Words like Beetle Shells

Look! I wrote something!

2010-09-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you tale of this place. It began long ago, in the time of the love of ice and earth, when the ice ground out fantastical shapes in the skin of the earth, vast mountains and deep gullies of passion, narrow twisting rivulets of tenderness, when earth could still ignore the dormancy that crept up inside her, the ice the warmth that snuck in. But time passed, and finally the ice could not deny the warming of its deepest coldest parts and fled back to the place of cold that had birthed it, leaving behind the warmth within it to patch the holes left in the earth. Thus was this place born: made of earth's loneliness, surrounded by ice's regret.

For many years here the earth kept this place open and empty, the traces of the ice's fingertips exposed to the incessant wearing pull of wind and the thirsty tongue of water. But when naught but a thin strip of land remained shivering against the onslaught of the lake, there was some shift, deep within the heart of the earth. This place, which for so long had only known stone and harsh eroding grief, began to know green: first tiny intrepid bursts of moss, clinging to the smooth stone with everything that was within it, then tight little clusters of leaves that took shelter in indents in the stone, before growing bold and proud on the tops, sides, wherever it could find purchase in worn boulders.

But you wonder why I tell this old tale, set to the pace of great slow things, when you asked me who I was. Well, child, it is my tale too, for I sprouted with those first plants, near to this very spot, taking shape out of the age and sadness and wear of these rocks, of the incessant pounding of wave on shore. I was born with a face pitted and creased like weathered stone, hair the grey of the storm-tossed lake, bones that creaked and groaned like the shifting of earth. I tended some days to the squalling of new lives, but in other times moved little, let the waves lap at my toes, remembered in some distant part of me the deep sweet voice of the earth.

Still, my melancholy did not keep me from being charmed by the growth of the first pale tiny flowers, the large ones in riotous colors which followed, the whole hale meadow that sprung from barren rocks. Once soil filled in the ice-scars and straight tall saplings grew from the ground, I knew I grew more and more tired with each new growth, even as I bursted with love and pride. As the saplings grew into trees I lay down among them and did not rise; as vines twined their way around great trunks, I let my hair grow long and snarled around their roots; and as saplings grew from the toppled trunks, I fell at last asleep.

I dreamed: dark, and warmth, and a voice that sang a song of ever-shifting ground. And then I woke up, and I was not the same.

I woke to a sky that was close, smokey flickering stars not ten feet from where I lay, and was filled with men who worked at great beasts of metal and did not see me.

I stood—the lethargy that had possessed me seemed but a tale, remembered but untrue—and wandered about the tiny space that had become my world. It was bigger, I thought, than the tight embrace of the earth, yet it felt like a cavern woven of strangling vines, surrounding me, cutting me off from all I knew.

For a time that seemed much longer than my time in the earth, I watched the men and their machines and feared to see nothing else. But then came a clear, cold clanging, the machines ceased moving, and a bit of the wall was flung aside to reveal a patch of sunlight. I slipped outside in the crowds of men, and danced my joy among them.

My land, though, was as changed as I was. The towering stone building I came out of stood where my dear first trees had been and were no more; great winding paths were cut through the forest, and rail-cars and motor-cars spat noise and smoke out from them; and in the center of the island, a great pit gaped, growing bigger still with each stone they hauled from it.

Yet I did not mind as much as I think perhaps I should have; my skin was smooth as birch bark, my hair bounced back sunbeams enough to blind the sun, and nothing but that moment was real. I breathed deep the ancient dust of ice-furrowed stone, and took my delight in ghosting the miners; I puffed myself up to half-filled their rail-carts so that most of the stone they dropped in tumbled over the side, then springing out as the car was unloaded to watch the dock-workers as they saw only a few small boulders topple into their ships; I made myself visible and solid as I tumbled off their cliff, only to vanish again and float softly to the other side; I sung strange screams that bounced off the walls they build for hours; I sat on men's chests at night and blew strange dreams of cold winds and rough waves beneath their eyelids.

Then one day the railroad cars stopped their clatter back and forth, and men no longer trudged about, and the last steamship left and did not return. The silence unnerved me, and so I slipped away into the woods, sought once again what I had been before their coming.

Yet even as the railway track was surrounded and then overrun by the hungry forest, as clever young saplings shoved their branches between the slats of the wooden bed of a rusted pickup left behind, as the roof of the prison I woke in crumbled and three strong trees shattered the floor and roofed the building again in their branches, I could not find the joy I once did in living things. I dove again and again off outcroppings of shore; I bloodied myself on sharp rocks in shallow waters. In winter I slid barefoot over the ice until my toes grew numb, and I grew older each winter and each spring heeded less and less the needs of green things. Now you find me grown ancient once more, and this land at once too familiar and too strange, my thoughts turned towards elsewhere. Now you find me grown ancient once more, and pale as ice.

It definitely still needs some work, but I think I like it.

(semi-) WWP 11

2009-12-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

Jerry Uelsmann

I blink, and a thousand thousand years pass; the land around the hill I stand on fills with water and a pine forest grows around me, tall straight trunks that are stricken, one by one, by blight or age or fire until only a few trunks perch wind-twisted and reaching on the land, now worn rocky and barren.

I wipe the stain of the past from my eyes and set out to continue my task.

Yeahhhhh that's all I've got for that one. I'm sure there's a story here, I just have no clue what it is...

WWP 10: Forever Lost

2009-12-06T21:01:00.001-08:00

This week Mackenzie and I decided to collaborate and as I am too lazy to post it myself you should all go read it over on her blog.

WWP 8

2009-11-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

Sam Weber

October:

I turn orange and brown,
come all to pieces on your lawn,
dry, crumbling bits
of braid, shoulder, smile
scattered across your grass.
The sun shines low and golden through my spaces.

Last spring
I stood pale green and
dewy here, you
appearing when I called
whistling about me, whispering of always

into June, when
we blazed sleepily,
sun-deepened, familiar
our arms rooted fast
in the soil of us

until October:
we erode

Better late than never? Also, is the ending too sudden? Is this just the worst thing I have ever written? Why am I the worst judge ever of my poetry?

WWP 7: Hanging Man

2009-11-09T18:37:00.000-08:00

Sam Jinks

Tonight I come home angry and so it is difficult to loosen and shed my skin. When I finally do and hang it in the hallway next to the others by the skin of its neck it resists me, shifts with the win to fall back on to me, but I am firm and on the hook it stays. I move my naked bones into the kitchen, where I think I see you for an instant, staring in the window at my weathered weary skull with hope drawn about your shoulders like a warm woolen shawl, its fringes growing tendrils down your arms, beneath your skin. I wonder for a second if you can not even shed your skin at night, if it has grown into your bones, tangled itself around and around inside you, and the thought makes me grow sadness from my fingertips for a minute or two as I think of the weight of skin forever pressing in on you before I close the curtains.

In the night I am haunted by the thought of you and several times I grab at my arm and expect to feel a skin surrounding it. It was naught but speculations and yet I can not shake the thought of your skin growing tighter and tighter until it becomes a part of you as surely as your bones and blood and sinew, and I wonder at the strength of that emotion. When I sleep at last, I dream of your face, gaunt and unchanging, in my window.

I wake in a sweat and walk downstairs to find that something has tangled my skins, wrapped them brittle and shredding around one another, and when I disentangle one from the pile it is two sizes too small. I think of you and your skins, too small like this, and I think how it would feel to be your bones. I have never thought of you so often as I have today.

So someone in my creative writing class told me last class, "You should use more punctuation." I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT.

WWP 6: Excavation

2009-10-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

James Jean

When she left she told us to stay with you but we couldn't let her go so we shook and we shook and we shook off our skins and we left you bundled in them and we bounded after her, held together by muscle and sinew and love, following her into the cool arms of the night and the woods and the wind, shedding drops of blood behind us. We padded silently just outside the shallow puddle of light cast by her candle, gnashing our teeth at the things whose scents and secrets crept about on the clear night air. When she came to the pool she blew out her candle, smelling like snowdrops in her calm and her blindness, shed her pale blue gown, and stepped into the water. We who felt the wind whispering through our bones could not be any nakeder so we stepped in after her. We could not help but yelp at the cold water that rushed through our paws, but she did not scold us, just walked on reverently, and so we yipped and yarooed joyfully at her and the pale thin moon above her.

Soooo yeah. I wrote a paragraph this week. Way to go, Emma.

WWP 4

2009-10-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

http://buttercupfestival.com/

You sing
and
I see the universe:

the vast darknesses of your notes,
punctuated with bright fiery fermatas
collapsing into black hole rests
when you breathe, pulling
me in closer, stretching
me thinner
until

at the
edge of your
event horizon

you

sing once more
and I
see the whole universe
but no light escapes you.

Still not satisfied with the ending. But oh well.

Possessions, Possessions - Writing Prompt No. 3

2009-10-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

Possessions, Possessions by Maggie Taylor

Before the flood, Margaret had been possessed of:

One (1) house, brick, of middling size, and assorted furnishings therein;
One (1) husband, a mildly prosperous merchant;
Sixteen (16) apple trees, planted in neat rows, raised one by one by her from cuttings from her mother;
Two (2) daughters, now grown and moved away;
Seven (7) dresses of which she was inordinately fond, and several others towards which her feelings were less enthusiastic;
One (1) bookcase, containing fifty-two (52) volumes, one for each week of the year;
Five (5) gold necklaces, three inherited, two new;
Five (5) coordinating bracelets;
And one (1) small yippy dog named Max.

Afterwards, she was possessed of:

The clothes she wore, including a green dress, which she liked moderately well, white silk stockings, several hairpins, and various undergarments;
One (1) black patent-leather shoe, the left;
One (1) purple silk fan;
One (1) wooden chair, to which she owed her life;
One (1) baby carraige, newly removed of dust;
And one (1) lemon.

I'm not sure if there's more. I feel like it might be complete.

Writing Prompt No. 2

2009-09-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

thelotuseater.com

Once upon a time we walked here, you and I. The grass grew tall then, verdant as springtime, flecked with wide white parasols of Queen Anne's Lace and reaching, purple-maned asters, and the sun shone kindly and golden. We walked here as laughing leaping gazelle youths; we walked here as adults, rushing after first one another, then our own children; and we walked here when we were aged, with skin like old leather and sleepy, contented eyes.

All that is left here now is bones and sunshine. Bones, sunshine, and you.

All three are here on promises: the bones, having promised their body never to forget; the sun, keeping his promise to his love the earth; and you, keeping the promise you made the last time we walked here, when I found pitch-skinned Death waiting in my path.

You sat on the bench where we had been resting more and more lately as I let Death take me into his arms. You sat as I let him dance me away to the other place. You sat, and summer turned to autumn, autumn to winter, winter thawed to spring, spring bloomed once more into summer, again and again and again. You sat as one springtime no flowers bloomed, through a summer in which the tall grass withered away; you sat as leaves fell off one autumn never to return; you sat as tree trunks rotted away and broke, leaving jagged scars of stumps. You sat as the rich dark soil eroded away beneath you, as water filled in the hole it left. You sat and watched new trees grow on the copper island bones of the old, as they died when the water drained away. You sat, and when the bench beneath you crumbled away you lent it your bones, and sat still. You sat as the sun grew bitter from gazing on the desolate land, and beat your skin darker until you faded into the wood you sat on. You sat until I finally returned, wispy and faint, to take you to the land of the dead, but your skin had grown into the bench and so you sat on, and so I sat down upon the bench and found with my ghostly one the solid steadfast outline of your hand.

So yeah that's a very rough draft. But I'm sort of fond of it.

Girl in a Bee Dress

2009-09-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

Girl in a Bee Dress, Maggie Taylor

Mackenzie and I are doing a writing-prompt-a-week, and then sharing the results midnight every Sunday, finished or not. In this case, decidedly the latter.

Once upon a time there was a girl made of flower petals, and she was the beloved of bees. Her skin was stitched of pure white daisies; her eyes, periwinkles; and her hair, bright golden chains of sunflowers. Her dress was a shifting swirling mass of bees that hung, cloudlike, from her shoulders to her ankles. She ate only sunlight, drank only rainwater, and when she spoke drops of sparkling sweet nectar fell from her carnation lips. Never were they allowed to touch the ground.

This girl lived in a clearing surrounded by beehives in a green-gold forest in a far distant corner of the earth, a place where the world of cars and computer screens and hulking towers of steel and glass could only be smelled faintly on windy days.

It was one such day in early autumn, a crisp, cloudless day with a wind that made the trees shiver and yellowed the edges of their leaves and brought the sharp tang of civilization up from the south, when the girl wandered down from the hill where she habitually watched the sun rise and into a tangle of brush that she thought hadn't been there when she had climbed up.

She felt the brambles pulling her in, bidding her nearer, and she let her feet be pulled forward.