.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.