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.

Going insane. Jet lag. Going places.

Mostly you have to draw on modern experiences to describe the top of the clouds from an airplane window--they look like pillows, goose down! They look like spun cotton, cotton balls, cotton stuffing, cotton candy! Like looking down from a ski lift! Like a bed, a duvet, a comforter!

How far back can you go that the image will be universal? I think it's impossible. They look like scored clay ready to be attached with slip, silt and rain. They look like a very clean sheep's wool. They look like white hills and valleys; like an alien landscape, like crisscrossed scars on the moon lit from within. Like pale, aged skin, bunched and pulled translucent over blue veins. Like milk dropping into a bucket. Endless fields in monochrome; like if the kingdom of heaven was Kansas. When the sky opens up, the clouds become pearled archipelagos amidst the blue.

Thin purple clouds hang even higher over the head of the plane, pulling sunlight from below--do they look different as floor than ceiling, too? Some things are so old and transient I will never begin to grasp them because I am too new and temporary; and I'm glad, these kinds of things I never expected I would get anyway. Ever since I was a kid, I loved the line in The Sound of Music when the nuns say, How can you catch a cloud and pin it down? I am coming to terms with it, some things aren't meant for me to spend my whole life trying to figure out, they are just better to sit with and enjoy my time quietly. Still after 7 hours I imagine the plane runs continuously forever, until a round trip is more like a spiral.

To be honest I have never been on this long of a flight on my own before. It's so normal up here-- I mix a terrible airplane mimosa with flat white wine and Sunkist and type on my phone. Below us the shadow of a giant being stretches across the "ground" -- the extension of our bodies at 9:00 am on December 12 2024, a Boeing 767 to Newark.

How it feels to write literally anything

she think she 

love me.

 

I think she

trolling.

- Rae Sremmurd

Stage directions for a couple in June

He says he has this fantasy that someone hates his guts but can't leave him alone. He’s dangling his feet off the side of the train platform. Everywhere, it's so green. It's so green everywhere. Down below there is graffiti on the concrete ledge: red and green and blue. White. Someone's name, or their initials maybe. A little face. You don't say anything because you have nothing adversarial to say. You try not to imagine a train blowing by right now, his fragile grandeur dissected, just eyes and nerves probably. Where would his shoes fly off to? You imagine them dancing from a telephone wire with the laces tied together.

He says he's afraid of knowing too many people, he doesn't want them to lose their worth by comparison. He says every time he speaks to someone new his self gets worn down a little bit by contact with each extreme. Eventually, you will become the aggregate of everyone you’ve known-- true average. Every person will become just a sequence of movements to anticipate and outsmart and nothing will be fun anymore (when you begin to know enough). Someday he’ll live inside forever, or he’ll only go where he knows no one else goes. Behind his back you tell your friends you think he’s the strangest person you've ever met.

Preface: Anywhere you go in the woods there is a rock wall. Really, anywhere you can go, someone has been. Mostly, if it is possible, it has been done. Out of only the two of us one of us cannot win "best in show." I like when the rock walls are so old and neglected they have grown moss, and they are so wet you can't climb them, even when you dig your fingernails in you come away with slippery clumps. You can imagine him picking the moss out of his nails with the tip of a hunting knife sitting on a plastic chair in front of a fire. I bet sometimes he just leaves it.

He says he doesn't think there's room for more than one person in the world. He says it like you will understand but I don't think he cares (obviously). There's just no room. What's it like, to inherit the world and everything in it? How does it feel to be the only one left alive after everything else is gone? Move over, let me dangle my feet too. You're just talking to yourself again.  

 

Inspired by “A Message to You Rudy” by the Specials and memories of driving around my hometown after it flooded over the summer

self-portrait

I have so much stuff to do but all I want to do is to look at myself naked in the mirror, twist and contort myself around until I can see all of me, endless and infinite skin and spine and what little muscle I have. Sometimes I look around my own mouth so I remember what teeth look like from close up, but I know I am just one case study, no one else would let me do it, I can’t form a general understanding. Some days I have the unending urge to dissect, I want to know everything at least the barest shallowest bit. I am not afraid of looking at bad things or ugly things or stupid things. I like them in that they are, and I know them and I can store them away in my understanding, decide where they fit in my worldview. Sometimes I am afraid I talk too much and I am too invasive. 

Sometimes I am worried I will never see my own bones. I am never brave enough to make myself a cross-section of muscle fascia tendons and tissue but I imagine my arm, split ends chopped off, a cauterized cylinder, perfect like a textbook diagram... Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel pain, only temperature, but then I push on a bruise and I love it again. I own one bone outside of my body, a sharp jaw with teeth I found on Dexter’s front porch over the summer, bleached white under the Connecticut sun. Fearing for my own life I mourn the hoards* of the elderly and dying, I despise their adult children who don’t understand, who can’t sort the necessary from the wanted and extraneous. What is important to you? I am terrified, I am really terrified… 

I am not afraid of death or dying alone. I am afraid in 60 years they will put me in the earth fully formed, painted and powdery and cold, no one will see my insides, no one will feel them red and warm and dripping… No one will recognize me as I am fully what I make myself in the morning. I have a fantasy I’m just empty skin like canvas stretched over a wooden frame. I think of myself as wide eyes in a skull and everything from there is a product of my own making-- I can put on my glasses and makeup and go to the gym and become a real person, a full person, a person worth understanding; I can gain a personality, train myself to be kind and open, to take people at their word. Most of the time I worry that I am too intense and that I never get it. Sometimes I'm scared most people don't have to try this hard.

Everything in me is similar to others. I know that and it comforts me, that gaping center everyone has, the pit where your uterus would be, where your stomach goes when you see faces removed from context, hear voices removed from bodies. I am a normal, happy person, I am exploratory, I want, I desire… Sometimes I’m scared that my curiosity is wasted on myself, the least interesting topic in the world, my own bones and teeth and skin-- I think I am afraid of things that are too grand, concepts that are too big and heavy and important, I have enough difficulty with the niche and insignificant. I am just one case study, a manageable workload. I am like a girl who paints only self portraits, the one thing I know best but I can’t understand or accurately reproduce, such a 21st-century fear-- it is so frustrating, you don’t even know yourself, how can you even start to know anything else? In my bitterest thoughts, I imagine I can see you better than you can, and then won’t you feel stupid when I’m right? But it never lasts longer than a second before I remember I’m projecting, in my own head I am a little bit of everyone on earth.

*not hordes I mean actually hoards like when people are hoarders/collectors and their kids have to go through their stuff. just bc i was reading this back and was like wait im not afraid of groups of old people even though it sounds like that kinda.