It feels like the holiday spirit is hard to tap into this year.
I feel like i make this statement every year.
The Herrband is sick, and this means the world stops for a little while.
He's a good man, but when he gets sick it literally shuts him down. He holes up on the couch and doesn't move. I shudder to think of when we have a little one and he realizes the days of being sick and getting left alone are entirely over.
I'm probably a jerk because, whenever I get sick, I refuse to stop. I got a sinus infection the first week of november and it took me two weeks to go to the doctor, and by then it had gotten so bad that I could barely hear out of one ear and I kept keeling into people like a drunk because my balance was shot.
It's not a competition, but if it was, I would totally win.
Anyway, so because of the holing up in sick fortress central, we couldn't go get a tree today, and we won't have another day off until next tuesday, which GASP is a week before Christmas and only about three days before Yule.
Okay, so I probably sound like I'm bitching about now, and I realize that, but it's okay.
I take lots of long sparkly walks at night through the twinkly diamond crusted snow and look at all the beautiful Christmas lights on the fancy people's houses and generally feel super pixie about everything-
Wait a second...
It's been fifty degrees for the last four days? Fifty degrees and raining off and on? WHAT THE HELL? Global warming is seriously putting a damper on my Holiday vibe.
Okay, now I know I just sound retarded.
So in an effort to be a rockstar sugarplum of my own creation, I am going to my sister's apartment tonight and I am going to drink a fuckload of wine and make about seven different types of Christmas cookies.
YES.
This sounds like a great plan that will inevitable result in me with a basket of beautiful goodies, bundled up, oh so adorably, traipsing about the neighborhood and giving away parcels of lovely, warm treats.
I know.
I'll probably just end up drunk on her kitchen floor rolling around in red and green sanding sugar.
I'll still twinkle, right?
You know, as I was leaving this morning with that very same sister to hit up the corner diner for our weekly Compound breakfast date (yeah, how do you like this run on sentence?), we almost tripped over the sweetest, white haired little old lady raking the foul mountains of dead leaves off our porch.
We exclaimed over her kindness, and she explained that she was just hanging out with our 95 year old neighbor, Mary, waiting for the delivery of her enormous Christmas tree, and she thought she'd give our flower beds a tidy.
We thanked her and asked if she'd like a coffee or anything when we came back from the diner. She refused politely, but asked that we just dispose of the piles of leaves that she worked so hard for.
"You can't have Christmas if it's still all covered up in Fall leaves, can you?" she said brightly.
We shook our heads in agreement, thanked her again, and went to breakfast a little shamefully.
You bet your ass I can find time to bag up those leaves tonight, and I think there's a nice lady next door to me who deserves some cookies.
Oh yeah...
there's that holiday spirit.
The feeling of twinkles and snow crinkles and warmth and smiling rosy cheeks and crisp cold is all there underneath the surface as close to spilling over as water tension on a bead of eggnog. Nutmeg spritely crown and all.
You make your own.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Trailer Park Love Story.
I slept beneath a sheet of tin.
I woke up with with a jar of gin,
for a pillow.
I wonder if you've ever sunk so low,
if you wanted to,
if you oughtn't to,
I could love you if you woke me up in the wormskin night.
The mothfeather wind blowing under lights shot through with blue.
You grip my face with greasesmoke hands and tell me to open my eyes.
I trip over the cat's golden cadillac box, and realize I'd follow you anywhere.
You stroke my blonde blonde curls with their green ribbons.
You promise me a chicken bone,
a second home,
a brood of babies with balloon stomachs full of wonderbread and peanut butter dreams.
I flash you my best ragged gum smile, and snap a click of peppermint as an invitation, and you lead me by the head to the pink flamingo bonfire in the middle of the trailer park, and surrounded by the noxious, plastic, black smoke you kiss me slow and luscious.
And you taste like honey bourbon and you smell like the floor of the basketball court at the high school. Rubber on rubber on rubber.
They know when we make love because we squeak
like mice.
They know when we leave town because
we set the trailer park ablaze and ride away in a whiptail of gasoline flames.
I fan myself with a booklet of foodstamps, and you flick our credit cards sock sock sock into tree trunks like ninja stars.
We didn't stop 'til we hit the strip. Stake a place out with the last of the money in his wallet.
I looked up at you from the deep, white, outdoor fresh scented swamp of a hotel bed, and you swandove on to me-your liferaft-and you sang.
You sang.
If you wanted to.
If you oughtn't to.
You could keep me alive for years.
I wore my mama's sleeping slip the day we got married. Her best slippers of pink fuzzy bliss, like wearing two marshmallow peeps on my toes I said.
I never dreamt of being this happy.
Six elvises tripping me up on tiptoes to teetotaller tragedy all over the gilded microphone.
It was Christmas in the desert, and everyone was holy and jolly or holly and rolling, and you slipped out before the reception, but for you I made an exception, and we danced until the sun came up on boxing day.
You came back to our honeymoon nutcracker suite the next day at 11:59am.
The digital ruby box screamed to click me all the way back home,
but you caught my throat before the scream got loose, and when you dragged me out into the glittering sunlight, the red sand and the dust just filled my blonde blonde curls with the holiday spirit.
When you buried me-
My throat wrapped in green ribbons like a present-
My pink tufted toes poked out of the red dirt like an easter egg hunt, and I felt like every birthday you had ever had or ever would.
I dreamt i could hear the rain on the tin above my head, but it was the stars falling. One by one, from the boughs of the joshua trees.
I pull myself free.
I pull my self free.
I get out into the night,
-like a piece of tinsel blowing on a tree on the curb waiting for the garbage truck-
-like the flame of a candle inside a watermelon with a monster face
-like my mama's sleeping slip
-like those babies with their red, white, and blue bellies swaying over the wet plastic slip n' slide back in the trailer park, waiting for a babysitter who will never come home-
I'm a blue neon cross over a thousand penitent sinners.
And I'm coming for you.
I stagger back toward that open wound of light inside the desert.
You can't bury me away, baby.
If you wanted to.
If you oughtn't to.
I will haunt your ass for years.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
If Depression is Anger turned Inward, What's Anger eating a big pile of depression for breakfast?
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Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Freewrite #1- No Stars on the Globe
You are a place.
I can close my eyes and stand a hundred meters from the map, and every dart i throw will hit you.
So I need something better than my own eyelids. Something I can trust better than myself.
When I loved you. It was the way a child loves a treehouse.
You were mine, and I could climb to you.
You stood in the woods behind my house. You stood underneath my window. You stood, a shadow in my bedroom door. An imprint of a nightmare I woke startled and soaked in perspiration to find gone, and left to wonder if you had ever moved at all.
I think I built you in the tree I squirmed up that late Autumn afternoon the boy and his friends threw clay and broken pieces of pottery at me during art in school that day. Their teeth were spaced in their mouths like tombstones, and their laughter echoed in their mouths like the mouths of graves.
I ran home.
I ran to the tree and climbed until I reached the highest limb, and only when I had gotten settled on that outstretched arm, did I allow myself to cry.
And you, the tree, were dead.
How could I know?
And when I cried too hard, instead of shaking off broke your arm, and down we fell.
I barely had time to catch my breath, before we hit the ground. You shattered all around me, and I lay on top of your splinters and laughed until my sides ached and my head felt light and clear. The bars of afternoon sunlight as firm as gold around us made a gilded cage.
When I loved you. It was the way a girl loves a boy she doesn't know.
Someone she's never had the courage to speak to, let alone let know her.
I wrote your name and drew your eyes on everything
in eyeliner
in chalk
in charcoal
never in anything that couldn't be washed away.
I wore a lot of black, and I covered my bed in christmas lights, and I sang about you, and I wrote about you, and I breathed when I thought you were breathing, and I told you all my secrets, and I knew you'd find me when you found me, and I could wait, until I couldn't possibly wait any longer, and then I gave up I gave up I gave up
on it all.
Then I didn't love you for a while.
I felt you retract.
I felt your absence the way a loss is absorbed into the blood. Slowly. Fearfully. Ferociously angry at myself for turning away.
I built and tore down a hundred sand castles.
I wrote letters to no one and left them all over the world.
I drank with strangers because I thought if their faces blurred enough maybe they'd look like someone I could recognize.
I lay out at night in the desert under the stars and wondered if anything would ever grow in me again. I wondered if I were petrifying, slowly, into a fossil, perfectly preserved with all my memories, and no more bloody, pulpy, breathy tomorrows.
I hurled myself into the hearts of jade green waves and tried to drown you out of me. And the ocean made my face into the sand and I ate it, the humility, the dirt, the shame, and came up gasping.
I lost myself in trees the size of dinosaurs.
I threw my body against cliffs with faces like judges.
I ripped the map to pieces and ate some of them, burned others, left some as tips in coffee shops.
I covered the globe in clues.
So you would find me.
...but you didn't look.
I came home.
When I realized I still loved you.
When I realized there was nothing out there that could help me be better.
And when I called, and you didn't come.
When I screamed and pleaded and begged and used every phone number and called the police to report the lack of the intruder-
When I opened my bedroom window and sent out the paper airplane with an entreaty written in blood-
And you still didn't come.
I fell asleep underneath it all,
I wait
to wake
to your shadow
at the door.
11-14-12 J. Mann
I can close my eyes and stand a hundred meters from the map, and every dart i throw will hit you.
So I need something better than my own eyelids. Something I can trust better than myself.
When I loved you. It was the way a child loves a treehouse.
You were mine, and I could climb to you.
You stood in the woods behind my house. You stood underneath my window. You stood, a shadow in my bedroom door. An imprint of a nightmare I woke startled and soaked in perspiration to find gone, and left to wonder if you had ever moved at all.
I think I built you in the tree I squirmed up that late Autumn afternoon the boy and his friends threw clay and broken pieces of pottery at me during art in school that day. Their teeth were spaced in their mouths like tombstones, and their laughter echoed in their mouths like the mouths of graves.
I ran home.
I ran to the tree and climbed until I reached the highest limb, and only when I had gotten settled on that outstretched arm, did I allow myself to cry.
And you, the tree, were dead.
How could I know?
And when I cried too hard, instead of shaking off broke your arm, and down we fell.
I barely had time to catch my breath, before we hit the ground. You shattered all around me, and I lay on top of your splinters and laughed until my sides ached and my head felt light and clear. The bars of afternoon sunlight as firm as gold around us made a gilded cage.
When I loved you. It was the way a girl loves a boy she doesn't know.
Someone she's never had the courage to speak to, let alone let know her.
I wrote your name and drew your eyes on everything
in eyeliner
in chalk
in charcoal
never in anything that couldn't be washed away.
I wore a lot of black, and I covered my bed in christmas lights, and I sang about you, and I wrote about you, and I breathed when I thought you were breathing, and I told you all my secrets, and I knew you'd find me when you found me, and I could wait, until I couldn't possibly wait any longer, and then I gave up I gave up I gave up
on it all.
Then I didn't love you for a while.
I felt you retract.
I felt your absence the way a loss is absorbed into the blood. Slowly. Fearfully. Ferociously angry at myself for turning away.
I built and tore down a hundred sand castles.
I wrote letters to no one and left them all over the world.
I drank with strangers because I thought if their faces blurred enough maybe they'd look like someone I could recognize.
I lay out at night in the desert under the stars and wondered if anything would ever grow in me again. I wondered if I were petrifying, slowly, into a fossil, perfectly preserved with all my memories, and no more bloody, pulpy, breathy tomorrows.
I hurled myself into the hearts of jade green waves and tried to drown you out of me. And the ocean made my face into the sand and I ate it, the humility, the dirt, the shame, and came up gasping.
I lost myself in trees the size of dinosaurs.
I threw my body against cliffs with faces like judges.
I ripped the map to pieces and ate some of them, burned others, left some as tips in coffee shops.
I covered the globe in clues.
So you would find me.
...but you didn't look.
I came home.
When I realized I still loved you.
When I realized there was nothing out there that could help me be better.
And when I called, and you didn't come.
When I screamed and pleaded and begged and used every phone number and called the police to report the lack of the intruder-
When I opened my bedroom window and sent out the paper airplane with an entreaty written in blood-
And you still didn't come.
I fell asleep underneath it all,
I wait
to wake
to your shadow
at the door.
11-14-12 J. Mann
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Sacred Space
On the theme of Cemeteries.
If you feel inspired; a recommendation:
Write on your own about the space where you put things to die.
We all have a space, a place, perhaps an object, real or imagined, where we keep the thoughts of things which hurt us most.
What is yours?
Do you visit it?
Is it a good place? Has it ever threatened to leak your secrets?
I plan on writing a bit of prose on the subject in the next week.
If you feel inspired do some writing of your own and post it in the comments of this blog.
Part of The Tinderbox's manifesto is getting a viable, living, writing discussion that goes on long after the computer is off and the pen is still.
I'll post mine in a couple of days.
Hope to read yours soon!
If you feel inspired; a recommendation:
Write on your own about the space where you put things to die.
We all have a space, a place, perhaps an object, real or imagined, where we keep the thoughts of things which hurt us most.
What is yours?
Do you visit it?
Is it a good place? Has it ever threatened to leak your secrets?
I plan on writing a bit of prose on the subject in the next week.
If you feel inspired do some writing of your own and post it in the comments of this blog.
Part of The Tinderbox's manifesto is getting a viable, living, writing discussion that goes on long after the computer is off and the pen is still.
I'll post mine in a couple of days.
Hope to read yours soon!
Felt strangely poetry magnetized today.
So here's some brain spillage. Enjoy.
Intro:
The waterlogged bicycle graveyard
under the bridge
loses its poignance
every high tide.
Every rusted spoke
an outcry,
a screeching love poem
of abandoned
destinations.
I am bricking you up
inside the catacombs of my heart
like some Poe supervillain
I might convince myself your
death behind those walls
won't haunt me
into madness.
Your spectre
My expectations
Your expiration
My exhalation
Your thornbush
My thornbush
oh god.
We've met again.
In the cracks
between the
cum slathered bricks of my dreams.
I beg
of you
Amnesia
Oblivion
Suffocation
In the graveyard
of salt drowned bicycles
Sweat covered upper lip
Curl
At the ready.
Oh how I want to burn those lips
off your skull
For my moment of weakness
my scarab
of weakness
scurrying through the scalding sand
into the cool dark
of my pyramids
my pyramis
my oubliette
Raked and Ravaged
by your punctured memory.
A tincture
A poison ring
A pill box
This thornbush
My thornbush
This memory
My memory
Your ghost
And my unreliable narrative
Forever
underground.
-J.Mann 12-11-12
So here's some brain spillage. Enjoy.
Intro:
The waterlogged bicycle graveyard
under the bridge
loses its poignance
every high tide.
Every rusted spoke
an outcry,
a screeching love poem
of abandoned
destinations.
I am bricking you up
inside the catacombs of my heart
like some Poe supervillain
I might convince myself your
death behind those walls
won't haunt me
into madness.
Your spectre
My expectations
Your expiration
My exhalation
Your thornbush
My thornbush
oh god.
We've met again.
In the cracks
between the
cum slathered bricks of my dreams.
I beg
of you
Amnesia
Oblivion
Suffocation
In the graveyard
of salt drowned bicycles
Sweat covered upper lip
Curl
At the ready.
Oh how I want to burn those lips
off your skull
For my moment of weakness
my scarab
of weakness
scurrying through the scalding sand
into the cool dark
of my pyramids
my pyramis
my oubliette
Raked and Ravaged
by your punctured memory.
A tincture
A poison ring
A pill box
This thornbush
My thornbush
This memory
My memory
Your ghost
And my unreliable narrative
Forever
underground.
-J.Mann 12-11-12
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Welcome to the Tinderbox.
An online space for me to twiddle about with writing prompts, muse about the delicate balance between life and writing, and generally make an ass of myself due to poor editing skills.
A little bit about me:
My name is Jess Mann.
I like writing about creepy things, people, and places. Preferable creepy things held by creepy people while lurking in creepy places, possibly while Siouxie and the Banshees or Sisters of Mercy plays in the background.
I live in Salem, MA. I work in a bakery to pay the bills, so if my writing does veer off into the descriptively delicious at times, it's just a benefit of being surrounded by delicious items, constantly. I am married to a weird, beardy manbeast, whom I affectionately refer to as the herrband. Pronunciation is key.
HRRRR-(in growly, back of throat rottweiler key)
BUUND-(slightly softer, with still throaty undertones...sometimes lapsing into southern accent depending on may factors including but not limited to sobriety)
I work hard. I love halloween! Our porch currently looks like something Tim Burton threw up after Edward Gorey tied him to a chair and spoon fed him cat food while watching An American Werewolf in London.
I read a lot. I love libraries. I love bookstores. I drink an unhealthy amount of coffee, which I do not apologize for.
I went to school for Creative Writing (University of Maine at Farmington...Go Beavers! No seriously, the mascot is the beaver. I can't make this shit up). While there I wrote a lot of poetry, didn't drink or smoke, made out a lot, did improv theatre, and took lots of long walks through crunchy orange leaves.
Now I write fiction, short stories, long stories (I absolutely hate when somebody saunters up to you and guiltily admits they wrote a novel. I hear it, and all I can think of is some nasty corduroy clad, past his prime English prof cocking his knee up on a desk and talking down to a nubile young coed with a notebook covered in spirally, filigreed handwriting and doodles. VOM. As in vomit. As in gross, no), and sometimes I write stories with kids in mind.
I'm actually obsessed with stories for the kind of child I was. I ate up fairy tales and goblin books, and old cornish wives tales and Hans Christian Anderson stuff until way into my teens, and I don't see anything like that out there anymore.
You've got all these over-plush, heavy eyelinered high school supernatural tales where the emphasis is all about romance and being "the chosen one".
I read this Toni Morrison quote (and I'm paraphrasing here) about how if you think of a story, something that you really want to read, and it doesn't exist yet, then that is the story you need to write, and I want to read fairy tales again. I want them modern. I want them classic. i want them creepy. I want them to by spooky. I want them to be heartwarming. I want them haunted and dreamy and mysterious and exotic and magical and funny and bright and charming and complicated and entrancing!
In short, I am going to be experimenting a lot on here, and I hope you'll go to my website, and look at what I come up with, and help me keep churning out my stories, because I love writing.
I love talking about writing. I love readers, and people who read. I love everything there is about reading and screaming at your friends about it afterwards, and I really hope that here, at the Tinderbox, we are starting something special, something exciting, and something new. I want a forum, where people can bring their ideas and writing prompts and reactions to literature, so I'm starting one, and I'll bring you guys everything I can.
All I ask is that you strike the match with me. Enough fiction, and we'll set the whole world on fire!
An online space for me to twiddle about with writing prompts, muse about the delicate balance between life and writing, and generally make an ass of myself due to poor editing skills.
A little bit about me:
My name is Jess Mann.
I like writing about creepy things, people, and places. Preferable creepy things held by creepy people while lurking in creepy places, possibly while Siouxie and the Banshees or Sisters of Mercy plays in the background.
I live in Salem, MA. I work in a bakery to pay the bills, so if my writing does veer off into the descriptively delicious at times, it's just a benefit of being surrounded by delicious items, constantly. I am married to a weird, beardy manbeast, whom I affectionately refer to as the herrband. Pronunciation is key.
HRRRR-(in growly, back of throat rottweiler key)
BUUND-(slightly softer, with still throaty undertones...sometimes lapsing into southern accent depending on may factors including but not limited to sobriety)
I work hard. I love halloween! Our porch currently looks like something Tim Burton threw up after Edward Gorey tied him to a chair and spoon fed him cat food while watching An American Werewolf in London.
I read a lot. I love libraries. I love bookstores. I drink an unhealthy amount of coffee, which I do not apologize for.
I went to school for Creative Writing (University of Maine at Farmington...Go Beavers! No seriously, the mascot is the beaver. I can't make this shit up). While there I wrote a lot of poetry, didn't drink or smoke, made out a lot, did improv theatre, and took lots of long walks through crunchy orange leaves.
Now I write fiction, short stories, long stories (I absolutely hate when somebody saunters up to you and guiltily admits they wrote a novel. I hear it, and all I can think of is some nasty corduroy clad, past his prime English prof cocking his knee up on a desk and talking down to a nubile young coed with a notebook covered in spirally, filigreed handwriting and doodles. VOM. As in vomit. As in gross, no), and sometimes I write stories with kids in mind.
I'm actually obsessed with stories for the kind of child I was. I ate up fairy tales and goblin books, and old cornish wives tales and Hans Christian Anderson stuff until way into my teens, and I don't see anything like that out there anymore.
You've got all these over-plush, heavy eyelinered high school supernatural tales where the emphasis is all about romance and being "the chosen one".
I read this Toni Morrison quote (and I'm paraphrasing here) about how if you think of a story, something that you really want to read, and it doesn't exist yet, then that is the story you need to write, and I want to read fairy tales again. I want them modern. I want them classic. i want them creepy. I want them to by spooky. I want them to be heartwarming. I want them haunted and dreamy and mysterious and exotic and magical and funny and bright and charming and complicated and entrancing!
In short, I am going to be experimenting a lot on here, and I hope you'll go to my website, and look at what I come up with, and help me keep churning out my stories, because I love writing.
I love talking about writing. I love readers, and people who read. I love everything there is about reading and screaming at your friends about it afterwards, and I really hope that here, at the Tinderbox, we are starting something special, something exciting, and something new. I want a forum, where people can bring their ideas and writing prompts and reactions to literature, so I'm starting one, and I'll bring you guys everything I can.
All I ask is that you strike the match with me. Enough fiction, and we'll set the whole world on fire!
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