Publications

Slides

Tue, 9 Jun 2009 18:12:25 -0700

I slid open the closet door, the left side, and that damn Tigger bag I kept hidden fell off the top shelf and struck me on the forehead and the zipper ripped apart and spilled the goddamn slides all over my fucking floor, the slides I kept, the ones you submitted with your EPK, the ones you wanted back, along with your portfolio, your CDs, your DVDs, the ones everyone else saw you in, that I wouldn’t watch, because I didn’t need to, the promos and the pornos you hid from me when I was in your apartment on the wrong side of the 101; and when they taped us for the documentary, on the beach, you in black shorts, everything black, all the time, even in the sun (and there was always sun), my hand-embroidered hippie shirt billowed, the white cloth fluttered across your white arm, we were that close, even then, and you handed them to me like hundreds of little square gifts encased in protective sheets of plastic for my approval, like a child, pushing them into my hands, index finger lingering on my palm, like a man, hoping I’d get you signed, and now they were all scattered on the carpet and slipped into crevasses behind my dresser and hiding between the folded sheets, sunk into the toes of my socks and burrowed amongst my underwear, all those damn slides, white rectangles filled with processed film, tungsten lighting, blue and orange gels, and you, in all of them, for me.  And the pictures, the one on the beach where I painted you, you in your goddamn headshot shot, watercolors bled into burnt sienna, and the 35mm of you and me, the negative, turned positive, you in the Harley jacket, the cracked sunglasses, the I Love Cocaine T-shirt, and me, in a silk sundress, snaked through your legs, white cotton underwear unknowingly shown, shame, and the frame toppled down onto the hardwood floor in your coffin-sized bedroom next to the red bathroom with a busted lightbulb, and the mattress pulled away from both, out onto the floor in the living room because I was claustrophobic and couldn’t breathe, with the fan, not oscillating, angled on me, always on my naked body, a sheen of sweat from the heavy Hollywood air and the smog from the freeway, and you, the next day, in black and white newspaper pixels, suspended by six ropes threaded through the hooks attached to the piercings through the tattoos in your back, my blood extracted for your ink, while the cameras rolled and the reporters volleyed microphones like nets catching your words, and you meditated through the pain, pushed through the publicity.  I thought I had thrown that bag in the fire we built out back in the alley that day when you were gone and the fumes from the exterminator were still lingering around making us sick, but the weather was cold, dropped below fifty, so we bundled up in sweatshirts, and wool socks, and tied scarves around our necks, and stayed in and smoked cigarettes and did shots of vodka with wedges of lemons on the kitchen counter, and played Buena Vista Social Club over and over, tangoed on the carpet across skeletal remains of silverfish and termites waiting to be vacuumed with the sparse black ashes from some, but apparently not all, of the tiny little frames of you that melted in the fire and floated inside through the holes in the screen door.
copyright 2007 LeAnne Kline
First published in Poetic Diversity April 2009

The Reunion

Tue, 8 Jul 2008 10:03:05 -0700

The sweet rain rusted
his hair into honey
as delicate storms
of languid death
and whispers lusted
for worshiping shadows.

Twenty-Three Steps

Fri, 4 Jul 2008 07:19:02 -0700

The breathing woke her; excited, uncontainable panting, like an overweight frenzied dog fearfully obeying his master’s command to sit still. But it wasn’t her dog. She knew right away who it was and recounted her steps before crawling into bed that night, the doors, windows all locked, the skinny piece of wood slid into the metal groove of the sliding glass doors. The deadbolt, the chain lock, the foot-stop lock that penetrated into the floor. She fought the urge to open her eyes, pressing her lids tight against themselves to prolong the moment, this last moment. If she opened them, the room would be dark anyway and though she wouldn’t be able to see him, he would be able to see her eyelids flicker, and then he’d make his move, and do what he came here to do.
She wanted to roll over, quick and stealth, pull open the drawer of her nightstand that housed the gun. Her gun. A .22 pistol she had borrowed from her dad two weeks ago, who claimed it was hers, had been since she was five, though she had never fired it or seen it, for that matter, before he, not her dad, but he, showed up again, this time in person not in letters or flower deliveries, but two weeks ago he had drummed up the nerve to show up in person at her door. Her front door. The fucker had walked up to it like it was a summer Sunday afternoon and knocked on it.
It wasn’t summer, it was winter. It wasn’t Sunday, it was Thursday. It wasn’t afternoon, it was nighttime.
He caught her completely unaware. She never expected him to materialize in person, after ignoring the years of creepy letters written in cryptic block letters, two lines of text for every college-ruled line on the sheets of paper, and flower deliveries every year though she moved from apartment to townhouse, west coast to east, phone number changed every year or so, the flowers always showed up, Valentine’s Day was always a reminder that he had found her…again.
She didn’t believe he would show up again two weeks later after his botched attempt to knock on her door and come in. She told him off, said she’d call the cops, her dog was barking, as she raced her fingers along the wall for the light switches, brightness chasing away the shadows he wanted to perch behind, blend inside, and hide underneath. He only got to the twentieth step. Her step, her front step. Then failed to get in.
Nevertheless, without opening her eyes, her body enshrouded by her cotton sheets, duvet, and quilt, she knew he was now standing in the corner of her room. Heaving breath. Waiting. Patient, as he had been all these years. Calculating his next move. And she would not be able to open the drawer and grab her gun. Though, she thought she still might give it a try.
He knew the gun was there, he had been in her room before when she wasn’t home. Had opened every drawer, cabinet, envelope, pulled down her blankets and laid his head on her high thread-count sheets, imagined staring into her eyes before she fell asleep. He had calculated the steps ahead of time, the steps to get to the gun, seven total: open the drawer, pull out the gun, remove the holster, lock, load, point, pull the trigger. He could, would, overcome her by then, by step two, seven was too many for her to succeed.
She had smiled and said hello to him as they passed in the hallway at a party one summer, years ago, eleven years, to be precise. He was on his way to the bathroom, she was on her way out the back door to the lawn lined with tiki torches, smoking coals in the grill, wine, candles, and a weeping willow’s branches swaying in the breeze, white moneymen floating through the air like a fantasy summerland. She was on her way out back to her boyfriend, his best friend, to sit in his arms, a friend who no longer spoke to him. When they broke up, it made things easier on his conscience to continue trying to get in touch with her, just one more smile from her to him, a moment he could slow down in his memory would last the rest of his life. Just one. One smile from her. But she never responded. And he realized he had to do something more, something different than what he had been doing, he couldn’t let the years pass any longer so patiently, he couldn’t be patient at all anymore.
It took him years to summon the courage to bridge the distance between his world and hers. Years of planning, conspiring, mapping, watching, and studying her. And every year, month, day, hour, every minute, every second had been spent planning the one meeting that would lead up to knocking on her door.

She didn’t know all of this then, it wasn’t until just before the lights dimmed that he confessed to her everything he had been thinking over the past decade, in a whisper, rancid breath in her nose, she couldn’t move by then, though, and had to hear him out.
He described his complicated thought processes, wanderings and obsessions and the labyrinth in which his ideas played, running around themselves, amok, creating new thoughts and ideas, all intertwined around her. Only her. As he explained and pleaded, for a moment on his knees in front of her, beside her on the floor next to the bed, like a child saying his nighttime prayers, then back up again holding her gun tenderly as though it were one of her limbs, her wrists, or her delicate fingers, as she lay in bed, frozen, and he babbled on about his plans.
Meticulous. After all the years of thinking it through, the steps were outlined, theorized, proofed, re-worked, beta-tested, until one day, two weeks ago on a Thursday evening in winter, blood draining from his head, snow falling through the bare limbs on the trees, heart pounding adrenaline into beads of sweat, he got out of his car and…
One: Locate her new apartment. Two: Park car outside. Three: Study her habits. Four: Follow her for one week. Five: Rent new car. Six: Follow her for another week. Seven: Buy chocolate. Eight: Buy gloves. Nine: Clean out the basement to make space. Ten: Get haircut. Eleven: Buy new pair of jeans and shirt. Twelve: Wait for her to get home. Thirteen: Listen to music for courage. Fourteen: Breath mint. Fifteen: Close car door quietly. Sixteen: Walk swiftly, twenty steps to her front door. Seventeen: Breathe. Eighteen: Knock. Nineteen: Wait. Twenty: Say Hello. Twenty-One: Walk inside. Twenty-two: Express love. Twenty-three: Give her chocolate.
Of course, he hadn’t planned on harming her dog.
As the lights dimmed, repulsed by his body now in her bed, her lids open, eyes gone blind, her last thought was wishing she had worn matching socks, wondered why he had wasted ten years of his life for this, this end, then the foil on the open chocolate bar sparkled no more.

The Drum Circle

Fri, 1 Feb 2008 07:33:18 -0800

I. Militant, strong,  and liberated from Republicanism,  Christianity and snow.  I scout talent, but not  on the beach, not the drummers.  Clubs all night, VIP, free  backstage passes. Shiny  lavender skirt, bare belly,  tanned through my woodlawn  northeastern skin, and barefoot,  toe ring, two congas, and salsa.    II. Dumbek, (no djembe), because  Egyptians play: taka-tak,  taka-tum, taka-tak, taka-tum  Espresso skin, rough  with freckles, lawn chair  squeaking round the circle.  Mother died years ago;  portrait enfolded in his  wallet. Amir, pilot— and security guard at the strip mall.    III. Bangledeshian family  proud of the accountant  living across the ocean,  Santa Monica Rent  Control. Suit by day,  knit cap and loose-skinned  djembe with no sound  on Sunday. Disney, Warner,  and now stealth bombers.  All in need of number-  crunching by Rahmon  and his Lexus.   IV. Louise, pale-skinned gypsy  lusterless orange hair,  frizzy ringlets and woven  feathers in braids that whip  when she dances inside  the circle. Corpulent, no  shame, jiggles when she  shimmies. Black lace  with beads and coins.  Lost her children,  lives alone on Speedway.    V Freakshow, downstairs,  only two dollars, a new  exhibit underneath  Venice Beach. Skip,  the armless, legless  midget, who scoots  on his skateboard, racing  up the boardwalk.    VI. Masters.

The Caves

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 07:43:34 -0700

No more needles, pain, blood, no more suction, pulling or stretching, no more therapy, healing, sharing. I left with no shoes, but decided I would make my own one day. Kill a cow, tan its hide, sew the sole to the tongue with the intestines as thread, how hard could it be? I just needed to get to a place where no one knew me, missed me, realized I was gone. The weather was nice, pleasant warm breeze aerating through the worn cotton of my gown. I let my hair down. I pretended to let it down, it had all been shaved off. It was easy to pretend anything now, anything at all.
To the caves was where I decided to go. The cow would have to come later. Cows didn’t live in caves. Maybe I could just go to a deserted farm, after I lived in the caves for a while. I used to travel as a child, with my family, place to place, town to town, there were always caves in the woods and cows in the fields, in every country, every state, I could find them both and live happily until the end of the world.
The grass was slick, the moist earth below gave under my weight like a sponge, with just enough squish to feel pleasant without filling the crevasses between my toes with unpleasant mud. I remembered my toenails being painted, pale pink, I was a girl once, small with pale pink skin to match. And a handbag my aunt had given me.
Three hundred and sixty-two hairs on my forearm before my elbow, that’s where the handbag used to swing. Forty-one freckles above my wrist, where my watch used to indicate the time. I could live with no time, or maybe tell myself the time, whatever time I wished it to be.
But then how could I know for sure, what if I couldn’t see the sun? Or in the middle of the night, if I wanted to know, what would I tell myself? It would only be me, in the caves, maybe with the cow eventually.
The forest floor was quilted in pine needles that lodged under my toenails every few yards. The caves. The caves. Were there really caves out here? Now I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t quite nail the memory and make it stick. Dusk in the forest was as good as night, but there were fireflies. I remembered catching them as a child, and hammering the nail through the lid of the jar, and filling it with slick grass, and pine needles, and some cones.
The lights bounced around, through the trees, backlighting the leaves, the bark shining, and something barking and an owl hooo-ing, and the caves weren’t anywhere, and there were certainly no cows. My toes looked darker, but red, red was under the nails, and I wanted pink, but I couldn’t find my handbag to catch the fireflies, and how would they be able to breathe there without a hole for air, they would escape if I left it unzipped.
The lights, on, off, glowing, far, then closer, and as I turned around in circles trying to remember where the caves were, a voice sang out my name, low, like the owl, Hooo, and the wind rustled my cotton gown and the leaves chimed in, and I answered, “It’s me, that’s who.” And a hand reached out from the light of the fireflies, handing me my pink purse and a pair of shoes, a glass of water and a pink tablet, and I swallowed, as the sun shined, through the meadow, with a cow, and big round boulders marked the mouth of the caves.