The Dire Wolf came in March. Like a birthday gift to beware of. 

The Dire Wolf left in July. Like the heart of a monsoon.

But then, in the heat of our summer of discontent, he returned.

With my heart in his jaws.

He grinned wide so I could see it...

 

and then he swallowed.

6.2833° N, 57.3833° W

I promised myself that someday I would tell you about the Black Shell Girl. How she looked at me with eyes of such loathing that in the equatorial heat they struck my heart cold and still haunt my dreams. How she slid soundlessly through putrid water and all I could think of was her thin body, her girl parts, being exposed to so much bacteria and the infections that must follow. How dark dark black her skin was, though it was only meant to be coffee colored. How she didn't appear to go to school with the other children but instead spent all day in the water gathering snails for her family to eat. This is the lowest form of poverty in an impoverished country.
She was black.
The water was black.
The snails were black.
Snails the size of your fist, but it still took several buckets to feed a family for a day. They are mostly shell, after all.

She diffused silence and hatred. Hatred for the snails, hatred for the putrid water, hatred for the merciless sun, but especially hatred for everyone else. Because none of us were in that water, none of us were that cursed, and none of us were that young.
She slid through the stagnant trench with her alligator eyes locked on me. Me, pale as a helpless fish, under a UV-blocking umbrella, belly full of anything but snails. None of us deserve the life we are given.
In my dreams she one day crawls onto the bank and discovers that she no longer has the body of a too-thin 12-year-old girl, but instead the armored skin and prehistoric jaws of her brethren. She slips back into the water and slides away from the rotting shack forever, full of power and vengeance.

Eventually she finds me and eats me.
And at last we can both sleep peacefully.

i am drawing on your arm with marker and you are not amused

by Austin Kerswill on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 11:30am

There was a profound sadness
in her eyes.
It rarely reached her lips
but it was there.
It was my plan to draw it out.

I am writing this because I want to.
You are reading this because you were told to.

She spoke of things she
wanted to do with my arms.
She spoke of Removing the Tendons
and making them into a stringed instrument.
I would have let her.

No, not you.
The girl in the poem.
The one I'm writing about.
Of course she's not real.

She got a haircut.
She said it made her look
like a boy.
I told her she didn't.
She did.

Now you have taken the marker and are poking me with it. I am laughing. You aren't.




**I don't know Austin. He wrote this back in 2009, and in 2010 he died at the age of 18. I know people who knew him, and I wanted to know him back in 2009 after reading this poem on facebook. I hope I get to meet him someday, and I want to tell him that I was thinking about him long after he died, and I didn't even know him. That's how important each one of us is. And that's how important a poem can be.

Anyone who says differently is selling something.

Two times in my life I have been broken all the way down.

Two times I have reached my limits and lost all understanding of how to go on. And two times I’ve had to wait, in the belly of a whale, before being rescued.

That in between space — post-breaking and pre-repairing — isn’t so bad. It’s quiet, it’s numb, and it only smells a little like death. The war of giving up has already taken place, this is just the wreckage. There’s so much activity while your house is burning down but once it’s all ashes what do you do? Sink to the very depths of passivity and take comfort in the invincibility of no longer caring.
It’s not a bad space, but the admission to get in is steep. And you can’t stay forever, 3 days 3 nights, you know the rules.

Get up, wipe the vomit off, get to work.

The story doesn’t end when you break and it doesn’t end when you’re rescued. Everything just keeps going because this is life and pain is patient.


There is no rock bottom. Just the soft belly of a whale.

"I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life.
Some of them. Not all."

-- Neil Gaiman