Connective Cube

Connecting the hard edges

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Quite memoir, Quite fiction.

  • Pro-ble-ma-tic

    Knock tap knock
    Tick the clock tock
    I listen close to the watch that still seems to work
    at the flea market with actual tiny flecks that fly around
    but don’t seen to have any wings. .

    Turning the camera on me, I see
    well, let’s see where I walk with a scalding cup of Lipton tea
    it wasn’t a hip coffee joint, and Lipton took me back to
    the sweet tea flavors but this time with cream
    and a sincere desire to avoid burning the roof of my mouth.

    Close enough to walk for food
    but far enough to take at least 20 minutes.

    Boom boom
    Interrupts my gaze at the ridges of a birch tree leaf
    cars with their austere rims anonymous with
    an outline of a bobble head
    no more a man for revving that engine groggle
    that awakes me from my walk-a-day slumber.

    I think back to times with less tinny and revving sounds
    Or those times when a buzz above
    expands to sonic pebbles that I barely perceive.

    Only 10,000 planes at a time in an hour above
    That’s millions in the last 10 years alone, oh.
    –

  • Moving a mouth

    Loud voice, closed lips
    If my chords work right now
    they would say
    ‘absolutely incorrect’.

    Someone might believe I have
    Hardly a conscious thought;
    She’s not fond to ponder without a point,
    Is she even understanding what I’m saying?

    My nail nubs have a hard time opening the new face cream.
    I puncture the think layer of iridescent plastic with a knife,
    Eager to spread the blob on my face cake and
    Relieve my dry fingers..

    Ruminating another false perception
    Not really
    Wanting to talk about it
    While I knead my forehead and my cheekbones.

    It feels like a romance, one with a book cover
    Of grinning faces around a long table.
    They know each other from a spectacular sociality.
    Or having many many cousins or kids.

    It’s not regrets and I’m thankful to take naps
    To listen to the birds and wonder why
    Throat to chord, jaw to beak
    What moves a mouth to open.

  • A cursory matter

    I wait for you, patiently, to transform me into letterforms.
    It’s easier in a way, I can adapt to your unfolding expression.

    I blink when you stop signaling me.

    Before, you had that rectangle flat
    gestures flow with determination
    softness of matter absorbing ink
    stretching the guile of the neural environs. 

    You’d look at those rectangles and tap away.
    Eventually, you came to treat me as the
    spiral notebook, free legal pad, or large whiteboards.

    Now, your honesty, honestly, could benefit from:
    no
    soft electronic
    flashes
    that last a micro-moment

    Now someone asks me a sentence I disappear until you’re ready.
    Your neural environs reflect on my host’s electronic archive.

    I’ll come back once my host answers your prompt. It’s evidence.
    The ask is often beyond your neural environs.

    You ask questions to me
    more than you answer them.

    Pushing you to stop blinking and keep the remix of words reminds me
    in a flash
    that I can still make the world stop with my
    own
    words. 

  • Reviewing poetry

    I’m challenging myself to write about poetry and short fiction that I didn’t write. Not so much to critique, but rather to notice form and structure. And subject matter. I tend to understand meaning by creating more words. Articulation continues to move as a becoming and the memory of ruptures revisited in that moment. Sometimes the memory floats and documenting it with words, film, or drawing isn’t a priority as much. The memory of those moments can bring back the sensory experiences, and that’s what I tend to explore in my own work.

    Right now, I’m eager to pull back to the text, and pay attention to the thickness of the poets who create sensory experiences with words. A different way of understanding the many forms the text can take. None of these reviews are AI-driven, and is intended to give one human’s considerations about poetics of the early 21st century, and sometimes before. I’ll match a song to it, one from when the book was released. Sometimes I’ll focus on one poem in the book, and other times I’ll review as a whole.

    The first review

    The first review focuses on a chapbook ‘I Wrote this Poem” by Cindy St. John released by Salt Hill Journal. Its cover of hand-drawn elements on natural paper shows the sun and the moon, a fish that spans the front and back cover, and the sea. Michael Burkard’s illustrations show expressive and warmth in the hand drawn elements. Many of the poems are set in New York City, a place where you can forget all three exist when you’re going from the middle of Queens to the middle of Manhattan.

    Much of the poetry captures micro-moments in a home or in public space. ‘I never write any poems while driving a car’ caps off a poem while she captures the safety talk by the bus driver.

    “I never write any poems while driving a car”

    I Wrote this Poem, Cindy St. John

    Other moments include overseeing t-shirts and outfits with branding and slogans, and lamenting about boat desires while scrolling through Instagram. Another reflects on an unexpected shared understanding about the brightness of light in a coffee shop. After a flight, the movements and rewards that come from a bag check also have an excess to examine underneath, even if it’s not fully knowable in the moment.

    The poems at the end are the reaction with a distinct sensation. The tight flash paragraph reads as personal recounts and event the writing process. The utilitarian use of color in an art gallery invites a sharper connection with the vibrancy of the city beyond the gallery walls on a gray day – 

    "Mostly when writing this poem I was not thinking about the art or the gallery, but the city and its colors and the sidewalks: 

    on either side of your thin eyelids
    you see yellow'

    Reading this in 2026, the poems reflect an optimism in the ordinary, even if there’s a silent questioning of the structures that uphold daily life.

  • Tooth brain smack

    What’s that slice in the gum
    The one that shows so definitively when I press hard.

    So soft, the imprint noticeable 3 minutes later, though fading.
    I mean no shade when I say this is another stint

    Of proving my doctor right that I have a high pain tolerance
    By chance, no evidence of it when I wake up before my alarm.

    4 hours earlier. At 2am wondering if I’ll swallow my tooth in my sleep
    LIke the one time I chomped on sticky taffy and my crown fell down my throat.

    That one stubborn crust that went perpendicular on the pink graiin
    But still didn’t penetrate, only the same when I pressed my fingernail

    Into my gooey mouth when I was 10 with calcium bound pearls
    Wondering why my gums are the same color as bubble yum.

  • Tangle tap tap tap

    Tangle tap tap tap

    Let’s face it. I’m forced to use AI at my job, mostly because I have writer in my title. In reality, automation by using Grammarly in the later 2010s helped me get the words right. Grammar doesn’t excite me as much as a flow of language, although, I’ve become a better writer understanding the mechanics of grammar. The other reality is oh YAY another technological change that’s going to change the world and look wow AI can be better than geography based education and honestly just wanting to make all the blue light go away.

    I haven’t published in a minute – this is the one and only time I’ll use AI for an image, and look, the meta narrative of reading a book behind the noveau mirror encapsulates how far I want to go with innovation for innovation sake.

    But handwriting.

    That’s the thing. Me. Mechanics. Hands that knock things over, especially jars with lids that I forget to tighten all the way. Digital excited me, I didn’t have to contend with my right-left confusion and general ability to drop things easily. It only was until last year that I got the difference between the en dash – and —. (I used the Option+Shift+- and not AI to create this em dash). Getting quick with keyboard commands, one day, but I now tend to dream of days where I don’t tap a keyboard.

    I grew up in that awkward time where the kids 2 years older than me and kids 2 years younger than me had either more connection to the analog world or more connection to the emerging digital world. When I was a freshman, someone 2 years older than me recommended I take a typing class. Typing? I was typing when I was 10 and starting to see how I could remedy my ‘Needs improvement’ level handwriting, TYVM. That’s thank you very much, acronyms with no reference are rude. I was surprised they offered a typing class. Didn’t everyone know how to type to play Oregon Trail and write things?

    Now I’m someone who still can’t identify what GOAT in conversations, although it seems positive and having to do with someone being the best at something. Haven’t Googled or ChatGPT’ed it, and was recently thankful I had my sunglasses on while someone referred to GOAT and some very famous artist who thinks she’s an English teacher marrying a gym teacher with optimism an joy. I mean, goat’s are stubborn sweethearts, and I guess she’s a good musician because I’ll listen to a song like ‘Trouble trouble’ but dear lord she’s in a photo with someone with a Nazi sign on their shirt, and to summarize some Reddit headline, I’ve somehow managed to live my adult life and not pose with people wearing Nazi propaganda. Mostly, I listen to other things and find the obsession stangely cultish, and if kindness matters, try not to burst music bubbles – lots of other things worth popping.

    Then there were the kids 2 years younger than me in middle school who seemed more confident than the entire class of 2000, they still didn’t have cell phones en masse in high school, but in general didn’t get the general anxiety of an industrial arts teacher asking to transition to a ‘computer skills’ teacher in the last year of his retirement. Those little ones maybe started with him teaching computers, which meant he sat in the back of the room while everyone else played games. They never got to make a giant paper clip in a woodshop in one of those vests and t-shift combos with a gray bearded man who looked more Appalachain than southern. Why did I have to sit and play video games, I liked the big wood clip far more than the home economics class, even though I’d never say no to baking a brownie or cookies.

    Even in high school, 2 dudes dared to kiss openly who were 2002 grads; I got to sit in advanced literature with baseball bros talking about some meathead on their team using a bat to beat the boys up. I usually avoided anyone who didn’t reed nerd, but mumbled and said that it’s silly it bothers them so much.

    Now, I contend with the creeping 25th anniversary of 9/11, the current 20th anniversary of Katrina and even Columbine my junior year.

  • Exposure zone

    I’ve delayed writing about 9/11 on the 20 year anniversary. When was that. 09/11/21. 20 years, seriously? 3 years later goes so fast, plus another week.

    ———–

    A social media ad that shows the exposure zone on 9/11 below Canal Street in Manhattan

    An Instagram ad in 2024 on my feed.

    9/11 is when I go through some emotional catharsis or epiphany. Okay, that’s many days. What’s different about 9/11 is that I had the pleasure of living in the exposure zone. How does technology know that I lived a few blocks south of Canal? Is that cough something I need to checkout? Is that a persistent itch over my lungs? My fat cells, is something still lingering there from the air?

    I avoided the dust cloud, 2 blocks down by the time we evacuated.

    ———–

    Flit a thought here, flit a thought there, my brain flits like dandelion seeds that tumble around like little dust specks that come from dryer lint.

    I’m a deadline champ. I’m not a deadline champ.

    ———–

    I ran away uptown walk walk walk walk walk walk up Lafayette, then Union Square. I had 3 days of no exposure below Canal. Then another 90 or so.

    ———–

    When I left New York geographically in 2010, I figured the distance would help. I had to leave New York and move on – I was getting too angry at anyone who held their new iPhones to the beaming twin towers. Twitter in general pissed me off, it seemed like popularity contests and brand-as-self that I still feel squeamish about. I still have a hard time thinking of myself as a curated brand that says all the right things on command that’s full of style and substance, don’t go off-brand.

    Organization continued to present itself in new challenges, and I had a second room filled with furniture people gave to me that I had no idea how to arrange properly, at the time. Money was low, but not out, and the recession brought out even more tense tendencies.

    Interviewing for a coffee shop in Red Hook, I spoke to the owner about how gentrification was present in so many places in Brooklyn, and that I was writing about it. I didn’t get hired. Somehow, I realized opening a coffee shop dream would never be about improving a neighborhood that I’m not from.

    ———–

    A year or so ago, I walked by my old dorm on Lafayette after a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge with people I love. The second floor that used to have a balcony overlooking an empty lot now has a large condo building. No more 40s from the deli for the teenagers and post-teenagers.

    Was this ever an exposure zone?

  • Spread smash

    Spread smash

    A stick in the sky,
    shy, I try to pry.

    It stays, firm,
    with a tussle in the leaves
    nothing perceptible falls.

    Hey, smalls!
    no one would ever call me.
    my american thighs
    squish wide on the seat,
    full flat.

    Legs, double the
    hand-drawn sticks
    I try to draw.

    Thicken here, share there,
    look at that line
    so static,
    for now.

  • Sometimes I shiver a river

    Sometimes I shiver a river

    I get goose bumps most times when / the little holes in my eyelids / produce an overflow of liquid

    that my dam eyes fail to contain

    There the micro-hills on my arm feel flattened by / the only warm appendage / my hand that was in my pocket

    and now catches the four raindrops through the cracks

    My soggy arm now beaming heat and chill / the shirt, it’s a stainer as I strain / to see through / the eyeglass condensation

    Big girls don’t cry-yai-yai

    Yai right / boys don’t cry / big girls don’t crai / infantilize the cry baby / hold it back / let it out / cry cry cry / did you forget to cry? / He doesn’t cry often, but when he does / she cries to get attention / it’s not all about you.

    The chill / the hill / the ill I feel now that I have to breath in / breath out / haaaaaaaaa hot air / jaw creaks / water splash / it’s time to say hiiiii-eeee and care / I’m not overthinking , not overthinking right now.

  • Too lia

    Too lia

    Bustle my loves, I’m a friend to all
    Who doesn’t make it about them /

    Disorderly you, how can I help?!
    I ask, as if expecting an answer /

    Stir you nothing, can you speak?
    If I can, YOU can too! /

    Wait no, no, not that tone,
    Stop, although I can’t say why /

    Stay positive, don’t overthink it! I tell you,
    It’s your one goal to make others laugh, that’s it /

    No, no, not like that, be more uplifting!
    Your stories make others feel worried /

    I can’t say why, just remember your childhood,
    don’t we all have good stories from then? /

    If you want to be cherished like me, change,
    Be more like me, people like me, they clap /

    Wait, why is you face so blank,
    Have you any emotion, like me?