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Pink Dinosaur Dreams

Mae Grewal


Pink Dinosaur Dreams

  by Mae Grewal

  Copyright 2013 Mae Grewal

  Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

  Special thanks to:

  Kat Fowler for pulling me out of my box,

  Justin Hegyi for catching me when I fall,

  and

  My parents for believing in me.

  And it's as simple as that.

  Table of Contents

  Why I Write

  Tyger Tyger Wishes

  Zoo

  Where the Moon in Argentina Does Not Rise

  Turtle Yearnings

  When I Go Bad

  Conquer

  Your Lips

  Forever Minus Seventy

  A Requiem for Albus Dumbledore

  Synesthesia

  A Tribute to Adam

  Masks

  9/10 of What They Saw

  ColorMe

  The Phenomenon of Something Permanent

  thisclose

  The Last Confession of My Vans

  Pink Dinosaur Dreams

  Why I Write

  Tyger Tyger Wishes

  Tyger Tyger burning bright

  In the forests of the night

  Wish I may Wish I might

  Have the Wish I Wish tonight

  Deep in the jungle, where the brute roots grow

  Tripping up intentions of years long ago;

  Where the canopy shields against winds of time;

  At the darkest hour of the longest winter night,

  The boy was born to three sets of watching eyes:

  Two ignorant mortals and one creature shy,

  Brownblack, and liquid amber gold

  Like fireflies, like owlswise,

  Like fears creeping, weeping, seeing and unbelieving,

  Like hearts beating, weaving fleeting

  Threads.

  Ephemeral

  KnottedTangled Stuck.

  Heartstrings to pluck,

  Threads.

  And the boy opened eyes of gelatinous black

  And scars laced across his smooth back,

  Unnoticeable to the unwatching fool

  But tangible like the spider web spool.

  His unready mother dropped a single tear

  Then grew ashamed of her unspeakable fear

  And cradled him close:

  This tiny miracle;

  This light of her life;

  This fragile heartbeat;

  This steady breath;

  This her sweat and blood and undamnable river of love

  Molded by some crazy mischance of fate,

  By some lucky alignment of stars

  Into her breakable baby boy.

  Boy?

  Tyger Tyger burning bright

  In the forests of the night

  Wish I may Wish I might

  Have the Wish I Wish tonight

  Curious was the case of the winter solstice cub.

  He grew up watching and waiting and lying in the sun.

  He would lounge up in trees and bat down baby birds

  And wrestle with other boys until they weren't quite sure

  Of his patronage,

  Of his flagerance,

  Of his self-denied anchorage in this world of meN

  Who've beaten back the bushes and the burly undergrowth,

  And the teasing root of Mother and her ever-patient show—

  She'll wait them out,

  She's kind,

  She'll buoy their belie

  Of self-proclaimed, civilized, high and mighty

  Dignity.

  The boy grows up to know this and grows up to know

  No one in the wake of irreconcilable truth. And so,

  He tests the poison berries on his tongue

  And grows well acquainted with the mud

  Into which he is shoved

  By the other boys

  By the puppet strings and victory's toys.

  And he runs home to ask his mother to stop the noise

  She can't, in the end, the truth is his choice.

  She can't see past the streaks that spoil

  The tender skin,

  The human skin

  That stretches across his cheeks and marks him not of their kin.

  Darker than blood and hotter than sin;

  Temperature rising and rage setting in;

  Why is he different? Outcast age ten?

  It's coming,

  It's boiling,

  It's here,

  It's in.

  Combustion

  And sparks and the wrong way spin

  Of grating gears and leering grins

  Of whispers of truth he flees again and again

  He's different, strange creature,

  An alien.

  Tyger Tyger burning bright

  In the forests of the night

  Wish I may Wish I might

  Have the Wish I Wish tonight

  Then one day, stars cross and dark matter takes reign,

  Electric and swirling and magma untamed

  And unsoundable terror surges his veins

  And he snaps and he cries and he roars his own name

  Sake, forsaken by the nurture he claimed

  And he breaks down.

  And he tears down,

  And he rents the red curtains of dawn down;

  And he slashes and crashes and scratches and gnashes and snatches the paint from the wind down.

  He fells down the boy from the village who laughed at the way

  He chased the dragonfly's tail and puffed his own flame.

  And he wrings stripes from the canvas of the bare boy's back—

  And he chokes on his prayers and his bargaining act—

  And God there's nowhere and he hacks and he whacks—

  Miserable, abhorable, he just wants to match!

  Oh for eyes to meet his as he skirts down the path;

  For a smile on lips that don't taste like a snack;

  For an arm to enclose him,

  For a hand to hold his,

  For a brush of the merest fingertips

  Oh for the merest brush of fingertips.

  Now he's caught, now he's captured.

  Now he's surrounded by faces who map their

  Revenge. No, justice.

  And he quakes in his shame and he's held there enraptured,

  The point to the vein at his neck that desperately snaps there.

  Not gun, not knife, but hate-

  Hate. Rusted iron crowbar hate.

  Cold unflinching hate

  Hate born from fear, the vampiric shadow;

  Fear born from difference the miraged abyss.

  So the men bind his limbs, gag his voice, strip his pride,

  Solemnly process to where the jury presides

  Those who unbelieve him, it's they who decide

  Those with shelled glittering beetles for eyes

  That scuttle the crevices of blunder to pry

  The truth. Their truth. The truth will set them free

  Free from the guilt that they refused to see

  A boy.

  A boy with skeletons stripes where a monster should've stood,

  A boy starved and malnourished and lonely.

  Tyger Tyger burning bright

  In the forests of the night

  Wish I may Wish I might

  Have the Wish I Wish tonight

  Would there, could there maybe be...?

  No. Not a single intervening plea;

  Not a single cry for mercy;

  Not a single shred of humanity.

  Not even from the mother who once held him close

  And whispered fantastical worlds as he reposed—

  Who earlier wished fo
r the easier way,

  For her son, for herself.

  And now, who turns her head away.

  That is the iron fist of fear.

  Sentence—swinging axe—exile.

  And without a backwards glance at that lawless desert of love,

  He puts his foot to the earth,

  He puts his legs to the chase,

  He puts his lungs to the test,

  He puts his heart to the race,

  Under starry skies he runs.

  Into jungle where the wild ferns grow,

  And the banana boat leaves in the twilight glow,

  And the vines tango round and tickle the mud,

  And the trunks elbow out and reach far and up,

  And the orchid's alluring breath hangs heavy in the air,

  And the insects buzz and the blind spiders stare,

  And the green lizards dart and the yellow frogs dare,

  And the monkeys screech and the parrots blare,

  And the snake flicks a taste and its coils ensnare,

  And the toucan squawks all, court jester, beware:

  Rogue prince reigns all.

  Padded paws stalk and muscles glide over high shoulder haunches as he smooths in.

  Tyger Tyger burning bright

  In the forests of the Night

  He wishes he may and He wishes he might

  Blend with the beast whose blood he can't fight

  Curl his stripes up for sweet dreams that night

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright.

  Zoo

  Where the Moon in Argentina Does Not Rise

  It was January of 1932 when I decided to kill my husband. It wasn't an impulsive decision, lest anyone think I'm neurotic. It was a long belabored means to an end, to escape. Escape. To save myself. Escape. Then again maybe I am neurotic. He certainly thought so, especially in the minutes before the poisoned tea was finally swallowed. But he'd never loved me and I never him.

  It was an arranged marriage that brought us together and the convenience of an arrangement that kept us together these forty long years. Forty years he stole from me. He nabbed the stars and he pocketed my moon. Forty years I rotted from within.

  In white, I wedded a gray stranger in black, forty long years ago. Out from blue we stepped into the small corner church where Jesus in body and blood blessed this holy matrimony and into gray we stepped out as one. I learned his name in the chauffeured car ride that carried us to the boat and in a sonorous voice he told me my new name. Esperanze, I was excited. He didn't say anything else until we'd reached the docks. There, he grunted, pointing to where a dingy rowboat bobbed up and down in the cloudy teal waters, manned by an emaciated brown in a ragged loincloth. The civilized cannibal would row us to the island, he explained, where we would spend our honeymoon.

  Our honeymoon! I shivered at the thought of something so romantic, so grand. My family, poor but proud, could never have afforded such a luxury, and it became apparent then that my new husband was a very rich man. A honeymoon, I'd shivered, and I still shiver. I have never escaped my honeymoon—boasted threshold of married life— the treacle stickiness of that lie, amber, glumping up my throat and viscousing my words.

  As he held my hand and I held my dress to step gingerly into the spongy rowboat, my husband sheathed my eyes from the sight of the savage. Proper gentleman, I thought then. Selfish brute I think now. It took a year or several to remember, but now I do: before his doughy paw clamped over my virgin eyes I saw the moon for the last time. Crescent and hushed like a dandelion in the frost. I have not seen the moon since in these forty years. The stars are still there for my husband to hang when he pleases so he can force my head to turn to watch those winks taunt me. But I have not seen where he keeps my moon.

  He steps through the door of our humble hut now. For all his once-proclaimed riches, my husband is a poor man in the game of economics and yet he fancies himself a dilettante in the company of liquors he can no longer afford. Years ago, silver men came to the door of our spacious home and demanded our gold. It turned out my husband had some debts to pay, and if he wasn't there to pay him, well, I could make just as easy of a settlement, willingly or no. They kept me tied to the kitchen chair for hours until the orange sun went down and the moon never came up and my husband came home. When he saw the stake out set up in his own home, he became furious, chased the men out of there with cutting words and hurling their filthy money at their slated backs. He ripped me from my chair and threw me to the floor. It was in an anger that my body would bloom blue and accustomed to in the following years. I can still feel where ropes bite into my wrists and linoleum licks my cheeks.

  After this... 'indecent' as he says, though he never likes to, we fled here to the place where you go to get lost, to Argentina, to this thatched roof, to this wild land lush in strange noises at night yet, unquenched in friends and family and familiarity. I do not call it my home, this dearth of love. I do not call it my country, this paucity of civilization. The jungle grows green outside my windows unchecked and burgeons something dangerous inside of me, something reckless. Man cannot tame the earth, earth cultures and grooms man and so it has with me, so it has shown me my escape. Escape. My freedom. Escape.

  My husband hangs his frayed brown coat on its peg and sits down heavily at the dinner table where, without even a glance to where I stand now crippled, now 58, now too browned by this sun and this life and this hard earth, he grabs his pottered blue bowl of soup and ladles it messily into his wide mouth. I finger the tiny vial of toxics in the folds of my apron.

  He has had a hard day of work this day, but I know better now than to think it has been for me. He only labors to wine and dine that vixen Vodka so that he may cheat her the next night with giddy Gin. I do not begrudge these mistresses, I bide my time. But see how he has had a hard day of work this day; I have learned to tell by the state of his thick hands, the once clammy meat of his palms toughened now, like forgotten beef. They are sliced and blistered in some places, thinly roped, hard, shiny to heal in others, and dust, gray dust cakes his fingernails. They must have hit the crust digging the foundation today, and tomorrow they would start on their next set.

  When we first moved to this place, this Satan's good times, my husband joined a construction crew and painted tales of how they would rise cities, glitter them out from between the too tall trees, blossom them up like the purple flowers beyond the backyard. It's been 35 years and I have yet to see these planted sequins thrive and flourish like the native roots meant for this soil. Instead they dig and they dig for some new way to stick something square and neat and clean into the big cats' squalid manor. My husband would not count himself among the they's for much longer though. And watching the wrinkles of his face work and jump up and down as he chewed the meat of the stew, I almost wanted to tell him this, to comfort him with this secret knowledge.

  He grunts for his perfunctory tea, and this is my cue.

  I'm shaking, I did not expect that. I turn to the stove to pour his tea and spill the hot liquid on the dirt floor. My husband cusses, but does not get up to help. I grab the rust-colored kitchen cloth and drop to my knees to mop the mess, nearly crushing my precious vial in the process. I rescue the glass liberty from the folds of my apron and clutch it fast in my knotted grip. I concentrate on the cool nested in my hot hand and remember the same cool breeze on the back of my hot neck the day I picked the plant.

  One does not live in this abomination Argentina forty years without naming the plants, testing them, testing how they test you. I had smuggled knowledge that my husband never knew of. I knew which ferns curled at the touch and which herbs simmered nicely in a stew, which flowers courted the nasty wasps and which buds could bloom in our stuffy kitchen. And I knew which thorns pricked cuts that stung with the acid of the fire ant and which needles plucked off skin like love me love me not. And I knew which leaf made its sugars from the horrors of the sunlight, flowed fear through its spiny green veins, harvested hallucinations to drive the w
isest man mad into the fathomless realm of forever in its thin stem.

  This leaf, Circet Etusa, was rare, even for morbid collector Argentina. But the desperate are the most ruthless hunters. I coaxed a reluctant weed out from the outcasts of my garden. I nourished this vagabond with water I dare not waste on myself. I loved this parasite like a child. And two suns prior, it was ready. I picked it under the stardust with my husband's heavy work gloves. I crushed it with a blunt knife we would melt down again soon. I swept it into the vial that no longer held the mediation I no longer needed. My baby in this vial.

  He was a foolish man to think I would not discover his plot. A woman is never so stupid when it comes to her baby. He was an ignorant man when he swore with stale metal on his breath that he could never love 'the demon'. He was a desperate man when he remedied my mornings with medicinal herbs 'to take away my pains forever.' He was a foolish man when he flushed down my red and pink moon, rubbed my back, and went to the bar. Went to the bar, and he went to the bar. My baby in this vial.

  I stand up suddenly and turned once again to his tea. With a hand that no longer shakes, I empty the contents of the vial into the pot. The pointy bits of the itsby bitsy green stars stick and float on the top for just a moment, last moment, before I no longer pour just tea into my husband's teacup.

  It is a nice teacup, only one chip in it's plated rim, small and delicate with a handle too thin for his first finger. I swirl the teacup just once before placing it on its saucer and handing it to my husband. And I sit down on my chair at the opposite end of the table with a hand on my stomach to watch.

  My husband puts the cup to lips but does not sip.

  I dig my nails into my stomach.

  He sets it back down and I scream.

  He accuses its temperature.

  I foretell his fate: you are going to die.

  His thick eyebrows crawl over those hooded eyes and he sits back in his chair. I repeat myself with conviction. He was, he had to. Then I lean forwards and press my palms to the table and lick my words with a relish: I am going to kill you.

  He begins to laugh. I scream louder to drown out that hated noise that senseless noise. You are going to die. I am going to kill you. You are a walking dead man.

  My husband stops laughing. I do not stop screaming.

  I stop screaming when he upturns the table. The teacup flies through the air. It is a swift flip, all the silverware grows wings. I do too, I grow wings, but it is too late.

  The teacup shatters on the floor and my precious poison stains where it ought not be staining. My husband watches me watch my liquid victory dissipate before hollow eyes. I have grown very silent now. And my husband has won. Like the jaguar with pretending spots, he stalks towards his prey, shoulders hunched under lithe cords of muscle, raw power. He snarls and stomps the liquid and I almost see my moon under those heavy boots.