I write the words on the wing
of a butterfly flapping rings
around the world, speak them through
sliding doors I always miss
as the train zips, rushed away, they
exit two stops down, tucked into a purse
pocket, plucked out weeks later
with a tissue and tumble
down, sidewalk bound, to be tripped
over, kicked like a curb…
My writer self was reborn about a year and half ago, when I began penning stories from the dark times during my years of alcohol abuse. I had been free from addiction for two years, and the words were screaming for release.
Hello. My name is Vixen Lea and I have been Razzle-Dazzle for 1000 days.
It seems like such a small thing when you look at the words of it: I Decided to Quit Drinking. Like I just made a decision and then that was that and all was good in…
I pulled the card again:
Impatience.
Ah, so that’s what’s been needling me —
again I find my mind pacing the corner of the room.
Be steady, she says, There are stallions in the sky.
Today I let my human walk the earth,
balancing gravity with spirit,
pushed heavenward by mosses, held in…
Looking for you every night in the mouthfeel of merlot, my own bed always seemed colder than the stoop in front of the Ukrainian bar down Damen Ave, where the lost lined up —
aging hipsters knee-to-knee, flicking Parliament butts into gutters — as if we weren’t on that same…
Pale skin translucent, luminescent
shin-stubble like poppy seeds
under middle-school gymnasium fluorescent,
nothing takes longer than being last-picked,
kick-tripped, holding sweaty adolescence
in my palms, a trapezoid
caught in a square-dance, bulging agony
spilling over granny-pants, baby-fat
lined up behind razor burn and spiral perm,
hiding chicken legs and too…
Recovery is a word I have used often to describe my journey away from alcohol. It is universally recognized as a term for the stage of life one enters after quitting an addiction. It is a term that implies a convalescence: you were sick, now you are recovering.
Yet this…
It’s a wet Christmas — unseasonably warm
and a friend lies dying in the ICU
from this ongoing present-day plague. …
ebb. flow.
an unlikely molecule
perpetually stable yet
continuously morphing
freeze. thaw.
without you
we are no better than Brother Mars
shrunken and dusty
imagined riverbeds like scabs
across mummified plains
boil. condense.
you have reigned
with a fair and firm hand
dousing fire and nurturing earth
hammering down justice
in swift torrents and gulping…
The day is uncharacteristically warm
(like our bed, lately)
and the year has run its ruts into us,
you and I going round in circles, always something
to be dressed and bandaged
even as there is nothing more to be said —
but am I too much like those dopey saplings,
daring to unfurl even as…
