I think we should fly more.
Let’s sit in metal tubes
And huddle with strangers
Each one of us
Anxious
What I’d Do if I Could Still Write
late night phone call
[Untitled]
Tu Me Manques
Windows
Moiety
Moiety could not work without a lab partner. It’s not that she lacked the skills—her five years in the Alkenia Academy of Alchemy and subsequent apprenticeships had brought out her talents and left her as one of the finest alchemists in the Kingdom—but it was negligence and frivolous errors that kept her fume hood fuming. Moiety knew this fact all too well. After too many charges to count for broken vials and spilt potions, she always made sure to schedule her work hours with the other alchemists’. She wasn’t even sure why it helped her; her partners never reached a hand into her bubbling setups. Maybe it was their positive presence. Moiety never knew. She didn’t need to know. All she needed was someone to work in her vicinity so she could actually get something done.
Portland Sleeps
Portland sleeps; the city dreams. Eleven bridges cross the Willamette, not necessarily leading to the other side. Streets are reshuffled, entire neighborhoods rearranged, towering redwoods growing beside downtown skyscrapers. Portland’s dreams are full of rain, creating music in the puddles and reflections that refuse to stay still. Portland dreams of you, and you are not yourself.
Buffalo
Fragment No. 1. The Butte
I slid down the snowy Montana butte, slowly at first. I was still clumsy with the snowshoes.
Did you fall down up there?
Not yet! I’m on my way.
I didn’t rush. I looked out across the frozen lake with our cabin on the other side and the edge of little West Yellowstone. The clarity of the air could cut through your many layers.
The landscape was tricolor. The snow white had little blood pricks of red sagebrush along the 191 and the evergreen was dark green like the beginning of time.
My cheeks were always red like Christmas or childhood and I kept having these dreams of what my ancestors did when their mountains got misty and cold.
I bent my knees and down I went. The trees tightened the trail and I whooshed past the frozen branches of pine. Evergreens encased in ice glittered like insect wings.
I saw tiny paw prints I couldn’t identify nearly as quick as I could poetic devices like metonymy, the whole for the part.
It was that fox you like.
Or synecdoche — the part for the whole — the paws for the fox.
Forgotten Places
Reflections
Cigarettes
She hated the smell of cigarettes. There was no bright memory, no reclusive, subtle silver lining to be salvaged from the smell of cigarettes. Cigarettes were what her boyfriend always smelled like. Always does smell like. He started smoking a lot of weed and then stopped caring about school or anything really and then his parents divorced and he started smoking cigarettes and now he always smells like cigarettes.
First Love (Pt. 3)
It was all more perfect than I could have imagined! The yard was filled with circling neighbors, so many new faces and bodies, all so extravagantly adorned. I soon spotted Matches bolting around in ecstasy, racing to all corners of the party, enthralled at the panoply around him. As I traced his path I came across faces both familiar and strange, family and neighbors alike. However, I could not find that face I had spent my day envisioning with such vigor. Where was Lisa?
First Love (Pt. 2)
From as far back as I can remember our family would spend the summers in the home near Hartford. Every year through the end of middle school I would come home on the final day of class to find the station wagon parked in front of our brownstone, loaded and ready, glowing in the early summer heat. My brother and I crowded into the backseat, our pasty legs knocking together, and our father drove us on past the city limits. I remember watching him with a sort of reverence. He had the face of a boxer, his jawline sharp as glass, and dark eyes that seemed to take in everything and nothing all at once. On these drives he would stop for nothing, his meaty fingers gripping the wheel with a firm tenderness, manipulating it this way and that. He would tap his calloused fingers, a thrumming which drove my mother into a silent fury. I noticed a slight smile on his face as this all transpired.
First Love (Pt. 1)
Toward the end of this most recent August I made a trip up to the house where I spent most of my summers as a boy. The journey was nearly rendered impossible by a disruptive late summer storm, Hurricane Lisa,1 which residents of the area should certainly recall as being particularly fickle and destructive. Yet I ended up arriving before the worst of things, the train pulling into Hartford Station (as to this day I do not drive) while gusts of rain clicked against the roof and windows of the train car, the fogged glass and roaring wind giving the oddest sensation of being removed from both space and time.
The Track Star
A track star, he, running along the brown-orange and the green-white in shiny blue windswept shorts and great white sneakers with intricate designs. He’s bronzed and heaving, a furnace of movement, perfectly suffering in the golden sun, an immaculately sculpted seventeen-year-old machine of tremendous output. Cheered on by girls in the bleachers, all hair-obscured foreheads and colored tights enamored with his athleticism, his deliberately-cut blonde hair, his gigantic blue eyes, this boy bouncing rapidly along the track, a dorky Adonis, a goofball Aryan blur. When they say his name he smiles, straight teeth, glowing droopy cartoon eyes, mind in the world with the girls and with God shining benevolently above him, happy for all he’s done and all he will do, a future happy family man, this well-liked boy, not too serious, wearer of funny t-shirts from funny movies and avid listener of high-energy rock music, friend to surfer dude and hipster creep alike, safe in His warmth, powerful in His consciousness.
Lyrics and lunch
The Woods
It was hard to tell how big she got when it happened, but judging by the height of the bramble tunnel all around her, she got pretty big.
The sun was weak where it filtered overhead, through the low mist of the morning, making the light grey. Cool and damp against her skin, against her body.
Irene inhaled sharply, deeply, suddenly. Her heart shuddered inside of her, pounding. She fought for her breath, the cold air painful and hollow against her throat. She felt like she had not as much awoken as risen from the dead.
The ground was cold and hard under her face and hands and hips and legs. It pressed into her, the moss seeping water where her body weight pressed it like a sponge.
She was naked, she was wet, she was hyperventilating.
