The Sears Tower was full of new bunk beds. The bunk beds were under department store lights. Norman sat in the front of everything. Everybody's bed was a desk. The pillows were still wrapped in plastic. This is how we went to school.

Height and Meat

I was only five feet tall. It was terrible. Everybody's huge eyes staring down at me.
At a festival in a park, all I wanted, over and over asking
for Milk & Sugar & Coffee
& Sugar & Milk & Coffee &
Coffee & Sugar & Milk
because it would make me grow.

6/27
On the cruise ship again. Somebody was touching my breasts. I was night blind, eating a turkey sandwich.

Teflon Regatta

There is this invention about boats that slide really well through bacon grease. There are no natural bacon grease lakes. What a bummer.

Ms. Australia, Other Facts of Surveillance

I think I'm alone, a stranger in a new city, but then everyone I knew but didn't talk to much in high school is coming out of this bar where there was some reunion thing. Crammed in a hallway, bad posture as usual.

I discover that a large earthworks statue has been made, modeled after my childhood friend Tess. It is in Australia. It is made of shrubbery and mountains. She is standing above the country like their Statue of LIberty. Her left hand is held up to the side of her face in order to keep the morning sun out of her eyes.

Robin Pollens shows up in my parent's backyard during a party. She seems miffed that she was not invited. I offer her a package of soy sausage as a consolation. She accepts.

I walk far away, out into a field. I am smoking cigarettes with Eric Sabatino. The sky is a camera and everyone can see us.

Bananarama Mystery Beauty

My elementary school principal is sitting in the hallway wearing a matching purple and white 1970's old lady style blouse & slacks ensemble. She's hurt her ankle and is propping it up on the windowsill. I approach her, feeling very confused about my age. I can only approach her as a seven year old, yet I feel that I am at least in high school. I look down and see that I am holding a big stack of cassette tapes. Most of them are by the band "Bananarama." They are for some project going on down the hall. "Do you want to listen to them?" I ask.
"No," she says, politely eating a salad.
I think about the colors of her clothing. They remind me of the flourescent lights at k-mart.
I walk in the classroom. Sit down with Brittany?
I fall asleep at school. I must be in high school.
When I wake up I am laying out in a field between the junkyard and the handicapped school on the outskirts of Battle Creek (where T. used to live). Someone who is supposed to be z.w. is with me but I can tell it's not really him because this person seems gray and sort of round. "Oh, by the way," they say "do you know how beautiful you are?"
"I don't even know how I got here," I reply.

Cardigan Museum

I thought when I moved out I had moved everything. A room in a warehouse in Chicago. Something like East Hall but higher up. I went back for something and there were still full bookshelves and old clothes, half-finished drawings, and projects I'd forgotten. An excavation of previous lives. Allyson and Patrick were with me, along for the tour. Somewhere I had it in my head that I had to go work at the retirement home, too. The room felt like New Year's Eve in Colorado. Or at least that a room in a hotel above a restaurant in Denver where we floated on a carpet listening to Sonic Youth, steering a spaceship, until the construction sounds of morning.

A Walk

A conglomerate medley of every street.

Picking Flowers

Somebody is playing the piano for him in the lobby of somewhere. They call milkshakes and ice cream “tornados.” They are trying not to sleep with other people . The coffee flavor is the only one they will eat b/c it has sugar and not chemicals. She walks by at the same time as the other her. He stoops (stops) for a taste. She is a pair of legs reflected in front of a vending machine. She is her, too. Her name is Snoball. He has no name.
His old lady woke him up every morning with a shard of breakfast on a plate; shuffled away past him saying “where the hell did he get an idea like that.” He wishes she knew old Snoball, would have given her a chance.
How she finds him: basketball, uncommon. “It’s okay if you don’t do the whole avocado album,” she says at the gym over noises of bounces, sweat, yellow light.
“I know,” he says, “but it’s my favorite kind of work,” wiping his brow with his wristband. She leads him outside to a very scenic place with a good view of the Statue of Liberty.
“This could get pornographic real fast,” she says. He struggles to stay in the scene, presses himself up to the grime of a few centuries—the finger scabs and germs in the cement lion’s mane. “What are you doing?” she asks, twisting her fingers in his belt loop, pulling him towards her.
“I am picking you flowers,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut.

All Bedrooms and Forests Are Connected

A conglomerate room of rooms lived in: all connected by sharp cupboard doors, countertops, and crumbled thing-collections. I couldn't open my eyes but could see in flashes. There were dolls in one corner. I found the brown haired one. I put my chin on the top of her head like I did when I was a child. The odd plasticky smell of it was very pleasant and exactly the same. And then there was that same old nightmare about dying and escaped gerbils.

...

I went to visit Friendship Village (a retirement home where I used to work). Ryan came with me and managed to remember everyone's names. I was impressed by this. We watched a movie where the main character is cutting up paper and coloring it in a manic-familiar-nonsense fashion. We sat in the balcony of a cafe- old, wooden, and dark, something like 4th Coast in Kalamazoo or Valentine's in Portland. It was raining outside, and dark. The windows had beads of rain on them and the lights from outside made it seem like we were watching aquariums. He put his arm around me, as if predicting that when we left Friendship Village I would begin to cry. Which I did.

...

Mom and I were walking the the woods near where Tabor and Kalamazoo meet. She told me to take her somewhere she's never been. I thought of a trail which connects the Redwoods to the woods outside of Prague... of course all the forests (in dreams) are connected, and this one wasn't that far away, just over the Kazoo School/Klienstuck hill... We passed through a mess of intersecting train and tram tracks, a maze of sidewalks and machines...a fountain that you step on and it sends water jetting up into the air, a man sitting outside a restaurant with a little dog (very European). "I thought we'd go a little way and then turn around," I said.

...

Planning a trip to Washington with Dad and Nick. It's going to be cold. Everyone just kept telling me how cold I'd be. There was a pile of various coats from throughout my past piling up on a countertop. I go to my bedroom (which looks more like Tess's bedroom from the house on Winchell and feels high up and incapsulated like a rocket ship. I start packing. I turn around and see that Brad has suddenly appeared. He picks up a pair of my underwear from my suitcase and puts them on over his clothes. He starts dancing around and making hooting noises. I am very embarrassed but glad to see him.

Craft Hour on Russet

Making wrapping paper with Mom and Nick. Mom wants to use paint to attach leaves and grass to it. She runs outside to gather these things. Nick and I look at each other skeptically.

Combing

The sorts of things my parents threw away. Lead from the pencil drawings of what they were like before us. The way their desks smelled. Coat pockets of thread and lint, wrappers, garlic, smoke. The slight poison/adulthood.

We were digging this up from the beach. Plastic buckets at our sides.

Alchemy

On the dance floor of a cruise ship we are working on a chemical process to turn arugula and lettuce into gold. The gold looks like shingles or the soles of old shoes. At the very least we turn the leafy greens into incense. There was some special show in town that everyone wanted to go see. All of my clothes were hung in awkward places from hangers all over the bathroom, drying. I could hear everyone in the world talking at once.

Dusty book covers. Talking to herbalists in an Irish Pub. I don't like to go out: hate mingling with people I almost know. Standing in the salsa section at Whole Foods it's shiny and new. An old time marching band is marching past the door, leaving a cloud of dust and tassels, dead purple fabric complimenting the dust in the street.

Another Boat

...near the port of Portland that really is on the ocean... which is connected to the Williamsburg bridge. This looks like a scene from Venice. If Venice were located in a vast, flourescently-lit country called "K-Mart." The Jesus and Mary Chain on loudspeakers somewhere, everything lit like a little league field. All the strangers milling by were wearing those shirt-dress things that are from India that I forget the name of. The boat sways and I periodically think of a description of a blonde woman's hips in the novel I was reading last night.

clinic-storm-cocoa-stone

There was a big boat.
A photo show around the world.
The boat is made of that peely soft wood that is like dehydrated moss.
In the neighborhood of
we were eating waxy chocolates
cheap like the plastic box they came in
but smooth on our tongues flat snapping cold

Baby Elephant

On May 30th I was a baby elephant. How did I know I was a baby elephant? My elbows and knees were so wrinkly, my skin was nearly made of clay. I kept stretching them, the mud and crumbs of my flesh. I also had this cute bald forehead and I could see fuzzy little clear hairs on it. I felt very comfortable in this body.