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