May 22nd: Blue Fay
I am in bed watching the Tales of Yanxi Palace with the blinds drawn. The empress is in a coma, the main character has been sent to the imperial slave house, and the emperor’s favorite concubine has just hung herself from the rafters of the Palace of Gathered Elegance. I woke up at 4.30am and have been watching Chinese soap operas since dawn. My studio is full of wilting lilies, and bowls of lemons, and poems taped to the walls, poems taped to the doors, poems taped to the bathroom mirror. My thesis is due two weeks from tomorrow. My committee is expecting sixty poems. There are sixty poems taped to the walls, but this is a more ambiguous victory than it might, at first, appear. The difference is vague but visceral. The page numbers of a book are not the book itself.
I pull myself together. I pick up the pieces of last night’s outfit, folding the trousers, hanging the collared shirt back up in the closet, and crawl toward the shower. I wash my hair. I make a bowl of porridge and eat it standing up, facing the poems. They hang on the wall in uniform ranks, rows of fours and fives. I try to imagine what it would be like to read them for the first time, and I decide it would be hideous. I haven’t been sleeping well. My friend AJ blames the poems. He thinks that the poems are climbing down from the wall and crawling into bed with me at night. I wish I wasn’t writing a book. I wish I was a suburban mom with five kids, a hatchback, and a mortal enemy on the HOA. I look at myself in the mirror and wonder who would ever want to marry someone this sensitive. It’s barely even 9am and I’ve already made myself cry.
I can’t work at home. I go to a cafe on Folsom with a large brick patio. I sit down at a long, scarred oak table, surrounded by hanging succulents and potted lemon trees. I attempt to face the problem head on. I open a google doc and spend two hours lineating and unlineating the same poem.
I give up. I go home. I have a meeting with someone from the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication to discuss my application for a tenure-track position at San Mateo City College. During the meeting, I realize that the deadline to submit my application was last night. The writing consultant is horrified but I show no emotion. If getting an MFA in poetry has taught me anything, it’s that the future is vexed, unbound by promise, slippery as a sex toy.
I call my ex-boyfriend. He tells me he is going to break up with his new boyfriend because their star charts aren’t compatible. He asks me to remind him what day I was born, down to the hour, down to the minute. He looks at my star chart. Apparently, there is something disturbing about the placement of my Pluto, revealing the sporadic and unforeseeable nature of my anger, my wrath evaporating off the surface of my life like water and falling on people when they expect it least. Other than that, he says my chart is perfect.
While we speak, I walk around the apartment and study the wilting lilies. At first, I think I should throw them out, but then I realize there are unopened buds hidden under the brown petals. I twist the dead blooms off their stems, collecting them in an old coffee tin. The pollen coats my hands, freckles my arms, stains my tank top, bleeding into the white fabric. After removing all the dead blooms, four buds remain. I give them more water. I hang up the phone.
I walk to the Haight to look for a graduation dress. I go to Wasteland and try on a prairie dress that goes down to my ankles. I go to Relic and try on a beautiful purple evening gown from the 1950s. The dress slips effortlessly over my head and down my body like the beginning of a curse. It fits so tightly I can’t take it off. I have to pull back the velvet curtains and ask the salesgirls for help. They crowd into the fitting room, their hair in victory rolls, their poodle skirts pushing up against the mirror. It takes three women to lift the dress over my shoulders. It’s torturous, the zipper gets stuck, the 75-year-old seams threatening to rip over my ribcage. Finally, the women work the dress over my head and I am standing there in nothing but my boxer shorts. The women nod and carry the dress out of the changing room.
On my way home, I buy a whole chicken at the store. I simmer it in a stock pot for an hour with celery and bay leaves and an entire onion. I remove the chicken, strip the breasts and thighs, and lower the bones back into the pot. I am not sick, not exactly, but I’m open to the idea. I believe in the common cold the way I believe in the future, something innocent and inevitable, massing on the horizon of my life.
I take a bath. I clean out. I lotion my arms and legs and chest. I put on a pair of dark charcoal trousers and a bright blue shirt. I walk to the Castro. I pass the bars, and the sex shops, and the magazine stalls selling vintage porn. There are two men breaking up with each other under the awnings of a shuttered storefront.
“I get that,” one of them says, holding both hands behind his back, rubbing his thumb over his knuckles. “But the thing is…”
I turn on 18th Street and walk up into the hills. I am looking for a blue house with large bay windows. A man answers the door. He kisses me and his puppy runs between his legs, sits down on his feet, and begins to cry. She hates when he brings guys over. He invites me to sit on the couch, and the puppy immediately jumps between us, wedging herself down into the cushions and glaring at us with all the suspicious propriety of a Victorian chaperone.
The puppy gets banished to the guest bedroom. She cries through the walls. The bay windows are open and the wind seeps into the living room. My friend AJ once described the wind in San Francisco as “a dog with three legs.” I start trembling and the man puts his arms around me.
I like hanging out with him a lot, but there is one thing I’m never prepared for. He likes to listen to me. He lets me talk myself in circles, revealing things I never intended to say out loud. I tell him about the gogo boy I was in love with back in LA, about how much I hate my poems, about my fear of disease, the unknowable rhythms of my immune system. I am sure that there will be some terrible consequence for all this transparency, but he just keeps holding me. He takes my face in his hand and tells me I am very handsome, and very smart. It’s only 9pm and I have already made myself cry. I suddenly understand why his puppy behaves the way she does, her desire to be close to him at all times, her fear of separation.
I walk home a little before midnight. I stop myself from turning on the lights because I do not want to see the poems, or maybe because I do not want the poems to see me. I promise myself that tomorrow I will take everything off the walls, that I will make a real effort to trust the men in my life, that I will stop making decisions out of fear. I decide to watch one more episode of Yanxi Palace before bed. Somewhere, on a sound stage in the People’s Republic of China, the Qianlong Emperor is threatening to have the palace embroiderer decapitated. I take off my tank top, still stained with pollen. I run my fingers over the stain while the palace eunuchs interrogate the embroiderer. Isn’t she going to beg the emperor for mercy? I take out my own embroidery box, and fit a hoop over the tank top. The embroiderer is on her knees but she refuses to beg. She reasons with the emperor. She remonstrates. I select some green floss, splitting it down the middle three times until I have equal lengths of thread. I fit the first length of thread through the eye of a needle, knotting the end. I push the needle through the center of the stain. For a moment, I hesitate, and then I start embroidering a lilypad.
Blue Fay is a prose poet from Southern California. He has worked in children’s hospitals, concert halls, and most recently, the prison system, teaching creative writing. Blue is currently serving as the poetry editor of Faultline Journal.