my dog dreams of trains [poem]
How a cardboard Princess Leia scared my roommate [short short]
The Full-Time Sentence Finisher [comic]
How a cardboard Princess Leia scared my roommate [short short]
The Full-Time Sentence Finisher [comic]
Needed: curtains.
--Because I covet my lover's nakedness. Except when she's looking at on-line pictures with her mom and her beautiful breasts make a surprise appearance.
I'm still sorry about that.
[note he left for me]
one morning, a few months ago, when it was still awkward to wake up and find your body next to mine, we left your house together, early. still glowing from this new new thing we'd only just discovered hiding inside of one another. we drank coffee and went shopping for new sheets. in the warm car, driving north on 14th street through the frosted grey morning, we talked and smiled, and you reached across the seat and wiped my runny nose with your bare hand. just one seemingly insignificant moment--i knew.
you think she's an open book,
but you don't know which page to turn to, do you?
do you? do you? do you?
Oh, sweet disappointments that could be waiting for me at the scrap heap! Like all those things that remind me of the time I was breaking up with my eighth grade boyfriend. Sweet Slick vinyl seated dreams of something awfully aqua or puke green. To curl up cozy and make my calves purr into delirious soundlessness. My scalp itches and begs for attention just to think of it.
i've been researching baby names, just in case.
this morning he calls from the floor of his bathroom and hung-over in between puking and too sick to make it to work.
what the hell am i getting myself into.
This morning on the way to campus, while I carried my coffee and tried not to slosh it all over my white shirt, just like the idiot words I'd stored up and then spilt all over you without necessary reason, a kid from (what I can only guess is) the school for the challenged ran up and out of the drive and passed me on the sidewalk. His feet pumped against pavement like freedom.
Later in my head, I saw him burst into furious flames of attained desire like sugar under high heat. No chains no hands to drag him back to where he so desperately spun from.
Words spin and go until I find myself over-exposed. That chemical smell of the water bath in the darkroom in a memory stuck in the back of my throat. Words like bright lights to burn in. Exposing unmasked areas. Nothing like a test strip to save you paper and time and the swell of curses from doing it all wrong the first thousand tries. The rejects spinning and sloshing in the running pail behind you in the dark to remember not to forget how it all goes, next time.
I write to her and say, Mom, I don't know what I do what I've done this nightmare version of myself that doesn't want to stop making everything luster-less. In strange moments of honesty, I tell her that I don't want this or anything else about me to deliver up your locus of regret. I cut and paste numbers corresponding to nothing into documents full of words that fly by nonsensical like boys on fire until it's my turn to go.
Walking too long through this city in the afternoon is like baking a cake with your head in the oven. I walk until I feel like I might fall down. Until I lose track of where I am and where I've been. Turn toward what I think might be the direction of home. These legs like those wavy heat lines that drive up from asphalt in summer. Stop by the building next to the building I used to work in that I don't have a name for and throw up into some random toilet, twice. In my head, I have one of those meta-conversations with myself (and the grey and blue tiled floor) about just how much I hate throwing up in foreign bathrooms, especially pubic ones. Wash my hands and face with cold water, and walk the rest of the way home.
I check for signs of fire-boy, but only find a drunk stinking man asleep on one of the benches near where he arrived, and the Indigo Girls sing into my ears not to take a picture -- to remember it in my head -- and then you're there -- and they sing something about a heart, but I can't hear it over the buzzing sound of construction at the church as I pass.
He is crazy about you and that needs to be enough to let you know he only means things in a good way. Try not to worry; all will be well if it isn't already. Just be sure you don't cry all the time. He will get tired of that. Love and kisses and keep me posted, I would hate to have to fly back there to knock some sense into you two. --Mom
I stop then. Remember what if feels like to breathe and what that means about love these days. Write with permanent marker onto my left forearm:
don't cry all the time.
If I had slept at all last night, I'm sure I would have dreamt about pizza. Melted cheesy top like the firey red-gold glow of the burning Fall leaves on an old beautiful tree that I've imagined myself simple and beautiful marrying you in front of while our close friends and family looked on sitting in the grass like perfect picnics on hilltops overlooking the lake near which I first, and then always, wanted you to kiss me.
i'm allergic to my boyfriend's cat
*oh, lord, this post has finally rendered this blog completely inane and irrelevant.
mym, lym
and kinds of strength and understanding, just when i need it most.
best friends are like that
yep, they are.
I'm trying to write, but nothing comes out. The last words typed, yesterday--before I found out that I owe more in taxes than I make in over 2 months wages and then cried self-pity intermittently into and out of people who love me and then into my pillow until my alarm rang me into hitting the long glossy give me 10 more minutes bar on the top front edge of my bedside clock--were: ideological divide. Then there's nothing. Then there's this. The slow spiral sirens calling out the tornado alarms yesterday afternoon like the punctuation of the empty spot on my couch that you left. That remained. A pang of the loss left to ring in my ears like a bell that's been struck. The silent ferocious fuck raising blood in the back of my throat to the smell of sun warmed pennies. Memory game. The endless mind suck of time and words.
I should go wash the sheets.
friday night one of my writer friends asked if i'd read something different at an upcoming special reading in two weeks. i don't really have anything cool or interesting that i've been working on . . . but the idea started simmering in my head that there are people out there who have been writing a lot lately about writing (or not writing) . . . and that if any of those people wanted to write a short something funny or different or whatever about that topic that seems to be on all of our heads that i'd love to read a collection of these thoughts from writers near and far.
if you're at all interested--let me know.
He1 says that I am without question the sexiest girl in the department and then sits next to me in the booth far too closely.
My ex sits across from us wide eyed and later says far too many years late that I am beautiful and sexy and intelligent and irreplaceable.
He2 holds me inappropriately in an embrace outside the bar, his hands somehow inside my rib cage, his face and lips and breath inside my hair, an hour or so after he exclaims in front of a group of our mutual friends at the inexplicable situation that we aren't currently dating, and says finely tuned words like loved for guitar strings are strung.
I call Him twice on two different occasions, aside from other modes of communication, to say stupid desperate words that sound a lot like I miss you and I need you and you are so much and
even though this love is impossible to compare to anything else before or since
I am still this me, now, and
he doesn't show
and that is
way more than
enough, now.
crawl under the desk to plug in the corresponding cords then click it on but even before i can finish the 15 second message just to say hello, my voice cracks into tears
and what remains--
Just in from smoking half a cigarette, of which I've not done in probably as long since you've seen me do such, and already probably drunk on one tall glass of red wine, I remark inside my head, hard, that it's still slightly odd, disconcerting even, that at least one--if not all--of these rooms that I currently occupy, don't anymore hold the scent of you just like they used to.
