Celeste Colarič-Gonzales
Celeste Colarič-Gonzales (she/her) writes/arts/mothers in Oakland, CA on unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land. A dual M(F)A candidate at SFSU, she’s the recipient of several awards, including the Marcus Fellowship. When not wording, she paints, does old-school photography, or otherwise crafts. Find her words+ in/forthcoming from Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Blood Orange Review, NELLE, The Ana, Cosmic Daffodil, Woodcrest, and Transfer Magazine, where she’s served as Poetry Editor and EIC.
Easy read of the prose in the images above:
Tense
CW: allusions to sexual violence and drug use
We are giggling inside geometric shards of domed fabric, hues neon and natural, taut against fanned fingers, thin as skin, opaque and iridescent in the artificial light. We unzip, peek out at the torso-less legs walking by. When one comes close, we zip up and hush, leave the price tags swaying. I dart out to the cookware, bring back a stacked set of mini titanium pots and pans, play cook for my little sister. When I get bored I drag her by the hand, the other thumbed in her mouth, to the clothesline of pendulous rainbow cocoons, play hide and seek. When we hear our parent’s voices she jumps out, but I palm my way against the wall towards them, soft static brushing my cheek, hiding until called. I chose you because you were plush and purple, my favorite color then. (Actually, if asked I would have said pretentiously ‘pearly periwinkle.’) Now I don’t have a favorite color. I can’t even decide on the simplest of meaningless things. But you were royal—almost dark Byzantium—the color of Queen Maleficent’s cartoon cloak collar. I did not yet know that innocence lives in the marrow of the present continuous. Or how when touched, it’s lost to a maze of innards, beyond paradigms of mappable time.
I christened you at sleepovers. Sprawled on others’ living room floors, frightful at first in the unfamiliar of not-my-home, but finding comfort in your pillowy plumage. In your smell, my mother’s lavender shampoo, my father’s frankincense aftershave. These rooms of others next became a haven of guilty pleasures. Of not-in-my home junk food and forbidden knowledge bestowed. Demystifying where babies and Santa Clause really come from. Of all truth versions of truth and dare. Where they made fun of my wheeze in the morning, laughing that I snored, before I remembered to always pack my inhaler. Where they put her hands in a glass bowl of warm water as she slept. Maybe that was when I first learned that sleep was vulnerable, could be dangerous. Games of telephone secrets became rotary prank calls, became huddles around whoevers’ iMac instant message chats with whatever boy, became flip phone texts of party invites. The Never Ending Story became Pretty In Pink, became sneaking out and sleeping on others’ beds or couches, intolerable now without a panic attack.
On that trip, you were cold to my touch. I couldn’t get warm. You were damp from the rain. Darkened. In the tent filtered moonlight, almost octopus ink black. Sinking my slow-stuck limbs to stillness. He held you. Over my head. You smelled like seaweed strangled driftwood drying beside campfire smoke. Beneath your worn pelt and clumped feathers, I felt stones press. Roots knot my back. My voice swallowed my throat. Playing dead. Frozen. I tried to remember your origin. Wished I recognized your loyalty, offering me a layer of skin as mine was becoming no longer my own. You bore witness to a history of self I was molting. But I was ungrateful. I lay, watching trauma metamorphoses a life. So predictably impossible. Slow motion wondering, If transcendence is viable, when? How?
One day you were no longer needed. Having lost your stuffer, you lived in a black garbage bag at the bottom of my apartment hallway closet. You smelled of must, of memory eroding, like my sick cat’s matted fur before he died. I strung out, untethered my knots, steadied my pulse with the stained circumference of bottles and baggies. That littered couch, my new chrysalis. I didn’t sleep in my bed for a year. I didn’t think, thinking this would help me not to feel. Burrowing, hibernating somewhere not yet knowable, growing stronger than me. Would this kill me, or thaw flight from fight? Sprouting forewings and hindwings from powdery veins and glass bones, I formed ash into words.
I don’t know from which unopened trash bag to car trunk to apartment closet I finally decided to donate you. I don’t know where you are now; in a home, on the street, a landfill. When will I know whether you've been finally renounced, reconciled with, or made of future use?
