“Police! Thieves! Back you devils! Police! Thieves!”

I recognized the quavering shouts in the hall as belonging to the tenant in apartment #8, the only other apartment in my hall. I didn’t even flinch. This tenant, John Moses (who everyone just referred to by his last name), seemed as old as the apartment building himself, but was actually about ninety, a tiny old man smelled like dust and cigarette ash, like musty stacks of newspaper. His hair looked like handfuls of cobwebs, and he always wore the same ancient Reed College sweatshirt, and old dirty Levi’s with a black fine tooth comb peeking out of the back pocket.

Half-awake on a Wednesday morning, in the middle of a lackluster March, I slid my back down the porcelain edge of the clawfoot tub in my apartment until half my face was submersed in the now tepid bathwater, lilac and geranium scented soap floating at the other end of the tub, causing a layer of filmy suds to slide over the surface of the water, my ears submerged to muffle the noise. Staring out the bathroom window, I could only see the shabby branches of the cottonwood tree after sliding down so far – I could no longer see the tops of the apartment buildings, the baseball field, the grocery stores, the music venues, or the Fremont Bridge which leads travelers north across the river. I still woke at eight thirty every morning, even though I quit setting my alarm. I wondered how many people had stared at that tree from this exact spot, in this apartment building that was once a boarding house. I wondered if boarders would stare through that window with its crooked windowsill, and dark wood starting to splinter and bubble. I imagined, as I had so many times before, that I didn’t live in this apartment, but that I was just staying a night in the boarding house, some other winter, in some other year, maybe 1897, right after the building was built. I closed my eyes, and my pockets were full of blueberries and tobacco, I played banjo in a band for a circus, I was waiting for the next train south, and I would soon be gone, eating cherry pie, wearing handmade poplin dresses and a pair of old lace up boots, borrowed from my brother who had outgrown them.

“Commie bastards, eh all of you…pinkos!” I heard Moses muttering over the sounds of doors slamming. I hear my doorknob being rattled, but was in the habit of locking the door always, just for occasions like this, when Moses forgot whose apartment was whose.

I didn’t think about my full voicemail box as I lay in the tub; I didn’t think about all the messages from my friends, wondering why I was missing our weekly routine outings, I didn’t think about messages from my dad, wondering why I hadn’t answered his emails, I didn’t think about the calls from my boss, the messages he would leave that were full of words that would render concern, but were spoken in a tone that sounded accusatory – “I hope you feel well enough to return to work soon…We really need you back.”

With my eyes closed, I couldn’t even see the tiny green tendrils sprouting on the branches of the cottonwood tree, the tender buds forming on the branches – the first sign that warm weather would soon burn away the winter, dissolve the clouds that bore rain on the city, that bore rain on the shoulders of my coat, on the top of my hat for the last six months. The apartment I moved in to in the winter, felt less cozy by early spring. The friendships I formed with my neighbors and people in the neighborhood felt less delightful but more confining, like responsibilities. Weekly events, nights out, movie and Thai food nights, craft nights, I began to dread them all; I would wince whenever someone sarcastically asked if I couldn’t come because I had a headache – not because I felt bad or because I had a headache, but because it meant that my excuse had been figured out, thus it wouldn’t work anymore. I began calling in sick to work, mostly because I hated the work but was too scared to actually quit. In some way, I knew that this excuse would be exhausted, and maybe I really wanted to quit, but didn’t know how. Even the walls in my apartment, once sea green-blue looked gray, and as I lay in bed at night, the sounds of the heater, the city train sliding down its tracks, the water dripping in the bathroom, all these noises seemed horrendously loud and jarring, filling the tiny space of my studio apartment even more, as I shivered in my tangerine sheets, listening to the rain on the roof, as if I could hear every drop.

Climbing out of the tub, reaching for my scratchy yellow towel, I looked at the imprints my wet feet left on the cream mat outside my tub, perfect outlines of tiny feet. I heard a loud rattling of keys and a tenuous guffaw from the hall, so I knew that Moses had found his way into his apartment. All those days, in that winter, where I called in sick and couldn’t even motivate myself to read a book, I would just float in my apartment, laying in one place to another – from the bath to the couch, still in a towel, or back into bed, to look through some old magazine or journal I’d written. Usually, I would make a cup of black tea, sweeten it with sugar, and sit on the front stoop, a little shelter outside from the rain, and smoke a cigarette. I don’t know how long Moses had been smoking cigarettes, but when I think about it, I wonder if it was more than fifty years. Our cigarette breaks often coordinated. My interactions with Moses were varied at first: when I first moved in, if I asked him a question, he would crane his neck towards me, the white prickly hairs on the back of his neck looking like the gruff of an old hound; his eyes were a dull blue, and I knew that he was only pretending to listen, that I wasn’t speaking loud enough for him to hear. He did this with other people too, at the coffee shop around the corner, where they usually let him eat for free. I wished I could ignore people like he did, sometimes, just let their words pass by my ears, nod, and then be done. Once I became more familiar to Moses, he would speak to me more often. When he saw my septum piercing, he squinted his eyes, pursed his lips and said, “You look like a prize bull.” Other times he would say, “I feel bad for you. You’ve got a crush on me and I’m too old for you.” Another time, I opened a door for him and he said, “You’re just like every other woman I know, taking charge! I won’t have it!” Occasionally I would just pass him in the coffee shop or on the apartment stairs and ask how he was. Sometimes he would tell me to “mind my own damn business,” another time he said something like, “Oh, just thinking back on my past affairs. Some lovely, some I’d care to forget. You know how that goes, you’ve been around the block a few times, I’m sure.” My landlord told me once that Moses was a friend of her father’s from college, and that they had fought in World War Two together, and Moses later had fought in Korea. I never knew for sure, but I’d heard that they didn’t charge him rent to live in that apartment anymore.

I sighed and looked around my apartment, #7 – jars half full of water, chipped mugs, mismatched saucers cluttering my desk and table; knitting projects, tangles of yarn, needles and fabric; piles of clothes – clean, dirty, needing to be hung up, needing to be folded, needing to be washed; crumbs on the counter, stacks of pans in the dishes with dried on food that would never come off. I sat and leaned my head back against the wall, regarding all these things with the same apathy as everything else.

*

“There aren’t any fruit trees in this city,” I had said, looking over at Moses, whose small figure made the weather battered plastic lawn chair look large, months earlier, sometime in January. As I took a sip of tea, much too hot, I watched his reaction to this – he wrinkled his nose, furrowed his brows and looked to the side, as if it took more time for my words to find meaning as they passed from his ears into his mind. I exhaled a slow, smoky breath wishing my mouth was full of the taste of oranges not cigarettes. I remembered when I lived with my mother in the Florida Keys, in a small blue house. I hardly remember the house, I was seven when we moved away, but I remember my mother lifting me up and walking around with me on her shoulders, her curly black hair tickling my thick legs as we would walk under the two blood orange and one lemon and one lime tree that grew under the webs of power lines, between the telephone poles, the only trees in our tiny yard. I stretched to reach the oranges, then handed them to my mother, who would stuff them into any pockets she had on her dress or sweatshirt. Then I would sit on the concrete patio and peel orange after orange, lime after lime while my mother read Ramona Quimby books to me. My fingers would be stained from the scent and color of the rinds of the fruit, punky fragrant pieces shoved under my fingernails, pieces of dark blood orange slices scattered around.

As I sat on the porch stairs, Moses in his plastic throne, I eyed my cigarette, and felt how acrid it made my inhale, how much tighter my chest was, and I wished I were seven and covered with sticky citrus juice. I wished I were anywhere that wasn’t my apartment, my neighborhood, the coffee shop, the bar, or a friend’s house. I wished I was pulling apart a blood orange, warm from the sun; I wished that my mom laying in the grass next to me, wearing her favorite green blouse, asleep with her book covering her face from the light and the sky. I remember the afternoon I tried to climb the tree by myself, but tumbled out of the tree, unable to capture any of the pulpy treasures hanging from the end of the branches. I sat with my legs straight out in front of me, puffing with tears, rubbing the scratches on my face and arms. “Oh, you have a thicker skin than that, you’re okay,” my mother had said, both comforting and scolding, as she knelt to wipe my arm with a dishtowel in our dark kitchen. I still wonder how thick my skin is supposed to be.

“Ah, fruit trees!” Moses exclaimed, finally realizing what I had said.

“Those bastards. When I was…” he paused to tilt his head away from me, looking at me with one quavering eye, that seemed to be hiding a wink, “…a much younger, more attractive man, if you can imagine that, I was chasing this girl who’s father had a plum orchard. This was years ago, when I lived in Minnesota. A plum orchard. Christ. I worked there a summer, thinking I could woo this girl. Well, those trees were more trouble than it was worth – trimming, picking, raking. It was a hassle,” he particularly emphasized the word hassle, nearly shouting the word.

“A storm came through that summer, a wind storm, you know like sometimes happen here. Well those trees have shallow roots, but wide. One got blown over, then a whole bunch of others when with them. The thing about those fruit trees is that their tiniest roots held on the hardest. Once the big roots broke loose, well they were done for. But I could hear the tiny crackles of the..the little roots…the littlest ones…holding on to the earth as long as they could. Ah well. That storm ended my summer work. I probably spend the rest of August drinking whiskey or some other rascaly business. But you know nothing about that do you?” he turned his face towards me, mustache bristling with a smile, saying “do you” less as a question, but a statement. Whenever he spoke, his voice would get quiet and then loud, oddly emphasizing words in some way I could never quite decipher. Phrases of words would be spoken simply, phrases of words would be stuttered, fumbled with, and then one word shouted. Maybe it wasn’t intended to be meaningful. I asked him what happened to the girl he was trying to woo.

“Well, being the cantankerous hooligan I was…” Moses chuckled, “well, being the cantankerous hooligan I am, I found something or someone else to chase. She got married or something, had a slew of kids. I can’t remember,” and he took another shaky drag of his cigarette.

Running my tongue around on the insides of my cheek, trying to wash out the taste of my cigarette, I looked down the stairs at the street, at the empty city train curving up the hill, at the scraggly trees planted by the city on the sidewalk, their trunks so thing I could fit both hands around them. “Well, I wish we could have some plum trees around here. Or oranges. Or anything other than this weather.”

“Fruit trees, eh. Well, I don’t know about that. Won’t grow up here. But this weather…well I’ve been here for quite a few winters, and the thing about the weather here, in eh…the weather here in…” Moses looked down into his cup of coffee for a moment, his face cloudy with irritation, “Portland. The thing about the weather here in the winters in Portland, is that it doesn’t keep any secrets from us. Not one,” he said, pushing himself slowly up and out of the chair. I stood, seeing tiny splashes on the thin white paper of my cigarette, feeling drops my eyelashes and pulled the door open for Moses, who shuffled inside, dwarfed by puffy blue jacket. I wondered what sort of secrets wintery Portland had, what sort of secrets the rainy weather wasn’t keeping. I wondered if this too, like Moses’s emphasized words, had meaning or not.

*

Maybe I was tired of staring at the mess of my apartment, or I realized I hadn’t left the tiny place in three days. When I looked out the window in my bedroom, the one that was only three feet wide, but six feet tall, white paint chipping of the frame, I saw that it wasn’t raining – or at least wasn’t raining yet. The sidewalk was wet, the trees were dark and wet, the sky bright, not in a sunny way, but only because of the thick, gray clouds, which somehow reflected light. I got dressed and pulled on some boots, my old gray wool coat, a thin blue scarf my best friend sent me from Colorado after she moved there, and decided to go outside, on a walk, to get air, any of those things people say are good to do - not even taking a bag, or my wallet, or any cash, just a cigarette I’d rolled dangling from my lips.

I stopped on the front porch, cupping my hand to light my cigarette. It still wasn’t raining, but drops of water were splashing down from the eaves. Moses was sitting in his usual perch, same puffy blue coat, and a gray stocking cap, folded over twice. I glanced over to see what the paper was that he was holding to read – I think it was #4’s electric bill. If Moses wasn’t re-reading Nietzsche essays or War and Peace, he would read our mail. Moses had gotten better about taking mail that wasn’t his, but usually I would find my letters and bills opened, re-folded, then tucked under my door. He nodded at me, smiling with his old teeth under his bristly mustache. I folded my lips upward into a return smile, and noticed his eyes seemed sharper, less dull, like shards of old blue glass bottles. As I padded down the twelve dirty cement stairs, under the brick arch, landing on the sidewalk and turning to the north, a small fuzzy object was caught in my periphery, nesting in one of the scraggly sidewalk trees. Pausing, then walking closer, I saw a tiny Clementine orange, peeled, fragrant and spicy, wet from the earlier rain shower tucked between two twiggy branches. Looking at the two other trees on the block, I saw tiny citrus gems placed between the other branches. I turned, stood under the arch which had our apartment building’s name painted across it in scrolling hand painted letters, cupping the tiny fruit in the palm of my hand, wondering if Moses’s fingers were stained from the color and scent of the orange peel. Moses snuffed out his cigarette. As he stood I saw how hunched he was, how his sitting posture and standing posture were not so different. He hunched down slightly and pointed his finger at me. I thought I saw his mustache twitch, like it did when he smiled or winked, and then he turned and began fumbling with his keys. Pulling the main door open, I saw the back of his hat tilt upward as he surveyed the steep stairs ahead of him. Grabbing onto the handrail, I heard him grumble to himself, as I had heard him say so many times before as he fought his way up those stairs, “Dammit, Moses! Get a hold of yourself. Keep it together

laundry

i spin this line - weave this
string, used to pin my words -
like soaked linens to dry.
and the words, as they hang
become lighter from the sun
or
battered
by the wind.
you collect them,
unpin them from the twine,
and choose to fold them
or wash them again yourself.
but since you do this
in silence
the line sways empty,
and emptier still;
i don't stop spinning it.


wednesday

and so,
another glass of wine
or another mile away
your hands clench,
so i know where you think it's going.

slow trains
thunder even more slowly in Indian summer,
even more slowly in the heat.


this heat is different
dry, not thick or musky
like it was in your cold bedroom
walls painted like crepe paper.

it was warm in that room too,
the air smelled the same
but felt different as i pulled it inside me,
dense, peppery dew.

tonight, or late afternoon,
it could smell like november.
if i closed my eyes
i could still see highway twenty nine


but i don't

because one time, i think you told me,
asleep in your twin bed
by the broken heater
which sparked- your arm covering my head

that no one else would ever
love me like you did.
i think of those words, wild and sweet,
now
and understand in a way
so bittersweetly profound.

i hope the grapes keep turning,
but for reasons other than they sound
early ripening to create a coppery berry liquid,


if someone else "loves" me like you did
i promise
it won't be about wine and miles
it will be about trains and heat.

i feel that, to some extent, as an adult i can put myself in situations and places to gain experience i need, to refine myself, to polish myself, to work out flaws and become stronger and have the important experiences we need to grow up, as grown ups.

it's not the same with childhood. childhood is shorter, and those formative experiences - silly journaling, coloring, summer classes, swim lessons, camping, learning that the world is grand and big and full of places and opportunities - these aren't things i had as a child, and aren't things i could have learned then, and are things i don't even realize fully that i need to learn now.

a different variety and set of objects are framing my periphery. things i used to worry about, people i disliked, thoughts i used to think, they all seem different. the worries i have are legitimate - about work, about school, about writing. i began this year taking a writing class with the mindset that i was a reader, not a writer, and now i'm thinking with some longing about getting even an article or essay published.

it's the small things like hanging up my clothes that have begun to derail -- it's the weekends i'm entirely alone that i manage to keep it together, it's the weekends that i'm entirely alone i have enough time to see the cracks in my own thinking.

camera lenses, refraction, sheer cream fabric, plants in pots, tea in cups, making better breakfast, the good bread, the coconut oolong, a glass of wine while homeworking, a new neighbor, and old friend, and those who have slipped out off my sight...these are as simple as it's become

She’s going to do the earring thing.

As if happening upon Taylor wouldn’t have been enough of a fiasco, I have to do it when she’s on a fucking date. Suddenly I’m remembering all those songs I can’t listen to anymore because of her, how I can’t smell jasmine or even think about pancakes on a Sunday morning while wrapped in blue bed-sheets without a sentimental panic, how my lampshade still has her grandmother’s old broach pinned to it from when she was undressing and stuck it on there so she wouldn’t forget it. Now it makes this strange abstract pattern on my wall whenever I turn on the lamp to read by its half-light.
It’s funny, of all the places I’ve avoided – the farmer’s market, the Crow Bar, our favorite coffee shop on 19th, not just those places but whole neighborhoods and streets – to run into her here, eating Vietnamese noodles, with some curly haired man that is wearing tight gray jeans and some big gaudy turquoise ring on his finger. Well, I’ve imagined this happening, dreaded seeing her and having to face her with those green eyes, with those red spots in her left eye that always reassured me that she was so unique, but I can’t even figure out how to handle this – it seems to be worse than any encounter I could have imagined at the market. I imagined we would have had to ask each other blank, not too personal questions about how we’ve been living, how life is since we’ve been apart for the last six months. I could handle that. We would distractedly act like we’re selecting the ripest mangos or something. We would pick up and softly squeeze the fruits in their skins, poking them to see if they are soft, as I would pretend that I haven’t missed her, that I’ve been inspired and productive with my sculpture, that her broach, shaped like a bee with its opaque agate in the middle isn’t still pinned to my lamp as if she were going to wake up tomorrow, give me a side smile, embarrassed that she’s forgotten it for so long and pin it onto her scarf.

She looks good today, but I’ve seen that green dress before, I’ve even seen her wear it with that black cardigan. I know she is going to do the earring thing with this guy. I’m sure this guy will be a sucker for it. She takes her long red sideswept bangs in her palm, this tress of hair that has a perfect wave to frame her face, but is horribly dry at the ends, and smoothes it aside, then she pulls tenderly at her long earrings – the silver ones with cloudy amethysts – she always wears them. For some reason, as she does this, her neck looks fucking perfect, even her ears look fucking perfect, and it does this thing, or at least to me, that makes you think she’s the craziest, most beautifully flawed, best woman imaginable. She’s doing it now: the hair smoothing. I should walk over there, walk to the restroom, maybe she’ll see me, maybe she’ll turn her short dark eyelashes towards me and dump whatever hipster fuck she’s with.
But as I’m watching her, she’s doing the clever earring tug, this perfect endearing fidget, I can’t help but watch this whole seduction trick unfold but only see her canvas bag with the calla lily print on it, and those books peeking out the top that she would carry around but never actually read. I see how she’s pursing her lips ever so slightly as he speaks, laughing as if she’s interested – that laugh that rings tinny when disingenuous – I heard it when she met my friends, and seemed completely at ease, until she told me later that they lacked intellectual capacities, that one of them clearly doesn’t understand the subtleties of semiotics or something.

For some reason now, I think I have seen that earring tug exactly one too many times to be charmed by it again. And for some reason now, I don’t know if this realization or missing her is the greater loss.

He sits inside the bar, pulling at his top lip with this finger and thumb, watching her cross the street – seeing the new darkness that now exists at five in the evening, seeing only sheets of rain, a light gray coat, edges of her dress, her brown boots with the broken buckles. She has on her orange knit slouchy hat, always that hat which sat back on her head and revealed only the wet ends of her straw hair. He knows that dress is really a summer dress, remembers how he could see the outline of her legs through it when August light pushed through the sheer cream fabric with its red and brown round design, how that dress smelled faintly like clementine oranges, citrusy and peppery when she wore it, when she sweat in it in the summer – when they would ride their bikes to the river or the market for peaches to can. He sits with some apathetic irritation, watching her look up and down the street, back and forth at the traffic signal that forbids her to cross the completely clear two-lane street that would lead her across 42nd and into the bar. “She’s prolonging it,” he thinks, looking at the scratches in the old glossy wood of the table, looking at words people carved after he takes an amber swallow of his pint. He knows that she wasn’t prolonging it – not consciously at least, because her inability to jaywalk had bothered him for as long as they had been seeing each other – three or for months. It bothered him in the way that some innocent quirk or habit bothers anyone about the other – it’s minimal and personal, so to bring it up would seem aggressive and hurtful, like shaming someone for the way they hold their fork or for the way they discreetly play air guitar. He didn’t say anything, but it bothered him. He didn’t know why, but it bothered him.
He had chosen this bar because it seemed to be a safe middle ground: not the comfortable dark, red-and-green striped booths of his favorite pub where he was a regular, because it would make her uncomfortable; yet he couldn’t choose some hip new place because that idea seemed terrifying and required too much effort. Thus, he settled for the Moon and Sixpence – quiet enough, enough things hanging on the wall to look at aimlessly, enough noise to sink into his ears if she got drunk and started talking and talking, close enough to home to stumble, in case he did.
She walks in, through the oversized red door that dwarfs her as she passes through it, and stops to unwrap the coral scarf from around her neck, twisting both the scarf and her neck in strange opposite directions so she can look around. Not seeing him, she walks past the three middle booths to the back, and into the bathroom. He watches her from the corner booth on the left, by the window, where she walks straight past him, still soggy in her coat from the late November rain. He sees her dress, peeking out from the bottom of her coat, and that the fabric is soaked through, and he knows that she won’t smell of spicy tangerines, warm sun, bike rides, grapes stems and peach pits this time in that dress – that the dress will feel different now that she is wearing it over her rough winter skin. He knows that she will smell like she has just showered – which means that she will smell faintly of dampness and the lingering scent of pear shampoo, vanilla lotion and the talc-y smell of deodorant. Mostly, he will just remember that she smells like wet hair and cigarettes in the winter. He takes her overlooking him as some last and final sign that clearly this whole thing hasn’t been working, as though people meant to be together should be able to recognize and find each other in any setting, in different lifetimes, bodies, states, times. By this point, the beer only has one last warm sip, and he doesn’t even feel the need to chide himself for such blatant romanticism. I just don’t have it in me, he thinks.
She’s been in the bathroom forever, he thinks. She is prolonging it.

The bartender keeps serving drinks and running tabs not as if she is working, but as if she is swaying to some constant wind that is pushing her from one motion to another. Seamlessly she reaches over to turn up the stereo and some song that he remembers from college starts up, and it sounds to him like the noise blushing would make- not embarrassed blushing, but good-feeling blushing – a haze in the face, a slow mellow warm that sunk down to his feet, so that he finds his broken-in old brown oxford shoes silently keeping rhythm in slow waltz time to the soft thump of the drums. He recognizes some of the lyrics from this song that he remembered listening to years ago, back from before the singer had killed himself. He remembers the song carries itself, even though the singer’s voice is something that could either astound you, or cross over your ears without forging its way in – depending on who you were. He leans back in the booth, rests his head against the back of it, but to the side so that he is still looking at the street she crossed, at the stop sign, at the traffic light, at the empty parking lot of the beauty school, which is as far as he can see in the foggy downpour.
She finally sees him, still in his big khaki coat and rough darkest blue sweater, his hand brushing through his ginger beard, little lines forming around his eyes as if they had been drawn in pencil and then erased. She comes over and pulls herself into the booth across from him, slides across the black plastic leather, which squeaks awkwardly as her soaking wet coat slides across it.
He looks over without remembering to tell his mouth to tell a smile, he sees her and thinks that he’ll always remember that she was pretty, even if he just remembers that hat, those spectacularly big eyes and black glasses. Pretty, I can’t even think of a better adjective, he thinks with some unfounded dissatisfaction – he doesn’t even know if he’s dissatisfied with himself or her. The line “Got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song,” and the guitar beats that follow fall into his ears from the song that is almost ending, and the line resonates perfectly- at least in his mind- as they sit, and stare at each other, knowing that they don’t even need to say what they thought they needed to say, knowing that Portland in winter is a strange, if somewhat rhythmic existence.

the thing about this weather in portland oregon, the rain and completely gray canopy is that the weather doesn't seem like its up there, happening in the sky it's not something that you can look up at and observe but feel detached from, like the great uncontrollable force it is, as it rolls through. the weather in portland isn't detached, it's on your shoulders and in your eyes. it covers your clothes, it covers your feet, it changes your face. it's oppressive, part of what you breathe, part of what you think.

and then it clears


and when it clears i dont know what to think, because i'm used to having this thing that really is just precipitation and clouds on my shoulders above my coat. but on days where i have no need for a coat and don't have to wear heavy boots, it feels like all i want to do is sit and pull every breath into my chest and feel my chest expand fully - deeply - and wide across because i am unencumbered by the atmosphere, which shouldn't have been my responsibility in the first place.

the ancient man that lives across the hall and i sat on the porch, and listening to the rhythm of the city train cross on schedule, he said to me, "well that's the thing about portland in the dead of winter...it doesn't keep any secrets from us, does it?"

then we saw the tiny drops of rain on our cigarettes, and shuffled inside.

i just feel inextricably strange tonight. maybe the word is solitary. maybe it’s because the apartment across the hall is empty. maybe its because i feel like i can’t keep up in conversation, and then the words im typing can’t keep up with me. the whole thing – whatever it is, feels very fragile. sometimes when I feel like this, or the other night, when I half climbed half fell out of bed, partially drunk, partially hysterical full of dizzying thoughts, Iisit and watch the Fremont bridge from my apartment, across the city. seeing the diminished frequency of cars as they pass the upper and lower decks calms me, as though the whole city is falling asleep, or is feeling the same, or hopefully, not feeling the same at all. i dont know why this physical structure, with its two red lights blinking in perfect time makes me feel calm, or rights my mind. sometimes i pacify myself with cigarettes, but hate the ash they leave behind, burned out, hollowed out, smelling ugly. there is no music for this, no soundtrack, no epic ballads, just the strange sound of the heater turning itself on because I forgot a window open, as I fight for sleep, covered in quilts and comforters, but still shivering in the tangerine sheets of my bed.

i've been washing my face at night with grapefruit and honey soap hoping that i will wake up fresh faced and smooth. fresh faced, smooth, tender. it's all right, soon enough we will be eating tomatoes and greens that just had their own dirt washed off them, soon enough we will smell like apricots, be smooth as violets, and smoking blueberry tobacco, drinking tea, visiting in the sun, remembering why we study the books we do, remembering what it was like before - and remembering what it's like just to be a person again, and turning our ribs to honeycomb.

chainsmoking weather

sunday morning i'm sleeping past what i should, am awake for only an hour before i feel like i either need to chainsmoke or nap, and both are equally upsetting urges. i like thinking about what is a thousand miles away. i think about the things i want, when i have them, when i don't, and when i'm too malcontent to know the difference. i think about when things are too late, or if they ever are, and also i think that my soundtrack is both songs from before i met you, before i moved, but i can only hear parts of their choruses through the radio static. this small room, that old chair, that big plant, it all makes it feel like these thoughts are ok.

oh oh cheri

i didn't go to class because i didn't want to walk in the rain. today is one of those days where i woke up, lay in bed, moved to lay in the tub, got dressed, and re-dressed, and have been reading and stopping to wonder if today is one of those days where i am not greater than the sum of my parts, or if today is one of those days where maybe i am best being defined or explained by my belongings or what i am wearing - that i am just a green tweed hat and typewriter key earrings - that i am a messy car and cluttered apartment. for some reason, that seems calm and still, for i expect little and have little expected of me...a day that has been reduced to, or at least punctuated by tea stains and tobacco, literary theory and lost spectacles, an old sweater, and shoes falling to pieces.

spring jasmine

nearly a year ago, i had a dream that i have often thought of, but never written down. this dream was both nightmarish, and oracular, and it woke me up, feverish but subdued, at that really early morning time characterized by half-light. i dreamt that i was being shown a book that had pages made of leaves, green and glossy, bound by twine and twigs. in this book were photos of the most bittersweet, elusive, and fantastic memories - photos of he and i laying in his twin bed, near the heater that would spark, photos of my brother, photos of my mother and i when i was young and she was carrying me up the stairs, photos of me laying on my aunt's outstretched legs while grandpa fished for catfish. the oracle, or shaman showing me this book had a deep gravely voice, and i feel sure that it was grandpa. in the photos, above my shoulders were three small captures of light, like dust. but i was told that this was actually three evil spirits which i carry on my shoulders, and that are always present, even in the most simple and sublime of moments, moments like the first time you touched me, or moments like when you first brushed your hand on mine to hold it. and i could sit now and try to describe in some new way how much this dream upset me, but i can't. all i can say is that it did, in one of the most profound ways i have ever known. and though nightmares should elucidate and disappear when you wake up, and put on your shoes, and walk out to the street, this one never has. it feels as confusing in my mind's vision now as it did that morning i woke up, in that bed that wasn't mine and i saw the white sheets with small seaglass blue dots, and the light beginning to tear through the bamboo shades on the window, my hair tangled, my eyes still with sleep in them.

poppies

i like saying i'm from california.
and i was thinking about how it went from home being in lake oswego to not having a home for a few years and freaking out about it to the one day i said "yeah i'm going home for a week" and referred to home as california. it makes it seem like that's how it's always been, and, and it should be, like my parents met and married and split but my family my roots are all still down there, hanging out, excited for me to visit. maybe i like this because it will envelope everything until i was seventeen and push it away, and that's how i'd rather remember things

in the middle of a shrieking laughter, of absolute joy and hysterical delight a sobering thought ran through my head as we were running around and doing what we do - making things with fiber, filling our lungs with smoke and dousing our bloodstreams with alcohol. in the middle of this creative bliss, as we were walking i suddenly thought, "this too shall pass." and though those words are often thrown out in heartbreak or sadness as comfort, i realized that he was right, happiness, like everything, comes in waves, and i thought about it passing. and i thought about holding on to things, and that grasping is the greatest source of disappointment and sadness, because its never really ours, its just a series of events that involve us. people are never really ours. or at least you were never really mine.

needles only prick

the spring wind was not as it should have been: a thin zephyr playing with our clothes as it whips through the trees. no, that day, the day i left home, it was the kind of wind that is frustrating and intent on making you close your eyes because its stabbing them with your own hair and blowing your clothes against your body in the most unattractive angles.

my mother and i stood in the strange circular driveway of the house on 4201 haven street. we stood underneath the huge fir trees that grew all over the neighborhood, dwarfing us, two women of approximate equal height and weight, two woman of equal determination, two women who were acting though they hated each other, and only acting that way because they both know they didn't. i shouldn't say "two women" because i was 17, and in age and maturity, a girl. we stood, eye to eye, a few feet apart, it some strange hypnotic staredown, neither speaking.

it began as some sort of manic dream a few months ago, when i called my mom to say i was still unhappy at the college she had chosen for me, and that i wanted a change of scenery, and that i wanted to go to california and spend time with my father, who i never really knew. i've examined my intentions time and time again, and have had years to do so, to think and rethink about why i did that, if i moved away like my mother thought because i hated her, because i hated how she raised me, because i was ungrateful and abandoning my role in their family. and i have come to the conclusion that those things weren't true, but have also grown to understand why she thought so. i have thought that she has abandoned me - and at the time it was hard to understand it as any other way - she took me off her health insurance, she told me i could never come home, not for holidays, not ask for money, and told me that she knew what i was doing, had been where i was going, and that it was going to be a trainwreck. california was not a golden utopia of free thinking and promise in her mind - it was "her old stomping grounds" where she rambled about, and apparently, did not care to see me visit.

and as i stood there that day, i knew that i had no idea what i was in for. and, at seventeen, isn't that the thrill of the world? preparing yourself go to out and experience "it" and having no idea what "it" is - and not knowing i would find myself in different houses with different roommates - find myself living with a circus, with beautiful women and men, finding best friends, realizing age is inconsequential but also inextricably binding, losing innocence, finding myself in houses with numbers 29, 1964, 1323, 2759, 3548, or 1122, reeling and wounded from relationships, euphoric from sublime nights of running through barky twists and tangles of grapes, seeing fires, seeing oceans near fields of callalilies, seeing almost every mile of the eternal interstate 5, and ultimately having if only a minimally clearer sense of who i am when i wake up in the morning.

even then, thinking now, i was excited about bad relationships, heartbreak, cars breaking down, getting lost alone, working bad hours for bad bosses, though i didn't consciously think those things, but i think i was - because it was new. because it seemed important. because i felt like those things had to be experienced. because those were the stairs that break underneath your weight but allow you to feel like you have some immeasurable amount of treasured independence.

but all this, and an entire world more was to come, and i knew it, i could feel it, and it terrorized my stomach and raised my pulse, and like screaming and crying and laughing all at once, it was unstoppable. it was compulsive. it was pleasure, it was pain. growing up young, being treated as child but held to the responsibilities of an adult, all of it felt like it had funneled into this day, the day i moved out for reals, for forever, and this set into motion a series of events and stories that could only, for lack of a better name, be labeled as a girl growing up.

my mother and i just stood staring until my younger brother came outside. weeks of exhausting phone calls and fights, weeks of packing, and i had come home to get a final few boxes. after this there would be finals, my first year of college behind me, and my dad would drive from california to pack my entire physical existence into his subaru, and drive ten hours back down california, where i would unpack and try to orient myself in the dizzying mass of new highways, jobs, and people. but i think mom and i stood there in silence because we both were too confused to speak for fear of crying, or for fear of saying more mean things. and we had done both.

so i sighed, but couldn't hear it over the terrible wind, which was now pushing streams of pine needles and small branches down onto my car, onto my mother and brother and i. i knelt down to hug my brother, but as i did, he didn't put his arms back around me, didnt push his head into my stomach like his normal hugs, he just stood, stiff and unwelcoming for a few moments while i squeezed his small 10 year old body. suddenly, i felt him break in my arms, instantly melting into a wave of sobs and weeping, and his small fists began to wrap around me and pound into my back, eventually until he was both hugging, crying, and punching me all at once.

my mother stood watching, and began to slowly shake her head. she may have been wearing sunglasses, but she could still see right into me.

my brother turned to her and buried his face in the skirt of her green corduroy dress, fist fulls of the fabric, still sobbing; my mother's head was still slowly shaking.

i reached to hug her and she reached back. for about five seconds we stood hugging, my brother huddled between us, the wind blowing pine needles onto us, pricking the back of my neck. then i eased back, my mom let me go, and i stepped a few feet back towards my car.

my mother stood watching, still shaking her head, reaching down to console my brother, who, i was told much later, slept in my bed for weeks after i left; who, i was told much later, cried himself to sleep on my pillow every night.

that was it. it felt as final as it ever would. i turned and got into my car. as i backed out of the driveway, the scene was unreal: seeing the wind bend and curve the trees, completely silent and still in my car, as i brushed pine needles out of my tangled hair, watching my mother stand in the exact place in the driveway as she picked up my brother, much to large for her five foot frame. seeing the trees fold to the wishes of the wind. watching as my mother did all this while still slowly shaking her head.

"the end of summer" only means anything while you are in school..or does it? what is it about the end of summer that is so bittersweet? ending a romance at the end of winter isn't the same, or with spring, or with fall, but what about summer makes it so painful and pleasurable? and thinking of that, i was thinking of all the times i have laughed and screamed and screamed and laughed and cried all at once and wonder if those are the times when we feel the most alive, or if its at the late months of dusky summer, either way, it feels like dust is settling and now we can see it because its all on fire, the sky, the city, the winter.

but we were so much better then
is this twenties? is this city life?
is this portland? just getting better at
rolling cigarettes and seeing with rain in
our eyes, avoiding literary theory at all costs

you don't have to open yourself up to everyone,
you don't have to open yourself up to anyone

we were so much better then, with callalilies ahead
and turning up the best part of the song, saying the best things
now i don't know who is asleep on my couch or what i've been
doing in my apartment for the last few days
or if i want to stay in portland
or if i was so much better than i am now
low eyes, blowing smoke at the fremont as i walk
into the hollow, wondering if this is as good as it gets

we were so much better then

i'm thinking that life can't be moving in any linear way, in any straight line. it has to be spinning...and that's why i want it so badly to slow itself the hell down. what moves in circles what spins records spin and the faster they spin the more obnoxious and distorted they sound, and sometimes something comes out of it thats well and ok...and usually not...and pottery wheels spin, and the faster i kicked the wheel the more quickly the clay would be thin when i was raising its walls, and if i focused and was careful i could make something come out of it that looked ok once it was glazed and fired, but was structurally unsound, but when i wouldn't focus it would fall in on itself, a wet slow mess and thats because it as spinning, spinning so quickly

its not that i wouldn't pick you, if it were just up to people you know, if you could just pick a person, i would always pick you. but you have to pick people and situations and timing and behaviors all at once and i can't pick those things can't control those things

i feel honestly like my body is refusing the past few weeks, like i've been consuming and consuming and not thinking and pushing and clawing and its ridiculous and finally my body had to refuse it, had to reject it and render me delirious and tearful. and it strangely felt like that's how it was supposed to be.

i say it feels unreal, like a dream - but only because it feels like it has been some strange dim night for the past two weeks or so. it has swept through like a dream, feels transcient and fleeting like a dream and the only way to recover is to realize that you've been forced to grow up, to realize things about yourself, to realize things about you and other people, and who they are, and where the good people are and what they look like and who is worth really hanging onto, and who felt you aren't worth hanging onto. we all need work. and i wonder if i've been choosing to not callous or bruise, thus remaining slow and half-healed, because i've realized as soft as i want to be, the world is brushing and rushing against me and that's exactly what it should be doing. i can't list everything i've realized, and sometimes i like to think that it would just be different if i had a mom to ask about it, if she would know, but then i realize that she too has been swirled into her own part - she is the chemical reaction created by light filtering through the silver and dye in photo negatives, as they are put in old projectors and shined onto the walls that i'm standing in front of, trying to manipulate her image, i want to call it a reflection, but the actual term, which is so heartbreakingly true, is that it is a projection. this aside, i want to tell people i love them, and that i miss them, and want to hold their old shirts, and childhood photos, and little things they have left behind in my arms and curl up with them in some strange sublime summer night and not even care if time is standing still or walking decidedly forward. i still say it feels unreal, like a dream, where suddenly you think you see someone but it is someone else, the cast is strangely fluid, and your secrets become known but for some reason its ok, it's all right, you don't think twice. maybe that's the trick - deciding your decisions and never questioning them, so maybe stop bending your will for the sake of others, but this would also exclude forgiving - or thus being forgiven. i think that i am living in some place between those two - accepting apologies and asking for them, simultaneously, from everyone and myself.

these lyrics

have made me want to cry for...years now..i guess


" all those evenings on the back deck of our first apartment
they meant everything but the wind just carried them off
and we can't go back now, just a passing moment gone "

it seems like people never grow up like you want them to, or at least like you think they should


for matters of the heart are increasingly ambiguous

i'm trying to remember an adventure that hayley and i had...and it seems like i have a million hayley stories and memories but maybe not of just her and i.

i remember swinging around on the tire swing when sarah g. accosted her for losing her glitter handle silverware. i remember when erich saved rose petals with the unfortunate idea to spread them on my bed, which i immmmediately shut down and was grossly offended by because 1. my bed is not, nor was not some stupid add for a romantic getaway, a honeymoon suite, or a lover's play place 2. i hate roses and was mad and sad that he hadn't figured that out yet and 3. who the fuck does that??

anyways after i had shut down the gesture, because, i am a bitch, erich and hayley giggled and ran around in the yard throwing the petals everywhere, and i stood on the porch laughing and screaming because i had just raked the entire yard and now there were rose petals all over it and i realized that i kind of had kids, though one was my roommate and i was dating the other one. but i guess we were all just kind of kids that summer.

i remember being in the car in canada and hayley found the cookies that rachel had baked and made a huge deal in telling us that we were NOT to eat them, she was saving them for her friend. nonetheless, hayley managed to paw one away, and as we crammed into ali's car to sleep in snowy canada, all drunk beyond repair, hayley lay face down munching ever so quietly her stolen treat, then decides she doesn't want it, grunts, and throws the cookie. i never laughed so hard.

ali and i have a million stories, on the other hand, of things that we've done, trouble we've gotten ourselves into.

i'm trying to remember what it was like, living on haven street, not being able to drive, having to be in at a certain time, living in between the most passive agressive man in the world, and my mother, quickly still becoming the thing that makes me the saddest. anyways, i'm trying to remember what it was like then, when ali threw pinecones at my window to wake me up and show me her haircut, when we forged a path between our houses, when we would slide into the pool naked and giggling because it sounded hilarious, when we would sleep night after night in sleeping bags on the trampoline. i came home once, deflated from hanging out with someone, and there was a note on the door saying, "you had a bad night, i know, meet me on the trampoline."

once, i think on my sixteenth birthday, ali and i were reduced to wandering about and we went into some houses that were being built on our street and stood and explored the hollow skeletons that now have become structures that people will connect to and find refuge, or have a home in. that's a weird thought - being in a house, someone's a home before it was every really formed, when it was just lumber and nails...and then what do houses do when they grow up?

i'm trying to remember what it was like before i ever had sex, how holding hands seemed so much better than
i'm trying to remember what it was like before i ever had a panic attack, a migraine, cried over a friend, cried over a boy, cried about my mom, or what it was like before i ever missed home because i had never left it. what was it like when i lived with no internet no cell phone and couldn't drive or leave the house

what was it like before i had any independence?

i remember not knowing north from south, literally not knowing north from south.


what was it like to be fifteen?

1. do not be crazy do not be crazy
2. do not be worried or nervous
3. do not make fun if that kid in class AKA punmaster 8000
4. attend class
5. I CLEAN MY APARTMENT FOR NO MAN
6. weekend weekend
7. do not space out in jazz class
8. do not think about moving or leaving
9. do not get sick
10. stop being tired!

remember monkey freeze?

was that question rhetorical or to no one

when i close my eye covers im back in california, on the ferry, on 29, and i smell jasmine and my skin is prickly and warm and i hear laughter in the distance and the sky clears and breaks and opens and cries and burns and then i think about all the house numbers

29
1964
1323
3548
2579
1122
what do those mean

past, present, failure
my mandolin is still broken everything is missing strings, there's a moth in here
theres a tear in my coat, i found a table, plant grew, tarot cards can't know shit or can they
past present failure
the middle, tea, anatomy, disposable, embellished, gold, silver, grommets, green
past present future
never forget teeth imperfections knit lashes wit crashes

1. do not be crazy or sad
2. focus on those who love you
3. remember

trees please

how can i be both anxious and apathetic at the same time about everything? i woke up this morning to the sound of them cutting down trees, maybe even trees grow too big in the city, in portland. i feel like i don't want to leave, and i feel like i do, and cheers to duplicity, duality and any other big damn word i could think of having to do with...shit what?

smoky city

i know how many steps up the stairs it takes, the distance to the street, the number on your door, the way to the fire escape. i wonder if i could recognize you in some setting, in some bodies other than these.
i can't tell the difference between hot and cold anymore. the city smelled smokey, i swear winter is being burned away, not soon enough will we shed our winter skins, for it is hardening and tightening around our chests, our eyelids, our lips, so that we cannot feel the brushing fingertips

i know that this emptiness i feel without you is nothing in comparison to the emptiness i felt with you.
i know? i think? either way, it seems that we always lived best in bittersweet, we always lived best in shytown. certain chords and smells are burned into me forever, and always, for everyone i can't forget and shouldn't but maybe should i feel weighed down by all the places i've been and places i've lived and people left in all those places then i don't know or i do know or i shouldn't know and i can't know anymore. coming and going is more normal than it should be, and we both know this, know the tangerine tinge of the streetlight, know the poem i wrote about standing in your room in the middle of the night and being unable to see the night from the shield of condensation we're all just becoming condensation of each other and blending and breathing and beating and moaning and occasionally we'll run into each other but call it kissing but it still seems so silent. but it still seems so violent.. there are worse things you could do to someone than love them, never forget even artichokes have hearts, never forget we made it, the broken mandolins, guitar strings, the woods, the creek, the walk, the bog, the abandoned house, the time in the backyard where the piano was hauled out and in and tuned and i always felt awkward but wanted to convince myself otherwise. i wish you could just come home and we could lay in clean sheets and never leave but i dont know who you are. who has been here forever and why and never and forever are so fucking scary but so fucking constant, if there is one thing that is never or if there is one thing that is forever what could it be if you would choose? what would your body be made of if you could choose? do you wish you could choose? its so fucking slow its so fucking fast its so fucking sad but its so fucking beautiful, as if we are in a car, plane or train and see that it is moving, told that it is moving, but we feel as though it barely creeps forward but do we care afterall? who do we know when do we know them how do introductions ever happen do i over think why can't my feelers, tendrils go away and what is this consciousness i see but do not experience or am aware of. i want to climb out the window and to be aided by rope and honey and fire and a gun in my garter and know no man, know no woman, feel no pain except the physical or maybe the emotional and i wonder if there is every any difference any difference between anything or anyone ever. im bad at people. im bad at talking, i've been stuttering again i've been falling again, i've been lying again, and i'm sorry. i've been good and i've been so used to disappointment and shelving my feelings that why should any of this suprise me? i haven't been sleeping but i have been eating and drinking and whiskey is a volatile friend but whiskey is a consistent friend but who are my friends i wish you knew what i think but i really wish i knew what i think and at the same time its more interesting but i dont when you said the best thing, remember when you said the best thing? you said to me and i closed my eyes and you couldn;t see because it was dark but then again do you remember? it made me think i may not be alone but we all know that's not true and thats ok it really is because if theres anything to be valued it could possibly be the truth but THEN AGAIN to we even know that? fold it crush it bend it break it but then pin it onto your chest right onto your skin and relish the sensation. all of it.

pull that smooth leg up
mine and bristle
every
tiny hair
in your lacklsuter attempt to
wash over everything

with wings like branches from your spine
and a gun hidden tenderly in your garter
you've set out to change the world

i am trying to be a grown up but those things i have associated with such are not clear markers into adulthood -- repainting rooms alone, coffee and drinks, cigarettes.

cheers to you, i loved you, and cheers to you my best friends, it seems we may have seen the green walls and ridden the bus and found our apartment seven, if only for the time being

and it is simultaneously both everything we did and didn't think it would be.

Photographs of Trains -- roughly

Photographs of Trains

I see the tangerine tinge of the streetlight divided and then rendered into a thousand tiny drops of condensation forming on my window. From my bed, I hear people walking and coughing on the street and the sound of cars passing with lesser frequency on the interstate as late night melts to early morning. It must be two or three in the morning and I’ve fallen into a cliché of sleepless nights. Kenny, who I’ve been dating since last autumn, feels me turning over and sleepily drops his arm across my stomach and curls around me as I lay rigid on my back. Though we’ve been together for a year, we live apart, and for the first time I feel claustrophobic having someone sleep in my bed, breathing next to me. Faintly I hear it: the only sound that I can hear from the outside loudly enough to wake me at night and instantly be comforting- the whistle of a train rolling by.

-----

The previous summer, at an estate sale, I bought an old pair of cowboy boots and a typewriter, which I adored because it typed in cursive. I typed everything on it – even shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of words that I just liked. I preferred to see the crisp mechanical font over my own hand writing style, characterized by inconsistent patches of cursive and print.
I was always wearing those cowboy boots. Once when I was wearing them during a visit to my father’s sister, my aunt Lisa, she remarked how funny it was that I dressed like my mother when she was my age. “You know, when I first met your mother I thought she was so great – really interesting, talking about her job at NPR in San Francisco, and really just fun to be around. Phenomenal writer.” I relished any history Lisa would impart to me about my mom or father. My dad was usually open to telling stories about when he and my mom met, or when they were married; my mother however made it clear through her irritation and terseness in her usually placid tone that it was not something to be discussed. Lisa’s perspective of my parent’s relationship was my favorite to hear because it was so glamorized. Lisa is a fantastic storyteller, with a soothing voice that was textured like mahogany. Her when she laughed, her head tilted back slightly, the lashes about her eyes knit together, and her laugh itself sounded like an endearing cackle. Initially, Lisa’s stories about my mother, particularly, sounded so full of adventure and charm: my mother the aspiring writer, actor in Shakespeare productions meets my father, the starving artist in San Francisco, and they both discover they avid fly-fishermen. The more I heard these stories from Lisa, though, they began to feel artificially innocent. Whenever I talked about a past breakup with Lisa, she would ask what I learned from the relationship, and say that we don’t need to have regrets. That philosophy may have worked in Lisa’s personal history, but she was just an observer of my parent’s relationship. Maybe it made her feel better to re-tell me stories like this – polished with the haze of foregone sentiment and romance. Maybe she thought it would make me feel better.
-----
After commenting about my mother’s and my similar attire, Lisa sent me an old photo of my mother, when she first met my father. It’s a photograph just of her profile, a California sun glowing softly around her face and on the straight honey hair which framed her face. In this photo, her eyes are closed, her lips are parted, her bulky knit sweater hanging comfortably on her frame, and on her head is an old dusty white cowboy hat, a cluster of wild roses tucked into the band. I never saw my mother like this – when she had just finished college and her senior thesis on Hawthorne; when she was being romanced by my father, also freshly graduated, pioneering his way into graphic design. She looks different now, her hair is dark and permed, mascara and eyeshadow on her eyes, Mary Kay’s Frosted Pink lipstick detailing her lips. Holding this photo, I couldn’t help but see what everyone always said and I denied growing up – that my mother and I look alike, especially in this photo when she was about my age – early twenties. I thought that I most resembled my father, who lived in a different state, and since there was no other comparison or contrast, I believed, for my friends to think that I looked like my mother was not a fair analysis, but simply a lack of options.

-----

I pull air into my lungs and fill them as full as I can as the first train whistle blows. I hold it in until I hear the next train’s long moan, and ration my exhale, releasing the air burning in my lungs as long as the train’s sigh. I never quite make it. I turn onto my stomach after gently picking Kenny’s hand up by his pinky finger and placing it on the bed beside me. I keep listening to the trains, rattling along on tracks, bound for their next scheduled destination. I poke Kenny’s arm, then stomach, and he stirs softly. I barely hear him say It’s fine. It’s okay. Sleep, over the crescendo of the train’s wistful exhales as I lay on my back and stare up and out the window that is covered in tiny spectacular gems of water.


-----
Along with the photo of my mother in the cowboy hat, Lisa also sent my mom and dad’s wedding announcement. It is on simple brown paper, with a sepia toned candid shot of my mom and dad in an embrace, wind ruffling their hair and denim jackets. In this photo, the resemblance between my mother and I was undeniable. Below the photo, old Grateful Dead lyrics read:

It’s nothing they explain
Like a diesel train
Better not be there when it rolls over
…They love each other

Better not be there when it rolls over? I read and reread the lyrics. I know there are other interpretations of this song, but I immediately felt tingling in my cheeks and thought What the hell kind of warning is that to put on your wedding announcement. Later I realized that my parents had already known my mother was pregnant with me by the time those announcements were sent, those invitations that made love seem like a diesel train. I wondered if those lyrics had been some clever foreshadowing; I couldn’t keep the images of my parents- together and happy, something I cannot picture except for in photographs- out of my mind, and began to search for significance in photos and stories of my parents. I wanted to know why piecing a history of my parents together was so important to me. It became obsessively essential for me to know if they had really loved each other or not. Initially, I wanted to know because I thought it would cement my alluring position as a lovechild, a reminder of a hippie legacy of yesteryear that existed in Lisa’s rendition of my parent’s story.
But I soon realized I anxiously wanted to know if history really repeats itself. And if, by typing my story so distinctly in cursive, my story was not an original, but a revision of my mother’s, and I just couldn’t see it because of the difference in lettering.
-----
I fall asleep finally, on my stomach, one palm pressed against the head of the bed, shifting over so far in the large bed that my other arm falls over the side and my legs are half in, half out in the tangle of sheets and quilts. When morning sun burns through my gauzy blue curtains, I’ve relaxed so Kenny and I are twisted together again, my toes nestling in the arch of his foot. Kenny mumbles, his mouth full of both concern and sleep “What’s wrong? What are you thinking about?” I’ve learned that my face is my greatest traitor of my emotion. I don’t answer but turn the question to him.
“I was actually thinking about a Dmajor 7 dominant chord in Coltrane’s Kind of Blue and his phenomenally new use of the Lydian Scale,” he says, effortlessly, like an afterthought. He looks different to me as he lays in bed this morning, as though I am peering through a sharper lens. I see how my favorite curl in his hair catches the light through the dewy pale glow of the curtains. The shutter of my mind’s camera adjusts, the curtain drops, and the moment is captured. And, like all other photos it is suspended in time, thus making it instantaneously a thing of the past. Within a moment, he is up and dressed, and wants to go eat breakfast.

-----
Once my parent’s divorced when I was four, I never saw my mother and father in the same room again. I have constructed memories of the two of them together solely through photographs Lisa has shown me, and stories that are infrequently told. They married on a hill overlooking Marin and John Muir Woods, called Mt. Tamalpais. My mother wore a sheer, layered white dress, and had flowers braided into her hair. The intricate crocheted webs of her grandmother’s ivory gloves are spun around her fingers, adorning her slender hands. My father wore a simple brown suit, the late afternoon sun radiating the ginger flecks in his beard, a white rose tucked into his lapel. A friend had made their wedding cake – a thick cake full of carrots from the friend’s garden, nuts and dates.
During the reception when my mother and my father cut the cake and exchanged bites, embarrassment draining color from his face, as he told that when he took his bite from my mother’s fingers, he thought that there was a nut in the cake, so he kept biting harder and harder. The nut wouldn’t break, and he opened his eyes to see my mother had tears running down her cheek. “I thought she was just so overcome with emotion!” He said to me, laughing nervously, his brown eyes getting bigger as he told the story. “My mouth filled with the coppery taste of blood, and I realized that I was biting her finger.” As we sat eating lunch he finished his story and looked directly across the table at me, and laughed as he said said “You know, I really thought it was going to work out. Live and learn, kid. Your mom seems like she’s happy now with Larry, and I’m happy with how things are for me.” I wondered if it really was as simple as that. If toil and emotional pain and confusion over years and years could suddenly be satisfied by applying a “live and learn” mentality.
I asked my mother about the cake story a few years ago and her cheeks instantly flourished a ruddy color. She bit her lower lip, leaned her head back and away from me, the stiffness in her jaw causing veins in her stiff neck to swell. Her voice sputtered sharply with terse beginning of words or phrases, like a frustrated engine giving away to false starts, completely uncharacteristic of her usually fluid tone. She crossed her arms and I could see her knuckles pale as she pressed her fingers into the flesh of her arms. Her hands appeared as bony and fragile as a swallow’s claws. I remembered seeing her hands, like claws, clutching something so tightly like this before: once when I was seven or eight and begged her to show me the house where she and my father first lived in North Portland. She protested on the grounds that the neighbhorhood was unsafe, didn’t I remember when that driveby shooting happened on our street? Eventually she gave in, as long as I promised to be good while we did the rest of the errands.
As we drove past a colorful sign on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. welcoming us into “Portland’s Urban Community” she barked at me to lock the doors of our boxy old blue Volvo. Our conversation ended abruptly after that, as she straightened in her seat and pressed her head and her stiff neck into the headrest, and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that the muscles in her upper arms were defined; so tightly that her hands once again nearly trembled like a small bird’s, dearly holding onto its safe perch. I saw no apparent harm in this neighborhood, but as my mother slowly curled her thin, delicate lip into her mouth and clenched her upper teeth onto it I realized with a chill that she was uncomfortable. It seems so clear to me now that she wanted to fiercely protect me, lock me in the car, and drive straightforward.
Now I was pushing her to tell her side of a bittersweet memory.
“Oh God – excuse me for taking the Lord’s name in vain- but that was so stupid! I knew right then it was a mistake and I shouldn’t have married him.” Then why did you? “Well I had found out a month earlier that I was pregnant with you, and I settled. It seemed like the best thing to do at the time. I just thought that I loved him, but I guess I wasn’t sure. But hey, I got you out of the deal,” she nudged me as we sat side by side on the loveseat, which she called a settee, in her living room, which she called a parlor. I thought that there must have been more that a bit finger to be a harbinger of failed marriage, but we never really spoke of the subject again. She patted my hand, but her fingers were cold, her fingernails long, and the rings she wore on her fingers clicked together, punctuating the quiet.
“I got you out of the deal.” I didn’t even know how to begin digesting that. It became clearer to me: my mother may not subscribe to the “live and learn” “there are no regrets” philosophies of Lisa and my father. My mother wrote in an email after I moved out a few years earlier when I was seventeen, that “You have chosen a tough path. People ask me about you and I tell them you are fine, but I don’t really know. I feel like you’re going down my path, honey, and I’ll tell you something: I regret it. I learned, but I still regret it and can’t get back all that time I wasted, pursuing journalism and marrying your father, concerts and drugs, all of it. It amounted to nothing. You can’t ever retrieve time.”
It wasn’t anger that constricted her throat and jaw and made her grasp with a talon-like strength. It must have been the terror of a mother who feels she must protect her child. Now, I believe she has the right as the position of a mother to fiercely protect me in any way she believes she can; however I did not always recognize or like her methods and I know that I do not always appreciate them, though I should accept them because they come from the loving intentions of a mother. I've come to realize this is my downfall, not hers.
When we had been driving in the car she wanted me to protect me, and I couldn’t see it because I couldn’t see the danger that she believed existed. If this was the case now, we both had a common fear: and that was one of me reliving her past.

-----

My aunt, Lisa, and I are not only family, but have become close friends as I have grown up. She’s all about “meditation retreats”—at one such event we even stole bread from the resident monk’s quarters together and hid behind a tree to eat it unnoticed by our fellow Qui Guong meditators. I forget she is my dad’s older sister.
She is the keeper of family history: has all the pictures and knows all the stories about our great aunt who immigrated here from Italy, stories of her father as a boy, and stories of my parents together. She always told me that my parents really were in love, for a time, despite whatever my mother says. I’m really not sure whose word to take on that one.
My mother says she never was, and still is not a fan of her ex-sister-in law, Lisa.
The briefest history of my relationships with my Aunt Lisa and my mother could be summed up something like the following:
Age Four- Matters of Eternal Significance:
Mom: I’ve asked Jesus into my heart to save me from my sins and save me from Hell. I think you should too.
Lisa: I don’t believe in Hell

Age Seven- Dress Code:
Mom: We’ve decided we’re not going to wear pants anymore because it’s displeasing to the Lord and its cross-dressing
Lisa: Let’s go shopping! Look at these pink stretchy pants! They’re darling. When you get back home you could wear them under your dresses.

Age Eleven- Body Modifications:
Mom: If God wanted you to have holes in your ear lobes, he would have put them there already.
Lisa: Well then why didn’t God just give you a zipper if he wanted you to have babies? Let’s get your ears pierced. Twice!

Age Thirteen – First Real Bra:
Mom: Why do you want to buy colorful bras? Who’s going to see them? Nobody better be seeing them! (I remember how she laughed nervously as she said this; now her laugher in that memory echoes in my ears as tender, addled with terror, bittersweet)
Lisa: Pretty bras make you feel good! Let’s go to Victoria’s Secret

Age Fifteen – Boy Talk:
Mom: You are far too young to understand what it means to kiss a boy. It is the beginning of an intimacy that you should save for marriage. You are defrauding your future husband by being promiscuous.
Lisa: Do you have a boyfriend? Is he cute?!

Age Seventeen – Bridesmaid at Lisa’s Second Wedding:
Mom: Your Aunt Lisa really isn’t doing her kids any favors by getting remarried. She’s choosing her own life over her kids.
Lisa: (In her slim wedding gown, with her smooth hair upswept and pinned) You know, when I married Jack (her first husband) I said to my bridesmaid, right before the ceremony started like this, that one day I was going to divorce him. I knew it had an expiration date from the beginning, but I wanted to have kids, and it seemed like it was going to work out, so I compromised.
Until that moment I had relied on Lisa to be opposite to everything my mother believed about religion, fashion, and family. This statement of Lisa’s resonated loudly with my mother’s account of her resorted marriage to my father. Though their motives and outcomes were different, though they Lisa, and my mother blissfully remarried, they had first compromised.

-----
My relationship with Kenny was comfortable, and by comparison, he was a better boyfriend than the previous boy, who hid fifths of whiskey in the campus library to unfailingly spike his coffee when he studied, who had no remorse over getting a rather large Homer Simpson tattoo, and who had a very visible tattoo of a beer stein- which he explained in one of those all-too-true-jokes that he loved cartoons and beer more than anything. I knew that it shouldn’t have been about comparisons.
When Kenny appeared with a mutual friend to my house on my birthday that early fall evening that we met, he was carrying a guitar, had a feather in his cap, and was undeniably sweet. Everyone else fell asleep, but he and I sat in the tall grass of my backyard and told stories about being kids, old-time music, and where to get the best burritos. We were both born in California, only a few miles apart. He told me about his childhood, being a fledgling skate punk, raised in Singapore and Mexico. I told him about being raised in Oregon by Baptists. He somehow thought that was equally exotic. We couldn’t understand with so many common friends why we hadn’t met before.
Over the next year, though, I began to feel my relationship with him like was running after a train or a bus that I needed to catch; I could see it, but it clearly wasn’t stopping. Running after public transportation is impossibly disappointing. Our relationship was so fluid initially: conversation was easy, any time we saw each other was delightful – full of adventures and hikes through the forest, bike rides, and picnics in the back of his truck. Slowly, though, over months our conversations relied on gossip about mutual friends or monotonies about school: Do you have a lot of homework this week? Yeah. Did you know Sarah is getting married? Yeah. Weird. I felt like I was back at college orientation, mindlessly answering What’s your name what’s your major?
As the summer turned to gray autumn, we always ate at the same Thai restaurant. We sat there once, and Kenny asked if I would order the pumpkin curry, like I always did. And I asked if he would order the lemongrass chicken, like he always did. After that we sat in an uncomfortable quiet, and I racked my mind for something to talk about. Finally I just said that I felt like all we did when we spent time together was sleep, eat, or I would read while he practiced guitar. I argued that wasn’t quality time, that it was just coexisting. His eyebrows moved together as he pushed a curl behind his ear and said with his eyes looking away from me, “That’s all I ever do…practice, eat, sleep. It’s all I really want to do. It’s nice when we can just do those things together. I think that’s what companionship is.” I panicked at the thought that we were not growing closer, but growing accustomed to each other—that what I thought was empty coexistence was meaningful companionship to Kenny. I assumed I should attribute any disenchantment to us being comfortable, “after the honeymoon phase” as “they” (whoever they may be) so obnoxiously say. I desperately wanted to run back to sublime summer nights in fields of tall grass and the diminishing thrill holding hands; but it seemed as though that was the past, better contained in photographs. So I rationalized that this was what comfortable relationships were about: companionship over excitement, and lowering my expectations as a compromise to avoid constantly sleeping alone and cold solitary weekends and holidays.
But Mom had settled. Lisa had compromised. I didn’t know if I was doing the same or just convincing myself I was.
I continued wanting to see pictures and hear stories of my parents over and over. And know if there was some objective way to know whether or not I was becoming my mother in more ways than just physical similarities. I thought I could find a clue, some transcendent enlightenment from knowing my parent’s history to illuminate my situation.
This kept me up at night.

-----

I had the opportunity…or experience, rather, to attend both of my parents’ second weddings. My mother remarried when I was four, and limited by the capacity that I had for understanding at the time, I mostly remember diligently performing my duties as flower girl, my satin was dress sticky and moist – it was 108 degrees that August in Portland when my Mom married Larry. It seemed to me that their wedding was just attended by masses of suits and dresses and shoulder pads, shiny black oxfords, and pastel flats and sandals. It took place in a Baptist church where they sung in the choir. I remember most vividly Larry’s sister insisting on bringing her ambrosia salad, full of canned mandarin oranges and marshmallows. Mom and Larry insisted it was unnecessary, but she still carted in a huge bowl of the gelatinous mass to their wedding reception, in the non- air-conditioned church basement- turned- inferno by the intemperate weather.
Looking through photos the only thought that strikes me about that day is hair product – my mother’s artificially wavy hair sprayed and meticulous, Larry’s hair with this perfect side combed arch, detailed with hair gel. My mother had six bridesmaids, all wearing black matching dresses that looked like something a flight attendant wore. Mom wore a white shiny dress with big bulbous sleeves and carried burgundy roses, which coordinated with the other decorations; and seamlessly matched the cake: three tiers- white, starchy, with a few burgundy rosebuds and a crucifix on top, filled with raspberry. In wedding photos I can be seen gazing excitedly as Mom and Larry both hold the knife, cut the cake, laugh as they exchange bites, their eyes locked and gleaming. Larry and Laura, they almost even had the same name.
Now when I email my mother, I have to use their joint email, larlaura, which always makes me feel weird to address messages to a name-conglomeration. Though I address messages to my mom, I usually get a response from her husband. The funny thing about my mom’s transition from barefoot hippie bride to my father, to the bride of a Christ-centered church wedding, is that I can’t remember a transition. Maybe since it all happened when I was young, I was unaware of the change, but as I remember it, the transition was seamless and almost immediate. One month we lived with my father. Another month we lived with Larry. On Sundays we slept late and ate pancakes, until one Sunday we began attending church, and every Sunday thereafter.

-----

My father remarried much later, when I was nineteen, the summer before I met Kenny, the summer I wore cowboy boots all the time. The wedding was in an old country church outside of Davis, California and I sat with my cousins and Lisa, leaning my head on her shoulder, during the simple ceremony, in which Dad and Charlene exchanged vows and he slid my great grandmother’s wedding ring on her finger. Afterwards, Lisa and I drove past rows of grain and pear trees, now outlines and cut-outs in the diminishing late afternoon light, to the Italian restaurant where the outdoor reception was.
There were white lights strung in the trees, adding to the affectionate glow of that early May evening. My dad’s old fishing buddies told tall tales of their fishing adventures and drank beer while I met Charlene’s roommates from college. When the wedding cake was served– tiramisu, already sliced and put on plates, no circumstance surrounding it, friends and family gave toasts to my Dad and Charlene, his new bride, who I had immediately admired for being a writer. I took photos with Charlene’s old Minolta. When I developed the film, the photos were hazy, the kind taken in low light, so that motion is blurred, faces are grainy, light is tender and whatever is captured is ambiguously beautiful.
Later in the evening when my favorite Bob Dylan song played, my dad caught my eye across the tables where the revelers of the occasion sat, bellies full of food and wine, relishing the afterglow of the sunset and the mild twinkle of lights dazzling the glasses. Dad raised his glass and mouthed Thanks for being here, buddy. I raised my glass and we smiled.
I had always maintained that I looked more like my dad.

-----
Thack thack thack- Sitting in my room, a few days after that sleepless night full of trains sighing, I am pounding on my typewriter. I have been reheating the same cup of tea all evening, but the drink just gets stale and bitter, only lukewarm.
I watch my typewriter spit out my tangled thoughts on paper, typed so neatly in cursive reminiscent of vintage textbooks, its almost cruel. The notes are obscure and incoherent when I read over them – ramblings about white roses, my mom’s cowboy hat, my cowboy boots, debating with myself about whether or not I look like my mother, wedding photos, train tracks and fancy cakes, and the scar my mother’s trim finger has from my father’s teeth-- all ending with, Jesus Christ, Kenny and my name are so similar…are we going to have a joint email account too? Shit.
I cough on the tea, cooled once again and realize I have been typing all these thoughts so I didn’t have to see my handwriting, indistinguishable from my mother’s, right down to how we pen the stems of our lowercase a’s.
I stand and look out my window to only see it is dark, so the watery glass on the heavy old double-paned windows multiplies my distorted reflection. Pushing my arms into the sleeves of my scratchy wool coat and wrapping my scarf around me, I stumble over my own feet, rubbing my temples and untangling my hair with my fingers on my way out, pausing only to hear the doorknob latch behind me. I am still unsure of exactly what to say to Kenny. I do not know if I am compromising, justifying in this relationship, overreacting from the possibility, or any combination of those, but in the flurry, the nuance of those implications don’t even matter anymore.
---
I still don’t know. I think sometimes such matters are increasingly ambiguous; the clarity I have now has a dash of apathy. Time has passed, my relationship with Kenny feels smaller and far away.
Regardless, I do know that trains are only set in their tracks. And I was determined. I may not have had, or ever will have all the sides of the stories, or have the complete history of my parents. But I had what was in front of me: photographs and paper full of cursive.
My boots crushed leaves as I marched to his apartment, and resolvedly knocked on his door.
Better not be there when it rolls over.

1.

1.
The last summer my mother and I spent at my grandmother, Goldie’s house on Lake Winnebago, my main concern was to avoid the long, terrifying strands of algae that would curl around and brush against my thick, girlish leg as I swam by. The sensation of it was a sudden tickle, and caused me to quiver whenever it struck as though the ethereal spiny green ribbons were the tentacles of some unseen nefarious sea monster.
Oppressive humidity, the smells of the lake breeze blowing through rooms of musty wallpaper, Goldie’s thick perfume from its exquisite amber bottles, and the scent of her breath, bearing the aromas of Virginia Slims and brandy- this is backdrop to my childhood consciousness tenderly emerging; tiny green tendrils of an adult awareness beginning to curl into roots.
One of those countless afternoons spent at the lakehouse, I was standing on the dock looking down at the patterns and rivers the water made by clinging to the golden hair on my never-yet-shaved legs as the water turned to drips, hitting the tops of a faded red pair of my grandmother’s Keds that, though much to big, I wore as water shoes to protect from nemesis number two of the lake: leeches.
Goldie, nicknamed after her once straw-colored tresses, never came outside unless coaxed, and even then only to smoke. Her hair was cobwebs now – white and wispy, teased, sprayed and spun into a crusty globe. She went to get her hair done once a week, and would have a dent revealing her veiny skull from when she slept the very next day. I can’t place her in most of my lakehouse memories – I was always outdoors and she was always indoors.
I do remember Goldie would always order drinks at restaurants and hardly ever order food. My mom would order the same drink and say virgin, but switch glasses when Goldie wasn’t looking, and discreetly sip the minimum amount of the alcoholic drink maintain credibility to her mother. This was my first encounter with the word virgin. It had no sexual connotations; it was simply a way to order a Bloody Mary. Goldie sometimes blurred her words together, or would walk in a lilting shuffle, especially later in the afternoons and evenings –the only time I was inside because the lake flies were beginning to hatch, and would rise to the surface of the lake. I naively attributed her behavior to her age. She never even noticed my mother seamlessly absconding her drinks.
This afternoon, my mom was sitting outside, like always, to watch me while I stayed in the lake for hours. Her slick thighs were smothered with tanning oil, and her hair smelled lemony from the astringent scent of Sun-In. Despite the products, her thighs always just turned pink, and her dark hair faded to dirty orange from the combined ravages of a perm and the peroxide lightener.
I sat down next to her in a lawn chair, my bulky blue and green one-piece swimsuit clinging to my sturdy body, and picked off tiny bits of loose algae from my increasingly freckled arms. Thumbing through a People magazine, my mother stopped at a photo of a tall, blonde girl prancing out of the ocean, the softly rolling waves creating a perfect playground. Wow. Paris Hilton doesn’t have an ounce of fat on her body, does she? Mom observed. At nine, it didn’t occur to me to analyze and compare her body to mine, so I mindlessly agreed with my mother.
I sure don’t look like that in my swimsuit. As she said this, I saw her lips,
how thin and delicate they were; how her frosty pink lipstick detailed every line of her mouth. I knew that my lips were already bigger than hers, but I lacked the utilities to call them full or plump. Goldie’s feathery lips left wistful ruby imprints on the filters of her slender cigarettes. I looked at my mother, wearing her bikini top and loose shorts. My mom’s arms did kind of look like the celebrity’s in the photo: strong, lean, her muscles softly angular, carved into her flesh from hours of exercise. She also looked like the photo in this place on her chest, along her breastbone, where her ribs created thin ripples in her minimal cleavage. In Beverly Cleary books this place on a mother was soft and comforting, but when I leaned to press my ear against this place on my mother, it never quite fit together, her breastbone uncomfortably caused the cartilage in my ear to bend or fold. I judged her for this lack of motherliness, for not being a character in a Ramona Quimby book. Look at how her thighs don’t touch, Mom said. I examined the picture again, but was too distracted by Hilton’s playful scamper out of the water. I wondered if she was having such a great time because there weren’t any of those awful long algae strands or leeches in the ocean. If that was the case, I concluded, the only thing I could see to envy in the photo was Hilton’s uninhibited water play.
I stood and shuffled in the oversized red Ked’s back to the lakeshore, the water in the saturated soles of the shoes was pushed out and absorbed again as I put my weight into each step. Maybe we all had our battles that last summer at the lake house- Goldie in the house with her cigarettes and tumbler of tawny fluid, my mother and the image of a twenty-something starlet, and I, in the lake to single-handedly battle the inescapable sea creature with all the valor and courage possessed by a girl unencumbered.

we would be full of tobacco and chaff and after we leave the tracks, our shoes will have no soles and we won't mind. the notes pinned into our skin only leave beads of blood, for which we feel some thanks and heartbreak, all at once.

blood orange slices

i want to live in a construction of fiber and guitar strings woven together and balsa wood because there is no wind and there are thistles, and honey and we drink good beer and whiskey and swim in the creek and see the mossy rocks in the water and live on them and in them and he is there and you are there and she is there and the rooms are all small and full of books and old leather stuff with tobacco and our best stories are pinned to the walls and it is september eternal, we sleep outdoors and awake, entangled and dewy in the morning only to have days of cursive letters and typewriter keys and humming while you whistle or moan. we don't have to fight or wrestle. we have no fear if wearing our hearts on our sleeves, because our chests are pinned open and exposed and beating. we just live with what we are - skin and hip bones, relying on arteries and never again batteries. all fabric there is old, all faces soft, and we will all stay there until something sets the fields on fire and then we will stay until we can no longer see the moon, for the smoke has put us to sleep

of thistles and bees

you'll know when

i'll miss reading your mind and when you really looked at me, looked right at me and into me and through me and pointed out the green spots in my eyes.

once, you were vibrant, joking, loving, doting and full of fluid caresses in new forms.

and i will miss that

and i am happy that i was able to see at least some of you like that, before it all went away.

i hope it comes back


i hope that you will feel joyful and full of life and happiness once again, and i don't hope this for me and you and i don't think i can give that to you, but i hope you stay both tender while adventurous and unruly and plucky, like i heard you had been

and sometimes i will think that i will miss you

or the idea of you

but i will write notes about you or for you and fold them carefully and pin them to my chest

our bodies

this is going to be a continuing project amongst friends...and you?

my new body

my core would be a mandolin
my heart would be a pomegranate, with a locket pinned to it
my legs could be asparagus
my arms fiddlehead ferns
my mouths would be made of typewriter parts
and my eyes of stained glass
my intestines constructed of paper and thread
my blood could be made of tea, oolong and smooth

my ears made of jasmine and jade
my fingers - piano keys
my brain and mind would be made of wire with beads and bells, and old camera lenses, so that everything i see through stained glass eyes is captured


somewhere i'd like a persimmon and a blood orange

3.

The hawthorn tree was my lookout over my innocent secret garden full of violets where I found treasures in the soil – colored glass marbles and tiny porcelain figurines, and where I spit out seeds from the concord grapes that grew on the antiquated arbor in our back yard. I would squeeze the juicy organ out of its purple skin with a satisfying burst to better locate the seed. I had mastered climbing the hawthorn tree without falling prey to the pins and needles growing in thick clumps. From the nearby blossoming walnut tree, I would gather the unripened fruits – walnuts are covered in a fleshy green casing that later rots away, revealing the rigid textured shell.
The walnut tree left hundreds of brains in their casings, in various states of decay scattered in the overgrown grass of the house on Prescott Street. I would collect them, the greenest, freshest ones from the branches of the tree before they fell, and peel away their coverings, smelling the scent of unripened walnut – far more pithy than freshly cut grass or immature olives. When I scraped away the their skins, it would stain my fingers and nails a faded yellow, the scrapings caught under my nails would turn black, and its smell would permeate my fingertips in a way that only oils can.
Once I fell while climbing onto the grape arbor in the middle of August, when the grapes were ripest and their mild scent strongest. In the tumble, rusty nails that protruded from the structure ran across the uppermost part of my thigh, gashing the entire back of my leg open. I screamed underneath the grape arbor, lying on my stomach in the slits of light; howling and pounding my palms on a bed of twigs and branches that had fallen from the grape vines, adorned with their perfect barky twists. A phone hit the floor from inside the open door, and my mother’s bare feet rumbled down the back porch stairs. Blood made its slow trajectory down the back of my downy leg, bristling every hair as she rushed me into the house, where I lay on the cold beige linoleum floor. She trembled to say she couldn’t stop the bleeding, it was close to my femoral artery, her brief stint as an EMT in college wasn’t adequate to deal with this, and that I would have to lay on my stomach in the back seat of the car on the way to the hospital.
The doctor in the hospital, whose skin looked like melted plastic, spared me from the terror of stitches or staples, employing a new special kind of “medical superglue,” as he explained. Was this supposed to be exciting?
I was glued, taped, padded, poked, patched and sent home. Fresh skin forged my leg back into one piece eventually, but left an unusual scar. Puffy. It was puffy, a soft white line of texture. I was told at Crossroads Christian Academy the next month that hiking up my skirt to show my impressive scar was unladylike, and no one wanted to see my bottom. Not appropriate material for show and tell. I was conscious of the scar much later, when my legs were stems, when my body fleshed out like a fig, or a bow-back mandolin. The strange sensation of the scar never escaped notice from a lover’s fingertip. My mom told me a few years ago with a new callousness that she would have just glued it herself, with superglue, if the same thing happened again now. The thought settled uneasily in my stomach.
After the fall, I nervously eyed the grape arbor from my safe perch, up in the hawthorn tree near the cyclone fence. Plucking and squeezing the clusters of lush fruits was markedly less enticing. The various trees and vines in that yard knit together overhead, a quilt of various foliage, a soft canopy that fell leaf by leaf, piece by piece, to the ground once autumn rolled through, first grade came, and the rain whole-heartedly began its chore. For that summer, or rather for some immeasurable dewdrop in time, that plot of land had been a simple sort of delicate Eden.