wheels

I am sitting with my chin in my hands and thinking that I probably handled this wrong. I address this to the half empty bag of Reese's cups and the pizza crusts. You were the wrong salve. The right salve was flat on my back on my bed and Mozart and I did get there. But anyway, a car is a car, and as much as I have loved my tiny silver one, I shouldn't be surprised when its age and northern heritage catch up to it and the mechanic writes in bold ink on the bill SAFETY ISSUE: DANGEROUS TO DRIVE, and then traces this statement in highlighter--as if I'd forget his warning. The short stick of it is that I don't have the money to trade up, or over, or even down and probably won't for some time. I am chronically short of funds. But the long stick of it is that I can indeed live my life pretty damn well without a car--I have biked and walked the miles across town for work for years, I have a grocery store just up the hill, I have a free city bus pass, and I have a lover with a car like a chariot who always promises to come when I need him. And just last weekend I learned that I am indeed capable of biking the twelve miles out to my parents' house, and not having a car to drive at the time that my mom is having surgery to scoop out the rest of the cancer will certainly not stop me from getting to their house of my own steam if I need to, and I won't, you know, I won't have to, because even without a motor of my own, I am not alone.

smug

I am beginning to feel smug. I am beginning to be so, so certain of my love and the validity and promise of the way I know it will lay out in front of me. It makes me feel a sense of stability I've never felt before. It makes me confident and grateful and facing-the-right-way and it makes me feel smug. Like the heart buried within my own is not going to cease its beating. Smug. Like I'm one of the lucky ones.

rime

Today was about salt, and the way it rimed my body after two hours on my bike as I pushed over the hills and to the next town north and then back again.

I keep testing myself, and the answer is salt, and the answer is lenience.

it's kind of nice

Today I am embracing my own ignorance.

ice for the drinks

My hands won't warm up today. Maybe it started when I walked this morning from my car with a heavy bag of diet coke and what else? I don't even want to try to remember what all I bought last night for the birthday party today. The bag was heavy and I had to keep switching hands. Since then I have been cold. I keep a clingy darkheathergray sweater on the back of my office chair. When it's on I think to myself that if I cut a few holes at the end of the sleeves I could pull them down past my palms. If I sewed the ends closed. I'm not going to say I am not tempted. I never used to be this way--I used to have fire in my fingers. I worry that this is a hallmark of getting-closer-to-thirty, but this is stupid. I know I'm still doing well because I can blow up ten balloons in short order and still have the air to laugh about the way I become a living ball of static--me with my sweater and thin, flying hair and shuffling feet and balloons all around.

shades

I bought a pair of sunglasses at a dollar store. They're brown and they're missing a nose piece and I'm not sure--I haven't decided yet--whether they make me look badass or just backwards with 99 cents of plastic perched on my face. I'm not sure that I mind which. Bought them because I sat on my last pair of sunglasses a week ago. Sat on them because even though I have a legitimate chair now I've been using the floor as my desk chair for four years and it's a hard habit to break. Don't ask me why my deceased sunglasses were on the floor. Don't.

I AM THE COWARD WHO DID NOT PICK UP THE PHONE

I am the coward who did not pick up the phone, so as never to know.
So many clocks and yardsticks dumped into an ocean.

I am the ox which drew the cart full of urgent messages straight into
the river, emerging none the wiser on the opposite side, never looking
back at all those floating envelopes and postcards, the wet ashes of
some loved one's screams.

How was I to know?

I am the warrior who killed the sparrow with a cannon. I am the
guardian who led the child by the hand into the cloud, and emerged
holding only an empty glove. Oh--

the digital ringing of it. The string of a kite of it, which I let go of.
Oh, the commotion in the attic of it--in the front yard, in the back yard,
in the driveway--all of which I heard nothing of, because I am the
one who closed the windows and said This has nothing to do with us.
In fact, I am the one singing this so loudly I cannot hear you even now.

(Mama, what's happening outside? Honey, is that the phone?)

I am the one who sings, The bones and shells of us.
The organic broth of us.
The zen gong of us.

Oblivious, oblivious, oblivious.


~Laura Kasischke

trying

Shored up by a thermos of coffee and a roof sheltering me from the rain, I am trying very hard to convince myself that I am not not ok.

displaced

I'm craving winter.

I'm glad that my library is full of right angles today. I need them. Without a shelf to follow, a rail to grasp, I'm not sure where I would end up.

the fuss

I think perhaps I'm a bigger problem before I open my mouth than after. It's funny that way.

Anyway, this was a great weekend. I'm talking 3-D black light mini golf great. Bill Bryson, haunted houses, burgers and fries, Scott Pilgrim, wine-hazy board games great. Late nights and air mattresses great. Pixel blocks and newlyweds great. There was even a stop for German food and live accordion music on the way home last night, just the two of us, and then after I was home, as it was during the whole trip, a hot, low-hanging brand of love between my man and me.

What the fuss is wrong with my mind and body that kept itself directly in the line of limbo all this while?

I am going to be the sticky spot

I am going to have to be very strict with myself in the next few days over just how much there is to enjoy about a weekend trip to visit friends in North Carolina. Going to have to give myself an ultimatum that involves a MUST NEED DO to self about getting out of my own damn skull and letting this life be lived.
I am going to be the sticky spot.

staring into my apple core and thinking

I want cake.

paralleling

I am still thinking about
fruit flies.
Fruit flies and Octobers and pennies,
and I know these things
are not alliterative

but they feel that way.

swarm

I automatically think 'fruit flies' when the cloud of dust flies up around my feet and when the flock of starlings lifts away from the roof of the old hospital next door. It's a familiar feeling, probably because the same swarms of little winged thoughts have been circling through my mind for weeks now. I'm setting traps, and the flying things are so easy to fool into complacency with sweet fruit, but they're never quite all gone. Just when I think I'm clear another I catch sight of another cloud poised for liftoff.

flight delay

I am setting my alarm for 4:15am and looking up directions to the Baltimore airport and trying to temper my grump by being thankful that, were our roles reversed, my brother would gladly do the same.

[TITLE UNKNOWN]

I will take me away
To a foreign place

Where a language
Is unnecessary.

                       I
Shall move my mouth
In deepest darkness,

Sculpting sentences
That none shall hear:

They are mine alone.

A place where the one voice
That is heard is the wind

In strange trees, rustling
Branches of gaudy leaves.

Perhaps there is a sea
To respond--softly,

Implacably: a duologue
Of sibilance and fluting.

We shall collaborate.
(Me atop a barren hill,

Arms outspread, gesturing
To the sea, the dark sky.)

We shall indulge ourselves
In deepest conversation:

Wordlessness, movements,
Fullest comprehension.



-David Joshua Sharp

shattering

I'm trying not to be superstitious, but I'm about to leave for the funeral of a woman I never met and early this morning I broke a hand mirror and last evening while my brother was saying a blessing over a meal and was just at the part where he was mentioning my... (HOLY CRAP) fiance and me by name, the untouched dinner plate in front of me exploded outward like it had just been detonated, shards flying in all directions with a noise like a gunshot. I sat very still and sucked the blood off of the pad of my finger until all the sharp pieces had been brushed from my arms and legs and swept and mopped away.

Perhaps it was the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.

betrothed

Didn't really think that my reaction to seeing a diamond ring being held out to me by the man I love would be 'what the hell are you doing?' But then, when this same man first told me he loved me, my response was 'you're crazy.' I will have to work on these reactions of mine so that when the time comes to say 'I do' it won't come out 'schwaaaa?!'

I am not good at shorthand

but it feels important that I put a stamp on what I've just been living.

I want to make sure it's all real to me: the sinus infection that took me to a fever and the passing of time and love that brought me back. And the trip to the north that followed.
I think I have always told myself that I am capable of one day having Big love. Well. I am feeling it every day. I am feeling it in the old friends who have in them a lifetime of stories I share. When I am with them I always wish I had another day or two to spare to let my me out and to catch a little bit more of their them. And I was feeling Big love at the wedding by the river last weekend. By far, my favorite. The bride and groom walked down to meet each other in the middle of a circle of green to the beat of the music coming from my horn and from the mind and body of the man at my side. We do that well. I loved so much the bride, the bride who found treasure deep inside me long before I could see the reflection of worth in my own eyes. I was there to lace up her wedding dress and fasten the pearl necklace and settle it down on her strong collarbone. I could cry picturing it because she was that beautiful and I was that close to it all when she was opening her hands and heart and taking her lover inside. I know that look, because I have it, too. I have it, too. I am hilariously loved. And for a year I have been in three minds about how I should be and how I will be but now I know. I know by the way he brought me painkillers and kissed me even when I was sick and I know by the tone of his voice when we sat on the rocks watching the river run past us talking about our futures and I know by the way the sunset reflected off of his cheek and I know by the way much later into the night we snuck away from the party to dance alone, just the two of us and the stars. I know: you are the one.
I don't understand and have no way to pay for this gift, but my life has been just given to me like this and it's not only mine, it's ours and I can't wait.
I have been full and humming with I-like-you. We kept celebrating this weekend: birthdays and Holy Shit, One Year and bonfires and jello shots and red velvet cake, and yesterday before finding our way back to the highway four of us had lunch together at a place I'd like to take along home with me with a waitress who said 'yous' and made me smile because that sounds right. I wish I could always let it be written in my face and coming from my mouth how much I love your welcome and your time and your lifetime friendship. When I say thank you and I'll miss you what I mean is: y'all are like little pieces of my heart.
S and I drove home in a car that smelled like spilled wine and pasta sauce down a highway with potholes and traffic jams and I am sure again that he is real because there's no one I'd rather be stuck in traffic with and lost in Frackville with and nose to nose and toe to toe with once we're finally home.

on the road

I am feeling... sleek with love and pointing my bare feet toward the highway. I have been overwhelmingly blessed.

VII (I do not love you)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.


-Pablo Neruda

burning

I am awake at 4:00am because I have a fever behind my brow. Behind my left eye. In my neck. Down my back. My toes are curling in disappointment as the rest of my body sinks deeper into the mattress.
I have yet, in my more than three years at the library, taken a legitimate sick day. My fingers are tempted to flip the switch, but what stops me has always been what stops me: I can. I will wake to the alarm and slip myself from the bed and fumble for my glasses and slowly, slowly creep to the office and spend a few quick hours making a difference before skulking back to bed. I almost certainly will.
I have a day and a half to resurface and to clear the heat from my vision before S and I are to take a trip up to the top of the country for loving and bachelorettes and birthdays and anniversaries and a wedding--and playing the processional as my favorite bride walks down the grassy aisle. I cannot be There and not be Well.
I can't sleep--my heart beats too quickly and my arms are covered in goosebumps. There's no way to skip this part, is there? A cool cloth for my eyes, an allowance of time when the morning comes. There is something so human about fevers. I'm being offered up.