Waiting for Postcards

There’s so much wide open space between us, a million telephone poles, but only one uninterrupted wire. I miss your fingers and how you like to share my mitten so you can hold my hand, they stretch, the threads break. I buy new ones for you to rip apart. It’s worth it.

I think about all the time we spent clothed when we should have been naked. The days when we didn’t get anything done, except each other. How you say I’m too loud, sometimes.

Hear me.

Your days are half over when mine are just beginning and I leave cups around the apartment with tea half-drunk and they don’t disappear anymore. It’s an exercise but I don’t know what I’m learning.

The days countdown and I carry unfinished ones in my pockets. I cross out the wrong answers. I lie to my journal even when I’m telling the truth and we are all just different faces of deceit. This one’s smiling.

I wish I had more sense for you but rational thought is too expensive on one income.

I almost stole a bag of oranges but instead I paid and when I got home I cut them the way your momma taught me.

Unseasonably juicy. Sticky fingered. Waiting for a postcard.

Fruit Fly Memories

The orange juice was too expensive. The orange punch was on sale. Only the rich drink vitamins, but we’re rich in dreams. I mixed it up in a stolen beer pitcher, I liked it more than I thought I should. Orange drink. Mmm.

It’s the middle of winter but we still have fruit flies, so we leave the window open to periodically freeze them out. They always return. Little thoughts that breed memories like nostalgia. Disgusting. I slam the lid on them, out of sight.

One followed me to the living room, flew too close to the sun. I stuck my finger in the glass and it crawled out slowly, saved. Punch drunk.

I squished it against my palm and then wiped it on my jeans.

I felt bad, but only for a moment. Life goes on.

Until it doesn’t.

Twenty Eleven

I like the characters that come out after dark. The people who wrestle with demons across from you in Emergency, slouched against walls, jaws hanging open. You wait for hours just to hear your name. The excuses they make to start a conversation, just to talk about their pain.

We keep our eyes wide open, filling in yesterday’s crossword until 5 am when the next paper comes. I fall in and out of sleep on his arm.

7 hours later the doctor sounds our false alarm. We cancel New Year’s and sleep until dinnertime. Chinese food. A puzzle. Movies. Goodbye, 2010.

I make plans in my head.

Dear 2011,

I have great hopes for you. In 2010 I fell straight down the rabbit hole, this year I will be climbing back up. I’m finding myself around street corners, in conversations with strangers, on the walk to work.

I have promises to make. In 2011, I resolve to say yes more than no. To write every day and to post twice a week. To spend time alone. To open myself to new experiences, new people, new opportunities. To draw again. To start submitting my work. To use only natural products on my skin. To keep up on my correspondence. To eat local, to eat well, and to finally complete Couch to 5k. To take steps toward selling cupcakes at the Farmer’s Market. To drink green tea twice a day. To love harder, clearer, and with more thought than I ever have before.

I’m looking forward, not back. Up, not down. It’s a new year, a blank slate. Here’s to 2011, may it be our best year yet.

Love,

Lindsay

Holding You

There’s not much that I’m afraid of but those things that do cause me pause are the big things, the things that do more than go bump in the night. The fear of failure, commitment, public speaking. The fear of opening up and becoming vulnerable. Fear of abandonment. Fears that allow the rest of me to appear fearless, reckless, confident, brave. Often I feel like I’m walking a tightrope of identity with this long net stretching out below me of who you all want me to be.

And whispers, “fall, fall, fall.”

I don’t often do poetry and I have as of yet never recorded myself in spoken word but lately I’ve been inspired to do more, try more, push myself. I’m scared, and someone once said that’s how you know you’re moving in the right direction.

So, here it is. Be kind.

Holding You by Lindsay Rainingbird

[edit: in print as requested]

I told you I’d hold you

but I only meant in words

cradled

the language we don’t have

the search and you

the taste of every ill-placed comma

the way you were

only ever just—there

on the tip of my tongue.

How we reach outstretched

to fill up the blank spaces

to make the H

stay silent

to find a way to explain

describe this

giant abyss this

crack in communication

that we tiptoe around.

I said I’d hold you but

I meant in the palm of my hand

delicately

like a robin’s egg

still warm and heavy with life

purpose.

How a hand closed

becomes a fist

(how a fist is a measure of the heart)

how our hearts were clenched

too tight, our fingers locked

our love arrested.

[/edit]

In Which We Are Careful Not to Drown

I don’t know what we are; smooth scaled and slimy. The residue of a thousand kisses clinging to our bodies like algae on the sides of a neglected tank. Slough it off, those memories that do better without us. People untangled from ourselves.

His grandmother warned me as we packed up the kayaks for a new adventure. Wear a life jacket, she said. That lake is known for taking prisoners, the plants that reach up to the surface and clench tightly around wrists and ankles, pull us down. There was a boy who drowned there last year, she told me. Don’t take any risks.

I can’t help it. I trail my fingers along the crest and open my eyes  under water. I dive head first into shallows and embrace the lake floor, my fists closing around sand and stone, particles drifting up, glinting in the soft light of afternoon.

I take pictures without film and get them printed immediately at the grocery store. Flipping casually out of a machine. I miss the wait of development. I miss film canisters. Little treasure troves where we could store beads, fools gold, baby teeth. It’s so immediate, now. I tell time in album folders on my computer. I remember my life in snap shots and delete what is irrelevant to the story I am writing today.

Heartbreak in footnotes edited away. Happiness floating face up just below the surface, distorted.

Seaweed fingers sticking to our thighs as we

carefully

wade back in.

Bedouin Soundclash feat. Coeur De Pirate – Brutal Hearts

Inhale

She’s fresh from a four-month adventure in India. I’m pregnant with inertia. She offers me a one on one yoga class and we bend and stretch to the soothing current of her voice in my backyard, mosquitoes slapped against necks and arms between breaths.

“This is why my guru tells us to practice indoors.”

An hour in we gather an audience, neighbors perched on roofs and peering out of windows in the apartment building across the fence.

She drapes her body against mine in an effort to bring my pose deeper. She corrects and comments on my flexibility. I watch her brush a blonde curl out of her eye.

I feel off-balance. Out of tune. My legs shake with the effort to stretch, reach, ground into the earth. I build my body from the feet up, limbs stacked, muscles tensed, arms reaching, pulling myself in separate directions.

I concentrate on my breathing. Everything inside me is crumbling, I am fractured in a way I can’t begin to understand or address, but this, this deep breathing? This I can do.

Inhale, extend.

Exhale, go deeper.

I come out of it dazed. Feet filthy.

A smile smeared into the corners of my eyes.

Something, at least.

Kings of Convenience – Power of Not Knowing

Wait and See

It feels like going backward but that’s okay.

It feels like the foam on the top of cold beer and, you know, that’s okay too.

Let’s blur our vision together. Let’s take a second to breathe. Swig.

Turn the tape over put that song on repeat.

Let’s start again.

I miss you. Each word a pixel stacked one on top of the other. Too close now to see the big picture. The whole picture. Any picture.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Wipe away that tear.

You’ve made your choice. There’s nothing left to do but wait.

Wait and see.

The Boxer Rebellion – If You Run

Share this:

I don’t remember lovers much. Their faces fade and I have to strain to recall the shape of lips or the trace of fingertips. I forget.

I remember that he bought new sheets and a bed spread. I remember being pinned against the cloth, the feel of it against my cheek as I turned my head.

His breath on my neck like the smoke from his cigarette, trailing softly, temporary.

Haunted.

Like his dark eyes staring into the distance or an off-guard smile.

We fall in love with snapshots.

We forget that the sleep was never restful.

That we carried knots in our back for days

and bruises on the inside of our lids.

The Maccabees – Can You Give It

Are You Watching?

Dan Mangan – The Indie Queens Are Waiting

It’s my birthday on Monday. Most people would be excited. I think most people would be excited, I’m not sure what most people are anymore. I’m coming off a long run of terrible birthdays. Splinters in the bed of palm, reminders not to hold on so hard.

You can’t slow life.

I don’t write much. I eat half-donut crescents straight from the bag, rubbing sugar between my fingertips, leaving guilty crumbs in the folds of his bed. I think about the poetry in everyday moments and compose lines in my head that fade slowly and then, just like that, are gone.

I can’t stop watching or just waiting to see.

Going Back: Part 1

The dream weighs on my shoulders like a wet wool coat, scratchy, heavy, uncomfortable. I try to shrug it off, blink my eyes open but something isn’t right here in the passenger seat. I look to my left. L, again. My heart vaults into my throat and my pulse races, for the first time in an effort to flee, run from the car. My heart pounds in blood-language: No, no. Nuh uh. No, no. Nuh uh. No, no. Nuh uh.

He smiles at me and I drag the corners of my mouth into what might resemble the same, as though I am dragging an oar through water, nothing flows, nothing comes easy.

“W-what?”

“Oh, hey. You’ve been sleeping.”

I shake my head, trying to dislodge something, an idea. “When is it?”

“Oh, uh, it’s about 3.”

“No, it’s not—what day is it? What’s the date?”

“March 12th.”

“What? 2010?”

He looks at me with that look I got so often, the one that wonders if I’m joking, if he should play along or ignore me. Not sure yet, still, quite how to read me.

“2009, Lindsay.”

“Stop the car.”

“What? But, we’re on the—”

“STOP THE FUCKING CAR.”

He lays on the brake and the car skids to a stop on the gravel side. I rip the door open and run to the edge of green. It looks like we’re in Cape Breton or somewhere like it. My hands on my knees, I try to catch my breath.

2009. 2009. 2009. That means I’m still with L. No. We haven’t even broken up yet. What. I haven’t even met G yet. I’d show up on his doorstep and he’d think I was crazy… “No, seriously man, we’re totally soul mates. Made for each other. Believe me…. no I don’t want your bottles for recycling. I’m not homeless. No, I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy!”

I try to laugh but it catches in my throat as dry heaves. The next moment and I am vomiting food I can’t remember eating into the tall grass, car idling behind me.