The Spiders Are Big But Not Poisonous
WHEN YOU GET DISORIENTED, YOU CAN GO HOME. IT’S OKAY. THERE IS PLENTY TO LEARN THERE TOO.
Art by Spencer Gaffney
If you sit very still,
The sun sprawled in your lap
And in your hair,
The dock splintering your pale thighs,
And look out at the lake,
Everything will melt together.
The water, the perfect sky, the bright wood,
It will all fuse into blue,
An all-consuming blue that overwhelms and becomes the only thing there is.
I haven’t been well lately.
I put a final cut in an already-unraveling tie and watched it snap back at me, at him,
Both left holding our own severed half of the string.
It stung my finger but it turned this pleasant pink color. Now I’m here, picking through clovers.
Now I’m home.
No no it’s cool
No really it’s chill i didn’t really like the way you kissed me anyways
Yeah yeah friends
Let’s be friends
I’ll just toss that memory out with yesterday’s recycling,
Dripping with the last swills of your friends’ beer and the crumbs from those wonderful chalk-like cookies
The sex was good,
Was it good for you too?
Man, that’s awesome.
Will you look me in the eye tomorrow? Yeah, me either.
Hi.
Are you enjoying the party?
I keep losing you in the crowd but I know we’ll head back together at the end,
When our buzz is gone and our feet ache.
Is your art like mine? Is it music?
Is it indulgence?
Sometimes to remind yourself who you are you need to throw your body around, to share a space with someone, feel their hair brush your arm and the heat of their staggered breath.
It may be cramped but that place will become warm with time, and fizz around you in a soft lavender current.
Blood of my blood, your strength is that of the sea, vast and tumultuous. Sit and watch a moment. Comb your hair from your eyes, see for yourself.
Then movement. Vigorous movement, the kind that makes you sweat out your vodka soda and that sweat will mingle with hers, belly to belly, palm to palm. Specs of light swirl and swim, effortless.
The path of least resistance will leave your hands clean, but you will not get to experience texture, to live tactically, leave your fingerprints on the glass, wipe muddy paws on the rug.
Is your art like mine? Is it noise?
Is it laughter?
Does it sting your throat,
Or pass by the window, too fast to name?
I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in circles,
The best vantage point from which to see everyone at once, To marvel at a collective beauty,
To understand that life is vibration and sound.
Time to go now. It doesn’t have to be far, but it might be colder, higher.
You’ll stop at a lookout point with your family, pressed against dark mountains, and realize how tall your brother is now.
You’ll stumble upon a magical town you could’ve sworn you dreamed up.
When you get disoriented, you can go home. It’s okay.
There is plenty to learn there too.
New recipes,
Bravery,
Family,
How to cut someone’s hair in the front yard
Where to find people from all over the world in one place,
An inextricable web where we’ve attached ourselves to the same string, Sticky sweet,
One that if she were to tug on I could feel its pull at my center,
Where our energy flows directly through our bodies into the earth below and comes right back out the top of our heads and our space explodes into light and air and water and dandelion puffs and pink puckered lips and smoke
Rest, now. Climb back down the hill from the garden.
Yesterday was long and today was short and nothing is constant but you can rest here. You’ve been fed blueberry salad and Etienne plays the most beautiful music when the house begins to empty
Creatures big and small, of all the oddities you’ve seen, What has held you in its momentum, in its splendor, in its melancholy.
A stray spark pricks your cheek and you wake up into yourself,
Gasping and squirming out from under something damp and heavy,
An obsession with your breathing but did you know it all still turns even when you’re not looking?
Running hard, she checks each hilltop for snowy white owls and collects bones and driftwood under her arm, to make potions and spells.
Beginnings and endings all swell together until you’ve stopped trying to separate them. Each thing flows into the next, an estuary of synapses and nerve endings.
I think you’ll like it here.
She told me that when she was a kid, growing up in the mountains of upstate New York, she once stuck her hand in a tree full of termites, brought it to her mouth, and swallowed them. Someone told her they were edible. To her, you can was the same thing as you should.
It reminded me of when we toured that labyrinth of caves in Kentucky and the guide asked us not to touch the rocks that lined the walls. They were old, rare, and the oils on our hands may chemically deconstruct them. As soon as the guide turned her back, my aunt and I reached out our palms to make contact with that raw earthly matter.
In Atlanta, we strapped into rubber flippers and goggles and flung ourselves into a massive tank. I sat perched on the edge at first, afraid my mask wouldn’t work, that my lungs would fill with water. Once I climbed in and she swam underneath me for the first time, that giant speckled body, I came to terms with how little space I took up. They told us to keep our hands to our sides, but my dad gently extended an arm to feel the shark’s tough rubbery skin.
A friend of a friend’s relative licked a Picasso painting once. Maybe for the sake of chaos and interference, to cross the black line, to disrupt something priceless, an unspeakable act that took surprisingly little time or energy.
Slapping a muddy footprint on a porcelain floor, tasting the blood from a prick on a finger, kissing you, holding a marble on the tongue, plucking a flower only for it to die in hours, ripping and patching holes in this mortal fabric, for fun, for now.