December 31st, 2014

It really is glory to glory. I am abandoned to joy. In this year I have learned how small
miracles come at every moment, from the nuances of reconciliation to the nuances
of a love that is not a lover's love but is scintillating all the same, to toast falling on the
floor butter side up. I have watched beauty carve itself into my face and weave itself
into my hair, though this is a different beauty than I have met before. I have learned that
loss has two chapters: the absence of thing, an immediate shock, and then the slow receding
of memory from the thing. Eventually the edges of the space left by both wear down until
they form only a doorway, smooth and sanded, safe to walk through or lean against,
depending on the need of the moment. I have also learned that things take back their names.
Lies do not prevail when we are walking through losses and reveling in the miracle. I used
to say "love" and mean "destruction of ego". Now when my mouth forms the word what I
am really saying is "mystery". And something else: how easily magic is coaxed from the
corner when we are not afraid to open our hand! No seduction is sweeter than that between

this Magic and I - how it bids me follow further into my own chambers...  

December 30th, 2014

What is true of sunrise in winter over the ocean is that the sky is light long
before the sun is born.  As I watch it crowning slowly, and then quickly rising
between two clouds, it is no longer light that is emitted, but fire, and somehow,
in those moments, everything seems darker because the sun itself has appeared
and is so light  the sky, which seemed fully illuminated before, is the color
of a glass of milk into which pieces of ice have melted. Yesterday I sat for a long
time and collected many pieces of beauty and hung them around the living room
so when the low winter sun shone in they would become illuminated. The dust
in mid afternoon light when I was 8, the choreography of a fly, a bird, a plane, all
ticking in time to Sigur Ros in a golden field behind a tobacco barn when I was 20,
the warm summer rain falling into a gray ocean at low tide, all things silver, when
I was 23, and then yesterday, the way it seemed as if the sun itself made ripples
in the sea, every angled wave a precious metal, shimmer before me like standards. 
These are the moments that represent a life. Keep this poem if I leave first.

December 29th, 2014

I want to address this to you Steve, though you have long forgotten our talks and the way they felt both like the velveteen rabbit and a scarlet fever. Never mind, I am happy to have those conversations as references on this map. Over there, by Mt Revelation, on which you said "I don't know who has hurt you to such a degree that you no longer take yourself seriously, but you must stop treating your body and heart casually, and stop allowing men to bruise you" is where I last wore this dress that I am about to burn. It is tight and sheer and it has every vital vein of my body stitched onto it in silver, I guess so the vipers would know where to strike. I have always been very kind to my enemies. Steve, it will make the most glorious snapping sound when it burns, like pine sap crackling or birch bark curling back in flame. I will send you the ashes if you like in a little box. You see, your voice was a hand when I needed one, and a sword knighting me when I needed that. How easily I brandish my own sword now! If I thought it wouldn't terrify your small children or whatever woman you are in love with at the moment, I would send you, in hat boxes, the heads of men who wished to bruise me. And right now, right now, I am sitting by the Lake of Solace and looking into quiet waters which appear gray and then purple and then, suddenly, to spark with the cool fire of a waxing moon.

December 15th, 2014


They are bending over their exams and I should be grading their last papers
so they can fold that "feedback" into the rest of the feedback from me that
I'm sure is very insufficient but instead I am trying to keep my eyelids from
falling and dreaming about the title of a book I might someday write. And,
then, in the middle of it, a text. This text results in a necessary, but unpleasant
conversation. I feel my cheeks grow hot and wonder if the students notice. They
write on, occasionally pausing and resting their chins on their hands. They are
writing about their progress with writing, a meta-analysis, and this is hard and I
watch them strain and I wish I could guide them even now. What they don't know
is that this exam really is less of an assessment of their own knowledge and more
an assessment of my teaching. I have grown miles from this kind of exam. The
texts keep buzzing in. This conversation was dead before it started, but it continues
on, a stubborn ghost. It lasts much longer than their exams, and by the end I am
laughing the nervous laughter of one who narrowly avoided a car wreck.

November 20th, 2014


He told you last night how he bought a rose but how it had died very quickly and how he had removed slowly the dead petals until all that remained was the protected center. The story had touched you, the gentleness of finger, the consideration, but the single white rose, stripped and small, tucked under your windshield wiper and gleaming in the 5:45 am streetlight, was halting and lovely. It made your cold tired face break into a smile, the weariness and gathering age, gently, but immediately, stripped. The man at the Indian restaurant seems very disapproving that I ask for a table for one. I am drunk off just this one glass of wine. And how, I wonder, is this possible oh and now the table next to me is talking about Versace. I feel very cold near them. "I would enjoy it more if it were 3500" he said. He bought the coat, it turns out, at Gods urging. "Does Marriella want to get married?""well, you see, yes she would, but", her father interposes, "it is better to not be married than married to the wrong person". And this is perhaps what I have come to hear. I am now the kind of professional woman who takes herself to dinner to think, and this thrills me to the ridges of my shins, to the tips of my shoulder blades. As I prepare to walk into the sharp night I feel all my points as coordinates lining up with the stars; there is a map at work and I follow its blossoming.

November 18th, 2014

There are some children that aren't really children at all, they are pillars of flame that burn everything they touch and there are some children who are just pillars of ash and they fall apart when you touch them said Sherman Alexie through a character in Smoke Signals and I am shaking with sobs in a down vest that must have been my fathers. It is too big on the shoulders and too tight on the chest and as my body trembles the huge shoulders rise and meet the edge of hair and graze my jawline so the sobbing becomes corrugated sound, like a salt shaker, like tiny pieces of ice falling at different pitches. I dream of South Dakota and skies like blankets. I dream of the wholeness of pitted city streets. This is the second day in a row I have called out. I am not well. The mind, which is eternal wants what is eternal. The hand, which is ephemeral, wants work it can finish. These two fates are ours as humans; we cannot choose one over the other. For the first time in weeks I feel happiness while scrubbing the shower walls of dead skin I've shed, but if I did only this my mind would ache like an old tooth. How everything here in the divided room of this world endeavors to disconnect us from ourselves and still we are expected to illumine! What is a light bulb without the socket!? I do not expect to survive this life, but I do expect what life I live to be alive.

November 10th, 2014

For three whole periods you speak in an accent because you find that it both engages
the students -- who want only to pretend a little longer, to squeeze the last bits
of childhood from their senior year -- and allows you to be better, sharper, funnier
and firmer because there is protection in personae. From behind the accent you do
not blush when you correct them. This cannot last forever, this strange ritual of the
false, but for now you settle into it. You have pretended at many things - pretended
to like the fishing pole, the tool box, the poem, tokens of clumsy love. What you want
is the elegance of a semicolon. You want transition words to slip their long fingers
over your body, between your ribs, along your thigh. You want a smoothing, a sleeking.
You tremble at this desire. You want metaphors to nuzzle your breast and similes to catch
in your throat. You want to be overcome by allusion and style and the subtleties of voice.  
If my brother was an instrument writes a student he would be a loud drum. That's good you
say and she blooms. The room shimmers and moves, the chairs in a sort of dance, the desks
resisting their invitation. You are busy tucking your real self away - mostly your heart.


November 6th, 2014

Full mooned face but not just yet it's tomorrow and you haven't taken the muscle
relaxers but you feel all bent up like a wire hanger that's been through a violent
transcontinental move. You will take them though, in hopes of unlocking secrets
that curl in the center of your sinews and crawl inching through your bones. They
will stuff you up with hot air like a balloon, only you will still end up being the
one the clowns make animals out of, it will still be easy for you to bend in whatever
way is required. In the morning you pull your dripping body off the bed and wring
yourself out - who turned you into a sponge while  you slept? - and you will step
carefully past the puddle and into the shadows of winter dawn. Whatever you find
there will not please you like the muscle relaxers, but it also will not saturate your
body with the loud and pulsing emptiness of drugs. It is more of a filling, an almost
gluttony of every day, the excessses of ugly and beauty. And when you are done with
that day there will be another, and another, each with its own particular high, long
after you have used up the last of the prescription.

November 4th, 2014

The beautiful older woman at the coffee shop compliments me on my purse, which is really more
of a saddlebag. She had one like it in 1969. I wonder how many memories she is fitting into it now
as she stares fondly at the worn leather in the slants of morning light. Later, Genna and I walk to vote,
only I haven't registered so I sit impotently against the cold white-painted cinderblock wall of the church cellar. I think about the steadiness of this church on South Whitney, the faithfulness of it,
how like an open hand it is. How consistently it gives itself to the first of the month food stamps
and voting days, the colored linoleum tiles always bearing all that weight. Once, on a day when
I was sad, I walked home from Tisane in the late afternoon through the back ally that comes out
across from the church. The sun was setting through the window and the bare tree in front of the church was perfectly framed in the textured stained-glass glow. It was either early spring or late fall - some inbetween time I love and feel undone by. Tonight Davia and I walked 7 miles through West Hartford, first the gardens, then the neighborhoods, then the town center; it is like walking through the evolution of culture and society. I say "I'm sorry" in many different ways. I think she hears them all. How quickly silence builds fences! How thoroughly laughter knocks them down!

November 2nd, 2014

The house is so cold I want to burn it down and sit in the
center watching the flame lick through each layer of construction.
Instead I build a fire, close the blinds, boil water, and open the
cellar door because the basement is 10 degrees warmer. I am
wearing three sweatshirts and two pairs of pants. I am wearing
fingerless gloves. I want to smoke cigarettes with you, wearing
fingerless gloves I said once to somebody and I can't imagine,
though I remember, saying it. I used to be frightened of the cold.
Now it is my enemy and I am not afraid to fight. I was made for
this: this survival, this resilience. You win I said to him But you 
never will again although we both knew there would not be another
time. The wood is not seasoned well and it hisses as the heat
enters it; white smoke fills the fireplace. Does it have to be a 
competition? He says. It isn't I say. It's war. Everything is.

November 1st, 2014

You wanted to know how long I would be here
you asked as if the tree wasn’t shedding bark already
as if the dandelions had yet to throw their seed
you asked as if there was time, the golden rod and
sun collecting in the bowl of my belly. Where have you
gone? It’s not that I was waiting exactly, but I wasn’t
moving, still like a deer in the bushes who suspects
someone waits to catch her with his eye. Someone,
on whom I should not be eavesdropping, says Science 
says you could fit all of the planets between the earth
and the moon. I visualize it but even the image is
nothing more than a pretty line for a poem. My huge
book of postmodern poetry sits waterlogged on the
table. It is open but unread. The tea grows cold.

October 31st, 2014

The thing that's really rather remarkable is that I didn't feel the regret
I thought I would when I woke. A steady hum of disappointment
buzzed below my breathing and I felt only sadness for both of us,
all of us, who are less than we are. I scraped the first frost from my
windshield with the edge of a box of chalk - the classroom at the
college has only chalkboards - and watched a car pull up in front
of Josh's house. The driver got out and walked away. My throat burned
in the deep cold and as soon as I could I huddled in the warming air
of my car. I drove to starbucks and got two coffees, one hot and one cold,
because I still don't know what I want in life, and this is a decadence
I can afford. I drive the long way to school, through Elizabeth garden
and the manicured but wild neighborhoods of the west end. The grates
in the road release steam which looks like ghosts of men I've lost. They
appear at first to incline towards my car, but lean away when I draw near.

October 30th, 2014

I have been sick since Saturday, but it's only yesterday and today that I
would admit to it. By Tuesday afternoon my fever spiked and I couldn't
drive and when I looked at faces I swear I saw through skin to bone as
if it were all made of glass and I felt fear and giddiness, a pool of self
and also an unconquorable stone. So, Thursday I sat by the fire burning
paper bags and grading exams because I couldn't do anything else and
occasionally the door would bang and I would twirl around, still slightly
feverish and paranoid. In the afternoon, when the sun dips and hovers but
somehow, this time of year, feels no nearer than noon, Brett came home
to smoke cloves on the porch. My room is clean. My exams are graded.
I have been productive in spite of the virus raging through my body.
I blow into the fire and it blows back at me, a low aching moan. I'll leave 
you to your smoldering logs, Sean says after dropping off native honey
for me and a typewriter for Brett. I wait for things I don't even believe exist.

October 25th, 2014

It is the kind of gray that gnaws at your bones by the time I get home from hiking. The hike, however, was beautiful. There was a golden forest, a bamboo field, many still moments in which I peered through trees looking for a mythical creature. There was even a spear, perfectly formed, which still sits in the back of my car. I watched a hawk circle so far above me that sometimes I was no longer sure it existed. The air was warm and the rock we lay against was cool, so he gingerly, with the sureness of a child, offered me his arms for warmth. It felt not unlike hugging a straw man, but I didn't mind very much as there was nothing to it anyway. When we pulled up to the house the three of them watched and did not wave hello and the gray came then. We sat in a jarring silence, occasionally making small talk like pebbles breaking water until the mushroom lady walked by. I have never she said seen such a crop mushrooms. Strange year. The mushrooms, they are all out of order and schedule because the weather has been so wild. She doesn't say a word directly to me unless I ask questions. She doesn't say anything about the stories she has heard that were weaved from the thin bits of evidence I've left lying around. She makes no comment about the men. The porch splinters. There are ever so many canaries in the coal mine. 

October 22, 2014

4:11: the alarm goes off and I lie in bed with God asking him if I really have to get up and creating
impossible equations in my head if I sleep for 20 more minutes and then work through lunch 
today, what percentage of students in sixth period will get their progress reports? 4:20 a.m:
uninvited, an image of my father's Bible, and then his hands turning the pages, and then his face
over it, earnest. 4:21 a.m. I think of how my father used to be a person, used to be a person in the world, used to be alive. I cry for a moment.  4:30: in the kitchen heating coffee from yesterday in a pan. I make an egg and toast. I feel so fully adult and proud, that it is like washing dishes for the first time. How unaccustomed I am to taking care of myself. 4:47a.m.: I light candles, turn on one light only, and begin to grade. 6:57 a.m. I drive through Elizabeth park to hide in the trees for ten minutes. I sing at the top of my lungs and have this thought if everyone everyday did everything they love and were made to do, for fun or pay, the world would be so much happier. You should write then, I tell myself. 7:15. Walk through doors of school. 11:00 DaVaughn tells me his understanding of paragraph structure has moved from a 2 to a 7. I am thrilled. He is thrilled. This is worth skipping lunch for. 12:40 Daquan looks up at me while working on the review for the exam and says, for no reason, "Miss, I love everyone in the world". I laugh. There is a fight brewing, I am out of ideas for managing this too big and too needy class, someone's phone has been stolen, I don't know who knows paragraph structure, nor why my seniors didn't come to me knowing it, but Daquan loves everyone. There is hope yet. At 3:10 I buy a bagel because I have eaten only breakfast and two apples. I am at the college by 3:30, but this is too late because I must make copies. 3:59 I watch the clock switch to 4:00 while the copying machine whirs out number 15 of the 20 copies I need. 4:10 four students walk in late and I don't feel bad for 3 minute indiscretion. At 4:51 Jaqueena, who missed school today emails me simply "hi" and I know something is going on. I respond. She responds with the sex of her baby. she missed school for the appointment. I am suddenly aware that the future of this child relies on the future of Jaqueena and the future of Jaqueena relies on, in part, my class. My strength is renewed. For Jaqueena's unborn child I will roll this boulder uphill every day. 5:20 Dylan and I sit down to talk. He hasn't been to class in weeks, since the semester started, but his baby, who is almost one, was sick and he was caring for the child. His eyes are watery with sleep because he worked third shift and he is worried. I tell him what he needs and tell him he can do it. I tell him he has to. I tell him he will. 6:10 I get home for the day and call my mother to tell her all the ways education can be improved because behind everything all day it's all I think about because there are minds and lives in the mouth of the same toothless lion that has education by the neck and my mind is buzzing with ideas. 7:30 I take a bath. 8:30 I make tea and fall into bed. I fall asleep three times writing this and I don't have the energy to edit it down to 14 lines. I finish my tea. I have gotten used to drinking tea and water right before bed to flush out my system for the next day. The added benefit is that sometimes I wake in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and, as time alone is so infrequent, I just lie there, in the center of time, feeling held. I am grateful for my home, for my job, for my body, for my bed. I am grateful for the sound of tires through a puddle or the moon through the window. It is a different thing to be glad in the middle of the night when you are free and your mind belongs to nothing but those moments. These are the sorts of things I want to tell my students. Every day is an envelope in which I am stuffing little notes that I hope they open and read when they need it most. 9:50 there is a flash of lightening and soon after a clap of thunder. 9:52: my eyelids are thick. Wake me in the morning, we have an exam to finish writing.


October 19th, 2014

You wrap me in your wind and I want no other arms.
The blades of grass rustle a praise and urge my lips
to moisten with your song. These days are monuments
to what bigger monuments there will be.
You will be first in line
to lead
which means to serve 
He says as I walk back to my car and I am thrilled and
terrified by the invitation. I want only to hide in this
garden amongst the evergreens and under low boughs.
I ran my hand along the underside of the branch and
caught the eye of a passing walker. He seemed frightened
by me. Let me rest in the garden a little longer Lord, but
not forever. I will follow You out into the world's desert. 

September 29th, 2014

Two figures against the backlit church side. They sit on the wall
of a raised garden. One is a round older woman and the other a
skinny child. He crawls all over the garden and makes a game
of his movements. He stops and leans on the woman and for a
moment they are a picture. Then he bursts from her and nearly
runs into the street. The orange streetlight rests on his hair like a
hand. Stop right there, son, it says. And he halts sharply and then
slinks back to the woman who still sits, unmoving, amongst the
silhouetted plants of the raised garden. This animated story paints
itself under my eyelids and I see it still as I slowly turn the corners
to home. In my mind even now the two remain, the boy a trembling
life about to break into being, a tightened string, the woman a rock
around which waves and wind break. They stay like this, turning
slowly and mechanically in my mind, like figures in a music box.


September 23rd, 2014

I can knot my hair on top of my head now. It has grown.
These dreams though, they continue. Two in a row now.
They start in my brain and travel through my body as I
dream them, making my hands open and close like a
fish's mouth, making my legs kick off the blanket, and
in the morning my stomach holds onto the dreams and
I call out of work and cry, except there is no water left,
so this crying is the kind I do in every movement of my
body. It is more complicated now. I am acquiring more
hearts. They hang on a bloody string and I pet them
gently and offer them my own blood when I can squeeze
it from my crumpled, wrung-out heart. There are many
things about this that are wrong - one is the fact that I am
still talking to you in my head and dreams. Goodnight.


September 17th, 2014

Everything is art he said standing on the edge of the sidewalk
Music is art. Fashion is art she offered. Fashion is absolutely
art he agrees. Food is art. These lines in the pavement are art.
The light turns red and we cross in a crowd. It is art that we
cross in a herd; it is art that I walk directly below the stoplights
half-hoping one will fall on me so that I can rest for a little while.
It is art that I always watch the white lines of the crosswalk
below my heels, whether or not I keep to them, and sometimes
I do, and that is art too: when I do and when I do not. It is art
that later that night, though I don't know it yet, Jeremy and Caitlin
and I will drink and then cry together in a movie. We will sob
together over love and birth and death, some of us louder than the
others. Even later we will sit with Alex in a windowless bar and hate
things together. I will lower my head to my arm and count my breaths. 

August 26th, 2014

I was jealous, actually jealous, of the 8th grade boys at the convocation. They
were quiet and well behaved, and yet their sidelong glances, their swallowed s
nickers, their dancing eyes, how light all of these things. I didn't listen very
well to the speakers, the mayor, the superintendent, and neither did these boys
and I felt like I wanted to say, we are together in this, in our rebellion, in our
mirth. I raised my eyes to one of them and he held my gaze steadily; creature
to creature we stared. I could not look away and when I did his eyes remained
on me. It was then that I understood how we are each, every person, a lock.
He wondered what it must be like to be a teacher and I wondered what it must be
like to be in eighth grade, and we sat there immersing ourselves in wonder at
the other's existence. Tomorrow I will meet people I have not yet promised my
heart to, and yet, I know they will have it fully for the next nine months.
Tomorrow I will enter a room full of locks that is waiting to become a room full
of open safes, and I am honored to hold the keys.

August 10th, 2014

What is creator? Pressure heat and time, he said, with the
confidence of a king from his couch. And though he meant
to steal some warmth from the night his words only served
to stoke a fire that was burning very deep, beneath the carpet
and the couch, and the eight floors of apartment. And though
we had danced in hot rooms and and whispered in corners and
ran our bodies over other bodies and away from them, this was
better and worth so much more. With every word you speak you 
lay a path others may walk on. This feels like work, like the
sighing and satisfied muscles after a day in the field, swollen,
breathless, fully aware of themselves and beautiful. When you
crawled into bed finally at 6:30 in the morning, you heard birds
bathing in the neighbor's pool. You fell asleep to a fully risen
sun and wild and secret baptism. 



August 9th, 2014

I got worse at spitting the cherry pits into the flower pot full of cigarette butts on regent
street as I neared the end of the cherries.  I lost the last two pits, one to an overspit and one
to an under, and this seemed important, although I know it's not. The temperature is 84
degrees, but in other words this means I can wear a loose tank top and nothing else as
I sit on the front stoop spitting cherry pits and talking to Brett about love, again. I am
always talking to Brett about love and he is always listening and offering advice, but mostly
the slow nod of companionship and the yes, yes, these are strange things, the desires of the
heart, the impulses of the body. I tell him how attraction doesn't always have to do with the
eye and how I have tried on different kinds of love like dresses and the one that I like best
isn't the most flattering on me. I don't say these words, but he knows what I mean anyway
his nod assures me. Earlier when we sat on the patio David drew a heart on my left arm. It
was elongated in its shape. Now while I sit next to Brett talking about love, he snaps a
picture of the heart and when I see it I think of the verse place me like seal over your heart, 
like a seal over your arm, and how I still have many muscles to tone.

August 7th, 2014

You are my God. Where shall my heart go but to your throne?
I have found it hiding in desert caves on vacant nights and
cowering in lovers' arms when the moon's hollowed eyes stare
blinklessly through the naked window. I have found it wandering
a forest it no longer belongs to in which there are many traps and
the leaves whisper ghost stories to each other as it passes. These
places no longer hold their hands out in gentle invitation, but
rather they offer the embrace of a prison. So, my God, you are
where this lost heart must abide, but to lasso it and reel it in is
work for a strong and fearless one, and that I am not. I will fight
every demon but my own and lie bleeding out my fruitless victory
as the night bears down on me, and that is when they gather, the
bloodsuckers, the thirsty fears. So, take me because I can not take
myself. Here I am, lead me into your courts and burn me clean.



August 6th, 2014

The moon, although it is hazed, turns the tall grasses gold in its almost-full light. The clouds
around it are lit like the edge of the sea that barely reaches the light from shore. This is so 
beautiful you cry, too loud, with a moan that comes from a deeper place than you have known recently, a place even deeper than your well of sadness. Sure Alex says, as if he is so accustomed
to this beauty, that it is a fact and to speak of it is redundant. Caitlin trails behind and takes
pictures of the sky. Your soul feels a little less bruised, it has been elevated and iced and tended
to by them, with food and drink and basketball and a moonlit hike, and no matter what happens,
and even if they don't know it, this is what it means to be okay. Still there are tides coming in at
this time of year that wash away all the monuments to your freedom you've been building out
of sand all summer long. It is hard to hear your own foot fall on the hiking trail and breathe
in the sweet smell of grass and leaves and feel your body respond to the air as it brushes your
neck and breast and not think of him. It's all the moments of the lifetime you lived together, the
small moments, that fall like waves against you, but the rip tide is not very strong now, and you
will last longer than its pull. 

August 1st, 2014

The second campsite offered better sleep, but also, there was less magic. This is okay. Magic needn't be in every place or we would habituate to it and never notice its gentle tickling of our imagination. Joe and I woke, missing Caitlin, and walked down the road to find breakfast. When Joe left I lay around in the tent and the sun half dressed and wishing I was not alone but also very glad I was, and when I wandered in a half-dream to the bathroom a man who spoke with a thick accent was cleaning the sinks. I hope you know why I am here he said. Of course I said, bashful in only my bathing suit but still needing the mirror to put up my hair which has, as I imagined it would, grown out in such a way that it snakes from my skull, a wild brood, I am grateful for clean bathrooms. Well, I will clean it very well then, so you will come back. I smiled and looked down, pulled the final bobby pin from my lips and secured my hair. As I left he yelled Congratulations! You are very beautiful! I walked a mile to a coffee shop, and it was a very long mile, but the coffee was good and the internet was free, and the man with the braided goatee behind the counter was disarming in his desire to serve. Is there a liquor store that is walkable from here? I asked. Yes, he said, I know all of them because I used to go every day and it is something like a wine skin splitting the way his honesty makes me feel.

July 30th, 2014

Perhaps this is when the magic came back. This trip. Things are frightening again in only the 
way that magic can be. She said as she drove through the dark. The moon hung low over the
horizon (the moon was always hanging low on this vacation) which looked like mountains (but
we are by the sea and it is mostly flat here). It was thin and red, a sharp hook that made Caitlin
shiver, and yes, it was strange to see the white light muted by rust and so small. In Chatham there
was music in the park and all the children were friendly to each other. Two boys stopped a couple pushing a stroller to bend their 8 year old heads down to the baby boy and coo and giggle. The
baby reached for their little boy beach hair and they laughed in delight. A family walked by and a lone wail from a child of about 5 rose. My icecream! My icecream! His mother turned and said simply you ate most of it. Now a bird will have the rest and the child stopped crying and quietly considered this as he trailed after his family. Earlier, while we walked through Provincetown a very old man dressed as a pilgrim walked up to us and said "All is well because you three are here". Caitlin believes I was fighting demons in my sleep when I stirred and gasped and wimpered, and always
in the morning, the birds, I swear, were speaking French.

July 28th, 2014

Even still, in these notes, I hear him, and for a moment it is not terrible to remember
things as they were. This tiny postage stamp city, a moving picture of love and life
before me, fades into its own scalloped edges and I am in a field dreaming of some
boy who said I love you and then disappeared into the wide world he needed to know
and be known by. He is years and years from me in a different city right now, and I
am on vacation by the sea with people who have taught me how to be loved, not just
how to love. Now that I understand both I am ready to begin again. "You're working
all your muscles" Brett said the other day. "First you learned desire, and then to accept
being the object of desire, and then that there was still room to feel, and then you
exercised the muscles of conflict, and now you are ready. Now you wait." It's family
week in Province Town and we are a family, Joe, Caitlin, and I. We make no apologies
for our love or loveliness or the headlights in the campground at one in the morning.
Love, like water, takes different shapes, and now that I have been near the sea, I cannot
go back to smaller tributaries.


July 27th, 2014

There was a lot of talk about the ocean and its endlessness from the pulpit,
and how grace is so much deeper than we know, though not deeper than we
can feel if we allow ourselves to feel it. I went home feeling an awareness
of the depth, though not the depth itself. I lay myself across the white concrete
of our front steps and closed my eyes. I spread my hands out on the concrete, my
head tipped back to the grass and dirt of the yard, and lay there feeling the warmth
and texture of everything beneath my palms. I prayed wordlessly about all the things
passing through my mind. The clouds became a little heavier, and little closer, until
they broke over me and I welcomed the water on my bare skin. I prayed the rain
would fall heavier and heavier until my lace dress was soaked through, and it did.
Ezra took off his shirt and joined me and we laughed, open-mouth and squinted eye,
as the rain fell in huge summer drops. When we were saturated I felt clean and
submerged and even reborn. I rose to wring out my dress but first turned to see the
pale dry on the steps where my body had been.

July 26th, 2014

My Lord is not like any other. The other gods are jealous and murderous; the gods of lust,
power, and addiction would promise a moment of pleasure and then take all of me as payment.
My Lord wants me to smile under large skies of possibilities. He wants freedom and peace in a
fullness I have come to know as love. I can feel his pulse in the center of night and feel his
breath when I walk into fields of tall grass and wildflowers. It is sweet and his exhalation
against my body is the laugh of a father who watches as his child learns the world. I feel
his hand pressing me into sleep and then reaching to help me out of bed the next morning.
And still there are failings and siren calls and everything I have left drawing me back. How
can both things be true in such a small place as my heart? How can I want to please him and
be so willing to walk into the chains held before me? But they are so lovely, so polished, and
there is safety in their weight. These are frightening things to say, and scarier things to see.
There is a stairwell below everything and my specific shackles wait there, familiar and lovely,
and gently swaying against the crumbling brick wall to the beat of my heart and the clock.
It is not that time is running out, not exactly. It is that the fullness of things is thinning.

July 25th, 2014

I should have just written last night, after midnight, about Catherine our beautiful neighbor
who was walking her dog, and how we, Brett and Davia and I, were all on the porch,
Davia and I just having finished a walk and Brett coming out from his room to smoke
a cigarette. I love your garden. I said to Catherine It kept me alive, the beauty of it, the 
wildness of it when everything else had died when I first moved here. I watched it sway 
from my second floor window and knew that all would be well someday. She smiles and says  
I am so glad. That garden got me through the three years after my divorce. I went to bed
after that with dreams of her, her lovely face and calm smile and how she was so exactly
the kind of woman I want eventually to be. But now it is 2:30 in the morning and I am lying
here, wrung out, half asleep, unable to articulate the night. It was saturated with beautiful men,
none of whom I wanted, and there was something about what the Russian boy said about
American women that made me feel certain that I was not meant for the heart of an American
man, nor the heart of a Russian boy. The categorical response, the sifting and separating -
I am a wildflower without a garden; I am a bird and there is nowhere to land.

July 24th, 2014


Well I guess something happens in your body when it learns depression. The heaviness
of limbs, the dullness of sight. So my heart, a faster beat now, and my body a smaller
size now, and my eyes, darting and sharper now, still feel a little bit disconnected
from each other as if they are just learning to be friends after a long time of fighting.
Laundry is exhausting. Someday I won't think that. Someday it will be a small thing.
For now it is an exercise of will, as still sometimes, leaving the bed is. Three months
ago I was driving to church and I realized: all my hair, the hair that knew every heart
ache I had faced, was gone. The new hair, cut close to my skull, was innocent of wrong-doing
and had never hurt or been hurt. The body wants renewal. And so, in that moment suspended over all
things, I knew renewal fully. Redemption is not the erasure of all the wrong, but rather a lifting
in spite of. And, gripping the steering wheel, I laughed. Today, the smell of cut grass
rises to my window and the breeze coming in lifts my now-longer hair from my cheek with
the tenderness of all the lovers I've really loved, and how fortunate, really, we all are to be
alive, in spite of any pain that is a byproduct of all the possible joy. I will lie silently no longer.




Let all your words be stones
in the city you are building,
and all your actions be the mortar.
We will rebuild this world yet.
It is not too late, your skin is not
too thin, your arms are strong and
sunned, and your legs are powerful.
Soon the blueprint will rise. It will
be a smile that starts the revolution,
so be very brave and look kindly
into the faces of people you've vowed
to hate. Be very still and listen for answers
when you yell your questions to the sky.
Tighten your belt and lift your eyes.

July 23rd, 2014

I don't want to write. There isn't anything to say. But there is. There
are a thousand beautiful things and yet this sleepiness, this fullness,
is pushing me into my bed and I can barely make my fingers fall against
the keyboard hard enough to coax the letters onto the page. Today the
sun was hot and my skin is once again kissed red. We laughed so hard
at dinner that I think I watched the notes of my laughter break against
the rafters of the restaurant. My lips are dried from the sun and burned
swollen. I don't mind though. My hip still hurts, but I also don't mind that.
Tonight Caitlin said how happy she was to have found us all, and I had
just been thinking about the miraculous nature of life and the way God
bears out his love in the simple things, like the beach and dinner with
friends. A thunderstorm falls but never breaks up the heat and so I lie in
the dark with the fan on, feeling the food move through my stomach and happiness
move through my veins, and I am glad that I can still feel salt and sand on my skin.


You will not want simple things, but in this, you will mistake wrong things
for complexity, for intrigue. Everyone will tell you not to marry him, to leave
him, except for your mother who knows the depth of your love and who sees
all good in all things, but who secretly, although she will not burden you with
this, fears your eventual reduction at his hand. In the end, when you do command
your feet to walk away, you will confuse preservation for failure for many many
years, and ruin plenty of good things in the process of this mis-attribution. And
then, one day, when you are 30 and sweating alone in your room with your dreams
and your tea and the fan that feels very human as it blows the blessing of coolness
towards you, you will know that it isn't failure, and it isn't even right or wrong,
and that, no, no! pain is not complexity and pleasure is not simple. How deeply
nuanced it is to be loved, to be loved and really known and reflected back to
yourself in all of their shining eyes, the many pieces, the many angles, the many
girls within you who had been silent and sleeping for years.


July 22nd, 2014

Tuesday and there are endless opportunities to get it right today. I woke before 6, just after the sun, with a red pain in my left hip. It was as if someone was inside of me, scraping a rusty nail along the bone. I drove home when I could move and painted white over the peach color I had covered the walls with 13 summers ago when life was very different. The yard was waist high and ruined when we first walked the property. My father saw only what could be, and so it became that, a beautiful, tailored, acre of garden, chicken, and manicured rose gardens. How lovely, and what privaledge to know that no matter where you landed with this family, with this man of a father, beauty would radiate out from his hands as they thoughtfully tested and weighed the dirt for its potential. Now the yard has won again, has taken back its name from my father, who has since returned to dirt himself.
It is the forest around sleeping beauty's castle, which is not an untrue metaphor for all of our hearts. But, I am sharpening my blade. Soon I will come home, not to paint over the past, but to fight the feral yard and bend it once again into a shape of recognizable beauty, in honor of his vision, what little of it I could ever see. I will even take his ashes and scatter them through the garden rows, although our mother grows pale at the thought.


July 21st, 2014

Imagine how quickly you'd get into heaven if you converted an atheist though?
Brett says, mirth and salt clinging to his lips. We laugh and I throw my head back
in a way that Kelly says "is like those women who are extras in movies and when
the camera pans out for a full restaurant shot, they laugh expansively". It is Monday
and the day was a failure, really, if we're being honest. And we might as well be,
since this is a book of truths. And if we're being honest, it's not a book, but rather
a long scroll that you would wear as a dress if you could. Brett is writing poetry
and every time a message from Rich comes through, something deeper than the
last time stirs. If I drank, Brett says, I would fuck with that. The drink smells like
pineapple and coconut and I want sunscreen and rocky beaches and to be alone
there, thinking these thoughts and feeling my longing. I forgot what it felt like
to want, to feel desire in the back of my throat. The air is cold tonight, and a breeze
comes through the screen while I, like a caged animal, pace, and write, and fold laundry.
My legs ache with a thirst for the street, my mouth aches with a thirst for his sweat.


Another poem is moving inside me so vigorously that I stop typing to vomit. The spinach
wasn't even digested and I'm not sure if it was the salt of the soy sauce or the too-sweet
alcohol that curdled it all. It feels much better to be empty, but this is a dangerous thought,
a dangerous shaking in the limbs which feels like cocaine and inspiration. There is nothing
like it, and how close they are, those two. Today was sour too. It began so sweetly, but
fell apart like cardboard in rain. My head is addled and my room is in shambles. The
laundry is daunting and when people spoke to me today, outside of Rich and Brett, I
could not hear their words for my distraction at the movement of their lips and my complete
inability to make sense of anything. I want to be alone. I want to be alone in a clean and
empty room. I want to be alone and empty in a clean and empty room. I do not know what is happening to my body and my mind is contorting and shaking. Perhaps it's because I could
not find my Bible this morning. My Bible and I have become a sort of joke, but the people
who tell it are gentle and loving and I know their kindness will be paid back to them. I wrap
my mouth around the word "trust" and sink my nails into a night that wants to wrestle me to the ground.

July 15th, 2014  

For Rich

 It wasn't a band-aid because there were no longer any open wounds, but still,
you knew it would hurt a little when he left. And it did. And this is okay.
The milky sky separates at spots to show you the blue that is always there.
Your mouth is dry from his lips and thirsty for more, not only of his kisses, but
also his words. This is good. There is an order that must be kept and he is not yours,
but his arms will rest around you in ways you don't yet anticipate, and there is
protection and life in their hold. You meant it when you placed your palms
against his chest, over his heart and lungs and ribs as he left, and said I will pray 
a benediction over you. Go in peace. Our love is different than all the others. 
It is vast and diffuse and stretches from the sheets to the width of this country. 
I'll find you again. Until then, walk with your spine straight my dear, and your 
eyes to the vanishing point we will never reach but always run towards. I'll 
meet you in bed or on a city street, or in a song, and we'll laugh a little more, 
and learn to touch, and even hold, the truths behind our words.

July 11th, 2014

And right before I woke up my father appeared and said
come with me and I did and he was showing me something
in a house, a door, perhaps work he had done, but before
we walked through the door he looked at me with such
tenderness and love that in waking life I had only dreamed
of and said, I love you so damn much, and hugged me in the
way that only exists between fathers and daughter. It was full
of approval, validation, and protection. He shook with sobs
and I was nervous, a blossoming flower in his arms, but not
quite ready to discuss everything that had gone wrong in our
relationship or his life. I cried too, uncomfortably, but
then we pulled apart and he was no longer crying and we were
about to continue on through the door when I woke smiling. It
took me several seconds to remember that he was dead.


July 10th, 2014

Slowly, slowly, things fall into place. I ran two days in a row.
I met the man who once passed me a microphone at a panel
discussion. This same man gives me hope for the future of
humanity. I am writing again. At least, I am committing these
words to this page. We'll see when the "writing" begins again.
I read tonight, to a room full of people who maybe understood
60% of what I said; the room was too small for expanding nuances.
The moon was lovely tonight and as I ran around a corner I
startled a couple who had been making out on a park bench.
At the sight of me they stood. I outlived them and used their
bench for arm presses. now I am falling asleep as I try to offer
my siblings as full a hope as I can I drift what was I trying to do
for my siblings in that dream in the shallow end of sleep? All i
understood is that it was kind. And then sleep came.



June 30th, 2014

Everything smelled like bikram yoga.
Everything smelled like bikram yoga
and noxzema and the wine that had
spilled on the light pink sheet turning
it to the bruised color of a sky that
clears of clouds just after sunset. These
are the days we live within and count
as our own, and are our own alone in the
kind of solitary that grows plants. A deep
dirt kind of solitary, a deeper practice, a
deeper heat. I grew familiar with the
deeper heat and the feeling of blood
buzzing through pathways, tingling in the
tips of things, moving always onward and through. 


June 23rd, 2014

Clearing out the space was like
lugging your dead body from a
grave, its weight catching on the
soft dark of dirt. These things
are never as they seem, like when
we climbed to the top of the mountain
to scatter your ashes and it was
raining and we hid in the fog from the
other hikers, from the gaze of children
and their tourist parents. Nothing was
soft and forgiving and the rain fell
sharp and your ashes, they stuck to the
rocks as we tried to let them out, tried to return
you to a place you had loved and conquered. 


June 19th, 2014

He will write today. His eyes don't focus on things 

before him but rather the words he will write and 

all the images they stand as symbol for. His eyes. 

They are a negotiation of smoke and water as a 

storm over a sea and maybe there is, though we 

do not speak of it often, sadness as well. Here is 

where image and word meet, even before he draws 

his pen along the lines. How many times have I sat 

with him and watched this, a long net patiently dragged 

along sand through gray water to bring up what is many 

miles beneath and then the sorting through trash and 

treasure? He is Ahab. Also he is Jonah. He is the 

striving and the silence, the tautness of a line and 

the life on the other end.

June 15th, 2014

Dear Dad, 

A stranger was in my bed last night. 

It wasn't on purpose, not really anyway, 

and the day is perfect and the sun is out

and if you were alive you would be 

browning in it, your skin a deep leather

crossed with a few wrinkles and many 

hairs. You would yawn a growl of a

yawn, as a bear, and you would be so 

pleased with yourself, sweat and oil

dripping from your bald forehead. 

I feel the fullness of regret, but also
the numbness that always follows it.
I will let the sun melt these layers.


June 8th, 2014

Jamie said there are always sports all the time if you want to find them
because his child, my cousin, is playing a sport that strikes me as
unseasonal, though I know very little of these things, and in truth,
wish to know even less than I do. This is constructed around just a note
from that day, June 8th, and I have no memory of why this was important.
The rest of the note reads: 
Something said on the porch
bukowski
I can not hope to unfold these folded notes that hole some wisdom or at
least narrative from the day, but I do know that "something said on the
porch" is an unintentionally lovely line and evokes a feeling, if not a memory,
that is true of this day. Something is always being said on the porch, and
very often, these things being said relate to Bukowski, and very often,
these things being said lance wounds.


 June 7th, 2014

There's still weight which won't seem to come off I
say to myself every single time I look in the mirror, as
if the layer of fat on my hips and belly had a stubborn
mind of its own and a stake in staying attached to me. The
reason it isn't coming off is because too often in the months
from last June to this one I held myself under covers rather
than scraping my knees tripping during a night run. Too
many times I said, well, why not another drink? Why not
this food? And now the fat on my body seems so other
to me, so foreign, that I speak to it in a passive aggressive
tone through my reflection. It doesn't want to leave because
I have prepared a home for it. It has bonded to my bone.
No one was ever really afraid of failure, rather, we're not
sure we deserve success.

June 1st, 2014

Dream/porch/sun/shopping

May 31st, 2014

disappointment/sparing

May 30th, 2014

Tulip

May 29th, 2014

Talent show

May 28th, 2014

Dream

May 27th, 2014

And when I closed my eyes one of the things I saw was you smiling into a sun
that would never cease. Hello. We have never met and yet you have taken my
hand and walked me through both fields and concrete paths. Your name was
vesper, at least one of them was, and when I heard your voice I heard the call
embedded within. Oh lady, how lovely and pure your white hands were. How
hard also, and how strong, your same white hands were. Hello, we have not
met, but if we did, I imagine I would have ducked from your constant blue
gaze, and you, undeterred, would have steadily looked until I could no longer
avert. These are just words, and none of them very good. Your daughter was
beautiful and gracious, and your son, still a boy, hunched his shoulders and
smiled. Both children smiled into the eyes of those who sought them out and
they seemed to know that they must be strong for all the wild people who had
loved their mother and drawn near to her fire. Your husband was tall and his
eyes were crinkled in the corners like tissue paper. Ingrid, I would have, I do! loved you.


 May 25th, 2014

The fabric frays at its thread-level from overuse and light,
gathering mass, almost experienced in the material, as the
material, wears through. Through this we find a waking, a
lucid mind. All the pebbles fathered by the stones and rocks
of the center of the world, they gather at these shores. This is
not the end. We are just growing through layer by layer by layer
and many people are left to be born and live these ideas into
their bones. We are the first ones; we will bring into this fight
new weapons and wise children who will see a wave for everything
it is. Break bread with me and let us laugh like a we are children
seeing rain for the first time. When you are tired, find the swell
of my breast to rest against. I have carved a place for your hand
in mine. My eyes are sharpened to your sight. I can almost see
the curve of your smile. It is not unlike my own when I think of you.

 May 23rd, 2014

We are athletes of words I say to them.
They don't buy it. I have to pee she says,
I'm going to write about that. Some things
are about the act of doing them, not your
enjoyment, I want to tell them. Some time,
not very close to this time, you will be in the
midst of doing something that you hate, or at
least don't like, and you will feel suddenly the
burst of joy that comes only from endurance.
There is nothing like sweat for cleaning your
conscience, and nothing like breaking muscle
to feel yourself, the very core of yourself,
as you are unadulterated. They don't know
many of the words I say, but, I think, they feel them.



May 22nd, 2014

My stomach cried all day, as it had every other day this week and I
wondered if maybe a parasite had moved in and was expanding and
pushing out the gut. It also felt as if a large hand of steal was inside
twisting my intestines around its thick fingers, as if they were curls.
I don't want to be caressed in this manner, please, hand of steal,
remove your touch from my lower abdomen.  Or, if you must stay,
stop forcing food up through my esophagus and into the toilet; I do
not want my teeth to decay before my skin has fallen from my bones.
This is a small thing to ask, I think, of an uninvited hand. Unless,
of course, I've got it all wrong and it the absence of thing, not the thing
itself, that hurts. I imagine a black hole pulsing with black light.
Through it, if you squint your eyes, you can see another universe all
together. But I cannot give myself over to the mysticism of pain today,
for I have worldly things to do. So, please pain, flee.

May 21st, 2014

I got really good, so they gave me mausoleums he says, stirring his shepherd's pie
from the staff lunch room. And now we are here, both teaching, I a former waitress
and he a former graveyard salesman. When we pull into the liquor store parking lot,
Joe and I, the space is tight. When we leave, someone has decided to park right
behind us, limiting our space even more. I start to inch out and a woman with long
white hair appears out of no where to coach me. She also tells the parked car to move
and it does. I wave a thanks and she waves it away. Her shirt says "I am crazy" or
something to that effect. We see her later at a gas station down the street. In the park
we are in the house that belongs to lucas and genna and I and a mom and a small boy
enter. She lifts him up and shows him where his name has been carved into the bark.
We were here, your father and I and you. You were four months. The boy laughs in
delight and then demands to be put down. He stumbles almost onto our blanket and says
oh! you're having a picnic! and then he is gone. My dart game was impeccable tonight,
though we still didn't win. When I kissed him it was with a quiet desire that took its time.

May 20th, 2014

there are too many things to say to really begin
when i held that tree i felt a pulse i didn't really
believe i would ever again feel. it seemed to manifest
arms and lifted them to touch my back. the lilacs
were almost in bloom and i reached up to take a
bunch. my stomach continues to ache and my throat
is dry and my head pounds. You'll miss tomorrow
miss they said. no, I can't. tomorrow is a quiz and
what am I sick with? I think it is only spring fever
and i think the cure is in daily hikes and keeping to my
schedule. Has it always been this way in the spring?
Yes. yes it has. since the first swallow opened its mouth
to sing and the first lover watched the pulse
of the soft bird neck as he lowered himself to her lips.

May 19th, 2014

Do you remember the bleeding hearts? How pink they were, how very thoroughly and completely the color with no apologies, and how they clashed with the Japanese maple, and how they were cheerful in spite of the bleeding? I ran only in intervals tonight because that is where my
body is right now, but as I ran, I felt my muscles lengthen and break and grow and I avoided the roots in the path, and even danced, twirling and throwing my arms up when I was sure no one else was there. I reached the top and didn't pause, I had not time to waste, and ran back down the
path. My thoughts were not yet untangled and this was okay because I still had the silence and space of the woods in which to be tangled and un. I stopped at the rock with words on it I couldn't read and all the thinking I had done caught in my throat and came out like sob. My eyes blurred
and a tree before me called to me. I ran to it and fell against its solid bark and it said, that's fine girl, cry. There is a lot to cry about, and the earth is hurting as much as you are. I am not an animist but I felt this tree's soul, and I swear we both shook a bit when I broke apart from its arms. I didn't know yet, but tomorrow I would come back and wrap my arms around every tree until I found this one again.

May 14th, 2014

You never write poems about me. She said. I don't like essays. Think of it as a paper then. She squints her eyes and barely looks at me, letting me know she does not think I am funny. What is funny says Monica from the other part of the room after I tell her I wrote about her in the poem from yesterday is that he did drive by in the afternoon and I didn't have the baby wrapped up, so he saw his foot. The worst part of the dream two nights ago was that I didn't see his face
because he had none. He was just a presence and a voice telling me over and over again that no, no. He could not forgive me. But you are hurting everyone I said and he said he didn't care. I woke feeling like something had burrowed into me in the dark and then exited, leaving a yawning space that wanted to be filled. But, what I woke to in the real world was the certainty of a birds calling out the rising sun and the fact that there was nothing to be forgiven for. I dressed by the window, repeating these truths, rehearsing them and feeling the way they felt with my tongue, when suddenly I saw on the window what must have been there all along, since I've moved in, a heart drawn in the dust by someone's finger that said "K + G". So, so, there is love. When I tell my students this, they stare and say finally so you don't clean your windows. No. I don't. And the light still comes in. No matter what blocks it, it still finds an avenue.

May 13th, 2014

I wrap the baby up tight when I go outside so that his father cannot see him when 
he drives by slow.All he sees is a blue blanket. When you are killing an animal, 
if you show emotion the animal will hold on to life for longer. It's true. It feels 
your desire for its life, and it fights. In Puerto Rico you'd get smacked for that. 
These are among the things I learn when I come here to teach. I let Caitlin read
the poem from yesterday about our night, and then I let Eaton read it too. His
face follows every line and embodies its desired emotion. Somehow, this
is exactly what should have happened and what had been ordained from the
beginning of time. We have very little to do with the arrangements. Every dress fits
incorrectly, although it is true that my waist is smaller than before. I didn't
even want to find his eyes. I just wanted to keep mine down and continue
walking slowly towards absolution. That's not how it works though. His smile
and the warmth I feel within it has complicated things. I AM feeling these two 
things at once. That's what makes it complex Brett says, giving voice to my thoughts.

May 12, 2014

When she drove by, Brett perked up like a cat at the window smelling summer for the
first time. My eyes were itchy from pollen and my mouth was dry and hungry for
something more than the food I ate. Sharon drove by after SHE did, and we yelled her
name. Caitlin drove by after that and we called to her as well. Both came and joined
us on the patio. The sun was warm and we were wrapped together in its remaining light.
Later Caitlin and I prayed theatrically over our phones because we so wanted the boys
we liked to text us back. They both did, and Caitlin knew suddenly the power of prayer
in a way that rivaled old testament stories. Joe called and his voice was lost and unsure, somewhere in the back of his throat, and we rushed to meet him in the dark on the street
to hear why he sounded that way. We both hugged him and listened until his smile became
more sure. We walked him home and said goodbye by the bushes. We prayed once more,
for everyone and everything, and the simplicity of it sparkled. On the way home the moon
got caught in branches in the most delightful way and I had to stop and release it at least
three times. This is just where I am right now, in some lovely village at the palm of two
very high ridges. and this is where I will stay.


May 7th, 2014

how we tell our lives through stories over and over,
how we tell our stories through shades that only we
can see. I have often wondered what kind of stories
are told about me, but then I remember Sapir and
Worf and how they believed that if one did not have a
word for blue in ones language he could not see the color
blue, at least not as one, who had the word, could. So,
then, if love meant "control and possession" to one
and "sacrifice and identity" to another, how could the
stories possibly ever line up? I have painted my story in
shadows on the sea, and still my sorrow has followed
me. For a year I braided it into all the songs I knew, and
after that I told it through jokes that no one found funny.
We are all impressionists. Stand back, very far back, to understand.


May 6th, 2014

My energy,
which I
had so
carefully
collected
over the
last few
weeks, all
leaked slowly
out of me
today,
second
by
second.

 May 5th, 2014


And a cry I was not sure anybody heard, not the whole of it, not the
many worlds that made their existence within it, not the reach of its
vastness and excruciating poignance, escaped in a trickle from my lips
when through my open bedroom door I said to Brett, well what then?
What do I do? Do I settle? And what I was really saying is will there
ever be any release from the prison of this cry that no one can hear and
will I ever be loved and am I even worth such a thought, and Brett poised
and posed at the bottom of the stairs, coffee cup in hand, looked up steadily
and said, as if he heard the questions I was not asking I think you're lovely. 
Stick with me. I will never tell you to settle. And, as if a stone had been
thrown at a flock of seagulls, the fear and pain, the very cry itself, scattered
and rose to the textured ceiling and the day, like water, settled into itself in
a soothing lapping that belongs only to the still waters we dream of when
we dream of peace.

 May 4th, 2014

 All this happened in the time when the earth was undeniably warming and huge prehistoric
fish washed up on the shore of connecticut. All this happened after your father had gone
off somewhere you couldn't follow, twice; once to a land he described as the greenest in
all the world and then to somewhere you can't even reach by phone. There were huge plants
in the living room, which was more of a grotto, or a terrarium, and the skylight hung over us
hugely but lightly. He wasn't surprised I was homeschooled, it made sense you see, after all
the creativity he had observed in me he said as he moved in a gentle drunken way on the
cushion, breathing deep from his vaporizer. Joe had his hand tucked between my legs, between
the two knees really, as I had them crossed, and the touch was nice, like warm bathwater, and
just as clean and familiar. On the ride home Josh told stories of high school and I laughed
harder than I had in a long time, really laughed with my whole face, until my gut hurt. All this happened on a Saturday night when any one of us could have been somewhere else, but we
gathered together and went there, and while Tom taught Josh how to play piano, I realized
what I wanted out of life, and how close this was to it.

May 3rd, 2014

We drove down empty streets on a gray February day somewhere in Rhode Island seven years ago. I had my lap top and we kept it open as the car moved slowly by houses until we found unsecured internet. Then we stopped and idled and looked up real estate. Your dreams then were not my own, but I tried very hard to be with you there, although, the closest I believe I ever got was to wait just outside the austere gates of your designs for you to notice the garden I was planting around the periphery. You were always a cross stitch in black thread of some puritanical axiom, and I was the flowers embroidered around the solid lettering to bring in what beauty was allowed. Not very much was, and since you it has taken me three years and many many mistakes to remember what beauty I was born with. Now I understand the looks of other men when I expressed my unending devotion, my hands dripping with dirt from the garden I planted for us, my hair tangled with flowers I so wished you would notice. Later that day it snowed and the car was stuck on a hill. The slicked road would not give us traction and finally I steered and you got out and pushed and, then, then, we were together. If only you would have joined me outside of that city of your dreams and come, even just for an afternoon, to the garden. We would have together known the wet warm of dirt and all the possibility in its depths.

April 29th, 2014

After the meeting, when we broke out of the building feeling like high school kids because we were free, we decided to get food and a drink instead of going straight to the gym. This turned into hours of laughter and talk and meeting people who own spas and salt caves in West Hartford. When we walked into the gym the air that hit our lungs was stale and filled with the burning of grinding gears. The sky was so near that when we went for a run around the plaza it fell in little pieces and hit us in the eye. I rowed a boat eternally into nothing and you smiled largely like a Chesire cat, at the man who looked like your old professor, at the machines, at everything. My muscles hurt eventually and the machine that waits like an open mouth to be further separated by my legs yawned sleepily as I climbed out of it. It was 9:40 when we left and the sky was further off then, a vague distance, facing away from us and looking dreamily out into space. Earlier that day a student had jokingly kicked a chair and another student had feigned shock and said "that's a government chair" and I thought of Jamiaca Kinkaid and her government ink.  Everything is government chairs and government ink
and the large invisible hand that provides it knows neither the words we write nor the lives we live within and without these government cinder block walls.

April 28th, 2014


I poured through the day like a wave, filling every second with some essential part of me.
And by the end of it, I felt lighter, as if I had stored and hidden many little pieces under
tea cups in other people's china cabinets. Whatever is lost I don't much need now. Earlier
today I thought, one thing he left me with is a deep strain of judgement and snobbery,
like mica glistening between layers in a rock. I shiver inside when someone uses the wrong
word or the incorrect conjugation or adds an s where there should not be an s... but this
was his weight, not my own, and mica is soft and can be peeled away in layers, and so,
after teaching for 12 hours, after traffic that was so backed up I nearly fell asleep on the
stagnant highway, after being hurt and disillusioned and then also delighted by the world,
I dug my fingers into my core and peeled, layer by layer, the slick pieces of judgement
out. I danced like a person I am not. I smiled into everyone's eyes. I drank a strange
drink and touched people freely, as if there was not a thing separating all of us. And
there isn't. These divisions are not mine and I will no longer abide by them. So, come
to me, even if I have spurned you. I am not who I was this morning, and I never will be
again.


April 23rd, 2014

All the girls on the stage are vibrating with hope. I want to tell them so many
things. First, their awards matter much less than what got them the awards.
That is the only thing that will last, but they must, they MUST, make it last.
They will have many battles to fight to support and affirm and continue that
thing inside them that propelled them here. Second, there is no such thing as
beauty, or rather, it is not so predictable or contained as I used to believe.
Every single girl is lovely in her own way. Some of them only because of their
youth, but even that is a crown, though one made of flowers that will fade.
Some are sharp and their very shape is beauty, and some have both things,
though age will bring it more into focus, but since it is not a static word, beauty,
since it means too many things to mean anything, there's no use worrying over it.
Third, I want to tell them to trust all things always, but especially their own
gut. If it hurts when you lie down next to him, girl, it will always hurt. Some
pain is meant to exist as a warning. These are your nerve endings. Do not try to outgrow them.

April 22nd, 2014

A thin place. A place where we feel the breath of the other. A place in which the
sounds that exist have not come from our own lips. It comes as a whisper, a swell
of wave from far off, holy holy holy.
Meet me, you say, by the lake in the dark. The light on the water will remind you
how my love rests, without burden and luminous. Meet me, you say, where the light
breaks off in pieces at the end of the day and rests red on the horizon. Meet me, you
say, when the first seconds of sun stain the darkness white. Meet me in the moments
your will splinters and in the moments your triumph flares. I am who you seek, and
I have been waiting. Meet me, you say, in a simple place of longing, in places long
forgotten. I was there even then. Break bread and feast, but, when you break bread, let
it always be with me. For my words, my every word, recorded in letter and whispered
in your ear, are what you seek. This will be your safety, your sustenance, your strength
and your armor. My love, this table was set before you were born, before city states
shook their arms in power, before even the earth took form. I have been waiting. Be with me.

April 21st, 2014

When I spend time with Ezra sometimes it is as if I am slowly and gently touching many small porcelain animals I had on dressers as a child. There are worlds within worlds within him, and the way he picks up and puts on and smooths over his chest thoughts and perceptions interests me. He is quiet tonight, but his eyes are full of more stories than I have time to hear. My white wine has pear and orange and lychee, all of which "quietly linger" according to the menu, and it is true. Ezra's red is viscous caramel and berries. When I tell him again how deeply I have hurt, he makes a noise like the distant rush of wind through pines, a low, empathic anger at injustice and loss which is somehow without judgement. His instinct is equity and in this we are brothers. After, I sleepily move in my bed and rearrange the keepsakes and memories, all the tiny animals, on that internal shelf of the mind. It is good to remember and touch these tiny creatures of what has been, and the movement stirs up dust which shines like gold in the spears of sun through the window of the mind. And this time, this time, my hand is not even cut by the remaining shards of broken things. When I smiled at Ezra tonight, it was with more than my lips, and this somehow takes us back to a sunny river bank in a different April long ago when I was free for a moment, lying against poison oak roots on the shores of the possible.

April 19th, 2014

At first I was shy and maybe they were too, but after many thimblefulls of wine, half Pinot Noir
and half Manishevitz - and what a feat to pour both bottles, portion by portion, into the tiny glass sitting on the white table cloth without destroying anything - there was a settling in and we began to smile behind our smiles. I lived in the west end of Hartford she said There was a health food store, a wonderful theatre, and such a friendliness, an openness, that was not where I grew up in New York. I let sink in the image of this woman, young and beautiful, walking streets that I now walk. The other woman says my mother died when I was seven and a half. No one talked about it. In class when we were asked to stand and tell the names of our parents, I lied. There was such a shame in in being motherless. What I would like to know though, she says, is where your remarkable compassion comes from. My students, I stammer through a blush, and she shakes her head no before I finish my sentence no, no. It is much older and deeper in you than that. We are interrupted by everyone saying goodbye but her words, all of their words, stay with me through the night like the plumb brandy that moves through my veins like a pulsing light. Time and tribe collapses around us and we are part of a single tapestry. As we separate into the night, the fabric holds.

April 18th, 2014

Today, when I walked out of the coffee shop I looked up to see a man I had known two years ago when I was sad and drunk all the time. He was a barfly and the men I was comforting myself with were also, and so they knew each other and I by extension knew this man. I knew him in the peripheral way we recognize our own suffering in others. He was kind and cheerful and always always drunk. Very soon, the men I crowded my life with evaporated, moving away or entangling themselves with others, and I stopped fusing myself to the seats of that shadowy bar and started to notice things like the sun and myself again. I saw this man once more and he told me he was moving to the West Coast. So when I walked into the gray April afternoon from the coffee shop today and looked up to see him walking with a lovely blonde woman, I thought for a moment I had invented this. Wrapped tightly and bound to his chest was a small baby. The three squinted into the bright white of the day, moving almost as one unit, and he proudly the helm and the rudder, and I thought he might have seen me from the corner of his eye, and might have smiled in my direction, and whether or not this happened, I beamed as if the sun were out, as if the warmth of it was touching everyone. For a moment we shared the same pavement as he walked by, two ruined strangers restored and cutting paths though this sea, still.

April 17th, 2014 (Fifth period free write. Written after Maureen Seaton's Etta's Elegy)

And let us start by saying words we barely know and then taking them apart, syllable by syllable, letter by letter, and reducing the flesh to the dehydrated skins of animals and then stitching these together to make a new meaning from what is undone. We are the brave ones. We are the ones writing on a Thursday morning in the sun while a lawn mower roars its song to a sky full of blue. So walk into a world you know only some words for; walk into it bravely wearing what you have made of the deconstructed words of your life. Everything you have been is just below the surface, moving slowly like a huge sea creature below the still water. But also, everything you will become is here too, blossoming and blooming and erupting as underwater volcanoes. When all the words are in pieces like the shattered porcelain on the floor of the kitchen when you threw the plate but didn't know why, don't bother to collect the shards. It is right to break things. Even hearts. But, don't ignore the mess either. This happened. This is always happening. Everything you are is happening and never un. We are the brave ones. We gather, languageless and strong, sunned to darkness and teeth bleached with smiles, around the first fires of civilization and we look with eyes full of what will be into a sky we need no words to hold. These are the days that matter most of all. Be brave. Be strong.

April 15th, 2014

Steve says bones are not something to write about, or at least that the word bone should not be used, and I know I should listen because he is wise, but I can't resist the urge to imagine them, small or large, couched in the blood and tissue of the ephemeral, and how that will melt and allow them freedom, allow them to bleach, allow them to grind down into the powder of witch doctors or be polished into jewelry. Teeth are bones we can see - little lanterns going forth to make our name known in dark villages. The students bow their heads to the page. They write and I wonder what worlds unfold themselves on the page. In a creation myth I am creating right now the moth is esteemed because the world, in two-dimension, in pastel colors as a map of the Pangea, was carried on its back and when it had flown for a very long time to the edge of the light in a sky that was not yet the sky because there was no earth to define it, it fell to a ground that was not yet the ground and broke apart. Its blood and flesh, the indistinct blood and flesh of insect, flowed and stuck together and from these trembling clumps of once life the earth formed. It formed immediately and swiftly, and in the same amount of time it had taken the great moth to fall from the sky, tribe and village and city state rose, each a rippling muscle on the back of my hand.

April 14th, 2014 (From first period's free write. For my family)

I remember first St. Patrick's day and the way my grandmother, smelling like the heavy perfume she always wore, would come to dinner, or make dinner, and it was always corn beef and cabbage and how the beef and cabbage and potatoes would melt in my mouth and how the broth would shine with the fat from the beef and how the meat would come off in strips and maintain its elasticity through chewing even. There were green things too, but mostly it was the greening spring grass. Then, four days later, my birthday, the first, or first full day, of spring depending on the year. And then Easter. Easter. Full of hope. Easter. All redemption, past and future, hidden in a day. When I was very little it was all frilly dresses and bonnets and maybe even kid gloves. Easter is the fanciest holiday because the color scheme is soft and lovely and it is warm enough to not wear a coat. But last Easter was cold. Last Easter was gray. Last Easter was like a funeral for everything we had lost or killed. We dressed up anyway, we dressed brightly even, and when we returned from church we ate and laughed and smiled bravely while all the ghosts came around to pull at our sleeves. We squared our shoulders and sang songs that angels sing and moment by moment the past cleared from our gaze, like a thick fog burned away by the rising sun.

April 13th, 2014

Deep seeds He said. Deep seeds which are
now pushing through ground. Breaking the
ground. This was intended long ago, but now,
now it is becoming real. Now it is pushing
through ash. Remember that image from long
 ago? You didn't know how true it was, did you.
And now you must believe because you are left
with no other option. Kelly prayed Psalm 24:4
over me. I know it is both an encouragement and
a warning, and I will treat it as such. Also, she said,
your father, your father in his redeemed existence,
he is very proud of you. And I know this is true.
Ash is good for the ground. The reduction of life
bids the tiny plants to grow. A metaphor; a miracle.


April 12th, 2014

I count off, in no particular order, the dealings of my day. Why so long away?
Why comfort, satisfaction, success, do you keep yourself from me and loll
about in the shadows of my porch, or just down the road, or drinking beers
on somebody else's porch? Why are you just beyond my reach like a dandelion
seed I have been chasing through a field for so long that now the grass beneath
me is broken by huge machines whose teeth tear and pull and still I chase, just
ahead of the destruction but just behind the soft bristles of your white hair. 
There are so many things that disappoint me about me. This impulse, for one,
of chasing things I can barely see rather than noticing an entire field is being
tilled into a modern box-house development so that now I am just running for my
life and there is no time to chain myself to the trees or the loamy dirt. I am sorry
field of neglected things below my feet. I am sorry earthworms and tiny black beetles.
I am sorry that I was chasing a dandelion seed rather than searching your depth
for four leaf clovers. I am sorry your belly is eviscerated and your children are orphans.


April 11th, 2014

Yes, I know there is one last thing to give up.
By one last thing I suppose I mean more that
there is a box of tiny things that loom hugely
in my mind; a smile, a promise, a hope, an
expectation. When Pandora opened the box
what left were the things you would want to get
rid of, and what remained was hope locked in that
gilded room. Though I do not wish my misfortune
or metastasized grief on anyone else, Lord, when
you open my heart, let those things burn off as
mist, as snow rising, and, please, I beg of you,
let hope remain. I can't wait for you to see what's 
next you say bending over me gently and brushing
the hair from my teary and tired eyes.



April 10th, 2014 (from this morning's free write prompt for first period)

I was young enough to have to go to bed while it was still light out in the height of summer. Looking back, I imagine this as the longest day of the year, but I have no way of knowing if it was. I lay in my bed feeling the most sensational pressure in my body and mind, the urge and compulsion to live and be in every moment. It made my limbs stretch towards a future I was too young to even imagine. I pressed my face against the screen window and took the summer air into my lungs. The fireflies danced. The huge rhododendron outside my window seemed to move in time to the blinking, although I knew this was impossible because its roots were too deep. I imagined my father planted the rhododendron bush, in the way that you assume the world around you has been shaped and created by the parents who shaped and created you, but now I know it was older than he was at the time and that though he tended it he wasn't its author. In the neighbor's yard a bug zapper intermittently snapped at the mosquitos that came too close. The smell of grass kept me awake, as well as the idea of all that was possible in this world, this small and also huge world whose borders were the borders or my yard. I stared hard, so hard, at the fireflies and knew that I would never, ever, forget this moment. And I never did.


April 9th, 2014

As I re-bobbypinned my hair a person I didn't see flew
through the door and into a stall. I said: are you okay?
She didn't answer at first. And then said, yes. You don't
sound it. I'm not. What is it. Would you like to talk. It's just.
It's just. My brother. He may be going away for a long time.
Finally she emerges from the stall, eyes still dripping, but a
smile near her lips. And you name? Sheba she says. Nice
to meet you. I'm Leanne. I hope things work out, but I'll
pray for your family. She smiles, laughs through tears, sniffles,
wipes her tears again. As I walked out of the bathroom another
student follows and I hold the door after me and catch a glimpse
of her face. She is a foot shorter than I am and when I look over
my shoulder and down she is looking up and she smiles
gently. And that was that.

April 6th, 2014

And this morning the way the sun shone through all the windows was a taste I had been seeking and I opened my mouth and savored the dusty silence of beams. A man walks his dog. He is from the early 2000s and so is his goatee, now white, though his face is lineless and still glazed with youth. His dog stops to ponder the border of the sidewalk. His dog stops to smell the dirt. He is patient and he smiles down at the dog. I love this man and his goatee, and that is not an exaggeration. I love, and he is the manifestation of all things in this moment, and so from my second floor room my love falls on him. He feels it nearly, lifting his eyes, but he cannot see me in this room that is the same color as the light that floods it. I put back up all the poems about you that I took down. It has nothing to do with now, but I am old enough to say remember when, and to read again the love, the way it swelled and pooled and rushed in and drew out, the way it really was like an ocean full of salt and life and slowly moving plants, it was good, good, to see this and say, yes. Yes. This happened. I did not imagine it. My love, I wish you well. When the taste of your salt has finally left my mouth, I will be able to give the pith of these poems to another. But the old will remain, and I am comforted by this thought, even though I own nothing you gave me any more.

April 5th, 2014 

soon! Sweet girl, I'll arrange to conveniently be wherever you last saw your 

innocence. Maybe it was the final time you held a porcelain doll and felt the lovely 

cool skin as if it were life. Or maybe it was when you kissed him for the first time 

and felt the rug burns on your knees as you moved over him erupt into blossom and 

it felt like new life but it was only that the burn left scabs that looked like wildflowers 

so you had to wear bandaids under your jeans as you walked around the campus of your 

high school under the trees that knew and bent low to touch your cheek and say now 

you have become a woman. Now you are ancient and lovely like us. Or maybe it was the 

23rd summer which you spent hiding from the lightening under friends’ windowsills or 

maybe it’s still under that very first windowsill which was also a boat and also a whale 

and also a carriage and also a white horse.  I will wait there and whisper to you in that 

secret language you perceive only as movement through water that the weight of this 

moment will melt like soap against skin. When you feel a warmth on your cheek, smile 

at me, who you will become, and heed what I say. 

April 4th, 2014

The night was sharp and its edges were rocks around which to navigate. It was maybe because of my falseness and indulgences from the night before which knocked the Bible off the bed, or perhaps because of the words Brett and I spoke in the kitchen before retreating to our separate bedrooms. I try to love, or like at least, but the most I can honestly say I feel is curiosity, as if I'm watching. What will happen next? Brett's face breaks like water and he nods in agreement. When was the last time I said it and meant it? Surely not the length of any pairing. But no, this cannot be true. I am not the villain. I am not the villain. When I walked outside at night Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday of this week and smelled the smell of waking grass and resting blue, I remembered how much a part of the earth my veins are and felt that if I were barefoot I would feel a deeper pulse and recognize the beat. Just breathe one of my students writes you wouldn't drown if you didn't fight. I wonder if she knows how true this is. The quicksand desires at once to pull us in and support our weight. The decision lies in our muscles, but our muscles, so dumb and shining, so quick to act, betray us more than we would ever think our own bodies could. I am lucky; muscle memory ties me to the mast after all this time, but my ears are unblocked, and I hear. Oh I hear. Sometimes their voices sound like yours.

April 3rd, 2014

This morning I told the girls at the coffee shop stories of horror from my life and they
gazed wide eyed, and I laughed and ended the stories with something like, but not exactly,
no matter what happens as long as you survive it, there's always something beautiful, 
if you want to see it that is. Every black woman over the age of 70 reminds me of my
 grandmother. It has always been this way. Everything is wanting to bud, but not budding
yet, even though it is April 3rd. I have ruined this flow. I have stepped back from the
voice and started singing a song I don't like over it. I have plugged my ears with the kind
of longing that sticks to the back of your throat so that you can't even taste the wine you
bring to your lips. It is bitter and sweet, the wine. It has always been this way. Tonight I
will give your necklace, that I only wore once when I was a girl working in a coffee shop,
to Nikki and I will say it is time. And it is time. The buds will grow and break into bloom.
There is nothing that can stop this. A man down the street from me waves a white shirt
in the wind. He is shaking it out before folding it, but I look at just the right moment
to see it as a white flag. There are white flags everywhere. It has always been this way.

March 31st, 2014

Sean said something that I almost cannot remember now, something in his own defense or
at my expense, but either way it was clever, and his blue eyes rippled like a puddle of just-fallen rain. I woke up to snow, at least an inch, and this was the last thing I expected after my non-drug-induced-though-it-felt-drug-induced sleep. It was 10 or 11 hours, the sleep, and in my dreams I was falling in love with a man who belonged to another woman and I felt only disgust for the
man and compassion for the woman especially because she was no longer beautiful, although, I couldn't imagine ever finding her so, and in his bed waiting for him to take me I looked outside and saw her, crying in the backyard, and helped her climb through the window and we waited
to confront him together. He seemed unconcerned and didn't understand why we all three could not be lovers. She was upset, but not with me, and I didn't mind the idea but only because I had
decided I did not want to fall in love after all. I woke up to Brett coughing and Genna in Florida and enough snow to soak my shirt sleeve wiping off the windshield. You're not  proud of me. You're proud of me like you're proud of a student who doesn't misspell the word 'cat'. Sean said, and then we smiled, both proud of such a simile.