I was born 11/26/1982 (at 11:26 am no less!) in a small town called McHenry, Illinios. I am stilling living in the United States, but I currently reside in New York City. I am currently studying both creative writing and modernist literature at Eugene Lang College, a part of The New School University in New York City. I am the cofounder/editor-in-chief of my own little literary zine entitled The Castalia Project and I am an editor for the New York City based literary magazine The Olive Tree Review. I have had short fiction published in "Children, Churches and Daddies," "City Writers," and "Open Wide Magazine." I have also had poetry published in The Northwest Herald.
Email address: Riotpoetjm@aol.com.
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AFTER NIRVANA
After Nirvana wrapped its soft arms around your shivering body and sent you sinking into crisp exotic seashores. After the snowfall buried you deep inside its shivering heartbeat, captive like a caged animal. After you clawed your way through my stomach, burning my insides, leaking through my pores as I watched them lower you far into the frozen arctic tundra. I could still feel you freezing. After Nirvana, where are you?
I wandered along the beach on the eve of his funeral, a tightrope dance delicate like a newborns soft outstretched fingers. The frozen Alaskan waters pierced through my sneakers, calling the waves back out to sea. Where are you? wondered the knowing incessant buzzing inside my chest, as my icy blue eyes scanned the waves. The only answer was moonlight. The rich creamy glow of twilight illuminated the water as it softly approached, tapping my skin like the frosty arctic bites of a thousand tiny rabbits. All I could see was blue reflecting off the waters, coming out through the dark night sky, the bright white crests fizzling deep inside of him. I could always see the ocean in his eyes.
Jason, he had our mother's eyes and his father's face. He was darker than the rest of us; with bold black hair and a deep native stare, he stood testament to the mighty Akhiok, the tribe of his father. Our mother had married Delsin, Jason's father, almost immediately after they met at a truck rally in northern Minnesota. Delsin was a mechanic, who had come to Minnesota with a race car driver to help work on engines during the rally. My mother's father ran the stockyards where they set up the cars and sometimes my mother came by to help out. My mother told me it was love at first sight. She saw Delsin from across the yards, staring down at a 1968 Mustang like a panther stalking its prey, ready to pounce in one rapid moment. The engine flared under him, a deep throaty growl as she watched this dark stranger slam his first hard on the hood, taming the beast. She watched as he ran his dark callused fingers over the chrome rimes, the look of Casanova in his deep piercing eyes. She imagined her body sprawled out before him just like the mustang, naked and shuttering, long white hair draped over porcelain skin.
They made a peculiar couple, my tiny Nordic mother and her dark native lover. He was a tiger; his wild spirit ravaged the tiny Norwegian village, where my mother lived with her family, trampling its roads with exhaust fumes and rebellion. He could not be caged, but she could tame him. My mother married Delsin before she finished high school and moved to Alaska where they lived near his tribe. Delsin got a job at the lumber yard in town while my mother washed dishes at a diner at the local truck stop. They lived happily, a young couple in harmony amidst the frozen lakes and barren fields. Then, Jason was born, and his cries ran through the town like sirens, demanding his place. He was never happy here.
I saw his body before the funeral. Before the makeup artists stiffened his face, they made him ashen and pale, a failed wax sculpture. They used no skill in highlighting his bloated features as they painted color on his cheeks and put him in a suit. "That is not my brother," I stated as I looked down at him. I saw him lying there cold and distant. He was naked, barren, gone. The reality of sheer body isolated and lifeless. The definition of what? Where are you? I wondered. And there he was, with ice cold fingers and desert eyes, no longer of this world. As a child he had taken my hand, clasped it with his rough callused boy fingers and led me to the top of the hill near the house. "So, what else do you think is out there?" he used to ask as we listened to the howling of the wolves. "Someday, I'm gonna find out." He would say with determination. He was not of this world.
If it had been one hundred years before the townspeople would have stoned him to death. They would have taken him into the center of town, out by Main Street and the General Store and encircled him like a pack of wolves. They never understood why he didn't go to the polls on election day. They called him a sissy when he wrote poetry instead of working at the lumber yard. They all watched him leave for a fancy college out East with relief in their eyes and cursed the day he returned. "Stella, there's a great big world out there," he said to me after he returned from college, "A world where the streets don't all look the same. A place where people starve and get high. A place where it's okay to raise your hand and speak or burn a flag. A place where people don't work in lumber yards."
Driving home at one a.m. down the barren streets of my tiny Alaskan lumber town, my cheeks were burning before the backdrop of middle America. The small blue-collar avenues with machine shops that displayed motors in their windows, the all night mini-marts and the neon liquor stores had all come out to pay their respects to my eccentric older brother. I drove past the lumbar yard, where every man in town collected a paycheck on Fridays. I passed the pool hall where most of the High School kids hung out on the weekends to drink cheap beer. There was something about the way it felt, the barrenness of it all that called to me. The soft eerie radiance of the street lamps and neon signs was all too familiar. The cranberry glow of stoplights was like angels blind with rage. They made me want to get out and walk.
After Jason's father died, my mother had to look after herself. She had never made any friends in town and Delsin's family couldn't help her much with her child. She lived in the church shelter for many weeks before my father rescued her. My father, Jacob, was a friend of my mother's family. He had come from Norway when he was very young and lived next door to my mother most of her life. They grew up together like identical twins with pale white hair and ice blue eyes. They taught each other English and tried to get rid of their accents together after school. My mother's Grandmother used to tell them they shared one body and one mind growing up. Homeland, the body and mind of their ancestors. My mother wrote to my father every month after she left Minnesota and he came running the second he heard of her troubles. My father left Yale to live with my mother. It was only supposed to be for a little while, until my mother, who was too stubborn to leave Alaska with her newborn baby, came up with a way to support herself. Instead my father ended up with a union card for the local lumber yard and a wailing little girl whose piercing cries echoed her older brother's defiance.
The early morning sun cut though the window shades and into my eyes as I sat on Jason's bed after his funeral. It blinded me as I went through boxes of his things. Jason put up pictures of rock stars, he plastered them all over the fake wood paneling of his room before he left for college and never took them down. I felt dirty just sitting there surrounded by those sweaty creatures with long greasy hair and venom eyes. Jason wanted to be a rock star. He was an artist. He painted long stretched canvasses with miles of color and played guitar all night long. His face was sweaty and marked with fever as he thrashed at the canvas. He filled it with miles of blue, like Poseidon thrashing at the ocean floor. "Once I graduate I'm outta here," he used to say. "Me and the guys are gonna get a place in San Francisco and play just like Jerry Garcia did."
I remember laying in Jason's bed and snuggling his pillows wrapped in silky warmth as he sat in the corner and jammed on his guitar. It was like glass shattering and stars sobbing with every precious prick of the strings, each note more delicate than the next. It was like space, the way each cord shuttered under his fingertips. I was floating in the soft angelic air past pale stars and deep flaming planets that gleamed and twinkled like chimes on a veranda. He was not of this world. The way he shut his eyes and caressed the neck of the guitar was all too delicate, inhuman. The crazed look in his eyes as he splattered the canvas with rage was too fierce to compare. He was his mother's pale face and his father's wild eyes.
There wasn't much to go through in Jason's boxes. He never had much, no knickknacks or high school mementos, half-empty pens, or other junk drawer items. He had a couple of pairs of ripped blue jeans and a whole decade's worth of rock t-shirts in his dresser. In his desk he had three pens, a couple of loose guitar picks and music paper that was littered with code I couldn't decipher. Chills ran through my skin as I ran my hands up and down the music he had been writing his entire life. I was mesmerized by the way it looked on paper, so neat and perfect, like a crisp white living room, everything in its place. I stared at it for a while until I could see Jason working there before me. I saw his face, the way he used to look at the water with intense eyes like a caged animal staring through the bars at freedom. I knew what he was thinking when he went up past town, into the woods to "be alone." He was not of this world.
After a while something shiny fell out of Jason's music book. It was a candid shot, a moment of the living, lost forever and frozen on Kodak paper. It was a picture of a man falling over sideways with a guitar in hand and a genuine smile plastered on his face. He looked like me with pale eyes and snowy white hair. He seemed about Jason's age and I could see in his smiling face that he did not come from here. On the back Jason had written, "San Francisco 2000" in his messy rushed script. The picture grabbed me. It held my eyes in a deep focused anxiety as I looked into the face of this wild-eyed stranger. I felt numb, my fingers couldn't move, my legs went stiff and my mind cracked as I gazed at the picture for several moments. He had not been at Jason's funeral. I had recognized the face of every townie that had come in flannel shirts and linen dress pants to pay their respects to my brother. He was from somewhere else, "San Francisco 2000." A world away from my mothers tear-stained face and the reverend's empty words.
I wrung my fist around the picture, held it tight with a painful rage that shook in my hands as I approached Jason's canvas. I could hear Jason's guitar in the background. Pale, like Picasso's blue period, singing "Avé Maria" passing through me in one delicate moment. I could hear his heart beat, a pure steady rhythm scratching through my stomach and throbbing inside my chest. I stood before his unfinished canvas with tears in my eyes. I screamed into it, my cries piercing the lavender surface like a pebble in water. I turned on the canvas, which buried so much of him deep inside itself, thrashing at it with massive painful strokes until it was gone.
I took my mother's car keys from the key rack and threw an impromptu packed suitcase into her Ford Pickup. I did not want to see her pleading eyes and drawn face as I walked out the door. I did not want to hear her say to me with her soft tiny voice, "You have class on Monday, why not wait until Spring Break?" There was no choice. "San Francisco 2000" was waiting somewhere in another world. A world away from Alaska and its frozen nights. Away from my father's silence and my mother's wails. A world where people starved and got high. A place where people said things to each other and burned flags. A world where people did not work in Lumber yards or mourn eccentric artist's passing.
The muted yellow lines sped by in a blur as I drove my mother's truck down the highway. I kept the windows rolled down so I could feel the soft arctic winds rush up against me, running their invisible fingers through my icy blond hair. Every town looked the same buried under the thick grey sky. Every road gave birth to neon run down diners and blue light cheap motels. I sat at these diners and ate French Fries with thick creamy ketchup and drank freezer burned milk shakes. I woke up amidst the cardboard scented instant coffee each morning to feel the bristly shag carpeting between my toes. The pot holes were like roller coasters, the highway signs like Hollywood billboards selling a new life as the road revealed its secrets to me. Every breath was the highway and I was on my way.
Canada rushed by in a blur, every evergreen and truck stop meshed together outside my window like the back bumpers of passing automobiles. It was raining in Seattle, when I stopped for the night. I let it trickle down my pale freckled face, let it cling to my eyelashes and saturate my dry rusted lips. I pulled into a motel at three a.m. and left my baggage in the truck. The room was cold when I arrived. It felt barren and alone as I wrapped myself in the paper thin motel blankets and stared down at "San Francisco 2000." He was somewhere else, smiling and playing. His life made sense.
I could see Jason, just before I closed my eyes taking his rightful place in the corner, guitar in hand. His face was soft and seemed to glow with each note. My heart bled slowly a thick euphoric liquid that dissolved into every fiber of my body. My limbs quivered ever so slightly with anticipation as I listened to his crystal notes play on.
Alaska killed Jason, just as it killed his father. It sucked the life from their lungs with one arctic breath and smothered them like miners in a fallen shaft. His father, Delsin, died while ice fishing with a bunch of buddies on the lake in the dead of winter. The ice was supposed to be sturdy, had always been sturdy in the winter. Centuries of Akhiok had fished there. Yet, when Jason's father needed her strength, Alaska caved in on him. It sucked him into her frozen void drowning him in one rapid instant that lived forever.
Jason went a similar way. He was driving down a small country road just after the frost, when his car skidded on a patch of ice lying carelessly in the middle of the road. Jason's car swirled out of control and crashed into a tree. The window was broken and Jason was ejected from the car and flung hard into the thick heavy snow. He was buried instantly, left smothered and unconscious. There were no fatal injuries. They said he froze to death.
I was making a turkey sandwich when he died. I had just gotten home from the library at the community college when it happened. It was three in the morning when I walked in the door, starving from a long night of work. I got the bread out just as the clock was flashing 3:15 and it was then that lightning hit me. I could feel a thick cold shiver run up my spine at 100 miles per hour. A kind of dark frozen anxiety filled my bloodstream as I stood near the counter, my body was like ice. Life rushed through me, cold and trembling like the lake in January. Bang! And he was gone. They told us Jason died at 3:15 exactly. He passed through me, his cold and shivering body passed right through as I stood, knife in hand, about to spread the mayonnaise.
I got into San Francisco around closing time, just as the office buildings were letting out streams of people wearing pressed suits, their briefcases in hand. The big green and white sign called out from the highway with its big billboard letters "San Francisco Next 5 Exits." For the first time I saw light shining from beyond the deep winding car chase city. The blue Alaskan sky had given way to the glistening California sunshine. There were no more freeze-dried milkshakes or deserts full of rain and snow.
I parked my mother's truck in an alleyway just outside the Wharf and left its safety up to a few friendly fishermen who wore dark rubber overalls and blue baseball caps. I decided, once again, to get out and walk, to be nothing but a fly on the wall of civilization. Jason would have been happy here playing his music like Jerry Garcia. I could see him standing on the street with his hands in his pockets, his eyes searching as the wind ran through his long dark hair. He would be here, like the wolves which roamed free in the forest just outside of town, answering to no one.
I wandered through the night only half aware of the world in front of me. Everything seemed distorted as I made my way past sidewalk cafés and Italian restaurants. Like Picasso's Cubism, everything was slanted, the colors skewed as if they were meant to drive you crazy. I could see the music before I heard it coming through the thick red door of a first level bar off Mission Street. The music was bright red and orange, purple and gold but as I rushed in to see who was playing everything went soft and jazzy. It was blue again, like the Alaskan fields after the first snowfall, the lake, frozen over, calling to Jason and his father. The tribe wanted them home.
And there he was, "San Francisco 2000" up on stage clutching Jason's guitar. He stood off to the side, enveloped in his own world as the music spun a web around him. There he was, from Michelangelo's marble, crafted to perfection with long pale hair and creamy skin like freshly carved stone. He had my mother's eyes, I knew it before he looked out at me. I could feel his bright blue stare before he turned to me with a wondering expression on his face. I could see the ocean and feel the waves. He was Michelangelo's David, his face tense, trembling with anxiety, defiant.
He seemed drawn to me, as I had been drawn to his picture. His deep knowing stare penetrated into me. It was then that I saw that I knew him. Suddenly I was back in the blueness, swallowed whole by the melancholy of every delicate note. The music slowed to a heartbeat, every note a precise and delicate whisper as "San Francisco 2000" stepped out from the corner of the stage.
The room began to spin until there was nothing, just a mesh of black and lavender, grey and white encircling me slowly with every note. Every prick of the strings was a tiny star, galaxies off waiting for its turn to light up the universe. Suddenly I was there, wandering weightlessly through space, colors saturating my eyes as the white lights rushed by in a blur. Every note, every solitary second seemed to go on forever. The planets were purple, with golden mountains and deep burrowing cliffs. They were orange and green with rings of rainbows dancing about them. I could feel that shiver come back through me, up through my feet and out from my eyes into a million sparkling pieces of shattered glass. Where are you, Jason? And there he was, scattered throughout the gleaming stars and kaleidoscope of planets. He was not of this world. Matter could not touch him, gravity had no authority here. He was not of the exotic fields or the deep Alaskan snow. He was not of the lumber yards or run down diners, the barren mountains or the ocean that rushed up against him. There was nothing, and he was all.
Jason sat in the corner, behind "San Francisco 2000." He was hunched over, like he used to be when he played for me. He had a look of deep concentration like a caged animal on his face as strands of his hair fell into his eyes. He was next to me, his arms wrapped tightly around me as I stood stock still while the universe passed through me, up over and around me. I could feel his rough callused fingertips run through my hair as we stood spinning, bathed in light. There he was rushing through me, a life encased in stone, 360 degrees right through my synapses. I felt his hands delicately dance over the strings of his guitar and could feel the wind rushing through his long dark hair as he dove into the icy Alaskan waters. His sweat dripped from my skin, I could feel his body convulsing with a thick jagged pain and pleasure and saw his hands flying out to scar the canvas.
We were together, bound by tropical rainforests and the bite of Antarctica. He was Venus, born of the ocean upon a tiny seashell. The waters rushed through him, they slapped his face and held him by his long dark hair. His eyes were closed as he emerged from the waters and came rising up from nowhere and into the ocean waves that beat him. He stood there with me, scratching through the lining of my stomach. Rushing through my bloodstream, an exotic creature whose name no one could recognize.
…I left the canvas and reached for the window. I stared out at the cold barren streets of my tiny Alaskan Lumber town. I felt his hand on my shoulder. It was time to go, somewhere not bound or broken. A place where people didn't work in lumber yards or mourn eccentric artists passing. I was born to wander and he would come with me.
I stared into the canvas a long while, my icy blue eyes searching for the code, hunting for the message, the meaning of everything which lay buried inside the war torn canvas. I thrashed at it with streaks of blue and lavender, bright red and burnt orange moaning like a women possessed by her lovers hand. Sweat poured from my body and dripped from my hair as I stood before the canvas, wearing nothing but one of Jason's long dress shirts. And there it was, standing before me like Poseidon's ocean or Venus's sea shell; life, passion, existence. All mingling together like the gapes of a fine wine delicately merging into something beyond the canvas, beyond the paints, the artist, the idea. Something not of this world, beyond it and its comprehension eternally.
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