Leah’s Sweater

Did you notice the sweater in the closet?

What sweater?

It’s like one of those Irish sweaters, it wasn’t there before.

Maybe your Dad left it.

No, it’s not his.

Well, I’m sure it’s someone’s.

The sweater was cream colored and only a little scratchy. It looked like it would be warm and keep you cozy on a damp night.

Leah wanted to wear it but felt a little conflicted.

You’re not mine, she whispered to the sweater. But she slipped it on anyway.

There was something off about the fit, but she threw it on over her fall dress and with her dark tights she looked more East Coast than West. She liked this coastal disconnect.

To say it was a reflection of how she felt wouldn’t be exactly true, because she didn’t feel disconnected. Sometimes she’d make Chris laugh by unplugging her hair dryer and saying, “what happened to the spark?”

She felt connected to a lot of things: her need for coffee in the morning, her need for a walk in the afternoon, smiles from the people at the bookstore where she worked.

The sweater felt like a disguise and a revelation. Leah was both herself and someone she was pretending to be. She kept wondering if she’d bump into whatever friend must have left it at her place one night over beers and nachos or whatever they’d had for dinner.

At the bookstore, Leah was on the register for the first four hours of her shift then stocking for two. It was quiet but humming. You could secret yourself away for a minute if you needed to. Sometimes she did. Because she did need to.

There is something about a bookstore with matte black walls that makes you feel you’ve entered a club and a tomb and a place of worship. That’s what Leah had thought when she came in with her resume.

She looked like she fit in at the bookstore. Beautiful and complicated in a serene way. She had evident quirks, eyes that flashed curious, a healthy figure, nice hands. It would have been too much for her to be gap toothed and she wasn’t, her teeth were just regular in that way that most people’s are now. Her smile was frequent and toothy.

She rode her bike to work and under the sweater she sweat and thought – is that why they call it a sweater? Like that time in the airport when she’d exclaimed – I’m tired of lugging this around! And realized just how hysterical it was to call it luggage.

She wore a helmet mostly because of her mom. If anything ever happened (God forbid) she did not want somebody saying, your daughter was seriously injured riding her bike on the way to work. No, she wasn’t wearing a helmet.

It was the same reason she always wore her seatbelt. And didn’t drive after drinking. And tried to keep up with regular pap smears. The guilt would have been too great, but just enough of the guilt kept her on top of a lot of stuff in her life.

The sweater made her feel like she could get sleepy and comfortable just about anywhere. At lunch she wanted to make it into a pillow and close her eyes for a few minutes. She didn’t do it, she always felt groggy after a stolen nap. If she had thought to go to the park, maybe it would have worked, just stretching out on the grass is different.

Leah thought about The Red Shoes. She almost took the sweater off. She was hot, and now freaking herself out thinking, what is this going to make me do? Who am I anyway? How can I knit myself out of this?

I have “ideas” then I have “anxiety”

in Chinatown we parked in the $3 lot with the spatula push pin to slide the money in the slot
 
there we were in the dust of a bookstore and the drive to LAX never makes me happy because I dig Los Angeles even though my heart is somewhere suspended over a different kind of city
 
the way we taper into nothing
in hands it’s classical
little flames for hands
 
every time a new DSM comes out we laugh at our classifications and then we feel relief
 
happy as a clock
we need guidance and to experience the thing as separate because we are afraid
I’m in a lazy phase, this change in my brain
 
this house of dreams
trees leaves
if you saw me after I changed would you know (me)
 

—

Remember the little home. Like a stone tucked away somewhere. With clay walls and a dry floor with sunshine. Winds come there is a chill we ward off with sweaters and body heat. Lying on the bed in the afternoon. Whispering tunes and wondering what to have for dinner.

I can’t find my scissors or my hair. I can’t find my beetle and I can’t also find my mouse. I had a very nice steak and I can’t find it anywhere now. I wish for a baked potato to go with it and St. Anthony, is it St. Anthony, what am I looking for? I had a boyfriend once, who was really very patient and also a real prize in general but he’s gone so I’m stuck now with nobody so in a way I’m looking for a boyfriend but in a real way I’m looking for the way I felt that time I saw a really tiny pair of jeans someone gave me try on and I was like, no way, those won’t fit, and then they did.

Like I was just a little smidge of a thing then. I ate tofu and steamed greens sparingly. I ate these pretzel sticks and I would treasure them like cigarettes.

Back then once I showed up in a doorway with whiskey wearing an off the shoulder sweater and said “what” when the guy I was meeting looked at me. I was in it and I wasn’t. 

A way in. A way out. How long this feeling will last for.

A party where I don’t have to stay late if I don’t want to and I can leave if I want to and there is stuff I like and people I like and I don’t have to drive home at all.

I’m looking for a book that will make things make sense.

The ditch with graffiti. We hiked up over LA so we could see Dodger Stadium all big and all that parking. I had a mango popsicle. The ground was squishy in the grass. I went to the bathroom and held on to the lock. Any toilet paper in a public stall like that is a little blessing. And into the water, dumped my offering.

We posed for a picture. We held each other tight.

Wife photographs the scenes for the paintings –then it’s her eye.

I’m looking for something.

Why did you open the window?

A two-inch breeze, an October evening, it’s all the same to me. I throw them open too, sometimes, and then the curtain sets the alarm when we’re gone, reaches across the threshold like an arm, it’s warm on the sunny side, that’s where I’ll walk. But only if I’ve got sunblock on.

Is there anything on my face?

This brown streak of a face.

Look back on me and say – she was doing her best, that little eyeball. She was trying so hard to just be a good eyeball on the floor and she still stunk. She was the relic of her sinkhole eye hole past and she couldn’t get past it but she knows, hindsight is 20/20. That girl sized up the scenario and had her way with the world. She ended up eating a word. She swallowed a dictionary and that’s an awful bit of, what, metaphor, no, not really. It wasn’t like she swallowed a dictionary. She was an eye and she ate the whole dictionary just trying to find a word. 

sitting for Javi

your eraser, your gray shoes
I have frequently had the blues
I like the look of the both of you together and want to be friends forever
 
my hands got hot
and the pictures did look like me
but what part
 
Javi and I joked
that if he made a mistake the mistake would stick
and I’d sit for portrait after portrait trying to get back to my regular face
 
my regular real face
I wonder what I’m made of
other than bones
 
light got less light because it got later
gill of a fish, blade of cheese grater
that gal named her jacket James Spader
 
let’s always sit like this
let’s all always be      in the same city
 

Remember Yesterday Day

I was almost exactly the same. Were you? Where were you yesterday anyway?

I smelled that laundry smell I love so much, the one that reminds me of living in Paris. I bet it comes in a powder, a big box. I’d put it next to the mop bucket in the cupboard. If we had a cupboard like that, and a mop.

I went for a long walk. Went to the bookstore. Didn’t buy the book I went for because I could tell, secretly, it was a crock.

Instead I bought the hardcover.

Yesterday was like an English morning in fall, calling for tea and to make it the right way. In the downstairs kitchen and knowing that a way is right only because it’s been ours for so long.

We thought we had to go to the airport yesterday but we didn’t. We went today. And I’ll go again the day after tomorrow. And the day after that I’ll look back a day and think, yesterday I got on a plane.

Everything that I was: eating a lot of parmesan cheese, jogging in the cool and going backwards on a stretch where I was solo (but I wondered if the people in the building could see me) while I listened to Kanye and Jay-Z. Thought about “plans” and got nervous. 

Celebrate yesterday because yesterday I found out I was pregnant and yesterday I got married and reunited with a friend from grade school at the supermarket, and went to the supermarket and bought an acorn squash for the first time, and cooked it, and ate it roasted with butter and cinnamon.

Then I went for a hike and then I went for a swim and while I was swimming there was a big tuna fish and it looked me right in the eye and said you can tune a piano. I laughed yesterday, I cleaned my entire house that I bought yesterday.

There is another pin it says- Say yes to yesterday.

i think i am descended from a toy

I think I am descended from a toy

and that you is a tiny barn set with tiny sheeps and chickens

plastic people committing suicide heave themselves on the radiator

some toy things we can’t help

I want to shove pieces of you into my ear canal

sometimes I think I should be the boy toy

I used to think I was special

I thought this shine came from inside now I think

even a toy needs a drink 

my lovely goon

you’ll never lick my spoon

If it was sumer, july, june

the moon

that moves

like

duh

everything

I’ll never be as famous as the moon

carnival sand in glass bottles

it doesn’t have to be everything

itch is a warning

a language in flesh

at a carnival bees near the trash can and beautiful women with beautiful breasts

ride, be best friends, be a family

sand in glass bottles is one of the most beautiful things I have seen

and we have to compare stars and sand because our minds are finite

(but we have an infite organ, the one you’re not allowed to say in poems)

color on tie-dye shirts and frisbees with paint splatter

the pie here was made in a factory

we could DIY one

but even my grandma fudged

A man and a woman are in a car. Where are they going? Two boys are in a canoe.

I’ve been here before is a thought I think to myself especially driving through small towns. This is not such a small one, mid-sized city, world class hospitals. Death in a story this soon would be cheating.

They weren’t our boys in the canoe.

They were ours only because they were beautiful. Out on the little river.

Helmets are more popular but we resist them. We glorify our own youth at their expense, what we had, what we’d heard about hardship. That actress died in a ski accident. She had twins. Two little boys. Those two little boys in the canoe had a sister. She’s going to be a girl with the fresh shine of tragedy.

They’re why we’re in this car. That was the day I decided to go hungry. I can be deliberate, he says. He says I’m dramatic.

I held my last love in my arms while he died.

My brother picked me up at the airport. His city, my temporary home. I’m tired of myself, too. His wife knows what I mean but wishes she didn’t. Every piece of falling apart is the hardest.

This is a fresh start like that was – the newspaper job. Small town newspapers skirt the dark by nature. Focus on teacher of the year, community theatre, the sculpture outside the motorcycle shop, be safe.

How many small towns am I?

My brother is still my beautiful brother. Graying, but all that hair. We wear the same mouth. Use it to order similar snacks or lunches without knowing it. Our old trick. I had grilled cheese. Me too. No, did you? Our stomachs, our brains.

Every bit of pain I’ve held he’s held in his way. He’s got a little one.

I know I need help when doting on July isn’t enough to pull my face into an expression.

Get a car. Get a job again. Avoid medication if possible, as long as possible. The boys tossed my pills in the river, helmets like rowboats, rescue tugboats, if only our lungs were more buoyant.

how to feel purpose

how to peel oranges

how to arrange orifices