Month: August 2026

when you are the light
there are no shadows

August 1, 2026

What pitiful things we are!

So easily abused, tortured, corrupted,
controlled.

If I were a god I would not love us.

August 1, 2026

What a foolish girl I am to believe in
what doesn't believe in me!

Quiet as a mouse I am at least
(sometimes) loud enough to
walk away.

August 1, 2026

I had a father once, when I was
a little girl.

A blurry bug-eyed man in a photo-
graph I keep in an old-fashioned
album.

I remember his voice when
he said my nickname.

I can hear it in my mind if I
try hard enough.

Playful. Happy.

(But what do I know about other
people's happiness?)

I remember his mustachioed smile.
His teeth.

I don't remember his laugh.

I remember climbing onto his
sunblock greasy shoulders.

I remember shouting in a burst
of joy as I jumped into the ocean.

I remember a picnic table, a glass
carafe of wine.

I remember my mother saying
his name the way she always did.

She was afraid.

He wasn't a good man.
He wasn't a good father.
He was a man.
He was a father.

He was The Man.

I remember gritted teeth. Locked
jaw. Eyes illuminated from within,
a manic match to a Joker grin.

I was sixteen. I remember standing between him and the dog, him
and my mother.

"Over my dead body," I said.

(Which in hindsight is pretty
damned funny.)

I no longer remember what
happened next.

I no longer remember being
dragged down the hall by my hair.

It's only from long repetition of
memory that I remember being
folded over, my face crushed
into the carpet, lights exploding
in the darkness, a needle
pressure in my chest.

I no longer remember sitting
on the carpet, drool smear on
my cheek, looking at a clump
of my own hair.

I'm sure my mother was hysterical
(she was always hysterical) but I
don't remember.

I don't remember standing at the
window looking down at the
patrol car in the driveway as
my father and the officer
shared a laugh.

I don't remember the time of year
or the weather.

I remember the year only from
long repetition.

It was referred to in whispers
as "the incident" but it wasn't
the only one.

(He never struck her, not once.)

I remember frenetic energy.

He was always up at dawn.
He ate almost nothing.
He ran, he jogged.
He went to the gym.

He was rarely home, less often
present.

(How do you spend seventeen
years in a household without a
conversation?)

That's where I get my frenetic
energy, the drive to do too much,
the curiosity to learn more, to
try the new, the different, to
strive for self improvement,
for enlightenment (even if it
turns out to be wrong, sadly).

I got his Polish nose, though
my hook is less pronounced.

I got his brown hair that always
looked like it needed a trim, as
if he'd never quite left the 70's.

It's funny how a moment of so
short a duration has elongated
through time, faded in its
particulars, lost its details,
blurred into an afterimage,
a backdrop, a slow motion
scene behind frosted glass,
an infinite reminder of
finite possibilities
that has left me
unable to
recognize
the
world
without it.

I shaved my head once a month
for seventeen years.

I used to think about writing him
a letter, but I never did.

He doesn't know who I am,
who I've become.

He can't remember who I was.
I've been blacked out by blackouts.

In the end it doesn't matter.

I've changed too much.
I know too much.
I've grown too old.

I used to have a dad, but that was
a long time ago, when I was a
little girl.

I don't miss him.

I don't miss him anymore.

August 1, 2026

Nature Girl has been beaten
into shape, beaten out of me.

I've been left alone on a foreign
shore, a foreigner abandoned
in a world I don't belong to,
inside a world outside
the outside.

I
can't
breathe
in here but
that doesn't matter
to anyone, not even me.

I'm a space cadet without a helmet.

There's no path back to where
(or who) I was. I am bereft
of context, an orphaned
asterisk.

Eleven
years later
and I still don't
have one right answer.
I'm no longer in the wrong
class but now I wander the halls
in a stupor. I no longer try the
doors, I just look out the
windows, unconcerned
as to their reality as I
can no longer count
their dimensions.

A pixel, a picture, an unreachable
reality, what's the difference
to an old woman trapped
in the perpetual motion
of poverty?

I know the score, I've done the math.

Sometimes when I drown,
the water is cold.

Sometimes when I drown,
the water is warm.

Sometimes that's the only
choice I have.

When it rains on my virtual island
I stay inside. I pretend to shelter.

She did too, back in the long
ago day, crawling in between
the skinny legs of sumac.

She thought she knew things
and I learned to disbelieve
and now I get it:

She knew the important things.

But none of it was enough to
fill up a world that's been
emptied out. She'd
never heard
of
the
strangler fig
and wouldn't have
been wise enough to be afraid.

I'm afraid, but not for her.
She's gone.

I killed her.

And I've lost far more than I've
gained from it, all said.

I thought I had no choice, and
maybe I was right. Poor thing.

She sat in that dorm room alone
and cried. Heartbroken.

I have to do this, I said and wrote
(I may still have it somewhere).

I can no longer follow the changing
of the seasons, each sign given
freely, like a gift.

I can no longer watch for the
Wild Hunt or listen to the
chorus of a billion
insects or delight
in the antics
of
snapping turtles
and wolf spiders and
tree beetles and water scorpions
or search for the bubble eggs of
frogs and toads and newts or
peel the bark from wild
grape or run my
fingers
over
the silky
smooth wood
of fallen pine branches
or listen for the trickle of snowmelt.

(She was always alone but
never lonely.)

It's all gone now, I said, I wrote.
I have to give it up. I have to
join this world that closes
off the world that isn't
beholden to time.

And I did.
And I wish I could go back.

None of it was worthwhile.

Over thirty years later and not one
moment was worthwhile.

There's no key here.
There's no breadcrumbs.

It's just a complicated mess,
all backwards. And yet,
I'm not bitter.

Only sad.

I remember her.
I remember who I was.
I remember who I sacrificed.

I never want to forget.

August 1, 2026