Venus Comb

by Mia

Remember when I’d tuck your skin into my purse,

            and take you to the ocean to play?

Perched atop a limestone skeleton,

            a silver slip down your back,

iridescence settles the waves, the sand, your eyes;

            incandescent and supple, your curves glow.

Peel back the layers, sit by me,

            sealskin bustle around your hips.

Peel open the rising sun,

            let the layers warm us in waves.

Salsa with me along the shore,

            dip your feet into nascent nebulae;

twist abalone, cockle and cone into crowns:

            You are the princess of the sea.

Toeing the shore, you call

            fantastical creatures with glistening sides;

in pod, school, shiver and bloom,      

            they arrive.

Blue-black, your silhouette pours,

            luminous, into my cupped palms,

smelling of salt and moonrise,

            of celestial waves and a pool of stars.

The skin of your translucent temples

            exposes veins, ribbons of seawater,

that lick your pulse’s shoreline.

            My job was to keep the ocean alive:

Tidepools in your bathtub,

            ocean spray in your hair,        

foam that smells

            like the crest of a wave.

Tides carried me far;

            a landlocked island with no room for a seal.

You flash my peripherals;

            sandy eyes, parched skin, somber smile.

There is no ocean where I live;

            without me, there isn’t one near you.

You were made to paddle, surf and glide,

            not drag bloodied feet against asphalt.

I will make us an ocean in my dorm:

            a cavern under my bed,

an inlet to the cafeteria,

            a mobile of glass, polished lime and seafoam.

The worst thing to do is let you dry out.

            Please let me kiss color into your cheeks;

the waves will comb your hair;

            clutch the sealskin to your chest

and swim

            far out

                        to sea.

oh-thats-wanky:

After far too long of a delay*, I’m quite pleased to present the seventh in a series of interviews with writers in the Brittana fandom.

You may know Mia from FF.net, or through her rambunctious tumblr blog, and I consider her an up-and-coming writer in our fandom. Her work shows a sensitivity for both emotion and character, and I’m looking forward to what she has in store for us in the future.

OTW: Mia, you have a story in progress called Mariposa. Can you tell me what it’s about, what what prompted you to write it?

Read More

Mia, OTW, this is wonderful! Great questions and such lovely, lovely answers. And I can learn something about my own writing here. Thank you for that, Mia.

that love is dependent on memory,
that life is eternal and therefore criminal,
that thought is an invisible veil that covers our eyes,
that death is only another animal,
that beauty is formed by desperation,
that sex is solely a human problem,
that pets are wild in heaven,
that sounds and smells escape us,
that there are bones in the earth without any marker,
that language refers to too many things,
that music hints at what we heard before we sang,
that the circle is loaded,
that nothing we know by forgetting is sacred,
that humor charges the smallest things,
that the gods are animals without their masks,
that stones tell secrets to the wildest creatures,
that nature is an idea and not a place,
that our bodies have diminished in size and strength,
that our faces are terrible,
that our eyes are double when gazed upon,
that snakes do talk, as well as asses,
that we compose our only audience,
that we are geniuses when we wish to kill,
that we are naked despite our clothes,
that our minds are bodies in another world.

Can’t you ask some computer wiz to help you locate it?

Nooooooo, it was just on Tumblr! I did it all in one draft!

:o Oh dear!!!!! I am sure the rewrite will be even better. You can do it!

You are sweet, but oh, god!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

That is EXACTLY how I feel!

I think you can still copy and paste the first few paragraphs from someone’s page who has reblogged it. lajeunefilleenfleur’s page shows the first three paragraphs still.

Three paragraphs is good—

No! Was it Why Do You Love Me? I had the page up and I just copied and pasted it—do you want me to send it?

OH MY GOD YOU ARE AMAZING AND YOU ARE SAVING ME AND THANK YOOOOUUUU!!!!

GET IT FROM THE PERSON WHO HAD THE PAGE UP WEEEEE

DONE AND DONE!

literaryluminations asked: Tess! What's your favorite color? Have you always been a writer?

My favorite colors are in the turquoise, blue and green spectrums. But my favorite colors also change according to the weather: grays when it’s misty out, reds and golds in winter, pale blues and greens and whites in summer. But blues and greens always.

I wrote my first story in first grade when I had extra time in class. I never, ever stopped. I began writing poetry when I was eleven, and never stopped that, either. My first story was about about eight orphan girls who lived together in a garden :)

literaryluminations asked: Forgive me if you've already discussed this, but what's your dream garden, inside and out? What would you grow? What would you do in it? What's your favorite thing about gardens?

Mia, I love this question! And I had to take awhile to think about it…

When I imagine my dream garden, I am thinking a little about a cottage garden, I think—lots of beautiful flowers trained over trellises, wisteria climbing the walls and veiling the windows, trees with low branches and profuse blossoms shading almost everything but the garden’s borders where all the sun-loving flowers would be. There would be roses and jasmine, and violets and clover would hide among stones, while violet snow carpets the grass under a jacaranda. It would be shaded and cool and fragrant and wild.

I would grow flowers, of course, and nurse fruit trees, and I would have an herb garden for cooking.

I would spend a lot of time there, and I would have a swing in one of the trees, and I would doubtless have picnics during which I would coax the lovely girl with me to sit and read with me and drink wine and eat berries.

And my favorite thing about gardens is a little bit of wildness; I love that they’re alive, and that animals and birds come and go from them, and that it’s as if there are birds singing inside your own house. I love that I can be out in the world while still preserving some of myself in it. I love that it’s part of the world outside, and that the world comes and goes from it, even while I can be there and choose who’s there with me.

Ivy ties the cellar door
in autumn, in summer morning glory
wraps the ribs of a mouse.
Love binds me to the one
whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,
whose sleeping head I kiss,
wondering is it death?
beauty? this dark
star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.

My love’s hair is autumn hair, there
the sun ripens.
My fingers harvest the dark
vegetable of her body.
In the morning I remove it
from my tongue and
sleep again.

Hair spills
through my dream, sprouts
from my stomach, thickens my heart,
and tangles from the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb.
Hair ascends the tree
of my childhood—the willow
I climbed
one bare foot and hand at a time,
feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing
my father plead from his window, Don’t fall!

In my dream I fly
past summers and moths,
to the thistle
caught in my mother’s hair, the purple one
I touched and bled for,
to myself at three, sleeping
beside her, waking with her hair in my mouth.

Along a slippery twine of her black hair
my mother ties ko-tze knots for me:
fish and lion heads, chrysanthemum buds, the heads
of Chinamen, black-haired and frowning.

Li-En, my brother, frowns when he sleeps.
I push back his hair, stroke his brow.
His hairline is our father’s, three peaks pointing down.

What sprouts from the body
and touches the body?
What filters sunlight
and drinks moonlight?
Where have I misplaced my heart?
What stops wheels and great machines?
What tangles in the bough
and snaps the loom?

Out of the grave
my father’s hair
bursts. A strand
pierces my left sole, shoots
up bone, past ribs,
to the broken heart it stitches,
then down,
swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down,
through the right foot.

What binds me to this earth?
What remembers the dead
and grows towards them?

I’m tired of thinking.
I long to taste the world with a kiss.
I long to fly into hair with kisses and weeping,
remembering an afternoon
when, kissing my sleeping father, I saw for the first time
behind the thick swirl of his black hair,
the mole of wisdom,
a lone planet spinning slowly.

Sometimes my love is melancholy
and I hold her head in my hands.
Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death.
Then, I must grab handfuls
of her hair, and, I tell you, there
are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men
taking off their boots, their hearts breaking,
not knowing
which they love more, the water, or
their women’s hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

literaryluminations asked: What's the most decadent dessert you've ever had? Best vacation you've ever experienced?

Most decadent: a triple chocolate cake my mother made for my birthday once—it was chocolate so rich I literally couldn’t finish a whole piece. And I was a child. A child who loved chocolate.

Best vacation is harder. But… I think it was when I went alone to Dublin. The Irish are every bit as cool as their reputation. And I spent each day buying books, reading them in cafes, and doing the whole thing over again… in between actual adventures, of course :)

literaryluminations asked: Tess! Which poem has been most influential to your life? Or for something lighter: do you have a favorite kind of jellyfish?

Ooooh…

21 Love Poems by Adrienne Rich—I’d never read lesbian love poetry before, or love poetry that mixed in so much about the world, or so much awareness of human pain.

The “mauve stinger”, or Pelagia noctiluca: