WATCH OUT FOR FALLING METAPHORS A QUARANT-ZINE FOR PAP PAP POETRY BY EMMA CARTER
CONTENTS
ON LIVING 02 FIVE 03 NAKEDNESS 06 07 08 11
ON BECOMING EVENTIDE ODE TO JUNIOR YEAR GOD(B)LESS AMERICA DARLING MANHATTAN, YOU WICKED INSOMNIAC—
14 15 16 18 19 20 21
ON LOVING OVER HEELS FIREFLY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD INSTRUCTIONS ON LOVING A POET HIGHWAY 84 HISTORY OF ARSON DAYBREAK TO A NAKED GIRL
ON LIVING
FIVE Spearmint tastes like Raleigh; I remember Mama’s worn hands on the steering wheel flying down 49. Tickling orange is home, lazy afternoons and a sagging sofa underneath the ladder of Dad’s spine. It’s beginning to creak. Cinnamon’s flare belongs to youth, white knuckles crushing green rubber chains in the backyard, pushing further and further into the sky. Surrender to icy black. The sky has become cracked porcelain behind bare-bone branches and breezes are gentle, but these are crooked. Today is wintergreen, sharp and intact. Intrusive; the pine trees jut into the grey sky like hipbones. I grow hollow. 2
Nakedness I step into the rain. The crimson glow of the peek-a-boo sun throbs behind the thick blanket of clouds, and I revel in being washed clean by Carolina heavens. My mother came from such a haze, hidden among the Raleigh pines. Her mother, from the piedmont’s palm. Stitched together by heaving state roads, I am allowed to exist. The downpour slides canyons into my face, washing everything else away. Today, I am underneath my mother’s sky. 3
ON BECOMING
Eventide Clouds streak golden between slushes of blurry grey. My toes trace a lazy waltz under shimmering rays of fading afternoon. Slowly, gently, I am bathed in twilight, and the warm hardwood tingles like home again. The sunset cracks the horizon orange and scarlet and magenta, creating living embers winking in and out of reality. I hear laughter in the wind, feel electricity in the clouds: fleeting, a thunderstorm setting my atmosphere ablaze with July energy. I sit in the evening crook of my rooftop, watching the sun drip below the skyline. Pinhole stars in a hazy indigo, a sleepy blanket, late nights under the disco heavens and me, penning madness, carving heart into the clouds between shallow breaths and constellations. I am the flickering diamond residue of the evening; I condense coal against yesterday’s bland exhale and surrender rapidly to black. Early sunlight peeks up from behind jagged trees, leaks in through the holes in the curtains, allowing soft baby light to wash my bedroom. I breathe a ‘thank you’ into the monsoon-wake of the morning and rise to become more than just a freckle on the Earth’s shoulder blades. 6
Ode to Junior Year My best days are those on which I go to Taco Bell around five, because the guy working the drive-thru always asks me how I’m doing and gives me extra Freeze. It’d be cool if I knew his name. When I drive home, I take the long way. I go out where the land can breathe with the heartbeat of the rain and the streetlights’ flickering reflections are washed by wet asphalt, glinting like tiny suns underneath blankets of sky. Hopelessly I oscillate around my own beginning and end: stuck in this sleepy town, travelling at the speed of light to today’s event horizon just to be sucked back into another tomorrow. Soon it will be summer, and summer is built out of thick, goopy days. They stick to one another, bleeding together into one giant, sweltering heap. At least, they have in the past. When I fly back down the spines of these back roads, I’ll look forward to their tiny suns welcoming me back. Maybe then my days will be better than Taco Bell. 7
God(B)less America i. this town don’t grow on you. she grows inside you, in your soft belly, an old oak with too many roots tangled up in your guts. this town’s got secrets as old as Sin. ii. remember the wire fence, my neighbor’s swimmin’ pool, how in violet midnights we used to sprint shiverin’ through my yard, reekin’ of chlorine—we ain’t never been Godly perfect. summers we played ball and smeared ourselves through the red dust till we paraded home in victory lookin’ like astronauts fresh from mars. we were all bloody scabs and band-aids, swollen lips and loose teeth, the bruises on our skin shaped like God’s fingers. we spat all over the grimy pavement. we stabbed apples with buck knives. we went huntin’ for ghosts after dark just to brag that we saw ‘em and came back alive. iii. our old daddies got hearts like crowbars and our sweet mamas got cavities. everybody over forty’s got a box of deer bones and a story about the time they met the Devil himself and survived. they got frayed coats and torn jeans and hands that are calloused like their parents’ hands. they got silver hair and tobacco-caked lungs and mouths that don’t like to sing no more. their sorry hymns bled into the croaking of frogs in the cotton blur of the thick night sky. remember, we wondered who was fixin’ survival. 8
iv. Hell’s real, cries the pastor with his hands full of snakes. Hell’s real, cries the pastor, and we’ve built it right here. Christ stopped in dixie, the pastor cries, but He didn’t actually come in. now, the pastor’s glassy eyes whisper, now we can’t leave. v. we never saw any ghosts, not in the junkyard, not in the woods, no matter how hard we shouted at Jesus to push a few our way. so, maybe we were the wicked ones. maybe we were the hauntin’, all sharp teeth and rot-black ribs. mama says this here, this empty porch swing, this sepia—this is God’s country, but i think they stopped inviting Him a long time ago. 9
10
Darling Manhattan, you wicked insomniac—
It is Sunday, around 9:30 pm, and the elevator is a slingshot to empty sky. Outside, the skyscrapers stand against the night like cardboard silhouettes — cut jaggedly, as if by a child, with thousands of eyeball windows. For a moment, they look dressed in stars. Broadway beats proud and broke beyond the softer breath of Chelsea. Just below, the artery of Fifth Ave throbs. I fall back to Earth as rivers of ants flow in and out of specked taxi cabs. The machine moves mindlessly. From the bones of East 43rd, I look up. Before me is Chrysler’s stack of light, cascading into oblivion. Clouds tangle in a crown around its needlepoint. The sidewalk remains stagnant beneath a hundred thousand shuffling feet. Sheet glass faces trickle in all directions. Beyond this, they shatter into stillness. You are made of bodies belonging to strangers on buses, swaying together along 32nd to car horns and sirens, as if God himself choreographed the nameless dance. 11
ON LOVING
Over Heels
Outer Banks I will take her to live by the Atlantic. Every morning she will see the ocean’s great blue arms stretching across the horizon to welcome her home like my own. When the golden sun falls below the trees, it’ll reveal stars and a disco ball moon that we’ll dance under on the cool sand. Inner Banks Her freckles are like a map of miles of road, stretching into the swaying green grasses in her eyes and the soft dunes of her lips. Her hair hangs about her face like clouds tangled in sunshine, masking cerebral thunder. Piedmont Her laughter rolls like the hills, and her smile fits her cheeks like rivers fit the land. Her lips are state fair funnel cakes in October, leaving powdered sugar tracks across my collarbones. Appalachia She sits with her legs knotted in a breezy sky, keeping her gaze on the tide of clouds above us. I’ll only ever be looking at her. 14
Firefly Capital of the World Fireflies freckle the cheekbones of a sharp night sky. Bright highway lines fracture the moon’s glow, or maybe it’s just the clouds cracking closer and closer to the ground. Under the blanket of sky, she traces my knuckles and calloused fingertips. She puts her feet on the dashboard. We are flying between the mountain crests, under miles and miles of sky and an endless cloak of fireflies. Her blue-green eyes catch the flies’ kerosene glow, and the wind from the open window tangles her hair. She’s laughing, shifting, dynamic, never static. Every day, she is new. Yesterday, I learned that she feels safe driving through the countryside, but only when she isn’t alone. Today, I learn that she snuck in between my bones, gentle fingers between baby-bird-hollow ribs, lifting me out of rust. Tomorrow, I will learn that she is teaching me to trust my caged hips and my barbed-wire thighs. Her gentle touch is a vine between iron gates, and that is enough. 15
Instructions on Loving a Poet I. It will start cautiously because he is a menagerie contained by only his words. Gentle, gentle, a tiptoe tumbling, be careful what you touch; every constellation you trace will breathe beneath your fingertips. II. His lips will burn your writer’s block: weekly ballads will become daily, and he’ll dance gold across syllables to you. You will start to pay more attention to the rivets in your spine, to the hollows of your pelvis; you will trace his sloping jaw with the tip of your pen and he will smile for you.
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III. Until your poems look more like him, he will slip his fingers into the hem of your jeans, tug on your belt loops, bring you closer and closer and closer until your jigsaw hips explode golden. IV. As he kisses you under a dripping sky, you will wonder if you even existed before. Still, he will remind you that before you are anyone else’s, you are yours. V. When he leaves you, his poems will stay in your closet, folded up in a shoebox. Let them gather stardust. 17
Highway 84 An uncertain heartbeat rests just beyond my right palm, sitting on the plastic console between me and a wildfire. The heavy bass thumps against the old carpet and the plastic pedals beneath my toes as we tumble over and down the piedmont’s soft creases. Standing atop a mountain of dust off the side of the road, he flickers. Between the whisper of a May breeze, rivers of sunlight cascade along the slight curve of his collarbones beneath an old Panthers t-shirt, and a smile plays at his cheeks. There’s a little chuckle before we climb back into my old Santa Fe, crawl back down the patched up two-lane road. Over the hiccups of backroad potholes, his fingers find mine again, this time a little less afraid. Old stars litter the sky above us. A click into place, we find each other in the rhythm of the road. 18
History of Arson In this fading indigo twilight of a bedroom, see how the evening graces her collarbones. Pay attention to her fingertips skating across your waist and wait for the fever to come. When it arrives, search her for exit wounds. Cradle the tremors in her fingers; tell her to breathe. Show her what it is to be valuable again; show her that she is not violated—that she is still whole, that her body was not stolen from her. Remind her that she is new now— Watch her eyes flicker under pinhole stars as she guides your hand across the horizon’s fringe. Notice how constellations sew the ocean to the night sky. Remember to be gentle. —because nobody is ever gentle with the pre-owned. She still flinches under your palms, your soft palms, despite their promises to be different. Use the edge of your t-shirt to wipe the sweat from her brow. Do not leave her alone to blister in the dark. Lightning fractures a grey summer sky and trees groan under the wind’s fingers. Allow her to fall asleep to your pulse. 19
I remember her in the morning’s soft glow, the sun folding over the hills of her. Her eyes still closed.
Daybreak
The trees are breathing, swaying with the warm whisper of the breeze. A sleepy river of patchwork haze crawls the street, shimmering with the sun’s early beams. The rays slice sharply through the heavy thickness.
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Here, her chest rises and falls. She breathes deeply, rendering forever with each intake. Her heartbeat is the rhythm of time itself; a deep dark blackness at its birth. I become the ocean in her arms, her sky, and we are millions of miles apart.
To A Naked Girl
I am handing over pieces of myself, shards slicing open my palms. I think I hand them to her. She looks through me and speaks her own name. When she does outstretch her hand, she aims for the edge. She grasps clumsily for the splinters. I do not realize. I do not stop her. It drips down her arms. It has already dried at my ankles. Between us, there is dust. There is the lying soft light of the moon. The glow is spilled milk, washed over the cracking beneath my feet. Nothing more.
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TO BEING
+ ON TO GROWING
WATCH OUT FOR FALLING METAPHORS. SPRING 2020. FOR PAP PAP. LOVE EMMA.