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.