Inventory

INVENTORY

I love Lana Del Rey unironically. that is not to say without snag—I have worried for the state of my feminism, as if my feminism were a house that needs tending—its dusty corridors, its cobwebs & clutter. 

I am suspicious of the tender feelings I once had for people who did not love me in my imperfection—of the way tender feelings reappear less tenderly, barbs working their way heartward. 

when I was a child I thought chocolate milk came from black cows & regular milk came from any other kind of cow; for a long time I thought this was cute but now I suspect it was a symptom of racism. likewise, I thought all dogs were male & all cats female. this perhaps had to do with the way dogs chase cats & the way men bark at women & even more to do with my budding tendency towards categorization, a tendency with which I am in constant conflict, as in deciding whether or not to describe myself as bisexual when what I mean is I am not interested in gender, binaries are boring, I'd much rather tender my identity as slick lips parting on the border between one breath & the next.

sometimes I see things out of the corner of my eye that aren’t quite there; once I was certain I was experiencing myself in a car accident. the person I was with in the car couldn’t understand the shuddering & the crying & this is partly to do with why I do not drive. 

I believe in the law of feeling conservation: feelings cannot be added or taken away but are only able to change shape, still existing in equal measure. 

a year & a half ago I unintentionally & casually said something cruel in the presence of a friend (cruel because of what she was going through at the time); though I’m certain she’s forgotten the incident I still think about it regularly, this week alone I've thought of it on four separate occasions. 

perhaps I fear a revenant feeling; indeed—I know I fear re-entering doors I'd thought closed behind me.

Lana croons of love & booze. the love is unreturned, the booze top shelf. when her voice gets really low, I feel it in my groin: God knows I tried, God knows I tried, she groans in a voice verging on voiceless-ness. towards the end of the song she takes off, her voice high & airy—So let there be light, let there be light, light of my life, light of my...she trails off into pure delight. the feeling rises up through my skin like carbonation. 

I try to stop biting. the fingernails grow, milky half-moons. I press my teeth to them, feel along the smooth edge with my tongue. the urge to make rough. give me something jagged that catches. keep me not from my own skin. 

when I tell someone I do not think it is a good idea for me to drive or I do not think I would make a suitable mother & they respond with platitudes—practice makes perfect—my thoughts slide from my incapacities to theirs. 

I am both annoyed & comforted by my Myers-Briggs personality type (INFJ—only one percent of the population falls into this category); annoyed because I want to defy categorization, comforted because it affirms my notion of myself as rare & valuable—the need for this kind of categorical affirmation being the most common human attribute I know.

I love animals because they are uncomplicated. I love people because they are complicated. 

as I'm writing this piece I feel an echo of a mentor’s voice inside of mine & I feel a little like a puppet or a thief. 

writing this, I heard a puppy or a grief.

the woman is trying to press the buttons on the screen of the credit card machine but her manicured nails get in the way. she tries tapping: pink flamingo beaks against the screen. she tries laying her fingers flat instead. I imagine her laying her fingers across my lips. I imagine biting her nails for her. 

the night I left my parents' house, I sat in the passenger seat of my boyfriend's car, vision blurred—I was in such an emotional state that it took me longer than it should have to understand the blurring was caused by tears. we backed over the bump in the driveway & pulled onto the street. I took one good long look, knowing I would not live again under the same roof as my family. the tree my mother had planted to celebrate my adoption (each of us children had a tree devoted to us) waved its wide leaves at me, but it was the weeping birch to which I directed my good-bye. a year or so later, my parents divorced & sold the house. every now & then I dream my way back there. I stand on the street & weep. all the trees are missing but the birch, whose little green leaves won't stop shaking. 

sometimes I walk great distances only to arrive at myself. this is my Nebraska story, condensed to a sentence. or: this is the story of anyone. 

I have kissed more men than I have women. I have masturbated to more women than I have men. facts are so fucking useless.

He hit me and it felt like a kiss, Lana sings, & with her voice Jim's hand is soft as silk.I will do anything for you, babe. Blessed is this, this union. Jim is the name of her lover, who is also her abuser. coincidentally, the man who molested me as a child was also named Jim. 

I have been a cutter in my life. I have taken razor blade to inner thigh, lit match to wrist, I have created rows of blistered little pathways leading nowhere.

I like paradoxes & vortexes & the word vox& the phrase in flux& Popa’s Little Box poems & wild vetch & I could go on forever this way, sounding my way forward, hemlock & fox & apex: you can be delivered like this, an infant screaming bloody & bewildered into the opening of the world— 

Pretty Woman (a troublingly romanticized movie from 1990 about a sex worker who falls in love with her trick) has long been a guilty pleasure. my favorite line is delivered by Vivien (played by Julia Roberts), & is a question of ownership. I decide who, I decide when, she yells, fists clenched, then repeats, I decide WHO. 

I cannot tell by listening whether someone is underlining a sentence or crossing it out. this reminds me of Schrodinger's cat, & a poem I once wrote, & what it feels like when you are first falling in love with someone you know nothing at all about. 

in Nebraska, I walked the same trail for two years, or ran it, & at the very end of it I'd stop, sit on the grassy slope overlooking the hospital, & think of calling my ex. I'd hold my phone, dial the number without pressing call, & imagine the things I would say, which is almost the same as saying them. then I'd close my phone & go home to someone else. 

Pretty Womanis the only movie I've seen which depicts the possibility of a sex worker exiting that particular line of work alive, of their own volition, & sane. it's the only movie I've seen where a woman is both a sex worker & indispensable. I'm not blind to the movie's countless clichés, tired binaries, & fucked-up implications. according to a friend who used to be a sex worker, the movie inspired a whole new generation of girls to enter the trade; what wouldn't look glamourous when performed by Julia Roberts? but when Vivien whispers to Edward while they're lying in bed: It's easier to believe the bad stuff, I think yes, it absolutely is, & what about the women who saw this movie & thought, Here's a possibility: I don't have to die alone, raped, dumped in the dirt, a spur in someone else's storyline. 

in my mid-twenties, I cut my hair, dyed it red, then purple, then black, then brown. I got highlights. the highlights made me feel like a different person, so I bought white pants & strappy sandals. in my white pants & strappy sandals, I did things I didn't think I would ever do.  

I like listening to actors speak of their craft; I prefer it to listening to writers speak of theirs. something to do with the overlap & also the distance between modes.

while I was waiting for a bus, a man, drunk at 2:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, said, Men like me go to prison so we can learn how to take care of creatures like you. Delicate creatures. I can protect you, he said, wafting the scent of whiskey in my face. Creatures like you need to be protected. Delicate fairy creatures. You're so delicate someone could throw you in a trunk & drive away with you.

I get a little thrill when I say: language is useless. it's a garbage thought, but it makes me feel as though I am inhabiting someone else entirely, Judi Dench acting in a period piece, say, & I deliver the phrase with a haughty defiance, as though deep inside my character knows precisely the power of words & how they may be used—to suppress & to liberate, neither of which I am free enough yet to fully understand.

it’s possible this poem (can I call this a poem?) is trying to make up for the lost document. the lost document is a document I kept on my computer in high school. I wrote in it every day, sometimes multiple times a day. it wasn’t a diary but an accumulation of thoughts, observations, words I liked, lists upon lists, memories, remembered snippets of language from things I'd read or seen or heard that piled up with not so much as a paragraph break to indicate the passage of time. as far as anyone would be able to tell I had written the document in one sitting, but actually it happened over a long period of time. 

I ask a customer if he'd like to keep or donate his bag credit. he responds by quoting Mao, something about an overabundance of choices being the root of suffering. I feel I have the opposite problem, & in that feeling a seed of resentment sprouts. 

I am suspicious of the binaries I create &/or proliferate. Yet I return to them like a guilty lover, not yet ready to shed familiarity for nuance, a mapped world for an unmapped one. 

in an interview Lana explains that her inspiration for Ultraviolenceis the hydrangea—its blues, greens, & violets. I, too, am mesmerized by its hues, & also by how common its flowers. growing up, our house was filled with them—clipped from the stalk, they'd dry into a muted, mothy brown. up close, you could see the veins beneath the papery petals. 

I think of the lost document sometimes. I poured part of myself into a bowl & the liquid crystallized & then I threw the crystals into a lake & now I can only see them—that part of myself—when I close my eyes.

caught in a sudden downpour, I stood beneath a bridge, sobbing my longing into the wet night. I remember thinking, You have to tell the truth when it's raining. I waited until the rain subsided to go home. 

once I attempted to save a praying mantis from being crushed between a screen door & the doorframe. with the mantis in hand, I stepped out into the afternoon & in my haste to be rid of the clinging, startled creature, I stumbled & fell. as I fell, I kept my arm rigid, my hand open flat, thinking only of not crushing the insect. I remember as I lay there waiting for someone to come help me (my wrist was broken) the mantis exited my palm & turned its head toward me. I will never know how I looked through its colossal, compound eyes or if I even registered as a living thing, if I was monstrous or heroic or simply geography. I felt a blooming shame. I had not fallen from trying to help the mantis; I had fallen from trying to escape the discomfort of its stiff, delicate grasp. 

at work customers ask me what kind of poems I write. I am evasive, vague. I don’t like speaking of poetry in passing, & besides, I exit a poem the way I exit sleep; I know I dreamed, but already the details are shrouded. when I re-read the poem, I might as well be touching an artifact from a lost world. I write poems about Atlantis, I say, & it doesn't matter, I'm handing them a receipt, they've already forgotten the question.

I would name my son Forsythia. I would name my daughter Gloam.

I left home in a hurry. within a week all my belongings had been boxed & relegated to the garage. a teacher took me to get my things. my mother refused to leave her bedroom as my father helped me load the boxes into the car. I don't know for whom in this memory I feel the most tenderness—my mother, angry & grieving the departure of her youngest daughter a week after having a hysterectomy; my father, who carried the weight of my things out to the car without asking for anything in return; my teacher, who would nearly lose her job over this small act of generosity; or that version of myself, who had no idea what she was losing, who she was hurting, or that there was an option to do otherwise. 

sometimes I feel I am a hypocrite for loving Lana Del Rey. she sings of wealth & nostalgia for an America that never existed. I relax into the sound of her voice & my skepticism is subdued by the movement of my hips. I sway & sing along, unsure of who I am, who I might be.

at church while everyone prayed, I stared at the rapt, immobile faces & wondered what streams gurgled beneath the smooth surfaces. it took me years to learn that this, too, is a kind of prayer.

what are the edges of the poem? I don’t mean this poem so much as poetry. but of course I am interested in the edges of this particular poem, in fact I am enchanted by edges, I like to run my fingers along them & feel that tingling that happens when the edge might be sharp enough to cut.