January 3rd, 2014
And now I can hold the life I have up to the light
like the crystals my father’s mother used to hang
in her living room so they would cast rainbows
over the seat covers and knitted doilies and ceramic
butterflies and cats, and see all the angles,
however sharp, bend light and here are where
the colors are, and here is where the excitement is
and here is where I’ve fallen off and gotten lost,
trying to arrange the glass in a linear fashion
when all the pieces fit together in a fractal and
breaking them apart and lining them up was never
productive anyway. every love touches every other love
every loss touches every other loss and, when you
hang it where the light comes in, the fractures blossom.


January 2nd, 2014 (this is what I wrote in my sleep, having forgotten to write before falling asleep)

we lived in a house that was very large and long
and was somehow both my mother’s mother’s house
and my childhood friend’s house and I had been there
before in other dreams and it was always falling apart.
we three lived there, but other people did as well and we
didn’t know because the house was so fractured and cavernous
that there were rooms within rooms, worlds within worlds.
Our landlords in real life were our landlords in this house,
only they were 100 years older than they are now
and I promised them I would pay the rent before they finished showing
the secret rooms we didn’t know about. Then it was night and the sea
at low tide came up the house and we crossed it into a land called
“the outer limits” and we walked along a path that looked like any other
but we had crossed into a different world and could never get back.


January 1st, 2014 (I first wrote 1014 and had the thrill of time travel for a moment)

Last night: all the lights collected in the corner of my eyes
and though I wasn’t drunk, everything blurred to gold
every door we walked through was Pluto’s Gate
and every man who reached for us was too old
or too young or too Russian or too American
and everyone, the girls with their sharp heels
and sparkling shirts, the bartenders with their sharp
tongues and quick hands, was too aggressive.
the feeling of otherness settled around me and i could
not meet anyone’s eye. bad kisses at midnight and champagne
dripping down everyones chin. When he said
“you’re gorgeous by the way, may I call you sometime?”
i finally found the voice to say, “thank you, no” and with that,
the lights flickered and the year became mine.


December 31st, 2013.

it’s colder than i wanted it to be tonight
and I’ve not showered yet and the grading
hangs over me still like the way the depression from
this year was a suffocating blanket, and it is not even warming.
I hate this project already and I hate all the shadows trying to hold
me to old ways and I hate that I must go out tonight
and smile and believe I am beautiful and free
while I feel ugly and ancient and sad and like a failure
and yet, yet, yet, that from which I was spared is
much worse, much much worse. If only I could
see it, stare into its eyes and refuse to choose it again
I did once, but that was not enough. The nails I used
for the coffin were only thumbtacks and one by one
they have fallen out as the wood swells with rain (it is as yet unburied)