sh hhh–

I think of friends in terms of color groups.
                                                                    

                                                                                           I assume the flies have settled.

 

Paris I (old)

I am in Paris. I get off the plane and get my bags, wandering through the maze that is the Charles De Gaulle airport, eyes wide, mind hazy from the eight hour plane ride. I wander onto the right bus, somehow, fumbling through awkward conversations with irritated French airport workers. On the bus, I meet a woman and we have a wonderful conversation. I am filled with adrenaline. The last time she was in Paris, years and years ago, she was a nanny too. She is coming back to meet with a lover, someone she left behind all those years ago. I am open and friendly, and tell her that I believe our conversation together is a good omen for the beginning of my year there.

The first time I am really aware of Paris is when the bus is roaring up the Champs Elysees. The city appears dirty – the streets are lined with trash, the sidewalks crammed with people, and there seem to be no agreed-upon rules of the road. Cars cut corners, eschew turn signals, ignore speed limits and pedestrians. I am amazed that the bus driver can navigate the chaotic traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe – I am more amazed at this than I am at the monument itself. I am blown away by the sheer size of Paris, and unable to wrap my mind around the fact that I am going to be living here for the next year of my life. This is Paris. Besides the trash, the city is truly breathtakingly beautiful – I spot the Eiffel tower and the Pantheon, and everywhere the buildings are made of white stone. Some of the cafes and shops looks straight out of Les Miserables. I am thrilled and terrified.

The first task, after getting off the bus, is finding a cab driver. The friendly bus driver (a cruel joke, having the first Parisian I meet be friendly; this does not prepare me well) points me in the right direction, right across the street. I drag my luggage across the crosswalk, tickled by the little green man in the crossing signal. I find a cab and the driver silently and unceremoniously throws my suitcases in the trunk as I climb in the backseat and wait for him. He gets in the driver’s seat. Staring in the rear view mirror at me, he says something in French that, by sheer guesswork, I take to mean “Where are you going?”

I say, naively, “Parlez-vous Anglais?”

The driver rolls his eyes and says “Non, non. Leetle bit, eh? Leetle,” and indicates with his thumb and index finger the amount of extent of his English vocabulary.

Oh, shit.

How on God’s green earth could I have assumed that I could get around in this behemoth of a city without being able to speak fluent French?  I try as best I can to pronounce the address I was given, which means I have to say the number eighty-eight in French, which any beginning French student can tell you is no easy task. The actual word is quatre-vingt- huit, meaning literally “four-twenty-eight”. Four twenties makes eighty, get it? Plus eight, equals eighty-eight. The French are horrible.

At first, the driver doesn’t understand my words. I shove the paper in his face, he reads it, says “Ah,” and drives the car into the melee. I hang on for dear life as the taxi nearly careens into a Smartcar entering the traffic circle. On the way there I lose track of the amount of times I almost die. We manage a few tidbits of very awkward conversation conducted in Frenglish. I learn that the driver is not a native Parisian – he’s not even from France. He and his family moved here many years ago from a country I do not remember, but it was one in which the people were rough and living in poverty.

We finally reach the apartment. He tells me it is across the street. I am not prepared for the glamour of the lobby when I enter it. The floors appear to be made of dyed marble. The heavy glass doors have golden handles. I stumble across the floor, catching a glimpse of myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, looking very American indeed with my tousled hair, bright red St. Mary’s Academy Class of 2003 sweatshirt, worn jeans, flip-flops, and giant suitcases dragging behind me. There are no signs anywhere, just a small booth office-type place where a friendly-looking man sits staring at me inquisitively. I slowly make my way over to him.

“Tisserand?” I say haltingly. “La famille Tisserand?”
“Ah oui!,” he says, “La sixieme. Ils sont la.”

I have no idea what this means. He understands that I have no idea what this means. I feel angry and frustrated that I do not understand what this means.

“Sixieme,” he repeats slowly, holding up six fingers. “L’ascenseur est a la droite. L’ascenseur,” he says, walking out of his office and pointing around the corner to the right.
“Okay,” I say, smiling. “Merci!”

I find the elevator. Sixth floor, I’m sure that’s what he meant. I take the elevator, impossibly small though it is, to the sixth floor. I get off and there in front of me is a large wooden door with the right number on it and a small button, above which is embossed the name Tisserand on a brass plaque. I am scared. I am about to meet the children that I will be with for the next year. The hallway is very small – there are only two doors, two elevators and a staircase. I press my ear up to the cold wood and hear nothing inside. The building is impeccably clean. I just stand outside the doorway for a good two minutes, not really wanting to ring the doorbell. I listen to the sounds echoing up from the lobby. A small dog yipping, and a low male voice murmuring something in French.

I have resolve. I must ring this doorbell. I have no choice. I have nowhere else to go, no other options. I press my finger to the button and hear a chime just inside the door. A soft bark erupts from inside the apartment, and I hear little dog feet clattering across a floor, followed by the louder thuds of human footsteps. The footsteps arrive at the door, and then stop. There is a slight pause. I realize I am being observed through the spyglass in the door. And then the door opens. My eyes meet those of a young, striking boy of about thirteen. His eyes are a bright, sparkling green lined with long, dark lashes. His hair is black and spiked up fashionably. He is more fashionably dressed than I ever will be, in clothes that can only be either Ralph Lauren or something of the sort.

“Hello!” he barks, his voice cracking with prepubescent force.

“Hi there!” I say, overly friendly. “I’m Blythe. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“Yes, yes, come in, come in. I am Adrien. Let me take your things.” His heavy French accent is charming. To God, I think: You must be kidding. This is going to be my life? I can’t believe it. I was delighted.

He leads me into what seems to be a hotel penthouse, or is at least decorated as such. The entrance hall floors are checkered marble. On a small hall table is an miniature model of a wooden sailing ship that looks to be worth thousands of dollars. I turn around and am again confronted with a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Adrien indicates that I must take off my shoes. I do so, and put them by the hall table, on the floor. I follow him down the hall and to the left, where we set my bags down inside a large bedroom that I can tell belongs to his parents. The room is immaculate and very tastefully decorated. The carpet matches the curtains which match the bedspread which match the lampshade, and so on. On the walls are hung original works of art, which of course match the color scheme of the room. There is a small television on the dresser. It looks as though the room was cleaned thirty seconds before I walked into it.

Adrien then leads me across the hall and to a different room, where a small boy is stretched out on the floor in front of an episode of some Japanese cartoon that has been dubbed over into French.

“Romain!” bellows Adrien. The little boy turns around, takes me in, and scrambles to his feet. He comes over and shakes my hand. Romain is ten years old and has piercing, hawk-like blue eyes. He stares at me and I can feel him sizing me up. His cheeks are flushed with health, and he, too, is clothed in the latest fashions. He is one of the most beautiful children I’ve ever met. After shaking my hand, he loses interest in me and again stretches out on the floor.

“Are you ‘ungry?” asks Adrien tentatively.

“Yes, actually I am,” I say, still in happy introductions mode. Adrien leads me to the kitchen and commands his brother to follow. As I am asked to sit, I begin to feel a bit like a new pet. I do not feel in control of the situation at all, regardless of the age difference between myself and these boys. I feel like an intruder, like an awkward guest. Romain and Adrien appeared old enough to take care of themselves; that was certainly what they had been doing when I arrived at the door.

 

Lecture, Ground Out Through the Brain

Trajectory:

(After the break – after the break – afterwards)

after

words

after

the

fall

after

falling from a great height.

(“If you make success in a social environment, you should be dominant because you’re better There’s a reason why you’re in poverty because you’re supposed to be there)

(“Something I found interesting about this commercial strange vibe you want to find nit take time to be a Dad interesting. The tactics you use. That’s what contributes to the power of it.)

Oh

no -

don’t lose

your

ink -

or your

mind.

(more than just competition)

(The form of the presentation, undisputed within a narrow context of)

unworthy peons

The proletariat beckons, awaits your yawning mouths, underpins your riding whip underneath the belly of the horse which you shouldn’t gallop wallop bullwhip him into submission un-dom ungdom masters unflinching unwillingly riding you down fully into the future like an undecided piece of meat! Come back to us, father – come bend us in the snow come stilt your candle towards the whole Self wisdom

(you saw a neighbor looking over, wondering – what’s going on here?)

(it’s consistent with gender ideology)

(a public service announcement telling you how to live – who pays for these public announcements? An organization – might be something of interest to you later on, perhaps – in movies – they’re trying to counteract a trend – it’s very pedagogical – one final comment.)

A CHAaaaaNGE IN IDeO-o-o-Logy?

 

Poor Little Function Words, I’ll Give You Somewhere to Go!

The the turned to the by and uttered

colorly, “Stop thrashing to me!”

And an on upped the wharf,

flogging slowly,

cradling a naive of

in her too.

 

I am in the Passenger Seat of a Chevy Suburban

The gendered aspects of conversation

are perhaps a good

jumping-off point

The business nodes of

analytical seminal (meaning semen)

talking-pants

But back to the gender,

I have serious points to make

seriously

I am very serious, too serious to be

taken at all seriously -

go to your corner!

 

My grandmother was a large woman

My grandmother was a large woman. I remember her with white curly hair, her large frame draped over an armchair, settled, regal, commanding. Her ankles were swollen and red from years of carying around all that weight, and her feet and toes swelled, plump with water, sometimes purple. Her toenails were yellow and curled, and she wore sandals, probably because other types of shoes didn’t give her appendages enough room. My grandmother’s body was a source of great fascination for me as a child. I wanted an explanation for her size – her bulk seemed to me a sign of a different or special kind of spirit inside – one that took up great space, and that quality was reflected in her girth. She smelled like a combination of her perfume (a pungent floral musk) and urine, incontinence just one of the results of her obesity. Cats, too, I associated with my grandmother. She took in Mittens, my uncle’s cat, also incontinent, and this is perhaps what bound them together. Mittens also left his mark on my grandmother’s smell.

Her body was an assortment of colors and smells not found anywhere else in the sphere of my childhood. She wore bright blue eyeshadow coupled with bright red lipstick. She wore black, stretchy dresses and real pearl necklackes. She wore fancy clip-on earrings with Birkenstocks. She recorded her monthly weight in a little red journal that I was forbidden to look in. I looked.

Early childhood, her house in Seattle – one storey and probably very small, but to me was just enough, large, even – a brown carpet, a white couch, a seventies-era kitchen with linoleum tiling. Grandma’s bedroom at the end of the hallway, a larger-than-life bed occupying most of the floor, blue coverlet which was blue even if it wasn’t blue, because blue was eternally her color.

In that bedroom were Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, dolls whose value Grandma would lecture me about. She told me where they came from, who loved them, how old they were. I always played with them weighted with false nostalgia. I could never love those dolls because the time when they were alive and loved was past. They were corpses. So I didn’t take very much to Raggedy Ann and Andy.

I think that dolls have life spans. Maybe they only have the life we give them, but there is a palpable difference between an active doll and an inactive one. I think everybody can tell.

 

Shitty, Shitty Beef Chalupa (or: The Jungle Princess Experiences a Decline)

Guatemala City. We had dropped off the face of the planet, emerging out of the rich, rain-soaked jungles of El Peten into the grimy, ominous capital city. Our ‘vacation within a vacation’ nearly at an end, our hearts were heavy as we left the humid, musical labyrinth of Livingston behind and headed south, towards “home”, towards La Cambalacha, towards work and routine.

Chrissy once said to me, “Guatemala City is a slum. All of it.” After a grueling six-hour chicken bus ride from Rio Dulce, we landed right in the heart of it. At first glance, the City appeared to me not exactly like a slum, but a remarkably colorless, staggeringly enormous sprawl of beige and concrete buildings, most of which seemed to house dark histories and even darker futures. Anything resembling character or culture had evaded this part of the country, as giant billboards littered the major streets, women stood by the side of the road wearing bright green vests bearing the names of mobile phone companies in glittering letters and omnipresent American food chains occupied vast parking-lot sized tracts of land. Mayans, marked by their traditional clothing and small stature, were few and far between. Business owned the city. It was the lack of color that was most halting; after having visited the most beautiful, sensuous parts of the country, it was a loss to no longer be surrounded by extraordinary diversity in sight and smell. Loaded with backpacks, drenched in sweat, we staggered away from the bus, evading the gesturing taxi drivers. Preparing to cross the street, a darkly dressed man, spotting our white skin and excessive luggage, turned around and cautioned us. “What are you doing here? This is a very dangerous city. You should not be here,” he warned, brows furrowed, before hurrying across the avenue.

I had already settled on Hotel Fenix as the best option for our nights in Guatemala City – the only problem being that we were completely disoriented and unable to find even our own location on the tiny guidebook map. The guidebook (Lonely Planet, which I came to despise not only for its mediocre information but because every other backpacker we met also had it) warned us about several things: the first of them being that we should definitely not stand on a corner in the City, all our luggage in tow, consulting a map and looking lost. As we stood on a corner, all our luggage in tow, consulting a map and looking lost, panic set in. We decided that we needed to find the closest budget hotel possible so we could stop standing on a corner, all our luggage in tow, consulting a map and looking lost. Kirk decided on Hotel Capri, which seemed to the closest possibility. We hurried past murky-looking diners, pharmacies with heavy steel bars on the windows, large cerrado signs and crowds of people walking quickly past us, looking at the ground. Upon arriving at the hotel, we checked in at the desk where the concierge, surprised to see us, seemed to have emerged from a seventies-era used car dealership magazine advertisement. He gave us the key to our room, complete with oversized red plastic tag. The hotel was prison-chic. There was too much space – the ceilings too high, the brick walls too thickly slathered with beige paint, the hallways too vast and echoing. It felt like my elementary school, if the school had been run by ominous-looking nuns and a murder had taken place and all the kids had been evacuated and the ghosts of the dead still haunted the hallways.

We sat down on the bed and surveyed our new surroundings. The last hotel we had stayed in was Casa Rosa in Livingston, where we shared a bungalow with delicate, hand-painted furniture and hand-sewn quilts, a wooden chest of drawers and a screen door that opened to a view of the Caribbean sea, complete with a dock at the end of which was a hammock, where we could watch the pelicans and the fisherman, smoke endless cigarettes and drink endless gifiti; where we could ponder the nature of the universe and of ourselves, delving lightly but sweetly into any thought that drifted through our heads.

Our room in Guatemala City, however, had a window with a view of the opposite brick wall and the underground parking lot below. A single fluorescent light bulb flickered above the bed. A giant black television stared blankly at us from atop the dresser, while a large plastic sign tacked to the wall humorlessly informed us that neither the hotel nor its employees were responsible for lost or stolen articles. A single glass ashtray lounged on the bedside table. The sounds of the city drifted to us from outside; buses roaring, cars honking, brakes screeching. While Kirk had a rendezvous with the toilet (the giardia still on active duty), I opened up the guidebook to read more about where on earth we were. After the budget hotels listing was a brief paragraph on dangerous parts of the city:

“Calles 5a and 6a, while close to the bus stations, are generally to be avoided. This is the city’s red-light district, with the highest concentration of drug dealers and underground crime operatives. Watch your back, and your wallet.”

I flipped again to the address of our hotel, and then to the map. Hotel Capri was smack in the middle of Calle 5a. Beautiful.

When Kirk emerged from the bathroom, it was decided that, as frightened and disenchanted as we were, we did have to venture out of the hotel room to feed ourselves. We rung up Charlie and Gabi back in San Marcos La Laguna, and Gabi – a former denizen of the City – recommended that we head for Cuatro Grados Norte, a trendy student area with bars and nightlife. Kirk found a promising-looking restaurant in that area in the guidebook, so we hesitantly left the room (bringing all valuables with us), and hailed a taxi. After a long, expensive ride, the very friendly driver let us out on a deserted avenue where we encountered a lovely wrought-iron archway emblazoned with the words Cuatros Grados Norte, behind which was a lovely little pedestrian avenue lined with tiny little barros and cafés, and a couple of jazz clubs. All of them – inexplicably – closed. Barred, locked, chairs stacked, lights off, shut down. It was a Monday. We learned later that apparently in Guatemala City nothing happens anywhere on Monday nights. The entire city shuts down like Labor Day. Defeated, we wandered up and down the deserted street. Not a single car or person could be seen. Except – ah! A man and woman emerged from one of the dark restaurants, locking the doors and talking quietly with each other. We approached them. In very basic Spanish, I asked them if there was any food near here. He asked me some things I didn’t understand, and when he saw my confused look he said in perfect English, “What kind of place are you looking for?”
“Oh, we’re just looking for someplace to get some dinner, somewhere nice.”
“Ah,” the man said thoughtfully. “Emm, well, there is not really any place around here. Up on that street there is a Pollo Campero, and there is a McDonalds, and there is a Taco Bell.”
“Oh, erm… okay. There aren’t any other places?”
“Not at this hour, no.”
We thanked him. He and the young woman walked away up the street. I turned to Kirk, grimacing.
“Oh my god. McDonald’s?”
“I know, man,” Kirk assented, “Pretty lame.”
We continued towards the busy street up ahead, thinking that if nothing else, at least we could find a taxi back to the hotel and we could eat at the tiny little cantina next to it. Why didn’t we just eat there in the first place? Why did we feel the need to go adventuring around Gotham City?

We meandered up another large, deserted avenue. One of the concrete walls was smothered in beautiful graffiti art – large animals converged with elegantly crafted lettering in English, Spanish and in-between, colorful illustrations bled into each other. This was the most pleasing sight we had yet seen in Guatemala City – a richly executed wall of graffiti. I mentioned that we should take a picture of it, for Collin.

We wandered past what was evidently a church service – perhaps services on Monday nights are what shut the city down? – attended by hundreds of people. Families lined the block with tables piled with brunch-like food, apparently waiting for something, waiting for more family members to emerge, or waiting for the service to begin. Everyone was sharply and brightly dressed, even in the night-time, and more and more families kept coming – in cars, around corners. We felt a part of the procession. The church building, square and concrete, loomed up on our left, with large windows lending a glimpse of vaulted ceilings, thousands of fold-up chairs, a large stage with a microphone – an evangelical service the likes of what we see at home on television.

Reaching the main street, I was reminded of the Lloyd District back home in Portland. Large, looming skyscrapers looked down upon a traffic-congested, impossibly wide avenue, lined with big box stores and fast food joints. To our right, Taco Bell. To our left, the ever-present global parasite – McDonalds.

Kirk paused, his face illuminated by the beckoning neon of the Bell.
“Oh my god. I think we gotta do it,” he said softly, eyes glistening.
“No. I don’t think we gotta do it. I think I can’t eat at Taco Bell in Guatemala.”
“Why not? Come on. We gotta do it.”
“No. I would feel so, so bad. I would feel so bad, Kirk. I don’t know about this. I don’t want to eat at Taco Bell.”
“Come on. We’ve been so good. We gotta do it.”

The decision to override my screaming conscience and walk through the doors of one of the biggest names in the American fast food industry can only be explained by a combination of the following factors:  gnawing hunger, the knowledge that Kirk really needed something resembling the comforts of home, and a masochistic wish to explore my own reaction to American corporatism in the context of another country.

Waiting in line. Here I am. A big, fat American coming into big, fat Taco Bell to eat my big, fat chalupa. I imagined the other customers thinking that I expected to be treated royally, or that I had been wandering around Guatemala, hating it, and now, here at last, was finally food that I knew and loved. Ah. And I’m just that ignorant, to think it’s funny, hey, isn’t it a hysterical notion, to go into Taco Bell, won’t that be funny and ironic? Oh, the wonder of the universe.

The implications of my presence in that restaurant were too vast for me to be able to stomach all at once. It wasn’t just a playful jaunt for food. I took a glance at the menu and was thoroughly disgusted at the sheer caprice of the United States. We give ourselves permission to take food from someone else’s culture, repackage it, sell it back to them, and then reap the benefits (though Taco Bell technically mimics Mexican cuisine, not Guatemalan, it was similar enough to hit home). And the worst part was that here, Taco Bell was as good as any family restaurant. Held in high regard, even. The cantinas were the cheapest places to go here, not Taco Bell. Rich families ate at Taco Bell. Rich people, comparatively, worked here. And here I was, waltzing on to my country’s giant victory dirt mound to proudly order from the menu I was so sickeningly familiar with. I felt every bit the conquistadora. I felt ashamed of my country, of the cultural homogenization we were helping to spread at a terrifying rate across the globe. I felt ashamed of our bad, hazardous food. I felt ashamed that because of this Taco Bell, local cantinas and tiendas were losing money. We were sucking the culture out of this country through a gilded straw. I felt disturbed that everybody here had decided that this was a great place to go. No one in sight recognized the giant ghostly American dollar sign floating through the restaurant. I felt like a pirate caught mid-plunder, surrounded by treasure chests, draped in red velvet and gold medallions, swilling the brandy I stole from the king. I felt that by coming into this Taco Bell, I was sending several loud and clear messages to Guatemala – I support your country’s economic dependence on my country. I support unhealthy food. I support the empire of America. I support helping your leaders rob you so my people can remodel their four-bedroom homes, vacation in the Florida Keys, and buy the new iPhone 3G. I support the neo-colonization of your country and your culture. I support the virtual enslavement of your government to large, American corporations. I support all of this, and by god, I am going to eat a taco because I fucking can.

And who’s to blame? How does the world not revolve around money? It dawned on me like a sucker-punch to the face that the very nature of capitalism is to rob, pillage, plunder and rape others. Our entire society has been built on a system meant to push others down. Individualism. Robbing as many people as possible in the most efficient way possible. Making money. Harming other humans and not giving a shit (or not being allowed to). Business. And it really dawned on me, in a way it never did in the classroom, how horrible that is: how this system encourages selfishness, isolation, greed. It completely overrides our human urges to love, to care for one another equally, to be kind, to give selflessly. And the whole world, the whole world is run like this. The whole world is run by the desire to kill each other and run away with the money. What monsters have we made of ourselves? No wonder so much of the United States suffers from depression, no wonder there are so many murders, suicides, divorces, drug addicts. Our economic system is built like a giant pyramid. There is only room for one at the top. Any concept of true and equal community is shattered at the conception. We are doomed never to trust each other, to compete for dwindling resources, to practice conditional friendship and conditional love. The world is madness.

These overwhelming thoughts struck me at the precise moment that two other terrible things happened. The first thing was that I bit into the worst chalupa I’ve ever tasted in my life. I had asked for chicken: Kirk, of course, had ordered beef. And the second terrible thing was Kirk issuing the following statement:

“I don’t believe in hurting other people, but I do believe in capitalism.”

The combination of these words, the terrible taste in my mouth and the sinking feeling in my heart produced a physical reaction common to many humans when under extreme stress: I cried. I ate my shitty, shitty beef chalupa, my face turned red, my nose ran, and I cried. About capitalism. Into the processed cheese and micro-waved tomatoes. In the middle of Taco Bell.

Kirk helped me through this by saying “Well, I don’t think you have to cry about it.”

I was devastated. Devastated by this horrible, robotic system running the world and oppressing everybody, horrified at being stuck in a foreign country with a man who was completely incapable of ever reaching me, and defeated by the shitty, shitty beef chalupa I was eating in shitty, shitty Taco Bell on a shitty, shitty Monday night.

 

Unfortunately

Kissing someone

is a delightful method

of avoiding them.

 

On Why We Don’t Eat Spicy Food Before Bedtime

I had caught a praying mantis / grasshopper in a jar. It was grotesquely opaque and had a disproportionately large head with fanglike teeth as the prominent feature. I kept it in a jar filled with water (apparently an amphibious praying mantis) and it was sort of my pet, only it was extremely hostile and evil and halfway dead already. A family member remarked on my prehistoric insect-in-a-glass-jar pet, saying that it needs food, it needs sustenance, and when was the last time I fed it? I didn’t know, I said. But I had this frog or tadpole-like creature, equally as disgusting as the praying mantis, somewhere else in the kitchen. I fed the tadpole to the insect in the jar and they swam through the ancient, dirty, clouded water before finally detecting each other’s presence. In the way rival fish do, they twitched upon touching each other, then were frozen for a second before the mantis pounced on the tadpole and caught its head in his mouth, biting viciously through the neck and swallowing it whole. Then the jar faded out through the atmosphere, the water became murkier and harder to see the insect carnage through.

The scene shifted to my grandmother’s living room, also wildly out of proportion. Everything was too big, too far apart – the carpet was the wrong color, dark blue and orange instead of cream. There was something digital about it. We were in the future, or a holographic vision of the future, or doing an experiment where we could see ourselves in the future – in any event, something having to do with time and space. My family was there in their physical selves, but they were not who they are. They were shells, or characters. We were on a mission, trying to reach something. We traveled along the lines of the rug and the curves of the chair and the lining of plastic bags. But the important point is that cockroaches (though I called them termites) were hatching in pods which I pulled out of my ears. They were born in green husks, and I could tell when they were there because fibrous strands hung out of my ears, which I pulled out. Sometimes they were already alive and moving. Sometimes they were still in husks and green until emerging, sometimes two or three at a time, crawling all over me and falling onto the carpet, disappearing into it and frightening me even more because I couldn’t see them, but knew they were probably scheming and procreating down there.

The cockroaches / termites would crawl out of my ears throughout the story. I was polluted with them.

I was in bed with someone and didn’t dream about the actual act but about afterwards. I got up from the too-large bed with a sparklingly white, fluffy comforter and terribly white sheets, to look in the mirror. I wore dentures over my real teeth, and the dentures were whiter, with differently shaped front teeth. There was something wrong with my own teeth. I went to the mirror feeling something gritty in my mouth. I took off the top set of dentures and looked down. The inside was filled with black, gritty material. Plasticky and gravelly. It was slowly decomposing. Not decomposing, but coming off. I looked again at my own teeth. They were fragile and yellowed. And there was a brown line across the top ones, marking where the dentures were. I tried desperately to pick it off and clean it, only succeeding halfway. My teeth were loose. Especially on the left side. Decaying. And graying.

 

Extempore

The running water in the stream in my aunt’s cabin
Flows over the kitchen table, drenching
My brother in sweet moss and flowing silently
Through the kitchen looking for me,
Covering each family member one by one
It reaches me and flows up over my neck
Cascading down my back in wet ringlets
Flowers grow from my eyes
And I lie in the water and am swept out to sea.