Note to Self
Photography by Julia Cassell.
By Olivia Treynor
It is noon
and the squirrels are stealing newly hatched birds
from the trees.
I don’t stop them ––
It sounds so beautiful.
I wonder what we owe each other
if not kindness.
The cats are grooming themselves again
their bodies, a perpetual project.
The noose rings on the coffee table
like so many eclipses.
My mother’s spittle
is pure every time.
I cried with her today.
She touched my back.
When I have a child
she will be born covered in blood
and I’ll think of Carrie.
Her buried magic.
The woman with wide palms
who told me not to drink seltzer
might be in the heat tonight.
She might want to cure me again
with her ceramic disks,
the cupping bruises on my back
o o o
My jewelry held
in a glass dish. My skin unperfumed.
I cried with her, too. There’s so much mess
I can’t make clean.
Also: the bird pressed against the window.
First popsicle.
Linen wrung, wringing, still wet.
Hear it?
Anyway all the lightning
looks like cobwebs.
I buy myself bread
because I am a person.
I’m allowed to drive again
but still when the plane hits turbulence
I don’t pray to anyone.
Don’t forget: Jane with the tattoo
of cow tools. Love that makes your bones black.
Don’t forget: the head of Lenin
smothered in white, facing
a land that has abolished him.
The flying objects in the sky
are still there, still flying.
So much wind from nowhere.
Don’t forget: the angel wings
obscuring death.
Olivia: Green is your color.
About the Author
Olivia Treynor is a Barnard College student from the upper half of California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Southeast Review, Yemassee, phoebe journal, and elsewhere. She loves lakes but is scared of the ocean.
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists
Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”
All Accounts & Mixture is CutBank’s annual space for queer writers and artists, and we’re incredibly proud and honored to present this year’s bunch of daring, earnest, and straight up wild pieces. Our sincerest thanks to the contributors, as well as to each and every submitter to this year’s feature. Reading your work is a privilege, one we hope to continue undertaking for a long while.
Olivia Treynor
About the Photographer
Julia Cassell lives, studies, and photographs in Western Massachusetts and Brooklyn, NY.
Julia Cassell