26 Quotes by Jalina Mhyana

It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people’s invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I’m even fooling myself.

If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirtin her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs and open the lid when you visit.Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars melt and spiral into a halo over my head and I’ve stirred my death into the sky.

All of the sudden, we were a grown-up married couple! Like little figures in a doll's house, we sat there dazed, in awe, wishing a chubby little arm would pass through a window and move us around, tell us what to do. We would have given anything for a magnificent child to show us how to be husband and wife.

I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I’m miming myself.

Dante Alighieri wrote his first book in the prosimetrum genre – La Vita Nuova – in 14th century Florence. Since I’m compiling this collection – my first indie publication – in Florence, just blocks from Dante’s house, and since his book involves a lost love, and ‘A New Life,’ I thought it fitting to emulate this style in my own casual, intuitive fashion. My hope is that the juxtaposition of poems, journal entries, essays and prose will create a story; a memoir in anarchistic vignettes.

Our marriage beganwith knots and fangs;vows inked on skin.Black venom stainedour fingers, twinnedsnakes stranglingthe marriage veinin Celtic macramé –cocksure monogamy.We became one,me and the gun,the serpent reelingitself from the needle.I had few firsts left;marriage a wild westfor the hedonist.Snakes unspooledlike figure-eights,symbols of eternity.Acrimony, alimony;Leave the moaningto adults. We childrenwill be wiserwed, inoculated –these hickeys,homeopathy.

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,boulders, and caves where Kami nature spiritsminister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root, and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.

Every Sunday behind bibles, virgins,soldiers tight against me, longing,and my pelvis rubbing gods'to the big black woman voices.Soldiers tight against me, longing,all that rising, sitting, kneelingto the big black woman voices,spirits warming, tensing, folding, thenall that rising, sitting, kneelinglike some kind of dance, a mating,spirits warming, tensing, folding andgod went “Shhhhh” between my thighs –