February 2012
2 posts
November 2010
2 posts
2 tags
2.
The nurses who are taking care of Andrea now are pretty nice. Some of them, like Juliet who has read hair and wears pink scrubs a lot which always seems strange to me, bring me things like plastic cups of apple juice with foil tops that you peel off just a little to make for smallish sips. Juliet calls me Jules and I think that’s how she remembers me, because our names are almost the same. Most of...
2 tags
1.
The day Loren came home and put a baseball bat into the middle of my sister’s back was my first day of ninth grade so I wasn’t home to help her.
It didn’t surprise anybody, what Loren did. That sort of thing happens a lot around here and he’d already gone three tours so it was almost expected.
*
It’s not his fault, Loren’s mom, Mrs. Tate...
July 2010
2 posts
Ode to the animals
I have been thinking about animals lately. Mine, in particular. I have been thinking of them in part because I see them all the time and also due to their enviable capacity for presence. To be fair, their respective abilities to think ahead encompass only the time between meals, arguably giving them a better shot at happiness than a human being, but maybe that’s the key, maybe that’s the reason I...
June 2010
4 posts
4 tags
Consolation
I am teaching eighth grade English to four students at a local summer school. They are all boys. Every day I come in with my books and my attendance sheet and my red pen and tell them to sit down, to be quiet, to hand in their homework.
They make fun of each other often. A lot of their jokes center around the bathroom, their respective mothers. At first I worried they’d make fun of me too. So I...
4 tags
Moonshine
I finally got my porch light fixed. It took ten minutes, if that. A man named Max came over and twisted off one of the screws that held the burnt out bulb in place, pulled a fresh one from a cardboard sleeve and bing!
Illumination.
I have been talking about getting maintenance over here to do this very simple thing for months now. For over six months. During those six months, I stumbled around...
6 tags
It is Saturday night in Valencia California.
Al green is on in Starbucks, singing about how She Used to Be My Girl.
I am writing this on an outdoor patio, typing to his words and the hum of female voices at the table behind me.
Teenagers wander out of the Starbs holding whipping topped pink drinks and talking over each other through braces and straws. Plates and forks collide at the hollow form...
5 tags
Barbara
As a means of distracting myself from the loneliness wrought by the semester’s end and a current state of unemployment, I have begun to shop.
I don’t buy much, but I do while away the hours trolling aisles and pillaging clearance racks. I check tags, feel fabrics and pick up items I do not need just to fondle their curves, set them back down and move on.
Tonight I wandered around the Wal-Mart...
May 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Letters to Blue (just started, unfinished, more to...
Dear Blue,
Driving across America. Alone. Writing you letters from empty gas stations. Rest stops. Roadside lodges.
Watch for their coming. Or don’t. Or pull them from your metal mailbox and throw them in the trash. Slip them under your bed sheets. Hang them on your fridge.
There will be more than one so make space. In your trash can. In between box spring and bed sheets.
There will be more...
April 2010
5 posts
6 tags
I will ride a road bike through France and maybe into Spain. I will do this alone or with a lover or with a friend. I or we will begin each day holding shins and pulling at calves and then riding for two hours laughing and chatting or remembering and humming to the whir of bike wheels and breath.
I or we will stop beside streams covered with stone arch bridges.
Will pull cans of pamplemousse...
4 tags
Squeeze
“Do you ever stand under the hot water and let it run hot and scald you and love it just a little?”
She looks at me. Holds her palms up to the showerhead like she is trying to catch the water it’s releasing.
“I guess?” She says.
I ask her these kinds of questions a lot, in the shower, mostly. Her responses are pensive and short. I don’t think she thinks about this stuff too much.
“I dream in...
6 tags
Darling
It’s Wednesday evening at six pm and still light out. The time has changed here in California and evenings dawn long before the sun goes down and this, I love. I wish I could see it now, falling on far off mountains, melting onto my balcony like so much buttery light.
Instead I am in this black box theater, trying to take notes on contemporary film theory but checking my email instead and...
March 2010
5 posts
It’s midnight on a Saturday.
I’ve just read an email in which she talks about feeling tired and skipping some excursion into some Egyptian market and I remember that I dreamed of diagnosis’s last night and grey areas and intangible solutions.
I don’t want to feel so wholly alone so I turn on the TV and mute the sound so I can read over my own manuscript and mark mistakes in red pen.
On the...
6 tags
SHE.
She is what I always write towards, perhaps in an effort to hold onto what is everyday slipping away.
How are you feeling? I ask her each evening on the phone, watching an imagined idea of her moving through an empty house.
I am eating cereal, she tells me.
You are at the kitchen table, I say. I see you there.
Lost another three pounds, she says and I ask her to please pour herself...
3 tags
Grey
It’s 3:30 in the morning, I’m flipping through clothes hangers and I can’t find a single paint smudged garment. Instead it’s all the rustle of plastic on plastic and dresses yet unstained.
Outside clouds are rolling over. The parking lot is dark.
I move through the apartment, turning off lamps, leaving plugged in the white twinkle lights that cast shadows on the eggshell colored walls, the beige...
3 tags
“It’s very hard, peeling off the layers of your own onion. When I get to...”
– ~Joni Mitchell, 1971
8 tags
Moon Shadow
My mother is boarding a plane tonight and flying to Egypt.
I am sitting here, after telling her I love you and hanging up the phone, imagining some terrorist hijacking, some catastrophic loss.
I am then picking up the Annie Dillard book I began to read last night and finishing a chapter on lunar eclipses.
My yoga teacher says the lunar phases effect everything. I buy this completely.
Sometimes,...
February 2010
5 posts
7 tags
Blue
1. I flew from California to Connecticut on Christmas day. Met my father at a diner on route one. We sat in a booth by the counter where short brown men cupped palms around short mugs of brown coffee. It sounds like little Lebanon in here, Dad said. 2. I order vegan, he orders cheese. The waitress removes plates. Brings my tea. I didn’t plan to but begin anyways, talking about my feelings, the...
3 tags
Dave
I’m thinking I might be obsessive compulsive because every night when I get home, I clean. I do this in steps, quitting only once I’ve made vacuum patterns on the carpet and doused my apartment in Lysol disinfectant spray.
Achieving this sterile end is a satisfying process. First I vacuum, making sure to scrub each couch cushion as well as the spots on the rug stuck with bits of fluff from...
5 tags
Dunk Rocks, Deep Breaths
I wake up in a funk from a dream about my friend’s boyfriend. He’d shown up at my house asking me to help. He was crying. I don’t know what to do for her, he said. I was sitting across from him at a wooden table, discussing a plan of action when the dog jumped off the bed and woke me up. I lie there mindless and shallow breathed for seven minutes before rolling out of bed, turning on the kettle...
3 tags
You. You are a child. Nine years old, standing on the edge of a dirt circle. Holding in one hand a bicycle helmet. On it are stickers of toothy sharks plastered over a blue plastic shell. It is fall in New Hampshire. Cut cornfields make for barren strips of land. Brittle stalks stick up like broken teeth on a plastic comb and line the circle’s edge. In the center, a rusty folding chair. A broad...
January 2010
1 post
Today my horse Ham boarded a truck in Connecticut and left his home in the East for a new one with me in California. It is seven degrees below freezing in the place he’s set out from, seventy degrees and sunny here where I wait. It’s hard to say just how this move’s important to me. Hard to say how achingly glad I am it’s come to pass. All I really know how to write is that I spent years preparing...
December 2009
1 post
4 tags
Bell Pepper
I am charting this life
A constellation
A topography of places I’ve been
I am doing this at 11 o clock on a Saturday night
Staining noodles in my kitchen
Slicing green peppers and remembering my father
It seemed he was always cutting veg
Mixing red onion, raw broccoli and chives
In big bowls with wide hands
Saran wrapping
Knife sharpening
Wiping down the wooden cutting board with a smelly...
November 2009
8 posts
“I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words...”
– ~Virginia Woolf
Seventeen
It is dark in this hallway. In the foyer of my parents house. My hand is on the wall, feeling for a light switch. Your hand is on my hand. You are behind me. Covering my back with your front. My hand with your hand. My mouth, with your mouth and missing. Searching with lips stretched thin. Over my face. Your breath is warm and smells like scotch. I am afraid of you. I want you more.
Or want you...
Thirty Three
We make her in the morning.
In that blue grey house on Martha’s Vineyard. Blue grey and worn by beach winds.
I am awake before him, lying on my side facing his sleeping back. He is shirtless and breathing steadily under skin, under thin blue bed sheet. I count three moles; a constellation I’ve not yet noticed.
The house is quiet this morning and perhaps that’s why he sleeps on. We are...
Cory
I wonder what we’ve created out of adolescent girls
With limbs like twigs and dime eyes
Does she feed herself when she’s alone
Does she sit quietly
To deprive someone of silence is a universal form of torture
So it is something inhuman that’s dismembered without noise
Everybody is famous nowadays
And busy
Performing
Perfected
Personas
Of interesting
Look at me I want
Your body
Your...
Writers Block
You say slow down and I say never but I know it’s just my brain seated on a barstool ordering diet cokes and pretending they’re vodka sodas. I imagine myself as I imagine you imagine me to be. Today a sexpot. Tomorrow, a free spirit. And that until I can’t take whimsy without control and revert back to whatever I really am; A creature revealed only after midnight, illuminated by the light of the...
SPERANZA
There is a photograph of myself in flight.
I was six years old when it was taken.
In Italy, with my parents on vacation.
We’d driven in a day from Rome to Viterbo.
There we ate pizza margherita.
Walked hand in hand in hand – a chain of flowers, una catena dei fiori – down the cobblestone streets.
Slept in an inn with stucco walls and gatos everywhere.
I wore a tourist t shirt.
SPERANZA it...
October 2009
18 posts
Notes on Dying
1.
I drive over red blotches on the 405 and wonder if they’re the blood stains from some gruesome collision earlier in the day.
I can imagine that head-on happening to me with a cinematic clarity.
Can picture so plainly the intersection of my vehicle with another.
All shattering glass and sickening crunch of car metal, skin, and bone.
2.
Skin and bone. Intersected, dissected, resected and...
Death Fugue
I reread Celan’s Death Fugue last night. The circles of words he shapes – ashen hair Shulamite, golden hair Margareta- stirred in circular motions my memory. The darkness – black milk – recalled the darkness in which I first read the poem. Night classes in New York. Fall semester sophmore year. Professor Anthony Robbins. We watched Godard, Resnais. Read Sontag, Celan. Studied death camps,...
Why you’re so tight lipped he says, lowering the camera and looking at the image reported back on its digital screen. Oh, he says, because you’re from Connecticut. Ouch, I say Exactly, I think Because as much as I might like to go Sex sex sex and my cunt I can’t
I was looking up shrinks in the LA area Playing with the idea of...
Monstrous
1. Monstrous monstrous monstrous me, bent over and illuminated by the white light of the fridge. At midnight. On a Monday.
2. Monstrous he, horse, equus, cheval.
One part French – un parti francais- for his beauty. One part sea creature for the spiny ridge that thick braids form along the crest of his neck. Like individual vertebra on a bony water monster. So FIERSOME and bold. So funny when,...
Pamplemousse
A series of impossibles hung over the railing.
We washed them with our underwear in the bathtub,
lay them on the window sill to dry.
Bleach spotted pink cotton next to potted begonias.
Magnolia was my name then.
I sprawled spread eagle on the bed
sipped
Pamplemousse juice from the mini bar.
Fresh from the shower, wrapped in terry cloth, she picked up the phone.
...
Finders Keepers
I go to Starbucks today to try and write a poem because at least at Starbucks I can listen to other people talk and write that right into whatever I’m trying to say and somehow it always seems to fit this I have learned is called found material because when people say things they just lay there in the air like fair game for someone like me to swoop in and snatch up their story and add it to my own...
California Slugs
It’s raining tonight. First time since I got here. Water droplets hit wind and fall in slanted streams. For some reason, this rain’s not as repellent as the east coast makes it. There, I run from it. Sprint from house to car to barn to house. And if I happen to have an umbrella, cling tightly to its handle. But here I let rainwater intersect with skin. Find it refreshing after months of blue skies...
The path climbs steeply upwards
And the dog and I climb it
He padding forth and I
Rolling off the balls and toes of my feet
Trying to muster energy with the movement.
It’s a new wilderness, here
On a dusty road lined with sage brush and succulents
I am full of desire for it
Full of hope and also fear
I look for rattlesnakes
Imagine mountain lions
Still I want to sit in the dried creek bed and...
The couple who lived below me were EVICTED.
I saw the notice on their door and two days later, they left in a cacophony of cardboard boxes and car wheels.
Don’t make me do this alone, he yelled at her, Don’t you make me —
Do this alone.
Fuck you, she screamed, fuck you fuck you I hate you.
Car door slams. She skids away. And the next day, they’re gone.
For weeks...
“Below the window
Flesh and rock and hunger
Loose in the night sky
...”
– Excerpt from Eclogue by George Oppen
It’s seven o clock and I’m straining noodles in my new kitchen.
Outside, kids are laughing, screaming, shrieking with glee.
They make cannonballs into still pool water, shattering brief moments of stillness with their splashes.
I go to put music on and realize I don’t want any.
I love these sounds.
Writers, has it ever happened that you become someone you’ve written of?
Maybe not wholly....