The Lost Years

(are these good enough for you, April? cos I am not convinced)

5/30
I wrote the start of a book about vaginas and four letter words and starvation and war. I won't finish it. I watched a movie about relationships. I won't finish those either. I wrote the start of a poem it goes like this: I was born a winter baby all inconvenience, ice and cold.

6/30
List of things viewed from the seven windows of the sun room: (Giddings Street, Chicago)
1. two ladies, young in appearance, wearing red jeans.
2. one squirrel, crosses the road, refuses a tree, scampers about the neighbors gate. I am distracted by a pigeon (who reminds me of a general) and lose track of the squirrel. He has crossed through three windows, reminding me of cartoon panels.
3. the bottom half of a flier, stuck to a tree, flaps in the wind.
4. three small birds (wrens?) land in the grass. Squirrel and Pigeon are there too.
5. tall and lanky man. I am overcome by a desire to marry him.
6. kids running. baby goes on a winter walk with a dad wearing strikingly white pants.
7. the sound of the El

7/30
I am thinking about Chicago. About being
far away and how spending days reading
inside puts me in no-mans-land.
I am thinking about Ben and how I should tell
him I love him. Because I did, anyway, and what
if that never comes back? And so what if I am
forgetting.
I am thinking about volunteering at the local
hospital and about the boy we saw
getting cuffed at dinner last night.
I am thinking about the way our silverware
clanked at the table.
I am thinking about Robert's carpet, how
green it was, how dark his room was, how many things
I said that I shouldn't have. and things I didn't say that I
should have. Count them.
I am thinking about two days inside, reading
and how I am nowhere.

8/30
“when next she sets you under her ear to fall asleep/ whisper into it/ tell her/ that the river is a canyon in reverse/ and so the echoes all come back to it/ the voice come home” –anis mojgani

On a futon in San Diego I swallow
the entire Pacific Ocean. My ear
pressing against flesh, pressing against
alabaster bone and inside his chest
lives a whale.

I can hear the ocean when
he breathes. I hold his chest up
to my head like a sun-bleached
shell, pull his ribcage from his
ligaments. I am the air that forces
expansion. He is a cavern,
full of waves while my body makes a
canopy for the gulls.

Now my ear
becomes a canyon, in reverse.
His heartbeat
is drowning and the ocean is a cadence
counting waves. I am
seventy percent salt-water
now my ear
releases symphonies and rivers
and his chest is full of ocean and
his chest is an echo.

On a futon in San Diego I will
sleep--swallow the entire
Pacific Ocean, and let my river
find a way home.

9/30
Animal Parts

There are spider webs in my brain and
if this wall was ten feet
higher it would contain me

I have jumping beans in my thighs and
crude-oil in the blood near my heart.
I use a broomstick to clean
out my windpipe every second
Tuesday of the month so
to keep out all the amphibians.

There are six-toed sloths eating
moth-balls and falling ill behind
my left eye. You can only
see them when I laugh. More
obviously when I am laughing
at you. And

a family of spider monkeys have
taken refuge in the left
over left ventricle of my heart so
all of my feelings have gone
bananas. It is why I swallow
birds eggs and helps to explain
all this fluttering and beating
my chest cavity has to endure.

I guess the spider webs are more
like cobwebs. The spiders crawl out
my ears in my dreams. And
if I could dream walls
that were ten feet taller I
wouldn’t have these birds in
my heart.