cool yeah great excellent
i hate being home, i hate being put under pressure to perform emotionally, i don't really like anybody
so yeah cool wow wonderful, let's all get mad at me for not doing what i am told!! and let's really make her super nervous all of the time that she is doing the wrong thing and then demand that she do something very difficult that she has never wanted to do in the first place, and then get mad when she inevitably fucks it up, word that is just so super excellent and wonderful, thanks everybody for being so good to me, really, how would i ever get on in the world if anybody trusted me or said, it's ok

yesterday, this girl i knew in high school said to me, "oh, so you're just concerned with getting your MRS now" because i confessed that i'm gonna wait to go to grad school

I kind of feel like I want to get rid of all my posts & start over
It's my birthday again & somehow that word implies getting to start over fresh and clean and new, but it doesn't and maybe that's why it's so disappointing every year
& the not getting what you want
& nobody picks up the phone because they don't have time to take you out & don't want to say it in person
So I'm going to write more, and be better, and look up.

i forgot about how you sucked at my skin on the train tracks and said, i can't do this, i have to leave

it just turned sunday and you're lying in bed while they all drive elsewhere, home or places you don't want to be but would if you were braver, or bigger, or more. instead you're wishing your bed weren't so fucking big, or empty, or fuck it, both, because it's been awhile and you just want another pair of arms to augment your own. but the room smells funny, or maybe its just you, drenched in soap you never quite washed off, because it didn't matter and despite the pulled pork brought to you by housemates you were lonely. lonely enough to feel it here, in your bed, in the aching hand that wont quite do its duty underneath the bed clothes (the porn is stale and empty under backlight on your hard drive, too much so). so you lie listless and think of him, who you left and who left you, a thousand times in a row you left each other mostly on strange notes, but whose children you can already see running with their cousins under big sky, and it makes you sick but you can't stop seeing the family you'll become because you're lying alone under a comforter you father bought you and
god damn

Cascading hot against the soft edge of her, honey on the stove and cherry blossoms seen from the other side of the world through telescopic lenses these were his hands. Thick and slow and convalecent almost juice fought from the core of some loose fruit the parts of their bodies that are usually reserved for either quiet moments with oneself or for the menial tasks of living, tying shoelaces and unfolding the paper packages that breakfast cereal normally arrives. Cutting hunks of melon on the kitchen counter and dialing your mother's phone number, these digits are evolved for these purposes but in this instance they have become appendages specifically for the divining of where exactly the flesh becomes concavity and where it protrudes in the correct fashion thus that it fits into the corner of a palm and there becomes warm and flushed beneath the breath of lifelines.

So she found out about it while taking him in, and she arched her back and put her hand to the wall for support. She wanted more of their bellies touching, she wanted to understand the fact of his face and the worry there, a crease stuck firm into his brow bone when he shut his eyes tight and let sound escape. She wanted always bedding beneath her knees, and she exhaled sharp nearly falling back and shuddering, didn't know before that this was it, had never been so sure as just this moment.

what  i was trying to tell you was that the other night
these kids here, they were talking about something
and they were talking about determinism
and this one kid he was sure of free will and i said
really?
and he got all mad but i knew the truth even though i didn't want to

20090813 HAIKU FOR SIR THOMAS MOORE

when i cut off your
head i will cauterize the
wound to keep it clean

thnx, hpn.

by the way, fuck you american apparel, nothing you make ever looks good on my huge tits

I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I'LL WRITE TO YOU IN FRENCH IF I HAVE TO

hello, 2010. want a cracker?

20071130
We are on the train.
I am.
They are.
Currently, you are on the train. Later you may not be on the train anymore but will go one, if not this one, soon. And then you will be on the train again.
There are people on the train. I don't know them, but one day I could meet them again. And ask: are you the one from the train? And be told: yes. Or else they will not remember me, or I will not remember them. We may not remember each other at all. We will talk and talk and talk and talk but maybe the subject of trains will never come up, because why would it? And then we may never know that at one time our trajectories did cross at a singular point - a train ride- at some time in the past. We will know each other but never know that once we were on the train together- we rode a train together! That was the start! Some people will never ride trains together. Some people will never ride a train with you, or with me. We are already a step ahead! We have already made it possible for ourselves to connect because we chose to get on the train and thus we chose to be near each other. And if we meet again, do not think that it has nothing to do with this train ride, because each subsequent meeting of our bodies in space depends on, owes itself to, making the choice to place ourselves on this vessel and be carried over tracks to our destination. We chose this. You chose it. So why are you just sitting there? Why are we doing nothing about this chance we've been given? Reach out and take it,
it's yours

did you ride the metro north on 30 november, 2007? if so, this post is about you. also it's good because it's metaphorical and deep.

assorted confections
of which i am proud
& which mean things to people
& which may one day convince you that i know how to do it, this stringing of words.

• But I want you so desperately to A) read it and B) read it slow and careful. Can you do this for me you constant eye and ear?

• Acceptable epithets.

• Lightning & luminescence; listen to your heartbeat juxtaposed against the rain on the roof, waiting for corrugated kisses & new shoes.

• I know the time you spend. I spend it, too.

• I had a dream about you. You were drawing on my words, I was writing on your face.

• At first, he did, because of the quenching and because of the ignition. These were his shining moments, if he had any.

20071104 Be passionate. Be full & bursting. Rip yourself limb from limb and then in a frenzy pull yourself back together only to repeat. Spill yourself. This is your chance to deconstruct. Burn & burn & never stop sparking up into the sky, scalded and singed. Raise yourself to him & tell him to go fuck himself. Burn down buildings & kill by the thousands. Be passionate.

'How's the pain?'
'Manageable.'
'Uh huh. Good. Any vomiting?'
'No.'
'Shortness of breath?'
'No.'
'Alright. Good. Nosebleeds?'
'Oh. Well. Maybe.'
'Maybe?'
'I just keep waking up with my pillowcase drenched in blood.'

• I was going through the pile of papers I'd abandoned on a shelf, and found the letters I pretended to write you on the plane. I elected not to read them. Not today. 
• I've lost my appetite.
• I'm terribly hungry.
• I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom. I can't sleep.
• I'm terribly tired.

(inspiration here; an idea which also popped up this afternoon and which i'm going to try and run with for a while)

I know she does not like poetry. Not because she does not like poetry. Not because this is a Thing about her that I know, or that we are Expected to know. Not because she has said this to me, in her voice like bees across the spine of my book: I do not like poetry. Not because I have seen her turn her gaze in agitation away from any particular stanzas. In fact I may have even heard her utter praise for Whitman, or sigh longingly at the mention of the careful constructions of Dickinson, or even Plath. She probably read a lot of poetry in High School, probably copied verses into the pages of her own journals, adding annotations of her own.
I know she does not like poetry because she hasn't the time. She simply reads too fast.

I've got some bad news. I am not going to suck your dick while you're driving.
But I've got some good news, too.

allie

we get low to floor

I found her in the bath tub. She was half sunk, and her whole body was stinging pink. The water rippled where her flesh was exposed, a quiet rising and falling of tide over the bloom of her belly and breasts with each of her shallow breaths. It pooled in the hollows of her clavicles and in her belly button. Her hair curled damp against her forehead and clung to her temples. She had her eyes closed, and her ears below the waterline. I wondered, briefly, if she could hear her own heartbeat; if the slow sounds of her life were somehow magnified by the water. I knelt beside her with a towel on my lap and waited for her to acknowledge me.

I loved watching her be. The moments were few and far between, but there were times during which she would knowingly let me gaze. I knew how she felt about it, that she wanted to cover her chest with her arms, or turn onto her side. The part of her body that I knew best was the space between her shoulder blades. The smooth plane of it, the suggestion of vertebrae beneath her skin. She turned her back to me more often than not, in sleep and in moments of intimacy. It took a while before I learned to let her do that. Finally it dawned on me that she thought of the upper back as the one part of the body which remains the same from girl to girl. The one part of her I couldn't wish was different.

I never really understood the way she felt about her own body. She seemed to love herself unconditionally, to truly think she was a gorgeous piece of flesh. She took such care. She was in awe of her biology and revelled in her own homeostasis, in ways I'd never known anyone to. More, she really did believe that she was beautiful, an excellent machine. But there were these moments, these horrible moments when we were together. I would be above her, or beside her, reaching a hand out to hold a part of her, and she would suck in air and hold her breath. It was as if, by touching her, I was trespassing on sacred ground. And for a few moments she would set her jaw; I could almost hear her convincing herself that this was what she was built for, that my hand here meant I loved her, or wanted her, or both. And then she would suddenly flush, her hot face showing me shame. This incredible sadness would take over her.

I think, now, that it was more about the way she didn't look; as though she wished she could be what I wanted, and was embarassed that she wasn't. As though she thought there was something she should be doing that she wasn't. She had decided, without consulting me, that she fell short in my eyes.

I learned to watch her. I watched her while she cooked, while she ate, while she sat typing at her computer. I watched her sleep. These were the only times I was able to get my eyes on her without her searching my face, wondering what faults I was finding. I realize now that I talked a lot then about hot girls and dirty sex. That she must have felt as though she was in competition with the pornography on my hard drive; a competition she, necessarily, would have found herself losing. There was no way to argue against that, because she was not like those girls. But I watched her in a different way completely. I knew she wanted me to tell her that she was beautiful, but I didn't know how.


So when she let me look at her in the tub, I knew what it meant. And when she finally stood up, dripping on the tile floor, I wrapped the towel around her. Not because I wanted to cover her up, but because I wanted to be closer to her. I wanted to feel the heat of her skin next to mine, and for her to know that I wanted that. If I had had the words, I would have said them. I would have said, I don't want anything other than exactly you. But even in my head that sounded flat and empty; the words that match the rich tenderness of her do no exist. So instead I kissed her shoulder and put my hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. 

and i like the idea of pursuit.

i was drunk

I helped her carry her boxes into the garage.
She had bags of groceries.

We fell asleep breathless and woke up together, hot under the blankets. Windows open. Snow on the ground. She made me breakfast and napped on the couch. She kicked in her sleep. These are things you will never understand.

We fell off and into each other.

We drank whole milk straight out of the carton, thinking it would make us stronger, more like God. Instead we were hungry.

The only time I've seen a roasting pig
Was at my mother's 40th high school reunion.
Ennis Mustangs, altogether again.
Dry that summer's August.
We watched it brown,
Apple in mouth.
She said, it's been there over 16 hours.
Under the big tent I ate:
Potato salad, baked beans
Corn on the cob,
And drank Coca-Cola out of a can.
Helen made a speech.
I heard France in her voice.

She stares blank over that last cup of coffee. 'It's coming', she says. She doesn't have to tell me that she doesn't know when.
Her change clinks onto the table top, she breathes out and gets up. She's gone for good, and I know this, as she picks her bag up off the floor and head out, I know this. All of the sick, sad things she's done thus far and she's gone. Easy as pie.
I push my hands into each other and my knuckles pop one by one.
It's good but not good enough.

At home I pull open the top drawer of my dresser and pull out all the things I drew for her. All the words I wrote to her. There's six pages in all, none of them stupid enough to throw out, and none of them succinct enough to keep. I thought I could write it perfect, or draw it right, but I never could.

I make a pot of cofee, crush up six adderalls and line them up neat. I sit staring. Milligram by milligram the pseudo-speed goes into my nose. Pen moves adjacent to paper, and this is the closest I've ever come to ritual.

And the weight of it!

I'm bored after a while, my head voice makes me sick.

I lie on my back on the floor, looking at the ceiling. I count. I make it to 3,789. I started over twice, both times around 400. Couldn't get that face she makes out from under my eyelids. The one that says, Please.

So I call her, because this is like quitting smoking, or having smoking quit you. You think, after this one last pack. You think, this time I can change. I leave a voice mail that says, Baby.

tossed
by the teeth of the plow.

hands up over your head! sound escaping! calculator, straight edge
palpitation tremulous
cheek against clavicle je t'attends.

BOOT SHELLAC

part one is finally finished. there's one piece that i may decide to place elsewhere, but the rest of it is as near to done as it will be and i need to post it now, before i go soft on it.



Ian likes to say that he pulls teeth for a living, but that isn't exactly true: Ian sells cocaine. That's how we met. He ripped me off, and I let him, and we've best best friends ever since. More or less.

Ian says, You have tiny hands.
Ian says, I can feel your ribs.
Ian says, If I wasn't in love with you, I'd break your face.

He thinks he's stronger than he is. But I can tell you, that was about the only thing he's ever wrong about.



When I was seventeen, my boyfriend, this big guy named Wes, pushed me down the stairs of his apartment building. My shoulder came right out of its socket, and they had to wire shut my jaw (split clean into quarters) so it could heal . Other than that, I was fine. Wes said, She fell, so from then on I was clumsy. Clumsy and quiet. They fed me milkshakes through a straw; I lost 26 pounds.

When I got all that headgear finally taken off, my teeth were straighter and I had a series of criss-crossing tan-lines from the wires snaking up and down my face. Wes made fun of me no end. Three months inside that metal cage, I'd practically forgotten how to speak, let alone to tell Wes not to make fun of me. So I took it.

Except that one night, Wes's guy went out of town, so we called Wes's guy's guy: Ian. We went to meet him at the corner of Amsterdam and 139th. He walks up, tall and skinny, with his dark loose curls cropped short against his head. He gives us much less than a gram, no doubt about it. Wes got pissed. Wes said, Look here, asshole!
That made me nervous. I said, Wes, stoppit.
Wes said, Shut up, freakface.

Ian says, That's no way to talk to a lady.
Wes's neck is nestled safe between the sidewalk and Ian's knee.
Ian says, Apologize to your woman.
Wes's lip is bleeding.
Ian says, Get the fuck out of my neighborhood.
Wes is running, looking over his shoulder and calling my name.
Ian says, Come with me, beautiful.


Ian drives an old, impractical pick up. A Chevy from about 1962. I laughed when I saw it, and then I thought maybe I'd hurt his feelings, because his face turns pink. So I said, I'm sorry, this is just really, uh. And Ian nods, and opens the door for me. And I got in, because that's the kind of girl I was. I had a hard time saying no.

In the cab of the truck, I got a good look at him. Ian is gray all over, with dull green eyes and uneven stubble cropping out on the lower half of his face. Ian is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He looks weather-worn, and mean, but in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth there is a hopeful sort of promise for better days. But I also saw that kind of thing a lot back then. My eyes were tuned to it.

Ian takes me back to his place. He lives in this shitty apartment building, above a deli. But his apartment was gorgeous. All white walls, hardwood floors. It looked, and was, expensive. His kitchen was 90% stainless steel, sparkling clean, and fully stocked. We could have stayed there for weeks without ever having to leave. Ian has money. Ian has a lot of money. Inside the freezer (he shows me this later), there was a secret panel and when you opened it, you could see that the appliance was lined with Benjamins. And at the back of the pantry, behind the cans, were stacked these perfect bricks of coke. They were so geometric that at first I thought they were just the wall behind the cupboard, painted a dull, uniform white. Then I realized.

Ian opens me a beer, and takes my sweater. He hangs it up by the door, polite. He asks me my name, and I told him. Louise. He tells me that it's a pretty name, which it is. He's right. He says, it suits you.

Ian's wearing dark wool trousers and black shoes. Ian's got on a white button-down shirt that needs to be washed. Ian takes off his jacket and hangs it next to my sweater, and he's wearing suspenders, and he rolls his sleeves up, and he looks like he's from some other time. He says, I like your dress, Louise.

I liked that dress, too. It had belonged to my mother, and I'd taken it from the attic when I left home. It made me feel young and American, for some reason. I thought it fit well with my haircut. I guess I was going for that whole 1950's thing. Thinking on it now, I realize what a bitch I must have looked like. What a hipster. But at the time, I felt unique and pretty. And when Ian comments on it, I didn't feel like he's hitting on me, and I wasn't expecting him to say anything like "Now take it off". And he doesn't. He's calm, and polite, and he offers me a seat on his sofa. He says, How did you break your jaw?

So I told him. I told him about Wes, and I told him about falling and not being able to talk. It was the most I'd spoken in months, and it felt good. Ian actually listens to me. He responds to me thoughtfully. As I answered his questions and told him about myself, he's sitting in this big leather chair, leaning over the arm of it and cutting the most perfectly straight and even lines out onto this mirrored jewelry box on a side-table. He's actually using a straight razor. And when he's got about four lines separated from the little mountain on the side, he takes a hundred dollar bill- a real one- out of his pocket, and rolls it up. I felt like I was in a movie. Ian is just living his life.

Ian's about the only person I ever felt I could talk to like that. I'm still not sure if that was just part of his charm, or if all that talking actually interests him. But it didn't matter to me. I talked and talked and talked. And Ian listens, and we converse, and I felt grown-up.

I continued talking into the silence of him for a while. Eventually, it got late, and soon Ian turns the lights off, letting the blue glow of dawn into the apartment. The light rose slowly, first staining the white of the apartment a dull blue-purple and then revealing the perfection of the space. Each corner seemed sharper in the white morning light. I was beginning to come down, and was seeing with anxious eyes. Ian cuts out two more lines for us, ever precise with his blade against the fine powder. Watching him do that was like watching someone else feed a child. My vision started going out, which sometimes happens when I've been awake too long; images come in but they don't get processed. The cocaine helped. Everything straightened out, stopped slanting over to the left.

As the light slowly gave birth to morning, I began to feel the edges of something in Ian, a tenuous quality I couldn't name until months later. Hunger.

That night he barely touches me, though honestly I would have let him take whatever he wants to. He knows that, probably. He read it in me when I got into his truck. But for whatever reason, he hangs on, doesn't fuck me and throw me away. I'd like to say that this is because Ian is a good man, and because he can see that I was already bruised; because he doesn't want to hurt me more than I had already been hurt. Or that he likes listening to me, and thinks what I have to say is interesting or important or both. But none of that is true. Ian has a keen eye. And that dress fit me perfectly.

His hands were rough against my face. I could feel the force of them, though they do nothing but brush a stray strand of hair behind my ear. He asks me if I'm tired, and I was. Ian says, Sleep here. I need to go out, run some errands. I'll be back around noon. So he shows me into the spare bedroom, pours me a glass of water, and closes the door behind him when he leaves.



When he comes back, he's bearing two things. The first is a paper sack filled with groceries, and the other is, and this is not a joke, a trunk full of my stuff. It's a big wooden thing, old and worn, with iron clasps. Something my grandmother might have owned.

I searched his face, and he offered no explanation. I guess I didn't need one. He'd gone, probably first to to Wes' apartment and then to my parents' old place, and collected my things. Simple. I wondered at first what he meant by that. I was 17; I hadn't finished High School yet. Then I thought maybe I'd said more than I thought; he knows I had nowhere else to go, and he's moving me into his apartment. I opened the trunk and there it all was. My dresses, my books. Even the things I'd kept in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. All of it neatly folded and placed considerately, organized. And on top was a crumpled brown paper bag, the kind we used to bring our packed lunches in in elementary school. I opened it, and pictures of Ulysses S. Grant looked back up at me. There must have been at least 10 or 12 stacks of bills. Reading my mind, Ian says, I figured Wes owed you. For your jaw.



..

He sat next to her in homeroom, 10th grade.
Assigned seating by alphabet.
During morning announcements he'd sit with his head on the table.
And she always scribbling. Last minute math homework remembered.
He was vaguely aware when her hair no longer reached halfway to her ass (she'd cut it herself.)
She was peripheral and ephemeral in that immortal teenaged girl way. Thin, gangly limbs that protruded from ill-fitting attire. Limbs that, over the course of a schoolyear, went from a deep healthy summer tan to sickly pale and back again. Limbs that, had be been paying attention, he would have worried for.
Even at 15 years of life, it seemed her body hadn't considered puberty yet. The somewhat childish scent of citrus and oatmeal hung on her.
And then in November one morning, she walked into class and every person possessing male genitalia was, immediately and irrevocably, captivated. As if suddenly the hint of flesh was palpable under those worn out hand-me-down jeans. And there, under the white cotton of those huge tshirts- were those nipples? Luteinizing hormone & follicle-stimulating hormone, those fuckers. For exactly three days, about thirteen times a year for the next eternity, her pituitary glad (suddenly awakened by God-only-knows-what) will trigger the complex set of chemical reactions resulting in the release of the ovum.
Bitch in heat.
Jonah knows nothing about what happens in girls' bodies. All he knows is that for a few days every month he is drawn to her, and that about two weeks later the vague idea of the scent of blood seems to cling to her.
But show him a picture of her face and he wouldn't be able to put a name to it. Some of the older boys, Wes among them, developed fascinations with her. They discussed her body as if it didn't belong to her at all, guffawing between hits of spliff behind the gym. But Jonah, lost in his own early-morning aches & pains, can't be bothered to stare at her the way she wants him to.
Until.
There are rumors that her mother's boyfriend (the dad long gone) got mad and went apeshit or something, beat her to death. Louise does nothing to quell the spread of talk like that. But the sick truth is that the woman had a coronary arrest in her sleep. Just didn't wake up on a Friday morning. Louise was out of school for maybe three days. When she got back, her face was all puffed up and she had on the most beautiful fucking dress. Having finally grown some tits and hips, she consequently now fit into the contents of her mother's closet, and had been given posthumous permission to permanently borrow it all. So she did.
And her first morning back at school, Jonah just happened to let his eyes rest in the space between the underside of the desk and her lap- a place he usually gazed into, where his glance would be met with the innocence of her baggy, washed out cotton tshirt. But today her clothing hugged her abdomen. And for the entirety of the 15-minute morning announcements he watched as her belly expanded and contracted slightly under the fabric of her dress. Watched her breathe.
This is the moment that Jonah Stark fell in love with Louise Stillman.

...


After I'd unpacked all my things into Ian's spare bedroom, I came out into the kitchen. A spread of bread, cheese, cold cuts and various other lunch foods was spread out on the kitchen table. We sat and ate, tearing off hunks of the soft bread, not speaking. When we were done eating, I made moves to clear the table, and Ian lets me. I did the dishes and put the remainder of the food into the fridge. I began to get the notion that Ian aims to make me his maid, or his wife.

Ian says, School starts on Monday, doesn't it.
I nodded yes. I wondered how old he was, what I thought I was doing standing in his kitchen with wet hands the way I was. What the fuck was going on.

Ian says, Listen, Louise. I know this is. A very strange way to begin a relationship with someone.

He pauses as if to give me time to agree with him. But I just stood looking at him, trying to read his face. He looks so calm, so genuine. But he also looks incalculably sad and fucked up. I realised: that was why I was there. Because I had felt in him, in the way he sits and listens, a familiar kind of lostness. I began to cry.

Ian says, Louise. I won't try to explain my actions. He gets up and walks toward me with his arms open. His shirt feels rough, starched, against my cheek. His hands are firm and warm against my back.


Wes and I met in High School. My first boyfriend. Two years older than me, one of those boys my mother, had she lived to see the day, would have forbidden me to date. But he just so happened to touch my arm one day while I stood at my locker. And he looked into my eyes and asked me on a date. He was big, and dumb, but he spoke to me. After my mother died, friends were hard to come by. I couldn't ignore the increase of eyes that seemed glued to my newly-formed flesh, but Wes. Wes I thought was different. He was a door who had unlocked himself for me, and fuck but I decided to step right over that threshold.

I let him engage me in that familiar High School song and dance of movies and dinners, and eventually he started touching me, and eventually I gave up on saying No. Felt like I owed him something. By that time I was suddenly a C student but so, so happy.

My step-father, to whose care I was entrusted after the death of my mother, basically moved in with another woman by the middle of my junior year, and so I moved in with Wes. That's about the time the drugs started up, which was honestly fine by me. I'd been doing bumps out of my mother's secret coke holdings since the day I turned 13. After a few months Wes started realising we couldn't afford the gram-a-day we'd become used to, offered me up instead of cash.

The first time he did that, I cried and yelled, but he looked me in the eye the same way he had the first time he asked me out and he told me, I love you Louise. Just do this for me.

I had a hard time saying no.


The smell of Ian that day in the kitchen was so visceral, so the opposite of Wes. Wes always smelled like men's deodorant, some kind of chemically-produced manly smell. But Ian just smells of hard work, shoe polish and, well, Ian. And his hands on me, his cheek pressed up against my ear. It was like he's apologizing for everything.

I accepted the apology, and that is how we got started.

It wasn't until later, when I found the jars of teeth and the potato sacks filled to the brim with Dactylopius coccus, that I realized just what I'd stepped into. But by then I didn't feel too bad about it. By then I knew that Ian isn't all spine; he has a soft side just like everyone else. And it wasn't until far after that, even after Jonah and the broken fingers, that I started wanting out.

calculator, straight edge
clean faces scrubbed new.
pinprick
drop of blood in the sink.
salivation.
satiation.
very acute.

and like, magically, everything just fucking
disappears

Boot shellac & cochineal.

Ian likes to say that he pulls teeth for a living, but that isn't exactly true: Ian sells cocaine. That's how we met. He ripped me off, and I let him, and we've best best friends ever since. More or less.

Ian says, You have tiny hands.
Ian says, I can feel your ribs.
Ian says, If I wasn't in love with you, I'd break your face.

He thinks he's stronger than he is. But I can tell you, that was about the only thing he's ever wrong about.



When I was seventeen, my boyfriend, this big guy named Wes, pushed me down the stairs of his apartment building. My right shoulder came right out of its socket, and they had to wire shut my jaw (split clean into quarters) so it could heal . Other than that, I was fine. Wes said, She fell, so from then on I was clumsy. Clumsy and quiet. They fed me milkshakes through a straw; I lost 26 pounds.

When I got all that headgear finally taken off, my teeth were straighter and I had a series of criss-crossing tan-lines from the wires snaking up and down my face. Wes made fun of me no end. Three months inside that metal cage, I'd practically forgotten how to speak, let alone to tell Wes not to make fun of me. So I took it.

Except that one night, Wes's guy went out of town, so we called Wes's guy's guy: Ian. We went to meet him at the corner of Amsterdam and 139th. He walks up, tall and skinny, with his dark loose curls cropped short against his head. He gives us much less than a gram, no doubt about it. Wes got pissed. Wes said, Look here, asshole!
That made me nervous. I said, Wes, stoppit.
Wes said, Shut up, freakface.

Ian says, That's no way to talk to a lady.
Wes's neck is nestled safe between the sidewalk and Ian's knee.
Ian says, Apologize to your woman.
Wes's lip is bleeding.
Ian says, Get the fuck out of my neighborhood.
Wes is running, looking over his shoulder and calling my name.
Ian says, Come with me, beautiful.


Ian drives an old, impractical pick up. A Chevy from about 1962. I laughed when I saw it, and then I thought maybe I'd hurt his feelings, because his face turns pink. So I said, I'm sorry, this is just really, uh. And Ian nods, and opens the door for me. And I got in, because that's the kind of girl I was. I had a hard time saying no.

In the cab of the truck, I got a good look at him. Ian is gray all over, with dull green eyes and uneven stubble cropping out on the lower half of his face. Ian is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He looks weather-worn, and mean, but in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth there is a hopeful sort of promise for better days. But I also saw that kind of thing a lot back then. My eyes were tuned to it.

Ian takes me back to his place. He lives in this shitty apartment building, above a deli. But his apartment was gorgeous. All white walls, hardwood floors. It looked, and was, expensive. His kitchen was 90% stainless steel, sparkling clean, and fully stocked. We could have stayed there for weeks without ever having to leave. Ian has money. Ian has a lot of money. Inside the freezer (he shows me this later), there was a secret panel and when you opened it, you could see that the appliance was lined with Benjamins. And at the back of the pantry, behind the cans, were stacked these perfect bricks of coke. They were so geometric that at first I thought they were just the wall behind the cupboard, painted a dull, uniform white. Then I realized.

Ian opens me a beer, and takes my sweater. He hangs it up by the door, polite. He asks me my name, and I told him. Louise. He tells me that it's a pretty name, which it is. He's right. He says, it suits you.

Ian's wearing dark wool trousers and black shoes. Ian's got on a white button-down shirt that needs to be washed. Ian takes off his jacket and hangs it next to my sweater, and he's wearing suspenders, and he rolls his sleeves up, and he looks like he's from some other time. He says, I like your dress, Louise.

I liked that dress, too. It had belonged to my mother, and I'd taken it from the attic when I left home. It made me feel young and American, for some reason. I thought it fit well with my haircut. I guess I was going for that whole 1950's thing. Thinking on it now, I realize what a bitch I must have looked like. What a hipster. But at the time, I felt unique and pretty. And when Ian comments on it, I didn't feel like he's hitting on me, and I wasn't expecting him to say anything like "Now take it off". And he doesn't. He's calm, and polite, and he offers me a seat on his sofa. He says, How did you break your jaw?

So I told him. I told him about Wes, and I told him about falling and not being able to talk. It was the most I'd spoken in months, and it felt good. Ian actually listens to me. He responds to me thoughtfully. As I answered his questions and told him about myself, he's sitting in this big leather chair, leaning over the arm of it and cutting the most perfectly straight and even lines out onto this mirrored jewelry box on a side-table. He's actually using a straight razor. And when he's got about four lines separated from the little mountain on the side, he takes a hundred dollar bill- a real one- out of his pocket, and rolls it up. I felt like I was in a movie. Ian is just living his life.

Ian's about the only person I ever felt I could talk to like that. I'm still not sure if that was just part of his charm, or if all that talking actually interests him. But it didn't matter to me. I talked and talked and talked. And Ian listens, and we converse, and I felt grown-up.

.this originated around june 17, 2009. it is not finished, and may never be; but i'm tired of it sitting in the drafts pile, so whatever.

Go ahead.
Fuck her.

However there are a few things that belong to me, and I would rather she did not have them.
.do make say think
.the plane of your back (the morning after)
.oxytocin (this is unfair of me)
.you, going down (this is also unfair of me; moreso, even.)
.nevermind, they are all unfair.

Oh, god damnit, Christopher.
She's better than me, isn't she.
I am drinking wine out of a box, of course she is better than me!

It's ok. Really.
Oh so many words but they are all blurred.

if not now, when?

Here is an analysis.
The 'Julian' figure here does not correspond exactly to the presence of Julian Watts as a character in my life; rather, he is representative of a protective male figure, one which, at that time, I had but did not know how to make use of. He is also representative of a 'listener' figure, someone with whom I would theoretically be able to speak to about all the fucked up shit that was happening, without necessary response- but who would understand, effortlessly, what I meant. What's compelling about the poem is how I begin the conversation with Julian only to lead him into the enigmatic semi-discussion of the subjects at hand, never allowing him to have a part in the conversation.
"do you know anything about africa?" (line 2): Claire was, at that time, just returned from living in South Africa with her boyfriend Robert. This line, literally translated, means: Do you have any idea what happened to her there? The irony here is that Julian has no idea, but that I do. And what was that?: She lived in Robert's house for several months with no job and slowly fell into the depths of a deep, dangerous alcoholism (a manifestation of the disease she was actually suffering from; NOT the disease itself) which nearly took her life several times. And will continue to do so.
"that inky glue on the back of my throat:" (line 4): Semen. This line is derived from an unpleasant and wholly unexpected moment during which ejaculate was, well, ejaculated into the back of my throat. This experience left me feeling used and degraded (I don't even like giving head in the first place. And this unanounced indulgence made me so fucking angry) Which leads us to:
"this isn't plate-breaking material / this is not a kiss on the mouth and a kick in the jaw / this is not the tiny bones in my feet snapping." (lines 5-7) These lines are a deliniation of the fact that, even though I felt angry about the boy having cum in my mouth with no warning, the anger (and shame and disgust and feeling like a whore) were not passionate; rather, they were not passionate responses, but dejected and quietly seething emotions fueled by an intense self-hatred (and guilt! though that doesn't figure into this analysis of the poem, but to an analysis of that time itself) rather than a firey hatred of others. These emotions also apply directly to how I felt when Claire moved back home (especially that first night when my parents left me with her & she got so drunk & made me take care of her & how much I cried! Do you remember me crying on the phone to Caroline? Do you remember me sobbing into your arms?) Which leads us to:
"do you know about vomit in the sink? / and babies crying to you from their unbroken, perfect wombs?" (lines 8-9) This is, actually, a direct question, not to Julian but to Mark. When Claire told us, through her slurring blackout, that she was pregnant, I prickled and wanted to die. To me that baby was crying out to be aborted! I felt like such an asshole, but I couldn't think of a worse thing to happen to anybody! First of all, for her to have a baby, that would have straight up killed her, ripped her in half, literally. Second of all, the baby would have died, one way or another, either in the womb or out. And thirdly, our family would have been cleft into so many more pieces than it was already. ALSO I would not have gone to college, no money. But Mark. Oh, Mark. You sat with her as she chainsmoked and drank and drank and drank. You rationalised with her, you spoke to her like she was a real person (which at that time, and after that, she was not to me). You tried to take care of her! But what these lines are really saying is: you will never understand who Claire is, and you never can, because you never knew what the fuck I went through with her, even though you went through some of it, too, because to you it was ok but to me it was unpardonable and inconceivable and totally incomprehensible. I will never be able to explain what it meant that she got so sick. And so the question: do you know about vomit in the sink? is rhetorical, because you will never know. It isn't just the vomit, the purging and the manipulation of own her body and of others', it is the fact that I bled myself dry and thought myself responsible for so many years.
"julian, it's late" (line 10) this line is like me saying, it's too late for me to be able to tell you what it what all meant because there are never enough words for that, not after so many years of it.

and why did i write this? this analysis of meaningless, bad poetry written so long ago? because i have been thinking so much about the scars I bear from it all, and have been wanting (waiting?) to explain it, and the truth is that i did those things to my own body for the sole reason that i was punishing myself (it was not because I have no natural predators, no. just, no.); punishing myself both for having caused her sickness (i truly thought it was my fault!- which is something one day i will have to explain, just like everything else, but won't right now) and for feeling such guilt (on some level i knew it couldn't have been my fault, but was sure those feelings were just plain selfish).

OHWHATEVERIJUSTMADEALLOFTHATUPHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Why were we so nervous?
All that time spent with butterflies, considering and reconsidering. Waiting. Configuring the correct combinations of words. Why?
If I could go back. If I could go back, and do it again, this is how I would do it. I would walk with my face set, my hair pulled up and pinned away from my skin, geometry textbook pressed to my chest. I would walk straight up to you and say it.

"If I could go back." How ridiculous. I do go back.

The best thing I ever did for myself: I was in 11th grade and I rode the bus late at night to him. After rehearsal, I called Max and asked him how to get to James' house. I took the 57 down Van Ness and changed at Union to the 1. That was the first time I'd ever taken that bus route; just a year later it became my afterschool activity. But this night I was lost and worried. I called my mother, "Ma, there is something I need to do."
I called him and said, come outside. I am outside.
He came down.
We stood in streetlamp glow and I kissed him. Said, goodbye.

"We talked about that a lot of after you did it." Pause.
"James and Simon and Jeremy, they all thought it was weird and creepy." Pause.
"I thought it was sweet." Break.




The more I drink, the more drunk I feel. Is this normal?
So okay, let's write some poetry together.
I made a whole life for us, it was written in three parts and the first part was called Now I Am a Part of You, pt. 1. But I won't package it up and send it to you, though I already burned it onto three blue blank discs, because I am embarrassed. That seems to be the theme of this post, and of my life: being embarrassed. I imagine what would be possible if I were to erase that word from my vocabulary, nullify it as possibility. I would take off my shirt. I would pinch my OWN NIPPLES. hahahahahaa

But listen to me, first. She miscarried. It's true! Lying dark at the bottom of the bowl, there is was. This is why I fill my lungs with smoke and this is why I take in as much cocaine as possible through each and every nostril. No, I lied. The reason is that I am so sad. Her miscarriage is just coincidence. Excuse.

But honestly none of this has to so with the image here. However, I did write you a poem when I was walking back from the gas station. It goes like this:
Mon coeur.
Mon propre coeur.
Je n'y arrive pas.

It's short & it sounds better in the original.

Well I was going to tell you about how I lay on my stomach for a while, trying to bring you to life, trying to bring myself to life with the contraction or uterine walls and release of oxytocin, your face the only image behind the lids of my eyes, but I was so fucking tired that I fell in and out of circular motion there, in and out of dreams. And when I, periodically, woke and began again, I was so confused. Where did he go. Whose hand is this? Should I stop and fall into the dream for real or should I continue this delusion, fuck. So anyway I'm unsatiated, and when I woke for real I was on my back and naked, and I thought you were here! And pulling myself up out of that hurt somewhere deep in my sternum. And I do that every morning, that pulling, that convincing: no, just a dream, again. No, no warm flesh against you, that sweat you're pooled in is simply your own. Oh, Eleanore, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you have to wake lonely and I'm sorry that it will be that way for a long time. I'm sorry it's so hard to fall into sleep these days. I'm sorry he runs through you like birds singing. I'm sorry there are so many possibilities and I'm sorry you finally gave up looking at flights online. Oh, Eleanore. I'm so sorry you did this to yourself.
So here is where the text connects to the imagery. Those shadows? Those belong to you and to him.
Eleanore, I know the tug. I know the lack. I know that your bones feel weightless and unhinged. I know that it's always, always, always nighttime for you, because daylight here belongs to the afterdark there; and vice-versa. Your mind finds him asleep; though honestly your sleeping mind is the only one which truly finds him. Last night you looked at books in the basement of his parents' library, didn't you? You undressed in the stacks and found him, poring over old pages. You came to him naked and perfect, your body lit by the golden shine of text, and he had you. He was everywhere, he was inside and he was outside and you came with a gulp and a cry out simultaneously, your hips spreadeagled and sweat mingling. You kissed his temples and held his face in your hands, oh Eleanore, I am sorry-sorry, but that was a dream. You still have the feeling of his beared on your fingertips; that beard no longer exists. I am sorry you are so sad. I am sorry that you sob your mind quiet at night. I am sorry that his absence is stronger than his presence, these days. I am sorry that he is far. You are sore, aren't you? You are sore. You ache all over, your mind a muscle that works too hard in the dark for him. And the hands of others, they burn on you. They are jokes that serve to remind of you what is missing.

I am sorry that the future can't exist. Plans are impossible, though you can't help but force the images of it into being.
You'll be happily exhausted next to him. One day. I can promise you nothing, but I will promise you this anyway: distances are easily shortened. The only thing you want is to touch him, I know this, but listen to me Eleanore: what is not now is not discounted in time to come.
No, even better: there is no such thing as time. It is fabrication!
Oh I know it's not enough just to see him and listen to him, a projection of pixles on a screen. But take what you can get and close off all other thoughts, baby girl. Oh Eleanore. I am so, so sorry. Your cheek aches for his chest, I know, stop crying you beautiful girl.
I'll stop; otherwise this will never end.
The point is, it's a physical ache I'm enduring over here. It has to do with the longings in my brain, but it is manifested in a real, actual pain in my chest. Oh baby, stop being a shadow, start being mine. I don;t want to wait! But I will. I will.

i am
slowly
picking myself up

Here she is unpacking her suitcase.
Here she is getting off the train.
Here he sucks the hickey right off her neck.
Tears roll up his face into his eyes.
She lights cigarettes with the heel of her shoe.

I'M GOING TO BE THE FIRST NON-RUSSIAN COSMONAUT AND I'M NEVER GOING TO DIE.

here is a true fact:

it has recently come to my attention that no one reads this blog.

that's ok.
here are some secrects i've been meaning to share.

one. I'm going to be free. And I'm going to be brave. I'm going to live each day as if it were my last. Courageously. Fantastically. With grace. And in the dark of the night, and it does get dark, when I call a name, it will be your name.

two. I don't want to send you the mixes I made because you're going to hate them.

three. I am desperate.

four. If I were less lazy, I'd be happier, but instead I sit around.

five. This weekend I am going to do a lot of drugs in an attempt to forget you. And it will work. And I will fumble around in the dark with some body that I will wish was yours, but which will not be yours. And when I get home afterwards I will cry.

six. Seven is my lucky number and I miss you all the fucking time.

i just keep telling myself: these are powerful images
& these are the right words

Robert pulls the gun out of his pocket, watching my face. He's looking for clues, but I am made of marble.

Rebecca, he says, and I remember again that I do not like the sounds of our names next to one another.
I tell him: I wrote Haikus.
I tell him: I was long-winded.
He grins and says, the two go hand in hand, don't they?
He's illiterate.

He shoots the dog.

I've been telling him ever since I've known him that the dog is on its way out. Hind legs broken, blind and angry, that dog was dead before it was born. But in a way, we all were, right? If not death, what is the space before the womb?

He asks me again what we're going to name the baby, and I don't have the heart to tell him that the baby left me weeks ago. Christopher, I say. Yes, I lay on that sticky plastic table, with goop on my belly as the nurse said, Oh. Yes, I lay in bed and bled out onto the sheets. A thick, lifeless mess of genetics burrowed its red flesh into my underwear. Yes, I let out a sob. Yes, I wanted to tell him. Christopher, I say again.

He fires the gun again into its thick white body. He lights a cigarette.

I get up and go into the house.

(in collaboration with wag scala)

So what you're asking me is, Why did I go over there?
I wasn't thinking. Or rather, I was thinking that my heart hurt and that I wanted to get fucked up on as many drugs I could. And I knew his yay connection was pretty alright, and that he'd pay, as long as I brought the beer. I forgot that I would also be expected to bring the pussy.
His apartment was spotless.
He was very kind.
But then he picked me up and I wrapped my legs around his waist. There are some things no one should ever know.
I said, I'm sorry but I can't.
I said, I have done this before. I said, I got hurt.
He said, I didn't know that. I laughed, even though I knew he was serious.
He said, you can tell me to do the things he does.
This made me feel sick to my stomach. I said, There are some things that do not belong to you anymore.
He said, you can call out his name if you want.
I began to cry.
I tugged at the corners of my skirt. I took off my shoes. He watched me take my hair down. He said, you are usually so full of joy. The smile on my face said, I am so sad.
He asked to see my boobs and I thought, it's the least I can do.
His guy never called him back. I suspect that was never on the books in the first place. Another deal I got burned on.
We lay down and I turned away.
He said, I can't even touch you now?
My body shook, my hands in fists between my breasts. I closed my eyes. The salt spilled over anyway.
He pulled me over to face him. His fingers were at the elastic of my underwear.
There are some things you should never know.

He said, I don't love her anymore.
My belly sunk, and I understood, not for the first time and not for the last, why he wanted me.
All this hurt and all he can do is give me her jewlery and ask me to tell him he's perfect again.

(in collaboration with wag scala)

So anyway, I'm drunk by myself again.
The title of this post is, COPS IS FUCKED UP.
Or, alternatively, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

I found a video of myself on youtube. I was singing along. But here is the serious analysis of what, exactly, happened here in the insula.
(Did I ever tell you: we MRI'd my brain in March and I lay there for an hour, maybe less or more, anyway I looked at disgusted faces and then I mimicked them, and then he analised what had happened there, in the insula, and he found decreased activity, I worry about this often.) (This means, simply put, that chemically I am depressed.) (Which is funny actually, because I actually feel pretty ok.)

I have been daydreaming. Of homes. Of places to live.
I have been coming home home from work to boxes of cereal.
I have been sleeping at least 18 hours a day.
I have been resisting calling my coke dealer.
I have been sending text messages to your phone number.

I will write something real here tomorrow. The real response to this image cannot be written at this time. Our apologies.

(incollaboration with wag scala)

Here are the things we lost in the process:

The right to each others' skin & knotted shoulder meat.
The ability to call out to our mothers.
REM cycles.
Certain combinations of words, including each others' full names.
Text messaging.
David Attenborough.
The sweat on our palms.
Solitude in which to sob.


This is one way in which I become absolved.
This is penitence.

Let me tell you a story. It is a story about organics and evolution. It is a story about loneliness and about cravings. About empty bellies and hot showers. It is a story about salt water and bruised vital organs. About shaking at the sight of you.

Once upon a time, about a week ago, we were walking. What's that, I asked. You took my hand. The sun had set. I was unclean. You said, You've never seen a firefly before?
The end.

(in collaboration with wag scala)

Dear Christopher,

It got hot. Up in the 90s today, and I'm sick as a dog. We all are. Everyone here gets off work at five, and until eight or nine the apartment is smoldering, sweaty and dreamless. We sleep a heavy, collective sleep, a cacophony of alarm clocks bleating at us every half hour from six on, painfully reset & hastily forgotten. And then, one by one, we climb out of our rumpled beds and into the kitchen, where the heat of the oven sets itself deep into our bones and we reheat take out and half-thawed pizzas. We sit in the living room on the couch, eyelids swollen, cutting more successfully through the bloated stale air than through our food, wielding clumsy forks up to our cotton mouths.

I've felt totally empty since you left. I eat thick, buttery things until my stomach feels uncomfortably full. Ground beef and eggplant over oily pasta; lo mein out of a carton at least four times a week; kidney beans straight out of the can. I smoke cigarettes until my mouth tastes like woodsmoke days after the fire's burned out. Chocolate chips by the handful. Am I compensating for my sexual unfulfillment? For how lonely I am? Yes.

Do you remember the first summer I brought you up to Montana? We drove up in your car. Damnit, that was a long, hard drive. When we pulled up to the red house, finally, and stepped out of the car, I started to cry. You hugged me under the porch light, which was swimming with moths, and we listened first to the receeding tide of my sobs and then to the Wrights' flock of sheep complaining out in their pasture. You kissed the top of my head and said, It's okay, baby. It's dry out here. Then we went inside, and I crept upstairs to my parent's bedroom, to wake them and tell them we'd made it. They came down into the kitchen, where you'd poured a tall glass of water for yourself. My mother in her glasses and blue nightgown, my dad pale and shirtless, shaking your hand. We brought our bags into the house, left them in the livingroom and undressed in the downstairs bathroom. We brushed our teeth. And then, exhausted, made the quietest of love in my uncle Kit's childhood bedroom, sideways in the blue rising light of early morning.

We woke a few stark hours later, to the breakfast sounds of my sister and her children. You introduced yourself to my family, and then you kissed first my neice and then my nephew on their temples. You looked Caroline in the eye and said, These are gorgeous children. I sat at the dining room table and sipped hot coffee, watching you. I wonder if you were thinking then about your plans to pack up and move out. At that time, no thought was farther from my mind.

Later, I called my uncle and asked if we could come over and swim. I laughed when you put on your swimming trunks and grabbed your waist, pulled you into me. My aunt and uncle met us on their verandah with two bottles of cold Big Sky IPA, on their way out to meet friends for lunch in town. They opened their doors to us, and I led you into their cool, dark kitchen, showed you pictures of my cousin, and of myself at a younger age: red-cheeked, watermelon-stained. And then we worked up a sweat, jumping on the trampoline on the back lawn. I led you through the willows at the creek's edge, showed you how to hang up your clothes on the pliable branches in the midst of the thicket. I put one arm over my chest and used the other to claw our way through the limbs of the trees (trees I remember, always, as being much smaller) to the cold rush of the water. I stepped right in, waded over towards the deepest part of the stream until the water reached my thigh. I beckoned you over with a laugh. You said, Fuck it's cold. You were right. That water is snow melt and it's got a mean edge to it. I said, Come here.

Hestiantly, making faces I'll never forget, you fought your way towards me. I pointed to the middle of the creek, where the water runs fastest out of the culvert under the road. I said, On three.
One.
Two.
Three.
And then I was under, skin puckered and pinched. You'd stayed up, remember? Cowardly and frozen. I broke the surface of the water from the bottom up as violently as I could and grabbed your shoulders, pulled you into me. Only our heads, mine wet and yours dry as a bone, above the water. You yelled, and to silence you I put my mouth on yours, wrapped my legs around yours. The sun was hot above us, drying out the earth and the freshly cut hay out in the feilds. In the creek, shaded by the willows from the prying eyes of passersby, everything was cool and still.

Our bodies slowly came to terms with the chill of the water. We wrestled and kissed and touched. And then we climbed back out, collected our clothes and wrapped each other up in stiff towels. I showed you the best spot to lay out on the lawn, and we delayed getting dressed until we heard my uncle's car pull up in the driveway on the other side of the house. We went out to them, and my aunt was cleaving a watermelon into chunks on the porch.

That night, just after dinner, my dad said our names solemnly. He motioned us out to the car. We got in, and, laughing and joking with us, drove us out to the lake. He parked on the hillside overlooking the canyon, where the lake runs to the dam. The sun had just set and a golden glow of afterlight coated the earth. You and my father shared a beer sitting on the hood of the car, and I stood a little ways away from you, listening to you talk.

We climbed into bed bone tired but soft and smooth against each other. I have often wondered if I will feel that kind of satisfied exhaustion again. And I have often wondered if you will ever be in those places with me again. And whether there are similar places from the history of your own life that I will one day be in with you.

Christopher, my heart is heavy in this humid place. I fell in love with you without meaning to, and I apologize for that. I am not trying to make you sad: I am trying to make myself happy. It is self-indulgent, this feeling of love like mollasses flowing through my veins, and the only way I know how to leech it is to spread it thick onto the pages of this stationery. Toast and honey. I find myself daydreaming, creating our own histories, spaces for us to inhabit. I can't help it. I will try not to weigh you down with it. I will try not to tie these lead weights to your boots. I cannot guarantee that I will not wait with a pain in my chest for you to reply or return, but I can promise you that I will continue to live my life fantastically, corageously, and with grace.

I am missing you with ferocity.

Until forever,
Yours,
Eleanore

(in collaboration with wag scala)

I brought my Nalgene but it was filled with limeade and gin. We drove up in your Grand Cherokee, listening to loud, vaugely sad music from San Diego. At first everyone was talking and singing. I sat in the front seat, which is where I always sat in your car, and I smoked cigarettes out the window. The wind of the highway against my face and turning back, laughing at what David and Nicky were saying as they sparked a blunt. You took your hand off the steering wheel and gripped my leg above the knee. Isabel, with Rose on her lap, was already beligerant.

When we pulled up to the gate, you turned off the music and we sat staring at the padlocked fence. Summer sounds crept over to us and suddenly the building looked sad, no longer the menacing and stubborn character we remembered it as being. Should we get out and climb it?, said David, leaning in so that his face was between yours and mine. His breath was hot and purply: a fake grape scent clung to his saliva. Nicky, without saying anything, got out of the car. We watched him in the yellow glow of the headlights, his back to us. He shook the chain-link and paused. And then, a resounding pop and clang of metal and the gate jerked open. We drove in and you stopped the car right next to him, and I could see blood on the white canvas of his shoes. He held his right hand in his left and said, Hand me that Jack. He took a long pull on the flask. His face was pale. You cut the lights.

We had thought we'd go in and do some damage. But as we piled out of the car, I realised that all I wanted to do was look. To watch the place as it was without us: deserted and sweaty.

The paint cans stayed in the car.

We walked out, a silently wobbly group, towards the baseball diamond. The floodlights were on. We sat on the bleechers. This wasn't the scene any of us had been expecting. I got tired and laid my head in your lap. I wanted to have sex with you in the outfeild. You put your hand on my shoulder. And then, David in his clear bell of a voice said, My children are going to go to this school. And we all nodded, like Yeah, mine, too.

(in collaboration with wag scala)

Dear Christopher,
I know it's only skin, but it means so much to me. It'll grow back, yes, but smoother this time. Shiny. Maybe we should quit smoking.
Or buy a car.

I lay on my stomach with one hand under my pelvis and the other up by my ear. The sheets got hot and sticky under me and the only thing in my mind was the face you made when I said, I'm close. I wish I could fall asleep but I'm hungry and my neck aches and these walls are paper thin. There's one scar on my right leg that I don't think you ever saw. I was angry and sitting dry in the bathtub, one night after Claire had come over for dinner, I was 16. After we ate she went into the upstairs bathroom and ran all three faucets but I could still hear her choking it out. This was when she lived in the apartment on Fulton by herself, right before South Africa, which I think is where she switched to vodka. Anyway then she went home and I put on my pajamas. Mom and Dad went to bed and I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and I couldn't help myself. It was about a quarter of an inch deep and probably needed to be stitched. Whales' blood is so thick with iron that it looks black. My knee jerked up and I hit my head on the tile by accident. Then I sat for a while. A few weeks later my mother said, What happened to these sheets? And I told her I'd gotten my period unexpectedly. I was 16. We are allowed to fuck up occasionally.

I forgive you.

I spoke to my mother on the phone this morning. She told me that she failed French in college. She sounded disappointed. I lied and said I'd won at beer pong. She laughed and said, This is a good thing. Then she said, The last thing he needs is to come home to someone who's just been pining away, sitting in bed all day missing him. I think she's impressed. I think she pined for my dad when he moved to Hong Kong. And then again when he moved to London, and then to Belgium, and then to Germany. And even more when he moved to San Francisco and she was at home with us, two sad and guilty daughters, each inducing endorphins in different but comparable ways. We thought we were keeping secrets. Our mother saw everything.

I forgive you.

What I am saying, Christopher, is that I think you should get a helmet. And that I'm so glad we didn't call Lighty last night. All that cocaine is just salt in the wound.

Okay, baby, I'm going to go buy lunch. Tell me when you get a phone number, or an address.

All my love
Eleanore

(in collaboration with wag scala)

We used to worry about the silliest things. You and I.

Do you remember our first morning upstate, you pulled the curtains open on me and I curled up and away from the mid-morning. How you laughed. How I put one hand over my chest and the other over my eyes and fought my way back into the dream I had been having. And you said, what is this! You said, I love this you! You lay on top of me and breathed on my face.

We made love seven times that weekend because seven is my lucky number. Your spine shook. We showered and you washed your hair, telling me that the most personal thing about a person is the way they dry off after bathing. You put soap on my shoulders and watched while I stood under the water, rinsing off. The night you left I got into the shower to be alone to cry and immediately regretted it. Soaping up I felt like I was washing you right off my skin and I hated myself for it. Me, I start with the towel against my arms, first right and then left; then my legs, first left and then right. And then my belly and my back, and very carefully the nape of my neck, and the space behind my ears. And then I fold the terrycloth around my whole body in a hug. It's lonely, drying off without you.

We stood in the rain in those ridiculous blue ponchos, and you were kidding, but I really did feel baptized that day. Like I'd unzipped the sleeping bag of myself finally and climbed into the sheets of a shared bed. Like finally I could calm down and be honest. Like it didn't matter that the sky was covered in a layer of clouds because I knew that up above the sun was shining. Like finally I could say everything- even though I didn't.

When you and Asher lit that bonfire in his backyard and smoked it, and afterwards when we were sitting on his couch, when you were fighting with my hand against your leg, that is when I fell in love with you. Not for the first time and not for the last. I looked at you in the blue wash of television and saw you at every age. Then in a lull you turned to me and asked me, What are you doing in a year? And I wanted to say, In a year I'll be in your bed and that is a promise I'm not strong enough to break.

(in collaboration with wag scala)

because all my life i've been crying about one thing or another, and this, this this this this this thisthisthisthisthisthis is one thing i refuse to be sad about
because i needed clear eyes to look at you with
to drink you in
and burn the image of your face onto my brain (that scares me the most, what if i forget what you look like, you you you you you you you youyouyouyouyouyouyouyou you bright illustrious cosmic force)
and then on the train even before i find a seat i am sobbing
and then the train is filled with salt water, my own secreted ocean
and then at home the first thing i do is put on your shirt and the hat you gave me
and my big headphones
and into my ears comes herstory of glory and then the room is flooded with salt water
and yechen is reading about the stock market and i fucking hate her so much, i want to say to her, why can't you just leave me alone? why can't you understand that the most beautiful thing just happened to me? why can't you just get the fuck out of here? why can't you leave and let me lie in these sheets and this shirt pretending i can still smell him?
i can't feel my face
and these little sounds are escaping my throat, sounds i've never made before
my hands already miss the feel of your face
i'm sorry, i don't know why i couldn't cry, none of this feels real, none of this feels like it happened, did it happen? did i have you and are you gone? in the car when you put on that song it felt like everything i've ever felt was welling up in my extremities, this burning adrenaline rush of sadness swelling my capilaries and the tears just spilled out onto my face as if i had no choice, i had no choice, and my jaw muscles hurt because i bit down so hard trying to stop myself, why couldn't i cry at the station?
and now you're shaving
and packing up, moving out
i love you so much

my sister is mentally ill. she has bipolar disorder (type II) and is an alcoholic.

i've only had the words for this since last week and i'm sorry but it makes me so incredibly sad. and i think about it all the time



(i wrote & posted this on july 15; then in the morning i took it down because it felt too raw; then i realised i need it up here because it's true and it's new and it's punctuating my life, so maybe it should punctuate my blog, too.)

Why can't I write to you? Why can't I speak to you? Why can't I translate these synaptic transmissions into words?This used to be the easiest part. This recording of emotions, the naming of feelings and thoughts. But I can't do it for you. is it because I was burned by that impulse in February? been told so often not to fall in love, been laughed at too many times for telling the truth
is it because I'm afraid of how much it's going to hurt when you go? (it'll hurt whether or not I write it down, I know)



I memorised it, as humiliating as that is, :

Because I found this the way I found you: raggedy-edged and glorious,
Darling. Tender. Terribly important.
I'll never forget you, bright illustrious cosmic force.

Boundless love,

all i can think is how easily that must've slipped out of her,
i know that feeling (how many love notes did i write to julian? how many to james and to jacob?)
but
it's that middle part that really gets me: darling. tender. terribly important.
and the part where she said, i'll never forget you.

why does it cleave me so?

because it implies for her something enduring and thickly felt. and because those words, darling, tender, are words i would never have thought of. because, try as i might, i can't produce anything similar: my attempt would be in imitation and i just can't make words coagulate like that for you. and that's something i'm actively struggling with. the incompetence of language is not something i am used to running up against. it makes me anxious that i can't put this on paper. why can't i? this worries me, this dumbness. i write you out and it's clunky, inaccurate, i use the delete key more than anything else. is it my closeness?
am i just saturated with you? in that case, i fear the inevitable flood when you go. i'll be drowning in salt & squared pages before you even land.

see even this post sounds like a fucking--
speech or someshit
i have some good combinations of words going (thickly felt; make words coagulate; being saturated with you) but the rest of the paragraph reads like some stupid bitch with a heavy heart wrote it. and yes, i know, i am just some stupid bitch with a heavy heart, but usually i can make it sound better than that.
and not being able to write it down means it's all just sitting in my body cavity, soaking and accruing and getting heavy. so heavy. hard to lift.
and the quality of this writing is just, embarassing. i want to write something beautiful and clear-eyed so that you will know how i feel. i can't even end this fucking post elegantly. shit.
its not done yet but go ahead.
WHY!?

my heart hurts

fuck these distances, long and rambling over this country that shouldn't even exist, fuckers. (misplaced anxiety). (misplaced frustration).

no i don't want to ride your horses

no i don't want to swim in your creek and no, i don't want to dream about you.

and i don't want to fight about this. (i sleep exclusively on my left side now; did you know that i dozed through the last half hour of that four-part masterpiece, my ear against your chest. no, you didn't know.)

hmm. we breathe. we comfort ourselves with the quick pace of time. we try to think in the parts of our heads that don't contain each other. we occupy our hands. and we try not to cry.

hahahahahahahahaha!

I WAS JUST THINKING about how I had no beautiful combinations of words for you. About how no poetry would ever contain this feeling. How what that girl wrote is, yes, it is true & beautiful & lyrical (though, maybe, meaningless). And how I would never be able to come up with anything so wistful and filled with awe; nothing quite so excellently grand. Instead I just miss you: a gentle achey pull at my sternum that has no words. A dizzying longing for your body and for your voice and also i want to sleep with you for days.

potatoes are grown from the eyes of other potatoes.

yeah but
neurologically speaking-- it's possible to experience pain in someone else's body

twenty years ago today, i was born
two weeks late, and blue & strangled- but born nonetheless.

from May 2006

It started with one. He felt it pushing from his solar plexus, forcing its way out of his lungs and blood vessels, drawn to the ink in his pen and the white on his paper. Without knowing, without understanding, he found himself writing, filling page after page with messy black script. Everything he had been keeping in the hollow space behind his bellybutton, every secret and ghost and imagining was bubbling up and out of him, and, as soon as it had been remembered, it ended up as garbled vomit across acres and acres of white paper on his desk.

It was late one night, having returned home drunk and confused, that he was first consumed with two burning desires: the first was to write and write and write (this was far more than a desire, it was a need, a thirst and a hunger. It enveloped him in its pin-prickly grasp, forced him to extend his fingers and reach for a pen, even made him impossibly sad that his fingers themselves were not able to draw lines of ink across the page.) The second was the need for searching, scanning eyes. He wanted a God, an undefined being, something- he didn’t know what, just a person, a thing to understand him. This was the desire to be known, and it was crackling there inside of him like a campfire.

Waking up the next morning, hung over and bleary-eyed, Aaron was surprised to find the black ball-point still grasped tightly between his thumb and fore-finger. More than that, however, he was surprised to find that what he had written was both truthful and coherent (not, as one might assume, the drunken ramblings of a seventeen-year-old boy). Things he had always wanted to say to people, bits and pieces from his memories, they were all there, staring up at him, as useless as they had been when they had lain dormant inside his bones. It was only then, examining the pages which had flown from him a few hours before that he realized he was writing letters. The next logical step, in this hungry, crazed delirium, was to take the heavy telephone book from its place high up on the shelf in his father’s study and start from the A’s.

To Cora Ace he sent a short memory of a recent Saturday night:

“She turned to face me, eyes glimmering in the darkness, mouth turned down at the corners in confusion and something else I can’t name. Her skin was warm and damp against my arms, her hair brushed my cheek, I breathed her in before she got up and looked away from me. Just what is it, she asked the room around us, that you’re trying so hard to forget?”

He folded and packaged and mailed off the first memory of the sound a fist makes against a mother’s jaw bone to Johanna Bolivar, pressed into a piece of paper intended for Robert Buchanon the way it feels to fly without leaving the ground. His first experiences with the desire to get between a girl’s thighs, those fear-filled nights having gotten this wish, they were sent away with everything else. Memories of diving for miles under the clearest green ocean in the world just because of the way it felt to have the expanse of water pressing in on his chest, buying rock candy at the beach with his brother as a child- they were all there, they filled the mailboxes and emptied his pockets of change, all his money going towards the never ending need for stamps.

He tasted the envelope and stamp glue everywhere. It was in his cereal at breakfast every morning, in the exhaust of the cars on his walk to school. Sometimes he even discovered it in the mouth of a girl, turning his stomach with that toothache of a reminder - he had to keep writing. It wasn’t that he needed to get his life down on paper, it wasn’t even that he needed to remember those things he found it necessary to transcribe to paper. It was that his life had turned out so differently than he felt it had been meant to. By writing it, he was being given a second chance. No, he wasn’t changing his history, he wasn’t making anything up, not inventing things. He was examining, and perfecting. He needed to hit himself over the head with his stupidity, and to congratulate himself on his triumphs: he was writing his life down more truthfully than it had happened.

It started with one. At home sick one afternoon, eating apples and peanut butter in front of the television, Prudence Zugar heard her favorite noise in the world for the first time in weeks- the subtle ca-chink of the mail slot opening followed quickly after with the sloop of paper land on the welcome mat of her parent’s house. She bounced up and off of the sofa and crossed the living room into the hall. A single envelope, addressed simply to her house but not to anyone in it, lay on the floor in front of the door. Figuring that it must belong to her as much as it belonged to anyone else, she picked it up and carried it to her room, like some precious and valuable object.

She wanted nothing more than to find out what it contained, couldn’t help but pin all her hopes on this one bundle of papers. (Hopes for what? For happiness? For direction and truth and all these made-up images she was keeping in her mind as false and terrifying beacons of reality? How could she have pinned all this on one tiny inanimate object? But can we blame her, really, can we fault her for hoping and believing in this one perfect idol, this unusual God, when we do the same, every day to every thing around us?)

She waited. And as she waited, tensely, anticipating what she would find, what the letter represented to her grew and changed and became at once more and less than what it had been at the start. Finally, on the sixteenth day, eight envelopes, all similar to the first in that they bore only her house address but not her name, appeared on her doorstep. That was when she decided to open it.

She carefully slid her finger under the corner on the envelope, tearing its flesh apart to reveal a letter written in smudged black ink. Her eyes drank in every word, sentence, paragraph, she crawled into her bed, trying to bury herself under the weight which suddenly filled her chest and sat like molasses in her bones. She read each page a thousand times, there was a life here, whose was it and where could she find it, listen:

“They moved at each other, fists held high though both knew there would be no blood spilled by knuckle against flesh. I cowered in my place at the top the stairs, the door was wide open I remember thinking the cat would run away. I remember thinking that I wished I could run like a fox out of that open door so I would never have to see whatever it was that was happening. Jacob circled in on father, yelled something I wish I could remember, there were thudding noises as things flew from one side of the kitchen to the other father yelled Look into my eyes, Jacob hollered Look into mine, they had each other by the jaws and I became a fox.”

“Making lightheaded movements towards the bed, we were stumbling, was she as afraid of this as I was? She fell, I caught her, she was dripping with sweat and I wanted to ask her if it would be alright to listen to her heavy heartbeat for a few minutes, maybe an eternity, her salt mixed with mine, we were a chemistry experiment, I did what I did, held her where I held her, only because it was necessary only because of the way her hot breath felt in my ear.”

It was everything, all the things Aaron had set on paper, all the people he had tried to send his life to, they all ended up as piles of snow on Prudence’s bedroom floor, she read him, she knew him, he filled the empty spaces inside of her with the words which forced themselves out of him- together they were the prefect match, the reader and the writer, each giving the other exactly what they needed.