Young Hobgoblins, etc.

8/25

You were also a little young hobgoblin, a witchy young old lady. Living in a cabin we were, or…visiting. I remember my father saying something, it was like the inside of a cuckoo clock, a birdhouse, a jewel box, a little bit of science and some floor cleaner.

We drove by but could not get out- my friends from my my old town playing a tackling game in the field, Trent pulling somebody down in the mud, edge of the hill fields near K-College, in the fall when the mud starts to freeze.

Like holding. Like the rain brought the beginning of autumn. False-movie autumn (as it doesn’t exist in the desert, that yellow yellow light and spill and slosh of seasonal decay).

Like holding: little collections of bones. The brown insides of a cuckoo clock. The mouse bones in an owl pellet. Inside the owl’s house- two bodies in the belly of a crow- a town described as a black hole. handanklekneetooth clanking.


8/2?

Selling seashells, selling shoes? Making paintings: a house of popsicle sticks.
I snuck in a house through the window. A boy’s house?
Norman opened the door.
There was an old dog inside.
I was there for a surprise purpose.
It was out in the woods.
I showered in the shower with the window open.
The window was smaller than when I’d crawled though.
Small like the window of a bank/ like that house on 68th and Woodstock.
The woods were supposed to be the woods by the cabins up north.
But there were too many lakes and the lakes were full of fishermen.
Shallow fields of fisherman in matching aluminum boats, little buoys around them.
My grandfather stood to the side: tall, wistful.



8/21

Mom walking around the house.
Make-up in cases. My sister packing for somewhere.
There were bugs here, bigger than quarters, smaller than my palm,
an inch or so thick: beetle-turtles.
Black thorax with day-glo green side panels.
Their bodies tough and squishy.
We had a pet? A jar with a tarantula.
It did not look like a tarantula.
My sister packed make-up for me because I forgot.
The jar with the spider was really my kombucha.


8/20

Camp Wakeshma dance floor pavilion
moving in and out of dark houses
night flutter under house lights
smell of bugs/fire/arms-in-the-air
my grandmother’s three-season porch
the chair she calls “the davenport”
mice and opossum
little animals that we are
roasters, holders, gleaners.

I woke up crying and walked in the desert where after it rains it smells like honey and little birds sputter in puddles

At a cabin up north; a place beyond season-- inside there was the warmth of a fire but the idea of cold outside, windowpanes steaming, sun bright, but pale yellow, like it is in the winter in the east. Friends gathered in the small dining room around a stove. J. was there, it wasn't surprising, we all accepted that he wasn't alive but had come to talk to us. He told us he understood how much we all cared. We told him again that we cared. Everyone hugging. We'd burned mint leaves in the fire. He said the woods always smelled like smoke and mint, walking to Saguaro Lake in the morning. A. wrote/remembered: how there was always ice in the tea kettle in the morning, but how they'd make it ca-chunk /ca-chunk/ melt. He said he wished he wouldn't have done it. He said it was good to hear so many people say his name.

In An Apartment on Minor St.

I was tired of having a baby. It was really just the thought of having to take care of one that was making me tired.
I received a letter and then a phone call which both explained that there were many things left unsaid. I knew that.
I found a bunch of 7-inch records that described the stars. Words of the Constellations?
They were in a little cardboard box (white and blue and pink) with star shapes punched in them.
I went on a walk somewhere rainy at night. I decided I could move in there in a couple years.

On an island much like Saturna

Beckian and one of mother's journalist friends have property there-everyone was roving around the island (which also had a lake in the middle- so it was like a ring of land) in the dark, stumbly like a midwestern party in the woods. Allyson B. was there and every time I ran into her we had to do this jig/riverdance/footkicking dance that she knew very well but I was clumsy at. But I couldn't not do it. Her stare was very persuasive. At the party, Allyson and Tyler had been doing funny gorilla leg dances on a couch.
Justin and Brad decided to stay an extra night but I rode a tippy boat back to the mainland.
It was something like an old toy boat from the 30's or 40's, rust and raincoats. It was raining and the streets were cobblestone, slick, windy: like Florence at night, late spring. I was completely alone. Could see myself from above running through streets. I would notice the slight sepia of the streetlights and then go back into my body. I thought of somebody else's wedding picture. I ran to K's house, which was empty, where we had some agreement I could sleep. I was running with urgency as if he would be there, knowing he would not.
At K's, on an old squeaky screen porch that itself is a jewel box, I called the journalist. I told her "thank you for having me over." There was a long pause and I looked at the coffee cups and lowlit colorful pitchers hung on the wall. It seemed like a nice place. It was like a little coffee shop with great paint and many newspapers in I use to live in. I took a sip of wine. I told Margaret, the journalist, about what a great deal the small bottle of wine had been: "it was only 3.75!" She said she got hers for only 75 cents. The phone noise and the sky became the same color/sound combination--
high and low pitch at once and bright blue;an arm holding an empty plastic bottle out the passenger side of a car in the mountains, tilted just enough to make a noise.