Valley //
Eleanor Rigby is whispering from the record player, the needle running pointed kisses through revolving vinyl valleys. Above, the slow ceiling fan throbs out of tempo and in the opposite direction. The heat is hardly discouraged, as stiflingly heavy as my drooping eyelids under this haze of a half-drowse. From my weary recline the single window reveals a sky even hazier, all shades of sickly brown, like dried blood diluted with piss and sprayed against the sagging canvas above. Plumes of pitch-black smoke billow from the factories just beyond the distant jagged-wire fence. They stand stark and cruel against the mute, ashen earth.
There’s a low drone pooling in my earlobes and pulling me down, the clanking of machinery in the industrial city below, a barrage of staccato twisted into a wave that never breaks. I cough when aftershocks from the deep miners leave the shambled tenement houses shuddering. I’ve been coughing more lately.
She stills my paroxysms with a subtle touch, her hand brushing over my chest as if tracing images of the long-gone flowers she had loved, back when the window was festooned with chrysanthemums budding and the sky’s only pockmarks were the stars at night.
I run my hand over the small of her back, the topography of her body so different from the cyclic edging of the 45 rpm Parlophone. There’s a lamp near the sunken bed, but the light is burned out, and her head’s silhouette seems cast from the surrounding dim. I feel myself shudder as she lowers herself next to me, the gentle waterfall of her hair dancing against my parched lips and settling between my shoulder and my ear. I can sense the tension in her arms, in the tautness of her muscles.
They relax as I pull her closer, as we enrobe each other in a quiet embrace. When I kiss her all the broken streets without fade back into the drone, and I can taste the hopeful pulse of her heartbeat.
The needle has reached the center of the record, halted in the sudden silence as the disc below keeps spinning, spinning, spinning.
It’s my favorite part of the song. When the real lyrics hang in the air long after the audible notes have drifted away. All the lonely people. Nowhere do they belong.
//
Eleanor Rigby is whispering from the record player, the needle running pointed kisses through revolving vinyl valleys. Above, the slow ceiling fan throbs out of tempo and in the opposite direction. The heat is hardly discouraged, as stiflingly heavy as my drooping eyelids under this haze of a half-drowse. From my weary recline the single window reveals a sky even hazier, all shades of sickly brown, like dried blood diluted with piss and sprayed against the sagging canvas above. Plumes of pitch-black smoke billow from the factories just beyond the distant jagged-wire fence. They stand stark and cruel against the mute, ashen earth.
There’s a low drone pooling in my earlobes and pulling me down, the clanking of machinery in the industrial city below, a barrage of staccato twisted into a wave that never breaks. I cough when aftershocks from the deep miners leave the shambled tenement houses shuddering. I’ve been coughing more lately.
She stills my paroxysms with a subtle touch, her hand brushing over my chest as if tracing images of the long-gone flowers she had loved, back when the window was festooned with chrysanthemums budding and the sky’s only pockmarks were the stars at night.
I run my hand over the small of her back, the topography of her body so different from the cyclic edging of the 45 rpm Parlophone. There’s a lamp near the sunken bed, but the light is burned out, and her head’s silhouette seems cast from the surrounding dim. I feel myself shudder as she lowers herself next to me, the gentle waterfall of her hair dancing against my parched lips and settling between my shoulder and my ear. I can sense the tension in her arms, in the tautness of her muscles.
They relax as I pull her closer, as we enrobe each other in a quiet embrace. When I kiss her all the broken streets without fade back into the drone, and I can taste the hopeful pulse of her heartbeat.
The needle has reached the center of the record, halted in the sudden silence as the disc below keeps spinning, spinning, spinning.
It’s my favorite part of the song. When the real lyrics hang in the air long after the audible notes have drifted away. All the lonely people. Nowhere do they belong.
//
Partial list:
- NCTE Writing Award Winner, 2012
- "Existence" (poetry) in Brilliance
- "Catch" (fiction) and "The Choreographer" (poetry) in Leland Quarterly
- "Five Senses of Forgetting" (poetry) in West Magazine
- 2015 Chappell Lougee Fellow
- "this is how i'll remember you" (poetry) in the Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies