today i'm yours

I want you to brighten the colors around me, I want birds to fly over us like they do in Kansas, in patterns, I want the ravens to be blacker than I've ever seen them. I want you to be ecstasy, colors that spin around me, a kaleidoscope, lifted, lightened, moving the floor. I want you to be music, red and yellow and purple, tasteless inhibition, I want you to snap loudly, fizzle and crack. I want the sky to be loud when I look at you, the glass to be cold. I am tired of making you something, you are something, you don't need to be synthetic, or cooked, pressed into a pill, you are enough.

Pearl Street

Boulder you are a stranger to me. A man told me I could take a picture of him for a dollar.  You have the longest hair I've ever seen. Pretentious Europeans in their mother's glasses sunbathe their leather coats. 1960's revival. Extravagant homelessness. You play this game well. I'm sorry Boulder, I'm out of cash. I gave my last buck to the man playing a didgeridoo. I don't belong here, I'm sure. We used to climb the roofs at night and drink champagne. He fell asleep on my feet. I'm sorry, still. I forgot to feed the cat. Boulder, you don't grow tired of this? People line up every day to watch this man fold himself into a box. Seven stores that sell exclusively yoga pants. Put some shoes on, Boulder. Comb your damn hair. We used to sleep on top of the bar, we climbed the dumpsters in the alley and drank chamomile tea. You wear your heart on your sleeve, Boulder. Mine is somewhere beneath the mohair sweater. You let a cigarette burning in the grass. I feel like wax on your organic apple. Someone needs to clean me with a vegetable brush.

Edna

I feel like Edna, trapped on my Louisiana porch, arrested by the humidity and listening to a parrot squawk shit it heard Adele say last week. We emerged ourselves in infinity, swam naked in the ocean, under the moon, thought about the shapes the stars made, before Galileo taught us about gravity and I believed that there was fishing line stretched thin between the planets. I feel like Edna, leaving you in favor of the one room house around the block where I can eat tea cakes alone in my bay window and write about the water. I'm self-indulgent. I want solitude and decadence. I will refuse to make sacrifices for you. My thighs rub together. They will rub together in the water, in the Gulf, when I'm waiting for my legs to tire. I feel like the woman I wrote about, smoking cigarettes in her red dress, drawing a bird in the sand and speaking in tongues about canvases. Darling, you are simply not among us. Maybe that is me. Maybe I'm the woman who will leave her family to live in a downtown flat when she's fifty.

Banana Spiders

Drinking $6 wine out of a Halloween-themed dixie cup, wishing you were drunk and falling into me. When you're gone I forget what it's like to touch you. You feel like a hologram.

Burning Bridges

The Brooklyn Bridge is burning. Mother is at work, the leaves are browning and waltzing to the ground, children are walking in single-file lines, Dylan is holding his chest and laughing, but the bridge is burning, and we are all swallowing ash. I didn't know what it meant to see the flames from Avenue B. I thought of how I could've started it, did I leave a cigarette burning on my way to the deli? Did a plane crash through it? Should I have tried to shoot it down? The soot tastes sour on my tongue, the pieces of the bridge, in them I can taste the lovers who kissed there, all of their footprints are tired and sleeping in my nostrils. There is a stench, of loss maybe, of fear. There are journalists standing around the bridge in gas masks, but none of them are stepping into the flames. "It is too hard to contain," he says under his breath. Brooklyn and Manhattan are fighting over whose responsibility it is to call for engines and water hoses. No one wants to be the first to try. A boat caught fire for a few minutes, and traveled into the mouth of the river. The children are excited by it. A few of them are in their mittens, roasting marshmallows with scrap metal. "The Brooklyn Bridge is burning," someone says to their sister. And the sun still heats the concrete in the mornings, people comb their hair in traffic, seagulls circle the skyline, and everyone finds a different way to work.

space

I woke up wondering what blind people dream about. The last thing they saw? I would dream about my mother's feet. Or your ghost, in blue, standing in my dining room,  your lips pursed together like sandbags. That is the last thing I saw. I don't like to look at the stars anymore, not lately, I can't conceive of the space. I want to live in a studio apartment, where there is no space. No mirrors. No hiding places. I was in love with you today, so much my corneas hurt, from the space.

I'm not a writer, I won't be a writer, I don't know why I continually try to be a writer. I hate to be told how to write. You cannot teach this. Why do I keep trying to learn? You cannot learn this. I'm not a writer. I won't be a writer.

I'm too stubborn to write. I'm too self-indulgent to invent characters that aren't me, too ignorant to invent stories that aren't mine. If I'm a writer I'm a selfish, absent-minded memoir writer, and I cannot write anything else. I'm not a god damn writer.