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3.25.20
I’ve always been at odds: how much I want to contribute and be a part of a community, be a good neighbor, and support my fellow artists and writers; at once how much I want to hunker in studio for days, deny the Capitalism cog.
My middle ground is being two minutes late to everything because I’d rather be drawing or writing. If hangry is a thing (and a byproduct of neglecting the body), what is its equivalent from not getting to be alone enough?
WFH sounds like a rebel rastafarian rap group from the early oughts, but I am lucky to have it. I am grateful to still be at a place I can WFH for a paycheck. I take breaks to sanitize the doorknobs and counters. It feels vaguely productive. I don’t have much energy to give my hypochondria. I used up that anxiety a while ago and now I’m just determined not to let this body be an incubation site.
When not working or making: consuming increments of news from the radio or the internet, consious of each minute, a slippery game of hot potato. Reading. Researching grants and residencies and shows and journals. Applying to grants and residencies and shows and journals. Taking pictures of works in progress. Maintaining some order and cleanliness to our apartment. Sweeping. Folding things. Filing things. Keeping up with letters, emails, messages, comments. Keeping up with culture: Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, the cousin’s video blog. Texting. Writing lists of people I need to text or call. Worrying about people. Administering cough meds, coffee, tortillas with cheese; melatonin for when I didn’t time the coffee right. Looking for winter in the folds, even though it’s 80, even though we know better than to call this a snowstorm.
A cantelope colored light hits the sawhorse in the backyard. I don’t want to check if it’s sunset or dirty streetlight. Things are left alone longer here. I brought a single can of beer that was pillaged weeks ago from my friend’s fridge. It tastes snappy, makes me feel seventeen swigging it between glances at text messages.
The darkened trees in the other backyards are very slowly but steadily blotting the cantelope. I leave the can on the sawhorse, half-full. Moths will float in the chambered liquid by dawn.
***
01.19.20
We had cheesy, potato-laden tacos with bright orange homemade hot sauce from Justine and Turner’s garden. We ate all our meals at the kitchen table and we played rummy after lunch. I kiss my girlfriend more, and spring for crisp, cold beer on tap to go with the tacos.
The men are buried in propped truck hoods or cleaning the garages. The kids are on trampolines. One has taken their hot pink Skip-It out to the driveway to show off. A woman extends a watering can over the hedges. As a person who grew up composting, growing gardens, and playing on contraptions my parents hand-built, I take solace in seeing how other people sort, extend, and take care of their things, and by extension, their homes and families.
By the warehouses east of downtown, the scent of burnt sugar and roasting coffee beans tease and the criss-crossing of railroad track keeps me on my toes. Several times I hop off my bike entirely where the ruts are too wide because someone decided there wasn’t enough foot-traffic here to waste the tar.
In the evening as you draw you think of the tightening pitch of 80-foot trees creaking. You recall the almost inaudible reverberation of their trunks shifting in the soil.
***
8.15.19
Oh hello. Here's a free, breathing list of Houston area galleries and art museums hours, coded by district, updated as gallery hours shift (well, that last one's on me and you). Add an entry or edit a time slot.
Next up: a corresponding map for best parking, especially on Thursday nights in the district? A map of bike routes to bundle galleries most safely? Hmm...
6.26.19
I gave up baking as a career years ago, but my hands still remember whipping buttercream, decorating cakes, and layering slivered fruit. In my home kitchen during a quiet weekend now, I make biscuits, savoring the calculated steps and the fact I’m not baking for strangers anymore. I grate the frozen butter into cold flour, fold the dough into thirds seven times, proof it, pierce it with metal rounds. I swirl the melted butter in the saucepan, as if the rich biscuits could possibly hold more.
*
At first it’s the land of white sugar, milk chocolate, and sunlight: the lemon curd to beat all lemon curd. The picture-book tart sliced into dainty “dunce hat” triangles.
When you get old and jaded (see also: refined), the appeal of darker things descends. Dense yerba matte that stains your teeth chartreuse and gives you the spins may be acceptably softened with a spider web of honey.
In service industries you’re either fancy or you’re dirt wearing fancy clothes. I like to think I’m fancy wearing dirt, a hard-working intellectual biding my time stocking egg white patties and cokes.
If you don’t watch out, you become that person who only buys shoes made of a high-grade rubber that replicate Ibex hooves.
Or worse, your body begins to age faster than it should and you never have energy for the important work that doesn’t start until you leave the kitchen. You mess things up and start having panic attacks and don’t recognize yourself anymore. You try to remember when you started taking everything so seriously except for the right things.
*
Inside a pair of dishwashing gloves that staff members throw on to scrub the pans (SECRET: 90% OF WORKING IN A KITCHEN IS WASHING DISHES), I come across a used band-aid wedged into the fingertip. A single rose is printed upon the fleshy pad, clear adhesive sides crumpled against the backing.
Next day, everyone gets their own set of gloves, names sharpied onto the wrists. Also, I quit.
***
2.26.19:
I used to dream of being a more precise package with all my interests overlapping and condensing. It took a long time to see that both art and writing embrace pluralism, research, and multidisciplinary sidebars. I shed some interests and grew knew ones. The ones I can't shake have grown under my fingernails and into my bloodstream.
Spectral Lines: Poems about Scientists (from Alternating Current Press) includes my first poem that unapologetically pulls from geology and natural sciences. Nerd out with me.
***
1.23.19:
Recently I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Voyage Houston magazine. I talk about why I make & think about the things I do here.
I wait outside the taquiera el ray del tacorriendo at the corner of Oakcliffe and Telephone, Inglesia Catolica Rena de la Paz church across the street. Shorn palm tree husks and a child’s mattress are on the curb for trash pickup.
Isn’t this how it always goes? You leave your future self to handle the reports. You do not fully trust your goo-goo eyed present self, all mushy with novelty.
Any given time of day in any neighborhood in Houston, Whataburger takeout may be found smeared on a road, the last point of starch to the once-white and orange sack.
Sometimes writing is not poetry, but flossing gunked-on plaque. No shame in taking care of your teeth.
Does it count if I know what I wrote and how I felt when I lassoed the words that no one else can read?
***
12.15.18:
Overcast November afternoons in the midwest are hard to shake. My parents drive the minivan past harvested cornfields. Patches of pine loom in hues of maroon and periwinkle. This is where I set all my love ballads and hair-band anthems.
Smoke, leather,
hay, heather.
*
He says, “I have a picture of you on my ‘fridgerator!” We all laugh. It feels like the right thing to do. There’s a thin chance our paths crossed when I was 15.
Later I go inside his house. He has proved himself unthreatening, a bit batty.
Sure enough, it’s Sarah, not me. Sarah and I look alike in the same way the Latino kids at the art center said my white intern and I looked alike (though coincidentally, she did become a good friend). We both have short brown hair, particular noses.
People can’t help but tidy up, bundle, name.
*
Lately I feel like a weird type of rebellious again, the not-cool kind. I honor the child-like seed I was told in many ways and by many people I ought to disassociate from as quickly as possible.
Post install, I go to the pizza joint for a beer with an Itzo horror manga in hand. My heart soars with the quiet happiness of getting the work out of the studio and into the world.
Itzo’s mollusks and singed bodies come encased in a sleek cover that, as a kid just beginning to love and discriminate literature, I cherished the most, a soft and slightly matte skin of a book cover.
In the bathroom stall popcorn falls from my dress. No one can touch me.
***
8.09.18:
Leonard Nimoy is making eyes at me and singing “Ruby don’t take your love to town." He is 30 & waltzing in 1960s technicolor. I wear a smart chartreuse shift Nancy Drew-style. There is something dried-blood-hued behind a vaulted steel door. Outer space? The 1970s?
A humorously-loud junk vehicle revvs directly below me, rattling my tatami bed. I pretend it's a Cocteau Twins song and get back to dreaming. I swim toward a woman with a country road behind her and ridges of vertebrae nestled at her feet. Breaststroke to doggy paddle to stomach dragging upon asphalt, but she's a mirage out here in the hot cracking wind. She keeps glitching away from me.
When you wake again, breakfast dishes clink. On an old timey radio J.J Jackson is creating his own percussion with his mouth. The bawler neeeeds you by his side, but not as much as his pounding piano chords. The pulsing guitar riffs are a spell broken only by a tap-danced “fe-LAP-stOMP.”
The alto sax bubbles up like a fat smiling crocodile.
*
My parents wanted us to be in the circus. My brother knew how to unicycle and walk on stilts. My sisters and I tap-danced for relatives. There’s a video of us sashaying between Grandma’s dryer and washer. We wear oversized Lansing, Michigan t-shirts like athletic gowns.
The dance world sounds like a wedding with tinkly jazz piano; the writing world, a Howard Johnson’s pool after hours, buglights zapping. If you have to spend a life in it, sad pools are more interesting.
It doesn’t mean you can’t be inspired by Gene’s fluttering feet, Michael’s “stank” (as Wesley Morris coins Mr. Jackson). Grab it wherever you can. Make more room for studio than socially acceptable. Do it for your future self. Are you afraid of finding out resourcefulness and imagination are better than the Capitalist treadmill you’ve been trained to accept?
I never looked back on a time and thought it was fine except I shouldn’t have wrote.
So hole up and be an expat, an esperanto, a recluse, an artist. Get back to drawing the Switchgrass and Big Bluestem with your felt-tips. Two soprano beats followed by one falsetto let me know my music is about to start again.
***
3.13.18
The backsteps of lower income apartments come in two shades of paint: sun-bleached or water-logged. It’s from these tiny balconies intended for last-resort exits where some of my best writing happens.
I stoop it on the fire escape of my first apartment and scribble the day’s hobknobbings. I didn’t have a job and spent a lot of time walking around Westport taking bad photographs of wiry drifters and tangled trees. I creep on cussing crustkids with rattails and cigarettes. A woman in a tank top and flowing skirt floats the street silently on a Segueway.
*
You can read about my stay at the Prairieside Outpost Artist Residency in Matfield Green, Kansas (many thanks to the outstanding Laura Berman and team). Because it’s been a minute, you might read my short story at New Flash Fiction Review or head to Cold Mountain Review, where my drawings are in the good company of such writers as the breath-taking Tiffany Higgins.
*
Last week my girlfriend and I took a vacation. We were reminded that all we really do on vacation is allow ourselves to get lost in our sketchbooks. We sketch and scribble, often eating fancy refreshments while doing so. Shopping and sight-seeing are all fine, but heads down, hands moving always win.
If lacking a chic sidewalk café or luxe balcony, write on the muddy strip of earth where only gas technicians dare to slither. Draw where the neighbor’s fence butts against and nothing pretty grows.
***
01.23.18
I wake up in a farmhouse at the sleepover where all the other girls are cheerleaders. I've survived the night. Saturday stretches out ahead.
Grandma and Grandpa’s motorhome smelled like cotton pillows, Virginia Slims, straw and sunlight.
Or the butterscotch candy you cup against the hollow of your mouth’s roof, suctioning to the bone.
There was a flat prairie of empty time and a haze of sun in the living room.
Your middle-class roots are showing.
The comfort of being a child in a two income-household was a privilege; the possibility of being an Artist at all a luxury my family could encourage. Making art is a delicacy, but it’s a crazy person’s hard work too. No one helped me with this one. I am the one who plunked down earned overtime and vacation hours to do this residency. I put extra work into ensuring my employees were trained and my absence from work mediated. I purchased the plane tickets, the rental car, the gas money, the groceries and art supplies. In all honesty I don’t make a lot of money and it’s a trip I can’t afford to do thoughtlessly. All the more reason it feels amazing to slough off the stubborn slips of Retail-Colleen, Worker-Colleen, 9-5-Colleen.
Every summer the tree grows back and scratches at the kitchen like a needy animal. It wakes me up from dreams of huddling in the pop-up camper while the forest looms outside.
***
10.21.17
The first week after is sewage and levy-letting, torrents of water pooling into the dirt-crusted downtown streets. Demo-crews and bulldozers. Heaps of pink asbestos and ruined carpet stack up on curbs. The second week is the shooting of nail guns. Everywhere. Roofs are stripped, trucks drive in with supplies, roll out with soggy sheet plaster.
Some things stay the same. The threads of spider webs flash in the trees, stretched between bundles of Spanish moss.
Once you visited the Hoover Dam. The tour guide kept making damn jokes. Your attention drifted. The torrents below were a pillow to break the fall—or a coffin. You imagined 1930s workmen in overalls clutching at the sides of the canyon like dainty insects. There was a sense of comfort in knowing if the water became too violent, we could grab rock cuts.
*
The sun smacks my shoulders while I bike Troost Avenue, riding past Hurricane Katrina headlines behind newspaper dispensers. I stop at the grotto with the built-in waterfall chiseled into a Kansas City limestone ledge. Mosquitoes swarm. I sit by the Virgin Mary to absolve my sins, feeling like a displaced Tippi Hedren character, 1960s, Rome.
*
A necessary visit home one month later becomes a weekend for bébés and babes. I find myself on rugs reading board books, catching frogs with boys, and gabbing about boys with the bff.
The bébés are all under 5 and whip-smart and sweet as babies should be--what could make them jaded yet? They are content reading books, for a little while, and then you realize: board book pages are small, sturdy doors. The novelty of opening things gets tiring and they turn to cars. The Tonka truck has a siren like a European ambulance. The tiny two-year-old has a siren inside her lungs she keeps reserved for when breakfast has gone on too long. Like a child ruler from her highchair, she has barricaded herself with hash browns and bacon and soon the food will be flung to the Common below.
*
The bass guitar starts and Rachel and I may as well be at the 8th grade dance as if 18 years did not just happen, as if the Beastie Boys' “Intergalactic” is pounding through the dimly-lit cafeteria but we’re 32 now in a Detroit club and in a split second we turn to each other and command, Balcony. It's 50 bucks we didn't plan for, but this is no time to be thrifty—plus, we’re 32 now. We make a little money. We climb upstairs and grab standing room by the railing. Our feet are basically kicking the stage speakers. Taylor is 30 feet away, not a body between. I might jump and he could catch me in his muscular arms (my luck I'd just break his Casio). Thanks to the speaker and amps, 2/3 of Hanson are blocked most of the time. It becomes The Isaac Show. I try to show him love. He’s grown into his looks, and as long as he has a guitar he looks good. I flash him a cool smile when our eyes meet over the course of the evening, a smile that says: I like your brothers more than you, but I still see your value and special attributes.
Rachel and I squeal like we aren't married or in monogamous lesbian relationships. Penny and me like to roll the windows down turn the radio up, push the pedal to the ground. I stumble on lyrics but don't bother fighting it. Later we gush "he looked at me at LEAST three times!" "They pick out pretty girls in the crowd to gaze at and flirt with," I explain bluntly. Don't get me wrong. We respect their wives and kids. We respect our wives/husbands/kids. I also know these dudes have their own fantasies getting them through another fucking round of Mmmbop. I like Mmmbop ok, but tone it down when the rest of the room roars. My 100% is scary--my 60% is scary. How to do cool? I’m in 8th grade again. Rachel is effortlessly cool next to me in denim and permanently-black hair. Goth, classical baroque, and Mmmbop all look good on her. My smile is the width of a chipmunk dressed like The Joker for Halloween. My debutante slouch is just a matronly slump. I'm grateful to Rach for getting one good selfie of us where my mouth isn't a total sinkhole.
By proxy, of course, I transform into something a bit cooler. And after 27 years of sharing everything with her, I'm one of her biggest fans. As I fly back to Houston I recall the middle-school meloncholy of “Sleepover-withdrawal” (n.): the sense of loneliness at the end of a multi-day event with friends.
We’re 13, watching Rachel’s VHS copy of Hanson’s tour video. We wear XXL t-shirts as nightgowns, jersey cartoon princesses with saggy sleeves that hang around our armpits like floppy wings. We break into song together as though each of us is alone.
***
7.17.17
It’s hard to articulate how I want to be my strongest, most determined self without sounding like a generic, competitive Paleo-&-bootcamp-lovin’ millennial. Some of the desire is to build routine and parameters in my personal and work life. There’s also a training-toward-life element that includes but does not settle entirely on self-defense, protest and rebel training, extreme weather and disaster planning, and good old end-of-the-world scenarios.
I plumb the humidity without equipment, stupidly cycling city streets of smog.
Take the heat in beats. Don’t get grouchy and take the neighborhood down with you before its time.
What is unbearable heat? You won’t know it till later. In the moment the heat’s not as bad as a Ford F-150 with a fat horn on the tail of your 20-pound-street-bicycle. The heat’s viscosity pads your quick turns as you dodge Budweiser shards. It sits back there behind your neck and shoulders and there’s never any one moment it inflicts more than the others. Sometimes you don’t feel it until, once inside, the salt chills inside the creases of your eyelids.
*
When you grow up with ice in the air, Oak branches over you, and frozen dirt under you, you never really lose the cold inside you. You learn eventually that you’re anemic and that’s why you can never get your toes and fingers warm, but still.
As kids we thought sound existed inside Space. I imagined it a tethered structure that made that tinny “plang” of a basketball dribbled on court:
the double echo of
compressed air inside the ball
+ ball bouncing in cinderblock gymnasium.
*
I project Houston’s history in Space exploration upon my otherwise flat and unglamorous running route as I listen to Dynatron on earbuds. In a moment of magical thinking, my brain creates the sensation of valleys and plateaus. The humidity clinging to skin is not terribly far from swimming, the flowering trees not so different from coral reef. The dogs bark behind iron gates. A parrot blats inside a darkened porch.
Run past the new high rise condos. Marvel at their oblivion—like the end of the world is not nigh, we harumph to each other. Their largesse makes life look like a nightclub, not like pushing out lower to mid-class established neighbors. We listen for the hum underneath. We’ll know the zombie apocalypse by its early eighties grain and morose, synth-heavy soundtrack.
R.I.P., George Romero.
Found a fitting home for one of my flash fiction pieces in the timely "Worksongs for the Apocalypse" by Pea River Journal. Special thanks to Trish Harris.
***
6.11.17
I can’t stop thinking about my beautiful, mermaid-haired girl with her turquoise-and-magenta halo. So our teeth aren’t as white as they were at 22. The creases when we smile are deeper. Our chemistry is so thick that strangers are in disbelief we didn’t just start dating.
*
That was the year I stabbed a homemade needle tool into a piece of paper to form words, which connected with other words to form sentences. The sentences felt urgent, minimal, and stoic, which is how I pinned myself that year.
That was the year I was constantly facing the ultimatum: all her, or nothing. Not him. It was the year I either finally got to be a lesbian or believe there was something about masculinity I needed more than I needed her.
I sealed each piercing with clean white paper. I went about putting putty in the cracks of stucco, and later washed over with wheat paste and wallpaper. Scale back on the sadness any way you can, I’d have said to her. Write your way through this, draw and paint your way into becoming what you need to be for the both of you. Stop seeking permission. Go make stuff.
*
We slip, calling our respective studio rooms our “bedrooms” like we are 16. We giggle that we do this over and over. Full-grown adults. I love the person I get to share this life with and the routines we’ve formed.
When I am working out on the wood floors at 6 or drawing fossils at my standing desk at 11, all the bedrooms and studios I’ve worked in collide. I slowly rack up the pencil marks. It is and it isn’t an accident.
You veer into me like soft tar, your hair sweet and sweaty, smelling faintly of yarn.
***
3.29.16
Psyched to collaborate with the mega-talented Kevin Wilkinson and Sara Lippmann in recent features of Synaesthesia Magazine.
I’m 13 and hanging out in our shared attic bedroom on a Friday night after we’ve vacuumed and Lite Rock 99 is blasting Toni Braxton and Mariah Carey. The windows have been slid open. We’re talking about getting the aluminum fire ladder out to practice.
I feel like a beach babe when I dial the silver tuning knob of our radio. The yellow light inside the glassed-in frequency line brings to mind track-lighting, which is so in right now. Grown up Barbie, dream mansion.
I dream of being a Clavin Klein skeleton bupping around in a Gap boatneck at a sterilized beach
...wake up wearing yard-sale hospital scrubs once owned and sharpie'd by someone named Angelica.
***
12.14.16
"Fenestrate Bryozoa" graphite and charcoal on paper (WIP)
This is the handwriting of a caffeinated, word-starved woman writing to Flogging Molly, certain someone will interrupt her any moment.
Wallpaper from Transylvania and RAW BEAMS, BABY. The barista says I look very punk. Well. Thanks bike gloves + Trenton Doyle Hancock t-shirt. The music is like Outkast's "Idlewild" album, all that early 00's interest in hammy swing. Minus the hip-hop. Plus light house beats. "It's getting a little Star Wars in here!" the bartender laughs as the clarinets soar. Benny Goodman empties his spit valve from his grave.
Hot pink windbreaker and spandexed cardio walk in. The volume knob on our Fisher Price tape player is stuck on the highest setting. The Cars’ “Heartbreak City” belts full blast while I shower. We romanticize what we cut our teeth on, before the loan payments and jobs hit. I could write endless reams of poems and homages to the distinct flavor of a period I barely lived through.
While S. talks with her Mom I thumb out sticky notes on my flip phone.
Across the street they take down a building. The jet stream of the power washer never dribbles. A queue of SUVs drive through a cloud of mist and debris. The bulldozer plumbing the brick wall looks not unlike a long-necked Aposaurus clumsily combing their crush’s hair away from her face. Everyone walking by stops to watch. Some inside the café leap outdoors with cellphones outstretched. There are other people who came prepared with tripods and long zoom lens. Several of my friends’ sons would be all over this. The children don't need phones to mediate it. I'm proud of the few adults who do not either. The man who pulled up on a bike with a 35mm SLR has refrained from taking many shots. He stares into the mist for minutes at time, not moving.
The server compulsively hammers the edge of the bar as he whips by.
Get better at writing with Nikki Minaj, Anderson Cooper, and Ellen gurgling in the background. You should be immune to the robot-spa ringtones. Ignore America trying to sell you things.
I have to come to the paper with a big hat and boots, a personality that towers a bit more than I feel. If the written and drawn version of myself cannot be as strong as the string of words I use to console my friends, what’s the point?
Tell yourself you’re living. You’re alive. Maybe it’s the plumes of orange and blue flame, or the steak-scented smoke that does it for you. In between the searing and fileting the line chefs glug water from plastic to-go containers. We have to leave—the smoke is filling up my lungs. The man at the table behind me has a laugh just like Robert’s. There I go trying to find old people in a new place.
On the way out, the washed up Beach Boy-man sprawled on a picnic table will tell me again how smooth the design of my bike is. “Better be, it’s my car,” I shout back. I have so much more writing to do.
***
9.30.16
August felt both overwhelming and underwhelming at once, a flibberty-gibbet month in withdrawal from the euphoria of vacation in July,
where--
I run, paint, write, see people; run, paint, write, see the paintings of other people.
When do I ever get to run for two hours straight? The edges of the road have tall, stalky weeds that feel more akin to Arizona than Michigan. Further in, Queen Ann’s Lace, purple coneflowers, clover. The corn is still only stomach-high.
The dirt clearing's still there. The couch isn't.
Thick filets of cod, lemon potatoes, buttery corn on the cob, cold beer…
*
The way some people excel at introductions in such a way that makes instant friendships is how I feel about Storychord, who recently curated my art with Andrew Bertaina’s writing and Miss Lana Rebel’s music.
*
The Goth kids never grow up. The good baristas never left the bar. Walking by that Italian place downtown by the River Market, thinking Sometimes I dream about you and I don’t know what to do with it. The dreams are murky. The toothy wolf grin under the bristle.
(By the time we met I felt differently. The city still called, and I saw I could be with you and still within it. The darkest section of bicycle trail before we got to the clearing was the first time I totally trusted you with my life.)
*
“Is there a story that goes with this show?” the college boy asks, seeking a narrative to the bleak art vacant of figures, vacant of color. Free of the mess of the hand.
I wrote a story here. Count? And if that’s not enough, I even wrote about writing at NANOFiction. Please don’t say “meta.” That word is dead to me.
Come home. An emptied Corona’s been shelved on the wood fence by the driveway. The inch of gold inside the glass bottle is mostly rain, 10% Saturday night.
***
8.01.16
(New drawing here.)
A relief fossil= when mud pools inside a shell, hardens. Shell rots. An impression of.
Their bedrooms and basements where the scent of their bodies caked. The mudroom. They tracked it in—the kids from the vines inside the forest, the parents from the cross-country skiing (in winter) and field runs (the other months).
Lunch is on a sidewalk outside a vacant retail space overlooking the freeway, though mostly absorbed in Roberto Bolaño’s "A Little Lumpen Novelita." I eat the book in one afternoon. It hits in a way I've not experienced for some time.
Don’t forget about the girl who stays up late drawing in bed. She was awake to see it happen: moonlight and streetlight cutting eclipses into the blackened neighbor’s lawn. Complete silence. She arches her necks and tilts her whole body.
***
06.13.16
As a neurotic, precocious third–grader I began making titles for my nightmares. The idea was to write a book someday. “Terror” was an acceptable word to sandwich into several titles. It didn’t yet register as a large-scale event that devastated communities and whole nations. It was innocent, when the scariest things came with a little box with an “R” inside of it. It was a Halloween word, a word describing the feeling of being frozen in your bed because you’d heard a noise.
At 1:09 A.M. the status on their Facebook page is “get out of pulse and keep running.”
A few years ago I read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. It’s a classic novel about a young butch lesbian/transgendered person named Jess living during the tight-lipped McCarthy era (1950s/’60s). It’s pre-Stonewall, by a hair: Jess is a factory worker who manages to find others like her at secret gay bars that no one’s allowed to talk about publicly. It’s really, really tough to read (throughout the book Jess is orphaned, harassed, incarcerated, beaten, raped) but perhaps for someone whose life is suddenly being shaken, important to see that the spectrum of gender goes a long ways back. There’s always been a “not normal.” And there have always been people who call “not normal” the big, bad wolf.
While reading the book I did what I always do with good books. I invited the characters into our home. I squeezed up in doorways to make room for them. I imagined Jess after a break-up, pulling up rotted floorboards and putting down new slats in my partner’s studio. Jess and her girlfriend folded into our fourth floor unit, crumpling into our low bed and spilling onto the rug early mornings.
I thought a lot about what I would do if my partner came home bruised and bleeding at 5 A.M. after a riot.
Before this book, Stonewall was a just a cold fact from a bygone era. But also before this book, rewind just a bit and I had never had a secret that so controlled my life. I was suddenly a lesbian, or at least not straight. In the necessity of concealing my private life from students and colleagues and employees I had to manage the guilt of hiding my partner/us, and the guilt of lying to a lot of people. Every interaction with another person involved wondering if and how much I could trust that person. This has not changed and never will now—but it was new then.
Terror took on new proportions. My nightmare-content shifted. One night I woke myself screaming from a man with an axe bursting into our apartment to hurt my girlfriend. She held me, over and over told me it was a dream. But the swoosh of the door seal had been there. The specific creaks our floors make when stomping swiftly on them.
It’s still just Monday morning and I’m processing because yesterday we were just a heap of blankets and post-bike ride sweat. Riding home, before we heard the news, we biked past a couple kissing in front of a mural. I smiled, but I also did not want to smile. I want us to be at that point in history where gay/bi/different couples kissing in public should be normal. Nothing new.
***
04.13.16
Mimosa fueled phone date with Jen. Sugar-smashed and espresso-drunk, the flatness of Houston has me imagining depth and volume.
Palm trees elongate the landscape and create a mall feeling, a boardwalk-but-no-beach je ne sais quoi. The crass beauty of 4 by 4’s and parking lot as rodeo. In the front window of a house life-size Barbies with frizzed –out hairdos have been propped like guards.
How could you not have the hots for this place?
I came here looking for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, a film cut in Mexico’s late afternoons, posing as Venice Beach. Too late I realize the movie is bawdy, unintelligent, headache-inducing. I didn’t know any better sitting in the one-room moviehouse the summer before 7th grade. Sticky seats + Leo’s sweaty clavicles. I went home to the rust-colored carpet of my attic bedroom. I lit incense from The Body Shop. The sticks came in a recycled cardboard container with the rounded flaps you peel up. Hemp. White musk. Satsuma. It would have been a year later but I muddle playing Erykah Badu’s “Baduizm” CD on repeat. “Oh on and on and on and on.” I thought about how dusty unrequited love is, a cobweb I can hold close but never get anything in return except gray smudge.
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