5/4/2017 0 Comments Poetry by Elsa ValmidianoDIVERSION Step outside. You wonder how temptations work. Why they’re there. Step outside. You want to peek inside the window frame of your body. Step outside. You watch the person inside yourself stuck. You know nothing of the inching scent on his cheeks, the feel of his hair behind his ears, the taste of his tongue on yours, the curve of his spine, or the sharp edges of his shoulder blades. Are they sharp? You want to know. You want to know some of it. At least. You don’t want to know. He could be apolitical. He could care less whether #BlackLivesMatter. He could claim to be color-blind. He could just be safe. He could just be safe in himself. He could just be safe in his daily complaints. He could bite his nails. You hate that. Step outside. You know the math of what you would be throwing away, but the gut pulls apart your common sense. “Fuck common sense,” the gut laughs. But the gut isn’t really the gut, but a snail that leaves its glistening tracks behind, teasing you to wonder about the Easter Bunny and other fairy tales. A new crush to get crushed. Isn’t that what crushes are for? You ride the skinny line tracing up your arm to the place where your ancestors would’ve never met his. Or maybe they did. You think, Impossible. Be grateful. Be grateful for the years. Be grateful for getting through the thick and thin. There are so many avalanches you think of. The insecurities of sex, of competition, of wanting to believe what isn’t really there. Step outside. There isn’t any pushing out the door. You listen to the whisper that tells you to step outside. You realize there is a disruption to the routine. What was the routine? You reach out. An arm out. For now. THE LOVER THAT NEVER WAS Social media fucks up the universe. We weren’t supposed to meet, but we did for some odd reason, and not in the way I would’ve liked to, you would’ve liked to. I believe in the Universe. I believe in immediate vicinities. I believe in crossing paths, physical paths, at the right time. And yet what is physical? I’ve only started to believe in crossing paths at the wrong time too. Only now. And it was because of you, this man in the middle of America who types the right words but whom I still don’t know much about, but enough to make me want to dig a little deeper for the possibilities. I want, maybe you want, so desperately to be understood that I’ve come to believe that maybe it just isn’t possible, that we’re all J. Alfred Prufrocks forced to live out our responsibilities and duties to everyone else and not always to our deepest desires except in the safety and salvation of our writing and art, which may be the only things that free us. Who knows? We could misunderstand each other. You inspire writing again. Romantic writing, and that’s not even such a thing really to me except belonging to the realm of Wordsworth, Barrett Browning, or cummings. It’s questionable whether it is beautiful. It’s enough. It could be crap. I love the little things I know about you but can never have. How much do you mean exactly, as you might wonder how much do I mean. There’s always the risk, the threat, of denial. “They’re just words,” I or you can easily say, as if words have no meaning and fall flat to simply an alphabet that strings meaningless letters together and fail to convey any emotion, any truth. But I don’t lie. I accept I am crazy. I mean exactly what I say. I risk being laughed at, being judged as crazy, but it doesn’t matter except the pouring of my heart which I know is true and real. The only thing I know is real. You could be an asshole. I could be a bitch. We could both be idiots and each other’s regret when I think, or you think, we could’ve fallen madly in love. Isn’t that the point of fear? Isn’t that the point of falling madly in love? Isn’t that the point of the words we say, wish we could mean, wish we didn’t mean, wish we could feel, wish we could have. I can deny the sting, even though it hurts with the flicker of my eyelashes blinking no to the light. But I feel it anyway and I hate that I deny that I feel it. My heart races. I feel exactly what you mean, what I think you mean, what I hope you mean. The re-reading of the transcript gives me nothing but a conversation that runs so fast, while I hold onto the memory of suspension in the spark and crackle of a sentence, or just What? Ha. Wow. Enjoy. Okay. Yes. Nice. So! Damn. Yeah? Yep. Why? Night. Cool. Sorry. We don’t have anything but the weightlessness of words. We have no memories of soft skin, a tongue against a tongue, or morning light kissing both of our shoulders. Each word wounds, soothes, loves, hates, fucks, deludes, and eludes. Is this how writers love each other, fuck each other, and break each other’s hearts? Social media fucks up the universe. Bio: Elsa Valmidiano's works have appeared in literary journals such as TAYO, make/shift, Burner, As/Us, Literature for Life, Bottlecap Press, and others, as well as chapbooks and anthologies such as Field of Mirrors, Walang Hiya, Circe’s Lament, and forthcoming in Precipice: Writing On The Edge. In 2016, she was a finalist for the Rita Dove Award in Poetry sponsored by the Salem College Center for Women Writers, and she was also long-listed for the Short Memoir Prize sponsored by Fish Publishing in Ireland. This summer, Elsa has been awarded to attend the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and has performed numerous readings throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently serves as Fiction Editor of As/Us, where she seeks stories by underrepresented writers of color.
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