Saturday, January 22, 2011

Giant Celestial Microwave: December, January...

1/19/11
Sitting on a couch-bench bus stop in Eugene / Edison Neighborhood, Kalamazoo. I was using a giant magic 8 ball that someone had modified to have collage answers from old records/magazines. I found $14 in the couch, gave up my magic 8 ball to some bratty teenage girls who were wandering through siren noises on James St.. I went to a gas station to squander my findings on chocolate soft-serve frozen yogurt, but the machine was broken.
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An ex-lover writes this about me: “you were wearing those earrings,
the hooped ones with the clasps/ you could never tell I they were open or closed/
always asking me to check/the pleasure I have gotten from that/the witnessing of necks.
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On the airplane, the stewardesses forgo the safety demonstration
instead we are given an in-flight tutorial in two parts:
first, how to play one-person poker: the right hand is the dealer,
the left dangles below the tray table, a gray germy mystery.
After this: how to sleep alone
the best positions for the lonely
in an airplane, in a person, prisoner of one’s own body,
for use in daily life.
---
A woman in a lacy Victorian era pink dress is speaking about the house burning down. She is on the second floor in front of a spinning wheel. Everyone else has made it out of the house. She can see them clamoring in the dusty street below. I don’t understand why she doesn’t leave. I realize that the woman is me as I look down and see how the pink dress never ends, how it flows out to the perimeter of the room. As the heat rises the dress expands and balloons up to cover the house. My body crumples inside it. I imagine a wedding cake too close to the sun, that giant celestial microwave. I am the figurine. The groom has escaped. My wax body melts into the foundation. My dress, my house
burns a mushroom cloud, a saccharine dent, that last breath choked with charred lace, an implosion.
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Went “water” skiing behind a truck, wearing boots in a river with Sara B and Brittany. We needed gas money. Brittany shaved the back of her head. We were such teenagers.
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M. shot me in the leg. But maybe I just got hit by a car or hurt myself skiing. Threw apple juice at me but Sarah Kramer? was there and threw it right back. It hurt like hell but only looked like little teeth marks or BB gun scars. I made it to my parent’s house screaming and thinking I was going to die. My mother could not understand what all the fuss was about.
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Diagram-Mechanisms for Unanswerable Questions:
each one was living on a piece of fabric: a cross between a brown paper bag that has gotten wet, canvas that has been soaked with oil, an intestine blown up to make a balloon, ephemeral and bright the way that bush on the top of ridge was lit up by the sun… inside of these wrappings were all sorts of things, scale being a complete non-issue: tents and trees and cities and sounds, all of them whirring along. A bird tattoo had left it’s ink and flesh, was hopping around and put some footprints in one of them. They were the same size as the rooftops and the silverware.
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I move back to Kalamazoo. I go to a new cafĂ© across the street from 4th Coast and I feel like a traitor but I am with friends who need quiet concentration from me. I order a medium coffee and it comes in a large bowl, slightly larger than a bushel basket. I have to kneel on the ground beneath a spout and pour it into my mouth. This is part of some advertising gimmick because the place is called “The Coffee Bowl” or something worse. It was raining downtown and my boots kept squishing down like they were socks. MY hair was shorter and I was working on a collage from an old sheet music book that I’d seen before at Kevin’s house but apparently had decided to steal.
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Playing a game with folded cards, pieces of paper, and objects that represent each family member. Alison was a pine cone. Grandma Vickie took Nick and I to get ice cream. She drove…terribly. It is some skate boarder neighborhood friend’s birthday.
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1/5/11
Nick, Kate, and I are crossing a road. Kate is taking care of us like we are still children. It was Halloween and she was taking us trick or treating. We kept trying to explain to her that we were adults without costumes and it was unnecessary. Outside an elementary school we see a kid dressed in a full body paper mache costume of “Mr. T as a Native American.” My brother trips and falls in the road and there are ambulances and EMTs and he is dead somehow. I wake up crying.
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My dad gives us hamsters because he says he likes the smell.
There are cereal boxes in the house that have fold-out mirrors on the back of them so that the cats can check themselves for dust mites.
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1/2/11
In an anonymous refrigerator/metal room. A girl asks me to go down on her. She refers to the lips of her vagina as “hot bullets.”
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1/28/11
“Dear (?), Thank you for trying to visit last night. What a long succession of libraries, waiting rooms, and movie scenes I went through in order to see you.”

Storm standing outside and a long black snake angling its way through my toes (poisonous or dangerous).

A co-worker from the retirement home wrote a play based on his high school escapades. It was getting good reviews.
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12/14/10
Read to you last night,
I drank you from a little yellow cup,
from a little yellow book—
but my glasses fell off before I woke up
I don’t remember what it said.
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12/11/10
Justin and I are on a road trip, we are driving a portable RV style aquarium. We snuck ourselves into a big fancy aquarium dome and traded in our little black goldfish for some big fancy orange goldfish and a bag of sea salt chips. We could breath underwater, of course.