Hot water feels so good on your hands.
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shut in
just cuz i said it
ahh, the friday sweatpants.
putting clumps of piss-soaked cat litter in crevices to ward off mice.
baking a cake at 11 pm.
i am not single, but while New Year camps with his friends, i pretend to be, doing all those perfect things that i can only admit anonymously.
and they must have changed the recipe for chips ahoy, because they taste like gasoline. i've been off my antidepressants too long, using my good luck as buoyancy. i'm rudderless, drifter, floating on top of a very deep ocean.
i come to writing as a project, as a cry.
i live in this great hall with a series of little jobs, a looming birthday.
2:25 a.m. - 2012-04-14
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when i give the OK
getting back into writing is like getting back onto a red wagon when you're 11. no longer a magic carpet, a space ship, a hovercraft. suddenly, a red wagon.
--
at dusk over interstate 95, short snipped ribbons of rainbows. no pots of gold. drive the same road with the sun in my eyes. old farms, domestic love.
--
we took grandma out to a restaurant today. no pot of gold here either. she chewed her food, wedged her cheeks full of it, daintily sipped her water--then unpacked it all into a napkin and gave it to my uncle.
how did i eat a crabcake with all this in mind?
2:37 a.m. - 2012-02-29
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wrapped
ahh, the new year with New Year. a few runs through the streets, a few public shames, did you resolve anything?
i resolved to write here more.
--
my old apartment was good, but small. and run by a little horrid man who installed cameras in the halls--probably my room as well.
my new one is beyond my budget. now i live on others' money and feel subhuman. however, stunning living room.
--
New Year is at a cabin somewhere eating bacon-wrapped man cliches. i'm here nestled in bed, with the laptop streaming lady cliches, recultivating old habits.
i used to write or write. now those parts are displaced somewhere else. refugee camps, ticking drip wall heaters. the heat pulled out in a thin wide sheet, rolling up and out the cracks in the window frame.
the cat shrimp-curled up in New Year's place in bed. so when i turn my head i don't see his face like a blue-gold norse god. only a furry gray muff, left behind by a fat russian empress.
3:33 a.m. - 2012-01-22
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more later
"robin williams and coco the gorilla having a tickle fight."
well here's something new. my apartment does not have hot water. for this, no love.
--
the people with skin in shads of gray. gradation. they smile and go up and go in.
he's drifting asleep on the couch, a tree slowly uprooting itself and falling sideways to the ground.
--
there's no question. i love him.
--
details make the difference.
12:01 a.m. - 2011-11-23
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curriculum vitae
i got a teaching job, long last. now i'm learning stick shift. when is that book gettin done?
New Year and I are going on a roadtrip. we're going to be murdered in a walmart parking lot.
i love the world. i'm full of cheap, shitty turkish delight.
he is finding out about me, piece by piece. by this i mean i tell him about all the bad choices i made. he may not be aware how often he asks me the last time i was tested, but i am
--
i saw a shadow behind the curtain, but unlike last night, there's no strange man on the fire escape. what was he doing there? can i teach him freshman comp at a community college?
2:07 a.m. - 2011-07-25
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six lines from my novel
Sure, i could easily go work in the carnival.
So I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, my head in my hands, sweating and pulsating for ten minutes, during which time I had two thin, weird shits that just fell out of me.
I hear two distinct kinds of honks: sexual honks and antagonistic honks.
Here's the moment when a better person pops out from behind a parked car to say, "To each his own!"
In twenty years the pencil arches will be popular again and I'll be cast aside because my eyebrows don't look like arched sperm.
I've missed the face melting scene, and my car isn’t even ready.
1:47 p.m. - 2011-07-12
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oh really
i never write anymore. he keeps me so busy, so happy, i keep myself busy and happy. happily, i busy myself.
i once kept a cleaning schedule, once or twice in a time. the days are long and hot. i have a second chance. i have a thousand second chances. someone wants me to succeed.
an unstructured time, like these days. i feel so strongly about him, my mouth is filled with music. it's so easy. i break him in slowly to the story of my ridiculous life. as i do, i hate myself.
the past doesn't matter, at all. he has a beautiful ex-girlfriend, and i have three hundred horrible ex-nothings. people that took and took from me until all that was left was a scarred pile of olives.
he tells me all these people that wanted him. he is picky, so the question i start to ask is, why me? the answer is a loop, wherein i see myself from a robin's nest. then i like myself again.
no one matters, at all. it's just another morning, him and me in the taco-fold bed. i've given up my limbs to him, i take his in return.
i got here, somehow, though i couldn't give directions.
6:06 p.m. - 2011-06-06
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here we go
he is my boyfriend and we will call him New Year. for his birthday, i made him two cakes, because i like him a lot.
chocolate
everything is great because everything is great. he rubs the inside of my thigh in the car.
he has eyes like sea glass sunflower seeds, set under a perfect brow, what is a perfect brow, it is a brow i can't seem to draw, but that i can trace with the pads of my thumbs.
and i can put my hand on his chest in the middle of the night, or eat from the bag of swedish fish without asking first.
now is the best part, i know, finding all these little stars and making a constellation of our own design. things that don't matter but feel so great. we both like green and blue together, we both quote jurassic park, we both dislike white chocolate.
i need to eat dinner, i say, at midnight. let's go to the 24-hour diner. i give him a bite of breakfast sausage, he gives me a bite of chicken sandwich.
coconut
i don't know what i'm doing. we drive back from the diner, i drop information about my past. he wants to know more, while i want is to say something that will fill him in without making my life sound as pathetic as it was, is, could be again.
my weirdness slips out from under the tarp. i flit my eyes over to see, how does he react to these things, such as my barking laugh, malformed opinions.
or my boundless pessimism: will i find a tumor tomorrow, will i wilt his boner, will i get a text from him in the night?
you are a bit odd, thanks for the cakes, goodbye.
3:08 a.m. - 2011-04-04
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allegretto
i galloped up to my door, did a forward roll up the stairs, cartwheeled out of my clothes and into bed.
then i had a dream that i ran downhill through a green-yellow meadow, while a group of men watched me. i screamed, "SPRING!" at the top of my lungs. my hair was in pigtails. what do these things mean? dreams do have a meaning, even when your brain is spitting off excess electricity. it was an exclamation, it was my body casting a spell and hastening the arrival of spring.
i want this spring to come, even more than i did last year, and that was after 30 inches of snow. this spring will be the best spring, and i'm going to write this novel, and i'm going to have sex in the daytime, i'm going to wear pigtails and rub his back and scream his name like i'm conjuring the seasons.
1:44 a.m. - 2011-03-04
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