50, this is soooo old

I didn't have a girlfriend when I was seventeen, that explains a lot.

 

Certain Verses in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Corinthians

 

This is the secret defining thing

(and by the end,

you'll know what it is

tho i'll never tell)

 

This is the every look-away glance

Every time I met a her's eyes

 

This the particular peculiar section in the bookstore

That I walk around, beside but never

Through

(have you figured

it out?)

 

This is being seventeen, being so alive in such a spring, being in love and

ashamed

 

This is acquiring a code language

That I never studied, or even asked for

Quavering constantly on the precipice of my tongue

Unsure whether to deploy these verbal bombs

Or just hold the hot words in my mouth.

 

This is never getting it right.

 

(Hint. Toaster ovens, three dollar bills. being earnest, chickens and handkerchiefs)

 

This is being embarrassed that part of my identity revolves around

The who of whose hips I watch swing steady down the hall

 

(You've probably figured it out, haven't you?)

 

This is returning to certain verses in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Corinthians

Till my fingers memorize the onion-skin pages and

Open them wantonly, without intent

And rereading (I can't remember reading)

For an answer, a sensible solution.

 

This is the way I never find any.

48, I miss poetry.

for a old friend:

 

 

best beloved of the fates

 

with some people you can tell.

is it the weft of blue veins on the arches of their feet?

or it might be a certain trick of deportment,

a method of walking to make oneself appear taller.

 

with some people the fragrance of destiny trails after them;

the scent of hairspray under klieg lights.

 

destiny is a funny thing. I am writing of it as a thing of certainty

but more often than not is it is bought with shin splints and hours logged in

airports and studios.

talent is merely interest on that payment, the principal is work.

 

with some people you can tell.

destiny means this could've been written ten years from now.

then, it would have started like this.

 

-I saw Lauren Cannon last on a program tucked into a stranger's back pocket in New York. The photographer must've loved her, just a little , to catch the sureness in those hands, which always managed to convey something beautiful and inarticulate.-

 

with some people, those best beloved by fate, you forgive them their talent.

just for the privilege to watch from the black velvet wings,

her immense shadow projected on the dark wall,

as insubstantial as smoke, as large as legend.

46

To All The Beautiful Girls in San Francisco,

where did you come from? You alight on the seats of the MUNI like migratory songbirds and I imagine you laying in my bed, wearing only your yellow boyshorts that I spy peeking above your low slung khaki cargo pants, telling me about your migration from Middle America. In my mind, beautiful girls, you are all from Illinois.

You are dangerous, distractible, delightful. I simultaneously want to take you home and see what your pretty bones look like under all those layers of vintage clothes, and also ask whether you have health insurance (because I worry about those pretty, pretty bones).

In summer, you seduce me not with the standard sundresses (is it ever warm enough here for sundresses?) and sun tans, but the smooth sure roundness of your calves, which is entirely unfair. As sculpted as the curves of a seashell, one August a particularly disarmingly Zanzibar brown pair distracted me from catching the 14 bus up Mission.

I love you, all of you, without discrimination. I am an omnivorous visual slut. I love the defiantly lounging punk girls in the Haight with their kittens curled around their shoulders, because blue hair don't care but also because I want to feed them pancakes with plenty of (vegan) butter and ask where they nest at night.

I love all the tough femmes congregating outside the Lexington wearing their mother's crinolines like their mothers never did. I love them for their pinup tattoos and ability to cry without their mascara running and throw a punch without breaking a knuckle.

I love the girls in the Mission who walk like a big fuck-you and almost a suggestion at the same time, who let their hair blow in the wind like a banner for their own private war. Girls like that make me close my eyes and think of Death and Desire and wonder if God underestimated both.

I love the rockabilly butch who once waved to me and my girlfriend from the bus stop as our overflowing bus pulled away from Castro Street, almost as if to say hello there, tribe. And I love that butch for hir tattoo on hir forearm that read no blood no foul.

I love the hipsters in Valencia, nervous-skinny and too aware of their own breakable beauty for their own good. And sometimes, I could sell my soul just to watch them smoke outside the restaurant; a slow and evocative kind of death.

I even love the fourteen year old girls in bedrooms across San Francisco, noses pressed against windows, watching this glorious parade of misfits strut down the city streets. Poor babies. Just wait, little darlins.

I love all of them, all of them for being alive and awake, for paying attention, for seducing me by standing on the station platform at the 16^th and Mission BART and also for boarding the train and never looking back.

Come here, my beautiful battered birds. Bring your broken wings, and crooked teeth, your childhood sexual abuse. Let's all go home, wherever that is, together. We can all hold hands in Golden Gate Park and kiss each other with all the tenderness this beautiful, brokedown city can manage.

 

46, a long one kiddos

This kind of thing is so easy for me to write. I could do this for days, but I really don't feel it's a reflection of my best work.

How We Fell Apart and What Was Left Behind

1.

Are you awake and listening? So much of what I say goes unheard and I want to be sure you're awake and listening. The time I cried for two days, cried while I was vacuuming, cried while sending out grad school applications, crying while making overly ambitious dinners using ingredients I couldn't afford, no one listened to me. My family had heard it all before and you had never bothered to listen at all.

My stepmother told me that some lessons are unteachable. That somethings you have to walk through to understand what walking through feels like, to arrive at the destination to understand what the destination feels like.

I know what my destination is. The destination is inside the envelope that holds announcements of my student debt, it is the wall side of my bed that I press my body towards (these days, my body is interested only in solidity), it is the dryness and the emptiness of the bottom of my coffee cup and also the realization that I can't afford more. It is also called absence, also independence.

Listen, alright? I am going to give you directions to the place I have arrived. Pay attention. Don't follow me.

 

2.

If I could turn back the clock I would let you escape the bad fortune of ever knowing me.

• Emmeline, 12/27/2008
  

3.

Don't go.

-Emmeline, 12/29/2008

4.

And I dragged you out into the carless street because the shower didn't work and it was raining and the overdoses on TV were always wet, thrashing. You were very still. I brought you out into the rain because I wanted you to live and you were intent on dying in my arms, you always told me you played Romeo in your high school production and now I believe you. If you had been conscious enough (and I doubt you were conscious enough, you were never conscious of how I made myself smaller to make room for you, or how I trailed after you, picking up the tab [you did notice that I always had store brand peanut butter but no jelly in my cabinets and complained mightily]), but between the sodium yellow street light bathing you in a kind of golden midsummer glamour, and the way your bones that were doing a terrible job of holding you together looked like cathedral spires, between your stillness like a saint and the blue of your lips like Alki Beach the first time you kissed my neck so tenderly and then got shy-

you were awful beautiful that night.

I guess you got what you wanted. I held you half upright, your knees getting soaked in the puddles from the rain that fell like a benediction. Everything was very still and very quiet. Each rise of your chest was the world to me. I don't know how long I held you in the raid, Emmeline, because you were then living solely on my attention, and I could never deny you that. Each breath you drew was a concession to the fact that you lived your life for an audience of the people you charmed by being reckless and pretty like their dead grandmothers before they got married, and stupid like fireworks are stupid.

Eventually, you woke up. You said you wanted to go back to the party. I followed you in.

 

5.

How we met:

It was at the wedding of two friends who had had an abortion and then decided to get married. I couldn't decide if this was progressive or regressive of them.

The band was in full swing at the Seattle Observatory Floyd and Georgia had rented, and the year's constellations were scrolling slowly across the ceiling and Emmeline sat right down at my table and demanded to know if I was wearing false eyelashes. Later, I found out that she was the groom's half sister, but at the time, I just thought she was a bitch. I told her I was most certainly not and she said she most certainly did not believe me. She took my face in both hands and demanded that I close my eyes so she could check and when I did she kissed me.

 

6.

Emmeline was an art history major. I was looking at business and accounting or possibly marketing. There were signs.

 

7.

I think one of the tragedies of Emmeline is that she carried out her dramatics on such a small stage. In the Puget Sound, in November, you are less a god of the late nights, with blue fingernails bitten short and tally marks caked on your wrist, then someone's drunken aunt just ten years off from decay.

Maybe if she had gotten herself to a big city, where it didn't rain so much. Maybe LA. New York. I feel like she could've been one of those people that you read about on blogs, not so much for their talent, but for that one old fashioned thing they hung on to, charisma. Even a different time would've been better. I can picture her in the Washington Square Park with the Fitzgeralds, Zelda would've loved her, loved the mouth on her. And they would've gotten drunk off the strawberries in the champagne and gossiped about all the pretty people and Emmeline could've curled up between the two most sensational people of the decade and fallen asleep with her feet hooked around their ankles.

Instead, I watched her look at the lamps I bought from IKEA mild distaste. She didn't like that we lived close to a grocery store. She hated orca whales, and whale watching tours and didn't give a shit about the salmon run. When our lovely, private, liberal arts college put on readings, I sometimes thought that she choose those times to be strategic about her bad life decisions, stumbling shouting through the neatly arranged folding chairs, getting sick on the lecturer's notes. She was maybe a little pleased at my mortification, and definitely pleased when I took her home, gave her a warm shower, fed her tea, tucked her into bed. She liked to hook her feet around my ankles as she fell asleep.

 

8.

If she doesn't make you nervous, you should be nervous.

-Surprisingly good advice from Emmeline's old roommate, who I later found out was also her dealer

 

9.

One of the things that kept my heartstrings fully wrapped around her wrist was her early morning behavior. She was never a good sleeper and would do her best through the night to entwine her body around mine. In the mornings, I would wake up before her and if I didn't have class till later, I would let her rest her head on my chest and tell me about her dreams. Her sleepy warmth was almost as good as the feeling that she needed me to listen. There were stinging jellyfish, and elephants, and her father, and they kept trying to get her. I would protect her, right?

I wish I could've protected her.

 

10.

She had us kiss in the front pew of every church in Seattle.

Her childhood nickname was Ducky.

She was catholically attractive. Gay men, grandmothers, sorority sisters, middle manager types, small children, - all at one time or another I caught scoping out her sweet high ass.

She could catch bumblebees and never be stung.

She had perfect white, straight teeth. She would never admit to anything so suburban as braces.

No matter where she woke up, she always flossed.

She had a habit of sitting in my lap when she wanted to talk to me about the cafeteria's lack of vegan options or cats and it was very endearing.

 

11.

"And here's what we're going to do, okay? Are you listening? Okay, you've got those AP credentials, so you can graduate early. And I've can take online classes. I've been looking into it. We can take your car and drive to Colorado. You don't know anyone in Colorado, right? I don't either and I think it will be good. And we can go get a cabin in the mountains and you can tell people how to spend their money and I can paint. We'll grow squash and cucumbers and not get a phone so I can't talk to anyone from the city, which I also think will be good. You can get one of those dumb happy dogs that are just like you. And we can be happy, okay? We'll be so fucking happy they won't know what to do with us."

-Emmeline, 3/12/2009

12.

Her parents did a terrible job with her.

 

13.

Sometime after we got the apartment together spring semester, I realized that you had an awful lot of friends. Well, visitors. They were all skinny like runway models from Russia or the girls with eating disorders in my high school and none of them seemed able to control their volume I'd hear you with them in the living room, snort laughing over nothing and then I'd catch a shouted AND WE DON'T KNOW WHERE SHE IS or THE HOSPITAL, IT CLOSES AT or BUBBLES, YOU'VE GOT TO GET THE BUBBLES OUT, or FUCK ALL OF THIS I DON'T NEED THIS SHIT, I'M GOING HOME, but I always woke up to them on our couch. I worried to you that they didn't have homes. You assured me they did, but maybe not in the same kind of way I was thinking.

Every time they'd leave, you'd pad into the kitchen where I would be doing my financial accounting homework and demand kisses from me and ask what was for dinner. I would boil you some dollar store pasta and we wouldn't ask hard questions.

 

14.

She was beautiful and she knew it.

She had decided she was more beautiful than I was and was not afraid to let me know.

She was not afraid of things she should have been afraid of.

She was exhausting. I woke up worrying about her, went to class worrying about her, came back to the apartment, took care of her and fell asleep worrying that I wasn't doing enough.

She had a chest piece that said The Struggle Still Feels Beautiful, which should have been a tipoff right there.

Sometimes, most times, she wanted a sycophant, not a girlfriend. She wanted someone to keep track of her during her stumbling back alley nights and to admire how pretty she looked with the sweat making her bangs stick to her forehead the morning after.

 

15.

Things I Should Have Been Doing with My Life Instead (a short list)

• Getting a real job instead of doing the spreadsheets at my dad's office all the time
  
• Actually applying to grad school, not just looking at their websites with the amount of guilt that regular people associate with internet porn
  
• Gotten a cat
  
• My stepmother thinks I should've waxed my eyebrows or not gotten my hair cut by the little boy's barber. This one's open for debate.
  
• Spent less time in craigslist looking for the right job for Emmeline, that involved flexible hours, medical and dental, art and no assholes.
  
• Made friends.
  
• Made friends that weren't Emmeline's friends
  
• Made friends who actually cared about things like the economy and voting and which grocery stores had the cheapest yogurt.
  
• Slept
  
• Worried about myself. Fed myself.
  
• Gotten a girlfriend who didn't wake me up crying into a pillow on the far corner of the bed, curled into the smallest ball possible, who would never tell me why, or who, or when
  

 

16.

I have never forgiven her for the morning she woke up and cuddled closer and said, "You'll do for now", before she was fully awake.     

 

17.

I would be lying to say I don't miss you. I miss you in the same way a dog misses its collar. I have a lot of dreams about her. I never used to dream before.

I would dream that I was walking through a city with bridges that we built together and a river that we had both named Safety. I am always looking for you. You have left me with this terrible city that is now my responsibility and I want you. The streets are made of cobblestone, which in the dream reminds me that we had argued over making the streets cobblestone or brick and you had won out. The city smells like your neck after I brought you in from the rain during the party. Sometimes I see the heel of your favorite pair of shoes as I turn the corner, but I never catch up.

 

 

45 Mills Meta

This is a collaboration I'm doing with a dance MFA grad student, so it loses something without the dance. But it says a lot of what I've been trying to say these last two years about my school and Oakland and my own obligations to both.

 

 

Intro

Over to the left we have the children's school, which moved from its original location in the Vera Long building in the early 1970s. The children's school is a laboratory school. Mills students with children estimate that it would cost 65,000 dollars to attend Mills and have childcare on campus. The eucalyptus trees on campus are over a hundred years old. Mills had the first computer science major for women west of the Mississippi. For forty years, Mills owned a ski lodge in Lake Tahoe. I am only providing context.

 

Here we have cyrus mills.

 

Please, don't pay too much attention. Cyrus knows about the two fourteen year old boys who were shot on the streetcorner on the first day of classes, but we don't want you to know about that. That's beyond us, its out there, outside the gates. So don't worry, don't stop walking, don't look. What you can look at are the roses, do you see the rose, aren't the roses pretty? He brought them from Ceylon, never mind the revolution in Ceylon Cyrus, just think about the roses, alright?

Cyrus, cryus, don't worry so much. We've got all the natives on reservations, they died in mining camps, the land's clear for the college. Sleep safe at night Cyrus. The girls are fine, but sad. You worry that their bodies, falling like snow betrothed for another landscape will catch in your rose trellis. They don't, don't worry.

And you. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on? Cyrus isn't telling anything, caught in that splendid abstraction called history, but Cyrus, I've gotta ask you some questions. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on?

 

Dance of Ivory Ignorance

 

So you won't tell me anything? Frankly, I doubt you knew anything, anymore, ever. Because what I'm trying to say to you Cyrus, is that I'm afraid. I'm afraid of the kind of disasters that result in snapped necks and bloody mouths, but I'm also afraid of the slow kind of disaster, the kind that take place in children's lungs as they walk to school and result in thinks like asthma and chronic pneumonia. Do you know what I'm talking about Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

But Cyrus, listen! I'm afraid that what I've learned at college is that murals are only there to cover bullet holes. I'm afraid of my own fear that dogs my heels as men approach me at the bus stop. I'm afraid I'm becoming more like you everyday Cyrus. You saw brown people as things that ought to be educated and a burden you cared for abstractly, in Beatitudes and rice, and I worry that we think of Mills as a kind of mission outpost, the relic of New England's and Spain's good intentions in beautiful, brokedown Oakland. Am I right, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Are you sure? Because the first night I was here, I mistook fireworks for gunshots. I'm terrified because I'm not terrified. The boys who died on the streetcorner behind my back are not my boys. My someday daughter will never be shot in her sleep, because I'm majoring in something sensible and getting out of here. All the same, all this eats at my heart like disease. Do you understand what I'm saying, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Do we even know each other? I'm awake and listening, I'm paying attention, but you won't let me know what's going on. You must've had some kind of intelligence that rested in your bones saying marry this woman. she knows where she's going.

I'm supposed to be your granddaughter, I walk the garden paths you paved, I am smelling your roses, but you leave me locked out. I am looking for an education, and a kind of understanding of the hardest things, but you were so ignorant that I worry you have nothing to teach me. You, you and your roses.

 

 

 

Situation

I have talked to you as I am. Sophmore, brokenhearted, young and afraid. But sometimes, I just get so tired of trepidation. I want to talk like someone who always knew what was going on, understood the loops and patterns of history, for better or worse. Somehow, when I imagine that voice, I imagine Susan speaking to Cyrus in the rose garden called time. I imagine this is what she would say to him:

Yes, your roses are beautiful.

Yes, you were part of this thing that made history, you made the books, even as a blundering footnote.

But darling, things are moving, awake and alive. You're still here, still repeating, still caught in this loop called history.

Maybe we run out of money in ten years and close down to rot and rust. Maybe the gates come down, and little girls from Seminary come and sleep on our lawn.

And sometimes, I want that voice to speak to me, I want it to say to me this:

Let them know who you are and what you represent. Make what you represent a thing to be proud of. Work at it.

Don't be so afraid. Stay awake. Listen. Look around. There is work to be done, and you are the ones to do it.

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.