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.