Usagi's blog

Two electronic picture frames, one catapult, and seventeen very surprised elephants later, all that remained was a large hole in the ground.

We could hear them as we huddled around the campfire: a faint ringing like war-drums in the night. In the morning we found Tommy's mangled body and a note that said, "While you were out..."

The sky was icy black and the world was twisting up at the corners. Gruesome shapes writhed in my peripheral vision; screams rang through the night. I knew without having to look that the hutch would be empty.

After almost two years of living in Japan, I had gotten used to the stares. The pointing fingers. The whispers. Even the small child who once burst into tears when I smiled could not surprise me. I was the American; I was the foreigner. I was different. I was weird. I was the walking oddity of Isahaya, brown-haired and blue-eyed and utterly, completely strange.

First conversations always began the same way. A knot of girls would huddle, glancing over at me at my cramped desk or on a park bench or, sometimes, halfway up a tree. One would walk timidly over while the rest giggled from a safe distance. Her English would be halting and uncertain, but proud.

“What is your name?”

“Bridget.” The Japanese head-bow had become instinctive almost immediately; to this day I appear to be constantly ducking when I’m nervous. I must also reluctantly admit to bowing while on the phone. Read more »

i.
I dream in color, I’ve realized—finally—
soft purple, blue
like gauze, like clouds.
They linger on my eyelids in the morning
until I can’t remember
they were never real.

I do not believe in dreams
but I don’t believe in reality,
either.

I cannot silence the whisper
that insists
there must be more than this

somewhere.

ii.
I dig for something deeper
but I can’t get past the surface.
I’m searching frantically now,
clawing at the dirt
in search of buried treasure
that’s not there,

x marks the spot but, oops,
it was a cross all along.
Sorry Jesus;

I’m not looking for you.

iii.
On the other side of reality
are stars.
They are cold and far away
and they refuse to say a word,
no matter how I plead.

They exist for no reason.
They have no secrets to tell.

iv.
Somebody, whisper
to me as I lie asleep at night—
my purpose. My reason.
Tell me I am here for
something Read more »

remember me.mp3

I’m good at hiding pain.
I don’t even flinch.
I’m good at arguments.
I don’t give an inch.
I can fade away
until I’m not there.
I’m good at pretending
I don’t even care.
I don’t care.
Yes, I care.

I will write a thousand words
in ink upon my hand
and I will read a thousand books
to try to understand
and I will post a thousand poems
in the hope that one
will be read and remembered
when my life is done.

I’m trying to figure out
my reality
so that there’ll be something left
to remember me.
I try to find what might be there
deep inside my mind
So in the end, when I die
I’ll leave something behind.

I will write a thousand words
in ink upon my hand
and I will read a thousand books
to try to understand
and I will post a thousand poems
in the hope that one
will be read and remembered
when my life is done.
I don’t know if I’ll succeed
but I have to try
because the only thing I know
is I don’t want to die. Read more »

resolution.mp3

It was the headless body that got to me.

His face was slick with blood.
His head rested on his stomach, staring up
at the indifferent lens of the camera.
Red pooled in the gravel of the road.
He had been a policeman.
He had been killed as an example.
They didn't say his name.

And when the image cut to an interview,
a car bomb, an assassination,
one phrase ran on repeat through my head:
This is our world.
This is our existence; this
is our reality.
Our present. Our future.
And as we complain about homework,
friends, high gas prices

half a planet away, a bomb goes off.

I cannot hide in my bubble of a world.
High school, college, office nine to five--

no.

I will go over there; Pakistan, India, Iraq.
I will help. I will try.
I will risk assassination because that means
I will be worth assassinating.
Maybe I will become that body in the road.
Maybe I will be
an example.

I don't care. Read more »

For once, my thoughts are not scrawled
across my hand in the dark—
lack of words, perhaps,
or maybe lack of pen.
A starting point. Give me
one end of the thread
and I shall unravel a story.

But this is a tale of myth,
a fairy-rumor intended
only for the welcome cloak of night.
Daylight flares its details into ash.
Shadows remain, outlines scorched:
silhouettes embracing in the dark.

Listen. Can you hear the whispers?
Lips brush hair.
We are blind

to the future,
to reality,
to the label I had so grudgingly
accepted,

to everything but
now

until darkness lifts its veil
and our definitions can no longer be denied.

“The clouds are made of rainbow monkeys/Flippin’ around with their wings in a whirl.”—Me in a turkey-addled haze, minutes before I decided the best way to remove the plastic around a bottle was to gnaw at it.

Jonathan’s iThing--An iPod Touch, actually, which is one of the coolest gadgets on the planet. I refused to let go of it for a long, long time.

Cacti--excess of. I discovered a nasty little barb in my toe as I was walking home and ended up limping the rest of the way sans one shoe. Have you ever tried walking barefoot on frozen-solid tire marks on a dirt road?

Don’t.

I looked down some time later and realized I was walking on snow. Since my foot had not registered cold, I inferred that it had gone completely numb and was therefore little more than a block of ice with toes. Yay! I can use deductive reasoning.

Grace--O gr8 ceilingcat, i thnx u fur teh nom, kbai onnomnom.

She likes
how she can saunter down the cobblestones
and feel the off-beat rhythm of the world
through the soles of her shoes

and she likes
how the yellow road-lines painted
so carefully straight

go woozy and wavy when
she swigs from her bottle of cough syrup
with the expiration date from a decade ago.

She likes waving at the boys
who line up by the shop windows.
She likes how they spit and whistle
when she sways by.

She likes to throw her reality
off-kilter and unbalanced
and teetering on the edge
of some metaphorical cliff
somewhere

with the vertigo of living
streaming past her popping ears.

She can hear the world rip
along the seams
if she listens close enough,
hard enough, long enough,

nodding her head to the beat of reality
and letting the last gulp of burning grape
flow down to her feet
tripping along the cobblestones.

He gave her a necklace of stainless steel
coated with silver so that it looked real.
She bit back frustration expertly masked
and said she’d lost it the next time he asked.

She’s used to reading her lines from a page
and she’s convinced that all life is a stage.
It doesn’t matter what the actors know,
just that the audience enjoys the show.

She’ll keep on going until it’s too late
and like her mother she’ll blame it on fate.
One day the chain of the necklace will break.
The crowd will find out the whole act is fake.

He thinks she’s simple but fun to deceive
because she can’t tell what not to believe.
He gets his joy from messing with her head
and trying to lure her best friend into bed.

She’ll keep on going until it’s too late
and like her mother she’ll blame it on fate.
One day the chain of the necklace will break.
The crowd will find out the whole act is fake.

She’ll keep on going until it’s too late Read more »

Pretty in pigments and makeup and all
looks in the mirror and looks at a doll
painted-on smile and glassy blank eyes
careful perfection and constructed lies.

At the end of the day she steps from her skin
scrubs away memory of where she’s been
puts on the mask of the girl of the night
tries to pretend it’ll all be all right.

And she listens when we say
it doesn’t matter anyway
‘cause at the end of everything there’s nothing ever left to stay,
to stay, to stay—

She flirts with the boys and she flirts with the men
they grin and they tell her to do it again.
She counts out the dollars on her bedroom floor
telling herself—just a few months more—

telling herself she’s not a whore—
telling herself
telling herself
telling herself—not anymore—

(bridge)
The denial of desire is her trial by our fire
and there’s nothing stopping her from popping pills so she’ll believe the liars. Read more »

The moss on the trees looked like faces out of the corners of his eyes. They gazed at him sideways, disapproving, green brows wrinkling as they scowled. Even now, even here, he could not escape the scorn of his people.

Ignore them. Pretend they’re not there and maybe they won’t be, next time he turned around. They don’t exist. They were all in his mind. He blinked and they slid back into existence, glowering.

Focus. Focus.

His quarry stumbled through the undergrowth a hundred meters ahead. The wind whipped the white puff of her breath through the damp mossy trunks and out across the half-frozen water of the lake. She cried out as one foot twisted beneath her, the noise piercing and startlingly human. He started to slow, to stop. No. No! Keep going. He started to run again, trying to ignore the cramp slicing at his side, thoughts and breath coming in waves of white and red.

Her hair thrashed in the wind. Like any other girl. Innocent. Like his sister— Read more »

I’m alive.

I’m alive and though my head is pounding and my throat feels like I swallowed a mouthful of embers it doesn’t matter because I’m alive, I’m alive. I try to roll over and wince. I’m alive and I’m covered in burns.

My window has cracked from the heat and through it all I can see is gray. Ash and smoke smearing together and blurring earth and sky into a dense monochromatic fog. I can just make out the charred stumps of the WASHINGTON DC PENITENTIARY sign.

The window. Window cracked. Thoughts take a long time to assemble in my fire-ravaged brain. Window open.

Escape.

I haul myself up to the blackened ledge and bite my blistered lip as the concrete scrapes bloody tracks down my burned legs. Sweep the glass from the sill. Watch it fall to the ground with a gentle puff of ash. Lean forward. Let myself drop.

Fuck. The ground is hard. Legs hurt. Everything hurts. Fuck. Fuck. Read more »

Fire crackles and roars, a living creature spreading, growing, rising high to lick the smoke-filled sky. There is such thing as dragons, but the fantasy writers got it wrong; dragons don’t need to bother with bodies and wings and scales. They are fire, fire embodied, fire is enough of a body. Orange-red and powerful and hungry, so hungry. Starving.

Flames caress the thick concrete of East Wing. Flickering tendrils stroke the windows, drawing back, forward, closer, dancing gold along the glass. Somewhere, there’s the thump of an explosion. Fire crawls along the wires overhead. The lights flicker out and shadows writhe, taunting, beckoning. Not too long now. Stay where you are, you’ll be with us soon.

You’ll be ash. Read more »

The guards wear uniforms the same color as concrete and pace the hallways, peering into the cells, watching. They are as much a part of East Wing as the blank walls. They control where we go, when, every move we make. They are the bars and locks of this prison. Machines can be outsmarted easily enough. But human beings--they're harder to trick. They know the prison as well as we do, and they carry guns.

Best of all, they're expendable. Machines are expensive to make, what with coal restrictions and China's nasty habit of shooting rockets at passing freighters. But people are plentiful. Cheap.

I almost don't notice them anymore. Don't notice them until they're gone.

There are no guards today. The doors stand alone, unflanked by those familiar gray-clothed figures. The catwalks do not echo with their heavy footsteps; their gruff greetings. Mornin'.

Silence. Read more »

My grandfather was elected vice-president almost twenty years ago. Four years later, he returned for a second term. He wasn’t voted into office, despite what the results said. Voter fraud. That was the first of the crimes uncovered in the investigation.

The court case was laughable, just another series of the official procedure government is so smitten with. The sentence was obvious from the beginning. Life, because of a nasty little side project that left twelve US soldiers and most of a Middle Eastern village rotting in the sun. Also a bit of a snafu with the foster care system that ended up diverting child healthcare funds into my grandfather's bank account. Juries are predictably sympathetic to cases involving sick little kiddies. Read more »

Complete and utter fiction set slightly in the future.

In my very first memory, the walls were striped red and gold. A chandelier glittered overhead. I remember watching the crystals spin, transfixed, as my mother tried to coax something sticky and white into my mouth. My father sat at the table, eating carefully with one hand while typing on a laptop with the other. His rings flashed in the faint gray glow of the screen.

Then a knock rang at the door and reverberated through the whole house. I remember thinking the knocker must have a hand of iron to make such a noise. My father slammed the laptop shut so hard the Esc key zinged across the room. My mother scooped me up with one hand. The other clutched a steak knife.

“Put it down, Sara.”

My mother shook her head and shifted me so my weight rested on her opposite hip.

“It’ll only make things worse for us.” My father’s face was stoic, his voice close to a monotone. Read more »

This time, it is I who seeks her, tracks her down, grabs her by the arm and pins her to the wall of the room in my mind. Her skin is smooth and paper-white; her face is a mannequin’s. Her lips do not move when she speaks.

“Angry, are we?”

The room is pristine at first glance, but I can see the dust on the floor, the husks of dead flies shriveling inside the wide florescent lights. The smudged fingerprints on the glass of the clock in the far corner. The second hands spins smoothly across the numbers, shearing off moments that die too quickly to be mourned.

Her voice adopts an edge of mocking grief. “Anger decreases efficiency. You’re wasting time here, listening to me.”

“Shut up, bitch.”

She laughs with the sound of splintering wood, of metal grating against metal. “But I won’t shut up. Whatever I say, you’ll listen.” Her arm twists in my grip. “You’ll stop. You’ll doubt.” I hold tighter. “You’ll know I’m right.” Read more »

"Did you write poems about your ghost?"--Thank you, Somebody, that completely made my day.

Omnioptic--Alright, E, be that way.

Hmph.

Mustache--I has one. Had one. I was supposed to be a guy in the play--and a dead body, after the second act--and needed to appear more manly. The resulting eyeliner mustache apparently made me look French.

Which means all my French jokes are coming back to haunt me.

Karma.

*Waves cigarette*

DE D
E D
--Please, someone, tell me what the hell is up with the DEAD END signs with the A and N scratched out. I understand STOP BUSH, I get YIELD TO (sports team of the graffiti-er's choice), I thoroughly enjoyed the speed bump sign in Cairns, Australia (http://lh6.ggpht.com/_VzrHbX8OqyE/R2DHBVEsGlI/AAAAAAAADQs/yJy_hhdUVuA/DS...), but what's with DED ED?

Cheese obsessed--my father. A snippet of a recent conversation:

"Dad, Colby isn't a cheese."

"Yes it is." Read more »

I lie splayed on this stage of a reality,
struggling to breathe. My heart is clenched
and shudders as it beats. Head swimming,
rolling, chanting: stay alive. stay alive.

This will be my night of death.

Fitting. Stabbed through the stomach
with a sword unsharpened, rounded dull,
I collapse with a gurgle to the floor.
Illusion, all of it, and as the bodies pile up
the audience just laughs. The curtains close
and I scramble to my feet, my death played out.
I must keep out of sight, for I'm a ghost.

Yes, fitting, do you not agree?
The stage is perfect for a death,
a transition, a shedding of
this act, this character I had become
so very good at playing. So well cast.
Clap for the director, nowhere to be seen.
Run away to another play. Clap anyway

for once the play has ended, once
the final bow is taken and actors have
shed their parts, the world rushes in
and reality reigns again. I'm left
dead and wondering if I'm still on stage.

Perhaps it's just the play
looming closer with every wasted moment
that slips past, waving with a smile
as my hands knot into fists.
Perhaps it's the essay due, perhaps the project
mocking unstarted from its list of requirements,
perhaps the computer cut off from the internet—
again—
with no warning, no consent from me
as my nose leaks blood.

I'm stumbling up the stairs with
the guts of my disemboweled Mac
dripping from my hands

and it's all I can do
to not tear the dangling wires from their ports,
break the keyboard in half
against the banister smooth-worn
from years of my small hands running down the wood.
I picture keys bouncing down the steps.
control. option. escape.
They spring free from their moorings in reality
and only feed my anger
as they fall.

I press a tissue to my nose
and it comes away soaked in red.

My brother's book is on the floor
and I grab it from the carpet
and throw it hard against his bed. Read more »

untitled3.mp3

I’m not boasting, bragging,
never wanted to be that kind of girl,
ragging on about whatever’s wrong
in her world,
no,
I want quiet, I want
time to myself, ‘cause
this loud girl I’ve turned into?
she’s not who I was Read more »

Though I won the slam, her poem defined the night.

Tell me there’s no gravity
and maybe I will fly.
Tell me of immortality
and maybe I won’t die.
Tell me time does not go on
and maybe I can’t leave.
Tell me that there is a god
and maybe I’ll believe.

Yes, tell me of the reason
you rise early each Sunday;
tell me why I should kneel down
and clasp my hands to pray.
Tell me how your prayers are heard,
how god listens to you.
Explain to me why you believe.
Maybe I’ll listen too.
Maybe I’ll listen too.
But I still won’t accept it all as true.

Tell me of the angels
and someday I might fly.
Tell me of eternal souls
and maybe I won’t die.
Tell me death’s an illusion
and maybe I won’t grieve.
Tell me that there is a god
and maybe I’ll believe.

You have converts a thousand strong.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be wrong
‘cause truth can be practiced by a few.
But the only truth that I can find
is it’s all within the human mind.
We believe what we want to be true. Read more »

I do not trust you.

I played with your hair
as you lay on my bed and talked
about boys.
It was too long
and tangled in my fingers
and as I promised
I won't tell,
I struggled to free my hand.

I broke that promise.
I broke that promise,
and didn't think anything of it.
Your secret, small as it was,
became just something to say
to break the awkward silence on the phone.

You promised me
I won't tell
but the information could gain you
the center of attention
for a day.
And such information spreads quickly
in a school as small as yours.

Do you trust me?
You shouldn't.
Do I trust you?
Not at all.

He was a music stand
with three legs and no head;
decapitated, it lay
tipped on its side in a corner.
I slipped off my shoes
and danced with him,
socks whispering against
the dusty carpet of his home

as we spun. Mindless, both of us.
We gave ourselves to gravity and momentum
and swayed, yes, twirled and swooped and bowed
as his feet rang against the ground
in time to the piano's voice
spilling through the room,
tangling in my hair, around
the metal torso of my partner
and settling in lazy waves
across the floor.

He stumbled and faltered and fell.
I picked him up and leaned him against the wall.

He was a music stand.
He did not know how to dance, but I
cannot dance alone.

No, I am not emo, flirting or otherwise; I am not depressed, I am not cutting myself, and I find it twistedly amusing that I have to say this at all.

run away.mp3

She's chased by the demons and the monsters of the night
and they won't go away when she turns on the light.
They wear the masks of the people of the day
and they smile and they beckon until she runs away.
She always runs away.

She's chased by the demons and the monsters of her past
and she tries to turn away but they move too fast.
They wear seductive faces of the ones who couldn't stay
and they smile and they beckon until she runs away.
She always runs away.

Night is falling and her car is stalling
and she throws open the driver's door,
tripping on her feet down the empty street,
shouting please no more,
please no more.

She never learned to let go of her childhood fears
and her face is stained with childhood tears
and she can't ignore what the shadows say
and they smile and they beckon until she runs away.
She always runs away.

Night is falling and her car is stalling
and she throws open the driver's door,
tripping on her feet down the empty street, Read more »

Today my Terrorism class watched part of the film This Is What Democracy Looks Like. My reaction.

This is what democracy looks like.
Winter coats and untamed hair and voices chanting,
singing, shouting: This Is My Country.
This Is My Freedom. This Is My
Democracy.

The police are faceless behind their masks.
The camera cannot see their eyes, only
the black-gloved hands loading canisters of gas
into their guns, ready to shoot

as the protesters link arms and stand
with their signs waving, their faces
set in resolve stronger than any police line.

This Is My Voice. This Is My Democracy.

CS gas. “They’re shooting poison!”
“They’re shooting poison!”
“Poison!”
Poison. CS gas is potentially lethal.
The buildings of Seattle rise straight-and-tall
and don’t look down. Their glass eyes
are closed.

This Is My Freedom. This Is My Democracy.

The protesters let themselves be hauled away
one-by-one, hoping their numbers Read more »