Grace Beats Karma

american women's history.

2009-08-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

The basic female body comes with the following accessories:

garter belt, panti-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, feather boa, chemise, virgin zone, lip balm, whore precinct, stilettos, cowboy boots, veil, matte lipstick labeled, “rebel”, lace gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, weepers, falsies (eyelashes), falsies (mastectomy) grandmother’s gold necklace, grandmother’s high school ring, barrettes, back tattoo, bangles, brazillian beads, turquoise ring, hoop earrings, sunglasses (various), lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, flannel nightie, floral muu muu, cotton panties, lace panties, lace teddy, nose ring, nuvaring, face, mouth, head, bed.

a truncated list of ways to make me happy.

2009-04-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

let me see a full one side of you.
beat the clouds in a texture competition.
make rubber bands with the insides of your elbows.
cover and uncover us with blue
split the ocean in two with your hips
bat shadows with your lashes
open your mouth a little and almost say a secret
be so clear that i see my hands inside of you
create the sun with your forehead
fall gracefully off the horizon
hold shells up to your ears so they can hear the earth

meet me in oregon.
cape sebastian, first week in july.

2008-11-29T20:59:00.000-08:00

november 29th.

2008-11-29T19:49:00.000-08:00

in winter without you i send
a postcard from hawaii to myself
to somehow remind me of the week
after the first of august and towards the end
when summer would soon be placed on the shelf
and we would both realize that it really was
all just a waste of time.

Letter from Paradise. 2008.

2008-10-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

October 2008.
Because I had been too tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too frightened of hangovers and failure and the days getting shorter, I was sent, a badly behaved twenty five year old child, to Brazil, where winter does not come and no one fails and the median age is twenty three. There I could become a new woman, there with the American construction workers on million dollar a year incentive trips, there with the Italian divorcees and the splurging secretaries and the girls in string bikinis and the boys constantly in search of something, children who were totally unconcerned regarding the economy of buying a motorbike or a surfboard for thirty American dollars, (fifteen Brazilian reais down and ten dollars, five reais, a week and then abandoning it; children who may or may have not been told, as I was told, that golden children all must, as chimney sweepers, face the dust. I was to lie beneath the same sun that had kept Astrud Gilberto and Brigitte Bardot forever hopeful. I was to play at sipping caiphirinas and wear flowers in my hair as if five years had never happened. I was to see for myself that just beyond the end of the line lay not “Despond” but secret islands of raw earthen clay and happy people without alcohol problems.

I went to Brazil as a dreamy visitor and have now since, come to bear a scary, wary resemblance of a person I didn’t want to emerge from the equator as, which has remained since my returning to the States. Simply put, I do not believe that the stories told by folklore or capoieria merit extensive study. I have never heard a Portuguese phrase, including and perhaps most particularly “beleza”, which accurately expressed anything I had to say. I have neither enough capacity for surprise nor enough heart for twice-told tales of unrequited love (Girl from Ipanema) or tedious vignettes (100 Years of Solitude) and the surprising lovely sight of prostitutes in muumuus. And so, now that it is on the line between us that for some reason I had lost a quite reasonable amount of temperament for paradise, real or not, I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely how and why Brazil moves me, touches me, saddens and troubles and engages my imagination, my spirit and faith in people, what it is in the southern hemispheric air that will linger long after I have forgotten the smell of passion fruit and lime and the way the palms sound in the trade winds and what rainy mornings eventually would turn to look like after my first day of my first day of teaching job and everything in between.

February 2008.

The 9:45 p.m. Continental flight to Sao Paulo this evening was delayed two hours before take off from the airport in Houston. During the delay, the flight attendants served Coca-Cola and peanuts and two children played tag in the aisles and, somewhere behind me, a man began screaming at a woman who seemed to be his wife. I say that the woman seemed to be his wife only because the tone in of his invective voice sounded practiced, as though it were somewhat of a routine. Although the only words I heard clearly were these: “You are driving me to murder”. After a moment I was aware of the door to the plane being opened a few rows ahead of me, and of the man rushing off. At that time, there were quite a few flight attendants (Continental employees?) rushing on and off then, and considerable confusion even from my Ambianic state. The post-9/11 world, as we were living as travelers, had changed a great deal, and this commotion made me order a bourbon cocktail. I do not know whether the man ever re-boarded the plane before take off or whether the woman came to Brazil alone, but I thought about it while I was drinking that bourbon cocktail and I thought about it during breakfast the next morning, when I had emerged from my interrupted sleep, and I was still thinking about it when the first sight of the anticipated country appeared off of the left wing tip.
It was not until we were approaching Sao Paulo and were descending low over the city, minutes before landing, when I realized what I disliked most about all of this as an incident. I disliked it because of the couple. Because every aspect of a short story, one of those “little epiphany” stories in which the main character glimpses a crisis of a stranger’s life – a woman weeping in the powder room, or perhaps a tear room at a swank hotel, someone walking away from a lover, or an accident seen from the window of a train, “tear rooms” and “trains” still being fixtures of short stories although not of real life – and is moved to see his or her own life in a different light. I was not going to Brazil because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Brazil because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I want room for fresh flowers and emotions and people who may or may not be driving one another to murder but in any case are not provoked, by the demands of narrative conventions to say so out loud on the 9:45 p.m. flight from Houston to Sao Paulo.

Work in progress.

Brasil: A Traveler’s Guide.

2008-10-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

I.
This time tomorrow,
I will be a woman of Brasil.

II.

I am
going
to
visit
Bahia.

III.

My fingers graze
the cold plastic walls.

A motionless aeroplane
goes shrieking over the bay of Mexico
and down to America Sol.

The captain has turned on the FASTEN SEATBELT sign.

"I can see the world and it ain't so big at all".

Brazil will be waking now.

We fall desperately into Sao Paulo.

VII.

who I am doesn’t matter
as you see me
fighting to survive.

fighting to be esteemed and honored
(so that my past vanishes)
you will dismiss me as nothing terrific

Fair enough
but there is one thing about me:
I can take you to Salvador.

VIII.

Now although I hate to travel
I go to a lot of places

and have noted

a certain recurrent phenomena.
A journey, for example,
begins with a voice

calling out your name
behind you.
This seems a convenient arrangement.

How else would you know it’s time to go?
On the other hand,
who is it?

And what do they want?
So too a friendship
begins before the first meeting,

love
before the first conquest.

maybe
the people of Salvador
can explain
some of this to me.

tired sex.

2008-08-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

trying to strike a match in a matchbook
that has been laid up all winter under the woodpile
damp sulfur
on sodden cardboard.

i catch myself yawning through the window.
i watch mrs. whiskers the cat
batting around.

like turning the pages of a book the
professor assigned-

you ought to read it, he said.
it's great literature.

lost and safe.

2008-07-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

In Ithaca,
even the lake that is in the nearby fields
can moisten the dry season
of the farms right outside of town,

could make men move mountains
for the healing green of the inner hills
glistening like slices of winter melon.

and we were graceful
as graceful can be

But we left home
to move freely.

There
in Ithaca

I gathered patience,
learning to walk
without breaking
the grace of my movements
dormant as butter cups
as redundant as the farmyard hens.

But I didn’t travel far
in surviving,
learning
to quiet the demons,
the noisy mouths of men.

And there was a young woman
who lived near the lake
who made jade green jewelry
next to the house where I watched
the Aurora Borealis
and the rising tide of locusts.

only I swarmed with others
to inundate another shore.

In Cleveland,
there are many streets
where women can stride along with men.

And in this other wilderness
the possibilities,
the loneliness
the emptiness
can strangulate like jungle vines.

The meager provisions and sentiments
of once obliging to
fermented roots consisting of dominoes and firecrackers-

set up in a flimsy house
in an apartment
in a forest of another nightless city.

A giant snake rattling above and

where dough-faced landlords
slip in and out of your keyholes,
taking claims you don’t understand,
tapping into your communications systems
of laundry lines and restaurant chains.

You find you need Ithaca
your one fragile glimpse of identification-
a jade link
on your left wrist
you remember the lake
and the stars
and the bare feet
and legs to walk
and thoughts to fly
and there is a body of water.
There
at that lake-

the constant space of your
happiness.

notes from a native granddaughter.

2008-07-14T20:38:00.000-07:00

I wrap the blue towel
after washing in the pacific,
around the damp
weight of hair, heavy
as a sleeping cat,
and sit out on the porch.
Still dripping water,
it'll be dry by just about dinner time,
by the time the dust
settles off your shoes,
though it's only five
past noon. Think
of the luxury: how to use
the afternoon like the stretch
of lawn spread before me.
There's the laundry
sun-warm clothes at twillight,
and the mountain of stringbeans
in my lap. Each one,
I'll break and snap
thoughtfully in half.

But there is this slow arousal.
The small buttons
of my cotton blouse
are pulling away from my body.
I feel the strain of threads,
the swollen magnolias
heavy as a flock of birds
in the tree. Already,
the red velvet cake
is rising in the oven.
Set at 350 degrees
I know you'll say it makes
your mouth dry
and I'll watch you
drench each slice of it
with whole milk
and lick the plate clean.

So much hair, my grandmother
used to say, grabbing
the thick bun
in her hands while we washed
the breakfast dishes, discussing
dresses and pastries.
My mind sometimes elsewhere
as we did the morning chores together.
Sometimes, a few strands
would catch in her cocktail ring.
I worked harder then,
anticipating the hour
when I would let the tightly woven bun
down
at night to roll around in the strips of sheets,
knotted and tied,
while she slept in tight blankets near the
air-conditioner downstairs.
My hair, freshly washed
like a measure of wealth,
like a bridal veil
I used to dream about.
Crouching in the grass,
you would wait for the signal,
for the movement of curtains.

for virginia
and for charlie.

untitled #33.

2008-06-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

although it is summer, I sit in the bathroom waiting
for the red eyes of the heater
to stare back at me
as I feel the sweat prickle behind my knees.

and the only thing I see, is that room outside
and everything in it.

i must stay still now
while I prepare for what might come next.

certain hard days ahead
when I’ll need what I know so clearly
this moment.

i am making use
of the one thing I learned and all the things my father tried to teach me
about the art of memory.

i am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about time
and its difficulties.

i’ll let your faint whisper of questions,
slight discussions and
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.

your scent,
of hinted spice and a wound,
I’ll let that stand for my only distraction
keeping me from writing other things
that hold real necessity.

around, the walls of this room
and everything in it, a voice
goes whispering,
just be careful

your old bloated belly
is the daily cup
of coffee I drink
each morning when i've already forgotten
about you.

the picture of your brother
above the kitchen sink
is when he was young and you were king.
and how you used to build towers
made of recycled vine
that stretched
high above the sky
and eventually fell
all around your feet.

i'm beginning to see the difference
between places and faces.

the sun on that face
of the wall
is god, the face
i can’t see, my soul.

and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater thought
not pertaining to you.

still, one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about this occasion,

i’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
that in this room, the only thing gone uncovered
was when we would lie and discover what each other’s bodies
were made for.

now
i’ve forgotten my
idea.

nevertheless,
i continue to look around, this time, just
merely with a glance here and there,
sitting on the carpet in front of the
blue sofa
in a curtainless morning
with my nerves open to the air like
something skinned,
hoping to trick myself into some interior vision,
but all i saw
was a man and a woman in a room across town
making their beds and laughing.

the book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind –
the even numbered pages are
the past, the odd –
numbered pages, the future.

your thoughts are songs for the dreams your brother had about
different ways to die.

my idea
has evaporated.

it's funny, really.

because all of this had
something to do with
with a message or a phone call,
a chance meeting,
a bad fuck that lasted too long

it had something
to do with a room and
everything in it

where
in one afternoon I learned
I could never
love you.

december.

2008-06-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

sometimes you have to take
your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling home

back home
over twisted ice

witness drifts over your house.
a page of warm light
falls steady from your open door.

here is your bed, folded open
Lie down and let the blue
snow cover you.

2007.
for m.

things to pack and wear.

2008-01-26T13:40:00.000-08:00

assignment:

Find Arthur “Bobby” Harrison.
Find G.B. Smith.
both living somewhere in upstate New York.
Ask them about 1971.
Then ask them about Attica.
They will be expecting you.
But, first
go to Albany.

to pack and wear:

2 skirts
2 house dresses
2 t-shirts
2 sleeveless shirts
1 pullover sweater
boots
soft socks
bra
nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with:
shampoo
toothbrush and paste
lip salve
aspirin, prescriptions, tampax,
face cream, powder and baby oil

to carry:
mohair throw
2 scarves
laptop
2 legal pads and pens
list of telephone numbers
house key

This is a list that is taped inside my closet door on the third floor of my mother’s house for the past two years as I have lived there more or less steadily. The list enables me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do.

Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a sleeveless shirt, and boots – articles of clothing that would allow me to pass on either side of the socioeconomic bed.

Notice the mohair throw for truck-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same hotel room. Notice the laptop for the airport, coming home: the idea was to call my mother, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.

It should be clear that this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard the cues, knew her narrative.

There is on this list one significant omission, one article I always needed and never had: a watch.
I needed a watch not during the day, when I could turn on the car radio or ask someone, but at night, in the motel.

Quite often I would ask the desk for the time every half hour or so, until finally, embarrassed to ask again, I would call someone, gather up an excuse as to why I called in the first place, then kindly ask them the time.

In other words I had skirts, t-shirts, a pullover sweater, shoes, socks, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, lip salve, asprin, prescriptions, tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil, mohair throw, laptop, legal pads, pens, telephone numbers, and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was.

This is perhaps a parable, either in my life as a writer during this past few years after college or of the period itself.

2007-11-22T18:06:00.000-08:00

found this one in the crypt...

I asked myself the worst question today.

what would you think?

not is it bad?
or is it safe?
or what might this make of me?
but
what would you think?

I settled back on my heels
thirty pounds heavier than you
five scars above you
twenty seven people more experienced than you

and it’s this question that rings in my mind like the bells of that old church near my grandparents’ old farm in Virginia.
this question that I can’t relieve my mind from
as I’ve been trying to do for some time now.

but, I thought about you this morning.
This same morning I told the mirror to go to hell and decided you were all that mattered.

you are
and you will always be

a rat.

and I’ll love you for that.

* * *

I looked in the mirror at each flaw, each freckle, each mole, each scar, tear, wrinkle, burn, crow’s foot, and the glass left in my eyes, which seems to have worn out its welcome.

all these tiny imperfections have somehow taken the stage as a walk-on role for each doughnut, each beer, broken window, minor altercation, lousy lay and parking ticket left unpaid.

'tis a sad and simple story, really.

and an awfully melodramatic one at that.

and I still have this question:
what would you think?

I wish I could bang you out of my head like some telepathic drum.
bang you out of me until there is nothing left
and we both have turned into something we can tolerate.

I see the piece of an imperfection on my left arm and imagine it transforming into a pair of shooting stars
and I imagine that these stars will teleport us both to some serene and ethereal plane
where love never tends to collide with hate
where floatation devices never detonate
and the idea of parallel universes
well, we have yet to properly invent them.
only we aren’t proper people.

just tell me you don’t care.
tell me I might mean some miniscule measure.
it doesn’t matter.
but, just tell me something
before I turn out too used up, worn out, burned out, fractured and broke.

I hear people all day ask each other questions.
what time do you have to wake up in the morning?
why didn’t you call me back?
what is the holiness of conversation?
can I have twenty on pump 4?
should I say something?
where am I going?
and where have I been?
don’t you know god is pooh bear?

still, my question is better.

What would you think?

12.19.2004

last nite.

2007-11-18T19:29:00.000-08:00

late night television shows exhibit the fixed filth.
those who suddenly share themselves in hope of some gruesome success
like people trying to get laid.

this blank television
my television
has become boring and dull

like the block of self in each of us.

untitled 2.

2007-10-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

I.
I hear my mother in the next room turn and sigh.
my father has the flu near the bathroom
and I have a secret stash on the third floor.

I hear him all night and it pains me to record this because
I just keep trying to maintain a muffle to the sounds of blowing and grunting and beer can cracking.

out the window the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on fading banks of sky.

in the morning, I peel the stale cage of sheets off my legs
and I am free.

out on the day, the September light is clear as an alarm.
the sound of the dogs barking startles me –
(is it wrong to feel ashamed to have your dogs see you in a horrible hangover condition?)

and I go back into a dream I was having when I awoke,
one of those nightlong sweet dreams of
lying curled up in the arms of h.
like a needle in water – it is a strong physical effort
to pull myself out of his blue silk hands
as they slide down my dream hips.

but there is no longer goodness.
to see the love between h. and me
turn into two animals gnawing and craving
through one another
towards some other hunger was terrible.
perhaps this is what people mean by original sin, I thought.

it made me angry.
some regard anger as a kind of vocation for most women.
indeed, it is a chilly thought.
only the vocation of anger is not mine.
why construe silence anyway?

II.
the constant cold departure of h. from my nervous system
every time I drew a breath or moved through some tender touch be may or may not have given to me that last warm morning
was all something I thought myself too clever to get holed up in.
“You’re too smart for that” John said when I told him I was scared of what was going on
just before he left for Belgium.

I am not unfamiliar with this half-life of mine.
but there is more to it than that.
“of course there isn’t” Meredith would say.
"you really know how to hang puppies, dani" she's said.
just because he overheard your half-broken sentences he’d never bother to piece together – doesn’t mean you have to stick around to find out what happens next,
I would say to myself.
and by now, I’m back to listening to the kinks and cracking beers.

* * *

I wake too fast from a cellar of hanged puppies
with my eyes pouring into the dark.
fumbling

and slowly
consciousness replaces all the whiskey huts from previous hours
finally. dreamtails and angry liquids

swim back down to the middle of me
taken from that well-kept secret stash.
it is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
this is not uncommon after loss of love

however, I must say that this is highly uncommon for me.
again, I am generally not an angry person.
yet, I am interested in anger.
I clamber through my days to find a source for all those who are, well, angry.
I come across only one.

III.
I was having a dream right before the last tremens.
the dream was of an old woman lying awake in bed.
she controls the house by a system of light bulbs strung above her on wires.
each wire has a little black switch.

one by one the switches refuse to turn the bulbs on.
she keeps switching and switching
in rising tides of red hot anger.

then she creeps out of bed to peer through the lattices
at the rooms of the rest of the house.
the rooms are silent and brilliantly lit

and full of huge furniture beneath which bury
small creatures – not quite cats not quite rats
licking their narrow pink jaws

under a load of time.

I want to be beautiful again, she whispers
but the great overlit rooms tick emptily

like a deserted oceanliner and now behind her in the dark
a rustling sound, comes –

my pajamas are soaked.

anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart,
pouring up the vents.
last night I woke to this same anger,

the soaked bed,
the hot pain box slamming me each way I move.

I want an explanation. slam.
I want justice. slam.
I want to curse the false friend who said I love you forever. slam.

I reach up and switch on the bedside lamp.

perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.

moonlight in the kitchen.

2007-10-10T23:24:00.000-07:00

Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of my grandmother’s graceful demise.

The kind of sadness that a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own belly button
and which the Buddhists call
“no mindcover” is a sign of sexual despair.

The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like penny arcades situated in old run-down beach towns are signs that we might overcome.
My own calmness is a sign that I might never get well.

The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.

From these different signs you can see
how much work remains to do.

Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.

small, but muddled measures.

2007-10-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

you have been most kind
in speaking slowly
and inviting me in for a few of beers
with a state of mind.

although tongue-tied myself, your talk, our conversation
this discussion that I keep having with myself
has led me to uncover
certain false answers
to life’s basic questions.

once or twice we spoke our hearts,
kissed in slow motion.

only now, we simply measure the distance from each other’s hands
that we could never really bring ourselves to touch.

but we fuck.

I’ll miss all that.

and here we are just people sitting across from one another in some bar
that is seemingly crowded when it is perfectly empty.

I’ll miss that too.

however, we seem to have a breakdown.
can I speak to the manager of this joint?
it isn't urgent and i'm not complaining.
nevertheless, I feel I should say something.
I lunge for words
as you knock them down
in accordance with your firm fluctuation between good man and bad man.
helpful phrases come to mind.
they may have even worked.

you see, I want to be a good woman.
and I can’t stand to see you be a bad man.
and this is why I am leaving.

and this is why
I am lying
when I say
I can’t see you anymore.

I ain't afraid to roll in the bottom of things...

2007-09-26T19:34:00.000-07:00

sorry tim.

I’ve always had a predication for the company of emotionally unavailable men.

The half wits, fuck wits, dim wits, dumb wits, the poor man’s Kerouac, those pansies all cooped up in their own captivity, the morally bankrupt barfly, repeat offenders and all the others that I did when I was bored and stupid and willing enough to spread my legs for.

But, please don’t be misunderstood. I might be somewhat of a sure thing, but I ain't no trick so, on occasion, I'd make them earn it.
I had one speak to me in Keats the day Derek left and I needed a justification for taking on a bed partner.
Another, I insisted he kiss the security guard at Rite-Aid when we were buying condoms. The crazy motherfucker did it all right. And I remember cackling like I was listening in on a drunken discussion about lost love that was right on schedule in some cross town bar.

I bailed on him and went over to Will’s to get high instead.

And another. He was some hot-blooded lay with shitty taste in movies. His name escapes me. I don’t think I ever really knew it. Either way, I let him go down on me for a good long time, so perhaps the recollection of his name seems like a good trade off for now.
Sure. I’ve had them all. And there may have been three or four sweethearts in there somewhere, only I can’t really remember their names either.

This is from a past life.

So, as I was saying, I love men. I have all of their records.

Yet, I’m here on the floor alone.
The beer ran out hours ago. But the vinyl is, indeed, agreeably still sweet and warm, human.
It makes for Keith Moon’s resonance undoubtedly much more spectacular.
I tend to choose vinyl these days.

Nevertheless, I can’t get this one out of my head. I see his high heart and broken soul standing tall and proud in this here record player to my left. Looks like there is just another analog girl living in a digital world dancing around in her old party dresses, going crazy in her room again.
Likewise, there are three provisional little things I’ve recently learned about this little life of mine:

Number one: a morning of awkwardness is far better than a night of loneliness.
Number two: if you have to ask for it, you’re probably too old to have it.
Number three: I probably won’t go down in history, but I might go down on your brother.

And so here we are. Surrounded by those records that keep getting on and cans of Budweiser that keep running out - otherwise known as the very edge of the world and I never really liked heights.
Still, we are all so desperate to feel. Desperate to feel something and just “not get bored”. So desperate and bored of our own stupid boredom that we keep falling into each other and eventually fucking each other to the end of our days.

Best to ignore the shit and keep dancing.

obituary.

2007-09-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

never liked the word.

for max, as spoken in a late night exchange with an old friend.

darling dani.
charming actress, storyteller, constant companion, sympathetic disdainer,
steadfast supporter of ghetto gold, dwelling enthusiast, smoking gun, loose cannon.
all around loon.

remembered for setting the world on fire
and for creating chaos and uproar wherever she went
all but while escaping the clutches of her terrifying foregoing lovers.
made friends with everybody and anybody.

divorced as many times as she married.

the devil’s in the details of her untimely death.
although she endured far too much tie-dye and accuracy for one person to handle,
it was the exceeding amount of dial tones in which ultimately took her.

she leaves behind only good wishes.

Wild Wolves Caught in Curious Crosswinds.

2007-09-09T00:21:00.000-07:00

“I fear that these poor lost dogs may be the shadow of a future journey if we don’t watch out.”
Richard Brautigan, “The View from the Dog Tower” 1963.

I sat across from her at some stateline diner near Jamestown New York by way of Ithaca while traveling to Cleveland sometime in March a few years back. We were exhausted from our rumored higher education and the snowfall had gotten worse.
Our waitress had a glass eye and a wobbled waist as though she had been there far too long after closing time if you catch my drift.
We ordered a black and white milkshake and a couple of coffees.
We hadn’t really spoke too much on the drive as we had intended or rather, anticipated to make the trek go by faster as conversation tends to do when you are in a car traveling a long distance.
We listened to whatever music we were listening to at that time, undoubtedly some hippie shit or it could have been the Pixies but I can’t remember because it’s not worth considering to recall right now.
I just kept thinking about this dream I had earlier that morning.
It was still in my head from the time we left Ithaca, which was several hours ago, but then again, this isn’t unusual.
It involved a wolf.

I saw my life as a wolf dashing along the road
and I questioned the woman of that approximate place in that road we just passed.

Some regard the wolf as immortal, they said.
Now you know this has only knowingly occurred in one case and that
wolves die regularly of various causes –

bears kill them, men hunt them,
they get epilepsy,
they get a salmon bone crosswise in their throat,

they run themselves to death no one knows why –
but perhaps you never heard
of their ear trouble.

They have good ears,
they can hear a cloud pass overhead.
And sometimes it happens
that a windblown seed will bury itself in the aural canal
displacing equilibrium.
They go mad trying to stand upright,

nothing to connect to.
They die of anger.
Only one we know learned to go along with it.

He took small steps at first.
Using the gentle wind of New Mexico.
The woman at the bar couldn’t remember what they called him.

Things are as hard as you make them.

Mortal Accuracies.

2007-09-09T00:19:00.001-07:00

Chaos overshadows us.
Unsheltered sorrow shuts upon us.
We are strangled by bitter light and unnecessary flashes.
Our bones shake like sticks.
We snap
occasionally bend.
We grope.
We find our lost remote.
We give up and go dry.
We say hello and how do you do.
Our tongues turn black and say things we don’t want it to.
All day is endless.
Nights endless.
Our skin crawls, it cracks, it gets old.
Our room teases us like a kitten, then grows tired of us and the people we bring into it.
Our hope is a noose.
We take our flesh in our teeth.
We are strained and fall.
We are hung in a void.
We are shattered on the ocean.
We are smeared in the darkness.
We are slit and drained out.
Little things drink us.
We drink little things and we
drink because little things drive us to drink.
We lie unburied.
We are dust.
We know nothing,
We cannot answer questions.
We will speak no more.
BUT WE WILL NOT STOP.
We carve pumpkins and chew chicklets.
We have been instructed to call this His love.

The Rehearsal

2007-09-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

for Katherine and Meredith.

The last time I saw D. was a thick black night in September.
Autumn had just begun,

my knees were cold inside my clothes.
A chill fragment of moon rose.
He stood in my living room and spoke

without looking at me. Not enough spin on it,
he said of our three years of love.
Inside my chest I felt my heart snap into two pieces

which floated apart. By now I was so cold
it was like burning. I put my hand out
to touch his. He moved back.

I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.

Everything gets crazy. When nude
I turned my back because he likes the back.
He moved onto me.

Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself

thrusting my big burning blue backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.
There was no area of my mind

not appalled by this action, no part of my body
that could have done otherwise.
But to talk of body and mind begs the question of
soul and its existence.

Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.
He stayed with me.
We lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and
time,

caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language
like the children we used to be.
That was the night that centered Heaven and Hell.

We tried to fuck
but he remained limp, although happy. I came
again and again, each time accumulating lucidity,

until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down
on the two souls clasped there on the bed
with their mortal boundaries

visible around them like lines on a map.
I saw the lines harden.
He left in the morning.

The Boy with the Golden Arm (in progress)

2007-09-05T17:56:00.000-07:00

for Judah.

Beware of phone calls that come in the middle of the night.

It was far too dark to drive out to Judah’s farm that night, but the urgency in her voice brought me through the snaking roads of old Route 13 during those first glimpses of summer. I remember there was an electrical storm on the rise somewhere around Horseheads, New York.
So, this urgency that I am talking about would come one night when an old friend called and with a hush of her voice so softly said, “If you want to see Judah again before…you should come soon”. It is the very phone call I’d been dreading for years and by now, my heart was beating as fast as a sparrow’s.
I already couldn’t sleep because I’d been sobering up and the nightmares that come along with this process occupied a rather large corner inside my brain for almost a week now. I remember I couldn’t tell whether or not it was, in fact, one of these nightmares or a hallucination of sorts – another side effect I believe to be part of the process of drying out.
Since all these terribly dim thoughts were keeping me up at night and with the inclination to get into my car at quite an unreasonable hour, when it was too dark to drive out to upstate New York, I suddenly remembered that Judah meant more to me than most people ever will.

* * *

I could never remember his lady friend’s name. I suppose it is because I’ve never actually said her name out loud or spoke of her. Never could. But then again, she never noticed. This skinny little girl who brought all that junk to my darling asks the same questions. Questions like, “Do you know what time it is?” or “Wait, how do you know Judah again?” – all in her stupid slow heroin-logged voice. And she wasn’t too quick to pick up on my chronic roll of the eyes because she kept talking and asking those same fucking questions. The questions that I’d eventually have to pound out of my head like a drum, along with all of the things that Judah and I spoke about that night of the electrical storm.

* * *

Judah is making lunch for us and his lady friend is going into town for the night. Judah called all meals lunch.
“Dammit!” He shouted. “I forgot the ice cream!”
“It’s okay, I don’t really need any” I said.
“Of course nobody ever really needs ice cream…It’s just nice to have some in store for my July company” he says under his breath.
We were half way through a rather silent lunch until an almost silent tone, he muttered, “I remember you used to really like ice cream.”
I laughed and ashed my cigarette.
“Pistachio!” He exclaimed as he clamored along with the plates and the coffee pot.
“See…I remember”.
“That’s all you used to eat when you were on all that speed”.
“Remember all those bottles of wine you used to have to drink to go to sleep?”

“Yes” I said.
I remember I just sat there strumming my cigarette along the bottom of the cemetery ground of Camel lights in that old ashtray I brought back for him from Mexico.
There was something in me that was just so fearful of him. His addiction, his arm, which was bandaged up, his face that seemed so vacant. He looked like a hangman fumbling with a noose with every little chore he tried to do around that old farmhouse. Yet, the words that came out of his mouth off a little ease. Obviously, it was the phone call.
Still, there was this looming doom that seemed to have just reached the surface.

The place was a mess.

“Remember you used to just wear panties when you wrote? You would just sit there at that computer bare-breasted and all”
I laugh again and tell him I still do.

* * *
“At least I’m not drinking anymore” he says after a long while of silence.
“Don’t you think heroin might be a little bit more severe than alcohol, Dahlink?”
“Depends” he said as we sat there folding his laundry.

We always called each other dahlink. And if I can remember correctly, it was from Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, a novel that we both used to really like and quoted often.

And we’d tip toe around on blow and bourbon, disappear in my room on Plain Street until someone found us.
That’s how we got through the winters.

I remember the one night we almost fucked. I called him a pussy and he called me a prude. And we just laughed and touched each other for a long time.
I remember after that night, I always thought about making love to him. I would think how much it would’ve meant and how all the sex that I would have that came after would never come close to the meaning and understanding of our one night of love. It would have been a sweet sweet something that would eventually bring into a focus a picture of a sweet nothing- where that saying might have really started to make sense, accordingly, making it a little easier for me to walk away from the half-assed lovers that I just so happen to fall into bed with. And Judah, in one night, could have curved my vulnerability, but Judah always liked to talk vulnerability. In fact, he preferred me this way.

I told him about my ways of getting over a lover.
He wanted to hear about him, but I couldn’t tell him how everything happened.
“It's all for copy” he said.

He would be dead in less than a week.

God's List of Liquids.

2007-08-23T18:30:00.001-07:00

it was an april night of winds and rain.
leaves tore past the window and i didn't know leaves
existed in brooklyn.

i was smoking a cigarette outside on the fire escape and

god had the book of life open at a chapter called
PLEASURE.

and he was holding the pages down with one hand
at a time

"For I made their flesh as a sieve"

wrote god at the top of the page
and then listed in order of importance:
alcohol
blood
gratitude
memory
semen
song
tears
time.

Days of Letters and Forgetting

2007-08-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

In recent days
When the paper comes, I look for predictions in the weather.
Rain today.
Rain tomorrow.

The heat is growing and the humidity is
killing all form and reason.

I've been lighting the candles still
left in the house that have yet to slump
as many of them have
from this tremendous heat

I suppose it could serve as an archetypal homebody's
metaphor for an "only the strong survive"-
a saying that I never really understood.

* * *

I wake up early
and it's funny how, by now, moving back home
I know when my mother is doing fine by the way she
scoops the coffee into the percolator.
And it becomes very clear the way she stirs in the sugar.
I'm sure one day I will see a change in her wind
But not today.

I bum a few cigarettes and we drink our morning coffee.
Rain today.
Rain tomorrow.

All of the windows are left open and
there is nothing allowing me to begin my day
only the steam in the coffee driving up my nose
the heat of the mug
in that
cold kitchen.

Out of the window I can see cool green grass and
soaked chair cushions.
No dead leaves
Or dregs of snow yet.
Where the ground goes down into a depression
Rain today.
Rain tomorrow.
Slight chance of beer today.
Eighty percent chance tomorrow.

My mother speaks suddenly.
The therapy’s not doing you any good is it?
You aren't getting over him.
My mother has a way of summing things up.

When she goes back to work
I begin my daily burnings.
And I think I might not be able to
survive another winter.
Although it is still summer
Rain today.
Rain tomorrow.
Beer today.
Gone tomorrow.

* * *

A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside of my lids and
when I finally woke for the first time
quite early this morning
My fingers were numb.
Perhaps it is a side effect from the Ambien
Yet, I believe when they are frozen
Almost certainly, I was dreaming of the childhood that
once belonged to me.
Nevertheless, Judah was there.
The concrete meadow
where he used to play
The imaginary forest behind his house
where everything was discovered and more than
everything was all too possible.
Where he ran so hard he thought he would die.

Yes
I'm sure
that's the sound of his childhood.
Of our childhood.
Heavy breathing and shoes scratching
across the hard dusty earth.
A slight stubborn stiffness of the fingers is
the dream of childhood as it has been returned to
me this morning
as I watch the wax
of the candles melt.

The Girls at Lansing

2007-08-10T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Girls at Lansing
1.
At Lansing Residential Center on that particular evening the wind was blowing the cold rain in squalls across the muddied lawns and against the lighted windows of the building that shelters the girls I will be teaching. The grounds look eerily familiar to my alma mater, another all-girls scene, where the only difference is, we were enrolled there because our parents could pay the tuition, while the girls at Lansing are placed here by New York State family court system for “various criminal offenses” and have no choice in the matter. I remember thinking about this peculiarity between “them” and me as I walked steadily along the bridge built over the river that flows underneath.
The main building seems to look identical to the convent at my previous precious school, where my friends and I would sneak into during lunch recess and steal their old habits and cloaks out of their squeaky cedar closets so we could go bar hopping that weekend or another. However, looking back to that time, I think now how utterly irrelevant what I supposedly did wrong in my adolescence has in fact effected the woman I have presumably become. And the only real different between me, or rather us, to “them” is that they have no real autonomy. In fact, they have no idea what autonomy looks like except when they look at me. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I have a good sense of these girls. After all, I used to be just like them. As for us, we did these seemingly rebellious things because were given this almost inevitable autonomy at the place of our birth, where as far as the girls at Lansing go, they did whatever it was that they did to wind up here in the middle of New York in order to survive, to experience, to live. Or at least they did it for a while. I suppose the only thing they do now is tell each other stories. Whether they are true or undoubtedly false, as some of their stories are, they are still caged in this confinement, snatched from their human condition of street life, disbanded into a place that is only supposed to rehabilitate them, not teach them.
I am going here to teach them.
And they are going to tell me their story.
Since the inclination to work at Lansing, to teach a group of about 6 to 8 girls, depending on the day, if they could or could not participate in my lesson, if they were “good” in the previous days, or rather in other words, if they stayed within their box, that I came to work with them and their writing is distinctly a somewhat special one, seeing as though people and students who do venture up the slight seventeen or so miles outside of Ithaca onto the court of criminals and misunderstood young women, “only come once and never come back”. “They aren’t consistent…you have to be consistent if you want to reach them,” Dollbaby Cooper, the home’s youth recreation specialist says to me when I eagerly tell her I want to teach writing. This occurrence was an interesting scene when she told me this because she said this right in front of all 20 of my prospective students. The word consistency ran through my head as I turned and saw all of their simultaneously volatile and endearing expressions. I thought to myself that I have never been consistent with anything in my whole life. Always brushing off any kind of responsibility, condoning my behavior by saying something terrible like, “I’m only 23”, “I’m still in college”, or answering a midnight phone call that would prevent me from doing anything for about 48 hours and would go something like this “I am coming over with a bottle of bourbon and this hot new band who heard so much about you from so and so in Williamsburg, and are just dying to meet you”. In other words, the stuff of a typically privileged, college educated white girl from the suburbs, the periphery of an awfully segregated place that my hometown of Cleveland is. It was there I knew at that very moment I had to make my decision and right in front of these girls nonetheless. It was then where I had to acquire the life lesson of a certain responsibility, a lesson of “less talk more action”, an attempt to bring into focus a picture which did not suggest that I have lived my life entirely outside of the box, conflicted, concerned and with an only somewhat archaic sense of incomprehensibility. It was then I knew I had to do this because of reason and vocation: I didn’t see them as criminals, as I am told most do, nor did I see them as strangers. I saw them as kin.

2.
Same time, same place, I began directing a group of young writers stuck in the Lansing Residential Center. The home is often described typically as a medium secure correctional facility for girls ages 11-17. Where, ideally, the all female group were eagerly awaiting their first lesson. Hopefully, the sort of programming I will attempt them with will prove somewhat effective either today or some other day, eventually. I think to myself, perhaps their writing and their selective time with me, since I am completely devoted to them, could provide a sort of replacement for the “missing pieces” of their girlhood and their lives. I want to teleport them to a place where they feel most comfortable, most secure. For their first assignment I tell them I want them to think about what it means to be a woman where they are from by writing, and if they can’t do this, which Jaquana has a problem with, I tell her to write about something she hasn’t written about today. She writes about trust as virtue and something that is unattainable. Jaquana’s story is typical of most of the girls wedged in The System.
Her story can be “simply” told. In fact, when I ask her to write her story, she brushes it off, makes a little noise under her breath and says, “That’s easy!” Her story would go something like this: One day Jaquana trusted her mother. After all, mothers are to be trusted by their daughters. So, one day Jaquana started selling drugs. These weren’t the same drugs Jaquana’s mother likes. Jaquana’s mother like different drugs. On another day, Jaquana’s mother makes her go out and get the drugs she likes for her. She says to get them anyway you can. Jaquana did it through her body, losing that much more of her soul because all Jaquana wanted to do was make her mother happy. Jaquana says that she doesn’t trust her mother. She only wishes she could. But, after all, she ended up at the bitter end of Lansing Residential Center because she trusted her mother “too much”. Jaquana tells me, “If I would have known my father, I would have trusted him and left like he did”. Jaquana is fifteen years old, has lived at Lansing for a year, will probably be in there until she is 18 and the only thing I want from her is to trust me.
The girls have a good sense of themselves and have an even better sense of the difference between them and me. Still, the only deviation that they really see and verbally communicate to me is that I am white, they are black or Latino, I live “out there” while they are here, “locked up”. During the first lesson, they underestimate me.

3.
Around two o’clock on some morning last July, on the busy street corners in the community of Mott Haven, a 16-year-old named Yanique Serrano was stopped and questioned by police officers, one white one black, both whose names Yanique couldn’t remember, nor did she need to. A few weeks later she was indicted by the Bronx County court on felonious charges in possession of marijuana. She laughs about it now because she seems far too young to really understand that six pounds, the amount she told me she was arrested for, is an enormous amount.
In the spring, almost a year after her arrest, while Yanique Serrano sits miles away from the home she shares with her two great aunts in the Bronx, during my short stint of attempting to teach her something about writing, I see her once a week for about two and half hours at Lansing Residential Center. Again, I am thinking about what has brought me here. I only suppose now, after nearly a month of making the trek out to Lansing, that I began coming or going because I am interested in the alteration of issues, for an issue is what Yanique Serrano and her fellow detained mates had by then become.
Yet to understand how she ended up here you must first consider Yanique Serrano, who she once was and who she is now, to the State of New York and to me. She came from the Bronx, a characteristic all-too typical of the girls at Lansing. Her mother is from Puerto Rico and her father was born and raised in the Bronx. She met her father for the third time in her life only days before her arrest. The Bronx certainly has had its share of declination. In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the communities, including the community of Mott Haven, where Yanique’s family has lived since her mother became a citizen, underwent a weakening in the quality of life. Urban Renewal Projects, such as the Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway almost single handedly destroyed existing low-density neighborhoods in favor of roads that produced the quintessential urban sprawl as well as high-density housing projects. Another factor may have been the shift by insurance companies and banks to stop offering financial services to the Bronx and to other working class areas, more notably and most affectionately called the “rustbelt” in favor of building up the suburbs, “the sunbelt”, a practice we know as redlining, a sure process known to result in residential racial segregation, which by now defines the Bronx. The story of how the Bronx came to be the place that it is today as well as how Yanique Serrano came to be the young woman she is today is especially important in the indispensable contemporary African-American history of people simply because of the horrible notion that one day redlines were drawn on a map.
The Bronx police probably knew Yanique before her big time arrest, and probably had a list of all of the kids in the crowd that she ran with or just held drugs for. I am telling you neither that Yanique Serrano surely possessed the amount of marijuana she claims nor the court claim nor that Yanique Serrano did not knowingly hold the drugs, for in the context of social politics, Yanique Serrano’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant. I am telling you only how Yanique Serrano happened to be in the Lansing Residential Center, and why I go up there every week. Still, I do not get the sense that the girls at Lansing are or were intended to become my personal political martyrs.

4.
However, the time I am writing about, I think I was in search of a political martyr of sorts. While my current status as a fifth year undergraduate student was coming to an end, and in the time spent at Lansing, I was inadvertently trying to bring the photograph to focus which certainly at this point in time as I am living it, as an acquaintance once put it, “in a life of half-assed discrepancy, drunkenness, sexual prowess”. It has always been somewhat of a struggle to surprise me. It is even harder to get my attention and the type of notorious existence I have in Ithaca doesn’t mean anything to me. It may even be getting worse, nevertheless, this was the time where I was completely occupied in my mind, graduation, booze, and in the time I spent at Lansing. The only problem now, was that my entire education, thus far, everything I had ever been told, the jokes that were made about my work at Lansing, everything that I had told myself, insisted that teaching as well as writing as my craft was never supposed to be improvised: everything was supposed to be planned on a piece of paper, only now, I seem to have misplaced it, and the only ones that really found it are the girls at Lansing.

5.
Ashley, Jacky and Tonya are my best students. I already see myself favoring them over the rest of the girls in my group. They are the most attentive and creative of the writers. Ashley writes about love, Jacky writes about her life in Brooklyn, while Tonya’s poetry embodies one smart girl from the Bronx who’s social consciousness has suddenly broken through in front of my eyes one day when I tell the girls just to write what they want.
Tonya speaks in metaphors and dreams in chance. And when I say this to her, when I think out loud, on a day when I feel especially grateful to her for allowing me to come and visit with them and share their writing with me, she doesn’t really appreciate it. I get from Tonya that she sees through me a little more that I know, or at least she thinks she does. She doesn’t say much, but her writing tells her story and she has given it to me, and with that I am grateful.

6.
Driving between Ithaca and Lansing in the gloaming minutes in April I kept the radio on very loud. On this occasion I kept the radio very loud not to find out what time it was but in an effort to erase four words from my mind. Four little words, which when put together form a question, a question that I have asked so many times, but can’t really seem to remember any one saying them to me and meaning it. The words, or rather the question asked by two of the girls at Lansing were these: will you write me. Question mark. The radio played The Yardbirds. Will you write me? Somewhere between Ithaca and Lansing it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about photography or something else that just reeked with pretension. Somewhere between Ithaca and Lansing it also occurred to me that the sadness on this particular evening was going to present itself as an inability to drive my car along the Cayuga Lake and back into town. Sweet Josephine is going to sleep. I closed my eyes and drove along the lake. I kept driving because I had work to do, essays that needed attention, tests that needed to be studied for, because I promised the two girls at Lansing that I would write to them and because there was no place to really pull over and because everything in my mind was someway going to go into a letter that I needed to write.

* * *

I have known, since then, very little about the cause of incarceration, how girls can go from there to here overnight. I know that Jacky was released a few weeks ago, having no real education or training. I know that Ashley, her girlfriend, now sneaks letters out to her in Brooklyn. I know Amanda, a quiet girl that I never really worked with, nor did I know very well, is now housed in the mental health unit. I know the girl who braids her hair in the corner, in front of a mirror you can’t really even see into, is still on suicide watch. I know that the girls aren’t allowed to slam the doors to their bedrooms – a sacrament seen to most teenage girls with just a little freedom. I also know that their bedrooms are kept cold and the girls sleep with their faces on the radiators, leaving red markings on their cheeks in the morning. I know that Tonya still has ten months left and Yanique has six. I know that Jaquana doesn’t want to write about her past anymore, but her future. She once told me that writing allows her to “reflect on experience and see what it means.” I know that the first boy I ever loved when I was fourteen drowned three summers ago, putting an end to my own adolescence, losing that privilege.
Quite often, I reflect on my years living in Ithaca and not knowing that the Lansing Residential Center even existed, on what Yanique’s life in the Bronx really looks like, how Jacky is paying to ride the L-train and on the fact that I only may or may not have impacted my students, but I am still not sure writing this has yet helped me too see what happens next.

Notes on Boredom, Curiosity and Unmentionables

2007-08-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

Notes on Boredom, Curiosity and Unmentionables.
(Irreverence + Resuscitation =Grace Beats Karma)

I’m really fucking on.
Yet, there’s no time and place to tell.

I gave my telephone number out. Something that I almost never deliver.
Don’t give away the goods too soon
is what my Mexican mother might have told me
as it sounded much sweeter in Spanish.
And the gentlemen whom I had slipped it to told me that it was (utterly) “unsolicited”
Before noticing that he had recently grown facial hair, something that I might be a real sucker for, I said aloud:
That’s my line, dick!

Sometime before this minor altercation, and I was drunk, he told me he always sees me this way.
Weeks earlier, he whispered a line in my ear like this:
Why’d you have get so drunk and turn me on that way?
And I would say something matter-of-factly and from a great: How can I be drunk? I’m just drinking beer.

Moments later I would fall down in the street and fumble towards some old tomcat feelings.

They came around this time at quite a reasonable hour on my former lover’s front door, in spite the very fact that I began drinking at a not so reasonable an hour.
I gave a few slow and subtle taps as if reason has suddenly come back to me
Like a wind, a resuscitation of sorts that told me No. Stop.
a few more times
And one lb. away.

Got pulled over and somehow got myself out of the allegations of speeding and swerving and even mistaking the officer’s gender.

A friend who, 1.) on occasion places me in a seedy, rude corner 2. talks only somewhat pretty and 3. sometimes makes love to me
A trilogy of something I have no idea what it looks like from far away-all of which only moderately (or is increasingly) irritating me.

I told him one time that I had a good line on him. Where, sober, as I certainly was not, inevitably meant, I figured something out about you. Things will be different now. But, that’s all boring.
Hopefully, I didn’t let my guard down too far in the messages that followed-all of which I have no recollection. No resuscitation here. Perhaps something of a parallel universe. Still so boring.
Fuck it. It was the only thing that I knew about at that particular time.

Yelled at a cop. I think I called her a meter maid.
I wasn’t drinking beer.
I was drunk.

Hung over and thought for a moment that I should be more of a lady.
I went to the lingerie shop, where they sized me up and charted it all down. My tits got bigger, but the lady with the measuring tape had really bad perfume on so I only bought a few hot numbers.

I had a toothache but didn’t go to the dentist to find out about it.
The office space is too small and smells like latex and he’s known me since I was a little girl and couldn’t bear to let him see me this way.
I drank away my hangover and smoked a little reefer.

I stayed home from whatever I needed to do that day. I think it was Tuesday, and worked on some of my writing.
By two, I wanted a glass of wine and thought about hitting on the mailman when he came around.
I thought about Judah instead.

These are all things that go unmentioned in letters sent back to New York.

Untitled.

2007-08-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

Lately, I’ve been despising my loneliness.
There once was a time when I undoubtedly cherished it
Yet now it is only silence.
Drip.
drip.
drop.
At least he’s there.
Sometimes.
Sun-tanned and ready to fuck.
It’s not how I’d imagined it would happen. Although
in the back of my mind, I knew in a way it might. Probably.
Me being a “sure thing” and all.

Gradually, I understood that these thoughts were just
naked glimpses of my arms.
I stop and turn and stand into the wind
Only to find there is no wind.
No rain.
Just heat.
And I have no business left here.

Still
My arms
are long flaps, shreds of flesh-
a composition of my body-an extenditure of
what I might be truly capable of.
Perhaps I could touch him with them.
He doesn't make it at all possible
Still
I can feel those arms
and a heart beating inside mine
as I press into him near the dingy corner.
No. I think to myself.
I try and force my arms down
through air which is suddenly cold and heavy
As I were wrestling in a body of water
on that clammy summer night.

Loneliness: There is no organ that can take it all.

I imagine that these shreds of flesh,
In a quick flash, will raise up and propel away on the wind, leaving
An exposed column of one single bone
and blood
and muscle

It pains me to record this.

I am not a melodramatic person.
Still, soul is carved in a wild workshop

I am obliged that
I can talk forcefully and evenly
About the other furniture in the clinic-
About the unalterable spirit
stronger than a man, simpler than a child
The cruel illness
pain no words can render
The autonomous end
she sank rapidly

Nevertheless, the question (someone would say)
I am left with is the legitimacy of her loneliness.

Supposedly, one way to put off loneliness is to interpose God.

* * *

There is no question,
it would be sweet to have a friend to
tell things to at night,
without the terrible sex price to pay.