in everyplace, having gotten used to the wind, i'd close my eyes, not so i could sleep, but so that i could see. this is how i traveled to you in dreams worth more than most porches generations sat on & spilled sweet tea on. i thought about your conception of little creatures and how monsters came to be in the dark, "it was from thirst and hunger that their names and faces changed." in the peak of night and the pit of hope, you fed them and gave them water to drink like the clothes off your back. too shy to look me in the eye, you said to me in the same visceral way you would to anyone, " this is how i found you and myself."

the roots, like most visionaries, can start at fela kuti and end up somewhere like : we knew from the start that things fall apart. i really l o v e them.

a little morning lullaby is a hollow reminder full of tunisia. nuh-nee. nuh-neee. sleep has come to you. your mother is a moon and your father is a star. nuh-nee. nuh-neee.

freedom. free`dome. free do me. free do me still.
freedom est (il) liberte.

in this particular july stritch in time, i walked around in circles, in my head and in the street and in the past and took the same shortcut to the future over and over again. i woke you up and you walked with me too in all the same places. my parents followed us in a black truck and like the cusack brand of the silver screen, it started to rain. we kept walking and i kept yelling about the wild west and medical things. & i remember you walking next me like water. you had that same beautiful kind of calm strength that you have, the kind that can slip through fingers and hold up a ship & it was exactly what i needed. the street lights cast our bodies onto the cement street & we saw the same shadows we've seen on those streets since we were 16 years old. isn't so nice to be met with that kind of consistency? the shadows mourn and worry and laugh at absurd things and laugh more at more absurd things for us, like we do- & like we will for eelternity. jenna, thank you for your friendship and your love. happy birthday, my dear friend. i want to be as dependable in your life as midwest club cul-de-sacs and our shadows under the first summer sun and the tan lines that follow. you've talked me down from so many little ledges \\\ & you are the prettiest, miss.hindi. teach your students just a hundredth of what you've taught me and i'd say they're going to do just fine.

3 parts mahmoud darwish, 1 part water from the sea, 1 part joey tribbiani.

on a scale of one to ten, it's a 4 or a 5. the feeling doesn't radiate anywhere and i don't know how to describe it today. nothing makes it feel better or worse & it just started this morning- there i was just a regular ol' would-be peacock feeling insatiable and eating everything when some guy with forceps had the audacity to be this tediously happy person- he wasn't warm at all and certainly had no charisma. you see, doc, it's just that i know a charmless smile when i see one & my god, did he have one...you would have felt angry just looking at him too, but that's all that happened this morning- it wasn't unusual for this place- i know you wanna call it a trigger doc, but it doesn't fit. yes it was the worstttttt being stuck in a charmless moment and all, but it's so expected, after all. charmless with an element of surprise- well that's the worstttt.

6 AM wound around my cul-de-sac like 67 degrees of new york separation at 6:57 PM once upon a fall break until fall break broke. the sky was characteristically lavender, the bricks smelled like laundry and the clouds fell to the ground like mustard and metal.

if he made from water every living thing- we must water every living thing// it is only as i wring my hair into a bun on top of my head, that i piece together what the lion wrote to me & get this mid-morning synapse: we're just smoke and vapour made real by smoke and mirrors. heaven and earth hold us my dear and deceivingly strong boned baby, you supernavae birthed baby, where is your modern cosmic dust? exploding stars breathe fire and life into tough mothers and spiders, both of which are matters for pious proportions. how do you not wonder when atlas will shrug? i wonder if i will shrug first.

medical mnemonics make for dramatic stories- ( see: netterature/netterary studies)

those were a couple of thoughts.

Oh! but, how about these? can you balance them on your head and walk around town?

ladies in labcoats can make even dead men spineless. i did today and i didn't even know his name.

i put in my first IV today and got it on my first try.

i need life like i need grace- it turned out this way somewhere between the mayfield lane trees that bind me to our name. their branches cast shadows on desert skies halfway around the world as the sun sets pink and blue and pompous at noon.
in writing, i tell the stories i hope & wait to someday live or fear i will someday live, but either way, they're moments i tragically anticipate & that makes more sense than anything.
at least today, it does...a leel' bit.
after his weathered back embalmed my fingertips and tired my little body, I teetered for him on a wooden block
& it came to matter.
these bodies are still imprinted with spirits in circular ways and dense regular ways
- we call it dermatoglyphics and these thick skin tricks aren't for kids.
but they are innocent ideas and i guess they feel like hope- or at least reverence.
to revere life in the palm prints of the dead- or to at least feel deeply beautiful things sometimesss is the point today.

the street lights make shadows like rails for my tired body to follow as i walk around a neighborhood somewhere between where i grew up and where you're going. the light rain and the smell of september, and all you could say is all you could say. i told you how i've had tuff bones and tough bones both a couple times ago. & now i just want a stranger's trauma and crafty tools in my brain and in my hands. i know it's not interesting to you-i mean- like an older eel says, it is what it is. you beg to differ and i decide you're like a child's collarbone and boring sometime in the afternoon.

whisper- just listen, then yell: "i flipped this room upside down for him, i almost bleached the carpet i scrubbed it so hard." you asked who i could've done that for when it wasn't about me. like always, the streets were a cocoon and i was another sugared girl. when i lived in that beirut space for five minutes, we parked slowly and stopped suddenly in white cars after days spent in ruined coastal towns/ the stories we spun took seconds to live and hours to tell.

the water and the waves of the sea reflect in a girl's braineyes in the morning. we drank a strange something with coffee and orange blossoms & i loved it & that's when it felt the most like playing house. on the street, i'd plead that my kidnapped husband be returned to me. we have three sons and i have one grey highlight down the middle part of my tired hair. even when i told you women suspend dreams in places like this where adults are kidnapped and children are adults, it still wasn't about me. army men occupy everything between my brain and your ear, my brain and your pillow... & especially my brain and the car seat that night. that's the truth of the situation. i just walk around with my mom's memories like heels on old shoes. after all, we are physical poets and literary rams. in waking life, we force all sorts of shapes & sounds on our poor pink tongues to practice putting meaning into dreaming. i knew this was especially true today as i aged at a coffee shop and we laughed about stale chocolate under siege.

to my city-strangers & my unnamed campus rats:

you are & always have been the main characters in my chicago love story. i haven't met her yet, but i'm sure the portland version of myself will miss you the most.
you make this city what it is for me no matter who i'm with, where i am or what i'm doing there.
don't you think there is such a beauty in that kind of consistency?/ thank you for the mangoes & also for the salt.
Oh! & just today thank you for splitting that fancy sort of kitschy something with me... maybe i'll go to savannah sooner.

i know it's just a matter of seasons. this is the midwest after all. fields for farmers and crowded streets are really the only sorts of places where you can meet people you once knew. OR at least that's how a man on tour described it to me & he was a crowded person who has lived with these ideas fuming in his car for so long. the creases in his hand kind of looked like mine, but much more exaggerated in an exhausted kind of way, & i couldn't help but believe every word he said especially when he was using so many words to say nothing at all.

AND what about him? In the most conventional sense, he is an urban shepherd, a cross walker who takes his job seriously while he tends to crowds of people at busy intersections and such. After work, the piles of things around his city streets take up all his time. I was thinking about him today and how he's a hoarder of sorts for empty items like luggage, hatboxes and briefcases. There is an arrogance about his collection of hardly collectible items.

you surround yourself with these things, but don't you feel any strength inside of you?- A wily egyptian woman said this to a flimsy egyptian man once & I know she would have said it to this man. I keep imagining him in a striking field of colored balloons in a vacant lot next to apartments and row houses. He walks from corner to corner all day long guiding his floating balloons from place to place. It's the kind of image that is beautiful in the right lighting and captured in a still picture.

& I don't even have to say it, but it is so haunting in real life like commodified midnight & like most purposelessly dramatic people.

a sprig of rosemary is the most romantic thing about that particular kind of incident. the house was made out of wood and it was delicate, unlike any of the people who lived there, though, they, too, were made out of wood. people who are made out of wood don't have eyes. in our world, we'd say they are blind, but luckily their society knows better & not having eyes is seen as their gift. they are part of a scent tribe and inhabit a forest in grasse, france where clouds of lilac-colored smells hang light in the air. base notes are likened to familial lineage and top notes to individuality. they are warriors for nature and lovers and the strongest people to have ever lived. late at night, the wood people ether into perfume and float into the crevices of cracking bark to soak & write letters to old travelers. the now wind-weathered-people are lulled to sleep by the tales and the lores that cradle their little sheer bodies.

sometimes two wood people fall in love & they start to smell the same. often times a family is formed before they even realize they belong to each other. it's like the one legend of a man who brought her a sprig of rosemary & always, she'd find a use for it: eventually they did what the hopeless & the hopeful, the lonely & the lovely do & they grew into each other. they named their first born rosemarine. the first sentence she said out loud was something about the moon and how it was always out. most people, she noted, can only see it when it's dark enough, but we're lucky because we can always smell it and scents it. she wondered if the rest of us knew the constellation of stories that surround the moon as well as she knew them. "the light is piercing, but so is the sentiment. and i guess so are we." that's just how she was.

notes about portland:

terrible tim on the 8 told me ports and coin tosses on the west coast were enough and serenely erie. it was a boston and a gold rush to a could-have-been-boston in 1851. the two rivers crossed at a point known as "the clearing" & 800 people lived there and though they are historic, in some ways he thinks we're just as alike as anyone could be & he's probably right, as most terrible people are.

i think about us and our drifting poetries often- i am because we are. it's not necessarily the words written on paper, but it is how we live- the way we all swim indoors & the water that splashes up against our windows. That's why we will never feel as lovely in the outside world- you see the way everyone walks and runs like zombies-it's almost apocalyptic. sometimes this city is just dry air & a concrete street. but inside 1234 we are all swimmers and floaters. water slips through our fingers and holds us up like ships. graceful strength is the most beautiful kind and nothing embodies it quite like the buoyant bubbles that come up and burst from our blurred voices. there is something to be said about soft hands in winter, peppermint, a gray coat in everytime and anyplace & patience when people have no idea what it means to live for their shadow. you can at least laugh at it. stand atop a steeple and percuss a tune on my hips with twigs. i think someday & maybe soon, my heart will beat with that rhythm. i could be one of those people in a constant state of spiritual remembrance- some sufi/salinger aromatic thrill. we know no one could pick out phonies quite like HC and that's why i was terrified to meet him. thank god, he's just a character in a book i read once.

today was the earliest i've woken up since my boston days, i hated it, but i just had to stretch. it was a stretch of a lake shore street and there WERE smoky billowed clouds hanging over these perfect waves made glassy with slushed ice and such. the leafless trees were distractingly beautiful. & you know my rubber wheels tend to drift as it is with such an aloof captainesse behind the wheel, but my car and i, well all of us, drift in exaggerated ways when there are brittle winter trees innervating the city's brain. i love, love, love how the branches curve like dancers and how their legend is so much granderrr- don't you feel it sometimes? the skeletal environment can be so charming & honestly so worthy of your attention- a public accordion would have been a particular kind of transportation for this morning and i couldn't help but hope to ride in one & to find my mom living in the orchestra village; in these last couple of days, i'm sure it's where she belongs - after all, when she quit playing the guitar as a 14 year old is precisely when she planted her seeds of paradise lost.

andalusian ceramics & turkish hammered metalware are the only things i want to surround me tomorrow and i definitively do not want to pick up scattered books from the street while cars honk at me- what an urban myth and a real disaster. i've felt very heavy these past couple of days with all the things I have to carry in circles- 60 history-years and his classical guitar are especially weighted & vacant in their own ways. luckily, in a graceful chance, just as i was starting to feel blurry and tedious- this man with a perfect fedora and the most perfect beard was rapping & echoing in the city underground something about escaping to yourself. ack, exactly.

when it rains- it pours.
from one girl to another, be very cautious of this weather forecast.
bring your umbrella, prepare for flash floods and overwhelmed bodies.
try to save the new rain in old jars and somehow keep the supply for a drier- or lonelier day.
also, listen to the banjo and follow the snare drums.
tomorrow i'll sign up to stretch my tired body in a hot room & hum that tune.