Jennifer Walters

Cactus

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:06:18 -0500

I will be your cactus, sprouting in some remote place inside of you. You may not expect me, recognize me, see me at all. At first. You will run into me one day. I may hurt you. I am sorry. But I will not move. I will not leave.

I will be your cactus, and you can spend your time plucking the spines from my stiff body and reveal, finally, my soft skin hiding beneath. My form almost squishy. Will you help protect me now?

I will be your cactus and store your love like water inside the very core of my being. And when your presence has vanished from my view, I will cup my hands like buckets, dip into the well of myself, and be quenched.

I'm infatuated with you, You should know

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:55:19 -0500

My heart hangs by a thin thread

to which your heart is also tied.

They are connected

as a pair of handmade telephones,

one speaks

and the other hears.

The string vibrating between us.

The Way I Hope to Feel about a Love I Hope to Find - 2010

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:32:00 -0500

Opposite of the way the ancient conglomeration of earth spread apart to create the placement of our modern world, our bodies, like continents, will reverse, will rejoin to form a new Pangaea, leaving no spaces between our borders. Our tectonic plates of bone, colliding beneath the surface of our fault-lined skin, will leave our earth-quaked bodies a jumbled collection of rubble.

Our mismatched aftermath, quickly integrating and assimilating between either side of newly joined terrain. We will no longer be able to be distinguished as separate forms. Your bent knuckles, your tensed shoulder blades, my hip bones, my stretched chin, and jutting ankles, all resembling fallen rocks. The destruction of our mapped barriers has created disarray and yet is still welcomed as it signifies the end of our search, the end of our continental drifting.

Our bodies anchored into one another, and I never want to be parted again.

Burying Birds - 2010

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:26:00 -0500

I didn’t start noticing dead birds until this past year, but once I saw one, I kept seeing them. I decided one day, upon seeing another dead bird, that from then on I would give each one I found what I deemed to be a proper burial. To honor, to pay homage. To a life.

At first, I thought about naming each of them, but decided against it quickly. There’s a theory in psychology that once we name things they become concrete in our minds. “…Naming is an act which not only instantiates an element, but gives it consistency and engenders a structure’ (Nasio, 1998, p. 48).” We make connections to things based on their relationship to other things. We name them and put them into a category in order to more fully understand them. That’s the idea anyway. But I have a feeling this act is often more detrimental than helpful. Once we categorize things, we base their identity on already understood knowledge, preconceived ideas. When we categorize, we separate, an act of separation, as if everything makes more sense when jailed into specific vocation. Nothing is allowed to be fluid. We distance ideas from other ideas and from ourselves in order to give them a distinct place and character. But in this method, we come to know the differences between things much more than their similarities. We divide, split, partition, segregate. And hardly into distinct identities, but rather into groups of seemingly like-minded items. In this way, the idiosyncratic and individiualized facets of character are overlooked.

I did not want to do that with these birds. I did not need to make them more legitimate in my mind. I already had a place for them inside of me. I did not want to make them into something I needed or wanted them to be for myself. I wanted them to exist as they were, stripped of my prescribed symbolism, name, identity, or classification. Because really when we classify things, we often times are not even trying to understand them. We are trying to understand ourselves, in relation to them and thus to the rest of the world. We are not trying to make those things legitimate, but instead we are trying to legitimize ourselves. We are self-involved thinkers and are much more curious to know how we fit into the world. We want to know how the world percieves us instead of the other way around. Our intentions are predominantly too selfish to contemplate how we might actually view the world if we only cared enough to stop and look. If we did, we’d find that the world is organic and moving. Everything in it, including ourselves, are changing all the time and therefor are inherently innaproporiate to be labeled or contained.

No, I did not want to file and dismiss these lives. They would retain their identity and their memory, even if I didn’t know what that entailed and even if I wasn’t a part of it. I did not want to use my burial as a way to insert myself into their lives. I wanted to celebrate these birds, not with a life I had imagined, not by imposing myself into their death. I did not think I gave them meaning. I just wanted to raise their meaning. I wanted to honor, to pay homage, to a life.

*Nasio, J.-D. (1998). Five lessons on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.

New York: State University of New York Press.

Hearing You - 2009

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:13:00 -0500

I feel like the way sound travels, like it takes a second to reach you. I feel like the sound, and the waves, and the thick air stifled between us. But what I really want is to be your eardrum and bury myself deep within the acid pit of your stomach, safe and dissolved. I imagine my heart composed of ears, and when you lay your head on my chest to hear my heartbeat, I’m actually hearing you hearing me.

Electric - 2008

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:10:00 -0500

Sometimes I find myself watching you, your elegant movements,

especially your dancer’s feet, permanently fixated with pointed toe,

naively, innocently torturing me, carelessly hanging, swaying, flexing.

Your feet, your legs are such a strange thing to me, how they move.

I want to live inside them, feel the electric signals sent to them from your brain.

If I could live inside you, I’d be electric too.

Map of my Body - 2007

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:08:00 -0500

I want to make a map for you to find me by, but it will be a map of my body. It will be a map where the roads are the lanes through which my blood travels, the city points are my moles, and the capital is the birthmark located on the upper right side of my back just above the crease where my arm meets the curve of my rib cage. A map where my heart is a rest stop, my fingers are bridges, and my ankles are speed bumps. My forearms will be your highways, my stomach will be your parking lot, and my belly button will be your tunnel. My shoulder blades can be your quiet plains, but my knees will be your potholed cities. The rises and falls of my face will be the hills of your countryside, and the notch between my collar bones at the base of my neck will be your destination. My suprasternal notch. That’s where I’ll be. Meet me in that place where my clavicles meet my sternum. My suprasternal notch. I am here. Find me.

Memories - 2005

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:06:00 -0500

It’s truly amazing how difficult it becomes to differentiate between memories to which you can actually think back and the ones that you’ve, so to speak, learned to remember. The latter of these two kinds of recollections becomes embedded in our thoughts as a memory, but when we try to think back on them, actually think back on them, there’s nothing there. We’ve only come to remember these accounts over time because we’ve memorized them through pictures and stories. A rehersed history of sorts.

Sometimes I curse myself for not being able to remember as well as I wish. I try to think back on things so hard, but all it does is confuse me more and more as my memories get construed within one another.

But then again, as much as I hate forgetting something that could possibly be a retention-worthy moment, I still find something comforting about these escaped recollections.

I just mean, it feels like we’re laying the groundwork for something greater than we are. Each lost memory is like a tiny secret. The best of tiny secrets. The kind you lean in real close to hear to make sure you don’t miss a word. And it just seems like every memory, the secret and forgotten kind or the still visible kind, is just another way we’re all a part of one another.

I used to try to remember people’s faces. Like the way someone smiled at me or looked at me. Even if it was an unimportant smile or look, sometimes there was something special about remembering those little things that I just loved, and so I’d think back on those memories as often as possible. But before long I’d feel the vision slipping, and then, not too long after that, I wouldn’t be able to remember it at all anymore. The memory would get tucked away as a secret and become one of a billion other tiny secrets.

But, see, the best part about the whole process of forgetting was then remembering again. I would get another look or smile, and it would bring back the memory of one I had forgotten, one that was tucked away.

So years from now I could see something that could remind me of what I never even knew I forgot. One of my tiny secrets would slip out. I’d lean in real close to hear, never missing a word.

And then I’d listen, and remember, and smile, and revel in our best made plans.

Butter

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:02:00 -0500

I sink, sink my teeth in, sharp. I cut into a book. Split it open like a baked potato. I add butter and sour cream, salt and pepper. I used to dig potatoes out of the ground with my granddad. dirty fingernails, washing dirty fingernails against yellow soap – yellowing pages open to me. scent fills me, what is that scent, that old paper smell? I read, the words open, they bloom in my mind like flowers, like little buttercups held under a chin. yellow reflection means you like butter.

Granddaddy Who - 1997

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Granddaddy who spits out words like a typewriter
and questions, ‘Will you read to me tonight?’

has soft eyes and chapped lips
who is hard nails and sweet berries
whose hair is silky, white, and topped with a hat
is too sore to drive nails today
who announces to the family, “I love Jennifer.”
who yells to the world, “I love Jennifer!”
whose unshaved beard is like sandpaper
his voice is scratchy but once was clear
has cramps in his legs
lives in Virginia far away from me
and when I’m gone, he is my heaven
whispering, ‘Will you read to me tonight?’
and when the sun dawns, he’s in the sky
when the sun sets, he’s in my room
is toothpicks, trampolines, and fat books
whose care guides me in the right direction
and sweet voice calms my cry
he’s an apple laid in the sun
is all dried up now
Granddaddy who loves him who?
I do.