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.

I am in love with your spleen

Sometimes I wonder if God is just another name for gravity. Or  gravity is the scientific name for God. It is what holds us at the exact distance from the Sun necessary to sustain life. Science is mathematical abbreviations for the Old Testament. The Big Bang is Genesis. Science and religion are constantly colliding. Gravity is laughing at us, scoffing at our ignorance. Fate is the magnetic force within each of us, God is the force that draws you to me, your atoms to my atoms. What you call my smile is the reaction of my protons and neutrons, hunny I am in love with your nucleus, with the sequence of your cells, your molecules. God is what makes matter, matter.

I want to meet this man

White wine and an orchid in the window that seems content to die. I thought of ways to kill my baby. I wanted to strangle my stomach with a rope. Throw myself from the window. Roll in shards of glass. I want to be on a roof with the city below me, with something below me, because right now I am below everything. I want to be in Alaska with ice under my feet, with a cigarette between my teeth, because right now I feel everything.

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

Like a Net of Birds

mourning the loss of something that's in front of me, alive in my hands. mourning it, slipping through my fingers, like sand.


"Rachel says love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you're waiting on the bottom to catch it. There was a man, a crazy who lived upstairs from us when we lived on South Loomis. He couldn't talk, just walked around all day with this harmonica in his mouth. Didn't play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out. This is how it is with me. Love I mean."
- Sandra Cisneros.

Heineken

I don't want to be told that we learn from our mistakes, when my mistakes are at the expense of someone, of something, something that has to be mended every day, four years later, clean bandages, an hourly wage.

muslin

the stars in my eyes have jumped ship. i don't believe in anything that i can't understand.

Stars

My feet hurt. Everything is poison lately, every day I find things to sigh about, things to cry over, expired parking tickets, children without mothers skipping on the lake.

My back is bubble wrap, every joint popping like cellophane. Today was draining and I sat cross legged in my car and we talked about you, how mad I was at you. I am so mad lately.

I want to be a regular. I want to sit in the same seat for 30 years in the same town and drink my latte. My wide eyes are starting to narrow. I want to be bleak. 

And the little girl's mother said, "She wants her cup of stars." Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.

"I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?"
I much prefer to run away.

Harlem

He's one of those men who laugh loudly to invite a conversation. Today he laughed at the obituaries and ate a muffin with a fork.

I miss you in oranges. I miss you in straw hats and cornfields, shallow bales and thirsty horses.  I miss you in cardboard boxes, wet with humidity, stacked against drywall. I miss you in white peaches and chubby fingers. I ache like an oak tree.

thimbles

i never know how to say the things that  break under my fingers like bread crumbling, like bread crumbs, rising in the oven like the california heat or the shingles on your roof that burn our feet and never scar them. i am never able to write about your lips like honey, or the texture of your tongue, i can't say what it means to me to be twirling in your bed like ballerinas or ice cream cones. i never know how to describe it, i can't tell if it's that i get lost in the moment or if i don't, if i'm too busy acting. tonight i wanted to ask you whether you ever act differently in front of other people, like a chameleon, sometimes i feel like a chameleon in a cage but not with you, or do i? is it just another color? that i don't know, maybe i'll never know, maybe my pining will some day get an answer or maybe it won't, even at the gates when we meet god, god part of me hopes we meet him together, lately i don't know what i'd do without you, or everyone, all of us, what would i do without all of us? i never know what to think, sometimes i try to convince myself to think within certain boundaries, mark buoys  in the lake, i contain them like asian carp, my thoughts have fangs under their lips, and i am constantly in a straight jacket with my arms tied. but you untie them often, and i wish i could talk about you holding onto the strand and spinning me, letting it go, untying a corset, lifting the weights off of me, like birds, carrying me, blowing out candles, sometimes i have this urge to explode on you, like shaken champagne, volcanoes or broken septic tanks, spill onto you, all the things i keep, i want them out sometimes, i want to lay them on you, neatly, in perfect rows and columns, like stacked books, organized alphabetically and dusted daily. there's nights when i question you, i think about your teeth or something shallow, the truth is i think i left you for a rainbow, the hope of gold at the end of it, some kind of trophy, but i was a fool to think there was any chemistry out there sunbathing in the greener grass. there's a cauldron between us, carpet rubbing against my shins, your words cuddling into my ear lobes, how many times do i have to remind myself that you electrify me, even inches from you, i feel lightning, i was chasing the fear of never knowing, perfect teeth and expensive shaving bristles, but in the storm i've learned to love your imperfections like you love mine, they feel like home to me now, i sat in front of the mirror without a shirt on and tried to see what you see in me, see my naked body like old portraits of naked women wrapped in silk and posing under olive trees, never ashamed of themselves, and i feel comfortable, at least a little bit, i wish i could write about that feeling, describe it like dough rising, doubling in size, your polaroids developing, sand on the sidewalks and your plaid shorts, peddling, the sun setting over a bad caesar salad, these are the moments people make movies about, clouds in the shape of eagles, pelicans chewing on fish, hands in bad haircuts, discussions of dinosaurs and moon conspiracies, last night you read to me from a wrinkle in time, sometimes that is what we feel like, a wrinkle in time, the sky sighing with its eyes, i try to imagine what you do when i'm not there, whether you sit cross legged and if you sleep on your side, i wish i knew everything about you, everything about everyone, maybe.

Rain

British Airways lost my luggage and it's been raining in Paris for two days now. It's easy sometimes to think that the rain is only falling on me. But today I saw all of the Parisians under their umbrellas and remembered again that this isn't some kind of punishment. I haven't done anything wrong. Sometimes it just rains. Sometimes the ground is just thirsty.

Cheeks

I feel miserable on the El platform. The reflection of everyone's legs in the rain water looks like you, like you are hiding under the tracks from me, like you are pacing the sidewalks. Last night I dreamed that I lived through my own execution, and today a man told me that it meant I had a new beginning, that what we thought had died had only been resting. I told him how sick I felt after the jolts. He read my palm with his swollen fingers, and told me that there was a rebirth. I don't know what there was. I just know that there's been something missing from me for days now. I am a few fingers short, a heartbeat, an eyelid. And I just know that I am so sick of space. I am so tired of walls. Of galaxies. Of fields. Of trains. Of planes. Of motorcycles. I want to be closer to everyone, sandwiched between them if possible. I don't want inches between us, or centimeters. I want to be wrapped around your thumb like a thimble. I want to put my fingers between your bracelets and your wrists. I am tired of the radius, of the spotlight circle that surrounds us, of the maps that count the miles. I feel blank. Maybe it's because my wallet's gone, maybe I have nothing to define myself with. Maybe it's because since you left my eyes have nothing bouncing back on them. I don't know. I feel restless. It's just that the world feels grim since then. Since everyone left every day feels like a ride in a cab with tinted windows, and the world feels like a Happy Birthday balloon, popping. The foil kind that starts to sag after 3 days tied to a flower vase. I feel like I can see that the end is near, that time is plummeting, that the universe's cheeks are beginning to sag with its age. I feel like I can see its jowls forming and its eyes folding. That man must have been right, there's a rebirth of some kind. There's something happening. Whatever it is I hope it brings me closer. I want to be suctioned to you like a straw. There is so much that I want to know, so much I want to explore. But every time I hit a wall. There is something concrete I can't break through. I hit a field of sunflowers that I can't see over. I hit oceans and moats. And I just want to mow over all the weeds between us. I don't want fabric or air between us. I just want you close to me, as close as you can be to me.

fireworks

i think a lot about the night
we kissed like vacuums might / or magnets
stacked like old books on your mattress,
hardcover poems of ancient lovers and dust.

you sucked on my lips like they were
fences we were jumping over
immigrants crossing borders
& hoarding the time we lost in boxes.

i wanted to touch you / between tics & tocs,
smother you like green chili
on your sides (your hands like fly traps on mine)
& feel the warmth of you,
your fireworks / your forest fire.

i tried to fill the space between us with that smoke,
with skin & with bones,
with a string that stretched across our eyes,
like tin can telephones
tugging at mine.

Rust

He is crying on his couch and twenty five hundred miles away my rain boot honesty is rubbing my ankles. Isn't there a threshold to this evening, a breaking point where all the qualms burst into tulips? or hydrangeas? But not carnations, you know that much about me. There are blisters so bear with me and let me put some stretch into the seams. dry your eyes with whatever you can find. He keeps saying, "please, please, let me be your home." But i am nervous of the rain, my dear, and the planes, and the rust left on the chrome.

Nantucket

The lake looks like Nantucket. If I were Herman Melville I would sit on my windowsill and write a chapter about corn chowder with my fountain pen. Everything is especially gloomy today and there's a white whale somewhere out there bobbing in the surf next to my uncertainty. I need a harpoon or a time machine. I need a plane ride. I need a sunburn. I need a raincoat. I wish rain ever fell softly anymore. It's always so violent.

Clouds

sometimes i think we are more like clouds

than people

& sometimes we collide in the sky

& we are vapor against vapor

& there is some kind of buzz between us

a spark

a fire

Birds

Don't you ever wish we were birds? I'm sick of words. lately language is narrowing me, and mildewing me, into one of those obtuse people in pea pods, running in figure eights.

Red Wine

There are some very exquisite moments that I think I could write books about. I read my mother's journal once and it compared her relationship to red wine, something of pungency and culinary eloquence, a sharpness on the tongue but a sweetness in the throat. I remember the man she compared it to, tall handsome and highbrow, and I remember the wine, a vintage merlot. I would compare you to the lipstick stains on glasses and the fingerprints on stems, that often take several washes to remove. I would compare you to the stinging feeling of red wine on chapped lips, or the bitter bit on the back on the tongue before I swallow it. You're the cabernet sauviognon I bought for six dollars and drank for two weeks. Anyway, there are some exquisite moments I think I could write books about. I could write about his body in my bed, hell I have, I could write about one night like it was forty, forty days and nights of him with his neck against my mattress and our bodies coiled together like rattlesnakes, or wires. I remember every second so poignantly, the quiet darkness, the buzz between our ankles and his toes crawling through the sheets toward me. I could write a novel about the sound of crickets and his breath on me, walls and scalps and plaid blankets and cold sheets and bellies and backs.

Maps

I am rarely honest or blunt. I'm so accustomed to hiding in vague metaphors that sometimes I feel like I lose what I mean to say. Sometimes I am so fascinated by what other people are doing that I forget what I do myself. Lately I am fascinated by this woman & her daughter who quit their lives in Baltimore, sold their furniture, drove to California, and have been living in hostels. I've stayed up until 4am reading their blogs. It's nothing too unique I guess but it fascinates me and lately it's made me feel like traveling is the absolute most important thing I could be doing. Sometimes I think that the experiences I've had in other places are ten times more valuable than anything else I've done. But then I sit in Colorado in a baby blue Camry smoking a cigarette out the window on I-25 feeling like it is the most exquisite experience of my entire life. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever relate to anyone the way I relate to her or experience anything more worthwhile than the conversations I've had on porches or sucking on clamshells in her kitchen.

I have been to sixty-one Jack's Mannequin shows and 37 states. Sometimes I wish I've blogged about it, every detail and every moment in photograph and framed, every conversation documented, every interstate tracked. I sit in class and go through these dissociative spells where my entire life seems written out and ridiculous. Sometimes I see no value in doing anything else, these hours in these desks cracking my back. Like that weekend when we were driving back from Louisiana, the sun was setting over the Mississippi and I felt like all the plans I had were fencing me into a narrative. I remember the feeling that their 6 square foot slab of concrete was the only place I'd ever want to be again, that somehow the french toast and the cigarettes we shared in April meant more to me than any semblance of "life" I had elsewhere. But then I wonder if I ever found something worth settling for, or if this is all a desperate case of wanderlust. Lust, indefinitely, is the driving force of my life so far. Lust and spontaneity. I don't know if I'll ever know what it's worth but it's been an amazing thing so far. Sometimes I wonder if I'm faking something, when I think about how much it meant to us to swim at Ventura Beach, filling bottles with sand and experiencing everything for the first time, dipping our toes into the pacific and eating clam chowder out of bread bowls in chinatown, worried that somehow the newness will fade. But maybe we were just children, maybe the first time is always the best time, maybe the pictures and the alcohol are just more mediums of the experience.

Sometimes I worry myself sick that I spend so much time elsewhere that I am losing something at home. I'm worried that the time I spend away takes away from the time I spend with the people who stay. I fight constantly with myself over which I'd rather focus on. The trips end and I grow tired of watching people leave. I am always leaving and always watching people leave, their planes lift and their cars turn corners, upwind from jet engines and staring into red lights. Why can't we be the kind of people who stay? Sometimes I wonder whether staying somewhere requires a stronger spine, whether seeing the same people every day is such an inconvenience. But then I think about the nights I spent in Colorado watching the walls cave in on me, and the time I spent in a town that pushed up against the mountains until it all almost toppled on top of itself, and how claustrophobic it became, and how good it feels to scream off of rocks in Kansas, and sit on levees and hills. And I can't help but fascinate myself with this girl writing in the common room of a hostel, talking about the morning stroll she took through Montreal. Maybe wanderlust isn't such a bad thing. Maybe we're not all so fit for the narrative prescribed to us. I know that at the very least I have incredible stories to tell, and I'm tired of apologizing for them.

Apathy

I took the bus two stops too far so I had three extra blocks to think. The wind isn't bothering me. I can't stop listening to this song, it's not poignant, maybe it's just relevant. Maybe it's the way he sings it, be here now. Maybe I just wish I could be everywhere. I feel kind of smacked across the ass. Flipped upside down or whatever. Some kind of cliche no doubt. Some kind of hackneyed slap. When I was 19 I tried to save a dog in the highway, I pulled my car into the median and I was chasing it across the lanes, on my knees in the grass, and I spent an hour trying to get it to come to me, find its collar and call someone, tell them their dog was missing. And people were honking, and the dog was barking at me, showing its teeth and snarling at me, and my mom told me Katy, you can't save the world. You are not a superhero, you need to let the dog go, it'll find its way home, and if it's dead in the road, you're not the one who killed it. This Irish man told me today that people always forget to put humor in their writing, that he sees these kids laughing with each other, and then when they sit down to write they talk like they are men in their forties grieving their youth. And when I write about ghosts, I never think that maybe they'll make good company one day, a few holes in my cushions, and thumbprints on my walls.

ghosts

is it just me or is this house getting heavy with history?

in every corner there's a ghost that's whispering to me

there's a ghost in the bedroom crying in the sheets

and all of the skeletons in my closet are grinning through their teeth

i get the feeling i've been feeding fish that don't eat

wrapping nets in empty water and watching them sink

and there are ghosts of my past and my innocence

i don't sleep well to the sound of them tapping their fists

so i stay up to count all the names on my list

and it takes me the night to get through what i miss

and lately my body is sore, from pushing lines and rocky shores,

and wedging my fingers into so many doors

but i want more, i want more, i want more,

so i keep tiptoeing these tightropes in rooms without floors.

Today for a moment I thought about Karl Marx and commodity fetishism. I am caught in the center of a circle with a ten foot radius. A fly in a spiderweb. Please do not cross the barricade, remain on the other side of the tape. We reserve the right to remove patrons from the property. Autonomy is incredibly important to me. Flaws are so forceful. Today I'm not sure I know anything. I don't care to hear anyone's beige beliefs. Your mundanity is boring me. I'm tired of punctuation. Admission is so futile. Coats with fur trimmed sleeves. I'm so often the opposite of what I preach. I'm tired of words, they're never enough. I'm sick of devices. Was Marx right two hundred years ago when he said that commodities separate man from man? Was he talking about steam engines? It's sad to think we've lived out his prophecy. Cities with 2nd floor restaurants. Maybe I'm closer than I think but I feel so far and disconnected. So tense when I'm touched. Today I heard the prettiest song in the subway. Perfect pitch. I have bricks in the small of my back. People don't carry hammers anymore. Snow covering the names on tomb stones. Dirt roads in graveyards. There's one ghost that's truly gone now, making my way down the list.

sometimes i wish stars were just holes in black sheets. i want to throw what i own out the window onto concrete. will you dance with me to the music of it hitting the street? i want to love all my enemies. it was vodka on ice, your tonic and lime, the nights you spent talking, i just whispered and mimed and now i'm running up escalators, turning back time. i want to love all my enemies. and yeah there's ghosts in winter park and baton rouge, there are bodies in beds and california full moons. there's the words i never said now drowning in bayous. i want to love all my enemies. and i'd still buy you bad coffee to smell your stale breathe cause i miss your toes on my ankles and the sound of your chest. i've sold you my pride and i'll swallow what's left. i want to love all my enemies.

Michigan Avenue

Today was cold until I saw so many men without coats

And the juxtaposed rows

Of people whose homes are the roads

Standing outside stores with diamonds in their windows

Asking for quarters, or food, or warm toes,

And all of the people in their cashmere clothes

Saying no.

4:16AM

My neck aches and I can't decide if it's a stiff mattress or the months I've spent with my head kinked towards your pedestal. Today is julienned carrots and I'm in the kitchen as a child. There will be a lot of small talk, bad jokes, and fake smiles.

White

Do you remember when our legs touched on my white sheets?

We built static between us, white light & electricity.

Do you remember my white skin, my white cheeks?

White lines, white vans, white teeth?

Do you remember your white tiles,

Cold under our feet?

Remember the white lies in the white of my eyes?

White walls, white windows, white sleep?

God dammit, don't you ever say what you mean?

Don't you ever get stains on all of your perfect white things?

Onions

I guess onion isn't the right word anymore. You don't have that many layers. I suppose you're putrid and sharp though, and a bit transparent, like sauteed red onions, the kind that don't caramelize or sweeten, but just turn kind of limp in the heat of the pan.