AND ALLEY CATS

Looking at myself in the mirror is a little like looking at the face of a stranger. Why does the hair fall the way it does, why does the chin dip so low and the nose arch down the middle like the back of a lazy cat. I don’t recognize myself after thirteen years, but my eyes are like the space between stars and I’ve seen those eyes before.

My mother has the face of someone who has seen many, many things. Her soul is a dragon. My father’s face is like the sun. Like a child, he glows from within. When he smiles, it shows in his eyes.

My sister, a boychild. Face of change, face of wrought and rights and wrongs disguised as rights. She has tattoos. Across her collar is a star and across her neck is bliss. Her hair is coarse and bushy and pitch, like a lion’s mane, cut short around her head. She looks like herself. I look like my mom and dad.

When I get older, I hope to become like my lion sister. Etch ink into my skin or cut my hair short. Right now, I’m just not brave enough. II.

My neighborhood is a collection of shoe boxes. In each shoe box there is a different pair of people. There are the tired and worn, the bright and new, the ones who get compliments and the ones who get stares. We have dust on our roofs and roots in our shoes.

I don’t talk to the people in the shoeboxes, because they always talk to me, and so I find friends in the neighborhood behind the alley. The houses there have pine fences tinged with sundown and cat-shaped shadows. The kids have castles for houses and planes for bikes. Charlie is one of them, and he’s a bit of a sloppy character, but I like him. He’s a pint-size king, with his own little kingdom and a homegrown crown.

Cara is thin as the horizon, like she is on the cusp of vanishing. In her world the sun only sets. Cara hides, behind doors and piles of paper and blankets of eye shadow she lays over her eyelids. Cara, constantly hiding. She lives her life like she’s jealous of the people with ropes around their necks.

Theodora acts like a queen but looks like a mutt. She’s the oldest, but in my head, she’s just a puppy that bites and bites. Roman shakes the ground when he walks, enough that the doves on his shoulders fly away and we all scatter with them. Before Ursula moved away, she taught me to dance and ignore fairy tales.

Isabel is a name that fits the girl it belongs to like a coat too large. I renamed her Izzie because Izzie fits perfectly, like an artificial diamond into a plastic diadem. Izzie, Izzie. She’s the real princess. Izzie with the fuzzy hair, Izzie with the butterfly lashes and lips like a butterfly’s kiss. The only thing about her is that she isn’t brave. She can fake it, and I credit her for trying, but she’s training herself to be someone she’s not. She can fake it, I can’t. I’m either brave or I’m not.

You only see it if you take a good long look at us. You see that we are not at all who we seem, and that deep down we are very, very afraid.

III.

I like to think Izzie and I are a gang. We break rules. We skate until the road ends and keep going until another begins. We get our hands dirty on the asphalt and we poison our minds with sidewalk treasure. We get drunk on energy and forget what we did in our excitement but it all tastes good. We’re only two kids, and sometimes we’re two kids and alley cats, but we know. It all ends. We know that when we go home we’ll need to wash our hands, tie our shoes, set the dinner table, sit, eat, and obey our parents. It will itch and I won’t like it, but it will happen. Because the adults say so. Because adults tell you how adults should be. And they tell you how kids should be. I don’t understand that.

To be an adult is to have a clean suit of clothing. To be taller than us. To wish us off to school and crouch in an office all day. To trim bushes, drink coffee, read newspapers with glasses halfway down the nose. To be an adult is to look down and tighten your mouth.

Adults know when to stop complaining. They know to act, they know how to talk. They know how to tell real lies. Obscure figures of dust. That is all these people are to me.

I don’t understand them. I only understood, one day, when someone I can’t remember said, to be an adult is to remember you were once a kid who got your hands dirty.

IV.

When Layla Elladinki died, I tried remembering her. I tried remem- bering her. I tried remebering but forgot. The only thing was her eyes. Narrow, sharp like glass, green as envy herself. I thought they watched me through my window at night.

No one knew Layla until she died. No one even knew she hadn’t been dead until the night her body was carried out her front door. She had lived in the house devastated by a storm no one saw, and she had been the most damaged of all women. Broken bones and a stolen heart. Spent years curled in chains, the key hanging off her fingers.

The night she died was the night everyone knew had been coming.

I saw her as she passed into a red and blue light show, lying rigid like a plank on a stretcher. Hair like burnt candle wax. Swollen desert lips. Haunting, as though the features of her face were sketched with a pencil then erased, there then gone for good.

It was like the earth swallowed her in one gulp and she stopped breathing. I remember something passing over me. It started raining. I reached out and held Layla’s hand. Her hand was still warm, but the warmth was empty. Life had just leaked right out of her fingertips. I realized then death isn’t what people think it is. It wasn’t what I thought it was.

I wasn’t sure why the neighbors left flowers on her porch, or why everyone stopped walking on her side of the street, or why it seemed to me that even the sun didn’t disturb the boarded-up windows. It was as if we were scared. Scared of what had happened. Not sad for who had been lost.

V.

Summer appears in the clearing of smoke. Here is when I run until I lose sight of the sun and I fly off where the sidewalk ends until I land, tangled in limbs. I imagine myself with wings so long and beautiful they drag on the ground like a wedding veil. They’re powerful enough to carry me above the clouds where I can be alone.

But in summer I am tired. The days bleed together, I am scraped up. The sun drags herself across the sky, I drag myself to and from. To and from, until I can’t help but wait.

At the beginning of autumn it rains. Dusk doesn’t last as long, the clouds linger, the sun softens. I climb roofs leaving prints, I carve words into the skin of trees. I sit in the branches with Izzie as she thinks of ways she can bring the stars down to Earth and hold them in her hands. I stare into the space between, thinking of ways I can dance with them up there in their cold, glimmering world.

But in autumn I am falling. It is a red and orange world of right turns and wrong turns and ups and downs. Two steps forward and a single plummet backward. The leaves and I sing as we fall. Fall and fall, and I can’t help but wait.

And winter comes with a whisper. One soundless white plume of breath. She holds the world on a slim white finger, and I am left with time spent alone and time wasted. Here I sit, I think. I set my thoughts free. Because they are birds who know where they’re going and never return. My mind melts, melts and washes away.

But in winter I am lonely. Here, I find a difference between alone and lonely. Here, I find that winter is the loneliest evening of the year.

And so I am left hoping for spring.

Sparrow Murray

Scheherazade At Dawn

The garden cat saunters through the brush having captured the dark-eyed junco. Birdsong continues, leaf-scent drifts in. I cherish these mornings. Mornings like afternoons when I get to carry the world’s sadness — a little coin — everywhere I go, turning the piece over and over, concealed in my pocket, just to hold it a moment longer (a coin is easily lost) before it must be spent — a treat, a gift, transportation.

Recently I’ve been attempting to channel the voice of Scheherezade at dawn for a poem; what it was she said to the King. I keep asking myself how she did it but I don’t know if I mean: share a bed with a man like that, or find a love for him somewhere, or manage each night to unfold vital fiction from within vital, potent fiction.

Like the King I too can’t seem to discern how much of love is performance. How much of gesture is ephemera. How much is real flesh, Real. I too, dislike it: this question of Self and Other — reconciling.

Last night I almost broke the vow of chastity I didn’t make, straddling this girl in her twin bed, sharing cautious, level kisses. My failure was not knowing if it was her mouth too closed or mine too open. Too eager to consume? & if passion is as perishing as the world? In class the professor speaks of the deliciousness in taking on persona; shifting out of oneself and into another consciousness — tangible, separate. When the poet professor calls my name I say Does this please your high pleasure? Her gaze is unbreaking, serene, fatal. (My desire acts as another means of passing judgment, of fortifying the jetty that keeps a distance, keeps a fantasy traversing the mind’s wide water.)

This was Shahriyar’s dilemma: give the woman the occasion to betray or remember that initial, smooth, impossible figure — remember Night, when every detail exists, expires, is created not again but ongoing, inconstant. To write a poem you must write another. You must learn you take all your past lovers to bed with you. Friend, Beloved, Source of my Being, help me turn toward You… & how I’ll never quit worshiping the vast red stains on the bed linens; on my vacant, low heart.

Olivia Harrison

Part of an unfinished series of crowns

Beads, handmade chain, wire and ribbon (see page before), wire (above)