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.