Pictures of Lilies

Story Slam, November 2011 #2

2011-11-29T17:13:00.002-05:00

Words: saddle, stipulate, debonair

She smelled like a saddle. Like leather that's been oiled and oiled and thrown over the dusty coat of a living animal. She was debonair like a man is debonair. She was pressed cotton and shined shoes. Shoes your spit would bubble on. Shoes that squeaked on polished floors. She was full of stipulations. She would only eat open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches. She would only eat open-faced anything, and then she would only eat half. She always took leftovers. She always made the server package her food, preferably in tinfoil and paper and plastic. She demanded. She stood up straight. Her bones would bend but never break. But she'd break yours.

Story Slam, November 2011

2011-11-29T17:10:00.003-05:00

Theme: Mercy

She was limp as a blue book, pages with no cover. She quivered when the wind blew.

She relaxed easily into couches, chairs, the corner of a bar, reached her arm across to play with the bartender's cufflinks. Put her starfish hand on men's backs until they moved away.

She was liquid, sleepy, her eyelids always low and shadowed, her movements never quick or jerky. She poured herself into a cab, onto the street, into the bar, onto a stool, and a different man bought each of her drinks. She spun her earrings, the beads of her necklace, her hair.

She drank, and drank until last call night after night. And at last call every night, the bartender touched her arm, her wrist, gave her water instead of gin, and then he drove her home.

Story Slam, October 2011

2011-11-13T16:29:00.005-05:00

Sweet Sticky Thing

The honey drips slowly from the counter. She watches it drip, watches the sun light it sun-colored, watches it stretch from a drop to a string to a thread, lengthen and break and drop into a circle of light on the formica. She puts her finger in, dots it, smears it, watches another one start to lengthen, about to fall. Watches it all fall, all separate. Her finger newly sticky with light and furred with dust. The Ohio Players honey record cover, the woman dripping honey onto her naked body, her waist unreasonably slim.

And she wants to be that woman, that body, desire in female form. She takes the honey off the counter, squirts it on the floor, puts full hands in and draws it into wide circles that reach broader, broader, to the counters on either side. From the refrigerator she pulls out shelves and food – lettuce, which she drops leaf by leaf and crushes with her bare heels, lunch meat and slices of cheese and a can of beer that she shakes up and sprays. She wonders if she will ever meet that Ohio Players woman, if that woman is even alive anymore, or if she was ever alive.

She opens cabinets, shakes out cocoa and jelly, paprika and parsley and flour. And soon she has thrown it all out, all over the floor, thrown out being neat, being clean, being a person who does not waste food, who won’t cook anything too complicated. Soon she has become that Ohio Players woman, waist slimmed, legs lengthened, hard muscles inserted into her arms. Hair grown wild and huge. She puts on her coat, she takes her keys, and she leaves her kitchen to the ants and roaches, to the landlord, nosy neighbors, to anyone remaining responsible. Because she is not responsible, anymore.

Story Slam, February 2011

2011-03-27T10:57:00.011-04:00

Words: tarantula, twist, spongy
The ridge above the property line is spongy with moss that has always made her want to take off her shoes, feel it between her toes, even when snow lingers in the shade. She twists around a beech tree, her mitten slipping easily on the smooth bark as she spins, trusts it to hold her weight. She thinks about Scotty's tarantula, the way it slipped one leg and then another off the rock in its heated tank. She thinks about not seeing Scotty again, about how you never know for sure that it's the last time. The sun is low over the lake, trees reflecting dark on the smooth surface. Any time now she should go back to her parents' house for dinner, put in some time. But instead, she spins, lazy, too slow to get dizzy, and feels the moss giving and receiving beneath her boots. She hears a mourning dove sing evening, and Spring.

Line: "You don't have to be rich to rule my world"
He went in through the out door at the frame shop where I spent the summer between junior and senior year of college. The frame shop also sold alcohol, and clove cigarettes, and he came in on Thursday afternoons to pick up packs of Sampoerna Extras for the weekend. I didn't know who his friends were, where his parents lived, or even how old he was. Maybe his friends had parties where they sat on rooftop deckchairs and talked about the movies they had seen and the paintings they were doing. I assumed he was an artist because he came to the frame store to get his cigarettes, but that was just a guess. He only ever got cloves, and all I knew was how much I wanted to kiss the taste of cloves off his lips. I wanted to be with him anywhere, but especially in the woods behind the basketball court at my college dorm, or especially on the concrete steps behind the frame shop where I took my breaks. That summer was simple, the way I wanted it. I wanted Kahlua sombreros at the pub down the street from the house I rented with six other girls. I wanted money so I could use my frame store discount to buy art supplies. I wanted a raspberry popsicle every day when I got home from work, I wanted to take off my frame shop t-shirt and sit in front of the fan and draw in one sketchbook after another after another, and I wanted him.
(didn't read)

Theme: Hypothetical urgency
I look like a city person now. Hands deep in the pockets of my dark-colored coat, crossed tight over my chest, or swinging fast, propelling me forward with purpose. I look like someone who could give you directions to the dog groomer's, the comic shop, the vegetarian bistro. Sometimes I still slip, look someone in the eye and smile, forget to keep my gaze low and stony, forget to map my path blocks ahead, to avoid collision, confrontation. Yesterday I was indecisive about my route. A man moved, I moved, and he crossed right in front of me. I held my hand up and touched his soft, dark coat, mumbling sorry. I broke my stride. But I'm learning. One block more, and I was back at full speed, arms moving, dodging people as I looked at their midriffs and not their eyes. Moving forward with hypothetical urgency, although everyday when I get to the bridge I still can't help slowing down, looking over the railing at the current streaming over the pilings of the Walnut Street Bridge, and when I look away, I always search for somebody's eyes.

Final round: truck, rent, thin
for Major Jackson (who was in attendance)
Rental trucks aren't plain white anymore. That means rollers. It means paint trays. It means time. Most people aren't dumb enough to leave a rental truck parked on a dark street overnight, but you get one once in a while.

The sound of the roller as it hits, wet, your arms shaking nervous as you reach it as high as you can. No time to be perfect. No time to reach all the way to the top, and no time to let it dry, even, before your backpack full of metal cans clanks to the sidewalk, before you zipper it open and the zipper catches--you're shaking too hard.

Calm down. The cans come out. Your lookout is a block away. A dog barks, but far, and close by nothing's moving but the overhang of trees in the streetlights. You put down a thin line, black on white, your mark. You try to make it thin enough not to drip, add the Philly fade at the top and bottom, but you still shake. It's been too long since you did this last. Your lookout's still quiet and the dog has stopped barking, and you fill in color after color and even add the stars, the year.

You'll see this in the afterlife, this one night when you didn't get caught, when it turned out exactly the way you wanted. When it turned out well enough to do it again, one time too many.

Story Slam, January 2011

2011-03-27T10:07:00.004-04:00

Words: mound, sling, slippery
He grabs the bucket, slings water out into the woods. It arcs, full of leaves and dead insects, which spray across the grass on the way. She feels drops of dirty water hit her crossed, bare legs. The mound of sand in the sandbox is starting to grow bits of grass and weeds, untilled for ten years, when she was last a child. Everything is slippery in the late-summer heat, the sheen of the fresh-flung water fades as the ground soaks it in.
(didn't read this)

Line: The worst you can do
(nothing)

Theme: cowboys
It's about the jeans, the way they bunch around the skinny legs. The way the waistband hangs a little below the tanline when they go out at night, when they bend over pool tables and stretch their untucked shirts away. The way their shoulders roll under the thin cotton of their shirts, the array of faded plaid. The jeans dusty, oil-stained, or crisply, newly clean and so stiff they could stand on their own. It's about how they always seem a little separate from their clothes, a little naked; no matter what they're wearing, the whole frame shows below. He grips the neck of a Corona in New Hampshire, and he's a cowboy, 1200 miles away from a wild horse, and I'm sold.

Final round: knife, roof, velvet
He knifes the velvet off the horns of the deer, the buck hanging from the metal rack by its back hooves. They're in the side parking lot of the general store, the blood running down from the gash in its belly, and she's sitting on the roof of his truck, wanting to see and not see, wishing he wouldn't do this in the open at this time of year. In the fall, everything's colder, drier, not yet frozen solid but getting there. It's not right for him to do this in a t-shirt, for her to be able to smell the blood. The velvet skin falls to the gravel parking lot as he carves it away, scraping all the way down to bright white bone, antler that hasn't had time to shade to ivory. The blood drips down blue-red, he carves at the antlers, and she watches from the roof until the sun goes down, until he gets it perfect.

Story Slam, October 2010

2011-03-25T15:08:00.004-04:00

Words: specter, greasy, shake
Even the shake felt greasy in her hand, like she was leaving fingerprints on the glass when she touched it. She felt coated, like a puddle with a rainbow of oil smeared across, like swimming in a river with jeans on. Like a formaldehyde fetus in a thick-lidded jar. Like a specter in a doorway, a smudge that distorted the air. She touched the glass and knew it should feel cold, and that made her think about matter, the concrete around the oily puddle, her bones beneath her skin.
(didn't read this)

Sentence: His eyes aren't scary at all.
"Light as a feather, stiff as a board." He stands at her feet and looks down, while the others sit cross-legged around her, touching her shoulders, the back of her knees, her hair. "Say it," he says, and they all do. The carpet is hard, the TV tuned to static, and she thinks of last summer, when he led her into the Phantom, dark ride stopped by a real hurricane, a real flood, actual darkness. Their feet slipped in the mud left over, her eyes tried to focus, and he turned to her.

Theme: The bureaucracy of hope and lies.
(Just notes for this) The inside of a dark chocolate truffle. A piece of lettuce wedged next to an eye tooth. Light coming in through an upstairs window, stained glass colors on the hardwood floor. The sharp smell of onions on the side of a plate.

Last round: zombie, imagine, fossilized
(nothing for this)

Story Slam, May 2010

2011-03-14T13:06:00.005-04:00

Words: Door, Blink, Blue

The door is blue now, but once it was red, once it was white, once it was avocado, once it was the honey color of new wood, its knots darker, once it was plain planks coming off a machine, covered in its own dust. Once it was a tree that waved on a hillside in a stand of others. The thick blue paint is gloss, bright in the morning sun, richer in the afternoon. You sit in your yard, the grass spiky on your legs, which are stuck straight out, your weight leaning back on the heels of your hands. You watch your father paint the door, which is never allowed to peel and show its former colors. You blink summer on your eyelashes, the rainbow haze like 70s snapshots when you lower your lids, eyes thatched with lashes. You blink away a long afternoon, and the door is newly blue.

Line: Suddenly, the idea of eating the fat ones didn't seem so strange.
Earlier that day, she had waded into the pool from the waterfall, legs prettiest pale, up to ankles, knees, the hem of her dress wicking water, the sash trailing, darkening. And now, as they sit next to the fire, he slides a hot dog over a crooked branch, hears it hiss when it hits the fire. His hands are wet with it, meat just out of the plastic package, the watery cooler, the beer leaning cold against his foot. He watches it split, burn. Two years without a bite of meat, but now, for her, he could.

Theme: Paybacks
(I had nothing for this)

Words: stool, perform, shiny
The circus tent bloomed open, striped to make it merry. Kids cotton candy shiny, the trapeze artists backstage eating penny candy for good luck. Backstage smells of wine and mildew, tent packed too tight. In their train cars, the fabric's loose over lamps and everything's tied down tight for movement. The ferris wheel spins Sunday, shiny, the churchwheel reflected in last night's rain. Trapeze girl on tiptoes, feet lift off of wooden stool, kick it back and leap off into darkness, performance, and risk.

Story Slam, April 2010

2011-03-14T11:22:00.002-04:00

Words: Agitate, Dude, Spindly

The water glass, table bump, agitate. Patio chair with its spindly legs, everything seeming to tilt. And the air cool around the cone of the heat lamp, her foot hooked around the chair's leg, worrying it, tilting the chair slowly back and forth. She looks beyond the table, across the street, into the dark branches of the trees, branches that flip in the light breeze. She pulls her scarf around her shoulders. Agitate. The water glass tips, the water spills over the lip, slight. Dude, she says, you're bumping the table.

***
Theme: The improbability of love

The path through the woods is faint, and you don't even know if you're still on it, or if it ever existed, or if you want it to. There's something to the thought of getting lost, even if it's just a mile from a highway. You imagine wax wings melting, the feathers that covered the floor when your comforter split. One mile away, the car is still smoking, the hood mangled metal, reflecting streetlights off plane after plane, silver paint grayed.

***
Same theme?

Are you going to eat that, she's thinking. She waits, waits. He's talking about his job again, the job where he works with people she's not close enough to know. Yet, she should thing, not close enough to know yet. And she wants to believe that someday she will be able to put her hand on his knee while he drives, casually and without having to wonder if it's okay. She'll be able to go to a party with him and know she doesn't have to worry about him -- he'll make his own way. She'll be able to take the pickles off his plate as soon as it comes, before the pickle juice soaks into the chips. Someday, she thinks. Not yet.

Words: ditzy, wipe, earlobe

Red velvet tiptoe the fork, three pronged, silver, patina. Do you clean it and make it pretty, or leave the dirt on to show how old? Tiptoe to the top of the staircase, the mystery show the grownups watch, spoons serrated in the garbage disposal, taped together with masking tape, my grandmother's Sharpie handwriting, "mangled". Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, you tiptoe to the kitchen, slip a finger along the edge, a little at first and then farther, more, the cake ruined already, but you can't stop licking the sugar off the groove along your fingernail, grooved from bike-fall, grew back wrong. The cake ruined now, and all you can do is climb up on the stool, steady yourself, lift the sheet of cake above your head and let go. It falls flat, red pieces spring up, and settle.

A Snack for the Bear at the Window

2010-05-04T23:34:00.006-04:00

Went upstairs, planning to go to bed -- long work day tomorrow. But then I went out on the roof for a few minutes and the stars were out and I could feel the writing life, outside me but maybe looking in through a window, hands cupped around its eyes, knowing I'm in there somewhere. And I know it's out there, too, even when I can't see or feel it. I know it, but sometimes I lose my faith that we will connect again.

Twenty-two minutes til midnight. I will now pull three words from friends' blogs, the first word I notice from each, and I will write something real quick, and that something will help me to feel that the big blue Denver Conference Center bear of the writing life is closer, that maybe I'm letting him in for a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, maybe we will feel familiar enough with each other to put our feet up on the coffee table together, as I'm doing now alone.

Words:
Symptoms of Loneliness (Lyle's blog), Calm (Rebecca's blog), Album (Marshall's blog)

1.
Sometimes I miss the symptoms of my loneliness. The way everything unfamiliar looked so clear. The way every brick in the sidewalk stood separate, like everything looks when you get done crying. But also still edged with sadness, like when I got my new glasses back from the eye doctor, and every lampshade had a line of rainbow on the edge, primary colors that expanded if I moved my head just so. Chromatic aberration, my dad said. We were a crossword family, a Jeopardy! family. We were precise in naming things. Some winter nights my dad and I trudged with flashlights down the rocky path to the lake, crunched across the frozen cove to the spot where the sky was a bowl above us. Dad found Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, Io and Ganymede and Betelgeuse, his professor voice naming them for me, a most important class of one.

2.
Sometimes I think I've traded alertness, traded art, for this hard-won calm. Sometimes I miss the churned-up lakewater, legs kicking panicked akimbo, the sink-or-swim of it all. Many drowners, I hear, forget which way is up.

Once I knew for sure what home was, and I held onto my loyalty like a banged-up shield, bending and shifting the light with its dented planes. It was, of course, the same light I watched from the balcony, booming back and forth between the buildings, slow-motion pinballed, lunch-truck morning to anxious afternoon to relieved evening.

I couldn't get by without music, album after album, a different one every day. I needed it -- it was a pair of sunglasses that kept me from taking too much in. The abandoned buildings were enough, empty windowholes with black behind them, signifying something lost, something gone. It was enough to see them without thinking, the music like aloe on my raw skinless skin.

Midnight, so I will keep my promise to myself and post this, as messy as it is.

(But of course I will then take another twenty minutes to go back and sand it down, rearrange the words, reshape. Still messy, but I still have to go to bed.)

"Cities" in Press 1

2010-04-14T09:39:00.001-04:00

My story "Cities" just came out in Press 1:
http://www.leafscape.org/press1/v4n1/thorpe.html

Story Slam #2 (12/10/09)

2010-04-13T10:20:00.002-04:00

1.
swingset strangle prickly

The tag of my t-shirt was prickly on the nape of my neck. My pants were too short, my feet were hot in my shoes, and I was just about to strangle this girl Holly with the chain from one of the swings on the swingset.

I just wanted to keep walking past the hot asphalt of the basketball court with the foursquare game painted on it. (Has anyone ever known how to play foursquare?) I wanted to step into the cool space between the trees where nobody could see how red my face still was. Where the trees were older than anyone here, older than most of the kids would ever get to be, older than the kids who played foursquare on the basketball court, the kids who became our parents. The kids who grew up and still had kids, even knowing those kids would have to go to this same school someday.

2.
Unknown prompt

Love is nothing compared to hate in junior high. Hate could be just as good. It could be better. You could wake up and think, "I hate Amanda. I wish her father would get transferred to Michigan so I'd never have to see her stupid face ever again. And her stupid hair, and her pink Victoria's Secret pencil box and the fluorescent elastics on her braces that get spit in them that shines in the fluorescent lights of Mrs. Feeney's classroom that always smells like snow boots and tuna salad."

But you don't want Amanda's father to get transferred, not really, because hating Amanda is almost as good maybe better than loving someone. Every night when you go to bed you think about Amanda, when you step off the school bus you think about Amanda and her sneakers, her jeans, her braces, Amanda is a fire in your belly that feels almost exactly like love.

3.
First line: "cleavage looks better in black and white".

Cleavage looks better in black and white. At least, that's what they say. I wouldn't know. Cleavage has never interested me, no matter how many times I tried to make it true. No matter how many magazines I snuck out of my father's car trunk (don't ask me why he doesn't keep them in the house). No matter how many times I accidentally touched one of my girlfriends' boobs when I was in high school, no matter how many times I slept with Jenny in college. I would lie there after, feeling nothing. Promising myself that next time I would make it different, somehow.

Cleavage always looks better in black and white. I think someone said that to me at a bar one time. And I nodded, took my baseball hat off, ran my hand over my hair, put it back on. Coughed like a guy who likes cleavage might.

4.
red dog slipped

The sun on the red wine in the sidewalk cafe, fingers twirling the stem, wine warming, and a strap slipped down her shoulder, spaghetti, twirling the stem between her fingers, wine red, shoulders red, a long day in the sun coming slow to an end, skin red, sun red, wine red, the sidewalk cafe slowing from day to night, slipping into gloaming.

Almost sweater time, and she slips the strap up and down, up and down slips fabric between her fingers, red skin warm as wine in the sun, as the sun slips down, fingers twirling stem, the day twirls down to evening, sweater weather soon, but
not
quite
yet.

She leans to pet a passing dog, fingers on his collar, the strap
slips
down.

Per Contra

2010-04-02T09:32:00.000-04:00

The new issue of Per Contra contains my story, "Punctuation". I'm glad it found a good home:
http://www.percontra.net/18thorpe.htm

Story Slam #5 (3/25/10)

2010-03-28T21:42:00.004-04:00

No poet this time.

Words: kneecap, pretty, ridicule
Her kneecap was pretty bony, which led to playground ridicule when they hung their legs down through the skeletal metal dome and kicked at the kids fighting inside, beyond the thunderdome. Her kneecap was bony, but pretty, and he tried to bump into it as often as possible when weaving out of range of Frankie's fists.

Theme: letters to Mom
(I was eating a burger, so I didn't write in response to this one)

Line: something very long about Benjamin realizing only after 1000 feet that he had stopped worrying what the neighbors thought. Also shouted out: "Nobody believes in dragons anymore."
I responded to this, but didn't read it aloud, so I was able to wrap it into a later piece.

Words: email, wrangle, waterlogged
Twenty years before email we wrangled, wrassled, grappled on the truck tire inner tube. The lake was sunlight sparkled, the water undulating away from the tube in fast rolls getting slower, farther, the lake a tub shaken, water slopping side to side, his wiry arms clenching, grabbing biceps, ankles, trying to shake my grip. Our waterlogged shorts wrapped around skinny thighs like plastic bags draped and dripping across fallen trees. We wrestled, wrangled, shorts low on our waists, legs about to give out, feet ready to slip. And then the splash, sinking down through the water weeds, streaks of sunlight, blowing water out hard through my nose, arms and legs finally limp. I lay back, looked up at sky wavered by water, looked at his bright white legs dangling down below him as he held the tube. Let myself stop, float, let him win.

Poker round. Words: hallucinate, chew, moist
Nobody believes in dragons anymore, Benjamin thought, but we do believe in drugs, specifically acid. We do believe in 700 strangers signing our Tao of Pooh t-shirt, the Sharpie pushing through the cloth to crawling skin, marking him so that when he took the shirt off in the tent later he could see black dots all over his pale chest.

He was working on a pretty good farmer tan, farmer burn, probably, which is why people kept offering him sunscreen, spraying him with cool mist from water bottles. Finally, mid-afternoon and the dry straw grass was rising and sinking below him, affecting his footing, and an earth-mother type with silver rings in her dreads squirted some sunscreen from a bottle she kept in her backpack's side pocket and just slathered it onto his arm, slipping her fingers down, massage artist.

Benjamin had stopped worrying what the neighbors would think a long time ago, when he chewed the moist paper tab, wondering if you were supposed to chew it, really, or just swallow it whole.

The tent, later, pink cloth moist but not dripping. His teeth were starting to feel metallic, edged, clenched. He looked at the tent ceiling, filmstrip burning in an ashtray, everything falling down. Moira there, wrapping him tight in his sleeping bag.

"Your safety song is 'Sex You Up', by Color Me Badd," she said, and started humming, hugging the down of the sleeping bag around him, bodies conforming.

William Tell

2010-03-16T13:32:00.001-04:00

My story "William Tell" is in the new issue of Painted Bride Quarterly:

http://www.pbq.drexel.edu/issue81/fiction/thorpe-elizabeth_william-tell.php

Story Slam #4 (2/25/10)

2010-03-15T11:00:00.003-04:00

Poet: Genevieve Betts

Line: "The first time I saw it, I squinted"
(this was the third round, but I didn't read in the first two, so I folded details into this one)
The first time I saw it, I squinted. I was lying next to Kevin in the back of a pickup truck that wasn't his and wasn't mine. I saw the empty bottle and squinted in the early light, looked for other, fuller bottles nearby. I remembered the night before, shot after shot, power hour after power hour in the apartment above the bar, the apartment that also wasn't Kevin's or mine. The apartment where mice had shat on the kitchen counter, next to a knife that gleamed dull but still menacing. I remember how the fluorescent light in the kitchen got brighter and brighter and the music got louder until someone said the cops were there. We went down the fire escape, Kevin and me, we hid behind the dumpsters in the odd glow of the bar's bug light, and then when everything was quiet again, we got into the back of this uncapped pickup truck and I kept drinking from the bottle of vodka I'd taken off the dirty counter and stuck in my backpack. I drank from the bottle because I had to, but I tried to measure shots anyway. I like to keep track.

Line: As the other two Chrises lay dying (there were three Chrises at the slam that night)
As the other two Chrises lay dying on the couch, or claiming they were dying, anyway, from the soup at the Indian buffet that had given them food poisoning three days ago, plenty of time for them to get over it by now, if they weren't so concerned about getting girls (other girls, outside girls, not me) to take care of them by getting them Bud Light from the refrigerator, Bud Light being the brand they'd both just switched to from Coors because they had fallen for the Here We Go slogan in the new Bud Light Superbowl commercials, because they liked to walk out of convenience stores with two thirty packs and Chris One's brand new license that proved he was finally 21, and hold the beer up as they came to the car with the windows open, me inside, and say Here We Go, and then get inside and encourage me to peel out like they imagine Danica Patrick might if they were cool enough to hang out with her. The two other Chrises lay dying, or claiming they were dying, but I wasn't falling for it, and neither would Danica Patrick if they were cool enough to hang out with her.

Words: beer, drive, transcendent
The Chrises lay dying on the couch, or claiming they were dying, even though the food poisoning at the Indian buffet happened three days ago. A girl with the lowest of low cut shirts and slutty high heels with no socks even though it was winter and the snow fell slowly outside, falling and melting instantly on the warm wet streets, snow like I'd see someday in the Alps on Easter when I went with an Australian and a French girl to a church service in German where I would understand the music but could only mouth the words in English and not sing them in German, on the trip that was so far in my future I couldn't even imagine it could happen, the snow was falling and melting like it would on the wet winding streets in the Alps someday and the girl was sitting on the arm of the couch near Chris Two, not too close in case he was going to puke but close enough, the beer was running low and I needed to get out of that hot, close apartment, I had to drive somewhere tonight, so I went up to Chris One, sat next to him on his couch arm like the girl with the slutty shoes sat on the other and said to Chris One, "beer run. Let's go. Transcend."

Theme: Faking it
In eighth grade band we were told by the blond band leader to fake it if we didn't know how to play our instruments right. I sat next to Shannon, my steady best friend, and next to her Orion wouldn't quit hooking his clarinet screws on Casey's dangly earrings, threatening to pull them out, and that was enough to convince me never to wear dangly earrings. We moved our fingers over the holes in our clarinets, finger-synching with everyone else in our section, but we didn't blow.

Theme: Drinking before noon, Words: fantastic, hopped, ?
It was fantastic, drinking before noon, before nine, before seven, on a Cinco de Mayo that didn't in any way resemble a long afternoon in Mexico where the guy trying to sell us a marble chess set for eleven dollars handed my camera to my mom and stood next to me, subtly pinching my ass while the camera clicked.

It was a snowy Cinco de Mayo on a thin small-town street, a Mexican restaurant across from the Rite-Aid (closed) and a jewelry store (closed). We stood around the early morning Cinco de Mayo bar at the Mexican restaurant, wearing straw sombreros with the Mexican restaurant's corporate logo stamped in black ink on the fronts, we stood around the bar with Erika, who got me a blender for my birthday so she could stop by and borrow it every single Thursday night and return it crusted red with dried daiquiri every Sunday afternoon.

We stood there on Cinco de Mayo, early light greying the snow outside the crepe-papered windows, and I was already kind of over it. One day I would be nostalgic for this, the tight muscles of the hockey player I'd invited into my bed and then rejected the night before, the dried out limes in the white bucket on the edge of the bar, even the heavy-hopped microbrews at the pub around the corner. It was fantastic, drinking before noon, or later I'd remember it that way, but I was done.

For My Brother, on his 30th Birthday

2010-03-14T23:48:00.003-04:00

Your knees were always scabby, band-aids falling off, your skin sunburned or grayed-dry, scratched from raspberry or blackberry brambles. You were the first, the only, to get stitches, break an arm, break teeth.

You lost things; winter coats, a tent in a concert parking lot, half an apartment full of furniture put out by your landlord with the trash.

Your college books were plastered with yellow used stickers and warped with seawater from driving your open Jeep into the water on the Rhode Island beach.

You passed out too close to campfires, woke up damp in the early grey light, fumbling for the pack of cigarettes you’d crushed in your pocket. You ditched finals and drove to Boston with a girl who made the Jeep stink with cheap perfume, you bought her a rose at a service station, then gave it, frozen to wilting, to our mother when she came to spring the car from the impound lot.

You ran across six lanes of traffic to the Arc de Triomphe instead of using the underground tunnel. You did backflips at parties when you were too drunk to stand. The wheel of your fifty-dollar car fell off on the way home from the prom.

You are in danger every minute of every day. But you’ve made it this far.

***

Note: This isn't done -- I can't seem to make it come out right. But it is my brother's birthday, and my thoughts have been with him today, so I wanted to at least post what I had.

Story Slam #3 (1/28/10)

2010-03-13T10:49:00.003-05:00

Poet: Paul Siegell

#1 google, muffin, useless

Some places have good airports, good train stations, some places you just know when you get there. Years before google, years before useless commitments, excuses, the streets warm and smelling of flowers at night when you walk to the beach with the girls you just met, the girls yelling "la playa". You just want to put your hands in the water, fulfill the promise of that airport, that train station, that morning when you walked downstairs to their version of the 7-11, siete diez y ono?, to get a muffin in the morning (and the morning smelled like flowers, too) and you saw the machine for squeezing oranges, fresh, and were you ever glad to be so far from home. And are you ever now, la playa, as you put your hands in a body of water you've never touched.

(didn't read this one aloud)

#2 Baccanalia
Barcelona midnight with these girls I just met. Cartons of sangria from the 7-11, and we watch the street sweeper twist along the sidewalks around the park,
(restart)
Barcelona midnight and it all smells like flowers. I sit on benches with these girls I just met, drinking sangria from the 7-11 next door to our hostel. And the park is dark, the air thick and sweet, but when someone says "la playa", we all get up and go. Winding the streets, windowboxes vined with flowers, flowers dripping almost down to our feet and loose petals underneath.
(restart)

I release you, you want to say. Cold November, your hands are cold but his lips are warm. You didn't expect this. You didn't want this.
(restart)
Take me somewhere beautiful he says, and you don't want it, you don't want any of this. He flew across the country for this. Cold November, and his lips are warm, but warm is all you feel, nothing else. You pull back and you see it in him, how badly he wanted this to be different. How he said, next time I see you, I won't be able not to kiss you. Next time. And all it is is cold and gray, and all you are is tired from work, and he says, if I go...if I go, this is it. He looks at you. You nod.

(didn't read any of this aloud. Wasn't feeling good about the writing yet.)

#3 Dishrag, imbibe, retro
At the bar everything shines, even the dishrag with soap bubbles bursting, shine of pink and blue on each bubble, and the tiny movement when it pops. She looks at the shine on the dishrag and thinks the word imbibe, rounded like bubbles, classy. Classy like this retro bar, red sparkle vinyl on the seats, rounded TV in the corner with a basketball game on, retro, windy March Madness. Imbibe, she thinks, imbibe, and she watches the little bubbles shining and bursting on the dishrag that looks homemade, made by someone's classy grandma, someone who would never have done what she just did in the rock-walled basement, down narrow stairs, below where she sits at the bar, watching the bubbles burst, thinking imbibe. Retro. Class.

#4 Alcoholism
Spin, spin, downward spin, spin the bottle and it always points the same way. You spin it anyway, every time, label up, label down, label soaked off in the rain from the overflow pipe below the market street bridge. On the rocks, on the ice, thin ice, black ice, rocks sharp, poking through, jagged up-and-down rocks. The bottle spins and once it was Coke and once it was a circle of girls, pretty girls, drunk girls, low-lidded girls in low dresses, low blouses, low jeans. Low. Spin low, swing low, sweet chariot, sweet Jesus, Sweet Jane. Spin low, swing low, spin bottle after bottle and it's time to go home.

#5 Refrigerator, tucked, brilliant
The fountain is supposed to be a waterfall, water over the ledge in a clean clear sheet, bright blue that looks almost tropical. But it's cool as a refrigerator back there, me and Evan sitting there cross-legged, looking through the light on the water, something brilliant, grey asphalt all around, cross-legged, wearing shorts, legs bare on the cold concrete, the afternoon long and hot, and we will sit there, knees barely touching, all afternoon.

(rewrite -- done at the Slam)
The fountain is supposed to be a waterfall, water a clean clear plate falling fast over the ledge right in front of us, so close we can feel the cool, smell the chlorine, see the sun through the brilliant blue, so bright it's almost tropical. Cool as a refrigerator back there, cavern cool, basement cool, cool as deep under the pier in Atlantic City, me and Evan cross-legged in shorts, concrete scratchy on our skin. Something brilliant, water plate glass clean, me and Evan, knees barely touching, and I could stay here, legs tucked beneath us, knees almost touching, sun on the water. I think we could stay here, all afternoon.

Story Slam #1

2010-03-13T08:57:00.002-05:00

(From one of the early Slams at the Bubble House. See http://twoxpats.blogspot.com/2010/03/story-slam.html for details.)

#1
words: Chaise Longue, Slurping, Tan

I pointed out the mistake in the poem.
"Look," I said to Connie, "She spelled chaise lounge wrong. Twice."
I expected her to laugh, like we always did, at the crazy poet who couldn't spell, even on her final drafts. Sometimes we rejected stories after one or two lines.
"It's so nice," Connie would say, "to work with someone who understands these things."
We worked in her kitchen. I would come in and say hello and go to the hall where the wicker laundry basket was filled with submissions. We went through them together, and I wrote the rejection letters:

"Dear X,
Thank you for thinking of us.
Unfortunately, this doesn't quite suit..."

We were on the same page. But today, she looked at me like I was slurping the bright orange Sunkist I'd made the mistake of bringing in with me. She looked at me, regal and tan from working in her garden.
"It's chaise longue," she said. "It's French."

#2
"So this is it" was the theme or beginning. This one didn't really work, so I kind of folded some of the details into the next one.

#3
First line: "I cleaned my mirror with a sponge"

I cleaned my mirror with a sponge. I cleaned everything, scrubbed the inside of the microwave and polished the faucets, trying to erase all trace of him. Eddie hadn't touched the mirror, but he had looked in it, probably.

He went in the bathroom after, and I lay there and thought about how I had done it, I had crossed a line I'd never meant to cross. Last night, we were in somebody's basement with the white Christmas lights duct-taped to the ceiling and the screen door that almost blew away in Eddie's hand when he opened it to let us out into the stars reflected in the lake.

That was before, and this is forever after. And no matter how many ways I try to clean my after apartment, this is it.

#4
Theme: Duality in a high school cafeteria

Our high school had a dress code, because it was semi-private, but not really. My town paid for it, and all I got for their money was me in khakis or corduroy. I kept my shirt tucked in around teachers -- I didn't want to have to stay there in uncomfortable clothes any longer than I had to, so I was careful to avoid the teachers who were too happy with the detention slips.

The cafeteria was on school grounds, so theoretically school rules applied. But those same teachers with the stacks of slips were the ones whose breath reeked of coffee in the afternoons. They needed their coffee and I needed to feel some air on my skin. So I was two ways. Mr. Button-Down Khaki and Mr. Shirt Untucked, Mr. Making Out in the Janitor Closet with Janie Frederick, who took off her sweater as soon as we got in there and kept it off until the bell.

The dress code was supposed to make us ready to dress in a business-appropriate manner for our future jobs, but all it did was make me narrow my job search to places where I could wear jeans and t-shirts and drink coffee all day.

2010-03-03T23:42:00.002-05:00

"If you see my girlfriend, tell her I'm drinking responsibly." A Jersey guy, bright white sneakers, slick black hair, baggy buttondown and jeans, says it to a girl in green scrubs and and a puffy white coat. He's smoking outside Slainte in the rain, his white shirt reflected on the dark wet street.

She steps carefully over water pooling at the corner and laughs as she keeps walking.

"Of all the three million people in Philly to see," he says to his friend, when she's gone.

Creative Writing

2010-03-03T00:14:00.001-05:00

He was a hockey player from Montreal. He smoked pot in the woods behind the basketball hoops, just outside the ring of the dorm’s orange light, with my friend Justin, who was a dealer. Once Justin introduced him to me, and he said, yeah, I know Jenny, though I never knew why. The class fulfilled a requirement for him, and most of the time he didn’t speak, just nodded when the professor called his name for attendance. I sat there in the desk behind him, three days a week, looking at the way his dark hair curled down, sometimes wet, sometimes dry and tangled, into the collars of his shirts, hockey hair. Sometimes he wore a bright blue sweater with big uneven stitches that looked homemade, and a collar that kind of rested low so you could see bare skin over the muscles in his neck.

Finally one day he had to read something in class. He looked down at the paper the whole time and read fast about Nintendo games lined up on the wooden shelf above his bed, the faded colors of the labels, how he prized them. The story ended when his basement room flooded and they all got ruined. He didn’t even check if they still worked, just threw them clattering into a big black trash bag and never fished them back out like I would’ve.

Since then I’ve read millions of words on pages, millions of first-draft words, millions of published words, written millions of words of my own. But his line of grey plastic games, the way the light slanted in on them through the basement window in the late afternoons when his friends came over after practice to flop on beanbag chairs on the orange shag rug and make fun of each other and play Contra or Excitebike or Mario, the way the labels curled, peeled, and then rubbed off, ruined, after the flood, his childhood’s end…strange, the things you never forget.

Secret Society

2009-10-23T11:38:00.004-04:00

Hello Readers,
I'm thinking about password-protecting Pictures of Lilies so only invited people can read it. You'd probably have to create a google account and log in to see my entries. I would like to post here more often, but I'm concerned that publishing pieces on my blog will affect my ability to publish them formally later on.

Would you please comment and let me know if you'd be willing to sign in to read my entries? An alternative would be for me to email you my new posts (if you don't want to go through the hassle of creating a google account).

thank you so much for your support.

The Original

2009-09-30T22:40:00.002-04:00

My computer broke this morning. Something was wrong with the hard drive, and I was afraid I lost the writing I did last night. I rewrote this story during my office hour (it appears as Witness in the next entry). I think it's interesting to see how memory works, so I figured I'd post the original here now that all is well.

I think I heard it. It was like a door slamming upstairs. Sometimes the doors slammed like that when it was windy and the language teachers left their classroom windows open. I was in the school after school, probably in the library. I was probably with my friends in the library after school like usual, but when I think back I think alone.

They found the body that night. This kid Hollis found it, this kid Hollis who had a unibrow that he smoothed over and over with his fingertips when he stood on the diving board about to do a dive. Hollis was on the prom committee. The prom committee was in the auditorium decorating for the prom. Hollis had gone upstairs for something, he went upstairs to find more decorations or something, into the dressing rooms on the sides of the stage that we only used during plays or musicals. He went upstairs and he saw the body, and he told Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Harrison went upstairs and he saw the body too. Later, months later, in our junior English class, Mr. Harrison read us a piece of prose he had written about that night. I don’t know what he wanted us to say about it. It was like he wanted us to help him carry it, or something, like he didn’t want to be alone with it anymore. He said the body was pale and slumped against the wall. He mentioned the blood. For years after I would sometimes imagine the body slumped against the side of the bathtub in my parents’ house. I would imagine it when I closed my eyes in the shower. I would imagine it like Mr. Harrison described it. I never heard how Hollis described it.

Hollis was “pretty shook up”. That’s what Carrie said the next day when we were posing for prom pictures at Cascade Park. Carrie said it matter-of-factly – of course he would be shook up. And then Veronica almost started to cry, but caught herself because of her makeup, and she said she didn’t know how anybody could enjoy prom now, now that this had happened. I was sorry it happened, but I didn’t know him and neither did Veronica. Veronica saying that was just trying to get attention like Veronica always did. She was actually lucky to get attention for being upset about the kid who died instead of the dress she was wearing, which was so slutty she had Carrie pretend to be her when they went to her blind date’s parents’ house to pick him up. The blind date was a freshman from another school. The blind date’s parents weren’t fooled.

They buried the body a week later. By then they had decided that he definitely knew that the wrestling team wasn’t going to get cut, after all. By then everyone knew about his migraines, that he was in frequent terrible pain. His casket was plain wood, and his friends wrote messages on it in Sharpie. They put bottles of alcohol in there with him, and a couple of joints, and CDs of Metallica and Iron Maiden and stuff. I wonder what his parents thought about that. I wonder how long it had been since his parents knew him that well.

The prom went on, in spite of this dead kid we didn’t know, this kid we could barely picture because nobody went to wrestling meets and he didn’t do anything else. The prom went on, and graduation, and college, and people got married and people had kids. Other people died. It was like we were all on a train going away from high school, and most people stayed on the train, but some people stopped. That kid was the first to stop. And I only had one thing to do with it, and that was this: I heard the shot.

Witness

2009-09-30T12:07:00.006-04:00

I think I heard the shot. It sounded like a door slamming upstairs. Sometimes the doors slammed like that when the language teachers left their classroom windows open. I was probably in the library when I heard it. I was probably with my friends in the library like usual, but when I think about where I was when I heard it, I think alone.

This kid Hollis found the body later, this kid Hollis who always smoothed his bushy eyebrows over and over with his fingertips when he was standing on the diving board about to do a dive. Hollis was decorating the auditorium with the prom committee, and he went upstairs to get something, some crepe paper or something, and he found the body in a dressing room above the stage that we only used during musicals. Hollis saw the body and he went and got Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Harrison saw the body too. Months later Mr. Harrison read this thing he wrote about seeing the body. He read it to our junior English class. I don't know what he expected us to say. It was like he wanted us to help him carry it, or something, that memory. He said that the body was pale, slumped against the wall. He mentioned the blood. For a long time after that I would imagine the body when I closed my eyes in the shower, imagine it slumped against my parents' bathtub. I imagined it the way Mr. Harrison described it. I never heard how Hollis described it.

The next day when we were posing for prom pictures at Cascade Park, Carrie said Hollis was "pretty shook up". She said it like of course he was, anybody would be. Veronica almost cried but stopped because of her eye makeup, and she said she didn't know how we could enjoy the prom now, after what happened, but she was just saying it to get attention like always. She was lucky to get attention for feeling bad about that kid instead of for her prom dress, which was so slutty that when she went to pick up her blind date, who was a freshman at another school, she made Carrie pretend to be her. The blind date's parents weren't fooled.

Veronica didn't know that kid who died and neither did I. Neither did Hollis. All he did was wrestling, and nobody went to wrestling meets. Or matches. Or whatever.

But some kids went to his funeral, and they said the casket was plain wood and people wrote messages on it in Sharpie. They said people put bottles of alcohol in there with him, and joints, and Metallica and Iron Maiden CDs. I wonder what his parents thought about that. I wonder how long it had been since they knew him that well. They said he definitely knew before he did it that they weren’t going to cut the wrestling team after all. But he still did it.

We had the prom and we had graduation, we had college, and some people got married and some people had kids. It was like we were all on a train going away from high school and every once in a while the train stopped and somebody got off. That kid was the first to get off. And I didn't have anything to do with that kid, nothing at all except for this: I heard the shot.

New Collaboration

2009-08-24T21:52:00.001-04:00

http://postcardfictioncollaborative.blogspot.com/

We plan to post pictures and prose responses once a month.

Summer Storm

2009-08-02T11:18:00.005-04:00

Sunday morning. A storm gathers around my apartment. The light is not silver, but gray. The windows are dark as gloaming. Chromatic aberration: orange and blue along the panes' edges, through my old glasses.

The rain starts, a few clanging drops on the metal chimneytops, then sheets of it on the roof across the way -- the wind blows it into waves, wavetops fly off like steam. Our neighbors' bamboo tosses in their backyard below. The loudest thunder yet shakes our wood floor.

The lights are off in the apartment; I see the rose-colored lightning illuminate me -- my white t-shirt, my hands on the keyboard. Water runs hard off the roof next door, over the pipe that's supposed to catch it. The path of the courtyard is covered in water, the rain fills it in from one low brick wall to the other.

At the bookstore, Margaret and I would hurry out to stand in front of the big strip-mall windows to watch storms. They come on faster in Maine. Here we know half an hour in advance, at least.

The rain changes direction, soaks the screens so everything blurs. I can still see the movement of the waterfall over the drainpipe, a flicker like fire. A bit of diminished thunder, the last fireworks before the finale.

Back to a few clangs on metal, a splashing waterfall. The storm drags tentacles of thunder behind it, moving on.

Second Section of Other Prose/Poetry Collaboration

2009-07-30T16:47:00.001-04:00

Running past instinct, I board the bus that will take me to the train back to my city. The mist is still low, it’s early morning. I try to name all the shades of green in the trees.

I stay awake until the bus crosses the bridge between this state and the next. When we were little, on our way to see our grandparents in Connecticut, we pushed our feet as far forward as they could go, under the seats – I’m in New Hampshire first! Then we threw our hands back – I’m in Maine last!

The train ride – dry yellow grasses, pebbled gravestone, broken-windowed warehouse, stacked boxcars. The bridge that says “Trenton Makes the World Takes” in orange lights. Finally, my city’s skyline, radio towers blinking red, Liberty One lit Eagle green, the Verizon building still tallest. Every new skyscraper has a company’s name.

The Comcast building is a hole in the ground behind the hotel where we live. I see it from our laundry room window, and I try to remember to take pictures of its progress, although I’m not sure why. Instinct.

My grandfather made an album of a new building’s progress in 1940. The album had thick black paper and the pictures were all black and white and small, two by three inches. My grandfather labeled the stages of the project in white pencil. That album was the one thing I gave away, donated to a museum in Hartford. It’s the one thing I should have kept.

Sometimes traffic on the wet street sounds like ocean waves. From the hotel balcony I try to pick out stars in the humid sky. My hands palm the damp metal railing. “It’s an emergency,” a crazy man once told me, “that I’m not with you.”

First Section of Prose/Poetry Collaborative Piece

2009-07-28T12:28:00.001-04:00

When Leila leaves, she sees a playing card lying in the snow next to the steps. It’s bent in half, lengthwise. She nudges it with her toe, flips it enough to see that it’s the Jack of Hearts. Figures.

Anything can set her off when she feels this way – the thought of playing War with the kids slumps her shoulders. Jason always got mad when the Jack came around – he wanted a card named after him. So they took to calling the Joker the Jason. Leila wonders if the kids still play that way, still call it that.

The air is that dry cold, the kind that hurts the inside of her nose and makes it hard to breathe deep. She balls her hands in stretchy cotton fabric and wraps her arms around her chest, wishing she had more than this sweatshirt, which is so big for her that the cold air comes right up at the hem and fills the empty space around her body. Still, it was nice of Ron to let her borrow it. She puts her nose into the collar, to keep it warm and also to inhale the scent of man – car oil and woodsmoke and shaving cream.

Snow is crusted along the lip of the sidewalk, all the way down the hill. The sky is just starting to turn from flat grey to something brighter. It’ll be a pain to get her car down the icy incline to the main road. She’s glad she’s not parked right out front, though. She doesn’t want anyone inside to make a big deal out of her leaving. She’s just ready to go. Her head doesn’t ache yet, but she’s thirsty, and she feels the tension in her neck and between her shoulderblades. All day long at work she will roll her neck, stretch her arms out in front of her, crack her back, but it won’t do much good.

29th and Market

2009-04-21T09:11:00.004-04:00

The red light can't dam Tuesday morning, each driver's need most urgent. The cars trickle through, trickle through, daring the broadside wave.

I wait on one bank, hoping to reach the other.

ten years

2008-11-20T20:10:00.007-05:00

Today while I'm drying my hair and eating an apple, I think about what L said at dinner the other night. The restaurant had booths, and he said he likes being on a certain side of the table because he's right handed. This way it's easier for the waitress to refill his coffee.
"But I'm right handed, too," I said.
"Yeah, but you drink coffee with your left hand."
"I do?"
"You probably got used to doing it because you're usually holding a book in your other hand."
He's right. I didn't know that.

what I think about when I walk up Chestnut

2008-10-27T12:49:00.004-04:00

The city’s full of desperate people, throwing their hands up in the air, talking to themselves, quiet mumbling and then a shouting explosion as they look back at a perceived wrong, an imaginary or remembered antagonist.

I think what if one of them had a knife, and as he walked by me he pushed it in my chest to the hilt. What if it didn’t hit my heart, but pushed me back to sit on pavement, leaning against the sandstone of the post office. I would hold my jacket around it, trying to keep my blood -- MY blood, the indignity of someone else laying claim to it -- from spilling. I imagine the assailant would run, the act random, not wanting to finish the job of killing me. Weakened, I'd try to keep the well-meaners (assuming any arrive to help) from removing the blade and hurting me more.

I think about shootings, a crazed kid with a gun in the quad, me hiding behind a metal trash can, trying to shelter myself. The kid coming up to me, leveling the gun at me, maybe he’s one of my students, or a former one. I act calm like I do in the classroom, even though my fingers are locked white on the metal slats of the can, the only reason I’m upright, and I ask the kid to spare me, leave me to document what’s happening, tell his story, make him matter.

he remembers

2008-10-09T00:10:00.009-04:00

from a freewrite I did with my students last weekend. The assignment was to write about an emotional thing, like falling in love, crying, loneliness, without cliches. To start with "I remember" or, as one of the students suggested, "he/she remembers"

He remembers sitting in a shower with her, water coming down all around. He had never been with someone that way, just naked together, not ashamed or even aroused. He remembers the rings on her fingers, middle and pointer, the rings bright silver, watching her pull them on and off while she talked. He doesn't remember what they talked about. The water slicked their hair down, they kept blinking and ducking their heads to keep it out of their eyes. It made her hair dark, like his. It made her skin pink. The shower stall was small, level with the bathroom floor, they had their knees up but their toes still almost touched. He remembers what it was like to touch her whenever he wanted, so casual.

The last time he saw her, fully clothed in the passenger seat, he wanted to put his hand on her leg, feel the warmth of her under her jeans, but it wasn't allowed anymore. Their breath fogged the windshield and he cracked his window to clear it. It was early morning, bright sunshine, and his head hurt from fighting all night. He breathed in the cold that hurt his nose and throat. He turned on the car to drive her home.

mentor

2008-10-01T11:58:00.005-04:00

I dreamed about Connie for the first time since she died. We were in her garage, I think, or on her porch -- the in-between rooms blurred together into light, so that we could have passed easily from one place to the other. I imagine that she was wearing her jeans with hose and black flats, her big sweater. I think that's what she wore the last time I saw her, but I can't picture it for sure. I wish I could remember exactly, everything about every time I saw her, everything we said. (How tiresome, she would say about that, and she would laugh.)

The garage had big wood beams and dirty cardboard boxes full of clean books, and a sign that said No Hunting near the door to the kitchen. We were standing by the boxes, let's say. (Unless we were in the porch, and then we were next to the picnic table with the sea glass and shells in baskets and bowls, and I could see the weather stick that pointed up or down to indicate whether it would rain or shine.)

I said to her something about how I would have to stop being lazy and just finish the book. And she didn't say anything, nodded, maybe. It was the basic truth, maybe not that it's laziness, but that finishing the book is completely up to me.

And then maybe we worked a little, counted books in boxes or shifted boxes around. And I said,

"I miss you. I just miss you so much." Like I was letting go of some kind of pretense, admitting something simple, that again we both knew. It felt, in the dream, that I had just moved away, that she wasn't really gone. That I had chosen this.

She didn't say anything, but I could tell she was sympathetic. There was nothing to say, really, except, "I know."

My Old Neighborhood

2008-09-29T10:29:00.005-04:00

Outside the Natural History Museum, brown leaf prints on the sidewalk. Ghost leaves, a suggestion, a representation. More mark than I left on this part of the city, although I walked these streets every day for more than two years.

Even the Dunkin Donuts where I bought my coffee every day, where huge-breasted Kevina knew what I wanted and smiled when she handed it to me, even the Dunkin has been ousted from its corner spot, the windows brown-papered, the building waiting for something new to move in, take its place.

Someone else lives in our tiny apartment, stands on the balcony and looks down at the street below, at me seeing the leaf prints. Does anyone else notice them? Does the new resident spend as much time as I did watching the street?

Things change fast here. Not like at home, where nothing ever seems to disappear. Old clothes are passed around within a family, and then from friend to friend, and then maybe are sold in a yard sale, and then maybe reappear in a secondhand store. Ancient barns are left to their own devices, they and the weather decide whether they will stand or fall. People are remembered in stories, connections, the things they made and said and did.

No time to get this exactly right, figure out what I'm getting at. But there's something I'm missing, some kind of mattering, roots running deep through sidewalks to cobblestones, to bricks and rocks. Trees that will grow leaves and drop them and grow some more. It's here, as well as there, I know it is, but I'm not a part of it yet.

to stick in the novel somewhere

2008-08-19T00:25:00.001-04:00

The dinghies were all facing the same direction, small stand—ins for the larger fishing boats. They and their brightly-colored mooring buoys were reflected perfectly in the still water.

(Does this happen only in the morning or evening? Can afternoons be calm too? Why do they all face the same way like that?)

swimming

2008-08-11T13:20:00.007-04:00

was a first day in a flowered beach suit with a back too low. It was a new black Speedo, also with the wrong kind of back. It was two or three torn practice suits on top of each other for extra drag. It was a meet suit you could barely roll up over your hips.

It was crawling in the beginner lane, trailing too close to someone's feet, eye-level with a wart, a flap of skin, a band-aid.

It was anchoring a relay that had been lapped already, swimming alone before a crowd that was done cheering.

It was a hairball in a drain. It was the girl who didn't wear tampons. It was pushing someone's glob of mucus out of your way. It was having a perpetual cold.

It was watching someone flip too close to a wall, hearing the backs of both ankles smack the tile, seeing her body wilt toward the bottom.

It was trying too hard. It was leaving too much for the end. It was counting the laps wrong. It was bruises on your hands from hitting the lane lines. It was terrible chlorinated skin.

It was the day the coach turned the lights off and Aerosmith up as the team motorboated back and forth, pushing beat-up kickboards.

It was the smell of your coach's shirt when he hugged you as you cried after you lost, how he didn't care if he got wet. It was waiting in the bleachers for your race, listening to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. It was pulling yourself out of the pool at the end of a good swim, how your arms shook.

It was frozen hair and cold car rides. It was a heavy bag full of wet towels, finding space for them in your parents' bathroom. It was being bone-tired with homework still to do.

It was leaning down at the end of a lane to yell for a friend as she flipped.

It was someone making fun of the Head and Shoulders your mom bought you, because your mom thought shampoo was shampoo. It was everyone seeing your underwear. It was growing your leg hair from fall to spring and wondering whether to shave your arms for States.

It was the bright yellow panic of trying to swim the whole length of the pool underwater. It was getting up on Christmas Eve morning and driving to practice, the heavy doors and the quiet changing room.

It was the day-to-day, the everyday, the twice-a-day. It was the difference between what you thought you could do and what you did do and what you would do.

partners

2008-08-08T12:18:00.003-04:00

A woman poses a man for a picture. He sits on the edge of the fountain in Washington Square and adjusts his face, trying to find the right expression. I imagine catching his eye and smiling, and his smile warming in return.

clear

2008-07-26T23:31:00.005-04:00

Which do you like better?

Tonight the stars were so bright the lake reflected them.
Tonight the lake reflected the brightest stars.
Tonight I watched the lake reflect the stars.
Stars; lake; reflection.

It was hard to choose sky or water.

Tonight nothing I write matters. All that matters is that the stars looked like they were falling, shooting, through the barely-rippling water. I have to write it because I can't watch them forever. The dock is damp on my back, I get cold. I wonder if I need a new contact prescription, I think I should learn the constellations, my mind wanders.

I try to fix the bowl of stars in my mind but I can't, not perfectly. And I can't write it perfectly, I can't put you there or keep myself there. I just keep grabbing at things.

The way the trees across the lake are reflected darker in the water. The one bright planet, yellowish. The Milky Way stretched from treeline to treeline. The frogs and the loons, calling.

Not enough, but all that is mine, all I can take with me, those details.

from The Party Sampler

2008-07-25T23:49:00.004-04:00

(erasure not totally mine)

I

Or, we may serve tea
at the end
of the afternoon,
or snacks
toward the end
of the evening.

The snack party, with grape
juice, cola and other
soft drinks,
is particularly popular
with the teen-agers.

II

Suggestions for preparation and service of

will be found with and

If is to be served with the menu,
appropriate glasses
should be provided.
While
should be chilled and

should be served
at room temperature. The

may be filled and passed to the
guests or
may be arranged

Accompaniments for before dinner
should be simple.

III

The host will need no
suggestions
in regard to mixing
the pre-dinner
or for arranging on the

The guests may mix themselves.
Recipes for
and other
will be found under

IV

She will often
prepare the meat
in her own kitchen.

V

The
is an American invention
Guests may be asked for
and instead served

particularly popular with the men is

Wholesale the recipe is based on

Another good punch with
slightly
less authority
has been approved
by many men
as well as women.

If you serve authentic
be content
and both of

beforehand
with a pitcher,
if you like.

Vacationland (so far)

2008-07-25T00:19:00.005-04:00

1) As soon as I got off the bus in Portland I could smell the trees.

2) Today the trees were dark green against the grey mist. Tomorrow or the next day maybe they'll be that lighter color, the non-evergreens lit through by sunlight.

3) There were little swimming things in the metal watering can on the deck. I think they were pre-bugs. I sat and watched them swim for a while. Also, the watering can had moss in it.

4) Now I'm listening to the rain and my grandmother's clock.

5) Bought a book at the Big Chicken Barn about Party Planning. The previous owner had crossed out all references to alcohol in blue ballpoint pen. I can still read all the words.

6) Trying not to let wanting to live in Maine mar my enjoyment of visiting Maine. A romantic once told me, "It's an emergency that I'm not with you." That's how I feel about here when I'm here. It's an emergency that I spend most of the year Away.

from my seat over the wing

2008-07-21T23:27:00.005-04:00

I saw a yellow moon rising. Far below were the lights of a city. Above were stars that looked closer. On our level, a thundercloud flashed with lightning.

We went through heavy clouds to land. My heart beat faster when I heard the pilot tell the flight attendants to take their seats. While the plane slid back and forth I closed my eyes. I thought of the moon rising over the Puget Sound; pink, then orange, then white.

another day in the neighborhood

2008-07-10T17:23:00.004-04:00

The red hand had just gone up, so I stood on the corner of Walnut waiting for the light to go through another cycle. A silver-haired man stepped onto the curb from the crosswalk and walked into me. I could feel the crisp fabric of his suit on my bare arm. The impact wasn't hard, but it was significant, like half of each of our bodies went through each other. He kept walking, without saying anything or breaking stride.

"Stand your ground, they won't run into you," L always says when I shy away from people on the sidewalk. That's him being wrong. I've been hit before, by bicycle handlebars, by people's swinging hands, by baby strollers.

Today I was reminded me of the time, a few years ago, when a man sped through a crosswalk I had just stepped into (I had the green light) and looked into my eyes as he went by. I knew, from that glance, that my life meant no more to him than a fly's.

That guy looked like he hated me, but to the one today, I was invisible.

breakfast

2008-07-08T15:07:00.005-04:00

Joan wakes up and sees light moving across the wall opposite her bed. She gets up and looks out the window. The trees are black against the new snow. She sees Josh get out of the Jeep and slam the door. He’s smoking a cigarette. She can see the smoke rising above the silver car. She hates it when he smokes in her car.

She looks at the clock. 5:15. She’s wide awake – no point in trying to go back to sleep now. She always wakes up early these days, (but not always this early) and once she's up, she's up. She gets her robe from the back of the door, but stands there and waits until she hears her son cough, pull hard on the storm door, come inside. She doesn’t want to seem like she’s confronting him by meeting him at the door.

Her head aches. She needs a cup of tea. She smooths her hair back and waits.

Josh’s movements are all so familiar to her. She hears him throw his coat across the trunk in the porch, knock his boots off. When she hears the wooden floor creak as he goes through the living room, she waits another minute, then opens her door. She turns on the living room light. Josh has already turned the kitchen lights on and is looking for something in the refrigerator.

“Morning,” Joan says, moving toward the sink to fill the kettle.
“Hello,” says Josh, and he clears his throat loudly. He’s taking things out of the refrigerator and piling them on the counter – bacon, eggs, green peppers, mushrooms, an unopened brick of cheese.
“There’s some cheese already open,” Joan says.
“It’s moldy.”
“What? It looked fine yesterday.”
Josh shrugs and opens a can of Mountain Dew.

They don’t talk as the kettle heats up. Joan has to remind herself to just put two tea bags into the pot, not four. She sets the timer on the microwave and goes to the porch to put on her boots. The paper has already been delivered, thankfully. She stands for a minute in the cold, watching the sky lighten over the lake. It's supposed to snow again this afternoon.

She can hear the grease popping on the bacon when she goes inside. It already smells good. She pours her tea and goes into the addition to start the crossword. With the lights on, her son home, tea in hand, she can almost pretend that things are normal. In fact, she's determined that they are. Cyril will certainly come home today. He went farther than she expected, calling in at work, but she's sure it won't last.

"It's almost ready," Josh says from the kitchen. Joan gets up and brings her tea to the table. She gets out plates, silverware, paper napkins. She puts bread in the toaster.

Josh brings in the pan of eggs, scrambled with the peppers and mushrooms. He's such a good cook. It's so funny that he, and not Laura, inherited that interest. He throws a potholder on the table and sets the pan down. Then he goes out and gets another pan of bacon. Joan sighs but doesn't say anything. She wishes he had just used one pan.

The toaster pings and she takes the toast out.
"Toast?" she says to Josh.
He shakes his head and dumps eggs onto his plate.
Joan wishes she hadn't put in two pieces of toast. But she can eat them both. She reaches for the margarine, on Cyril's side of the table.

"So, what did you guys do last night?" Joan asks.
"Not much."
"Did you get to see Alex?"
"Yeah, he was there for a little while." Josh clears his throat again, then goes to get another Mountain Dew.
"I made an appointment for you to see the lawyer this afternoon," Joan calls out to the kitchen. Josh doesn't say anything.
"Did you hear me?" she says when he sits down.
"Yeah." He grabs a couple of pieces of bacon.
"Do you think you can get up and go to the appointment?"
Josh frowns. His resting expression is a frown. He's looking for something.
"What do you need?" Joan asks.
"Salt and pepper."
She hands them to him and waits. He keeps eating, noisily.
"Josh?"
"What?"
"Do you think you can get up and go to the appointment?"
"Sure, I guess." He pushes his chair back (she winces as she thinks of the floor getting scratched) and leaves the table. He puts his dishes next to the sink and takes his Mountain Dew with him.
"Do you want me to wake you up, or are you going to set an alarm?"
"What time is the appointment?" he yells from the stairs.
"One."
"Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Okay, you can wake me up."
"All right," Joan says. She doesn't want to, but can't help but add, "You're not going to be mad this time, are you?"
Josh doesn't respond.
"Because I don't want to have a problem waking you up."

He's already gone to bed. Joan sighs and finishes her toast, then takes a bit of egg and bacon. He's made too much egg -- a lot of it will go to waste. She wonders if she can put it in the refrigerator for later. She probably could. But who's going to want re-cooked egg later?

She gets up and finds an empty margarine container, puts the egg in that and puts it in the refrigerator. She eats the last piece of bacon and runs water into the pan. She scrapes Josh's plate and puts it in the dishwasher. For a minute she stands with her hand on the handle of the refrigerator and thinks of Cyril. Goddamn Cyril.

At Carpenters' Hall

2008-07-03T09:34:00.003-04:00

In Old City, we watch the lightning bugs fly low over the dark grass. L points out that they all turn off at the same time, then turn back on in waves.

The old trees are all around. One is a Magritte tree, tall and black against a lit building. "We know how lucky we are," a friend kept saying at his wedding.

We listen to horses' hooves on butcher block roads. There's a warm breeze constant on my face, and tonight I am glad to live here.

Captain Acadia

2008-06-27T15:39:00.003-04:00

Like long gull row
turn from wind, pain.
Trudge these light experiments:
rock deer mountain
enormous gorgeous language
almost through always
again.

routine

2008-06-27T00:32:00.004-04:00

Ate dinner on the roof tonight. It was getting dark, but still light enough to see our plates of pasta. We lit the citronella candle and compared Philly bugs to Maine bugs, how we have noseeums here too but probably nobody calls them that.

Yos

2008-06-25T23:29:00.004-04:00

Today I took the train to Atlantic City by myself. It took some effort to get myself up and ready and over to the train station on time, but I was glad when I did it. I'm feeling the aimlessness that comes from losing my routine. I'm supposed to be thrilled to be home for the summer with time to write. I'm not. I'm much more scared than excited.

In Atlantic City I stood under the pier for a long time. A steady breeze blew through, and the ocean was loud. I watched it crash around the pilings. Farther out the water sparkled with sunlight. This was what I'd come for. I needed to hear the ocean. Lately I've been craving earth -- I've spent several afternoons lying on my back in the grass in the park (after checking for dogshit and trash). I can never quite relax in the city, but there's something about unpavemented ground that calms me.

After the day of beach and gulls and reading and avoiding people as much as possible, I took the train home. And I accidentally sat next to a Talker.

For some reason, no matter how occupied I look -- headphones on, book or notebook in hand -- there's a certain kind of Talker that latches right on to me. This one started by asking if my book was good. I said it was. "Bestseller, huh?" Yes. (Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach). And then he talked, for about ninety minutes, all the way from Atlantic City to Philadelphia.

At a certain point I stopped being desperate for a view out the windows, for some time to think about my day, and went to Plan B. My Plan B, with Talkers, is to pretend or assume that things happen for a reason and that this Talker has something to teach me.

He looked to be in his late forties, hair graying around the temples. His parents are from Africa. He lived in Amsterdam for a while. He got a new job in Atlantic City three weeks ago, and has been commuting daily. He trained in Cape May for week. He talked about tourism in Cape May vs. Atlantic City vs. Philadelphia. He talked about crime in Philadelphia (how it's mostly people from Camden coming in for drugs and committing crimes) and about why drugs should be decriminalized. No argument from me. Few words from me at all, in fact.

He talked about quantum physics (the seat in front of us looks solid but is made up of moving molecules, etc. The observer changes the event, etc.) He was an economics major. In Jimmy Carter's time, CEOs on average made 40 times the salaries of their employees. Now it's 400 times. (Also, Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House, and W. took them off.) We have all the financial resources to fix our problems, but we don't have the right mindset. If a homeless man is given $20,000 dollars, he is most likely to quickly end up back where he started. It's because he's not ready to be prosperous. He's not ready for the opportunity he's been granted.

Finally he talked about people making things happen for themselves, a sort of determining our own destiny by manifesting what we want. We have to know for sure what we want, and we will get it. His example: he knew a couple who wanted desperately to get pregnant. They'd tried all the fertility treatments, everything. He told the woman to go out and buy some baby clothes and prepare to have a baby. She did, and she became pregnant. She also, apparently, started craving peppers. She had never liked them before, but suddenly she kept picking them up everywhere she went. She didn't know it, but these peppers were full of folic acid, which is what she needed to conceive.

I kind of swore off the new age stuff last year, but a light did turn on in my head, at least dimly. When he talked about how opportunities come around again and again, even if we don't accept them the first time, I thought about how I've been approaching this summer all wrong. I've been trying to create favorable conditions so I will be able to write and finish a book, but I haven't really believed that I could do it. I've been trying to force myself to write, and I've felt completely empty. But I've been expecting myself to fail, the way I've been "failing" all along. It's too much pressure. Better to believe that it's possible and necessary and not so painful and not such a big deal to write something.

When we are around creative people we want to be creative. We have to allow ourselves to create in non-threatening environments. That's another thing this guy talked about -- being motivated by love and not fear. Being motivated by fear doesn't work. This, of course, also applies to my situation. I used to love writing. When I was a kid I would go on endlessly telling stories to anyone who would listen. I don't remember ever worrying about getting into a story and not being able to invent an end. The more complicated, the better. I always found my way out.

So, anyway, this is an unconventional PoL entry, but I'm posting it as a sort of welcome back to myself. I knew this guy for an hour and a half tonight. Maybe there's a reason why.

magnetic poetry

2008-06-05T14:54:00.000-04:00

tell about after.

Fictions

2008-06-03T00:23:00.005-04:00

This is no time for fiction. It seems all anyone wants is the truth, even me. Why have stories lost their power? You'd think now would be a good time to escape into imagined worlds.

I guess the problem is not the release but the return.

April's end

2008-04-30T23:33:00.002-04:00

It's been so long. A really good sentence would be nice. I'd be happy with that -- just one.

Paper stacks on our picnic table, held down by jars of sea glass. It's still too windy. I have to go in. I grade papers in a spot of sun on the hardwood floor.

Next week I need to read my work at work. I need to choose a story that is non-threatening, non-revealing, not too depressing, complete. I want to fit in universally. I want to continue to blend.

L is untangling my ball of yarn. Our new plant is beyond him, near the window. Two days ago it sat on an unknown neighbor's steps, "free to a good home." I left a note in its place: "We will take good care of your plant."

Five minutes to a new month. Here's to lots of false starts and do-overs. Here's to trying again and again.

history

2007-11-06T23:31:00.000-05:00

They say prisoners miss the stars the most.

in the "office"

2007-10-24T16:50:00.000-04:00

I've got nothing. Fluorescent lights, a pile of stapled papers, some indistinct buzzing. In my grey office cubicle, in the basement, missing writing's wildness in the face of a checklisted appointment book. Or, not really "missing" it, not in the emotional sense, just noting its absence. I'm not unhappy. I just don't feel like I feel on a cold October night with the wind separating brittle leaves from the branches of trees, beech trees and birches. Or like I do on an early morning beach, pond flat calm, last night's campfire burned down to delicate gray ash. Replacing that is contentedness, efficiency, pride in not screwing up in my classes this time. Someday I'll learn to make room for both ways of living. But for now I'm just at work.

on tv

2007-09-27T09:26:00.000-04:00

Last night I watched a medical show about a woman who was pregnant for 46 years. The baby had died and turned to stone inside her, calcified in a shell, entombed, they kept saying. I was sorry when they chose to take it from her, after her body had cradled it for so long. It seemed that the two should remain forever entwined, become entombed together. But there it was, the baby she had denied, willed herself to forget, halved on an examining table, a secret beached for the world to see.

The woman said she felt a great weight had been lifted, that now, at 75, she could move on. Unnatural science brought to bear on grotesque nature, restoring the Right, the Normal, and easing her physical pain. The doctors spoke with excitement, the woman with resignation and relief.

fish dreams

2007-08-22T02:27:00.000-04:00

Apartment half full of half-full boxes. My bones feel out of place. Writing won't help me sleep tonight. The boxes have other people's interests on them. Petco. A George Foreman three-in-one combo (grill, ten-cup coffee maker, shower radio. All translucent aqua blue.) A picture of an office chair. (Not so interesting.) Moving won't help this headache. In fact, it makes it worse. A pretty turn of phrase, a magic charm to help me sleep. I packed those already.

Begin again. The way my foot looks when it's half in and half out of the lake, half deadpale and half lifelike. Starry sky half-covered with cloudbank. Glass of wine half full, full, full. Not interesting enough.

Begin again. Annie's half-heart locket. Halfhearted applause. (Maybe I have a rib out of place. I twist my trunk. No good.)

Begin. Half-moon reflected, the long white moon-path I'd swim along were I not so afraid of what's below it. Half-dead underwater skin, half-goosebumped, half-puckered. The other day I wrote a lie I hate to re-read (wait, I'll go get it):

Lie #2: I love eating live fish from fishtanks. I love the
way they flip around in my mouth, and the way they go
limp when I bite down. I keep the limp body in my
mouth for a second before I swallow. It makes me feel
powerful.

Sometimes, half-awake in grey morning light, I imagine there are dead goldfish in my bed, near my feet. It's all I can do not to flail away from them. This has happened more than once.

Larger dead fish don't bother me so much.

Again. No closer to sleeping. No closer to anything, except I just finished my water. I drink bottled water. You're not supposed to do that anymore.

Begin again. Should I be numbering this? Would that make it easier to read? Would that make anything easier?

I remember a dead fish on a lakerock. I didn't know what it was at first, and I asked my grandmother to get it for me. She was visiting. I don't remember what happened then. She didn't pick it up or anything. No screaming. Somehow we discovered it was a fish. It was shiny silver. It was on its side. Strange, the things you never forget.

Also the fish in our fishtank, having babies one morning before church, right after Dad got the new car. All the babies swimming around, and then we realized that the mother was eating them. Mom put a glass pitcher over the mother, to keep her from eating her children. But they died anyway. I don't have that picture in my mind, thank God. Just of them swimming around, big-eyed, and the mother gulping them up, which is bad enough.

Now I'll probably have those fish-dreams again.

If I ever fall asleep.

These days, I don't close my eyes in the shower for long. But I used to sometimes imagine fish floating around my ankles in the backed-up water. I haven't thought about that in a long time.

I hate fishtanks, but love aquariums. At the Boston Aquarium I saw a school of silver fish, moving fast, all in the same direction, except for one that was dead. The body was sort of moving in the same direction, but not really keeping up. Its eye was wide and staring, but then all the live ones' eyes were too. (I wrote it's and changed it. Maybe I am getting tired.) I didn't mind that dead fish, but I still remember it.

I can hear the trashtruck picking up the dumpster in the street below our apartment. It picks it up and shakes it into itself, and there's the sound of glass breaking. I bet it smells like fish. Dead fish. That's what they usually smell like.

I had a scratch-n-sniff sticker that ostensibly smelled like dead fish. On it was a picture of a trashcan with a limp fish on top, with an x for an eye. The dead Boston Aquarium fish did not have an x for an eye.

In college my next-door neighbor had one leg. (This detail is not an integral part of the recollection.) He was very good at skiing. Skiing and banging on girls' doors in the middle of the night, demanding to be let in. He never banged on my door, though. (That's not integral to the story either.) He was going away on a skiing trip and he had a fishtank (oh ho! she gets to the point) and he asked if he could leave the fishtank in my room while he went away on his trip. He promised that he would take me skiing later in the winter if I fishsat for him. Reluctantly, I said okay (this long recollection is breaking whatever form I had established for this piece. Nevertheless.) I remember him standing next to my dorm room window, after having put his fishtank on the windowsill. He moved slightly awkwardly, but was really barely hampered by only having the one leg. He was pouring water into the tank and I was looking on with dread, and I finally said, "I can't do it. I hate fish." It was awkward, but I knew I couldn't handle it, a weekend with fish in my room.

Begin again. Still about fish -- I also don't mind when the lake fish bite my toes. It's startling, but okay. I kick at them, and they go away. They have hard mouth ridges, not differentiated teeth. At least, that's what it feels like. I assume that to be true.

I assume a lot of things to be true that may not actually be true. Perhaps that's one of my faults. Or strengths.

I have a bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. We have eaten almost everything in the apartment, in preparation for moving. But the bag of shrimp is still there. It's been there for a long time, because the last time I thawed some of those shrimp bodies and ate them I realized how similar to fish bodies they were. "Come on," L said, "don't do that to yourself. You love shrimps." I do. But the fact remains, they are little dead fish bodies. Not quite as slippery as goldfish, at least. I think it would actually be better if they were the peel-and-eat kind, with legs on. Peeling them would distract me, I think. Now, that is odd. Why do I make these distinctions?

This makes me sound like I am obsessed with fish. But really I only think about them once in a while. They're on my mind because I just read a passage in a book about a girl's fish dying when someone unplugged their tank overnight. The girl and her father flushed the fish down the toilet. That is not what we did in our family. Our plumbing was too unreliable, so we buried our fish in margarine containers.

Begin again. I am beginning to wonder if this will ever come to a natural end. I am beginning to think I will have to end it abruptly. But perhaps some better images to end with? Something to keep me from thinking about fish when I try to sleep again?

What is the opposite of dead fish? Polar bears? NO! Bears eat fish. Iowa? Yes, that. Somewhere as far away from water as possible. Wide plains-n-prairies. Buffalo with their shaggy dusty coats and formidable horns.

Packing boxes half-full of not-fish. (Ah, symmetry.) Eyes heavy-lidded, mind clear of fish, mind full of tumbleweeds that bounce along a dusty, deserted street, leaving no trails.

awake

2007-08-19T13:52:00.000-04:00

Night, on a motorboat big enough to stand on, cruising over a black lake with stars above. Seventeen, and I thought now my life will be like this.

caught

2007-08-17T01:45:00.000-04:00

Tonight the ocean on TV, dark blue water and wide-clouded blue sky and a boat going up and down over the choppy waves.

I know that boat smells like rotten fish, and I know you could chop off a finger or two on the gear it carries. Live lobsters pinch; and they stay dangerous even when they're dead, when they're boiled red, black eyes sightless but shells still hard. Even after you pull off the thick wet rubber bands from the lifeless claws you cut your fingers, no matter how careful you are when you crack and bend the shells to get to the meat that you'll dip into butter bubbled white on top, the little metal cup of butter that makes a dark stain on the wood of the picnic table. You go too fast and cut yourself and those little lobsterspine cuts will sting for days.

I doubt I'd last a day on a lobster boat, but I long for it anyway, long to lie in bed at night feeling like I'm still rising and falling with the boat over the water, limbs tired after a day of physical work, eyes dry from the wind, skin sunburned tight.

Or at least I long for that picnic table, the sweet reward of a slow meal, the table set on a rocky beach with boats resting at anchor, and mountains blue beyond the bay, the fishermen at rest, too, gone home to their dinners and beds.

I can't describe how much I miss it, the shock of the cold Atlantic numbing my feet at the beach, the water coming in and going out around my cold white skin, how it looks like I'm what's moving, not the sand and the water. Watching the fishing boats move from trap to trap with their clouds of gulls and their blaring radios, circling, circling.

I miss the sea-and-skyline, the neverending noise of wind and water, the bell buoy calling, lonely, bobbing in an empty patch of dark blue sea.

age ten

2007-08-09T03:00:00.001-04:00

My new best friend's new house smelled like new carpets. She had a blacktopped driveway and her garage smelled like golden retrievers and her basement smelled like laundry detergent and her refrigerator made ice cubes. Now and then we would stop to fill heavy glasses with ice and water. But we didn't have time to stop for long. We were playing our new game, stumbling around the house with our eyes closed and arms outstretched, trying to find our way.

never

2007-08-08T02:02:00.000-04:00

And late one night, after the others had left, they were in a building dark inside but outside bright with falling snow. They could hear the snow piling. And they were strange but familiar to each other, and when they had decided to go and avoid catastrophe, he pulled her back for one more moment in that strangely-lit room.

Eakins Oval

2007-08-07T01:19:00.001-04:00

Today they staged a disaster
over by the art museum.
We thought about watching
but didn't.

skin

2007-08-06T01:26:00.000-04:00

She had never noticed the freckle above her lover's navel. Not until that afternoon, as he lay on the bed with his shirt pulled up, humidity-sweat dried by the fan's weak breeze. How had she never noticed? Maybe she had and forgot, and she wondered what else she had forgotten, what peculiarities of other lovers' bodies.

She wondered if mothers forgot or if they memorized every inch of their babies' clean, unbroken planes of skin and remembered them always. How would it be to be a mother and see a beloved child's skin pierced, reddened, by jewelry? Or inked by tattoos or broken by misfortune? How would it be to rush a child's compound fracture to the hospital, seeing the bright white bone no one was ever meant to see, laid out like a myth, an excavation, to be studied and reburied changed, documented, no longer a secret.

What would it be like to give a child up, to let it grow up and go away to a lover who would know the adult body better than a mother ever could?

And why didn't she treasure his body, the skin that she alone viewed, she and he together and separately and daily? How could she not notice, but then how could she? It was impossible to live on the plane of the first flush of love, when lovers sat at each other's tables and devoured the details of each other. After that first feast, they took the crumbs of details as they came: summer hair brightened by sunlight, knees that ached in movie theaters, skin pulled tight over shoulder bones. And these things changed and changed and changed.

She had overlooked the freckle before, but at least she knew now.

the archivist

2007-08-05T02:12:00.000-04:00

As a child, she collected Gouda cheese wax, molding it into a ball that reached softball proportions. She collected Strawberry Shortcake dolls and My Little Ponies (checking them off on back-of-the-box lists and sending off for free extras with berry points or Pony points). She collected bottlecaps and business cards from every restaurant her family went to, every hotel they stayed at. She went home from the beach with buckets full of shells and rocks. Once she made a person-shaped figure out of Prince Edward Island vacation mud and brought it home, dried and heavy, and set it on her bookshelf.

She saved all of her high school binders, full of worksheets and quizzes and papers and notes. She saved her journals in a fireproof box. She saved her high school swim cap, even though it disintegrated into powder over the years. She saved all of her ragged racing suits. When her other favorite clothes started to wear out, she stopped wearing them, in order to preserve them for special occasions.

She saved the lighter a friend gave her in college, even though she didn't smoke. She saved the McDonald's toys she got when they went out for late-night snacks. She saved programs for plays. She saved movie tickets and put them into a binder with plastic pages and little pockets. She saved concert tickets, sports tickets, raffle tickets. She saved beer mats, writing the date on them and what she ate or drank at the restaurants she stole them from.

She tried to get extras of things, one to use and one to save, one to display and one to keep in the box. When her favorite shampoo or conditioner was discontinued, she saved a little bit of the last bottle in a jar, so she would always be able to open it up and remember the scent, how her hair had smelled at a certain time of her life.

She became a teacher. She took pictures of each of her classes on the first and last days and on special occasions. She kept her pictures in the envelopes with the negatives, wrote the dates on the outsides and ordered them in a plastic waterproof box. When she got her digital camera she kept all of her pictures in computer folders and sub-folders, carefully labeled with dates and details. She took many pictures, trying to depict things from all angles, never knowing what she would find most important later on. She made a new music mix every month, and chose a picture to go with each and typed up the song list and dated them and organized them oldest to newest.

When she cooked special meals, she took pictures, and put the pictures in a book with the recipes copied out underneath. She saved wine corks, and wrote notes on them about the meals the wines accompanied. She kept the pads of paper she doodled on when she talked on the phone. She dated the doodles. She saved calendars (stickered with different stickers for days she exercised, days she practiced the guitar, days she wrote in her journal). She saved datebooks, bank statements, emails, she archived her emails into folders and downloaded them in zip files and sometimes she printed them and put them into binders.

She often dreamed about packing. In the dreams, she was always in a hurry, and she always had to decide what she'd need to bring with her. Sometimes she had to get out of a burning house, and she had to choose what to save.

She never lost things, not even pens. She could always account for all of her belongings at all times. When she traveled she counted the number of bags she brought with her and she stopped to re-count every time she sat down or stood up or relocated. She put her boarding passes in special pockets. She opened her bag every once in a while and touched them, to be absolutely sure they were still there. She saved the airplane itineraries she printed for trips. When she traveled, she collected spoons, shot glasses, postcards, little plastic license plates with her name on them. She collected Christmas ornaments, then Halloween decorations, then Easter. She collected corked glass bottles full of sand.

After hikes she pressed pine needles and sweet ferns and autumn leaves into her hiking journals that mapped her routes.

She kept all these things, neatly organized and labeled. Someday she might want to look back and see how she had lived.

coffee run

2007-08-03T22:55:00.001-04:00

They got L's Coolatta wrong again. Thick with cream that coats the back of the tongue, not nearly enough ice. I tried to suck the syrup out -- still not right. It's in the freezer now, straw bent down. I'll drink it tomorrow.

berry picker

2007-08-03T11:30:00.000-04:00

In August they worked in the blueberry fields. Most berry fields were raked by migrant workers and high school kids, making their way down long lanes of berry bushes, the lanes marked by white strings. But not at this farm. Here they picked the berries by hand, a whole crowd of children and their benevolent boss.

She wanted to be just like her boss, tan and strong and funny, with beautiful light blue eyes. She sat as close to her boss as she could while they picked berries and listened to the radio, sometimes talking but often not. Her brother was nearby, with his best friends. And her best friend was there, too. Sometimes she and her best friend talked about the school clothes they would buy with their berry money. Her best friend had lists and bookmarked catalogs of all the outfits she wanted.

Some days the berries were bad, and she picked only six pints or so, six dollars' worth. On her best day she got 25. Some days it rained too hard to pick berries, and some days it just misted and they went out and got wet.

The sky was usually wide, August blue. The air smelled of berries, and when she was hungry she could eat berries and when she was thirsty there was a communal Coleman thermos of clear, cold well water. Berries squished into her shoes, stained her clothes. At night she dreamed of berry bushes. She learned to roll the berries into her hand, get a handful and then transfer them into the green cardboard pint box and then put the pint box in a row of others like it in the wooden flat.

From berry picking and from her boss she learned what it was to build exactly the life you wanted, bit by bit.

city sky

2007-05-24T00:19:00.001-04:00

At first it's just dark. But I look long enough to see one faint star, and then more -- light freckles, few and far.

sledding

2007-05-22T01:41:00.001-04:00

Remember what it feels like when snow wedges between boot and bare leg? How your skin turns red and you can see your pores and you brush at the snow with your mitten to get it out fast? Some melts. The melted snow gets the top of your sock wet. Your sock is already scrunched down around your heel because of the boot, because of the running around. Your sock's wet and your ankle hurts with cold, but it doesn't hurt enough to go inside.

You pull the leg of your snow pants back around the boot where it belongs and you grab your red plastic sled, last-year's sled, faded from being stored under the deck, just barely in the path of the sun. The sled has some brown leaves frozen into the back of it, in the hollow part behind the seat. You would have thought the leaves would have shaken loose when you flipped the sled, but they didn't, not yet.

You run uphill, next to the sled path that's been smoothed by the sleds going down, messed up only a little bit near the bottom where you dumped it last time. You pull your sled behind you by the rope and you dig the toes of your boots into the snow hard to get enough traction to climb the hill. You look back when one of your sled's metal brakes catches. You look back just a little too long and maybe you've veered into the sled path a little bit, a wayward step when your going-forward was stopped by the brake catching.

You look back for just long enough to pull your sled free, and when you look forward, BAM, your brother hits you full-on, his hard head catching your chin, making you fall over backward and wedging your boot full of snow again. Your face hurts from the impact and the cold and your brother's snowsuited body is on top of your snowsuited body and you push him off. Then he pushes you because you pushed him and because you were in the way.

And you never, even for a minute, imagine that you'll miss this someday, that your body will miss the impact of his body, that you'll miss all those times when you fought in the snow and he was right there at arms' length. You lie back and he lies back, and you and he are breathing hard and sweating in your snowsuits, and you're upside down on the hill with the blood rushing into your heads. You look up at the night sky, the tree branches, the dizzying stars. Someday you will ache for this.

new blog

2007-05-17T14:50:00.000-04:00

I have a new blog that's just for reviews:
http://sundaymorningreviews.blogspot.com/

thanks for reading!

pedestrian

2007-05-12T00:49:00.000-04:00

I cross my fingers when I cross the street.

Rittenhouse Square #2

2007-05-03T23:55:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I saw a little crew-cutted kid carrying a plastic machine gun and a ukelele.

Logan Circle

2007-04-29T01:19:00.000-04:00

Tonight I was watching when the fountain turned off.

Rittenhouse Square

2007-04-20T22:52:00.000-04:00

"My bike weighs, like, 200 tons. Literally." BMX kid borrowing his friend's bike.

plain brown notebooks

2007-04-18T11:29:00.000-04:00

I dreamed about a stack of ring-bound notebooks with music written in them. They were carefully labeled on the front in thick black pen, but I don't remember the words. Someone showed me a page of music -- neatly defined lines covering the page, dark notes penciled in. He pointed to a spot where the letter "i" was written, more lightly than the rest of the notes. "That's where the musician died," the man told me. But just after the i, the notes continued, as sure as before.

looking up

2007-04-11T21:53:00.000-04:00

The metal trim of a building on Market Street still says, "Hats Trimmed Free of Charge".

nameless

2007-04-07T01:05:00.000-04:00

One day I'm at the mall, reading. The mall has big windows, and that's why I'm here. Or so I tell myself. I'm sitting on a bench and reading when the old woman next to me turns and says,
"Do you speak American?"
Started, I say yes.
"What do you think of Anna Nicole Smith?" she says.
I'm usually good at small talk, but I have no idea how to respond. "I don't know," I say. "What do you think?"
"I think it's sad," she says.
"Yeah." I feel something else is required of me. "And she just had that baby."
"I know! And all these people claiming to be the father."
A few years ago I would have tried to keep this conversation going, out of a sense of obligation. But today I don't really feel like it. I smile and go back to my book.
A while later the lady mentions the weather. She says soon we'll wish for this cold weather, when it's hot and humid. She says she goes down the shore in the summer sometimes, but she has to be careful because her skin is fair. "Like yours," she says.
I put my bookmark in my book and put the book in my bag.
"I like your ring," I say. I do. It's big and bright green.
"Dollar store!" says the lady.
We talk about her sister-in-law, about the bus, about poor Anna Nicole. This woman is lonely, and it is my un-volunteered-for job to ease other people's loneliness. Will I get to this point, I wonder? Will I feel the need to go out and sit on a bench in a public place and talk to strangers, just to hear the sound of my own voice responding to someone else's? The thought strikes me as self-pitying, so I excuse myself as politely as I can, say goodbye to the nameless woman, make my own lonely way down the mall corridor, out into the windy street.

lost

2007-04-05T16:34:00.000-04:00

It's been a year today. The trees are blooming again, abundant white like debutante dresses. (I look up dogwoods. Are they dogwoods?)

Beauty and fragility, everything still temporary. What is eighty years?

How many years does a tree ring signify? (I find the word dendochronology.)

I search under your name, and there you are, in front of your piano in a sleek black sweater, looking amused, as you always seemed to be, at the attention. The picture hits my breastbone hard, jarring me (I look up whiplash).

I see you, but I can't hear your voice (I search, and search, and search).

the city

2007-03-28T23:56:00.000-04:00

A man comes into the Wawa convenience store as I'm about to leave. He spills a whole container of thick pink yogurt on the floor, stuffs the container in a trash can, and leaves, shaking his head.

//

2007-03-19T09:36:00.000-04:00

The alarm/snooze/alarm rips my sleep into bright ribbons. I dream I get ready and ride to work with L. When I wake up, he's standing next to our bed in the city where we don't have cars.

Ralph

2007-03-14T17:18:00.000-04:00

I'm grading papers at the Rodin museum when he comes into the courtyard. He sits on a wooden bench nearby and takes off his shirt. He has a plastic bag stuffed with clothes -- not a garbage bag but a shopping one. He takes out a new bag of Jax and opens it. I look back down at my papers. Somehow I know he'll come talk to me, even though nobody's ever bothered me here before. He sits down at the end of my bench and offers me some Jax. I smile and refuse. We lie to each other for a while.
"You a student?" he asks.
"Yeah."
"Where at?"
"Drexel."
"Over at University City?"
"Yeah."
"I used to go there. Over to University City. Penn, Drexel. Did a year at community college."
I nod.
"You a junior?"
"Senior."
'Doing homework?"
"Yeah."

"What's your field?" He has to ask it three times before I can hear the word correctly. He's wearing a blue plastic wristband that says "Stop Prostate Cancer." His eyes are brown, ringed with blue.
"English," I say. Then, because it seems impolite not to add anything, "What do you do?"
"Career man. Retired."
"That's the way to be."
His hair is tight gray curls, clean-looking, and he's wearing new-ish work boots. His jeans are too big, rolled down at the waist. The museum closes in half an hour. If he gets weird, I can leave while the security guard is locking the gates. Plus all his stuff is over at the other bench. He wouldn't want to leave that behind.

He leans back and hums, just a long, tuneless mmmmmm. His stomach is round, his dark skin hairless and unwrinkled, as if for all of his life he's been this exact same size.

I go back to my work, making notes on a bad Freshman paper on euthanasia.
"Got a drink?" he says.
"Just water."
"Mmm."
"Want some?"
"Maybe in a minute." He gestures with the Jax bag, "These are dry."

"You write book reports?" he says.
"Uh...sure."
"What's your book report on?"
"Which one? The last one? The Great Gatsby." (It's my stock answer to "What's your favorite book?")
"Oh yeah. The Great Gatsby."
"You read it?"
"It's about a butler, right?"
"Yeah."
He looks pleased with himself, like he thinks he's tricking me.

We sit for a while longer, then I pack up.
"You want that water?" I say.
"Yeah, I'll have a sip."
"You can have it."
"The whole thing? Thanks."
"Sure."
"What's your name?"
I tell him. "What's yours?"
He thinks. "Ralph."
"You going back to school?" Ralph says.
"Yeah."
"Maybe I'll see you over there sometime."

impermanence

2007-03-08T20:36:00.000-05:00

Almost a year since you released your balloon strings. Eighty years of treasured things drifted to the auction, the archive, the antique store. On my desk, a brass napkin ring inscribed with your name.

stars

2007-02-15T20:45:00.000-05:00

Tonight it's cold enough to see Orion above the city lights.

winter Schuylkill

2007-02-07T00:13:00.000-05:00

Today the reflections don't move. In spite of the cold, I stop on the bridge to look -- it's the first time I've seen the river ice over. Scallops of white where the top currents ran slow, slower, thick with cold.

blackberries

2007-02-05T23:19:00.000-05:00

With the taste of store-bought blackberries, unexpectedly, the Big Rock. Before the wooden walkway, when we leaned the heels of our hands against one granite wall and sidestepped bare toes across another. When the brambles made thin marks on our dry, tanned legs, we picked blackberries in the late-summer sun. And ate them. And swam. Lakewater washing our juice-stained hands.

hardened

2007-02-01T21:23:00.000-05:00

A woman sobs on the other side of the street. I sneak a look. She's walking in the other direction, pulling a plaid shopping bag on wheels. And because she could be crazy, or drunk, or faking, because I'm not in Maine, I look ahead and walk faster.

unseasonable #2

2007-02-01T21:21:00.000-05:00

Unmelted snow rings the trees. Tree, mulch, snow, grass.

day's end

2007-01-31T21:04:00.000-05:00

The unflickering fire of sunset in the windows.

blanch

2007-01-30T22:35:00.000-05:00

A pile of fine chalk dust on my desk in front of the classroom.

Road salt against a telephone pole, small round balls of it clinging together like styrofoam.

Snow sideways in the streetlights.

winter weather

2007-01-29T13:31:00.000-05:00

A fine crust of snow on the balcony, shaped by the wind.

reality

2007-01-29T01:19:00.000-05:00

We eat at the diner next to the now-empty Real World house. I wonder if the Real World Roommates ate at this diner, if the camera angles and fast cuts made it look more "interesting" in the episodes. If the filters made the neon lights brighter, the cheesesteak cheesier, the diner an approximation of a diner. The real world blurred and fictionalized, baked, cut, frosted and served.

30th Street

2007-01-27T23:40:00.000-05:00

On a thick column, the shadow of the statue's wing.

Snow Day

2007-01-23T11:35:00.001-05:00

Grass looks greener when it's poking through snow.

Shannon's room

2007-01-22T14:22:00.000-05:00

My friend Shannon lived in Boston for a few years. She worked as an RA at a boarding school, so she had a tiny room and bathroom in an old stone dorm. When I visited, I slept on the top bunk, and we talked and giggled like Girl Scouts until we fell asleep at night. She also worked at the YMCA, which meant that she had to get up early in the morning, four thirty or five. I remember the grey light through the window and the warmth of the flannel sheets from LL Bean, the smell of french vanilla Dunkin Donuts coffee, and the pleasure of being able to fall back asleep for as long as I wanted.

The light is the same today -- grey sky, snow on the rooftops.

Fidgeting

2007-01-21T23:08:00.000-05:00

I have a pile of clay poker chips on my desk, next to the computer. I sift them with one hand, overlap them one on another and then move them back into their neat stack, over and over. They're vaguely nautical -- white with blue stripes on the outside edges. I don't play poker, but I admire people who do, the ones who play it for their lives. I like the clicking sound my chips make when they snap into place.

Food Court

2007-01-20T18:55:00.000-05:00

The cleaning lady leans on the counter to talk to the high school girl who works at the deli. As the mall shoppers finish their dinners and the workers clean up, new tables and chairs are brought in and covered with tablecloths. Lighthouse candle holders and napkin rings on every table. Buckets for vacation raffle tickets on a church-supper table outside the popcorn store. People in gowns and tuxes coming in to replace me in my jeans and sweatshirt and the other mall-goers in their newsboy hats, sheepskin boots, shiny hairsprayed hair. A man directs another who is moving the new cars that have been parked on the mall's main floor. There's a sense of pleasant activity -- the food court workers getting ready to go home, the store workers folding sweaters on cardboard cards, making sure each corner is square, each pile is of equal size. The caterers ready to start their night's work. The rich dressed up, excited to see each other and maybe to compare gowns and careers. There's a boat show at the convention center. We would have gone, just to see the big boats, see what a boat show is exactly, but tickets were fifteen dollars apiece.

We buy a bag of popcorn and go out into the cold night, to get a frozen pizza at the 7-11. And when I come home and ask L what I should write about today, he says, "write about the mall, about the guys moving the cars and the lighthouse stuff." So I do, I write it without knowing my place in it all.

Dear Connie

2007-01-19T18:25:00.000-05:00

Today I bought an ice pick. Wood-handled, wood-sheathed. Like the one we used to open your mail. A bargain at $3.50. Already I'm afraid I'm forgetting, on a slow train away from the city of you.

Hotel Apollo

2007-01-18T23:11:00.000-05:00

Skinny, three stories high. Burned-out, skull-socket windows. When I moved here the windows were full of broken glass. Then there was a padlock on the door, now plywood reinforcements. And they've fenced off the street in front. Something is afoot.

A cold night

2007-01-17T17:56:00.000-05:00

The lights of a far-off building shimmer in the rising heat from another.

Compounded

2007-01-15T21:37:00.000-05:00

I wake up with a sore neck. I look outside and see a man on a bench in the rain, head in hands. It doesn't make me feel better.

Offseason

2007-01-14T23:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the Cira's lights were Eagle-green, but tonight they're back to blue. The building's top is lost in mist.

The Hawk Again

2007-01-12T16:14:00.000-05:00

He lands to rest on the gold cross of the Basilica and I realize how big it must be, to make the him look like the smallest sparrow. He drops off, flaps his wings, and glides, making small adjustments.

Outside the Public House

2007-01-11T21:20:00.000-05:00

"Be right back," the man calls, and runs away up the sidewalk. It's a duck-run, awkward, exaggerated for his friends. "Dude, where you going?" his buddy calls, the two girls giggling beside him. The man's steps lengthen, the wind presses his business shirt against his chest.

Quarter of Five

2007-01-10T16:54:00.000-05:00

The buildings gold with setting sun.

Unseasonable

2007-01-09T18:03:00.000-05:00

Confused trees
budding in warm sun.
Still January.