Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

I have never been kissed—hence, my “primitive” ranking;

you can only be surprised to the same degree as your ignorance.

to dwell on the origin of pain is to become trapped in a loop—to circle the trauma as if in a semi-truck, until the tire grooves grow so deep, you can’t turn out to drive forward.

Papa always says one listens with one’s eyes,

He says that a poem must serve as a map to a world outside itself—it cannot be just a cute story or lovely images. It must guide readers to what feels like a shared experience.

My own heart seems hardly to beat tonight. Once, when we were small, Luc stepped on a cricket in the washroom, and it chirped a slow pulse that grew slower and slower for what felt like an eternity. That’s what my heartbeat feels like.

I wrapped my arms around myself thinking, That’s evolutionary grace—that human beings have two arms long enough to hug themselves. But even as I thought the words, I knew that a person’s own arms aren’t enough. A body wants another person’s arms to hold it. It does not long to hold as badly as it longs to be held. Here, it wants another body to say, rest here a while.

So much happens to and inside every human being on this planet—it’s as if we are all small infinite worlds. And how do we connect? How do we come to see each other’s constellations?

she strolls around in jeans as if her derrière was sculpted from her mother's womb for them.

“It is terrifying to be a parent. To choose to behave one way with your child, and then watch what comes of it. It is like planting a garden with aster and dynamite, but you never know which, and either sprouts up at the oddest times to remind you of what you did well or poorly.”

I love this quote. it spoke to my very soul. I have felt this way many times with my own children.

He was right—I was his little bird. Sometimes he still calls me that. His pigeon, actually. Because I always fly home.

This is your life right now. It might be both happy and sad, but where there’s happiness—like, good, bright happiness—you take it.”

The present we live in vanishes before we blink, let alone write it down in ink.

“Your drinker of ink.” The name was perfect—a more elegant version of rat de bibliothèque—“library rat,” or “bookworm.”

I automatically pressed one side of my face to his heart—I’ve been thinking that his heart beats a rhythm in my life, too.

“A person can be mired in sorrow, and laughter still finds you.”

A string tugged across a map in my mind, the ends pinned to New York and Ljubljana. I imagined tying those ends together. It didn’t matter anymore where you pinned the knot; the knot was the home. The places simply contained it.