Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Dear John:


At first you pack in secret –
Quietly stowing away your happiness,
Then your grief.

Turning to your belongings,
You look at them in a different light;
What goes and what stays,

What's essential and what you would leave
If it were burning. It's me that's burning.
You can guess the rest.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Majda's house

Every time I leave your house it's the same. The same fog, the same wet grass, the same darkness. Every time I try to make a three point turn and almost hit your mailbox. Every time I feel the loneliness. It sets in before I make it past your hedge (monkey grass that gives me goose-bumps when it brushes against my legs in the summer).

Atlanta was a series of headless buildings tonight. Low clouds. You would have liked that. You're all destruction and slow unraveling. I'm veils and burning fields. You make me certain of my absolute sanity. We scare men at Kinkos into giving us discounts. We stink of smoke and coffee.

Your mother campaigns for me to gain weight and does so successfully. Homemade bread and cheese and salmon - sometimes a piece of cake or a hunk of smoked beef. Some soup or other Bosnian delight whose name I can neither pronounce nor find a word for in English. When I ask your mom to make it I say it's that noodle-wrap-cheesy-meat-thing.

You like fragments too.
not to be broken.
We don't pretend

I hope all those fancy schools in New York reject you. I've told you this. I imagine us in Chicago, nursing each other through graduate school. I want to think about that. I don't want to think about the fires we've set to our lives. Maybe it was smoke that masked Atlanta, disguised as clouds. Like I'm disguised as a wife.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

clementines before bed

I'm wearing blue slippers with stars and moons on them. They were given to me in December of 2001 at a company Christmas party. I took off my heels and put them on. I got chided by my boss for doing so - but only because we were at the Ritz.

My fingers smell of clementines because I've just eaten about five of them. There's something about peeling fruit. Oranges, tangerines, pomegranites, grapefruit even. Everything is veiled. Everything breaths, everything shits, and everything has a membrane of some sort.

Burst your bubble.

We often say we're doing something to "get close", but we're usually just talking about physical proximity. Matt wants to "get close" me. I want to "get close" to ____. But I just ate a clementine. What the hell are we talking about?