mad dash

we crank out a new story every night, some by hand, some by sheer force of will. we're all helpless against the onslaught of old voices, musty hair, you little trembling thing you already knew what breaks a heart; nobody ever had to tell you a thing you just knew.

says she, she says.

slither across this snowy street, slide and slow and climb the streetlights. i fumble in the dark sometimes. some things strike me, some cold coffee memories and burnt reminders, some peeling pages.

oh this, oh that. oh mustached nights and sparkly shirts and plates piled high with good things to eat. i'm new in town; you look like you know what's up, he says, but his tennessee eyes are too easy to fool.

sidle up sideways, link elbows and make a run for the door. for the horizon. for what might be the horizon hidden off behind and beneath the tall buildings of this fat downtown. (beside them, we forget the smell of dirt.)

winter is a blessing and a curse. every season is an excuse.

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.