12/25

Last night I found you and me on a beach somewhere where the water lapped up on the sand like slopping mouthfuls of garbled words. waves fell and rose eastward like men kneeling in prayer. The meeting was peaceful and silent and the night sky was bright low in the distance as the horizon pushed daylight upward into sight. I hoped that lightning might strike and strike and the sand would turn to glass.

When I woke the memory was vague but the sensation of being near you clung to me. The feeling lingered, the feeling that nothing existed outside of the two feet of space we kept between our bodies.

Then today I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike and every crooked tree that sat against the rapidly darkening day was an angry tangle of spines. The sky was orange and the bark was black and the landscape laughed at such unrealistic hues.

Discontent

There is a deserted town
with doors swinging,
willed by phantom winds and
the translucent fingertips of
tourist-ghosts.
No one is here in the cold
months, only the in-and-out
of a freezing tide.
She needs
a change of scenery,
and at least
twenty more degrees.

India! Or: Dear Roommate, Across the Ocean

There you are across the ocean shopping for saris and I imagine what it must be like to go back to a place with which you are so related but from which you are so estranged.

The sun is on your skin and it is warm and if the air of our neighborhood and that of your current location were to collide it would smell like cheesesteaks and curry and there would be a whirlwind tornado of dull winter greys and brilliant dyes of purple and orange.

Something important would merge and sitars and bucket drums would ring like weird bombs in the freeze and balm of a crashing afternoon.

Thermostat

Last night I managed to sleep with ice cubes in my head and I was sprawled out in suspended animation somewhere warm and the kick and hum of the heat vent was a noisy breeze that ran itself awkwardly through my hair and across my shoulders. The years all fill to the brim and then spill into each other and there’s no way to separate them once they mix and so I’m six and I’m in the womb and I’m nineteen wrapped up in farm animal sheets having my first dream that I can remember. My house has turned into the inside of a clock and I am climbing through gears hoping that I won’t fall through and get my ribs crushed into a million tiny bone needles. It’s six in the morning and the ice cubes have gone and now it’s just a million pounds of water vapor trying to leave my head and the light creeps in through the window and people start chatting outside and I am thrust into another day and all I can smell off myself is stale lemons and limes.

The Jazz Man

I found my old USB drive recently and it is chock full of ancient microsoft word artifacts such as this one. Enjoy very much, please.

He pounds on the
protruding belly
as if to wake a beast
from an ancient slumber.
He plucks at the strings,
vibrating sinews
belching guttural lows
number after number

After the Flood

Last week, the rains left
mangled umbrellas in

pieces all over the neighborhood.
I watched them decay like roadkill

over the past three days.
The taut black material eventually

blows away, and only the crooked,
spidering metal of umbrella skeleton

remains. But they do not decay, really
they disappear. Tattered city tumbleweeds

that roll down, down the block
and eventually catch in the gutter

or get carried up to a garbage-nest in
a wheezing grey tree.

Everything Suddenly Honks

It is the afternoon, the week has recently Decembered. I am praying for a sea of yellow cabs to burst through the skywall of the city and flow onto Broad Street. Suddenly, it happens! They begin falling. First slowly, and then a downpour. No one knows what to do. Cyclists and old ladies and bums everywhere are getting squashed under the great weight of a million falling cabs. The pigeons all fly off in a grand flutter of moldy grey feathers. The squirrels move in closer to investigate the sprawling and continuous wreckage. They think that the cabs are going to feed them. I look around, wondering what happened. I had only wanted a little excitement. A little bit of New York buzz to get the blood pumping in my veins. Instead now the city is peppered with yellow piles of metal and everyone is terrified and I never knew the capacity of my own desires.

An Open Welcome to Friday, and a See-You-Next-Week to Thursday.

Is love the blood of the universe?

Life flows through us, within and without us, and I imagine every pulsating organ, its own vital factory. And then we are real. Some mornings when I wake I take a moment and realize that I am seeing the world as if my eyes have turned to fish bowls in which my pupils can swing on a hinge and look in every direction. The day breathes on me and I am alive!

Last night I drank too much and I leaned on a friend’s shoulder and there was some memory of a voice echoing in my head and it read like a mantra and felt as if it were the deepest of truths but I came to find that it was really just some clever rhyme to remember at an inconvenient time…. “Beer before liquor. Never been….” To Europe! And I had never been there and the voice in my head knew and I realized it was mine and it rocked me up and down, and from side to side. The Earth could be uninhabited.

That was a momentary shift in consciousness, inward.
Last night I dreamed and I could see everything happening to me transferring to my brain as I slept and goodness I remember my dreams and I worship the REM cycle! By day, I saw my best friend caring for her pregnant sister and I swelled with every emotion that means something beautiful is happening and in my dream there were awful horror movies, terrifyingly crude and terrible, but I could look away because my best friend and I were surrogate mothers to the same batch of children and we held hands and knew that everything was beautiful.

That is exactly what I mean.

The universe is a giant body or a heart or a moment and it pulsates and moves and it is a functioning massive being and love flows through it and makes it go. I know it to be the most natural state of existence, to love, and it flows through us and we are hearts and skin and fingertips. We embrace and push away but most of all we embrace, or should. And I love every child spilling out of the womb and into this earth and if the universe is living then there are bustling worlds of dust and static between every planet and there love exists too, even if life forms do not. Love transcends and arches over all else. Love becomes us.

Pulse

“And somewhere lions still roam: so magnificent they can’t understand weakness.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Contemplating the blotches on
our skin we are
compromised.

All night I would rest
my weary head
on a block of wood
attempting to transfer
from one to the other
some form of
consciousness.

Look at this landscape.
An endless silhouette of
upward-reaching
steel and metal.
I do not know
chemical compounds.
If I did, perhaps this equation
would come simply.
But I do not and it
does not.

There is an emptiness
associated with
the shell.
That is, material
surrounding space.

Once I thought
that every building
was my father.
This was disproved.
Instead I now find
that buildings fill up
flat endless space.

Try to fathom the universe.
And we do. And we do.
So now there are
oranges and bodies and children.

So now there is
a world so
full to the brim with
things, that we can’t
believe it was ever
previously so full.
There are cavemen
suspended in time.
Icy tombs ready to burst
with life on hold,
if only the sun
could melt them and revitalize
their contents.

Beneath the endless
cracking clay there are
pots that once held water,
ancient water.

Geography consumes
and bellows.

A child in a basket
floats down, down, and we are
all immaculate.

Everyone was conceived
without consummation.
In this way,
we accept existence
without disgust.

Breakfast

Winter comes as I am cracking eggs over
a frying pan in the concrete grey morning.
The trees have gone bare but
the lovely young women are still fertile,
as if summer did not end, but rather
took refuge in the mishmash of organs
behind their flat white stomachs.

I imagine a field of sunflowers
bursting brilliant greens and yellows
inside my uterus.
I hold an egg in my hand and somehow
feel I am confronting an ovary.
Sipping coffee, I realize I am
lost in the refrigerator's
cold trade winds,
contemplating fruits and vegetables,
trying to figure out
how to be a woman.

Limbus

Walking down the road in the morning, he began to feel old. His knees ached and his shoulder ached and his head was aching earlier but the pain of that had subsided, mostly. He knew nothing about Barometric pressure but he thought perhaps that was part of what ailed his joints today. “The air,” he thought, “does feel exceedingly tight on my body, as if I’m wrapped—parts of me wrapped— in sheets? No. Plastic?” He could not place the sensation, as he’d never felt it before. It was as if the air had taken a tight, knotted grip around his lower thigh, above the knee and also around the place where his arm and shoulder met, near the joint. Suddenly he awoke lying in the middle of a field where two men stood over him discussing futility. He did not know what kind of futility. That is, the futility of what. He felt his left shoulder with his right hand and the hand came away covered in blood. He looked down at his left leg, to his knee which had ached. The knee was gone, and all the rest of the leg below it. A man’s belt was cinched tightly around the leg and the pool of blood beneath it suggested it had bled for some time before subsiding to a slow pulsating stream. He was torn apart as a doll at the mercy of some sadistic child-god which had plucked pieces from him. He closed his eyes and grasped the sticky wet grass with his wet red hand. He felt hands grabbing, perhaps those of the futile men, grabbing as if trying to keep him whole. He retreated back to the unnamable, implacable road and walked, for he would much rather walk with an ache than stay in hell; would rather walk than lay half-dying on an expanse of half-dead field. The day was not cold, but suggested that the cold may come in the following days and weeks. As he walked down the road, he touched his shoulder with his right hand and the hand came away once again covered in blood. He looked about— no one near, no one for miles it seemed. He looked at his hand. “Strange,” he thought.

For the Record

I did not consume the apple.
The apple consumed
me.

I explained this to you. You, with your green scarf and year-round tan skin. Your hair is short so that the dark curl cannot be detected. I explained that the apple tasted fine but normally I probably would not have liked it. It was too soft, but at the time the texture in my mouth felt good, as if the atoms in it separated like sand that wasn’t tiny rocks.

Millions of tiny
grains of apple.

The surface was jagged and fibrous. It was mars, it was tundra. The landscape of it was wet and white with tiny green spirals shooting up from it, nearly imperceptible. I saw the apple living, I saw every fiber of its being. To the core. I ate it then threw it out. I explained everything about the experience to you. In this way, I told you I still love you. I told you that I am still alive and that I detect in everything some form of life.

The winter season
changes me annually.
Without
fail.
Receding
fall.

I imagine you in your city and I, in mine. We don’t have apple trees, but we have apples. I realize now that the white jagged landscape is really your concrete jungle a few hours north. I devoured the thing, devoured you. The whole episode was exceedingly strange. It resisted… interpretation.

I kick myself
today.
I wanted
the apple for
breakfast.

Somewhere in a black hole there is brilliant light that can’t escape. It is there that you and I exist in the same perpetual moment. It is there, squinting with my hand above my eyes to shield them from the light, that I tell you I love you over and over. I eat the same endless apple.

An Episode Preceding My Birth

Before I was born and my mother was a strict Buddhist-liberal-vegetarian she stood on the beach in Los Angeles and fed birdseed to a group of doves that had washed up on the sand like sleek feathered shells. “Where did you come from?” she asked them. The doves spoke English, though their native language was Mandarin, a happy coincidence, as my mother had learned how to count to 100 in Mandarin and also knew a few common phrases through her marriage to a man from Korea. The doves paused a moment on my mother’s question and then laughed the sound of gongs. “We came from everywhere,” the doves said, “for we are everything. We are light and also air. We are the unfathomable drops of water that make up this sea. We are howling angels imploding into new matter. It matters not where we came from, but why. We came to tell you that you will move to Philadelphia and become impregnated by your chemistry professor and you will beget a daughter.” My mother laughed the carefree laugh of a woman aware of her own dreaming. She laughed the laugh of a woman that once felt the wind and noticed the sun. She threw the last of the handful of birdseed and the doves disappeared and she worried a moment for she was unsure what had taken place. Not long after, my mother’s husband smashed up her white mustang with his green mustang and the steel horses clashed in an expensive shining crunch of metal. Not long after that she moved to Philadelphia and her time there was interrupted by a belly swollen with child. It was a daughter (my sister), and in the first ultrasound my mother swore she saw the flutter of wings in the grainy black and white picture.

10/29

Today I was struck by a number of sights that perhaps would not normally arrest my attention. However, I feel as though with each passing week I have become increasingly inspired by simplicity, exceedingly distracted by that which is considered common. With a change in seasons as the backdrop to the mornings and afternoons, I imagine most anything can be beautiful. Yesterday it rained, it rained hard. I pedaled to school, musing about rain-related idioms. My hands were freezing, my legs soaked. It took some moments to for the blood to restore feeling throughout my body once I finally entered a warm and dry room. Today I pedaled back from school and it was then I saw a mangled upside-down and inside-out umbrella, the handle sticking straight up from the street as if it had taken metal root in the hard black pavement. I remembered yesterday; I thought of today. My hands froze again, dry this time. Winter is upon us, and soon the sky will not expel cats and dogs but rather blanket the streets in snow. The wind will howl and the cold will be bitter as a woman scorned. I hope to have gloves by next week, perhaps a heavier winter coat the week after. I will try to dress for the weather.

Miss Hazel

Miss Hazel sleeps
with two eyes open:
one out the window
one on the cats.
She's lived on N. Gratz St.
her whole life,
attends church
every Sunday.
Wednesday, too.
"S'long as y'all be good
an' behave yoselves,
we be fine," she tells me from
the second floor.

Our street seldom sleeps,
Miss Hazel knows best.
Cats claw into the night,
ignitions won't turn
over as darkness
submits to the day.

We don't need cans and strings
or telephones.
Just a voice and an open window
to poke out the head,
check the scene,
shout a hello or profanity.
A "how you feelin'?" or
"Shut yo' mouth."

Law & Order

We ripped the bong and my mouth was unbelievably dry— I needed water but there was only seltzer. My throat was flesh on fire. Passing the church, I saw Mary on the half shell. Her stone fingers sculpted into a strange sign. An ancient fuck you or a signal to steal third. I don’t get sports. The fog was thick. I think we smoked up the whole town. We had a fire in the back yard. Green flames devoured junk mail—an electricity bill and five million dollars from Publisher’s Clearinghouse. I was high, and my contact lenses bonded to my pupils. I think my eyes changed color recently. There was a tiny boot on the sidewalk, a doll’s shoe. Jesus Christ, Barbie’s been raped and kidnapped and murdered and they’ve left her boot behind! “We have evidence that Barbie may have been turning tricks.” “That doesn’t make it right.” I ring the doorbell and slide my badge out of my coat pocket. A dreamy dirty blonde answers the door. His jaw is strong and his ensemble is impeccable. “Excuse me sir,” I hold up the Ziploc bag containing the evidence. “We found this and we think it may belong to your girlfriend.” I rattle off a list of questions, standard procedure. He is our number-one suspect right now. “When was the last time you saw her? Could she have been using drugs? Weren’t you concerned when she went missing? What’s in that deep freezer?”

Actually, it may not have been a boot.
It could have been a leaf.
Television has poisoned my brain.
I’d never join the force.

A Dirt Road, WA

She dreams of climbing to the top of a silo. An ancient structure protruding from uneven dirt and field. One can be in a valley and not even know it, she says aloud. She gives no thought to the silo or its function. Later on she looks back and remembers. She wonders whether it had been empty or full at the time she ascended it and stood at the top. As I gripped the aging later, she thinks, was there a winter’s worth of corn inside? Was there hay for all the cows? Was there simply nothing? What is space when it is enclosed, enveloped by matter? What is space when around it there is a shell? That is emptiness. Once at the domed top of the silo, she looks across the land and feels the way one feels when in a place that shows no signs of being what it is. She knows she is in a valley but cannot see it. The neighbors only pick up static. A woman in a trailer ages considerably in only a year’s time. The father of two small children across the road brings her Epsom salt. The two will die in the same week. All this she sees as she looks across the farm. The river. The falls. A vast expanse of memory. A fabrication of thought that defies the laws of space and geography. It is day but the harvest moon sits heavy in the sky. Suspended conveniently in the background of the scene. The world collapses neatly and folds itself into a tiny square. She places the folded piece of space into the silo, fills it to bursting with one flat scrap. She shoves the silo into the ground with her thumb. The earth does not resist. She fills the hole with the father’s books and clothes and then covers it with some dirt and leaves. She wakes.

To Mrs. Laurenzie, Whose Red Lipstick Was the Brightest Thing I Saw On the First Day of School in 1998 When I Moved to Haddon Heights, New Jersey

I write out “remembrance” and it looks
like Rembrandt.
I recall in the fourth grade
looking at
a book of
his paintings.
At one in particular,
my art teacher exclaimed “how beautiful!”
Rembrandt had painted light caught
in the slick muddy side of clay on a wheel.
To me at the time
it just looked like a white band
of nothing that had found
its way to a potter’s hands.

I am on Friday, but the world is on Saturday. Let us not argue over it.

This evening we danced. I mean "we" as a collective "we," rather than a shortened "you and I." I realize that this is solemnity, though not loneliness. This is detachment, though not isolation. The seasons are changing and the days grow colder and eat up the warm ones, and soon the summer is outnumbered by infinite dehydrated brown leaves. When the color leaves- no, exits- our faces, we are whiter, sometimes sallow. I mean "we" as a collective "we." Not a "you and I." Do not take this as fact, but consider it as truth.

Latin American Politics: 11:40-12:30, MWF

In some dreams I am a lioness and alone I trek through the jungle among rustling waves of green. As I explore the dark steaming depths, I stumble on a clearing. There are things I recognize but that should not be there, and I know the names for them though I am a beast of the wild. There is a table, an old typewriter, a box of necklaces, a pile of clothing, a string of colored flags with strange writing on them. I know what all of these objects are, and I am suspicious it is part of another consciousness hidden somewhere in my cerebral cortex. Cerebral cortex? I must have heard that on television. Television? How do I know about television? I paw at the typewriter, a clumsy attempt to record this scene, these thoughts. But my paws are too big for the keys and the letters are curved symbols I cannot read. The paper is damp with wet air, the ink won’t stick.

The air cools, the green fades, the leaves blur together and fuse into flat darkness. The clearing clears and the musty smell of wet earth becomes the stale smell of unwashed laundry. I awake on all fours scratching at my typewriter.

Refrigerator Magnet Poem

he is so silly
following spring
glad that his
once magic light
yellowed for good

The sun comes before I wake and leaves too soon before I sleep and though I implore it to stay (I say, "please stay, please stay, don't leave me") it goes without a word, without a wink. Not a nod. Nothing.

Then the air cools with the approaching evening, I breathe it.

There was a time when I favored the moon but that has long since passed. It went out with my singing. Night singing beneath stars. Singing out the blues and grays, cast in the jaundice of streetlamps.

Morning came &
hit her over
the head —
hard.
The afternoon
devoured her headaches
with hours to spare.

Please enjoy this throwback from just over a year ago.

I woke up at six fifty.
Scraps of morning light
draped themselves across
the floor and ceiling,
the walls
and a pile of dirty clothes.

My eyes burned and were dry.
What the hell is this place?
The apartment was almost empty—
Finally.
It looked so much bigger
without all that useless stuff.
I was only there for the night.
I dreaded showering,
and shaving my legs
and washing my hair
and hating my stomach

We got to the funeral home,
an old Victorian house—
the inside a blur
of aging flowered wall paper
stiff carpet
and pastel accents
the color of easy listening music
on very low volume.

The door to the room
folded like a brown,
creaky accordion.
I saw the giant spray of flowers
somehow resting above the open casket.
I picked those out, my mother said, smiling.
They remind me of Hawaiian shirts, I said.
They really did, and I liked them.

Somewhere, PA

Between two pieces of glass collects a condensation that cannot be rubbed away and so she pauses to watch it dissipate beneath the sun. “There is no resolution” she reminds herself— a wait with no foreseeable end. A weight so profoundly heavy in her chest. This is grief and it penetrates her dreams, permeates the waking day as well as the retreat of sleep. She believes that with time the skewed silhouettes of the world will appear clearer, will hold pronounced against the recurring picturesque sky of summer mornings. She looked upward the night prior and saw stars, and underneath them she slept. She thanked the universe for reminding her that she is small.

They sat on a bench kissing. He bit her lip.
"Want to go back to my place?"
He bit too hard to be sexy. 8 hours at work had brought them to the bar & 2 hours at the bar had lead them to the park. Now from the park they would go to his apartment. Really, it was his friend's apartment. He had been staying there for two months. She was curious if he paid rent. She did not ask. He slept on a fold out couch with no sheets. There was a book of CDs under the pillow, a discovery she made while he went to the bathroom. They kissed all night & into the morning & it was awful. She slipped out at 8:30 a.m. & rode her bike to a bookstore & then through that same park, then to her house. Her hair was windblown when she got through the front door & she realized she had left her hairclip next to the makeshift bed. At work three days after she asked him for it. Weeks later he still had not returned it. It was a black ellipse with pink & blue flowers on it. She imagined how it would be when they made the subtle exchange at work. She imagined it must feel strange for a man, to have a ladies' hairclip in his pocket.

Day One

Today was long but went
like hotcakes. The weather was
not so extreme, after all.
But oh, the sun did shine brilliantly.
I got lost for awhile, beneath
pages and pages.

Plots

Grief distorts her vision
she sees everything in
the backward light
of the past. She stands at
the edge of her father’s
grave and wonders
what makes these plots
so beautiful? To one side,
a yellow field
leans, willed by the wind.
A forest wraps around
the left perimeter, a right angle.
The road to the place
is small, and winds around
the curvature of the landscape.
Two brick pillars announce
the location of the entrance.
Perhaps it is because she often visits
in spring, but she swears
she always feels the sun out there.

Orange Lady

Today I sat on my stoop and had a smoke. I had an anthology of American Literature in my lap and was reading Daisy Miller. A few bugs bit me. My room is on the first floor, the window to the right of our porch if you're looking at the house. I heard a crash come from my room but thought nothing of it. Later on, I came inside and saw that my wall hangings had fallen down, cause unknown.

There is no way to know, but it probably went something like this:
The cheaply framed photo of John Lennon in front of the Statue of Liberty fell off the wall. As it came crashing down it took out an orange statuette of a woman's face (I think she may be Indian) that was hanging directly below it.

I found a whole mess in a confused pile on my desk upon entering the room. I've hung everything back up now, but I'm a little concerned as to how long they will hold.

Otherwise, today was somewhat uneventful. This entry is meant to serve as an introduction to myself and my writing. I hope to use this blog to make my work accessible to anyone interested.