44?

Because my family was always lovely to me about the gay.

A Family Romance

When Roger brought Lewis home, we did not approve. Roger is our baby, our sweet boy smiling through all the changes in hairstyle and height in all the photo albums. Even when we no longer all wore matching sailor suits and started to have our photos taken in Notre Dame graduation robes and Episcopalian wedding chapel, he always hung back a little, beagleish in his eagerness to please. We had hoped he would grow up to be something interesting that we could tell our friends about at cocktail parties, but tax law had thrilled him in undergraduate and the family always had our taxes done by February, so we left him to his small sensible pleasures.

 

Roger's mild fagginess was as much a part of our family as the story of Ann driving the motorboat too close to the lake's shore when Dad was waterskiing and the memory of the sling he wore for the rest of that summer vacation. You have to love a boy who collects leaf rubbings and ceramic dog figurines. We did.

 

And when Roger emailed us to ask if he could bring a friend to our traditional Thursday soup night (uninterrupted for seventeen years, except for summer, when it turns into barbeque night), we hoped that he could swap Eddie Bauer khakis with and who would dote on his gently overweight black lab. Mom speculated that spring weddings were still very popular and more than one of us googled his and his tuxedo sets and group rates at bed and breakfasts in Massachusetts.

 

However, Lewis in the flesh was not up to family standards. The story goes that Mom twisted her ankle at the university she and Dad attended. Dad had a huge crush on her. So, when she wasn't paying attention in chemistry lecture, he threw her crutches out the window and gallantly offered to escort her around campus all day. What they told us this story meant is: someone who loves you should work for it. What it also means is: marry someone with at least a bachelors.

 

Lewis did not look like he had his bachelor's degree. Lewis looked like he had dropped out of community college to pursue other interests. Lewis scuffed his steel toe shitkickers on the hardwood as we looked at him. He looked back at us from under extravagant, almost effeminate eyelashes with puppy soft brown eyes. His trousers were studded with patches proclaiming "Slavery ended in 1864", with a picture of a cow and "Stop Police Brutality", with a picture of a pig. Condor wings peered out from the collar of his tshirt, entangled with tendrils of fire and snakes rendered on his skin, suggesting familiarity with a kind of apocalypse and break down that our family is unfamiliar with.

 

We watched him pick peas out of Mom's beloved minestrone soup and the way he ate only the soft gut out of the home baked bread, discarding the crust on the butter plate. We watched his restless legs and wondered if that might indicate a failure of ability to be constant to just one mouth. We imagine him drunk on Seagrams at a bonfire proclaiming alliance with love, not lovers.

 

And while, we were watching Lewis, Roger was watching us. He was still our sweet boy. He would probably abide by the family's judgment. We wondered how he had ever worked himself up enough to bring home this wheatpaste and drumroll creature. How did they ever meet? Do vegan anarchist collectives need their taxes done?

 

But still. There was something in beautiful in their asymmetry. As they sat on Dad's couch from his first apartment, we could watch the flicker of history between them. A slideshow of the rabbit they adopted together and how it snuggled with their old lab. Fights as subtle as paper cuts that were resolved in shouting and snuggling. Roger's inability to put the toothpaste cap back on, Lewis' fear of loading the dishwasher. The time they got lost in Chicago. Cascades of coffee that kept them up at night, wandering somnolently though their apartment until their exhausted bodies collided and wound together like puppies. Roger standing in the crowd as Lewis shouted from the stage, because I'm a wreck and I love you, because I like what you laugh at, because you welcome me to a new kind of church, because I would leave all this and follow you to Guam, Gaza, Greater Uzbekistan, because my heart's chaos and your head's order, because this time I'll be bulletproof, because if you were infirm I would feed you, because I love you like a thing that does not even know it loves another thing-

 

We passed Lewis the cookie plate and asked after his family.

 

whooohooo

Like Pomona is getting published! This is only my...third time? And I've made literally five dollars from my writing. But its a start.

44

This was a fun one to read out loud.

Said the Sun to the Earth

 

    Said the sun to the earth, you seem very beautiful to me. Said the earth to the sun, but my Sun, have you seen my dirt? The sun kissed the earth with waves of photons that undulate through space like seaweed and murmured, I don't know what dirt is. I know what light is, and I understand darkness, but I don't know what dirt is. To me, you are the solution to the darkness that surrounds me, and also the antithesis to the fire that burns me. Basking, the earth said, but you don't understand. The way your hydrogen burns is so pure, so self convicted and determined to devour itself. I am afraid, he sighed, you would not understand things like dirt. The sun, she bathed him in her heat (and all of us who are alive understand that heat. it is also called desire, also, truth and hope) and asked, try.

 

    -Alright. What you need to understand is that even the dirt loves the foot that stamps on it, just as the antelope loves the lion as it tears out it's throat. Life loves life. I feel across my body the hope within decaying logs. They will feed those who are yet to come with their own bodies, like cannibalism, like true love.

    What I think you understand, my sun, is that decay is a form of love. The Brazilian family, with their bellies full of hookworms and their women pregnant and silent, that is a form of decay and I love them for it. Their struggle still feels wonderful. I feel them writing about themselves (and when they write, they never write we are writing we are writing, but, the virgin mary has come to me and she has asked of me to marry soccorro, despite her bastard child) and about cities that never existed except for one tubercular man in a garret in London during the Blitz and about passions that never transpired except for a moment's glance between a man and a woman who never met again. And I am bewildered that they don't spend sunrise to sunset sitting on the dirt watching the million different chemical reactions called life. I love life for it's inability to reach equilibrium. I love all of them for their restlessness to be more than cells, learn how to grow horns, hair, fins, fingers, learn how to fuck and fight, leave gifts for no reason at one anothers dwellings.

    I love the child with smallpox. I love smallpox. I love the forest fire and the genocide and I love them all for being alive and unwilling to settle. I dread stillness. Dear sun, you are still yourself and you would not understand the desirability of the unstable. Do you even understand what it is to have moment? asked the earth to the sun. The sun felt her hydrogen catalyze into small explosions that rippled across her skin and nodded. The living on the earth understood it as an eclipse.

    I love the living for telling me that if I am stranded somewhere, and exhausted, love is an Arabian horse. I feel stranded and exhausted, but I am waiting for the Arabian horse and I envy the living for their ability to be rescued. I love the living for inventing angels so vividly I feel battered by their pinion feathers. If you're wondering, my Sun, it feels exactly like when the flamingos take flight off Lake Victoria.

I love the living for a girl I remember from what they call 1985, what I remember as old and tired, but that's most years these years, who descended out of a bright August sky in the Columbia River Gorge, wearing a wet red tshirt. I love her for her beauty on the descent and her beauty as her neck snapped and her beauty as the blood trickled from her ear into the river. I love permafrost. I love mammoth corpses doomed and frozen from the moment they wandered from the herd. I love viruses and lemurs, nervous systems and potato blights, struggle and collapse, hands and wet hair, magnets and penguin chicks, dance and Colt pistols and blood clots and do you understand what I mean when I say I love dirt?-

 

The sun reached into its clean burning heart and thought it could find a dark greasy smudge of something like understanding.

-

 

43

Less joyful than it usually is.

 

The Goodness of the World, And the Sweetness

        

    There is no sorrow but loss. I lose nothing. I am no longer broke down by sorrow. I am afraid of goodbye, because goodbye is losing. And nothing comes back, anymore. I have perfected the art of loosing things. The cathedral in Prague. I no longer miss it. My mother. She is dead and I will not get her back. The night they burned my Bible and the ashes fell like snow. It burned for nine minutes and was done. I am learning to want this state called nothing. Loss is sorrow. I am learning this like a liturgy. There is nothing that I want. Nothing.

 

    I need you to believe that lack nothing. Do you hear? My world is made of this gravel path. The weeping mud, the thoughtless stones. Even though these solely are my world alone, I don't need them. There loss is nothing. If tomorrow I step shivering into the fog and this path has been replaced by the mouldering canals in Amsterdam or waist deep mud and shit, I won't mind. I have stopped minding.

 

    Please. Don't ask me to desire again. I used to understand yearning. Yearning is what one feels in the mountains in Austria, praying for the fire called Holy Ghost to descend on one. Yearning is what one feels for the warmth of your girls shoulder when she is out of the city on a university outing and one knows she'll be back on Sunday. There is none of that.

Desire is not the root of all evil. I have come to know at least that.

 

    When people are gone. I am learning not to mind. I used to believe that we were all essential cogs in some whirring productive machine called the world and also life. I had thought we together turned out loaves of crusty bread, babies, the curl of maple on the cradle my grandfather carved for me, potato dumplings, the ability to play chess. Now. I know this machine can run itself without any of us. I am not sure what it makes. We are no loss. The other day, I saw a man break another mans's ribcage by stepping casually on it, as easily as one climbs the stairs to go to church.

 

    Notice also means almost lost, or about to be. To notice is to take inventory of what exists without preparing oneself to lose it all. What exists in the world is nothing. A gravel path. Not even that. Once a thing exists, it leaves. Please don't ask me about the others. I want for nothing.