web

like the open curtain falling in and out and in to the room, the smell of the painted walls linger. painted orange walls. yesterday. without warning. they came home and there it was--orange on the walls. like how someone dyes their hair and you sense a change but can't quite place it. and then when you finally realize what has actually happen, it always becomes the first thing you notice. the room is orange.

grinning, she turns to the kitchen to make lunch. "hungry?" she'll ask and not expect a refusal. they say that paint fumes give some headaches, but the aroma of fried onions and beef mixed with paint is enough to make someone throw up. why are we eating onions and beef for lunch anyhow?

they all sit down and the Saturday afternoon glares into the white kitchen, watching the four heads bob up and down from chair to plate, winking on the silverware, and whining with the wind. looking up, she catches a neighbourhood cat in the yard, scurrying away after being seen. the cat is big and fat, but seems totally self-aware and confident. like her mother--only maybe arrogant than confident.

sometimes like her mother.

upstairs, she is no better. her room is like a sentence without skimp punctuation, whereas her mothers' house is like a freight train sentence, loaded with comas and cargo of words, boxed together with parenthesis and never-ending with trailing thoughts ... while her mother has plenty to protect her, her daughter has minimal to

her daughter has minimal to
to
?

she once heard about a girl on Oprah who was just under a hundred pounds but ate only waffles and Sugar Crisp. the girl was convinced she had to keep skinny, but couldn't bring herself to will a healthy diet. as usual on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the morale of the story is in a healthy attitude. believe in yourself. envision a better you.

in the ducts that connect the kitchen ventilation fans to the heating vents of her daughter's room, a spider has been spinning an undisturbed web. undisturbed because it is out of human reach--practically invisible. but in some lights, you can see it. in some lights, it gleams a rare shade of silver. in some lights.

Resistance

like desert

there are dunes and tracks in the powdery texture,
white___grain___mounts

breathing all over the horizon
in angry gusts,
burning on my ears
and stinging my face

(don't you know that wind is just a special effect?)

and Underneath this skin of desert
even further than the ceiling of ice
I'm still moving.

those ripples are mine
and the dimpled dents on the surface
are my causation

(the reason why she can't sleep when the pea
is under all hundred of those mattresses)

she can't sleep

won't rest
until she ceases,

yields to
the barricade that's embracing her.