Best 26 quotes of Jalina Mhyana on MyQuotes

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.

Back at the cottage we explored the topography of my body; twigs in my hair, calves striped red and my skirt smudged in meadowtones. The forest underlined me, accentuated me, illustrated me. I felt alive in that midnight village whose dark places left their signatures on my skin, whose bites still hummed around my wrists. I didn’t notice till then the thousand nettle stings rising like pearls; burning bracelets that my love kissed and rubbed with dock leaves; a folk remedy painting my pulse points green; honorary stalks.

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.

Each malevolence has a cousin that heals it. I fancy Hurtsickle and Heartsease as herbal enemies –weeds growing in reach of one another; the bite and the balm in balance.

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, kneeling to the big black woman voices, spirits warming, tensing, folding, then all that rising, sitting, kneeling like some kind of dance, a mating, spirits warming, tensing, folding and god went “Shhhhh” between my thighs –

Everything was numbered: the lenses, the painterly sky, the milligrams of my panic pills. I had prescription eyes that allowed me to see better, and prescription panic pills that allowed me to play blind.

First, make sure the ocean is rolled by an older woman whose quick fingers have been rolling the ocean for as long as you’ve been alive – She’ll fatten the rice in hot, sugared water spiked with rice vinegar then make a soft bed of it to wrap a slip of fish muscle, squeezing the bamboo rolling mat until the ocean’s circumference is compacted in seaweed’s brittle corsetry. It takes her just moments to dress the ocean, its nudity a pink tongue poking from iridescent green nori wrap

He’s always been attracted to broken things. He was the kind of boy who talked the bad girls through their problems, who defended them and didn’t take advantage. He was sensitive to his stuffed animals’ feelings, rotating their position on his bed so that a new plush animal would occupy pride of place at his pillowside every night. Soon I became first and foremost on that pillow; princess of the island of misfit toys.

I can’t pray or weigh my words right; doomsday is here my friend, but you’re immune. We suffer for you. I’m weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads; a souvenir so you’ll never forget your friends.

I can’t remember what I’ve done with my lingerie. I look in the containers under my bed, as if my sexual self has been relegated to the wrong side of the mattress. I imagine my husband’s sexuality down there too, our shadow selves making love deep in our unconscious as we cuddle above the mattress as brother and sister.

I cut our paper dinner with a pair of scissors borrowed from the front desk of the hotel. I cooked with a spice rack box of crayons – sixteen colors. I seasoned the pumpkin pie with orange crayon, and basted the turkey's crisp skin in brown. I was remorseless with my sketchbook abattoir, playing the part of carnivore just as surely as I was play-acting the role of wife. I may as well have been a wax figure in a dollhouse eating the wax-scented food.

I dreamed in night vision; white flowers of nocturnal gun fire – day residue shot to hell. If I held my dreams to a windowsill, sun would sieve through my screams.

If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirt in 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.

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.

I’m in a caregiver's relationship with my body, a perpetual internal gauging of wellness. My spine is Hogarth’s thermometer. I ascend and descend its rungs a hundred times a day, reading the mercury level. The same dis-ease speaks many languages. If you block one mouth, another will speak. The symptoms represent differently, and as I get older, my translation changes. The prescription changes. Must be vigilant. Must be my best nurse.

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.

I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank Zappa” and “window onto a magical world.” He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

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

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.

Our marriage began with knots and fangs; vows inked on skin. Black venom stained our fingers, twinned snakes strangling the marriage vein in Celtic macramé – cocksure monogamy. We became one, me and the gun, the serpent reeling itself from the needle. I had few firsts left; marriage a wild west for the hedonist. Snakes unspooled like figure-eights, symbols of eternity. Acrimony, alimony; Leave the moaning to adults. We children will be wiser wed, inoculated – these hickeys, homeopathy.

The Wishing Bones A thousand grandmothers ago Pyrrha and Deucalion repopulated the world with rocks, bones of mother Earth, a generation of my ancestors strained from the mud of a drowned planet. But I’m more interested in my earliest grandmothers, their gills and wetness, before they crawled from that blue expanse and learned to carry the sea within them, in their cells, between their cells, in their eyes. The buoyancy of ocean has never left us. It hides in skin’s complex reservoir where we're selectively permeable and our bodies exchange the smallest life. If we had no need to distinguish ourselves from others we’d be missing the skin that defines lovers and enemies and opens itself to both.

Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.

Veins of ivy scale stones, find footholds but the caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the dead head to head so they won’t topple like drunks on their moss-soft shadows.

We could scan each car for terrorists and lovers she could lean into my camouflage her head resting on woven trees. When they come for her body she could run deep into my uniform into the forest of me where they could never find her.

We played with the moon all night, painting faces on its blank cheek, shining its spotlight into sleeping people’s windows. But mostly we just ate the moon, stuck tongues to its surface and felt it dissolve, left chunks of its minty scalp on neighbors’ doorsteps.

With each kiss in the cold house 
we swallow clouds of breath – exhaled spirit, speech bubbles
 we’d rather lick away 
than fill with words. We run naked from room to room, 
keeping the walls warm.
 Our bodies blur through the halls 
of your house, its winter circulation.