grandpa

misty mississippi morning became a foggy alabama afternoon became a drizzly georgia night.

& the air was warm for december and everything smelled like it should, and the waitress at the cracker barrel poured endless refills into my tall plastic cup of sweet tea.

we were like seaweed, remember? i wrapped a tune of you up in old newspaper ads, tied with white kitchen string, to open and burst into song on some faraway day. i hid it inside yr fiddle case as a surprise, in case you ever return.

the cedars by the alabama roadside are squat and dark green, lovely on this dull grey day. they smell like pencils, my grandfather says, you stick yr head in and they smell like pencils. he dislikes the northwest because it's all the same shade of grey-green. i'm too wedged up against that one grey-green city to remember if i agree.

salt, pepper, two kinds of mustard, and a half-empty bottle of tabasco. he picks each up in turn, reads the labels, tells me stories about a hot sauce made on a small island off the coast of louisiana, in the original old factory, by hand, and aged for, like, two years. this island has salt mines, oil, and the hot sauce factory. they're filthy rich. something about the old man, and his will, and beautiful modern houses that were built there. oh, the architecture was marvelous !

he sighs, and pushes his plate across the table so that i can finish off the last few greasy french fries. we stand up slowly and i wipe my fingers on my jeans and he waves good night to the waitress and we walk back out into the wet parking lot and the night.

the cold

The way the night continues despite everything. The way the dawn of another grey winter sky creeps up across yr back while you look down, trying not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. My cheeks are rough and ready for the sting of the wind but the thin skin on the insides of my wrists reddens and aches where my sleeves ride up to leave it exposed to the cold.

The cat is yelling outside the front door again and some soulful lady is howling on the record player and we're all sitting in our bedrooms mumbling about the cold.

for so long

We inserted words
into spaces in the rain


Yr feet trudging home through puddles and I am glad. I don't know what you are thinking.

I will cough this out of me, cough my lungs hoarse and dry, pour more water down my dusty throat and pine for morning air.

Hocus pocus. Focus harder. Down behind the ink somewhere are wedged my indecisions, insomnias, incantations. I don't want to know better than to want you back. But I do. (Want you, and know.)

My itchy hips pitch fits. These woozy, snot-nosed dreams get less strange all the time. I sleep, and dream of bicycles and packages and record stores and vegetables. I dream about love like compost, messy and hot and beautiful. I dream of firm yellow squash and translucent onions browning in oil. And you, with yr pinned eyes, stumbling through all of my nightmares. I sleep so heavily with someone else near, comforting in the dark. I fall asleep so easily alone now, too.

What a way to start a fire!

kneejerk

These days I fall asleep slowly, wake up too fast, fold insomnia round me in a stiff approximation of selves I'd thought I'd lost. We stare at art 'til we're dizzy. I'm susceptible to patterns, to shifting lines. He said he liked the style with which I hightailed it from the room, out into the windy night.

The other day we danced to stay warm, pedaled out a sweeping arc through our cold, wet city, til our lungs burned like my wind-soaked cheeks.

It doesn't matter, because people fall in and out all the time. I could just pretend, for the sake of some solid, dreamless sleep. For the sake of the skin on my neck.

Snores are shaking the floorboards. There's a funny stale taste on my tongue, like cigarettes, or forgettery. The air by the doorway smells of sweet fermentation, around our cluster of colorful jars.

I'm grasping at the same threads that bind my hands behind my back.

redo

We talked for hours over burritos, about Vienna and cynicism, about food and poop and friends and sex and getting older. When we finally pulled our jackets back on, and walked outside, I unlocked my bike and we stood shivering while he smoked, in that strange familiar way that he pulls on a cigarette, breathy, like sipping through an empty plastic straw. He said, it's good to see you again. He said, we're the type of travelers who will meet up again in a year, or more, and neither of us will have changed. We'll swap our stories of might-have-been plans and how we don't know where we're heading. We'll talk about falling in love, and out again, and being better off in the end. I hugged him goodbye, a good long hug, and we kissed cheeks with loud smacks, and he smelled like old friendship on a chilly night.

cyanide seeds

lipstick of pomegranate juice. questions like fat tomatoes under a hungry eye. bedbugs, burnt onions, the soft warmth of our bare bellies and the glow of my cheeks in remembrance. no, i didn't know him. did you? i'll chip my teeth on my own longing; i'll dull the cracking ache with some smoke and mirrors and a pinned on grin, cheshire cat. he inhaled clay dust and all the rest - this tastes of nothing less than submersion. we swell like yellow jacket stings in the sweaty summertime, like webs of poison ivy scars on the backs of our legs. (i eat apple cores, now, because of you.)

howl o ween / milwaukee

I'm sleepy and snotty and sore, a little. It's nice when people stick around, when we sit at the kitchen table for hours and talk about pickles and kraut, draw on faces and pull on wigs and ride off slowly to far-off red glowing places, dark smoky soul dance parties where we'll polish off the whiskey and dance til the music is done.

What a strange time of year - the season is changing, but it can't make up its mind. It's snow one week and short sleeves the next, and all these beautiful bright trees shouting out colors into the fall. In Milwaukee, the streets are piled high with fallen leaves, the front porches are tall and inviting, and the houses are wooden and cozy, like Portland, or Carrboro. Nostalgia is a strange beast. Steep hills become novelties.

We slept a fitful sleep on thin mattresses in our tall van, dreamt of tow trucks and belltowers and ice on yr clothes. We biked around town on heavy cruisers with a James Brown tape playing from the milkcrate strapped to the front, and picnicked by a smelly lagoon by the lake, bought cheese curds and pickles from some aromatic market downtown. Cities feel so small after we adjust to Chicago.

trace

Today at work was silly. This damn judge wouldn't sign for his own damn package, even when he had it in his hands. I came back three times, but his clerks were never back from lunch.

This morning, at my second drop of the day, at 700 S Clinton, I got locked in the building because the locksmith who was working on the door was across the street getting breakfast. We all stood around for a while until finally the manager walked me through some long office and out the side door instead.

Looking at all these maps and lines and sketchy outlines of plans, it gets my blood flowing and my head whirling and there are so many roads and so many destinations so let's just spin blindfolded and point and head in any random direction we choose, til we hit something big and beautiful or just small and lovely like the dirt beneath our feet.

In high school, I taped maps to my walls with my route across the country traced in hot pink highlighter. It faded in the sunlight, but I still know which roads to follow with my finger along those dusty walls.

(Do you remember how easy it was being drunk and lonesome and brave?)

animal rights

Undercooked apple coffee cakes bundled up in towels in my bag to bike through the downpour to that vegan potluck and some familiar faces, and kittens everywhere making me sneeze. I've reverted to more shyness than usual, lately. It's been a rough year. A nervous stumbling, hands outstretched and back tensing - I rush to spill my giddy guts before we part ways.

We met in the middle, carrying chocolate and tea, and went on an epic sort of walk down sidewalks and alleys and train tracks over chilly streets until the pads of my feet ached for rest. The backs of buildings always look so different than I remember, so different from how they pass out of the corner of yr eye as you bike on by.

relent

Wishes like thick, scratched chunks of glass.

Come home so I can write you a love song, or don't, so I can hammer out my goodbyes.

It's disillusionment each time, sour in the back of my throat, heavy on my spine. It's hope rising and cresting and falling, words escaping me unspoken. You are far away and I can't picture yr face and maybe you were nothing but a dream or an invention, nothing but the scent of milk and oranges assaulting my nostrils. In the end, we flounder. We flail and sink and the best of our intentions trip on their own soft ankles. My thighs are at rest. My toes clench unconsciously. The ground is pounding upwards at my heels.

I want to believe harder that these things we do are right and useful and I want to know that the sky is electric every single night.

carolina

Economic discussions, rosemary orange biscuits, and long long bike rides along the highway to get to where more people are. I walked right in and started flipping pancakes while we slowly got to know each other. We ate apples and oat groats and some kids left for a wedding and then we sorted books and wrote letters in the garage, mailed off packages to prisons, biked off for burritos and popsicles and a meeting in an old bookstore that will be a bookstore again.

Before that, we played backgammon and walked around the botanical garden and the storyteller's bench and peppers far too hot to eat that burned and sizzled on my tongue so i was licking the roof of my mouth for far too long afterwards. Before that, we danced late at night to zydeco, in a tent under dark skies, drinking from a big growler of local beer.

Before that, I left Chicago and sank into the warm embrace of the place I'll always call home.

hullabaloo

I read Ghost World in German, courtesy of Nicole, and with my own English copy for reference when I needed it. When I was in high school, that book resonated with me in such a different way. It seemed inspiring, and hopeful, and funny, and this time around every part felt so melancholic. And so real. There is so much melancholy in our dumb lonely lives sometimes. So much joy, too, though. Things are fun, things are weird and nonsensical and beautiful.

At Brew Not Bombs I drank some good homebrew and had some good conversations and danced to some good banjo tunes. Oh man. Each time I thought I was about to leave, something new came up. So many faces I've been wanting to see, so many friends to grab onto and jump around and dance and keep each other upright, how lovely.

I can't wait to get to North Carolina and smell trees and clay and sky.

tailwind

Time goes by. Things like that happen. My toes curl inward of their own volition, and so do yours. We're circling, hackles raised, but our necks are growing weary. We'll wake up stiff tomorrow. We'll unroll like tentacles reaching across a briny mess. We'll hang these tapestries from our walls, to signal a loud and resilient "yes".

Spattering talk is multiplicity. These soft words are incantations. My eyelids are window weights; yr limbs beside mine could lull me into hovering sleep. Unline my face, relax my strained forehead. I am too young, and too old. I forget where my good graces went. I tell people the same things every day, but what's the difference? I am consumed with inertia. She said, we must have a tailwind; how lovely.

fall up.

These things cling to our skin under the autumn breeze.

I hear the Liberty Bell is breaking. Or broken, maybe, but the breaking itself is the painful part. I know someone who cuts out the soft cloth panels of his sneakers, between the sporty leather partitions, to make summer sandals.

I remember when you found a long skinny strip of receipt tape on our floor, covered in my inky words, lying as if waiting to be found, though I'd no such intention at all. I remember when Josh and Katy and I found a mound of mud in Louisiana, plunged broken sticks into it and ran while the fire ants came streaming out, dripping off the ends of the wood like flaming water, like vengeance.

Oh, geez. Natural disasters, oncoming clouds, cities we can't even see across for the smog. Things are pulling further and further apart. If you don't deadhead the flowers they might not bloom again. With all the energy in the upper realm they won't bother with roots at all. Who has time and attention for both at once, and who can even see what lies underground?

You are out of reach, far and again, and maybe for the best.

dry

I drink (gulp) water 'til i'm dizzy, and still i'm thirsty all the time, pouring it down my throat and dripping on my chin and soaking it up 'til i am all just dewdrops and muddy rainfall and those puddles that splash up yr back. she unfurled a pennant for our long list of to-do's. You never pick up the phone, except to call me at 3 AM with booze and uncertainty in yr voice. I proposed to you on New Year's Eve, and recanted the very next day. He never asks me about you, but I can hear it hovering around the clouds of his breath. So many of us share the same names, and who can keep them all straight? (And how can there be such meaning in names, or in stars, or those cards we flip over and over in order to invent truths for ourselves.)

In New Orleans, a fortune teller named Velvet gave me a red stone for love and luck. She smiled at my smudged face and weary shoulders like she'd seen my kind before. I hope she was right. She told me it was time to rest, time to heal. I can hear from across the room the whispering feet of my ghosts. I pretend to sleep all night, but I stay awake, heavy with breath, to listen to them sigh and swear.

lips

Ascend the stairs of your open-drawered dresser and clamber up towards the sky. Wish on a star, or an airplane will do if you are the first one to see it. Step higher. Fold your breath up in little pieces and save it for looking down, back to the red-purple carpet swirls and the slippered feet you can barely stretchingly squintingly see a million inches below you on the floor.

Exhale, and sit back down. Nestle your chin into the middle of the "M" formed by your kneecaps. Shake your eyes open. Bound away, and out towards the day. Skip down the sidewalk until you stub your toes too many times in a row, then slow and slouch and drag your feet behind your tired ankles. This is how they do it, those cool cats in the hip cafes, they shrug and snarl and scuff up the soles of their shoes. Roll your eyes and pout your mouth out, for better effect. "Hey, Lips," says the grinning old black dude in the distinguished suit. "Hey, Lips, crack a smile for me!"

this one day

i remember a book i read, where the author said that we eat too many seeds, not enough leaves and stems and fruits. i remember that, while i eat handfuls of nuts and trail mix, and wonder if he's right.

this one day i walked with a boy and his dog through a vast oregon forest, following the curves of a muddy creek. it was not the woods i'm used to. it was not lush and damp and seething with undergrowth, not dense and thorny and moist. there was space between the trunks of the trees. there were small flowers growing beneath them, at intervals, wildflowers i'd never seen before, in reds and whites and strange formations.

i laid down on the pine needles and the cool, dusty dirt, and closed my eyes to the sudden, towering silence. everything was magnified. a mosquito crawled across my forearm, but i didn't move, and it flew away. i opened my eyes and the trees shot upwards towards the sky, telescoping away from my small face on the forest floor.

& the quiet was so intoxicating that i would have laid there forever if the dog hadn't stuck his cold nose in my face and tempted me laughing back upright.

memor-ing

you & me and you & me and you & me and remnants, is all.

i'm tying a thought of you into a circle knotted on my finger, to remind me to remember.

all our plans have always fallen into disarray. all our taut bows and smooth wooden bodies and endless forgettery: negation.

flattery, and (re)learning the language of small talk, the gestures of camaraderie.

we look back wonderingly towards the not-so-distant past, try and remember how to pull every bit of life from each night, but arrive at wistful instead.

my philosopher friend once told me that some people just walk around well together. this has to do with pace, with energy, with desires and joys that are more than misleading.

breach

yeah, fragile. fragile like whisper cracks in windows, spidery and small. fragile like fat concrete walls of those busted-up levees. my jaw creaks and aches and i think i must be grinding my teeth at night again. i never used to sleep so soundly as this. it's a new kind of vanishing. i'm a sneak peeking through spyholes. you are painting portraits of the obscene. we can't recall, we can't recall, we can't resummon those selves we miss.

these stammering sketches, outlines incomplete, are the closest it gets sometimes.

sadness is another form of slow poison, or, maybe, poison is another slow form of sadness. i'm just waiting for someone to come running at me, arms open wide enough to contain all this flood.

workin' girl.

i got rehired, sooner than expected.
it's great great great to be working again. too much vacation stresses me out. there's something soothing in routine and productivity.

i love my job oh so much; even 8 hours in the rain today left me feeling pretty good, soggy feet and all.

pictures, august.

road trip to canada, boston, nyc:
kandace & dave, biking up to mystic lake, all dressed up for the wedding, a strange old-timey museum in michigan.












new orleans:
fairy rings of mushrooms everywhere, john, a bridge by the ninth ward, RUBARB bike shop, houses in the bywater.

habitual

Sometimes a fear of things unknown, of things I simply don't know how to handle, though you know how I hate to admit it. And you and all yr well-meant promises that prove too tough for you to keep, and the things we plug ourselves into, to forget for a moment the speed at which the earth spins beneath our feet.

I have only stinging words, and you have only stinging spoonfuls of the recurring past.

Basil leaves under the sun on cooler days. Grimy toes shoving at the mud. Crates full of all the secrets we lug around from home to home and only keep closed tight.

ramble round

In Canada we ate platefuls of the heartiest, wholesomest food, wandered around the farm identifying plants and trees and flowers, got eaten by mosquitoes in the woods, and cats invaded the van through every open door at once, looking for food or lovin.

In New York, we got asked for directions by a messenger, got invited to hang out with squatters in Tompkins Sq Park, got warned about cops by a long-dreaded dude at the bike shop. It's strange, all the impressions people get from you in a city you don't even know. Only two days - one for Manhattan and one for Brooklyn, but we biked far and fast and squeezed between rush hour taxis and soared down big hills in the park and ate apples, with peanut butter, by the water while the helicopters took off nearby.

In Boston we drank coffee all over town, sat on the sidewalk in the business district eating chinese pastries and watching the cars and the bikes go by. We rode up to Mystic Lake and dangled our feet in the water off a dock for way too long, rushed off to eat vegan ice cream with Nick, showed up at the Charles Hotel drenched soaked dripping wet n dirt onto the clean floors, to change into my dress and his rented tux and spend the evening drinking free jack n cokes at my cousin's wedding.

We came back too soon; we almost stayed on the road (on people's couches) for even longer. Once you remember how good it feels to visit and explore and learn each city by riding down every one of its streets, you have to drag your feet all the way back home. We didn't sleep for two days straight. We sat forever at Customs to cross back over from Canada. We played putt putt and biked to the Warren Dunes, to miss rush hour in Chicago, and then arrived just in time for the biggest storm I've ever ever seen.

They say it was 800 bolts of lightning a minute, and those are just the ones that touched the ground.

(you played me a song in the thunder and the rain and it's never sounded so good to be back on our own porch again.)

Love's Truck Stop

it's nice to move in a different way. it's nice to spend a minute under skies that are not Chicago's, and to let my fingers walk out routes on a shiny new map.

the twisting pinks and blues of road maps resemble nothing less than the highways they purport to describe, but really who can say anything descriptive about highways? long dumb strips of asphalt plowing through who-even-knows-what country out past the truckstops and the walmarts.

and damn, girl, whatcha doing just walking down my block in chicago with yr dreads up in buns and yr sweet grin i haven't laid eyes on since north carolina and years ago in our somewhat overlapping adolescences. this world is too small and too big and oh man it keeps flinging different pieces of my life into juxtaposition.

smear sneer

I don't usually have specific tihngs to say about work, but some days...

Today I had to deliver a package to a fancy hotel up north, with something else I had to pick up quick nearby, and the smarmy concierge took five minutes to look up the guest's name, and then wouldn't accept it because his computer said "Jeremy" and the envelope in my hand said "Jerry". It seems straightforward enough to me...but I had to call in and have my company call in to the sender and when we finally got confirmation of the name and came back inside to tell this fella, he just flirted and giggled with some guests while I fidgeted in front of him forever. Finally I talked him into taking it, and set my clipboard on his desk. He filled out some parking slips, looked at something in the desk drawer, kept saying, "I'll just take care of this first..." until I just asked him, pleading, "Could you please just sign it? My other deliveries are going to be late now." and he kind of batted his eyes and scrawled something illegible. Oh geez.

These things only happen when I'm in a hurry...something of the power people know they have over my time gives them some satisfaction, and I've worked enough service industry jobs to know that there are days when it just feels good not to jump and rush (and bow and scrape) for everyone who wants me to. And maybe after kissing up to hoity toity hotel guests all day, it helps him to be able to make me do what he wants, but twenty minutes of wasted time when I have my own job to do...is just a bummer.

What a weird stupid world where we're all trying to get back at each other even when we're strangers, and the only form of empowerment is inconveniencing someone else just to show you can. You know?

lamplit

there are things that seem crucial sometimes, like lamplight through dusty screens, like the sound of water falling into the sink, like the soft songs of girls who can't sing.

i'd live out another winter here; i just worry it'd go like the last, and the last before. friendships here don't open up like i'd like them to. people don't relax and smile at you like they should. i am still uncomfortably wearing this big city skin.

stretch out

catch yr lip on yr own teeth by mistake, and again. forget how to walk through a roomful of sporadic strangers. i try to glue the soles back onto my shoes but they are ornery like you wouldn't believe.

(if i were wolverine, with metal running alongside my bones, i'd have cleats implanted onto the pads of my feet to click in and out as i please. oh yeah.)

these days i feel strong and fast and you keep talking 'bout my legs, which is mostly what i need to feel powerful, but i'm worried that i'll take a job indoors and start feeling sleepy and slow again. portland has such a small, hilly downtown. how do they even have room to stretch their legs?

the inside lane

My heritage is one part swampy New Orleans and one part sunny southern California, but parental bloodlines aside, it's a multitude of twining stems rooted always in North Carolina soil. And if we move in a few months, like we say we will, back up to a soft rainy city at the farthest diagonal from the place that's left this red clay stuck permanently between my toes, I don't know when I'll ever find the time to make it back home. I need to sink my teeth into the South; I need to spend an autumn pedaling through cooling air and crisp leaves and the desolation and new growth and beauty and sly appeal of these musty green places.

Everything always seems so urgent, and every decision sometimes tastes too sharply of the regrets of every path not taken.

It's too easy here in Chicago to accept invitations and then forget to show up. It's too easy to blame the July heat or the February snow for my lethargy. My sniffly nose and swelling throat trapped me sweating at home this weekend, but for sporadic bouts of alleyway shopping and trips to the garden store to haul soil back for transplanting hundreds of small beautiful basil plants into tires and pots and trays and anywhere they'd fit with just a little more distance from each other. They transplant so well; they shrug and smile up towards the sun, wait for water and jam their toes even more firmly into this new earth.

If only, so many things.

I might quit my job for a month, or more, and ease this need for new skies, for the coasts I'm used to, before we strike out westward and leave it all even farther behind.

reflect

because we know that there is meaning in the mirroring of our cheeky smiles. because there is sometimes life and death or at least breath in the memories of grassy knees and all the relived childhood games we might not have gotten the chance to play the first time around. because every time i stub my toe it jolts me into reality.

& when a crowd of sweet faces on bikes show up at our house so we can ride off to rusty fences, endless train tracks, and treacherous rooftops, that's what jolts me into the reality of what matters most sometimes. i'm sick of being reluctant to make friends.

this is what counts, or some part of it, at least.

we went to oregon last weekend.

we'll eat saltines and dream of the ocean. (we'll forget to send letters but stock up on stamps.)

somewhere between the high desert and the trees i wrapped my fingers into his belt while we buzzed a scooter around a strange sleepy town. the air was dry and it smelled like pine needles and bloody noses. later, in portland, we revisited all these different months of our different pasts, sipped coffee - good coffee - on a sidewalk in the sun, and left way too soon. i invent regrets. my secret treasure map leads to too many different places at once in paths of deep soft creases from my linty pockets.

but chicago has such a big rumbling heart, and the hot breath of the subway is bursting from the grates beneath our feet. the tomato plants are just coming to flower.

crosswords

and my head is swimming brimming with all the mumbling mumbled things i forget to say. there are hopping popping toads at my eyelids, vying for attention. yr leafy wrist is a summons, my bruising feet a warning. i'm daydreaming about bicycles and rivers and longlost curlyheaded comrades who lure me to long nights of adventure.

(it makes me wonder if i should flee before the hot blue skies return.)

my throat is a waterfall and this world is a riverbed. debris is rising beneath my ribcage.

and you know, it's been almost a year since i've seen the ocean.

twitchy lids

Today I drank espresso, over ice, till my fingers and my tongue jittered and my eyelids peeled open. Today I saw her at the door and backtracked to say hello. She's only been back here a week, she says, but she's trying to figure it out still. I nod. Cities are hard, I say. I love Chicago, and I hate it. Yeah, they are, she says. She looks solid and beautiful and strong, but her eyes are always worried, like mine. Sometimes on my happiest days strangers stop to cheer me up because I look too sad when I squint in the sun.

I worry too hard about all these lost-eyed girls, about these boys who try and drink themselves far away.

I feel helpless without my contacts in because everything blurs and I can no longer interpret the lines in their faces. Sometimes I like it better that way. (Sometimes i wonder which of us is more real. Sometimes I don't.) His hair is a blessing. Her high heels are a disguise. There are black smudges on my calves and my thumbs and my forehead. I am feeling the pavement through the cracking soles of my shoes. I am tiring of block letters and dark sunglasses. Our lists grow shorter; the days grow longer.

they say chemicals

i want rollerskates, a tape recorder, and a hammock so i can skate to the park and lie hanging beneath the trees singing soft songs to the breeze.

it's been two weeks since i've practiced and already my fingers have forgotten all the strings. it's been seven months since i biked for hours along the danube, singing with all my might to the sun. seven months! that's so many days between me and where i maybe want to be. i maybe want to be everywhere or anywhere or just somewhere where all my friends won't keep moving away. yesterday everything was a reminder, and i could feel my eyes stretching wide to take in all these places just out of reach. i rode home a new way and found the smoothest-rolling paved alley in the city, & when i looked to my left, through the slats of the fence and across the empty lot, another cyclist was mirroring my path.

i remember the way she cut his hair and then brushed the clippings from his bare back, hesitantly, tenderly.

i remember hands on my thighs from both sides while we piled on laps and sang beatles songs in someone's hallway on a fuzzy early morning.

yellow ink

candlelit card games on summer porches and the soft sweet taste of small smooth onions in my mouth. cinder block confessions, shared cigarettes, crumbling foundations and smudged cheeks.

summer nighttimes sweep by in broad strokes, each illuminating a new depth or a slow fade to misdirection. our small hands - yours with bitten fingernails, mine long and knobby-jointed - our small hands grasp at the few straws of our bareskinned memories while we stub toes on new demands. on door sills and windowsills and rusty screens dangling from their frames. in the summer you are the light of a borrowed cigarette gesticulating toward the dawn. in the summer the sticky air on my thighs brings me to leafy forests and old streets framed in wrought iron. you are the bruise on my gums. you are the damp hairs lying flat on my neck, the irresolute wanderings of fruit flies around our lazy yard.

cities & farms

I know I have all the time in the world to try out different places and different lives and figure out what's right for me, but opportunities always seem to pop up when I can't really take advantage of them, and they're always hard to find when I go looking.

Yesterday I talked to a few of the Biofuels kids about an internship on their CSA farm, over on their industrial site in Pittsboro. The pay is low, but more than enough, especially since housing is provided, and ever since I worked on a WWOOF farm in Ontario two years ago, that's the environment I've been longing to come back to. Working on a farm, or in any small, fairly contained setting where you both live and work, there's a distinct and wonderful feeling of community that has to develop. I like to know what my physical work is for each day, and to do it, and to know, tangibly, that it is done. Working with a small number of other people is rewarding in the same way - you will develop tangible relationships and bonds, and take the time to value them.

I've been trying to live in a collective house in Chicago - we're all trying. My housemates are wonderful, caring, smart people, but we're all so busy all the time, with things in and out of the house, that it's hard to spend the time to feel really connected, sometimes. This is how I feel about Chicago in general, and maybe just about city life. There are so many places and people and attractions pulling us in different directions at any given moment that it's hard to choose any one direction to focus on. There are a lot of half-finished projects. There are a lot of promising friendships that remain on the verge of acquaintance and comrade.

I was talking about this the other night, to a friend from Chicago who now lives in New Orleans but is also visiting family in Chapel Hill for a week (as always, a small world...). Everyone is concerned about community. But everyone I know is moving constantly, looking for new adventure or maybe looking for a new scene that hasn't dried up yet, when maybe what we should be doing is staying put, establishing relationships and reciprocities that will have to last longer than a few months or a few years. Maybe we should stop being so afraid to let our roots latch onto the ground beneath our feet. Nico says that it comes down to people needing each other, and I agree. I've spent enough time fighting with myself about this thing exactly, about whether it's better to be independent and thus somewhat safe & less vulnerable, or to openly, joyfully need other people. I need to feel needed. I know that.

He says small towns are probably the model, ideally, for the ways we will have to live if things become bad enough, in some societal or ecological way, for us to have to start needing one another again, and to be self-sustaining within smaller communities. Yet we're all looking to cities, because they are big and sprawling and beautiful, because in a city I can work and live and bike and grow in community gardens and use public transportation and have access to arts...but what I can't do is be a necessary part of it, because the whole system is too large. We forge communities within it, wonderful communities that overlap with other ones and last for a short while, but we all know that we can move at a moment's notice, that we will not all be here forever.

All I'm trying to say is something about community and human dependence. I spent yesterday agonizing over whether I should stay here and be happy and healthy and focused, working in the dirt, learning to live with a small group of people, or whether I should go back to my big beautiful Chicago, to a similarly tangible job and to a small group of people I could learn to live better with. I'm going back, of course. I have too many plans and commitments and friends coming from out of town; I have way too much love for the long, flat streets and the ability to get around without a car.

I just got new wheels built for my bike, after all.















(pictures found at the "Virtual Tour of Piedmont Biofuels" photo set on flickr.)

it's a small world after all

...as we all know, as it proves itself again and again in lovely small ways.

I'm in North Carolina, after a pretty last-minute trip based around helping Lindsay and her pop drive a U-Haul down to Richmond to store her stuff for the summer while she travels South America, before moving to Carrboro in the fall. It was a great drive - once we hit the South, the air got warm and the sun got bright and when we stopped in DC traffic, we could smell the honeysuckle by the side of the road.

It's nice to see hills and trees again. It's nice to sit in coffee shops for hours talking to every familiar face that walks in. It's nice to ride my dad's bike through these small-town streets and up the steep hills I'm not used to anymore, to have long conversations with friendly strangers, to spend afternoons on our shady front porch in Bynum with the dog.

This afternoon my mom and I drove out to the Piedmont Biofuels Co-op, past Pittsboro, for their weekly tour. They showed us the process in which the waste oil they've collected is converted into high-quality biodiesel, and all the ways they're trying to become sustainable, using solar power and teaching courses to interested homebrewers, starting a "farm incubator" program where they "grow farmers" - giving new faces a chance to get a start and learn their craft on the land before striking out on their own. At the beginning of the tour, he showed us the large solar panels on the roof of a shed filled with big containers of oil sitting to allow the crud to settle out at the bottom. Half the panels were shaded from the afternoon sun.

"We'd get way more power if we cut down this big tree that's blocking it, but we like the tree, so we're not going to do that," he explained. A big black dog was lying in the shade; a hammock was strung between that tree and another. I'm glad their work towards efficiency and sustainability hasn't yet required the compromise of a shady tree. That seems important.

There are a lot of really great projects going on around here that I'm excited about every time I visit, even though the most I can do is come check them out for a day, maybe hang around and help out and make some friends, and then vanish for six months or a year before coming back to check on their progress. It's a bummer, and it's at least in part a function of not living here, and therefore having nothing but time when I am here. There are great projects that I don't get involved in, in Chicago. If I was visiting there, I probably would make a point to check them all out and get excited about them, and wistful about leaving them behind.

Or maybe it's just that this is where I'm from, and so these are people who seem to speak at my pace.

Projects/Stuff I wish I could stay & get involved with:
Durham Bike Co-Op
Carrboro ReCyclery
Piedmont BioFuels
Bull City HeadQuarters
Paper Hand Puppet Intervention
Nightlight
Chatham Marketplace
Carrboro Comida No Migra (like Food Not Bombs)
and much more, i'm sure

backtrack

remember: the scent of woodsmoke still rising from our pillows in the morning.

remember: blue ink under my fingernails on slow Indiana hills.

i'm forgetting the phone numbers of all the girls i used to love - or, still do, but maybe in distant and parallel ways.

big blue skies & a southward breeze and we passed the mountains long ago.

short hair, dragging feet. gold wristwatches. ghost towns with the most beautiful broken shutters in the world.

my back is turned, but my ears are still faintly straining for the sound of you trying to stop me. i'm the best eavesdropper in the world. i'm the best at sneaking away. i'd forgotten the joyful feeling of my ribs expanding, somewhere in the process of my slow vanishing.

(& sometimes, all answers come down to this:
because he holds me like a starfish when we sleep.)

Food Not Bombs Party & Iron Chef

photos from lindsay.

stomachache.

some days it's slow slow slow, and stiff knees and sore spines and everything coming just a little bit undone on my bike, a little bit unwound, creaking and crunching and all sorts of sounds you don't want to hear beneath you as yr trying to fly through yr day. it made it all through winter and then everything needs replacing all at once, right now.

i need more sleep than i will ever get, my uncomfortable eyelids popping open way too soon each morninglight and leading me swooning through my days. i want to reclaim nighttime ! but bed is so cozy.

forgettery

i remember when it was harder for me to meet people then it is now, and i remember when it was easier. i yo-yo back and forth. i forget what's important, then i remember. i like to turn big rocks gently over and watch the squirming paths of worms and centipedes and doodlebugs twisting through the earth. i like to sit on the stoop and watch the kids on bikes wheel up and down the street, or the families yelling to one another, leaning out to toss keys out of second story windows. i like to ride my bike on cool windless nights down the empty industrial corridors, past open doors where sparks fly and machines hum, past the quiet storefronts and mysterious factories and never ever ever have to stop for lights. i like to take long walks through alleys, to the record store or the park or your house, collecting treasures as we go. to snip cuttings of plants and watch them root and grow in old juice bottles on our kitchen sill, the fragile stems too tender yet for outside air. i like to wear mismatched socks, to cook and share and sit around the kitchen table longer than we mean to.

i barely remember school. i barely remember austria, or a month ago, even. i want a little bit of everything back, but i don't think i'm the same shape and size and hue to stick myself in the outlines of where i used to be, again. everyone is taking off, these days, and everyone is looking for new places but i'm still sort of shyly looking for new pieces of myself. recollection is a funny thing. she says all we need is a slight affirmation and we'll fool ourselves each time. he hopped a bus again, and then we all gathered to watch the lightning, like dogs turning in circles to lie down.

san diego morning air

all night i was grumbling how i want to be at home in chicago playing in the dirt, riding my bike around looking for wood to build things for the garden, and here i am in southern california plastering a grin on through all the family small talk i can bear.

but this morning i'm awake early, listening to my sister snore beside me and my brother shout in his dreams, and the breeze from the window smells dry and clean and soft. the scent of the canyons - i'd forgotten that. this place is not for me, but it does have its charms, my own dear aggravating loving confusing kind extended family included.

for a while i was surprised every time i saw myself in the mirror, but now that i've learned my own face again i miss something of my fluidity.

in the midst of breath. forgetting justifications. i'm trying to be self-assured and tall, to ignore these roping concerns.

no, i don't miss you this fast. i'd like you to be here so i could crawl over to you in this early morning light and fall back asleep, and i'd like you to be my backbone while i have all these stiff conversations, but yr far away and really (we may never sing anything at all).

the ovals of airplane windows.

how to arrange the cadence into song. how to sing at all. how to impress the family by showing up late with tomato juice drops on the front of my freshly (finally) washed t-shirt. my legs always ache with sitting still. i'm terrified of being old and stiff, now with my knees and glutes already aching all the time. i can't even sit through a movie, let alone a flight. (remember those eight days crammed on busses last year, or my rubbery legs last week?)

we're so lonely even together that sometimes i wonder what either of us could do to be a bit whole or right or even okay.

on the airplane, I read a book about earthworms and all their subterrestrial lives, the relationship of these crawling blind creatures to the movement of continents, "...the tiny bristle-like hairs called setae that worms use to anchor themselves in their burrow or to hold onto one another when they mate". how beautiful, how small.

if we end as we begin, it will have to be in a shy conversation about the weather, not in a big mess of shouts and fists and things breaking to bits. all we can do is talk in double negatives and i think it's time to move to the other side of the axis.

i want, i want, i want, not what i don't.

the cartography of yr ups and downs could build mountains out of mere divets in the earth.

everyone's niceties are finally coming out with the sunshine, like my bare legs seeing the light of day for the first time in months.

shy-town

sing till yr life fades.
this city shrinks and grows at a dizzying rate. two of my favorite ladies in the whole wide world and especially in this moody city are taking off for opposite coasts and opposite lives, way too soon for me to fathom. i need more friends to sit in my kitchen and drink whiskey and make coffee and talk about things quiet and slow and fun and fast even before we go out to dance with the rest.

things tug me in different directions. things, lately, are not new.

i am enamored with physical missives, with messages that cling to their objectness, that refuse to travel except from hand to hand. maybe that's half of why i like my job so much; the other half has to do with feeling strong and alive, with the immediate gratification, physicality, sense of completion, in taking one thing from one place to another. no more trying in vain to stretch my bored weary legs behind countertops or talk my way through another long day.

chicago is the antithesis of and the antidote for my urges, both. i close my eyes and think of hills and trees, the scent of pine, mud between my toes and every face easy and familiar on small-town paths. i open them and i'm in love with long long flat streets in every direction, with the hugeness and smallness of everything, with collapsing distances between one place and another as we spin our legs faster and play with the wind and the traffic flow and the way the bike flows smooth n sweet.

sometimes i think that's the only thing that keeps me here, this teeming stupid downtown and the way i can work sort of at once in and out of and beneath it.

but everyone is always looking in ten directions at once, and i just want us to stroll into each others' houses without knocking, move slowly and calmly, dogs and gardens and markets and front porches with creaky swings. something of the south is ringing in my ears, still buzzing in my ribcage, but i don't know if i could shake off the humming pulse of this city.

strangerer

rodeo revelations and a white-knuckled grip as they keep on tryin' to buck you off. fleeting encounters memorable mainly for their brevity. some people will never be anything but unknowns. others come around full circle and make sure you never quite let go. i found a scratched record of cowboy songs at the thrift store and listened to it with all the lights off, eyes wide open into the dark of our empty humming house, open wider trying to grasp at the starry skies of wide open spaces far-off.

when i was a kid, in the car on the way to school, my dad would lead us in latin exercises or poetry readings from the driver's seat until we asked for cowboy tapes instead, and that song where the dog dies always made me cry. last christmas i dug in the wooden boxes of cassettes till i found the two "wagon wheels" tapes and played them loud loud through the house until my sister couldn't help but sing along. (sometimes family is serendipity, even when you never truly forget what to expect.)


three strange incidents right in a row at work on friday, a strange day anyway with morning sweaty temperatures and me all too overdressed for it in my long-sleeved shirt, till the winds picked up and the dark clouds rolled in with the cold.

one: "hey! alleycat! hey! miss!" with mean eyebrows yelling in my face from the sidewalk about ordinances and dangerous things while i shrugged and rode safely quickly away.

two: three blocks later a middle-aged man with a friendly face asked "may i?" & catfooted his way between cars, brought his lens in close so close while i fidgeted waiting for the light, took my picture, patted my shoulder, walked off.

three: i smiled at the dentist as he handed me the package but he squinted in at my grin and handed me a business card quick, "do you have a dentist? you should come here." and i thanked him but wiped my teeth with my sleeve once the elevator doors had shut.

strange attentions, strange visibility in a job where some days i love what seems like my own translucence. unknowns crossing paths and bumping shoulders, leaving little smudgy traces only to mark their way. i fell the day before, hard, on my knee, tangled up in my bike and my bag in the rain, and yeah i waved the car on, but no one even glanced or stopped to offer a hand up from the pavement.

(went to see caribou and fuck buttons last night, and then a show at WOR, and remembered why being a wintertime hermit gets old. let this be the last weekend of cold ever ever ever ! i'm ready for spring and fun.)

static

static out of an unplugged radio: secret transmissions from beyond and between the sockets of yr navel and yr spine, yearning squirming joyous sounds twisting through all yr mess of inner circuitry, through all yr mess of me and my eyelashes on yr shoulder blades.

out with the old and in with the new, and in with more old and worn at the edges, too.

these things get trapped in the humid air, dissipate in the winds off the lake, before they ever hit paper or memory.

at work, on stand-by, i eat so many french fries my stomach hurts and i stagger woozily past security, brushing potato crumbs from my lips.

erosion

small fractured things, like strings so slightly out of tune they throw the whole song off kilter, like the sun vanishing behind a cloud on a february day, sending out only splintered, chilly warmth.

fissures, i mean: fissures appearing in surfaces we think we can trust, barely perceptible, the way that things erode and slide, the precarity of our own flesh and bones.

fractured memories and everythhing slipping together except for some small illuminated keepsakes, moments that might better bear forgetting. (who wants to see again and again a wounded look in his eyes, or long for adventurous nights whose image (&scent, &softness, &newness) only ram home the sort of metallic back-of-the-tongue nostalgia that twines too closely with regret?)

regret only in the sense of constantly mapping, and the unrecoverable joys long past.

needless to say, or maybe need to say, this is all an eruption of sorts; this is all a straining sinewy mass of all the things we don't say all day, all night, always. trapped behind my teeth are all sorts of regrets or maybe just reluctant instinctive niceties, fleeting as air, except air sticks around to remind us, to lay damp and heavy on our forearms and the backs of our necks.

maybe this is is what they meant by redemption.

(this sounds like such despair, but all i mean to write on is how beautiful the sun and the shards of melting ice.)

sledding

you're all complaining about winter and dark dampness and the smell of exhaustion in the air, but the snow is so beautiful when it piles up deep, buries our stairs, flies sideways through the wind so that everything is white on one side and bare and lonely on the other, trees standing tall and skeletal against the orange sky in the park. today my stomach and my arms are sore, my elbows aching just a little, but it's all worth it for those two hours we sledded down that hill, yelling and falling and running back up to the top, calf-deep, snow down the backs of our necks, to do it all over again. the best is not the steepest or the longest downhill slope; the best is to find a flattened, faintly reflective groove where others have sledded before, and it's smooth sailing from there. we made our own paths, too, between deep snow angels where i chased the sled as it rolled downhill and i sank in up to my knees, held it in front of my face to keep the shards of sleet from my wind-burned cheeks.

and then we dive into big bowls of spicy soup and dry clothes, march back out through the snow to one place after another and maybe winter's just the coziest time of all.

now it's february, and there's so much more of the cold still to come that i'm not aching for summertime yet, but i'm remembering how i wasted a lot of last year's sunshine by working two, three, four jobs, avoiding the people i loved, shutting myself away and aloof and rolling my eyes at every party i went to. remember, in the summer i hated hipster dance parties and all the raucous sweaty joy of the places i used to love. remember, in vienna, those dumb giddy thoughtless nights were what i missed. there has to be a compromise here. sometimes excitement feels empty. sometimes, i think, there seems to be a divide between things that are meaningful and things that are fun and things that are neither but make the time fly faster. (since when do we want time to go so fast, anyway? i want to wallow in each moment for as long as i can.)

hansel & gretel

the winds pink from my cheeks, i mean, my cheeks pink (from the), i mean, the trails we leave behind as we move, like the faint voluminous traces of snails, like crumbs dropped by betrayed children in the woods.

sometimes we resemble nothing more than palindromes, for all our purported asymmetry. all sudden reversions and revisions, all suddenly telescoping mosaics, kaleidoscopes of infinitely patterned forms. stuttering again and again back to old familiar themes, moments of regression.

each stem you trim short grows out again and again, seeking the shears of yr disapproval. pruning is another way of blessing - creating sharp borders from which meaning can unfold.

i could write a book on this stuff, he says - man, i could write a book on the things i seen.

in winter, things fall to pieces. sometimes the fall is more of a slow slide, a fading of edges, a whimper of a descent or dissolution. the instability of all these connecting forces, these ties we forge to shore ourselves up against the reminders of our own precarity, reminders which hover beyond the corners of our eyes.

in the winter, we close our eyes against the sting of the falling snow and jog blindly forward in search of warmth. (the soft ways bodies acquiesce to one another in the dark hours of morning.)

eavesdripdrop

steam still rising from the pan (from our feet, from his hair, from the warm compost in the frosty air).

always a series of hallways, like the ones in all my dreams, every glimpsed or eavesdropped moment framed in layers of doorways and corners and long, searching glances from one room to the next (and another).

poker-faced jokes and rererepeated names. coconuts and apples and melons gleaned from a dumpster in the snow, slush in the streets and car wheels sliding through the mist. when the music fades out between songs and i hear a slice of you, singing in the other room, eyes closed, head down, fingers hesitantly strumming.

cabin fever

in the wintertime, things fall apart. (they disperse and reconverge, incessantly.) the painfully obvious precarity of everything. all my loving heart scattered in crumpled bits, one here for her sweet eyes, one there for the way he grabs my wrists, and you a whole heap of haunted scraps like snowdrifts gathered against my door.

output

yeah, and once we hurled handfuls of packed snow at each other till our knees were soaked and yr nose bled, but now mine is just bloody all the time.

lately i talk about things like they're a crossroads, or an impasse, dead air while we pass the time looking the other way, beer can in hand, pretending to forget. sometimes i'd rather dance all night. sometimes i'd rather ride bikes for hours, find the smoothest, newest asphalt in the city and pedal through the cool, empty, finally quieting night. it has to be silence, or beats as loud as we can make them. it has to be stillness, or giddy flailing limbs. they said i was a stolid dancer. he said i was enraged, that one night, so long ago, but it takes more than that. i'm an expert at about-faces and stiff backbones, at making the wrong expressions and deja vu conversations and throwing you off.

i need to find an answer or a story besides "oh, nothing really...", but right now what i seem to live for is dumpstered furniture, dumpstered food, spraypainting pictures to put on the walls. finding errands as far from home as possible so that buying groceries takes house on my bike, on new or forgotten streets, so my toes get cold and my ears burn and my legs feel alive again. my new hobby is homemaking, but i think anything that involves "making" should be alright.

(what does anyone "do" with a college degree ?)