time

okay I'm going to blog for a minute like it is 2005.

my relationship to time feels very peculiar and this has always been true but somehow always feels new somehow as if it is different suddenly. as if at some point in the past I had a relationship with time that felt pedestrian and knowable. I do feel disappointed with myself for not having more discipline re: slowing down and noticing things, but also fuck that noise because there is plenty of guilt to go around already.

but I also feel full of despair and full of hope simultaneously. saying things directly and plainly takes some warming up, but saying them in poems feels better and closer. but now I'm just going to try and type a bunch of informative sentences that hopefully will not be too boring. because I want to remember things. especially things that make me feel good/less alone/happy.

I am very excited that Juliet Cook, whose poetics and general way of being a poet in the world I've admired for awhile, wrote this glitter-guts review of After-Cave. I met Juliet briefly in Minneapolis, and in person she is very sparkly and sweet.

& I'm really glad that I went to Minneapolis. I pretended I was a bit of plankton and just went where I went. I got to spend some QT with two of my BFFs -- Amanda Ackerman & Jessica Smith. Both Amanda and Jessica have new books out and they are amazing. I also finally got to meet Gillian Devereux  IRL, and I immediately found her presence so warm and comforting, so as far as I'm concerned we are bonded for life. I also finally met Amish Trivedi whose dry wit & friendly charm made me feel relaxed and like maybe the world isn't so terrible. Amish also has a new book out and if you don't already have it you should because it is good.

I also did some readings in Minneapolis and that was fun. I still kinda feel like I go into a trancey place when I read, even if I'm nervous, but that nervousness definitely makes my reading faster. so there is time again. because up there reading it feels slow, but Amish took some video and watching it back I can see/hear/feel its speed. In some parts of the book, the speaker is speaking really fast. but in other places, it is more measured with lots of silences and breaks.

The best part of doing readings is meeting other poets and hearing them read.  Or hearing people I love read again. Like I love Harold Abramowitz and Teresa Carmody and so it is always good to hear them read. Unfortunately I had to leave the Insert/Wonder/Les Figues reading before I could hear Matt Timmons and Amanda and all the other rad poets at that event read because that Ahsahta reading was the same night. Then at the Ahsahta reading I got to hear Mary Hickman, Susan Tichy, Aaron Apps, Cody-Rose Clevidence, and TC Tolbert read. I got all swoony for all of them. Also wonderful to meet Janet Holmes at last who I will love forever no matter what because I think it is like a biological rule that you imprint on whoever publishes your first book. Plus Janet is wonderful and so smart and spirited.

with Cody-Rose Clevidence at Ahsahta table. Photo by Janet Holmes. Have you read Beast Feast yet? so good.

It was also fun to connect with the folks from Entropy. Janice Lee is a force of nature and has cultivated such a great community through Entropy and Enclave. She gave me an Entropy t-shirt which is black and that is important because that is the best color for collecting dog fur. & I always feel best when I'm wearing some dog fur.

also, I feel like I should say this somewhere; you have to read Jennifer Tamayo. Now. Go read her.

are you reading her yet?

& like the best thing that has ever happened to me in my whole life is that Bhanu called After-Cave the "best feral lyric" of 2014. 

what I'm reading rn

& so there have been a lot of things that have made me feel happy lately, but also things are still really fucked up. The deaths of Freddie Gray and Walter Scott -- these lynchings happening in broad daylight by the hands of the state -- confirm that there can really be no unslackening of attention to projects of resistance and intervention. Of all kinds. Sometimes making poems feels like the silliest thing, but other times it feels like coming up for air when everything else is poison.

it began as a dream about a group of strong, sleek men in a field. In a circle. They were passing heavy reams of canvas -- unspooled from angular bolts -- between one another. Looking out at them in the field -- the way their skin gleamed -- I felt envious. "be careful what you wish for," said the dream.

In the next scene we are walking along a narrow stone path that borders the sea. The sea is black and held back with the help of a wall. We look down into the black sea, and like a cloche the ink night descends, staining our sheets. But we are sequined and lithe. We gleam along.

Now the numerous gold lights of night light up one by one -- pop! pop! pop! in the trees and along the wires. We make our way from the stony sea path to a stony, open air banquet hall of pink marble columns and luminous chandeliers of wax and iron. On the long table, enormous silver platters are heaped with heavy piles of meat -- mostly bird. Pheasant and quail and partridge. Though the meat is cooked, feather quills cling to the skin. Black feathers with green and white and iridescent spots. Folks grab a wing, feather meat, and proceed to have warbling, slow conversations about the political conditions of the government, about freedom.

And then those who have eaten the meat begin to experience a change. They shed all their rings. They retire to the stone benches where they rest and sweat profusely, fanning themselves before they acquiesce to the overwhelming desire to remove their drenched clothing.

Soon, in all of the prettily landscaped lounge areas, they are only wet bodies and piles of steaming, sopping clothes.

Somehow, with the sun-rise, this scene melts away, evaporates into the field of men passing the reams of cloth. Their sweat and nakedness a type of interminable clock. A sort of labor that never resolves.

At this point I want to awake, but cannot.

Already, it is December. How does this happen? The trees
know some things -- things we do not know. Already, my hair
has grown long, and dark. The windows fill with gray
clouds, the absence of missed things, like two hundred
versions of your childhood-self pressing the glass cold.

I'm never paying attention.
Instead, I'm following 8 red winter coats
punctuating the snowscape.
From here, their sojourn feels
impossibly slow.

I am like a full moon in my belly. I don't want anyone to die. the feral things -- it's all our fault. During the day you can't see in and a night you can't see out. the moon hangs like an axe, a sad axe, an unfinished question. we abandon our companions and open wounds, prisons. we say get a grip but we mean let go.

In my mermaid eye, I

become an eyelid. lidded

glass in the little waves -- skip, skip -- the heart

has it's two halves, it's beloveds, those

internalized twins of kissing. Who

will whisper, pine siskins zipping

threads for trees, little whiskers

on the hillside, over ever water.

All along, I wondered. Your eyes

don't look at me. I mean: Don't

look at me! How raw to be seen --

to be realized. Once I was invisible:

I wanted to be seen. But now I think -- NO!

Let me let you look at me. Let me.

they take a polaroid of me

and hang it up

a woman, well-meaning, uses

a ruler to make lines, to divide

my body into parts

center line as my axis

my spine, my spindle

from there she can show me

where the hip curve is a letter off

where my waist should whittle

it was the day we had to wear leotards

mine was silver

everything felt crumpled like trash

I'm gathering connections. I gather gather gather and this seems to be the only thing I am good at. I may not even be good at it; perhaps it is all I can do. My projects, all of them, take years, decades. the current project is at least ten years old, perhaps more. and then there is the research project, the question, and that is 35 years old. my earliest research was recorded by others, before I could write, or speak even. I can remember the way things touched, the way I felt. fogged yellow mirror glass and the tilted room with the brown carpet and the daybeds and my mother and the sound of soap operas clotting humidly against the fly-buzz of the summer screen. I only pretend to remember. I am remembered by it -- by the house, the titled photographs, recorded in the grooves of the warped vinyl. I cannot bear to hear burt bacharach without wanting to cry. such sour dishrag chords stuck together with sirens and melting vixens all stuffed with pills. This is also true of the Carpenters and Dione Warwick. It is the saddest music in the world.



Perhaps sad is not the right word. Oh, forget it, it's not. But I can't bear it. Not because it is bad, but because it makes me feel so intolerably uncomfortable. It's like 1977 is trapped in the colors and the air.

There is so much for one's attention.

after a week a reading,

I see pelicans in their hovery, undulating, connect-the-dots. They fly in elegant lines that trace the coast.

I see a white haired woman eating bread out of the bin at the grocery store.

I see swim flick of a fin on the horizon.

I see a spider.

The bank of dense and luxurious honeysuckle near the back door at work -- its fragrance is thick and radiant. Sparks flicker in my brain.

There is too much to take in. I must sleep and sleep for what feels like years.

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.

I know that I am alive and I try not to forget this but to stay in the space of "knowing" is difficult. today on the beach there was all this pink. K and I walked and when we turned around there was this sudden rush and it isn't knowing but feeling and in that moment it was such a relief -- it was so much easier.

Haunted/Hunted

It's obvious: the whole
world is haunted. Consider
the disasters and broken
spaces, how inside we're
all broken up, a soup
of bits like plastics
in the ocean currents. Nothing
is really solid, is really
whole. We're what coheres, what
we create. It's how
we care that matters.
No life truly disappears:
we gather and relate, mark
edges and measure holes.
We've traveled through all
this time, all these years.
We're what accumulates.
We're them. Over and over again.

in a fantasy I am fully manifest as animal -- whiskers to tail --licking my paw, sniffing the air.

it's like all I ever think about is fantasy, and animals, and how gender is a ghost and we're all haunted whether we like it or not

some days are bright and sunny and it seems so easy to feel happy and optimistic. & it seems a little bit amazing that feeling happy and optimistic can be easy -- that it persists. the word it makes me think of is resilience.

I've been thinking about desire and fantasy, and thinking that desire is like a drive, is like vim. Desire as a site of possibility and health -- that to be in touch with one's desire is to be healthy. Like, wanting is good. This is different than thinking about desire as a lack. To me, right now, desire feels full.

Good Faith

I invented things

you discovered

& took. This

is only what

happened, not

how it felt.

Always there's

a part of the story

we'd rather leave

out. Motives, arrows

thrown about

like trash, like ghosts.

I came when you

called for me:

I only wanted

to help.

Recovery is the New Category

& there are new types of victories. The pill countdown, the pain's clean edge, tart and bright as a razor -- so defined, no longer muffled or suffuse. It dwindles to this hard clean edge the glows like neon in the dark. I am aware of parts of my body & I search for pictures: networks and ribbons. And there are phantoms that wander over my skin, a new type of radiculopathy -- syndrome spreading sensations from point a to point b -- something is felt where nothing touches. & there's a pulse to it, like waves.

post post-op

a thing happens like turning down the corner of the page, and the next page is there. a turning down that feels a bit like a seeing through. a counting down of pills. dreams of apple trees growing inside silver, financial cones. a sort of institutionalized kindness that is just good enough. just seeing through. how the disembodied becomes you again. yes, this is my head, my hair. I'm seeing through. I try to wear jeans, but the incision seam is still there, up my back like a zipper, the plastic stitches underneath my skin. For weeks, it bubbled. "an allergic reaction." this is what my surgeon said. my surgeon? I want to ask him what he saw when he looked inside me. I want to say "describe it." I feel shy asking questions, ask my husband to take notes. In the car, I ask him over and over, "what else did he say?" and "how did I seem?" How do I seem? Am I here? The bottles collect like...a snowdrift of bottles -- everything in the orange RX. but recovery is the new category.