The Ballerine

The sway of jazz piano

gets the slow dance in her

before she’s risen from her chair.

Betty doesn’t have a partner

and she doesn’t want to ask.

Instead, she goes to the center

of the floor and strikes a pose

a ballerina posture

from a jewelry box.

She hopes her sadness

can be seen through the dark.

She wants the men to think

of tiny dancers, young daughters

they’ve neglected

since the day they were born.

She wants them to think

of placating guilt, of their own successes,

and of giving the ballerina something for her box.

She hopes they feed her the pearls one by one.

Regarding My First Apartment:

how it burned down.
The ashes and ovens -
the old dining room -
preparing a new table
for that feast of coals.

All I remember now,
as the smoke still curdles
on the banks of this river,
is how firm my feet felt
ascending the icy stairs.
How the morning shine
was as obnoxious
as the whine from Canadian mills.

The hallway runner leading,
by the awkward tilt
of old pizzerias,
to the refrigerator
that scarcely knew food.

The haze of my romantic era
is gone, only alive, an ember,
in an equally flammable
house of memory.

Dizzy on the sidewalk,
delegating the street lamp
to be my legs firmly planted,
I am swaying, so sorrowful,
through the veils of those
strange days, finally removed.

Elizabeth

This audio piece is my first attempt at sound mixing. It was so intriguing and fun (to the point that my face got all red, flustered and uncomfortable).

Elizabeth.egg on Aviary.

Give it a hear, eh?
Also, if you want to download the mp3, you can do that right here!

And, for your consideration, the text:

Some of the trees wear red.
It’s both the color of your apron
and the apples you baked into a pie.
You don’t remember me
but you remember autumn rain.
You recognize its fragrance,
like a loved one
coming home for a harvest meal,
smelling better than the cinnamon.

When it comes into your open window
(something they still allow
in that gray room of yours),
you sink back,
as far as the crooked bed will allow,
and close your eyes.
You don’t remember me
but you remember the way the autumn rain
felt on your breasts when they were still up high.
How he held your waist
and you could feel the children you’d yet to bear
forming between the space in his two hands.
How you knew it was the right way to be held.

Some things you can’t forget.
The smell of the cool breeze dusk
on the evening that you married each other,
your hearth already baking a treat
your catholic God couldn’t love.
The dusk with a color like pale apples
strewn out in the orchard,
nibbled by anxious deer.
Music came whispering down the hotel hallway
and it sounded like the right music,
the kind that held you in an autumn dusk.

With the window open, nothing held back
the welcoming of maple leaves.

Known

If Nabokov had known me, he would have written about how charmingly the sweat glistened on my mustache after I'd come in from running outside.

If e.e. cummings had known me, he would have written it was

oh
so
Brand(new)
ev(er)y ti(me)
I went
in(si)de
:
)

If Leonard Cohen had known me, he'd have written of me plainly enough, his Bathsheba that could never come clean.

If Walt Whitman had known me, he wouldn't have wanted to fuck me, but he'd have written about the thousand voices in my mouth, the dots that made constellations across my back, the "I am the center of the universe" and the "everything else is the center of the universe," both of which I contained.

If Charles Bukowski had known me, he would have written about how timid I was while his mouth gulped at my tits and that he loved how he could never smell the whiskey on my breath but tasted it damn near every time.

If Jack Kerouac had known me, he would have written that the deep dusk was never dark enough to cover up my hot mess or the or maybe and the turmoil in my green eyes that were small, voluminous, loud and begging for all the hands of the world to touch them at once.

Think how I'd have done them all and left this world with literature. 

The Way We Spill

Bill doesn't know how you handle life at all.

Like: if he spills a glass of milk,

he doesn't exactly cry over it

but he does think about all the potential

children he's lost to the sheets

alone in covering his cold body.

For that, he weeps.

It's unseemly for a man his size

to shed so many tears

and so silently.

Crying like this makes him think

about the water he’s wasting

when he brushes his teeth,

letting the faucet drown the bottom of the sink

in a filtered stream from the river.

Bill loves the river and he's spilling it, everywhere.

About Ren

as seen on:
         - the trestle bridge in Old Town many times, Summer 2009
-the balcony at the Gillian Welch concert in Boston, Dec. 2011
       -her face sometimes when it's really icy
-her mom and dad's TV stand, in the form of a photograph


Reynolds Willoughby is a writer, StairMaster-er, and blossoming food addict who can playfully banter and hack up a lung with the best of 'em. She accepted her degree in English and now uses it to "wow" people with her skills in concise communication. She cannibalizes her fingertips, hates her cellphone, and has a picture of a Buddhist monk framed on her desk. Reynolds (also known as "Ren") over-reads, under-writes (and not in that fancy insurance way), and sleeps pretty normally. She wants a baby, but is willing to settle for a puppy at this point. Cheery-Ho! (and who doesn't want one of those...)

The Failing of Each Cold Season

How does the sun feel shining through dead leaves?

Does it get angry at seeing what its grown
wither and die? fall down and lie
crumpled, full of holes, on the sidewalks,
in the eaves, in brown bags by the road?

Do you think it anticipates spring?
Or has it become jaded by the recurrence of cold?
Does it know that the summer might be fine,
(it might be the time when the hearts grows bold)
but the winter will come and steal the life
of everything its done, everything its become?

I bet the sun becomes quite emotional about it all.
You know, I don't see it much in the winter.
I'm guessing that it's not just busy on the other side of the globe.
I bet it's distracting itself over there,
away from the pain of everything that falls apart
whether you will it to or not.

Even as you do it to yourself, sun,
I'm sure there are regrets.
I'm sure that, when you see those piles of leaves
and remember what they once were,
vibrant and stiff on the fingers of trees,
you feel like a piece of shit
for moving away and tending
something else awhile. 

We Could Be A Still Life

Too often I think of your mouth on someone else. Tasting them at first, biting them as soon as you know they want to be bitten. Too often I want to be your fruit. And not the fruit sitting in the bowl with the other round globes, us eying each other, judging each others skin and texture, the scent of our juices comingling in an aroma that unhides our ripeness.  I want to be the fruit laid out on the table with a stark shaft of light beating down on me. I want to be painted over a long period of time. I want to lay completely still, motionless, until you decide to move me and are finished.  

The Banging Delete

It seems easier writing poems

when you're in the way of writing novels.

When you’ve become accustomed to a book

gestating and moving inside you,

all of it inside of you at once,

a poem feels like laughter,

short - a burst - over and done with

before you’re done blinking sense into it.

And both of these, poem and novel,

are my own way of breathing.

Days without words are like

hiccups in a life -

awkward - uncomfortable and

anxious to be over.

Mornings: when my hand

just needs the pen,

the clacking of keys, the banging delete:

are a deep inhalation, a welcome meditation.

And nights too. When I write (smiling)

lists of things to do,

people to become,

this great deep breathing

is my way of dreaming.

It's in and out, in and out, amen.