5.9.2011

va jugando con el tiempo
she the pretty anarcho
feminist says
of exposures
I could take one of Macchu Picchu
and then one of you
sin girando la pelicula
the sun is moving the
afternoon is gone
se fue.
a journal in verse might be
a possibility.

7.9.2011

spectating polo en
bici, I am thinking
of the 8-year-old in me that comes out,
quiet, when it’s so hard to
communicate.
thats who I am sometimes, me
alegre que decidiera no jugar 8
year-old me
couldn’t ride a bike.

9.9.2011

the tango bar was much
crazier than esperabamos
manana tenemos cita para bailar salsa con:
una pareja homosexual
nuestro verdudero y
the character rachel refers to
affectionately as
wolfman.

14.9.2011

yesterday
was a good day
we went to a monumental apology
and a biblical theme park
in between
a man with one tooth
showed us his fish.
I can still write as if I were
in love. I bought
3 alfajores (I think I forgot
the lunch I packed) one for
George one for Nick
one for me.
while he gabbed about
fishing culture, while
the slippery soft catfish
spent itself in the dry bucket, I
kept an eye on his tooth
which was long & off-center it’s
a fun mouth to imagine having,
and I thought about how I’d package it.
I will already be home when
the postcards
arrive
I have already eaten
my alfajor I have already boarded
the plane.

Watching the procession of vintage Cadillacs,
tattooed roller derby girls
& veterans in uniforms the green of Vietnam jungles,
a gulp of lemonade in one hand,
a sundressed wife in the other;
the children chasing mascots & sweet taffies,
waving flags along the asphalt road.

Something about the highway:
the yellow-pink clouds floating high
above the dense black asphalt,
the cars careering forward oblivious
to the pastels around them
in this great American landscape,
as if impelled into the sunset
by the red magnet lights
of the car before them.

On either side: long empty fields
dark and spent with harvest,
lights winking on here, there,
in dusty slatted houses.
And the pines, first silhouettes
at the top of distant hills,
then close enfolding the road,
pressing up against the windows
of the too-warm car.

Ahead: over the next crest
a steady stream of bobbing
yellow lights signal the
oncoming flow. But in the dark
it seems as though we are alone,
just the radio and the yellow pool
of the headlights to guide us
as we hurtle on, counting the miles
until we are home.

When I was younger they told me that electrons move
constantly,
that we exchange them every
moment, many times over. I thought
that if I touched something long enough, if I could
dedicate centuries to constant contact,
we would gradually become one another.

I could be part redwood tree or desk drawer,
carrot, cat or stone. I could be part
Eiffel Tower, part Wailing Wall.
(I hesitate to think how much of me would be socks and headphones.)
I could carry a bit of every person I’d ever hugged,
fibers from every bed
I’d ever slept in, a page
of every book I’d ever read.

The world would dissolve into the soles of my feet.

And you would be, by now, my fingernail
or maybe my right breast, my earlobes.
Then you would not be only you either,
but everything you’d every touched.

This is what I think of, still, after you’ve fallen asleep.
I do not know what this thirst is, only
it’s for nothing so solid as we seem.

A fossil deposit of exceptional richness or interest.
- Oxford English Dictionary

On the shelf, a floral
arrangement of teal-foam cerebrums
sits near clam shells,
collected from a sandstone fossil ridge
while on an excursion in Mount Diablo—
where the Chupcan natives,
the devils, outwitted Spaniards in 1805.

After two centuries, a dozen
relations have settled in their river meandering.
Beneath the Bible, a family photo
taken in 1996; what are the sizes of these grains to me?
There are smoked fish in the freezer,
conveying the essence of their lost
pelagic in plastic bags,
and crumbs on a half-eaten bagel seem deep Earth
in origin—a matrix of volcanic ashes,
roommate chewing at two in the morning.

In the shade, a stash
of study-abroad brochures lithifies in time,
and becomes mere impressions: Cape Town, Flor—
the black fan a planeterium
of spiral-spun lint: supper molluscs and sweet tooth.
On one cover, an African boy holds
the hand of a smiling white woman
while his mother stays behind: older, darker.