Tag Archives: creative writing

Cupcake Windchime

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Her Cam Girl name was Cupcake Windchime, and boy, could she ever dangle. She was a dangler, because she had sex in the woods or else she could chill. She could hang, @petergriffin-studmode69 had put it. And she tells us where to put it, he nodded to his old poodle in the corner.

Her parents had looked at her screaming twisting body and named her Loretta. They thought she would take on the name like a dough, but Loretta never took. Loretta was in a fluorescent kitchen by six am, whipping a cupcake batter into shape. She did not feel like Loretta- she wanted to be the cupcake. At the first opportunity, she was cupcakelover12@hotmail.com. Then, icedcupcake86, semi-professionally. And now, she supposed, her reasons were spiritual.

She never signed off the chat before 4am. That’s when you got the real freaks. She woke up at 2pm every day, without setting any alarms. In her mornings, the soft tinkling of chimes seemed to follow her around the house. Looking down at her ankles, she’d see the circle of thread and the knot. The attached pieces doing the tinkling were just plain-old cutlery.

Cupcake shook her head, bubbling over in a big laugh. Same dick different day, she said to the coffeemaker, and it bleeped its red eye, snarling out a few more drops of decaf. She grabbed the mug, and with it in one hand, and her hairbrush in the other, Cupcake climbed the stairs to her office.

When she walked in the room, a man jumped up from the desk chair. He landed on his feet, cat-like, facing the window. Legs spread apart and tensed. His audible breaths came like popcorn popping and she couldn’t see his right arm. His black leather jacket was turned towards her. Cupcake screamed and flung the mug across the room. It missed the intruder completely, breaking into shards and splashing its contents on the wall and window. The man threw his head back and cried out. She felt his whole body clenching- the sensation rocketing through her seemed both erotic and holy- driving at last into the buried pink nerve heart of each one of her teeth. Cupcake screamed out once more, then fell silent.

The man began lowing like a cow in heat. His bald head ran into a pink folded nape, reddening steadily.

“Spread those butterfly lips for me, chica, how ’bout it?”

How did you get in here? Cupcake asked. She watched in terror as a thin ray of moisture crept up on the air, her tongue ran along her bottom lip without realizing it.

He had said it all without turning around.

“Chica, I bet you’d do it with dirt in your mouth. You wouldn’t refuse me. Even if I sat your ass in a puddle right before.” He laughed- a high aluminum whisking sound that reminded Cupcake of a deli slicer. Her mood darkened, and she pictured pushing a great tube of salami into the path of a blade.

The black leather jacket began to shake, reveling in the bloodpump pleasure of its own lewdness. The right arm was again wrenched out of sight. Before Cupcake could speak, he had zipped his fly and was making a break for it! His legs swung up over the windowsill and in a flurry of chimes he was gone.

It was a long time before Cupcake could move. When she finally did, she walked over to the desk and unplugged the computer. Unplugged the webcam. Maybe she should take the night off. Maybe it was time for a different career altogether. Loretta, her mother wrote on lunchboxes, Loretta, at the top of her papers. Cupcake looked over at the kit, lying open on the desk, and her arms and face began to itch, itch, itch.

She carried the desktop over to the window, and, ever so carefully, pushed it over the edge.

Smooth Animal

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outside my house
i see another.
it blinks with windows at me,
leans out with a face that falls apart
broken tv on the lawn
scooped like a bear carcass
new land growing over

a smooth animal curls on the lawn
its tail circles the washing pole
taut, receding
licking a furry arm the length of line
that holds my clothes.

all of my terrible clothes
my smooth animal wears them,
sneaks under the house
i look back, see him waiting
under the bed
the chair the table

inside my house
anywhere he goes
he finds clothes heaped in beautiful folds
Piles of Sweatshirts
to be marvelled at, believed in-

he is sicker
than my oldest
unmatched sneaker.

Moonrock

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Until I was twenty-two, I believed the faces of the sun and moon belonged to the same rock. I thought: when man first walked on the moon, he must have done it at night.
When my friends heard about this belief, they mocked me until they realized that no one had told them outright that it wasn’t true. Then one of them punched me. Laughing, he attempted to reassure us that we had all learned about such things in science class.
“Come to think of it,” one said, “I have seen the sun and moon together in the sky, on plenty of occasions.”
“So there’s your proof,” said another.
I agreed, nodding wildly. I had seen them together in the sky, too, but I had found a way to explain it: if you really looked, one or the other was always more duskily faded. Like a reflection in water.
“Or ice,” another said dreamily.
“You know, the Apollo astronauts trained right here in Iceland in the 1960s.”
We immediately bowed our heads in the direction of our quietest friend. I loved when this one spoke. We were careless listeners among each other, but when he spoke, we paid attention. We paid him the reverence that only Valur had ever earned from us, in those quivering post-match moments in the Hlíðarendi Stadium.
“My grandfather used to spy on their activities, combing the surrounding volcanic rock for cavansite.”
“Cavansite?”
“It had been discovered in Oregon earlier that year. He read about in Geology Magazine.”
We all stared at him blankly.
“In his old age, he became obsessed with finding this rare blue mineral. He would take my father on long walks, circling the training camp, whose presence had been corrupting his ideal of the black-ridged Icelandic landscape. My father remembers these walks, though he was very young, due to how completely alone he felt. My grandfather never said a word to him about the astronauts over the fence. Their mission, their freeze-dried food and microgravity training. All stuff which would have been fascinating to a child. He was too busy searching, and they had to search quietly. Every rock my father picked up glinted like a tooth, but it was never the right one. Never the prismatic royal blue contained in the crinkled magazine photograph, which was tacked to the mantle in his father’s workshop.”
“Did they find it?” I had to ask.
“Forty-three years later,” he said, lowering his eyes. “Another man found it.”
We all started thinking it- that his grandfather had died trying.
“You have to wonder… Was the cavansite there all along?” a boy asked, incorrectly, but we forgave him. He was careless with words, while I was usually not. And I had been mistaken about the moon.
I wondered if I would ever live it down, and that night I lay awake, dreaming of astronauts landing without sound as tiny snowflakes on black rock.
I twisted my neck out the window and aimed it at the moon.

Cracked

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‘bring a lamb to school

see who is the fool’

i laughed. on a dark day

i laughed so my skull

crackahd the plate 

so sweep them 

china dust pieces 

under the grandmother rug

lick it there

leave those rough shapes

in the bulldust.

how my sideways face looks

to the girl on the corner

walk antelope talk

stockings in stock

check-pick

ground in lock-step

what a bad bad girl.

yes

i laughed. and sold my only thing.

yesss

i spun into silence

my womb was the shape of me

see under

those yellow brick lights

under the grandmudder

in a peaked silence

one that abounds. downtown girl

you rise

with fresh madness each night

you sink 

you were unlike the birds

broken thing

i think you could fly.

Music Bit My Mouth Open

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The whining cars up on the hill are missing home. They beg, where is our tomb? The answer shudders underground and in my hands are flowers. And beside me is all my family standing in a Domino row.

If I combine the only witness, slump his tongue right under mine…

Afraid to feel without a thudding chest to get the blood out. And. Tastes like clockwork, works like climate change. How? Press a thumb to my lips, taste the hard-won tip of a bee-stung corn. Size of grapefruit. Lanced on my abdomen.

Come up the riverbank, my seasick carp.

A Lifetime of Milk

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Carl stood under the umbrella, looking out across the downtown square. In coveralls reeking of machine oils and sweat, made worse by the rain. On the farm, Carl remembered, nothing was ever made worse by rain.

The old man’s farm. Paved over. A lifetime of milk and red earth-tinged memories. Sprouting tall buildings now, where sweet corn and green pastures once flowered. Where an old cow giving birth kicked the daylights out of his five-year old head. He got to name that one, ol’ Milk Dud, on account of how much his head bled.

And now he was the old man. He couldn’t have told you how it happened, but it did, and the city came up all around them. Lost the farm, hired on at the factory. At least he and Barb had the kids.

A tiny spasm wracked his hand and the umbrella slid out. Carl winced. The arthritis was flaring up, more and more these days. He collapsed to his knees. Why the heck did he come back here? And in his coveralls! He stuck out like a sore thumb. And in fact his thumbs were sore, and the truth was that being here made him feel there wasn’t a thing left worth livin’ for.

-originally publ. on flashfriday.wordpress.com

Time

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My doctor thought of Time in terms of a green wound,
a sly, leech-lidded reservoir under the skin-

Time was his wireframe glasses and the clock I punched
when he told me the forecast of those old wounds
when my life gathered around me to hug itself through this…
and in my mind I went back as a ghost to
all my future high school reunions

and did not hear my name all night.

THE VIRILE HARVEST

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In town the dust gathers. In skins of yellow dust the people pray.

The chapel wilts all week, dips in the middle. An old host. Chestnuts hit the roof during service and belief thuds into the hearts of men, frightens the women. They fear the Harvest. They know the roots are here to stay.

Paint peels off an old barn in the sun. A new cat every day.

The farmers reach into the ground, dung clung to the heels of their boots.

The sun tips water in their mouths, and something brazen and heavy clatters down the road. A patch of dust swabbed over the elbow, scabbed over the heathen ground.

The people wait for wheat to curl.

They dig up the virile harvest.

Stella

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Stella lurched over the last hill, clutching at the front of her dress in agony. She reached the stone domicile just in time; she could feel the bairn being coaxed out by the cool fingers of mist riding low in the air. She ducked inside. Into the black heart of a home, dug into a green hill.

She left her body on the floor, momentarily, when the Tacksman’s bairn finally shuddered out with a single prolonged wail. His face was sweet and red, still slick with her oils. She studied its shape for traces of the Tacksman- she could find none. He was hers alone, at least in possibility; it was possible that the Tacksman’s imprint had stopped short of her son. Given time, the boy could grow to resemble the man that he would call his father. Or else, the scarring on her heart could heal… but over time, men only grow into their monsters.

– originally publ. on flashfriday.wordpress.com

Watching out for Birds with Ruin Written on their Wings

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I watched the explosion from my chair outside,
mesmerized by little paws, dancing all along the edge
of a wall
pushed out of hoof-chewed ground-

this is the way our town burns down.

Fire licks and whines along the edges
scarring streets and buildings-
our family home assumes the shape
of some small person
shrouded, crying

next to a house departed as ash.

It is the kind of winged migration
that rides the wind too far, too fast.