Meet Mr. Muffin

I've been thinking about the day and how it sliced like a sheet across the sky, the blue water line of the horizon teetering like a saw, like a glimmer of a glass edge. I wonder about my eyes -- about the accuracy of their vision, about the notes I make with my hands, my nails. I am especially attentive to surfaces -- how they are rough or smooth, or hot or cool, and how my own skin is a surface that changes, that you can touch. I am without a winter, without a new year. The things here, if there are changes, are more like rearrangements of predictable weathers. or else, one day it is one way -- extreme -- cold and black -- and the next the blue sky balminess soothes us back into a sort of dreamy submission. I get so much less done here, in California. My own body has become more solid -- in response I think the abundance of air. Looking out into the ocean, there is so much sky, so much space. My lungs feel frail, a pair of dusty wings, a pair of sheer, shallow winds that barely keep my here.

The idea is to make the babies

work; they are so photogenic

and their lungs are so ripe

and pink. All the birds come

falling down, out of the sky

like ashes. A little song sings

a-long like a little rope-gold

lasso. Spinster-whip sinister

sisters, muse-twins conjoined.

Embryos harvested for their

fossil fuels. Blood is a gas

that burns blue as DNA:

genetic pyrotechnics. All

the pink babies go pop!

pop! pop! We're so naked

in our humanity. It's like

we were all just born.

I had a dream last night about resurrection. My hamster was alive; we were wrong about her being dead. I think this was in part a wish-fulfillment dream and in part a sort of shadowy psychic residue left in my brain after watching a sad video of a mother chimpanzee reacting to death of her infant.

There are so many ways in which a bird and a girl are similar.

Of course we all write too much about birds. We write about them because they disappear. We have to figure out a way to be sad about it.

I think briefly of smoke stacks, snow, ash. I fantasize about papering over every surface with pretty patterned paper.

Sleep is like levitation. Girls can levitate. This secret power is explored at slumber parties, but then we all forget.

We used to do back flips on the trampoline. In the dark after drinking warm beer. It seemed we went higher than the pines.

The thing I miss most about South Carolina is the pines. That and the humid, evening air during summer. How the air feels like the cicadas humming. We write too much about cicadas, but why not? I've only written about them once or twice.

I put my name on a list for a baby teddy bear hamster. Her name will be Baroness Petunia Muffin Merriweather and she will sleep in pretty pink air.