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Jalina Mhyana QUOTES

Jalina Mhyana QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , The Wishing Bones

2 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , The Trauma Scope: Poems of Heartache & Optical Illusion

3 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Spikeseed

4 " My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he’d place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

5 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

6 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , The Wishing Bones

7 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

8 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

9 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , The Wishing Bones

10 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

11 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

12 " 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 – "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

13 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

14 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , The Wishing Bones

15 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana

16 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

17 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana

18 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Spikeseed

19 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

20 " 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. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes