Little ambient lonely. I want to fiercely disconnect. Savor the solitude. Get into my head more, get something done. Except the notknowing, it keeps me from experiencing, and I don't get the trajectory of lives right in my own head. Because of course I can't write about my own. Because of course the whole thing is stagnant.

I'm trying to figure out how important it is to work on Norah's story, because it relates a lot more I think to the timbre of where we are today, and it's more possibly important to what needs to be said, if someone like me could ever have the capacity to say what needs to be said.

And the nightmares of the windmills. Those violent fingers slicing torso in half, the black-eyed lidless children wailing for the unseen future. Is that really relevant? Am I fooling myself into thinking a selfish, spoiled brat like me can write anything except the stories of selfish, spoiled brats?

Either way, I need to finish "river island" and more on to the turbines. They're quite impressive to look at, those turbines.

Wicked Opiate and the True Femmes

Being living is OKAY. Day-to-day breaths are measured in small towns, in big cities, in extraordinary deserts, in clusters of the near-dead and dying. So she (Natalia I think I mean) will go off, shoulders stooped, carrying on bag for the things she owns and one bag for the things she's bought, looking down the tunnel of the street, the buildings blending together and the snow in the roads, the thick ice in shattered pieces on the sidewalk.

Come on, Dear Lord, please help me get by. I can either chose to face the hate, and overcome it and gloriously victoriously come out much stronger or I can wipe my brain, and I can hold apathy like a bitter cyanide capsule under my tongue (harmless now though; bitter but harmless - for now - ) and be maybe a little okay. Being living little is all OKAY.

Like Mr. Sufjan Stevens, I'M NOT FUCKING AROUND. I really do want to be well.

Characters come and characters do not go so please live on, little phosphorescence; I need you very much.

live on, live on

so in the worst of weather, do I dare to believe God steered me with great assurance to safety? Am I to believe that I've not died for a very particular reason? so what is folly, after all? I owe my Creator great thanks.

her story is finally coming along; struggling and screaming from the birth canal, swallowing air and bloating her stomach, turning blue, freezing softly, dead in the forest. there are worse fates: her's was an ugly one but there are always worse fates.

Now Things Will Start

See: I am a little girl. They can look at me and guess maybe fourteen, fifteen. It is easy to be waited on. It is easy to be pampered and consoled and fawned over because of your youth delicate youth fragile intentions and innocent thoughts.

But for once for now I think I want my voice to be heard.

It will come in the slow cracked hum of an old woman whose bitterness became fury with age. A lacy white innocuous pathetic even (that's what they'd think of her, wouldn't they?) bubbling under the surface with frothy heat. Not a lonely cantankerous old woman but possessed with a sort of psychosis, a schizophrenic delusion of grandeur pulled from the shape of a Dostoyevsky novel and crudely shaped into her own vaguely clever but most blatantly third-rate creaking stooped form.

Pity The Poor Alcoholic

she heard "I Like Your Peacock"
and she thought "Christ will come like that" (pregnant suns, how was that imagery even possible, could you imagine the sun mother bent over wearily, her back sore with light?)

the alcohol always catches her off guard. it's not that she does it every night it's that she does it at the most inopportune times like just before work or driving down the interstate. the exits are tight: construction is unpredictable. with ardor, shaky lean torso, it always catches her off guard because she's vomiting next thing she knows. under the low predictable light of the bathroom, the sound of other women's high heels clacking around her and their knowledgeable hush as the splash hits the water. always deep cherry red. it still smells like wine.

somebody stops her on the street and says, "I LIKE YOUR PEACOCK" and it takes her a second to realize that they mean the tattoo because she forgets that it's there. her head is too full all the time and she wants it dulled, dialed down, scrubbed away. the dead clean neatness of space. out there, she'll speak her thoughts aloud, because no one will be able to hear them.

comme ca, elle l'aime. it's this she loves: feeling infinitely sorry for herself.

death of a log cabin

being that which was inherited ages ago by the mcNally's - they'd owned the property in the rural alcove of jungle-like trees of New York State. boards now rotten, gone sweet with decay and the delicate lacy maggots that squirmed among the wood. and it was quite beautifully shaded with bars of light from the listless northern sun. Some of the McNally's siblings traveled west - and where else? escaping the gloomy winters and the frail, miserable people. Several of them stayed, out of obligation or crippling low self-esteem: they sent their children to country school, and hid their cigarette habits in the strangest places (the creek, the old sandbox, the bottom drawer of a dresser nobody used).

The woods behind the McNally's house was a sort of Terebithia to their children - and grandchildren, in turn. In the creek the slippery rocks and the wide hills of the gully were foreboding, so deliciously. They hidden in the lob cabin for hours, counting childish aspirations and poking at small, helpless animals with sticks. Sarah, the recluse, she was the dreamer: winding herself joyfully through the spires of trees, extemporizing: the glory she sought in the most basic and immature of matters.

For her older brother Sean the cabin was an indolent place to smoke pot, hook up, lead young women astray. He felt their bra-straps so carefully, that look of empathy so well manufactured onto his vaguely handsome face. And of course the fucking and the pained expression of those girls' faces and the weak begging -

(Sean would go to jail, in seven years, charged with three accounts of first degree rape)

And poor Sarah, a rare beauty, came back to the property after her parents died. She and her partner (Alanya - mahogany haired, level headed woman) helped her get the house onto the market. And on a chilly damp day in spring they hiked back to the log cabin and solemnly, tremblingly set it on fire. The heat crackled in the impossible mist in the unseasonably cold air. Sarah lay her head on Alanya's shoulder. Really the fire was quite beautiful: all those yellows and blues and oranges: melting and competing with one another over the old lace-like maggots in the boards.

Angular

Angie would have been an octopus. Many lengthy fingers to hold with: teacups and geraniums and spiced rum. To move fluidly under a great weight, to be not bound by the pressure of gravity below the firmament.

Her sister, Leanne, believed in the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Jane: which was actually a new-new testament written by a radical feminist Christian organization. She held prayer circles in the lawn with daffodils, cranberry juice and swung loosely from side to side for the salvation of the sisters round the world, whose gifts were horribly repressed. They painted from pictures they pulled off news websites, and posted those pictures all around their house to humanize many squandered statistical resources. One was a wide-eyed little girl with such a tremor, with such a tremor as to be seen through the veneer of the magazine paper.

Guilty jaundice. Hydrogen peroxide poured (last of it) on the cut, the little foamy noises, a distant sort of wind from the turbine farm across the valley. Angie leaned over the sink and pretended to see the germs in colorful paramecium struggling on the slick white surface. She was almost seven months pregnant. The father vanished, sort of, in a flurry: she heard his black hole scream. No matter. Her sister enveloped her in soft white prayer, little strings of gossamer on her shoulders and sprigs of lavender to hide behind the ears. Baby to be named Aiden, which was mostly an androgynous name. Leanne's partner Rachel built a crib out of pine from her backyard.

In about two months Angie would give birth to an octopus. Then she'd put it in the water, and watch it fly.

the melted ear

THE MELTED EAR

freckle, little on large yellow thigh
wonders?
very, indeed quite hungrily
beneath pants:
to see longingly questionable sun?
sun-tastes, to see browning disasterfeet
in long bare chortles
making dust happen,
then cotton-smothered hidden long
winterly long.

Devil Bird, Evil Still

?

the lovely people and their kittens were tired and sad. we went to sleep under the maple trees; later I saw him coming up over the ridge like a lip (she was with him).

Jesus, our Lord, purify the hearts of the wicked and purge the thoughts of sin from the righteous. none of the righteous can live without sin lest they be mistaken for something more remote than human.

there were two very large maple leaves laying triangular across Julie's chest. she had come with Mark, who always walked three feet forward; very aggressive and insecure he was. Mark had short, stiff blond hair and a small firm mouth. he had small eyes set back in his head and he coughed into the back of his hand hackingly and incessantly.

if God almighty chose to make the skies very blue and the dirt exceedingly brown, still, what is that to the rest of us? if He was omnipotent enough to infer the proper length of grass against our heels, then what?

Julie has blue eyes. i am afraid of her teeth, which are too sharp. she is my older sister's girlfriend but she is a liar and a cheat. i didn't trust her then - and i do not trust her now.

Let Live, Little Woman

She cannot get you pregnant - so she must change you, in some other way.

Understand the way the wind changes when it comes from the mountains, through the trees, then onto the plains where it has a great rushing sound like child holding its breath to stop hiccups -

Evangline called herself "Ev," shortly touched her mouth with her index finger before she spoke. Huge heavy dreads rolled down her back and shook with the weight of her: she was not a thin girl, so you loved her for it. All the girls in your dorm had exorbitant waists and beady, blackly line eyes. They looked furious and mistrusting. Ev had freckles and her eyes were always crinkled with happiness.

You were eighteen and you hated men. You had not yet learned to love and let live the way crocodiles open their mouths to let in tiny birds [finches are they?] who clean the speckles from even the most vicious of fangs.

If you could be tiny, extraordinary, like a filament, like a flash of white, then.
So tiny as to fit in her belly like a fetus with lily-white feet, unawares of the outsides' noise and booming, war furious and sticky raging across the ocean, the many oceans of change. You threw up because standing made you dizzy. Then your period stopped and you wondered where had it gone. You thrust two fingers inside you to fish out the blood ( Ou est ca, la sang?) So you grappled and dry heaved and then sobbed.

"Aidez-moi, s'il vous plait," mais comment?

Ev, Evangeline and her massive eyes quivering as with breaths her cheeks sucked in and the freckles round her nose, the freckles in a portentous garden round her nose.


"Everyday," she said, and looked over her large shoulder, the bone-looking earrings in spirals beneath small clumps of hair, "women are raped and molested and abused. You think you have it bad? You think you know what anything means?"

- they took you to the hospital.
you were on a saline drip and they took great pleasure in thrusting a long catheter down the length of your nostril, your throat, your collapsed little stomach.

When you screamed, they gave in, pulled you in white (like a wedding gown) and rolled you into the psych ward. There the nurses had mouths fluffed with flour and cheeks impaled deeply with time and other nuisances.
"I'm well," you pleaded earnestly. Evangeline showed up to visit you, Ev, her hands behind her large back. She seemed to take up so much space in that small hospital room. Her large eyes, blue eyes were narrowed.

"I could not get you pregnant," she said defensively. "I had to change you somehow, didn't I?"

They had your heart on a monitor; its speech read in little beeps. Barely thirty per minute. Who am I? Who are you? When the male nurse touched your rib to adjust the sticky plunger of an instrument you sneered and nearly bit his hand off.

Little woman, there are people here so much more ill than you are. I hear the little ones screaming down the hall; I can hear the sobs of the parents whose only children will not see twelve. Little woman, let live, your childish nonsense put to bed beneath those soft blue sheets, under which you perspire, under which you were absconded by the deep shroud of sleep.

She couldn't possibly have made you pregnant. She had to exact that change upon you, somehow.