Portholes

I am the next one up at the poetry slam. My whole class of girl poets is performing. Not a problem I think, I'll just go through the poems I have memorized and choose one. I can't think of a single poem. I start getting a little worried and my waking brain kicks in, "maybe my 'poems' are songs" I guess that I could poet a song, but I keep trying to think of something else, I tell my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Vanderlip that I have to go into nature to collect my thoughts, then I hike up into the dark wood behind the stage.

I come to a lake surrounded by black rocks. There is path of rocks out into the water that lead to a boulder. I walk out the island and look into the lake. There is a man with no legs swimming in the water below me. He looks happy. His red flannel shirt tails float around nothing. I wonder how he's swimming so well.

Somehow I know that he is not alive. He is a ghost of someone who lost his legs in the lake. Then I am aware that he is with another ghost, but she is invisible because she died in the lake. I think that I could probably write this down and make a poem out of it. More tourists come up the boulder and I leave, but I get freaked out when I touch the water because it's had dead people in it.

I return to my impending poetry performance. It's over, and my teacher tells me I'll have to perform in tomorrow's show. I am relieved and disappointed.

Later I am attending a writing workshop we're reading a poetry example from the Wilderness Charter School (where I went to high school) The poem is mine. It's very Lorca-esque with references to animals and the color green and some nice little surreal moments. I remember I wrote in in another dark wood by a little stream.

I realize I am watching a film of the writing workshop. It's of my college class. In it I am soliloquizing some important idea and I get a good reaction from the class for showing my solidarity with whatever it is. Then the cameraman leaves the room, and so do I and a bunch of my friends because we're still in the video. We come to a door labeled "Campbell Club" and "Cooks." All of my friends are either members of the Campbell Club or have the name Cook. We go in. It's a bathroom. Cool.

We leave and I ask my friend what he thought of the poetry example in class. I can't hear what he says but I think he didn't like it that much, I dig out the paper and look at the back. My copy is the original and has the rough draft on the back. I read it. It's so bad, so ridiculous that I don't want him to see it, I hide the worst parts with my hands. He falls asleep at the table and because I'm in a movie from the past I kiss him and tell him I love him.

The End.

TEETH!

Last night I purposely and accidentally cracked one of my molars. It was coming out in pieces and i was holding them in my hand hoping a dentist could put them back together. I was horrified.

Also last week or so it was prom that night, and I had to find a date and a dress. I didn't like any of my options. I was dreading the whole thing.

In the capital and the forest

I was driving around Washington DC in a bus at night, with my sister and Cassie. The bus driver was one of my professors, and we were supposed to go on a date after he finished his route. It became very late, and I had to decide whether to stay overnight with him in DC or to take the last train back to Baltimore with the girls. First I decided that I would stay, and then I changed my mind and decided to return home. As soon as I knew that I was going to leave, the spell was broken and I had no idea why I had been tempted to spend time with my professor in the first place.

Then I was driving with David through a redwood forest, along the edge of a mountain. We pulled over next to a very long, steep dirt road leading down into the trees. David got out of the car, walked over to the road, sat down, pushed himself off and slid down through the trees so fast that he was quickly out of view. I followed, thinking as I sped down how difficult it would be to climb back up later. At the bottom of the road was a narrow beach, and I slid right past a fat black seal into the water. We were in a small, sunny cove, with a high stone wall about fifty feet out that prevented us from seeing the ocean beyond.

Stories

Stef and I are sitting in one room-- I with my new jumbo notebook (about 5 ft by 2ft) Stef on her bean bag. The whole room tinted green. In the hall (is it green? blue? sunset?) people go by talking on an on about monkeys but the word that they're using for monkey sounds like 'vagina' so we keep cracking up. One man comes in the room and says "you like my diagram of the vagina? We laugh and laugh.

A friend from elementary school appears in the room and tells me she's growing her hair down to her feet.

There is an illustrated story of how monkeys got on Noah's ark in groups. The groups were called: up, down, beautiful, strange, brother, and sister. We joke about how Coco and Juju didn't get on the boat because they forgot about the group called 'horsey.'

I woke up laughing.

Gangster

I was on the upper west side of Manhattan, driving a futon with David and one of my painting students. David was driving, but I took over to parallel park in between two car-sized bowls of oatmeal. After trying and failing to park, I got out of the futon and my student got into the driver's seat. I asked her, and then told her, to let me drive, since it was my futon. She was offended by this and got out and and walked away. David and I left her and went into a big, old house, where we found my sister and another friend in the attic. We all rolled our own joints out of dollar bills and sat smoking them sprawled out on the attic floor.

Poetry

I am in the South Valley: trees, farms, horses, dirt roads. It looks like my work but I feel good about being there. The sun illuminates beautiful meadows, I sit in the shaded dirt road. The shade is pitch-black. Chiarascuro.

I look out on everything wishing more than ever that I could write poetry. I try, maybe coming up with something good but I recall nothing after waking.

mostly disgusting

I can smell my sweat. and my feet are cold and hot at the same time. Mostly dry. The tips of my fingers have little cuts that have been sore for over a week. I have to pee and my heart has been beating fast for hours, but not fast it just feels fast. It's more a breathing issue. Or a consumption issue. I think it's narcissism. And I'm thinking of you reading this. Exactly! I don't think the scarf I wore to bed is helping all of this. Lets address this issue. I'm wondering what Steve Barry was thinking. I'm going to follow up with him. Ewww there is sweat where the scarf was. I'm too lazy to get dressed let alone take off my clothes, which lends itself to itself. But it becomes a dermatological issue because I live in a desert and I wash my hands often. I'm not too lazy to wash my hands, but I am too lazy to put on lotion. Now I have eczema. Right, and it's not that my heart is beating fast, it's that I can feel it extra loud in my body. And i'm concerned about this fear of flying that it might severely impede my future life. or maybe I'll just have to make my work around that. Like build a bridge out of cardboard to Venice for the Biennial that my work gets into... you know. right? gross.

please accept my insomnia.

i love you.