Self-Portrait

 

I picked up my charcoal and went back to the eyes.  They were vacant, but not in a good way.  Not in the way that makes a self-portrait haunting or provocative.  They were dead, really.  My teacher, a seasoned artist, was hosting a two day workshop in her home studio.  As the hours passed, she made her way around the room of seven, issuing critiques on our technique and progress.

“Why are you doing that?” she asked, her breath on my neck.  Ever uncomfortable when she approached, I immediately began shading an area that didn’t need it.  “Just adding some detail,” I blubbered.  “Jenny-you have got to step back.  You’re being too literal here.  I mean, you are drawing each individual eyelash. Can you actually see each eyelash when you look in the mirror?”

Thank God.  She’d given me an opening.  “As a matter-of-fact,” I responded looking at her deadpan, “with my new Cover Girl Lash Blast Mascara, I can”.  She half-laughed and began making her way to the next easel.  And just when I thought I was off the hook, she looked back over her shoulder. “Something’s missing,” she said.  “And I suggest you explore it.”

I knew she was right.  I knew I had heavy chains on both ankles.  One that tethered me to a city I didn’t want to live in and the other latched  to a nasty hangover and the unrelenting itch for 5 pm.  But drawing that version of me wasn’t on the table.  I didn’t know how to draw a stranger.  

So I pushed through the exercise, attempting to make it blurry and abstract enough for her approval.  Never daring to reveal the gooey, monstrous mess that my insides had become. The portrait that resulted was of a woman that looked nothing like me.  It wasn’t interesting or important.  It was a throwaway, like the paper you’d wrap a fish in.  

 

But instead of scrapping it immediately, I kept it close by for four more years.  A bit of shading here, a sparkling earring there–adding layers to a mask that hadn’t suited me in the first place.   An artist friend once told me, “The secret of creating something beautiful is knowing when to stop”.  Her words vaporized as I kept at it.  If I could just get the angle of the chin right. The whisper of a cheekbone.  Then, surely, she would be complete.   

What should have been an exploration–an artistic purge–had immobilized me.  My inner-territory had grown so foreign, so wildly unattended that it was impassable.  I was a madwoman sketching in the dark. Zooming in on my lashes, the curves of my ear–was self-preservation.  A frog splayed out in a tray with pins in each limb. Up close, my parts didn’t seem at odds with one another.  My facts and fictions were separated by marked out squares, and could be examined separately–or not at all.

More years passed until my charcoal became an unusable stub.  The paper, torn through from my sweat and heavy pressing with holes where my eyes should be. I had no choice but to toss me out.  I upgraded from newsprint to canvas and bought some colored paints. But as is the case with any renovation, the demolition stage came first.  At times, the transition was excruciating.  The colors fought against my blending.  The canvas laughed.  I eyed the balled up original in the trash and contemplated pressing her out.  Returning to the comfort of my previous vacancies.  

But eventually, the redesign took shape.  And the new portrait, the one with a palette as vibrant as my insides, is a work in progress.  And when she’s looking at me wrong–when her mouth crooks to the side or her eyes drift toward the hollows, I don’t mindlessly slap on new layers.  Instead, I reach toward the painting and I hook her eyelids with my thumbs.  I pull them back until she’s forced to focus back at me.  And we stare at one another until a silent pact is made.  A promise to share the weight of who we were and who we’ve become.  

Both of us willing to explore the untapped wilderness.  

Shed

I envy the small green snake
peeking out from behind my Begonias.
Tired of her skin, she slithers out of it. Sloughs it off,
leaving it tangled in the leaves like a discarded coat.
One ziiiiiiiiip from eyecaps to tail and she is new.
Scales shiny as airport shoes, she carves through
the thick St. Augustine grass. A regal
huntress, parting the tides with
intimidating ease.

I envy the patient cicada
ground-bound, larval and waiting to push
his way out of his dusty incubation. Tree-
clinging as he unwraps his luscious iridescence
from it’s casing. Blazing from silence to
symphony in the course of one day.
Tymbals vibrating their eager
mating song, attracting love
on the first go-round.

Buy why? Why don’t I
have buttons down my spine or simple
snaps to yank at when my body begs to re-emerge
as something new–when I ache to boast and shine?
Why? Why must I carry these heavy rewrites
in my cavity (this evidence of change
like anchors on my wings) when
all I really want to do is sing?

Maybe one day you’ll see me
latched barkside to that tree.
Teasing my way out of the skin
I’m in until I plunk into the dirt.
Until I slither and then fly. Shiny
and high. Leaving only
an effigy–a hollowed-
out replica
behind.

 

A Message to My Fellow Prisoners

“Scattered thunderstorms predicted throughout the day”. I roll my eyes as I close the weather app on my phone. “Always a chance of storms,” I mutter as I head to the closet to pull out my running shoes. I undo the double knots, resisting the urge to jam my heel into them while they’re still tied. Once I’m all laced up, I open the door. I see the clouds, blackest at the edges and try to gauge their direction. “Uhggggh,” I say as I set off down the street, desperate to see some light.

It was 12 years ago when I injured my back, and there have been very few pain-free runs since then. Machines have documented every jacked up bone in my body. Smile, spine! You’re on camera. Doctors have poked and prodded my every vertebrae, Does it hurt when I do THIS? Physical therapists have twisted me Cirque du Soleil style, Step right up folks, see a real-life Gumby!And despite all of this, I run anyway.

And as I run, my eyes inventory the world around me. The woman pulling weeds from cracked concrete — knees resting on the Welcome mat. The man with the sweaty blue work shirt — checking his watch as he flings his briefcase into the backseat. The young girl with her backpack on one shoulder — standing several feet from the cluster of other kids at the bus stop. Each of us carrying aches and pains that hail from different sources.Each of us serving time in our own ways. We all know about life on the inside. We’ve all been contained.

Some of us? Prisoners to our parents — the adults who could have coddled our sense of magic and creativity but instead seemed hell-bent on scrubbing it out of us. Some of us, prisoners to an internal well of loneliness that we attempted to fill with food, alcohol, sex, drugs — anything but self-love. And some of us prisoners to a misguided sense of success that led us closer to filling our mansions and our jewelry boxes but further from filling our hearts.

Universally, though, it was these vacancies-these empty spaces- that landed us here in our cells. We share the one smudgy mirror. They cover it in thick plastic to protect us, but it distorts the reflection to the point that we’re indistinguishable. Business attire long since replaced by orange jumpsuits. Hair, once Clairolcolored and smoothed just right — now a tuft of gray frazzled roots. Formerly contoured cheeks, flesh-fattened— stuffed daily with potatoes and macaroni served from ice cream scoops.

And when you serve time, you lose things. Possessions, friendships, marriages, self-worth. And at some point your heart gets so hardened-so black, that feeling nothing becomes the norm. There’s a safety in the monotony. A cadence to the humming florescent lights. A comfort in eating from the same trough everyday.

And after years of wrapping ourselves in these blankets made of ice, we realize we have two choices. We either stay in the confines of our cells or we escape. The answer seems so obvious. “Escape, of course”, says our heart. “It’s so blank in here”.

“You’re better off staying put,” says that other voice — the one that’s gotten much louder since the the day of our sentencing. “You’re safe here. You have a routine. You have a roof over your head and 3 meals a day. It’s not the Ritz, but it’s a helluva lot better than what’s out there.”

This dialogue goes on for hours, days, months, years. And for some — until coffin lids close and darkness bathes us. Others of us, though, still feel our mouth corners turn up at the mention of sun. Some of us want out. We’re an elite group of plotting escapees, whispering through floor vents, collecting tools beneath our mattresses. Co-conspirators in a den of lemmings.

The moment arrives. The day we’ve all waited for. The guards backs are turned. The door that leads to the gate is cracked. We look back at the cells one last time. A landscape so memorized, so soul-etched that we’ll see it in our sleep for years. And then, we look at each other. It’s go time.

One by one we shuffle out the door. All gripping the various tools we’ve collected along the way. All desperate to feel the rays beat down on our sun-hungry skin. But it’s overcast. We see the clouds, blackest at the edges. A chance of storms in all directions. Shoes laced, hearts braced — we run anyway.

Originally published on Medium.com

Buried Alive (and How I Dug My Way Out)

There was nothing odd about a Saturday morning spent on my knees, digging. The mud underneath my fingernails, the crates half-full of foil wrapped fossils, and the blur of my focused father in my periphery were as familiar to me as my own reflection.

“Time for some lunch!” mom bellowed from the high edge of the creek bed.

“Just a few more minutes,” I’d mutter, remaining focused on the fossilized snail half-emerged from the embankment before me.

The precision and time demanded by these fossil-digs afforded me rare glimpses at my patient side. One hasty move, one wrong tool and a seventy million year old invertebrate became dust at my knees. Whether the appeal stemmed from unearthing something so rare and delicate or from the opportunity to kneel beside my father for several uninterrupted hours evades me still. Regardless, my moments spent in a creek bed once covered by the Gulf are as precious to me as the fossils themselves.

In my early days of sobriety, I often found my mind drifting to these more innocent times. Unintentionally, I’d begun to view my years of drinking as violent assaults on the most sacred moments of my past. I visualized myself at the base of the fossil embankment, carelessly swinging my pick ax into the mud wall until the battered banks covered me from head to toe.

These reckless daydreams did me no good. I was allowing guilt to rewrite my past as it waged a frightening and suffocating war within. How, though, does one reconcile the muddy layers of shame that accompany addiction?

By digging differently, of course.

In visualizing recovery not as an uncomfortable assault, but as the delicate unearthing of something long buried, I am able to move forward. I’ve sharpened my most useful tools and parted ways with those dulled by misuse.

Back on my knees and digging patiently once again, I glance at my son beside me. Cheeks dusty and eyes intently focused on the task before him, I make a silent promise — a promise more precious than the fossils themselves.

Excavation

My long-buried bones

emit dusty gasps as she works

her chipping hammer around my

periphery.

Shale bits slough

off creek bed’s bank, gathering

on her denim knees. A paint

brush tickles my

groggy fins, posed

gracefully for their wake.

Parts wrapped and

numbered—

stacked in muddied

egg crates, forced from

the safe hug of

hibernation.

Bright lab lights

shine on busy picks and

chisels, as carefully

she reassembles me.

Perched exhibit high

and stripped of once

thick flesh and liquid

shield, I wait.

Crowds gasp and

whisper — reverence paid

as, naked, I resume

my reign.

---

* Piece originally published on Medium.com

I Am Water

 

Those summers on the Georgia coast replaced my parts from the inside out.  My blood is not red but a light brown. The brackish water of the intracoastal. Wring me out like a washcloth and then lick your hand.  It will taste like salt.  Tear the skin off my leg and you’ll find no bones.  Just razor clams and joints of cockle shells.  Run a brush through my hair.  It’s tangled spanish moss and full of wild things. Try to catch them.  You can’t.  They’ll hide in the knuckles of the old oak trees, nestled in the dark spaces between my secrets.

To arrive at my house, you’ll travel a dirt road that dips and turns through forest shadows.  There will be pockets of “once lived heres” along the way.  A trailer swallowed by kudzu.  A dumpster rusted, with daisies dancing in the cracks.  And just when you think the road leads nowhere–just when you’re certain that all four tires are sighing out their air, you’ll see the edge of it.

As you pull up, the house will speak to you only in whispers.  The words will pass your ears like mosquitoes.  Taunting you with tidbits of the history that pushed you into the world with a moan.  A clearing where the old barn and maid’s quarters used to be. A small white john boat now painted by storms and the paws of muddy bobcats.  A crumbling stone fireplace that baked Red fish and Snapper in it’s fiery belly.

You walk up the stairs, concrete and moss-stained, to tug at the flimsy screen door. There are smells that live only here.  Close your eyes and you’ll know the room.  Sulfur water dripping from the faucet in the kitchen sink, gliding down the stained porcelain into the pipes that speak at night.  Must from the winter-sealed dresser drawers and mildewed mattresses.  Four to a room. Wind gusts of low-tide muck from the exposed riverbeds outside the front porch.

Walls wooden.  Storied with the arches of darkened grain and mismatched frames.  Faces, black and white in bathing caps.  Peeping heads over dock’s edge.  Shirtless, gangly boys with rows of squirrel fish pinned to leather straps that crisscross their chest bones, ammunition-like.

You look closer at the picture of her.  Your mother’s mother. A beautiful she you never knew.  Long arms that never rocked you.  Fingers that never ran through your mossy hair.  You trace your finger along her face.  You run it across her full lips and up to her eyes.  She’s younger than you here, but sadder.  You step back a bit and see your sweaty reflection in the glass.   You move to another room.

A skeleton key, shifting this way and that to open the closet door.  Shelves of hats and battered boots that no one wears and no one throws away.  Metal boxes packed with rusty tools and old fish hooks.  Broken bits from the rods and reels that came home with glory stories of the ones that got away.  

And then down the dusty path to the dock.  Raised roots so familiar you lift your feet without ever looking down.  The bluff–a painting.  Trees arched just so as the branches beards let in the right amount of light behind them.  Sun bathing the marsh in yellows and light greens. A heron wading in the muddy shallows, watching you with it’s dinosaur eye.  Boards splintered, you run your calloused hand along the rail.  And then you stop.

Because it’s right now.  This very moment when you realize you aren’t just visiting. You are rooted here.  Your organs are doing things they can’t in concrete spaces.  Your lungs are full.  The two chambers of your heart are pumping the Atlantic into every single corner.  You slide your hand down and feel the rope tied tightly around your waist.  You realize it’s been chafing at your sides while you’ve been away-stained in light brown.  

You follow the rope down the ramp to the floating dock and rock in a familiar way–feeling your eyes grow heavy.  You inch your hand down further as the rope leads into the water.  Your lay on your stomach with one ear against the wood.  The slaps and gurgles beneath you pair with the music of the fiddler crabs in your periphery.  

You don’t tug at the rope.  You know what’s at the end.  An anchor so heavy that it could snap your shelled spine into two.  So you stay there.  Flesh pressed against the weathered wood. Rocking with the rhythm of this place you’re forever tethered to. Humming along as the fiddler’s compose their symphony.

*See more pieces like this on  Jen’s Medium Page

Footprints

Pants around my ankles, I squatted over the fossilized dinosaur footprint — a goofy grin spreading across my face. It’s one of those memories that I carry like a tattoo. It’s skin etched. Maybe it’s because I’ve told it so many times, each recount darkening the ink at the edges. Or perhaps it’s what it captured. An entire childhood in one simple snapshot.

The image of six-year old me, bare-bottomed in the wide open Oklahoma panhandle, pissing in an Apatosaurus print screams, “Here you go! This was my big, fat exotic childhood.” My dad was a museum man — of the Natural History variety. Half desk job, half field work with a family tagging along for the latter.

We were a breed of our own, my sister and I. Barely batting an eye when dad brought home shrunken heads and Megalodon teeth to discuss at our 6pm sharp family dinners. Fuck bounce houses. We had corn snakes and baby gators in wading pools for our parties. Airport souvenirs? Ha! Blowguns smuggled from the Amazon jungle and clay figurines from the base shops of Machu Picchu seasoned our bookshelves.

We were tethered to my father by bungee cords. Head lamps were adjusted at the entrances of caves. Snorkeling fins were forced over wet heels as we waded in waist deep near the reefs. Mother dutifully stood vigil on the sidelines — never failing to see us off or to listen to our breathless recounts when we emerged on the other side.

We know what we know as kids. My family constellation was drawn in private planetarium shows and the muddy knees of fossil digs. This was my norm. Only now, with certain memories curling up at the edges, do I long to piece together the whole. To see it projected sky high in the darkened dome above my chair.

First, you’ll only see the stars — some twinkling more brightly than others. Then, a shape emerges and you begin to connect the dots. That line that gave us form is my mother — the thread that anchored us to the sky. But to look at the constellation of my youth from any distance undermines the details. So today I zoom in — on the star that’s dusty from the great Black Mesa. Where the corners of Colorado, Oklahoma, and New Mexico meet.

The bit where, upon close enough examination, you see me squatting over a footprint that preceded me by 165 million years. A footprint stamped by a giant — his legs, pillar-like. His neck serpentine. I’m an ant in a canyon.

Dad was mixing business with pleasure. With our pop-up camper back at the park, we’d driven out to the site of the prints, tasked with taking some photos for the exhibit back home. The casts had already been taken — soon to be staged and served up to the oooohs and ahhhhhs of young visitors.

But the photographs weren’t panning out. The dry sediment was camouflaging it’s own Jurassic past. “It’s working!” I screamed, watching the print darken between my skinny legs as the yellow waterfall splashed my ankles. A prehistoric watering hole. “Great. Move out of the shot,” Dad commanded, eager to get some photos before my efforts evaporated. My sister had been keeping time, marking her own turf just a footprint away.

With one eye, we briefly surveyed mother. Forever the conductor of this mad symphony, she was always attuned. Today, she laughed. It was hard not to. This prehistoric pissing contest rivaled all former roadside squats and emergency tree pullovers. This was one for the family scrapbooks.

So what begins as a story about a road trip out West, becomes a story about footprints. The tattered maps and fossil tracks are now boxed neatly in Dad’s garage — a retired past, yellowing. Someday, my father will go out like the Sauropods. With a Big Bang — leaving footprints I can sit in.

And then there will be the smaller, softer tracks in my periphery (the ones my mother’s been leaving) that remind me what I’m anchored to —and why I’m brave enough to walk with dinosaurs.

The Only Drum

Should I be familiar with blasons?  Perhaps I missed that day of English Major class.  Well-regardless, I’m fascinated.  In The True Secret of Writing, Natalie Goldberg describes them as an entire 16th century poetry genre.  One that was used to praise women via anatomical analogy.  She cites several examples, including a famous one by Shakespeare that could easily be coined the anti-blazon.  It mocks all of the cliches we’ve come to associate with beauty.  It made smile.  

So I’ve been toying with these things.  Writing blasons about my husband and my son.  I’ve attempted it “Goldberg” style–that is, without overthinking the metaphors and just rolling with the images that float into my brain.  My own strange tributes have resulted.  

Blason One — Day Husband

His Legs are all of him. Hips for ears.

His fingers knobby with knuckles like bulbs, for planting.

His eyes, muddy puddles. No fun until you jump in them.

The splashing makes them twinkle in a subtle North Star way.

His feet, long straws. Perfect, thin, and light. Tattooed with

neon racing stripes. They carry him through miles of

trials. His heart, the only one I’d like in my morning

coffee cup. Steady — pumping the day’s rhythm. But

always ready for a stir.

Blason Two — Night Husband

Your giraffe limbs — awkward shapes and sharp edges

make for a horrid bedfellow. Spooning with you is a fork

to my lumbar. Yet — as you tangle and gangle — leaving no

nook for my more padded frame — our insides pair

quite nicely. Organs in sync. Your mind rests in mine. The curve

of a sea turtle’s belly against the warm sand. You heart, a metronome.

Bringing my more erratic beats to pace. Our breath, blending then

swirling upward like smoke in a tube. We fit in the important ways

my ill-proportioned love. So draw the curtains of your eyes as sleep

seeps in. Do it peacefully. Do it, knowing that all will be well if you

keep to your side of the bed.

Blason Three — Son

Your lips are pillows for my cheeks. Soft bows,

curved perfectly. Your rectangle frame lengthening

faster than the measuring tape in my hands. Thinning out.

That baby face finding it’s angles, giving hints of the man

underneath. That mind, a grasshopper — uncageable. Your legs

— pillars of jello. You stumble over yourself

with mother’s net to fall in. Your voice is butter on warm

cinnamon bread and your hands are clams, muddied from digging.

Your china skin and starfish grip hold parts of me once

unknown. Your “mommy” is silk tickling my ear. And your

heart is the only drum I hope to hear

when my body is soil. When I’m earth

for you to dance on.

Originally published  in Poets Unlimited on Medium.com