LETTERS FROM FIRE ISLAND

something like forgetting, a dusty let-go

2010-05-03T07:20:00.001-04:00

Gone brittle, all over in dust
winter’s long whooped
its last shudder,
its final heaving chill.

On a corner I remembered you
in shades of geometry,
slender lamps slouching
dense yellow heads.

I knew long ago
how to sing out
in years and seasons,
but now you are lost on me,
plural, occasionally mysterious
or very truly passed.

My maps are fatigued,
estranged. They feel
too much
too often.

My maps are blank or
coffee rung. Mountains tower like monsters,
skylines shatter the grid.

I knew once how to cough up words for dirt roads, long slow
veins branched at significant moments, family plots
splintered off then full stop where the hatchet’s dug up,
rotten through wet, sagged across the palms.

I lived long with gravestones,
lived long on this decay
fended thirst with ashes
caked at the base of my gums,
breathed in the over echoed air of the last hymn
stuck on the high noon of a bright stubborn old day.

Weather the Storm (from last spring's final project for poetry workshop. A crude cut and paste job.)

2010-04-12T17:38:00.002-04:00

weather the storm  ghosts carry  on the spine  and shoulders,  weighing their forms  on skin,  on flesh   binding white bones.
bodies turned  in the seasons  to ashes  to dust  to dirt  dug out the ground,  to make space  of the solid,  to hollow a hole  in the thick   of the earth to scatter   the soil  in chanting  a final say   for the love  of god.  
weather the storm,   as the long scorch   of hot months
forgets  as rain softens   barren weeded lands.  water fills splits   in the earth,   mends faults   in the hard ground   while the pour   wets forth oases, atones the cruelty of a blind sun.
heat condenses,  extracts damp  from the fertile  land, swelters  a brining wake  with a turn of the other burning cheek.  
columns crumble,  perish to pillars,  salts sifted   through a sieve   of cupped hands.
weather the storm   of sirens fallen   off facades, torn   off steeples  screamed from   a pulpit of knotted wood,  an assemblage   of crooking limbs  begging alms,  exacting penance  in sundering sky.
wings of plastic bag angels   rattle in the breath  mutter crumpled prayers   for a turn  in the wind, a rift  in the fold.
weather the storm  when in winter   the heart   hibernates  the beat slows  the body gives,  cripples in the freeze.
to hold the heart  in the hands  pulsing warmth   to cracked and dry  skin  dripping a trail  as heat   burrows  holes  drops on the sidewalk  sings on   the covered street when another  for warmth of body  saves the avalanched self  the soul  buried months long  suspended months long  in ice.

weather the storm  in spring  for this one,  the darkest   of ever,  and wet.   rain shores  on the street,   shadows pavement  as a receding tide  on drying sand.  in evening   if clouds part,  stars persist   through up and outward  urban light.  the glow reaches  wraithed streets  lunar and delayed  on the near hour  and some billion years.
weather the storm  sleeking manholes,  pouring forth from the rivering gutters,  leaking off awnings.  soaked rains   through seasoned leaves   anoint the foreheads   of passersby, carrying through  
on the stop and go  of traffic splashed off fallen ponds   and straits,  bodies warm on  sewer grates,  a heel catching stubborn  for a moment   missed.
a slip  in the shoes,  slackens the step  stairs slouch   in a building’s   slummed shadow,  crumble as fallen rock   off the cut side  of a stone hill  plywood confines  decay,
a rot from inside,   forgetting   the life   of a thing.

Slouching Toward

2010-04-04T06:37:00.000-04:00

How we left, cleaved our hearts
in two. In my mind
we are pilgrims, dirty and sweating
grit in the eyes, orange clay
in ragged half moons
beneath clawed nail beds.

Bonnets and buckles,
tatters in burlap. Funeral pyres,
wagons. Dust floes, sandy red
apparitions that blinded
our course to the west.

Lately I dream of deserts,
a trek. Boiling sun relentless
in its beating. Hardly in beams
but heavy columns yoked
across our weakened shoulders.

But then it is not so. Our distance,
an ocean, the sea. Steely birds
grind and whir, streak the sky
in earnest. Stomach hollowed
with a drop, a turbulent shudder.

Far below we carry along
a paved course. Outrun
our stumbling ancestors
with their high noons,
their five o’ clocks.

Those ghosts sink once
and over in the soft dunes.
Above I smile at the small hours
to pass before I see you again.

Along the highway we approach
the ends of the earth. Birds bounce
or quiver on half smug power
lines, all a hum and chatter.

I have not seen a road extinguish
on the horizon since the last time
I felt at home.

Frequency

2010-03-23T13:50:00.000-04:00

We are fed through power lines
words in a woodchipper
our voices emerge, savagely cut
chunked and piled
on the other side
Filtered through time zones,
sifting exchange rates
placing you in spent hours
spent hours through grey afternoon
a slow twilight and single sky
I have not seen the sea in a million
years, we call it enemy
blame the vast water
the culprit of our crippled we.

I am Pangea longing,
my orphaned shores adrift
distant and jagged
hacked from my breast
stuck in complement
to my shape, skyrose
or deserted, black or tumbled
with an outward tide’s refuse.

then there are the principles of echo
when abyss envelops
your distant voice
when mine turns back,
sharp and how, I wonder,
one learns about the calm
or violence of open water
for that is where our words
and silences hover,
pierced or particled
rising and falling
on the heaving wet lung,
rocked on the turning sea.

Spring

2010-02-15T11:55:00.001-05:00

Poor child was strung up by her toes upside down in a tree, taken by a bird mistaken for a bird could have been hatched out of an egg for all she knew bits of shell in her curls her hair slimed in white she’s devoured the yolk but this was an accident it was not meant to be for she did not wear feathers but lace and had not a beak but a few jagged seapearls stuck in her gums, fresh with ridges but there she was, helpless her dress hem up round her ears her frilled socks ripped to tears and tatters hanging up by her toes upside down in a tree.

2009-12-13T10:35:00.003-05:00

Sounds all register the interior structures of whatever it is that produces them. A violin filled with concrete will not sound like a normal violin. A saxophone sounds differently from a flute: it is structurally different inside. And above all, the human voice comes from inside the human organism which provides the voice's resonances.

-Walter Ong, Some Psychodynamics of Orality

Houses I Have Known II: Taking Stock

2009-12-12T10:00:00.002-05:00

My first home after
mom’s womb was
a matchbox apartment
on the beach in San Diego
there were lemon trees,
a bathroom skylight,
and the rushing ocean

the second place was the site
of my first dream
it was there that I crawled
through the clunking
insides of a clock,
all cogs and springs,
and I looked out across
a bulldozed horizon
a yellow machine
blasting piles of dirt
for no apparent reason

once my grandfather
and his wife visited

my mother said
I like your makeup
my grandfather's wife said,
thanks it’s pancake
and I’ve spent over
a decade trying to figure
if I heard correctly

after that we switched
country sides
it was a yellow duplex
near boston
where I think
there was a miserable Christmas

in the spring we
searched for easter eggs
in the early summer
my father found a rotten one
forgotten months before

I had the chicken pox
and scratched for days
examined my tongue
in the mirror
and tried to pass it on
to my brother

this is where the
circuits fail some

oh yes, we went a town
or two over
moved into a house
that smelled like paint
I put my nose
to the walls I loved it so much

my mother described it as
salmon colored

she exercised
on a Stairmaster
and prayed the rosary
at the same time
I’ll never forget those
heaving Hail Mary’s
the rhythmic Our Father’s
in time with
her flexed calves

My sister told me
what pot was,
my mother and father
screamed
I’m not sure
what was wrong
I remember rolling fruit,
apples and oranges

One day my father
got into his beat up Volkswagon bus
and drove away
to Oregon

there was another yellow house
near Boston on Six Park Avenue
my mother mentioned the address
to everyone
I wasn’t sure why it mattered

I read the Secret Garden
I listened to a 60’s box set
my father sent in the mail
my mother gave us a fish
and we had bunk beds

once she wouldn’t let
me sleep up top she said
if you fall off
we’ll be buying you a casket
and that’s that

Houses I Have Known (to be continued)

2009-12-11T10:12:00.000-05:00

a worn out farm
lodged on aged
horses’ backs

slow whither,
rainwater spewed
from gutters
choked on past
autumn leaves

shingles curl
at edges,
warp and weather

slick black
in the rain,
a tired cracked
grey beneath
high noon.

all the fallen
houses I have known,
gaping doors
and windows

always the roof
to bear down
on the rot,
witness to all
manner of decay

the estate
overgrown
settles beneath
thick leaves
moulding bound
in brush and vines

dandelions bloom
out of dark gramophones

flies impose on sepian figures
preserved under glass

2009-12-09T17:21:00.001-05:00

remembering our respiratory
dissonance, I am lying in bed
it is winter again

I harbored suspicions
that the last might never end
but then there was spring
and everything was dripping
or had dripped

snowdrifts melted
to stationary puddles,
a nice place to keep
one’s reflection

once we stretched
the wee hours and walked
in that eerie blue light
to that terrible part of town
where I lived, it was cast
in morning twilight
but that doesn’t have a name
so far as I know

I tried to screw the cap
back on an orange fire hydrant
and then there was grease
all over my hands

that was inexplicable

there were fake golden flowers
in the saddest planter
I’ve ever seen
I thought I might die at the sight of it

suddenly nothing grew

and we were in bed again
the light shifted upward some,
and rising.

Two in the Wilderness

2009-12-07T06:06:00.001-05:00

together  in waiting,
punctuated  
movements  (pause)

I am a valley, I
a river
here  we converge

the scene resists  landscape,
they wade in pages.

speaking is tongues
words words words

historical recitations
recitatated re-r-
esuscitated mouthof  mouthfulof
man  mouth ofaman

shakespeare’s throat
wheezes poetic
death rattle chest
dreams on the
death bed

thou doth pulse
soft,
mouth of a woman

tethered lips
to another’s
neuroses.

historical recitations,
addresses audience
exclamations
(pause)
devastated

here, converge
wading through
pages,  movements
punctuated,
space (pause)

I'm Picking Your Brain for Things You Forgot

2009-11-11T05:07:00.004-05:00

Scenes of My Father's Ghost

2009-11-09T12:24:00.003-05:00

I.
My father’s ghost lived behind my eyelids  between the hours of eight pm. and eight am.  from the time I was nine years old.

Once the sun rose,  his ghost preferred  to reside in the crawlspace  at the corner of my room.

He came about in dreams,  relentless in his accusations  with unkind words  that cut into the dark air  of my imaginings.

“Why”, I asked, “did you die?”

A doctor enters, interjects:
“Well you see, he could have lived.  We have the technology. But  we didn’t know that then. We’ve worked  with many cases like your father’s.  They’re all fine now.  Sorry.”

My father reappears:
 “Well, I didn’t die. I faked my death.”

Then I would wake.  The sun was up, my father’s ghost  would slink to the far end of the room,  not to be seen until  the following night.

After some time, this all became  less frequent. The doctors disappeared and I would not set foot in a hospital  for at least seven years.

Once he came to my sister  as she slept on a trampoline  in my aunt’s backyard,  the indian summer  warm in her hair.
He extended an apology,  told her everything would  be fine, then dissipated  once again.

II.

My father’s ghost  is a blooming wildflower  off the crags  of a lonely mountain.

My father’s ghost  slipped in through  the floorboards  of a creaking cottage  to watch an old man  dream on his deathbed.

My father’s ghost  is separate from the body.  In fact, it has never once  been to Virginia,  nor is it interested  in visiting.

My father’s ghost  remembers the fall , sleeps through winter,  and often  forgets the spring.  

My father’s ghost aches  in the hot months,  recalling its first  lonely summer  after life.

My father’s ghost  never inhabited a cat,  but watched  with moderate pleasure  as my mother and sister  once called to a stray where they thought  he may reside.

seasons

2009-11-05T14:25:00.002-05:00

the headlines read today
someone caught a fugitive line
that was something like:
"but the sea is too far to swim"

it crawled out of the slop
in a world war trench
slinked up the ditch
like an amoeba sprouted legs
to up and leave the ocean
through and through
like the development
of skeletal structure
calcification of the first bone
a ring in the marrow
the tone of dispossession
which resides between keys
somewhere before your voice
meets mine

today my tears roll on
like the back hills of pennsylvania
that time we tricked sunday
and our eyes glazed sedate
off the sounds of synthesized
billboard hits and brown gravy
a hole in our brains
bigger than a bread box
torn off the residual effects
of engineered epiphanies
and i asked in twenty questions
if it was magic

we piled stones and whispered
in the waterfall's shadow

Dentalium

2009-10-29T10:51:00.001-04:00

Clung to a shifting vernacular,
speech unclear, gnawing the soft
inside of the cheek
in nervousness.

I am sure that my inflection
is not quite right.

So it rings like pre-dream
sounds, conversations wove from
ceiling fans and knocking
radiators.

The wisdom teeth
are suspended
evolutionary echoes,
mine puncture the gums
crowd the mouth—
attempt a chance
at gnashing some tough thing,
but these days I hardly
chew meat, and molars
are best fit for sinew.

I thought how romantic
to bury a milk-tooth
under a Banyan tree.

So for some hours
I played witch,
decided fertility would be
the aim, precipitation
the result.

Thus ensued
a continuation of longing,

the rain washed
earth from the spade.

Portraits of My Father at Sea

2009-10-29T09:43:00.001-04:00

I.

His memory
drifted--

no, adrift
it went
forth in knots

labyrinthine
longitudes,
tidal shifts

spatial subtleties,
cardinal directions
imperceptible

particular fibers,
particles awash
filtered fast
spineless
shelled

his spirit
transient,
extant, yet
unclassifiable

separation in simple
terms, suggested
categorizations
for the discorporate

we must strictly
stick to stone--
stamp initials
dates, final
remarks

cremation an option
associations strong,
largely undesirable

so, his body  was casked--
no, casketed
embalmed, emboxed

interred.

defined as  
one:
to place
(a dead body)
in a grave or
tomb; bury

or  
two:
Obsolete.
To put
into the earth.

II.

His memory
adrift, went

sank beneath
the turning
surface
swirling pools
oceanic passage

an image,
the vasty deep
perhaps where
horizon
meets
sea

slight curvature,
shape theories concerned with
shifting horizons

astronomical
assertions of
spherical
orientations

his body, stationary then
carried east
on engines, wings

those steely
pallbearers

Smithfield, Virginia
directly
beneath the sun

genealogical proximity,
insights into
relations/personal  tragedies,
beliefs.

III.

His memory
drifts,

drifting
the sea at
eighteen
for months

left home,
to breathe salty air
to chew boiled meat,  soft vegetables
in the mess

forks and knives
scraping
in time
a bell rings  the hours

years later,
a tale about a man with no teeth
but cafeterial
status

navigation principles
charted clusters
deceased, persistent
then rising  landmasses off the abyss’
edge

boy of eighteen--
maybe nineteen,
no matter, awash
out about
the mighty ocean
tying knots,
raising sails
hardening skin
on upturned palms.

A Momentous Rediscovery

2009-10-23T11:25:00.001-04:00

the summer swept us by 
sweat on the brow, sun
on the brim
shine in the eyes, and once
on a vast expanse of field
I looked to you and dared  
to seek my own reflection
in your fluctuating pupils

The Slovenian Bell Ringer

2009-10-23T11:22:00.001-04:00

We rang the bells near dawn  to cue the sunrise,
and the women wept
wailed, donned black for thinking
someone had died. The sun came, haloed its light 
on the sounds, and echoes admired themselves
reflecting off the wet grass and distant
crags. Men kept the children
from the belfries, so they pounded sheet metal,
grenade shrapnel, measured out water in
glass bottles to make
various sounds, beat the earth
with scythes and pickaxes
to keep time. It was then
we knew it would crumble, as the bricks
loosened and bells cracked with the hammers’
relentless strikes. We, embracing, fled to the hills
to watch at a distance. From there we saw it,
like giant shining flower bulbs,
like magnificent beasts shot down:
hundreds of bells wheeled away
to toss in the furnace then
flatten, their melted remains
fashioned to bronze cannons.

2009-10-08T05:20:00.004-04:00

Apparitions

2009-09-13T20:08:00.001-04:00

would you if you could
would you pull my voice
from your own throat
would you throw it
to the air, to hear
it echo like it did
when the season
was warm?

would you if you could
would you pull my body
from indentations left,
depressions in your mattress?
would you if you could
would you talk and answer
yourself with my sound
to feel less alone?

if i could I might
I would perhaps
to feel less alone,
to break the quiet,
take your voice from
my mouth, throw it
to these empty walls
to answer the sadness
in my own sound

A Lull in the Season, Afterlife Musings, and Universe Leftovers

2009-05-27T10:04:00.002-04:00

On the Here and Hereafter

Limbo in sainthood,
a translucence
splits wings
out either side
where a spine
marks the median

Exhale

I am a million words breathed back in the troubling reverse of a screaming decade.
I am reconciliation of a black hole sat in the center of a spiral armed galaxy.
I am a single made molecule in the square footage of a stadium, alone in shattering
laws of physics with stunning accuracy.
I devour all I perceive, consume each owned conception.
When reality relies on the distance and depth of sight, it is made and thusly altered.

Overcast, and a heavy sack of groceries.

2009-05-11T12:24:00.003-04:00

PLEASE SUPPORT IN OTHER WORDS, ATTEND THIS READING!

2009-04-10T16:16:00.002-04:00

In Other Words Reading

Moonstone Art Center,

110 South 13th Street, 2nd floor (above the old Robin's bookstore)
Hear Temple students and faculty from In Other Words magazine
for World Languages read their poetry, stories, and translations. Readings will be in English.

Stephen Benscoter, Prof. Hanoch Guy,

Thomas Riese, Lauren Spahr, Juan Vila, Thomas Viola,

Prof. Justin Vitiello, and others!

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
For more information, please write us at
inotherwords.temple@gmail.com

www.temple.edu/inotherwords

Circulation/Reserve

2009-04-10T11:21:00.002-04:00

Temple University has been slowly disposing of the card catalog, placing the cards out on the circulation and help desks to be used as scratch paper to write down call numbers. I have collected a number of them and use them for bookmarks, birthday cards,typewriter feed, and poems, incidentally.If you are ever near a stack of catalog cards, I highly encourage you to take them, examine them, build things, eat them, etc. There's a lot of interesting stuff on those little rectangles.

Circulation/ Reserve
Straight Ahead

I am separating cosmic/coincidence. I am associations always. Now that the card catalogue/all is electronic, the scratch paper is old rectangles of information with a single hole punched through, begging to be rewritten.

FLOOD INSURANCE STUDY:
… Borough of Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Cumberland County

In Cumberland MD., a small town made of mostly wood paneling and church steeples, my sister was incarcerated. My mother went to bail her out, and fell in love with her public defender. He was much shorter than her usual “type.” When the planes hit in September that year, we up and moved to the mountains, northening the center of terror/fire/danger as we drove south.

…Township of Fayette, Pennsylvania,
Juniata County.

On Fayette St., my mother and the lawyer were married on the front porch of an old Victorian house we rented by the month. Her fifth, his first. One of his friends/coworkers took photos with the Polaroid camera they used at the office for domestic abuse cases. I thought of all the ugly things that it had captured and then spat into the light. They sent me to private school. I wore my skirt long and froze all winter.

KEEP LATEST ONLY

Circulation/Reserve
Straight Ahead

EP 1.17 Transcript, Public Meeting on the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976;
Subtitle C, Hazardous Waste Management.

17090 EHX 07/71 Waste Treatment Lagoons- State of the
Art
In an undisclosed location, we have a population of mermaids/men living happily and willingly in our State of the Art Waste Treatment Lagoon, where there is a healthy abundance of Coleoptera, Asellidae, Astacidae, and Gammaridae for their consumption. As these creatures are (roughly) half-human, 50% of U.S. labor laws apply and they are compensated on a biweekly basis, contingent upon quality of waste treatment/quantity of waste treated.

17090 FJW 02/72 A Mathematical Model of A Final
Clarifier

Our mathematicians are currently calculating in upside-down leather chairs, anchored with bricks and cinderblocks somewhere beneath the Navigable Waters of Boston Harbor and its Tributaries- Massachusetts.

17090 FQJ 09/71 Biological Concepts For Design and
Operation of The Activated
Sludge Process

To understand fully The Activated Sludge Process, one must understand the composition of Activated Sludge as well as the salvage industry what it is, how it works. Generally brown-greenish or blackish-brown in color Activated Sludge may be found in above ground gutters and underground sewage systems, occasionally on subways trains and platforms.

A Continuous and Exhaustive Celebration of the Shift in Seasons, Amen

2009-04-05T23:51:00.005-04:00

Working on a final project for poetry class. Poems about... places and things, mostly. These two here await a third, as yet unwritten.

Post Meridian

a bride is blown
by the wind
in the park
tree branches
creak
the sun
beams

a breeze
lifts the veil
gathers cloth
at the knees,
pulling up
a cloud of
soft, heavy hem

a gust of pigeons
ascends,
a flapping sheet
of molding grey
hovers low,
then a rush of air
beneath wings

splits the seams,
beams burst through,
birds on the hem
the wind carries

Eventide

Shots did not ring out, but sank
did not sing, but ate holes

in the talk on the street,
emptied voices into a second’s

static. The roar of the ear
cupped in a seashell of air

gasped out the barrel
so quickly, the house went

slant with red and blue flashing,
the block squared with yellow

tape to echo the sound.
Ground triangled and circled

in chalk, lines of salt about
where the slugs stuck on falling.

Big Yellow

2009-04-01T02:12:00.001-04:00

tonight i call the moon
big yellow
a clipped toe nail
hung slant

the city brights
glow upward
and the clouds are
dense steam

tonight two cats howl
two cats claw
and i hear fur
tearing from flesh

someone punches
a pillow backwards
handfuls of cotton
whisper to the ground

perhaps tomorrow i'll harvest
tomorrow i'll collect
aluminum cans, gather them up
with the clatter of dull bells

tomorrow i'll comb the streets
catch plastic bags in plastic bags
to watch them rattle and flutter
in the city's great heaving lung

Eau

2009-03-22T23:24:00.002-04:00

Our ladies of skin
dance in themselves
our ladies of flesh
wove and kindred
our ladies of the selves
of the selvas
of vegetation
of green where
shining jungle flowers
fall a sleep at night

steam rises from
brush and streams
tiny capillaries of water
roll off glossed
vert leaves

and the rumbling of frogs
and the hissing fogs
and the birds rustling
plumage and foliage
rubbing branches and
backs, bird backs
branches brush brush
brush—bakaw,
baakaawww
and the rose and
falled calling

Moon-logging and Dreams of Solar Luminosity

2009-03-22T12:15:00.002-04:00

Some while it's been so welcome back if you were away or went away because I went away but now the coldest part is over so we can all sweat and melt a little and become real people again, rather than dimmer versions of ourselves.

Parallax

I.
In the beginning
god created
all things

the egg came
before the chicken
and he hung

the sliming yellow
yolk in the sky
called it day,

then splattered the whites
across a vast blackness.
dripping moon
and stars made night.

globular clusters,
a dipper-full of
dark matter.

black holes devour,
vacuum light

II.

morning approaches,
the geocentrics stir.
a pale slice of stale

smelling light,
the refrigerator door’s
ajar.

night again,
a twilight weak
and momentary

the helicopter
searchlight hovers
like day is trying ,
peeking through shifting
pinholes in the sky.

the moon wants,
the stars choke dimly,
tall steel reaches
upward to smother them.

evening traffic
honks and hums.

Elegy, Manuscript, Trying:

2009-01-25T20:09:00.001-05:00

This has resisted organization. This has come together and fallen apart numerous times— there are pages and pages of poetry begging to fit to one another. Some argue that when writing elegy, the poet’s thoughts break down because grief shatters the mind and contraries coherence. My memory has broken down, fragmented. Pieces halved and quartered to other pieces. I have a pile of memories translated to poetry. Scrapped, folded, and stained on my bedroom floor in a wooden crate. I placed too much meaning into objects, put too much stock in location. I treated my dreams too much like reality. I tried to fit a story together that is too vast and tangled a web to be navigated. I aspired to understand everything. I expected every realization to be the realization. I prayed to some non-god for epiphanies. I prayed to the universe to reveal itself, for the multiverse to map itself, for the stars to constellate in some way that might lend the sky to a meaning that I could record in the pages of my notebook. My handwriting has deteriorated tremendously. There is a story for that too. Everything I see and touch I can bring back around to my father, to death, to mortality, to the eye in the sky that we feel staring or blinking when two giant circles become concentric and arrive us at meant-to-be moments. There are things I will tell. There are things I will not tell. There are realities I have run from for many months now. I never confronted fully the story I wished to tell because I considered it rather as a condition. Now I see that the two are part of some hybridized one. Our condition is that we are our story and our story is the story of others. When a person takes on the responsibility of documenting truth, or truth as he or she might understand it, that person takes on more than the truth of one story. The truth of one story is the truth of hundreds or millions of others. We drift and overlap like autumn leaves, we carry and fall off the wind like dandelion fuzz. Some of us are swept into the same pile and left for the season. Some of us push up from the wet spring earth with the same stories to tell about someone we knew so long ago that the name sounds foreign on the tongue. In the fragmentation there is a great connectivity that cannot be restructured. Pieces fall across state lines, they drift to sea.

Sightings and Signs

2009-01-16T16:03:00.001-05:00

The summer after my father died, my mother took me to the optometrist to get a new pair of glasses. They dilated my pupils during the examination and I felt as if my eyes were bulging out of their sockets. When we left the office, the afternoon blinded me and I spent the rest of the day squinting and shielding my eyes from the sun. In the months following, I regarded my poor eyesight as an advantage rather than a disability. In supermarkets or in crowds, I would take off my glasses and let the world recede into blurred imbalance. Without the detail in faces, every tall dark haired man could be my father, perusing the frozen foods section or buying a movie theater ticket.

The fall after my father died, my mother was jogging through the park near our house in New Jersey. When she came home there was an orange cat following her. She told me that it started following her while she was running and when it looked at her she felt as if it was my father. I thought it ran like a lion, my sister started calling it by my father’s name, Seth. It stayed on our porch for a few days. I rejected the possibility that it was my father, because I was sure there was no way he could have been reincarnated into a cat that had certainly been alive longer than the four or five months since his death. The cat eventually disappeared to stray on somewhere else and we never saw it again.

During my first year of school after my father died, I had a collection of tiny vases that I kept on my windowsill. Whenever I was completely alone, I would arrange them in a circle on the middle of my floor and try to summon ghosts in our house. For me, everything was a sign or omen and so I regarded any creak or draft as a reason to attempt a meeting with the spirits. I never asked for my father specifically for fear that he would come, and for fear that he would not. After many failed attempts, one of my séances resulted in a mysterious knock that I swore came from inside the wall of my room opposite the windowsill. I decided it was my father that had knocked, and that I would never again use my vases in such a way.

2009-01-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

I substituted a part of something for the whole, but the effort was foiled when I realized that every stapler was broken. So I was forced to fasten this with string and I wove it together sloppily, albeit gently and with love and I pretended I was a Cherokee woman tying a rock to a stick and creating a sacred and beautiful weapon for battle. How I long for some kind of antiquity. How I wish that I could trace my ancestors back to their huddled masses and then before that to the warm country side of Italy eating olives or maybe Austria, wearing heavy coats.

Things In My Room and In My Mind

2009-01-03T04:34:00.002-05:00

thank-you, Odetta.

Twelve pounds of laundry
Sit soft in a paper bag—
You, and great intrigue.

CAMELS: a haiku

2009-01-02T13:58:00.001-05:00

How the camels drink
They trek across the desert
Have two humps, two humps

12/25

2008-12-25T23:59:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-23T11:09:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-20T19:20:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-18T15:46:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-14T21:03:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-14T16:42:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-14T12:45:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-12-12T14:45:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-10T04:20:00.000-05:00

“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

2008-12-07T16:05:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-05T14:41:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-02T19:46:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-19T21:31:00.000-05:00

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

2008-10-29T20:26:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-19T16:19:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-28T13:18:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-28T13:17:00.002-04:00

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

2008-09-27T17:26:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-09-27T03:30:00.001-04:00

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

2008-09-24T15:21:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-24T15:07:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-22T20:07:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-09-19T09:14:00.001-04:00

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

2008-09-17T21:49:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-17T16:07:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-09-17T02:58:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-15T23:54:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-10T23:59:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-07T17:26:00.001-04:00

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.