yosemite valley on a saturday in fall
hantavirus and me and my bike
mobil stations, sweet hot springs, nevada deserts, this beautiful woman, Zion, Esperante
crazy water and tourists see rain
locals love it like a rare treat
rivers rush brown, smell swelling, rain means something in a dry climate
life comes to life out in Moab
country and orchards explode
this coffe, cold
this motorcyle, me, lovely Emily
I’ll talk to him if he doesn’t do it today, Gloria thought.
George had mowed the lawn weekly for the seventeen years they’d been in the house. Not the spring he had sciatica (they’d hired that dyke-y girl Emma from down the street, she was meticulous), but George loved to mow. In winter he missed it.
For the last three weeks he’d been skipping a part of the lawn.
“George,” out the kitchen window over the sink.
She was pretty sure it was on purpose.
George wasn’t a big man but he looked like he wanted to be. One of those guys who stays really trim partly because of genetics, partly because of a love of running, and partly because of no eating to the point of stuffed, he always knew when to stop.
Gloria looked like Gloria. What I mean is, have you ever looked in the mirror and thought – wow, today I look like me? That’s every day for Gloria.
—
I am the spot on the lawn where he won’t mow.
Pushing and up I’m long and each piece I am the lawn, extruding.
Lawn man loves the old fashioned one that reminds him of being a kid/guy/dude. Too short shorts and sweatshirt without sleeves. His patchiness is something lawn has known.
From the kitchen a woman but she’ll come around. She keeps clippings, still, in a pressed notebook. Photos from local newspapers only of faces. She took one of us once to leaf there. She recreates in the quiet ash of five cigarettes a day, hardly a habit, half a habit, fodder for faces.
Not unhappy people. And here this lawn has bigger art projects and plans for the future. This blade I hesitates for inadequate language.
I wish sometimes for a mathematician to visit while he mows (as long as he never utters “elegant.”). Do you see what I’m getting at? I am grass! Let me long. Whether you let me or not I am the seed that contains itself. And the language she speaks in ash faces and he in the squirt of an orgasm.
Where we’re meant to live we hardly need to be watered, just receive what we need.
the colorado clouds are off to the side in a sky that’s miles high and wide
a city a painting or backdrop
a drive with my sister from denver to boulder
she’s younger I’m older I wish I had told her
I love you, I told her, I love you
having held her or how I hold her
we are made of similar shapes our differences even are similar, our slimness and thickness and slickness, my sickeness her sickness, sick sisters or nurses, curse and a wound, we bark with our funny bones
the way I sing to potatoes and she sing songs to her boyfriend who thinks it’s a new thing but its blood it’s our back up karaoke – under melody, she brings me water two daughters chicken dinner on a scale graphic font grows thinner I’m the beginner see we’re the same are we twins, no but she is, the longer it takes to tell you the more real it makes it
I thought things would get clearer as I got or get older but I’m more a shadow now and everything is a haze is that why people have babies I mean to love them and for all of that but to be re-rooted in a real world and feel your feet feetward and feel your head heavenward and hold a little girl and know you will not go anywhere you won’t need to think it anymore because now you have two bodies and your cells are a miraculous smallness and life is the sky over any state like colorado and you have been to a beautiful national park
I told Bill about the dream and now he’s worried. I should call him. I’ll call him after coffee.
In the dream my hair is long and Bill is at a table with a teenage girl on “Panty Patrol.” They check everyone’s panties. I’m at this fair or flea market looking for beautiful unique vintage dresses but everything I pick up they tell me – that’s one of our most popular items.
Later there is a room where people are absolutely covered in shit. It’s horrible and disgusting but it doesn’t smell.
When I told him about it, Bill freaked out. I’m kind of freaked out too.
I didn’t know but Bill went to high school with this girl Jackie Blackburn. She’s been popping into his mind like crazy for a month or so he said.
They were in the same homeroom. Bill made this badge one day and told her, “I’m here to debrief you. I’m with the Panty Patrol.” Jackie punched him in the arm and got sent to the office. Bill felt bad so he flashed his badge and got sent to the office too. Jackie didn’t usually get in trouble. They’d laughed so hard that morning in the hall. She asked him to make her a badge.
I met Bill two weeks ago at Jonsey’s downtown. He’s a nice guy. I need a coffee. I think I need to think about my dreams.
It was a bottomless cup of coffee.
A porcelain infinity.
Have you ever known a cup? Dove headfirst and kept going, weighted yourself to a place where you could forget about breathing and even a fish would pop a gill? Too big for earth. Heavy handle/faint lipstick.
(an easy, lazy detail to mention – it’s Hollywood making you work – think of every other woman with lips who touched this and lipless faces now just lips to lick. Lipstick I wore, lipstick parties and rings around cocks – no middle schooler could invent that – that’s for someone sad doing suburban laundry and trying not to snack. Flakes of skin and pieces of ourselves we shed in a fall disintegration. If trees have leaves we have things to leave too. Nail bits/stray hairs. I would wish my DNA everywhere but it already is what a waste of a wish. Read this.)
and I’ll add all the stuff about beauty, false beauty, Hollywood and fame - come back Joan, you skinny bitch, let me tell you this alien landscape story. i’ll wear a semi-sheer white blouse, i promise to wear expensive shoes. i’ll put out food but i won’t eat it. diet coke and tequila. occasional mexican coke in glass bottles. i’ll be reborn in a bikini body by 35. in the shower, steel groove of perenium. can it be arranged that there is someone younger, even if i’m (finally) married to a for real type and rich. just let me keep fucking things up. no plastic surgeries. careful quiet ritual. keep creams in the fridge and oils in the cupboard.
that there is WRONG
and if i lay myself upon it it’s the shape i make
a brain that makes every part of us, consolidates to put US in a body
i sometimes want to put my arm into a barrel of dry beans or lentils right up to the elbow, or suck a stranger’s dick
Thank you so much for coming. You, the volunteer First Aid Committee, are what will help make the upcoming Cliff Jumping Tournament and 5K Trail Run in Rattlesnake Park the success we know it will be, must be, in order to keep morale in this community high.
You’re a real great group of individuals.
I’m here to teach you all the First Aid you need to help our athletes. And I should mention, some of you will be participating athletes yourselves. A round of applause everyone. The competing First Aid-ers will have unique red jerseys helping them stand out on race day. Way to go!
Okay, so, as a professional, I have to warn you, strains, sprains, blisters, dehydration, even over hydration will all be common. We may even see some fractures or broken bones if anyone takes a spill. Our route does take its name from a certain venomous serpent, and spider bites are also common.
I’m here to provide you with the only information that can truly help you in any of these circumstances. Now, call me Mom, that’s what the folks at the ER do, because I’m always nagging and mothering them, but heck, it works. Here goes, there is only one thing you need to know in order to stay safe: Don’t Get Hurt.
Volunteers, it’s your responsibility to get this message out there while you’re on the field. You are our eyes and ears on the ground, and if one of those is bleeding, well we need you even more. Your duty, and we are counting on you, is to give a Don’t Get Hurt reminder to participants every three minutes.
We’ve provided, in your Official Cliff Jumping Tournament and 5K Trail Run in Rattlesnake Park satchel, a heart-rate monitor and watch that is set with a special Volunteer Alarm which will provide an auditory cue to call out our motto at the allotted intervals. We are counting on you!
And if that doesn’t work, and you come across an injured participant, please kneel over them and repeat “we warned you not to get hurt,” until they bleed out.
Okay everyone, enough with the speeches! Please enjoy the complimentary donuts. And for those of you who have also signed on as back-up for the Volunteer Fire Department, I’ll see you at the Town Hall Meeting next Monday!
Let’s be safe and have a great time!
DEAR DIARY: I don’t know what I feel so far away from, but sometimes it’s “myself,” or “success,” or “other people.” Also I feel guilty when I “waste time on the Internet.”
dear dear me
isn’t it funny
this feeling that this other voice is coming from inside of me
because I’m reading your book, I’m reading your book now, I’m already halfway through just from today (this afternoon even) and you know what I have a Jungian analyst (well, she lets me talk about dreams) and I am the one who thought of that purple moth with the body of the rat who crawled up on to the back of my neck and stayed there and that’s where she whispered to me from and it wasn’t so bad, once I got used to it
there are so many ways I’m afraid but now I’ve realized the biggest one of all is I’m not getting any prettier
no the biggest one of all is my apartment is lame
or the biggest one is – I used to be around all these luminaries, luminaries, and now I’m laughing to myself tombinaries, tombinaries
inside there is a rattle that isn’t like that other word for something big (you think about it) but that is like the summer I fucked five dudes all summer
that summer one of them like that was the only thing he ever did or was ever made for doing and I especially thought that every time he talked
I loved one but now I think it’s gross because I didn’t love him, I loved the way I acted like I was put together around him and plus he was rich so I wouldn’t have to be so scared about being a failure and not having any money for health insurance (but and also massages, dinners out, clothes)
three more, two of them were great and one was forgettable but in order to illustrate I’ll tell you this – he had a mattress on the floor in an empty apartment, there were those cigarette things you smoke when you’re trying to quit (or something) like cartridges, everywhere, and his tongue yuck flicking
I wish I had every memory right here along with this sinking feeling that the slow voice (like from when I was a kid and I would hear my mom talking really slow and calculated in my mind when really it was I don’t know the manifestation of my 6 year old anxiety) is going to leave too soon
