangers

Strangers

He watches me from underneath the apple blossom tree,

stands in his suit and tie, plum velvet and starched shirt,

like a Japanese foreigner against the hyper-blue of the sky,

the ragged green grass over-sharpened and aggressive,

and he looks defeated under those windswept branches,

bent boughs dusting his forehead in a petal and leaf crown

of apricot and pink and dusk-rose

I watch him from underneath the long-fingered uncut-nail clouds,

stand up against the window in my mother’s foam cashmere,

bare wood bruising the bones of my feet

as the brush of denim makes me feverish and my skin itch;

I use him and the window, framing my life in spare inches and eyes

as the walls slump inwards like yellow rice pudding

and I begin the act of eating distance

I let down my hair for him

that we could kiss, and trace buttons out of fabric loops

to release my hips to the damp shape of moist air,

which is not enough to keep my hands from hemlines and sleeves,

and I lean on the sill and we make love, he and I

until dark nips his heels and runs its hands across my haunches

and like a beautiful animal I mouth words,

small things he will never make out from the ground:

my name and how it is I love so many

strangers

God wrote two books

God wrote two books


I.

The insides of my skin are singing
as summer runs like lilies in rain

My blood maps my body in new patterns
many times a day,
and each wash and remaking
brings the veins closer to happiness
and collapse

II.

I hold the toad long enough to tell him all my quiet fears,
he seems to like that some,
pushes his dry soft belly against my palm,
nosing the spaces between my fingers,
asking me where my webbing’s
got to, and have I lost it along with everything else?

Down in the dirt,

his jelly cheeks brush outward into night air

as he tries to hold me with his sticky slick toes,

but he is very small

and I too human to condense to his caress,

so he leaves me with one final frog-lipped kiss

and pulls away over grass and weed

The worms are better listeners

and beautiful by starlight,

their organ skin dark and lustrous

under the moon glow

I watch them bully the dirt into helixes     

and half circles for their over-hearted

bodies to languish beneath—

they are all going someplace,

and I whisper to them some of my sadness,

that they may carry off pieces

to places far away from me

The grass is best of all,

and that is because it makes me up:

I know that veins aren’t so much hollow

spaghetti straws as they are fibrous

weeds knitted up under my skin

as like worms they tunnel their way

through dark cells,

mounting into stalk highways,

breaking over lips,

fanning out into the thirsty mouths of my organs

I pull a strand of grass from the ground,

and it says a reluctant farewell

in the same way my hair speaks to my scalp—

I know that this means we’re really all the same,

the toad, the worms, the living dirt,

and if I’m logical, then I’d also know

that if I lie here long enough

the human parts break down

as every little fiber and wet thing takes them in,

sucks them up, slickens themselves with feeling

and bumps away like the toad

And then I say goodbye too

to all the human bits

and hello to the dirt, the toad,

the worms and all the places

they have always meant to take me

Invitations

Invitations

They were trying to save her and she was having none of it. One light bulb died, only to be replaced by her slim fingers. Didn’t she know? When her head ached for hours and spider webs of searing white saturated her vision. Didn’t she know it was their doing? She wasn’t made to handle the three of them, trio of lights, nestled just above her sleeping head, congratulating themselves now on her making it through the day, plotting how she would survive the next with all of them powered at full tilt, all of their glass bulb bellies aflicker with electricity. And sometimes their whispering woke her and she lay for minutes in bed, her sheets curled around her like an ocean, her hair a wave’s spray arcing across her deflated pillowcase. Her chest would rise, would fall, her eyes, those weak, betraying eyes, were wet daubs in the darkness, sitting pools of deep water, jelly-like and moist as they acquainted themselves with the dark. They failed her each and every day and only at night could convince themselves it was not their own doing, that it was not the retina or the cords of nerves or mucus but something other outside that was broken, flagging. And then they’d get all slick and slippery, sliding out with their lie and glistening with it. Slowly though, slowly, she was losing things. She was losing sight.

One day she unscrewed all but one light bulb. Later she replaced that with a weaker kind. Outside the sunsets and sunrises, the Sunday flowers and long fingered clouds began to slip, to thin. She sat on her bed once and stared and stared and stared, memorizing the lines and colors of her favorite painting, even now somewhat deadened, its elegance slimmed, diluted by what already her eyes failed to show her. And then it was the mirror, it was her face, her hair, the shape and curve of her ribs into her hips, her breast to her shoulder, the fragile clavicle to the tender base of her throat. She cut her fingers at dinnertime, her blood and moans mingled amongst the carrots and cauliflower. And she couldn’t make out the red-coral-rose of it against the cutting board. And then the house was black, was gray, was unlit and empty. She sat in chairs with blankets and let her hair down, her resigned eyes making out nothing more than the blurred shapes of the basic things. That’s how and where they found her, sitting at her big kitchen table in the twilight, staring at nothingness straight through her eyes. And when she felt arms around her shoulders she cried, tears stinging her eyes and smelling of old things, of dust and betrayal. Outside and inside, all that remained to her was shadow and shadow’s shadow and the dullest and darkest of shades.

And they were trying to save her and she was having none of it. In her sockets, her eyes lay like stones, heavy and cold and dead.

Then, though she saw nothing of it, a slice of sunshine pushed through the window panes, striking first her hand before blushing against her face. Her expression for a moment flickered. Because the feeling of heat across her skin was exquisite, was like the brightest, most colorful of days. She turned into it, turned her cheek against the air and shuddered as it radiated through her flesh.

And they were trying to save her but in all the wrong ways. It wasn’t the lessening of light she needed, but the explosion of it, the diffusion, the devouring tongues of heat, of something like life, soaking into her bones as though she too were a tree straining its leaves towards the sun. And though her eyes lay like stones, she found nothing so hard in herself, nothing so unrelenting as to deny the unspoken invitation of the sun: to spread out her skin and live under the weighted light.

Absolution

Absolution

You want me to tell you

I love you,

but I’ve given up lying for Lent,

so for forty-six days and forty-six nights

you’ll wonder why the words have gotten stuck in my throat,

and I’ll kiss your neck with my mute lips

and pray to God for forgiveness

I Make Fruit Salads

I Make Fruit Salads

And lunch went something like this:

chaos sandwiched in-between circular discs of pineapple

and my peas were not cooperating

as the pulpy pit of the mango self-divided

decimating the cool-skinned plum

before bruising the insides of my mouth cavity.

But the juice, viscous can only capture

half of the pleasure if you don’t take a moment to imagine

the sensory delights I derived, fingers

curving fat parentheses from the white-

haired pedazos of my thick-skinned clementine.

Do I begin to tell you of my love

of cucumbers? The curling sound they made

between my incisors, the hot lightning crack

of condensed water grasping momentarily

outwards, before they departed throat-wards—

sacrificial chariots to the cords of my stomach.

Most of all, I eyed the pear nestled

amongst your long fingers, a stranger against

your slight hand, an ellipsis slowly

to your quiet motioning—and I wondered,

do you know that my eyes are hungry on you,

for that luscious piece of fruit?

Such an idea.

Leftovers

Leftovers

Lazarus picked at his arm until it hurt and then Jude came and struck him, tying the bandages back up again while his head spun and multiplied the world. All around was the smell of slow death, of rot and decay and loosening bodies. On a crowded mattress, a child wept and none moved to comfort or quiet. Lazarus, his one good eye swiveling about green and alive, tried to understand that he was going to die in this stinking construct, suffocation filling the air, crawling down this throat, making his fingers itch.

He started in on his wound again, shredding flimsy gauze with his cracked nails until it was lying open before him. He didn’t trust a thing he couldn’t see and somehow looking down into his own puckered flesh gave him a real sense of the thing and how it must feel to die, if this is what that was. And looking into himself, Lazarus thought for perhaps the first time in his life that he was beautiful. Working away in his forearm he could make out tightly woven veins as they embraced grooved muscle and were anchored by knotty cartilage. Peering inward he saw the diseased cells sliding up and about the bend of his wrist, pulling and sucking and sipping, drawing out each last tender bit of life.

And then he knew he was dying, his beautiful machinery cast open for a world that could offer only infection, only rust. Inside he knew he was butterfly parts, little entities flapping with shuddering delicacy, wings brushing wings brushing wings, until the whole system rose and fell like the faintest of breath. His body was only a cavern to be hidden in, a structure grown to weather the world and wither until that day, that long last day, when what was built up within was ready for flight.

He tried to tell Jude at first. His lover only cried and cried and cried, large sickly tears enlarging the pinprick holes of his tear ducts until they threatened to swallow his face whole. Lazarus told him again and again and again, until one day the ducts did eat him all up, and from then Jude became not-Jude, became Jude altered. This other Jude only looked at Lazarus with those devoured down eyes and did not cry anymore, not when his whole body was crying all the time, just with an absence of tears.

               

Lazarus could feel the twisting welling up inside, knew the moment of finality was upon him. He would have liked, perhaps, for Jude to have been there. But then, Jude had never known anything about insect-life. Jude would not appreciate the unraveling of the cocoon for the marvel of the newly born; he was too concerned with the shell, not enough with the thing moving on about inside.

Lazarus laid himself down one last time, breathed out until he could feel it, the motion of hundreds of thousands of tiny little bodies circling within, crawling forwards, their soft sticky legs finding purchase in his lungs, clouding his mouth, beating up against his temples. He breathed out until he saw with his one good eye the brilliant tip of a filmy wing brushing up passed his cheek. Then it all stopped, and his eye became less alive and whatever was inside him, if ever there was a thing buried, rushed his boundaries, spilled out and never bothered to look back at the body it had left. His chest compressed downward, and in the morning Jude found him and stared at him until he wasn’t sure if what he saw before him was anything at all or just whatever had been left over.

Fruta perdida

Fruta perdida

The old woman in Cuernavaca was glad her husband had died

and we laughed,

eyes wide on each other, mouths revealing set after set of exact-o edged teeth,

hot and honeysuckle words wrapping up, binding down our cool Iowa tongues

as her fast spit syllables tried to divine

¿tienes un novio?

I walk into the mornings and awaken as Yolanda peels me apart in her kitchen,

I taste papaya, swallow up mango, chew down peaches, wash away the taste of humid Spanish

in little jamaica waves,

I learn she is never done with me,

a plate of jitomates, juice of the cucumber,

aguacate and her words all eaten and disappearing

until I can feel them moving just below my skin

I kissed him first because I could

and he tasted like manufactured apples,

fake apples and syrup

we stayed that way until the female security guard found us under un árbol,

and I could only think that at least I wasn’t wrapped around him,

like a kid straining for higher branches

There was an announcement next morning before classes,

and through bites of my apple I wiped the sweat from above my lips,

He didn’t look at me, prefiguración if there ever was any,

and I was laughing somewhere inside at my response,

my last profesor had wanted to know if I had ever been in love, after all

I tasted all of it, the thinly sliced fruit disrupting the clean lines of Yolanda's white plates

before I picked them up, held the sensitive piel between my fingers, devoured wholes hungrily—

Just as soon, he ate himself up and became too full to have room left over for me,

the other girl was shorter, anyway

We left Mexico, land of the whitewashed tree,

and of the things I forgot, I was most sad about my sweat,

my phone, and my illusions about the flavors of fruit

Months on months looking like mouths on mouths, and now it is later and I start my mañanas

with apples and pears,

mostly misshapen, mostly bruised,

and I’m always tired with them in my mouth, not swollen with moist Mexican air,

but holding up form and solid,

reminding me of other tongues and a question I still won’t answer

I like to tease out the thought that perhaps one day dining services will come upon

a shipment fresh from Mexico, plátanos, strawberries and clementines,

and at breakfast I will spoon onto my plate beautiful golden slivers of pineapple,

except this time, el sabor will be real,

and my taste will come back from that hot and honey city where it got lost in the first place

Splits

Splits

If my brother were a rabbit,

I’d call him Ginger.

I’d clip his dark nails, hitting embedded veins only sometimes,

and cooing to him as he fidgeted on my thighs.

If my brother were a newt,

I’d call him Boris.

I’d suck his aquarium clean with a hollow plastic tube,

choking on filth when I forgot the right ways to breathe.

If my brother were a poplar,

I’d carve initials

into his stiff-lined trunk, trailing fingers in the gummy sap,

licking my blue-rinsed knuckles, thinking I’d made him cry.

If my brother weren’t so far

I wouldn’t call him

outside houses in the old cracked snow, waiting and knowing

the improbability of a broken ring tone.

Many miles away from me,

my brother rests head

to pillow, skeleton spine curving just under human flesh,

his body marking a possessive apostrophe.

And right here, I sit, bone to bone,

stacked ankles only

separated from him by an insignificant tweak,

a slight cross-hair of genetic divergence.

I am then a dappled sparrow;

He feeds me sometimes,

old rinds, bad bread bits, stuff gathered up in the cup of his hand,

parts of half-eaten things, wholes becoming half his, half mine.

All Due Recognition

All Due Recognition


I have pilfered my blog title from the beautiful book Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann. This novel details the early adult life of New Yorker Eveline Auerbach, and is one of the most intricate, thought-provoking and well-written books that I have ever read.

Excerpts from Anthropology of an American Girl:

"It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it."

"And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart."