One year later.

Grandpa is watching me as I scoop up the dust of his body and scatter it across America. Parts of him are floating in creeks and lakes and waterfalls. Parts of him are blowing in the red desert. Parts of him are drifting between the fiery leaves of eastern Autumn. But even as his body dissipates, pouring between my fingers, we feel the entirety of him, propping us up, we feel the full weight of his absence leaning on our shoulders.

One year after his death, he appears to me in a dream, smiling mysteriously. He has a tiny plant in his hands and even though there are suspicious eyes peering at us on all sides in this shadowy underworld, I squat and dig my fingers into the soil. I dig a small hole in the earth and sprinkle a handful of his ashes in the opening. Grandpa hands me the plant, and I tuck it in, covering and patting its roots gently. It's the smallest little thing, but it feels important — he's picked the exact spot for this unassuming little plant to flourish, its tiny roots pressing through the rubble of his bones.

It's been one year, Grandpa, but your presence has yet to diminish.

Witch & whale.

I am in some rusty vessel bobbing through the blue, isolated, enclosed, and in the shadows and hallways there is a resounding throaty growl, gripping, grabbing, and filling us all up with blackness, blackness that spreads, blackness, filling up our pupils and spreading to blot out our eyes. Bobbing, rocking, swaying, queasy seasick dread, eventually it’ll come for me. I can see out across the water, something looming, huge and gray beneath the surface, huge and gray, and waiting.

When she comes for me, I feel myself slipping towards the edge, all that vast blue looming heavy beneath me, ready to swallow me up, the yawning mouth, the abyss, the endless, endless depths, black as those iris-less eyes, darkness that reaches back into my soul and finds itself, waiting in the bitter bile of my secrets, all the failures stored up and waiting to pour out.

And as the whole rusty ship comes creaking down, tilting very slowly so that gravity is turned on its side and we are leaned over, backs parallel to the shimmering sea, parallel to the gray hulking mass, feet still touching the deck, and our hair spilling all around our faces, and all of us tumbling to certain death, I suddenly know that I am more than the sum of all that blackness and I push against it until I am staring into gray-blue eyes with tiny inky pinprick pupils, all emptied out. Everything evaporates.

In the next moment, I am walking away, huddled up and hurried. I encounter a person on the path that asks me where I’m headed, and I tell them I’m headed as far away from all that ominous water as I can go. Oh that, they say with a shrug, that’ll dry up any day now.

photo: Hani Amir via photopin cc

Fragments of thought from the back of my notebook.

Today I handed in the last paper of the quarter!

Every quarter, while I fill the pages front to back with notes for class, I fill the pages back to front with lists and dreams and thoughts. Often, these things creep into my margins and fill up the pages that are supposed to be notes, too.

Anyway, here is a little collection of notebook fragments that I've pulled from the insanely disorganized doodles of this quarter:

 

I.

All I can remember is making lewd jokes in my sleep. Now, dreamless, I feel hollow and heavy. Interrupted at least once, often twice in a night, crawling awake into gray-blue to empty myself out. Distracted sleeping.

II,

Only 3 days ago I complained into these pages, uncomfortable in my own skin, feeling stranded in the sea of my mistakes. But today, despite an early morning headache, and toast burned beyond rescue, I feel alert and ready, full of creative energy and hopefulness. Impervious to inattention, content with my social shortcomings, full of forward momentum. I hope it lasts.

III.

I dreamed that someone put me in a play without telling me the lines. It was Shakespeare. I tried to make a joke, but the audience was stunned and horrified by my irreverence.

Later, in a cafeteria, some precocious girl kept saying, “You know?” And I didn’t know. She asked me to make eggs fifteen different ways.

IV.

Somehow, I returned to Spain to learn more Spanish, but everyone spoke to me in patient English. Everyone I knew was one unwieldy hour away. I wanted to see those smiling faces in Granada, so close but impossible.

Kim was in a messy room with grayish light, where a boy was sweating feverishly into his sheets. I could see his bare shoulders. Maybe the fever was love; she would not leave him.

V.

The seams in my body are aching. I woke up unhinged from time, all gray and bleary eyed. It’s my own fault for going to bed thirsty. What is the name of my ignoring divinity, white eyed with rage foam; where is my crystalline sense of interconnectivity and direction? I am susceptible to pt. 10 Times New Roman, I feel heavy with second hand almost grief and undone elastic, with the orange wind that rattles my slumberous senses. I am susceptible to unintentional eye contact; I am semi-perpetually slogging through the fog of my fade-away analysis.

VI.

There are golden leaves bursting up beneath my eyes, there is a ghost, feeling my body. There is a thirty percent chance of rain, one hundred percent change of my pants slipping down. In the creeping, hopeful heat of Tuesday morning, I am bursting with sadness for humanity, bursting with melancholy affection for all the tiny, glaring vulnerabilities. The tall boy by the door, standing so awkwardly in his big blue high tops; the lecturer’s self-conscious clichés; a red-head’s soft shoulders; the smell of cheap public bathroom soap on so many hands; a girl’s chunky leather shoes, peeking out of her wide jeans, her chubby face full of lisping urgency. My mind is so critical and loathsome, so full of sad love.

VII.

If Rosa Morales were teaching Me in her bleating accent, what would she say?

“It was a known fact that she was awkward, and often red. She burrowed in a smoky, striped jacket, and withdrew. She planned anti climactic social events and then dreaded them. She offered squirming hospitality, begrudging kindness. She lived according to inconsistent belief systems and jumbled dreaming. She lusted after more authentic poverty and groaned at her tedious transformation into a penniless poet. Who is certain of their greatness and does it make the heavy scales of success any lighter? she would wonder. She did not know what she wanted very often. She was self-centered and sighing. She worried she was not very smart, after all. She could the smell ink on her cluttered pages, and the sides of her hands.”

VIII.

You and me, in blue-black predawn, your hand squeezes my side just a tiny bit. You’re drifting off, holding on. We ate orange capsules of focus, and hummed, and hummed in place, sitting on that faded futon, hours jangling through our desperate nerves. I become weird and obsessive, you lost steam, we distracted and muttered, went off on tangents. You spent what felt like at least an hour trying to explain integrating or something called u and a bunch of garbage symbols, but I leaned against you a little bit, and felt your hair brush mine where our heads met, and none of the words you said made sense but I said, uh huh, and was content, pretending this was maybe the third time we hung out, and that all our tiny touching was flirtatious and thrilling. It was easy to pretend, because the wanting to touch you has never changed. 

Secrets buried beneath sandy eyelids.

I remember soft light through a window—it looked like the purple-yellow of an insect’s wing. It was a mysterious, murky light. I remember soft feet, I remember hiding up high in a tree,  waking up feeling heavy with the dampness of not-quite-dawn and the gravity of some lost fragment of thought. Secrets, buried beneath sandy eyelids. Cold toes on the wooden ladder. A split second fear before flipping on the bathroom light switch, perhaps of seeing something unexpected in my own pale face, reflected in the oval bathroom mirror.

A letter to Macy.

To Macy—

You were born during a strange and fleeting heat wave in October. The night before your birth, miles away, I dreamed of your mother, round and bursting with life. You were born after a tumultuous September, and we looked to you as a green promise, a warm wind of hopefulness and light.

You were born into a family that will love you not sweetly, but fiercely. In many ways, we are more like a clan, a tribe, than a family. We brandish our last name like a flag and we will hold you up and sing your praises. We are boisterous people, kind, intuitive people, deeply connected with the other world, with the family members who are no longer here, but who guided you into your mother's arms. They are all around us, and you will feel them- when you are afraid, when you need strength, when you feel alone.

If I could tell you anything, offer you some small piece of advice, it would be this: life is full of all the lessons you need. Be aware of what is being shown to you, listen, and hold your mistakes in your hands like precious stones before tossing them aside and moving on. They are your most valuable possessions, but they weigh you down if you dwell on them.

Your life is a unique experience and no matter how much a person knows, only you are the expert in your own existence. Be receptive to the knowledge of others, but know that you are free to adapt what you learn to your own idea of self, your own path. The singularity of your existence is amazing- you are unlike any creature to ever walk the Earth. Embrace this as an opportunity to be unapologetically and wholly yourself, whoever that becomes.

No matter what, you are loved.

—Tressa

Fragments of dreams and teeth.

You were standing beneath a lamp, bathed in yellow light, packing cold earth into a mason jar, someone told me in a dream.

In a tent, my head is swimming, and some big person is pushing his body onto me. I call him filthy. I call him terrible names and cry.

There's something in my mouth. I spit our four cracked teeth and realize the rest are almost all gone already. What remains are sharp shards, exposed nerves. I feel responsible, guilty, almost, as if I've allowed all this decay to form, and am only now waking up to my ruined mouth.

This why we should have an emergency kit; a dream.

It’s coming—the end of civilization. In slow motion we see ships dropping from the sky, big barges, cruise ships, aircraft carriers, dropping on far-off cities, huge bursts of orange coming closer and closer. This is why we should have an emergency kit. In order to escape, we must flee to the fringes of the continent, to the costal edges of human reign.

We are swimming in black water, amid big blocks of floating ice. Casey is lighting the way intermittently with a cell phone. There is movement beneath us. I hear my breathing; loud, raspy panting. We follow the shoreline, where in the flickering light I can see shadowy objects of worship—gaunt Jesus, strung up on the cross, tarnished virgin Marys, looking up into the nothingness, eyeless skulls from worshippers of Santa Muerte—they send shivers all through me. I feel Casey’s body next to mine and search it’s presence for some sense of comfort.

Later there is a big washed up ship tilted on it’s side and a beautiful woman living amongst still corpses with a man whose wealth now means nothing. They sleep behind a curtain. Later the water dries up, and we retrace our steps across the debris-strewn shores of a huge, curving bay.

photo credit: wakalani via photopin cc

"Home"

 

I’m back in California after what could very well have been the most wonderful year of my life. Wonderful, yes, insane, chaotic, full of lessons, full of scrapes and bruises, full of loss and gain in an endless surging flow, sorrowful at times, surreal, unbelievable, euphoric, terrifying, also. There is so much I haven’t had the time or the attention span or even the words to tell you about. And now I’m back “home,” toying with that word like a question in my mouth.

Northern California is a beautiful place—we are lucky to grow up here, basking in the mild sunshine and the fresh redwood and ocean air. When I returned I was struck by the expansive sky, spread out above the low building tops, by the wideness of the smooth, black streets, the sidewalks. Everything is low and flat and spread out, bordered by green. Everything is square and new. The graffiti is painted over in stern squares. That image has a lot to do with how I feel, with a certain specific blankness, a lack of stories. I feel my bursting, booming, blooming year fading inside of me, as if eroding upon exposure to this sweet foreign air. Was it all a dream?

There are things that feel right about being here, like seeing my lover’s blue eyes up close, like getting behind the wheel of my dusty, leaf-cluttered car, like my brother’s skinny ten-year-old arms wrapped around me. I feel like I can sigh into California’s temperate embrace and sleep off a year long accumulated hangover. But I also feel something missing—a big gaping half of my heart. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t been overcome with the urge to cry at strange moments, like at a stoplight, or while buying cider at the grocery store.

In Spain time moved differently. Every moment felt full of possibility. Life seemed like some wild undefined adventure, something to be molded and tossed around, something to plunge into with open eyes and an open heart. Every strange, surreal dream felt possible. Back “home,” all those elaborate unconventional dreams seem impractical. I am being re-acclimatized to something called stability. Routine. Planning. Where before growth seemed spontaneous and personal, now progress seems like something to be charted out on some kind of dull trajectory of compromise. This is called the future. Suddenly all your living is supposed to be stored up for later—right now you must work to build options.

There is a Californian girl inside of me, and she knows how to navigate this kind of lifestyle—she’s done it for many years. But there’s another person, maybe new and raw and uncertain and incomplete but thirsty for life and strangely strong and all of this change is pressing against her all over, crushing her. Even on a purely geographical level, my options are suddenly limited. I’m compressed into a cage of stale social roles and a lack of travel possibilities. I feel like I left a certain kind of hole when I left, and now I’m supposed to come back and fill it, but I’m not the same shape anymore. I’m trying to find a place where I have room to move on, but also to acknowledge that so many amazing things have transpired in the past year, and to find a way to examine how these things have affected the trajectory of my life and who I am as a person.

The American Work Ethic

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Everything.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Building yourself up is not something you do with money or unhappiness. I want to build a self out of beautiful words and unforeseeable experiences. Strange and strong—I want to be like no other person you’ve met before. I want to be my own reverberating echo, a process of something like “freedom” and “truthfulness” and not in the sense of any cheap verbal honesty, but in the sense of fully inhabiting my own chameleon skin. Admit that you are not a person, neither the person you dream of, the person you long to be, the person whose mouth you speak through, you are a process just like:

            everything else.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

It’s based on a Dream;

            the Dream is not beautiful—

if you have the power to exist within an indefinite space with malleable rules and new visual/sensory possibilities that are impossible to even remember in a cognitive/conscious way according to the terms of waking memory—shouldn’t your Dream be at least beautiful?

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

America is not ours.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

Happiness should not be a novelty.

Stop the squirming.

 

Stop that squirming,

with your blackhole anxiety,

transition dreams and pockmarked skin,

there are certain people and then

there are others.

Displacement is not replacement,

personality is a fluctuating element, susceptible

to time and rejection.

Don’t forget to dig up love,

don’t forget that you can’t dance but you do,

don’t forget,

bald bird,

that you are just another indoor cat

before the open door.

Your secret hands are no secret,

self pity is no hot commodity and hot days

make you like this:

sticky, stuck, irritable.

And your lungs, too, may be cloudy

and thick,

but breathe through the gunk.

And your eyes may be cloudy

with distance,

but don’t blink the time away.

And your skin may be cloudy

and lonesome,

but it’s still translucent;

so the only choice is to be the muscles and the blood

the only choice is to be the bones and the sinew

the substance and the soul.

Another dream underwater.

 

I’ve signed off on rights to a mermaid adventure film, mother tells me, somehow certain that I am the mermaid. Later I will ask about the slippery tail and an art director looks at me with scorn. It’s about more than a mermaid. It’s a metaphor. Oh.

Still, strangely, all this time in water and tape has captured something secret, and on the flight home my silver suitcase is shuffled and scanned. For discrepancies.  I picture them with their fingers all over the watery footage. They must have found it, that dark thing, and scraped it with a scalpel from the sticky lace of my memory. All around it are hints that something is missing, and yet…what?

The escalator also goes down.

The escalator also goes down, mother sees this and we dash down pushing past sleek-haired women in blazers, past serious faces and rolling suitcases. Commotion.

Ladies and gentlemen. We are all floated out to sea, in the most brilliant piece of silver; luggage is scattered and rearranged. Beside us a group of Asian businessmen gather crates of soy sauce looking somehow simultaneously calm and peeved. On another floor, footsteps echo on slick floors and a huge man stuffed into a gray suit becomes enraged, stuffy and enraged. Where is why is, etc, these are the things that vex and bite at him, gray and bureaucratic, he strikes me, grabs my arm. I look at a big glowing clock and take note that at 5:03pm, I was struck. He snarls and denies it. Look. We are out to sea.

Kelsey wanders in, and he put his hands on her, his big mouth making ugly remarks. There is one other woman in the room. I look at the big glowing clock, making notes. His protests are like malevolent elephantine wails.

On the deck, or whatever, red and blue backpacks… We see them coming.

Kkkk. underwater oxygen sounds, kkkk.

Hold still

mermaid

what if

your cell phone goes off

underwater.

The breathless faces, all greenish blue, looking.

The voice comes through, narration overlapping the cloudy waves sounding crisp, clean and serious; And in the darkest waters, I climbed up, and squinted, eyes fogged up in murky waters, and I hurled those secrets into the green streak that could be a river channel. Later we will scrape the ocean floor with metallic contraptions, and pull the truth up to the light.

Belgium

I haven’t slept; the bright sunlight feels like a heavy blanket against my chest. Along the freeway are big stretches of warped glass, or birds and fish on long cement walls, we drive across a bridge with sleek cables that stretch out like big wings, like sails. We pass clusters of trees that look strangely flat, trees full of nests. The black birds seem to leave ripples behind as they glide through the purpley skies. All around us is a bright rainbow of green; light spring green, deep damp green, green leaves aglow with sunlight. At a gas station we pick up festival-bound hitchhikers. They give us Swiss chocolate and a little weed. We sail through the border and say, oh. We stop and smoke a spliff in a little cluster of trees, and later wish each other happy lives and I doze off watching orange rooftops and clusters of cows pass by the window. It all looks so clean and wholesome. In Brugge we park and then follow the peaks of old medieval towers, the big ancient brick buildings, wandering around and snapping photos of the red doors, the green shutters, the geese and swans and ducks along the murky canals. We buy French fries and write Brugge a letter. We gawk at big chocolate Easter sculptures. We stop at an art gallery with slippery floors, We find a wall of beer. We find a huge red poodle sculpture; it looks diabolical. We stop for tea, and then back in the car we begin to drive whimsically, turning onto smaller roads and searching for some quiet place where we can park. A headache grows in my temple, and finally we find a little turn out in the countryside alongside a swampy field. We push down the back seats and lay down blankets and pillows, and smoke out the door as the sky turns dusty midnight purple. The sound of rain drops patters through my dreams.

When we wake up, outside the window is thick white-gray mist; skinny reeds bob through the milky morning. We hit the road. In Antwerpen we stop at a little café and have tea. A man comes in with a sweet lab dog, and she walks over and greets us quietly. We find a busy market where men are calling out the prices for their asparagus and selling olives from enormous silver bowls. The scent of feta cheese and oil lingers in the air. They sell salami and cheese, they sell dream catchers and posters, tulips and clothing. Vincent buys a little water pipe. We hit the road, and eventually recognize the warped glass along the highway. Back in Amsterdam, traffic is fussy—we wiggle our way into a little parking space and eat Chinese food before parting ways.

The Most Lonesome Thing

Creaking and rocking, I am making little echo noises in the void of my own self, the only thing that exists. The world is an undulating thing, made of sand and hope, made of gritty fear. I am a red desert, stretched out in perfect dunes, as far as the eyes can see. You are a ghost, with whispering footprints that are swept away when I breathe in. I never hurt you, you are no solid thing. I can slip through your skin; there’s nothing there. You are a dream, a fragment, a wish, a passing thought.

I am floating in the silent certainty of only me. You cannot reach me here, you cannot touch me, because your fingers are made of white sand, the dust of my own internal experience; nothing.

I wonder what it’d be like to pour myself into you, to spill over you in little particles, slip through the cracks of you, enter your pores. Imagine us in a rusty VW bus leaking sand. We’re in the desert, dunes rolling and rippling and sighing as far as the eye can see. We live in a bus, with teacups, full of sand. We make love in a bed like a dried up sea, fine, orange dust that billows all around us like steam, makes your face look far away, I can see you dissolving into it. We sit cross-legged, naked and dusty, and I paint your body with wet strokes, trying to feel your skin, my fingers hopeful and searching. We stand in the desert hand in hand and watch as a huge dark wave comes rising up and crashes over us, rains against my flesh, your flesh, these flimsy little forms. We erode in seconds, dissolve into the absolute chaos, swallowed up into the explosive whirlwind of fiery sand.

I am the most lonesome thing, the only thing, heaving in the dark black void, the things that can never be known. I am writhing, in a bed. The sunlight is begging to crawl through the windows, through the cracks. You are not real. I can slip through your skin and find nothing.

Solipsism and Interconnectivity

I.

I’m trying to say that nothing feels real. Moments come and go and fade away. Memories seem like dreams, I can almost see myself in them, like a different person. Sometimes reality even seems implausible, sometimes while sitting, looking, talking, I feel the world tilt back away from me, glaze over like a dream. I’m never quite certain if I’m awake.

I’m trying to say that I feel sometimes incredibly disconnected from all that is around me, as if I’m floating through life without touching it. People sometimes seem impossibly distant, impossibly different creatures. I don’t understand the things they do, or why we all behave in this kind of shadowy secret way, as if we don’t have innards. I wonder why it’s not okay to show more. I feel like words are often inadequate for expression—thoughts are so much more than words, they are multi-dimensional experiences that mix up bodily feelings, senses of all types, goals, dreams, hopes, conjectures, memories… And I’m often frustrated by my inability to access the experience of others, and by my inability to share myself, my experience, my thoughts, my inner world, with others. Misunderstanding is a human condition. When a series of events produces a reaction within me, I want it to be touched and held and seen and understood and validated by others. That rarely happens. This makes me feel dismissive. This makes me feel achy and uncomfortable in my own skin.

There is some comfort, but also horror in the idea of solipsism. I am the only thing, just one long thought process blossoming into a complicated, colorful word within which I’ve built a place for a concept of self. Sometimes time feels jumpy, like I’m being plopped down into different settings and manipulated into interacting with varied, imaginative stimuli, just to produce feeling, to test the limits of the imagination, the boundaries of the big, sustained thought process which is the only thing, ever.

Sometimes I feel that way, but more often I guess I feel like we are isolated little units, blundering into each other with no hope of communication. Not only is language inadequate, it’s incredibly personal. A word is a only a symbol, attached to which are a series of experiences, and these will never, ever match up. Maybe this isn’t solipsism in a pure sense, but I think it relates to Gorgias’ idea that even if something exists, and even if something could be known about it, knowledge can’t be communicated to others.

II.

Despite all of this, though, communication does occur, at least to some to immeasurable degree. We can relate symptoms of physical pain, for example, and diagnose illness. We can meet for lunch at 2 ‘o clock. We can even listen to the same haunted notes and cry. And sometimes, quite often, despite the fact that we try so hard to present an outer idea of self and conceal our inner world, the inner world leaks out, and we study each others actions, personalities, histories, and come up with sometimes accurate conclusions. How?

All this makes me feel the opposite of alone; it makes me feel intrinsically connected to everything. It makes me feel as if we are not individual selves but fleshy pieces of a huge, breathing organism, something universal and communicative. Perhaps words are inadequate, but we seem to be communicating through out pores and veins, through our irises and our nerves.

These are the things I’m trying to say. These are the sensations I’m trying to convey. The words are inadequate, but I hope I am transmitting something.

Disclaimer of sorts: I know pretty much nothing about solipsism or Gorgias. These are just thoughts that I had brewing in me today, after watching Solipsist and reading a very small bit about the idea of solipsism. They are also probably influenced by reading excerpts of Emerson's essays on Nature.

Another Nightmare

Dreamy girl, self sufficient around the jaw, says she works here with that carefree kind of smirk, and fishes a couple bills out of some unsuspecting pocket. Oh, so she works here. Suddenly, she is pressed against me, kissing, and then an instant, I realize it’s happening and I am afraid to look at her; who is this person? When I pull away, there is this sagging, rotting corpse looking lecherously back at me. Her black tongue drops out of her head, I’m gagging, and I realize that it’s not real, but somehow, also, inescapable. The key is to remember where I’ve left my body, and I can feel it now, far away, but it’s so dark that I can’t remember exactly where. I think about my old bedroom, that big feather blanket, gray and purple, I think of my old bedroom, the stripped quilt, the bed low down on the floor, I think of my cold bedroom, my little twin bed, the flat pillow. I’m in none of these places. I’m in Leah’s bed, I realize, in the darkness. There is a sensation like waking, I’m lying on my stomach and a little figure appears beside me—it’s blurry, a boy, a man, I don’t know, a person, the size of a little water bottle, the size of a book or a thick candle, he appears there, blurry, and I wonder if is going to tell me something, but I’m lying there, in the dark, and I realize that I can see myself, as if in a reflection, I can see myself, shadowy, watching this blurry figure with a yellow T-shirt. As I watch, the eyes in the reflection self turn dark, inky black spreads all through them, she, or I, leans forward with a growl, and takes the little figure into a blackened mouth, into her jagged teeth, she eats him, and I realize, again, I’m not awake, this isn’t real, and I’m rocking back and forth, trying to make a sound so that Leah will turn around, so that she’ll say something, or wake me up, I’m touching my face with the hands that do not belong to my body and I feel my cheeks, my lips, but it all feels numb and distant. I’m suffocating in this vacuum, straining to breathe in some breath of reality, and yet I am trapped inside myself, writhing.

How did I finally wake up?

A Nightmare

I’m lying in a bathtub in a dingy house. The light is yellowish and there is some water in the tub, and it feels warm. I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’m on my back looking down at the mangled flesh where my clothing has opened up, and my skin has opened up, too.  I guess it must have been a shotgun; my whole torso looks like shredded meat. I try not to move my muscles, terrified to see my mangled midsection contort and squelch. In the other room, out a door to my right, where it is dim and grayish, I hear footsteps, and I try my hardest to pretend I’m dead. Secretly, I think I am. The footsteps walk out, I hear a swinging door, a swinging screen door, a slam.

Somehow I crawl out, into the other room, where there is a big disheveled bed, where the blinds have broken so a little dirty light is streaming through and I can see a dead girl in a heap. She has blond hair. She was shot in the stomach. All around her is berry brownish red. Sticky. I find a phone, retreat into the tub, and lay on my back again, with my legs splayed over the edge, just as I was before. In case. I call 911.

My mother answers, and this seems natural. I am very calm. I say hello, Mom, it’s me, I’m just calling to tell you I was shot in the stomach and I love you very much but I am going to die now. She says, ha ha ha. This is frustrating. I touch the edge of my big gaping wound, just barely. Mother, I’m not joking. I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’m lying in a bathtub, there is a dead girl on the bed in the other room. My fingertips are sticky. I hear footsteps, and suddenly it occurs to me in this very obvious kind of way, that I want to live. The footsteps are still outside. I manage to hurl myself over the edge of the tub, to the door, and lock it.

The man outside is furious, and he looks a little like my father or maybe a neighbor we once had. I know he is wearing work boots with steel toes. He kicks the door.

Mother, I think I could maybe live, but I’m going to need an ambulance, very fast, and somebody with a gun, or this man will kick down the door and kill me now. It’s funny how much and how little I know. For example, I know that he will kill me, and I know that if he does not, I will live. I do not know why he will kill me, who the dead girl is, or where we are. The house reminds me of the daycare I used to attend when I was little. In fact, outside of the broken blinds, I think I can see the big old willow, drooping over the sidewalk. I remember when that willow was cut down, though, and how the woman who ran that daycare out of her home mourned for it.

Somehow, my mother decides I am not joking. I live, although when the ambulance comes I feel a sudden surge of disgust and nausea because I know they will touch my wet, open flesh. Otherwise, I am stuck in this floating kind of logical detachment. I don’t know what happens to the man who wears work boots like my father, who mourned for the girl in a heap on the bed, or what became of the house that resembled a cramped together, torn down version of the place where I once ate little plates of lasagna and traced my hand in glitter glue. Later, I will make a joke about not eating too much, so as to not come apart at the seams.

December

December is cold, cold bones, hope and waiting, that impatient movement in my knees, closing my eyes and standing up on big old bricks, arms spread, fantasies like you on your back, balanced up there under a blanket. December is a deep sigh, mottled gray skies, holiday promises, layers of cloth. December is one more inch up, one more year turned gray and expired, warm things and spices, a month long desire, a smoking candle wick, the moment before the lights come back on. December is a worn out favorite sweater, a white and silver time, thin as paper, hands pressed together, a far-off fireplace in the redwoods. December is the tense ache from holding yourself together, rushing or not moving at all, forest green and mahogany red, extra layers, steam, in cups and out of mouths, in the damp bathroom. December is sleeping long hours, kitten kisses on my chin, blank walls, stagnation, cuddle up indoor days, words spilling out everywhere, wishes. December is one frozen snowflake on the windshield, your long legs stepping into white, your steely eyes fluttering.

Vestiges of Dreaming

You compressed yourself and stuck your hand down the back of my pants and I called in a fake emergency call from a stolen cell phone, not really certain why. In class I looked at the grain of my wooden desk and all around my the students groaned, like falling trees, the teachers face was set hard as stone, she left us without a backward glance. There was a dog; I felt responsible when the skin opened up on his haunches, but he didn’t complain. I tried to hold his body together, I could see the underside of his bare flesh, and there was a yellow smell. I carried him in a plastic bag.

Waking up Wonderful

Last night we sang poetry in my dreams,

really though, it was beautiful, breathing,

and there was a child I’d never seen before,

a strange woman who laid in the river

and picked flowers for her funeral, shaved her head.

And it’s amazing that on the grayest day with nothing

like certainty hovering around your sleepy head

that you can open your eyes everything can settle right

in that heavy happy chest, hollow places humming.

It’s amazing that everything can be just right,

and not even touch perfection.

It’s amazing that with all the questions in the world,

body wide open, full of holes,

permeable as lace,

you can be okay.

Listen to this:

A Momentary Melancholy

I feel the blue-sky honeymoon shrinking away beneath the heavy Summer clouds; a winter chill creeps prematurely into my bones, into my homesick heart. The quaint streets become foreboding as stress and uncertainty pile up on the sleepy arc of my spine. The slick cobblestones feel heavy and strange.

I wonder if this caffeine heartbeat and timid smile will be enough to prop up my toothpick bones against the sudden influx of impassive faces, eyes as green and silent as cats'. I am enveloped in uncertain skin each night and sleep to the rhythm of my own questions; they echo down the tiled hallways as shape-shifting Spanglish invades my dreams with it's awkward, imbalanced gait.