Better Late Than Never... from September until the Present...

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We were holding little collections of bones. The brown insides of a cuckoo clock. The mouse bones inside owl pellets inside the owl’s house. Two bodies in the belly of a crow. A town designated as a black hole: hands and knees and teeth clattering.

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On a bus trip to nowhere. Near Denner St., hungover with starvation tendencies. The bus windows look like displays of photographs of migrant workers waiting in line in parking lots. The coffee I am sipping, always too hot.
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G. wearing that coffee colored nightshirt. I dream of making rejectable soup all night long.
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C. giving me a piggy back ride through a pool. I’m touching his back, some really great muscle before his hip, his hand. I’ve left my purse somewhere down the beach or boardwalk. We’re in some mish-mashed European villa/MTV spring break scenario. I am jogging down the boardwalk and see some acquaintance following me. I think he is making sure I am safe. I see an ice cream café which is next to an apartment I remembered living in before, where my purse is. The woman who runs the place is busy sweeping up. The guy who is following me is pretty far behind. I recall running fast to impress him. I see the WC and remember also that I’d been wanting to take a shit. I decided the guy would think I was running so fast just to use the restroom and think that’s pretty funny. So I go into the stall and the toilet’s hanging up on the wall like a mailbox or something and this makes me realize I am dreaming. I think “oh, right, whenever I dream that I’m in Europe the toilets are so confusing.” Since I realize I’m dreaming, I realize that it will be no problem to go back to the pool and put the moves on the guy giving me a piggy back ride. I start running back down the boardwalk. My alarm goes off before I reach the pool.
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I want to go on a bike ride near the river with Nick and Tess. My grandma is babysitting us. We pretend to be sleeping after she gives us an enormous plate of cookies and tucks us in. I think I am an adult so it seems preposterous. I fidget and finally escape. Along the bike path by a river we see J talking to my mother about some miscommunication- a shirt with words printed on it. I got thrown back into the house. Still fidgeting in the bedroom, wanting to leave. A boy shows up in the driveway asking if I can go on a bike ride. I walk into the living room wailing “Can I leave? I’m 26!” I realize that I can leave. I go into my room to grab a special drawing to hang on my bike like a flag because this is a tradition of sorts. I look through a collection of different drawings that people have given me and choose one with golden spray paint from Justin and then he is the one in the driveway and we are looking for drugs.
Walked into the river with a big net in my hand. My mom and Nick happened to be there too, just hiking. The net got twisted in a rope above me but luckily it fell in the water where Nick and Mom caught it.
Rode back down the bike path, on a unicycle this time, and my mom and J are still amiably chatting. I know I look really dorky on the unicycle but thought that since J was so young it wouldn’t matter.
Back in the bedroom, fidgeting, waiting for that bike ride again. The light is on and we didn’t eat all the damn cookies yet. We put sleeping bags under the covers to make the shape of our bodies. We are looking for bug spray before we go to the river. There is a tube of really special face sunscreen that Tess finds and I wrinkle my nose at her and tell her there isn’t very much left and it’s not even bug spray but I know she wants to use it because it’s not the big ugly cheap bottles that my family usually buys.
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Looking out the window of a well-lit motel room—
A bee flies into my ear. M. tells me he’s still in love with me.
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--’s current girlfriend drops him off at my parent’s house cause he needs a place to stay. He has a million stories to tell about the old gang. His right hand is bandaged and he appears to be staying indefinitely. I guess I am too, but my hands are okay. We eat a strange meal standing up in the kitchen, probably tortillas and cheese over the sink. Talk about trials, trains and phones. My mom says “it’s good to have you home, stay as long as you want.” She says this to him, not me. I spy around the stairwell and watch his girlfriend say goodbye to him. I notice that she doesn’t even kiss him. I feel satisfied and wicked at the same time.
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A really great book cover:

A diagram of a swimming pool from above. There is a white plank diving board and grey sidewalk like an xy axis on the perimeter. The teal area for the water has an “x” drawn through it.
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A Trip to Marinita
It is like Saturna, but real funny. A little island I am visiting with my mother. At the ticket booth my mother and the man running it become very distracted talking about basketball, this is surprising because she doesn’t usually talk about basketball, the sport. I almost missed the ferry there and had to jump from boat to boat. I have a key to some apartment of Bradley’s with me. It’s on a pink paperclip, and I almost keep losing it.
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A voice says “but you’re holding a fish.” I look down and I am holding a very active fish. It is almost all head. Its orange scales all the same, nearly a cartoon.
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“one regrettably flickering
lightning bolt you are
driving mine t-shirt and
chickory bloom
fire sun free smell of summer rot
you are the body handling
my sadness in this season.”
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We shiver delicately somewhere we’ll never be. Seward, Alaska or some other white-bordered tourist location.
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Justin is talking to my mom while Katie and Fernando and I are surfing drunk in the kitchen. There’s a picture of Lindsay on top of a car that she’s selling.
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Working with kids up north in the stream-land.
Had to put cookies on a table. A fallen tree/see-saw.
“Be American,” written on one side “A tree” written on the other.
Remember to drink water.
“Is this a coyote Daddy?” a child asks.
“No,” someone says, “This is a kid’s tooth.”
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Rented an apartment in BC – all orange walls and it came with this huge rolltop wooden desk in the kitchen. It had this loft above it, it was the BEST PLACE EVER but then I remembered I had a place in Portland too and I had job and a lease or something too. Jason and Brad were standing on the ferry waiting area with some drug that you mixed with baking soda. My eternal slumlord landlord was grinning there with a silver tooth. But the apartment was sunny and warm. It was so good. I tried to trade it to Brad and I was embarrassed that I’d so impulsively bought it that I couldn’t live there. But he said he couldn’t live by himself and had to stay where he was. It was just so sunny and orange.
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Some dream about “theraputic” sex. I am mailing some package of salmon somewhere. On the deck of a ship two women stand with really nice tan legs. There is a radio show where a caller tells a story about doing it while her parents are sunbathing and somebody reads a story called “Ode on a Sunbonnet.” Fucking somebody with blonde hair before leaving for a rafting trip. It’s so cold on the ship and I wish I had more than the sweatshirt I was wearing.
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Four kids in the deck of a boat, practicing moves on them in the dark. Hardly being graceful but I had to tell them that they were. In the pool with them. I wander out. Yuck. Too much male energy.
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Changing clothes on the beach. Just a little leopard print standing somewhere closer. Naked in a statue doing a spell. A boat. The only sustainable nuance, a case of Bud Light.
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Below deck with the stewards and the bus boys. Men who are more polite than anyone I know.
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Prayable.
She’s holding “pray” inside of her mouth. Milking her tongue from the other words used up more easily, unbreakable—all the words that go with vacant hosts/hands.
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Nick sang songs that live more like “boxy aint comin’ home no more.” He was still in a pleasant mood.
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A sign for a bike trail with flowers. A church that’s good with land temps.
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Went to go see F. He lived at the end of a dirt road on a hill in California/Northern Mich. But he wasn’t home when I stopped by and there was a young man in a suit on the porch. I said I’d just drive F’s truck to the end of the road. He drove my neighbor’s truck. I drove the truck but it had no brakes. I crashed it into a tree but then it turned into a bike and got a flat tire. I was back in Michigan, in the kitchen, my mother feeding me something warm and said that F wasn’t home because she’d been with him, he’d taught her to play some carousel songs on the piano. And she thought it was weird he’d never taught them to me, but I told her I’d scared him off with all my sheet music.
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Watching an ex-lover climb into a taxi with another woman. D. says that they’re probably at his house all the time now, wearing blue silk sheets and writing poems. I watched the woman’s jewelry and boots jangle and clank so royally.
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We need a blanket for going on a walk. Anna is with me, adventuring. My foot-gloves are made of fleece. I tell her about how I really lost my mind in Tabor. We are leaving school in a country town where there has been a dance. All the men are wasted in the cabs of pick-up trucks, smoking secret cigarettes.
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I am watching a video that Brad made. At the end there are carrots covered in ice falling from the back of a delivery truck and when the ice shatters it sounds like chimes suspending. We break them with our fingers like gently chattering teeth.
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Home for Christmas. Mom makes me look at a picture of “yellow.” Just yellow in a jar.
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Flying somewhere. In my carry-on: spearmint, damiana, rolling papers, a picture of me as a young kid. I look just like my great-grandma in the picture.
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I was on my way back to Europe. At my parent’s house, trying to park a car, trying not to feel too ugly, not to bring too many clothes. A girl I knew in high school was standing around the neighborhood. -- was out in the yard trying to fix a car that was next to A‘s car. When I get to Europe there is a pile of bedding in the corner of a room that is still all rumpled, crazy and fucked up from my last night in Prague. I am still trying to park a car in my parent’s driveway. I need help parking the car. My mom is mad about this because she “has a job to do.” I watch an action movie starring large, tough women.
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I drove to Grand Rapids by myself to go to a show. Maybe it was near the cabins. Watched K taking a shy girl on a date. He told her that her nose was “intimately” attractive. I was talking to Sara B. about some boy I was going to bring home for Christmas. How I bought a Scrabble game, how I wasn’t gonna use it. Cameron from MFA was crouching on the ground imitating an action movie. Cameron who lives in England called from England. Nothing was working right, not even the word games.
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Standing in z’s kitchen. He’s making hot chocolate. It is early morning. He is wearing pale green underwear. His mother is there talking to us. There has been a gigantic rainstorm and the roads are terrible. I drive back to Kalamazoo anyway. I am driving my old minivan. Tapes from the future are playing on the stereo. We (who am I with? Nick?) spin out on Stadium. The minivan turns into my old truck. A small pygmy? child is with us, kinda like the sidekick kid in Indiana Jones movies, but much smaller. We give the kid a bow and arrow and set him on the dash like an archer pointing to the sun. I feel very happy even though we are going to a funeral! The snow is melting. K might right with us. I smile.
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Went on a trip. Had been with my family. Jean-Marie my neighbor and his toddler, Kamani, was there. It seemed fitting. Somebody got all excited about someone in the park who used to be in a band called “The Toaders.” The guy’s name was “Yoader Toader.” I think it was a jam band so I didn’t really care. But the woman who was talking might have been the lead singer and that was more interesting. Kamani kept wandering off. Jlo showed up and helped out.
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There was a mini-train like at the zoo that was near the place where Brazil and Portland are connected. Behind it is this funny tide pool thing and Bradley and I go swim in it. I find this midget back there with his mother and am intruiged by the midget. I want to be alone with it, but its mother just wont go away. I pretend to be distracted by a yellow leaf but when I look at the leaf it springs up and turns into a jumping goldfish and then back into a leaf again.
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We strap a piano and a sailboat to my corolla. Driving out on the Oregon coast with nick, kevin, assorted roommates. We ride the waves sideways and they hit the piano keys and the tide just right. We all have life jackets and they can’t believe I’ve never tried this before. But then the tide goes out and the piano smashes on the shore and we have to pay a fine to get it towed back to town. I am wearing a pair of shoes I found on the side of the road. I found some keys and charms in the gravel parking lot and went to let a pet bird out of my car I also remembered that there was another cage with two parakeets in it next to the car and I kick the blanket off the cage…
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A news story about Fernando being a fugitive. A map of all the apartments he’d lived in and hid from the law.
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Census boss is staying at my parent’s house as a boarder for some conference. I was visiting home and kept leaving my credit card at The Green Top. Sara told a story about me chasing her through a shopping mall with a tape recorder playing a Dylan song. At the bar there was a Jukebox that Veejay made that would only play songs that people had dedicated to people in the small hometown past.
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I am teaching a group of middle schoolers how to play some game that involves chess and animal impersonation, words and movement…it barely makes sense. I have no discipline. Karrie is there, observing my class, and she gets upset.
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Spelunking? Or, at least hearing a very old man give a description about it… his coins somewhere buried below the earth. He lived outside of town now and only had one friend who could help him get down there. He knows exactly where it is. / getting high with R. some silly night under a bridge.highway overpass, and we looked down and drew a picture of us how we looked from above, looking down from above, all glittering with coughs of laughter.
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F came to visit my family for a holiday dinner. Mom had a ceramic jar of his father’s that she wanted to give him. I went to the bathroom and everybody thought I left. Flying ensued.
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A call for artists: there is a place where the sand is so full of bees it is buzzing. We need to figure out a way to make them attack in pleasant and surprising ways.
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The feeling in one yard different from another. Looking up at moving clouds.
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You could “order” fortunes where they just wrote your name in the blank spots in old kids’ books. I was with my family. Nick had been doing the fortunes all by himself. One arrived by mail that Fernando had ordered for me and him. My mother ordered a tank to drive in and it had just arrived. I went with her to some arts event downtown or a trip and we borrowed my Dad’s truck. My dad managed to crash the tank while we were gone. It was prom night. The crash was in the newspaper in a newspaper box on the front page, my dad in a wrecked tank.

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Digging/excavating up an organ that looked like an accordian typewriter that would play songs that aligned with the planets/movement of the spheres. Ginger and Shuichi had buried it in the Rodin crater with some old postcards. It was baby blue, of course. I saw my grandfather’s Coors semi-truck sitting in a parking lot all by itself.
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In a park around the corner from my house except it wasn’t here, more like the idea of Denver. There was a memorial statue and it had all these metal structures that could control the flow of air over them and then control the shape of the clouds. Tom told me about it after he woke up there somewhere parked nearby. The little kid who lives next door found an asthma inhaler in the dumpster and was using it over and over.
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Waking up somewhere else with the remnants of magic. Costumes? Climbing metal fences? Batting cages?
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Skateboarding with my students on the highway ramps that are rollercoastery skinny loops between Grand Rapids and the old part of 131. A concrete maze. Nick and Dylan are there. Ended up somewhere with some of my students. An apartment. I started free style rapping with out any warning in order to impress them or something. Right when I realized what I was doing, my raps started to get real lame… all I remember saying was “Cause I’m the weirdest English teacher/…where the grass is… greener.”
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The longest-lasting residue of the human race will be its shine.
(due to toxic chemicals and indestructible plastics)
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Murder Mystery

No digging on federal land.
I can’t look for a body.
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Back in Kalamazoo with Sara and Sara and Dan Foley at that house on Dutton St. but nobody we knew lived there. I’m covered in mud. I’ve either been horseback riding or skateboarding. Trying to swallow a pill. Mucinex or something. Just can’t. Thugs? follow me into the house.
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“Some people just can’t make it past Pennsylvania.”
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Someone has died and my grandma is compulsively eating baked goods and crying.
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Brit and Alex in Seattle, I go to Alex’s house and there are exotic cacti and grow lights all over the stairs. I keep wobbling and getting poked as I walk. Nina is in charge of some literary journal and she wont let my poems in. I try to fly with Brittany from Portland to Van Couver. Kevin takes the light rail with us but we don’t buy tickets and get in trouble and miss our flight. The airport where we got tickets was a little metal teal sea vessel at the end of a dock. Like an old tea box. I go back to the hotel where I was staying the night before. It’s really expensive. I try to sneak in. I remember I left my tape recorder in the room along with some goopy underwear. There are snowboarding books on the walls and I realize I’ve been confusing Kevin with the character from some documentary about some “artsy” man who has glasses and Kurt Cobain hair milling around on a wood floor in the opening scene.
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I lived with the Pollens’ in a one bedroom apartment and they kept getting mad because I was smoking inside. I worked in a grocery store and kept going to visit someone in another department and this was a grocery store I’ve been in a lot in my dreams it’s never-ending a meijer/d&w hybrid.
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I found all these musty banners and posters and old super 8 films my dad made about the post-beat era. A segment of the film showed him and a friend walking through a furrowed field with nothing in it yet. It was like my junk field (rural deep dream) thing but in the past.
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Wading through mud. Helping a little kid put a paddleboat shaped life preserver on his head. Somewhere I was speaking to my dad about trail running.
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This is Bud’s Story About Riding the Train

“Grandpa Kerly said I could have 14 drinks on the train, but no more than 14! At this point [after drinking 14 drinks] I begin thinking ‘what’s the difference if I have just one more…’ So I did. And then I lit a cigarette on the train. I got yelled at and went into the bathroom. I closed my lapels in the door. They looked like they’d been eating a paper towel sandwich.”
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Nick has a job where he has reading buddies. His is some little blond kid who is really sassy and hilarious. Her grandpa is there too.
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My family took a trip to see Scott in prison. We fought the whole way there. I didn’t know that that’s where we were going so I was wearing a mini-skirt and some gaudy athletic shoes and was cranky because I hadn’t gotten to eat the dinner (bran flakes and whiskey) that I’d planned on having. We were in a red Ferrari convertible. I accidentally slammed my mom’s hand in the car door. Also Nick had brought some rich friend of his who was a “little bastard that was only along for the ride.” I remember wishing that more American cities had reliable public transportation. I woke up with the chorus of that song in my head that goes “get your booty on the floor tonighight…” repeating over and over.
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I received an email from a new friend that addressed me as “dear fish head” or “dear fish brain.”
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I was going to make biscuits. The woods looked like a Bruegel painting. I was out there with Tess. My boots were socks or felt like the bottoms were at least. Tess knew about the crush I had. She always knew about everything but was nice about it too. Anna was googling our high school class to find out who had turned into Nazis. Tess gave me pasta so I had to eat it.
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was attending some art school in an Italian village that closely resembled the Vine neighborhood. I kept having trouble transporting this enormous backpack with materials for class (large plastic hopscotch maps and blow up turtles and various other crap), it would slide off my back and it was heavy and I was hiking sort of lost in the jungle. I’d always get there late and misunderstand the directions. One assignment looked interesting, something about “stemmed” words or a list of interconnected words with the same stem… but it disappeared when I noticed half the people had created sort of scrapbooky crafty looking maps of islands. I went in the bathroom and was buttoning up my pants as I left and ran into Josh j. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in years. He looked at me and said “so you still only have the one pair of pants you really like, huh? You’re exactly the same.” I think I sneered and was gonna say something like “well so are you,” but I woke up.
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There were orange trees in Europe, outside of a church. I was climbing on the brass roof, dragging my bicycle with me. A man inside was playing some mysterious seven-stringed instrument made out of a wooden shell with a paper napkin with stitches inside and the roving platonic secular non-church church choir was warming up there. I only ended up on this roof after trying to escape Rachel Andoga’s apartment where I’d been given a piece of cheese that was about the same size as a large piece of bread.