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.