Boulders. Boulders like sky candy, falling. Resting on my collar bones, Lock me to the ground. Like life binding this body up in vines, clentching. Tendons that can’t breathe like gas pipes that cut through earth muscle. A plea to crack open, to send the pressure back to it’s source.
The cells ached, like they were trying to tell me something. My bedroom air smelled like high VOC paint but I didn’t know where it was coming from. The burning natural gas make sounds like a crying animal trapped in the floor boards. There is this feeling of wanting to hide and connect at the same time. Of only wanting them to know me once I know myself. Once the pictures are hanging on the wall. Once I turn the clay from the ground into a thick mask-vase, more real than this look on my face. A perpetual feeling of imploding, of folding into myself. This rock in my back, turning me inward, pulling me through.
When my wilting face isn’t soothed by pillow creases, I look at graphs of sky planets. the way they hook at cross each other. The way they catch glimpses of each other from all these different angles. And I wonder if their movments will tell me about mine inside. Will tell me about the forces that fill my emptiness. What messages the planets have when they draw this long cradle between each other for me to rest in. There I exhale.
I wonder if what I feel is the texas earth quaking, mother crust, drilled and displaced. Injected with something against her will and cracked from the inside. Sometimes at night when it feels like a collective humanity cry rings from the air, I go to check and see where and how hard the earth is quaking. And I notice these patterns. The Ring of Fire and west Texas. How strange I thought, with no fault line there. In the same way my spine plumets down, so these deep shallow holes carved by us. Moving ancient fluid through th ground like capilaries. Earth quakes like rupture bleeds from the inside. Clotting.
In August, on the hot sand, near the grass that grows by the ocean. We would dig into the ground as far as he can. The boys with plastic-blue shovel heads. My eyes participaing from sea level, and they below. Their shoulders brushing the earth sand, the tips of their hair graze air. Wet feet find water. For a moment they disappeared.
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There are some nights where some unknown grief keeps my body from falling limp. Where some unnamable pain creeps into this loose earth. Like fracking water sent deep underground, cracking ancient earth.
Usually when I feel this I wonder where it comes from, the pain of the world. I wonder if something happened and across space and time I feel the hurt of the world as if it bubbled up from within. Or maybe having a reason for feeling something so inexplicably painful would give me peace. These painful nights started happening after I learned how to feel. The first time I learned how to just feel it was 2019, finally something so thick my mind couldn’t reframe it. So I lie down in the waterless bathtub and just let my body vibrate. And then the pain disappates. I used to not have to feel, I could brush it aside, but now I feel everything. **
this morning when Tilly called me and asked me how I was doing, I started crying. I didn’t know why I was crying. It wasn’t until 5 pm that I let the tears come again, and this time when they fell out and collected in my hands, it was the pain and deep grief of the planet of the suffering on earth.
Last night the pain so extreme, like the full earth cracking open. So big my body didn’t know how to hold it. And I frozen for days until I let myself whimper. like the earths contaminated tears rising out of my aorta. But before I crack open there are the hours and days where it’s too big to feel. It rests above me like a pregnant rain cloud. Waiting for her water to break. And while I lie prgnant with this unknowable grief, I look to see where the earth trembles. Perhaps she shake scared people lining door frames. And their fear wafted north for my 2am inhale.
This is a ritual for me, looking up earthquake spots. Recently I’m noticing perpetual orange over west texas. I noticed it fist because it’s listed as south of new mexico. But it’s in Texas.
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The earth quakes over no fault lines, but perhaps new ones we’re forming. Our fault lines.
And after she explosed inside of my, I’m left with a blankness
I think about drawing her history up from the depths. Burning it, erasing it. Profiting off of it whithout acknowledging it. Where it comes from, how it got there, what it’s made of. Just extract, burn, heat, move, discard, suffocate.
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there aren;t so many words I have to say. But my body knows this pain. Of being penetrated against her will. Her earthquake tremors like shaking discharge. Just like nature knows how to do. As long as this happens on earth I know I’m going to keep feeling this. And I don’t know if I can. It’s a pain I’ve never known. Too big for this earthly body of mine.
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