All the Peppers

Thomas, The Dearest
—

I get up early, awake with the palm trees
and the wild doves.
I make breakfast for myself
while everyone else sleeps.
I slip into my runners and take the
tea that is made up of weeds,
tumbling it down my throat like
a prayer.
This is easy and alright.
Just here like this,
and a little there, like that.

I have seen this before, at 19, at 21
and already with you before
all of this, in February
and again, nearing June.
The ways we find to convince ourselves
of our misgivings
and how easy, how light
to laugh with you whenever
we could let go of it all.

The trouble is, my hands are sore.
A little blue around the edges,
with veins popping out from under
my ivory, rice-paper skin.
I can’t hold on anymore.
And letting go of the time,
the place and all of you
near to your birthday,
not even a year in
or a month out,
somehow feels different
to all the times I’ve done
this before.
I have been running from you
since they stuck the IV in my arm
and you asked me to hold your hand
but instead, I closed it like a fist
and tightened up.

Enough, love.
I have run with the river
until it ran dry
and began spitting insults
at me.
You psycho bitch.
I don’t care for you anymore.
If I end up with you, I’ll kill myself.

And I let it soak into me. I sat
and lapped it up
and still climbed into your arms
should you offer them
instead of making you bleed
the way my body had.
Leaked and wrenched and bruised
in your presence

and you call it the cosmos
you say it’s “just bad luck”
but there is no such thing,
my darling.
Just your anger bubbling up
and over that taking responsibility
for yourself, for this
is just a little too inconvenient
and a lot too much
for someone not yet half
of their 25 years.

And again, I learn another lesson.
From the man who used to press
his mouth to my shoulder in his sleep.
The very same, always a little
emptied because he is
pretty and a little bit funny
but not too much else.

Where something may be found,
convincingly enough to be different
from all the rest, it ends up
just the same, my love.

I think of you leaning across
the table when you first took me to
breakfast in October.
All bells and whistles.

Later, in my bed, always
so close to me
that I could barely breathe

And I think if this is letting you go

I am ready now
more than I was 4 months ago
to forget about you
As if you never happened, never existed
The hands you
didn’t extended
the ties that bind now cut
because of the “cosmos”

and all your bad luck
but really because you couldn’t see
what you had
and may never see it
even now that it’s gone

If ever you should read this
just know, for the first time
in all of this
I don’t feel sorry for you,
not a little bit,
not even at all.

All the Soup for You

I am having a slow Monday. Applying for internships. Writing like crazy. Napping. Thinking. Eating so very much. And watching the BBC 1980’s adaption of Pride and Prejudice (the one with a shirtless Colin Firth). I wouldn’t kick him out of my house, bedroom, bed… whatever.

I threw a bunch of things into a crockpot for dinner later. I love and hate how little things can sometimes be such clear reminders of a different part of your life. When I first lived in my very “almost” own apartment, I split a place with a best friend. There was only the two of us to contend for fridge and cupboard space. I was still studying psychology then and wearing huge knit sweaters that went down to my knees. I never brushed my hair. Nicole was always cutting her split ends or half-assing yoga in our kitchen while chugging a bottle of wine. We spent our evenings after work/class both curled up on opposite ends of our couch. Reading to each other. Painting our nails. Playing drinking games that we made up as we got drunker and drunker. It was always raining and all the grass was very, very green. I became really obsessed with soups that winter. Bean soups. Spinach soups. Split pea soups. Our apartment felt like a refuge from all the rain, so warm and cozy and smelling always of some sort of soup. It was everywhere. Whenever Nicole had a stressful day, I’d bake cookies and leave some hot soup for her. If she was sad over a guy, all the crying and the soup and some wine.

I had been casually seeing a guy that year. Someone from Toronto who left me more restless than anything else. I’d come home after spending the evening/night/weekend with him and chug cold, starchy soup like it would settle my heart down. It often did. I still have a scar on my thigh from all the soup I made that winter. Soaked straight through my jeans when said boyfriend leaned in to touch me. It had mixed with the smell of Nicole’s hand rolled cigarettes and burned me. Pretty badly. I look at it now and laugh. All the rain. All the soup. Feels like forever ago.

I need to get back to Colin Firth and sugar free chocolate since I’m on my 5th day without sugar or caffeine. Happy Monday eve, loves.

Love,

Zandria.

The Selected Morse Code of a Writers Past

Three years ago almost, an old series of photographs
to go with my dusty, old poetry.

I’m feeling nostalgic today. Particularly honest.
Most of this old work is ridiculous but it’s all
a part of me.

---

1.) June 27th, 2012

Sometimes, I  really envy people
a glass of wine with dinner
you replaced your margarita in
my favor and sometimes,
I go months without writing anything

we must try, our school teachers told us
if we want to become anything
but I am sitting right now and
lamenting one of those days
where nothing and everything
are the same thing

five days ago,
I was sitting on the balcony
11th floor, warm LA
crying to my mother

over a long-distance phone call
I still cry and phone my mother even though
I am 19 year old woman,
I am,
I am
but sometimes she doesn’t answer her phone
and sometimes … I …?

---

2.) January 1st, 2012

Thy Flesh, Thy Bone

I don’t know where I am going or how
I will get there
but I know that I am leaving
before the sentence can finish itself

I have my fingers on the map
and my feet out the window
of the second floor building
in the room where we used to
slow dance in our underwear to a symphony of shadows

truth behold, I am always looking for a way out
before I have even found a way in,
oh how this restlessness used to bother you
to no end

I brought you to your knees
slowly until you were kissing the ground with the very
same elbows that held me, cajoled me so many nights
into sleep

this is the secret, small and barely recognizable
only felt in the evenings
when I am very much alone

I cannot throw you far enough away from me

I think about your body and how your muscles arched
to rise and fall
with each breath
like tiny roman empires
surrendering themselves fully to
defeat, the scent ever present, of lust

and in the mornings, too tired to say much
of anything, we excused
our flaws and let our eyes betray us

and you say I am so
full of secrets, that I am a language
you could spend lifetimes learning

but I fear lately and with age, that I have
become a magazine with missing pages

there is nothing of me worth knowing
the small of my back, the spine and its vertebrae,
are common features
to your average woman,

you will
find pieces of me now
everywhere that you look
oh the torture! but nothing useful
in describing

except the tact you use
when you are ripping out the paper from the
bindings

just for a tiny gasp from my mouth

to make me say the things you want to hear

and I am losing density, soon I will no longer be
strong enough
to hold onto this name, nor place and age

So that when you try to find me, years from now

You will ask yourself if I was
ever someone real

---

3.) February 2011

when you left me, I started writing notes to myself
little notches to measure the time in which
we were apart

first it was just a word, then a sentence
in pen on the palm of my hand(s) then to
my wrists

eventually, I understood that the silence
was everything and they became tattoos
without even really trying

I forgot your first name but every so often
at night, I’d wish to be something more
than a girl, my bones wanted to be called
woman, freedom
and I’d hear you as if you were right there

Instead of in another bed, far away
and with another lover

for another year, another lesson

I am the girl always leaving and never really
knowing how to say goodbye

---

4.) June 29th, 2012

I am sleeping on the wrong side of the bed
even though neither side
is really the right side
when you have the whole room and your entire body
to yourself, every night

a quarter pack of bobby-pins later
rain, dropping into
the ocean
in a town where everyone pretends
to know me,

the real strawberry blonde
five stray
palm bays later and your bow-tie
hits the soft parts of my thigh
And I want you to know,
that I don’t have much to say
about you, to you,
for you, anymore

and I paint my lips red
because a best-friend once said,
that the best colour
For a sallow girl,
is bright and reckless
just like all my summer freckles
I draw maps in my sleep
on your hands
in an empty bed

in front of a dirty vanity mirror

and I have booked my flights out of this country
with a valid passport

and a different first name
than the one you used to call me

---

5.) May 10th, 2013

The Great Lakes of Canada

On the fourth day, I begin looking for messages
in my cheerios, drinking almond milk
with tingling disgust so that the
boys won’t notice

how often my body trembles
alone in bed at night, like
a frequency, barely picked up
by the human ear and
although i have scrubbed your
name from my skin, sat long and
hard in the sun, dried out the
pieces like fruit, bittersweet
on the end of my tongue,

I still know where to find you,
at the edge of my bed, with your
hands in my hair
like hooks, digging into my flesh

I could make a map out of this
place with the consistency
of your bite marks
on my flesh

but,

today, your last bruise fades
from my shoulder,
today, you are in the wilderness
on the outskirts of a city I do not
know well,
will never come together
again

so, I am falling out of sleep
and into the daylight like a bird
flying toward the horizon
because I have no where else to
go, you are paddling the great lake
in Algonquin park

with nothing left of me in your blood
and I am pounding my fists against the
wall, the lonely whale in the ocean
who cannot be heard by anyone
but herself

yet still, I am eating my cheerios
quiet and slow,
floating in this god-damned almond milk
soaking up nothing but the way
my love bloomed
and was cut down
by the raging waters of
Ontario and how distant
your body is
in relation to my heart

---

6.) March 2011

I want to kiss you with my eyes open
I want to read to you,
lines from books that I don’t remember
that have somehow pressed themselves
like drying daises between my muscles and bone
the same way you press yourself
between my lips and hair, falling asleep
as a boy that I am not loving with 
all my heart because my excuses for our escapades
are tiny and quiet
like the wings on a bird, so fragile
and if our tongues were made of glass
maybe we would be more careful
with speaking but
we are made of different metals
fused together and could you think of all
the jokes, we may or may not have
shared over the years?
how does it embarrass you to realize that we have spent many
of our nights the same way, so in love that it hurt
and pulled apart our veins, felt like nails
in our skin, pressing down and onward
used up all our declarations of innocence
other snaps of identity that
grew and displaced themselves
flowers in jars
smaller than their roots
and as the years went by,
I became less of that woman
and more of my own
with no one particular, an image, a smell
swimming through my veins
at the mention of late night binges on letters
handwritten, you left by my window
and secrets colder than air that seemed to stall our actions
but all of these things are relative,
somehow subjective
and your diction isn’t loud enough,
you’re too far away
the truth is, I never wanted you as much
As you thought

---

7.)

February 27th, 2013

I bought a pack of Malboro lights today
for myself, for emergencies

this isn’t really a poem, so much as it’s
working guilt into never opening the

pack of cigarettes that I have for no reason

---

8.) May 1st, 2013

Stay.
I have invented a new language
full of just that word
and my body begins
slowly at first, in the mornings
naked with your fingernails
tracing my ribs
to betray me

this compost heart
ragged
hums the word
over and over
the silent prayer
until I am made of nothing else
but for holy sorrow
and the way you kissed
my mouth
on that first night,
how our bodies broke together
like panes of glass
sharp enough to bleed
and now I’m jumping from cliffs
with my arms around
your neck
up in the early mornings
worshiping the sun
in your place, my bed empty
my arms outstretched, aching

I never wanted you
the way that you thought
until it was too late
to cash in the flights

you’re made of money
not of time

and I don’t want you to go
but you’re already
far, far away
even inside of me
that place sacred, your eyes
clouded with hopes
for a future
that does not include me
and still

this tired heart beats
stay, stay, stay
because it does not know
what else it could be

I’m exhausted, so heavy
with the things I cannot change
the men I will come to know
with fingerprints and tongues
I have no interest in anymore
just you

I am standing endlessly
back straight, spine-tip topped
pouring hot tea on your lap

and these life lessons, designed
to make my bones steel
my kisses lighter..
one after another, as I watch you
pack your things
and walk out the door, I wonder
the use of destiny, cursing God
or natural acts, sins
because I have committed many

I need something to make me weak in the knees,
it would taste and feel
so much better
than your body, on top of me
swallowing all the words
I will spit up later

---

People will always try to take the salt out of you.
The truth is, you can’t let them
no matter what.

Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light.

Forgive.

Write often.
Never apologize for your strength,
your beauty,
your potential.

Not everyone will understand you.
Not even you sometimes.

Love,

Zandria