Jalina Mhyana Quotes

With each kiss in the cold house 
we swallow clouds of breath – exhaled spirit, speech bubbles
 we'd rather lick away 
than fill with words.
We run naked from room to room, 
keeping the walls warm.

Our bodies blur through the halls 
of your house, its winter circulation.

My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he'd place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them.

I can't pray or weigh my words right; doomsday
is here my friend, but you're immune. We suffer
for you. I'm weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads;
a souvenir so you'll never forget your friends.

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

First, make sure
the ocean is rolled
by an older woman
whose quick fingers
have been rolling the ocean
for as long as you've been alive –
She'll fatten the rice in hot,
sugared water spiked
with rice vinegar
then make a soft bed of it to wrap
a slip of fish muscle,
squeezing the bamboo rolling mat
until the ocean's circumference
is compacted in seaweed's
brittle corsetry.
It takes her just moments
to dress the ocean,
its nudity a pink tongue
poking
from iridescent green nori wrap

I was his "little girl with the William Burroughs mind," his "secret fairy," "female Frank Zappa" and "window onto a magical world." He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

Our marriage began
with knots and fangs;
vows inked on skin.
Black venom stained
our fingers, twinned
snakes strangling
the marriage vein
in Celtic macramé –
cocksure monogamy.

We became one,
me and the gun,
the serpent reeling
itself from the needle.
I had few firsts left;
marriage a wild west
for the hedonist.

Snakes unspooled
like figure-eights,
symbols of eternity.
Acrimony, alimony;
Leave the moaning
to adults. We children
will be wiser
wed, inoculated –
these hickeys,
homeopathy.

I can't remember what I've done with my lingerie. I look in the containers under my bed, as if my sexual self has been relegated to the wrong side of the mattress. I imagine my husband's sexuality down there too, our shadow selves making love deep in our unconscious as we cuddle above the mattress as brother and sister.

We could scan each car for terrorists

and lovers she could lean into

my camouflage her head resting on woven trees.

When they come for her body she could run deep
into my uniform

into the forest of me
where they could never find her.

It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people's invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I'm even fooling myself.

He's always been attracted to broken things. He was the kind of boy who talked the bad girls through their problems, who defended them and didn't take advantage. He was sensitive to his stuffed animals' feelings, rotating their position on his bed so that a new plush animal would occupy pride of place at his pillowside every night. Soon I became first and foremost on that pillow; princess of the island of misfit toys.

Veins of ivy scale stones,
find footholds but
the caretaker cuts
earth short, peels
creepers from Cotswold
rock and props the dead
head to head so they won't
topple like drunks
on their moss-soft shadows.

Back at the cottage we explored the topography of my body; twigs in my hair, calves striped red and my skirt smudged in meadowtones. The forest underlined me, accentuated me, illustrated me. I felt alive in that midnight village whose dark places left their signatures on my skin, whose bites still hummed around my wrists. I didn't notice till then the thousand nettle stings rising like pearls; burning bracelets that my love kissed and rubbed with dock leaves; a folk remedy painting my pulse points green; honorary stalks.

Each malevolence has a cousin that heals it. I fancy Hurtsickle and Heartsease as herbal enemies –weeds growing in reach of one another; the bite and the balm in balance.

If I must die young, bury me
in a music box. I'll be the pale ballerina with dirt
in her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs
and open the lid when you visit.

Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling
the dark night's belly until I'm dizzy, until the stars
melt and spiral into a halo over my head
and I've stirred my death into the sky.

All of the sudden, we were a grown-up married couple! Like little figures in a doll's house, we sat there dazed, in awe, wishing a chubby little arm would pass through a window and move us around, tell us what to do. We would have given anything for a magnificent child to show us how to be husband and wife.

Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,
boulders, and caves where Kami nature spirits
minister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root,
and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.