.backyard.treasure.

It seems silly to even talk about it, but I have the recurring story of how my uncle Thomas decided to go his grave early, following the death of my Aunt Tilda. It wasn't as if he had a death wish. No, no, he just had it up to here with life above the ground, as if the sun and stars were the hands of a clock ticking away without a snooze button.
Uncle Thomas had been a carpenter by trade, so he spent a month or so designing his coffin, embellishing it with the standard decor one saw in his living room. And in fact, there were several items that were from his living room: sawed off lamps, his small television, the hideous upholstery that Aunt Tilda had knitted one Easter.
There was a huge yard sale after Uncle Thomas had finished his coffin, wherein he sold the rest of the house and its belongings. Remember how I said one day I'll be able to carry everything I own on my back and move from town to town without a worry? he said to us. Well, it's like that, only I don't want to move anywhere anymore, so I'm just making my house as small as I can make it. Which, in the end, turned out to be the size of small camper. What the hell is this, Tom? A horse coffin? my dad joked. But in his voice, I noticed a roughness like the unsanded wood that Uncle Thomas had been working with. Nothing a few cans of beer wouldn't polish off over a barbecue.
And that was my Uncle Thomas's funeral: nothing more than a large family barbecue, with his friends showing up for the free hot dogs and beer. Us kids knew no better, and ran around poking each other with sticks and climbing trees like we always did, until Uncle Thomas shot off some fireworks to get our attention. Hear hear! Let's bow our heads! And nobody did, of course, but the parents and grown ups all went around and said a little phrase about their favourite memories of Uncle Thomas, which I suspect was just to humour him. My mom wanted nothing to do with it, though, and told him flat out that he was going to be back inside in a week to watch the Lakers game with some Cheetos.
So she wasn't even outside when my Uncle Thomas saluted and climbed into his giant coffin, which he referred to as his Viking longboat, which he had somehow lowered into a giant hole he had dug out in his backyard. My dad joked about the duck and cover drills from their childhood, and that his coffin looked more like a fallout shelter. Do you really want to do this Tom?
But my Uncle Thomas was dead already, so he didn't answer. He just climbed down into his coffin, and expected us to pile the dirt on after him. None of the grown ups wanted to do it, so us kids made a game of it, pretending we were pirates hiding treasure, or squirrels storing away food, or anti-paleontologists, protecting the sacred remains of the long lost dinosaurs.
Anyway, that was the last time we really saw my Uncle Thomas. We talked to him sometimes when we were in his backyard (it was part of a short cut to the creek) and stopped for a while, and one time, we even managed to slide a can of beer to him from above ground, but that hole has long since filled up with dirt.
After a while, we stopped hearing from him altogether. Maybe he finally died down there. Either way, he left the world and all of us long ago, and sometimes, I can't blame him. I think about looking for that treasure map once in a while, and digging my way out of this life.

The Evening I Nearly Forgot You

I turned off the light and listened to the dogs
downstairs, their chorus of yowls.

I was getting used to being alone, reacquainting
myself with the sounds the house makes

when you're not here. The furnace kicks on, angry.
The neighbor's heavy footsteps on the other side

of a too-thin wall. I wanted these sounds
for company. I wanted my loneliness

to fill me entirely, make me
another woman, someone you couldn't love

not even if you tried.

thick be the tension

in this house. how many more months until I move?

.bristly.

I've been trying to learn a Thao song that involves hitting the strings with a toothbrush.
That is all.

nothing good

I'm in one of those moods when I think everything I write has been crap & will always be crap. How to shake it, how to shake it?

.moped.

Music always seems to find you at the perfect time. Or is it that you happen to latch onto whatever it is that seeps into your earholes at that moment? Either way, it always feels a little bit like predestination, even for the most non-fatalistic cynic of us.

So the rejections start rolling in, and I realize that my escape to Canada is being delayed by at least a year: a year to replan, rescheme, and work my ass off in a graduate program to reapply for the Ph.D program.
Orchestrating the mad dash to figure out how I'm going to afford Chicago next year is Thao Nguyen's solo album, which I finally managed to get a hold of, and the last track, Moped, is definitely a winner!
So is the rest of the album of course.

And hey, whatever, Chicago, and the University of Chicago for that matter, are by no means terrible places to be.
A year to plan.
A year to scheme.
A year to crank out a thesis.

.a.flock.of.aprils.

Has it occurred to you to check those headlines from April Fool's? Double check? Suppose that among the batch, there were a real one, hiding like a wolf.
It is the story that managed to push itself out of the membrane of impossibility into reality.
The ultimate joke is in its sincerity.
Nothing's funnier than confessionals.

grooming

the children study you, the morning ritual
of putting on your face. notice
the flesh-tone flecks falling on your robe
when dabbing the nose. see
your British plainness subside to cat-eyed
valentine. they learn:
to lure a man means
claret lips.

.before.semaphore.

Not everyone speaks semaphore, you know. And even fewer people knew and understood it before it was invented.
Two wooden crates set course, sailing off over the vast expanse of the Atlantic's belly, which always rumbles its malcontents deep below. Two buckets of hopeful eyes and restless hands arm in arm across the ocean blue. The year is something or other and two.

Five months to live as a small island, and the entire time, we were staring across the water at our brethren, sloshing ahead just further than we can throw our voices, which were plucked up by seagulls and whisked away to intricate migration patterns, weaving across the planet like lace.
Oh, we tried messages in bottles, but they had a habit of falling quite short of their intended targets. Come to think of it, we fancied afterwards that we had invented the whole notion of setting messages afloat in bottles.
And the one time my brother managed to fling his bottle clear across the gap and over the rail of our kindred ship, it crashed down not on the deck, but rather on the crown of the Gypsy's skull. By all means we were surprised it didn't knock him unconscious, but instead, we watched as he flew into a frenzy, setting countless exotic curses aflight on the wings of the gulls before he finally wagged the bottle in his hand and broke it against the rail and discarded the remains into the sea.
The last time we flung a bottle off our decks was not even to send message, believe it or not. Rather, the ship priest had been growing steadily more restless with each passing days, and had taken by the second week aboard to patrolling where he could, chastising everyone on their vices. As ship chaperone, he was notorious for scolding the children, interrupted intermittently only by his pauses to vomit over the side of the ship.
Halfway into our trip, when we crossed the line between departure and arrival, the priest finally went mad and poked holes in all the barrels of grog we had underneath. He was promptly chased out of the galleys by the furious cooks, but not before he had grabbed hold of one of the captain's private wine selections.
He emerged on the poop deck brandishing the bottle like a demon yelling at the top of his lungs about the sins of alcohol, which we inferred to mean the act of wielding a fine wine rather than sipping it over salted fish and biscuits. As the cook emerged behind him with a cleaver, his face as red as the wine in the priest's hands, the priest yelped and ran over to the side rail and flung the bottle as best as he could at the curious faces aboard our sister ship.
The bottle didn't make it even halfway, of course, and the priest was himself half over the side rail when he was gently bumped from behind by a young girl who had her doll taken away from her three days ago and flung over the side of the ship by the mad priest, who had then lashed her viciously for carrying pagan idols around so brazenly.
We looked at each other and remarked at how clumsy the priest was to have tripped over his robes as such.
After the whole incident, the captain ordered a meeting with the entire crew and passenger constituency of the ship and told us that was the end of flinging bottles overboard for whatever reason.

So for the second half of our voyage, as we drifted closer towards arrival, we simply sat on the deck with our legs passing through the side rail and stared across the gap towards our friends and family aboard their parallel journeys. We waved once in a while, and if the ships drifted close enough to each other, we could make out smiles.
We tried signing with our hands during those moments.
Julie had her baby? Oh my!
George secretly stockpiling salted herring? No!
The first mate was caught with Walter's wife? You don't say!
Julie's baby died and was thrown overboard? That's too bad.

But really, we had no idea, and those were only our best guesses at what was happening aboard their ship. I suspect that we were really just trying to understand our own ship's madness, in all its ribaldry and rancour, its miseries and majesties. We could only expect that they were experiencing it all the same, but we could never know.
So we just swung our legs, let the briny sea spray cool the space between our toes, and stared across the water at the other ship, or the horizon, or the stars; and should any of them drift close enough, we would smile and wave.

short histories

I.
What can I tell you about
the arbitrary lines between us?
We were in love
and then we were not:
Here is you and here is me.
But see in the road
how quickly the deer goes
from dead in one county
to dead in another.

II.
Southbound, you say,
We must be in bumfuck. Look
how all the stars are out.
Only trees and highway and now
the distance between us.

III.
Leaving you was a task like anything
else. I'd chart
your imperfections, I'd navigate
my narrow heart.

.chance.of.puddles.

umbrella in hand
crispy new rain jacket
(doubles as a windbreaker)
full fenders on
your bike - not
to be used, of course,
with the umbrella
concomitantly

and the rain never came
although the wind
wooshed on by
you, doubtless,
felt a little stupid in
your unweathered armour
your pale skin
aching for a little sun
but you let them
stare out from the corners
of their fashionably
racoon-painted eyes,
sloshing and splashing
through the criticism
with your galoshes

you are ready
to take on the world

.old.world.arumble.

If we should lose power tonight, remember the storm overhead. The ancient gods of old worlds and dilapidated peoples rumbling overhead in thunderous discontent. And hey, who wouldn't be? Forgotten and tamed by science, in all your enormous entirety.

It must feel like being a genie,
crammed back inside the
lantern of neglect
granting not
wishes, but shallow skin
deep warmth, enough
to smoothen goosebumps

So if the power goes out tonight, perhaps the sky will once again be visible, and we can pay heed to the cantankerous chatterboxes overhead, nostalgic for the old days,
when the world
and all that is in it
was still huge,
stretching beyond our trusted horizons.

promise

i can see myself anytime, but you
are another thing altogether.
when you left on business, extravagant
China, then Germany, then anywhere
that wasn't home, i thought
i'd never see you again, that
those cut-glass eyes
had seen something better.

heavy boots

when you kiss me on the cheek
again when you

said you wouldn't
remember this:

the room as it seemed
to move around you
the lightburst before
the bulb blew out

and us
alone, lonely together

in the dark

and all your heat
surrounding me.

.skink.

I bought a new light today for my bike: a front one. My old one was being rather dim and dim-witted - or should I say watted? And out of frustration, I commented, perhaps a little too loudly a day or two ago that I planned on replacing it with a bigger, brighter light.
I suspect it heard me and began to behave itself.
Alas, I bought a new light today.

Maybe in time I'll be able to buy a bigger, brighter back light to match it (no doubt my current back light is having tinges of ominous fortunes), but for now, at least oncoming traffic will see me, flying towards them, screaming into their eyes, Hey, I belong here too.

every man

what was the point
anyway?

to prove
you could break

me down like every
other man

unlucky
enough to love you?

.head.full.of.cursive.

I was still young when my grandmother got cancer. Too young, even, to really grasp the concept of cancer to a certain degree. Everyone talked sedately about a body turning on itself, but I as a pre-teen going on to teenage girl, my body was already betraying me in every way imaginable. Bodies are slippery things.

When I first discovered the clumps of hair all over the shower, I thought it was my own. I asked over dinner that night if it were possible for someone my age, hypothetically, to get grey hairs. My mother looked at my grandmother briefly and dismissed it awkwardly.
My grandmother sighed and admitted it was her hair, and that she had been losing it due to the chemotherapy. I told her she should be more careful about not leaving her hair everywhere in the shower, since it was pretty gross, and I certainly didn't want to have to be the person to clean it up. She laughed and said she'd try harder.

It wasn't much use, I guess, because the hair didn't really go away so much as accumulate in greater quantities on the walls, in the drain, on the curtain, behind the conditioner bottles. I had given up on the bar of soap for liquid soap.
It finally got to be too much for me and I confronted her again about it, and after a moment, she confessed to me that she was actually remembering things with each hair that fell out, plastering it to the curtains and walls like unwound cursive narratives.
Bullshit, grandma.
You don't believe me. The far wall is dedicated to faces I've remembered.
That's still gross.

But I looked the next time I took a shower, and strangely enough, I thought I did see something or a second on the wall, scrawled in hair. I couldn't make anything of it, but there looked like a certain order to it.
Unnerved, I splashed it off the wall with some water.
Over the next few days, weeks, months, I started to see letters, then words and finally, faces. I started to think that I had gone crazy myself, and that my eyes had started to betray me like my thighs.
I kept it to myself.
And then one day, I swore I saw my own face on the far wall, and couldn't help but ask my grandmother about it.
It's the day you were born, honey.
But I didn't look like that when I was born!
People aren't always born on their birthdays. I remember when you swam into the deep end of the rec center pool for the first time. You were born as a new person the second you pulled yourself out of the water that day.
Whatever grandma.

When she died a few months afterwards, it hit me harder than I had thought it would. I skipped school for a week and a half.
I finally shaved my head in solidarity and went back to class to take a math quiz I had missed. It was last period, and I went home again right afterwards.

You would think that the whole experience would have made me better about my own self-diagnosis, but I never adhered to much my entire life: diets, going to the gym, learning the guitar. The body is a slippery thing.
Cancer set up camp in my left breast last month sometime, and I'm not really sure what's going to happen from here on out. Maybe they'll have to carve out a piece of my body, like a sacrifice to itself. I'm supposed to start chemo next week, though.
I started thinking about my grandmother again, and her hair all over the shower. Who knows if she really wrote stories on the walls, or if she was just leaning her head against it in exhaustion and resignation. She certainly made no show of it, and convinced me until the end that she was going to make it, that she was going to finally write down all those stories she had been pasting onto the shower walls.
I thought about my own $140 haircut, and the tales it would unwind into, as I started losing my own hair. I hoped they'd be as strong as whatever stories my grandmother was writing in her head at the time.

Instead, I bought a razor and shaved my head that night, shearing the Gorgonic snakes from my scalp, and any petrifying power they still had over me.

.gateway.sex.

I realized I'm dating you because you're bisexual, and that's as close to dating a lesbian I will ever get.

momento

one night
i'll come home and see

how empty
the house can be

when you're around,
your bad juju in the air

like burnt coffee.
you will shave your hair

in the kitchen, each chunk
for the time you've wasted here,

you'll say, with me.

.the.year.after.

My first real weekend starts tomorrow. That is to say, it's hard to have a weekend without a week to end, and it's hard to have a week at all when I'm coasting through the days on my bum.
But now that I've been granted the structure of employment, that has yet to become droll, I suppose my days are starting to snap back into their subdivisions.
And as I wait to hear back from U of Toronto, I'm trying to do likewise with my mind: pick up the garbage, separate the recycling, sweep the dust out the door, and get tidy up for the year after.
It's nice to think we have plans.