Instructions on How to Build a Tiny Shrine
Senior Creative Writing Project
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree Bachelor of Arts with
A Major in Creative Writing at
The University of North Carolina at Asheville
Fall 2006
By Arielle Carlson
Thesis Advisor           Gary Ettari
Thesis Director
Richard Chess

Instructions on How to Build a Tiny Shrine
A collection of poems and a short story by Arielle Carlson
23 Coleman Ave. Asheville,NC 28801
618-713-7949 headonhead@gmail. com

Instructions on How to Build a Tiny Shrine

Contents
Roadhouse Cafe	1
Morning	2
Delivered	4
Meeting Her	5
Still Life	6
The Pageant	7
Immigrants and Angels	9
In the Attic	11
Rind in the Grass	12
On Watch	13
The End of An Affair	14
Walking Down a Blue Street	....15
To Cross Her is Like	17
Doing the Laundry	18
Instructions on How to Build a Tiny Shrine	19
Grown-up-ing	21
How it Ends	23
To Margaret, In Mexico	24
A Lecture on Sewing	25

Roadhouse Cafe
A squeal comes from the vinyl stool
as he swivels,
slowly:
cigarette machine
juke box cigarette machine juke box.
Ginger calls him fancy,
what with all his curls, his car,
the way he glares at the line cook like
he hates to think of grease traps.
His motel key scrapes the metal studs planted in his belt as he turns opposite the humming fans: cherry pie
Pall Malls cherry pie
Pall Malls.
She takes his plate and passes the bus boy, whispers: starved, his teeth so worn from grinding: Eisenhower
Highway Eisenhower
Highway.
She fills salt shakers with her right as she brushes one unruly strand of hair away with her left.

Carlson 1

Morning
There are
no conflicts, at first.
The day, largely quiet
in her roundabout premier
stands looming over my lawn,
dressed in her ordinary uniform of glory
and all that. The dew
comes from her brow,
from the effort of coaxing
birds into singing
their repetitious taps,
their miniature brass alarms
announcing their height, weight, color, and sex:
personal ads recited in mid air.
As I watch them
skip from branch
to branch, flirting and circling
each other
I think of you,
during our end,
lifting the glass to your lips
over and over,
your eyes glued to the window,
as if clutching at it
like claws to a branch, you,
saying nothing.
But I thought I heard you humming
one flat note
over and over
like a mocking bird recycling
the tune of a dirge,
barely audible above the
silence:
in the end,
our typical,

Carlson 2

lonesome,
squeaky-clean
silence of the eyes.

Carlson 3

Delivered
She stops walking, shuffles envelopes, searching
for the matching address,
sifting through ads for cheap pizza and designer cologne-
to give him time.
He stands up, brushes at his jeans, throws the dull spade into a patch of mud, and walks across the yard toward her panicked hands and tube socks.
She slides his energy bill into
the tin box, undoes
one button on her pale uniform, and lowers
the metal flag, holding it down.
She pretends not to watch as he spits into the raspberries.

Carlson 4

Carlson 5 Meeting Her
She carves her way through the crossed knees, the shopping bags full of souvenirs, the strollers hiding sleeping children seasoned by museums. Your book suddenly feels limp, bland. You feel her, first, as an uncollected idea, a hazy image of something powerful, a stallion trotting and elusive behind a silken sheet of mist. She is nearly there, the door to the next car, but does not continue. She excuses herself with a nod, stops in front of your shoes. A young father rocks a child on his hip. The teenagers kiss. She is quiet. She is looking at you. You know this before you stare back. Your book falls, a dead bird splayed in the aisle. She knows you? (A wink) Yes. You wonder how you know her. You know you know her. The library? The laundromat? The car rocks, stops at a station. People rush on, she remains, her toes squared with yours. You remember.
You do not have to say anything, (A wink) she knows. The lights rocket past the window, the car rattles. Her swollen hands restore the book into yours. You reach to shake her hand, to thank her? But her finger is to her lips. Hush. She turns, and passes through the door. You are thinking in colors.
Next stop is yours. You close your book, scratch your forehead. Rise. You feel like painting, you rarely do. You will pick up fresh brushes on the walk home. It feels urgent. You decide to exit out her car. And as you pass through, you notice her, smiling to everyone, hovering over the shoulder of a young poet. The muse, humming.

Still Life
You sat, eyes pacing in synch with your hands on your painterly sketch of my crossed legs, dressed in a table cloth and orange peels, a still-life like the Dutch Masters mastered, your coal
melting into the pewter saucer balanced on my knee, now on your page, a rough tangle of lines glowing white.
You said,
We should all try
to be good at something,
as if the peel must learn
to cover its fruit.
I coughed, struck a match, and created a small globe of light. Shadows pooled in your cheeks, showed them hollow, and I reminded you about lying.

Carlson 6

The Pageant
I.
She wins the pumpkin with her eyes, vacant and
swirling like oak leaves caught in barn drafts.
II.
A balloon drifts into
the lowest branch of a hickory,
snags and
pops: someone screams, but
no one looks away.
Flecks of dried blood stick to
her freshly pierced ears, rhinestones blink in the sun.
III.
We follow as she carries
it to the center of town
at dusk.
It is hers to pick,
to pierce with knife and carve

Carlson 7

a hollow smile out of taut rind.
VI.
The knife disappears with quick stabs.
She scoops seeds with bare hands shaking like loosened leaves rattled by wind.
During the applause she touches one flame to a waxen wick, grins.
The glow of a gutted face smiles
watching us as we dance on drying leaves.
A child begins to sing a song of skeletons and
ghosts:
no one looks away.

Carlson 8

Immigrants and Angels
Every Christmas my mother lugged mice-nibbled boxes of ornaments and bobbles, glittering candle sticks and table runners up the basement stairs to litter the house with. I hunted for St. Lucia first, before I knew her name.
She was A two inch statue,
a typical Aryan child
with butter colored hair and blue eyes,
peppermint cheeks and pale arms,
hand-painted and breakable.
I slipped her into my pocket and
sang her carols when I was alone.
St. Lucia is a saint.
God saved her from fire,
an arranged marriage,
because her honest delicacy persuaded him so.
Every december in her honor little pale girls scatter about the frozen school yards of Scandinavia dressed in white gowns, blinding the still air. At night they place wreathes of mistletoe on their flaxen heads and plant softly blazing candles between their branches.
Their glow designs a primitive halo:
they are saints for one night.
They feed their parents gingerbread
in bed and speak soft words to heaven.
They do not pray for presents, they pray for grace.
My mother once showed me a black and white
picture of her mother dressed as an angel
for some inner-city public-school holiday pageant.

Carlson 9

Her halo was a crown of copper buttons, her cotton wings hung limp about her pale arms and her silver eyes darted up towards the rafters. My mother explained that she was searching for the holy star of Bethlehem,
(some glass orb that dangled from a rotten support beam) but I know that she was looking north, for Sweden, for St. Lucia, for gingerbread,
for her family members who missed the boat, for a God to honor her naive delicacy, for the fields of unbreakable ice, and for her majestic wreath of saintly fire.

Carlson 10

In the Attic
We sat stuffed and lazy on the couch,
too tired to sleep.
From above we could hear Mom,
in the attic, as she cried at each new discovery
of boxes, as if she were finding colorful birds
nesting beneath the shadows. She
threw boxes through the trap door
that landed with a dull crash
hacking dust, like a dry cough.
They were shoe boxes, recovered
from the burning shelves of our ancestors'
blazing general store.
Our living room filled with the
stench of singed leather of boots
salvaged from flames.
She followed, her bare feet
finding each rung, steadily,
one after the other
quickly, as if she needed running,
as if she was fleeing
a dark container of skeletons,
and bent over to retrieve
a lone boot. She pressed
it's hot black sole to our sun burnt cheeks,
without speaking, and
We nodded, slowly,
as if the shoes demanded sympathy.
But we were too tired
to apologize for the past. To us,
it was only an attic
no one dared sleep in:
a blackened cage for
boxes full of ruined shoes
pretty as dead birds.

Carlson 11

Rind in the Grass
She rests her elbows on a picnic table, shaded by sycamore, shielded from rain, sucking on cantaloupe.
Her skin is chapped
by wind, tanned
by sun:
a shade of mud,
the color of an apple core
left in a window sill
At the crack of bark
the cantaloupe drops, the trunk is
halved and jagged, falling
in pieces.
the bench crumbles:
a heap of splinters missile to
the damp earth.
And as
the netting of branches sink into her curls she wonders how much blush morticians use on children

Carlson 12

On Watch
(A Converted Schoolhouse
New Orleans, LA)
The statue looms
at the end of the
hall of open windows,
staring into middle distance.
Her granite mantle does not curl
in the humidity, and
her open hands, still
as ice,
do not glow the way
the hands of saints
painted on candles
sold in mercatdos
glow. I tilt my flashlight into her eyes:
Wake up.
We need mothers.
Outside, the moon turns mud
the matte blue of frost. I hear wings of vultures flapping slowly, easing onto the barren schoolyard. Her pale eyes do not see. Her hidden teeth never move to bite her lip. Her stone hands seem to welcome even these dark birds coming to graze the filth with their shining beaks.

Carlson 13

The End of an Affair
Did you know that the field
we transplanted lettuce in,
the first day you arrived on the farm, used to be
a field of poppies?
The field I told you about when you were still in the city still surrounded by pigeons, used to be a field on fire with blossoms, their glowing stems leaning towards one another as if saving their secrets for the wind.
We could5 ve gone, but
I tore them flat
with the rusting tractor,
flipped their stalks into their graves, sweating
as if soaking my spine
so that we could get dirty "planting our bounty"
when really, we just stuck our fingers in the dirt,
and heads went unharvested
because no one looked after them once
we left.
You, to the city, so quickly, And I, to bed again, fragile as the poppies, weathered as the wind and the tractor.

Carlson 14

Walking Down a Blue Street
I.
Blue:
the color of Valium,
the bottom of a pool,
Madonna's electric eyeliner.
II
Blue falls from houses to the pavement creates the river I wade through, turns my skin freezer-bitten, pickled.
I am the stencil of a stranger,
the sound of a single man walking straight
into the dead of night. But something is missing. Where are the people, so beautiful and busy?
III.
Do you hear (he asks) that noise (he asks) like footfalls?
IV.
The cobalt shadow
warns them, confides in them:
the danger of trying,
the fantasy of pursuit,
the threat of an outsider
lingering before the door.
V.
Hold on, (she says) the Blue

Carlson 15

(she says) it speaks!
VL
Madonna describes her last tour to everyone missing the
blue sky, pulsing, still visible in the dead of night.

Carlson 16

To Cross Her is Like
A storm. From around the comer
you can feel the wood humming
as she stomps across the floor, her
feet falling firm and pounding
on the boards with thick soles as if
trying to hammer them thin
and brittle, break in two
and hurl aside, leaving nothing
between hunter
and the hunted:
so she may fly
straight at your chest,
kimono sleeves like wings
of an ofsprey, hooked to cover
your body.
She enters
you are shoved clear through
the window,
glass, like tinsel almost floating        You in a cloud of light, think: She exhales hurricanes before the stab of wet grass breaks your fall.

Carlson 17

Doing the Laundry
From the dryer
I pull
a snot-rag of a shirt,
the one you loved so much.
I remember finding it hiding in a cardboard box melting into the wet grass-A yard sale under rain,
Two boys joking and drinking on a broken porch. I lifted it under the thunder like a ship flag in surrender, and they raised their drunken fingers in response,
Fifty cents:
the cost of a Kleenex A condom
A round of pinball When I wore it
you saw clear through its weave, the holes growing fatter with every move exposing every curve. You used to use your teeth to lift it up, over my folded shoulders in one soft moan, your breath as heavy as wet cotton lapping at my skin.
Now the shirt is pulled
for someone else to strip me of, their hands
stretching the holy scars
open, until we feel only the naked thrill of
skin on skin.
my body pulls closer, towards this new shape, so close
and bare that the shirt might as well be plugging a crack
on some distant porch,, the rain
soaking each fraying thread, and the lightning
burning fresh holes

Carlson 18

Instructions on How to Build a Tiny Shrine
1.
Pour a pill-sized spill of paint into an empty matchbox. This is your backdrop.
2.
Rotate the box on the base of your palm.
Watch the color spread, the paint
rising towards the corners and bulging
like a single wave
growing fat near shore
under night.
3.
Choose your subject.
Consider:
Who is due homage?
What is worthy of
Gorilla Glue?
Not only
people are holy.
4. (Suggestions)
the long fingers of a pianist,
whole bean coffee,
sugar maples, vetch, and coxcomb,
vagabonds telling tarot cards,
a nervous octopus,
Quentin Tarantino,
etc.
5.
Consider:
topless women are taboo,
depending
on who finds it.

Carlson 19

6.
After paint dries
cut out appointed Saint,
and carefully, glue
to inside of box.
7.
Place shrine with reverence
or glee
or other fitting emotion.
8.
Consider:
naked women shrines might
best be appreciated
in your closet.
9.
Repeat until
you run out of heroes.

Carlson 20

Grown-up-ing
I remember the child's face
I used to wear
had a hole in it,
a hole for singing songs and eating sugar.
A hole that shouted
across the lake
jokes and stories
and proposed naked games of softball in lightning storms.
The hole was always moving around, flapping out something silly to another hole, which I think, would laugh. It never smoked cigarettes or gritted it's teeth or said words that broke other people's faces: It was a treasure hole, a well fed and toothbrushed hole.
That face also had something like a pair of binoculars
set above the smelling thing.
When the binoculars caught light,
they shined
the way a prism might
if hung in a window,
and other faces used to even tell
that face
the binoculars made it all very pretty
to look at.
This whole face
and all of the gangly parts below it
rested on these two posts, like support beams.
If that face was going to play softball
it had to ask those support beams
if they wanted to play too,

Carlson 21

because it required a lot of to-and-fro,
a lot of resting on the beams and making
them run a lot, maybe even until they
could not feel the running anymore,
only the wind on their hinges
and the way they extended like graceful necks
of wheat grass,
or lightning bolts.
I remember the smelling thing could smell
a lilac bush miles away and
the binoculars would ride upon their two support beams
across the glowing field
and that face would find the lilac bush,
and with the miraculous hands we had,
so tiny and awkward,
we would pick one bloom
and toss it into our hair
and the bloom would wave
in the wind until
the wind went still
and the trees went black
and my binocular things spotted home
and my support beams understood that it was time to go there:
and my support beams never used to buckle.

Carlson 22

How it Ends
(Watching Harold and Maude)
You didn't see them coming
the wrinkles, their billowing sags
soft as the curtains
descending from ceiling of theater, velvet.
The lobby lights on your steel chair,
polished spokes revolving, glint-
I watch you whisper
misshapen words
to the passing carpet.
In the dark
a sea of heads bob above the chairscape, like
glass buoys riding a constant march of waves.
As we roll down the slope, toward the front,
I imagine
you, thinking of drowning.
Harold jigs over
a cliff hulking above
the green ocean
strumming his banjo, singing:
Because there's a million things to be,
you know that there are.
The whole movie passes,
you slump, wilted under
shuffled memories, the scrambled past,
your mysterious montage of years.
I watch you
dreaming, ebbing.
You stir as if knowing
it is over,
while somewhere above,
an usher fumbles
for the light switch.

Carlson 23

To Margaret, In Mexico
Winter prepares to pounce: I see the claws of branches scratching the sky, daring snow.
I shut windows, shell chestnuts, drink bourbon. Our bed is dressed in pale flannel sheets. It is not warm. The fruit flies disappeared from the cutting-board a week ago.
But tell me about the marigolds: How they turn whole rooms yellow, If the cemeteries glow gold.
Are they really so velvet and petaled?
Our flower bed is shrinking, a dry collection of twigs. I hear the thin stems snapping under the small paws of opossums at night,
when I open the window,
to watch for your plane.
You sweat,
my dear,
I shiver.

Carlson 24

Carlson 25
A Lecture on Sewing: (Little Birds and Make-Up)
My grandmother wants a memory. She already has a body. The body's almost ninety. My mom says that the body hates the memory.
My grandmother has been wanting a memory for a long time. I've wanted to be the one to tell her that she doesn't need it. But now my mother despises my humoring; I'm not funny anymore. This may be true. My mother is very fond of her mother. She visits her everyday, without pinching her nose or crying. I ask my grandma, who always smiles, "Whose granddaughter am I? Am I your granddaughter?" My grandma says, "Fairy," and she won't stop to explain herself, "Fairy fairy fairy." I don't understand why she needs "memories" when she's already so damn enchanted by everything.
My grandmother's memory is borderline nonexistent. But she still remembers to swallow. She still responds to clapping and bird calls, still sucks her chocolate bars and loves Shalimar. She may not be able to articulate much, but at least she still wants. Just last.week she requested an apron during brunch - that is, so she could hide her extra mashed potatoes from the other diners. This week she wants her nails clipped, not because they're not adequately maintained - they are. But she loves the sound of running water, and the attention. My grandmother has always been obsessed with hygiene; my mother went so far as to call her "the white gloved Nazi." Grandma grew up in the depression, but her father, the owner of a quaint shoe store, always found enough cash to buy soap. As for myself, a self-proclaimed tomboy at six, the sound of running water never really got me off. Nor did aprons.
There were four of us girls in my family but my father only successfully affected me with

Carlson 26
his lectures on baseball as the purest sport, or how mahogany is softer than oak; yes, everything is softer than oak. My sisters were too absorbed in the intoxicating fumes of their nail polish, and the advertisements they tacked to their walls, which always depicted half-naked beach-types in bow-ties. My mother was never a tomboy because my grandmother sewed her dresses.
Grandmother Margaret is unusually beautiful. I told her she shouldn't feel bad about forgetting my name because looking at me is just as good. For her, finding words is kin to me, attempting to darn a sock. She's been humming, singing, and lecturing to all of our family for years, and that's never been our only reason for loving her. Recently we've encouraged her to point at familiar objects or people she recognizes. She points at me. She enjoys calling me "Fairy," "Kitty-cat," or even "New York." She never points at the nurses, though they are constantly hovering about her wheelchair, just waiting for her to shit her pants or scream. She only screams when the nurses arrive with fresh diapers. It's the loudest noise she makes. Louder than her laughter, which is huge.
This memory loss is beginning, slowly, to infect my mother. "Just because grandmother's lost it," I say, "Doesn't mean you have to too. You're young and vibrant, a healthy 57." She rolls her eyfcs and, exasperated, fingers her wrinkles. Many people, my self included, thought Alzheimer's skipped generations, but my mother's concern led to extensive research; she says I'm wrong. "So am I in the free and clear?" I ask, and with a disappointed smirk, she walks. Grandmother was big on giving silent treatments too. I think my whole family has been trained in the art of cold-shouldering, or has been cold-shouldered at least three dozen times before leaving for college. Silence. It's enough to make you think about screaming.
What's grandma going to get out of the memories of her long childhood or lost lovers? Glee? "Fairy" is gleeful. I even take her outside to watch little birds. One particularly bright day

Carlson 27
she pointed out a hidden, brown finch. It was struggling to build a nest in a gnarly magnolia tree. It wasn't really using its wings Just gliding around. The magnolia looked stupidly out of place, its buds trying vainly to pop up all over the place. Spring was coming, but it wasn't time for blooms yet. I think grandmother resented the tree too; she was a woman of modesty and believed in the natural rhythm of things. But she loved the finch and held her pointed finger stretched in the direction of that dirty bird - which could have been a wood elf for all she knew, and not a rabid finch.
I drive the twenty miles to her nursing home, thinking about showing her some of her old pictures, because they used to make her eyes glow. They would moisten, thick with tears. "Do you remember who that man is?" I asked. And her cheeks would lift, indicating her speechless, waning, nostalgia. It was an exercise, like making flash cards for a science test. You see one word on one side, and try to remember all the little words on the other side that defines the initial word. Similarly, the pictures were like triggers. And of course, she wouldn't always cry. Sometimes little sentences would try to wriggle their way out from between her lips, but most fall limp and die away before anything substantial is communicated. The photo of Ralph, her husband, seems to stab her every time. They were one of those couples that married young, threw bridge parties on Saturdays, held separately respectful day jobs despite having children, said "I love you" before falling asleep, and meant it
What is wrong with me? Why can't I take her "tragic dementia" as seriously as my mother wants me to? I "humor her," my mother says, as if I am doing her a great injustice by encouraging her fairy-tales.
If I stole her book of photographs, no one but my mother would miss them.
I drive on, dreaming of grandmother, before she forgot how to sew.