Savage Words - Tumblr Posts

close the door on your way out

At night, her grey eyes faintly glistening in the light of a row of lampposts, she stood in the shadow of a suburban cul-de-sac front porch. She mouthed with a grin, in the language of cigarette smoke, the words he would pronounce, his back resting upon an orange steel locker. She’d usually roll her eyes and answer:

Well, that’s very nice. Now, be a dear and close the door on your way out.

She chuckled thinking about it. He didn’t know that, afterwards, she’d lock herself in the bathroom stall, the no man’s land where the wandering soldiers, enslaved by dreams with no perspective would carve the truth with their bitten bitter tongues. And oh boy the profanity. She’d sympathize with the blistering paint of sin while running her fingers over the walls’ scars and tattoos, let their meaning soak her fingertips. She liked it. But did she understand it? She once saw:

If only we could all love.

This sentence creeped back to her with the small-town breeze, seeping into her skin. She put out her cigarette against the shadowed brick wall and sat back on the patio chair. She noticed how rusty the metal was. Maybe it had always been that way.

She wanted to write a play. Not a famous one that would make the Hollywood actors drool, but one of those eighty-cents coffee stained and dog-eared garage sale plays that you’d buy out of pity and out of a tingling curiosity for the literary pariahs. The sort that receives a scattered applause, the actors timidly bowing in response. But it would be about the caesuras of the heartbeat of this town. It would be about the dark blue teenage dreams.

Her eyes wondered to the cigarette ashes laying on the floor, intently staring at her. She smiled in approval to her thoughts, got up, and went back in.

© Margaux Emmanuel

a dreamlike love bite

Two songs

away from you

having lunch

by the car

I close my eyes

memories

of kissing pretty neighbors

in their treehouses

paint dripping

down the easel

of the night

all I wanted

was for love

to bite

and now

you’re smiling

by my side

I guess

I’ll rob the sky of tonight’s stars

for you

but once my eyelids open

I’m still a lovesick kid

in an empty parking lot

and the stars always find

a place to hide.

© Margaux Emmanuel

Liebestraum

Liszt’s Liebestraum playing in the background

She watched the two lovers while gripping a trembling glass in her hand. He caressed each note’s delicate skin, responding to every one of her quivers, covering her neck with slow kisses, holding her hand through the peril of the third candenza. No desires were left unfulfilled. Every pressed key said je t’aime, brought the two farther from the heavy haze of the day, interlaced into one dream of love unattainable by the mournful song of reality.

“Have you ever loved me?”, he asked. She turned back to him, unwillingly letting the pianist part from her sight. She took a nervous gulp from her drink, avoiding his eyes. She noticed that his lips were hanging apart, longing for an answer. Her eyes wandered again towards the origin of this music of the heavens. Was it jealousy that she felt? A bovarysme?

“Why did you ask me to meet you here?”, she finally replied in a low voice, not looking at him, the pain crawling onto her words.

“Mon amour”, he whispered, his shaking hands snaking towards hers. She let them intertwine.

Don’t call me that, she thought. She let him.

“This-”, she said, letting the words dangle in the air, her eyebrows scowling from the distress in the stiffness of his fingers. She stopped, licked her lips, and let the background melody inch back into her ears.

“This… has been over for a very long time, Arthur”, she finished, dipping into the placid waters of his brown eyes, in a cracked murmur.

The bags under his eyes were heavy, the tense lines of his face were hidden under a patchy beard; he hadn’t been sleeping for days. She had never called him Arthur. Resigned, they both moved their chairs in the direction of the pianist, sticky tears consoling their cheeks. They wondered what love was while watching the Liebestraum couple dance in such unison, wearing the foolish grin of passion, yet knowing that the night always ends.

“We never had that. We never had… anything”, he calmly said.

The pianist embraced his love one last time. His fingers parted from her thirsty touch, craving for more. The listener could almost hear their silent weep, could almost feel the suffering in his fingertips. He rose from his seat, bowed. Nobody applauded. He left the scene.

© Margaux Emmanuel

The diagonal scar swelling  on his cheek shadows the stalemate  of salvation  a glissando  of desire that flew west for the winter away from the tempered light of day. The anacoluthon  of love  trapped in the pillowcase feathers of the  "have you ever been hurt ?" speaks  the demotic language of the pinned knight on the chessboard  of neurasthenia.  His heart writes letters with no  return address  My heart is trembling  with haste. "Nunc scio quid sit amor."

la llovizna comprende | © Margaux Emmanuel

What do you think?”, he asked in that raspy voice of his, an unlit cigarette between his teeth, the “-k” firmly pressed against his palate in an assertive manner, while unscrewing a burnt-out lightbulb. She was sitting on the windowsill, only wearing his dark blue Lacoste polo shirt, unbuttoned. Her back was towards him but she could feel his every move, she knew that he would have that slight habitual scowl resting on his face and that he would mutter “shit” under his breath any second now, realizing that the lightbulb didn’t fit. “Shit”, he whispered. There it goes. “About that book of yours?”, she finally answered. She could sense his head’s nod, he was too busy to notice that she wasn’t facing him. She slowly brought her naked legs, covered in a thin layer of goosebumps from the chilly morning air, back into the apartment. He was standing on the old chair, the straw seat deforming from his weight, a dozen lightbulbs at the chair’s feet, slightly rolling back and forth, back and forth, from the uneven floorboards. His head was a harvest of untamed blond curls that he had never quite grown out, tickling the back of his shirt’s collar. He had those green-blue marshland eyes that would remind her of those times when she used to swim in the dark green creeks with the small-town kids. But then, suddenly, you had to quickly jump out to run after the ice-cream truck’s music, the water dripping off your wet body, tracing your steps on the concrete pavements. You would never quite see the truck, you could only hear it; you had to trust the melody. He hadn’t known her back then.   “What do you want me to think about it?”, she inquired with a slightly flirtatious grin after a long, reflective pause.  He let out a small laugh, still fiddling with the lightbulbs. “I… want you to think that it captures the beauty of your touch”, he said in an almost mocking manner, his eyebrows rising as he pronounced those words.  “That doesn’t really mean anything does it?”, she replied with a perplexed smile. “It doesn’t. You need to understand that you aren’t a muse; all of the sentences of my book are already written in the crevices of your skin.“ He was silent after that. "Well, you could do better then.

water sizzling on the concrete | © Margaux Emmanuel 

Ill-chosen metaphors towel my body dry inch towards the word toying with the tip of my tongue you know the word the one eyeing the dark corners of the after party of infatuation the one stinging in the touch of bare-knuckled motorists pretending to be in trouble in the implied sensuality of those haunted eyes I said no peeking you already know the word oh I’m not trying to stop you, love all of these untalented talented teens know exactly what they want now turn off the radio whisper it in your licorice breath I’ll just be here falling asleep in the arms of dawn waiting.

don’t look at me like that, help me find this word | © Margaux Emmanuel

women in love

Your face clouds over

when the picture

of the girl

with the red

octagonal

sunglasses

red cheeks

from having recently cried

leaning

on your car

falls out of your wallet

only to remind you

in the sotto voce

of memory

that she kept your

love letters

in a battered copy

of Women in love.

You wonder

if she kept it

she always said

that it was a mistake

to reread the novels

of your youth

Oh, she was a hesitation

You remember

every rhyme

every bite

of the poems

that she wrote

on your lips

for she always said

that you only know

what you feel

once it’s been written.

She was damnation

You remember

seeing the

ink stains

sprawled on the cover

of her

DH Lawrence

in the hands

of someone else

at that

end of the year

garage sale

he was laughing

chewing

his cheeks

but the book

isn’t funny

maybe he was laughing

at your poems

he was laughing

because he doesn’t love her

and he never will

maybe he was laughing

because you are trapped

in those pages

you still live

every curve

every sharpness

of her letters

and she now lives

in the verse of another

he wasn’t laughing.

© Margaux Emmanuel 

She rubbed her hand against her nose, smudging the blood still trickling out of her nostrils onto her index finger and cupid’s bow. She could still feel the outline of his knuckles pressing against her gum. They had left a fresh bruise on her lower cheek and her lip plump in its swollenness. Stiff from pain, she pressed her still moist palms, striped pink from the tight hand wraps, onto the parking lot concrete with a slight wince and attempted to straighten her back. She grabbed the icepack that she had angrily thrown to the floor, tears dripping out of its side from a rip in the blood-stained plastic, and despite the layer of sticky dirt thinly covering it, carelessly slapped it onto her face, her hunger for the cold solace betraying the hot rancour in her eyes. “All I did was make a fool of myself”, she thought as her eyes now woefully crawled towards the gloves, peaking out of a black-cloth gym bag, the ensanguined white flag shining from the timid light of a nearby lamppost. She laid her right hand onto her stomach, slightly discerning her drained muscles through the sticky shirt. Not a soul was in sight at this hour. She even leaned her ear onto the cement, awaiting the low grumble of some distant car, only to be confronted with a bitter silence. She was eventually lying on her side in the middle of the empty parking lot, the breeze leaving a cool impression on her humid hair, as her fingers danced, almost detached from her body, on a worn white line that had been painted onto the cement long ago. The blood from her nose slowed to a sideward drip. Her mind was elsewhere; she wallowed in the mud of her thoughts as she attempted to recall the intricacies of his face, a temptation that she could not resist. When she began to remember the rugged slit in his eyebrow and the grin of his pale green eyes, a violent nausea threatened her throat. She was on her knees, her arms pressed against the cold ground as she dryly coughed. “I need to get up”, she muttered to herself. She pushed herself up with the remaining strength in her muscles and arose with a tired lurch. She noticed a gas station sign, blinking red, bleeding into the blurred serenity of the night, floating in the darkness. She grabbed her bag and her leather gloves and, puffing her chest out, made her way into the moonless night.

fight | © Margaux Emmanuel

the drinks are on me

Past midnight, at a rusty bar, a young man conversing the outcome of a wrestling match. Quite charming, really: three shirt buttons undone, smooth grin of “the drinks are on me”. I heard the conversation make some turns, some more abrupt than others. The more drinks hit the counter, the more his words left tire tracks. He was soon boasting his fine palate for Japanese whiskey and saying “I saw scenery of the sort in Kyoto back in 2004”, “Hey Jim, here’s a quarter, go play me a song on the jukebox will ya”. 

He was in the booth in front of me, but I couldn’t see his face; I only caught a glimpse of his slicked-back brown hair. Maybe I had one or two, two or three drinks myself. Maybe it was a little too dark. I didn’t usually go to bars back then. 

“Wait, play that again, I’ve heard the tune before, just don’t quite remember from where”. 

A waitress, still bearing the traits of adolescence but old enough to look at you straight in the eye, came around. 

“Most people call me Connor. But you don’t look like ‘most people’. So call me whatever you want, it’ll do.” 

Connor. The way he pronounced his name, revealing his Boston accent, still rings in my ears. I still mouth it to this very day, letting my jaw slightly drop and my tongue press against the back of my lower teeth, just to make me remember that, despite the drunken haze the moment was soaked in, it was not a dream. It was something concrete in the stupor of it all. 

Soon enough, they were all loudly singing, their arms enlaced around their necks, swaying back and forth, tears swelling in their eyes. I watched, amused, possibly sipping the foam of yet another beer. 

And that’s when everything started to slow down. I laid my head against the wooden panel on my left side and let my heavy eyelids close. 

“We’re closing”; I was awoken, dazed, from the deep trance of a dreamless sleep. 

The bar was empty: only the manager, a heavily-built middle-aged man with tattoos covering his neck was standing right in front of me, slightly frowning. 

I rose from my seat, silent from the grogginess. As I was about to make my way out of the booth, I noticed a piece of paper, on the table, in the corner of my eye. Unsure if it was mine or not, I grabbed it and shoved it in my back pocket. 

I took the bus home but got off one stop too early. I stumbled my way through the streets, occasionally letting out a chuckle for no particular reason. The streets were bare; the town was dead. Ten minutes later, after fumbling with the keys and crawling in the stairs, I fell, fully clothed, onto my bed and fell back asleep.  

It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I was sitting down, my hand laying on the countertop, watching the coffee slowly drip, every drop tolling in my head. The piece of paper that I had taken the night before was in my right hand; it was a phone number. 

7911-75246 written in slanted black ink.

I grabbed my phone, turning it in my right hand indecisively. A few minutes later, the number was dialled; here we go again.

© Margaux Emmanuel

haiku

eyes of dented ink; 

summer liquor store color 

crawl into this bed 

© Margaux Emmanuel

The way your eyes would bite my neck during the cigarette break when there was nothing between us and the moon except for the smell of stale tobacco.

© Margaux Emmanuel 

It’s 12 am and teenagers are sitting down, cross-legged, in a fast-food’s parking lot, some loosely holding a crestfallen cigarette in their right hands, its embers lightly glowing in the darkness, some staring at the cars passing by. They’re playing some obscure artist’s b-sides on a beat down stereo that they all seem to be sitting around. “I’m going inside; so fucking cold out here. You guys want anything to eat? Daniel gave me a coupon for their sodas”, says a boy with piercing grey eyes as he rouses himself, long dyed-black hair peaking out from his over-sized sweatshirt’s hood. “I think we’re good”, replies a red-haired girl, almost mechanically, almost as if she is somehow not allowed to want anything, as she lies back and stares into the starless sky with an empty expression. Another girl in the group, chattering teeth and hugging her knees that she has covered with her large green knitted sweater, is aligning dominos on the smooth cement. “What are you doing?”, asks a boy, his veins visibly snaking under his pale skin and his eyes hidden behind strands of brown curls. “This…is us”, she answers while pushing the first domino and watching them fall, one by one onto one another until the very last one drops down and they are all lying there, inanimate, almost breathless. “The fuck are you rambling on about”, he sharply rejoins. “She’s saying that if it weren’t for Lawrence we wouldn’t be in this shithole”, suddenly says the red-haired girl, a little too loudly, as she sits up to face the other members of the group. “Shut your trap”, whispers the boy in a foggy breath as he nervously turns his head to make sure that Lawrence isn’t in sight. “Don’t you tell me that it’s not true, Anzu will tell you the same”, she continues but now in a lower voice and slightly turning herself towards Anzu, awaiting a response while bitterly putting out her cigarette against the asphalt. “Kat’s right…”, says Anzu under her breath with composure. The boy doesn’t say anything, perhaps because he knew that his friends were right but it hurt too much to acknowledge it. He moves the hair that was covering his eyes and places them behind his ear, revealing mellow cedar eyes that betray his cold demeanor. He peers at the dominos, almost frightened by them. Suddenly, he reaches towards the stereo and turns it off in the middle of “hear what I say and tell me if you still-”. Katherine and Anzu look at him, gaping. “Let’s go”, he says as he gets up and grabs the stereo. The girls remain where they are, puzzled. “Ernest, are you fucking out of your mind? We’re in the middle of nowhere and Lawrence has the car keys”, says Katherine with an anxious chuckle. Ernest begins to make his way across the parking lot, holding the stereo in one hand and putting his other hand into his hoodie’s pocket, ignoring Katherine’s indignant remark. “Ernest!”, screams Katherine as the washed-out boy’s figure progressively blends into the dark horizon. Anzu calmly lights a cigarette as Katherine arises and begins to desperately run after him. “What’s going on?”, says a voice from behind. Anzu turns around and sees Lawrence, insouciantly biting into a hamburger that he holds with his two hands, ketchup dripping onto them. “You really don’t understand, do you?”, she mutters into her green sweater as she watches Katherine and Anzu from afar. “Anzu, what are they-“ “Lawrence, it’s freezing, we’re far from home and we haven’t slept in days, this had to happen at some point.” “You can’t possibly think that this is all my fault!” “That’s not what I said.” “But you seem to think so.” Anzu doesn’t dare to look at Lawrence, maybe because the way that he would look at her would bring back more painful memories. She sniffles. “Are you crying?” “No, I’m just fucking cold”, she says as she rubs her sleeve against her teary eyes, gets up, and leaves Lawrence alone in the icy parking lot. He looks at the dominos laying on the floor and then, almost as a reflex, bends down and grabs them. As he turns the hard rectangles in his hands, he thinks  to himself that nothing can be done.

dominos | © Margaux Emmanuel 

wake up

you write

        arbitrary letters

                           on the lampshade dust

a game

        of mental scrabble,

modernity’s

           aphasia

the light turns on

v

u

  l

   n

     e

       r

        a

          b

            l

              e

you are in bed

writing

          what you think,

letting your skin

                  nervously flirt

                                      with unfamiliar sheets,

letting your pen 

                      nervously flirt

                                       with innocent paper,

meeting

            your pale lover’s

                                weak eyes

                                            for the first time:

we all need

           to meet

                   ourselves.

© Margaux Emmanuel

note to self

a glimpse of melancholia

in the lukewarm saké

of a child’s laughter

© Margaux Emmanuel

visiting hours are over

a melody from western japan

    sticks to the tears you begin to cry

“visiting hours are over”

    the curtains of your heart close

you sit on the stage

    and fold

origami feelings

    delicate

intricate

    intimate

weak

now

    you can take off your mask

and let yourself hum

    quietly

nervously

    and wait

to hear the same tune

    from the audience’s side

© Margaux Emmanuel

light-headed

I know a place

where the nights are hidden under a veil of tobacco

I know a place 

where lovers wait for the rain to cease, sheltered by a stranger’s open garage

holding stolen beers and each other’s hands 

I know a place

where boys with messy hair sit on the windowsill reading Cocteau 

I know a place

where people fall in love over a cigarette and a line of Tennyson 

It’s a place 

where life isn’t so bad 

© Margaux Emmanuel 

coal

He had been working in the mines for the past three months and he was beginning to cough like the others did.

A crooked picture ornamented the otherwise bare wall. That and the piano were his only valuable possessions. He would come back home every night and see both of them, one hanging a little too much on the left, one yawning with some of its off-tune teeth missing.  There used to be a midsize mirror on the floor, its back against the wall, but as the weeks passed, as his arms and legs grew thin and as his eyes adopted a permanent look of worry, he had gotten rid of it.

Before lighting the kerosene lamp, seconds after entering through the door, he would sit down in front of the piano and would let his weakened, tired, fingers fall onto the keys. He wasn’t a very good player, he would have to pause between some of the notes in order to cough.  He played clumsy nocturnes, only alighted by the moonshine, the grime on his hands making the keys stick to his fingers. It was always quiet, the neighbors were fast asleep and he would be alone with his moon. The tears would trickle onto his cheeks, mixing with the dirt on his face, as he thought of her.

He was scared that he would forget what she looked like. He would slightly tilt his head to the left every day, but the picture was blurry and he was certain that she was prettier in real life. You couldn’t tell by looking at it that she would always say “Keep the change” at the cashier, even though they could’ve used the extra dollar for another day’s worth of soup.

“Keep the change”, he would sometimes whisper. His lips pressing against each other, his tongue touching his palate while he said those three words- it made her seem more real. It was the concrete in the abstract of sentiment, it was feeling her pulse beat against his skin.

The moon seemed far away that night. It looked as if it were crying.

© Margaux Emmanuel

tonight we’ll see the stars

“What’s his name?”

“Suzuki…Or was it Nakamura?”

Edvin didn’t say anything as he opened the matchbox that had been in his pocket and carefully plucked a match out. In an abrupt motion, he struck the match. A small flame kindled at the end of the wooden stick. He carefully observed it, letting it take his full attention as his thoughts went blank. He didn’t want to think about her. But he couldn’t control it. His eyes crawled towards hers. An uncontrollable smile formed on his face as he broke out in a nervous chuckle.

“How do you say ‘fire’ in Japanese?”, he asked, feeling the tears bordering his eyelids.

“Do I look like I fucking know?”, she answered, her voice slightly breaking on the fucking as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

She blew out the match. A small cloud of smoke slowly whirled, tinting the darkness. Edvin watched the smoke dance with the cold breeze and almost imperceptibly inhaled it.

“You’re probably tired of me”, she suddenly said.

Edvin didn’t say anything and threw the match on the cold ground with a bitter smile.

“Your eyes… they’re not quite blue are they?”, he asked avoiding to answer to what she had just said.

She turned to look at him. The only source of light being the streetlight down the street, she could only make out his silhouette.

“It’s just that, at the party, they seemed a little lighter”, he added, his voice cracking with emotion, justifying the question he had just asked.

She remembered the party. She was haunted by the smell of beer in her nostrils, by how his sweater brushed against her chin, by the foggy music’s unclear words that seeped into her skin and mind…

“No, they’re blue”, she answered, as she got up and walked away into the night.

© Margaux Emmanuel

2003

Postcards from Saigon

yellowed pictures

pants rolled up to his knees

dark ray bans

thick rims

raindrops on lips

or raindrop lips

his eyes,

a different shade of brown

those that say

“buy me a beer

before I change my mind”,

dusty eyelids

a scar

lingering

under his eye

a dog-eared book

in his hand

where he wrote in the margins

These

are

the

lines

that

prove

that

my

existence

is

a

mistake

but you only read 

the pencil prophecy

after

you had kissed him  

after

he had taken

all of those

painkillers

after

he had written that letter

saying

“I too

was once loved,

but not by you”.

© Margaux Emmanuel 2018

punch-drunk

There were indistinct screams and catcalls coming from every angle of the dark abyss. They echoed up to her ears, but all she could hear was the thudding of her own thundering heart. The lights around her were bright, blinding. She felt the impression of an arm on her shoulder, water gushing down her throat, drops falling onto her bare stomach, mixed with the sweat.

“Come on, you gotta go the distance...”

“Tyler, she’s punch-drunk.”

Punch-drunk. “Punch-drunk”, she said, the words hazily forming on her lips.

“That upper-cut busted her ribs, the girl can’t even walk straight, let alone land one. She’s either gonna get knocked out or the judge’s gonna call it a technical.”

Knocked out clean.

A warm breeze blowing onto her face. Apartment buildings were towering around them, the sun red in the glass windows.

“So you see, he was all like punch-drunk and then he like threw a jab and then this uppercut that perfectly landed on his jaw. Like this look. And then BOOM he got knocked-out clean, it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen I tell ya.”, he said as he jumped down from the table he was standing on top of.  

“One day, I’ll teach ya how to box ya know.”

“Me? A boxer? Don’t be silly.”

She suddenly felt a sharp, twisting pain in her ribs.

A bell rings.

“Round six!”

“Come on, you gotta get back in there. Remember, she’s a swarmer so try to block her right…”

Her mother’s crying.

“He should have never practiced that sport. Your father always said that it’d end badly”.

Her face met the blood-covered floor.

“One! Two! Three! …”

“It’s over Tyler. For fuck’s sake!”

“Four! Five!”

“Sawyer...”, she said, tears lining her eyes.

“Six! Sev-“

She got up and rose both of her gloves.

© Margaux Emmanuel