I was cleaning the garage and then
the garage was clean. The voice
from the radio sounded shocked
by another mass shooting
but went on about the government
officials and their take on the violence,
which had nothing to do with pain
but was instead about elections. . . .
Because I was taught all my life to blend in, I want
my fingernails to blend out: like preschoolers
who stomp their rain boots in a parking lot, like coins
who wink at you from the scatter-bottom of a fountain, . . .
The end of the world
is not what’s wrong with me.
Old age, illness, and death
are not wrong. They just are.
A stone says, Wake up,
exactly this is all there is! . . .
Go West, young man: the first commandment of American dogma, and the last. Lewis and Clark heeded it in 1804, Kerouac and Cassidy in 1947. On foot or horse or motorcycle, in steamboat or convertible, we the people, as a people, chase the setting sun. Though the West has long been won (its native inhabitants slaughtered, . . .
Read moreI will miss Anne, with the well-placed e and easy shape. Steep climb, perfect point, and the slide into the runout of three short, round letters. The way the letters smooth across the page in a tiny creek of repeat, nn, and slip into silence. . . .
Read moreRobert Louis Stevenson’s sentences first came to me through the air, in my sister’s voice, when I was small and sleepy, and she was reading A Child’s Garden of Verses to me and my smaller brothers—curled in our beds upstairs in the old house, our sister singing the lucid chants of the poems gently, . . .
Read moreThis is so true I involuntarily doodle hearts everywhere I go. I sign my letters compulsively with hearts,
dream of disobedient hearts, work with hearts. I eat them. I boil sauces and the tomatoes on my cutting board form a daisy chain heart. My foot is a pretty ballet slipper, . . .
Read more
is the most important. Everything else is just an excuse for it.
E.g. weather in medium shot that you take extremely
seriously. Cloud above German city, white, covering
the blue, dispersing into formlessness, gossamer
and dissipating like ancient knowledge. . . .
In the morning my eyes look thirsty
like a willow leaning toward
its reflection. My mother waits
inside the circles. One day
I will remember her at her last age
and see her peering from the windows
. . .
If measuring
one’s life as circular
makes sense of movement,
how should we muscle
meaning into days?
As if we end up
where we’ve dreamt,
starlight for eyes
and train static
within the folds
of memory. . . .