belong to the world

nightsick

2012-01-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

by myself I walk down by the river because I am by myself most of the time. The days begin early and they are mazes of wavering in and out. I shut out the sound of my mother's voice for the first time since high school because it sounds like early snows and drainage ditches and warm obligation and that twists in the place of my absent organs. I call my best friend and she sounds like the mountains and freshly brewed tea and honestly it makes me cold and upset but I don't want them to know.

I need to be assured that if I became an antique set of china they would collect me. I found my car keys in a side pocket and I shrugged and then wanted to cry. I always knew I'd be homesick but I didn't know I would ever be so ill that I do nothing but get crushes on TV characters and lie in bed willing myself not to dream. It doesn't work, but it's close because even though it's different time zones, when we sleep, we dream of night.

the prisons are the same

2012-01-06T08:56:00.001-08:00

It would help if I were feeling less blah to write these things. I am in florence and the city is beautiful but I feel physically sick, tired because I have traveled a long way and ill because of some impossible obligation to love where I am and what I am doing at every minute. I haven't felt free in a while and I don't feel free right now. If anything further trapped - in a place that is not my own in a room that is not my own with rules and the inability to speak, navigate or cook for myself. I think I am supposed to feel like a child - taken care of, occasionally grumpy, filled with wonder. But instead I feel like a inmate on privileges for good behavior, taking walks and then returning to my bed to sleep the aches off.

anno nuovo

2012-01-01T20:56:00.000-08:00

I usually write to resolve in the beginning of january because it is grounding and it gets me excited. It would be easier if I were feeling less cold, if the floors were carpeted and if I had spent a long enough time in Maryland to feel bored and constrained by it. Instead though, I have come a long way to be in Italy, and while I am here I should resolve to do some things, so

for the semester:
learn to be alone.
find a coffee shop to sit inside.
spend time by the river.
go hiking a lot.
find a frisbee game.
make a lot of art and generally have ideas.
go hiking a lot.
explore the city and learn it.
go dancing.
travel.

for the year:

learn to be alone. let your wounds heal. collaborate. make large things. love the things you make. write more, and better. be a prompter pen pal. draw more, and better. read more. get a tattoo. do not shrivel in your den.

speaking and touching

2011-12-19T21:43:00.001-08:00

When we are young and do not know the language of bodies we must tease out things with our tongues, curling around words like they are objects in a vacuum. We spit as many as we can and in all the wrong places. Sitting next to someone on a grassy hill with on a cool evening you say “I heard somewhere that when you are close to someone your heartbeats will synchronize.” So instead of aligning the curves of your naked bodies and tussling down the hill you lie on your sides and face each other. There is at least six inches of space and it is dark but you look at your faces and your hands lie right next to each other and you try to listen to your own uneven heart.
Most people get past this tranquil method of touching-not-touching. Most people get older and they stop running into doorframes and open cabinets because they stop getting taller. They settle into their size and weight and sometimes hairstyles and they know how to move, to shuffle down a pew without stepping on people's toes and how to twitch to music so someone else will notice. When you grow up you hit a point where it is no longer acceptable to lie still, happy and tingling but pretending as though nothing is wrong, as the person next to you grazes their fingers along the sides of your arm. You have to wake up in the morning and say “nothing happened” when in your mind everything did. You have to kiss them, or not, you have to touch their cheeks and at the airport you have to say goodbye like you mean or wave like you don't. Things have to be decided and they must be either unspoken or discussed at length and there is no inbetween. There is no “I like you but I don't want to.” There is only I like you I like you I love you I don't love you anymore. At some point you understand it is just your lips, it is only your legs, you are just toes and fingers and there's no point in not using them. You don't speak in words because words mean everything. You speak in bodies because you understand they mean nothing and at this point, nothing is all you want and nothing is what is safe and your words are too specific so nothing is what you get.

its the same thing every time

2011-11-26T19:04:00.000-08:00

Not all my friends are fucked up and heartbroken and anxiety ridden but some of the them are and it's getting to be winter again in spite of the warm sun on the porch and the early morning light. Someone left a voodoo doll on the back side of my house and my parents are kind of creeped out but left it there. I've been told my home looks haunted before, and I'm sure I've thought it, and sometimes I sit on a stool by counter and look around as though I've never been there and I see what they mean I guess. We've got strange things and they are lined up on the wall. I've felt haunted for a while now but this has always just felt like home.
When I come back the weather is nice even if it is raining because even then, the storms are familiar. Late-August thunder or chilly November sheets. I'm not required to be here anymore and so anything the sky opens up with is a blessing and not a curse. Being alone is a pleasure and a privilege and drawing a comic in my room is because I want to and not because I have no where to go.

when teachers cry

2011-11-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

Everyone needs a gentler life. Your daughter has an eating disorder and now she picks at her food and pretends that you can't see her hips poking out the front of her jeans that don't fit. Your husband lives in California, which is at least $100 for every hour that it takes to reach him. I want to visit North Carolina to be nearer to the student that you cried and told all of this to, but I can't because it is too expensive and too close to Thanksgiving. She is worried about you, and unnerved because to us you are and adult and have it all figured out. We are prolonged adolescents, but seeing our mothers cry gives some of us panic attacks and others headaches. I don't know what to do for you - I've made stupid decisions before but never like this. I want to sit down in the dusty light of a meetinghouse on Sunday morning and hold you up to it, bathe you in it, warm you there. But it is quickly November, and today is another grey sky. In Italian class, I tell my professor in broken pieces that I want to grow up to be a revolutionary, an artist and a farmer. But I will gladly settle for getting through the winter.

you are a boring reflection

2011-11-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

It's grey and when I wake up it is dark outside. I think on how the pantry is short on sunlight. There are corners in my bedroom that are always dark no matter how many lights I turn on; I lose things in them like socks and things that prevent me from getting damp in the rain. It feels like an incoming hurricane but I know it is quieter than that, and sweeter. There is no promised rain just a dark drizzle. This is what the world will feel like once we learn to control and conquer its unpredictability. I feel like a stagnant pond - static and souring without change.
Kissing you was like kissing a clouded mirror. It was vague and unsettling, passionless and ultimately forgiving. You echo me in a way that I do not enjoy, but have to admire. And you are sweet, very sweet, and kind. And in moments of unending dark drizzle you do not bring me shopping bags full of sunlight, but instead a book and for yourself a cup of tea. There is nothing radical about that, but comforting all the same. The day I learn to accept your words but refuse you my nights will be another one entirely.

2011-10-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

you are standing in the doorway
which is an awkward place to stand.
I just wanted to let you know
because if you stay still for too long
the bark on the trees will begin to move
in sickening ways. I keep walking down
the trail and talking to you because I
feel like the world is coming apart at
the edges. It is strange, and beautiful
and difficult not to watch.
I never understood why you have to watch
cars plow into each other when it is
easy to avert your eyes. It felt like
a fever dream. I was too warm and felt
kind of sick and kind of drunk and like
I was battling something that didn't have
a shape. There was a web in the sky and the
stars were just light glinting off the corners.
I don't see it anymore, but I'm pretty sure
its still there - with the people in the shadows
and the rhythmic breathing of the earth.

two poems

2011-10-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

Poem for my roommate:

Here is a thing is that I'm tired of.
I'm tired of here, and the thing is
of staying too long and leaving too soon.

I say something and I can't see the
sidelong glance that says “you hurt me
with that, you motherfucker.” and you

can't see the sharp stick that pokes my
ribs every time you tell someone else
that I'm weird or that my thoughts

could break bottles with their shrapnel.
There is far too much pretending in this common universe.
Meanwhile you look at the insides of the rocks

tumbling down my insides, in a lab for seven hours.
Fred Shuttlesworth died, I want to tell you. It's
easier to be arrested for drugs if you are black

and you should know that before smoking that DMT
in a room by yourself at our birthday party. I
wish you understood how to be relevant

so I won't have to.

--------------

Poem for Rose

In Italian, I learn the words for different foods

and things you would find in a classroom. I know

how to describe the clothing you are wearing,

I can't yet communicate abstract concepts though.

I was talking to you on the computer when

I started to feel like a scrap of paper with

a grocery list on the backside of it. I started

crying and I didn't know why, just that

at one point I had a reason that I can't

think about right now or doesn't exist

anymore. Two weeks ago I needed to buy

deodorant, but now I don't. It is October,

and so we bought bags of candy corn but

they have been mostly eaten. You make

me into a better person, but I don't know

how to say that. Instead, I give you this

cancellina; you use it to erase things that

you have written in chalk or pencil.

all we want is to talk

2011-10-02T21:47:00.001-07:00

What I wanted was to talk about mountains. Ridges and long lines plastered to my skin. Powder under my fingernails. Holes in my jeans. The long drives and the range out your rear window.
Sometimes, I wish I were home. Some days are so middling - afternoons when I hover around the baseline, dull and uninterested. Like the autumn bite: mildly exhilarated and faintly sad. Slow, sleepy and dark. What I wanted was to talk about the topography of my body, the topography of my heart, the topography of my summer. I am making a map of islands. I wanted to talk without talking. The topography of my round paths, my in and out. You hit roadblocks when you try to read people, trees, circling areas. You stop or you go around them and somehow you keep climbing up towards the sky and the edges. Sometimes you get sad.
Sometimes you wish you were home. Sometimes you want to #OccupyDC. Sometimes you aren't in debt. Things happen all over the world. What I want is to talk about them on my front lawn or the porch swing late into the night. I'd like to be wearing sweaters and pants and for my feet to be a little cold. I keep mentioning the protests in New York and no one knows anything about them. I've been told "It's a good time to be a student." and sometimes you wonder and try to maintain your thoughts about privilege and breaking upwards. Full days and long boring nights where I stay up late for no reason and wake up still a little high. Middling days where its even up in the air if I like you or not. I wish I could feel the fire. Wish I were by myself. Wish I were from North Carolina but living in Baltimore. Wish I were living by choice.

precise gloom

2011-09-16T21:59:00.000-07:00

I'm grumpy. Lyda tells me it is a feeling. She says it is a vibe. It has to do with the moon and it's true: the moon is waning and my preference lies with waxing. But the day was early and full-bellied when I woke up this morning, slightly chilly and with my toes curled under the quilting. Out of sorts of shiny, my sweater and leggings a vast overstatement of the warmth. But the evenings are starting earlier and earlier and hours of dark expand to fill my weekend lungs. There is a buzzing behind my eyes and a tightness to my step. When did I go from unloved to unloving? I am an introvert and a purger; I force most everyone away and gain strength from the grief of their absence.
I try to find something to weep for, but sometimes all I need is not enough. I am missing my exact shadow. I would like to lie on my stomach with the precise weight of my limbs doubled above, crushing and holding me down.

.

2011-09-08T18:14:00.001-07:00

How come is it I feel strange deleting someone's meaningless emails after they've died? Like maybe they reside in those emails a little and if I move them to my trash box that will be moving them to the trash. Once you die the things about you become finite and when they are destroyed they are no longer boundless. He was a faceless administrator in my inbox. I've heard he was very sweet. He was tireless. He made this school a better place.

My writing class gives me a book and it says in the book that there are not infinite resources on the earth to consume. So why do we treat it that way while each new idea is regulated and controlled as though ideas will run out but trees won't, and you use up your thoughts if you aren't careful, but the fuel for our cars will last forever. I never thought about how competitive I am, but here I am pushing others to push themselves. My friend tells me that to love is to challenge and to be love is to have your spirit challenged. I like this, as I think and write about seedlings and try to gather my thoughts. I have never been afraid of dying alone, but I know I can't die boring. I am full and overfull with ideas and I want them to live and grow and dissipate just like everything else.

the breeze

2011-09-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

and in it, the taste of autumn. On the first of September it storms twice and the wind blows and we get soaked just standing on the front porch and everyone comes out of their houses like something incredible is happening, like for the first time they think about thinking about god.

The first of September and already the breeze tells me it is time for the spice to cool, that the sweat and the strong hands and forward movement may slow. My shoes have worn all the way through. You sit on the balcony with socks on but no shirt and I start considering the benefits of cigarettes for the first time. We become obsessed with sewing patches to our clothes, less trying to prevent the inevitable than to look cool doing it. Bicycles become a necessity but my concepts of distance always change when I meet new people. I have driven so far from the blazing summer and the terrors of the thunderous river at night. I am covered in open wounds but I feel less vulnerable in the autumn. You listen to the same songs over and over again but never seem to tire of them. I've been having dreams where I wake up terrified thinking me and everyone we know has just been sentenced to a death where we drink two cups of poison and play cards, waiting to die and trying to think about our last words. The dreams make me think my subconscious is fucking with me and I wonder, what kind of storm is hiding in the changing of the seasons and when will the calm turn and what will it be? An upright explosion or a slow destructive tendency? I break out my softest sweater and open the window to the September chill so that tonight I may sleep, intact and curled beneath the quilt.

it's dark out there but light in here

2011-08-29T18:07:00.001-07:00

You write things and I want to put them in my blood. I want to gobble them up and have my soft stomach tissue absorb the words and the bacteria gnaw and convert them into things my body needs. They will swim through my bloodstream and I will breathe tightly, wetly with all the things you have said like "God help me I am nineteen years old and I still don't want to live in New York City."

I was born to feel a way there are no words for and so you hang sheets up in rows around me to help layer and cover with their shifting white forms, to protect and cushion me from the outside. I didn't know you cared, but one day I woke up at 7 in the morning for no reason at all and the morning was diligent and still as ever. I biked halfway across the city just looking for someone to share the silence with and I found myself in a room full of people and the window passed through a familiar kind of sunday morning light. I talked with my mom on the phone for an hour and she said "how are your legs?" and I said "I've been taking cold showers." and she said "a tree fell down" and I said "I heard about everything, don't worry." and we all knew we'd be alright.

I've got a person in providence

2011-08-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

That little scruff of hair at the back of your neck and the shorts (too short and too tight according to social norms, just the way you like it.) You are a conflicting memory, a kid with a bandana and a glint in his eye or the boy with the glasses and lightest touch. It's been a million miles since I've seen you and my how your smile has grown. My brain stretches states wide and I finally think I understand your wanderlust revisited. You've been on trains, on dark station pathways and in your eyes I see rivers and oceans and the faraway look of a child who forgot about home. But you came back and now, in the swampy August night, you tell me that this might be a nice place to live, here at the crossroads. I say, I could live on a boat some day and what I mean is, do you miss me? I've been up and down the coast this year, and out west too and my internal measurement of time and distance has changed with the hours I've traveled. I see more and feel less and can fall asleep on anyone's backseat.

It's August again, the fateless month. The thunderstorms arrive steadily, the downpour as right as rain, regular and quickening. It's been two years since we discussed our personal sagas and I know we grew up together but does that mean we will grow old? I sit for hours on my kitchen floor with you and I am about to leave this place again. We always hug and hold too tight and I never know if we're in love or afraid we'll never see each other again.

2011-08-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

It's my birthday and, I'm sleepy.

Last night we remixed our summer evenings with the indoors, with air conditioning and alcohol and questions I already knew the answer to. That's the thing when you've been friends as long as I have you already know how to do it. Nothing we say is an isolated incident just a segment of a continuous narrative we get when we check in. When you learned how to kiss at age fifteen, the first party you ever went, how old you were when your mother died.

I already know a million things about you. I already know that you don't like coconut, and you know that when I smell like smoke its cause I've been driving my mother's car.

I was just crying because I haven't cried in three months and its about time. Because you're in love and its my birthday and that's what happens when its your birthday, you get overwhelmed and tired in the middle of the party and you just sit in the corner without talking to anyone and eat your cake and hope someone will come over and tell you that its your birthday and they love you, don't worry.

The things I have learned but do not understand

2011-07-21T12:29:00.000-07:00

1. You can make things grow in any way you want.

2. I only feel things liminally like your skin as we swim in the pond, so soft and ridged when I am about to leave. Only in transitions from day self to night, from dry to wet, above ground to underwater. We leave the dirt to the garden, the fleeting glances and the ripening cucumbers to the sun and the lawn.

3. They'll peck you to death if you're different.

4. Water is where worlds collide and I should have known this already. It's mythological and from it anything can arise as soft and cloudy as the muck that stains my toenails or the scum left in the strings of your hair. A gateway to my ghostly body, a beloved unknown universe.

5. People always think I'm older than I am but younger than I look.

6. Seduction is easy when you don't care.

7. You can make things grow in any way you want, whether you are tying stems to stakes with strings or shading them from the ballasted sun, whether you are spilling them your secrets or lying about your age and where you're from.

8. They'll peck you until you have curled up a small Faid in a ball with a bare neck and a shaved head and you will wait with your wings folded beneath you for someone to chase them away, for them to find and hold you for a short while.

9. The exhilarating fear of a cold shower applies an ease to my walk and give to my skin and a small cold knot in my breast.

10. If you write down and plan all your voicemails in case you have to leave them it may be a sign of disordered eating. If you empty the compost wrong and your chickens start pecking at their own eggs, it might be a sign of social anxiety. If you shave your head and you find gray hairs, it could be a sign of cervical cancer.

11. You can make things grow in any way you want but you live an ephemeral life and when you leave this backcountry field no one will remember your name and especially not where you're from or where you went or what you want.

young meat

2011-07-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

As usual, I start out underwater. Fingertips on muscles taught how to work by the midday sun, no kiss is as exciting as the dead dreams I can't remember. I use the lake to process, to shrink into. At midnight it's dead quiet, the dark sky gulping light in all but a few points. Bullfrogs send out low baleful croaks as I try to float my heavy limbs across the sun distilled surface. The soft rushing and muffled voices, if I close my eyes I could be at home in the bathtub waiting for some serial killer to creak open the door. In the light of the clouded moon my body is less than the sum of its soft and milky parts and it feels put together wrong, attached only by thin plastic bags or paper lanterns skimming the water tension between my bones.

When standing two bodies pressed in the water I feel both like a child and an ancient and exhausted old man. Do you do this to every city girl that finds herself awash in the heavy Carolinian heat? I never thought I could find skinning a dead rooster sexy but I guess I was missing out. All that flesh and feathers. I haven't eaten meat for over a year but the yellow fat nodules stretch across my fingers and each organ is bright and perfect in your wiry hands, contained to size and purpose. You didn't mean to, but you learned me things about the smell of a cooking chicken: how it smells good until you know the stench of the freshly dead. Irrevocably, it smells not of supper but of dark aggressive animal, and though I am accomplice I still do not touch tonight's soup.

poem for the husband or wife i haven't married

2011-06-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

You tell me one night about how you get tired
and you don't remember
how to work your fingers,
or take the sheets off the bed.
And sometimes you confuse the tornado warning
with an air raid siren, but either way
means backing away from the windows.

I come into your room one night
and you don't remember what curtains are
or that the sun rises in the morning
and not the afternoon.
One night you forget all the things we did for love.
Before a tsunami hits, the ocean sucks
all the water from the shore
leaving people damp, and scared.

One night you're drunk and in the kitchen
leaning against the counter you've lit a cigarette,
you say "here's to the nights we feel alive"
An earthquake can feel like the rumble
of a far away train when we're standing
in an open field before dawn.
I take a drag from your ash (I don't smoke)
and say "don't you mean dead?"
when I mean "felt."

All my crumbling homes

2011-06-23T12:55:00.000-07:00

I've only been sad for the time I've been alive (which isn't that long really) so don't worry. It's only halfway to middle age that you realize these things. It's only in big empty houses that used to belong to your grandma that the dust settles and a bird lands on your heart. One old house but every room is a new life vision. You can open the door and breath in the musty smell of the retro interior decoration and when you open your eyes you see something different. You see something beautiful and shiny and novel. Something new getting old.

Behind one door is my life with an architect: we live in a tree house. Back in college we used to fuck like old stadiums being blown up, like there was no tomorrow and there wasn't. We sleep in separate branches, two small beds he made out of the wild knotted tree, each with its own window and a view of the dense woods. In the middle of the forest, the outside of our home is covered in mirrors and reflects the forest around us. Invisible misery.

One room shows me if I married a chef and we opened up a restaurant, a bakery, a taco shack. Our romance started with smoking joints and baking pastries late into the night. We tend to it like we tend to the garden on our roof, gingerly with whispered compliments to the other organism, vying for its place in the sun. Our love is our work and begins at dawn, is rising bread and homemade pickles and cartons of milk gone bad.

In another I live with a taxidermist. We nest ourselves in a an abandoned P.S. 18 with huge tall cafeteria windows in the center which we fill with plants - our botanical index. Full on rooms of creatures labeled and numbered. On our first dates we read encyclopedias to each other, and he taught me about cataloging but now I ignore his cards and name each skull and preserved carcass things like Rex and Fido. We stop speaking when I get a dog, and the upper classrooms full of ignored books became our silent sanctuary.

Some things you do can't be taken back, and some kinds of people can live any life they want but everything will stay the same. I don't move in to any room, I don't turn down the sheets or put my clothes in their drawers but it won't make a difference. Your relatives really fuck you over and I'm already a part of this house and my architecture won't change no matter where I love.

Coming home always makes me want to turn back

2011-05-31T20:55:00.001-07:00

It's a new night but all I can fucking think of are things that make my brain fizzle and spark in the most terrifying destructive ways like what about all the life I've already lived that I can't live again. I just keep seeing all these old things in my head like remember that day we wore the same colored clothing, it was the first time I'd kissed anyone for two years. Those idyllic days last spring, when our hair was long like hippies and we looked different then, but good - it's how I love to think of us. My life has been jacknifed in all the important places by hairstyles. The older we grow the more beautiful we seem to get, but all that hair dropping to the floor heavier than it ought to be was the weight of my story struggling against another plot point.
I don't really regret but sometimes I wonder if I should. What about all those things that I cannot take back? What if I never find someone I love as much as I did when I was fourteen? I've discussed this, you never feel the same after you've used up that first heart. It's like a videogame that I never played: you can collect one or two along the way but you'll stay damaged til you win or die. And what if I'm never loved the way I was when I was seventeen? I can hold down my fort. I'm a packrat by nature and eventually nothing let in will come out and then nothing will come banging down my door again, wanting to be held and grasped and kissed through the night. But for now I am still traveling, looking at my hands and my feet and the furthest point on the road ahead.

2011-05-24T21:32:00.001-07:00

When I am old and review my life
so much of it will be replays
of these old playgrounds and summer evenings
like tonight
where I watch you as I would myself.
I observe you and her, but mostly you
and mostly your fingers
how I know you so well that
if you died
I would experience death in myriad small places
as black pockets of tissue created
with your love for me.

My fingertips itch,
I want you to be loved.
she has a gap tooth like I did
as a child.

2011-05-08T16:23:00.001-07:00

It's been a winter while since I have been outside like that. Staying up way too late used to be my specialty because I get crazy at those times, manic and productive and whirlwind. I make things like art and lists in my head of shit I'm gonna do to the people I love and jobs I want to have. Last night though we walked back as the birds began singing, in the middle of the street because it was brighter and safer though we usually like it freaky. I just felt like you know, you and I man we got the same sense of humor, I could spend weeks sitting on the porch in the dark with your friends. Yall can go through your cigarettes and I'll take off my shoes but this is the way the summer feels. Can't wait to go home and drink on my back porch, take off my clothes and lie in the grass. I always thought about that dirt patch behind my house under the honey suckles would be a good place to make love. Right by the street but no one can see you and the only thing better than the cool soft earth would be our sticky warm skin. The best feeling is the walk home in the early morning light, day old and dirty, covered in grit from the rooftops you lay on, uncaring, holding hands and falling into bed in as the sun streams sleepily through your window.

2011-05-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

Baby you should know this,
this is what happens with me:
I give you the night
and the whole sharp darkness,
the cool concrete.
I'll build you a front porch
and you'll lose your glasses
the sheets will come off the bed.
But darling, sweet,
come the stillness of the insects
after swarms of birds have fed, ravenous
all the eve before
your arms will be left,
holding an empty skin.
I will be gone,
but everything will remain the same.

my first loves

2011-05-02T23:25:00.000-07:00

My First Love.
I never had faith that I wouldn't love you forever
or die at the young weeping age of fourteen. One aching year
and two of broken bones slowly healing; I was young,
and I will probably never love as impossibly as I loved you.

My Second First Love.
You were the autumn and I was the summer and our thunderstorms
never seemed to match up just right. My first electric touch,
I will always think of you with the ginkgo trees. It's too bad,
about the sudden sullenness and perpetually changing seasons.

My Third First Love.
I'm sorry man, I forgot that time that you held me crying
and brought me cheez its. You know you didn't do much,
just lay down behind me, knew how to spoon, shut up
and read me bits of bob dylan's poetry. I'm sorry, friend
because you loved me in 99 out of 100 right ways.

My Fourth First Love.
Of them all I will grow old only with you. I know that you
were never loved feverishly nor with the passion of a first
love but you are my golden afternoon. Forgive me, please, for
your heart of scar tissue, for all the wounds and small bites
because even now there is no one from whom I would rather
learn how to kiss, or how to say "I do not want you anymore."

i blame the sea

2011-05-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

My sleeping schedule is off and it makes the days roll and crash onto each other in quiet swells. Everything seems to be winding down but then they pick back up again, the comfort of the undertow assures me that I will never feel to static nor too secure.
Yesterday already seems like a year ago because I did so many things that I have not yet thought about. I don't know if I'm a virgin anymore but it doesn't matter because my best friend was in the hospital and a wicked man was murdered and I am not celebrating. In that light - the still light of the early morning, pre-sunrise, which I have witnessed far too often in recent days - my legs are irrelevant, my dry lips banal; it is low tide in the shores of my eyes.
I'm an introvert, I know this to be true. I know that at parties I stand in doorways chatting about books while people make themselves drinks. I get too angry and too nerdy too fast so people edge away slowly cause they just want a good time. I know that I don't make friends suddenly. I know that I don't love easy, nor am I easy to love. I look forward to going home because I will get to be alone, but when I'm here I never want to be by myself. I've gotten good at ignoring people who are three feet away but bad at letting everyone a million miles from me go about their lives. There is just something both restful and restless about being buried at sea - all those swells that last for days and the way the seascape changes but always remains the same, just a thin inescapable line.

dark ages

2011-04-26T20:14:00.000-07:00

Days like this and I just live within my internal organs. I've been in my head all day ad its not a good place to be, spent the whole time seeing the world as though it is two far away points of light on a big dark sky. Days like these and I start to feel that bubbling well that I thought I had all but dried out in the pit of my stomach - the well that drove me to scratch at my arms from trying to get out or hole up in a soft sweatshirt and sleep for three days.
On occasion I have the terrifying thought that I will be myself for my entire life and I will never live as a house or snake and I will simply continue to rot from the inside out until my skin collapses and everyone realizes that I was just a large construction made of moldy leaves.

living here

2011-04-21T01:52:00.000-07:00

I think of myself as strange and beautiful and terrifying and not something everyone knows how to love. In the little dark house of my chest cavity, the one on the corner the one with the white picket fence and the third story attic and the lovelace trim and the dusty but relatively recently painted porch with the dying ivy and hollyhuck tree out front - you know the dark one that looks just like my parent's house? Only with lots of lines and more columns. In that dark little house I try to make a home, to sweep and sit on the porch with my glass of lemonade and greet the neighbors dogs. I try to go grocery shopping and fill the fridge and make the beds and live in it the way that I live inside of other people. No one knows where home is anymore, I got roots but they shrivel up if I stay in any one place too long but dry out of they don't touch soil too frequently. I said you know, I'm from DC but also my parent's house and home is really whenever I talk to Rose and Liam because they know me in my heart of hearts and they always seem to know where the raspberry(rose) and irish breakfast (liam) tea is in the cupboard even if I've moved it a hundred times in that dark little house of mine. They always seem to fit in my bed even though I've had it since I was four and everytime I go to my parent's house it breaks out from under me. You can't make homes out of human beings and I sure can't make one out of myself but I can sit on my porch with my friends and our iced tea and coo at the passerby and for all the world feel like I am somewhere like home.

all of my secrets are physical

2011-04-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

All of my secrets are physical. Each night I peel the skin off my feet and think of all the places on my body that are too open to the air. When we have wounds we are intimately acquainted with them, with the daily changing topography of our scrapes and bruises. A mess of scars and cuts, but each point of contact and each trickle of blood is a plotted point: The scabbed hair follicles, my bloody ear, two hangnails (with three parts), a bite at the hole in my jeans, a weeping scratch on my thumb. My peeling feet, each ridge of skin its own small landscape with a mountain and a dry lake bed.
All of my secrets are in this charted territory; I peel the skin off my feet and think about the childish way that people learn to love: brashly, and with loud clanging. Endless tortured looks, excitement and surprise. The way that people learn to love softly, their voices impossible, unobtrusive "but.."s that can destroy a fortress in a breath.
You could read my secrets in the way my wounds weep, but here's the thing: people rarely do. Someone will notice, gasp, ask what happened? I don't know I say, just one day it turned up and now its there, quiet and raw. On occasion, bad days, they get bumped, by the desk, my pillow, someone cruel or my own terrible hands and they burst. I am left in my tracks, with my feet peeling in the damp of grass late at night.

the dust is eternal

2011-03-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

I thought I brought the book of your poetry to college, but I guess I didn't. you were always so obsessed with luminosity, with the atmospheric glow of things, lighting your way to freedom. Showing me your luminous things, all I could muster was a muttered "they're beautiful" and then drown a little further, a little more darkly in my false bottomed boat. Now though, I think of the water house and of the warm asphalt that made you describe summer time, the paprika bringing tears to your eyes. We were so young then, though I have always been far to ancient for my age. Everyone says. Something about being an only child, all that focus and all those myths, internalized. My little kid body in the backseat all the time, reading the trees and the winds by myself, eyes half closed.

Last night though, the sadness poked out. That low nostalgia quietly slipped out, but behind it my monsterous fear. You will leave, you will choose other people and places than my knees and my moon eyes. You will choose the future before the past, adventure before another summer of you and me. I felt it then and I feel it now, the slippage. We all have low points. I have been fighting my way through a sand pit and a dust storm and I will come out barely remembering the world before its thin yellow coating I feel on my skin and membranes. I am clean, but the dust is internal.

stay beautiful

2011-03-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

When my grandmother died, I did not want to tell anyone. I did not want to broadcast to the earth that my insides hurt, that I was smaller than usual. I did not want the trees to hear me, to know and to still sway, like they always did, outside of her empty window. Two years later and her surviving dog forgot how to walk, she passed quietly appropriate and without much pain or grief in my parent's house.
Now thought, Mr. Bronson died early this morning and I want to shout it at the top of my lungs off the roof of my building, to stop people and the street and tell them about this old man, ex barber in Washington D.C. who died last night. I want them all to know that he lived in this world alongside them. That he liked to sing and talk about himself, he came to my family holidays and lived with my best friend for a while. They should all know the way that he said goodbye, he always said "Stay Beautiful" with a wave, and a smile, as though you'd see each other again just around the corner, or maybe never at all.

2011-03-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

In the passing months, I believe,
I have lost my body's poetic edge.
Something is gone, I do not know
how, only that the whining of skidding
rubber on pavement suddenly seems
more profound, more intelligible to
my swollen brain than the slender
curves of my ankles, or the flesh
beneath my arms. People sneak up on
me, have to shout, to get my attention.
I have ceased to understand touch -
I thought
I was fluent.

bookstore by Jon Brion (is the song)

2011-03-07T20:57:00.000-08:00

Instead of doing anything all today, all I've done is think about being a part of the universe, about being still and alone and attached flowing through and within and without everything. All I've done is think about being a rock and a mountain at the same time, I've listened to the same song 48 times on repeat and drawn four drawings called "plane crash" "drown" and "pain." All I've been thinking about is mountains, above and below me, the suffocation of being surrounded by mountains. Just my dark body, just my dark flesh all twisted together, the small irregular spaces filled in with rock falls, crevices packed with thin soil and small scrubby branches growing from my ears and armpits.
Sitting somewhere, the couch maybe, or the sidewalk, and I put my hands down and want my fingers to grow directly into the protected ground. I want them set up camp and draw moisture and nutrients from the earth, to tell me : this is all you need, this is all you will ever need. You will only ever need yourself and this dark earth. It doesn't matter that for now the people or the house or the concrete surrounds you; it doesn't matter that someone tried to ask you to leave, to go with him and grow into him. You will be here when he is gone, when the house has crumbled around you - all wood floors and dirty couches returned to your soil. You will then see the sun and it will be all you need - yourself and the sunlight.

2011-02-23T12:53:00.000-08:00

Almost asleep, in that vague and awful twisting of the mind where you suppose this must be what it feels like before your death of natural causes: sweet and sallow, heavy but breathing slowly in until you can't breath out. Instead though you wake me and for all the world I feel circular, lying with my eyes shut and my mouth pressed to the phone I wish I could just murmur to you the way my mother used to, soft and rhythmic buzzes until you drifted off into feverish sleep.
I worry every so often about you in that city of long streets and music, about the cold river running through it and I hope you don't fall in. Now I feel that whenever I hear the crackle of your voice on the phone it is smaller and sadder than before. Where is the jangly girl with whom I fell in fierce competition and loyalty? I used to envy your looks and your graceless hands and your way with boys, how they always seemed to smile your way. Now I know you are more scattered and plagued than medieval winds, you were always a tragedy to revel in, always a bridge to be burned, always a tree wickedly whipping the wind requiring only the right gust to put it over. But you keep fighting, weakly, your body almost fallen through the crack between our beds, but not quite.

my body mimics the seasons

2011-02-21T23:31:00.001-08:00

Wounds on my palms and my scalp - as regular and comprehensible as rain in the desert. I do not know where or what they came from, only that they prickle and bleed as I walk down the long brick pathways that have become sodden and dark with melted ice. The cuts on my palms catch the wind as I walk, small flaps of skin that is papery and dry. They sense the premonition of warmth in the air and open widely, licking at the first taste of spring. They sing quietly of long acrid nights and put out hopeful tendrils, blossoming dots before my eyes when brush them accidentally against the rail. In the shower they disappear, the impossible skin of my hands is pure and seamless.
But, the scabs on my scalp feel the impending seasons and tighten. They knot and twist closer like thread on a tapestry. I run my fingers through my hair and feel them everywhere, small hard nodes and meager puffs of despair. Stress, everyone tells me, stress and I know this about myself - know that I have the tendency to self destruct. I do not implode, shut down or fall over suddenly and sweetly though. I simply fall apart, innocuous bits of me stop working, start bleeding and they do not stop - my ear, my inner arm, my hair follicles. I do not go with a bang, I simply begin to disintegrate. I am quiet about it, so quiet that to an outsider the ribbons on my hands may seem as deadly as the wild and reddened nodes on my scalp, but I know that one is the chill of winter and the other is the coming spring.

don't lets hear the insects whirl

2011-01-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

I know I'm probably going to be one of those crazy mothers. The ones where later their kids write books about all the weird shit she did, and how she was smart but crazy, headstrong, capable but insane, beautiful but withering with a deep sadness. Like one time, she took us out in her jeep to the middle of the desert and she dropped us there and drove away. She told us we had to find our way back by nightfall or the coyotes would get us, so we did. She loved the us like she loved the sun, but I think sometimes she was trying to kill us. She read everything all the time all over the place and told us facts about cicadas that only come out every 17 years and knew all the bones in the human body. She covered the house with her own drawings and told us to paint over them. Sometimes she locked the door and spent the whole day in bed drinking tea and cutting up photos of her life before kids and weeping, maybe watering the plants while we sat on the stoop, playing with sticks and looking bored. Some days she was on the roof of the world though. We would ask to go to the zoo and she would drive us two hours out to the mountains or the coast and we would try to find mountain lions or crabs under the rocks in tide pools until it got dark. Once the sun set she would teach us how to build the biggest bonfires in a clearing or on the rocks and we'd dance around them until we got tired and then she would tell us sad or scary stories about all the people she knew and lost along the way. At those points we got very quiet and held our breath because the whole day, the wildlife and the driving and the dancing and the fire would suddenly seem like a planned out memoriam to something, the universe or the earth or the rats or something much greater and more difficult to feel sympathy for than a person. On warm nights we'd sleep in outside in the open air or the back of the pickup, but if it was cold she'd put out the fire and we'd drowse on the ride back, under the cold clear stars.

thoughts about flying

2011-01-16T21:24:00.000-08:00

amazed at how mundane flying seems to me to be lifted off the ground in a matter of minutes, seconds, to have left the surface of the earth so smoothly that I received a jolt as I looked out the window and saw the urban sprawl of St. Louis beneath me, small and unreachable, forgotten because we were distracted by the air beneath our wings and the seatbelts and the children in the compartment and the twiddling with the air conditioner. Instead I looked up from my book and saw I had missed the part that is my favorite. I had missed the imbalanced acceleration and the sudden quiet of rising, as though the air around us is thrust into stupefied awe at the way we have wrenched our fate from natural law and supposed ourselves to be something great and powerful. To defy our tendency, to tempt the hand of god or destinal purpose and the man next to me is already asleep, lolling his head toward my shoulder in his own wonderless dreams.

It is a funny thing to be in simultaneous motion with so many other bodies. To be hurtling through space and time (for we are always hurtling through time much faster than I ever wish to think about) at the exact pace and instant as 180 other brains and hearts, fingers and toes are. For a brief period the our lives run paralell, but hardly, if ever, intersect.

And isn't it strange? I am heading East and the sun is setting behind us. The sun, the god of our days and dictator of our nights is lying still in the universe as we fly circularly in the orbit of the earth. It's daily bedtime ritual has never been so apparent as we realize at how the earth turns below us more quickly than our speed of flight. Mostly though, its just reminds me that the days are catching up with us, and in long of it we don't have far to go.

2011-01-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

Last year I made some promises and they were good and strong like the wind through the trees in early autumn. They did not bury me and I believe I kept most of them. I was interested and excited for the most part, I thrifted and bicycled and bicycle repaired. I loved myself more, I think more than I have before and I loved others very fully, factually, intensely. I stopped giving a shit about what clothes you wear and music you listen to. I ate far less meat, I wrote and I made art and I bought secondhand. Like usual, I was blunt, but I think I have become better at speaking out and articulating. I have some really good things about this year like Rose, summer, creating a zine, figuring out me+Liam, ending school, beginning school. I am happy to be who I am, and confident in my ability to create lasting connections to people and places.
It's weird that we mark ourselves by years and that People Who Are Not In School mark the years by Januaries. I'm struggling with this post, which is supposed to be a resolutions/new years note that I usually find inspiration and strength in creating every year. I think it is because growing does not work in years, really, it just continues all over the place in spurts - the ideas I had for myself last year roll over to this year. I still place value on THESE promises. So instead of a new list, here is the addendum of wills:

i will be present where I am. i will be active, excited and happy. i will struggle. i will work my ass off. i will study hard and play hard.
i will begin and undertake initiatives. i will have projects.
i will try to make art every day, and in massive quantities. i will have projects that inspire me and that serve a purpose or a meaning. i will undertake larger initiatives in my own work, but also in other areas of my life.
i will say yes.
i will travel, and learn about paths other than my own.
i will make an effort to explore the spaces i occupy. i will get out into the city more.
i will start a garden at home.
i will try not to feel moored or stressed by maintaining relationships, i will have confidence in their sustainability.
i will always build community wherever i go.

that's all I got for the time being.

An Amount of Time

2010-12-22T22:30:00.000-08:00

It will take me a while for me to feel home again.
It will take me An Amount Of underlined Time to remember everything,
to relearn things like
how to swim,
how to eat,
how to cough.
what cigarettes smell like.
what darkness tastes like.

Someone asked me if I valued life or do I value
the way the wind blows through my hair,
being cold and wet and tired,
looking up and seeing the moon.
And would I rather die than do it again,
the same heartwrenching thing
repeated until tragedy becomes prosaic,
ecstasy becomes boredom and the fact
of my broken fingers, crumbled to dust,
doesn't bother me at all?

If I didn't exist would the trains ever run on time
or run at all for that matter? Probably yes, practically no.

I think of myself the way a mirror must,
as an expanse of empty water that has no reflection.
Pivotally impossible, theoretically infinite.

Honey I know,

2010-12-18T19:19:00.000-08:00

Over a year ago I wrote "People leave a lot of stuff when they die" and its true they do. They leave you bullshit and questions and lots of other, uncontrollably hostile feelings. They leave you with a fucked up childhood sometimes and the kind of despair that comes from knowing that some your friends don't really want to exist right here, right now. Today we traded stories, who do we know who got lost along the way and who do we think will lose themselves soon? Who is going to give up because its too rough? It's rough, I know its rough. There have been parents, friends - wrenching strings that didn't have anymore slack, birds teetering on the edge of flightless abandon, kids in the night cafe just curious about that warm light in the background and so just getting up out of this sickly and hostile red and green room to walk toward it forever. People who feel persistence hunted by death, its only a matter of time until some of us run out of power, until our legs stop working and we can't run anymore. We don't know, I say. I tell my RA, we really can't know everyone else's life stories its too hard its too sad its too secret. The winter gives me too much time to think about these things, too much time to curl into a small warm ball and close my eyes tight and feel the rough hewn edge of the darkness that's always there.

This is perennial though: the cold has never been my friend. I know it is kind to some; to some the winter is their sister's cashmere sweater, it is darling, lovely, icy kisses and warm drinks. For me though, the winter is a violent and angry small mammal; I cannot handle it's scratches and bites on my fingers and face or the sharp deadness of its small black eyes. I do not do well with the bareness of the trees or the early evenings. No, I would become a large bear in hibernation if I could, just spend the dark months sleeping sickly: losing weight, alone, oblivious.

But while I am thinking darkly about the shapes of dead leaves, someone inside me named Honey (or Angela, or Mildew or something like that?) tells me hold on, darling. Don't give in to the darkness. She points out the Aurora Borealis and she says "watch out for your edges because you would not want to miss this" as though the Northern Lights are the point of living. As though the magnetosphere and sunspots and electrical discharge processes are the most ineffable, and incredible. As though during my next late night in a Van Gogh painting with my disturbed contemporaries, the ethereal beauty of the winter sky will save us from the temptation of that far-off warm light. And weirdly, I feel as I look at out my asylum window I can imagine the depth of his love for the night sky and so I just think, Honey, I know its rough, but she was right.

2010-12-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

I said hold on darling, listen
to the air so clear, so fine, so full
of impending fear. And to all the little children walking
down the street, don't worry, momma said,
tomorrow we will have enough to eat.
rough days, no rough nights allowed
we just sit, watch and listen to our land
being plowed. being torn, being broken
being salted and sown as the storm clouds
a-coming take one look and they're blown.
lets sit in our down, dirty automobiles,
lets smoke our cigars and just cool our heels
as the ghouls and the monsters, the boogies and ghosts
pack up their belongings and head for the coast.
no place to rest, they said, you've ruined it all
a lost soul can't find peace when the earths starts to crawl.

some nights are out and under

2010-12-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

It's rough but some nights out are like that: big and pounding and rough. They tumble over my head and slam me repeatedly against table corners, walls and other people until my hearing has fallen to the bottom of a long well and the pads of my heels have worn through to the bone so that I leave an excited, bloody trail where I step. I've never been one much for the high life and for the whir of planes overhead transformed into a cloud of buzzing bees headed straight for me.
Other nights out are like being underwater at dusk, lonely and insane. Sweat and the shattering laughter is muffled and far away; around is cave-like silence and I do nothing but hold my ears and try to scream. Sometimes, I think on nights like these I do things for their pure ideas. I have never met the way the ocean thinks, or desert sky but people tell me they are both slow and rhythmic and that if they could speak their words would be the circumference of the sun. On nights like these I try to make my breath last lightyears, as though the mixing of fog and smoke makes something heavier and more buoyant than clouds, something to pull my dead weight to the surface.

jangly evenings

2010-11-11T21:57:00.000-08:00

I was just thinking, you know, these hours could last forever and I would be all right with that. The sky could look like this every day, each cloud edged with the metallic sun and looming over us like divine warnings. The wind could die down for every moment, and I would be okay with that.

Instead some days I feel jangly in my bones, like my joints are all connected wrong and my tarsals are rubbing the wrong way. I run, but the pounding of my feet on the dirt is too loud and the darkness above the trees doesn't seem to come closer. I am worried I was aligned improperly; I need someone to cut me open and take a look, to move an organ or two that have drifted and then sew me back up tighter, pull my skin to its rightful place.

In this body though I feel the turns of the earth too intimately;they disrupt my inner ear and throw me off balance. I have taken to sleeping in the same position every night: one leg up, my right hand outstretched and touching the wall. My palm rests on the hard cool concrete and I wonder if it is because I feel more grounded this way or if I just need to escape.

heady autumn

2010-10-27T15:30:00.000-07:00

Today I had some time outside; I devoured it hungrily, desperately. Sometimes I do not think I sit on the grass enough here. I do not think I take the moments of mild, when the wind calms and the cracks in the tunnel open up wide for the breadth of endless sky. I do not fly on my bicycle enough. Instead I walk and think and talk, I smile and make lists, over and over in my head I make lists. Lists of things I need (spoons, tampons), of things to do (homework, laundry), lists of vengeful retorts and reasons why you should fall in love with me. Rachel was right. We've got two track minds but 8 trains running and the sound of the railroad horn just reminds me of home.

Today though, I climbed three trees and I remembered the kinship I feel in their dry bark. I would like to live in the trees. I rode my bike down a grassy path, my thin tires wobbling and for some reason, my heart beating fast. I thought, the world is quiet here, and, in this moment no one is thinking of me.

The wind has been whipping through this town like none other, screaming by, clacking branches on my window and making the leaves fall like so many little people plummeting to their deaths. I was afraid for my skin. I feared that in this heady autumn wind if I stopped moving the glue beneath it would crumble and large swathes of it would peel back to expose the brittle browning bone.

last weekend

2010-10-18T21:21:00.001-07:00

I guess right now I'm just a pattern like the sea, like the waves and the wallpaper.

I went home this weekend. I bought a sweater. I rolled on the front lawn of someone's dorm with my best friend. We kissed, we made toast with eggs, hummus from canned chickpeas. I licked my dog, my cat, my mom. I ate breakfast too much.

Breakfast makes me miss the city. Taking the Metro down to Union Station. Hannah and I found a diner on the side of a rowhouse. We ate waffles and the waiter asked us if we were done enjoying them. She said "That's good. I should use that."

This weekend I spent a little time in my rightful bed - my small rightful bed where the autumn wakes me with the light on my pillow. It fits me and everyone I know. Even the short supply of kissing afternoons, even my best friends, my dog, even my cold winter fingers and Max asleep at the foot, even my hurting heart.

my bruises

2010-10-11T15:20:00.001-07:00

I am so glad that I know you because I feel
that you could love every inch of me. How
you love the bruises on my feet,
like they are constellations, like they
are not my crying skin but instead
golden traits as inheritable and delicate
as the bridge of my nose or the tilt of my jaw.
Everyone else could learn from you.
Every slow smile, curling lip, half closed eye
could learn from you about my bruises,
as dark and deep
as the universe.

The Reasons Why I Always Feel Dehydrated

2010-10-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

This morning on my way to class I ran over a squirrel. It was already dead, but that
doesn't make me feel any better about it.

I almost oversleep every day now. I wish the sun filtered in onto my pillow in the mornings.

She spent her winter break learning to pick locks. Away at school she had no friends, but she would always have the roofs.

Sometimes I have no idea who I used to be.

secret skin

2010-10-04T20:54:00.001-07:00

I know it's a secret, that someone once told you "I do not love you anymore."

Beneath the blanket I am shaking like a racehorse. Beneath my dress I am all gooseflesh but so very soft. Softer than you have ever met. The softest skin you have never touched. Fingertips on my belly trace my navel like this is a fact. Beneath them I am all loose and unshaped dough, rising with bacterial activity, swelling with life. Under my skin I am a cloudburst. Beneath my flesh I am an entire teeming world.

Under your clothes your flesh is tragic and under your tragic flesh is writhing small animals, I can see them. I can see them behind your eyes, they bare their toothcombs and the marmosets in my hair scatter. Beneath your cheeks are the golden membranes of nocturnal creatures. Your cheeks are lit with small eyes. In a moment they will vanish and in a moment I will feel my navel to make sure it is still there and still silent.

I know that the animals beneath your skin are secrets like the marmosets in my hair. I know that the eyes in your cheeks are secrets too, secrets like the softness of my skin. No one knows about my soft skin but I know about your animals. I know that someone once told you "I do not love you anymore" and your tragic flesh burst with them. Your tragic flesh was wrenched apart and now your animals are all over your face. Your animals are on your mouth; they climbing over your tongue. They were on your tongue and now they are on my tongue and in my skin and they are growling and biting themselves. They are beneath my soft skin. Under my cloudburst your animals writhe and tremble. Beneath the blankets I begin to shake.

I Think I Should Find You So You Will Know

2010-09-20T13:57:00.001-07:00

+
Last night I forgot to tell you something.
I forgot to tell you about the lines in your face. Did you know?
Did you know about them?
Those lines in your face the small lines
the small lines and the slow smile. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I forgot to hold your jaw with my peeling palms,
to hold it with my peeling palms and say to your mouth
"I love the lines in your face."
to say to the lines by your mouth,
to say
this,
this you know.

+

bitter bones

2010-09-10T10:06:00.001-07:00

Some days I taste incorrectly. Everything chews wrong, all soft and cottony and freshly laundered. I write on small cards about the things that I put in my mouth to remind myself of the seasons. I drink tea like it is someone's bedsheets. It tastes of dryer lint and compost.

I lie in bed on these days and feel my teeth with my tongue and fingers. I feel them grow when I rest my head down. My jaw falls off onto the mattress and I pick it up and put it, hard and inanimate, into a glass of milk. The orange on my desk smells like the ocean. It tastes of my mother's skin.

Parts of me fall off every day now. Mostly skin. I have had my eyelashes and toenails since I was born but the soft hair on my earlobes whistles when I sit down. My body is a wooden chair and my hands are useless shoelaces. A slice of pizza is railroad ties. A wrought iron staircase.

Now I am a messier eater. My fruits dribble and the crumbs of teacakes stick to my belly. I swell with the tastes of the sky and animal fur, billboards, open road. It will be hard to return to just sweet and sour. To escape bitter though, I would give continents.

goodnight

2010-08-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have flown by in a haze of sunshine and quiet wind.
It's like, hey, fuck here I am. Here is the lovely midwestern sun and here are all the places you will know like your own skeleton. Now please, follow your way up that staircase and find the paint; it is peeling and tired.

I tell myself to settle now and not to forget, but maybe do not try to remember your railroads and thunderstorms just now. Please just let them lie there in the corners. here you will do all those things, here you will walk along the tracks and spit on camels and the heads of the people below you at the carnival. Shush now, sleep please. Sleep long and heavy to your shiny mornings. They will be rough hewn but oiled. Here you will find faces tinted with joy and desperation, curious and cautious and awed as though they have discovered the great plains for the first time. Your arm hairs like bristles of faith and your flushed cheeks like the sudden and unexpected dawn, timely but forgotten, appropriately lovely and strong.

And yes, I will miss the summer nights. The long days of hiking, coconut pie, skinny dipping. I will miss the baltimore farmer's markets and stillness of a solo metro ride. I will miss the chill of the van at seven in the morning and the uncomfortable warmth of my sweaty friends piled around me and telling me "hey you know, this isn't really goodbye." My dad saying "It's harder for us left behind" and it sounds like I'm dying. I don't know if I'm dying but something is. Something is always dying as the rest of it grows and do you really think we ever forget all those etchings on the insides of our brains? Let me tell you, I will just scratch the tin further and run it under baths of acid until my life remixes to something incredible and full and flooded with the genuine and the sacred. In the morning though, don't worry. It will all happen in the sharp and shining morning.

young friends, my young friends.

2010-08-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

I haven’t always been a Quaker. My parents aren’t religious, but I started attending Sunday Meeting for Worship at the start of 11th grade. The Society of Friends worships in silence, with no program, no priest and no sermon. They don’t preach. They believe God is within everyone and can be shared through anyone. I haven’t made up my mind about God yet, but I think the real reason I am now a Quaker is the community I have found in the regional youth. Of all my high school endeavors, my projects, and commitments I do not believe I have found one more worthwhile than Young Friends, this amazing community a bunch of active, funky kids has managed to create and foster.
When I was fourteen years old I went to my first Young Friends gathering (we call them conferences). Nervous, insecure and quiet, I hid behind my sketchbook for almost the entire weekend. Yet what really struck me, and what continues to inspire me even now as clerk is the way we do business.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary aspects of Young Friends (YF) is that we are completely self-governed. We write our own rules, organize our own gatherings and demonstrations and make our own decisions as a community of teenagers, with limited guidance from our friendly adult presences. YF is just about the only place I have ever been in which teenagers are fully heard and fully trusted. At the same time, it is the place where I most see my peers act with utter thoughtfulness and integrity. We decide by a process of consensus; we are a highly intentional community, in which every voice is heard and every matter threshed out not among the much smaller Executive Committee, but with the entire gathering. This atmosphere inspires incredibly profound relationships between people, participating teens and adults alike. I can hardly write without crying at how proud I am of this community. We are goofy and thoughtful. We are crunchy-granola. We are activists and artists. We love each other deeply.
By the nature of a teenage and high school centered community, the turnover of participants is quick and each year is a bit different than the one before. As a senior and after having been on the nominated Executive Committee for three years, I feel the painful gap between my university-turned head and the awkward posture of excited incoming freshmen. It is important to remind myself that the spirit and teachings remain the same and relevant. I know that within YF I have grown in immense and immeasurable ways. From Young Friends I have learned how to lead as clerk and organize a group, how to listen as well as make myself heard. I have learned about people, about being aware of and sensitive to others. It has taught me how to love myself in body and mind, that I am capable, creative, intelligent and silly. It has taught me how important it is to have a community, but more importantly, how to make community and let my life speak. My heart and soul and passion has been rooted in fostering YF for four years. It has been my utmost pleasure to participate in and build this active, caring, intentional gathering of youth. I am tremendously inspired by this community and I know that it has influence and will continue to influence the way I approach everything from my classes, to my spirituality, sexuality and problem-solving.

-----------------------------
I wrote this essay while applying for college in december.

It holds true still, if not more so. My Quaker friends have proved to be among my most supportive, healthy, loving and necessary relationships. Sometimes I wonder, how would I breathe? How would I tread upon the earth? With them I walk in the light. Their love and strength is incalculable.

On Sunday I came home from my last Annual Session as a Young Friend. Since writing the essay I have attended countless Sunday meetings, three Young Friends conferences, two executive committee retreats and the Baltimore Yearly Meeting Annual Session. Lying in my bed alone for the first time in a week, I feel the absence of their constant community.

Of course, I am aged out and no longer a high school student. I may not attend the YF gatherings any longer, but I am immensely grateful for this community of extraordinary teenagers. I have given a significant portion of myself to it, but I have received and even larger and more whole sense of self from my participation. I am moving forward with sadness, but also a deep sense of pride and faith in the health of the community. There was a time we feared losing our self-governance, but with the committment of my year, all those before us and all those after us I think that the community is healthier than ever. so, to my lovely, funky, thoughtful, incredible young friends, thank you.

the real reason

2010-07-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

There are dead moths on my keyboard. Dead moths all over the place. Dead moths raining down from the bathroom ceiling like ashes after a citywide fire. So thick, their dusty wings are like snow.

But god, god, good god I love the summertime.

Days upon days of sticky heat and one big whooshing thunderstorm, one drive by tornado and the air is nice again. People come back outside and they open their windows finally and they start talking about the ocean again. They talk about the ocean as though it is the point of it all.

I think the point of it all is really the creeks and the ponds and the lakes though. The list of swimming holes and the sun drenched rocks. Little clay pebbles that rub off on our legs and arms is the point of it all. I could have lain in the creek all day with Chelsea, talking about boys and children and goofy things and the trees above us all afternoon.

The point of it all is really days filled so far to the brim I feel like they are spilling out in waves of hexagons and polygons and quick shapes, each with lovely sharp edges and straight lines that go somewhere and nowhere at the same time. Waking up early and walking three miles to the metro and the park is the point of it all. Drinking lemonade and falling asleep in air conditioned bookstores while reading about Marilyn Monroe is the fucking point of it. Staying out too late and them coming home to an empty house and Harry Potter on tape is the reason.

The real reason is bonfires, you know? Big ass fucking farm bonfires that you build from scraps of paper and tiny sticks to big, beautiful logs and cross-sections of trees that were alive before you were born; bonfires that turn the dark field in a towering glow of orange and green shadows on a moonless night, that outline your body against the soft velvet water and make your friends grin with admiration and delight as they strip their clothes and cool their heels. This is the point of it all: our days sun and stream heavy and our nights quiet and seared with fire.

home

2010-07-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4306i99LMXo

Last night I went to the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros concert at the 9:30 club. It was fucking fantastic. I went with Dennell and Lauren on the sweetness of Alejandra who bought me the ticket and then said it was a birthday present. The concert was really, really excellent. They were late getting started because Jade had gotten in a taxi somewhere but they more than made up for it by treating us really nice and giving a great show. We were pretty close, maybe fifth row? I always try to get up front at concerts. At a couple points Alexander came down off the stage into the audience - during one of them I even danced with him and he twirled me around a bunch. The music was even better live, and they were so fucking enthusiastic and happy and the incense from the hippie pianist was swirling around and Jade finally arrived and danced like a crazy person.

When they played Home, their most famous and best loved song, I called Hannah and Samir because I wanted them to hear it. Home has weirdly caught a hold of this last year for me and found its way into my many communities and many hearts. When Rose came home from Guilford the first time she was singing it and playing it and we spent days in Liam's bedroom under the snowdrifts listening and sleeping and yelling. It is our best friend song, and when we went to visit her at camp a week ago, we sang it as we drove up the mountain. By proxy, it worked its way under the strange ride of me and Liam, my first important relationship. Home is a little snippet of the fun parts and none of the bad.
Then surprisingly enough, somehow as the song gained popularity it became a staple at school. At school, where I never thought my communities would mix, suddenly we were organizing a band. I learned parts on the glockenspiel even though The Magnetic Zeros don't even have one and we had a 13 or 14 piece band of friends perform it, lovely and together and nervously in front of the entire school for battle of the bands. And we won prizes too! When word of the concert this summer came up we rallied to all go though the scarcity of tickets was an issue. Still though, I feel like last night has cemented the association of Home in my mind. Really Home means to me my home. In this last year and this last summer until everything feels like its changing I have Home connecting everything that I want to remember. So hot and heavy pumpkin pie, chocolate candy jesus christ, laugh until we think we'll die, barefoot on a summer night, moats and boats and water falls, alleyways and payphone calls, Alabama Arkansas, I do love my ma and pa, Home. Let me come home. Home is wherever I'm with you.

yikes likes

2010-07-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

"Yikes!" I want to scream. Yikes! Yikes like fuck this shit let's climb an abandoned building and break into it and then maybe clean it all up and throw out the empty beer cartons and sweep until we get blisters and then line up all the chairs in a circle and put a rug down and draw little anarchy symbols on the walls and invite all our friends and none of our enemies! Yeah yikes!

Yikes like hey it's okay babe, you got kicked out of your apartment for partying to hard but its okay cause it didn't have air conditioning anyway and you still know we love you right? Right. Calm down lets just go sit on the grass in front of Ft. Reno and listen to the free music while your friend calls me cute and we dance like right up front at the very edge of the stage just so the local high school band will feel good about themselves, right? Yikes right? Right.

Yikes like I feel kind of like a kid again and I know I should feel like a grown up right now but it's hard when I go bra shopping with my mom and she stops for coffee and cigarettes and instead of joining her I just read my book and hide in the racks of lingerie (I don't really but I sort of want to?) and sit for a while but it's her birthday and she looks happy so its all okay plus we get hashbrowns with onions and then sliders with more onions and I like when my parents kiss and my dad gives her earrings and I talk about gender and sexuality with them (at this point my book is under the table.)

Yikes and I stalk this GIRL on the internet and she is way hip but I remember when she was just a kid? Like a little blond dorky kid and I thought she was kind of stupid. She is still kind of stupid but now I am more jealous than vaguely annoyed and I wonder, where do we all go? Really? YIKES like where the fuck did I go when I grew up, and where do they all go and where does all the rain like molten gold go, and the backlit shadows at concerts and the stupid clothes and the bad haircuts? Where does it all go?

long, rainsoaked, evening

2010-07-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

Summer thunderstorms move quickly and quietly in this area until they are right upon you. It starts to rain while I am in the pool; my cheeks are pink and hot and they turn the water around me into a useless sweat. We swim until the thunder comes, softly at first, like a sweet scolding.

These are my favorite kinds of nights, when the sun is blocked out early and a cloudburst pours the rain, overflowing the gutters. The air is warm and the rain is cool but hard. The wind whips the trees and the streets are shiny, little rivers forming on the hills. I sit in my open doorway and watch the lightning with Stella; she is scared but she sits on my lap anyway and shakes when it thunders.

This too, is a perfect kind of evening. When the storm cools we go walking, bare feet on asphalt. My summers are spent trundling the neighborhood and admiring the weather. Emily makes me gasp and Liam makes me laugh. Carly is awkward and sad, but we all trip over different stretches of ground, so I know she will survive. There are too many days but too few weeks until I am uprooted from these streets, these railroads and drainage ditches and painted ladies.

When they leave, and I return home I sit on the porch as it starts to rain again. I am thinking mostly in the dark about St. Louis. The weather there is the same but more. I have winds on my back porch and they have tornadoes in their back yard, sunny day here, heat wave there, my two feet of snow is a blizzard.
I am excited
and scared.

spooks and haunts

2010-07-06T13:32:00.001-07:00

I'm sorry I speak of dreams so often - I don't know what to believe about them. Lots of times I look for the reasons that they float up, but I find only half-human, half-animals and the four little children inside of me that crawl, jump, hide and maul respectively.

In Maine, I always sleep in the green room in the bed on the right. It is there that these dreams took place - in that soft and sagged bed and the sea foam walls. I told my dad and he said, yes, when he was a child and even now when he sleeps in that room with his brother on the left he still dreams colors and scents. My second cousin - a fortysomething mother - says she too, as a kid in that room, in that bed dreams unlike other places. I believe it is haunted.

Maine was as it always is, stuck in time but also somehow moving very quickly. The threat of renters, and inheritance and Daphne's broken hip and my grandmother's ghost make our seconds there very quick indeed, but they are slowed by the mist on the point and the hibernation of cool, rainy days.

Home again though, I too feel a little like a spook. Every time that I move around my room, picking up objects and putting them down, I think of what will go and what will stay. Which books will I bring? ee cummings. William Carlos Williams. Heather Bell. Calvin and Hobbes. What will I need, but that will stay? Stella. Max and Pearly. Mom, Dad. What do I need to destroy? Those old journals. I am a ghost in my room. I think my mother cries because I am leaning so far forward; I have my head and shoulders out of the basement window and when she grabs my legs I do not even look back at her tears.

space aliens and losing my virginity

2010-06-24T10:29:00.000-07:00

Even in my dreams Nathan is unhappy.

I've had a lot of vivid dreams lately. The past two nights I stay up too late, wake up too early. The glow of the lamp in my room is impossible - soft and loving against the green spackle walls.

The first night I dreamt of space aliens and losing my virginity. It was a sad dream. I spent a lot of it running around and telling people to run and to hide and feeling this crushing hopelessness because I knew they would come and take us and abduct us and kill us. The took Ames and Callen and I told Brendan - you'd better say goodbye because this is the last time you will see your brother again. Callen came back scared, wide eyed...different than I have ever seen him. Ames was dead. Later, I had sex in a shower by myself and felt fine. Clean even, tired.

Last night I was with mother shopping at a high end designer boutique. They treated us like shit. The woman was severe and dark haired, bright red lipstick that looked waxy and clownish. She told us we were poor and foolish. I picked up a four hundred dollar shoe and threw it at her. She told my mother she was scum. I turned into a forty foot panther with scales human feet and a buck's antlers in front of her. I jumped the cash register, broke the window, mauled the saleswoman.
It felt very good.

Even in my dreams I see broken bridges and they are still broken, they do not mend. Nathan is still unhappy. Still small and mean.

O3 is a b-movie

2010-06-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

Lovely after hours, riding a bicycle in the pitch black seems dangerous
but somehow comical - like we are stuck inside of a bad horror film and soon the path will end and we will find four abandoned and rusted bicycles in the center of the wildlife preserve and (if we are lucky) the four corresponding skeletons.

There is nothing like the freedom of the dark. The freedom of our ghostly white bodies, and the wisps of the breakers on the beach. To me it was a perfect ending with no cracks, flush in the transition of the summer. I have never loved messy change. I prefer it to be soft and quiet. I prefer it to be so quick as to surprise you a few months later, when you wake up with a sad ache and you don't know why and you think maybe there is just too much ozone in the air today but it never goes away.

night terrors

2010-06-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

On cold nights I sleep shaking, dreamless sleeps. It is June now. The muggy summer is upon us. In Michigan they open their windows and let the air whip through the house, but here we shut ourselves in and lie against the walls of self-produced shade, our sweat thick upon the hardwood floors. I sleep in short colorful bursts and wake up suddenly not knowing how to breathe.

Last night, outside on an unfamiliar mattress I lay chest up, but with my head to the side. I had shallow dreams of driving through incredible, pebbled carriage roads. In the passenger seat I sat listless and watching the canopy of trees and forest growth all around us. My attention was caught by the way the forest seemed not to end nor lighten, but instead grow into thicker and darker knots around the road ahead. The leaves trapped the day's heat. Sudden like a heart attack, my friend appears in front of us. We run her over and I think she is dead. I look back calmly weeping and start again; she is on the roof with a knife. Next she is in the car laughing, telling me it is all a joke, and don't I like her new trick? Instead I am screaming and it is a tight, terrified scream through my teeth and throat like I am trying to get somewhere but am not moving and something is dragging me down. When I wake up Rose says "It sounded difficult. You were screaming." and I lie there looking up at the screen and beyond the screen, the sky and I wonder if the stars heard me, or if the humidity caught even my night terror from stirring the winds.

The truth is I rarely sleep in any weather. I just simmer late into the night, ears ringing, rubbing my feet against each other. I do not doze until the still of early morning and only then do I feel gravity truly working, only then do I feel securely attached to the earth.

Shake it off

2010-05-20T19:04:00.000-07:00

I will never be "that girl," that teen queen, baby beautiful. Hair like a kept lioness, eyes like sharp cut gemstones, souless American beauty. I will never be all small bones and half smiles, expensive boots and Humanity trips to Africa, persistent skin always tan always aglow and never available. Sad, cruel love.
That's okay, don't worry about it, shake it off.
I'll just be the secret perfect girl. The one you don't understand until later, until its too fucking late. Until your life is a dumbwaiter and reevaluating everything you thought was stunningly beautiful and realizing that it was all paint and peeling plastic.
Because I am fucking great and to you I will always have to be the one you were too blind to see. The blank face that if you stretched out your hands you could read my freckles like braille, fumble with the bridge of my nose rough hewn by the winter wind. When you are missing reading the dictionary aloud, and when you are missing lying in the grass and not knowing what makes us real, and when you are missing eyes that burn slowly and steadily like embers beneath the fire, and when you do not know how to wake up in the morning excited and a little frightened you will wonder where you went wrong that you don't know the exuberance of youth anymore and if you look back a little harder and a little farther you will find it is here. It is here with me that you chose wrong and embedded yourself into white sheets and watered lawns forever.

In my next life I will regret everything

2010-05-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

+
I just want to cut off all my hair,
just want to blow up the fucking sidewalk
bury clippings and bits of concrete
in the ground to mark the passage of
footprints, afternoons, grass, time.

I will tell my grandchildren:
YOU WILL FIND BITS OF ME ALL OVER THE WORLD
and send them on a lonesome scavenger hunt
for dead skin cells, bone dust, toes.
To all my numinous places
all the sleeping bags and starry nights,
sidewalks, slides and steep grassy hillsides,
collect them in birdcages and put them
in the attic to age and forget with time.

And when I need to pray I will climb the stairs
and sit beneath the grimy sky. I will
chew on my arms and fingers and leave nail trimmings
on the sill like little sacrifices.
I will unhook their sacred trappings and God
will rush out as Pandora's spites, along with
leaves and a few empty gumwrappers
and I will be left
with nothing but my soft rubber soled boots
and the revealed, jagged edges
of my concrete bones.
+

Madwoman takes her imaginary cigarette

2010-05-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

throws it on the ground then picks it up,
burns her arm, little eyes of angry flesh
on the inside of her elbow. "One for every
thing-I-can't-handle." One for playgrounds.
One for bank tellers. One for sea shanties.
One for my drunk boyfriend. One for hanging.
One for jumping. One for pills.

Sits on the bottom of a metal slide. Pretends
like she's on the phone with someone's dead
mom and paints her toenails. Tells her the past
and a bit of the future. "No, no. Your
husband dies next year. Charlie got a tattoo.
Careful, heart attacks can be fatal."
Gets up, dusts off the apple red dress,
takes a bite, falls on the floor, screaming.
Elbow stings, leaves fall but roses bloom.
Runs away. Doesn't look back.

three dead birds

2010-05-04T10:39:00.001-07:00

My first pet was a sparrow named Birdy and I was four years old. We had a cat too (Cowgamet) and a dog (Rashaan), but I think Birdy was mine. Birdy was brown and young and hurt. He had fallen from an unforgiving Holly and we had picked him up, and gave him some seed and found him a cage. American Sparrows don't live very long and people don't really love them very much. He died and I remember wrapping him in piece of printed fabric, covered in the eyes and bakti silhouettes of hidden animals. We buried him in the yard by the stream.

Birds are creatures that I do not draw well. They fascinate me and are very close to my heart. I have had two other birds as pets. A baby sparrow from a fallen tree rode around in my dad's shirt pocket for a week; we fed him bread and water until the boy who found it came back. It was also found under a holly. I also had a parakeet who got very very sick. His name was Suki and he was not very nice. Dipstick was my friend's bird who we called Baby and he was very nice and would sit on the top of the newspaper when you read it. Suki bit me a lot and I think he was lonely. He is buried next to my dead dog. There are a lot of dead pets in my yard, but they were well loved.

I think I do not know how to draw birds very well because I do not know how to capture the way that freedom can be very sad. I do not understand as well as I like the loneliness of flight.

Fifteen Words

2010-04-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

Several stories in fifteen words or less:

Sophia swayed silently over her imminent doom, she struck pavement as the belltower struck noon.

The congeniality of Arizona neighbors, no birdseed this summer, just small arthropods for desert spiders.

Children in the crematorium steal silk flowers, wait for their mothers, learn how to die.

The dragons beneath the earth are shifting in eonic time, waiting for armageddon or maybe breakfast.

Distantly, dogs salivate, politicians orate; but here on crumpled sheets we still our beating hearts.

shiny streets

2010-04-26T18:24:00.001-07:00

Shiny, godforsaken last days. Since last Thursday there has been rain on the streets, while people in droughts hang mirrors in their houses to remind them of water. It is not a biblical rain, just mildly sentient. It reminds us of stone turned coolth, and the prospect of summer at the same time as things ending and forthcoming clouds. Driving, my hands are patterned with water droplets and I think I may be melting, sinking down beneath the weight of all my future lives.
I wonder at how the rain freezes things like arthropods in drops of resin and the static of radio waves in an electrical storm. How is it things don't seem to move, but nothing stays the same?

2010-04-13T17:58:00.000-07:00

Six people I know nothing about all crowded on a hammock, legs touching feet touching thighs touching skirts and asses, hands on our hair on bellies and touching our own faces. I only met them less than 48 hours ago and I stretch my neck to look up at the sky, which is light where it should be dark and the rough pink-grey of handmade paper. The light pollution bothers the kid from West Virginia the most, but the rest of us are used to this sign of the ultimate infiltration of humanity into nature. We get real far real fast, and we alternate between the nervous tic of sexual innuendo and quieter, significantly more interesting patches.
I keep thinking maybe these are my real best friends, and then about how we will all say "see you later" and have to wonder if it's a lie.

dark dreams

2010-03-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

I dreamed a room full of people I have lost.

The summer girl with her sharp tongue a limited capacity to love, her painted stairwell all torn down and renovated. The kid who I traded verses with, our practiced flirtation meaningless and cold. That one boy I loved harder and more selfishly, his hair all cut short and his eyes dead in the corners. The two girls, lonely and venomous twins with the joyful laugh, seething and giving me darting, percussive glances. The boy who was born bespeckled and underevolved for the sun, earthshattering after dark and befuddling during the day.

And mostly my eye catches on one kid, one wound so recent. In the dream his head is bowed low and he's sitting in the corner, immeasurably dark. I don't know if he remembers my fingertips, or the smooth August vegetation, or even my kitchen counter. His head is covered in a slow murky viscosity that he can't escape, that threatens to sneak into his nostrils and mouth. I wonder if his synapses fire the same way, or if our few shared nerve endings have simply died, suffocated, in the muck.

sometimes rain

2010-03-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry sometimes,
for being crazy.
But if you were a large brown elephant in the middle of the tundra
I think you would understand my obsession with human anatomy and those
endless black scribbles all over my room.
I'm sorry, sometimes,
when the bottoms of my jeans are soaked through,
when your bike shudders and skids out into the busy intersection,
when I feel fathomless and hard-won to your calloused fingers.
I'm sorry when
I make you think you're an asshole
because I don't want to kiss you goodnight
Really, its just that the rain fell too hard today
and I need to make sure I don't crash on the way home.

Everyday feels like Sunday

2010-03-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

Today was a day of impending blackberries small mind wanderings. I'm tired now (I'm always tired), my legs already sore, each muscle fiber stretched to breaking like an old rubber band. I hobble places, a little funny old woman with a bad haircut and strangely sun deprived freckles.
Playing frisbee, discs in hand, we ran to the highest point in D.C. Fort Reno is deadly after dark but I've been there at dusk anyway, climbed over the crooked barbed wire fence to construction sites silhouetted against floodlights. I've sat at the top of the fake hills, all ripped up concrete and silt with long dune grasses, staring into the city light pollution by myself. Summer evenings spent on or in front of the Fort Reno stage, drawings ugly pictures of ourselves on the chipping paint, or kneeling under an umbrella in the warm August drizzle. Today was the kind of day where you don't need pants but you do need a sweater, where the sun is a glorious ear of golden corn and you are a half-starved small mammal, but the wind whips at your legs.
All the grass is dead, burnt and brittle like bones, brown from their stint of suffocating snow. The grass reminds me of human hair, or deer ribs on the bike path. Throwing the disc means destroying my knees in the dry, unforgiving blades, but I do so anyway. I like the power in a frisbee player's wrist.
I feel a strange vastness in my day - a cross between the luxurious nothing of summer that this weather foreshadows and the piercing emptiness of my house, late at night in February when the heat clicks off. Excitement, desire and a strange, unnecessary current of despair.

March again

2010-03-01T19:35:00.000-08:00

You live your life and I'll live mine. Write it all down on a road map so later I can get my green VW bus I've wanted since I was 7 and take a look. I'll put up some striped curtains in the back and buy some goat cheese and a new nalgene and I'll try to figure out where you went, follow your dotted and scraggly line.
When I catch up for a visit I'll overstay my welcome and you'll ask
"Where the fuck have you been?" and I'll say "Oh you know..." something about an internship and aimlessness, periodic depression and being really really grateful when the answer is really all over the place, everywhere, nowhere.
I'll ask "Where the fuck are you going?"
And you'll say you're going to fight the impossible fight, but first you are taking the garbage out. You'll ask me to grab one end of the stained bureau and help you lug it down the front steps, but then at the curb you'll sit me down and tell me I am worn out furniture, like "Hey, I loved that couch." you'll say about us,and hoist me onto the soft bed of the top drawer. You'll go back inside and I'll sit in the early morning light, in the soft purple hues of the hazy March day, in the quiet only trash collectors know and you'll say to yourself "But I'm glad it's gone."

Look out, sunshine

2010-02-22T19:29:00.000-08:00

The ground is covered with the closing dirt of winter, the asphalt ice, exhaust snow. I've said it before, in our hearts we are summer birds (and also I think you're cute.) I've been subsisting on toast with butter and jam and masala chicken that burns my throat on the way down, canker sores and long two hour conversations about nothing. Look out sunshine, the dark is rising like the tide again tonight, coming at us close and terrible like the Old Testament, quiet like Eve on her first time.
I feel like Lilith that wondrous first woman, but happier. My skin is her unvarnished cherry wood, my bones are compressed dust - the kind that goes on to lightly blanket forgotten places (the undersides of stained mattresses, drive-in movie theaters, the peeling paint on victorian windowsills).
The weather is a fucked up mixed-message that introduces itself and tells me its name and that its learning Indonesian for a mission trip this summer and that's why its got the phrase book and everything and then when it gets up because this is its stop it says "Thank you for the pleasant conversation" and slaps me in the face. Still, I shrug and jam my hat on my head the same, just with a finger shaped redness across my cheek and smile at the conductor and wave because I'm damn happy. I'm damn happy. Look out, summer birds are stretching their wings. Look out Sunshine, I'm happy.

water keeps going

2010-02-16T20:33:00.000-08:00

Things come and go real fast these days. Flashback: six years ago, awkward middle schooler, brand new kid, turquoise t shirts, dirty clam diggers, three pairs of sketchers sandals in my closet in progressing sizes (I was on the middle one.) I brought my swimsuit, towel and goggles to school for the first time.
Fast forward: tonight. Mounds of frozen snow outside on the ground. Dirty snow. The kind that still doesn't melt or fight after 12 long days of shovels and salt and exhaust pipes, just lies there big and blocky and useless. The National Cathedral is dark and except for that big old crucifix landmark, there is just the funny ravines and school buildings on the edges of the snow. I can see my dad sledding down here when he was a kid, I can see him swimming in the pool I'm about to jump into. This ice-cold goosebump pool where I got deferred from Chicago, where we practiced on tuesdays, this last meet, this sixth year.
Things come and go real fast now, like when we were cheering. I know time slows down in the water and sound whites out to a rushing in your ears. We were thinking about losing touch, making an effort, getting high. In a puddle of tiredsick kids looking forward we stopped and looked not back but down at our feet, at the earth we were standing on, at our pale and damp toes on the tile. I can only speak for myself but what I saw were half-truths, dark stars and goodbye waves.
But you know things come and go real quick now, like big tidal waves surprising us on the shore with a splash of frigid saltwater. They've been here the whole time, crashing over and over again to the rhythm of months but sometimes we forget. Sometimes we are looking out at our vanishing points on the horizon and they get us in the mouth and throat and we splutter, choking on the bitter brine.

When Things Fall Apart and Then Come Back Together

2010-02-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

OR: If I Knew What It Was To Live After The Seas Flooded Manhatten

In my new populace we are perfect, but the earth still dies.
In my new populace everyone is issued a bicycle and a water bottle. A single railroad operates between all major metropoli. We all live in group-housed earthships. But in my new populace we are still each a little whirlwind of thoughts ready to take the world by a storm, grasping at technology racing forward. We still love like the advancement of human society, like the destruction of natural and primitive instinct. We still bow under the creature feeling, Otto and Eliade’s mysterium tremendum pressing at the back of our sinuses. In my new populace we are each still new industrial revolutions, in which each old powerhouse and smokestack that blackened the winter sky is a new beginning and each dawn is just an old solution.

A new civilization is like a first love. That fizzy feeling in your stomach is like bombs dropping, going off one by one to break the walls and dissipate the acrid black smoke. All we’ve got is our post-apocalyptic resilience, our pre-utopic visions. All we've got is the way the jagged pieces of our strong hold are silhouetted in the sky and the way our bits of heart tissues glisten, red and raw. All we've got is the Cuyahoga River burning for days on end and the wondrous explosions of supernovas and demigods above our heads. The earth always seemed like that first love speeding to an end in break up or death that widows us all. In my new populace all we’ve got is each other.

In my new populace we will not kill animals for food and we will grow our crops aligned with the contours of the land. In my new populace we will construct a life centered around building our communities. We will teach our children our expertise. We will teach our children what we know about people and the land. We will teach them how to read the classics and how to draw stars. Every child will be raised by the parents, the village and the rain. We will teach our children our greatest truth: that living is feeling a strange-complicated mixture of melancholy and love. That we feel it in our intimately related bones and are connected through them regardless of flesh. They will know that this makes us equal. In my new populace we will devote our lives to the construction of a transient world for our children to live in, to the fostering of communities based on respect, honesty and trust. In my new populace we will not bargain our trust. In my new populace, all we’ve got is love. All we’ve got uncertainty. All we’ve got is stop gaps. All we’ve got is new beginnings and old solutions.

So,

everyone is issued a bicycle and
a water bottle.

pomp

2010-02-02T18:31:00.001-08:00

Everyone's got an intimate smile
trapped in the muscles of their face.
Everyone's got their teeth all straight,
and everyone's got their supernova.
Naomi's got the red chinese necklace her boyfriend made.
And John's got his mother's beret.
Sophia has got Kraft macaroni and cheese,
and Anna's got Safeway zebra cakes.
Rose has got my torrid affair,
and William's got my undying ambivalence.
Jamie's got drumsticks and his childhood bike,
and Tyler's got his weed.
And all I've got,
is this teacup filled with ocean water
and a great big pile of leaves.

Ruminations in short chapters

2010-01-25T17:06:00.000-08:00

IN WHICH:
I felt a crush like:
an egg breaking on my head, like the way you smile when you bang your funny bone into things and then gasp for breath, like a child walking barefoot through the grass.

IN WHICH:
I saw my best friend:
I I drove her around and couldn't find a parking place, in which I was a bad vegetarian, in which we smiled dreamily out the windows, in which we couldn't finish a banana split and the the waiter called us ma'ams.

IN WHICH:
I thought about infidelity:
Have you ever noticed how love is an excuse for almost anything? Or beauty is at least? For war or murder or kissing the wrong person? I would kiss the wrong person if I thought it would make me right, if I thought it would make me whole again, if it would prevent me from becoming a collected women - as a tin pot or a ceramic figurine becomes.

IN WHICH:
Kissing confuses and absolves me:
Are there stars and leaves on the ground? The answer is yes the way that it always thunderstorms in the summer, the answer is yes the way we squint when we laugh. The answer to who would you like to kiss? is yes.

IN WHICH:
Someone asks me an existential question and I reply existentially:
HOW am I ever ever complete? Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote "I am part of all I have met." Not Jack Kerouac, really now fauxhawks. I don't really know what that means, does it mean I am formed of all I have and will become all I encounter? Or does all I meet now have a small, rubbed of flake of myself?

IN WHICH:
The attractiveness of cigars is addressed:
I'll never understand the cigarette language but there is something in the way fingers wrap around the filter, maybe we are just young and so it is rebellious to kill yourself. I, I know, I am attracted to REBELLION.

IN WHICH:
I miss dearly:
Some people and some cuddling, some quakers and some real food. Real food in particular, I need some real food. I was missing Carlista because she was at UMD and not in my kitchen drinking tea. There is always a hole in my chest cavity.

IN WHICH:
I succumb to mature fantasies:
I am thinking about how nice it would be to share a house with someone, with hardwood floors and plants that need watering and a large double bed with white sheets. I would like to wash produce with them and make curry in the evenings, read novels or poetry or the dictionary out loud, then wake up to rain streaming down our window panes. I want to grab umbrellas and walk to bagel place and then put our wet things in the mud room.

IN WHICH:
Black dresses and gender assumptions are discussed:
Every girl needs a little black dress and a platinum coiffe, red lipstick and long, false eyelashes. They all need waxes and spray tans and stilettos and big hard fake tits. They need things that turn their faces to plastic, and they need little safety deposit boxes where they can put their old hearts and their old tears and their old boyfriends and all the things they don't need anymore, but that the lawyers will advise them to keep in case they ever go on trial for murder.

IN WHICH:
I list people who have exited:
Ex-patriate, ex-best friend, ex-lover, ex-housecat, ex-pantyhose.

IN WHICH:
I YELL ABOUT SEX:
IS THERE A PERSON OF ANY SEX THAT MEANS A LOT TO YOU OR DO THEY HAVE NO SEX BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MATTER, OR MAYBE THEY HAVE A LOT OF SEX.

IN WHICH:
I ruminate on cuddling:
Cuddling is my lifeblood.

IN WHICH:
I travel:
I like to take off and land when you look out the window and see small people and small cars who could be crushed by your weight were you to crash. I like to reach ten thousand feet and come to the realization that the wild earth has just become a tame human pattern of circles and squares which we harvest wickedly. I like to pretend that the plane is about to fall directly out of the sky and leave us in critical condition and wonder about who will come visit me in the hospital.

brownstones in rhode island

2010-01-15T20:14:00.000-08:00

I feel like a fucking crazy person today and I don't know why. I think it is because my hair is too long and it gets caught under my scarf like plastic bags on branches. Walking up and down Providence, as Denney once said "I can she how she fell in love here." Because the homes are old and tall with slats and multicolored trim like my historical neighborhood but the streets are thin and close like Baltimore with lots of fire escapes and charred bricks. I'm not used to unzoned high rises and they make me feel like I am on top of something that doesn't exist, like how wandering on the sidewalk you look up and just see the gap between glass office spaces and it is like the sky is all around.

In a small rotunda there are wire sculptures of shoes and I wonder if I will ever be that good. I drool over the paper masks you have to wear if you spend ten hours drawing with charcoal and the way that you sneeze to the scent of burning leaves and it comes out black. I'm worried about living and not living and think wistfully of drawing 200 portraits of myself for homework.

Meanwhile in my other life, in my outside of the mind life, I get three text messages and feel loved then notice all the smiles in high resolution and feel like a scared person. I keep going over and spending an hour at that one girl's crazy house. She hasn't been there in months and her brother is big and comes home from school now by himself on the bus and her dad lost his job last year and still lies about looking over her shoulder when she goes on the computer. I love to hate to compete, because while I have so much sometimes I feel like someone's bad remix, someone's free shitty anti-folk song from itunes, someone's commercialized disco 54. I go on about Iblis and the origins of Islam while everyone just wants to eat their fucking pecan pie and go to sleep because face it: I suck at physics and my little rat skeleton is tired, tired tired. My little rat bones are tired and I guess I just feel like such a fucking crazy person today.

disclaimer sometimes i am dramatic

2010-01-06T18:29:00.000-08:00

The earth is going to die. We are born to die.

We are each an industrial revolution. We are each a little whirlwind of thoughts ready to take the world by a storm, we are the racing forward of technology. We love like the advancement of human society, we love like the destruction of nature and of primitive instinct. It is sad. My passive voice and large sweeping statements are sad. Love is an industrial revolution. Every dawn is a new begginning, every powerhouse and smokestack blackening the winter sky is a new begginning and quickening of the world to an inevitable end.

The earth is going to die and we are born to die with it.

Inevitable destruction is a relationship starting out. That fizzy feeling in your stomach is the bombs dropping, going off one by one to break the walls so the acrid black smoke can corrode and eat away at your insides bit by bit. Remember that your love will die, that the earth will die because we are born to kill and then we are born to die.

And all we've got is whatever we can find in the destruction. All we've got is the way the jagged pieces of our strong hold are silhouetted in the sky and the way our bits of heart tissues glisten, red and raw. All we've got is the Cuyahoga river burning for days on end and the wonderous explosions of supernovas and demigods above our heads. The earth is a relationship speeding to an end in break up or death where both ways we are widowed. The earth is going to die and I can't stop it because I am born to die. Living is feeling a strange complicated mixture of melancholy and love because we remember that the earth is going to die. All we can really do is love it while it lasts because we were born to kill that which we love while the earth was born to be die and we were born to love.

wind screams

2010-01-04T16:51:00.000-08:00

Today is bones like lengthy spiral notebooks, like my spine is curling in on itself and compressing into a small, compact, backwards headache and someone says "I know just what to do." The crack in the door is whistling and I'm trying to make tea but I am too confused by all the sounds. I am a slow lumbering bear; I am exhausted and half-blind and modest and my gears are ticking slowly when someone tells me "Christmas is a bad motherfucker." and I read a poem for someone named Tyler but it isn't my Tyler.

Someone gives me advice, "I know just what to do," they say and
then I'm pushed roughly up against the bathroom wall and the
world is collapsing into a little airless room. I'm reading a book in
the library during lunch time, chewing an illegal piece of chocolate
and trying not to cry. "I'm tired," I say, not body tired, world tired,
and I'm hungry, not animal hungry, mouth hungry. "I know just what
to do, I know just what to do." Feel lead and leaden down a long bright hallway sometime strange, wishing and craving to be slow and human and inefficient. Wishing and craving to make fire instead of flourescent eco-friendly bulbs so much that I cut my hand on one when it drops and my blood spatters out as I suck my thumb "I know just what to do,"
No. No. No. The door is whistling and creaking and the kettle is boiling and I just don't know, I am the confused lumbering bear again I don't know what to do.

some promises.

2010-01-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

Dear girl, dear batshit crazy girl, dear nuclear powergirl, dear riot girl, dear sweet girl, dear darling girl, dear girl,

For this year, please:
- Stay excited and interested by everything you do.
- Buy all your clothes secondhand.
- Make art. Do a drawing every day.
- Love your body. Love your mind.
- Stay honest. Speak out. Be real.
- Bike more places. And learn how to fix bikes.
- Don't be a snob about art, music or style. Don't stereotype other people.
- Keep in touch, stay organized and don't lose people or things or thoughts or opportunities out of fear or laziness.
- Pierce your nose.
- Don't hate anyone, and don't say you hate anyone. No matter how badly they want it. Remember that we all die. (thanks carly.)
- Consume media and be well-read. Expand your library because books are worth your money more than almost anything else. Read more classics and more poetry.
- Eat less meat. Work towards becoming closer to vegan and try to have less impact.
- Keep writing, in journals and in the blog.
- Make random acts of fun and kindness a bigger part of my life.
- Figure out how to exercise by yourself. You'll need to know next September.
- Stay busy building a world you want to live in.

- don't break your promises.

thunder snow

2009-12-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

Snow makes you blind. Wonderful and coldly blind. It's that fresh slate thing again.
The way PG was declared a county in emergency, all roads lead to a soft and quiet ending when the windshield wipers stop and your engine just turns off, the heat just lingers.

I know in my heart I am a summer bird and the only things that make make me unutterably and fully happy are found in days of long sunshine and sweat on my shoulder blades. But somehow in the opposing depths of winter the bite and burn of cold, insecure days is relieved. Here is some calm and blinding brightness, here is the season of pure physicality.

2009-12-16T13:54:00.000-08:00

I started a second blog. At tumblr. I feel like a traitor.
It's for drawings though. Because here I feel like I need to write
things - and daily I need to DRAW things. And I think having
a quick tumblr blog to write and draw on daily will at least
give me some discipline about actually remembering that
drawing helps me and calms me.

Here is the link if you want to see it

www.georgiadraws.tumblr.com

boundless

2009-12-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

Wishing I was not afraid of things that are as fucked up as me (just in a different way). I don't need to go crazy to have fun but sometimes I need just a little bit of softness, the little push of a soft down pillow pressing into my face. It's the comfort of almost choking, of gasping for air - that whooshing of standing perfectly on the edge of a cliff...

toes in line and what if you just jumped off because right at that second the temptation to learn yourself the obsidian of pure flight is boundless.

santa

2009-12-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

Every year a million kids write letters to Santa, address, stamp and send them through the US post office. And the mailworkers, the federal employees take the letters home. They cram them into their bags and pockets. The ones all neatly written by some adult and the ones scrawled on straight printer paper in the careful letters of someone who barely knows them, all of them taken and read, left undelivered to polar ice caps. And sometimes, they write back.

And what if someone were just so desperate and sad and troubled. What if someone were so plagued by guilt or hatred or LUST. What if someone were to send a letter to santa with all their hopes and dreams and confessions and some US Federal post office worker were to reply. These are our very own anonymous Abbys, our Agony Aunts and Carolyn Hax's. Our trusted keepers in blue polyesters because they know our secret hearts.

2009-12-01T19:38:00.001-08:00

I keep having these ideas for places and things we could do on dates but I am afraid that if I let the batshit crazy out there will really be no, no hope.

I wonder if all the great men credited with the greatest love sonnets and ballads, the poems and professings to their women are accurate? How can they have been? How many men and women truly ever connected spiritually and equally together, in past societies where marriage is the first step and getting to know is later. And maybe all those wonderful words were just based on love at first sight, they were just based on beauty, on her porcelain necks and blushing lips. Nothing at all really, nothing at all.

dark glass

2009-11-22T14:55:00.001-08:00

Railroad tracks, they freak the shit out of me. That possibility of large industrial monster careening around the bend, carrying coal and graffiti, flattening pennies on the ties with no stopping power, no visibility far enough to see my delicate bones. These days I think about everything if I shared it with you. If climbing up the trestle to that skinny sheet metal pathway whipping in the wind would test your ability to love me. If we could stand beneath the tracks as the train goes by, thundering above our heads making sparks and iron filings, as though the heavens were reaching down and shaking us by our shoulders. If we could yell all our wrongdoings and pains and injustices up at the train billowing above would I know and would we become saved?

Similarly, the tension in a thundercloud above, fast approaching, and we are biking homeward bound. We dallied too long at the riverside, throwing rocks across the way to the cars scheduled for destruction, smelling the scorched rubber and watching the firemen practice rescues from burning vehicles. The cloudburst as we reach the first bridge, pouring down and soaking our skin in early November. I think of stopping beneath a tree for rest, confused by the Augustal sky and peering down at my red toes, soon purple. Stripping off our shoes and running the rest of the paved way, the ground like a mirror of our thoughts and wishes, of our inner conflict. The asphalt so cold and hard I cannot feel my feet.

cats and lettuce

2009-11-15T17:42:00.000-08:00

I would like to live in a house with someone, all
white sheets and a big double bed with the sunlight streaming in through the windows.
In my mind it is the sound of someone else's bare feet on dark hardwood floors, and the smell
of vegetable curry in the evenings. We wouldn't wear very much, just shirts
and maybe underwear, watering the plants naked. I think of the morning light
as I take a shower and,
sitting at a kitchen table, reading the paper, drinking my tea, peaceable in the breathing of the other.
I want to wake up on Sunday when it is raining softly, grab boots and umbrellas and walk to the bagel place nearby. When we get back we just leave everything in the mudroom.
My fantasies of washing produce, and curling up in the armchair together, reading stories
or poems or the dictionary out loud. Sitting on the kitchen countertop, kissing.
The sun making a curtain on our bare skin.

crazy-wonderful

2009-11-12T21:16:00.000-08:00

Wondering now how maybe I could get lost in the crazy-wonderful,
in the squint of your eyes when you laugh.
How I have fought not to love, not to care.

Love, love, love,
buttered toast and days that are silver and preternaturally cold.

My physics teacher tells me that
there is a gravity between all objects. He says that the earth is pulling
us down and apart, and that no, you cannot feel the gravity between
two people can you? You say
depends on the people.
As I am thinking is there a gravity between us?
Can you feel the force between us, the gravity
of our hearts, of my heavy chest cavity?
And if we collide will we fly apart or meld together,
the equal and opposite forces of our heartspaces,
like teacups and bricks, lips and eyes and small
remarkable animals and leaf matter.

westboro baptist church

2009-11-09T18:19:00.001-08:00

Today we were a perfect mass of colored cloth,
100 people, kids who don't care normally, kids
who think gay rights aren't worth daily thought
and yet, we stood so solidly. We were a block of
righteous wicked love, of tie-dye and hand-painted
signs. We were the honks the smiles the yells,
the man who told us we were doing a great thing
and then missed his bus to work. Up in front with
my papers and striped socks I turned around,
surprised and pleased and in love with us, with
our silence and respect, our community. Across
the street rolled the putridity of a life where the
sun is a hellion to warn us of our imminent doom,
and we stood with the compassion of Apollo's million
hot chariot rides, Artemis' silver bow at our backs
and the thousand-armed gods of century over century
reveling in our hearts.

tooth and breast

2009-11-02T19:20:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about women
a lot. For better or for worse, I am one.
There are unique pains, in our abdomens,
in our hearts. There is the pain of losing a
child, of bleeding from the womb in which one bellows
like a horse in mourning. In which one lies on the
bottom of the bathtub with the shower on scalding
hot, forcing one's eyes open under the stream.
In oppression there is the trappings
of marriage, of domestic abuse. There is the fear
of walking down the street, of whispers, and catcalls
and stares. The thought that there are women who
end up dead, desecrated in an alleyway, in a cornfield.
There are attachments to our sex. Of passion, criminality.
We are goddesses of teeth and breast. Headstrong and
fearfully powerful, symbols of destruction and devotion.
We are Madonnas, soft and pure. Our heads swathed in
sheets of white linen, our hands are the touch and taste
of sweet milk, of newly mown grass and calm cumuli.
In these I am hated and loved. In these I am more than
myself, I am only the thin place beneath my breasts, the
tender skin, weak and alluring, loved and hated. Hidden,
but receiving and tiresome. I carry the imprint of
mothers and sisters and wives above my ribcage.

the days after the train hit you

2009-11-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

A woman comes up to me in CVS and says excuse me,
ma'am, but is this your lipstick that you dropped? I
do not wear lipstick but she looks at me like she knows
that I should be marked with red. She looks at me like
she knows I should be guilty and doubled over, crying.
"Yes," I say, "Yes, thank you." I do not blink when I
meet her eyes and she reaches out one hand and touches
my lips like he used to. She lingers on my cupids bow
and opens her mouth as though she is about to whisper
"I love you." but she doesn't. Instead, she walks away
to buy lotion or breath mints or prescription drugs
or whatever she came here for.

unlikely

2009-10-22T19:13:00.001-07:00

Hey, you.
do you even know my name? you should,
by now. I am a force past the friction of
your new situation, your new weight.
Will our accelerations meet, will they
collide and bounce off? Our masses
flying apart, gravity is our fail-safe.
Maybe I like you because you are
that third culture kid that I lost this
summer. You've been everywhere
and I nowhere but you still laugh
when I mispronounce pencil - it's
funny, everyone thinks I have an
accent, though I'm born and raised
here in the capitol. You still smile at
me, lean on my shoulder past our
barrier - other girls can hug you but
we, we can barely brush fingers.
But mostly you smile. I smile.
And we just smile at each other
eyes crinkled up
grinning so hard
our teeth hurt.

ripping

2009-10-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

She feels the winter cool and soft, approaching.
A woman's blood, hot and cold. Her shivering
a side effect of crying, a side effect of taking
too many breaths. The rusty burn of her
lungs when she took off all her clothes and
ran in the snow because she was sad, with
blood pouring down her legs, tears on her knees.

What he said when he found her planting
a root in a saucer of milk under her bed. Her
eyes wide and pickled wet, she was caught
with her mouth open, teeth clacking listlessly
like a dog had burrowed beneath her tongue.
Gathered her up in his arms and twisted off
her legs, poured out the milk, cut a slit on
intersection of belly and thigh. Hands on the
back of her neck,
feeling molars rip through her cheeks.

on grief

2009-10-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

I was a kid and the day of the funeral was sunspotted and I
learned for the first time that the world doesn't wait for you
to stop crying. Every time I hear that Ukulele start unexpected
at the end of a movie or on the radio, my whole family has to
cover our mouths with our hands and bite down hard. I still
don't know about god or what we do after we die but I know
he's still here somewhere.

The craziest bit was is that when they go they leave the world
to you. You inherit photographs, pets, furniture. You inherit
grown - up things like bills, even if you paid them for years now.
Your siblings aren't kids anymore, and you don't have to help
host Christmas if you don't want to.

Away from home for the first time come back and your life is
turned upside down. Five years ago and he doesn't act different
in the slightest. Stuck in agreeable denial, I sometimes wonder if
he will ever leave home again. I wonder if the rains will come and
he see her strength and intelligence as his son reads out loud to him
for the first time. I wonder if he will remember how he wore his mom's
beret and trench coat on the first day of high school and we all
were worried and sad and wondered if he needed to talk.

Last, those two boys. The affluent Baltimore kid at the affluent
Potomac camp, the flames in the sky rising higher and higher
forcing heat on the faces of neighbors three blocks away.
First the stairs, then the second floor caught, his sister pushed
out of the window. Critical condition, lying in the hospital. I
didn't know him but some friends did, his death a peripheral
surreal happening. Then the young black boy, new family to
the neighborhood. He heads out of his house to the blue car
on the street. We hear a shot, ringing out, the car backfiring?
Stumbling, lonely, his mouth tasting of lemons and rust down
the half-block to the police station. The pool of blood in front of
my childhood park, the sad and dirty stuffed animals, balloons,
rosaries proceeding on the signpost. Another periphery, a tragedy.

The absence is a dusty room. Grandmother or number on the news,
the heartspace is a den of unmolted moths trapped in cocoons.

For the Batshit Crazy Girl

2009-09-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

The grocery boy yells at me:
Don't worry girl, you, you girl
you are batshit crazy girl. Don't
you worry. Here, kid, have some
oranges, some sweet pomegranates,
eat the seeds girl, they make the sky
turn white. They make it snow.

Your cocoon is deadly, kid. Here,
take your peaches. Bleach your
straw, your hair and rub your cheeks
with silver. Get a leather jacket and
run girl. Find a Gremlin somewhere,
girl. Bring just one pretty dress and
bring some rock hard kiwis, girl, they
last a long time.

You're a batshit crazy girl, you kid.
The cold will make you stupid, girl.
Eat some snap peas, find a way to
make your youthful toungue last, kid.
You dont need this town yet, you
don't need this old Hades yet.
So take the seeds girl,
the batshit crazy seeds,
and run.

the the kids

2009-09-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

To the kids:
Don't marry your girlfriend's sister
as if she were a cactus and you were
the once a year rain. Don't write letters
to your friends to be recieved after you
die, they don't want to know. They don't
want to think about your face in the mud.
Don't fall in love with a boy who does not
wear a leather jacket, or one who wears a
tie. The first one will be kind until he rubs
your face in the pavement and the second
one will make you smell like sweat stains.
Don't forget how to be patient and kind to
beggars even if they just want your cocaine.

To the kid's kids,
Record your voice every day until you are
47 and your mother is cast in an iron lung.
Put on your pants by doing a backflip and
cook bacon every day. Make love like a
hungry cheetah on the brink of extinction
and you will never need to plant trees on
the balcony of your lonely apartment.
Paint a sky on your bedroom ceiling and
you will never have to go outside. Protest
in the street every day even if you don't
know what is going on in the world because
you use the daily paper as a towel. Make
sure to protect your arms and wrists because
this city is a hawk that you will capture and
you feed it every day.

2009-09-22T14:20:00.000-07:00

Lips and eyes, finally I am back to that tingling new experience of a shy smile!

I feel cool, so cool.

In my dream, I dreamed of any organic farm. An open air store out in the middle of a dry, barren field, all hard mud caked to the bottoms of tractors. Alongside it, a controversial river. I slipped away from my group, the mother and daughter set arrived in a dusty white minivan so familiar to me. I snuck away and took off all my clothes. The water was cool and green and wide, the sky like a desert sky, blue and incredible. I like to swim naked because my body goes ghostly, I float palely on my back and I feel airless, the dizziness only ascribed to nature. Stroking to the opposite side, an overpass rises and ledge out of the water, columns as doric and ionic as the Mediterranean. On one side I hit a leafy bank, a man made stone wall with pine, and to the left is the market, my party calling me to come in, waving their arms lazily. I reach for the stone and find a rotary telephone, a note wedged into it's crevice. This is a lovers place. And here is the coded words, sly and secret. It is not for me but they know I have found it and they are tittering, a blushing laugh with a smile at my ignorance. I am their ecret here, hidden in the long sky and sad cumuli, drifting like fridays on the autumn winds.

fall

2009-09-21T18:06:00.001-07:00

From touching blandly,
my mind itched from tarantula hairs,
bogged down by spines and thistles.
Aligning time with comfort, fingers
with toes with tongues,
sitting in the bathtub and closing my
eyelids, face-down, my ears underwater
can hear the growl of my stomach,
the echo of the radiator through the house
and the loneliness of being together.

Fall moves in smooth and lethal like
oil slicks on water, my mouth tastes
funny and my bones ache.

hurricanes abound

2009-09-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

pining in the dark, have been your eyes for
long months, snows and rainfalls. our skin touches
and I know you are stuck, sensitive to every electrical
impulse, every neuron firing, stuck under your bed's
comforter, the air conditioner, stuck loving me,
loving me selfishly.
together we are the same as apart, awkward, sad.
My heart's not an empty room but right now it's
not in it. I can't be the bossy one, I can't know what
it is to be your most significant creature unless you
show me and,
well.
in the rain of your eyes is my father, not my lover.
in your breath, the rotting core of a long romance
in your arms, safety like a shack in a tropical storm

fleeting, worrisome and about to blow over.

2009-09-13T18:27:00.000-07:00

BETCHA DIDN'T KNOW I COULD MAKE ART TOOOOO.