eel slipper

There is No Driving Force

2012-02-06T07:00:00.004-05:00

Who doesn't want a little sustenance from time-to-time? The clothes on the floor make patterns like constellations. Someone keeps count of how this means your tides are coming back in. It is a tally in a notebook, or a count kept on fingers.

I imagine her tongue licking what is left of our numbers. The guide along which we measured what it meant to be us. No longer necessary, the smallest comforts. We can give up what it meant, we can.

A poet can say this with certainty. Knowing language and what it can and cannot mean, intimately. The back of the sink, always a little wet like a whisper. Like a thing to be kissed.

Go on ahead, dear. I will wish you well with a metal taste in both our mouths.

Snag

2012-02-01T08:54:00.002-05:00

creates an eddy.

Just playin' with you.

***

The blue tropical weight of snow. It never ceases to amaze me that I can decide not to go out in it.

Distorted Excitements

2012-01-28T07:43:00.003-05:00

Whatever gets said, or doesn't. The findings on a map. Scattered seeds, a few pods of rice. I take in the territory, surreptitiously. My eyeblind ringing.

Who can spell any word or make sense of any outline? I will apply my eyes to theirs so as to become an overview king. The fat know-it-all.

The probable answer to the question my foraging along the lines: no. The divide on the boundary between one country and another is solid. You cannot move beyond it. Ah, yes, someone points it out to me constantly. The wall, wall, wall.

We nudge it like newborn fawns. Shaky forelocks. Shaky deeds.

Who could be good enough for what we already are? Shall we change the lockets? Or make ourselves more disregarding? A thin, sickly thing I can't recognize.

Give it up for the escape of distortion.

You're Not to Blame (But You Are)

2012-01-16T06:37:00.003-05:00

Mmmm...the moribund findings. It was a chorus, and then the walk about after. You did not understand how we knew to go long, but you loved us nonetheless. I could have asked you to dance, and then you would have regarded me, but I pretended it wasn't necessary.

What a dunce! What a return find!

I could have asked you to touch me, but what was best was in the aftersphere. A word I made up to signify the distance in the moment.

Didn't you love it, you, did you?

If It's Not Love, It's the Bomb

2012-01-15T09:44:00.003-05:00

Ask me.

The excise tax. What does it cost to pass through it? The squeeze gate, the arbiter of history. I recognize someone along the sidelines I knew many years ago. I call out, "Boss!" and everyone seems to know me.

I could have been an expert. The only songs that made me cry were the ones in which I celebrated my own failed accomplishments. I was pitiless, I suppose. Yet, I held on tight. I held on.

I may have missed you, it is true. But in my mind, when we found each other again, it was merely happenstance. Nothing to write home about.

I Just Did It To Piss You Off

2012-01-14T06:31:00.002-05:00

The immature action, wasn't it? I gave no care to the sack of authenticity. It smelled like pine, but my elbows wouldn't fit, so what could I do? The slick part of my neck was always extending. You felt some rain, didn't you?

The overhand on the moment was divine. He had a gold tooth, you called to say I had forsaken you. Or you didn't call, I was mistaken. I was in the fantasy of a yellow wood. I was at the foot of Mt. Fuji, where my friend says the Japanese leave their shoes, shredded credit card, and clothes for collection before committing suicide.

The momento mori, who gives a fuck? Right? You asked to be a moment that slipped in the rain gutter, that was the iron you could taste at the back of your throat. I loved what happened underwater with you. The impossibility that we could ever surface.

I know how it sounds. We all posture from time to time. Your fake eyelashes hit off, shedding all over me. There is some old world violence necessary to make the hit.

Tell Me This Is How We Feel

2012-01-12T06:51:00.002-05:00

The projection is all. The future tense. I could have asked myself how I got here, but that would have defeated the game.

I chose instead, to care very little.

I had not said to myself "Why are you different?" I merely walked thus. It was a beat, a fracture that felt good to make.

When we know ourselves as the other, it becomes an addition of distance. This is another way of escaping the true self. It takes only a half-baked analysis to make the....

...diagnosis. Whatever word that was, I could not think of it for several minutes.

Instead, I was growing larger on my own tongue. This means I knew how to do many backstands of the self. I forgot how you looked, how I must have looked next to you, for a second.

Magnificence, a Pastime

2012-01-08T09:04:00.003-05:00

Returning is easy enough: the rainy streets, the blurry windows of the bus. How you can swipe the glass to make things familiar. It is always this way when you are return home, still a tourist. The eye is ocular, not in its workings, but in the distance it preserves in order to make of what it sees, a memory. An object to be manipulated in retrospection.

**

I wanted to go away with just the same feeling a boy has when he wants to run away to sea--at least, what I imagine a boy has. Only, in my adventure, men were mixed up, because of course they had to be. You understand, don't you? Do you understand that a girl might have that feeling?

--Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

**

How tenderly what is familiar approaches me. To consider the contours of the world strange, then, becomes a pastime to be cultivated. The bodies of each person, encased in a blue hazy light so it becomes easier to examine them.

Tonight, I am forming a cataloge of their differences, a compendium of measurements. I will start with the various marks on the bodies I've known: a red blotchy dot he called a "Mongol" mark, the slender pink scar he's just got from recent surgery (he rubs it like a coin), the immunization scar that shines in the right light (circled like a coin)on his arm, the knob at the back of his head (a primal mark of a certain kind of man). I will place these inside the dark patch of skin on the left side of my left leg just left of the knee.

It is important to be descriptive like this, to be exact, to be precise. This is the new pastime. To recognize in this way, the men have come into the story, to not as solid objects, but as the sea. A set of seas, and there--at the horizon--all my pretty tourist boats.

The Holly Day

2011-12-23T05:10:00.004-05:00

I don't feel lonely; rather, this is my favorite Christmas song. My mother had a record from ACE Hardware (or True Value?) that had this song on it. At Christmas, we used to play that record (it had Kate Smith, and The Carpenters on it) all the time in our old house.

I loved this song the most because it had a velvet sadness to it, something melancholy, but also pleasurable--the wallow of it, I suppose.

Yes, we think, you're sad with longing, but you love it so.

And now that I see Elvis doing it in his prime--even though he flubs half-way through, coughing out "without you"--his snarl lip and his sex eyes are something to behold. Because they have that pleasure thing about them.

Snap. Oh, you!

***

The gold tooth in your mouth, the thing that winked to me. I suppose we could have opposed the inner workings of gravity, but the old styles are enough for us. What country dates back to the Middle Kingdom?

I could have said: where I stand.

Today, I sat in a cafe and drank "Royal Milk Tea," and I felt wonderful. Some old 90s music that no one could understood was on the radio and I was reading a book while watching the people around me.

So I went like this: book, look up, book, look up, book. These were my angles: memorize them.

So I saw the ceremony of greeting which is how I knew I was situated in the right place.

A woman came to meet two people: another woman and a man. When she arrived, they were not at the table, having stepped out (I believe) for a smoke. So, she sat primly, awaiting their return.

When they came back, the woman greeted the other woman warmly--it appears they knew each other. The man hung back, more formal with the newly arrived woman.

Each bowed to the other: woman to woman, woman to man. Then, the man gave his name card (business card) to the woman who had been waiting and when she received it she bowed.

And then they both bowed together, again. It was like a choreograph. And though I have seen it before, it was the fluidity of it, the not specialness of it that was something for me then.

I was the obtuse angle on this scene, bisecting is with my gaze. What magnificent vantage point. A given otherness I found some home in. His blue Christmas.

A Paucity

2011-12-18T06:25:00.006-05:00

I must remember how to read things in another language. Can't get it out of my head: skin, hands, the cheeks' fullness.

Someone must play dolls with us. Because I feel a muscle, and you imagine me there. I take a back swipe, you know what I'm thinking.

The body is connected to the moment. We try not to look at each other. Will I ever forget what you slicked?

Our tunnel vision helps us navigate desire. Yes, forgot your fusty teeth, yes forgot your mother's birds, forgot how what I never measured was you--but, I put a red hat on the woman and the man, then mashed them together.

Such geographical societies are unknown to the basic fault. I kept walking on a cool day in order to make it freeze. The known fact of what you'd been, what was happening (the inner shakes of it), and the further on thing that was coming.

Ironically, when my spelling in that other language was checked I had written "Thursday" as "Eat day" because I am hungry, hungry for what I couldn't yet see.

A Real Hero or I Just Watched Drive

2011-12-11T09:22:00.002-05:00

The realizations I have daily make me often wonder if you pat yourself on the back. It wouldn't be out of character, though you would accuse my fantasies of being pretentious. I think rather I would like to be lying with you in the dark.

In the room with us, the dark velvet of an underwater sadness. The trusses pulled up so as to be made visible. So that what would happen when we fuck would be the sound of turbulent water.

I cannot imagine anything right now more than that.

This does not mean I think fondly. Many mistake these feelings for compassion, but what I mean is the way of remembering how cold and lonely it was in those other years I imagined you living before you met me.

I mean the white lattice work and the way my mother made me weed the garden all summer long so I was forced to imagine other ends to my days.That kind of pre-knowing of desire. And I mean the flowers I thought were lavender, but were lilacs, the smell I loved in the side yard and the one time I mowed the lawn I almost mowed them down and I mean that my hands would smell like the oil off the motor and your hands would be full of branches off the plant. When I say "sadness" and "turbulent water," I mean that you would stuff those lilacs in my mouth and what would explode then would be a full, extracted thing.

I Don't Know What Good It Serves

2011-12-09T06:25:00.002-05:00

I suppose we all want other origins. You pretend your father is a king and I pretend every cousin I have is a famous artist. To nestle up close to something more important feels like a comforting wrapper around the throat. You know, the feeling you get when you're too warm? And how you might sweat, but don't want to move? Yes, that feeling, yes.

I can remember when I was driving through the mountains and sleeping on the floor of the house that had no heat that warmth took on a symbolic weight for me. What cannot be accessed easily becomes the thing you must turn to a dictionary to understand.

Who knows what reprehensible things you did to me that you called words I'd never heard of. I suppose we know what we do and we merely look the other way to give ourselves a little mystery.

A long time we cheered whenever there was an upset, now we ask ourselves if we've dug deep enough to situate anything remotely near our outer limits. A red dye that cat tails in a friz to the inner fix. Hot fluff to the cold core body.

Hot musk to the never you care dwelling. It may be thrilling, but I don't know what good it serves.

The Quality of This Blue

2011-12-06T20:48:00.002-05:00

Last night, I read Bluets by Maggie Nelson in total, laying in the cold on my couch. I was reading it for the second time because I am in love with this book and because I wanted to feel the longing in it and somehow match it with my own longing--not for a man, but for a way of defining the limits of the self, the boundaries of feeling.

I think Nelson's philosophical propositions are a good way of capturing it--numbered, organization where there often is nothing but a formless chaos. I could relate to the sense that the memory of the lover who is being worked over in the text later becomes the thing that is being dealt with, that must be engaged with, even more so than the physical man himself.

An extension of a person, a memory is not always like a shadow; it too, can become a tangible thing that requires attention. I do not know who is the object of my memory, him? or him? or him?, but I suspect it is all of you and at once it is also, perhaps, myself.

If for just once you had said to me, The quality of your prose in the afternoon... I would have stayed with you forever. I suppose then I am saying this to myself.

So, please don't flatter yourself. Think about the placement of this song, you fool. Do your fucking research because I can no longer explain it to you. I don't have time to write that book.

Club Silencio

2011-12-03T08:07:00.003-05:00

We knew ourselves, though we wore disguises. We had come to it, thought we didn't know it. I kept telling myself that someone else must have heard it, that this wasn't a dream, but I also knew simultaneously that no one could be that quiet. There was a loop: a man comes home drunk to knock on his girlfriend's door and he yells as he knocks some name I cannot understand. There is no chorus, but I wake up several times to hear him again, do it again. The knock, his voice, the recording of his voice also simultaneously playing in my mind.

I could have stayed up so late to hear him, but I kept falling asleep when he said her name. I should have waited for the loop to take me. His voice and the way he said her name or did I imagine that? I supplied that feeling to his voice in the middle of the night. He came home, he knocked, I could not tell what he was saying. I filled in the rest.

***
I don't know, it repeated, it felt like a joke. We fell and laughed and cried. Some children passed the day trying to catch fish. It was that kind of that voice. Gone all over her front door. She wouldn't answer him. We were amnesiacs. We were in love what the echo brought us. That could explain it.

Yet, I felt something going on beyond us.

Please Keep Your Problems Calm

2011-11-30T08:09:00.003-05:00

This fit the day in so many ways.

**
I have refrained from saying the full yardage of what is in my mouth.

**
If I had a ear trumpet, I would use it to make the backed-up feeling in my mouth audible to you. It would sound, I'm convinced, like the weird noise you hear when your head is underwater. It would be a revelation for you, I'm sure: the real sound of water.

**
I once tried to tell you the story of how I got the scar on my knee, but I could tell your eyes were on that curly brown-haired girl. I would have written about it in my diary if I'd though it significant, but I wouldn't want to give a name to your ego.

**
You can call mine "match point." Freud approves.

Left Off in the Middle

2011-11-27T07:55:00.003-05:00

A woman who speaks as if she has something blocking her mouth. Haze at the edge of her syllables like someone spread smoke indoors and forced us to keep our eyes wide. Are all manners of speaking chocked up like this? Ill feeling a subtle irritation along the gums and the lips fall into a sleepy bidding. They stumble, they stumble.

It is difficult to compose the self in such circumstances. No matter how long one walks at the edges of the city, how long one pretends to be a stranger in a familiar neighborhood. We can embrace our exoticism, but it cannot keep anything clear.

The soreness of it is like a red bowl in a blue sea. Yet, something more striking than that. A group of deaf people walking past a group of men stripping the coating from wires.

I threw out that picture--one I'd seen today, walking alone in a quiet neighborhood, in a darkening day--to offer something worth reading into.

I can manage this: if what had never been heard could be captured on a wire, then the sound of the coating being stripped would be the song.

L'hiver

2011-11-21T10:19:00.005-05:00

When the weather is like this, we say the cold came suddenly.

It is fall, then it is winter. Isn't the way we don hats so wonderfully whimsical? A tie of scarves and the licking of lips, repeatedly, to find a spot that the wind can stick.

It occurred to me, quite suddenly, that I work better in the cold. The feet in blue slippers, as they say, as the kids go shouting down the street saying nothing I can understand.

Someone is always outside the door telling us about the wind, or the shape of our hair as we look backward into the sun. I had a hunch about me and loved to pretend I could keep my face completely inside the hood of my jacket. A reversed regard.

It was heavier, black--I'd just taken it out of the closet and suddenly it felt like someone else was here, a whole company filtering in on the cold drafts from the windows.

Suddenly, we can all pretend to have smaller mouths, a set of fish in our shoes, and something more French Canadian about us. A classical set of winter moves.

I Might Have Mistaken, You Read Into It

2011-11-18T06:22:00.002-05:00

I kept driving in the neighborhood that meant a deadend.
Oh you ticket that I plied. A flight that gave past my face.

You may not have written back, but there was joy in another flowering.
I thought to myself: did you turn it all on, the rice cooker, your boiler?

My mad jackass, a prick in the tease of shadow.
I have spent two days writing a review of you.

There you go, you long-forwarder. I might have given
myself to the husky voice, just so I could escape you.

Hatch, the quick fake. Oh I embarrassed myself
with a word that couldn't be translated.

Reparations

2011-11-17T09:40:00.006-05:00

I could read these book review, essays of hers all day long and into the night. Elisabeth Bachner--

I’m reading Nicholas Royle on the death drive, and repetition compulsion -- the strange, creepy magic of our ability to somehow play out the same scenario again and again, and to turn the people in our lives into characters in that scenario. “The man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend. The lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion.” It’s like we become writers, frightening writers who are entirely unaware of ourselves or at least out of our own control, writers possessed by demonic power. It took shell shock victims for Freud to decide that dreams weren’t always about wish fulfillment, that sometimes we compulsively reenact -- in our dreams, or when we’re awake -- stories that harm us.

It is important now to understand the dream. To understand that I always intended to be able to read the letter. That the desire preceded the act like a dream precedes a premonition.

Then, it must be ironic that I did not return to the letter until now. Remembering how, long ago, you'd told me you dreamed of fire, flood--you would not elaborate, for to do so would be bad luck--though, you stopped by the market to buy a lottery ticket. You said the dream encased you in good luck.

If I had understood then that a dream is not wish fulfillment, but a desire to reenact, would I have offered to buy your dream and relive our lives within it?

I see now that the letter, an archaic gesture I asked you to make, was both my dream and your dream colliding. And in that dream, in what you wrote in that letter, you called me good over and over again. I can see that within your dream I rose up beyond myself and in the letter I asked you to write you became the eyes through which I could see the better parts of myself.

Delayed Signals

2011-11-16T08:55:00.003-05:00

I guess karma got decided up in this bitch.

There was a time when I stayed home every Saturday night as if loneliness was not a problem. I felt key lime pie florescented in the middle aisle.

I watched some shows. I will not name them here so as to preserve the sense of import in the mystery. Somehow, though it was embarrassing to have walked around town not knowing which direction I went, I found followers. It seemed a snatch to make what happened answer me in my inbox. I felt to the ground of what past happened in there.

Maybe I told everything and maybe I massaged my discourse. Either way, it was the same.

I guess this was all taped earlier.

Just Hearded This In To Hear You In It

2011-11-11T00:34:00.005-05:00

You know what that means, right? It is like the condition of baby animals who "imprint" on another species. when I heard the Smiths, I always x. It is kind of an honor, but something that seems silly as well.

Last night, the ethnic Korean from Kazakhstan walked with me to the subway. He often wears the same coat to class, and has little crinkles around the edges of his eyes that make us guess he is around 30 years old. He also has red-chapped cheeks like a Mongolian. He laughs heartily whenever someone tries to pronounce the name of his country's president.

Since the man from Kazakhstan speaks no English and I speak no Russian, so we communicated in shoddy Korean. This was our conversation:

I asked him how often he sees his girlfriend and he said only two times a month. I said it was very sad (I used the verb "to be bad/ugly"), that he must have too "much" work (I said "much work").

When he asked me if I had a boyfriend, I said no, but explained that I had one previously. I explained that I came to Korea, and then because I didn't know the words to describe my intent I said:[gesture] hands in heart shape, breaking apart over chest at level of heart.

This must be a universal because he understood and said, in Korean, "Me too." "Me too."

*****

A gesture that makes physical an event: a gesture that makes communicable a feeling. It seems a little miraculous.

Who cares?

2011-11-09T08:44:00.002-05:00

Who cares what gets remembered?
A chord of organ music takes over everything.

I keep dog-earring the pages of books in order to follow a paper trail later. I am hungry for something I don't even know the taste of.

Am I getting enough done?

It is a Title that Would Read Appropriately in Your Diary

2011-11-06T02:34:00.005-05:00

I find it highly ironic in this time of solitude, I would be reading Black Holes, Black Stockings, a collaborative book of poetry which emphasizes the erotic potential of a mass of tangled selves. There is a shifting between a you, I and a third person, but there is never a way necessarily of knowing who is acting.

A cry comes out and is the changing exterior, particles without apparent cause in threes who vanish without a trace. Here and there and where, moebius space. Who heard suck, who sucked?

In this haze, I keep thinking to myself: it would have been so easy for you to be here. So easy, but then, you resisted that, so now here we are.

I know you would indent this paragraph with an explanation, but I am pointing out that sometimes there are simple ways to solve things.

Don't worry. I know this will infuriate you. I suppose we're still connected by that much.

Casually, I Got Up in Your Sticks

2011-11-04T07:13:00.002-04:00

You know everything is overheard now. It is an aftertaste existence. You wished I came across thinner, and in stereo.

I used to listen to the radio echo in the dark mornings in Minneapolis, like this sound I feel.

I was so tired that year. I lived in a corner apartment and knew when all my neighbors came home. I kissed a man until his tongue broke. He called me: cruel and never spoke to me again.

There might be a way of asking you to deaden what has happened or to trace the trajectory from there to here, but I doubt you'll do it. You answer with a pithy tongue and your fuzzed out basement. I could accuse you of being a fetishist, but I will resist it (though I will name it, so you recognize yourself nonetheless).

I suppose this can be chalked up to a resistance to desire. The past overcomes me, but some (you?) stand in front of it and take it like a full blast skirting through the self. I suppose then a lot rubble gets rocked out? Your bedroom fill up with my rustic charms. You must remember me each day, an intimate hair in the bedside table.

It might feel good to loose some pebbles, though, I suppose. You act on an unfortunate calling you knew before you were born: the shake-down.

I don't know how to make you answer me, but I can rectify a certain notion. I can know how to mitigate this missing.

Really Digging the Tune

2011-11-02T10:59:00.004-04:00

Little crusty bit, the song of nostalgia. What a woman sounds like singing underwater: kissing the rim of a glass jar.

A person I do not know says, "It's strange, but I feel as if I've been given all this fanfare before I've even proved myself." Her present fits her like a loose bag. The rest of us have no idea how we got here, either, but I don't say this.

I tell her someone else told me he knew why I'd come here. I explain defending. Some yellow gingko trees clap over our heads. I once saw it written that their leaves can all turn like little fish.

She has pledged to do her best. And it is a baggy fit, the space between now, the past and her future. It is the lead rope that I ate a little while ago when you told me I'd only come here for the men.

I guess it as easy as saying it is a day in which I read every third word and hope for the best.

A Human Stopwatch

2011-10-29T06:53:00.003-04:00

Before you read this, you should know I always wanted to say more.
The crest over lip was a fundamental fac totum.

We crest and then we go back. That is tides and they
are sadly human. I suppose that seems cliches, but the elevator
goes both ways. Give it up, my dear friend.

You slept in the basement most nights, so your understanding of the world
got hazy via the wood paneling. You fit the hair-wave pattern on the walls. Despite your human form.

It was as if you understood the logic. We carved
the sentences so as to fit the tides. Because that is the strength
of what a writing pen can do. Parse and logic, parse and dirigible.

I missed you most fiercely when I heard that one song.

Refrain, most painful.

Opprobrium

2011-10-26T10:59:00.006-04:00

There is a kind of yellow dust particulate the seems to settle over every day. It is not unpleasant, but we can feel it.

I changed my passwords three times to ensure a lock-out. There was only one way to tell if a person was traitorous or loyal: smell their breath.

Often, I take the barometer readings in my grandparents' basement. I don't understand old machinery, but I hold my breath so you mistake the results.

It was hard not to hate the woman in the elevator and the man who lusted after her. He looked at her fondly as he apologized for sending her an email that was, and I quote, "stream of consciousness."

She was eating a brownie she stole from an office. There was an artfullness to her carelessness. She is the kind of person who curls into desks.

He was the kind of person who pretends to be studious. A man who consciously cultivates his facial hair. As he never looked at me, we were not introduced.

When she asked me how I was, I looked at her with something shiny and said, "I'm doing good, really good. and you?"

She could feel whatever dust was settling then.

I wished them well, of course.

Something sour on the breath.

******

Otheration

2011-10-23T07:33:00.002-04:00

I was a foreigner and it meant I had to announce my intention.

I debated whether to buy speakers if I wasn't staying the duration. I needed to hear myself explain myself.

I spent so many days in your ear horn. Hanging spoons, engaged in your comeuppance.

Is this how you spell it?

There hadn't been a history, but I could have dared with it nonetheless. Trading the luxury of exotic locales for the big bracken of remembering.

Like a seaweed wafer between the knees. Gone wet, you see, it sticks. Forming a second skin to the self, a sticky hold you can't see through.

I think of what motion means then? Nostalgia the way it sticks? I suppose even you could answer that question. Some random calculator hanging itself between us and the me that is me historicizing you.

A referential memory frame made into a movie. The hands must post in the gesture just so. Those hands--

they must also become tourists and feel their way to hear themselves, gone (going?) off, jangling.

Translated Shift

2011-10-16T07:50:00.004-04:00

Who would have known that this is a seduction song? I've been hearing it around Seoul--where? where did I heard it?--and I've been imagining it as this grand song of want.

Truthfully, it is a song about convincing someone to sleep with you, seducing them even through the dailiness and the tiredness. Who knew?

I suppose translation is a tricky flip switch. I suppose that is true.

I could talk all night about the ways in which I went wrong.

Whatever, a big fat whatever.

I'm Always Dragging That Horse Around

2011-10-14T07:19:00.006-04:00

It is a strange thing that one accesses what cannot be opened. So this must mean torn.

I had written of it, previously. Or I had not.

Perhaps, I over-indulged in reading about it.
So, I no longer even wanted to do it.

I could make everything seem formalized, but really it was all a good cross-cutting. A jagged, misaligned set of straws.

I read every comment on every website as if they were speaking of me. You see, I mistook it all for a large bouquet of mouths rising up to meet me.

I dipped my head to the varying heights.

I did not mean, you see, kissed. I meant, that I was alone and this was how I imagined our conversation went. I spent the day talking, this way. Meeting what came to me in this moment.

You have always thought of me ensconced; I suppose that would be the easy explanation. I suppose.

Someone said that the worst things about being self-aware is to know your own needs. Hmmm, seems I needed this.

A Please Keep Still In the Dark Note

2011-10-09T08:36:00.002-04:00

There are curved blades that know how to cure you. I didn't mean it as if it was a Hot Topic commercial, you see, what I mean is that I had a clean down moment. I was accessed by the outer shelf of myself. I had an encounter with the way you had come and gone through me.

I do not think to name you now that you know yourself. How could you not? I am a little girl at the corner of the schoolyard holding on to my namecard and yours. What might not be obvious?

You have always expected it. Every move to make, you expect it. Like a big fat piece of concrete between my ankle bones, I am holding onto what you think you already know about me and walking despite, despite.

It could seem a stupid way of proving the self superior to others to assert that I keep on going, but what I am saying is it is not my fault that you have not felt what gravels in me. What makes me a random integer.

There is a distaste in even referring to it. I'm sorry I cannot lounge in it.

Really?

2011-10-07T07:28:00.003-04:00

A surprise then, when I realize the name of the band. Undeniable references, oh! On the very day when I have been toying with it.

Then, the recognition of the way in which I walk to the market and it makes me happy that the old man making dubu nods his head at me. He acknowledges me looking, they recognize me. It seems I am what you would call "a regular."

It is the look in which I recognize that I love this song and ask myself "What does that mean?" How can I not tell you?

Oh well, the backscore is a chorus of what doesn't get sung. A big flat chord of muted mums. A big snack of pinched gums. It is what it is, they say.

Oh well, they say I say you say it is what we didn't want it to be. No one sang the right parts, but you didn't care, you said "get out of here" and so I sang an aria from an expired piece. It was like the chorus to the song. A captured, thrilling thing that meant simultaneously "I care not" and "I cannot."

As if we are Duras, we write some stories over and over again. She kept repeating things in different books as if she could remake the past and then re-do it so each time the lover would appear as she wanted. And she could, you see, she could.

It seems fitting that one person should hold it for you like that. I think we all must give the trill to our arias, we must hold that note, at least.

I know it hurts me to treat you this way. Really?

Off-white Color

2011-10-03T09:23:00.003-04:00

I can't really do any writing today. The weather is very sentimental here: a little cool, what you might call "perfect jacket weather." I love wearing my sandals, my bare feet exposed, even though it's a bit cold. I embrace the feeling of how this pleases me.

Then too, I saw a cat eating a cake on the street. From afar, I thought it was a rabbit. But, then I saw it was a cat, hunched over, some scrapes along its face. It seemed a bit sad, but also somewhat strange, so I felt as if I'd seen something worth remembering. If I was a person who sketched, I would have sketched that in a desultory way.

The flavor of the afternoon seemed like nostalgic rice wine I didn't drink. I put everything off until tomorrow. Now, I'm going to read until bed.

Back Booth

2011-09-30T08:25:00.005-04:00

Carry on, it's a reassuring sign.

It is a daily occurrence; I lose hairs most moments. There is no emergency amongst me.

I am a full meadow along an amusement parkway. It is that full of what it could be.

You are a mere mention, yes, you are.

There was full color to our film and the kiss scene was to die for. I would swear to you how I saw it with many women. How you changed what you were as I was watching it.

I had a come to moment.

It necessitated these additions: how you picked me up drunk on the corner. How I imagined the ending.

It seems I have been caught up into the imagination. Oops. Must be a "comfortable shoes" moment.

That's Right

2011-09-27T08:35:00.003-04:00

In the crowded subway, a Korean woman presses her whole body up to mine, so we are ass to ass. But, because she is smaller than me, her ass fits me right below my own. She is like a little mold of me, captured in the curves of my self.

It is strange often to notice how Korean women are both smaller and yet so many are also the same size as me. It comes as surprise that so many are smaller and so many are my same size.

I vow often to never date another man who has an unsatisfied Asian fetish. Because I cannot be expected to carry the same size as these women.

It is easy then to think of the hysterical woman who sees symptoms everywhere through her body. How what does not measure must mean the very thing he desires.

That is not my concern; rather, I am trying to say "she fit" and to make you understand that means "goodbye." Perhaps, it also means "Good luck to what you think you'll love." And, "Here it is, what is not settled, eat it up."

I'm not entirely sure, but you could press up to me on the train to feel it. Surely, sure. Does it please you, this?

*****
I just like the laid back vibe of this song. Robyn!

What is your favorite color? I said blue.

2011-09-26T10:41:00.004-04:00

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."

Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. I knew it the same as other people, but, strangely, in advance.

Two passages from Marguerite Duras' The Lover.

Today has been hazy, so I have gone somewhere already this evening and come home only to forget that I had gone first to that other place, though the trip took hours. I walked there in the daylight and home in the dark, passing by the same garbage scavenger just leaving my building as I had passed when I'd left. It was as if I had only been gone for a few moments (isn't this what so many people say--it was like I never left?). Yet, I knew I had been gone for hours. When I came back, he was bent over, slowly pushing his cart down the street, his face cast in total shadow.

I like the way that the face in these passages takes on a romantic, yet melancholy cast. The first passage is from the start of the book and it does two things for me. 1) it tells me this is a story that is about wounding and that the plot will be the how of this wound and 2) it gives me a complete sense of romance to think of the sort of man who wants the wounded face more so than the face that has no wounds. It is the height of romance to me.

The second passage merely applies a little more knowledge to what we have learned in the first (it comes some pages later); yet, it presents again a strange sense of how the author is using these first few pages to tease out how she's come to bear this ravaged face. Yes, it is true that drink played a part, but as she says, there was something set aside in her from her youth, a space held open for the ravaging. It is such a curious thing to think.

A curious way of mentioning how the past somehow prepared the present. The way some faces seem familiar when you pass them again, and others, merely seem like cast off shadows.

Museful

2011-09-23T07:19:00.004-04:00

The Korean man who is a personal trainer at my gym, a young guy, an actor, he practices English every night, tells me, "Oh, you must get married...."

He says it, I might say, regretfully. He shakes his head. I say I am angry. I shake my head. I mimic how my heart got broken. I explain my problem with "trust" and it blows his mind that I am the untrustworthy party. He asks, "You are a Cassanova woman?"

He counts off my age on his hands.

I joke that he must become my matchmaker despite my issues with trust (I spell it out for him t-r-u-s-t), but, he says, all his friends are in their 20s. Ah, I see, I say.

A busy young man, he doesn't have a girlfriend. He works two jobs, one as a waiter at a Western chain restaurant (he does not like this word as it is associated with people who work at nightclubs and thus are not "nice" people....he says "service" instead of "waiter") and the other as a personal trainer at my gym.

He is concerned that we all (white people) suffer from racial blindness. I must explain. He asks me if all white people cannot see Korean faces, he mimics us seeing the faces and saying "same same same"--he does this in broken English--and I explain that this sight takes time to distinguish the difference. I say, "six months" because this is the time it took me to truly see Korean faces.

On the heels of this (perhaps it was his largest concern?), he asks me if his face might be attractive to Western women? It has been his plan all along. He needs to know, he is an actor, he wants to learn English--will he appeal to white women?

Yes, I say, your face can be attractive to Western women. To encourage him, I enact a scene in which I pretend to be him hitting on a Western woman. I say "Hey, I'm _____." And I pretend I am the girl, I put my hands under my chin in a typical "cute" style and I say, "Oh, _______, you are cute!" He seems satisfied with my enactment, though not quite convinced.

(I know if he walked into a bar and met a Western woman he would have no trouble. I try to convince him that his Korean "sister" is cute and totally datable, but he refuses this plan. It seems I have become, in one fell swoop, his matchmaker.)

It is difficult to be the racial arbiter of romance.

******

This is the song that was playing when I left the gym:

The Cat in the Hat Came Back

2011-09-22T07:01:00.002-04:00

I love this REM song. If a sidewinder is a snake and it sleeps on its back, then there is something sexual about its abandonment.

******

The little boy called me "aunt" in Korean because this is the age I appear to him. What cannot be hidden: age. Someone down the street cooks with sesame oil and it coats my nose. This is also a kind of temporality. A way of making "age" on the moment.

Now, I do my work on it. I make it into something.

It is the metaphor in which I have wished to communicate how I believe the world should work. You wake up one day and there are your people surrounding you, they are like something you have suddenly smelled, coming to you from far off.

It is a fantasy, yes, a fantasy. Nonetheless, my whole body reeks and takes up its spaces. It wants what it will want.

Others, go on--live your lives. A dog barks off in the distance, rhythmically. A thickening coats the air.

The Only Things We Love: Tigers' Eyes

2011-09-18T07:41:00.003-04:00

Give up your fatty face, sad unfortunate thing. Here, compression goes further than you would have ever thought. It must have something to do with the latitude. Everything just slightly off like a misprint.

People are governed by the feeling of wanting to go back in time. They wake up, put their feet on the floor, then remember themselves as they were yesterday. An unfortunate aspect of being alive, isn't it?

(I will play the same loud music 30 days in a row in order to show my dedication to your memory. I am so betrothed to your riot.)

Asides, there is no need to be specific to my location. This is now and always the other day. I could have emphasized my every woman, my everywhere for all anyone cares in this time frame.

I spoke several languages when I forgot how to get home. I was Neruda-esque in my love for the bodies I passed. They guided me back to what I had already lived.

Caught it seemed between the moment in which I remembered and the moment in which I remembered I had already thought it once before.

*****

We got arch, we got the big cars. We won't come round.

Rabbit's Foot

2011-09-14T09:25:00.002-04:00

It doesn't even matter really if it's nostalgic. It's more about walking around, remembering things. Now, I feel the need to insert gibberish and wish. Quoted rock lyrics as if they were trees in a postcard that form a scrutiny horizon. The heart's mutiny is in the shadows. We call her pawing at you a jackalope and laugh. Or, at least, this is how I imagine it going in the clearing you can't quite see from where you are. On the flat corners I lick my tongue along. The question is: to restrain her in a trap or let her gallop loose?

"Tanktop" by Caroline Smith and the Goodnight Sleeps from The Duluth Scene on Vimeo.

The Fullness

2011-09-12T06:43:00.003-04:00

I saw honest-to-goodness kids flying kites by the Han River. I was running and everything took on that picturesque flavor. Nostalgic blankets coating everything.

But, then, I have been educated enough to know better than to trust the desire for transcendence. I should be more specific: I have been educated enough in psychoanalysis to understand that the concept of empowerment too is something that must be interrogated for its fantasy of a coherent self.

Reading the chapter on acrobats and aerial tropes in the female grotesque by Mary Russo. I've read parts of this book and I made a copy of the library book which I had previously read. So, tonight I can see faint glimmers of someone else's annotations--not mine, but also in a way mine for having once read through and noticed these same annotations. However, tonight I have noted specifically the way in which Russo is attempting to start to demote some of the common linguistic (or, this chapter's case) spatial tropes of feminist theory (and really, many theories that claim empowerment as their goal).

To be "brought low" to "fall" was the gambit Russo was trying to sell me on tonight. I think she meant to fall with intention, to assume a role only to fall through it. I'm not entirely sure spatially how to see it, but she used the word feint/faint. It seemed things hinged on that backslash.

Triumph Rock

2011-09-11T07:54:00.003-04:00

I coined a term in order to inhabit it with my own definition. I waxed nostalgic for the first few days. Somewhere outside several people are talking. A woman's voice and then a man's rising and falling. Korean vowels and conjugations driving hard on the end of each phrase. A rising loop, or a falling fact?

Who cares to distinguish what is coming after the fact? Along the river, the scores of people watch the boats, talking quietly. It means "company" when I walk among them.

I remembered suddenly how I'd described someone's writing as an "alienated observer" and suddenly I realize. But, I think somehow this stance is more like "silently in conversation with" than anything else.

True, sometimes the self gets in the way of communication. It notices sound rather than meaning. I would drop a 1000 theoretical terms, but facing it requires simple terms.

I love listening to this song loud in the subway. Draw your own conclusions.

Non-person

2011-09-10T08:16:00.004-04:00

It felt like there was a moment that was made vulnerable, turned to the hazy afterlight of the afternoon. I walked along the subway tracks, but I could only hear the trains, not see them. I would have been mistaken not to understand that this was a metaphor for the way we become close to one another. A body next to a body, but with a shell between, a thin membrane separating.

I like Joan Baez's cover of this song because you can tell in the way she skips over the line "and anyway I'm not alone" that she is alone, despite what she says. So, the song takes on a mournful cast. Thus, the declaration becomes a lament, and yet also an admonition. A way of moving the lover back, back.

There have been some lived circumstances to this moment, there has been a precursor. And now I must remember everything you predicted. I must contend with it as if it is truth. I must come each time you call.

Perhaps, the declaration is enough to warrant parting? I have told my family not to bury me in your plot and I have expressed that I should not be associated with your name. Is that not enough?

The Arched Eyebrow

2011-09-09T08:12:00.002-04:00

I remember then, the man who said this singer knew how to sing. This meant that he felt her in his upper thighs. (And because he felt it bodily, I so believed him and loved her every since.)

Or perhaps, this is a way of braiding my female body with his? Can a man feel anything in the thighs? It is the place where a woman sits on him full weight, so perhaps, he goes numb?

I have imagined him leaning toward me, then going back. It is a pendulum that gets dusty in the "later parade." There is a sadness in all that nostalgic finery.

We have asked desire to give us back some momentary feeling. I went out and back through the door, you came in like a wainscoting.

It wasn't the moment to have dreams, it was a moment in which I needed to supplicate my own desires. I needed a big mouth for my love. Indeed, I needed a big mouth for my own desire. I was that mouth, no doubt.

I did not mean for this one "you" to have a pin; rather, I was thinking that I could spread this uncertainty over every facade. That there was prayer meeting for all my requests, yes?

I had imagined every "you" coming to me, unclasping me at the back and fingering me on into the next day. Yes, yes, it wasn't an easy fiscal policy: no, it required greed, a set of chops, and his forgiveness. Oh Lord, what he might forgive! (It was both a promise and a threat.)

It hadn't happened before I left (and it likely won't since).

The Secret Lives of Women

2011-09-08T23:00:00.002-04:00

I want to pair this with a photo I saw somewhere recently of a topless girl, back to the camera, on all fours on a bed. She's wearing white underwear, but there's a large bright red spot in the crotch, an obvious menstrual bleed.

It seems this juxtaposition works, but what do I know?

The Vague Diaries

2011-09-04T08:01:00.004-04:00

Bro. A. says to me, all Westerners in Korea in the 1920s were vague. He says, the trouble with these peoples' memoirs is that they were vague individuals. If they were not amongst the hordes of missionaries, they were debutantes. They came off the boat from Japan, where their lives were modern and they landed in a big pile of mud and shit.

So they left half-way memories in their wake and romanticized the rest. The woman I am researching came to a house high on a hill in Seoul and fell in love with a tree in the yard. There was a Buddhist alter near it and she romanticized her way into the water that lingered in the bowl of its shelter. Often, she would linger by that tree and make herself into something other than herself.

Her daughter called her a Zelda Fitzgerald so I know she did not long let herself stay in one spot. It was difficult for her to accept what she felt was a demotion from Japan to Korea, and yet she rallied half-way through her stay. It was if she gave up drinking and made herself meditate on Korean art. I do not quite believe this was a true moment of change, rather it might have been a rooting toward survival, staying engaged with the present/past around her.

I am struck with how we compare ourselves into something that is not ourselves. I do not know or understand how I have been going hard in this life. But, I know how there have been figments and romanticizations in the back yard.

Everything kept coming up exotic, it is clear from this photo. I believe it was easy then for her to enter into the stream of Korean poetry and make her own "translations." How can one resist making of oneself a romantic figure?

Keepin' It Up

2011-09-03T08:28:00.001-04:00

I knew best, aside from competition. It felt like reaching up, only to find yourself given back to yourself. But not inside a hand, no, the smell of you--it was--given back to yourself. That was the intimacy inverted.

I do not know a single person who loves the issue of themselves.

Thus, I asked myself to go for long walks in order to escape myself. All old women bonded, thus, walking out thier longings in the dusk. It was lore among us. These promenades meant to lose the self.

I have not been able to lose this secondary characteristic: you. I am sure you are working your way to accomplishment and finitude. There are many women who have meant to throw themselves at you. It wasn't accomplished yet.

That is the trophy. The flitter flux that surrounds each of us. I suppose that was what they all meant by "winning" and "better off." I suppose I will eat everyday at a buffet in my mind and ask no questions of myself.

Rather, invert, third position, invert.

Smoke on Snow Screens

2011-08-31T08:04:00.004-04:00

We try hard to imagine the winter. All Korean men now wear their jeans rolled up. The women wear skinny heels. Everyone, man or woman, dangles a camera around their neck. It is easy to follow the pattern of days, then harder at night.

Each silence gives itself over to the next moment in which I am thinking of the last moment. Someone takes my photo to remember my mouth just like this. And I am thinking of snow. Noting figures.

Though we swim in the summer's tired dregs. The way a good beer will leave itself on the glass. Tomorrow, I will shake everyone's hand and pose for all their photos. Tonight, I give up.

I'm on a Bon Iver kick, but it's so winter.

Oh, No, Loper, Snow

2011-08-28T11:28:00.002-04:00

If it had come to me in any other way, I would have denied the end point. Your thank God, your finishing line.

Tonight, I speak to a new friend about our mutual mysteries. There aren't many, but just what are the Korean hipsters doing down the street? We ask ourselves while drinking makoli, and he orders in Korean. So his glasses have a wise aspect that means he is ethnically tied to this place.

And my white balloon goes on, on and on. Help me get myself together. Oh Lord, I will watch what has happened. The you that gets mentioned as the night waxes. The you that shimmies along the feet of the crowd.

Did you watch me as I watched from the bathroom window, a couple kissing in the street? Did you see how I wanted to lean into them? Or how I wished I could last inside the moment I noticed them? Just then, just now?

There is a back hand slap to this "you." I haven't given in to the way of moving it on, but I have been diligent in washing my sheets. But look how the girl leans into him and he convinces her it means something to stop here for the night. She almost means that kiss.

***********

Doesn't even matter that you can't understand the commercials. Some sister or another thing coming out when I listen to the radio and the splatter. It gets cutterized.

It Should Be Embarassing, But it Feels like a Jolly Rancher

2011-08-27T07:40:00.003-04:00

Whatever loving, whatever ghost.

The little baby on the electric walkway at the department store has little devil horns, yet, she smiles at me. Because her eyes are brown and almond in the Asian style and she cannot yet see me clearly, but knows my taste as other. She stares, oh she stares.

Like you must offer up what is left of me, a platter, a head and the shining fact that there is nothing redemptive. This too, stare.

What might you know of it? What might you mean with all those eyes? The consumptive regard that follows us like an endorsement. I have hiccuped through the pain in each slice. To hold up the sign, to hold up the sign.

Yes, it may have been that I walked far and kept myself tight on the side of this building to show myself. To mimic shadows, the girl (who is me) gives herself up to the outline that is not yet hers.

Someone says, "I think I'm getting over jet lag." Trying to fit her mouth to the mouth of what is coming.

Yet, I have dry mouth. I could have shipped my kiss to you, that was the but it was just as displaced wet.

*************

Sometimes, the child she knows best: a dance tune that mimics the Victrola. Movement along a output trajectory.

Perms On the Barbie

2011-08-27T06:26:00.006-04:00

My poems at Past Simple

Lock it Up and Leave

2011-08-26T07:09:00.004-04:00

So that this impasse was how we got across the narrow bridge. Though I mispronounced it all the way through.

And by this misspokeness, I made you special. It was a given how I made the moment of it. You insisted on nothing outside the frame, though I insisted on holding your upper arm. I insisted with my fingers.

So each time there was memory on your skin, yes? You had felt it, yes? You see now I have to hook everything I say on conjecture? Yes?

In the new country, I have turned over on my old sheets. I have suffered the way this newness is familiar and I have listened to the little girl outside crying. She calls for her mother. There is a poignancy in it that makes me want to hold your hand.

So you know that I have that much tenderness.

It was what I did not demand during the last outpost on the last island. We had no supplies, and I had spent myself, then you turned to me and said:

"It is hard to believe that mouth given that its said so many lies."

But, I tried, my oar, my tongue giving itself over to the night:

"This mouth has done many things."

*****

It takes going back to find the right fit. I have refrained from posting the photo of you, but only by one hair. One hair.

The Fit Seems

2011-08-16T20:10:00.004-04:00

There isn't what has been said or isn't being said, there is what is already said. Nebraska, my home state. Yours? The iconic Midwestern point at which two woods meet.

It was the most unfortunate way to meet that destination.

Penetrative Glances

2011-08-05T20:56:00.004-04:00

What is important now is to remember nothing.

A snake shadow. A long lipped eel. These are clues to the essential issue. To remember nothing of it.

Channeling the hysteric and the man: the same thing? Man-sized hysteria?

The Real is called the encounter with what we never can quite know. I must sit in panties in the sun in order to encounter it. A snake shadow. A man-sized eel. Grimace and pose over it. Grimace and pose.

The Real the courses over one like high breaks. Heart snakes. What unrolls in the thunder then is merely a set of postures. A way the clouds pretend to be other things. Someone else to wear, for the time being.

All Bright Right, I Must Be Your Pebble Lights

2011-07-31T21:54:00.007-04:00

The bitter leaf that is the tea I drink. Some daguerreotype, a silhouette of the happening. What has already gone on.

Someone hangs it up to memorize it. N'est pas? the valuable, the other language?

There, the hook, the happening strange. You often take your afternoon tea with a lorgnette to cover your pinchy mouth. This is not my fault, but I have happened to meet the aperitif of you, on the long back from the road tack.

It was a hard distance. Effulgence, I had nothing left to tack. Portioned, you fed full. There were girl flanges at the edge. Some leave leaves, others bushes.

I was only the vacuum beast that came after. I knew you loved the fur! Big, happy slup of history: what was not valuable enough to take with. Big, happy fuck of your bitter leaf: what was not valuable enough to take with.

The shadow come lately, and after. Some ants wax in their coming age. This is not a powder keg or a come back, it is something much more righteous. Your victim aperture a blown off thing I sucked. It was lemon, red, the way we danced.

You have never been better than you are now.

Shoulder Blades

2011-07-20T23:42:00.003-04:00

I was thinking of the erotics of a tape measure. How the one measuring must hold the hands steady, or use delicate fingers to stick the tape to skin. Holding and shifting to get things right. I think of this as a kind of feminine gesture, though I understand the act of numbering is more akin to men. If our typical time period dictates this view, I will allow it to come in, but more often, it seems to me what is present in men is something feminine. And that what is present in me is something sharper, underwater, blue. Some notion of engulfing, certainly. Why can a man not eat through something even as he carefully measures it? A moth can come inside and die on the floor without fanfare. Just as I can pretend I am living in a different room as another person. There you tapped on the doorway, a tape measure in your arms. And what rose to meet you? What, then?

I Think This

2011-07-18T10:25:00.006-04:00

A predatory woman. If the heart is a thing that comes through the hazy scrub brush like a dog or some heat. If the past comes looking for the future and then there's a woman like a hungry thing dog in a bush. Or her bush is a dog and a heat thing at the same time. One is ugly, but astoundingly hungry. One is bushed, but astoundingly hot. It isn't enough to ride the memory of it, I want to fuckin' eat it. Run everything together and make it now or new or nothing at all.

Nicki Minaj come to my town!

I Don't Want to Play Girl to Your Boy No More

2011-07-09T22:33:00.004-04:00

Listening Pleasure:

There is a tilting way of a woman's pelvis. Because the scream of the arching away from your lack of true want is a tilt. It was hard to get out that mouthful because I thought of you often and denied it. When I conceive of it I know a hinge that looks like a trout's jaw. Some snapping thing.

Oh, what is this want? Available only for view in desiccation? Let us detach and grow serious beards to disguise this.

It is important to pay attention to what I tell you. Though you may desire only to fuck sugar. It is important to pay attention to this mouth.

I suppose we could chalk it up to the biological, but I prefer the notion that we have moved in performance. There is dancing, but only in a staid pattern.

I can't wait to get to the part of this that I don't understand.

When I Was a Child, Afraid of What Might Be

2011-06-30T19:36:00.005-04:00

Listening Pleasure:

Today, I feel disgust for my failings and the failings of those I have known. It's in the trees, it's coming.. Taking a shower at 6:30PM, the setting sun makes me look like a romantic heroine, fraught with the intensity of my own feelings.

It is a moment when what one needs is to stop looking. The ridiculous needs of a human body: to eat, to wash, to sustain the movement up from the knee to the pelvis to the body's full carriage. To dance oneself around the room as if to feel together with the other.

Today is the sort of day in which the deeper reflection is to be rewarded. The beer bottle caps sagely says The Real Scene Cannot Be Seen. We will be forgiven for taking this as a sign. As we are lipping the softening light like supplicants for a better view of ourselves.

Even the woman who has moved in next door talks with her mouth pressed to the screen of her kitchen window, her voice gaining ground like the sleek greyhound I pass on the way home. Remembering the sharp smell of an unwashed hound--sharp, dirty, and a little ashamed.

I own everything I have done and undone. It is the passage in the Bible in regards to what I have done that I have not wanted to do. We live in the inbetween phases. Everyone a bricoleur. Who doesn't want to be drug into the dark forest, taken for the trees?

Flour, Water, Baking Soda

2011-06-26T22:42:00.002-04:00

It's a little thing. You, along the kittywalk.

Dear, I didn't catch the silverfish before it scurried under the couch. Legs in a kick-a-poo formation, following in rotation. There have been many desired moments that get out of touch like this, though mainly

I felt that I've lived in a cul-de-sac, slow rotation back on myself. I understand that these are opposite projections.

Might Be Going Towards

2011-06-24T20:56:00.004-04:00

When the night gets to its start, then the trees outside get edged like cutouts. We are not able to count the leaves, but we're able to see through the branches. Indeed, I have made myself a viewfinder out of my hands. A little pickup stick, teased on the gaze.

There was a time when coming to the window seemed to mimic the movement of the small girl in Nepal who embodied the Hindu goddess. The hooded eyes, a low drag on the screen. When you see her, you think, you've seen it before, though she wore a unique headdress.

Her eyes, those spectacular eggshells that withstand the weight of human belief.

I slip up and hold your hand, every time. My window scrims the surface of wishing and settles in for the night.

History of Gains and Losses

2011-06-21T22:53:00.002-04:00

A tight heartbag; fortunately, an open, humid night. Easily lip-locked, cryptic. I am tired for 1000 years. There are ancient screens that must contain this story. Or, at least, the importance of the coins I used to pay for the bag of dried persimmons we split. How symbolic, coated as they were with an unidentifiable powder.

Tonight, I am thinking those birds in that tree outside look a little like bats. Or I am wishing for something unforseeable and dark. The tension may wane and wax, but only in loops, in loops.

Inches

2011-06-13T23:26:00.003-04:00

I can honestly say if a mouse gets trapped on one of the glue pads I've scattered around my kitchen and I have to pick it up while its still alive, I am uncertain what I will do. All night long there was a knocking in the wall near the left cupboards. I wanted to go outside and ask the neighbors for some kind of help. Instead, I left the lights on and hit the wall with the back of my hand.

Later, when I was watching all the actors on TV fake crying, straining to make the water in their eyes fall down, I heard the sounds again and it seemed like I could envision some little hands and feet stuck to the glue. When I opened the cupboard, I thought I'd see the mouse, but instead I stared hard at the pots and pans. Thought of a glancing blow and how the part that hits is what is left flopping in your chest.

And now I am officially scared to go in the kitchen and there are little itches on every inch of my body.

Steralized Day Fights

2011-06-11T20:33:00.003-04:00

It seems important now to allow oneself to write of what pleases one. As if the day was scraped clean of all the other pleasures, so one must feed down, indulge.

So, yes, I keep small scrabbles: I have not washed the sheets nor made my way around the block. In each basement, there are even more hot airs to breathe. Some poets write in dialect and I have not tried this yet, but I am sure that these penchants will warp my mouth.

There are always microscopes and magniphones to reach a sense of self. The antipodes of our travels. Our is a concept that eludes and feels baggy. That must also be charted and squeezed for the lemon rinds of the future.

Travel Toast

2011-06-06T23:21:00.003-04:00

There must be a looking who. Something that abrupts the sentences and parces out your exit. In all this air, I can hardly hear myself. An immediate question in an otherwise silent room. It is at times like these that I find myself relying exclusively on an understanding of what it means to fit. There are too many bugs in my living room and there's no one to reach up and kick them out. That is uneven. My upcoming condition. A fitting one. I'll probably be sleeping with my mouth open.

Get Going

2011-05-17T23:49:00.003-04:00

Given snow, given the otherwise unlicked center. Given the crust on you. Given the doorslams all night long. Given the echo chamber I am living in. A downstairs neighbor who shares my name. That sets the loop reel going and things get repeated.

A little intruder memory: there is a scene in All The King's Men when the main character (Jack?) meets Anne (yes, I remember her name) when they are young and she's wet or it's cold and she sleeps with him in a way that's solemn. I cannot clearly remember the way it goes, but I remember he doesn't know how to take her properly in so far as she gives herself to him, but he's unable to feel why or how. It's her action, the part of it that stems from herself, the part that she wouldn't give to him, that he so very wants. I think the room was night or it was rainy. I think that she was wearing a swimsuit or rain-soaked clothes.

Something about a song just made me remember something about a book I've read more than one time. And I see now, re-reading it, that she didn't sleep with him, she laid herself out, but he faltered because he could see himself clearly. Ah, what sleeping.

It happened when she took the highest dive I had ever seen her take, perhaps the highest she was ever to take in her life. I saw her climbing up, slow, then past the board she had been using, the twenty-foot board, and go on up. I called to her, but she didn't even look down at me. I knew she had heard me. I also knew that she would go on where she was going, no matter what I said now, now that she had started. I didn't call again. --All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren, pg. 288

This Commerical Talked about "Hearing the Roots"

2011-05-08T20:46:00.002-04:00

What did we know? The attachment you had to ownership of this thing, it was a devastating middle. How difficult is my middle road? There are things that call for being made to fit into one side, the other. Everything is a competition, a sock being pulled inside a flight. Did you realize: this is a reverse gravity. There isn't a category to describe this feeling. Ship. Skip. Who gives up his show in between us? Pull up while everything else pushes down.

Spark Up a Speaking

2011-05-02T23:49:00.003-04:00

A personality, a cold muffler. Last night, I woke up so cold I had to fold every blanket in half and then I woke up sweating. The glands make a butterfly at the throat. In an anatomy textbook, they are pictured like yellow, sponge hands encircling the windpipe.

It takes another person to diagram the body. Specular optics. I will have hired you then for one long afternoon of looking, I suppose. Or pinning. Or encircling. Each action falls in the same line down the same wax path leading up to my mouth, the swollen glands.

Terrible Urges

2011-04-26T23:24:00.003-04:00

Important to keep up appearances. Funny, that, my misspelling of the word. Here, a drowse song in the middle of the night. All the music I listen to these days has downturned corners. That means there are women looking everywhere for water with sticks. Nosing the ground and staying up late to think through the mechanics of attraction. It seems that no matter where you go you end up in a city that looks like the previous one. You've said it yourself. This too must be a vague drowse, a slight tug. The silt in me still sloshing. What can it mean?

Blam or Otherwise

2011-04-22T22:32:00.003-04:00

The few seconds of clean quiet. Your phone voice. I notice the rain stutters. You are a hesitant creature. An un-liquored light.

When you take me into the bathroom, I think it is to weigh me. To push what is not against yourself.

Instead. Instead. Some feel back backdraft.

There are tabs on each body. A slattern fit. Flush, the way hands hold cards. Full deck wise. Here is the counter, yes, there is the chair. All I have done is feel the response, a sting in the knob of me.

A guitar lick? How to give to the shower or to the sink? The bitter herbs pressed to dilate, to produce a curio of me. A palm guide in the given distance. Oh, my structural love. Your guarded self gives over.

And over.

I have often watched this happen to myself. Distanced sirens in my hair and your way of saying hello to my elbows and thighs.

I too am counting. The gutter punches we don't give each other.

Though You Wished Me Well

2011-04-21T23:17:00.005-04:00

Lately, a swarm of dogs. All hesitant, with sad eyes. Sometimes they struggle to balance their legs on my shins. Points of pressure. The train tracks on the edge of town. Often, there is prolonged eye contact. Which in this narrative would mean train whistle, but in real life means only birds that wake you up too early. But, thankfully, no dead birds in the track between my house and any other place. Only a blue bird in the park near the woods where hobos give themselves baths or I imagine meeting you. Later in the night, the air pressure drops and the back of my throat tastes like an animal, myself. A brush of my hand on my dirty sheets. Or a pelt of your disturbances I have draped over me. Like, later in the day, I find one of your hairs in my bathroom between my toes. A tentative bite, remonstrance.

A Deer, A Female Deer

2011-04-15T09:57:00.002-04:00

The flower of the youth, blooms and gives off little shrugs. Your head through the trees. I think I saw a way to garner more views. To hide our shiny cheeks and stage ourselves as deer, eating leaves. I had thought I would settle under the word "doe" and then my teeth would be fine, wooden, long. Yours: moving firmly over my limbs. Instead, I keep dreaming of how we eat each other with spoons, eager scoops, a tough righteous chew. It is often said that such imagery means not desire, but rage; however, it seems to also indicate a lust for full attachment, to the point of inverting the self to the other. I am not sure how to spatially draw it, but I will leave you a hoof print to follow me there.

Parting Shots

2011-04-12T23:40:00.003-04:00

A fig in the wallet, a bird in the blast. Flitted, flat-footed, what day rolls on? It is as if we are taking a test filled with analogies. How can movement also stand in for what doesn't happen? The weather is silty and the fresh rain fills the trashbarrels nonetheless. Someone come along and say it "glistens," yes?

Isn't it uncanny the Canadian geese mate for life and swim, tenderly honking, through the water? We would do well to web our feet, give ourselves furs, and lick what comes out of a spent seed. Hooved and curved, a hook that greets air, is the heart or another thing. A humanized animal need.

A Good Deal to the North (Hawaii)

2011-04-05T22:01:00.002-04:00

I had headed up to what meant there was no turning back. Oh, dramatic phrasal parting! In truth, I was a mere beachcomber. Some coming, some going. There were bell jars and my lounger chair that cast a slouching shadow. All day, tropical sun that gave our skin a heavier casting. Like frosting or a graph. I cannot explain how one light fragment can be made mathematical, but I know it is possible. Like seafaring crafts. Some cupped something. Or the way a surfer can ride the wave into my eyeholes. A possible trajectory.

Much of these days, lodged in tropical paradise, we walked to look for ice cream. Our whimsical feet paths left in sand. Oh, the parting shot, my sentimental postcard!

Birthing Queens

2011-03-25T23:27:00.004-04:00

We'd realized our spectropics. And then, I misrecognized your greeting in my inbox. I had no greeting from you; yes, no, indeed.

There wasn't my way. It wasn't my past. Irregardless, I had always said, there was a memento. Mori on the nori, dear. Crash pad cultural smash. I have always been told I looked slightly othered. Are you from around here?

This is not true. I am from around here.

I liked the way my students responded to the untruths in Lyn Hejinian. How they said, "Should I read backwards?" and I thought "Yes" to all your mothers. Those bookmarks. Let's scatter it hard. Pick-up sticks and all that jazz. Toward truth and psychoanalysis: how we have been read by the phallus.

I suppose I have not read enough into theory to understand how the ridiculous fronts go on. What it means to be read backwards, really. But, I know how the structure of my desire must be played out. How I fall to the right, to the left of the castration complex. Backwards.

But, what has happened really is the convex of yesteryear. Here we go again, my students said. How can I trust anyone?

Fitful Starts

2011-03-22T00:23:00.001-04:00

How to hold the hand that holds itself. It is an aphorism I found in the air vents. Got into bed, crept into it really, off and on, all day--but only in my head. There is narcissism--the primal repression? I haven't had your food in my cupboards, but I held your brain. There is sustenance in that, though you felt vulnerabilized. There is a special parking space for such labels. I long often to read and read these damn books in order to be done. The exam is what is inside my mouth. Check: yes or now.

일 번

2011-03-17T23:33:00.005-04:00

One of my students writes that like Sexton, Plath, underwent primitive therapies. She writes her analysis of Plath so certainly, calling her Sylvia,mentioning Anne and Emily, but I'm uncertain what this means. I think suddenly of my grandmother saying, "Keep your hands in the car. I knew a boy who lost his hand that way."

Perhaps, that retreat back in was part of the primitive therapy? But, then, that would make the illness something like riding the air with your hand. It's disappointing to be up against the metaphor, like this.

There was a movie I saw recently that had a blue candy feel to all of it. If I was sat down and asked to work over what blue means in that context, I could say something about primitive therapy. Law and symbolic threads that hold up the sky.

Lastly, I have spent too much time sucking the ends of my chopsticks today. Thinking: ash belly in the nuclearized distance. Here is a picture of the blue sky, again. Oh, there it goes again.

What Passes for Thinking These Days

2011-03-09T09:16:00.002-05:00

I just had this memory of my favorite bar in Seoul, somewhere in Hongdae. A little place in the basement. You go in and write down a list of songs you want to hear--the bartender finds them, plays them. He'd even download things on the spot to meet your needs. Whenever I went there, he'd be playing Oasis and my English friends would find themselves settling in to themselves. I never remembered Oasis until I went to Korea. Remembering suddenly the 90s, my Oasis cd, don't look back in anger, etc. etc. Actual English people liking actual English music.

The bathroom key tied to a cd. A little flipcart of shine. The whole place was a little dark, a little velvety, and I miss it. Not for any specific reason except for the exact moment of recognizing a place you like. In the midst of all the other places you could be, to come to the place where you want to be. That's something to miss.

Wow to Your Mother

2011-03-04T21:29:00.002-05:00

I have walked from the kitchen into this room and suddenly forgotten what it was that I wanted to say. I might have pushed "play" on the computer and what came out was the frame of mind. The flange of brain, brined. A salty flank I asked to patter, my little paws scatter.

There isn't a scrim on me, yet, I have cast all white shadows. Woo-hoo? Do you see me?

Mysterious, or mysteriously? I haven't quite caught the meaning of it. The mistaken walk of this given night. A spray of geese settling up to the walk, these half-way spring days that lead to opening the windows. Oh woo-hoo, cracked thighs!

These misted fraught nights.

I have liked to place the home of it, the wow to your mother*, hip-wide, to go into the pond, slang-deep.

I don't know what it means. For now, coming up, in another color.

*Reading Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu. This phrase is on almost every page.

Minute's All I've Got

2011-03-01T22:55:00.002-05:00

Important results tonight. A scatter of salt and a poem that turns up on the internet saying the famous lady poet has also scattered salt on her table, though she mistakes it as sugar. I found this resonance an echo. That said, same, same, same. Here isn't a moment, but a little bonnet. My face inside, ring wound or echo? What turns up in the water is the same reflection. I am holding onto every window ledge. Or looking up into the sun. Often, my eyelids cake and scatter from me. Someone called each day a cherry. The pit in the mouth, oh Lord, the pit in the mouth.

Kumiho

2011-02-21T23:36:00.004-05:00

It seems it would be very difficult to have the last name hemingway. I had that thought and then it left me. Instead, something about the nine-tailed fox. A light wailing when her tails unfurl in the moonlight. There is casual talk of eating men's livers. Reminds me of burning your tongue on hot soup. Yes, that's the crisp of it right there. Another skin glove forming on you. The thing unburdening itself to eat.

Reading

2011-02-17T22:20:00.002-05:00

Tin man, tip of the hat to you. Back blinder, go. Writing finite particles, reading abrupt meanings. Often, required to make up meanings. A daily base is the meaning of making it up. I traveled in little circles. Like a child? No, not exactly. A wag, mostly. Berryman's ghost lies a moulderin' in the grave. We sing in "authentic" voices to capture what it means to be "blue." Oh postmodern jazz hands. Apply them to me. Or, I will travel from here to the couch to read more.

They Keep Me Thinkin'

2011-02-12T21:28:00.003-05:00

I'm just gonna leave this picture of the v-shadow in the window. Seems like a good omen. A heading inward slipper kind of thing. I think fitting, but then I also think comforted.

On the radio, they play a spate of Dylan. And what it is, is a smell. The way the moment moved when I was 22. I could offer up what I remember, but it would be piecemeal. It wouldn't be what anyone else held onto.

If Dylan sings it, I will call each person I knew then and by our speaking we will turquoise his voice. Enact the evolutionary stiffining of time.

Momentary isn't it? Still, I get a leg shiv feeling. Missing the drama of the slim love each man had for me, at that time. Oh, at that time.

There is chorus element now asserting itself in my voice. What is this? It is evident that memory can be lorded and captive. See, the momentary glance? Inflection, repetition, my guiding syllable?

Ah, yes, yes.

All Flavors

2011-02-09T22:38:00.002-05:00

Better bit write it. How do you do? Here is the coldest day of the year. Over on the next street, we call it there. In a television show, they all eat shrimp and laugh over cocktails. Oh, to grit your teeth. Here, I need to wake up and dream weekends. There, you are asking yourself out for lunch. Someone says, "If another person uses the word 'towards,' I'm not listening." The ear dogs like whistles high. Or the other way around? It felt good to eat my teeth or it felt nice to think of the old cities I lived in, pressed leaves and corner bodegas. It seems like a lot of things fill up the spaces.

Can't Help But Think Of It

2011-02-05T23:11:00.003-05:00

The coaltish daddy longlegs. Is it one word or two? The parsing is part of the fun, n'est pas? You speak French to my kitchen, hearth of heat and cooking. Here isn't the score, it is the fait accompli.

When we were children we learned how to blow balloons. And even now, I'm never sure I can make the stupid thing hold air. Turning what is into something else is the hardest part. Did you know always know how to pucker your mouth like this? I am panting into it.

The Classic Blue Note

2011-02-01T23:50:00.004-05:00

Put on an old album, listen to the ice cover the trees. Good to remember the summer I learned to drink coffee in your empty apartment. A time of sincerity in a large city. Each girl, smoking or standing peering along the streets. I was walking around alone and thinking of myself as alone, but singular as if it made sense to be a universe in one person. It was the side effect of how we worked ourselves like portrait painters, models, always posing and posing. Each brunch with you when we should have been drinking, heavily, I realize now, to explode the hatch we buried under. It was the first year I got a concussion, fell on the ice while holding a plate, and learned how to ride a bike drunk. I see now it all meant that I spent the summer thinking of how often we were asking ourselves if skyscrapers had clues to how disappointed you were in me. Every other light on every other floor=love. Each light on=my faults all lit up. It wasn't a way to do math, but you felt as if you'd put finger, button on. I misted up just to see you even so. All those songbirds dead and fluttering off my shiny windows. I kept baskets full of what was losing off me. Before you came home from Europe, I'd returned your guitar in case we broke up.

Friday PM

2011-01-28T21:59:00.003-05:00

There you are. I have watched investigative TV in order to learn how to bipedal myself. Here it is: my further regard. I have learned how to move the plants into the light. To best situate them. She: this natal knowledge I possess? Here is the motored version of our daily aperture. Here it is: washing off. Do I possess what it is that could link you to me? Toward you, I didn't know I'd feel so flagrante. Or that speaking French would be an appropriate lip ring. Shimmer slink. Shifty smooch. This isn't a way of giving code, but rather, trying to praise you. Missing given fronds. Easter, the laying down of forgiveness--I hope it comes every day.

State of the Union

2011-01-25T21:48:00.003-05:00

[Preview.] The clasp at the chest strains. [The show.] People are always clapping at the wrong times on TV. Half-sentence, then an interruption. Deeper budget cuts. Yes, yes, and yes. Spending cuts. Yes, yes, and yes. Defense strains. Deeper budget cuts. Excess weight, cutting? There is a metaphor about flying, innovation, something meaning keeping creativity alive. Adding a quarter of a trillion in the deficit. Put me on solid ground in a bipartisan solution. Sweet doing it for the future generations. On the wings of the stock market. If we truly care, we can't be permanently wealthy. Cut those riches. Take money away from those wealthy scholarships. Give up your tax break. Promote success, its the best simplified code. Principle compromise is a hard choice. Step further into affordability. A government that's winning the future. The last major reorganization was a black-and-white TV. Office space in red tape. Think bigger. Merge the government with the goal of a competitive America. We will push. Rebuild faith in institutions. Where is your spent? What has an information website? Lobbyists! Meeting! Put it online. Because we deserve pets and earmarks-v-v-v-veto. 21st century open living drive is our successful reform. Approach engagements. [Postlude.] New Threats. New Challenges. No one rival superpower is aligned against us. Restored standing. Restored heads held high.

Winter Doldrums

2011-01-17T23:25:00.003-05:00

I shouldn't do it like this. Tidying up the frigate. A whole sloth of ships. The "calm and baffling winds" I wake to and to. No waffled waves, no downy bird calls. Space of no thing or a thing of no thing. It is a pretty undoing ribbon.

***
Been reading Gertrude Stein and other things. Reading.

비, 안이요! 겨올 이에요!

2011-01-11T13:39:00.006-05:00

Lovin' on me on a snow day.

Blow snow, go snow, flick yourself downtown, uptown, over to the flat side of Ohio. Here, we ask ourselves: have you had your slip down the driveway yet? There are shoe prints everywhere in white.

Last night, my neighbors put their O mouths on each other. (Do you know what this means?) I boiled an egg that bobbed in time.

Shedding off the birth pangs. There is nothing finer than beating out the dullness of each day by pretending to have a mouth full of praise.

어늘 한국아 수업이 없어요! 왜? 학교 돈을 없어요!

what you need and what you know

2011-01-09T21:37:00.003-05:00

You, oh you! Smart bald man! It is decisive, this snow. Making a slick along my road. There goes my car. I listened to the pitch of the throat of you until I could squall in my bed. I memorized the fist of it and the flap of it. You, oh you! Smart bald man! There is dome and there is moon and there is tracing the hair as it grows back. You, oh you! Smart bald man! Often, you ask for repertory players to act out my desire for you. It is a difficult enfolding meant to museum the self of me as it comes to you: the stage curtains, my words, your avid gaze.

This is the plan, this is the plow: ow, ow, ow. You, oh you! Smart bald man! This is a test of the emergency broadcast system and these are the ways any woman would categorize you.

This post Dedicated to my Cancelled Korean Language Class

2011-01-05T10:44:00.004-05:00

There's so much to eat in this video. But, it proves my theory that there's something good about the curious mix of American hip-hop's swagger with K-pop's cute. Secondly, it proves that G-dragon remains my man, and earns my respect for illustrating the amazing properties of Korean hair.

Also, let's all take a moment to recognize the racial/sexual politics of the white ladies and the Playboy bunnies. Amen.

ps. Korean is a hard language to learn. My slacker undergraduate classmates sealed the coffin on our course. Boo.

Incanta or Further Out

2011-01-01T21:04:00.003-05:00

There wasn't a way to decide which. I'm sorry that we halved your baby, but desire is a fickle thing. The new year tells itself how to walk, but lacks the ability to tie its shoes. I say that you're going after me, but you say it's only the shadow of what has come to represent you. Thin dwellings all people wear on the topside. There was a tracing on mumbles and something I intelligently called a "site" onto which you moved your parts. The fat slap. Oh, the crack of company in my baseless self. I like the non-sensicals of this. Find me in your lap dog nonetheless. I am returning to the theme: nonce. My little round face upturned and regarding, making loyalty into meaning. The mastermind in me all a wag.

I Find This Strangely Moving

2011-01-01T20:58:00.002-05:00

New Year to the New You

2010-12-31T11:54:00.002-05:00

A Smith's song makes my pants wilt for you.

And your vulnerable eggshell headache. Motoring onward.

Happy New Year!

New Scenes from the Old Year

2010-12-30T11:14:00.002-05:00

Shiv, shipley, the batter
horn in the matterhorn.

It is a long week from here to the next. Each continent tilts its way into the atmosphere, we hope to tingle there.

It's too late to change your mind. You let loss be your guide. Bamboozlement.

Under rug. It's a Thursday. There's rain on each branch and a slippery place scrolling out unmet.

Home Settings

2010-12-25T12:23:00.003-05:00

The laconic order of days. A radio sound in the other room. All Christmas songs all the time. Sleigh bells ring through all my woods. Let us gather at the foot of this fur wrap. Near the head, the intact teeth. I have always longed to re-enact the moment of the prairie's conception. A long slow scrape of ice, then grass, and grass, and grass. It is like the same desire to touch the teeth, once alive. To feel the black lace core of things running through the fingers. Someone handed me a Christmas card with a Willa Cather quote when I came home. I wished upon it that it would become this one: That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. The grass and the grass and the grass--it looked like a sea of burnished reds, more so than ever any green, she said. When I was in school I always heard it would be above your head in places and I fingered the edges of the prairie dress my mother had made. We played at pioneers in a one room school house. Some clothes are for walking, others for lying down, we learned. All my woods then, overfilled with grass.

Look at those Cavemen Go

2010-12-16T23:12:00.003-05:00

It seems to me that someone is breaking in next door, but I'm sure this is all about the rate of footfalls on the stairs. No one's going anywhere. David Bowie on the TV is there life on Mars with blue eyeshadow and orange hair. Colors that blaze like they've just been licked. Outside, snow, snow, snow that flares white across the windows. In the streetlight, it looked like small white hairs all over my black coat. I don't know anything about my saturation point, but I wish you'd have been here to see it. Letting everyone and everything root around in me. A weighty carryout on the stairs.

Sorry, It's Associational

2010-12-13T23:40:00.003-05:00

It must have been this song on the radio today.

A strange Canadian girl in anyang the summer before last when everyone I met was losing their Korean boyfriend, their Korean girlfriend and I got a big hole in my new jeans falling off the bus. It was like watching someone going down on someone else. It felt tight, hot, and entirely misplaced. Like the president's funeral memorials on each street corner where all the old Koreans would stop to put their hands and heads on the ground. To pay homage. The funeral chrysanthemums bloated white on air.

When the girl gave me her headphones and said "Listen to this" I took it in without asking. What was not yet to come had been coming through the windows every night, and even the lunar eclipse couldn't stop it. One night I tried to wake up a man who had fallen asleep in my co-worker's room because he thought sleep would bring her to him. I shook him and shook him, but he kept turning back over. The music coming in from far off. I couldn't understand the words, but I knew the feeling of it like dissatisfaction, removal of an old hand, the cool air smugly licking away all your warmth.

Piggyback Noodles

2010-12-10T23:40:00.004-05:00

Watching the way a mother parts hair is the same motion I use to pull under the reedy whatever in this pot. The open part of coming winter, as if all the books are already read. I can go to bed early, then wake up inside blue lagoons where everyone I have ever loved has pearls for eyes. And I think often of the feel of swallowing a white raincoat. Your gleam, that was my eye. It is all I can do these days to watch shows where people eat the crassest, unclean parts of meat.

************

I had just changed into a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man, of course; my body and soul were exactly the same.

So there's me also.

--Joanna Russ, The Female Man

When I read this, I wanted to read more. I got a little chill. Thanked myself for putting this on my fiction exam list.