The Smallest Windows

so i should be doing work. instead, stealing this from bandersnatch.

--

Q: What color is most reflective of you?
A: I want to say grey, but that seems utterly banal. Red and white striped?

Q: How did you get the idea for your diary name?
A: I used to live off Delree St in Columbia, SC

Q: What time were you born?
A: 4:21am

Q: Has the death of a celebrity ever made you cry?
A: No.

Q: What color underwear are you wearing?
A: Grey

Q: Do you want a baby?
A: Dear god, no.

Q: What does your mom do for a living?
A: Currently? Apparently she is solving crimes psychically. (No joke.)

Q: What does your dad do for a living?
A: Paper salesman.

Q: What is your pet's name?
A: Othello.

Q: What color are your bedsheets?
A: Right now they're creamy white. Although they're technically K's.

Q: What was the last concert you attended?
A: Tilly and the Wall in NOLA.

Q: Who was with you?
A: My friends Pat and Eric

Q: What was the last movie you saw?
A: In theaters? The Dark Knight. On video? Clerks.

Q: Who do you dislike most at this moment?
A: There are a few.

Q: What food are you craving right now?
A: My homemade nacho cheese sauce.

Q: Did you dream last night?
A: Yes. Of my sister and Kenny and I getting into a wreck in my grandmother's driveway, which apparently set off a national controversy.

Q: What was the last tv show you watched?
A: The Office

Q: What is your fave piece of jewelry?
A: My necklance with the two silver ring things.

Q: What is to the left of you?
A: Sarah's bed.

Q: What was the last thing you ate?
A: A homemade breakfast burrito.

Q: Who last imed you?
A: Kevin

Q: Where is your signifigant other right now?
A: At work.

Q: What shampoo do you use?
A: Pantene.

Q: When was the last time you cut your hair?
A: Myself? Never. Had it trimmed two or three months ago, I think.

Q: Are you on any meds?
A: Just birth control.

Q: Do you have a mental disease?
A: Not that I'm aware of.

Q: What shirt are you wearing?
A: Brown tank-top.

Q: What time is it?
A: 5:57pm central

Q: What is your fave frozen treat?
A: Coffee ice cream. (But Francie doesn't like coffee ice cream.)

Q: Are you sexy?
A: Amazingly so.

Q: Whats your favorite shopping store?
A: H&M or Hudson's

Q: Are you thirsty?
A: A little.

Q: Can you imagine yourself ever getting married?
A: Not until very recently.

Sherbet


In line at the grocery store, a man
is buying sherbet and sugar cones.
The neon neapolitan of iced fruit
just a stick away from my basket
of red pepper, mustard greens,
a pound of fleshy eggplant. My boyfriend
is making rice for curry at home,
the bottle of green paste whisked
in thick milk, heat in the nose
of jalapenos from our backyard garden.
He’ll roll basil like cigars, snipping the ends
into the pot. I’ll dice the greens
into thin parchment strips and we’ll
hold the warm bowls in our laps
and watch TV. I know this man
could be gathering his plastic-bellied
sweetness for children, a woman
who bathed him through a broken leg,
a second bout of lung cancer,
but it’s only the sadness I see.
The certain possibility of spoons
in the soft, milky fruit, of a man alone
touching his tongue to the cool
center of impossible pink.

in other news, i'll be seeing these fine folks in nola next weekend. so incredibly psyched.

it's strange the tenderness that wells up in me. the blade softened to spoon, the storm drains cleared, the splinter sanded down. such absolute love that even the things that bounce in the background -- that haze of memory, the brutalizing injustice of academia, the way we must all be depend on someone else's power -- seem nothing in the half-lit afternoons, when i'm laying on his arm gathering my breath, the fan above spinning and spinning.

new stirring!

two poems picked up by anti-poetry and two by sports literate. woot.

**

it's weird being back in the private sector and actually earning my money by being on my feet all day. gives me a refound appreciation for why i'm doing this crazy doctor thing anyhow.

off to atlanta and then columbia today with k. i'm not sure he knows exactly what he's getting into. then again, often, i don't either.

"well i'm a weak and lonely sort
but i'm not sailing just for sport
i've come to feel, out on the sea
these urgent lives press against me
i'm just a guest, i'm not a part
my tender hands and my easy heart
these several years out on the sea
made me empty, cold, and clear
pour yourself into me."
-Okkervil River

saw okkervil in hattiesburg a month ago. absolutely fantastic. like watching a show in someone's basement. it's a wonder sometimes, how small a circle the "cool kids club" is here in hattiesburg. a hundred people in a bar lit by colored christmas lights. and i know half of them. recognize the other. and every hand i brush against i know. the close of the eye.

and been listening to "a girl in port" for the last week in my car. something familiar and sad. how much happier i am settled. the pronouns shifting again. the way, on returning to bed, a body can grow so warm. a hand on my knee in the car ride home yesterday. the fact that i feel alive again after so long living as a stone, a sculpture of a woman stirring.

**

met k's family yesterday. it's been a long time since i've done that.

**

and better. so quickly. the cut that feels to the bone, only a thin slice of the skin that sucks itself closed.

"take a letter to god,
'dear sir, i'm dissatisfied...'"
-old 97s

it's so strange. the circles. the skin lifted from the bone. how i can't land on anything still. no dragonfly on a lillypad. no million-eyed fly sucking on orange rind. it's funny. my silly "personology" book i play with -- bought in high school and now a glorified party favor -- and how it talks about the march 7th need for justice. and realizing that that's just not how the world works. with anything.

i wonder about the idea of karma sometimes, though the religious connotations irk me. this idea of the "what goes around..." theory of existence. i don't want to believe it, but i can't shake the notion from my mind. that everything that happens -- good or bad, to me or others -- is somehow linked to past action. that somehow i deserve all all the knives in the chest, the terrible warmth in the eye. because i can't believe that. because what i've done in this life doesn't deserve the quicksand.

oh depression. i thought for a brief second you might have disappeared. it's like coming home. (unfortunately, literally.)

in searching out another euphemism for "slept with" for a poem i'm rewriting, i came across this -- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikisaurus:sexual_intercourse/more. housemate hilarity ensued.

“Not Because My Heart is Hard”: The Bondwoman’s Narrative, The Gothic, and Companionate Marriage

While Crafts, like Walpole, does not believe in marriage based in the economic, they both do still fundamentally believe that the institution can be reformed to help to equalize the positions of man and wife. In the move to companionate marriages over those made for economic and political gains, it was hoped, as Lawrence Stone posited, that the marriage would help to balance the roles within the family unit. Still the laws of the era made this very notion idyllic, as that in the eyes of the law, a woman was still considered subordinate to her husband and once married, her identity was more or less stripped. While both novels work to push this notion of freedom of choice to whom one bequeaths themselves – with Crafts’ use of this potentially inspired directly by Walpole’s novel – it is still a romantic notion of marriage, which ushers women into a system that ultimately works to betray them. Yet the avoidance of this social rite of passage is unavoidable for both Isabella and Hannah, whose entry into the “cult of true womanhood” cannot be complete without this final act of matrimony.

While this push for a marriage of companions is central to both these novels, as well as any other number of Gothic texts of the day, it was ultimately an unrealistic idea for marital felicity as that the law undermined the fundamental notions of a companionate marriage, and slavery totally nullified them. While pushing for marriages based in love and freedom of choice, these two novels are indeed attempting to be progressive in their ideas of matrimony, but without subsequent changes in the patriarchal arrangement of government which functioned to advance the white man first and foremost, their notions are merely philosophical. Thus the most that either of these novels can do is to allow a woman the right to choose to whom they must legally subordinate themselves.

Drinking Poem

I was probably drunk –
it’s amazing more poems
don’t start this way. The shot
glass O of my mouth
against his on the loveseat.
My bones so small on him,
like he was a slat wood
raft, a causeway through
the dirty Pontchartrain.

The day before you came home
I woke up with my pants
inside-out, a slit-eyed
memory of myself in his
bathroom, fumbling
with my tongued pockets.
And the day after you said
you would leave again,
I closed the wine bar
with another man, who cupped
my knee in his white horse
of a car and sucked
the air from between
our drowned bodies.

There is no forgiveness
in the emptied bottles
on his living room table,
the silent teeth of blackouts
on bourbon and cheap shiraz,
but today, I found my landlord’s
white pinwheel flowers had become
ten thousand blackberries
licking up my chainlink fence.
And my bell peppers have popped
from their starry beginnings
into the hard fetus of fruit.

I wonder sometimes if patience
turns us hard, like the hulled seeds
of pumpkins left to heat? Wait
translated into nothing more
than the brief pyrotechnics
of skin, the sure pop
of a button through a hole.
That long burn of a new cigarette
lit outside my favorite dive.

"we're on to you..."
-metric

the day he left the last time, i remember weeping uncontrollably in the car driving back from gulfport. m. had made me a mix tape, and whether she knew it or not, it was perhaps the finest break-up cd she could have constructed -- driftwood aflame, the clenched fist pounding against a steering wheel. was listening to it yesterday, the bald anger like cancer in the throat. and i just wonder why it has to keep coming up, like a white flag lifted every morning. i am desirous of nothing but to rub my hands clean of this mess.

so i recognized while teaching 'watership down' in my world lit class last semester that going 'tharn' was not only applicable in rabbit world, but in the world of graduate school as well.

i've noted for years the 'crazy eyes' of graduate students (particularly those of the english/literature persuasion) at the close of a semester. my roommate at illinois was a supreme example. whether this because she had remarkably large eyes to begin with or because the demands of a top ten program created a even more acute tic in its participant, i don't know. but it's that time in the semester, where everyone is looking a little rabbit-like. a little fiver under the hawk like.

strangely, though, i rarely get this way. this caused particular antipathy between myself and some of my friends at uiuc. here, less so, but i'm starting to see folks going numb around the lips and disappearing from social events in high numbers. i hate this, partially because i'm struck bored by my work ethic, and partially because i feel like i'm supposed to be in the midsts of insanity myself, thus creating a mirage of crazy grad student-ness.

regardless, i'm plowing through my 25-page paper on the gothic definition of marriage and how it applies to the slave narratives of pre-civil war america. eleven pages and counting.

check out this really lovely review of my book by my cohort gary wilkens. also, if you haven't yet, you can purchase a copy for you or your loved ones today!

i'm reobsessing about jens lekman. mark made me an awesome mix of his live performances, and the haunting violin in "you put your arms around me" is like a scalpel to the bones. the hearts of marrow. the living thing in the veins. it is what music is supposed to do.

don't believe me? watch for yourself.

**

i recently started letting one of my cats outside again after nearly two years of confinement in my miscellany of houses, and he looks alive again. i understand him utterly.

in other news, i'm doing napowrimo again this year. you can check out the fine folks (including myself, as that i'm not going to inundate my friends' friends pages with x-posting) here.

new stirring!

**

anyone going to cccc this week?

Sweet Wood


I chalk the walls with cinnamon
to keep the ants from coming in.
The same smoky sweetness glazes
soft snail breads, a deep red
chickpea stew. Freckles apple
cakes and simmers in hot syrups.
What strange passages bring it here –
the panicled flowers, ovate
green popping from the unshaved limbs.
To Roman funeral pyres,
Biblical beds perfumed in aloe
and myrrh, the groves of Sri Lanka
where the toddler trees wait to be
coppiced and macerated. Now here,
brown band-aid against the whip-black
army lined on the countertop.
What else can sweet wood cure? Fever?
Heartache? Spring’s yellow-bodied colds?
Solomon’s beloved bark-spiced,
the smell of Lebanon. I grate
a quill into sable coffee,
and it smells like Christmas, an odd
memory of kitchens and tulle.

"but i'm as sure as the moon rolls around you
that i could be happy..."
-jenny lewis

at a party on friday, r. brought his brother over to introduce us. there were twelve or so of us in the backyard drinking around our newly installed firepit, burning pallets and seeing how high we could get the flames and still walk through them. r. turned and said "and here is the future of academia. looks strikingly similar to the future of the bar scene."

**

yesterday, for easter, we made a turkey and pot-lucked the rest of a truly amazing dinner. there's something so comfortable in a house full of people. like a family, almost. all the love. all the disfunction. all the dishes left in the morning.

**

k. said last night that he judged my happiness by the extent to which i wrote in my lj. ironically, i do too.