The Fat Is In The Fire

We can only prepare so much:
the proper placement,
the appropriate warmth,
the timing such that nothing burns,
nothing spoils.

Everything else,
how the elements interact and react,
is out of our grease slicked hands.

It is not the fault of the meat that
despite itself
it has more to give.

Nor can we blame the fire for accepting,
for swelling and swallowing,
affectionate with gratitude.

We can only embrace what is next:
the rising heat,
how it coaxes,
the consequence of the coming burst,
the resulting release.

Nothing else
can be done, however you might try,
to quell or to quench
after that first descent.

Logically

When finally he gave me words
I didn’t know what to do with them.

Should I hear each one as a tiny
perfect
ringing bell?
Should I study their contour,
the curve of his g’s,
the delicate spacing,
and spiraling question marks?

I wasn’t sure if I should read them
or fill a glass with them
and drink.

Should I rub them against my skin,
feel their newness,
their raw ambition?
Or dance across their surface
like a fly:
touching,
then not,
then resting weightless
always about to move?

First I held them upside down to note their fluidity.
Would they spill and pool around my reason?
Then, I handed them to a translator,
a dead language specialist.
Were there any hidden clues to decipher?

After that, I touched them
to the tip of my tongue
to see if they had a taste.
I pressed my nose the screen.
I tried to peer around every O
and through every Y.

It turns out they were just words,
Just words.

But why then, after consuming them,
could I soar around the room,
the taste of metal in my mouth?

Safe Cleaning Procedures for a Glock

Steps for Disassembling

1. Depress the magazine release button located on the left side above the grip. This will eject the magazine from the weapon.

The day I met him, I recognized his voice without ever having heard it.
This is probably because I had been listening to him for so long.

2. While pointing the gun downward, pull the slide back to eject any live rounds in the chamber.

The night we first kissed, that’s just how it happened. WE kissed. I didn’t kiss him. He didn’t kiss me. We just launched ourselves at each other as if we were playing a game of chicken that we both won or both lost. That night made it feel like the former. The way things have progressed, the latter is probably more accurate.

3. With the gun still pointing downward, depress the slide release lever located on left side of frame.

The first time I slid into the booth across from him and there was a Diet Coke already waiting for me, I felt as if he had handed me a kitten, or a small bag of uncut diamonds. I pictured him telling the waitress, “She’ll have a Diet Coke,” and suddenly his hair was made of pillow-soft petals. His eyes were sparklers. I could have chugged the entire drink to show my appreciation. I could have thrown the table aside and leapt in to his lap. But instead I just stared at him. His face was made of light. Each of his teeth was a polished pearl. He was perfect. He had been waiting for me. He was ready. What an amazing gift.

4. With the slide-disassembling levers depressed, pull the trigger to remove the slide from the frame.

Sometimes, he says he loves me like he is whispering it into the ear of a sleeping monster. Sometimes, he says it boldly to my face, daring me to defy him.
Occasionally, he says it as if relinquishing something precious: carefully, his eyes begging me not to drop it.
Most of the time, when he says it, he is a doctor giving bad news.
I recognize the look in his eyes. I saw it a week before my father died.

5. Remove the recoil spring from the slide assembly.

He might have slapped me the day he told me that what I wrote made him uncomfortable. Or eaten my last french fry. “I’m not good at romance,” he said. “It makes me squirm.”

I had mulled over every word so thoroughly that even the “thes” and the “ands” I knew by name.
I had tied them to the ankles of a hundred doves with the greatest of care
and released them only to find that each and every one had met an untimely demise.
They had slammed into his closed window.
They had fallen lifeless to the ground.

6. Remove the barrel from the slide (within the slide).

Now, after several months of hearing that voice, I no longer recognize it. It echos strangely, things he’d never say, over and over.
And when we meet and I get there first, I have no idea what what drink to order for him.

He always wants something different.
What is there to give?

The disassembly is now complete.

something I think I’ve always understood

When I was very young, I cut out a picture from a magazine of two rams locked in a strange embrace. I hung it in my tiny room.

Their heads were pressed together in an aggressive nuzzle, their faces wild with an extreme passion that even as a child I could somehow identify. Both rams were pushing with equal force, relentlessly striving to keep the connection. I pasted it to my wall because I thought the rams were expressing affection.
It was a battle.
I thought it was love.

A few years later, my brother and father began cultivating their own little freshwater ecosystem in a 50 gallon aquarium. Before the days of the Georgia Aquarium’s awe inspiring displays, my mother would frequently take us to pet stores, some that exclusively sold fish, as something to do in the afternoon to keep us entertained. This kindled in us a desire to keep and care for a few tiny lives of our own. One day, while shopping for new additions to our finned family, I came across a pair of gouramis, more commonly know as “kissing fish.” As a breed, they are quite peculiar, possessing a pair of full lips that look almost comically out of place pursing from the tip of their thin, flat, ovular bodies. These two kissing fish had their lips locked forcefully together and were pushing each other to and fro. Again, I could see creatures that shared an equal passion. Again they were unyielding in their efforts to connect.

“Look, mom!” I exclaimed. “Those fish love each other.”
“Oh, sweetie,” my mother said with an affection made greater by my innocent assumption, “they aren’t kissing. They’re fighting.”
“Fighting?!” I repeated in disbelief. “But that’s not how you fight!”
“Sometimes, fighting and love can look almost the same. Like the rams in your photo.”

Suddenly, at this revelation, something within me cracked and spread.
The rams, the fish, I thought I understood them.

“I thought they loved each other. Both of them. I thought…”
“They very well could. Maybe they’re just fighting. You love me and you certainly do pick your fights with me.”

My mother was just being nice. She was trying to quell my disappointment by providing me with a possible alternative to the simple fact that those pairs of creatures could have hated each other, or felt threatened, or territorial, or even been indifferent to one another and just feeling aggressive.

I asked my mother to buy me a magazine about freshwater fish, and sensing that I might have been disheartened, she obliged.

Later that night, while my mother and father slept, I cut out a picture of a pair of sparring gouramis and tacked it neatly next to my quarreling rams.

Because I liked their passion.
Because I respected their doggedness.
Because, hey, they could be in love.

Sometimes you have to be in love to fight with that kind of ferocity.

Memorial Day Festivities

I slept at my mom’s house last night. This morning, I awoke to my mother throwing open the door, Fleetwood Mac blaring from her iPhone.

mom: I was trying to get American music on Pandora for Memorial Day, and it starting playing this.
me: Maybe it thought you wanted folk music. Try “patriotic music.”
mom: I did.
me: (mumbling something unintelligible into my pillow)

5 minutes later…

mom: (bursting through the door again) I tried “Star Spangled Banner” and it’s playing this! (Holds phone to my face) It’s cathedral music!
me: Yes, I can hear that. Try “Proud to be an American.” That song unabashedly states its agenda.

1 minute later…

mom: I tried it, and it’s playing, “Sometimes It Rains.”
me: Looks like Pandora is predicting a bleak future for America.
mom: You’re very pessimistic when you’re tired.
me: I promise to sing “America the Beautiful” with you after noon, when I’m a real person again. (faceplant into pillow.)
mom: I should have known better than to try and talk to you at this hour.  (Pandora starts to play something wildly inappropriate again.) I give up!
me: Finally! Sleep.
mom: (Hits me with pillow.)

5 minutes later:

mom: (throws open door) It’s playing “The Star Spangled Banner!” Thumbs up! Thumbs up! Can I give it several thumbs up?
me: I have no idea how many thumbs up you can give it, mom. In real life, you’re usually limited to two. But the awesome thing about a thumbs up is that you can deliver it silently.
mom: Harumph! (Storms out.)

(I don’t ever want to forget mornings like these.)

When One Door Closes

I warned him I am a monkey paw.
And with his third and final wish, he wished me away.
Now, I am a closed fist.

As I shut my laptop,
the final finger descending,
I thought to myself, “You know what they say…”

This is the best way I can think of to describe it:
Caring for him was like entering a venue that charges a $5 cover
every hour on the hour
just to hear him tune an instrument he never plays.
At first, I assumed he wanted everything to be perfect.
But as I longed for his lyrics, it finally occurred to me:
maybe he doesn’t know a single song.
Maybe all he has is an ear for how notes should sound.

I waited too long for his music. I ran out of money.
I ran out of simile and metaphor for him.

And the worst part is that
he never wanted my words anyway.
As I left the concert hall I could hear the dead latch hit the strike plate,
the soft click of the automatic lock.
I cannot go back.

I can remember my father’s advice whenever something like this would occur:
“Screw that, you can do better.”

And my mother’s advice, whenever I tell her these things, is always the same:
“Be patient, Jessica.”

When I reflect upon my mother’s advice, I imagine a lithe, flexible Jessica:
clad in all black,
hair pulled back into a slick bun,
able to make herself practically weightless.
In a shack nestled away in the mountains,
where a blizzard seems to always rage and wail,
she waits silently in the rafters.
She is breathing so softly that it’s imperceptible.
She is closing her eyes.
She is straining her ears to perceive the slightest possible change in the air:
a snapping branch, a creaking board, a whisper of moving fabric.

When I replay my father’s advice I imagine a wild, ferocious Jessica:
skin slick with dirt and sweat,
hair a crazed mane that juts in every direction,
body exposed save for a strip of canvas fabric around her flexing midsection.
She is straining bare foot up a steep dirt incline into the violent red of a hot setting sun.
Dust surrounds her.
Light surrounds her.
Wind whips her hair wildly around her form.
On her shoulders rests a yoke with her heart in one pail and her brain in the other.
Her eyes glitter with an intense determination as she carries her heavy load.

Those are both extremes, of course.
And neither are really what my parents meant at all.
Still, I must admit, I like both of those Jessicas better than the one with her back pressed against the locked venue door.

The beauty of this situation is that though their advice differed greatly,
I think that can I heed them both.

It’s like I would always say to him, when he would give me two choices and ask me which I was going to do, “First one, then the other.”

This can also apply to doors.
Doors close.
Doors open.
First one, they say.
And then the other.

I just have to be patient.
I just have to do better.

Lower Body Motion

Surely you have known the satisfaction of the first steps
before your muscles are kneaded by the hard fingers of fatigue:
the indescribable lift of the air pulsing past your form.
But the air is not moving,
you are.
And you are in control of everything.
And you decide your destination, and when
and whether
you will arrive.

And so you
support: your foot an anchor
and drive: your foot a spring
and recover: your foot a wing
until you don’t know which is better,
gravity’s ground or your push against it.
Perhaps it is the comfort of the back and forth:
pull versus propulsion,
force versus flex.

Pheidippides, you must be careful
how long you engage in this locomotion.
You must listen when your pulse is pounding
out morse code,
“Stop fighting.
We have won.”

I do not doubt that you can endure
long enough to reach me.
But what a pity it would be
for you to arrive in my arms
only to succumb to a permanent exhaustion
after you relay to me
your news.

The Heart of a Broken Story

“The only real difficulty in concocting a boy-meets-girl story is that, somehow, he must.”

Yes, meeting is necessary
of the minds
and in the middle
but for action potential to translate into a tale
there must be a “must.”
I must.
He must.


There is no telling what would occur were I, like light, to pierce the blinds of his reason,
a beam of tangible warmth, across his face
across his skin,
producing another freckle of self doubt to hold his focus
and quell the deepening sweetness of the “must.”
And who can know, if I pushed that “must” through my throat, with my tongue
If he would even feel it.

And so here, there is no story.
The cells are poised and ready to fire
but the hand never touches the stove.
The triangular rubber point never makes contact with the knee.
Instead, he waits, so very curious about the heat, hand hovering above the orange coil.
Here, there is no “must”
only desire
to know the thing, to touch it
and pull away.

everything means something else

Example A:

Yesterday was International Pancake Day at the International House of Pancakes/Happiness. Because of this, when I went to IHOP at 11 pm to gorge myself on grease and buttermilk, they were out of the following:
creamer for coffee, maple syrup, cheddar cheese, and sour cream.
This made my order of bacon, cheddar cheese, sour cream, and chive potatoes with a short stack of pancakes difficult to produce.

Every element of my meal had something missing. But this I am used to because every day, every minute, you are noticeably missing:
the cheddar cheese not on my potatoes
the reason my coffee is black.

“We don’t have any creamer,” my waiter winced. I could tell all day he had been forced to let people down, to bring them bad news regarding their desires. And in turn they most likely became angry at him as if he had destroyed all the creamers, one by one, by himself. I could picture him laughing, striking the little plastic single serving creamers with a hammer, wiping cream from his brow. “Do you still want coffee?”

“I’ll make do,” I replied much to his relief.

I drank the coffee, black with sugar, unable to ignore the metaphor, hoping that one day I won’t want you to swirl into my life and dissolve, an opaque wave that smooths and makes rich my harsh reality. Hoping one day, I’ll enjoy the bitterness.

My mouth will get tough.
I’ll like it lonely.

Example B:

Today I had gelato for lunch because: fuck you, life, fuck you. And because: whatever will bring me closer to happiness, right? And because: have you got a better idea? Well, have you? I didn’t think so. And because: I don’t have many appetites these days so I allow myself these things.

“If you can’t come, it’s not the end of the world.”

There. Right there. I should have known then and there.

significance testing

In statistics, as is my crude understanding, one prematurely makes an assumption which is thought to be valid until the data contradicts it. When a sample is taken from a larger data pool, for example, one would take the sample data and work backwards to see if it is truly indicative of the greater picture.

You, through a lifetime of personal data collection, have taken the small sample of your time with me and formed what seems to you to be a reasonable hypothesis:

Me ≠You

Any mathematician would warn you, dear, you are too quick to accept untested data as fact.

Without disregarding your knowledge of yourself, I am respectfully offering you a null hypothesis to ensure the accuracy of your assumption.

To test it, press your ear to the shell of me and see if you can hear the ocean.

Throw the possibility of us into the air to find out on which side it lands.

Brave the ant hills that line the wooden stairs in the back yard of your perception.

Allow yourself these little indulgences.

If I have learned anything from statistics, it is that what seems to be clear based on your knowledge of the data can be proven false.

Dear one, the sample you plucked in the beginning, that initial damning assumption that crushed me like a window closing on the sound of crickets, may not be accurate.  Perhaps if you keep dipping your open mind like a ladle into the sweet data of our circumstance, eventually the right sample will ease its way in, and you will reject your original hypothesis in lieu of a greater understanding of me.