blank walls

she's moved a thousand times and it's always the same: blank walls where her innumerable picture frames used to hang. dusty shelves where books and earrings and stationary used to gather. during each move (always in summer), sadness twists her heart into a knot that will surely burst and salty tears freely flow down her sticky summer-freckled face.

but this time is different. she's not crying. she can't cry. her age has rendered her emotionless or maybe it's her readiness.

still, i don't know why i took all the pictures down. i fucking hate blank walls.

It Wasn't Until Then

By Meredith Rivlin

It wasn't until i left your house that i felt the glass.

It wasn't until i left your house and decided to take the long way home,

past the painted water and mountains, on one of the sunny, earth-scented, spring days that could still be counted on one hand,

with an empty stomach because we didn't know if we should

eat breakfast or lunch

or stay in bed sleeping and fucking until the next morning.

It wasn't until then that i felt the glass.

It was sharper than a pebble in my shoe,

and was certainly not round.

It wasn't irritating like a pebble was, making you kick it

to the front of your shoe and keep going, or yelling

"wait up!" to your friends as they walked ahead.

Instead it was a sharp pain in my heel,

so painful that i walked on the toes of my left foot

until i got to a bench where i sat down and took off my shoe

and carefully peeled off my sock.

It wasn't until then that i saw the glass.

Well, i really saw the blood first,

where the glass had entered,

punctured through the calloused skin of my heel.

i nervously picked at it, desperate to get it out immediately

but thinking the worst:

It was lodged in deep;

it had broken into tiny pieces inside my body

i would need surgery;

sterilization;

this was an omen for more pain to come from you.

it wasn't until then that i wondered what had happened

to cause glass to be on my side of the bed, not your side,

where some of my clothes lay in a bundle,

a piece of glass sneaking its way into my sock.

i tried not to imagine you with someone else where i just

pretended to sleep while i really

looked at the spines on your bookshelf.

i didn't want to picture you with someone else,

having such wild sex that you broke glass and didn't even stop

to clean it up.
(I later learned that your landlord broke a bottle when repairing your refrigerator
and that you must not have swept it all up.)

It wasn't until then that i questioned whether i liked you

because of your hair and vulnerability

or because i was nervous that my number of sexual partners

could now be rounded up.

I grabbed the tiny point that hadn't been impacted

completely in my foot yet.

I scraped the skin around it in desperation,

close to panic.

I looked around to see joggers in spandex,

shaded people walking leashed dogs,

families on vacation.

How can they go on walking

when there is pain and metaphor happening!

It wasn't until i took a deep breath and pulled hard

at what had caused such pain

while Aesop's Fables ran through my head:

lions and mice and thorns,

unexpected friends coming

of stereotypical enemies.

It wasn't until then that i removed the glass.

I pulled out the triangular shard,

now tinted red

and a drop of blood

formed on my once impermeable heel.

But only one drop.

Love [is] the Drug

Walking to work this morning, actually walking to buy coffee from the cute new barista at Speeder and Earl's, I saw/smelled 3 people getting high on their ways to work. Got me thinking about getting numb before work to make it not as awful.
Maybe if you can't feel anything while you're entering data or doing things at your firm that people at firms do, maybe then it doesn't feel like a waste or a severe compromise.

Or maybe you only feel truly creative when you're high and then you can come up with really good names for files and titles for spreadsheets, meanwhile sketching trippy patterns and phrases that you will later transfer to a canvas and your journal. And then maybe you don't feel bound to anything; you feel free and light and part of the earth and the trees from where the paper in your printer came.

Maybe you've been smoking since you were a freshman in high school, or even in 8th grade, and now you can't function without weed; it feels more like you're on drugs when you're off them. You like the way your head feels and the way that music sounds and the culture and the experiences that you can't always remember.

And you forgot your lighter at home because you weren't stoned first, or else you would have remembered, so you pack your swirly-colored, hand-blown glass piece and use the matches you keep in your car for cases like this. And while you're stuck in traffic and listening to talk radio and news headlines, experiencing the truly tragic on your 15 minute ride to work, you strike the match and burn your essential green and inhale and hold the smoke in your lungs long enough to make you cough--that's the really good high--and now you're ready for work. Ready like having done your hair. Ready like having packed a 32 ounce thermos of strong Starbuck's coffee with low-fat half-and-half. Ready like having masturbated in the shower in the morning. Ready like having shaved your face. Ready like having put on lipstick and then having put the tube in your purse for touch-ups during the day. And you're ready to hold this vestige, this secret from coworkers, which would surely have you on the streets with little chance of being hired anywhere if anyone found out. And God knows, you don't want to end up like people like that.

The Senses of a Burlington Spring

(Photo and writing by Meredith Rivlin)

It snows in spring here too
when forsythia recalls foliage
and tulips bloom the rusty red
of fall when we
don't want to dread what comes next
and we sing and believe
when Simon and Garfunkel tell us
the green leaves will turn brown.

It snows in spring here too,
long after we've put away
boots and fleece and
wool and liners;
and long after we can't
remember the cold
digits turned purple from red
to white and back to purple again.

It snows here in spring.
Mid-spring, actually,
when you still need a blanket and
maybe to close the window at night.
But during the day as you ride
your bike uphill--
always up-Goddamn-hill--
a gust will spread the dandelion seeds.

And when it snows here in spring
it's just a flawed simile
because these seeds will replant
themselves in fertile soil and,
new, will soak up sunlight and live
on to have their seeds
blown in a gust of wind
or by someone making a wish or
trying to remember what wet snow smells like
but can't.
But the snow will stop. And start. And melt.
And thaw. And I wonder,
for another four months,
is it really connected?

but I hate short stories

Today went to Powell's, headed for the small press section. Am wearing hoop earrings, and as I was walking down the street I realized no one who I want to love me will love me if I'm wearing hoop earrings. Also feeling self-conscious about wearing a black hoodie from Old Navy that my neighbor was getting rid of.

Bought Barthes for Beginners, since I need to have even less faith in signs and signifiers. Thought of buying the newest Believer, but its dense columns of text written by people doing with their lives what I would like to be doing with my life seemed like steel mountains to climb. Originally had gone for the Tao Lin, but it was $14 to where the darkest channel of my brain doesn't need to go to. Almost picked up an old Paris Review, but I hate short stories and it's only full of dead white ghosts whose 20th century trials seem trivial now. Finally settled on the $8 zine my own name is in, to send to someone or something, and the Barthes was an impulse buy sitting at the counter for less than five bucks. By the time I check out at Powell's, every time, it's all I can do to look the cashier in the eye, I'm so crippled with the words I've scanned and the new truths I've drafted in my head and my own brain is left seeping on all the shelves I've touched.

I always see Miss Lonelyhearts/ Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, read it when I was 18 and home for a while and put myself on a strict reading schedule and lived at library book sales, left with paper bags full of paperbacks from 1959. Brought West on a family vacation to Athens, Georgia to see parents friends. Mark has a Ph.D in American literature, he's a high school teacher, published, but still hasn't written the Great American Novel. He saw my book, commented what seemed pleasant surprise, maybe that some girl with high heeled sandals seemed to give a fuck about what people his age used to when they were my age. Anyway, the book features a particularly 1960s brand of apocalyptic despair, which now seems like a pretty cozy place to lie.

So now I've got the Barthes, a companion guide to Semiotics for Beginners I bought almost a year ago at a fantastically musty and dirty over-stocked used book store on an island off of Washington state, with my mom and more parents' friends. The husband doesn't believe in evolution, his reasoning explained over breakfast when he looked at a blueberry and wondered how we could possibly be related. Luckily I'd just almost passed bio and remembered that all living organisms are joined by a protein called WNT or something, a seemingly important fact that about 20 people in the world care to know, and I brought this up in a voice quiet and measured that I always use in situations where that's ten times harder than getting radish-faced and shouting and bludgeoning people across the head for being so unbelievably wrong and offending the sensibilities of anyone who's put in the menial time and energy to have half a fucking brain.

Anyway, this island off of Washington reminded me of Maine, because it was all tall grass and water, and it was quiet. Except one year when we had a vacation in Maine I listened to a lot of Bon Jovi (Slippery When Wet. Jesus fucking Christ, obviously) and we were on the South Beach Diet, and I thought that losing 15 pounds would be as valuable as any other vital accessory to the person I knew I needed to be, like a 1500 on the SATs or a boyfriend on the hockey team. But it was brutal, we ate peanut butter and ricotta cheese the entire time, and didn't lose a pound, and I remained a size four, my dreams of twos and zeros dashed along with those of a Little Ivy acceptance, and other things I'm really fucking thankful never reached my hands, and am now mortified and guilty and sad to admit ever held a place within my mind.

Those long dirt roads were beautiful though, bisecting this fluttering sea of bright green grass, and sometimes horses would come to the fence by the road, perfect: dumb and handsome, and the fields only stopped for a cliff at the endless gray-blue deep of the Atlantic that our porch sat right over.

And that's what Washington reminded me of, and we followed around the orca-watching tour vans in our car, and took a ferry back to the mainland, and of course the bright orange sun just melted into that water and absorbed everything except for the wind, and the trees got black against the pink and orange, and thinking about it now, it's almost too beautiful to believe it was real, sitting on the water and watching the day's end illuminate everything, even the wind, and just feeling like nothing in the face of it all, in a good way.

That's the last sunset I can really remember, almost a year ago, because ever since, when the sun goes down, it's been raining, or I've been at work, or drunk, and it doesn't matter anyway, because there's no water here (a river is not an ocean).

Service: In the Proper Adaptable Format

byMeredith Rivlin

My hands grazed the keyboard resting
making the distinct clicking and twitching
sound of idling fingers.

(Working hands, though.
These are my hands.
They are privileged hands.)

And I worked and clicked and spoke and
eased my own conscious back
into consciousness where productivity
also lies.
I practiced selflessness while clicking “send/
receive” in hopes of 20 new emails addressed
to me personally
with questions I could answer and people
I could convince.

Open minds and opportunities will
take the place of littered envelopes
(remnants of a culture of desire)
and broken sidewalk glass
(whose contents is used to forget selves and ease fears
as we lay awake
next to someone who might just
know the answers to
questions we lay
awake trying to forget,
like are we really special and where does that fit in?)

Working visions.
These are my visions.
They are out there and
unspecific and cliché.

And they feed off of devotion and passion,
though we think we have enough,
and get swallowed by cynicism and
another explanation
or excuse
of our generation.

What it feels like for (this) girl

I am eleven or twelve or thirteen in the fitting room at The Gap. I barely fit in to a women’s size 16. I ask my mother where I am going to buy jeans once I exceed the sizes at Gap. My mother is a good mother and she doesn’t know what to say. Really, there is no consoling a fat girl. I probably cried. I cried then and seemingly a million times before because I knew I wasn’t pretty. At eleven or twelve or thirteen, I hung a photo of a woman with a “hot body” that I cut from one of my teen magazines, manuals for how to be a good woman. This woman had flat abdominals and tanned skin. This woman attracted men because she was beautiful. This woman was a woman while I was merely a girl.
In my preteen journal I wrote, Loose 30 pounds, next to doodles of hearts and stars, I assume. I considered hanging this, my demand of myself, on my mirror, next to the magazine photo of the beautiful vacant woman. But I did not want my parents, or anyone, to see it. I tore out my declarative scribbles and placed it in my underwear drawer next to some lip gloss purchased at CVS.