once again (washington square 12/15)

i instantly felt the mood and the energy of the air change, settle into something menacing, something at my expense, something that made me an object.

i couldn’t even hear what he was saying, becoming deaf to it in defense. i honestly couldn’t tell if he was slur-pronouncing me hot or hideous; the meaning was the same:

shut the fuck up, i get to tell you what to do and how to be and whether you matter. you don’t.

& there is no “correct answer” – that split second instinct to somehow defuse, evade, respond – gut-punching impossibility. just grin and bear it.

Advertisement

fog bois

i’d like to be a cheeky droplet of water, so small that gravity pulls at me lazily – so nonthreatening that it doesn’t feel the urgency to pull me to its center – so that i float, buffeting and zagging in the prevailing puffs of wind, joining forces now and then with others like me, following and moving and clinging to their motions like a bird or a fish (the fauna of fluid dynamics), colorless & completely clear but somehow obliterative when amongst my peers, and perhaps – for a time – spreading myself unimaginably thin, soaking, glistening, lacquering, sheening across crackled and rippled surfaces.

strange being the only one who stays on the road pt 2

I’m still driving. just as the mesas receded with the Spanish names, now the corn is giving way to burgeoning granite and reddening trees. the roads finally begin to wind again, radio & landscape twangier and country-thrush, the cars get smaller, more beat-up. abandoned, rusting cars appear on the side of the highway as if it was a reasonable place to park. billboards for injury lawyers promising thousands and thousands. Red and yellow speckled forests densify and the air outside my cracked windows congeals and condenses and moistens, almost misty. Others exit these highways, but I turn south toward humid air.

strange being the only one who stays on the road pt 1

In the West, I’m dwarfed, surrounded by vans and RVs and towed teardrops with mattresses, people who spend their dusty lives tracing canyons, looking for BLM land, staying at hot springs, the journey is the destination, the road is the hotel. As I move East I gain more hills and aspens root beneath the road and eventually evangelical radio preachers accumulate. Trump signs, anti-choice, AR 15s for sale. The cars become boxier and more performative, tow-trucks that don’t actually tow, 4-wheel-drives only used for playing pop country extra loud. Corn arrives, unending sentinels along disturbingly straight road. I keep driving.

the earth is not flat (oct 19)

not a square inch of flat surface on this seemingly level grassy meadow. nothing moving but everything quivering twitching humming, nothing silent but not a sound. zinging bees and minuscule flies, birds flitting and landing and unfurling wings. the only weight the weight of my body on itself, which is to say nothing, no weight at all. an empty sky, pierced by innumerable cloud wisps, trails of plane exhaust, a blue smoke rising intentionally from one property over. completely alone, idling, on my frayed turkish towel nestled in this meadow in the blue ridge mountains. empty but also completely full.