The Year I Let My Heart Go Asunder
Scraping into the basin with both hands
I let the waves lap against them,
pushing my giant hands to and fro.
The waves are gentle and they make my hands bob
like moths do when they're not being harassed by lights.
I am crouched down on the bank of Wellington Harbour
and I am huge as the hills.
I am squatting with my bottom on Khandallah,
my feet in the harbor and the water barely splashing my ankles.
When I stand, I am wondrous.
Get back! I want to cry out
at the men in their cars and their ships and their helicopters
slowly circling.
Get away, don't look.
I push them, but not with my hands
just with my mind,
not hurting them but just bending –
bending them with my mind until they go.
Anne Brontë
If I were an insect, I might be a lightning bug
but you would call me a firefly.
If you were an insect you might be a crane fly.
I don’t know what I would call you.
You’re not my kind of daddy longlegs.
If you were a crane fly your legs would be deciduous,
meaning: tending to fall off, particularly at maturity.
You might still have them
but you’d be getting close to losing them.
We’re getting close to losing our immaturity.
I bought a book about leaves for my father
but I want to keep it for myself.
We live in the bush now and it takes too long to get anywhere
so I might just stay up here this year,
carrying his book with me along the trails behind our house.
I’ll buy a pair of binoculars and spy on all the birds
and think of them as my friends because the neighbour’s cats won’t talk to me,
they just stare at me through the windows until I move
and then hunch down under the porch.
If we were Brontë sisters,
I would be Anne and you would be Emily.
Nobody wants to be Charlotte.
This One Weird Trick
One weird trick for turning a witch into a meerkat
One weird trick for teaching a bear how to dance
One weird trick for casting a spell against omnipotence
One weird trick for removing a lima bean from your hat
One weird trick for keeping the bees away from your bonnet
One weird trick for holding a seance in your backyard
One weird trick for gesturing wildly in public
One weird trick for growing asparagus in a rainforest
One weird trick for eating pimento out of a walnut shell
One weird trick for having your friends over for tea
One weird trick for keeping air in all four tires
One weird trick for losing your dentures at the prom
One weird trick for fighting a ranger with a spear gun
One weird trick for counting your blessings before they hatch
One weird trick for learning how to sweep your own chimney
One weird trick for breathing in with your diaphragm
One weird trick for aligning your moon cup with your cervix
One weird trick for dyeing your wedding dress black
One weird trick for catching lightning bugs in your hands
One weird trick for opening chips without spilling them
One weird trick for avoiding men named after apostles
One weird trick for ending the war of the roses
One weird trick for joining the badminton team
One weird trick for drinking sulfuric acid in space
One weird trick for knotting cherry stems with your teeth
One weird trick for winning a cake decorating competition
One weird trick for handling a concussion
One weird trick for shouting louder than your friends
One weird trick for running a half marathon in your underpants
One weird trick for generating a black hole
One weird trick for holding onto a lit match
One weird trick for sneaking past security
One weird trick for climbing Jupiter’s moon Europa
One weird trick for hacking into the White House
One weird trick for spying on a family of geese
One weird trick for asking your parents for money
One weird trick for picking your nose in public
One weird trick for creating the world’s longest chain mail
One weird trick for turning a prince into a frog
One weird trick for hiking the Appalachian trail
One weird trick for playing baseball for the Yankees
One weird trick for flying from Saskatchewan to Hong Kong
One weird trick for landing the role of Ann Darrow
One weird trick for bathing your cat in a basin of milk
One weird trick for flushing your tampon down the toilet
One weird trick for brushing your hair upside down
One weird trick for whipping yogurt into cream
One weird trick for getting your best friend pregnant
One weird trick for cooking a steak
One weird trick for vacuuming fibers out of your carpet
One weird trick for changing a turtle into a tortoise
One weird trick for sleeping all the way through the night
Carolyn DeCarlo
Carolyn DeCarlo is an American writer living in New Zealand. She has written two chapbooks, Strawberry Hill (Pangur Ban Party 2013) and Green Place (forthcoming from Enjoy Journal, November 2015), and co-authored two more with Jackson Nieuwland: Twilight Zone (NAP 2013) and Bound: An Ode to Falling in Love (Compound Press 2014), the winner of Auckland Zinefest's Best Literary Zine of 2015. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland, College Park.