Red-tailed hawk

Push your face into mine like a nesting bird 

summer two baby raccoons on the side of the road

asleep in the morning, split open by noon

as bumblebees tumbled over weeds in the garden

and diesel spilled in the driveway.

A spring hawk tweedles, chatters on

rust-brown through the trees,

food forgotten, as if she could ever forget,

how we sat quiet in a simulated Himalayan wind-tunnel

she was still,

her long black hair and soft brown feathers 

watching the grass,

then she struck -- 

my mom's best friend

painting with her favorite red.

(push your face into mine like a nesting bird summer two baby raccoons on the side of the road asleep in the morning split open by noon as bumblebees tumbled over weeds in the garden and diesel spilled in the driveway a spring hawk tweedles chatters on rust-brown through the trees food forgotten as if she could ever forget how we sat quiet in a simulated Himalayan wind-tunnel she was still her long black hair and soft brown feathers watching the grass then she struck we watched her through the window)

They should invent a machine

They should invent a machine that grabs you and flings you around a bare sterile room with a crane arm industrial that comes from the ceiling a blank white expanse. It should be able to catch the back of your shirt and toss you straight up and catch you across the stomach with its arm and knock the wind out of you mouth agape :O gasping breathing openfaced fish not a teeth only a tube to the other end. Metalblocked interrupted flow it should evacuate your air tire pump pressure. It should catch you when you slide off the arm drooling emptymouthed. It should be soft too and delicate when it needs. It should have spindly fingers at the end of the arm perfectly straight in the round thin like the tongs on a fork and pluck you from the space by the ankle dangle bloodless. It should squeeze from the head to the bottom of the feet to put you back in order and click click twisting wind up the ticking pulse in your neck. It should be safe it should be love it should throw you up and over again and never let you fall.

Swan

I'm hurrying past a woman in a long teal puffer coat when her perfume hits me: something jasmine, indolic and night-climbing. It faintly registers as sexy though I don't want her at all.  I read somewhere that the indole used in synthetic jasmine mimics animal shit at full strength but in low concentrations somewhere in the human brain it is associated with desire, somewhere deep and animalic and gross. 

I don't even think to associate the woman with her perfume, it comes disembodied and almost clinical or academic. She turns the corner and is gone. I hope someone is intoxicated by her, or finds her in her jasmine.

There is a swan I've been watching by the canal for a few days ever since I saw it biting a man's shoes on the dock. Yesterday it slept in the middle of the sidewalk, its beak tucked into its wing. Across the canal I saw two girls stop and look at it for a while. I think they were wondering (like I was) whether it was dead. The massive, elegant white creature became just a big lump of feathers, a roadblock. Pigeons clattered around it. People stepped off the sidewalk to avoid it. It felt terrible and wasteful. 

I walked by, but I was scared to look at it too closely in case it was really dead. I imagined what a swan would look like without feathers and I couldn't. I couldn't think how much volume would be missing; how skinny the neck must be. It made me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable like picturing a human being naked. I didn't stop to check if it was alive or not. I walked past and did not see it again when I came home.

This morning I saw it again, sleeping in the same way, its beak tucked into its wing. It was off of the sidewalk this time, closer to the canal in a flat patch of grass where I'd seen people pitch their tents some nights. 

Somehow it being off of the sidewalk assured me that it was comfortable. I assumed it was the same swan and felt relieved that it was alive, just a day-sleeper (apparently). I went down to where it was sleeping and watched it a while to be sure. Its breathing was so deep and steady and soft I almost cried for some reason. Its feathers did not move, only the whole structure of the bird breathed. I left once I saw it breathing; I didn't want to disturb it. 

On the last day

It swells and crashes
goes from hot heavy-pregnant wet
to cold, whipping, white peaks and things
equal to rise
lower to drop
and I keep drinking seawater
I keep sticking out my tongue and licking it
off my hands and arms
a salt-lick would they put iodine in my skin
and the girl on the beach watching my bags
looks just like me
if I sat on a sun-rock
dipping popcorn into dried salt
in the little empty tide pools 
and the fish wriggled
and the sand grit between my teeth

Queering the Map in Gaza

Diary entry

This morning I wished to be reborn and not for any genuine reason only that I'm bored and obligated. I swam in the ocean and tasted the salt of embryonic fluid (I imagine it is salty) and thought about performance and thought I could live in the cradle of the mountains in some sort of bush of purple flowers. Earlier today I was afraid of a barking dog behind a fence; I curled up inside myself and crossed the street and put my eyes down so it would know I'm not a threat. No, I could only live the life I am right now.

My friends

I like the way your face looks lit up from underneath by the neon light of the tap,
every little glittery yellow star in the dark room reflected in your beer, the panes of the windows circling, waving, wiggling when you wave your glass.

I have eaten a lemon cake with strings in my ears, resonant sliding and wind stretching the skin between my ribs--

for months when I was a kid I dreamed only of flying practice -- a bright green grassy hill, a blue sky like a default desktop background. The wind is harsh and whipping, my T-shirt some kind of parachute-- l spread my arms out and wait and breathe, feel it could happen on any exhale, l will be sucked up into the air and whirled around on a jet stream.

l become conscious that l'm doing it and then I try too hard; I get frustrated and wake up.

When I hear crickets I think about chasing fireflies and catching them on our hands,  ordinary bugs brown and sweet and harmless, crawling over our fingers, letting them fly off. Watching our steps in the wet grass. I would sleep with my head on your shoulder, but then where would yours go? I picture our hard skulls phasing through each others', our hair tangling together.

I forget I'm full of water until I see you again. 

Spring

Stained-glass dragonfly wing up close to my face tickling my cheek lands on my nose and begins to walk, its tiny legs tapping out mallet percussion across the glue of my eyes... a light trill, my elementary music class glockenspiel, you hear a little sprout straining and cracking its bulb, forcing itself up squirming into the dirt.

Your shovel breaks earth and the smell is divine, soil deep and cool and edible. I always dreamed of finding red-and-gold gummy worms writhing underneath a rock, stretching and pulling over each other, a chewy gummy texture that sticks to your molars. 

Sometimes when my brain is full of phlegm or water they are driven out onto the pavement. They peek around the balls of my eyes and ask each other how bad they think it is-- it would have to be pretty bad for them to leave-- before they get flooded out, down my face and out of my nose. And then later after everything has dried the streets are full of worm husks and the ones that survive limp sheepishly back in through my ears to start their lives over entirely.

What I mean, in plain English: I want to be cared for desperately. I need a doctor with his gloved hand on my forehead and all his charity work caught in the zipper of his teeth in his clenched mouth smile.

I would sit and swing my feet off the exam chair and keep pretending to run a fever until he gets sick of testing. And then I would say doctor to be honest I am afraid to move, because I am terrified of the ripping sound the roots make when you pull a weed out of the garden.

In the most lonely and coughing parts of my mind his prescription says on unmarked paper, baby stay forever, you are all the dreamy parts of spring... I love when the clouds make you calico --love you in every new light pattern and shadow--I want to see you become different in every season and place--I want to see you young and old and worm-eyed and unrooted. At the bottom his signature is unreadable. 

When the pharmacist asks about the signature I tell her I can't remember who prescribed it. I am afraid if I go back I will find out he accidentally switched my file with another worm-girl's, and my prescription was really just exercise, rest, and talk therapy. My head aches and I could but I know I will never go back. Summer makes everything a little less green.

Train Home

Superhigh girls with their lash extensions pretty and heavy and
blinking big cowlike and beautiful and slow 
and measured a waning halfmoon with the whites twice as low as usual 

Finding my way home by cosmic pull reeled in complacent and bobbing like a fishing lure 
up past Harlem-125th while I can still stay awake 
a little kid getting carried from the car to their bed

I know where I am (track 104) with only basic English and gibberish letters 3XYKJH4IJ 
meaning New Haven but you wouldn't know by looking 

or you wouldn't know at all

Some translucent bug with many legs crawls across the yellow line you aren't supposed to walk on 

but it can't understand and anyway it can survive on the tracks 

for more area than anyone 

It took me twenty-three years to know you
and for eight-and-a-half I was just sleeping
Not wasting my time
It's not ever a waste of time

Last Friday

Just a week ago one splendid horse at the horse race died. DIED! Broke her leg, got put down right on the track, fuckin tragedy. Last Friday. No that's the horse's name. Yeah you know like the riddle. The horse died on Tuesday. Fine mare. Beautiful chestnut. You got like a buck for your ten on her, she was so good. Everybody knew it. Everybody was sad to see her go but everybody was bored of the winning. Where's the fun? She was too good. Got a jockey knows he's on her for a race, he's throwing back Coors Lights behind the stables during the countdown. Fattest jockeys I ever seen on that girl, down twenty pounds for the next race. Saw Joey Mallard throwing up a baker's dozen apple cider donuts in the washing bucket after she ran. Doesn't matter! Ol girl could run records with a sumo wrestler on her back. She could stop and yawn at the finish line and still win every race she entered in. Yeah she was somethin special. Doubt we're ever gonna be lucky to see anything like her. But I'm excited to get a chance for winning again. Next race I got money on Devil's Audit.

Recent things in the painting corner

Koi pond painted with plastic knives & very cheap acrylics.

Friend with stick. I did not paint this one yet but I really want to. I'm afraid I won't be able to do it justice; this is one of my favorite pictures ever.

Friend can't remember his childhood home that well. He is outside looking at a worm or something.

The view from my window.

Please, somebody help this fish!!!!!!

(this was the first thing I painted)

I love visual art, but I have always thought of myself as more of a writer. I just haven't been coming up with anything to write recently... Surely you should not put yourself in only one category but I only started painting again to cover the stains on the wall of my apartment. Having fun with it though!

Also, happy last day of April! In France I learned "En avril ne te découvre pas d'un fil." I think in May you can start throwing your clothes off everywhere.

Magnolia State

I worry someday they will stop cutting the umbilical cord, and let the fetus swing between your legs as you walk, rotting forever showing everyone you weren't a worthy mother. Humiliation and consequences. A clear sign that you have committed some sin. 

 

You lie on the table, unclear whether you are alive or dead. He pulls out a long strip of clear tape, loudly it cries and tries to cling to itself as it is ripped out, fluttering writhing on the end of one finger. The clear tape will stick to his blue rubber hand momentarily; he will shake it off. Your feet planted on the table, you lie on your back. Hot breeze from an open window dries sticky on your sweaty skin. The humming-crunching drone of cicadas, sunshine loud filtered through the leaves illuminates dust thick on the windowsill. The smell of magnolia douses the room in heavy perfume oil, layered over iron and something more nauseous-- flies buzz and plink off of the ripped window screen. He picks up the afterbirth in the other hand, still red and gooey and wet, and places it on top of your gelatin stomach. It's hard to breathe; it's heavier outside than in. He says a prayer in a language you grew up speaking natively but the words don't make sense in order. Finally he lays the tape over it, and you drift back off into sleep.

Look

Picture an empty arctic tundra, pure white all around, glass cliffs rise to fill the background, surrounding the ice, smooth and unscalable. You and I stand across from each other in the biggest puffiest coats you can imagine. Your coat and snow pants can be in your favorite color, I am wearing mine (red). We both wear thick mittens and knitted hats with big colorful pom poms. We wrapped our scarves around our noses and mouths because it's so cold.

We kneel on the frozen ground; it is plain white snow. Between us there is a perfectly circular hole in the ice about a foot in diameter. Imagine the hole an ice fisher makes, the depth and the patient sitting. Within the hole is a cloud. Tentatively you reach into the hole with your mittened hand and find the cloud is soft and tactile, and it tears from itself when you pull on it. I see the cloud-piece in your hand and immediately plunge mine in too, to see what it's like, to touch it for myself,

 

until we are digging frantically like dogs, uncontrolled, hunched over the cloud-hole, throwing handfuls of cloud behind us as we go. Big chunks of wisp fly up over our shoulders and gradually slow down, floating and recondensing, finding each other, and traveling a calm orderly line away from our frenzy. They hit the glass cliffs and slide down, stacking on top of themselves and becoming solid, a staircase surrounding and filling up the basin we're in, an empty coliseum. Maybe later we will forget about the hole and climb up and out, see what's on top of the cliff. Or we'll stay digging until we find the end and we can submerge our hands in the clear sky itself.

Distant

I don't like myself when I'm not absorbing from other people. You can say love is everywhere but it doesn't exist unless you do something about it.
 

I felt enamoured with an old man carrying an upright bass on his back today, and he will never know how I felt, and I will forget about him someday. 

When I am by myself and I have time to observe, I try to notice things only a lover would-- I like the way your legs dangle from your stool, I want to pick you up and carry you home. I like when you think of something funny and your eyes scrunch for a second looking at nothing and you cough because it's the only way to laugh at your own head in public. I like how patient you are with your child and I like the little action figure he's squeezing in his fist like it's going to become sentient and make a break for it; your pretty hands zipping up his puffer coat. I like your neon, and that your key ring has entirely too many keys on it. I imagine how it feels to recognize the familiar sound, my ears flick back like a rabbit straining against my humanness, I want to run toward you. I fantasize that before you round the corner I can hear you coming. That I feel when you’re around me with my ears and nose and by the relative coldness of the wind.

He gives me romance on the way back from the club, I sway home and he walks behind me down the street. He tries to ask me a bunch of questions and I say, haha, no sorry, thank you though! He says to his friend, loudly behind him, Can you imagine you wake up every day and see her smile? His friend says, If you wake up and see her smile you haven’t woken up yet. I am distantly afraid they are going to follow me home, not sharply enough to think of what I'd do, but I turn off onto a smaller street and they keep straight on the main one. I don’t feel anything; everyone always assumes I am upset. It is almost kind to be made a dream girl for a little while, in low lights on a crowded street by people who don't know me at all.

My friend consoles me, you’ll never see him again. I know, I know.

Graffiti in the first stall of the girls’ bathroom at the bar where my friend works

I’ll pay money to fuck Bruce Springsteen
(Me Too!!! -x-
Go Piss girl <3
Bagri woz ere 2024
Juicy bitch here
Roxy Newon you rock!!!
FUCK THE POLICE
PDX PRICK. ONES.
Kiran from Cov was here :)
MAGDALENA BIRTHDAY WEEK 07.06.2023
Saoirse 4 Lyfe
I LOVE MILFS
^ Me too!

Over Denver Again by Allen Ginsberg

(Extremely sucks that he is the Roman Polanski of poetry. But he is super dead luckily.)

Nap Series

I wake up to a room that's not the same, it is grosser. Like a landlord painting a thick coat of glossy white over a cockroach on the wall, or the way each door hinge is cracking white with careless paint and when you run your fingers along the wall you can feel loose individual strands of some old tenant's long hair trapped beneath the most recent layer. I can't help but think, you are too shiny and was the room always this sick green? Every half hour I wake up to the sounds of dogs fighting and snapping at each other in English, they are saying things like: why are you doing this to me, and I don't know you started it and devolve into little bitchy comments punctuated with howls and ripping. I roll over and ignore them every time, when you try to separate them you only get yourself punctured and rabid too. Now I can only dream in shitty lowball shot-on-video horror movies where the blood is fake and the intestines are real, but twisted frankensteined, real animal guts under simulacra of human skin. In one of them there is a guy and a girl, and I am me, I am the main character, and I am in love with the guy and he is in love with me but we haven't said anything, and I can't get rid of the third girl, who is obsessed with him and openly hates me, because I am too nice. But she scares me, and she breaks the things I give him, his bracelet explodes tiny purple glass beads everywhere when she pulls it too hard to get a look at it, when I try to collect the beads she bites and threatens me with my dad's big hunting knife, until she cuts me deep by accident and I push her outside and barely lock her out. She screams like her lungs can hold forever and beats down the door and I am terrified, holding my cut until I wake up. The guy doesn't do anything of course he doesn't believe me that she would do that and I am always ultimately on my own isn't that the real fear? And how did she get into my apartment? I must have left the door open. maybe for him. He comes in with a robot on wheels he invented to follow me around playing me music and I am touched he thought of me at all and that's another horror fuck I am trapped in sentimentality. In another I am at swim practice and slowly everyone leaves and I am the only one left and all of a sudden I am surrounded by men in their thirties white men with shitty beards who descend upon the pool like crocodiles coming back to the riverbank after they missed a strike at a gazelle--in this one the horror is awkwardness and moreover potential energy. The feeling of being drunk and hurt around men you don't know very well who promise you cocaine and trips to montauk, who let you ride their electric scooter and never take you serious when you joke you'll steal it. Sick turnover in my stomach and slippery bodies in water, nothing happens before I wake up sweating and terrified, and of course I am fast but I am never quick enough to outswim a crocodile.

Church bathroom, fleabag, happy Hanukkah

Love is shallow and fond. I feel it when you call me sweet when I'm stumbling into your room when I can't find the bathroom. Can tell I'm not right, poor thing--

Sweet girl, it is down the hall--see, over there, that one. And to the left. Right through that door, sweet, do you see it? Yes, I do, I do now. And thank you, you are rare but you were easy to find: makes you feel like it'll be so easy again (it is easy you idiot). But it won't be. I was lost but I'm not anymore.

I remember saying love is, you see him like he wants to be seen. I am not understood very often even when I try to make myself clear, I don't want it after all. I can be understood very easily but I get told I don't make sense, sure I think that is an excuse (for laziness when I am egotistical, ambivalence when I am realistic, and stupidity when I am cruel).

I want to learn your name over and over forever, I can't see it ever hurting me but I don't ever want to know. And someday I'll stumble in back here looking for you pretending I already forgot. Do you call me kind things because you can't remember my name? Please don't lie to me,  it won't get you anywhere: I could never be angry at you.

In the dark & moving car I close my eyes and timejump to never seeing you again until next Christmas Eve-- I will be drunk off my ass on Bailey's and Kahlua again, and you will be in all black and white, rigid and austere like the Hays code-- I won't ask your name and you won't ask me mine because it doesn't matter, we don't know each other, and I don't think we could. Anyway I'd prefer if you call me whatever you like. 

Written partially during "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" lol -- Love catholicism

Havana / Overbearing love, I'd take you anywhere for a while

She is packing to go somewhere I can't with my passport, she jokes about putting me in her suitcase if I could fit.

She asks what she can hack off so that I will still be me--what I don't need to stay myself, to get under 50 lbs. I’m almost childish enough to say all I am is my brain.

We agree she takes my legs first, below the knee. They weigh a lot less than she thought, she says.

Okay, I am 94.824 lbs now.

She says she wants me to keep my hands, but unfortunately a lot more has to be done. Would I prefer to keep my arms or the rest of my legs?

I tell her I would prefer to keep my hands at this point, if my feet are already gone.

She nods and punches some numbers into the oversize calculator she uses for taxes. Now I am 64.0008 lbs.

We can't avoid it, she says, looking at the data. (It's some article she pulled up on her phone.) I'll have to take at least one arm, I think. I can take your left one, and then you can still write me while I'm gone.

I guess it wouldn't matter. Take both. I wouldn't have to write. I'm doing this to be there with you, aren't I?

Well, if we got separated.

How would we get separated? I can't walk, I can't move on my own. I have no legs. I have one arm. I'm in your suitcase. Where am I gonna get off to? You're gonna leave me somewhere?

Forget it, she says. Stupid joke. I'm late anyway, I really need to finish packing.

No, really. Can you even lift 50 lbs by yourself? How are you going to take me around? Havana has beaches, are you going to roll me through the sand? Or I'm just going to be up in the hotel room, watching you drink Piña Coladas from the balcony?

She sits on her suitcase to close it and leans back to tug on the zipper.

Can you drop it? she says. I said it's a stupid joke. I don't even know why you want to come. You won't have fun anyway. I don't want you to meet my family. You won't like my friends, or you will and I'll hate watching you get along. It's not about you. It's just that I don't... I don't know. I can't. It’s easier where I don’t know anyone. Thinking about you in that part of my life makes me feel sick.

Kind of inspired by "Gay Thoughts" by The Growlers. Only a little though?

Unfinished curse piece. Literally no idea how to continue it so just leaving it up like this

My mother says we are cursed. Everyone in my family rolls our eyes and kisses her on top of her head like she's being silly when she says it. My mother is a wonderful woman, but she is very old-fashioned and superstitious. As we’ve gotten older, she’s become smaller and frailer. We don’t want to upset her. A sweet woman like that does not deserve to be upset. When she worries, the whole house becomes shades colder, like the lightbulbs shifted their hue from yellow to blue. But we all – well I haven’t asked, but I’m pretty sure – believe she’s right. If not a curse, something is happening. Something strange and wrong. And we all wonder why.

This is when I believe it started: one morning we found a chicken garroted in the wire of the coop, barely alive but untouched besides that. We had to clip the wire to free her and replace the whole side. It was annoying work, and of course it went to me. That silly hen. I know I did a good job. I am diligent and careful to the point that my family teases me for working slow. But in the morning, the side had fully blown off and we were chasing chickens around the neighborhood for weeks. We lost almost a third of them. Sometimes our neighbors still call us about picking up a rogue hen. We never found the wire that flew off.

And then, last month, we had foxes. We could hear them screaming at night from the house. There’s nothing strange about that; foxes will scream, it’ll just keep you up a bit if you’re not used to it. Not a big deal. But they kept getting in. Every night they would start outside, but they would get louder. And then, some days, you would hear scratching and scrabbling at the walls. And then the screaming would echo from the first floor. You could hear the nails of their paws clicking on the wood in the kitchen. Someone – usually my brother, who sleeps the lightest – would run down to see what was going on. When he flipped on the lights, six or seven foxes would run out of the open front door.

After this happened a couple times, my father started standing outside the front door with a shotgun. They never came up while he was standing guard, just screamed at each other from miles apart. But he couldn’t sleep. After a few weeks of this, he was seeing nothing and everything. He was jumpy and nervous during the day. The foxes kept sounding closer. Then one night we heard shooting. My mother ran downstairs in her nightgown. He came in, crazed and stomping, looking for more bullets. My mother begged him to stay in, and he fully deflated; curled in on himself on the ground. My father is a proud man but he knows when he looks insane, and he listens to my mother always. In the morning, shells littered the front porch. I remember seeing my father stooped over picking them all up. No one ever talked about it. We don’t want to embarrass him. But he told me once, quietly over his coffee, not looking at me. Like he didn’t want to say it, but he had to make it shared. He swore he saw something in the dark. Something big.

But the worst one… It brings me no joy to say this, so I will spare the details. In the morning of December 13 2024 we found my sister’s favorite cow, Ellie, eaten to the bone. Just a pile of them in the middle of the field. We knew it was Ellie because she was the only one missing when we counted. Nothing of her was recognizable. Nothing of her – her massive kindness of being, her sweet gentle touches with her nose, her patient huffs during milking, the way she would paw like a cat with her front hoof when my sister brought out a carrot – was left. What else was strange was that there were no carrion birds to shoo away from the carcass like usual. Like they knew the meal was over. Like they already knew there was nothing left.

My sister was completely heartbroken. She did not leave the house for days after. The eggs – usually it was her job to collect them – piled up and spoiled; the hens began to eat them. Until my mother quietly took over the task. No one ever mentioned it to my sister. How could we? It was like she had lost a friend. And the other cows haven’t been acting right since. They don’t want to be touched or approached, even with food.

Now there is this strange neurotic spectre haunting the countryside. I felt it, just a tickle in my brain one day while I was picking apples out back. It was sunny out, surprisingly for the time. And then it wasn’t anymore.  It feels like when you’re swimming in a lake and you feel a cold spot, and you look down and the floor has dropped off – open water, who knows how deep.