peas

I feel empty of words now.

There is nothing to say. I feel emptied out, shelled, as it were. A pea pod, closed up, looks filled with meatiness. But I am an empty thing, torn in half. There is a stubbornness that is gone. A fight someone flicked from my insides and threw into a bowl for a soup.

It feels good to have no fight left in me. When a soldier surrenders, he sits, places his weapon behind him, and doesn't look back at it. He is done. That decision is made, and there are no second thoughts about overpowering the soldier he just held his hands up too. He just sits and waits for direction. 

The rain started this morning after midnight. First the wind, then the rain. I heard it coming, pulled another blanket out of the cupboard, and covered the boy and myself before it reached us properly. I thought about the meteor shower behind the clouds, and how all those wishes only come to those who see them. 

I can't sleep. My mind races, then I read and grow tired, then I put down the book, and my mind races. It starts again, the racing and reading and racing and reading.What I am thinking about is an unwinnable war. An endless war. A pointless war. A war from which I surrendered, but keep thinking of how much I loved my fucking rifle back when I would use it. So I listen to the rain and wait for direction.

I am sometimes in love with my defects. They are spicy and meaty and get me things I want, even as they come at the expense of others. I am a pacifist now. It feels empty, but I know it is filled with something else entirely. I sit beside the road and wait for an enemy to give me direction. I try not to give into the voice that tells me to turn around and look the man with the gun in the eye. Stare him down, defiant even as I am submissive, my mind saying, "I had a gun once. And when I had a gun, I should have used it."

There is nothing to be said, because I am empty of bitter fruit. I cannot rewrite the recipe that made me who I am. I cannot even say anything about it, because it is gone into the soup.I forget which spices. Which veggies.

The soup is unpalatable. The one made out of me. It contains a pound of flesh or six for a crime I committed lifetimes ago. She is gone. Into the soup. I kicked the witch into the fire and danced in the forest following a trail of bird scat in place of the bread we dropped ages ago. I am home, carrying the cauldron of me. It needs salt, or sugar. Perhaps both. I keep trying to take things away. Once something becomes part of a soup, it cannot be extracted. So, I add counter spices. Chants and spells and a candle for the new moon. It is a banishing spell. But the parts of me are still there, waiting to be shot despite the surrender.

I have no words left. And yet these fall out of me, like the man at a crossroads telling riddles to adventurers. One pathway leads to the beautiful princess and the pot of gold, or the other leads to certain death. I am either the one that always tells the truth, or never does. I don't know why I write like this when I am distressed. This was just about not having peas in me.

dreams

I wear my hair in a knot on the top of my head, a wooden moth hair clip holding it in place, locusts earrings I bought to remember Jess, and an antler around my neck. My vest is moss woven with fiddleheads and forsythia. I have tightly cropped bark pants and pretend I can fly. I am the mother butterfly, Beezus tells me. I demand the children go collect nectar for our meals. Thor creates the cauldron with loose stones. I feed them nectar smoothies until they are giggling and flying away again. It is just pretend, but it feels real. I see my wings scorched and darkened from flying too close to the sun. The girls giggle and beg of me, "Oh, Mommy Butterfly, what should we do next?"

Perhaps I just have a normal case of spring fever, hormones coursing through my body reminding me of that carnality, that impulse of Spring. It turns me into a butterfly mama, or the 100 yard stare remembering a blanket and an orchard and a boy without any other goal than a blanket in an orchard.

There is a Picasso exhibit. I am with a large man, almost twice my size. He has no hair, except a mustache. He doesn't have much of a neck. It has become part of his shoulders. But there is something about him I find irresistible. We are kissing. His head is so large, it dwarfs me. It eclipses my head. His lips cover my lips. It is sloppy, and makes me squirm. I feel swallowed by him, but I am more powerful after the kiss and a little drunk. I wonder if I am dreaming of a Greek god.  The God of Log Throwing, or Yoke pulling.

We drive away. To a train station. There is snow and ice. He is laughing, a big belly laugh, and I kiss him. My truck spins off the road. The large man whispers, "Nothing will happen to you. Breathe." He has an accent of undisclosed origin. It is much sexier than his kiss, but then again, anything is. I try to be fine, but I am frightened of the truck being ruined, and my husband being disappointed in me. Disappointed by the large man I am kissing and the accident it caused.

I dream wildly without abandon. I am sexy there, bawdy, ballsy. But when I follow through, lay a man with no neck, he is boring, and breathes through his mouth. I am afraid at the freebie of a dream.

I have insomnia on the full moons. I always seem to write then. I call them by their proper name as though it will banish them from my sleep. The Snow Moon. The Storm Moon. The Worm Moon. I whisper it, count the stars. The full moon was six days ago now, but I am still awake too late. I tire easily in the afternoons and when I drift off, it is always like this, adventures and crashes and Picasso and kissing strange gods on icy streets.

And then butterfly kisses wake me, reminding me of my whole truck and long-necked husband.

What sorts of things are you dreaming of these days? Any spring fever in your, ahem, parts?