7-19-24

Dear Internet Diary.

I'm in love with a boy and everything is so new. The entire world is so much brighter than usual. His kisses feel like lightning, his gaze is like sunshine. He is sweeter to me than I have ever known and it makes me listlessly happy.
Our anniversary is soon! we're going on 3 whole years! Three years will look like a spec compared to what we'll have had one day. I cannot fathom such a long time. I can't wait to fathom it with him. I never ever thought I could be so happy. Now I know that I can, and that I am, with him.

8-03-24

A Poem to Start Things Off

Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing. Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on. What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon. Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

shut up

I’m getting to it.

For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.

You still get to be the hero.

You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live? Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.
I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.

I take it back.

The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

Crossed out.

Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven,
even though we didn’t deserve it. Inside your head you hear a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up in a stranger’s bathroom, standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away from the dirtiest thing you know. All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly darkness,
suddenly only darkness. In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station, smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade, up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things, I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights. We walked through the house to the elevated train. All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too, smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud. Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
here’s the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought, so do it over, give me another version, a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say

something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry it’s such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again, years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together. We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . . When I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out
Richard Siken

8-10-24

From The Book You So Kindly Gifted To Me

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand

to your chest.

You, drowning
between my arms —
stay.

You, pushing your body
into the river
only to be left
with yourself —
stay.

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender.

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling.

Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.

I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.

Say amen. Say amend.

Say yes. Say yes

anyway.

In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.

In the life before this one, you could tell
two people were in love
because when they drove the pickup
over the bridge, their wings
would grow back just in time.

Some days I am still inside the pickup.
Some days I keep waiting.

It’s not too late. Our heads haloed
with gnats & summer too early
to leave any marks.
Your hand under my shirt as static
intensifies on the radio.
Your other hand pointing
your daddy’s revolver
to the sky. Stars falling one
by one in the cross hairs.
This means I won’t be
afraid if we’re already
here. Already more
than skin can hold. That a body
beside a body
must make a field
full of ticking. That your name
is only the sound of clocks
being set back another hour
& morning
finds our clothes
on your mother’s front porch, shed
like week-old lilies.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong

8-10-24

Sorry For All The Siken

1

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you,
and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,
and you are ready to die in this swimming pool
because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means
your life is over anyway.

You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things.
You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do
long division,
and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless
he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you
didn’t do,
because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.

2

A dark-haired man in a rented bungalow is licking the whiskey from the back of your wrist.
He feels nothing,
keeps a knife in his pocket,
peels an apple right in front of you
while you tramp around a mustard-colored room
in your underwear
drinking Dutch beer from a green bottle.
After everything that was going to happen has happened
you ask only for the cab fare home
and realize you should have asked for more
because he couldn't care less, either way.

3

The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, sees you
as a piece of real estate,
just another fallow field lying underneath him
like a sacrifice.
He's turning your back into a table so he doesn't have to eat off the floor, so he can get comfortable,
pressing against you until he fits, until he's made a place for himself
inside you
The clock ticks from five to six. Kissing degenerates into biting.
So you get a kidney punch, a little blood in your urine.
It isn't over yet, it's just begun.

4

Says to himself
The boy's no good. The boy is just no good.
but he takes you in his arms and pushes your flesh around
to see if you could ever be ugly to him.
You, the now familiar whipping boy, but you're beautiful,
he can feel the dogs licking his heart.
Who gets the whip and who gets the hoops of flame?
He hits you and he hits you and he hits you.
Desire driving his hands right into your body.
Hush, my sweet. These tornadoes are for you.
You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds of things.
You wanted to be in love
and he happened to get in the way.

5

The green-eyed boy in the powder-blue t-shirt standing
next to you in the supermarket recoils as if hit,
repeatedly, by a lot of men, as if he has a history of it.
This is not your problem.
You have your own body to deal with.
The lamp by the bed is broken.
You are feeling things he's no longer in touch with.
And everyone is speaking softly,
so as not to wake one another.
The wind knocks the heads of the flowers together.
Steam rises from every cup at every table at once.
Things happen all the time, things happen every minute
that have nothing to do with us.

6

So you say you want a deathbed scene, the knowledge that comes
before knowledge,
and you want it dirty.
And no one can ever figure out what you want,
and you won't tell them,
and you realize the one person in the world who loves you
isn't the one you thought it would be,
and you don't trust him to love you in a way
you would enjoy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way keeps weakening.
You thought if you handed over your body
he'd do something interesting.

7

The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to
sleep in your bed. You try to warn him, you tell him
you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,
but he doesn't listen.
You do this, you do. You take the things you love
and tear them apart
or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours.
So, you kiss him, and he doesn't move, he doesn't
pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn't moved,
he's frozen, and you've kissed him, and he'll never
forgive you, and maybe now he'll leave you alone.

A Primer for the Small Weird Loves
Richard Siken

9-5-24

Lies

I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue
water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal.
I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year.
Sure, I saw the raw white gannets hit the waves
so hard it could have been a showy blow hole.
But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want
something so hard you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once
told me gannets, those voracious sea birds
of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height
and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie.
Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.

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