I Know My Own Gun
Am I the asshole? Am I just a furball of complaints,
cataracts on my eyeballs
and ghosts in the doorway?
I melt on the hot embers of forgiveness, they’re poking me and hurting me to change
It’s a train and this line I’ve never rode before
We named our daughter Grace in another language
It’s the bitter pill I choke on
Self righteous I’m right and when I’m right I can forget the gentle gray pebbles of his nature
We’re in a dream its called Alaska its July 1998
The kayaks make a muted swish through the silver gray water
I have silver rings on all my fingers and an obsession with a boy named Kevin and he says I’m too scared to dance and he’s right
But no matter he’s back on the boat and I’m here
The dream seeping into my fleece
My grandparents are on the boat too
This is their before death trip but they don’t say it that way
I’m in front
Some adult thought it would be more meaningful maybe
To feel like I’m alone or something and I’m too cool to admit they’re right
There’s a finger in front of my face and a disembodied voice its pointing to a nest of sticks and earth on an island of mud
And then I see it
Them
All of them
Their folded wings as big as winter sweaters
The secrets of white that I catch in flecks when they rearrange their feathered bodies maybe saying go away, why are you here, I don’t know
I almost can’t breath
I zoom back
The water meets the sky but there’s no handover just silver gray seeping into silver gray
And I think, I’m inside a mirror
We're in a dream its called Alaska its July 1998 and it’s cold.
Is Mom here? Laurie?
Who’s behind me in this near-silent plastic boat?
It could be morning noon or well not evening that would feel darker
It must be a strong daylight hour but the sun is nowhere and everywhere all at once and I flash back to the woods behind our house where I once felt what could’ve been god
And then I’m back and they’re just bald eagles you know?
Just birds of prey
And broken glass and snapping turtles
I’m sort of aware of other islands around me, rising from the silver gray and they too, are occupied by giants
warming their next generation.
How did we find this place?
Who is in charge here?
I notice the sun warming the outside of my jacket and I feel the faint tinge of its comfort
And I exhale
And cranes unfold in my heart
This train it’s relentless its a glimpse and then gone
I will keep this, I microfiber to my chest
This could soften me, so I keep it, I could need it, I know my own gun
cataracts on my eyeballs
and ghosts in the doorway?
I melt on the hot embers of forgiveness, they’re poking me and hurting me to change
It’s a train and this line I’ve never rode before
We named our daughter Grace in another language
It’s the bitter pill I choke on
Self righteous I’m right and when I’m right I can forget the gentle gray pebbles of his nature
We’re in a dream its called Alaska its July 1998
The kayaks make a muted swish through the silver gray water
I have silver rings on all my fingers and an obsession with a boy named Kevin and he says I’m too scared to dance and he’s right
But no matter he’s back on the boat and I’m here
The dream seeping into my fleece
My grandparents are on the boat too
This is their before death trip but they don’t say it that way
I’m in front
Some adult thought it would be more meaningful maybe
To feel like I’m alone or something and I’m too cool to admit they’re right
There’s a finger in front of my face and a disembodied voice its pointing to a nest of sticks and earth on an island of mud
And then I see it
Them
All of them
Their folded wings as big as winter sweaters
The secrets of white that I catch in flecks when they rearrange their feathered bodies maybe saying go away, why are you here, I don’t know
I almost can’t breath
I zoom back
The water meets the sky but there’s no handover just silver gray seeping into silver gray
And I think, I’m inside a mirror
We're in a dream its called Alaska its July 1998 and it’s cold.
Is Mom here? Laurie?
Who’s behind me in this near-silent plastic boat?
It could be morning noon or well not evening that would feel darker
It must be a strong daylight hour but the sun is nowhere and everywhere all at once and I flash back to the woods behind our house where I once felt what could’ve been god
And then I’m back and they’re just bald eagles you know?
Just birds of prey
And broken glass and snapping turtles
I’m sort of aware of other islands around me, rising from the silver gray and they too, are occupied by giants
warming their next generation.
How did we find this place?
Who is in charge here?
I notice the sun warming the outside of my jacket and I feel the faint tinge of its comfort
And I exhale
And cranes unfold in my heart
This train it’s relentless its a glimpse and then gone
I will keep this, I microfiber to my chest
This could soften me, so I keep it, I could need it, I know my own gun
Costa Rica
There was a boy I met once, the only two people bobbing the silver waves of Pavones. Skinny horses drinking river before it spun into a salty soup. I threw him a crumb and he dragged me up the cold clear river, onto a mud crusted dirt bike, across the black sand where we walked barefoot to a small waterfall in shadow hillside that made my nipples hard as rocks. Catarata, he laughed, not cascada. He’s proud of how light skinned he is. Not like the others. Dejamos el interes en hacer amor, and his head finds the ground and hangs like a ripe fruit about to drop. He doesn’t speak English. He lives in a two room wooden building on top of a hill. His bike lives inside on the plywood floor and he kisses me greedy, in my mouth and around it, too much, way too much and I can’t think of how to say what I want and its dark and I’ve had too many beers but there is no one to go home to but an empty room in an upstairs building in the dark of town below us. The sky colors pulse and change behind black jungle heads bowing down the ocean. I don’t know how I got home. Did I? He wrote for years, until reality pulled the last corner of the curtain and the light stopped shining for good. I find the lonely boys, the past life kings, the ones that stare, and build things behind sunsets and long for things that aren’t. Mom’s yesterday music curls around two open door frames. I had an anchor and I cut the line. I try to keep my feet on the ground but they keep floating up and moving in the wind, the pressure, the tide, they move in big things I don’t fight, not then, not now.
Wake My Birds
I don’t like touching money in the mornings. It’s dirty. I’ll touch it all night if
Touching is talking
without thinking. Without even
I have a sudden pressing urge to Feng Shui. Anything to fix it. A sudden urge to
I forget to eat in the mornings. I answer emails and start drawings and texts and writing and cleaning and then its almost noon and I’m empty I forget to feed.
I forget things.
My memory is fucked sideways like dad the shocking scrambled my vaults too, like swallowed cum loaning genes to an egg fertilized by different swimmers.
The sky has lots to say today. I’ve said two sentences. It bangs cane stalks against the house, it makes the blankets damp and the frogs come out of their little dark holes.
I can’t measure what I want
down to something as precise as words so I pull my hair until it
I rock.
Remember singing.
We sang to raise the birds that slept in our
They rattled, found hunger and chased our single hum of velvet, our lighter than gravity, easier than human and
We sang to belong, to touch god on the soft wet inside, the side we know at night.
When we’re not touching money.
It swelled, it broke, new months flipped on, we yearned, fell asleep fell away, drank other illusions and forgot
Our chests our birds our god.
How can I be bigger I want to be
My own art, tall as a wall, too big be to be ashamed of.
I want to be big but
You can’t be part big. Everything has to be.
Big questions. Big time. Big eyes. Big strong big knowing and the thunderheads. Too big to be to be ashamed.
I want to wake my birds.
Claudia has a baby.
I have a borrowed bed.
I want to wake my birds.
Touching is talking
without thinking. Without even
I have a sudden pressing urge to Feng Shui. Anything to fix it. A sudden urge to
I forget to eat in the mornings. I answer emails and start drawings and texts and writing and cleaning and then its almost noon and I’m empty I forget to feed.
I forget things.
My memory is fucked sideways like dad the shocking scrambled my vaults too, like swallowed cum loaning genes to an egg fertilized by different swimmers.
The sky has lots to say today. I’ve said two sentences. It bangs cane stalks against the house, it makes the blankets damp and the frogs come out of their little dark holes.
I can’t measure what I want
down to something as precise as words so I pull my hair until it
I rock.
Remember singing.
We sang to raise the birds that slept in our
They rattled, found hunger and chased our single hum of velvet, our lighter than gravity, easier than human and
We sang to belong, to touch god on the soft wet inside, the side we know at night.
When we’re not touching money.
It swelled, it broke, new months flipped on, we yearned, fell asleep fell away, drank other illusions and forgot
Our chests our birds our god.
How can I be bigger I want to be
My own art, tall as a wall, too big be to be ashamed of.
I want to be big but
You can’t be part big. Everything has to be.
Big questions. Big time. Big eyes. Big strong big knowing and the thunderheads. Too big to be to be ashamed.
I want to wake my birds.
Claudia has a baby.
I have a borrowed bed.
I want to wake my birds.
Once
There’s a wave. It’s been a long time coming. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear it, didn’t stroke the white noise on the news like everyone else. But what can you do to prepare for birds swimming, for snakes shedding.
The wave has come now, salting my clothes, the paper that flutters when I think. I don’t want to talk which is good I guess because I can’t.
My life molds in front of me, eyes open wide, hands stapled to the wall. It’s not the scenes I thought I’d see but more like hearing colors.
The cold rock wall low enough to sit on in elementary school with the silver water fountain that hurt my fingers to twist open on cold days. My see- through tights and the static on the ends of my leg hairs, when they were wispy and white. The rubber of dad’s wetsuits and the liquid plastic he’d used to seal them when they cracked. The dry rubber cracks before he did, running my finger over them and reading in braille how deserts had outsmarted me in times before, taken my blood to flavor the pools while smiling and it was not a nice smile.
Kicking a hole in the promise after he spanked me. Getting detained in Mexico, the german shephards, the Spanish on particles, the blinking lights, the waiting. Walking a black galaxy alone after school and always the sounds of a yelling from a baseball game and hating how it turned my life into tissue in the wind, or worse, a paralyzed-from-the waist dream.
Picnics in the fog by the Golden Gate Bridge and my scratchy wool sweater, the smell of Papa Murphys pizza, how my hands died and turned into little lead pipes. Jon. Finding and losing that one wolf with hot to the touch eyes. Remembering when he gave the homeless guy a surfboard. Wrote me a note in his dead grandmother’s lace, tucked under my wiper blades and signed with a ball point heart. How he first kissed me with a plate of racing stripes in one hand. How I lost him cause I’m me and I twisted the stars wrong, I turned miracles into jokes and they blinked out and everyone forgot they’d been something once.
The wave has come now, salting my clothes, the paper that flutters when I think. I don’t want to talk which is good I guess because I can’t.
My life molds in front of me, eyes open wide, hands stapled to the wall. It’s not the scenes I thought I’d see but more like hearing colors.
The cold rock wall low enough to sit on in elementary school with the silver water fountain that hurt my fingers to twist open on cold days. My see- through tights and the static on the ends of my leg hairs, when they were wispy and white. The rubber of dad’s wetsuits and the liquid plastic he’d used to seal them when they cracked. The dry rubber cracks before he did, running my finger over them and reading in braille how deserts had outsmarted me in times before, taken my blood to flavor the pools while smiling and it was not a nice smile.
Kicking a hole in the promise after he spanked me. Getting detained in Mexico, the german shephards, the Spanish on particles, the blinking lights, the waiting. Walking a black galaxy alone after school and always the sounds of a yelling from a baseball game and hating how it turned my life into tissue in the wind, or worse, a paralyzed-from-the waist dream.
Picnics in the fog by the Golden Gate Bridge and my scratchy wool sweater, the smell of Papa Murphys pizza, how my hands died and turned into little lead pipes. Jon. Finding and losing that one wolf with hot to the touch eyes. Remembering when he gave the homeless guy a surfboard. Wrote me a note in his dead grandmother’s lace, tucked under my wiper blades and signed with a ball point heart. How he first kissed me with a plate of racing stripes in one hand. How I lost him cause I’m me and I twisted the stars wrong, I turned miracles into jokes and they blinked out and everyone forgot they’d been something once.
The Commune
Maybe it started after we left. Maybe while I was deep in my first burning man, naked except for a leather belt and a parasol, the cold water seeped from the hillside again. But I wasn't there to see it. We just drank from buckets of apple juice, hand cranked in Dave's orchard. Even when the the weeks turned to months and the buckets turned to cider.
When the fire crackled every night and the mornings got quiet we moved from the old tepee platform next to my favorite hemlock and into Marlie's old place. It was the best one. It had a wood stove and a bay window over the woodshed. I lit candles that dripped over the hand hewn windowsill and we’d fog up the windows until the animal calls went quiet in the forest and the other shacks were dark. Well, shack is too cruel but cottage is too kind.
I see the trail through stumps to the reservoir where we took Christie once. Wildflowers and poison oak grew around their giant bases. Christie looked as old as Zag's mother, pulled and aged by early onset dementia. He changed her diaper like a child with a matching wedding ring. Christie didn’t speak anymore but she grunted and slapped and hit. Sometimes smiled. We took a picture with her but she didn’t smile. It was hot and sunny and we thought we were doing a good thing. We caught newts in our hands for her to pet and cut wildflowers for mason jars that would wilt on the walk home. Soon after, Christie died. I still see Zag showering between lettuce rows, wiggling the hose over his head, barefoot in swim trunks against the grape arbor heavy with fruit. He didn't know then that her time was almost up.
We had lost Christie once. The whole two acres is fenced, but it happens sometimes, Zag said. We looked for her into the night with a headlamp and then ate without him in a room full of people that sounded like it was full of mice. I was carving a spoon, then. Haim taught me. He taught me lots of things and I gave him my first surfboard in thanks. This where I met the boys that went to the base in Antarctica to work every summer. And the curly haired girl who told me never push when you shit. And Mike with his green eyes and porn sized parts. And the rows and rows of glass jars full of home grown spices. I don’t have many pictures from the commune but there is one of me with my basket, made from willow branches woven with blackberry vines, thorns removed with my thumbs over a few evenings perched on logs next to people knitting and carving and talking under stars.
I hear it’s not a commune anymore. People don’t come and go and young men with dreadlocks don’t buy liquor at the convenience store in town anymore. Hippies don’t bike out of the woods for flour or matches and I hear Zag has a young girlfriend now. But I don’t want to know any more. I want to remember it how it was.
When the fire crackled every night and the mornings got quiet we moved from the old tepee platform next to my favorite hemlock and into Marlie's old place. It was the best one. It had a wood stove and a bay window over the woodshed. I lit candles that dripped over the hand hewn windowsill and we’d fog up the windows until the animal calls went quiet in the forest and the other shacks were dark. Well, shack is too cruel but cottage is too kind.
I see the trail through stumps to the reservoir where we took Christie once. Wildflowers and poison oak grew around their giant bases. Christie looked as old as Zag's mother, pulled and aged by early onset dementia. He changed her diaper like a child with a matching wedding ring. Christie didn’t speak anymore but she grunted and slapped and hit. Sometimes smiled. We took a picture with her but she didn’t smile. It was hot and sunny and we thought we were doing a good thing. We caught newts in our hands for her to pet and cut wildflowers for mason jars that would wilt on the walk home. Soon after, Christie died. I still see Zag showering between lettuce rows, wiggling the hose over his head, barefoot in swim trunks against the grape arbor heavy with fruit. He didn't know then that her time was almost up.
We had lost Christie once. The whole two acres is fenced, but it happens sometimes, Zag said. We looked for her into the night with a headlamp and then ate without him in a room full of people that sounded like it was full of mice. I was carving a spoon, then. Haim taught me. He taught me lots of things and I gave him my first surfboard in thanks. This where I met the boys that went to the base in Antarctica to work every summer. And the curly haired girl who told me never push when you shit. And Mike with his green eyes and porn sized parts. And the rows and rows of glass jars full of home grown spices. I don’t have many pictures from the commune but there is one of me with my basket, made from willow branches woven with blackberry vines, thorns removed with my thumbs over a few evenings perched on logs next to people knitting and carving and talking under stars.
I hear it’s not a commune anymore. People don’t come and go and young men with dreadlocks don’t buy liquor at the convenience store in town anymore. Hippies don’t bike out of the woods for flour or matches and I hear Zag has a young girlfriend now. But I don’t want to know any more. I want to remember it how it was.
Once
There’s a wave. It’s been a long time coming. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear it, didn’t stroke the white noise on the news like everyone else, but what can you do to prepare for birds swimming, for snakes shedding.
The wave has come now, salting my clothes, the paper that flutters when I think. I don’t want to talk which is good I guess because I can’t. My life molds in front of me, eyes open wide, hands stapled to the wall.
It’s not the scenes I thought I’d see but more like hearing colors.
The cold rock wall low enough to sit on in elementary school and the silver water fountain that hurt my fingers to twist open on cold days.
My see through tights and the static on the ends of my leg hairs, when they were wispy and weak.
The rubber of dad’s westuits and the liquid plastic he’d used to seal them when they cracked. The dry rubber cracks before he did, running my finger over them and reading in braile how deserts had outsmarted me in times before, taken my blood to flavor her pools while smiling and it was not a nice smile.
Kicking a hole in the promise after he spanked me. Getting detained in Mexico, the German shephards, the Spanish on particles, the blinking lights, the waiting.
Walking a black galaxy alone after school and always the sounds of a yelling from a baseball game and hating how it turned my life into tissue in the wind, or worse, a paralyzed-from-the waist dream.
Picnics in the fog by the golden gate bridge and my scratchy wool sweater, the smell of papa murphys pizza, how my hands died and turned into little lead pipes.
Jon. Finding and losing that one wolf with hot to the touch eyes. Remembering when he gave the homeless guy a surfboard. Wrote me a note in his dead grandmother’s lace, tucked under my wiper blades and signed with love. How he first kissed me with a plate of racing stripes in one hand. How I lost him cause I’m me and I twisted the stars wrong, I turned miracles into jokes and they blinked out and everyone forgot they’d been something once.
There’s a wave. It’s been a long time coming. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear it, didn’t stroke the white noise on the news like everyone else, but what can you do to prepare for birds swimming, for snakes shedding.
The wave has come now, salting my clothes, the paper that flutters when I think. I don’t want to talk which is good I guess because I can’t. My life molds in front of me, eyes open wide, hands stapled to the wall.
It’s not the scenes I thought I’d see but more like hearing colors.
The cold rock wall low enough to sit on in elementary school and the silver water fountain that hurt my fingers to twist open on cold days.
My see through tights and the static on the ends of my leg hairs, when they were wispy and weak.
The rubber of dad’s westuits and the liquid plastic he’d used to seal them when they cracked. The dry rubber cracks before he did, running my finger over them and reading in braile how deserts had outsmarted me in times before, taken my blood to flavor her pools while smiling and it was not a nice smile.
Kicking a hole in the promise after he spanked me. Getting detained in Mexico, the German shephards, the Spanish on particles, the blinking lights, the waiting.
Walking a black galaxy alone after school and always the sounds of a yelling from a baseball game and hating how it turned my life into tissue in the wind, or worse, a paralyzed-from-the waist dream.
Picnics in the fog by the golden gate bridge and my scratchy wool sweater, the smell of papa murphys pizza, how my hands died and turned into little lead pipes.
Jon. Finding and losing that one wolf with hot to the touch eyes. Remembering when he gave the homeless guy a surfboard. Wrote me a note in his dead grandmother’s lace, tucked under my wiper blades and signed with love. How he first kissed me with a plate of racing stripes in one hand. How I lost him cause I’m me and I twisted the stars wrong, I turned miracles into jokes and they blinked out and everyone forgot they’d been something once.
Deep South
I lean my arms on the cold wrought iron. I thought Louisiana was supposed to be hot. High above boulevards blooming in brick, I watch drinks bob in jeweled hands down Decatur, high heels laughing into saxophones from unfamiliar centuries. We move together like a river, popping bubbles from a thumping iron balcony and fondling crawfish, but it’s so loud we can’t hear their crunch.
The tops of casino boats disappear between skyscrapers. Shrimp and grits, gumbo file and frozen hurricanes coat throats that shout to concrete murals through the bass. I walk through the convention center with my name on a lanyard. Slip past the Mississippi, watching brown currents stream each polar direction at once and ducks sitting unconcerned between churning riverboats. What am I even doing here?
I put my head down and take notes. Record lectures. Pluck the right restaurants, cocktails and streetcars from books and mouths. I settle into y’alls and skulls, wondering what I will be doing a year from now. I need folders. Containers. I need lists and compartments to organize the nothing that is my future. I am always sweeping my fresh dust, squinting into the wake of the debris. I understand him now, I understand his thick sauces and spices, his two block wide voice. I smell him on every street, on every menu behind glass. He’s the honking and the leather.
Five feet below us the dead ocean groans but all I feel are concrete graves six foot in reverse and the eyes of those who don’t have them anymore. Plantains and mangoes fight with fried alligator settling into a half blinked truce, dancing calypso and reading moth ridden pages but it’s all in French so I let my sight go double and stop trying. I breath afternoon thunder and hot sauce dreams, looking for magic in a stand up base. Looking deep in the smoky brick corner but everything I see is more salt on my tongue so I tip my drink until the music dissects into strings of Spanish moss that drain responsibility in tiny veins back to where it was born.
The tops of casino boats disappear between skyscrapers. Shrimp and grits, gumbo file and frozen hurricanes coat throats that shout to concrete murals through the bass. I walk through the convention center with my name on a lanyard. Slip past the Mississippi, watching brown currents stream each polar direction at once and ducks sitting unconcerned between churning riverboats. What am I even doing here?
I put my head down and take notes. Record lectures. Pluck the right restaurants, cocktails and streetcars from books and mouths. I settle into y’alls and skulls, wondering what I will be doing a year from now. I need folders. Containers. I need lists and compartments to organize the nothing that is my future. I am always sweeping my fresh dust, squinting into the wake of the debris. I understand him now, I understand his thick sauces and spices, his two block wide voice. I smell him on every street, on every menu behind glass. He’s the honking and the leather.
Five feet below us the dead ocean groans but all I feel are concrete graves six foot in reverse and the eyes of those who don’t have them anymore. Plantains and mangoes fight with fried alligator settling into a half blinked truce, dancing calypso and reading moth ridden pages but it’s all in French so I let my sight go double and stop trying. I breath afternoon thunder and hot sauce dreams, looking for magic in a stand up base. Looking deep in the smoky brick corner but everything I see is more salt on my tongue so I tip my drink until the music dissects into strings of Spanish moss that drain responsibility in tiny veins back to where it was born.
The Fog House
Birthdays are always funny for me. Funny meaning lots of other things but funny haha not really being one of them. I don’t want to conceive by accident. I did that already. On my bed that looked out on the big empty beach between Santa Cruz and Monterey, where people only parked on weekends next to the ice plant hillsides guarding empty blue lifeguard towers. Where I kept white calla lilies in vases that bred mosquitoes in the summer and algae in the winter. The quiet there was never quiet because the ocean was always saying something. Woosh woosh over sand bars or boom crack don’t fuck with me I’m big. Or the soft sound the fog makes melting over everything. Or room mates’ doors closing or slamming. Meat frying and drifting up the grey carpet, up the stairs to my room. But never quiet quiet. Always smelling like seaweed, the long ropy red kind. Or like melting surfboard wax if it was sunny. Or wet asphalt if it was rainy. Or like bike grease and fresh bagels if Jon was over. One time we didn’t have any food. Or a car for that matter. Just two bikes two skateboards and four feet. So I watched out the big bay window while he went out in his waders and suspenders and threw lines in the water, sometimes disappearing in the fog and then reappearing again. He never turned back to look at me but I didn’t take my eyes off him. I touched the window and it made my finger cold and a little bit wet. I watched the back of his brown shaved head and the motions his arms made, and those were strong arms, throwing the bated line in different pockets of the green shallows between sand bars. Seagulls yelled at him and flew away. And when he came in, tracking sand all over the carpet and I said nothing, I fried up the small fish in butter and we ate it in silence or at least it felt that way and everything smelled like the lemon I sucked off my fingers.
Try Sideways
What if I could go a whole day speaking only in facts? It wasn’t boring or exciting or scary or crazy or weird whatever it just …
Arriving in clean jeans and a tank top and coming home smeared in dust, war paint on my face, shit under my nails, ten hours and twelve minutes later. Casey and I sat on a ripped blue backseat from one of the junk cars that Lio picked up and plopped under a tree for us. Myna birds fought in the tops of the lychee trees and we talked about the universe and how to make money and near death experiences and bell curves and meditating into third person and motorcycles and I screamed when I pulled a dead rat out of the pile because I saw little gray hands sticking out of the pile and I thought it was another toy from our 1980s archeological survey along with spam cans cup o noodles and underwear and foot long cell phones with big gray buttons and rusted car parts that crumble in our hands and broken bottles.
Facts.
I drove home and almost cried and didn’t know exactly why. Or didn’t want to admit it because the reasons seemed so small. Like I should keep them in my shirt and never name them.
Facts. Mr Surprise never called to go riding like he said he would. I’ve been given tuberose stems in the last week by two different people. Fact. It’s been a few hours short of four days since I’ve seen him.
Fact.
I’m scared to let my book run into the world. Scared of the people it could offend. Scared it’s- oh shit I almost said boring. Amy is leaving in a few weeks, for a while, so I’ll be flying solo. The place will go on the market in the next week. I’m worried I’ll never get a chance to be a mother. I ate a fish taco taco today with four hot sauces on it. Texted a Spanish man named Henry that I’ve never met. Picked two papaya. Yelled at Lio for being late. Sat in the grass with my lesbian neighbors that don’t know that I know they’re gay. They’re both local and Japanese. Casey said something about going to King K and how its good for everyone to experience being the minority. And I thought, one thing to try on the experience, another to never be able to take it off. But I didn’t say it. And silence followed and we all sipped our cans and stared at the rocks in the dry riverbed.
Mom showed up unannounced, whistling and making that noise all the females in our family make as she walked down the near vertical driveway. I gave her headphones and kept working. Perched hugging my knees on boulders. Looked up the palm trees and the ridges of the valley rising up to the cloudless sky and huge rocks and hanging vines and thought, I fucking love this gulch. Casey said, do theses flowers really get you high? And snapped off a Datura and held it out.
I watered the new lawn in the moonlight with one beer in my hand. Realized I had to be back in this same spot in twelve hours and turned the hose off and went home. And now I’m wondering if there’s something chemically wrong with my brain, where all my hope and optimism leaked out, and it all leads back to the same place. Always. The center of the labyrinth. The space between atoms. Everything. Me. the star of my play. The ghost driving the machine that thinks it is someone. That matters.
Arriving in clean jeans and a tank top and coming home smeared in dust, war paint on my face, shit under my nails, ten hours and twelve minutes later. Casey and I sat on a ripped blue backseat from one of the junk cars that Lio picked up and plopped under a tree for us. Myna birds fought in the tops of the lychee trees and we talked about the universe and how to make money and near death experiences and bell curves and meditating into third person and motorcycles and I screamed when I pulled a dead rat out of the pile because I saw little gray hands sticking out of the pile and I thought it was another toy from our 1980s archeological survey along with spam cans cup o noodles and underwear and foot long cell phones with big gray buttons and rusted car parts that crumble in our hands and broken bottles.
Facts.
I drove home and almost cried and didn’t know exactly why. Or didn’t want to admit it because the reasons seemed so small. Like I should keep them in my shirt and never name them.
Facts. Mr Surprise never called to go riding like he said he would. I’ve been given tuberose stems in the last week by two different people. Fact. It’s been a few hours short of four days since I’ve seen him.
Fact.
I’m scared to let my book run into the world. Scared of the people it could offend. Scared it’s- oh shit I almost said boring. Amy is leaving in a few weeks, for a while, so I’ll be flying solo. The place will go on the market in the next week. I’m worried I’ll never get a chance to be a mother. I ate a fish taco taco today with four hot sauces on it. Texted a Spanish man named Henry that I’ve never met. Picked two papaya. Yelled at Lio for being late. Sat in the grass with my lesbian neighbors that don’t know that I know they’re gay. They’re both local and Japanese. Casey said something about going to King K and how its good for everyone to experience being the minority. And I thought, one thing to try on the experience, another to never be able to take it off. But I didn’t say it. And silence followed and we all sipped our cans and stared at the rocks in the dry riverbed.
Mom showed up unannounced, whistling and making that noise all the females in our family make as she walked down the near vertical driveway. I gave her headphones and kept working. Perched hugging my knees on boulders. Looked up the palm trees and the ridges of the valley rising up to the cloudless sky and huge rocks and hanging vines and thought, I fucking love this gulch. Casey said, do theses flowers really get you high? And snapped off a Datura and held it out.
I watered the new lawn in the moonlight with one beer in my hand. Realized I had to be back in this same spot in twelve hours and turned the hose off and went home. And now I’m wondering if there’s something chemically wrong with my brain, where all my hope and optimism leaked out, and it all leads back to the same place. Always. The center of the labyrinth. The space between atoms. Everything. Me. the star of my play. The ghost driving the machine that thinks it is someone. That matters.
The Three Legged Dog
So I was driving home at close to midnight. 11:47 exactly, I looked. We had passed the pipe back and forth more than once, talked about the new bar he’s working at the west village, whatever that means, and DMT and success and music and we watched the beginning of the Grand Budapest hotel until he started breathing really regular and I tiptoed off the bed and found my clothes. I had forgotten. How deep the thoughts go and how they tunnel for miles. I had forgotten. He made a few flower arrangements sitting pretty in clear vases on the clean countertops. This surprised me. Old Motown or Soul in the background. He makes me want to read revolutionary books. To watch the best movies, to travel to the light side, the dark side, everywhere with eyes open and muscles loose, a drink in one hand a book in the other, the best of friends close, the most radically fantastic lovers closer. He makes me want to get better speakers. To read philosophy. Think harder, notice more. But… like I said, I left all that, and it didn’t trail after me for miles and days like it used to, didn’t tug on me so hard this time. I just left, swapped worlds like coats at the door. There was no one on the road this time. No lights. Maybe the power was out. Leaves littered all over the asphalt, not dried ones but bright green ones, and the sound of wind in the trees and branches knocking. No rain, but everything was soaking. Draining. Dripping. I’m listening to some late night shit on the radio I wouldn’t normally listen to but it kind of matches my mood and I’m driving slower than I usually do, and I see the lights of Hanzawas glowing in the darkness like a diffuse orange beacon. And then a dog… Just, suddenly, a dog. Black and white kind of spotted or more like smeared. And he’s walking funny. I slow down, watching him, and stop. He’s frozen. I put on the emergency blinkers, shut the door and call out to it. One of his front paws is bent and held up to his chest. It looks a little smaller than the other three. I call again and it just stares at me in the light rain that starting to fall now. Maybe he’s paralyzed by my lights. The wind rages in the trees. It’s so loud. It blows hair in my face. I kneel down, and leaves fly around my ankles. The orange glowy lights reflect in the puddles on the street and the dog pauses, looking at me, holding its gimpy leg high, almost to his chin now. I call again. Is there a collar? And then all of a sudden he starts his weird scamper down the street again, and stops for a second, looking back at me. I stare, my hand still reaching out, not saying anything. Then he darts right into a tall patch of cane bent over from rain. I walk back to the car, open the door and sit for a minute before putting it in drive again.
An Orchid
Loss pushes the shy one with the gun into his curled up rose in the eucalyptus forest.
He sprinkled green buds in the hole, a pack of ramen, cigarettes, cat food, and dumped out a beer.
I threw in three pink zinnias.
He reached down with a bloody left hand to give its fur one last pet. I don’t know what we’re doing only that we recognize a something familiar in the puddle, not direct but something else. I don’t know who he is I only know… nothing. Upon nothing. Upon nothing. the wanting to push something into the empty places where voices dance, flutter like leaves. I can’t focus can’t do one thing… and yet I do focus. On my thoughts.
She taught me how to clean wine glasses. Seriously there’s a right way.
How to cut the heads off dragons that show up at your gate spitting sparks onto the steps.
How to be cool but not distant.
How to talk but knowing when to shut up.
She taught me about dehumidifiers and top coats on nail polish.
Roasted lamb and good wine.
Baby lions inside godzillas that need extra petting.
And then there’s all the things I learned just by smelling.
What’s good cheese.
What’s sound advice and what’s a load of crap.
Keep medicine and opened wine in the fridge and mushrooms in the freezer.
It’s good to call but sometimes it’s good not to call.
Clean your pets a lot.
Don’t wait till it’s too late, get in there!
Check out the nose.
Pick the hitchhikers out of the fur.
Drain the hottub on the regular.
And don’t forget to keep buying candles.
Don’t forget about good books.
There’s an ocean of them out there all you have to do is ask.
And remember your rugs need climbing and your friends need to know you love them. that you care about their sand and pebbles.
And Dreams are tunnels that lead to dark rooms in Arabic and French, but if you take the time to touch the shadows its all becomes write like you talk.
And if you want an orchid, be an orchid, don’t just sit around waiting for rain.
He sprinkled green buds in the hole, a pack of ramen, cigarettes, cat food, and dumped out a beer.
I threw in three pink zinnias.
He reached down with a bloody left hand to give its fur one last pet. I don’t know what we’re doing only that we recognize a something familiar in the puddle, not direct but something else. I don’t know who he is I only know… nothing. Upon nothing. Upon nothing. the wanting to push something into the empty places where voices dance, flutter like leaves. I can’t focus can’t do one thing… and yet I do focus. On my thoughts.
She taught me how to clean wine glasses. Seriously there’s a right way.
How to cut the heads off dragons that show up at your gate spitting sparks onto the steps.
How to be cool but not distant.
How to talk but knowing when to shut up.
She taught me about dehumidifiers and top coats on nail polish.
Roasted lamb and good wine.
Baby lions inside godzillas that need extra petting.
And then there’s all the things I learned just by smelling.
What’s good cheese.
What’s sound advice and what’s a load of crap.
Keep medicine and opened wine in the fridge and mushrooms in the freezer.
It’s good to call but sometimes it’s good not to call.
Clean your pets a lot.
Don’t wait till it’s too late, get in there!
Check out the nose.
Pick the hitchhikers out of the fur.
Drain the hottub on the regular.
And don’t forget to keep buying candles.
Don’t forget about good books.
There’s an ocean of them out there all you have to do is ask.
And remember your rugs need climbing and your friends need to know you love them. that you care about their sand and pebbles.
And Dreams are tunnels that lead to dark rooms in Arabic and French, but if you take the time to touch the shadows its all becomes write like you talk.
And if you want an orchid, be an orchid, don’t just sit around waiting for rain.
Why Don't I Just Dance For You
He pulls his gun before I’ve even open my eyes.
He says you belong to me and then bats his dark lashes at the world, hemorrhaging open doors and quick sketch futures. The sauna smelled like eucalyptus and we sat on the highest bench. The moon was almost set across the lawn behind our backs and the stars didn’t shed enough light to give the lines between the bay and the cliffs much distinction. They blurred in the blue gray that is night, this night. And the window clouded over soon anyway. There was music in there, on a phone, a boom box, something. It oozed over the silence, the steam, the bodies. Then the door opened, some night air came in and the muted sounds of talk and laughter and water running outside, dripping hard drops though the deck panels onto the dry earth. I turn to look at his dark face and I’m meet with tongue. Our skin is slippery like seals. It gets hotter. We stay on our perch. Later drinks come in big red cups clunking with oversized ice cubes, a tampon sized joint, a black and white cat that does multiple somersaults and swats ankles with no claws. My hair tangles in a long wind streaked with headlights, vibrations rumbling under me, the missing pieces of road rearranging my organs, playing my ribs like a xylophone. A letter came from lali. She doesn’t address the thing directly. Instead she tells me how she collects Russian olive by the creek and the purple monsoon stalking her, making the town quiet. The smell of streamside mint crushed under her boots. The sage. I had a wave of fear when I picked that letter from the mailbox with my name in capitals letters. Why do I always assume the worst, who taught me to speculate in disasters. I want to unlearn this. The wind blows the lilikoi down in constellations. Orders from chefs dwindle, thin, some stop. I am lazy, I think. When was the last time I ate ice cream from a bowl. Cleaned the walls. Worked full time. And in this messy seaweed sea, whose words go in. Which ones adhere. Push on the gears, turn the projector. Why am I afraid to dance for you. All the air has been let out anyway. The fences are broken, the armies are waiting, the future is vexed.
Theres nothing to lose that hasn’t been lost already.
So why don’t I just dance for you.
He says you belong to me and then bats his dark lashes at the world, hemorrhaging open doors and quick sketch futures. The sauna smelled like eucalyptus and we sat on the highest bench. The moon was almost set across the lawn behind our backs and the stars didn’t shed enough light to give the lines between the bay and the cliffs much distinction. They blurred in the blue gray that is night, this night. And the window clouded over soon anyway. There was music in there, on a phone, a boom box, something. It oozed over the silence, the steam, the bodies. Then the door opened, some night air came in and the muted sounds of talk and laughter and water running outside, dripping hard drops though the deck panels onto the dry earth. I turn to look at his dark face and I’m meet with tongue. Our skin is slippery like seals. It gets hotter. We stay on our perch. Later drinks come in big red cups clunking with oversized ice cubes, a tampon sized joint, a black and white cat that does multiple somersaults and swats ankles with no claws. My hair tangles in a long wind streaked with headlights, vibrations rumbling under me, the missing pieces of road rearranging my organs, playing my ribs like a xylophone. A letter came from lali. She doesn’t address the thing directly. Instead she tells me how she collects Russian olive by the creek and the purple monsoon stalking her, making the town quiet. The smell of streamside mint crushed under her boots. The sage. I had a wave of fear when I picked that letter from the mailbox with my name in capitals letters. Why do I always assume the worst, who taught me to speculate in disasters. I want to unlearn this. The wind blows the lilikoi down in constellations. Orders from chefs dwindle, thin, some stop. I am lazy, I think. When was the last time I ate ice cream from a bowl. Cleaned the walls. Worked full time. And in this messy seaweed sea, whose words go in. Which ones adhere. Push on the gears, turn the projector. Why am I afraid to dance for you. All the air has been let out anyway. The fences are broken, the armies are waiting, the future is vexed.
Theres nothing to lose that hasn’t been lost already.
So why don’t I just dance for you.
Is There Such Thing As A Mistake
The aloof one has all the power you know. My feet hit the old basement floor, light brown dust puffs up around my ankles. He fits me like a broken halleleujah.. I am alone like the moon, like pluto, like the only child I am. Half a joint on the counter. No I can’t work today. Its eerily calm, quiet. The tension trickles into my forearms, I want to get away. I want this other him to GO away. I am way over here in China and he’s wherever the opposite of china is. Change, my friend, change my vaporous confidant, change, my shadow. Like fresh air shes cool and sudden and shocking and never the same. I like action he said. Well me too. Maybe that’s why I like you. But I drop potatoes on the floor. Burn myself in the sauna. Its all I can do to keep my mistakes from having babies, multiplying. To keep you from seeing all my empty shelves. Crooked silverware. These are all just sounds passing through but each keystroke is a tattoo. This one I’m staining into sculpture. What makes now at 3 o’clock worth remembering any more than this morning. Last night.
I feel like a wolf that has lost its pack. I’m starting to drink. This is what happens when I travel the old highway. Like ive always felt. Missing the warmth of a family. My mom as not mom but my best friend and dad gone all day, beer all night, sometimes stepping out of black and white and into color for Baja, Hawaii, the Bahamas, frozen frames that didn’t’ make it all better but made good pictures to keep in the shoebox in the cabinet under the phone. Alone. Not only but I’m picky too. I don’t want to spend time with just anyone. I think I know what’s best what’s right. I think I can tell but I can’t. I was raised by people that never hit me, well not hard. Raised by people that cared. Tried. How did I come out all bent. Crooked. Not like other people. A doll in nice clothes, a shy extrovert, a loner that loves people. So much silence in the wings. I just ate so much dinner it hurts. I have no children no investments. No sisters no brothers no stocks no bonds. I don’t know how to play card games. I don’t know what movie you’re talking about. You need friends for those things. I’ve never had many friends. Just a close circle of odd toys that don’t’ get along, don’t understand each other, but they each speak to a different organ, a different time, and to me it is symphony. But only to me
I feel like a wolf that has lost its pack. I’m starting to drink. This is what happens when I travel the old highway. Like ive always felt. Missing the warmth of a family. My mom as not mom but my best friend and dad gone all day, beer all night, sometimes stepping out of black and white and into color for Baja, Hawaii, the Bahamas, frozen frames that didn’t’ make it all better but made good pictures to keep in the shoebox in the cabinet under the phone. Alone. Not only but I’m picky too. I don’t want to spend time with just anyone. I think I know what’s best what’s right. I think I can tell but I can’t. I was raised by people that never hit me, well not hard. Raised by people that cared. Tried. How did I come out all bent. Crooked. Not like other people. A doll in nice clothes, a shy extrovert, a loner that loves people. So much silence in the wings. I just ate so much dinner it hurts. I have no children no investments. No sisters no brothers no stocks no bonds. I don’t know how to play card games. I don’t know what movie you’re talking about. You need friends for those things. I’ve never had many friends. Just a close circle of odd toys that don’t’ get along, don’t understand each other, but they each speak to a different organ, a different time, and to me it is symphony. But only to me
CONCRETE MOON
(HIS NAME)
Dark seeds bloom loosely into the earth
His children, mostly, gathered sideways, eyes big
And mistakes giving chase with punishment teeth
Sniffing across stages and slinking back into blackness chewing on his name his name.
I was painfully thirteen, forehead pressed against the cold glass,
Getting stoned on picnic tables, rubbing jeans,
Looking for a boy who felt like home.
He got rope burns early
Made him rude, curdled his milk
And scorpions crawled under the house to die
Leaving paper skeletons for exiled ants.
His mamas anger turning his thighs and then his stomach
Till stolen nikes slapped at another time zone, somewhere west of here where no one cares.
Now I’m on a plane
Drinking Heines crackling seat front
I’m hiding in places gone dark now.
One toe in the tepid water, before the wind wakes up
The whole tide of obligations bout to come due
Crossed the Date Line
Its tomorrow again and again.
But I'm happy in this hall of mirrors.
Mom sleeps five wide
My light the only beacon
In this dark tunnel its 3:37 am you know.
Next stop the equator the nothing the ocean the looping scenes of you like you used to be, cologne curling into blue sidekicks with foul mouths
Something about 8 hits of E and everything else that shadowboxes your smiles.
I hang in the riptides
watch the world be born again and again
Climb into seacaves and pretend it’s forever talk.
You pull from me some old voices
Like missing children on milk cartons, do they still?
Or like the Japanese girls sharpening kiwi tongues on K road.
I kill myself in a cartoons
This is halfway home, I say.
I smell the low tide on your breath
Where old lovers are circling their ache with half mast eyes.
Don’t even tell me the sheets are clean
You don’t have to tell me anything
The story peels off your dry fingers and down the veins to your concrete moon
Tying everything to one planet
One frosty lie
Just find your shoes
And face the wind, creak the door.
His children, mostly, gathered sideways, eyes big
And mistakes giving chase with punishment teeth
Sniffing across stages and slinking back into blackness chewing on his name his name.
I was painfully thirteen, forehead pressed against the cold glass,
Getting stoned on picnic tables, rubbing jeans,
Looking for a boy who felt like home.
He got rope burns early
Made him rude, curdled his milk
And scorpions crawled under the house to die
Leaving paper skeletons for exiled ants.
His mamas anger turning his thighs and then his stomach
Till stolen nikes slapped at another time zone, somewhere west of here where no one cares.
Now I’m on a plane
Drinking Heines crackling seat front
I’m hiding in places gone dark now.
One toe in the tepid water, before the wind wakes up
The whole tide of obligations bout to come due
Crossed the Date Line
Its tomorrow again and again.
But I'm happy in this hall of mirrors.
Mom sleeps five wide
My light the only beacon
In this dark tunnel its 3:37 am you know.
Next stop the equator the nothing the ocean the looping scenes of you like you used to be, cologne curling into blue sidekicks with foul mouths
Something about 8 hits of E and everything else that shadowboxes your smiles.
I hang in the riptides
watch the world be born again and again
Climb into seacaves and pretend it’s forever talk.
You pull from me some old voices
Like missing children on milk cartons, do they still?
Or like the Japanese girls sharpening kiwi tongues on K road.
I kill myself in a cartoons
This is halfway home, I say.
I smell the low tide on your breath
Where old lovers are circling their ache with half mast eyes.
Don’t even tell me the sheets are clean
You don’t have to tell me anything
The story peels off your dry fingers and down the veins to your concrete moon
Tying everything to one planet
One frosty lie
Just find your shoes
And face the wind, creak the door.
Heart Valves
Here’s how to know how big your heart is. How many times has it broken? Hearts are made of the same stuff as skin and muscle. When they break they grow back stronger. At least that’s what I think last after two puffs, when I go thinking out near the giant fences in the moonlight.
Chulahoma is on the speakers, spraying funky nonchalance all over the floor. I tuck my hair behind my ear and fill the French press to the old level, about half way. Or is it a third? It’s been so long. Theres a low ache in a my back that keeps me here, in the rain, in the morning. I stand in the bathroom bare foot and put on eyeliner. I’m still in my underwear and a hoodie. Hood up. All my plans for today have unraveled. I’m downloading Dream of Blue Turtles.
Okay. Change the floor. Don’t speak english.. See from the eyes in my belly, the fingertips in my toes and at the broken ends of my hair, picking up static like tumbled pebbles in the river spilling messages. You know you have the luxury of sitting back and smiling but I still need to claw and break things. I need to see what I miss once it’s all over the floor in shocked little pieces. I need mistakes to put their hands to my back, palms flush, and push with so little pressure I might miss it if I breath.
Coffee finds me in the morning. Loneliness finds me in the evening.
Theres nothing here, nothing here, no where I want to go with this. I just want to u-turn back to the happy place. Whrere all the bowls are hand made ceramic, all different colors with signatures on the bottom.
Where I walk barefoot on the wood floor and run my fingers over the dark stained wood walls and wood railings and touch my baby’s white cloud cheek. I put her on my back and we walk together, all three of us, picking olives and spitting them back out because of course you have to cure them first but we didn’t’ know that.
Walking walking past castles and over grassy hills and into restaurants with fountains in the middle and ivy hanging from the ceiling with waiters that take my coat and I don’t’ even need a coat because we’re in Spain remember and its never cold and we’re always kissing and my teeth get whiter to reflect my growing happiness.
You love me so hard and so long you’re sweetness gets into my nose like coke and drips down my throat and warms me from the inside and you whisper in my ear with languages I don’t understand just to tease me and we’re in a field of sunflowers leaning up against a little stone building that’s locked but the stone warms our backs and we stare into the nine thirty sun and eat strawberries and smear mali into our cheeks and you tuck jasmine into my hair because you say it does something for you but u don’t say what.
We have to go back to our lives I say, but your eyes stop me mid sentence and I realize you’re right. I blow up the pictures and you make wooden frames that hang on the walls of our wooden house and when all the candles are lit they almost look like movies so we crawl back inside of them and reach for fireworks and low tides and seashells.
You know me inside out like laundry, and more babies brew in your chest. Your wings are so big we could go forever and never come down, tom petty was wrong you say, there’s no rules here only the trust in the black of our eyes.
Chulahoma is on the speakers, spraying funky nonchalance all over the floor. I tuck my hair behind my ear and fill the French press to the old level, about half way. Or is it a third? It’s been so long. Theres a low ache in a my back that keeps me here, in the rain, in the morning. I stand in the bathroom bare foot and put on eyeliner. I’m still in my underwear and a hoodie. Hood up. All my plans for today have unraveled. I’m downloading Dream of Blue Turtles.
Okay. Change the floor. Don’t speak english.. See from the eyes in my belly, the fingertips in my toes and at the broken ends of my hair, picking up static like tumbled pebbles in the river spilling messages. You know you have the luxury of sitting back and smiling but I still need to claw and break things. I need to see what I miss once it’s all over the floor in shocked little pieces. I need mistakes to put their hands to my back, palms flush, and push with so little pressure I might miss it if I breath.
Coffee finds me in the morning. Loneliness finds me in the evening.
Theres nothing here, nothing here, no where I want to go with this. I just want to u-turn back to the happy place. Whrere all the bowls are hand made ceramic, all different colors with signatures on the bottom.
Where I walk barefoot on the wood floor and run my fingers over the dark stained wood walls and wood railings and touch my baby’s white cloud cheek. I put her on my back and we walk together, all three of us, picking olives and spitting them back out because of course you have to cure them first but we didn’t’ know that.
Walking walking past castles and over grassy hills and into restaurants with fountains in the middle and ivy hanging from the ceiling with waiters that take my coat and I don’t’ even need a coat because we’re in Spain remember and its never cold and we’re always kissing and my teeth get whiter to reflect my growing happiness.
You love me so hard and so long you’re sweetness gets into my nose like coke and drips down my throat and warms me from the inside and you whisper in my ear with languages I don’t understand just to tease me and we’re in a field of sunflowers leaning up against a little stone building that’s locked but the stone warms our backs and we stare into the nine thirty sun and eat strawberries and smear mali into our cheeks and you tuck jasmine into my hair because you say it does something for you but u don’t say what.
We have to go back to our lives I say, but your eyes stop me mid sentence and I realize you’re right. I blow up the pictures and you make wooden frames that hang on the walls of our wooden house and when all the candles are lit they almost look like movies so we crawl back inside of them and reach for fireworks and low tides and seashells.
You know me inside out like laundry, and more babies brew in your chest. Your wings are so big we could go forever and never come down, tom petty was wrong you say, there’s no rules here only the trust in the black of our eyes.
Love Your Father
I started off this speech like this “love your father. Not the father in the sky, but your father. And I somersaulted back to the times when we ate pizza on that old picnic table behind or to the side of, or whatever, the golden gate bridge. And how it was always cold and the cold ate at my fingers but I loved to be with them, together, looking down at the cold sea that raged and churned, disgusted to be going from great ocean to tiny bay.
Love your father, women of the world, for all the attention that is payed to the fatherless, the orphans and the estranged, what little is paid to the fathers who were home.
Love your father because his heart is no stronger than yours, and he has to know that he is doing a good job, has done a good job, women, love your fathers. Love your father in any way you know how, visits, phone calls, emails texts e-cards real cards facebook skype or a whisper to be passed on. Love your fathers.” And then the speech turned into something like this: “why is it weird when I talk to my dad. I want to love him but we are too busy being grown up, checking our reflection in each other’s lenses, I want to love him but we both forget how to break down and pick each other up.
If he cries I’m gone.
Even if I’m still sitting there. I hate when he cries. I want to love my dad but like she said just a few days ago, and I wrote it down under my to do list because it hurt because it was true and I wanted to remember it the way I wanted to remember the face of a dying friend, she said, “he is not at home in his soul.”
And for that, we concluded in tiny voices, I cannot help him.
Love my father, love my father, I want to love my father but he is coated in ativan, he is dulled with lithium and parts of his soul are MIA from all the electric shocking, and I’m not sure I can trust who it is exactly that I’m loving anymore.
I love my father but sometimes he feels like a stranger. Born to teenagers, kicked down stairs, do whatever you want, they said, we’ll just wash your underwear. Go.
I want to love my father but I feel his pain in my veins and I hate him for giving me something that feels shameful, I hate him for giving me anguish and addiction, for swirling universes of wind where there should be something real to touch.
Love my father, okay, I loved sailing across the school parking lot on the skateboard and holding his arms while he held the boom of the sail, and then the “ready, quick!” and we’d turn around and jibe, setting another course across the asphalt. but. I didn’t love the darkness, didn’t love the yelling that tied me into corners, I want to love my father but in all these years I’ve still never quite figured out how.
Love your father, women of the world, for all the attention that is payed to the fatherless, the orphans and the estranged, what little is paid to the fathers who were home.
Love your father because his heart is no stronger than yours, and he has to know that he is doing a good job, has done a good job, women, love your fathers. Love your father in any way you know how, visits, phone calls, emails texts e-cards real cards facebook skype or a whisper to be passed on. Love your fathers.” And then the speech turned into something like this: “why is it weird when I talk to my dad. I want to love him but we are too busy being grown up, checking our reflection in each other’s lenses, I want to love him but we both forget how to break down and pick each other up.
If he cries I’m gone.
Even if I’m still sitting there. I hate when he cries. I want to love my dad but like she said just a few days ago, and I wrote it down under my to do list because it hurt because it was true and I wanted to remember it the way I wanted to remember the face of a dying friend, she said, “he is not at home in his soul.”
And for that, we concluded in tiny voices, I cannot help him.
Love my father, love my father, I want to love my father but he is coated in ativan, he is dulled with lithium and parts of his soul are MIA from all the electric shocking, and I’m not sure I can trust who it is exactly that I’m loving anymore.
I love my father but sometimes he feels like a stranger. Born to teenagers, kicked down stairs, do whatever you want, they said, we’ll just wash your underwear. Go.
I want to love my father but I feel his pain in my veins and I hate him for giving me something that feels shameful, I hate him for giving me anguish and addiction, for swirling universes of wind where there should be something real to touch.
Love my father, okay, I loved sailing across the school parking lot on the skateboard and holding his arms while he held the boom of the sail, and then the “ready, quick!” and we’d turn around and jibe, setting another course across the asphalt. but. I didn’t love the darkness, didn’t love the yelling that tied me into corners, I want to love my father but in all these years I’ve still never quite figured out how.
Barefoot Voices
There’s a souring milk in my core, curling inward, feeding on the placenta of failure.
The evil twin’s voice slithers on her belly between scenes of my mistakes, hissing, spit flying, as she points at my weaknesses with shining eyes. Meanwhile in another theatre of my brain,
feathers fall lazily in a white mist,
just peels of dried up fruit to the hurricane that’s fighting and frothing above them.
This is a scene of delusion, tell me children can you smell the fear? Can you taste the wrong in the bitter sweat forming on your upper lip? This is a scene of delusion, obtrusion, disgust and mistrust, tell me children can you smell the fear? Can you see how her eyes dart to and fro, how her head sways from side to side in the absence of music? Repeat after me children, this is your brain on drugs.
I am starting to see that there is no right time, no easy way, threre’s just jumping off or holding on. And it isn’t always pretty. When Rebecca swung off the ropeswing that fateful day over the Deschuetes the river, she didn’t let go. I can still see her body, small in a black bikini, floating in slo mo over the river and then the unrehearsed return, crashing into the trunk with a thud and then the silence that followed and how all the splashing and beer drinking came to a stop like the moment had been chopped off with scissors.
She was fine more or less, although a little paranoid later when it was getting dark and we hadn’t gotten back to the cars yet and she had to be at her night shift job supervising registered sex offenders by 9pm. Anyway. Jump off or hold on. Or worse yet, if you’re a sucker for action, jump off but don’t’ let go like Rebecca.
I am unemployed and in my safety zone. I am not under pressure and I like it that way. I could sit here all day if I wanted to. Trouble is, I could sit here my whole life. But who’s to say I have to always push myself, get uncomfortable just so I can resolve it and learn?
Fuck that dark hallway, I have miles of neon paint glowing in my mirrors,
I don’t need to ripen on my hands and knees.
There’s a perfect face on my ass, surgically cutting smiles into fingernails that smell like divorce.
Drink your clouds down you young piano, there’s a desert growing in my dream and we are getting skinny for the rain.
I pull out the emergency kit and put bandaids on the weeds, trying stomp out the yelling in barefoot voices.
The evil twin’s voice slithers on her belly between scenes of my mistakes, hissing, spit flying, as she points at my weaknesses with shining eyes. Meanwhile in another theatre of my brain,
feathers fall lazily in a white mist,
just peels of dried up fruit to the hurricane that’s fighting and frothing above them.
This is a scene of delusion, tell me children can you smell the fear? Can you taste the wrong in the bitter sweat forming on your upper lip? This is a scene of delusion, obtrusion, disgust and mistrust, tell me children can you smell the fear? Can you see how her eyes dart to and fro, how her head sways from side to side in the absence of music? Repeat after me children, this is your brain on drugs.
I am starting to see that there is no right time, no easy way, threre’s just jumping off or holding on. And it isn’t always pretty. When Rebecca swung off the ropeswing that fateful day over the Deschuetes the river, she didn’t let go. I can still see her body, small in a black bikini, floating in slo mo over the river and then the unrehearsed return, crashing into the trunk with a thud and then the silence that followed and how all the splashing and beer drinking came to a stop like the moment had been chopped off with scissors.
She was fine more or less, although a little paranoid later when it was getting dark and we hadn’t gotten back to the cars yet and she had to be at her night shift job supervising registered sex offenders by 9pm. Anyway. Jump off or hold on. Or worse yet, if you’re a sucker for action, jump off but don’t’ let go like Rebecca.
I am unemployed and in my safety zone. I am not under pressure and I like it that way. I could sit here all day if I wanted to. Trouble is, I could sit here my whole life. But who’s to say I have to always push myself, get uncomfortable just so I can resolve it and learn?
Fuck that dark hallway, I have miles of neon paint glowing in my mirrors,
I don’t need to ripen on my hands and knees.
There’s a perfect face on my ass, surgically cutting smiles into fingernails that smell like divorce.
Drink your clouds down you young piano, there’s a desert growing in my dream and we are getting skinny for the rain.
I pull out the emergency kit and put bandaids on the weeds, trying stomp out the yelling in barefoot voices.
CARDINAL DIRECTIONS
My sorrow with you is tangled in the Great Sorrow.
A scream that ripples sheets of memory and.
Stinging like a reminder
deep as my burned finger
I replay and repeat, smoothing darkness
stuffing the present into the space between.
Hoping for wisdom, poise, acceptance, and finding.
Frozen pictures of smiling people in hot springs.
Shining food on white plates.
Cities locked in place until they crumble apart all over centuries and.
Feeling as alone as seagull poop cracking on hot boulders,
taking grief from the sun for lifetimes and then.
Feeling alone and I think lonely too but realizing.
All the times I’ve been with, and still the ache creeps.
Into my fingers and toes and expectations.
Still there, squirming worms of aches and then the indelicate task of cleaning shop. Making new and white again.
The smell of lasagna warming.
The sounds of new music in the little speakers that shudder deep home into my chest,
like running fingers over wooden dressers with eyes closed, trying to remember what I’ve only pretended to forget.
Coming back after a coma.
Remembering that we come and go alone.
Remembering. Standing at a cliff.
Open to miracles.
Feeling the wind navigating my ribs.
Searching but with eyes open.
I used to draw pictures and the girls’ eyes were penciled shut.
It was easier that way.
Parts of me are completely bowed.
In the dark shying from.
How much daylight does it take to turn and face the cardinal directions?
Birds flying from high nests.
Hurricanes spinning.
And still I cry like it matters.
How to inhabit the pebble and the planet all the same.
A long hanging horizon of creation,
And still I sit full of river stones.
Saying it’s easier that way.
HE PICKED ME WILDFLOWERS FOR STRANGER'S DAY
The couch. Only now do I recognize it as cheap. Then, it was just the place to sit, as far away from the yellow as possible while still being inside of it.
The feeling of cold glass is everywhere, even after it’s left my cheek, it lingers on the pads of my fingers, my forehead, my seeds.
Through the window are tall trees whose names I never learn.
And on most days, the dull teeth of the freeway.
After I throw my backpack down, I ususally end up here. Usually end up with something square in my mouth, this empty bathtub before I turn on the mtv, the time where everything is still alaive in my gut and at the door of my throat.
I have hours, now.
Mom is teaching, and she will open the old heavy garage door when she comes home.
Clunk.
Five-ish. Either right before or after the fog horn.
And dad will be a long tick after her. Giant door door slamming into place just a little harder than before. I wave at the ovals, as they pile into minivans, or skinny people in black that avoid looking at dreams that disappear down the driveway to the apartments.
If it’s night, and I’m fourteen, I’ll meet Katie and we’ll smoke her Marlboro reds that are too harsh in the cold metal, or in the basement where we listen to Oasis on repeat, and take pictures of ourselves beneath the sticker that says bad sex sucks. And if I’m fifteen garth double park outside and the whole street will hear ac/dc or def leppard until I shut the heavy bmw door and we’ll drive to Bolinas ridge with the sunroof open and he’ll kiss me and I’ll feel the dark valleys on my face and the warmth in my jeans.
And if I’m sixteen I’ll be on the leather seats of a black eye , passing the pipe, getting slammed against other bodies and different smelling hair, way too fast up mountain roads to stare at the body of San Francisco.
To stare sideways at whoever I like that month.
To steam.
If I’m 21 I’m not in my world but in his. I’m on Fresno st, and I look at the cherry tree blossoming pink and the smoke coming out of the house across the street and disappearing into the shitty grey sky .
I have a six pack of sapporro in my apartments. I hate this day. Why do I keep living out the bottoms?
And what did I drop? Only the response comes to me, well, then, I’m an asshole.
And something comes unhooked.
The same house where he tried to explain that our connection had something to do with a triangle, and I wanted to get it because it was so unlike him to be inner thighs. I didn’t though.
And later he bought me a skateboard and picked me wildflowers for stranger’s day. And I tried to make him chocolate covered strawberries and ended up with a lion. We rubbered to Watsonville and ordered tacos in Spanish.
Drove nowhere and came back with persimmons that died under pieces of clothing and old stains.
SEE WHAT GOES JUNGLE
I feel nauseous with joy. Now that I got what I want in the palm of my desert it’s value has tumbled. I see the moonlight different. When I get up in the middle of the night, like three times times last night because I couldn’t sleep, there were father figures all over the grass . And the silhouette of my sleeping man and furry shadow. So why do we write about stone bridges? Maybe becaue we’re not interested in how to process happiness. We know how to do joy. We drink glass. We frolic, we scream, we kiss.
We crave lessons in conflict and how to unbutton. It’s all so stone bridges, she said. I’m just not into that. Oh really? Are you into just apple blossoms? Call me late at night after a evening asphalt. You’ll be clawing for stories of bridges. Do you watch Ted talks of people describing their profound balloons? How amazing their life is, so you can recoil over how yours is not? And what do you read? How to resolve wolves and free your spirit? Maybe. But not all the time. Like us. Some bridges. And the rest. Be boring if you have to. Talk about pink and don’t go there. I dare you. See what goes jungle.
I LOOK FORWAD TO SHADY LOOKING MEN IN REST STOPS
Yesterday I started pavement. It’s a simple idea, and as I started off, I was covered head to toe with the smell of Doc. A grassy, manure-y, thick horse hair kind of smell.
I kept on pavement, and a few stolling steps later, there in my face are hundreds of little red chinese lanterns. I just touch them and they drop into my palm.
I pop them, suck them, and spit out the seeds without bothering to remove them all polite-like with my fingers.
I got my cheap and only headphones on. I keep adjusting my stride to the next song.
It’s a little weird, pavement. I feel like it’s been so long that I don’t quite remember how to do it right, like I’m a little bit moth ridden.
I round the corner where the Micronesians live and it smells like damp fur.
A thought floats in like a cloud. This is why I want to go to the cliffs.
This is all I need-- well, mostly, and I have it right here. I just had to break my own paper.
Even the sign of the church looks different from this slow angle.
I can look into my neighbors yards and living rooms easily, sideways, with my sunglasses on.
I am a part of the web again.
I am phone lines and speakers.
Of course, when I finally arrive I have to excuse myself right away to go wash my sandpaper and I’m a little tired, but I’m sure that will improve as I get better at pavement, and as I learn to carry emergency medical, functional and entertainment supplies in all my backpack sections, and as tone my tattoos and smarten up my cities.
All this plastic makes me consider going to the cliffs to meet mom in Vegas and drive “four hours through nowhere” to Lali’s parched lot.
I want to see her underground house. I want cowboy boots and places that are too wide and blue to crack me a little, because I hate these things.
I look forward to shady looking men in rest stops and creeks that don’t work and graffiti in bathroom stalls that make no sense.
I need these thigns. I’ve gotten too comfortable.
Don’t you understand what happens to me? It’s cheap linoleum.
It’s bends me the wrong way and doesn’t let me go.
CLIMB INTO YOUR SKIN SUIT AND START STEERING
I feel you in the small of my back. On the coldest days when we visit the edges of continents, you breath up my spine and the ocean creaks and moans and turns to glass. Slowly slowly turning, our blue ball melts out into deep space. The bankers trace frantic ovals, clawing at dust and flicking it into their clutched sacks. But you and I, we go up and down, rise and fall, over the long breath of time, and the silence of evolution. And the walls of my desire sigh into small. The taming of angles. A faucet drips, somewhere. You are more tightly wound than you appear. You don’t give when I pull. And I start pulling harder. Your heart is sewn to the page, hands stitched to the prize. I have to follow you through echoing hallways of glassed in trophies and under desks with pink gum and down down to the cold cold plumbing before I can find the sweet smell of earth. Of children’s knees. Of what you really mean. Down here raw. The belly feathers. The downy quiet. Some parts of me are very very old, you say. And some parts of you are very very young, I reply. Somewhere, a planet and it’s moon are colliding after a long and peaceful forever. Every clock will betray. Even gravity gives up. Don’t tell me you’re all good. Don’t tell me you’re all bad. Don’t give me those solid colors. Climb into your skin suit and start steering.
GROWING THIN
I turn back to my vault of memories, to the smell of fear as we jumped out of the little plane backwards, the sound of my great-grandmother straining to keep breathing in her upstairs apartment that reeked of smoke, to pedaling on the hard sand in the moonlight, feeling alone, but not lonely. My senses were clearer then, before I was soldered to pieces of paper that say I own this, I am married to you, I owe this much. Before all this, I spent a lot of time alone, moving. Throwing the bike over chain link fences, heart beating, sweating in the foggy night at the thought of getting caught, and riding to the warmth of the sun, finding sunglasses, money, letters and broken bottles next to the railroad tracks. Seeing storms that no one else was watching boil over the Pacific, squalls that turned the air dark purple and silenced the gulls. Running along the beach in that wide open afternoon and screaming when I found the spring fed waterfall running through its home made canyon, the forest of calla lilies almost as tall as I am, petting their thick skin and ripping a handful from the pool, running back home against the salty wind, laughing and screaming at my good fortune.
I turn back to my vault of memories, to the smell of fear as we jumped out of the little plane backwards, the sound of my great-grandmother straining to keep breathing in her upstairs apartment that reeked of smoke, to pedaling on the hard sand in the moonlight, feeling alone, but not lonely. My senses were clearer then, before I was soldered to pieces of paper that say I own this, I am married to you, I owe this much. Before all this, I spent a lot of time alone, moving. Throwing the bike over chain link fences, heart beating, sweating in the foggy night at the thought of getting caught, and riding to the warmth of the sun, finding sunglasses, money, letters and broken bottles next to the railroad tracks. Seeing storms that no one else was watching boil over the Pacific, squalls that turned the air dark purple and silenced the gulls. Running along the beach in that wide open afternoon and screaming when I found the spring fed waterfall running through its home made canyon, the forest of calla lilies almost as tall as I am, petting their thick skin and ripping a handful from the pool, running back home against the salty wind, laughing and screaming at my good fortune.
OF VULCAN LAKE By Marina
He always knows where were going, even if he doesn’t. I am wide eyed and uncomfortable in all this heat, looking over at him, pushing the Volvo up the sides of these burnt black mountains, the ocean barely visible beyond the Coast range, a blue strip being slowly digested by a long, white vampire. I roll down the window and hot air billows in. I suddenly notice something green, the strange plants cropping up in a small trickle of spring water dripping from a fern covered crack in the dust, dripping to the edge of the gravel road. I scream at you to stop the car because I’ve found water and now I can breath deeply again, ignoring the smell of burning. These plants are unlike anything I’ve ever seen, colors that don’t come from places like these, with wild patterned throats and some gaping open. I peer in, expect to see the carcasses of honeybees and horseflies being slowly assimilated but there is nothing, just this beautiful muted scream. And we go to get back in the car but we can’t move, and my heart starts beating all shaky and I look at you but you are fixated on the cloud of color moving at us, a sort of a reddish black, like a million red marbles and blinking eyelashes. And now they are everywhere, in my hair and trying to get inside my mouth as I laugh, batting at my cheeks and tickling my skin, and there you are, arms outstretched, hundreds of tiny bodies perched along the length of your plain, tiny red and black wings pulsing, resting. I run to get the camera but by the time I back out of the car, banging my head and fumbling towards you, they had risen like a cloud gathering back its falling rain, and all I get is this picture of you with you arms outstretched, chin up, mouth open, the fallen black forest like dominoes on golden cloth behind you, and the unbroken blue sky. We pull closed the heavy doors and I take a puff from our glass pipe, blowing smoke in you face and you suck it all back in like a smiling vacuum. You shine at me, cheeks full, and I see your thousand reflections in the disco ball swaying gently back and forth from the rearview mirror. “Hey that’s it!” and you brake. There is no one here. I don’t understand how the Forest Service even calls this as a low use area. We have seen no cars, no people. We hike up the ridgeline like dying animals under a magnifying glass in the sun, I don’t have enough energy to pick my feet up, and as we climb, I stub my toes on rocks and kick up dust, sweating, itching, looking out over the endless rises and falls and mountains, tiny logging roads in the distance, and one bird of prey, drawing wide circles to the west. We stop, panting. So thirsty I’m angry. No water. And then I see it. Below us is a small valley, where a large creature has scooped a handful out of the mountain side, and wept into the crevice. The lake of tears is glimmering a brilliant turquoise at the edges, and I hear the heartbeat of the deep center, endlessly, darkly blue. We fly down the steep trail, leaving a ribbon of suspended dust in the still air. At the water’s edge we start laughing, strip naked and lay on a smooth boulder, panting, to build the suspense you say. I pull baby dragons from the shallows onto my fingertips and rub their bellies, which makes them rumble quietly, before you grab my hair and then my hand and we jump off.
THE OPPOSITE OF TWILIGHT or HOW LONG THE JOURNEY
I lay on the strange indian thing kalani gave me, on the floor, next to the stove. I think the mice have moved out. No more little mice noises. Its’ too hot. It’s july everywhere. In the corners, in my armpits, in the dry grass, in the wind, in the orange sky smeared early mornings. I’m gonna be on the lookout for something from here on out. A key. A school I can attend remotely. A master’s degree? Even I laugh in my head about that one. I’ve got two businesses to juggle. How would another degree help me? It would help the lonely part of me, someone says. Cat walks in. veers a hard left and the smell of fishy kibbles drifts by. I will be looking. For whatever shape I am looking for. Something. To. Take. Me. out of this place. In any sense of the word. I’ll never run far enough but I’ll run my own landscapes and that will wear me out so hard I’ll think I’ve got it. I’ll find my lost thoughts and hair and freckles in the words of strangers. I’ll be like I was that first summer. I’ll melt into the madness like a tourist on drugs. I couldn’t play along then, didn’t know how. Wasn’t born with an innate sense of coolness. Couldn’t make pantomime stanzas like aya’s, which started and ended with something about her mom ironing her name into her underwear. And how joe fell for her. Nearly fell over. Fell for her jet black hair and her tattoos, for the space between her teeth. I can still see how her hair shined, each individual strand like it had never been in the wind, and I can see her laughing face with white teeth and how I wanted to hurt her. I loved her too. She was a magical creature with purple nails. Her body language was open. She was older. Seventeen maybe. And her best friend was maya, who wore no makeup and jean overalls and had long flowing curls and slender brown toes you could suck. maya wrote the line the girls don’t swing their hips anymore, who sat next to the pale boy with the moon face who wrote, he poured himself into her, soft milk into a bowl, and every time I looked at him I thought about sex. California state summer school for the arts was the fancy name. our mascot was a shopping cart. The whole anthology has a picture of it on the cover, and the cart’s name, Harold. When people wrote things for their page, they were clever and deep and dark or funny or disturbing in a good way, expect for the religious girl who wrote a never ending poem about Jesus. But I wrote something about neon letters gleaming in a glass window. I don’t remember what else. But I do know that I hated myself for it, it was so wrong, that I ripped out the page and disposed of it and now I’ll never know what was there. The only thing thats left is in the names, addresses and phone numbers part I the back where people wrote thigns like, faux blonde, I thought I could love but I was wrong… get the Jefferson airplane album with the white rabbit on it. You know I’d do anything for you.” And shit like that. actually joe wrote that to me. but you know what I wrote? Love ya miss ya call me. for reals. I didn’t know how else to be. An older version of the same kid I stares at those letters and one eye cries for the girl who didn’t know how to be, and so was just sugar and spice and everything nice, and the other eye smiles, appreciating the distance and long the journey.
THE STENCH OF SADNESS
I never thought I would have a lover that didn’t speak music. I played guitar in the stairwells in college and shy animals gathered into the folds of my coat. I spent high school scuba diving in the sorrow of women older and wiser than me, understanding their sadness by osmosis. I have been cultivating my origami and sharpening knifes, while colors fade from photographs. I know my knives will turn against me, they know I am only pretending to love them. I’ve started getting papercuts. Even they are on to me. And yet my photo albums play dead on the shelves, and the guitar pulls on her sleeping face.
I never thought I would have a lover that didn’t speak music. I played guitar in the stairwells in college and shy animals gathered into the folds of my coat. I spent high school scuba diving in the sorrow of women older and wiser than me, understanding their sadness by osmosis. I have been cultivating my origami and sharpening knifes, while colors fade from photographs. I know my knives will turn against me, they know I am only pretending to love them. I’ve started getting papercuts. Even they are on to me. And yet my photo albums play dead on the shelves, and the guitar pulls on her sleeping face.
A FLAG CALLING DARK SHAPES TO GATHER
We camp at the very edge of the outskirts of town, up against nothing, small scrubby trees and gray dirt, a bleached green sign stating this is the end of the Josephine County Line. How long do we sleep and blur and swim and drink here, two days? Three? There is dust in my lungs; my shoulders and nose are sunburned. This is the town whose name isn’t on any of our maps. The sun has been burning in this old boulder since morning. Now it ignites my back and I am seduced by the bright emerald of the river below me. Snowmelt. Melting. I see a pack of young wolves licking the ice of a frozen stream that will eventually join this one.
A few giant boulders down, a cement bridge hovers over the ribbon of sapphire water. In its shade I can feel the shadows of things that happened here. No matter how hot the day, it is damp under the bridge, algae blossoming from cracks in the rocks where a chess board of accidents and dark souls have collided, mouths opening and closing, looking for comfort. Something is spray painted on the concrete’s underbelly, like a flag calling dark shapes to gather.
I shiver in the heat and turn away, leaving a drop of sweat that smells like fear, leaking something old and unfinished, flicking off memories that have started to unwind, and I pull at my shirt anxiously. Cold, cold water. I look to the left; throw my shirt into the pale branches of a dead tree. We jump in and our breath is stolen, little icicles popping in my chest, and I thread through the cold to touch the bottom, just once, because I have to. Breathing deep, stinging, blinking. I love the sun. An eagle dips and glides overhead, and I watch the glistening droplets on my chest moving up and down, hairs standing on end, the alchemy of sunshine turning pain into the bright nothing of summer.
THE FIG TREE
Our elbows were resting on the porch railing, looking out over dry tumbles of foothills, mere ankles to the great granite thighs of the Sierras. He said it and I felt the molasses start heating and moving out my arms and down my legs, gagging each nerve with lava. “A fig is not a fruit, it is a swollen stem,” He has been saying, and the boundaries of my reality shrink to shape of his body. “The flower doesn’t get pollinated, but it still bears fruit. It’s called “parthenocarpic.” Time unwinds and stops. Beat, beat.
I close my eyes and explosions pepper my eyelids. How many men can explain five syllable scientific words in the heat of a summer evening and pretend to not see the butterflies batting against the glass? Above the surface, this moment is growing nothing, leading to no climax, but down below but it’s taproot has been working furiously, and it has found a vein that is mapped straight to the magma of my heart. This is the end of summers gathering flowers and watching them wilt. Of checking the wrinkled weather notebook each and every biting morning and inhaling in his clunky handwriting before noting the temperature in today’s column. Of the night of attic fairy tales that led to an empty basement when I was expecting a magic carpet ride.
I understand the fig tree. It waits for that certain insect to pollinate its open flower, but the tree doesn’t know that the insect is dead. Extinct. And yet in its ever hopefulness, the flower overloooks its unrequited love and bears fruit anyway. I look at his profile in the dry evening light, and for a moment, I feel closer to the fig tree.
We camp at the very edge of the outskirts of town, up against nothing, small scrubby trees and gray dirt, a bleached green sign stating this is the end of the Josephine County Line. How long do we sleep and blur and swim and drink here, two days? Three? There is dust in my lungs; my shoulders and nose are sunburned. This is the town whose name isn’t on any of our maps. The sun has been burning in this old boulder since morning. Now it ignites my back and I am seduced by the bright emerald of the river below me. Snowmelt. Melting. I see a pack of young wolves licking the ice of a frozen stream that will eventually join this one.
A few giant boulders down, a cement bridge hovers over the ribbon of sapphire water. In its shade I can feel the shadows of things that happened here. No matter how hot the day, it is damp under the bridge, algae blossoming from cracks in the rocks where a chess board of accidents and dark souls have collided, mouths opening and closing, looking for comfort. Something is spray painted on the concrete’s underbelly, like a flag calling dark shapes to gather.
I shiver in the heat and turn away, leaving a drop of sweat that smells like fear, leaking something old and unfinished, flicking off memories that have started to unwind, and I pull at my shirt anxiously. Cold, cold water. I look to the left; throw my shirt into the pale branches of a dead tree. We jump in and our breath is stolen, little icicles popping in my chest, and I thread through the cold to touch the bottom, just once, because I have to. Breathing deep, stinging, blinking. I love the sun. An eagle dips and glides overhead, and I watch the glistening droplets on my chest moving up and down, hairs standing on end, the alchemy of sunshine turning pain into the bright nothing of summer.
THE FIG TREE
Our elbows were resting on the porch railing, looking out over dry tumbles of foothills, mere ankles to the great granite thighs of the Sierras. He said it and I felt the molasses start heating and moving out my arms and down my legs, gagging each nerve with lava. “A fig is not a fruit, it is a swollen stem,” He has been saying, and the boundaries of my reality shrink to shape of his body. “The flower doesn’t get pollinated, but it still bears fruit. It’s called “parthenocarpic.” Time unwinds and stops. Beat, beat.
I close my eyes and explosions pepper my eyelids. How many men can explain five syllable scientific words in the heat of a summer evening and pretend to not see the butterflies batting against the glass? Above the surface, this moment is growing nothing, leading to no climax, but down below but it’s taproot has been working furiously, and it has found a vein that is mapped straight to the magma of my heart. This is the end of summers gathering flowers and watching them wilt. Of checking the wrinkled weather notebook each and every biting morning and inhaling in his clunky handwriting before noting the temperature in today’s column. Of the night of attic fairy tales that led to an empty basement when I was expecting a magic carpet ride.
I understand the fig tree. It waits for that certain insect to pollinate its open flower, but the tree doesn’t know that the insect is dead. Extinct. And yet in its ever hopefulness, the flower overloooks its unrequited love and bears fruit anyway. I look at his profile in the dry evening light, and for a moment, I feel closer to the fig tree.
THE PARKING LOTS ARE EMPTY BUT THE CART WAS FULL
I have something to tell you. So fuck me. I don’t have any decent male role models. Bob? Depressed. Grandpa? A sweetheart. But a gentle alcoholic who never could unroll his feelings so they came out in jokes and in nickles behind my ear. It’s heavy hot, muggy hot and its just started to rain. I’m alone on the property. Making curry. Sunburnt. With a crink in my neck. I have no good male role models. Maybe that’s why I chose him. He would never mess around behind my back. Never. He is a good provider. A generous friend, a gracious host, an attentive lover, kind with his words. He stopped kissing my deeply one, maybe two years ago. Now he hovers. He teases. He nibbles. It makes me furious. I’ve brought it up. My eyes get dark when he does it. I don’t know what else to do. How much do we change as people, really change, the inner mechanics change, the shadow places change? Will I always carry with me certain people while I drop others after minutes or years? Some people have crept into my voice, the way I walk, the way I dream. Jon will always be there, the wild animal part of myself that’s caged, even though I never really knew him or me. all I know is the feeling. I’m in a shopping cart, and the thing is rattling over every crack in the sidewalk and every upturned chunk of concrete which is many times per block because we’re in the neighborhood part of San Jose and there are giant shady maple trees everywhere, pushing up every sidewalk, but its not why we’re here. He pushes on the skateboard and we dip off the sidewalk and onto the street without really looking and the street is even louder and rattlier than the sidewalk. Sweep smooth up onto the concrete and the wheels skid sideways and he shoves me onto someone’s lawn to break. The back wheels of the cart sink into mud from someone’s leaking hose next to a rotting fence. “oh my god!” “slow down!” he doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. I’m shrieking with delight even though my hands are starting to ache from catching them. He hops down onto the fence and teeters for a minute, the rotting wood deciding if its’ going to support him or not. Clackclackclack rattle rattle I’m holding onto the metal sides of the cart which have warmed with sun. and at sun point, its all over, he’s a speck in the sky with a backpack full of bright red pomegranets and its deceember and I’m driving home alone on highway one. I think of my refrigerator. I have no classes anymore. maybe I’ll ride my bike into Watsonville and steal strawberries. Maybe I’ll call someone. Or drive home. I shift into fifth and rise up and down over the highway hills, ice plant turning red with winter. There’s no fog. Its just cold without any help. Driftwoods sculptures stand silent poses on the cold sand. The parking lots are empty.
WINTER
I start pulling on the memory tape, and it unravels without selection. I’m hearing the shots of Tom shooting the pack of wild kittens one by one on that quiet night in November, and I cover my ears so I don’t hear the soft thud of their bodies hitting the trees and the forest floor. I remember how dirty is was in the corners, how he never washed his cast iron pans, just cooked the next meal inside the remains of the previous, and I feel the delicacy of his sons, stretched thin between a radical father and a mother that gave in, remarried, and bought a hosue in suburbia. He he calls her things. We were instructed to never say he was here if the person on the other end asked for “Thomas.” I look up at his white beard, his calloused hands missing one? two? fingertips, always clutching coal black coffee or a chipped cup of whiskey, and I realize there is a lot I don't know.
I start pulling on the memory tape, and it unravels without selection. I’m hearing the shots of Tom shooting the pack of wild kittens one by one on that quiet night in November, and I cover my ears so I don’t hear the soft thud of their bodies hitting the trees and the forest floor. I remember how dirty is was in the corners, how he never washed his cast iron pans, just cooked the next meal inside the remains of the previous, and I feel the delicacy of his sons, stretched thin between a radical father and a mother that gave in, remarried, and bought a hosue in suburbia. He he calls her things. We were instructed to never say he was here if the person on the other end asked for “Thomas.” I look up at his white beard, his calloused hands missing one? two? fingertips, always clutching coal black coffee or a chipped cup of whiskey, and I realize there is a lot I don't know.
GRAFFITI ON THE WALLS INSIDE
THE DRAGONS ON CHINESE NEW YEAR MOVE INTO COLD CONCRETE IN THE FOG.
I WAS THINKING ABOUT KITTY AND CURVES FROM FOURTEEN YEARS OLD START SLITHERING ALONG MY BONES, GRAFFITI ON THE WALLS INSIDE.
IN GRANADA SPAIN HER FRIEND WAS UGLY BUT THE BEER WAS CHEAP. 60 CENTAVOS.
SO MUCH CONSTRUCTION! I THOUGHT EUROPE WAS NEVER CONSTRUCTED, IT JUST APPEARED, VINTAGE AND PINK.
I ALWAYS WANTED TO GO TO THAT SANCTUARY IN BOLIVIA, BUT HE COULDN’T GET IT UP BECAUSE HE WAS SO DRUNK OR SO HE IMPLIED, AND I’D NEVER BEEN THAT KIND OF ALONE BEFORE.
ALONE LIKE THE PAYPHONE OUTSIDE THE OUTLET STORE IN PANAMA CITY.
I FELT HIGH WITH THE STARS MOVING UNTIL I WOKE UP, AND NOW KATIE IS COMING TO MAUI, SMOKING MARLBOROS FROM THE CANDY STOP WHICH JUST SOUNDS LIKE A PLACE FOR CHILD MOLESTERS.
THE GAS STATION WAS RUMORED TO HAVE FUCKED UP THE AQUIFER OF ALPINE CHILL, RUSTING RAILROAD TRACKS ON SALE IN THE OUTDOORSY SHOP THAT ALWAYS ANNOYED ME.
HIPPIES WOULD FILL GLASS BOTTLES, CROCHETED BIKE BOTTLES, AND SOMEONE PLANTED DREADLOCKS ONE DAY AND WROTE SPECTACULAR MOMENTS ON THE WALL.
WE FOLLOWED THE MARCHING BAND AROUND CORNERS AND EVENTUALLY INTO THE MIRROR, AND WE REMEMBER IT BUT IT WAS ONLY SOUP IN ENGLAND FOR WHAT FELT LIKE A GOOD ALTERNATIVE.
IT WAS CREEPY LOOKING BACK ON IT. AND AYA LOVED LONDON. WHY, WE ASKED? SHOPPING, SHE CHIRPED, BREASTS TURNING INTO DINOSAURS AND SNATCHING BITS OF FOOD FROM UNDER THE TABLES.
THINGS THAT SHOULD NEVER BE KETCHUPED, ALL GMOS IN PLASTIC, BUT TUTU AT MCDONALDS DIDN’T THINK IT WAS BAD FOR ME.
OR DIDN’T CARE.
LATER I’D GO TO THE SAME MALL AS A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD, REMEMBERING EXPENSIVE TOMATOES THAT MOM TALKED ABOUT BEFORE SAMPLING PEACHES AND PUCKERING.
KATIE WORKED AT TULLY’S, SPINNING DEPRESSION INTO DOUBLE NONFAT LATTES AND PUTTING HER BLUE EYES IN THE TIP JAR.
THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH REMEMBERING I CAN TAKE.
THE STUPID EUROPEAN FOUNTAIN OF PRESERVED SPANISH LEMONS AND GUATEMALAN NANNIES WITH THEIR TEDDY BEARS.
NO WONDER I GOT THE FUCK OUT OF THE VITAMIN STORE.
I STOLE MASCARA IN MY ADDIDAS JACKET, AND NOW ITS ALL DIFFERENT WITH A SPA AND WEIRD CHAIN BRICKS AND NEW NAMES.
I WAS THINKING ABOUT KITTY AND CURVES FROM FOURTEEN YEARS OLD START SLITHERING ALONG MY BONES, GRAFFITI ON THE WALLS INSIDE.
IN GRANADA SPAIN HER FRIEND WAS UGLY BUT THE BEER WAS CHEAP. 60 CENTAVOS.
SO MUCH CONSTRUCTION! I THOUGHT EUROPE WAS NEVER CONSTRUCTED, IT JUST APPEARED, VINTAGE AND PINK.
I ALWAYS WANTED TO GO TO THAT SANCTUARY IN BOLIVIA, BUT HE COULDN’T GET IT UP BECAUSE HE WAS SO DRUNK OR SO HE IMPLIED, AND I’D NEVER BEEN THAT KIND OF ALONE BEFORE.
ALONE LIKE THE PAYPHONE OUTSIDE THE OUTLET STORE IN PANAMA CITY.
I FELT HIGH WITH THE STARS MOVING UNTIL I WOKE UP, AND NOW KATIE IS COMING TO MAUI, SMOKING MARLBOROS FROM THE CANDY STOP WHICH JUST SOUNDS LIKE A PLACE FOR CHILD MOLESTERS.
THE GAS STATION WAS RUMORED TO HAVE FUCKED UP THE AQUIFER OF ALPINE CHILL, RUSTING RAILROAD TRACKS ON SALE IN THE OUTDOORSY SHOP THAT ALWAYS ANNOYED ME.
HIPPIES WOULD FILL GLASS BOTTLES, CROCHETED BIKE BOTTLES, AND SOMEONE PLANTED DREADLOCKS ONE DAY AND WROTE SPECTACULAR MOMENTS ON THE WALL.
WE FOLLOWED THE MARCHING BAND AROUND CORNERS AND EVENTUALLY INTO THE MIRROR, AND WE REMEMBER IT BUT IT WAS ONLY SOUP IN ENGLAND FOR WHAT FELT LIKE A GOOD ALTERNATIVE.
IT WAS CREEPY LOOKING BACK ON IT. AND AYA LOVED LONDON. WHY, WE ASKED? SHOPPING, SHE CHIRPED, BREASTS TURNING INTO DINOSAURS AND SNATCHING BITS OF FOOD FROM UNDER THE TABLES.
THINGS THAT SHOULD NEVER BE KETCHUPED, ALL GMOS IN PLASTIC, BUT TUTU AT MCDONALDS DIDN’T THINK IT WAS BAD FOR ME.
OR DIDN’T CARE.
LATER I’D GO TO THE SAME MALL AS A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD, REMEMBERING EXPENSIVE TOMATOES THAT MOM TALKED ABOUT BEFORE SAMPLING PEACHES AND PUCKERING.
KATIE WORKED AT TULLY’S, SPINNING DEPRESSION INTO DOUBLE NONFAT LATTES AND PUTTING HER BLUE EYES IN THE TIP JAR.
THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH REMEMBERING I CAN TAKE.
THE STUPID EUROPEAN FOUNTAIN OF PRESERVED SPANISH LEMONS AND GUATEMALAN NANNIES WITH THEIR TEDDY BEARS.
NO WONDER I GOT THE FUCK OUT OF THE VITAMIN STORE.
I STOLE MASCARA IN MY ADDIDAS JACKET, AND NOW ITS ALL DIFFERENT WITH A SPA AND WEIRD CHAIN BRICKS AND NEW NAMES.
NOT THE TRAVEL MY BONES REMEMBER
WORK HAS ENDED LONG AFTER IT WAS SUPPOSED TO, AND MY PASSENGER SEAT IS PILED WITH EMPTY OLIVE BAR CONTAINERS AND TUPPERWARE, A BOTTLE OF WINE, MY PURSE, AND A CUTTING BOARD AND TRASH CAN I BOUGHT ON MY LUNCH HOUR. I WON’T STOP FOR HITCHHIKERS AND THEY WILL PROBABLY ASSUME I AM JUST TOO FILL IN THE BLANK TO PICK THEM UP.
THE CAR IS POINTED DOWN KOKOMO, AND I’VE JUST TAKEN IT OUT OF GEAR. IT’S QUIETER THIS WAY. THE SKY IS PINK, THE NEST OF CLOUDS BUNCHED AT THE HORIZON ARE PINK, AND THE REST OF THE SKY DOMES A LIGHT BLUE, AND THEN A DARK BLUE BEHIND ME WHERE I CAN ONLY SEE A RECTANGLE OF SHADOW IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR. I AM LISTENING TO LAURA’S MUSIC ON THE RADIO, A SONG THAT TINGLES ALL THE BEST MOLECULES IN MY BODY, AND I CAN FEEL THEM TWINKLING AND CONNECTING TO EACH OTHER IN HAPPINESS, SCREAMING, WE SPEAK THIS LANGUAGE! YES! AND MEMORIES START TRAVELING DOWN MY ARMS. I SWERVE TO AVOID A HUGE SUNKEN PART OF THE ROAD AND FLASH BACK TO WHERE I AM.
I REMEMBER WITH MY STOMACH SOME SIMPLE TRUTHS OF THIS PHASE OF MY LIFE. THERE IS NO TRAVEL FOR ME BEYOND THE HORIZON I AM LOOKING AT. NOT THE TRAVEL MY BONES REMEMBER. AT SOME POINT THERE WILL BE A HONEYMOON, AND WITHOUT A DOUBT IT WILL BE REFRESHING, ALTITUDES FAR HIGHER THAN I’VE EVER DREAMED OF GOING, AND THEN THE SWAMPY AMAZON. I’M SURE WE WILL STAND OPEN MOUTHED IN A MARKET IN IQUITOS, ASKING THE PRICE FOR THE PAW OF A JAGUAR AND POINT AT A BUCKET OF POISON DART FROGS. WE WILL STAY IN THE FIRST FOUR STAR HOTEL WE’VE EVER BEEN IN FOR AT LEAST A NIGHT, BOUNCING ON THE BED AND ORDERING ROOM SERVICE AND TAKING A PICTURE OF OURSELVES NAKED ON THE WHITE SHEETS, SURROUNDED BY COLORFUL SLICED FRUIT AND BUTTERED TOAST WITH THE CRUSTS REMOVED.
BUT ALL OF THIS WILL BE THE KIND OF ADVENTURE WHERE I KNOW THE ENDING. WE GO HOME. WE PAY THE BILLS WE MISSED WHILE WE WERE AWAY. THE CAT WILL NEED LOVING, THE GARDEN WILL BE DYING IN THE STRANGE, AWKWARD SECTIONS I FORGOT TO HOOK UP TO IRRIGATION. AND WE’LL GO BACK TO STRIVING FOR MORE, GOING TO A WATERFALL ONCE EVERY FOUR MONTHS AND HE WILL HAVE BOUGHT HIS GUN THAT HE’LL KEEP BEHIND HIS PILLOW IN THE NOOK OF THE BACK OF THE BED.
THE CAR IS POINTED DOWN KOKOMO, AND I’VE JUST TAKEN IT OUT OF GEAR. IT’S QUIETER THIS WAY. THE SKY IS PINK, THE NEST OF CLOUDS BUNCHED AT THE HORIZON ARE PINK, AND THE REST OF THE SKY DOMES A LIGHT BLUE, AND THEN A DARK BLUE BEHIND ME WHERE I CAN ONLY SEE A RECTANGLE OF SHADOW IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR. I AM LISTENING TO LAURA’S MUSIC ON THE RADIO, A SONG THAT TINGLES ALL THE BEST MOLECULES IN MY BODY, AND I CAN FEEL THEM TWINKLING AND CONNECTING TO EACH OTHER IN HAPPINESS, SCREAMING, WE SPEAK THIS LANGUAGE! YES! AND MEMORIES START TRAVELING DOWN MY ARMS. I SWERVE TO AVOID A HUGE SUNKEN PART OF THE ROAD AND FLASH BACK TO WHERE I AM.
I REMEMBER WITH MY STOMACH SOME SIMPLE TRUTHS OF THIS PHASE OF MY LIFE. THERE IS NO TRAVEL FOR ME BEYOND THE HORIZON I AM LOOKING AT. NOT THE TRAVEL MY BONES REMEMBER. AT SOME POINT THERE WILL BE A HONEYMOON, AND WITHOUT A DOUBT IT WILL BE REFRESHING, ALTITUDES FAR HIGHER THAN I’VE EVER DREAMED OF GOING, AND THEN THE SWAMPY AMAZON. I’M SURE WE WILL STAND OPEN MOUTHED IN A MARKET IN IQUITOS, ASKING THE PRICE FOR THE PAW OF A JAGUAR AND POINT AT A BUCKET OF POISON DART FROGS. WE WILL STAY IN THE FIRST FOUR STAR HOTEL WE’VE EVER BEEN IN FOR AT LEAST A NIGHT, BOUNCING ON THE BED AND ORDERING ROOM SERVICE AND TAKING A PICTURE OF OURSELVES NAKED ON THE WHITE SHEETS, SURROUNDED BY COLORFUL SLICED FRUIT AND BUTTERED TOAST WITH THE CRUSTS REMOVED.
BUT ALL OF THIS WILL BE THE KIND OF ADVENTURE WHERE I KNOW THE ENDING. WE GO HOME. WE PAY THE BILLS WE MISSED WHILE WE WERE AWAY. THE CAT WILL NEED LOVING, THE GARDEN WILL BE DYING IN THE STRANGE, AWKWARD SECTIONS I FORGOT TO HOOK UP TO IRRIGATION. AND WE’LL GO BACK TO STRIVING FOR MORE, GOING TO A WATERFALL ONCE EVERY FOUR MONTHS AND HE WILL HAVE BOUGHT HIS GUN THAT HE’LL KEEP BEHIND HIS PILLOW IN THE NOOK OF THE BACK OF THE BED.
MANIC
I travel through troughs of stars, renewing my vows where the moths have made shimmering lakes of earlier struggles. How darkly I want to cocoon and be fresh air, to become pillows and lemons like he is, but all my vases come crashing down on me and I am a nothing but mouse, sweeping linoleum on desolation row. There are no bridges from this puddle, I space shuttle all the bad actors into empty pools crackled with the speckles on my grandfather’s hands. So I’m afraid of everything, who cares right? It’s like it matters but I tell myself honey, life dresses you up with bruises and war paint and you die with your head full of stories. People take things too seriously these days, you know. Eveyone’s got a new disease, all these bullshit excuses I never heard before. I’m afraid, you’re afraid, let’s throw a pity party and jump in folks. So I’m here. In the bottom of my spirit, on the very basement below the bottom floor, and all the bad things are hovering around me like Disney holograms. I see my dad when he was mostly dead, when I was 14 to about 21, I see boys I’d rather forget, kitchen knives, and wobbling lies I told, floating around on black clocks. I panic so easily. I am the TGV to pessimism. Exhale. We jump through smoke rings smelling of cinnamon and cloves, and tuck white orchids behind our ears. A green vine still moist from birth starts growing at my feet, and its pale tip slides up between my toes. Sweet dew dribbles back to the earth. The vines slither up our thighs and we smile. We are not afraid. Blinking mushrooms breath out black stars that begin to glow as the evening deepens. Tell me friends, who moves you? Who do you think of in moments where no one can reach you, tell me, who moves you? Who moves your hand to the telephone, who moves your feet and who moves you hands to all the things you do throughout the day, think a moment my friends, we live not in a bubble and there are forces to uncover and influences drawing upon us like currents, tell me or the very least tell yourself, who moves you?
SOMETHING I COULD FEEL
Bone colored fog condenses and drips ever so slowly, from the lowest point of every roof, every car, every hanging branch. My world is white, the birds are not singing, and whatever sounds are left are muted down to secrets. The words we threw in other’s direction yesterday are still suspended in the hallway, where the air is so thick its hard to swallow. When I put my finger to the hundred year old glass panes, my skin turns to ice and whispers “this place is not meant for you.” I zip up my puffy jacket and apply new makeup over old makeup in the bathroom mirror. Who knows who might stop by. I sit on the couch next to the gaping window that’s lets in wide drafts of pale winter, and the hum of the freeway meets my heartbeat like opposite sides of a magnet- both powerful, both enemies. Now I go up the creaky stairs to the attic, where all the warmth of the day has pooled, warm clouds huddling together. I see the mountain out the back window, where I walk and write my name into soft moss that grows on the rocks with a stick. The mountain is something I can hold onto, something green, something I can trust. I turn my back on it, climb up the cold metal filing cabinets, step over dad’s homemade windowsill cuz he says it’ll break if I put my weight on it, carefully over the black vinyl of the window and then bare feet on asphalt shingles. I keep my center of gravity low, nodding to the pile of purple clouds in the north. I know the ropes that the wind uses to pull people from great heights and I won’t be fooled. The sun is setting but not glamorously, more like steel fighting wine. I settle into the nook between two rooflines and close my eyes on this stupid neighborhood, the leaves crinkling and cracking under my jeans and puffy jacket. I feel like an alien, listening to a minivan pull up, my neighbor’s children pour out, spraying chatter and uneven sounds. Doors slam, a child cries. I hate it here. I am fourteen. Later I meet Katie at the park. We always meet at the park. We smoke her cigarettes, she talks, we smoke from a pipe, and the stars start moving above me, dipping and swirling into a galactic soup of diamonds and trails. My legs suddenly feel luscious and moist, and I unclench my teeth. We swing through the night air beneath towering date palms and the air smells like the mud of the bay but tonight it’ sweet and earthy. We kick our shoes off into the blackness and I hear one of them clank against the cold metal monkey bars. We laugh and swing higher. We try to tip the swingset. It is beyond its fulcrum and wants to fall down. We play with this unfamiliar country, this beyond safe moment, and then we laugh, and everything is blending together and we have to stop pumping and dig our feet into the sand to make it all stop.
A MORE FAMILIAR KIND OF DANGER
What’s in my belly right now you ask? One pink allergy pill and half a mug of mate with brown sugar and cream. It reminds me of reading in one of my water damaged teenage journal pages, the line about nothing but cum and half a can of coke in my stomach, gurgling, crack fizzle. About as classy as the time those fucking ex felons pulled up next to the bus station in front of Northgate mall where I was kind of hovering, wanting to recover, trailing an hour behind me of firm couch pointed at phD, bright lights stinging, and those fucking guys had the nerve to yeah we’re going south, when I ask which way they’re headed, and then I am squished between them all, taking in the scenery of tattoos and muscles and vodka breath, and they get on the freeway going north. Then black girl with toddler. Or was she just very pregnant? Glass bottles clanking. Here take it, talk dirty to him. The white phone and its long white tail suspended in the air, a question mark, a dare, and like a good student, I feel obligated to try, but I’d much prefer diving under something soft and crying. Time stretches. More clanking. My sober brain outsmarts them, I’m out the door, my inner compass leading me, and it works even when I’m crying, wow, who knew? walking over an overpass, hot air and whooshing of freeway cars, grafitti and my stupid words echoing, running down to my feet, stupid, stupid, and then there’s a hotel and I walk up to the lobby trying to look less broken than I feel. Can I use your phone please. . dad picks me up. There is no crying in the Ford, there is no explanation, the van rumbles and I am safe now, or at least in a more familiar kind of danger..
What’s in my belly right now you ask? One pink allergy pill and half a mug of mate with brown sugar and cream. It reminds me of reading in one of my water damaged teenage journal pages, the line about nothing but cum and half a can of coke in my stomach, gurgling, crack fizzle. About as classy as the time those fucking ex felons pulled up next to the bus station in front of Northgate mall where I was kind of hovering, wanting to recover, trailing an hour behind me of firm couch pointed at phD, bright lights stinging, and those fucking guys had the nerve to yeah we’re going south, when I ask which way they’re headed, and then I am squished between them all, taking in the scenery of tattoos and muscles and vodka breath, and they get on the freeway going north. Then black girl with toddler. Or was she just very pregnant? Glass bottles clanking. Here take it, talk dirty to him. The white phone and its long white tail suspended in the air, a question mark, a dare, and like a good student, I feel obligated to try, but I’d much prefer diving under something soft and crying. Time stretches. More clanking. My sober brain outsmarts them, I’m out the door, my inner compass leading me, and it works even when I’m crying, wow, who knew? walking over an overpass, hot air and whooshing of freeway cars, grafitti and my stupid words echoing, running down to my feet, stupid, stupid, and then there’s a hotel and I walk up to the lobby trying to look less broken than I feel. Can I use your phone please. . dad picks me up. There is no crying in the Ford, there is no explanation, the van rumbles and I am safe now, or at least in a more familiar kind of danger..
FUCK
New bad habits are forming more quickly than I can pretend to be shocked by them, the water bill tucked into a corner, the invoice sent to a dumb and mute basement of my brain, it’s all garbage getting funneled down something, who am I and why did I offer so much to lose. The chill out music plays its late night comtemplative notes while I drink wine, stir the chicken, and the sadness moves around the room, and we ignore it, lay on the cold tile, sink into the high and the music., we push the nightmare as far back as w can reach until our arms hurt from the stretch. There are little secrets stowing away in my day to day. Julienne the carrots in this illegal kitchen, chop the chives and forget. Forget our illegal existence, a bruised blue under the speckling of brighter, more immediate disasters. stir in the tamarind paste, eggs, mung bean sprouts. “I think you drank more than me.” “I think you just have a hard time getting a buzz on.” How did it come to this? Thievery corporation. Empty wineglasses. Clean plates, wide eyed,.I don’t want to drnk water because it will dilute my high. I am exuberant to escape. It’s hard down here and I’m not religious. I’m not even dealing with soul wrenching problems. I’m just trying to stay afloat and finding my throat choked with water. As you may have noticed, there are some of us that don’t cry easily. It is a very small club. The package of peanuts stars at me, blue block letters. The looming doom throws shapes at me, all the darkness is aimed at my softest places. And I cry. I hate hearing an aristocratic man lose his dignity, with simple words, on a simple day, because he has to.
DISPATCH FROM THE FLOOR
My desires pull me around, sniffing with my head down, oblivious to the world crackling and changing around me. Cut the chord, please, leave me calm and willing like oil, rolling with gravity, never stopping at obstacles but quietly rerouting without pause. I want things like an angry creature with no language, I want things in all cardinal directions and their opposites, I want to be seen but I’m going to choose by who. I want to be a bird with wings so broad one stroke can keep me cutting the blue for hours. It’s safe up there. I’ve always wanted to fly, but I never pulled this through to its conclusion, what I really want is a more graceful escape than running or hiding, I want to fly away, to avoid, to unstrap, disengage, loosen, unravel, unbuckle and disappear. Anything to not look you in the eyes so deep it stings, anything to erase the anger and the uncomfortable moments and the sorrow that doesn’t seem to shrink but lengthens like muscle, I want to keep these things so far away that they ignite when they hit my atmosphere and rain down like dust that makes me sneeze but never cry.
My desires pull me around, sniffing with my head down, oblivious to the world crackling and changing around me. Cut the chord, please, leave me calm and willing like oil, rolling with gravity, never stopping at obstacles but quietly rerouting without pause. I want things like an angry creature with no language, I want things in all cardinal directions and their opposites, I want to be seen but I’m going to choose by who. I want to be a bird with wings so broad one stroke can keep me cutting the blue for hours. It’s safe up there. I’ve always wanted to fly, but I never pulled this through to its conclusion, what I really want is a more graceful escape than running or hiding, I want to fly away, to avoid, to unstrap, disengage, loosen, unravel, unbuckle and disappear. Anything to not look you in the eyes so deep it stings, anything to erase the anger and the uncomfortable moments and the sorrow that doesn’t seem to shrink but lengthens like muscle, I want to keep these things so far away that they ignite when they hit my atmosphere and rain down like dust that makes me sneeze but never cry.
LIKING IT TOO MUCH
If there’s one thing I don’t want to talk about, it’s cocaine. So let’s be brave and talk about it, shall we? I don’t know how it started and I’m not sure how it ends but I’ve got what’s happened in the middle jammed up in some nook of my brain, fermenting. We’d moved into the master bedroom that looked out over the tops of evergreen trees where they come to a dark point and there is soft white carpet and I hang up my silks from Thailand and our colorful surfboards nestle into the corners. We always use my thrift store skinny mirror and you always prefer hundred dollar bills because you say they have less blood and cum and someone else's coke on them. My heart beats faster just thinking about it. one flash, we’re tiptoeing around the house, giggling, wondering if anyone is going to notice we’re super high. Flash again, driving over to Becky’s boyfriend’s apartment, and then time breathes deep and lengthens again. I stiffen when we enter. His skin is the color of coal and Becky is so thin that I keep looking at her and looking away and looking again. They give us some to try. We are regular customers. I’d prefer not to remember how we learned it was with laced with other stuff. Then he asks if we want to try something different. What was it even? The procedure was unqiue, we were alone in boyfriend’s room, he brought out a piece of tinfoil and a lighter, I remember that much, but mostly, around the corner, I remember becky’s empty seat in accounting class, looking at the curved wood and wondering if she is just hungover or if she’s really in trouble this time. Every time she takes off her black buffy jacket her shirt hangs off her shoulders like a sheet on a tree branch. But we keep going back to that apartment with nothing on the walls, the place that where I have to remind myself to take deep breaths in compensation. We were with jon luey that night, it was after some big event at the college but I don’t remember the event, just Jason taking forever in the beer garden and me climbing up on something concrete and high off the ground, then it jumps straight to laying in the grass on the sketchy edge of the park whre you find strange things in the bushes, and the dew was soaking our jeans and we did lines until it got dark, and then we kept going. Someone said, “we either have to stop now or we gotta finish this.” And it was my voice that said, “let’s do it!” and when the softest colors started showing behind the tall coffins of trees, we were finally out and we sort of fell home and slept until the next afternoon, that awful kind of sleep where I wasn’t refreshed just recovering and I wake up feeling stale and kind of worthless. That’s what happens when I like it too much.
HER AND ME
There was not enough white pubic hair in all of California to make us laugh. Now she has a dark daughter and a father ghost. She always used to be shoe laces to deep dark skin, but she could barely face her own blinding deserts. In my own slow spinning, I hear Jaws breaking anger on traditional nights like these, but there’s a rhythm to keep my angst company. To warm the agony that follows me around like something lost and needing shelter, bowing my head and bending my eyes. One, two, die. Three, four, example of the afterlife, breaking down into dust and soil and other things that get trapped in my clothes and disintegrate on the line of time. Portobellas growing edgy in the stove, haliimalile on my half horizon. We harvested the world for them, we know they’re whores and so we put out everything behind the heavy curtain, breathing to ourselves and wondering in private. While Michael roams my backcountry, I see his stiff walk as sandy as memory, white and frozen and tasting like chalk. I hear his accusations even as I move in my green grasses, while the real ocean is whipped white and has no eyes. It’s amazing how I can never get it right. When I think it’s all dark weight, it’s really just a map with no borders. If I go down the steepest darkest trail where I fall and strain for life, all I get is more questions. There’s no peaceful resolution anywhere, there’s just cliffs and falling and strange metaphors and I’m so crying at not getting it, sinking into manufactured carperts of tears and confusion that meets candles and get silenced by mere introductions. Beer break. There’s only so many we can shame. And by that I mean me, heavy me, pointed needle me. I mean I never used to drink deep when I was smoother, when I knew less, and I think it’ s helping. It’s all speeding me towards my dark center. When I let go, everything goes back to the young spiral where I feed, where I feel my most outer muscles. There’s only nonsense and stardust out here. What a fucking relief. Property suction demasds attention. My bracelets on the metal are speaking rape. Sometimes meaning is just too much, it plays a strange harmony on my mistakes and I want it to be ugly but its all beautiful and that is way way too far from the target.
There was not enough white pubic hair in all of California to make us laugh. Now she has a dark daughter and a father ghost. She always used to be shoe laces to deep dark skin, but she could barely face her own blinding deserts. In my own slow spinning, I hear Jaws breaking anger on traditional nights like these, but there’s a rhythm to keep my angst company. To warm the agony that follows me around like something lost and needing shelter, bowing my head and bending my eyes. One, two, die. Three, four, example of the afterlife, breaking down into dust and soil and other things that get trapped in my clothes and disintegrate on the line of time. Portobellas growing edgy in the stove, haliimalile on my half horizon. We harvested the world for them, we know they’re whores and so we put out everything behind the heavy curtain, breathing to ourselves and wondering in private. While Michael roams my backcountry, I see his stiff walk as sandy as memory, white and frozen and tasting like chalk. I hear his accusations even as I move in my green grasses, while the real ocean is whipped white and has no eyes. It’s amazing how I can never get it right. When I think it’s all dark weight, it’s really just a map with no borders. If I go down the steepest darkest trail where I fall and strain for life, all I get is more questions. There’s no peaceful resolution anywhere, there’s just cliffs and falling and strange metaphors and I’m so crying at not getting it, sinking into manufactured carperts of tears and confusion that meets candles and get silenced by mere introductions. Beer break. There’s only so many we can shame. And by that I mean me, heavy me, pointed needle me. I mean I never used to drink deep when I was smoother, when I knew less, and I think it’ s helping. It’s all speeding me towards my dark center. When I let go, everything goes back to the young spiral where I feed, where I feel my most outer muscles. There’s only nonsense and stardust out here. What a fucking relief. Property suction demasds attention. My bracelets on the metal are speaking rape. Sometimes meaning is just too much, it plays a strange harmony on my mistakes and I want it to be ugly but its all beautiful and that is way way too far from the target.
FUCK YOU
OR YOU. OR YOU. OR ANY OF THE SHAPES THAT SWAY AND SPIT IN THE BACK THEATRES OF MY QUIET MOMENTS, IT WOULD BE EASIER IF IT WAS ABOUT ONE OF YOU, BECAUSE YOU ALL HAVE SMELLS AND QUIRKS AND BIRTHMARKS AND TEMPERS AND SHIT I COULD TALK ABOUT WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT MYSELF.
WELL, FUCK YOU OLD HOUSE, WHERE MY DREAMS STILL LIKE TO PLAY WITH ROTTING DOLLS UNDER FATHER SCREAMS AND NEIGHBOR CLOUDS FLOAT OVER TO PIERCE WHATEVER SOFT WE HAVE LEFT, AND FUCK YOU SELF. FUCK THE FLOOR IN YOUR TOWER THAT HAS NO EYES, YOU BLIND MOTHERFUCKER, EARTHQUAKES MAKE GLASS INTO RAIN AND I WONDER IN MY OWN SILENT VOICE WHO GOD IS, SCRAPING MY NAILS AGAINST DESTINY UNTIL ALL I CAN SEE IS THE SHAPE OF WHAT I DON’T HAVE, LIKE THE DARK SPACES AROUND THE BRANCHES, ITS WHAT MOM TAUGHT IN HER AFTERSCHOOL ART CLASSES AND ITS NAME IS NEGATIVE SPACE.
THIS MORNING I DROVE BY A MAN CUTTING THE GRASS IN FRONT OF A CROSS DRAPED WITH NECKLACES ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND IT TURNED MY MORNING INTO PUDDLES. DRIVING, DRIVING, MY LOUD GAS CHUGGING TRUCK, THINKING ABOUT JUST A SMALL THING SHE SAID, BUT I HAVE TO STRAIN MY NECK TO LOOK UP AT IT AND I THINK, DID HER MOTHER HAVE A BETTER PREGNANCY THAN MINE? HOW DOES SHE COME UP WITH THIS FAR REACHING AND PERFECTLY HARMONIZED TO THE UNIVERSE KIND OF SHIT? FUCK YOU TOO, YOU HOT PLANET BURING TOO CLOSE TO THE CENTER. MY OWN PROGRESS USED TO BURROW ITS HEAD INTO THE EVENINGS, THE NIGHTTIMES, AFTER THE TUNNEL HAD BEEN CLEARED BY CANDLES AND RUNNING ON THE CEMENT WITH SHOES THAT CLICKED, AND NOW THERE’S NOT MUCH ROOM FOR IT TO SHOVE IT’S WELL CONNECTED HEAD THROUGH THE PORTAL TO THE PLACE WHERE ALL GOOD THINGS ARE BORN. MY TREASURES SEEM SMALLER, MORE COATED WITH DUST LIKE THEY’VE BEEN WAITING TOO LONG AND NOW THERE’S DEAD BABIES IN MY FINGERS WITH A NOTE THAT’S TOO FADED TO MAKE OUT.
WELL, FUCK YOU OLD HOUSE, WHERE MY DREAMS STILL LIKE TO PLAY WITH ROTTING DOLLS UNDER FATHER SCREAMS AND NEIGHBOR CLOUDS FLOAT OVER TO PIERCE WHATEVER SOFT WE HAVE LEFT, AND FUCK YOU SELF. FUCK THE FLOOR IN YOUR TOWER THAT HAS NO EYES, YOU BLIND MOTHERFUCKER, EARTHQUAKES MAKE GLASS INTO RAIN AND I WONDER IN MY OWN SILENT VOICE WHO GOD IS, SCRAPING MY NAILS AGAINST DESTINY UNTIL ALL I CAN SEE IS THE SHAPE OF WHAT I DON’T HAVE, LIKE THE DARK SPACES AROUND THE BRANCHES, ITS WHAT MOM TAUGHT IN HER AFTERSCHOOL ART CLASSES AND ITS NAME IS NEGATIVE SPACE.
THIS MORNING I DROVE BY A MAN CUTTING THE GRASS IN FRONT OF A CROSS DRAPED WITH NECKLACES ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND IT TURNED MY MORNING INTO PUDDLES. DRIVING, DRIVING, MY LOUD GAS CHUGGING TRUCK, THINKING ABOUT JUST A SMALL THING SHE SAID, BUT I HAVE TO STRAIN MY NECK TO LOOK UP AT IT AND I THINK, DID HER MOTHER HAVE A BETTER PREGNANCY THAN MINE? HOW DOES SHE COME UP WITH THIS FAR REACHING AND PERFECTLY HARMONIZED TO THE UNIVERSE KIND OF SHIT? FUCK YOU TOO, YOU HOT PLANET BURING TOO CLOSE TO THE CENTER. MY OWN PROGRESS USED TO BURROW ITS HEAD INTO THE EVENINGS, THE NIGHTTIMES, AFTER THE TUNNEL HAD BEEN CLEARED BY CANDLES AND RUNNING ON THE CEMENT WITH SHOES THAT CLICKED, AND NOW THERE’S NOT MUCH ROOM FOR IT TO SHOVE IT’S WELL CONNECTED HEAD THROUGH THE PORTAL TO THE PLACE WHERE ALL GOOD THINGS ARE BORN. MY TREASURES SEEM SMALLER, MORE COATED WITH DUST LIKE THEY’VE BEEN WAITING TOO LONG AND NOW THERE’S DEAD BABIES IN MY FINGERS WITH A NOTE THAT’S TOO FADED TO MAKE OUT.
THE DIVING BOARD
My buttered mind freewheels down the diving board and into the empty deep end. I’m in a skeleton of a pool somewhere where the sky is white or gray or both and the freeway doesn’t hum but deep breathes. I’m very busy feeling the spattering of old adrenaline and the old newness and old oldness and the screams and unsuccessful seductions that took place here, they’ve sifted down to the concrete and rooted and stained themselves in, although they’re long gone. But in a way nothing is ever long gone, on some other plane we can’t see or even get, it’s all still there, and we carry in our brains and bones and legs and toes, galleries of everything, which bend and bloat and shrink unevenly as we replay certain scenes and not others. But really I’d just like to speak what you speak on the dark side of your moon. But that will never happen. I haven’t turned the light on yet, although I think is should. I might look funny floating here in the darkness. Outside there are no planets. The second furry heart I ever pulled tight to me was carried off by coyotes last night. Does it matter if he suffered? Why do I even ask? The book is closed. Is his blood still conscious as it loses oxygen, disappearing into the soil of a place I never called home? Let go already. I know everything else will turn me blue. I stare at her email. She was just stuffing envelopes full of favors. I turn the dial, back to scratching my legs from the vog bites and draping myself over dinners and chairs. The curiosity of death pulls at my clothes, unraveling from a dry place. Yeah fill yourself up until you die, go on taking and sucking and pumping and go back to where you came from. Like comets and babies. Like us.
FALLING INTO NETS
I’m swimming, in a place of always darkness, but light, or the gentle sense of light, the moon of my heart, the very back room that is gentle and never exposed to the sandpaper of sun. there is a boat rocking, I can hear its small sound of wood lapping water, but the wind is not blowing, it sucking, and this very knot causes me to stop thinking and start falling. And I fall into the nets of dad I love you, old boy hearts I treated like tissue paper and burned into nothing not even ashes, I’m sorry, oh, corner of my self, marble nut of my core, I am the most sorry, deeply down into tissue sorry for doubting you, giving up on you, you’re my child that resists growing so it can stay curious and ask the real questions, the simple ones, the ones with no right answers. I am so sorry for searching, looking in eyes and pants and wallets and pockets, looking, looking down veins and into jeans, looking back into mirrors but mostly not seeing, god I am so sorry. I sleep in the shade of rainbows and spin into funhouses of curving smoke and backwards records, looking for meaning in the pauses between words and hearing only the echoes of the things I never said, never did, shadows dancing across your freckles and then gone.
THANK YOU
I noticed you. Not because you’re spectacular. Just because you were there. And when I twirled around I caught sight of you again, moving like a river moves between rocks, and I smiled at another part of the room when I saw the black hair turning into a forest on your pale shoulders, ad I thought, he is not from here. Gentle people of the jury, I am not judging. Just seeing, and trying to understand. Everything. If I care. Everywhere. And I spin and you do what you do, and the music is cut off at its knees, an awkward pause if you make it one, but we are two smiles calm and ready for war. You are balding, and you smile. You cock your head at me. I puzzle piece your face, try not to smile, and immediately stop trying. Your hands paint a ball. I throw the ball. We wiggle in mirror image. Question marks on our faces, mock anger, whirlpools of lifetimes in our eyes that we can’t help but show. The one thing that doesn’t live in the tool bag but is never put away. We scream silent, we leap with joy, we crawl through praries on our bruised knees, and when we come up for air, several things dawn on me at once, like a group of hikers converging on a summit at the same moment. Your face is quite unattractive, dare I say fugly. but your electricity, your insides are so beautiful that the first thought retreats in embarrassment. Never judge a book. Never judge, we can never do never, but wow, pale warm squishy man from far away, thank you.
THE MARATHON
This year I have an eight year old. Next year, nine. Grieving the other life that just barely didn’t happen, and the huge detour that I made, or I think I made, because I think I’m in charge here, and everything , everything shifts to the right and down and settles on another plain, and I look down at the road in front of me, knowing only that it will change. Grieving about things that are gone is like trying to recall a smell from memory alone. It’s too ephemeral, it’s not meant to be pulled back. Let it go, let it go. I drive up the hill, always behind someone that pilots the incline in that weird space between third and forth gear and I’m either straining or lugging the engine back and forth between them, thinking, thinking about destiny and habits. Thinking how dad always opens his mail the same way, the entire nearly thrity years I’ve known him, he takes he pocket knife out of his lee jeans or lei girls jeans and slices the short end quick and clean and dumps the contents out into his hand on onto a table. Why, always the same? And why was it a good luck omen when the white goats were out on the really steep hillside and the sun was shining? Why? And then I think, because the rest of life is so exhausting. We lean on habits to give our brains a little nap, just for a minute, to ready ourselves for the rest of the marathon.
TRY ON BLACK AND WHITE
I repeat the same cry over roadmaps of fresh and rotting conversations
In each one I am screaming,
Wings! Shiny eyes! Strange shapes in my mouth pushing strange sounds, gimme!
The smell of smoke and spices.
I want to cry but I’m too stiff
Too much paint
Like the windows in my little girl home, frozen shut, in off-white
He asked “do you want to go out” and I said, but its 2 in the morning. And he said no, I mean go OUT.
I sing along with
the wrong words for years before someone taps me on the shoulder with the right ones
I don’t care
I don’t care that my memory is a cobweb
And sometimes it gets torn down and remade
A little different
These are white clouds on a windy day
Moving like giants but meaning nothing
You know what really matters
this tension for leaving
Like it’s this thing
Like being gay or having a mind for numbers
This thing, dyed in the wool, spoken by generations
I need to leave
I need to try on black and white
Play deaf
Look into pools and melt into creatures that haven’t been discovered yet
And as the tension gets tighter
It cuts into soft things
Kindness, there goes a corner
Gentle words I reach for evaporate when I get close
The same cry
ALWAYS OR THE SMooTH SKIN OF THE GUAVA TREE
I push my green tea gum up into my cheek as far as it’ll go so I can take a big swig of water. I feel weird. Code word. The sun is lighting up the tops of the trees, but I navigate the turn down here in the shade, in the still air, cool from nighttime. So I feel kind of ashamed that she saw that we aren’t perfect. Still ringing in my head, “amy, compare any future boyfriends to him.” I and smiled big. “and I don’t give compliments freely” he said in his deep voice and English accent, and amy and I both smile. We know. And now, here we are, moving soil and boxes and coolers in the thick heat and he’s out there in all black, almost yelling ” how did we get these numbers all wrong?” and “I’m buying the parts next time” abd fumbling through different containers with the kind of movement that makes me hold my breath. I keep saying I’m sorry. She says nothing, doesn’t bow to it. I suppose I am weak. I can feel that now, in this moment. When we finish, she whispers to me, I’ll go to the store, get him some beer. And maybe a snack. What does he like? Red hot blues and salsa. I’ll be back. And give him some action tonight. That oughta cheer him up.” How did she get so calm and wise? And why do I instead, shrink and expand with each argument, problem, ecstasy? I’m so glad I left. “you did the non co-depedent thing” mom says. But I’m not sure she knows much about being non codependent. Then again I don’t either. A text noise. I lunge for the phone. Distractions, take me! more immediate disasters, reel me in! Don’t let me stay here! I want nothing but to get out. Always searching for the next thing. Even naked in the smooth skin of the guava tree, looking down at kaity, eyes closed in the little waterfall on the slippery rock ledge, even there with nowhere to be and no one around but the wind in the eucs, how do I want to fast forward even this? Never enough, never enough, always the theme, on journal pages, in darting eyes, digging, digging, never enough.
LIKE A BALLOON THAT DOESN’T KNOW ITS NAME
My feelings? Underwater.
Can’t hear who they are or what they’re saying. Moon on the ocean, moon on the road.
Is that a cop? Maybe.
Moon on the fields. I am blank because I’m blank because I’m blank.
I know I love you when we put down our chopsticks and you push pad thai onto my fork.
I know I love you when you rub my hands across the table.
By the way, I went into the Tupperware, and, happened to all those hundreds? Sour. Another loan. Another emergency.
And the parking lot, yellow lights streaking.
Well I have strong desires too.
Head down, black hat over face.
Well don’t let me stop you.
Gagging our faces with old angry words,
carrying plywood in the dark, kitty meowing, hungry.
I bought beef. Don’t think a bout how long its been sitting in the car.
I feel ugly. Even on the inside. Especially on the inside.
All day. Looking at myself in the mirror at the mall, wanting to change something.
Looking in the vanities in the bathroom aisle.
I can’t.
My sixty dollar slippers hurt. I feel small. They were so beautiful.
Sugar cane rotting smell all over Kahului, like shopping in a giant fart.
Money couterclock down the hole.
Avoiding people in Mana, arranging things in my cart.
No energy for this.
Tripping from one mistake to another, straining to re-orient
at gratitude. Fizzles.
Crickets. Chocolate on my tongue. Wanting, so wanting to appreciate, to bow, but feeling like a balloon that doesn’t know its name.
FALL ME OUT
Why do drifters let themselves be blown? for the drinking of the distance, for watching the smell of the hooves on sweet grass, for the lullaby of the rails, for the hot shimmer of the next town or just an ache. hole. I know why I do this, why I step in painful feet and and then. Of course I do this because I am rock that has been here for years before there were numbers to count them, because I don’t have to try to merge with the nighttime or sheer cliffs or the clouds dampening the tops of the trees, I just wait, and the rain percolates in and down ad down and I am simply. Sand dust powder. Without muscle or thought. Still. Did you know? Flowers are meant to be given. Away. Because they were stolen in the first place when. Snap of the wrist, slice of the blade. Not karma. Too kind. Too simple too. But sins have vengeance and holes. Sins can only redeemed by giving. Be careful what you give! Where you give it from. From down. Locked. From polluted pools or. Which slice of me would you like to eat today? Sins of the father, toes in the desert, the stale bread that doesn’t breath. I thought, I could slide into that one note, that one string on the violin and complete. Resonant. And fall into. Instead I have to sweep myself up, put all the pieces. I must have a child that’s an artist it must. Balance the triangle, feed me. strong legs, deep simple heart. So close. There is no force stronger than this gravity to warmth and stillness, it bleeds away rivers and gullys in the dome of dark, away down. There. Pit, core seed soul nucleus magma stomach and heartwood. Fall me out of love with the wind, I have so many. Have anchors. Have crystals brewing in laboratories, fall me out.
MAYBE I NEED HIPSTER FRIENDS TO SAVE ME
I am a grey cat leaning on the horizon, one paw resting, both eyes slits, tail flicking to a rhythm you can’t hear, no purr, no nothing. I am red lettuce on a windy day, small and unmoved. I am a river of coffee, a deep, sweet catalyst. Of course everything I am is beautiful. I am not the film on the sink or the peacock poop. We think of ourselves so glorious.
So what did I think? I think it was a fucking relief. Playing music loud, laughing, surfing the inflatable lounger at hamoa. I gave them what they signed up for, miles and miles and miles and waterfalls and strange fruit and a party and a hike. I did a good job at what was expected of me. Plumerias on their windowsill. I like being good at things. It sucks when I’m not. For a whole day, I didn’t strain. Not a bit. We played blast from the past music. Stopped at fruit stands. They jumped off that super high ledge. We suckled yellow hibiscus. And all of this worries me. Because I finally felt relaxed. He’s got me under a spell. Or maybe I wove it myself. It metal and its grey and it cuts into my skin. Today I was all yellow, totally messy, flying over the endlessly repatched road, throwing up clouds of dry mango leaves. I was all turquoise, in my hair, in my fingers, in the lazy early morning joint smoking, after letting the salt sink in for hours. This can’t be foreign. Its can’t it can’t it can’t or I will die. Slowly for quickly, I will die. Maybe I should get new sunglasses. Invite new friends over that come with easels and rolls of canvas under their arms. Dressed like they’re in Portland, people that are so full of strangeness and creativity if you bump them some of it spills. Maybe then it would be okay. Okay to be me. Not sucked in like the tide, all focused too tight, playing the role.
So what did I think? I think it was a fucking relief. Playing music loud, laughing, surfing the inflatable lounger at hamoa. I gave them what they signed up for, miles and miles and miles and waterfalls and strange fruit and a party and a hike. I did a good job at what was expected of me. Plumerias on their windowsill. I like being good at things. It sucks when I’m not. For a whole day, I didn’t strain. Not a bit. We played blast from the past music. Stopped at fruit stands. They jumped off that super high ledge. We suckled yellow hibiscus. And all of this worries me. Because I finally felt relaxed. He’s got me under a spell. Or maybe I wove it myself. It metal and its grey and it cuts into my skin. Today I was all yellow, totally messy, flying over the endlessly repatched road, throwing up clouds of dry mango leaves. I was all turquoise, in my hair, in my fingers, in the lazy early morning joint smoking, after letting the salt sink in for hours. This can’t be foreign. Its can’t it can’t it can’t or I will die. Slowly for quickly, I will die. Maybe I should get new sunglasses. Invite new friends over that come with easels and rolls of canvas under their arms. Dressed like they’re in Portland, people that are so full of strangeness and creativity if you bump them some of it spills. Maybe then it would be okay. Okay to be me. Not sucked in like the tide, all focused too tight, playing the role.
