An Important Text From My Friend, About Feeling Like You're Pretending With Your Identity. I Feel Like

What the Dragon Said: a Love Story

by Catherynne M. Valente

So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair      and he says why the long tale?                  HAR HAR BUDDY says the dragon                  FUCK YOU. The dragon’s a classic the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats take in those Christmas colors, those impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath, comes standard with a heap of rubylust goldhuddled treasure.                  Go ahead.                  Kick the tires, boy.                  See how she rides. Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds roll off her back like dandruff. Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin? I’d rather be a unicorn.                  Always thought that was the better gig. Everyone thinks you’re innocent. Everyone calls you pure. And the girls aren’t afraid they come right up with their little hands out for you to sniff like you’re a puppy and they’re gonna take you home. They let you put your head right in their laps.                  But nobody on this earth ever got what they wanted. Now I know what you came for. You want my body. To hang it up on a nail over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica who lays her head in your lap look how much it takes to make me feel like a man.                  We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal shit right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been called up. This is the big game. You don’t have to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers like your monkey bravado can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet and lose. You’ve got nothing I want. Here’s something I bet you don’t know:      every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies.                  Something about seeing and being seen                  something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem                  I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.                  That last blockbuster took out a whole family                  of Bhutan thunder dragons living in Latvia the fumes of their cleargas hoard hanging on their beards like blue ghosts. A dragon’s gotta get zen                  with ephemerality. You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather with butcher’s chalk: cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue, chuck, chops, brisket, roast.                  I dig it, I do. I want to eat everything, too. When I look at the world      I see a table. All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales, bankers and Buddha statues the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins                  if you let me swallow you whole                  I’ll call you whatever you want. Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea                  Don’t they know they’d be safer                  inside me? I could be big for them      I could hold them all My belly could be a city      where everyone was so loved they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be the hyperreal post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.      I could eat them      and feed them      and eat them      and feed them. This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn. Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood and they don’t burn up like comets with love that tastes like starving to death.      And you, with your standup comedy knightliness, covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo, you can’t begin to think through      what it takes to fill up a body like this. It takes everything pretty and everything true      and you stick yourself in a cave because your want is bigger than you. I just want to be the size of a galaxy so I can eat all the stars and gas giants without them noticing and getting upset. Is that so bad?                  Isn’t that what love looks like?                  Isn’t that what you want, too? I’ll make you a deal.      Come close up stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself the goldpile of my body      Close enough to smell everything you’ll never be. Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing is it a snake that eats her tail and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth anyway? Everyone knows poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel like you’re just a story someone is telling about someone like you?                  I get that. I get you. You and me we could fit inside each other. It’s not nihilism if there’s really no point to anything. I have a secret down in the deep of my dark. All those other kids who wanted me to call them paladins, warriors, saints, whose swords had names, whose bodies were perfect as moonlight      they’ve set up a township near my liver had babies with the maidens they didn’t save      invented electric lightbulbs      thought up new holidays.                              You can have my body                              just like you wanted. Or you can keep on fighting dragons writing dragons fighting dragons re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch you mammals always win.                  But hey, hush, come on. Quit now. You’ll never fix that line.                  I have a forgiveness in me                  the size of eons                  and if a dragon’s body is big enough                  it just looks like the world.                                                          Did you know the earth used to have two moons?

this one really gets me bestie

(meditations in an emrgency, cameron awkward-rich)

i am holding hands with a girl at the pet store. i love how her voice changes when she speaks to different animals. round and bubbly for the angelfish, high and breathy for the calico kittens, sonorous and slithery for the python. she loves them all, even the great hairy tarantula that makes me cringe. 

i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t.

“are you two… together?”

this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words. 

“there are children here, you know.” 

in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon. 

i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with.

even with this, there is nowhere i would rather be than holding hands with her in a pet store, with her voice like rain on a hot day, her peach lips blowing kisses for fish, her grip tightening as if to say “i dare you to take this away from me.”

I owe the healing to myself and the little girl in me with big dreams.

I have been thinking of the ways we tell people things. My father's hands shake, but he holds the phone up so I can watch the video from six feet away. My mother emails me the recipe of her beef stroganoff at 6 in the morning with the comment - woke up and didn't want to forget to do this! On the highway, we sing so loudly my voice grows hoarse; on the beach I sneak nice rocks into people's hands so they have something to hold; on the floor we all sit quietly in the same agreeable silence. We are all saying the same thing.

My friends say "Oh you know, keeping busy." This means they are having a hard time but making themselves survive it. I ask them to help me walk me dog; this is me telling them it's okay sometimes to just be present and talk about young adult fiction. When I cancel again because I can't get out of bed, she tells me she's on her way with cookies.

I point out the sunset. She shares her fork before I ask for it. He calls me at 1 AM just because I'm on the road alone, we talk about stupid shit. She waits for me to get indoors safely before driving away. He says - nah, forget it, I'm happy to do it for free.

People are saying it, you know? They say it often and loudly. Sometimes, you know - you just have to be listening.

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

kill the shift manager in your brain

bathroom sink meditations, r.a.

dictionary

hi :) i love your blog so very much. i can’t sleep and im feeling horrifically anxious and i was wondering if you have any words that i can use to wrap myself around. anything that feels like being held ♡

Callista Buchen, “Taking Care”

Pat Schneider, “The Patience of Ordinary Things”

Kim Hye Rim

“Come, let’s stand by the window and look out / at the light on the field. / Let’s watch how / the clouds cover the the sun and almost nothing / stirs in the grass.”

Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August; “Thinking”

Heather Christle, “Then We Are in Agreement”

Holly Warburton

Ross Gay, from The Book of Delights 

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

Bernadette Mayer, from The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica

Ben McLaughlin, The Train

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Joy Harjo, from “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet”