On Not Writing

A missing molar. A kiss on a missing molar.

A miniature woman in a paper boat. The sea, paper. She requests I set fire to the sheet on which she drifts. I do and see flames, or early afternoon light on the comforter, on the bare walls, and on exposed aluminum vents. A quiet immolation. My bed smells like sheaves of paper. I’d slept with Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore next to me. I’m starting to mistrust this translation. Too many things happen suddenly, or silently. There is no variation in the moss. I look at the cover of the book, the sky behind the boy, sky reflected in his sunglasses, the band of sky above my blinds. I don’t open the book. Or my computer. Or sketchbook. Or any notebook.

A fat fly appears on Toni Morrison’s Paradise. I’d started it, stopped.

*

Trayvon is shot. I scroll and scroll past an image of a prone figure in summer grass. This is before Facebook’s algorithm encouraged accumulations so great they demanded deactivation. I recall my sister’s difficulties with grass, her years of visits to the allergist. Recall the nurses there, who recognized me from a news interview: “How do you feel about his deployment?” At the time, I was engaged to a soldier. They’d already undone Baghdad’s bridges. Shock and Awe: Iraqi night sky green-flared and slashed all night long. In that moment, I didn’t know what had led me to that farewell ceremony. “How do I feel?” I repeated. My braces probably glistened.

Trayvon is shot. I abandon a story about a child who trespasses into a gated community. Stop at the moment of her pursuit. Recall a neighboring gated community. Narrow escapes. Childhood harassment by police. Firefighters. Teachers. “The sorrow songs ask: how does it feel to be deracinated?” Macharia wrestled with his disorganization. It takes a few seasons to see my fragmentation. In a spiritual depression, all my nightmares and their day-terror images later align with testimonies surrounding the abduction and murder of Emmett Till. There are long days of sickness, “a series of folding-ins that seek comfort in formal repetition.” And there's joy in repetition, there's joy in repetition, there's joy in repetition, there's joy in repetition.

I ask if it isn't normal to get a bit sick from this place, to have to lie down. “I am not depressed. I am resting.”

Feel relief. Think of relief topographically: distance between depression and heights.

Hear Marlena sing, “I have been on the mountaintooooooooooop.”

In my “To Write” folder: a response to Buika’s concert nearly two years ago. An unfinished letter to The Trayvon Martin Foundation. A blank letter to Marissa Alexander.

*

A severed head rolled into a square. Blood on the courtroom floor. Snakes on the courtroom floor. Irregular behavior of lions and bees. I don’t open my “poems, ideas, quotes” file.

They bomb the beach. They bomb a hospital. Scroll through children’s ashen limbs on Facebook and Twitter. Form sublingual protest. Find minor blood on fingers lashed by my coarse hair while detangling it.

Scroll through gutted buildings. Recall a sulfurous dream nights ago. Recall an installation: miniature replicas of a gashed city.

Open my laptop. Open a file. I’m rarely aware of my heartbeat lately.

Get up to urinate. It smells like smoke, gunpowder.

Return to desk and approach my thumbnail with violence. Run my tongue over front teeth that threaten fracture. Urinate. Still smoke and commotion. Urinate again. Again. Again. Recall how the male cat runs to the litter box when distraught. Glance at the cats: their heads on kitchen tile, tails and torsos on living room hardwood. I think of bounds, teleportation.

*

My father used to point out complex images: Look. It’s a metaphor.

A black police officer leads a muzzled dog.// A pigeon follows the bounds of a crosswalk, rounds a corner. A pigeon takes the stairs. A pigeon sits on a bench. // A crow and a seagull face each other on a streetlight. // A spider anchors itself against thirtieth story wind and rain.

Is this surrealism?

*

These days I only have straightforward language, and my mother speaks in verse. I ask her to trade: automation for meditation.

“If you are loved,” she says, “you won’t live long in this world.” My father objects. She says, “Not her. Who loves Ladan? Who loves you?” she asks. She’s just starting, one-third through her life. We don’t want the girl to stumble (this is hard to translate).

“I see my mother and grandmother’s faces everywhere but not my father. Even my father’s mother. I ask: Why do I have to see the women? They are so greedy for blessings (she laughs). I want to better myself. I don’t want to die. When you die, you don’t get one hour, one minute extra, right?” Why are you telling these things to your daughter who lives alone?

I tell my mother no matter what I eat, I’m still hungry. “That’s because it’s summer. Go buy some meat.” They say when you’re hungry, drink water and wait twenty minutes.

A student tells me to water my feelings. Dive lightly/lightly. 

Another student tells me she’s careful not to drown those who swim in her waters.

"I feel like going somewhere the seawater isn't salty and the ground isn't a salty marsh."

“I feel guilty. My mother has wanted things. To build a well. I search wells online, to build one where she grew up, where her people can still use it. Or to build a small masjid. Or an orphanage. Your aunt bought something that catches rainwater, and put carpets in a masjid.” I imagine the carpets green, the color of slaked earth.

In the movie Poetry, workshop attendants recall The Most Beautiful Moment of their lives. I revived my back lawn following Texas drought. One night, nothing. The next morning, I ran outside barefoot and said: Grass! grassgrassgrass in a voice that sounded like it was pushing up through dirt all season.

I feel guilty. My mother has wanted things. Nearly ten years ago, she asked me to write a poem about ablutions. I tell her I’m in Pina’s down down down place. I tell her it’s a well lined with mirrors. I tell her it will fill with light light light.

*

“What is the problem?” Or: “Are you paining?” This is hard to translate.

"What are you writing?" I started a draft about horses (raised to the level of a human subclass) that are controlled, then defeated by anthems. I started a meditation on quiet/silence/silencing/disquiet. I'm writing a lyric narrative of the Somali Civil War. There are crows and blood everywhere.

I have a murky mind. I have a thinking problem.

Thumbnails, eyes, heart, lungs: sites where doctors made failed attempts to diagnose minor inconsistencies. At various ages, they couldn’t find the source of inflammation, or irritation, or hyperpigmentation, or cloudiness. “The results are inconclusive.”

One afternoon, my parents took me to a lab to test my lung capacity. I was alone in a transparent booth, wearing a very short smock. The room was white. My thighs and knees were very brown. A woman's voice reminded me that I wouldn't be able to breathe for a few seconds. "Are you ready?" After a series of clicks, absence. No sound. I couldn't recall how to inhale.

Laughter in a mouth with a missing molar. Air through a missing molar.