.blue.lines.

I started college here years ago, moving for the first time to the big city. Well, I had lived in cities before, but there is a difference between cities and cities. There is an inescapable sense of claustrophobia that either destroys you or keeps you scurrying about like a rat in the walls.
I lived in the dorms for the first quarter, having no other choice. It was the school's policy, and I think it was their desperate attempt to make sure the students wouldn't shoot each other by the time winter rolled around. It's kind of the opposite, I suppose, of how you're not supposed to give names to your livestock; the nominalized go on to haunt you after they're gone.
After that first quarter, though, which had passed by in the time it took an orange leaf to fall to the ground, I moved up to the north side. Dorm life had been a little miserable, having had to share a room with someone that watched TV until 4 in the morning. And it wasn't even that I really had a problem with; I mean, I stayed up until then my fair share of nights, shooting zombies, and Nazis, and sometimes Nazi zombies. I guess I really just didn't like him all that much. It was easy then to blame it on his being an Engineering major.
My new apartment was a small studio in a neighbourhood where few people spoke any English. My landlord decided that we didn't need a lease, which worked out fine by me. I had no intention of being bound to him, never thinking that the same thought was most likely going through his head. I assumed he had not wanted to go through the trouble of drawing up a contract in a language he hardly understood, much less used.
I took the blue line train to class every day, and at first it was somewhat exciting. My journey to class was something different. It had transformed and even matured into a real trip. I watched the city go by like a movie. It was if I was here in person now, but still watching everything go by on a screen, out of reach.
Eventually, as could be expected, the scenery became predictable: the same skyline, of course, but the same church with a homeless person asleep on the sloop, the same library under unending construction, and the same people in transit, crossing the blue lines of their to do lists. Of all of those people, there was one man in particular that I recognized. He was largely nondescript to be honest. He wore a bowler hat everyday, and that alone was enough for me to recognize him. He got on the same stop as me, but got off downtown, where he presumably worked. Me, I had at least 20 minutes after the downtown stop just to get to campus.
I didn't talk to him at all my first year.

It wasn't until my second year of school that we interacted at all. I had briefly mentioned him to my then girlfriend once, and it was one evening when she was coming back up north with me to hang out at my place that it happened.
It really wasn't anything spectacular. It dawned on Stef who was sitting down the car from us after a few stops. The bowler hat! she whispered to me with a certain ferocity and enthusiasm I couldn't quite place. And before I knew it, she had gotten up and walked over to him, introducing herself.
Their conversation was brief, and Stef looked somewhat disappointed as she came back. She was surely expecting some gruesome tale, but it turned out that Ethan Moreno was just a close to middle age acupuncturist that worked downtown. His pea coat said his practice was stable enough to afford Brooks Brothers, and his business card, which he had handed Stef, sighed in a thin sans serif font that he was bored with his life.

That year, I went skiing in Europe with Stef's family for winter break. It was my first time, and I certainly didn't win any points with her parents, who were content to bomb down the slopes without me, only waiting for me intermittently in hopes of convincing Stef to scream down the family favourites with them. She seemed a little torn, and I told her I'd just meet her at the bottom.
After returning my borrowed equipment, I tried a legit Italian cappuccino at a cafe. I realized that I didn't have any Euros on me too late, and tried to explain to the girl at the counter, hoping she'd understand. She smiled and told me not to worry about it; she would just say that it was her free drink for the shift. I thanked her profusely and went to go sit down and wait for Stef and her family to get back.
An hour later, there was still no sign of them, and I had finished the last English periodical that didn't offer fashion advice and sex tips.
"How was the cappuccino?"
I looked over to my right and noticed that it was the girl from the counter that had helped me earlier. I told her that it was great, although stronger than I was used to. She laughed more than she should have, and I wondered what European humour was like anyway.
We talked for a little bit and she finally said that she had no intentions of hanging out at her workplace when she wasn't on the clock, and asked me if I wanted to go back to her place for a bit. I told her I was waiting for my girlfriend and her parents, but she was insistent and said she just lived close by. I finally gave in, figuring that it had been almost 2 hours since I had left Stef and her family, so why not.
We walked out and before I could protest, hopped on a bus, where the girl spotted my fare. A few stops later, we got off and went up two flights of stairs to her small apartment. And long story short, I'll go ahead and say that we made small talk for a bit before proceeding to fool around a bit, before a sound downstairs caused her to jump up with a start.
"You have to get out of here. My boyfriend's home," she said quick and low.
"You have a boyfriend?"
"Yes, I don't have time to argue. Go. Take the back stairs."
"But." And I wanted to say that I didn't know where I was, or how to get back. And on top of that, I still didn't have any change for the bus. And yes, I did want to know what was going on.
"Look, you tourists think you're here to enjoy us. But you are here for us to enjoy you. Ok?"
I ran down the back stairs and onto the streets. Without money, and with the sun having set, I finally managed to flag down a police car, giving him the slip of paper the address of our hotel was on.
When I finally got back, there was a new air separating Stef and me, and I could tell she felt it too. They never asked where I was, and I wondered if they had seen me take off with the girl.
In any case, our relationship was never really the same after that holiday, and we ended up breaking up by March that year.

By that time, my grades had started to slip a little bit, and my mom called to tell me that her and my dad wouldn't be able to help me if I didn't pick up the pace a bit. I declared a political science major and decided to start focusing more on my studies.
By the time summer rolled around, I got a call from my older sister, who lived a state over. She was going through a bad divorce and needed a place to crash for the summer while she worked things out. What could I say?
She came in mid-June, after I was done with finals, knocking on my door holding nothing more than a camping backpack, a small duffel bag, and her pockets stuffed with a hodgepodge of new and used wads of Kleenex. Turns out she didn't have a car and I had to show her the ropes of how to get around the city by trains and buses.
Judy had never been on an elevated train before, and compared my familiar blue line to the monorail at Disneyland. I told her to stay away from the Goofies and Tinkerbells around here though.
I pointed out famous buildings, important stops, and when I saw the familiar bowler hat of, what was his name?, I pointed him out as well. I even introduced him as a friend of mine, just so I could remember his name. Ethan Moreno. I'd remember it now.
He looked a little confused as I introduced my sister, and I thought he would ignore us completely. He had that look on his face where one expects a candid camera to be in someone's purse, and everyone to suddenly start laughing at you in unison. Once she mentioned her divorce, however, he was trapped, and did his best to strike up small talk with us.
"How do you know him?" she asked me later.
"I just met him on the train." I didn't mention Stef. "He's an acupuncturist."
"Oooo!" Judy cooed.

I ended up being rather depressed that summer, still a little hung up on Stef, and decided to spend most of August hitchhiking across the country, trying to make it to my friend Dane's house in Portland. I told Judy to watch over things for me, which she was glad to do, if only to have her own place, somewhere to herself, even if it were mine.
"I guess you can sleep in my bed too," I conceded. "But no sex on it."
In the end, I caught a ride with a trucker who picked me up out of concern more than anything else.
"A boy like you: in school and with no goddamned sense. Standing on the side of the road where anyone could nab you," he muttered to what must have been a mysterious intangible third person in the cab. He was driving all the way to Sacramento, it turned out, and my month-long hitchhiking adventure turned out to be little more than a 5 day-excursion, having caught a ride some touring band from Sacramento to Portland. They didn't tell me until afterwards that they expected me to pay for gas.
By the time I got to Portland, I had three weeks to kill, since I still wasn't ready to head back home. I ended up sitting in Dane's living room playing video games for three weeks before finally just catching a Greyhound bus back east. I knocked on my own door with nothing more than a small backpack, a gym bag and a pocket full of receipts, feeling as if I had gotten nowhere in the past month, and that any self-discovery I may have made creeping west across the country was erased like a name written in sand as I crept back east.

It turned out that Judy had started acupuncture sessions with Ethan, and was feeling better as a result.
"He's cute," she admitted, "but he's gayer than a unicorn in a speedo."
In the end, she moved out, thankfully, halfway through fall term of my junior year, moving in with some friends she made at yoga class. She was becoming a bona fide new age yuppie. She told me she finally felt in control of her own body through yoga, and that meant she was in better touch with her own spiritual needs and development. She encouraged me to come with her to class, but I pointed out that I had my International Law class during that time.

I continued to see Ethan Moreno on my train rides to school, and even with our mutual connection, it seemed that he didn't feel very compelled to make conversations with me. To be honest, I didn't feel like being buddy buddy with him either, but out of guilt, told him one day that I liked his new shoes. His aloofness sublimated into the air as he thanked me and smiled, but it was still clear that he had no interest in starting a real topic of conversation.

The next couple of years flew by, and I wondered how it was ever possible that it took an entire year, an eternity, to move up a grade in elementary school. I was finding that it was harder and harder to fit in everything I wanted to do. And that wasn't even with regard to non-school related projects.
I had gotten more serious about school, and the time to think about what program I wanted to be in, which department I wanted to be a part of, where I wanted to live after graduation was already upon me, showing up like an older sister in distress. And I could only hope that it would resolve in a same way, with inner peace and flexibility.
Stef had gotten into Stanford for a PhD program in Linguistics, having texted me enthusiastically when she found out with "fuck this snow!". We were friends again, after having not talked for close to a year. There was no animosity, but we had realized that like the brown line and the red line, we shared paths for a bit, but were soon to diverge in our own directions.
My mother even came to visit, and my sister came with us to the famous Mexican restaurant right outside of downtown. She seemed at peace for the large part, but was still concerned with whether or not I knew what I was doing with myself. I told her I was visiting PhD programs over the next month, and not to worry; I was on top of my shit.
On the train ride back, Judy and I noticed that Ethan Moreno was sitting at the back of our car, but we didn't say anything, and didn't point him out to our mother.

So now here I am again, on the blue line, not heading to class nor my studio apartment, but the airport. I'm flying out to look at some schools on the West Coast. Dane says I can live with him in Long Beach, where he moved a few months ago.
And I know I'll be back in a week, but everything already starts to look alien to me, as if the city knew I was deserting it. Something was receding, like newsprint peeling off of the paper, and I couldn't tell if it was the city doing it or something inside of me.
Ethan Moreno sat across from me, as usual, and more than ever, I realized the obvious fact that I had seen this man for almost four years now on a semi-daily basis and we had no idea who each other were. I was comfortable with this fact, and clearly so was he. In fact, it had never even crossed my mind until I was here, on my way out the door. Ethan Moreno had been here poking holes in people long before I cracked my first book spine, and he would clearly be here for long after. In all this time, I realized, we hadn't travelled anywhere at all, but it was, rather, those years with all of their passengers that had click-clacked through us, leaving nothing more than a concrete platform and enough metal thorns on every horizontal surface to prevent even a pigeon from setting down to rest its wings.


********
Don't forget to read my Top Ten Albums of 2009 list if you haven't.

***********

.ten.albums.of.2009.

My current top 10 of 2009 (which is a little biased, I suspect, due to recent shows), also in no particular order, with my own notes:

1) Thao with the Get Down Stay Down - Know Better Learn Faster
**This album didn't immediately jump out at me like Thao's earlier stuff did, but I trust her, and in the end, it paid off. The production is a little slicker on this third full-length, and the songs a little bit more mature, but the things I know and love about Thao come through nevertheless. I suppose the one disappointment I had with this album is I felt it was lyrically weaker than her previous work, though, that is to say it is still echelons above anything I can pull off.

2) Do Make Say Think - The Other Truths
**I just saw them play at the beginning of the month. It was probably my 4th or 5th time, and they never disappoint. It's the hardest show for me to leave, because they are so good at creating an atmosphere, a world, a whatever, that by the time it's over, the mere thought of having to re-enter the real world is mortifying and reprehensible. I'm always surprised how this band can constantly refine their song on each album, exploring a new texture and new blends of genre within their own genre of 'post-rock': their last album seemed to me to really delve into a folk sound at times, outright rock at times, and the constant genius bass work of Charles Spearin, who comes from a background of, among other things, free jazz. He pulled out a 6 string fretless bass at the last show. Just sayin.

3) Years - Years
**A side project of Do Make Say Think, guitarist Ohad Benchetrit's solo work is perhaps not quite as solo as one might be led to believe. He opened for DMST at the show, and of course, Charles Spearin finally pointed out the obvious that even though there were three bands on the bill (the third being Spearin's own side project), it was really the same band coming on and off stage. That being said, Ohad's guitarwork, recognizable immediately to any DMST fanboys like me, has a nostalgic quality to it anyway, veering on the path of folk at times. But the whole project begins to deconstruct his own guitar abilities, with a more electronic, glitchy feel than DMST. Two BOSS RC-50 Loop Stations strong.

4) Norberto Lobo - Pata Lenta
**This may have been my own most important discovery of this year. I'm not even sure how I found him, but Norberto Lobo is one of the most blistering yet graceful guitarists I've ever seen. All his work is fundamentally solo guitar work, so you can imagine the normal influence that usual entails of John Fahey and American Primitivism, but the crucial difference here is that Lobo is Portuguese, and one can hear the traditional folk influence of his native land rampantly growing on top of the Fahey aesthetics. As if listening to hours and hours of gypsy jazz didn't make me feel enough like an incompetent guitarist, Norberto Lobo is out there to remind me that I'm outclassed pick or no pick, standard tuning or open tuning.

5) Tegan & Sara - Sainthood
**Well, I don't know what to say about this. As a male lesbian, I think I'm obligated to put Tegan & Sara down on this. I know some of my other lesbian friends don't like this new album, but something about it really grabbed me, and caused me to rediscover all my Tegan & Sara. This newest album has something of a darker, more urgent feel than their older stuff, slightly less of an acoustic sound, and more of a controlled cold growl of distortion that I expect from bands like Metric. But then, seeing as Tegan and Sara Quinn and Emily Haines would form the trifecta of lesbian wet dream awesome, I suppose that all makes sense.

6) HEALTH - Get Color
**Similar to the Tegan & Sara album, I have friends (primarily in noise bands, of course) that were not fond of the newest HEALTH full-length. I personally love it all the same, as long as I remind myself not to expect quite the same HEALTH as from their self-titled first full-length. The first thing I noticed off this new album is that BJ's virtuosic drum pounding, with the full ferocity of an entire warring tribe, has been toned down to little more than a 4 to the floor beat at times. It's as if the successful Crystal Castles remix of Crimewave and the resulting HEALTH//DISCO remix album got into someone's head, and they decide to make noise rock album that was more danceable. That being said, the signature guitar tones with all their asymmetric square waves are still there, and you don't realize how much you need those haunting mechanical sounds until you try to find another noise band that is that good at experimenting with tonal qualities.

7) Julie Doiron - I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day
**For those of you that don't know Julie Doiron, I'm sorry. If you have any love for Feist in her pre-iPod days, Julie Doiron provides a wealth of introverted emotional ephemera. Whereas her earlier album Woke Myself Up was up for some awards in Canada, I think that this album has done more for her here in the US. I suspect it's because it was released after her collaboration with Fred Squire and Mount Eerie that put her on the radar of all the Mount Eerie fans. This album seems to take off from the same point of departure as those two earlier albums I just mentioned, with a more upbeat sound, whose sound at times threatens to unhinge, reminding you that Julie is a nice person, who just wants to talk to her kids on her birthday while she's on tour. Anyone that gets a chance to catch her live, do it; you'll be in for a treat as you listen to Julie Doiron haphazardly relate 10 minute anecdotes between songs that remind you that despite what you may think, there is plenty of warmth in Canada.

8) Mika Miko - We Be Xuxa
**Mika Miko was the band that re-instilled my faith in punk rock. And it's a pity that they are breaking up, or have already done so, this year, but that's the way of punk bands. One should be surprised, I suppose, that any punk band lasts as long as it does. Mika Miko has the stripped down guitar work and driving beats you expect from this genre, but with the testosteroney male aggression defanged. That is not to say these aren't some tough ladies, and I find myself describing Mika Miko as a (post)-riot grrrl band, whatever that even means. The vocals are a bit of a departure from typical punk, and are much more in the style of noise rock. It's a pity they aren't playing shows anymore, because they seemed to consistently have the best artwork for their merch.

9) Beach House - Teen Dream
**I don't even know if this album is getting released this year or next, but I managed to get a hold of what is probably a transcode, since the torrent was pulled rather quickly. In any case, I've always liked Beach House, but was never blown away. And normally I'm not really enthusiastic about bands becoming more well-produced, but it seems to have worked for Beach House this time around. Their dream pop has gotten dreamier, like when you know you shouldn't eat those pizza and donuts at 3 in the morning before you go to sleep, but you do anyway. Well, minus the stomach-ache, anyway. The new single, "Norway", (which is available for free on their website, I think) has been the song of the month or whatever for me; I can't stop listening to it. Highly recommended whenever it finally is released for real.

10) The Bell Orchestre - As Seen Through Windows
**I have some friends that say that they can't listen to music without lyrics, and that generally speaking, they need vocals to focus on, even if they aren't in English. Well, if any of you are like that, I hope I don't surprise you with 4 instrumental albums on my list. The Bell Orchestre, from their inception have been in my sights. They follow a similar formula to Do Make Say Think with their 'post-rock with horns' formula, but they pull it off without going the jazzy direction that DMST does (which may just be because DMST has two drummers as well). In fact, I get this general feeling from this Canadian band when I listen to them like I'm going on a fox hunt in the middle of winter, but instead of finding a fox in the thicket of the woods, I find myself in Narnia. This album seems overly appropriate for the new snow and is certainly going to help me make it through the winter.

****
some other honourable mentions:

Charles Spearin - The Happiness Project
Le Loup - Family
Micachu - Jewellery
The Most Serene Republic - ...And the Ever Expanding Universe
Team Teamwork - The Ocarina of Rhyme [no, I'm not shitting you; a Zelda-rap mash up that is genius]
Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
Matt & Kim - Grand

****
I probably forgot some, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, if anybody feels like they need something, send me a message.

.a.missed.connection.to.my.sexually.incompatible.crush.

[this is a draft of something I'm submitting for a zine Stefanie Murawfsky is working on for a gender class. Everyone should read it whenever she's done with it!]

******

a Missed Connection to my sexually incompatible crush


We met at the Tegan and Sara show last week, when a mutual friend introduced us to each other. I was wearing pants, a tshirt and shoes, maybe even socks. You had hair shorter than mine in an asymmetric style and a half sleeve. You were also wearing a plaid button down shirt. We joked about how nice it was that you were so tall, because you could see over the teeming crowd of teenage girls holding hands. I made a joke about how it's convenient that lesbians don't seem to pay much attention to their partner's height, but I think the applause was too loud for you to hear me.

We found out after the show that we had both ridden our bikes to the show, and that we lived in the same direction. I had gotten a flat tire, however, and upon realizing this, you nimbly flipped my bike over and replaced my inner tube with a spare you had, all in under five minutes.

We stopped by a 24 hour donut shop, commonly frequented by vampiric philosophers (the kind whose postulates and polemics fail to materialize at any other time than the dead of night), and sat down for a late night snack that ironically did not consist of any donuts. You ordered a shawarma, and I ordered a basket of fries. You offered me a bite, but I told you I'm a vegan, and you simultaneously voiced your admiration of my morals and your love for meat, and your addiction to tacos. I laughed and put a small limp french fry in my mouth.

At about 2 in the morning, a bunch of drunken girls stumbled in for donuts. They were loudly singing the latest Lady Gaga song, and looking as if they might have also been competing for a look alike award. We talked about how much this 'girl power' ethos has devolved into pure camp, and that we both missed the days of riot grrrl. We couldn't agree on whether or not Huggy Bear or Bikini Kill was better.

You invited me back to your place to hang out, since neither of us were tired after having gulped down midnight coffee. You had Fallout 3, and we powerfisted the inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Washington DC in slow motion into the early morning. I noticed that there were a lot of clothes around that were far too small for you, and you told me that it was your ex's stuff, and that she still hadn't picked up yet since the break up. I asked you when that was, if you didn't mind sharing. Your break up had only been a month ago. I'm sorry to hear that (I'm really not); how long were you guys together? Three weeks. She took custody of the cat.

There was a slightly awkward silence and I asked if you played the piano in the corner of the room, hoping that it wasn't also your ex's. I said I had learned a song once from my brother. You seemed to perk up and pulled me over to the piano and asked me to play it. I fumbled through the first few bars of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies No. 1 before giving up. You gave me some encouraging words while holding my hands, remarking that I had long nimble fingers and that I had potential as a pianist. Then you sat down and virtuosically hammered out Piazzolla arrangement, further highlighting my ineptitude. The neighbors stomped on the ceiling in annoyance, and you had to end the piece prematurely.

We both dozed off on the couch after having put on the Buffy musical, and I dreamed about sinking my teeth into you, abruptly waking up with trepidation about the morning light. You were already up and taking a shower to get ready for work. I decided to make breakfast, which worked out because you had faux sausage in the freezer, which I guess you liked better than the real thing anyway. You seemed pleasantly surprised at having been prepared breakfast, and even more pleased after having eaten. Apparently you don't usually have time to eat more than bagel before work, and on top of that, you joked that you thought I was such a great cook I should cook breakfast for you every morning. I almost choked on my orange juice, but it may have just been because there was more pulp in it than I am used to.

Well, I have to get going to work, you said. You're welcome to stay as long as you'd like, and eat whatever you can find; just make sure the door locks behind you when you leave. I asked where you worked and you told me at the Valvoline downtown. I laughed and said that I might bring my car in, since the tire alignment seemed to be off. You have me an amazing hug goodbye and you must not have been wearing a bra because I could feel your nipple piercings through your shirt.

Anyway, I misplaced your number and thought it might be creepy to just show up at your apartment unannounced. Our mutual friend is traveling in Thailand right now, so I can't get in touch with her either.
There's a Peaches concert coming up, and I was hoping you'd want to go. We don't have to call it a date. That might imply something! But we can also call it a date if you're cool with it. Whatever works, right? It's not like I'm buying you dinner. I already bought an extra ticket for you. We can also get dinner beforehand if you want.

I think you're really great.
I'm sorry I have a penis.

.regressions.in.listening.

These confessions of ours
hardly seem to be able to, can only scarcely
beat on our over-taut eardrums. It's a familiar
rhythm, and all we can manage is
to push some air around, as if it weighed
more than you and me put
together. Put
in, out, away.

Hands, once together, clasp
wildly into the air, warding
off the last warm whispers that summer
left us with. White knuckles
grasping for those patches of
colour traversing the open spaces
from brittle branches to their brethren
mashed into the cul de sac.

If we have missed one
beat, we have missed several.
If we have climbed one
mountain of air, we have fallen
through many more. If
we could only remember
the melody, we could whistle
the tune. But we are left with nothing
more than refrains, an empty
chorus we can't place ourselves in
anymore.

.tree.trunk.arithmetic.

eyes diverge, gaze diverts
swooping fates scratched and
carved, like tree trunk arithmetic,
onto parting palms

.the.smouldering.season.

Why is it that plants get to take in all this sunlight, turn it into food even, and the three of us are sitting here absorbing nothing more than various shades of burning, possibly even cancer? Black black cancer, that acrid charcoal. I could tell you all about it, and how we're never going to find a cure because we all know somebody with cancer, and god help us if medicine isn't the fashionably late stranger to the party. My ex called me a cynic. My father was a smoker.

"For chrissakes, Mara, you're burning up!"
Nina decided to bring her girlfriend today, and for once, I wasn't the palest one, the one peeling bits of skin off my shoulders by the end of the day. Watching Nina apply sunscreen onto Mara struck me as something less than the lesbian fantasy captured within frat house posters, and was rather a fairly eerie process. It is like when you watch actors taking off their make up backstage, wiping a ghost off their faces and shaking them back into the air of the theatre, to be resummoned and reapplied for the next audience.
Well, I suppose it was like that in reverse, watching Mara's white skin smudge whiter.

"I don't know, maybe we should all get as much sun as we can now. And then we'll have that nice burn to keep us warm when the rain hits on Thursday."
"It's going to rain on Thursday?"
"All through the weekend."
"Ah! No shit, I have to run to campus on Thursday to drop off a paper. Maybe I'll take the bus. Are you sure it's going to rain, Thomas? Where did you read that?"
"I think Ted told me at work yesterday."
"I saw it online too, Nina."
"Well goddamn, summer's really over then, isn't it?"
"It's been over for a few weeks now, hasn't it? Isn't it the twenty-first or something when it switches over?"
"I think so."
"Screw the calendar; you can't tell me that this is autumn sunlight. And who goes to the beach in the fall, right?"
"Well, I guess that would be us."
"And this isn't a beach. It's a lake. You can't have a beach unless you're on the ocean."

The last time Nina had gotten sunburned was when she went with her family to Sri Lanka. In fact, it might have been the only time she got burned in her entire life. There is a sneaking temptation to make a joke about her people being bred to be immune to the sun, but for one, I had already made that joke this morning, and for two, I had the realization that it was probably a little less than a joke. My only inheritance was scuffed up Honda, bestowed on me as encouragement to pack my belongings and move somewhere to make something of life, and have it make something of me.
I lived in that car for a month and a half trying to get there. And when I was halfway to where I was going, I made a phone call to an answering machine and doubled backed, making a beeline for the start of the story, towards the happy hand holding, the first tentative kisses that are felt out with the lips, before we could taste on each other's tongues the sustenance that keeps us alive. She must have tasted on me that black, acrid decay of a bummed Parliament Light before she flung herself across the continent, tasting, herself, ever so slightly of cheap strawberry vodka.
-I know my mom is an alcoholic, she said, and I shouldn't be saying this, but your dad died of lung cancer. Do you really want to be smoking as well?
-Fuck off. He was an alcoholic too, I said as I finished the bottle.

Nina was in the water, treading about with nebulous intentions, deliberating on whether or not she wanted to swim or stand, keep her head above or below, billow up with the passing waves or meet them stiffly like a Dutch dike.
"You don't swim, Thomas?"
"Rather, I swam too much: swim team. The problem is I don't know how to do anything else. I forgot how to really enjoy being in the water a while ago."
"How long ago were you a swimmer?"
"Oh man, I don't even know. High school? I just haven't gone back to the water since then, really."
That was a lie. I had gone to the beach, the real beach, courtesy of Estella's family after graduation, where we had had White Russians in the condo and listened to Elvis Costello. We didn't change our clothes for the entire week.
"What about you? You not a big swimmer either?"
"Hm, I guess I haven't really thought about it too much. It doesn't appeal to me, but doesn't really bother me either, I guess. I didn't bring my swimsuit today though."
Estella and I were busted by the beach cops for skinny dipping at 3 in the morning. They warned us about the riptides pulling out seasoned swimmers and the moustached one gave me a buddy-buddy nudge as we ran back to the condo. We went straight to bed naked and slept on the wet sheets for the rest of the week.
"I think they dump all sorts of trash into the lake as well. It's kind of gross."
"Yeah, I heard about that. I keep telling Nina she's going to get some horrible disease from being in that water, but she doesn't really seem to care."

I had humoured my parents before my dad died, by going with them to the Phillipines for their 25th anniversary. It was the dead of winter and all I had on me were the books and printed out essays I needed for my research paper. My mom had a somewhat disappointed look about her, but must have decided to not let it stop her as she spent the rest of the week drinking rum in the giant sandcastle she commissioned some 8 year-olds to build her, and eating at the various Mongolian barbeques by night. My dad gave me some cash, which I spent at the poorly-ventilated internet cafe writing disjointed emails half a day into the past.
I finally gave in to my mom's insistence that I try the terrific fresh seafood halfway through the trip, being utterly fed up trying to explain vegetarianism to the vendors, who had learned only enough English to pander to the tourists on the island that outnumbered them a dozen to one. As expected, I got not quite deathly ill, but I could make out death on the horizon, it seemed.

Nina was drying off her hair and changing out of her swimsuit, attracting more than a few glances from a Hispanic family down the shore, as well as an elderly Asian family feeding some seagulls.
"Have you ever realized that this beach is usually totally the ethnic beach?"
"It's not a beach, Nina."
"Whatever, babe."
Watching them kiss made me wonder if Estella and I had ever been that sincere. I don't know it was just us or not, but I don't think I was ever as natural at it as Nina and Mara were. It's like they had it all figured out, and knew how to make it count, or if not, were willing to overlook the dark alleys of their doubts, and walk under the bright streetlights of the time they had together.
"So who moved in with who?"
"Ha ha. We still have our own places, thanks."
"While Nina's finishing up school anyway, right?"
"Oh, way to give the game away. So yeah, yeah, we'll be the U-Haul lesbians, but I'm allergic to cats, so don't count on that."
"And I like dogs better anyway."
"No dogs either! It's too close to having children."

-You're burning up, Thomas, my mom said as she put a damp hand towel over my forehead. God knows where she found a thermometer in the Phillipines. Her hands felt soft and cool against my skin, despite the callouses from playing the cello.

Mara's recital was in a few weeks, and it was her big fall performance, the last proving ground before her college would relinquish to her her due degree. Nina had nearly gotten fired from her part-time job trying to get that evening off.
-Aw, damn the man. You know I'd go even if they fired me.
None of us knew if Mara was going to get her visa renewed after graduating. Nina joked about her screwing up on purpose, but I suppose that it is some seriously bad juju to talk about that kind of thing. And in all honesty, Mara was good, too good to force herself to underperform. The first time she had played for us in her living room, it was if each wavering note had trickled down our ear canals and set fire to the kindling in our chests.

Summer was burning itself out, us smouldering along with it, leaving blackened husks to wait for its inevitable return the coming year, complete with new ultimatums of reigniting myself or finally collapsing inwards into the tarry darkness of my heaving lungs.

.where.do.you.find.a.dolphin.frame.

"Mr. K and Ms. S cordially invite you to attend their wedding on the 16th of May"

The invitation was pretty, I suppose, if not decorated overzealously with dolphins, which S loved so much when we were together. It looks like some things never really change. She certainly sat in his lap as they stared at the computer monitor, sifting and sieving through images of dolphins, deciding whether or not they should go with a gracefully submerged s-shaped posture, or the exuberance and raw energy of a bottlenose exploding from the water. Jesus, did they actually consider getting those cheesy entangled dolphin rings as well? or matching yin and yang dolphin tattoos? She'd never be that tacky, of course.
Don't get me wrong, here. I don't have the kind of emotional stake in this whole thing in the way you might imagine. I'm over it. Seriously. I'm seeing someone too, and she comes over every Tuesday and Thursday and spends the night, usually. I try to make it over to her place on Fridays when I can, but in all honesty, she tends to go out more than I do, and after spending a few nights alone in her bed, it seemed a little easier to make plans on my own.
Actually, most of these plans end up being lonely nights in, trying my best to churn something out of the piano. She plays the cello. Not S, that is, but Kaela, my current partner. We actually met at a city-sponsored free opera event, where we were shushed by the teeming ocean of white people indulging in high white culture. We laughed about how we were setting a bad example for our respective stereotypes. It didn't matter what they were, of course, so long as we were browner than the rest of them. She told me to fart behind a particularly stuffy collar as we ditched the concert mid-aria to go throw pebbles at the small sailboats in the harbour. We fooled around on a park bench before she straightened her jacket, looked for the earring that she had just lost, before finally deciding that she didn't have time before her cello lessons.
Last I heard from S, she had made it back to school like she had wanted. She was working on her masters now, if I recall correctly, in child sociology, in particular something to do with the legal system as it applies to minors. And the funny part is that we had always talked about how we hated children, or at least the prospect of creating any. I wonder if K is bringing any children into the relationship. Common sense says no, but I never thought S would go back to school either. I never thought she would give up eating meat again, and I figured it must be K's fault. It always seems to go one direction or another with those kind of dietary relationships. I must have corrupted her for that year and a half, when she reintroduced into her body the disassembled flesh of once living animals. She vomited the first time she ate the sushi we had picked up on a whim. I was caught off guard, and when I realized what had happened, I told her that we could have at least made an event of it, rather than mediocre take-out sushi in front of Star Trek reruns on my living couch. I thought I could handle it, she said, I didn't want to be the girl that orders the salad all the time.
I put the wedding invitation in the top drawer of my filing cabinet. It's where that sort of thing goes these days: invitations, birthday cards, ironic July valentines from Kaela. Below it, I keep folders of various photographs people send me. I think that my diploma might be tucked away in that drawer as well. And finally, the bottom drawer is where all the letters go. I have lost some of the envelopes, and a few of the letters met sloppy fates with saucy meals, but everything, for the most part, is still fully intact.
Frankly, I never even read anything, and hardly even look at the photographs, although I had always promised S I would find a good one to frame. Kaela doesn't seem to really mind, and suggested that I should get the photo inside an elaborate dolphin frame. Do they even make those?
The more I think about it, the more S fills up most of that cabinet, and some days, I really just want to lose the key and throw the whole thing into the ocean, walking away without ever seeing whether or not it sinks sleepily into the murky depths or surfaces for air.

I'm sick of hearing about the goddamn wind. I want to sink my teeth in a poem already.

.echoes.on.the.line.

It occurs to me that I can't recall how you sound, the voice that crept over me for so long. And we have all these great analogies and images for how it's like watching a silent movie, or hitting the mute button on the remote, but it's a little more eerie than that, I think. It seems that - with the absence of subtitles in my memories - the words are preserved, but given breath by other voices. So I suppose we can modify that metaphor a bit. We can call it a dubbed film.
Is it a big deal? Probably not. I tend to shy away from the phone anyway, and at this point, both of us having taken flight to opposite ends of the continent, drawing open like curtains the vast expanse of land in between us, there is little chance of actual contact. We would have nothing to say to each other.
It's bad enough for me having to call customers while I am at work, and I spend most of the time hoping that they won't pick up, allowing me to leave a message wherein I will trip over the same inevitable consonant clusters. And for all the typos I ignore in text messaging, as I spread grease all around the tiny illuminated keys on my phone, no one is expecting more than a few words. No one is really expecting my voice.
So maybe you don't remember what I sound like either. We could have an anonymous phone conversation from two pay phones, and talk about all the things that have been going on, and we can imagine the voices and stories coming from the mouths of strangers. If we could free ourselves from memories.

My phone rings, and I scramble as I always do to pick it up.
She's calling me back!
I answer the phone, my tongue ready to walk a tightrope of the right steps and sounds. For a moment I can almost recall your voice as she says my name, but as she continues speaking, the memory recedes back to being nothing more than an unplaceable humming along to this new refrain.

Fever

Your skin is a fever under
my fingers. At night when
thunder beats like a drum
against the house, we shield
our bodies in blankets.
I feel like a new moon
rising over you, far away
but seemingly near.
Let me love you from here
where it's safe, where
it's easy to lose.

Illinois

Come over; eat cereal with me.
I want to be poor
with you.

But then I don't. I don't
want what my parents had,
their food stamps and their love.

This morning
two slugs drug across my porch,
one half on the back of the other.

I sizzled them with salt, what else
was there to do?
It is a fool's thing to die alone.

.history's.hooves.

"
It's the old Gestapo headquarters. They're digging it up, researching the past. I don't know how anyone of my generation could accept that --Gestapo crimes neutralized by archaeology.
"
-Ian McEwan, Black Dogs


We are the walking, breathing past, not come to life as in the movies, but refusing to submit to rest. But not all of us. Don't flatter yourself; you may be as old as I, and although the stampede of history tramples us all, rarely do the wildebeest deeds of our lives make eye contact. Rarely do we come close enough to feel the breath from hot history's nostrils.

My two-year old nephew comes to visit me today. I told my brother that I would watch him while him and his wife went on a date. They are going to the same restaurant they were in eleven years ago when he proposed to her. I remember him asking me about it, if I thought it was wise, if I thought she'd accept, and what could I say? Would they have enough money? How did our parents do it? I had half a mind to follow him to the restaurant that night and watch from the corner as he sweated in his new collar, making small signals to the waiter.
And after they got married, our parents kept asking when the grandkids were coming, as if they could think of no better way to elbow their way into our lives any further. My brother and his new wife said they weren't ready yet; they were both still in school, and wanted to have enough money before bring a kid into the world. I wondered if there were some stupid book of these conversations that normal people memorized, quoting and playing the part with lack of gusto when the scene was set. 'And what of your brother', they asked him. 'Tell him to stop screwing around. He's the oldest son and he still doesn't have a girlfriend, much less a son to carry the name.' Where do they get this stuff? My brother sticks up for me as best he can, but it's a losing battle.
By the time that Jonas, my nephew, was born, my parents were in the ground and sea. My mother wanted to be buried, returned to the earth and all of that business. My father wanted to be scattered into the waters of the Pacific Ocean, presumably to make the swim back to his homeland. Even to their deaths, my parents were of firm, if not stereotypical character. How is it that my mother wished to be reunited with that great natural mother of all of us, while my dad thought he could still conquer the vast expanse of azure wilderness? I'm telling you, if there is some guidebook to staying in character, I did not receive one.
My brother tells me maybe I can start Jonas on the guitar early, haha, and maybe he'll be great musician one day. Like I never was, my brother is mindful not to add. And technically the guitar is partially his, as he lent me money to buy the 54-year old guitar, money which I have yet to pay back, though he has long since forgotten about it. I have not touched it in at least a month, to be honest, but probably closer to six weeks. The strings, no doubt need to be changed. And what the heck, why was I even considering all of this as if Jonas was actually going to sit down and play the damned thing, which sits, older than both of us combined, in its humidity-regulated case more often than not.
Jonas is dropped off shortly after Angie gets off work, as my brother swings by on his way to picking her up. I eye his slick black car, barely a year and a half old, and wonder how long it will be before they decide they need an SUV, or a minivan. Or maybe they'll have enough money to keep the date car, loaning me the minivan when I need to run errands.

"Thanks for watching Jonas, bro."
"No problem," I say, thinking of whether or not he was welcome.
"We'll probably be back before midnight, after the concert."
"Oh, a concert, too? Who's playing?"
"Oh, I don't know. Nobody you'd like. Angie got the tickets. It might be an orchestra?"

He sped off down the street, and I could picture him straightening his shirt, and delicately playing with the spot on his nose where he had a mole surgically removed when he was 24. It messed up his mojo, he said. You still got it, old man? he joked with me. I told him I hadn't had a date in six months. He laughed and told me maybe he'd try to set me up with someone he knew, maybe someone in his program. I don't need a green card girlfriend, I told him. He laughed again and drove to the hospital.
I never had the nerve, or desire, to renovate my face, but I held no qualms when it came to my house, an old duplex my parents had bought so I could have a convenient home while I was in school. They had rented out the other side, but since they died, it sat vacant while my brother and I circled around the idea of trying to rent it or sell it. You could move in with me and Angie, he said. I told him I could probably fix it up a little and then we could play it by ear. Sure, let me know if you need help.
So it began over three years ago, and I am still in the process of knocking down walls, replacing flooring, repainting. I stayed at my brother's for a week while I was working on the plumbing, but Jonas had just been born and I suspected I wasn't truly welcome. But he had promised, and with the prospect of the duplex being sold, if not collapsing beforehand, he was probably figuring out what he'd do if I actually moved in with him. After all, we were both raised with the unbreakable tenet of family first, and it'd be sooner than later that Mom would rise from the dirt and Dad's ashes would stop midstroke and turn right back around if we were to violate laws of family. 'Do you know how much we went through and sacrificed to give you everything? You wouldn't even be here if your father had gone to school for playing guitar.'
I think, really, I just enjoyed seeing change. I liked seeing the rooms change size, location, the walls change colours, the doors tentatively experimenting with which way to swing. We were told that if there were to be another earthquake, like the one that brought my parents' house down over their heads, we were to try to hide in the bathtub or underneath a door threshold. And why not a bathtub under a threshold, I joked. The lawyer tried to muster a chuckle before getting a papercut on his ring finger from some document or another my parents had prepared in case of their incidental demise. They were ready for everything, I suppose.
Anyway, that was the uninhabited side of the duplex, of course, and despite my satisfaction at the constant and complex rearrangements of structural skeletons, it was a relief to sit down on my couch and be entertained by Jonas. Jonas despised television, which I imagined was something of a vestigial trait from our parents, who bought a TV as a status symbol and consequently banned my brother and I from watching it for more than an hour a day, maybe two on weekends. The first time Angie had tried the electronic babysitter, Jonas burst into tears at the garishly coloured puppets on the big-screen TV, expanded to unnatural sizes. It could have been worse, but Jonas was rather well-behaved, a Golden Child all of Angie's friends joked, before relaying the last post-natal catastrophe. Jonas seemed pretty content to sit around and practice walking and running around most of the time, so long as someone was there to pay attention to him.
Eventually I decided to relocate to the porch, so we could watch as the setting sun painted the sky like an Easter egg. And with the outline of the buildings etched into the horizon, I thought about my little neighbourhood, this small town actually being inside a giant Easter egg, waiting to be found by someone, to be held by new hands, and examined by new eyes.
The librarian girl that lives down the street is walking her dog and stops to coo at how cute Jonas is. She knows he isn't mine and doesn't bother asking. I tell her that her dog is also cute, to which she laughs and says, 'Oh, this old fart? He is far beyond his cute years.' We talk a little longer about the weather and Kurt Vonnegut, before she starts to continue with her walk. 'Before old Woland here decides to crap on your yard,' she smirks as she tosses his ears around. 'Woland?' I ask. 'Oh yeah, I got him long ago right after I read The Master and Margarita and just thought it'd make the perfect name.' 'Ahh. I think I may have just gone with Margarita, personally.'
I would have asked her if she had liked to make some margaritas had I not tried asking her out to a movie when she moved into the neighbourhood. She agreed, but had decided to bring a friend of hers along as well. We had a good time hanging out, and I couldn't help feeling like that Steve Buscemi played in the movie adaptation of Ghost World. They would no doubt talk about how I was an old creeper after we parted ways that night. She would then think of various ways to tell me I was too old for her. She never did.

'Maybe you'll have better luck than me, Jonas.'
He wasn't particularly paying attention to anyone right now, and was playing with plastic ring etched with bite marks. I thought about how terrible plastic was for the environment, and how it would outlast both of us, and this house that we were sitting on the porch of. And yet, it would never receive the baton of history from Jonas, or his potential children, or their potential children. It will remain well-trampled, and utterly ignored by history stampeding by. Looking at Jonas, and the librarian girl disappearing down the block, I felt truly like walking, breathing history, and how we all have our turns to catch the eye of time's wildebeest, before being relegated to nothing more than ink to be written into the memoirs of those following us in the kicked up dust.

.eskimo.rolls.

With compulsory athletics, you don't end up having too many options until senior year. Until then, it was boys beating on boys in intramural house football - the oldest full-contact football league in the United States, I read - and then lurching into the drudgeries of winter and spring sports at which only the occasional sub-talented, or too lazy to try out for varsity, boy would attempt to lead his team. That was me with volleyball in the first month or so of winter term, and soccer at the start of spring term. Perhaps the best memory I have of how house volleyball played out is not even my own, but rather that of the duty master who coached our volleyball antics towards, and hopefully over, the net. It was some point during one of the games, when a boy on the other team happened to be standing on the court with his hand - and this is a bizarre trend I have not seen, thankfully, since my high school days - crassly down the front of his athletic shorts. He was neither fondling himself, nor was it cold, and the duty master (who we were all convinced had been a spy, and had a Chinese wife who barely spoke English) looked on with disgust, remarking dolefully that it was his personal volleyball that we were playing with. And does that cretin even realize where his hands have been and where they currently are?
It goes without saying that sophomore and junior year were a nightmare of competitive apathy.

So by the time senior year rolled around, the leashes were let out a bit, just taut enough to remind us of who was in charge, but just slack enough to earn our gratitude for the slender mercy afforded us: an extra hour of parietals (though I never really had girls in my room anyhow), an hour chipped away from study hall, and allowing the senior Upper House to become something of a quarantine colony for those with quick onset senioritis. And clearly, there is enough mayhem and debauchery in those extra hours to fill out page upon page, chapter upon chapter of epic stories. But my school, which I will perhaps keep unnamed for a while longer, has more than its fair share of lore in that manner, the kind of unspoken lore that garners a sly hint of a grin from the housemasters' mouths if they deem you worthy of such exclusivity. For the record, I never quite bought into the whole system of house competition (and as seniors, who were we fighting anyway?), and consequently suffered something of a rebuke from the housemasters. You have to figure that anyone living with their family in a house stuffed with over a score of teenage boys has to be looking for something they didn't get enough when they were stuffed into the plaster-walled rooms. They are curators of vicarious past ribaldries. They are the fathers that try to incompetently play Nintendo with you, and then refuse to drive you to your friend's house. Old boys and older rules lorded over the brick buildings of those dorms.

But in any case, with no one else to compete against - the senior boys were all packed into one enormous dorm - the non-varsity or JV sports for us were a hodgepodge of whatever activities the teachers that abhorred athletics wanted to do. Well, of course. You know that not all among those intellectual bunch had forgotten the days when they were humiliated by poor endurance and an anemic sense of coordination. So as it were, one of the physics teachers and another teacher I can't remember taught and sponsored - babysat, really - senior kayaking, the refuge of those of us looking to escape not only gruelling physical exertion, but also the confines of the 800-acre campus designed by the infamous Olmstead. There's never enough space when a wall is around it.
The first task was to teach us not to drown. We were taken to the swimming pool, where we then provided with kayaks, lifejackets and paddles, maybe even helmets. As we were instructed on how the skirt worked, and where the handles were, and how to bail out of the capsized kayak, I came to the realization that I was going to have to get wet, something I had reached a plateau of loathing for after having been forced on the swim team for 7 or 8 years of my early life. And whereas I appreciate the broader shoulders now, which I have received compliments directed specifically at (leaving me speechless, as how do you even respond to such a remark), there has ever since been a sour taste in my mouth for those chlorinated rectangular bodies of water. Eventually, we were all taught how to eskimo roll as well, which I think was taught to us more so to boost our self-confidence than anything else, as I don't think any of us were ever able to successfully execute the maneuvre in open water.
But finally, they thought we were ready to pile into the van and make our way towards the Delaware River, the very same one that George Washington brazenly crossed in a painting somewhere. The noble posture was a little compromised when I realized that the water was no more than chest deep in most parts I paddled about in.
At first, we didn't do anything fancy; we just took a leisurely kayak canoe trip down some side stream, where, to counteract some of the boredom of teenagers being surrounded by nature, my classmates began to compose a theme song for my roommate, who had somehow acquired the moniker of Robot Astronaut. I think that may actually have been my doing. It was partly because at some point in time in the van, we had been discussing a bass guitar, which Will heard as a "space guitar". It was also partly because we all enjoyed harrassing Will over his large head - though it could have just as well been a slender neck.
Eventually, the instructors decided we should tackle one of the waterfalls on the river. I think everyone was a little excited and anxious over the proposal, envisioning grandiose waterfalls from fiction and photos alike. Not to mention that one scene in The Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day-Lewis where he makes out with some girl behind an Indian waterfall before diving down the toppling water (I think that that particular film was watched a disproportionate amount in high school, and still sticks to the inside of my head to this day).
Of course, when we arrived at the waterfall, it was a gurgle of rushing water with the ferocity and grandeur of rainwater swirling down a sewer grate. Our physics teacher was clearly more excited than he had been in weeks, and was eager to get us all to 'surf' the little waterfall. We willingfully complied, paddling a few times in the rushing water before turning around and floating downstream a bit until we could make it back to the wooded bank of the river.

And one day, as the fall days got inevitably cooler, and the river correspondingly dropped a few degrees, we found ourselves more than a little disgruntled at the prospect of getting wet on such an overcast day, the kind that has the odor of unprepared for midterms and college essays. It was another day tackling the great waterfall and we could practically see the field lines and vectors of excitement radiating from our physics teacher's face.
We all took our time trudging down to the ater, dragging our kayaks on our shoulders (I swear they got heavier as the season wore on). By this time in the year, we had resorted to wearing the waterproof nylon jackets provided to us, possibly the most uncomfortable thing I had to wear all senior year. The wet nylon was one thing, but the elastic fitted cuffs and waistline made the whole thing near unbearable for me, and I even decided for a day to forego the thing altogether and just deal with the cold.
But if anything was a sign that none of our hearts were really in it that day, we were ignored. The results were almost comical, really: as we each took our turn, one by one, to try to surf the falls, we each, one by one, capsized immediately. Every last eight of us in less than ten minutes, swept downstream by the current, and unable to do an eskimo roll taught to us over a month ago in the placid serenity of the swimming pool. We all abandoned ship, which had been the modus operandi anyhow, as none of us were really capable of anything except saving ourselves. Except this time, I wasn't able to grab my kayak and paddle after I emerged from underneath the water. I began to focus, instead, on my swimming training as a child and started taking some decisive strokes toward the river bank. If anyone was watching, they might even be impressed enough to ask me where I learned how to swim like that. As it were, I took approxiamately three strokes before I realized I could stand up in the water, which came up somewhere along my thighs.
When I made it back to the bank, with all my other wet and shivering friends, I told the teacher that my school-provided kayak and paddle were floating downstream along the Delaware River somewhere. I could see my physics teacher's expression collapsing, like Rome in flames, becoming nothing more than a defeated resignation of an old white-bearded man by the time we all piled back in the van.
But for the moment, as the two teachers chased my kayak and paddle down the water, we were left on the bank of the Delaware River, shaking our wet hair out, with at least two hours before dinner at the dining hall and miles from campus. For the next 15 minutes or so, we were all free, free to be swept away by the fiery leaf-bearing currents of brisk autumn air before we too were hunted down by grizzled old physics teachers.

.things.i.have.been.putting.in.my.body.

Everything I eat looks the same.

Love Poem No. 1

I was here when I loved you
and so
I am here just the same.

.knocking.bones.

you never liked
me knocking my bones
the dull impact as
something in my skin
came into contact
with the outside world

millions of microfractures
it is said, over time
will regrow into stronger bones.
but one major fracture will floor you

i bounce my elbows together
i flick a pen back and forth against my shin
i tap my fingers on my ribs, my skull
as if i were punching into a typewriter, out of paper
or fingering frets on a stringless guitar
there is no soft hand coming between myself
staying my knees and wrists
no voice saying,
"Stop it, that really creeps me out."

.a.legacy.apart.

It didn't occur to me until rather recently that some of my friends from childhood, while I lived in Saudi Arabia, were around for the Apartheid. I could wrap my head around some of my peers being around for the Berlin Wall coming down, albeit I don't actually feel that I know too many Germans. I did think about the head German baker at my former job having grown up with that institution in place, but maybe I never gave it too much thought.
But that's just it, really: political trauma seemed to be symptomatic of older generations. And it's not even as if I really believe the world has become a better place to inhabit. With each problem solved, new ones seem to spring forth, like heads of the Hydra.
But anyway, even thinking of talking to Lithuanian and Latvian friends about their experiences of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc collapsing was bizarre, but it just didn't really hit me the same way as realizing that I had white South African friends that grew up with Apartheid as standard practice. What are we teaching ourselves?

This isn't meant to be a rant, or a PSA. Rather, it's an attempt for me to discern shapes through the translucent glass panes of their country's history, distilled through nothing more than some books and texts I've read. And there is no fiction that I can create in the face of what should never have been squeezed off of the paper into non-fiction in the first place. As much as we want that photo of black and white children holding hands, sharing toys through a chain link fence, I think they exchange nothing but skeptical gazes and taut silence.

.southern.wedding.

Have you ever noticed (I am sure you have) how freshly cut hair never falls in quite the way you wanted it to when you started. Perhaps it's more noticeable if you cut your own hair like I do, and you have no one to blame but yourself and your twitchy fingers on the reins of the hungry blades. I suspect this is why it's so easy to keep snipsnapping away until you have nothing left to obscure your prominent widow's peak.

It was just a little trim for this wedding I'm going to this weekend in the dirty heart of Texas, which isn't so dirty, and is actually rather young and hip and Bohemian, not unlike you. It is if Texas is an oyster on the seabed of the country, and in all the obesity and terrible air quality (oh yeah, and rampant racism and backwoods conservative cowboy ethos), some pearl was solidified, fortified and called Austin. The safest place for our kind is dead centre, surrounded by vast expanses of hostile white neo-natives. In fact, it's not unlike Columbus in that regard, I suppose.

My friend getting married, Sahar, constantly had a problem when we were younger: everyone seemed to want to spell her Persian name "Sarah", and you'd think that in the international community and school that we were in, a place where there were more Omers and Osmans than James or Johns, there would be some sensitivity to that sort of false typo. It even reminds me of taking a class with one of my favourite English professors at OSU, Pranav Jani: it wasn't his name that was mispelled, but the course was on Salman Rushdie, which the university printers had graciously corrected on the syllabus to read "Salmon Rushdie". We were headlong into postcolonial discourse (the Western biases of technology and its spell checks) before we had even cracked open Midnight's Children.

My friend Gianna will be there too, and is probably the main reason I agreed to go to this wedding at all. It's not as if neither of us are friends with Sahar; I think we just needed each other's presence to motivate ourselves to go.
And so, for the first time in probably a decade, our three families will all be in the same place at the same time. It feels as if it is some elaborate astrological event, but if it is scattering any tea leaves in my direction, I have done nothing more than ingest them to settle my recently poisoned stomach.

I imagine it like some ghost image of the past, blurred into the present picture. There we all are, standing in line: the Phams - 3 boys, the Bishehs - 4 girls, the Leggios - 3 girls. We hardly fit into the pictures of ourselves, and what is this business now of Sahar getting married? Is this for real?
The ghost image decays a bit, eroding slightly around the edges, not in quality necessarily, but in a more ontological sense, if that is the word. Objects begin to disappear from the field of vision, until all that's left is each of our faces, and how we have even outgrown those.

Am I ready for this confrontation? On one hand, yes. I have my clothes picked out, an outfit that was remarked upon as being "very GQ". Gianna told me that her mom is putting money on me as being best dressed at the wedding.
And on the other hand?...
Who's to say. My family stresses me out. Being in Texas stresses me out. Confronting layers of my past seems to have interesting effects on my head, a palimpsest of escapism and striving to just be enough.

Families reunited. Families expanded. Children gone. Fathers gone. It's not the same picture at all. One wonders how one was ever deceived in the first place.

July II

A flower pressed between the pages
of a book I haven't read: your way
of saying I was something else.
I call for you all night and get the same
machine. As if our bodies in infinite collision
were not enough. As if
your shoulder in the bare moonlight
could make any of it easier.
I find my way down
the block where our neighbor's
crab apple tree spits fruit
all over the sidewalk.
Then the rain in summer, how
warm, uncomfortably warm
like you in bed beside me, sweating
out your dreams.

Diner

The woman in the Chinese diner sits
two tables diagonally from me.
She is aware of herself the way
lonely people are.
I could be her in thirty years,
eating lunch by myself in
an over-sized sunflower shirt
and red pants. I want never to be
old. Each bite of lo mein
closer to my last.

.just.to.show.you.can.

I remember when I was probably about seven years old, I was thrust into all the activities a son could let down his father in. Try your best. Swimming, soccer, little league. There were probably more things, more sports. A healthy body, a healthy mind. Right? Explain jocks. Rotten minds in ripe bodies, moldy flesh in firm fruit. But not me; school comes first. Absolutely. Keep your grades up. Why only a B+? I'm talking to the teacher for you. Oh, that's so embarrassing, a mother shmoozing up some better grades for you. It's 'cause the school's so small. You can't help but know everyone. You can't help but be in everyone else's business, if only because they speak the same language. And you'd poke fun at their accents as well. You'd run around taunting the lunch lady until she cried. We sure as hell did. Maybe that's why they kept us busy with these sports. And maybe it was some semblance of familiar motions, comfortable movements, choreographed as if we were all at home across the water, where none of us would have known each other. So we'll just pretend, for the sake of it, for the sake of the charade. Were we playing sports? playing parts? And although swim team was the worst, I couldn't quit it for the life of me. I certainly tried, but it was like trying to reverse a dive back onto the starting block, a bootstrapping feat wherein it proved rather impossible to fully extricate myself from the agony. I wanted none of it. Do I totally regret it? Perhaps not. I have broad shoulders, and I suspect I have years of swim team to thank for that. I have recently found I have the shoulders of a medium sized woman, but not the hips. If you squeeze the forms a bit, we'd all resemble each other in a bit. Mold your body into the furnishings for the mind. But I also remember the guitar lessons. I couldn't have been more than, what did I say earlier? seven years old. Signed up for guitar lessons after school. Same building even. Same teachers too, I suspect. Did I know what a guitar was? Only in theory. And I had a realization a day into it: I could quit. So I quit. To what end I have no clue anymore. In fact, I think of all the good it could have done me. And yet I quit, for no other reason, I suspect, than to simply show myself that I could, that I could simply walk out that door and never have to look back. And there is certainly a story in that somewhere, should you look hard enough. A moral? None. Only lessons, once learned, forever clawing at that door to be released. Let me out! I quit! And never look back. Not until you're far enough to safely reminisce nostalgically about your regrets, insulated like a down jacket by the deadened silent feathers of all the years you put between yourself and whatever it is you thought you had quit.

July

July, like the hot breath of the dog
lazing on the porch.
I'd hole up in my room for days.
I could smell you all over
your side of the bed, right against
the wall. Even when you're gone,
you're there.

.house.and.homeless.

In this poem, he compares the heart to a house. It is a nexus of coming and going, eaten-away foundations, and wooden supports ready to ignite.

Whatever. You have to think that any grizzled old man writing poetry in his cabin knows rather little about love. And on that note, why is everyone so persistent on the topic? Universal themes are boring, aren't they? Or maybe it's just that they're safe.

The house is a haven. I do not need to reiterate the adage that a man's home is his castle.

And yet, she just did. Do women poets compare their organs to architectural structures as well? Why do all these men feel the need to construct their emotions outside of themselves? Erect themselves in nature somewhere and disappear again back into the woods and, eventually, the dirt. Why make symbols? At what point does representational analogy re-establish itself as paradigm, reasserting itself forever like a defiant statue in the desert?

And besides the direct metaphor, we must think about what is being implied given social context. Men have traditionally built houses; women have made homes. If the heart is a house, then the speaker is perhaps relating to us that he has an unfulfilled space. He requires his mistress to perform the transformational act of house to home.

House and homes have always been dicey for me. I lived overseas for most of my life, with the implicit knowledge that my house was temporary, as if it were written into the walls, "You are here, and you will leave". And the stark reminders every summer when my family returned to my country of birth, of citizenship, chiselled away at my American identity. I didn't really live here. Who was I fooling? My parents came uprooted from across an ocean and stretched their branchy arms into the air and grew money on their fingertips, shaking it down every fall to pay my tuition. And do I live here either? In this dorm? This is no more a home than a hostel, with possessions bolted down, and memories sewn up in mattresses.

What does the reader have to make, however, of the secret chambers of the heart that occur in the third stanza? What do locked rooms in a house denote? On which side of the door must we assume the speaker's love interest is locked? Is she his mistress? or does he have mistresses? If we extend his referral to her as his lifeblood in the first stanza, then we have to contend with two things: the first is that blood occupies the whole heart, and if there are sealed off chambers of the heart, we must assume that they contain blood all the same. And the second, is that the movement of blood through the heart, as the speaker admits, can only flow in one direction. From what rooms is the speaker's love moving, and where to? Is she destined to be expelled altogether?

Living in Saudi Arabia, the law accommodated for up to four wives, a fact that is often recited in Western demonizations of the Muslim and Arab world. In reality, it was rarely fulfilled. Four wives are four wives, and not just four more mouths to feed, but four more voices to hear. And given a few generations, that number grows exponentially. Did these women and their children have their own rooms, as the multiple wives their huts in Achebe's Things Fall Apart? or did they mingle together? Half-brothers, and half-sisters struggling to remember names and social standings. In the Bible, it was the custom for the first son to inherit everything, but it never once happened, at least in the Old Testament. Look for yourself. A rabbi told me.

The heart is the nexus of emotion and passion, as you clearly know, class. But, given the popular modular perspective of human character, where then does the mind reside, if not the house and home? And does the soul encompass the two? or does it too have its own dwelling place? Are these three components defensibly separatable? Can they act independently? And if the answer is yes, do we have to contend with the Self as an amalgamation of discrete identities? And if the answer is yes again, then is the poem setting up a parallel with the Christian model of the Holy Trinity? If we have that parallel to consider, then we, the readers, are in a place where we must decide which parts of the Trinity align with which parts of the Self as presented in the poem. If we accept the Father as the mind, the Holy Ghost as the soul, and the Son as the heart, then we are now left with a situation in which the Son, or the speaker, is the house, which the Father does not reside in, but has created. The question this leaves us with, and the topic of your coming essay, is whether or not the speaker has knowingly created an impossible love scenario for himself, wherein he must abandon reason and rationale - his Mind - in order to inhabit the fragile and empty structure of his house with his mistress. We will discuss the ensuing parallels with Father-Son/family connotations and how the Holy Ghost/soul plays into the dichotomy next class. Don't forget to pick up last week's paper before you leave.

Impossible scenarios indeed, this long distance relationship. And I know that it is only temporary while you are studying in Central America. Or was it working with Habitat for Humanity? Houses, homes, habitats. We live in all of them, but so rarely do I ever feel as if the walls will hold me in. What are we sheltering ourselves from? What elemental forces are so violent that we must shield ourselves inside of ourselves? You were like a tropical monsoon, ripping through all the little buildings inside of me, growing like palm trees. And now we have reached the dry season. Can we make it another year? Are we ever going to feel that cyclonic ferocity again, shaking the beating walls? It tires me, replanting, rebuilding, repairing every season. There is no such thing as progress, only cycles; no linearity, only meandering garden paths. And at the end of the day, when the sun sinks in my head, the heart is still the house to which we return, and I am homeless.

.refridgerator.

like my mother, you
have come and
gone
in your wake an
overstocked fridge
an open front door
inviting the night
air cooled by rain
it refuses to enter

Other Homes

My father moved to Indiana
under the pretense mother
would follow and when
she didn't, he shook her
off like old skin
and made for us another
home where nothing smelled
like her but she was there
all the same.

.jersey.barriers.

"
people always say "it's really easy, there's a simple formula. you just turn it clockwise half way and then turn it the other way until it won't turn anymore and then look in your mirror twice and turn the wheel a quarter turn and and and"
"

My roommate has made it to almost 30 without learning to drive. Or perhaps he has learned and forgotten. Maybe he has a secret license he has been hiding from us.
I think I can beat him. But I'm only 22 now, 23 tomorrow, actually, so that's only 6 or 7 more years without being behind the wheel that I have to get by. That's somewhere between a quarter and a third of the life I have lived so far. It will somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the life I will have lived at that point.

There was one time my father decided it was time for me to learn. I was already older than the average American teenager engineering his escape pod, courtesy of having attended a boarding school. In fact, my dad decided it was time because I had just graduated from high school.
My family was helping me move from New Jersey to Ohio for college, but we had to make a stop in Tennessee to pick up the old Toyota (or was it a Honda?) that they had bought for my grandparents to use almost a decade before. My mother was the type of person to stock up the top shelf of one our closets with various gifts, just in case. So when that kid in my class that I didn't really know or like invited me to his birthday party out of nowhere, my mom was ready with some wrapping paper. Or maybe we got invited to some kind of housewarming party. The shelf got a little emptier before the light turned off and we closed the door.
So it was really no surprise that she had masterminded a scheme in which my parents bought my grandparents a car to drive around in, with the hopes that I would drive it 10 years later when I was old enough, and my grandparents were too old (and in all actuality, it was only my grandfather anyway, since my grandmother, stricken with glaucoma and osteoporosis, preferred to putter around the house, stocking up Apple Jacks and Mello Yello for my impending summer visits). With me having graduated, the plan was simple: drive down with my family to Tennessee from New Jersey, pick up the Tonda (or was it Hoyota?) and drive up to Ohio from there with two cars, one which they could leave with me.
Maybe they hadn't counted on me not having a license yet. Nothing that couldn't be fixed though. Driving's easy. Tennessee is pretty sparse. My father drove me to an abandoned strip mall.
I have never been comfortable around particularly noisy mechanical things. Vacuuming was a chore. And airplane toilets were absolutely terrifying; I would be halfway out of the folding doors before I flushed the toilet. It wasn't even as if I feared being sucked through it or something, and in fact, that might have made the idea a bit more appealing. Blenders? Also terrifying, but my love for smoothies generally wins out.
The car was not particularly noisy, but feeling the herds of horsepower on the other side of my foot had the same unsettling effect. After all, it is not a far cry from stepping on hot coals, and maybe I even felt a bit like that one scene in Dr. Strangelove, riding that hot and bothered machine into certain doom.

I didn't take the car beyond 20 miles an hour.
And in retrospect, that's almost rather hilarious, as I am rather comfortable, these days, riding my bicycle around at that speed and beyond.

Perhaps my father was a little disappointed in my slow, misshapen laps around the parking lot, and thought that perhaps it was time to work on parking. I know: that pun wasn't intended. He pulled me out of the car and ran over a few basics of parking. I closed the door and my dad stood in front of the car, pretending to be a cone pretending to be another car. I began to ease the car into the parking space and crept forward until my dad jumped out of the way, pushing on the hood.
In retrospect, "crept" might have a bit of an under-exaggeration.
He drove home.

Maybe one day I'll have to get a license. My roommate is getting one next year, his financial situation is strong-arming him into the suburbs and into the front seat. He'll uncomfortably readjust his seat position and angles, never quite finding that sweet spot. He'll ignore the oil economy fueling him, and his role in fueling them. He'll check his mirrors. He'll take a sip of his coffee, sigh, and back his car out of the driveway like a retracted promise to himself.
I think I can beat him. Six or seven more years. They're just numbers.
Or maybe I will have to get a license as well, and take the plunge. Learn to walk those hot coals. And when I am issued my license, complete with haggerd photo, I will hide it in shame. Maybe under some towels in the hallway closet, on the top shelf underneath the hanging lightbulb. And when I forget your birthday, our anniversary, my best friend's wedding, a graduation party in a nearby city, I will open the closet door and wrap my license up in my wallet, and hope it's enough of a gift. I will hope you can unwrap those retracted promises, beaming false rainbows, failed covenants.

.a.million.fingertips.

normally, i
like to sleep to
music, playlists built
on strings and horns
arpeggio stairways and
sloping crescendos for
the handicapped

tonight, the
rain drowns it
out, with the
percussive
repercussions
percolating
like your fingertips
softly repeating
their customary
rapping, requesting
permission to
return
to your own bedroom

Notes to Self

Lose ten pounds. For real this time.
Sift through the shit you don't need to take with you.
Stop spending fliff. On shiny things.
Resist the urge to burn all your bridges before you move.

.burnt.toast.

so tan
these days
like toast, browning
on both sides
never evenly.
a little darker,
with every step under
the sun
pushing me down
smeared into a
shadow, melting
into yours

11 pm

Don't come
around here
like a hound
on the scent.
I've seen your
kind before,
don't I know
a thing or
two about
the hunger
of men.

.cherry.picker.

What do they call those guys that wear those reflective vests and hard hats on the side of the road, but don't actually do construction? Are they just workers? Telephone line repairmen? Surely they have names.
I saw a few on the way to work today, and since I was going in early, decided to stop for a bit, already having almost thrown myself off of my bike due to my own carelessness. I just about ran into the back of their truck, parked on the side of the road, as I thought about the sad sag of the telephone wires, victims of gravity. But you know all about that affliction.

I forget their names already, but they gave me an extra bottle of water they had lying around, and I pretended that it wasn't warm as sweat and just about as smelly. Water is water, and water is relief. And one of them asked if he could try my bike, not having ridden one since he was a teenager. Sure, why not.
When he came back from the other side of the parking lot, I told him he had to take me up in his cherry picker now. Sure, why not.
Wait.
Really? Oh, so he was serious after all. Maybe they were having a slow day as well, trying their best to prevent the sun from beating away their motivation and livelihood like colour evaporating from tattoos.

Up I went, a little choppily at first, but slightly smoother as I evened out to the height of the telephone wires. Some birds squawked disapproval and fluttered away, leaving me wondering how it was that they didn't get electrocuted.
I hung out for a little while. I marvelled at how much windier it was up that high, and when I finally looked down, I saw people walking dazed on the sidewalk. Here's an angle one doesn't see too often! How many people, do you think, make sure they look presentable from an aerial view? And as I sat up in the cherry picker looking down, there was some relief in realizing that people have lost interest or ability in ever looking up.

.book.burning.

"
This was terribly hard to do, because written-on paper burns reluctantly.
"
-Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

I made a bonfire last night, feeding it all your novels and notebooks, your diaries and magazines. There may have even been some of mine in there, but devil knows I haven't read a book in months, if not a year already, so what do I care. I can't help but see a wall of words stacked in front of my face, filling me with the desire to punch a hole through the paper and binding, and as I remove my hand, peer through the tiny prison cell window into the world.

The glossy periodicals went up first, the yellow flames looking a bit sick as they digested the various inks and chemicals. The models on the pages didn't blink as their faces were blackened and eventually erased altogether.
It occurred to me that I had forgotten the recent novel that you had finished and left on the bed. I walked back into the bedroom and found it undisturbed from where it had landed like a pine cone last week, fluffed and ruffled and spent of its contents. I looked around for any other forgotten texts: a piano score you had printed out, a newspaper with employment ads circled in blue ink, an inhaler prescription, a love letter written on a dollar bill.
I wrote a check out for the rest of the money I owed you, and hung a sheet over the mirror.

All that was left on the bonfire when I returned were some drawings from your sketchbook and the letters we had written each other while I was studying abroad, while you were visiting your relatives in the mountains, while you were in the kitchen. Bulgakov was right: the written-on pages stubbornly refused the flames, but even they eventually succumbed. Without ever changing colour or the shape of your looping cursive, the words clung obdurately to the crisping and crackling paper until, finally, your heartfelt confessions rose like smoky whispers into the ears of the night sky, leaving me with the cooling white-edged embers of all that remained.

God According to my Father

It doesn't matter what you believe, only
that you do.

And Jesus is good enough, but
that's not the whole story either.

After your mom left and took you girls
I thought I'd never fall asleep

and it was that way for days.
Nights became mornings became another night,

impenetrable dark and every
unwelcome nightsound magnified

by night's camouflage. The small apartment
rattled with the traffic of footsteps

and laughter from the neighbors. I was lonely
for them, for anyone, any sound

other than the heater as it shook at 4am,
grumbling to a slow wake in the dead of

that winter. But listen--
all that was dead inside me

made me live.

.when.the.moment.comes.

אני עוצם בעצם

.wild.things.

(Just so you know, the real version of this has that empty bottom square cut out completely so that the page is see through. Didn't quite translate when I scanned it)

Whoa! New mix cd!
Hit me up if you want me to figure out how to get you a copy.

For those of you that still can't read the tracklisting after blowing up the image:

Ear Pwr - Epic Suitcase .1
The Mae Shi - Run to Your Grave .2
The Magnetic Fields - I Think I Need a New Heart .3
Dillinger Four - Suckers International Has Gone Public .4
Rilo Kiley - Smoke Detector .5
Page France - Here's a Telephone .6
Erik Satie - Le Piccadilly .7
The Unicorns - I Was Born (a Unicorn) .8
Andrew Bird - Candy Shop .9
The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt .10
Malajube - Le Métronome .11
Thao Nguyen - What About .12
Mika Miko - Attitude .13
Stereo Total - In-Out .14
Cansei de Ser Sexy - Hollywood (Madonna) .15
Japanther - River Phoenix .16
Yea Big + Kid Static - The Nameless .17
She & Him - This is Not a Test .18
Kurt Weill - Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Moritatensänger Macheath) .19
Do Make Say Think - In Mind .20
Julie Doiron - Nice to Come Home .21

Linear

Because there are many ways
to fuck up a straight line. Because
when I walk toward you, I want
to walk away. Because
every path is forward moving
and devolving all at once.
Because in the hot breath
of a June evening, you were too
beautiful to bear--even another
moment of you would undo
all that was done.

.bose.einstein.condensates.

"
"Condensates" are extremely low-temperature fluids which contain properties and exhibit behaviors that are currently not completely understood, such as spontaneously flowing out of their containers. The effect is the consequence of quantum mechanics, which states that since continuous spectral regions can typically be neglected, systems can almost always acquire energy only in discrete steps. If a system is at such a low temperature that it is in the lowest energy state, it is no longer possible for it to reduce its energy, not even by friction. Without friction, the fluid will easily overcome gravity because of adhesion between the fluid and the container wall, and it will take up the most favorable position (all around the container).
"

When we are at our lowest and coolest points, it's hard not to think of all the potential.
It's hard not to climb all over you, screaming all the time that you will never contain me.