day 1

To My Grandmother

In the morning, when my throat
feels like papercuts, I'll drive home,
thinking about the vodka gummy bears
someone soaked for three days
and the Camels another girl and I split
while discussing sex and inadequacy.

And somewhere, in the dark
of my glove box, I shoved my phone
before the party. On it, an email from you
and I think about it between cigarettes
three and four, while watching the flame --
as everyone watched you drink-- out
the peripherals. Side-eyed when you
bee-lined the cabinets under the sink, hunting
not cleaning supplies, but vodka.

And we blamed ourselves for a while.
Until one day, when someone--I can't
remember if it was my mother or uncle--
woke up angry. Knowing you didn't give
a shit anymore. So we welcomed three years
of nothing, because that meant we wouldn't see
the decay. We would only wonder what's wrong
with you, as I do now--however brief-- while
picking at splinters in my leggings.

But then, when my cigarette extinguishes and
the pack is empty, I open the door and go back inside.

11

When the hunger disapates, what's really left?

You can smile for a minute, sure, 

Let your eyes crinkle at the sides, somehow

Speaking for you, reassuring with teeth.

In the end, it's about the fingernails, 

Not the teeth, clawing back from underground,

From under the water and soil, the mole hill

Stamped down by sheep and primitivity, the fear. 

You're a chameleon, they say. Changing from anger

To laughter quicker than clothes, they say. 

But don't forget to bear the pearly whites, to cope,

They say. Don't forget to clip the nails to the stub,

To watch the blood drip down the sides. 

Does anyone understand language grows on the side

Of a hill? That it grows under the skin, behind 

Gums and the white spots? When we speak,

We open the cords of the back throat, unleashing 

The sheep to the field, left to the mercy of hooves. 

10

This piece is playing with what German word order looks like in English. 

Although he sometimes an asshole be can, 

Sometimes thinks he of me or you

And we feel ourselves lucky and hurt

Yet nothing can worse be, than understanding 

The rays of the sun and how they into

The deep pores of our skin burn. 

Because he us knows and whatever

In the morning slowly in front of the rooster

Passes. You smoke. When smoke I, feel I 

Myself not pride but a so deep ache, coursing

Though my blood and my marrow. The valley 

Calls to me. It screams sweet nothings

And waves me in pity over. 

9

Someone told me of Icarus,
Flying with wings of wax
And feathers, curious.

Did you burn yours
With cigarettes or bridges?

Icarus landed in an ocean,
Lapped up by women, sold
To the sex trade, probably.

Now, he goes by Jerome,
Sits on a park bench playing
Chess with himself.

If no one sees you fall,
Where do you land?

8

You tell me with your hands,

And I agree for a moment, 

That slow is smooth, but nothing

Satisfies like an entire chicken

Or cooking the rooster outside

The door. You know, the alarm

Every morning. 

That plucky thing talks a lot,

Proving that he's worth something

Somewhere, proving that behind 

The feathers, we're the same--

Aching for someone to know 

We're awake and tossing around.

But does anyone care, really?

One day, we'll find the feathers,

The remnants of a reality that flew 

Past the branches like a bike

In the rain and understand, for 

A moment, what he called out 

Each morning--what it means

To really smell the sun up close. 

7

To the woman lying on her back, right hand turning purple

When you turn to smile for a minute
at your husband, who's just barely
made it back for the tinfoil blanket
to wrap around your body and tucked
his bike, and yours, around the corner
of the park, I ache to jump the curb,
to grab your twisted fingers and drive off.

It's not my fault, really, not wanting
to be here. I wasn't there when my mom
slid off her sled the wrong way, bashed
her kidney into a rock, peed blood
for five days. Nor was I there
when my grandmother slashed her calf
open while fishing knee deep in
a Montana river. But when I stand there,
listening to the story, I understand fluidity.

I choose language over relation, finding
the jumping tongue sharper than the snap
of my mother's fingers after I gaze sideways
for a half second too long. Sometimes,
I want to strangle Babel. To wrap my jacket,
like the tinfoil around you, and unleash
a flurry of Pitbulls and spit, listening
for a scream. But what would that sound like?

6

Somewhere between the fourth shot of Jager
and a beer, everything disappears
down the hole of a yellow straw. One day,
barriers will fall like Berlin in the 80s and
I'll understand day drinking. How sitting
at 4 pm sipping means productivity.

While watching ice clink, you complain
about unripe blueberries, the cold
and a remnant of a summer yet to come.
My eyes squint tighter. The woman
with the tray says numbers I want to read,
repeats herself again and again. Almost angry.

But who's angry here? The woman or me,
the one unable to pull a series of letters,
jumbled together like monkeys in a barrel.
Somehow, I think when I pull away
from the bar at the end of the night,
day drinking is the least of my problems.

5

Yesterday, in a garden with a duck castle,
I sat and watched couples soak vitamin d
and each other. Like the mallard,

who chased his mate up and down
a stream, waddling through leaves after her,
taking flight only after peering over the weeds,

searching. To the left, a Turkish 20
something with a blonde, smiling with eyes,
stared into small talk. His jacket, slightly

unbuttoned. His hand, resting on her right
thigh. They laughed. To the right, a man
grabs the bottom of a white dress, says

something I'm too far away to hear, falling
into a forever locked in a moment on a bridge.
I'm a voyeur. These scenes bite my eyes,

remind me I'm just close enough to grab,
but not quite have. Sure, snapshot and let it
flutter into oblivion. We're just Pedal boats

on a stream, sticking briefly on a branch.
We're sucking up too much water,
overflowing with language.

4

I was named by the Mexican janitor.
The way my mother tells the story,
after she squeezed me out, about
the time the hall lights flicker once,
and a doctor settles in until the morning,
they wrapped me in a blue blanket,
stuffed me into her arms. She stared down,
full of adoration and new mother claim.

But somewhere, the need for identity
bubbled inside her like a bottle of mineral
water. She inhaled my baby powder
and poops, muttered three different identities
after I love you, testing the sound
on her tongue. Then, he walked in. He wasn't
my father, no, but the man with the mop.

He wiped his hands on a pair of grubby
khakis, smiled a four missing tooth grin,
a glimmer of pseudo gold on the incisor.  
Cute boy you got dere, she whispers now,
reciting in his accent. What his name?
She looks down, unsure. How do we know
the name is right? Who tells us it's okay
and that we'll love it later?

There's an inherent pressure of the future,
no, gravity. Some people find comfort in liquor,
others in the line on a mirror. Me?
That tiny finger pressed against the window
behind the park, face covered in some semblance
of chocolate, full ignorance to the world,
beckoning a language I don't know. But,
that understanding of the trees, the breath
of another, the dispersing gravel between bike
treads-- it's all the same, really.

3

Uno's an aggressive game
when playing with a Russian,
four Americans, and a Honduran
named Raul. When we slap
green 6's, yellow skips and red +2's,
everyone's a Zicke.

To my left, a plus four color change
offers green and fick dich. Someone
whispers Uno and everyone groans.
This is a family game, somewhere--
where Uncle Jim slips candy under
the table and Dad tsks your sister
when he's skipped. But not here.

Here, we drink Jever and take too
big bites of a doner kebab, cabbage
falls on the plate, mixes briefly
with lamb shavings. I pluck a piece
and pop it in my mouth before playing
a blue 4. It tastes like Italy and nostalgia.

Or the alley outside our apartment,
where you used to call for keys
or homework assignments, while old men
with canes tapped at the cobble stones,
shaking their heads. I'd duck behind
the windowsill, giggling to myself.
When a pigeon pops up and stares at me,
I scream, and back here, when you play
that final card, I hear a pigeon coo
and it's all the same everywhere, ja?

2

Yesterday morning, as I walked six bus stops with my iPod on loop,
a Chinese woman with pigtails I once twisted wore a pair of sweatpants,
graying and torn, with a beige thermal and vest, limp in the wind.
She was running--past the gas station and the intersection where
an American muscle car waited impatiently. A couple on bikes stopped
next to me, giggling to themselves for a moment, and I wished I was her.
Not afraid of the could be car peeling down her lane as she outstretched
like the plane I rode in on. It's the way the pigtails slapped the wind.
The almost childlike hair ties tucked at the ends, like the laugh that lingers
outside my window and clings to curtains. Something for the lovers, maybe.
For the ones suffering from fernweh, or those that stare at the church steeple
from the ninth floor as something sickens deep down, screams at you to run,
not from, but to the darkening skyline--a crimson only dead bodies know.

1

When the Captain turns off the fasten-seat-belt light
and opens the cabin to the low hum of darkness,
my stomach churns. When the guy next to me thrusts
the window with such force, that would-be-smooth
swishes become more like smacks, and I forget
what the pull looks like for a moment, my left eyebrow
twitches. It keeps on even after the woman behind me
states, in a voice so loud the man fourteen rows up turns
around to look, that she's a trapped rat. Even after
a turbaned baby cries into his mother's red and yellow sari
and she lets her older boys wash their hands
with the bathroom door open, giggling and splashing water
like they aren't still naked from the waist down.
Where is home in all of this? Is it when you struggle
not to lean against the elevator's insides, the cool biting
at the unexpected heat. Or when you wonder if you'll ever
decorate those prison like walls, if it's worth it.
After all, you didn't bring that many clothes,
so what's a poster worth anyway?

Germany Update

In an attempt to keep writing and push my skill even further, I'm going to try and write a couple of new posts a week while in Germany this summer. It'll be hard, and I'll probably be cramming them in one after another sometimes, but to whoever is still out there reading...thank you.

Original Post 2 Week 12

Once, I lived in a town where it never rained
and boys liked pink more than blue.
It was June, and behind the house, someone
ran over a coyote in the middle of the night.
It was scrawny, lost. I should have cried.
No. Instead, I opened the door to my car
and stood for a minute, gazing at the blood,
the nails on the front right paw. It would have
bit me when I crouched, half-tempted to poke.
After two vultures paced in the brush for a while--
hidden from headlights--and I drove off, they
pulled out intestines, picked off fur, tearing
it to the shreds I wished I was. And
when I got home, turned the house light on,
folded up the night, I fell asleep, feeling nothing.

Original Post 1 Week 12

Last night, after I watched 14 people speak their work,
I stepped on the cat's paw outside my bedroom,
ate a protein bar with too much chalk, and threw away
my dead hamster's bedding. It's been a month and
sat in the corner behind my stack of poetry books.
My house, full of stacks, smells of cat piss
and passive aggression. Last night, I dreamed
of magazines and not enough Neosporin
to fix the wound you left. You did the fadeaway--
Like sidewalk chalk in the sun, pencil on paper,
or memories--I wondered for a moment, when I could
still hear the cat licking his paw, if you knew anything.

Junkyard 4 Week 12

I don't mingle because as much as I like people, I don't like people.
Instead, I hold a half a bottle of water in one hand and fear in the other.
Tomorrow, I'll wake up and know that I've done the most I can do
for the day, and when the four year old with the duck backpack huddles
under the table, I grin, knowing that someday, she'll be here too. Just as nervous.

Junkyard 3 Week 12

Don't become a museum to grief, or go to a place where the lights are all green.
There's something exhilarating about having no control and wearing capri pants
when it's a freeze warning. I don't own capri pants anymore. Or sit at a bar
and order cocktails. I'm the woman who drinks beer, and not out of a stemmed
water glass. When the man next to me starts quoting Pat Benatar, I stare down
at the foam, half wanting to swirl my oily finger in the off white level. Instead,
I recite the German alphabet in my head, repeat Ich heiße Taylor, over and over--
wondering for only a split second, if anyone can hear me.

Memory 2 Week 12

This morning, while walking into the gym, a man in a bright orange vest and khakis revs a jackhammer, spraying concrete and nostalgia as I breathe in, not the Carrollton Campus Center, but the via outside Zeppelin's pizza in Spoleto, Italy. Where the same orange, wide mesh plastic fence overtook my brain and wrapped it in the same thing that makes my throat hurt. And though I hear the Wolf Radio over the speakers, when I close my eyes am I here anymore?

Junkyard 2 Week 12

Below me, a stoplight changes too many times. Two women carry bags of Kroger groceries and a can of off brand green beans slips through a tiny rip in the plastic. She stops, turns, and mouths "forget it" and runs to catch her friend. The white paint of the crosswalk starts to peal. It starts to rain. Somewhere, someone screams.

Memory 1 Week 12

One day in May, during my junior year of high school, a dog with brown spots followed my mother home from a run. Or was it January? She always turned her headphones so loud the world was welcomed to sing along to Coldplay or Maroon Five with her. Somewhere behind the box of jump ropes and wiffle balls, the dog nestled itself, until my mother walked near and screamed. Its eyes, some pre-linguistic brown, yelled at her and she wrapped him in a blanket of the same color and brought him to the utility closet, or that hallway with a sink and the washing machine. When we came home, my sister and I, a yelp echoed through the door. The rug was curled up on the edges. Paw nails shadowed underneath. When we opened, he flew to the other side of the hallway, cowering behind a basket ficus. I took him for a walk the next morning before school and he shit watery green behind my neighbor's rose bushes. I didn't clean it up.
Four days later, my father kicked it out of the house after it peed on the leather couches downstairs. The dog never barked, except at my father's voice. It heard the anger, the hostility, the imminence we wouldn't.

Junkyard 1 Week 12

This morning I forgot deodorant,
so I washed my armpits in the locker room sink
and thought of Haiti, when we showered
only when it rained-- and of Ms. Betty in the kitchen,
who yelled when we turned on the sink, because
we were one of three places with a water reservoir.
I crave to go back, to relive what wastes away.

Original post 2 week 11

Open Apology

I'm sorry I know too much.

That one day, I'll open my eyes and realize everyone was faking it. 

That tomorrow, I'll walk from a parking lot to grab a box of books 

no one reads, and shuffle through them. That someone has a plan

I don't know, or that I'm mad when someone achieves at adulthood

when I don't. I'm sorry for him. That he doesn't know what we can't say, 

and that half the time, words mean nothing. And the other half, 

the wrong thing. Sparta fought with 300 and I can't fight with one. 

I'm sorry for Dave and Busters, and the tilted shuffleboard table 

that left you alone with her. And the fact I stayed the night. 

I'm sorry I keep trying. To do what? Pretend or explain?

Because is dangerous and I always wanted to be an actress. 

Life teaches you how to act okay, even when you're not. 

And when you're not, you ought to be. Otherwise, you're ungrateful. 

And sorry. But really, even when I wake up yawning, I'm not tired. 

Memory 2 week 11

I don't remember the last time I woke up at 5:30.

If anything, it was Christmas and I jumped out to see the reindeer prints 

in the snow, which were actually regular white tail deer, 

but to the kid who left reindeer food in bushes, it's all the same. 

This morning though, it isn't Christmas. And I'm not excited. 

Instead, it's the day your parents tell you to grab that last box from your room, 

the one with all your favorite books and that little stuffed dog 

with the too heavy head that you bought for ten bucks at some restaurant 

in Door County--the same restaurant with the goats on the roof reminding you 

of reindeer--and load into the car. When you beat the sun, nothing smiles. 

Memory 1 week 11

I remember the day my father told my mother it was over. 

We were called to the table. We were low on napkins. 

The pool needed to be filled. Somewhere, I left the tv on 

And the oxy clean guy hollered about if you called now,

You could get so many other things for free. I didn't want

Oxy clean. And now, two, three years later, when she sits

Across from me and I explain my sister, me, she nods

And the glass of milk dissolves the Oreo.

The washing machine buzzes. I clench my fists and apologize 

To my father. It's as though my stomach decides to pace,

The heat in the house turned to 90 degrees, and I'm back 

To being the sister I was in high school. This time though, 

I didn't clench her against the wall, or scream her awake. 

No, I attempted to build some bridges. And I'm not an architect. 

Junkyard 4 week 11

Out near the right turn, past the site of a tractor flip, lies a fallen tree. Behind the tree, a trickling waterfall, too weak and dried up for rappelling. There's no water here. A river canoe tour shop closed up a year ago because of drought. Now, you can see a little white chair stuck in the middle of where the river would be. Someone also drowned a canoe there too. Somewhere, does a mother mourn her son? Or did he swim away?

Junkyard 3 week 11

In Highlands, North Carolina, four kids step off a school bus and run for the Presbyterian church next door to the deli I'm sitting at, eating a French Dip. A boy about eight doesn't go with his friends, or meet his mother like a girl in gunmetal boots, but he lugs his backpack down the road to the grocery store to pick up a sandwich before walking home. Another sits on the church fence, swinging his feet.

Junkyard 2 week 11

When I rolled down the windows of my sister's car, on our way up one of the blue ridge mountains, or Appalachians, I could almost smell dog breath, truffles, and upturned asphalt after the bus's front bumper chunked part off the road. In my mother's laughter from the backseat, I heard someone else laughing on the side of the Umbrian hills, in the middle of a rousing round of that song from Mulan, pointing walking sticks at each other as one of the professors explained our behavior to the Italian owner with the dog. Pigs didn't truffle hunt anymore because they ate too many. It was out of season for us.

Junkyard 1 week 11

Through the town with one stop light and right before the state line, there's a road called happy hill. Two horses grazed nearby, ones rump spotted, the other full brown. A dog trotted alongside the car. A tree downed somewhere nearby a waterfall. At night, nothing honked or squealed.

Original Post 1 Week 11

The Troubles

To make an Irish Car Bomb, you pour a glass
of Guinness. But not too much--you have to chug
it all. Just enough to cover a shot glass.
Then, pour an ounce of Jameson and a half an ounce
of Baileys. Drop the shot glass. It bubbles.
Next to me, someone argues about napkins
or not enough peanuts and I'm listening to my mom
complain about the Catholic church and my grandmother,
while my father sits drinking and shaking his head.

Junkyard 4 Week 10

Lust sends you to hell, a billboard off 75 screams
at the cars, warning of a Bible verse and I'm sure
people laugh for a minute as they scream
Taylor Swift lyrics with their roommates
who drink too much pink champagne
at gas stations. We're all just shells,
someone says before commercial, and who
doesn't hate being a shell?

Junkyard 3 Week 10

At the stoplight across from Target, the arrow turns green.
An Escalade doesn't move, and when I pull up beside him,
his mouth is gaping open, eyes shut, not moving.
The arrow turns yellow, then red. Someone honks
and he wipes the drool from his lip.

Original Post 2 Week 10

September 10, 2001

A Central Park tree root wails,
no, it's a wadded blue blanket
with a 7 pound girl, newborn
and not as red as she should be--
eyes crusted shut, putrid. From
a bench, a man sits up, pulls
a splinter from underneath a glove,
and squints as though she's the sun
and there aren't any clouds in the sky.
The weatherman is wrong but people
call for storms tomorrow. Down
the street, someone examines the still
attached placenta, deems it okay, cuts
it off. No one will save it in a baby book,
show her in 12 years when she's old
enough to be embarrassed. No one will
cut up that blue blanket, make it into
a quilt or a dress for the bear from
the hospital gift shop. A nurse flips
through four books trying to find a number,
a mother missing her baby and a man
wheels in with a gunshot wound, or
was it a missing limb?

Junkyard 2 Week 10

Somewhere, someone's embalmed in spermaceti and fresh laundry.
My machine whirs again and again, shaking the house like an earthquake,
or when you've had one too many and God punishes you for a minute.
When I pull out my sweatpants, they don't burn me, but instead,
pretend like I need to melt a little. As though nothing can start without
two matching socks with little monkeys or Santa snowboarding. And when
your t-shirt shrinks two sizes because you dried it, you laugh and over
extend yourself while breaking seams to answer some divine question
about purity, pleading with yourself and a iron-on camel--from a campus
event on a wednesday-- for an offering to those who can't wait,
those who breathe mint julep and baby oil, exhale cotton. The blue
water engulfs you, and in the back of your throat, a whale calls out.

Memory 2 Week 10

Cleaning out my closet, I opened a red and white striped bankers box,
pulled out a clump of letters written on note cards, lined paper, backs
of stamps, re-read 7th grade. I remember writing the note, three pages
of misspellings and comma splices, in the blue plastic too hard for a butt.
Somewhere behind me, a girl giggles, and I watch her scribble with a smile.

Junkyard 1 Week 10

Somewhere, someone smells like vomit, and my toilet
won't flush. On NPR, they talked about how
we let our thoughts hold us in and control the way
we feel about ourselves, people. Mimicking neurons affect
the way we touch, or rather, who touches us.
I can't feel the hug your mother gives you,
or when you kiss your boyfriend.
I can't feel when you're mugged in Central Park,
or by the Ferris Wheel in Atlanta. Do I want to?
I want to taste the gnocchi with everyone else, sardined
between the back of a brown-black couch and
three wooden tables with place-mats. Mine, green like
pesto on someone's plate. The wind caught the wine
in my glass, the strand of hair on your face. Cold.
I want to feel the potato squish into the crevices
of my molars as pesto slides across my tongue.
Can you imagine gagging on the fork? The prongs
holding bile, as best they can. It's like watching death.

Memory Post 1 Week 10

I remember Christmas, when mom gave out gifts
like socks that looked like foxes, a pedometer,
and coupons for hugs. You opened a small box--
after my father's next Alex Cross novel
and mom's new watch, but before the Wii
and games we wouldn't play--and pulled out
a pink hair trimmer. I think it was meant for your
nether regions, but mom played it like
your eyebrows, which were just as out of control.
We called them ape hairs, like Phil Collins'
daughter's, only less groomed by a woman
with a smock. You were in eighth grade, sure,
but that's not an excuse for hygiene. Or so
someone said. Excited, you skipped two steps
up the stairs and we heard the high pitched whir,
your smile and then a scream. You shaved
your left eyebrow off, yelling at mom to fix it,
and I imagined, somehow, she would glue
each follicle back, fingers trembling, breathing
like a trainer in the ring with Rocky. Will Phil sing
the background song? Will Adrian or Maria Cross
come back from the dead to see this through?
No, it's just a brown pencil from Target
and three months of ten minute shading.

Original Post 1 Week 10

In my backyard, we didn't use fences.
Instead, a row of just shy of blooming
lilacs separated myself from my neighbors.
And the cracking yellow slide, housing
a family of rabbits in the summer.
I don't know why snow globes sell so well
at Christmas when our screen door--
with the gape from that day I poked
my pencil through it-- lets flakes, or bees,
fly through. But maybe we're all post-rain
worms, slinking trails on concrete, watching
dogs bark at mail men or a butterfly's wings
freeze. I don't know why the boy stole
a hot pink bow from that girl in overalls,
or shoved her arm in a chain link fence
out behind the 4 square court. But maybe,
when he bashed the other kid's head in
with a metal bat, he was snow on the top
of a snow globe house, landing precisely
where I, or you, wanted. Silent and freshly cut.

Original Post 2 Week 9

Tomorrow, I'll drink coffee and pretend to read
two books I don't want to. I'll pack my past
in a coffin and ship it to the end of the earth,
where someone thought we'd fall off the edge,
drown. I'm learning to drown once every day.
Last week, I fell asleep in a puddle, laughed
too hard and didn't realize I wasn't dead.
I cracked my skull on a pillow and showed you
the dreamscape of Sir Francis Drake. You popped
champagne and tucked the cork in your pocket,
whispered it was special. Somehow, I wanted you
to apologize for everyone else, because
in the depths of my cabinets, back behind the coffee
spoons and extra plastic bags, you hid them
from the world. Suffocating and harmless.

Original Post 1 Week 9

Half-sister of Saturday

We lived two hours from the Bean,
but baked them for lunch every day
in July. I grew to hate turkey jerky
and the milkman, as well.

That day though, I waited for you
to show up on my front porch—
can I come out and play?—but today

a BMW scooped you up first. While
I played Tic-Tac-Toe with my spit,
watching it dry and worms crisped

in the post-rain scorch. You pranced
down the street carrying a scooter
in cut offs and a bikini top. We were 10

and too blonde for our own good,
you just didn’t know it yet. The window
rolled down, the person in the front seat

murmured something I was too far away
to hear. I turned, hair whipping slightly
against the wind. I heard you laugh,

high-pitched and bird-like. No, that
was the car starting. You waved at Demeter,
or was it Hades? Were you smiling at least?

Junkyard 4 Week 9

In the kitchen, marshmallows cover semi-sweet chocolate,
melting and then crisping in the microwave. They taste
like seventh grade, and too many shoes taking up Halloween
candy space in the back of your closet. Or your mother,
finding you huddled, reading, popping M&Ms like
your grandmother's depression medication. It's that moment,
when you smell a book and it's the 90s and you're eight
and someone gives you a folded card with some conversation
heart message. But someone thinks it's a video game
and stabs you in the arm. Don't die yet. Four lives down. 

Memory 2 Week 9

Just call me Fandango, my sister says as she spouts movie times.
It's almost the opening line of Moby Dick, but not quite.
This would be something I would say, if I had read Moby Dick.
We were just outside Glacier Park, in Columbia Falls, Montana,
at the Motel 6 substitute that served breakfast.
My cousin finagled the bed from me, so I slept on the floor.
But it was still early, and we went to that movie
with the yellow pill-like beings in overalls,
who wore goggles and turned purple when mad.
One sang an interlude for a banana, another carried around
a unicorn doll and I laughed, hoping for somewhere I might
not be 20. It's a limbo worse than limbo. Where you can't
legally drink, but can be convicted of statutory rape if you wanted.
I didn't want. For that.
No, I wanted something more primal, basic.
The place where my parents and my future coincided, happy.
I couldn't have them in one place without a buffer, my sister.
Instead, I had a place where a woman sat us down on a porch bench
after a card game, telling us we were wrong about our father,
who wanted to play golf-- and not with us. Being 20 is a white whale.
A fleeting age where water only vanishes if you see it,
and Ahab's your father always running after you with a criticism.
You can't lop off his leg, because you can be tried for assault
and I can't be a prison bitch. 

Junkyard 3 Week 9

There's a bulletin board on a wall
on the far right side of the second floor
of a building in the center of campus.
On the bulletin board--about
16 fliers for graduate programs
all across the United States. Some
have tear off sheets that fall off
on their own. Onto the desk with four
literary magazines. Two from campus.
Two from some other place.
In the bottom corner of the board sticks
a yellow push pin, alone.
On the other side, seven point in a rectangle.
I pull out yellow, watch it roll back
and forth, tip spiked into something
that's not quite life-threatening. But this,
the papers of the future, is. I push yellow
into a different place, make a different
hole. Dig, Seamus Heaney says in the back
of my brain. But I've already got dirt
under my fingernails. Or I don't have them at all.

Junkyard 2 Week 9

There's a brown bottle, chicken on the label,
green cap not as dark as a christmas tree,
but darker than summer, lying in the snow
just north of civilization.

I smelled you before I heard you--a mix of
barbeque smoke and too many dreams.
You told me the best beer tasted like poetry
and looked like an album cover.

Memory 1 Week 9

Somewhere in Wyoming, when I was twelve, I met a second cousin who didn't shave,
and a third who was younger than me at a family reunion for my grandmother's side.
My dad's uncle Denny owned a 14 bedroom ranch with a series of tools named
after farm animals. That was the summer I drove a mule.
The KAWASAKI--green, with a cage on the back for the rifles and other guns
I don't know the names of--felt like a golf cart, but with a better turn radius
and a shitty gas pedal. He told me I had to punch the brake with my foot,
ease the other, keep both hands on the wheel and not go past 15. My cousin,
two weeks older and brutish, stood belly out, arms crossed, as my sister and I
doughnutted the gravel driveway. Uncle Denny said not to be afraid to drive them,
they wouldn't bite. We couldn't hurt them.
When everyone else is over 18 and trying to sell bracelets for their side job back home,
there's not a whole lot to do. After someone pulled out a corn hole set and a tambourine,
my sister and I found the keys to a mule and buckled up for safety, heading out past
the turn around, to a road narrower than my underweight second aunt's neck.
I don't remember how far we went, but I do remember attempting to back up the side
of a mountain, so we could turn around and not fall off the side. It was my first 3 point turn.
I told my sister to sing a song, because she was freaking me out with her "we're gonna die,
we're gonna die," and all I wanted to do was get out of the cart and leave it there,
but someone really would have killed me, and my uncle Denny was too nice to cross.
It's always the nice ones, I swear. It must have been five by the time we safely back and forthed
our way around, racing back the way we came, to the turn around where another mule waited.
There was Denny, pacing back and forth in front, and my cousin, perched and smiling
in the passenger seat. I was demoted from driving after that, and if I wanted to ride,
my cousin had to drive. He dangled the key in my face and I asked if he was overcompensating,
but not to his face. Afterward, I ate too many apricots and said the word Fuck for the first time.

Junkyard 1 Week 9

This morning, I didn't hear you scale the cage, gnawing knee deep in metal and plastic.
I didn't hear the water bottle insert move up and down with the pace of your tongue,
lapping in eighth notes. Still in the bowl, four blocks of something I trust was nutritious.
You'd have eaten by now. Not quite the sit-on-your-face alarm clock, but you somehow
knew when I put food in the bowl, eager and nipping at my skin. But when I grab
your little ball of brown and white, its cream, and you're blackening, cooling
with the air outside. I have a running Instagram of dead things, but they're all run over
or stepped on. You, curled around a block under the chewed up wooden bridge, in a pine
pile, can't be on it just yet. I'm just grateful the trash hasn't come yet.

Original Post 2 Week 8

I wish I could start this with my face disappears into the Fountain of Four Seasons,
but it's the Fountain of Four Rivers, and my face has nowhere to go.
It's 1 o'clock in Rome and I'm sunburnt. I'm gelato.
Somewhere behind the Nile lies my reflection, eying the fake Prada bags
and Ray Ban sunglasses. I turn that way--towards Danube, touching the coat of arms
I don't believe in. And that way--Rio de la Plata showing the abilities of America, riches
no one really sees. Somehow, I'm facing Ganges, navigating the water myself
if the sun shines at the right angle. I track only one obelisk and a couple
of missing thumbs, half expecting to see myself swimming in one of the puddles.
I can't get close enough to touch, two Indian men selling scarves stop me, try to wager
a guess on how low they won't go. I see Bernini laughing at me, waving
at me to leave his statue here, untouched by the other. But when I blink, turn
to walk away, it's just an older Italian couple and a child, laughing at a bird.

Memory 2 Week 8

A few years into college, I stopped going home as much. At 19, 20, I became too engrossed in a campus ministry retreat than hearing my mother cry herself to sleep at night, even when she thought we wouldn't know. I don't remember the exact day, or month, that I stopped wanting to go home, but I just remember being out to dinner one night with my sister-- we enjoyed sushi with coworkers on certain weekends--and she looked at me, asked if I wanted to ride around for a little while.

My sister's not one for talking. When we'd go out to dinner with my father and stepmother, she left the talking to me, as I could talk to anyone, anything. She's better at confrontation. At brooding. At knowing exactly what to say at the exact moment to say it. So, in order to not bother her with the same funny stories about whatever class I was taking at the time, ones I had told her three times that night out of awkwardness, I offered, "we should go buy a CD from Target. One that we've never heard of."

Ten minutes later, after two right turns and a stop light that took too long, we parked next to some banged up Chevy on the Entertainment side of Target. Somewhere between Childish Gambino and Eminem sat this band I had never heard of: Depeche Mode. The English major in me stopped working as I asked "who's Di-petch-eee Mode?" My sister stared at me, the laughed so hard I almost saw pee dribble down her jeans.

We debated between fits about that, AWOL Nation, and some now famous country singer, and Depeche Mode won. While we argued about who was going to buy it (as that person got to keep the CD later), my mother called, wondering when we were going to be home. I told her not for a while, we were still out, and she sniffled quickly and said okay. Hung up.

We ended up skipping every track but one, a song called "The Child Inside," and drove along 92 watching Taco Loco turn off its lights, turning down the road that led to the house our father was trying to sell so he could move closer to the office he stopped working at four months before.
It was all so coffee table. Something you flip through when you're bored or avoiding conversation.

Junkyard 4 Week 8

If I had an out of body experience right now, it would look something like this:

A girl, dressed in black polyester blend pants with a purple stripe down the side,
alternates between picking at a small hole in the right thigh and plucking lint clumps
off the Arkansas pullover she stole from her sister.
In front of her sits a computer, overheating and angry, sticky from apricot juice.
To her right, a water bottle with a chewed cap and a list of lists
in handwriting too tiny to read. Her stomach growls once, twice, three times
before heating up two day old leftovers in a faculty lounge, hoping no one sees.
The spinning rainbow wheel in the middle of the screen makes her start scratching
her scalp, running fingers along her eyebrows, prodding at a blood blister
from slamming her finger in the frozen car door the other day.
The same day as the leftovers.
Finally, an email sends and the wheel stops spinning. She takes a bite of food
and the phone to the left rings. She crosses a note off her list.
There's something subtle about February.

Junkyard 3 Week 8

Yesterday, before the rain came, a woman with a cotton sack
like a pillow case came to my door, not begging,
but asking. For lint, she said. I looked at my belly button,
and back at her. From the dryer, she clarified.
I asked what for. She said she's a lint weaver.
A weaver of lint. She said they take lint and spin it to yarn.
Even Google doesn't know.
As I pulled out the lint catcher, she smiled, explained
she was going to make a sweater for her sister's baby,
a girl named Jane. She likes pink and horses.
I handed her the bag, saw her out the door, and while I watched,
she walked up the hill and across the street, ready to ask again.

Junkyard 2 Week 8

Someone said it would snow, but out my window
is a stony sky pebbling rain.
My sister calls, Birmingham has rain too.
When my roommate tries to walk down the porch stairs,
she almost falls, because whatever landed, froze.

Memory 1 Week 8

In his Oscars acceptance speech,
Graham Moore writes about being weird
and later, says there's a part of him that's Chicago,
and Chicago "just wants everyone to like him
and hates conflict and hates yelling
and wants everyone to get along and be nice."
I don't think I heard a single person yell
in the suburbs of Chicago. Instead,
a lot of children running
through freshly tarred driveways
and narrowly missing telephone poles
while sledding. My neighbor, a five year old
girl with a last name that sounds like a pasta,
jumped on the igloo on my front lawn
because she was bored. I, and my sister,
spent six hours, two rounds of shoveling,
and four pairs of gloves building
that three tunneled house.
My mother brought us bags of carrots
and graham crackers with juice boxes.
I was thirteen.

Junkyard 1 Week 8

On Twitter the other day, someone wrote "I feel like I just installed Facebook's
retarded 3rd cousin from Alabama." But we can't say retarded anymore,
or eskimo, because they're not politically correct. Or polite.

Original Post 1 Week 8

This is the challenge from the end of class--to rant like Ruth Stone in "Translation"

Il Duce

Fifty six years ago, BigDddy1, owner of a white Cadillac
made in 1982 in Michigan or Kentucky but sent here to be sold
to you courtesy of Carl Hogan off 45 in Columbus, Mississippi,
you learned to drive on your daddy's Oldsmobile on the gravel
behind the farm, running over chickens and chasing sheep
when he wasn't looking. Are you paying attention, ex-farmhand?
Did you know I passed you up on that two lane, following
a blue Mercedes instead? Ten minutes later, you're behind me,
still on going south when the one stoplight turns red and we all wait
for no one. I told you to drive faster. You flipped me off in the rearview.
I should have smiled. I needed gas to continue to follow the Mercedes.
Your car spluttered, called me baby, bambina. Sometimes, I imagine
you to be my Italian lover, staring at luxury cars driving by after
some soccer team beat another. BigDddy1, fig of my road rage,
plum of profanity, did the war take all of the good cars? When you
shipped off to London to make bullets, did your father sell the original
for war bonds? Are you awake?

Somewhere between the Alabama line and death, you passed me,
shaking your fist, and my eyes flashed. Those hours playing back and forth
between dotted yellow and solid, how you wanted to slow down
for every curve, brake sharply for a pot hole easily missed by just a turn
of that stiff wheel; the same when the Italian ran his hand over my hip,
explained the motions of a soccer player in sounds that felt like rain.
The crossing of knees and pointing the foot before contact, falling
the elbow after a sideline kick, he blinked slowly and for a moment,
I saw your right blinker, a inch into a ditch. The Italian never needed
to check his gas cap mid trip. But what can he tell you about death?
Even your long lost wife's knuckled hands that used to make you happy,
kneading like you knead the wheel--I watch you hunch over, as though
being closer makes you see. Where were you in 1938, in May, when Rome
was adorned in death and some Cadillac drove two dictators down a new via?
Did you celebrate or act aloof? Are you that pact of steel? Were you kicked
like a soccer ball into a common goal of unchange? Would you die in that ditch
you drove in BigDddy1? Will you be incarnated in my lover?

You believed in rules, following a sign until the end. That's why you drove
45 until a small child graffittied a nine and told you to fuck off, old man.
Or was that me? May you forgive me, and yourself, BigDddy1,
for passing Driver's Education the fourth time because you couldn't hear turn directions.

Original Post 2 Week 7

There's a difference between mayonnaise women and salad dressing women,
the way they drink their tea. "You're from the midwest, dear," one says
when I brush away sugar, "you don't know any better,"
and she might as well have been wearing a hoop-skirt. It's Wednesday,
but the way she walked, it was 1990 and a Saturday pageant for Miss Mississippi.
I smiled and pushed back from the table,
I exude Chicago, apparently.
Long A, the incorrect pronunciation of "theater," and the inexplicable
knowledge of train systems. In Italy last summer,
I woke up before cafe owners, tracked the A train on a map.
My Italian resembles Aunt Martha, perpetually drunk from Olive Garden, carbed up
and too big for her Penne Carbonara, which isn't a thing.
There's no Alfredo in Italy. That's America becoming an ethical slut. At least,
that's just what I read on a shelf in a bookstore.

Memory 2 Week 7

I don't remember the first time I met her, my future stepmother.
But I tried to keep an open mind, I'm sure.
Because on the last day of Thanksgiving break,
when you asked mom if we'd travel with you to Montana,
we said no.

Part of me already knew, when I received a candle
and perfume in September, you were dating.
I just wanted to be part of it.
My sister, mad you lied, didn't.

I just want to talk, half the time.
More awkward than that one legged duck
in the pond outside my house, or Grandma on a scooter,
I remember just talking about nothing. I think she smiled.
I think we talked about school, hobbies, and what I was going to do
after graduation. That's all we still talk about.

That summer, my sister, mad I didn't stand up and argue
about where you were going and why, resented me.
I can't confront, not face to face.

But now, snide comments and a blackout later,
I'm forgetting things. Forgetting what I said, what I meant,
what I want to say. Forgetting how to be mad, how to hate,
but I'm learning what it means to be a good sister, and sometimes,
it means being a bad daughter.

Junkyard 4 Week 7

This morning, after making spaghetti carbonara last night, I brewed tea in a kettle and watched a cat climb up the tree hanging over my back porch. Using its paws, it pulled itself over the wall and onto the wicker table where a squirrel would sit if it were warm. Kelsey reads out loud a BuzzFeed list on 27 pasta recipes to keep you warm this winter, and carbonara doesn't include pepper, apparently. I think about the pasta maker under my cabinet and wonder, also out loud, if I should have taken a class on getting the dough right.

Junkyard 3 Week 7

"My Trix came up in a rainbow in the shower," my roommate said when we started talking about fruity cereals this morning. Apple Jacks don't taste like apples, but cinnamon. Fruit Loops taste the same, but French Toast Crunch tastes like the 90s. "You asked, it's back!" she reads off the box when we stop at Kroger, plucking the last box off the shelf in a fit of excitement. She didn't buy milk. She's prepared for snow week, so it won't happen. I wish for a minute I had bought Reese's Puffs.
In the kitchen later, she smells her milk, dumps it down the drain, and says, "I'm glad I smelled it before I poured the cereal."

Memory 1 Week 7

We picked the restaurant that night. Eating popcorn out of a wood bowl in the middle of a dimly lit table in a building made out of a castle, you asked us if we wanted to play Hangman. I was twelve, too cool for crayons and games, but my sister, eager for your attention, grabbed green.
I hadn't entered my stress eating phase yet, or the age where I hid bowls of pretzels under my bed out of shame for snacking, but I still downed the appetizer to share. Just like yesterday, when I devoured a bag of jalapeno jack kettle chips. Except this time, you didn't tell us we were moving. Or have a grin. Or clenched fists. Or even tears. You're a gargoyle sometimes, and I'm just Quasimodo, tending and caring more than he should.

Original Post 1 Week 7

This comes from my sestina work from last week...I decided to strip away the form and focus on something different:

Remaining Unmarried

At the stop sign my mother squints at a statue
I picked out from SkyMall. Somewhere,
a truck crashes into a tree, unleashing ravens,

and it's Apollo and Daphne, holding on.

She married young, to my father in a church
outside a small town of trucks.

Her mother ordered a statue of ice--
not quite Bernini, as it seems.

It shipped on a truck, bedded in hay
and something red, though it wasn't important
to my father, who just wanted to build mild winters. 

Apollo could only watch, as Daphne treed.

My grandmother told my father to button up his pants
and sit on a throne of ice because he was not yet a king.
He spoke in tones that bled words with -ing's, and when
tomorrow rode in on that truck, morphing asphalt to water,

a laurel whispers to my father, not Zeus.
Someone stood up, and with a gunshot of branches,
the beds of fledgling truckers laid to rest in the bottom
of something that never knows decay.

Like Eros, gold glistens darker than the summer, dipped
in something trucked in on a Tuesday, from the underbelly
we only see through the eyes of a raven. It's almost yelping
to be understood, our desire for a fathering.

Junkyard 2 week 7

The reason this is a junkyard: I found the phrase: cultural plastic and silence, in a book I was reading and just had to do something with it. 

The reporter everyone trusted

Wasn't pretty, but coiffed. 

And I imagined careers busted 

in cultural plastic and silence. 

When she stood at the front of the podium, 

talking to herself and some kind

of weathered pandemonium, 

I swallowed the scum rising 

from the back of my throat, almost calmed 

by the cut up the stomach, 

the peeling of the skull, embalmed 

in the moment she points to curvatures 

with her pen, marks beatings that tore 

apart the cerebellum, frontal lobe,

and his confidence. A man of lore,

will, and something not quite human.

She speaks with insistence, as if proving 

that somehow we all wanted him

lying on the slab, accomplished. I listen 

for another minute, above the dim

essential singing of a feathered bird 

and the dead puppeteer who loved them. 

Like I loved Formaldehyde 

and gasoline, poking at a hem, and staring. 

Junkyard 1 Week 7

This afternoon, as I turned into the parking lot, a bearded red-head sat on the back of his compact and pulled a ukelele from behind him, and I can almost hear his strumming. His half buttoned lumberjack thermal blows in the wind and I laugh to myself when no one comes to join him.

Junkyard 4 Week 6

On the television, a race-car circles a track three times,
and you're on the grad-school road with me again,
but in three weeks it'll crash and burn like the car outside
Chateau Marmont where two girls in pink waitress uniforms
pole dance to the Foo Fighters and
a James Van Der Beek look-a-like splays hungover on the bed.
Four high-heels are in the air
and a balloon deflates from the corner. But life isn't
a Sophia Coppola movie and cars don't drive without gasoline.

Junkyard 3 Week 6

In the upstairs two girls in tutus run through the halls, shouting at each other to run and wake up.
The heavy breathing comes from a blonde in braided pigtails, who gives me a scrunched up nose and a nod with her folded flower headband. Smiling, the girl behind, in a purple sweatshirt and pink cheeks, power-pumps her arms with each stride. Two others run up from around the corner, shoeless with straightened hair, stop and yield to oncoming traffic. Purple stops, picks at the lip of a wax cup she picked up from the lounge, filled halfway with water, asks in a voice that smells of playdoh where the potty is.

Memory 2 week 6

When I read, "can I call you," it's the moment you lost a sock

somewhere between the washer and dryer. And I already know

about fumbling fingers and whispered "is this okay?"

"I love you." And "I don't want to hurt you."

But you're five when you sob through the phone, as I lap the coliseum,

Once, twice, before lingering in the UTeach hallway and wandering outside,

Because the girls basketball team won, and you don't know if you did something wrong. 

He hugged me when he first met me, the day I stole your guacamole

from that burrito bowl and his car, sprayed in skittles and not exactly silly string,

sat in our driveway. His not quite an ex, your best friend, brought asphalt down

to vindicate herself. But it was before that-- when he brought roses for a day date 

and thought I was mom, when you barreled out of the garage,

stating, mom knows, as though I would tattle. Because I'm eight, and jealous.

But now, you call through my front door and I'm chopping squash,

Secretly happy you want me and not mom. Ready to fire icicles at him,

because science solves most problems and I'm not good at violence. 

You sit cross legged on my kitchen table, eating a yellow piped balloon, 

explaining why you couldn't leave and I wonder for a moment,

if you put a wilted petal in water, will it sprout again?

Memory 1 week 6

I remember a stench of backlogged drain hair and yeast stones 

when I walked in the door that day, in the middle of the Dallas December, 

and you smiled out of the side of your mouth, 

gray hair cut high and tight, said the lion fish died. 

When four boys no higher than my waist come running through the door, 

time fast forwards without me. 

My mother never calls when I'm with you. 

Somewhere, milk spoils, but in your kitchen, there's only beer 

and day old breakfast sandwiches. Somewhere, behind the cement wall 

and indoor fountain, a little voice hollers for you, except he calls you dad,

almost accidentally, but not quite. You think I'm okay because you 

can hear me smiling. How could you know the science of spoiling milk?

Junkyard 2 week 6

"Some kind of sick joke" the caption under a Russell Stover's coconut chocolate reads. 

It's almost appetizing, something only Elle Woods eats when watching romance movies in bed. 

Or me, when my roommate walks in at 6 pm and I'm too lazy too cook, but more hungry than a Siren. It's Wednesday, so Valentine's Day chocolate isn't on sale, and in my hand lies a mix of failed dreams and sucralose, or so the package says. My roommate grabs the paradise of hell demons and baby farts, crinkling like a woman accidentally stabbing herself in the eye with liner or a wand. 

Original Post 2 week 6

Sestina Practice (without the correct word pattern)

At the stop sign in the middle of Atlanta,

My mother stops, looks at the statue of stone,

and her eyes squint like when she laughs red.

She married young, in California, to my father

In a church outside a small town of trucks.

And her mother ordered a statue of ice

Shipped, as it seems, on a truck,

Bedded in hay and something like red

clay, though it wasn't important to my father,

Who just wanted to marry her and run to Atlanta.

To the home they will build of brick, ice--

And the mild winters lacking snow and fireplace in stone. 

My mother's mother wanted one thing, told father

To button up his pants and sit on a throne of ice 

Because he was not yet a king, not yet stone.

He spoke to her in tones hinted in red,

Bleeding words with -ing ends and forevers in Atlanta.

They only stopped when tomorrow rode in on a truck

Sweeping asphalt into the water and stone.

Someone stood up, whispered to my father,

Who ended the tirade with a gunshot of icicles

And the beds of fledgling truckers, 

Laid to rest in the bottom of something reddened

By madness and the underground of Atlanta.

My mother's ears glistened darker than blood red

Oranges in the summer, dipped in something trucked

In on a Tuesday, from the underbelly of a Kroger in Atlanta,

A melted, not yet evaporated, puddle of ice.

It's quiet, yelping to be understood and not stoned,

Her desire for the end. After someone, I think, fathered

Another strange occurrence of something with ice,

With my mother's strict diversion from Atlanta 

And blushing anger, the crashing of trucks

Into the drunk. It's uncanny, the way someone's stone

Faces the other side of a yesterday filled with my father. 

The way an eagle engulfs the nothingness of red. 

My father exuded nothing but red that day, he says When I ask 

about my mother, the trucks, and my grandmother's ice sculpture.

Tomorrow is yesterday, just covered in stone, curbed in Atlanta. 

Junkyard 1 week 6

Driving home last night, the jeep two car lengths on front of me stopped quickly, allowing me to notice the bike attached to the back. The tires, spinning with the wind, seemed to keep time with the song on my radio. I wonder briefly about my ex, and his 1962 Camaro that he jacked from his father, that night we snuck out and drove down 166--me singing to Riptide and you, staring blankly out the windshield. Contemplating, not life, but something more Poe-like, prophetical. 

He turned, saying, "it's never about money, but it's always about money," squeeling the corner into the grass, needling through asphalt. We are stamped, still, almost hyperbolic. 

Original post 1 week 6

This started out as the money post from class today...then turned into something totally different.

Operation Fishbowl

1962, that day when your father shot an armadillo

with twelve gauge and slapped his crotch in excitement.

Meanwhile, somewhere north of the equator, to protect

from flash-blindness or cancellation, a man in a suit 

hollers at gas masks to inspect and load. Fire. Launch. 

Your father watches this later on tv, after mounting

and soaking in the tub. He scoffs only briefly at the lack 

of mushroom clouds, saying "the soviets done better,"

sipping on a Budweiser. Tomorrow, the president

would announce the end of testing, and your father 

would be drafted, leaving you with a twelve gauge and fear. 

Junkyard 4 Week 5

Sitting cross-legged in front of a Lite Bright, piles of green, yellow, pink pegs
around my toes and knees, listening to the whirring of the sewing machine
in the next room. Grandma's patching someone's jeans. The insides of my Levi's
wore away. The carpet puckers where someone's picked over the years,
blue threads twine with green. The sewing machine stops; Grandma's dropped a needle.
She bends over, pants stretching, knees popping. Her right foot steps ever so slightly
to the left, too close to the other foot, on top of the needle, slicing up into the heel.

Memory 2 Week 5

When I turned 13, my parents checked me out of school in the middle of World History.
We hadn't gotten yearbooks yet, but the girls in my class crowded around me and started crying.
It was the last time I saw that school.
It was May. It was raining.
We sat on dull hardwood floors on empty pizza boxes while the moving men unloaded into different rooms. There were three upstairs and a basement still above ground.
The horizon broke with four mounds of dirt in our backyard, and a empty park filled with oak trees
where the neighborhood hid plastic eggs on Easter, begging four year-olds to fight with teenagers over candy.
I shared a bathroom with my sister. At night, we would scramble to the vents and whisper to each other about how mom wouldn't let us stay up to watch Nick @ Nite because it was too adult.
And on the weekends, I would count footsteps across her room and mine, making sure that my room was bigger.
One summer afternoon, I perched myself on my desk chair, mulling over multiplication tables in a bridge workbook, eavesdropping about my father.
That would be years before he sat us down on another summer afternoon, in a different town, and clipped the fraying thread of our family.

Junkyard 3 Week 5

The light splices the red and creme couch arm.
A green blanket lies balled on the floor.
A coaster sits under the table and the cat scratches at the underside.
Andre the giant laughs as he lobs a boulder off a mountain.
The cat leaps to the windowsill.
A dog from across the street, wanders into our front yard
and leaves a nice pile in the leaves.
Ewan McGregor goes square dancing in limbo.
My roommate pours quinoa into a bowl on the counter
and mixes butter into the pan on the stove.
And my sister, in Alabama, buys sunglasses off Amazon
for herself for Valentine's Day.  And tomorrow,
Heath Ledger skateboards with sixteen year-olds.

Memory 1 Week 5

He said I've gotta have a routine.
But I watch James Franco play Darl
and cannot take Anse Bundren seriously--
Tim Blake Nelson's got no teeth,
and all I see is Dr. Pendanski.

She said she'll be okay, but not right now.
And I smiled to myself, thinking of you,
swimming to the bottom of the lake,
hat floating above the ripples, bobbing
with that sniffling grin, too selfish to say
you were wrong.

He said whiskey was lucky, and shoved
the glass under my nose, burning by gut
and throat for a minute. I said I didn't want
you, or him. I remember the cats outside
my window, whining. The blinking lights 
of someone's car. A half pulled down sock.

Junkyard 2 Week 5

So It Goes

Someone told me fear was a sin.
Well, baby, watching you crash
like a telephone pole in a lightning
storm, and wishing in my gut
that instead of splintered wood,
bone crushed on pavement. Asphalt,
mixed with brain matter, my shoes
splattered crimson. Fear,

unless the fear of God or some shit said
in Sunday School, means more
than a piece of stuck gum on the bottom
of new sneakers. The blue ones,
with white stripes on the sides, that you
bought for my birthday that year.
Less than the jumping off buildings,
or the petting of a feral cat in the backyard.
Baby, your fear kisses ass and sits
in the back of my head like calcification. 

Junkyard 1 Week 5

Beforemath

The thing is,
I feel about average. The inextricable
relationship, Greekless reader,
between articulating phenomena
and the day the Bastille fell,
is a crime. Unfortunate lower clerk,
a minor nation celebrated,
the horizon yawned, and no refund
removed. Instead, it drifted back inside you.
Back inside the mass if unobtrusive. 

Original post 2 week 5

The Ten Commandments of self love sit on a bench outside the TLC lecture halls, repeated in the minds of the girl in purple upstairs, who printed them out before leaving the house this morning. 

1. I shall lovingly accept myself as I am right now. 

2. I shall regularly give thanks for all my blessings. 

3. I shall appreciate the beauty that makes me who I am.

A boy in black understands nothing, but sits in class discussing his personal life, using it against Emerson and Thoreau, or Morrison and her book Beloved. Because he's beloved by his mother and forgets to set his alarm each morning. 

4. I shall trust in my ability to take care of myself. 

5. I shall not criticize others. 

6. I shall forgive myself when I make a mistake. 

My mother drinks to forget my father, her mother, and the empty beds downstairs. Her car leaks fluid in the garage while my father drives around in the backseat of a man in a suit, sucking on a mint, discussing children he barely knows. 

7. I shall not criticize myself. 

8. I shall be kind to others, without sacrificing my own needs. 

9. I shall take responsibility for my life. 

My sister pulls into my driveway in her best friends truck, lugging a duffel. She sits on my kitchen table, cross legged, eating a piece of chocolate cake with yellow balloons. 

10. I shall love myself to the best of my ability. 

I almost fall asleep to the sound of my hamster running on her wheel, while a bottle of apple flavored wine sits half empty in the refrigerator, echoing something I can almost hear under the silence. 

Original post 1 week 5

This came from the pre-workshop prompt put on the board using the lines: "to take the wrong road/is to arrive at...." 

To take the wrong road

Is to arrive at the end, where a man 

In a dark red hat smiles with crooked teeth

And those crooked teeth smile at each other

And no one knows where to look to find the beginning again. 

We wish for frost. For a yellow summer

Where responsibility doesn't quite absolve who we are

And who we are contains an other beyond the marks 

Of seagreen white. And nothingness is a hollow ring 

Thrashing the air, like a pelican caught in plastic. 

To take the wrong road

Is to arrive with a man who frowns at nothing,

At everything, and to whom tears are the rivers

On a map in his closet. Forever is an ember

On the asphalt of infinity. And the road, 

The right road, takes us on a dotted line. 

Junkyard 4 Week 4

*I sat staring at Facebook for a while, earlier today, and figured I'd try my hand at what Richard Jackson tried to do with his piece titled Facebook. But this time, I want to participate with Twitter.*

A rape victim from Vandy tells others they're not alone.
Click this link.
Amazon's 20% deal is promoted by Amazon, a wireless speaker.
Shop now.
Freddie Benson is a total babe, click to see his transformation.
30 tips for 30 days.
We all read about Vogue skiing in Iran, only to wish we could adopt a motherless pig
like that Sheepdog did in North Dakota.
@JessieJunior retweeted from BuzzFeed.
The world is bigger than we think. Without a follow, who knows you're there?
@BuzzFeed retweeted @BuzzFeedMusic with an article about @falloutboy's tour life,
which @haashleyha favorited. Poetweet, simple and elegant, is a bit glichy, someone notes,
while another ad endorses itself and a $9.99 deal on polka dot dresses it thinks I want.
Wind echoes outside, begging for rain, a break in the clouds,
to pattern our jackets with significance.
@amandagutterman does math with gun control.
8 things never to say to creative people.
I'm creative.
Also, not sorry Justin Beiber is a brat.
Or curious in Cookie's 28 fierce looks on "Empire."
Someone famous favorites a tweet from someone else famous, and two superheroes
start a riot with their Superbowl bets. The children benefit there.
#byefelicia #mydogdoestricks #RedneckABook
I need to follow these people on this left column because they mean something to the world.
Let me alert you when @HoodJesus tweets.
What's happening?

Junkyard 3 Week 4

I never remember falling asleep. It's one of those things that you just know you do because the comforter wrinkles in the morning and you open to some guy talking through wavelengths. Most nights, I wake up with my computer open, Netflix asking if I want to "continue watching, go back to browse, or play from the beginning." I click "continue watching" to see who Ross married in that episode, or what Monica needed to clean. Sometimes, my quilt ends up on the right side of my bed, crumpled and unused. That sinking feeling appears between 8:30 and 9, when I melt into the pillow and somehow the bed feels the warmest, like hot coffee, or the moment when you try to cool off your overheated computer on frozen legs.

Original Post 2 week 4

Based on the mad libs idea for "Frying Trout while Drunk" by Lynn Emanuel. 

Father is yelling to release a hatred

that could cover the potholes with distance:   

come with me he hollered and she floundered

in his breath, its warm devastation 

where her head swiveled 

in the underlines of yesterday. 

When I yell it is always 2010,

a song echoing from the radio in an Accord

and father, white knuckled in insults,   

leaving a scar from the driver seat

to the passenger of words and spit.

He is a smart, unfortunate man

in cahoots with a woman of green so crisp

you could snort forgiveness through it

and when you did nothing, I would forget to speak.   

I remember all of us surrounded at summer,   

the light slicing across the table,

and then mother’s napkin hitting the floor,   

wrapped chunks of chicken splattering like wine on a white shirt.   

When I yell I am too much like him —   

the fork in one fist and in the other 

the ring with a gleam faded as my iris.   

I have wished you all my life

she begged him and it was true 

in the same that all his life 

he yelled, focused to the want itself,   

he arched at this table

and with the hatred of the very quiet 

placed in front of him the ring.

Original post 1 week 4

Speak Softly, Big Stick 

"I know something but I won't tell" the girl with pigtails hollered 

over rope on asphalt, when a low riding Cadillac turned over 

in the next lot. "Three little monkeys in a peanut shell."

Rough Riding Roosevelt wrote Henry Sprague, between 

two pages of government, said: "if I had yelled and blustered, 

I would not have ten votes," waxing in New York's abandon. 

Alas. The world is nothing without wind, 

and only hummingbirds hover, unless dead. 

You understand nothing because knowledge is sin. 

New York in '01. Demeter refused trees to fruit until Zeus 

brought Persephone from Hades. The ground was hapless. 

Men on United 93 fought a fake bomb to the ground, 

pushing past the detonator and waiting carts of Coke and pretzels, 

taking a fire axe to the flight door.

This is based on what we did with "Adulterated" by Jack Gilbert. 

Memory 2 week 4

I survived childhood with an imaginary friend named Grophy, who extended as my Id.
I remember a playroom, where some light split the carpet into two colors, and my sister asked to play Barbies and I just wanted to kick ant hills on the curb outside.
She, still young enough to be manipulated, wouldn't understand when I hit her for interfering in my death counts, knocking her onto the curb grass in our front lawn. She wouldn't cry, merely stare wide-eyed and confused, until I bent down and hugged her, almost clinging to her sweatshirt. I was 8 and scared of my father, soft spoken but always threatening the belt or a hairbrush.
Apologies exploded, intentional word vomit blaming not myself, anyone but myself.
"Did Grophy hurt you?"
She nods, my heart aches with knowing I'm free again.

Memory 1 week 4

At seven years old, my family lived in Elgin, a small suburb of Chicago, where the smell of lilacs engulfed the block. The way the wind warmed your arm hairs and allowed the back of your neck to prickle if you sat in the shade of a cherry tree for too long eminating from every crevice in the asphalt.
I remember my sister, trying to tag along with my friends and me, as we rode bikes around the block. Lauren still rode a tricycle at this time, a handed down Barbie bike-- four years old, thinking she'd keep up. The way the back wheels rocked back and forth as she rode, hitting the cement one at a time as she wobbled, peddled too fast for her legs, too slow for ours, lingered as me and my friends swung around the corner, out of her sight. She called out for me, I know. She started to cry, I know. She stopped, I know, feet firmly planted on the concrete, wiping tears from her cheeks.
I popped a wheelie, this time leaving my friends, pedaling faster than before-- half in fear of my mother, my father, half in fear of that unmarked van we were warned about just last week in school: some stranger danger shit.

Junkyard 2 Week 4

While driving home last night, I turned past a flipped Mercedes, a passerby kneeling in front of the driver window, and three men with radios not directing my traffic. He flipped over the curbed mud puddle, avoiding some nonexistent animal or man walking along. Half-tempted to pull over and help, I instead parked in my driveway down the street and watched three deer feed on my dead grass. 

Junkyard 1 Week 4

The car in front hits a deer and speeds off, over the hill, towards the highway.
The car behind bumps over it again, the car behind again, the car behind again.
By the time my Accord thumps over, it's roadkill. Pink and fur splattering the two lanes.
I can't see the hooves, the ears, the nose or face.
In my rear view, I see someone slow, pull over to the side, look back and forth across traffic,
then bend over, pick up a tuft of a pink cotton sweatshirt, a jean pocket, a shoelace.
Back at home, my mother flips on the tv, calls me about I-285 being backed up to 400,
someone was walking along the highway.

Original Post 1 Week 3

Using the line "only through us and nothing changed" and "seagreen white" from "The Sun of Auschwitz" by Tadeusz Borowski.


It was Friday. The asphalt came raining down,
some earthquake of humanity in the middle of a desert.
My neighborhood, torn apart by weather, existed only through us,
and nothing changed. Even when you told me you loved
the idea of me, the idea of a swing on a tree in the front yard of a picket fence,
a dog chasing two stubby legs in Oshkosh around, thinking it a plaything.
In the plywood rubble, I thought of building on the sand,
rocks and grass obviously didn't work before.
Seagreen white can't be the color of the world.

Memory Post 2 Week 3

People apply for a drivers permit at 15. I, being a paranoid teenager, sat in the drivers seat of my mother's Honda Pilot one year earlier, staring at the knobs on the radio, afraid that if I touched something, the car would do something it wasn't supposed to.
My mother pulled open the side door, situating herself in the passenger seat. "Alright, start the car," she said while buckling.
I turned the key gingerly, holding a little too long.
Her face crinkled in pain.
 ...
We pulled into the parking lot and my mother decided, too late, that I needed to park next to the cart return.
"CRANK THE WHEEL. TURN. TURN. CRANK IT!" My mother hollered from the passenger seat. My brain stopped working for a minute and my right foot hit the gas instead, ramming the left side of the car into the cart return, lodging the wheel between the asphalt and the middle rod. The right side, somehow swung around to knock the parked Corolla in front of me six feet into the aisle. Finally finding the brake, I put the car in park and stared.
...
A woman in a pink sweater and jeans races out of the store, pushing a bag-loaded buggy. She blips the lock button on her key fob, testing to make sure, indeed, the intercom was correct; her car was hit in the parking lot. My mother opens the door, in official Mom-mode, with insurance cards in hand. I watch from the drivers seat; my front door won't open. Impact caused it to buckle, making a cracking noise, almost like a breaking bone. 

Junkyard 4 Week 3

A washing machine, three tires, and a rusted oven lie strewn across the field behind my house. An overhanging branch knocks my window every few minutes, almost talking with the pregnant cat outside.

In the truck in front of me on 166, there's a short blonde behind the wheel, a shorter baseball hat in the middle, and a brunette man talking in the passenger seat. He's "No. 1" and someone named Charlie died in 1986, according to the stickers on the back window.

The puddle in my driveway, at the top right corner by the garbage can no one empties, looks like the face of Jesus Christ.

Response to Ryan Silver's Junkyard 1 Week 3

This is a response to Ryan Silver's Week 3 Junkyard 1.


I love the very beginning of this: "Lilies and roses cover the death smell,
mixing with the pounds of beige makeup and formaldehyde seeping up the staircase that leads down to the cold metal gurney where Betsy lay four hours ago.
Danny inched forward, bumping blacks slacks, spinning into a purse- a fat old woman caressing him behind the ear and speaking with his mother like Danny was a new doll" because it's supremely descriptive while not being explanatory. I especially admire the "bumping black slacks, spinning into a purse" because of the sounds these words together make. There's a technical word for this, but I'm not good at remembering technicalities. I think is assonance or alliteration or something like that.
But anyway, from this point to the bottom, the piece shifts into more of an explanation of what is happening, what Danny is feeling, and I feel that to be something of a missed opportunity.

My first thought for the next draft would be to beware of "because." There’s this whole chapter in Writing Poetry that I can go into about how dangerous the word is, use it sparingly, blah blah. Sometimes it can be used well, but for the most part, the word explains too much. It makes the piece lose the illusion. Showing the puppet strings, you could say.
What about: “like Danny was a boisterous doll, anxious and shiny. Receiving friends now was the peak of the old heifer’s social life—Betsy (include here something she did instead) for the last decade. But Danny, who didn't care about anything else, only knew there was something in her bulging eyes and painted smile and that wide brim, too black for her pale face, that he hated more pure than an infant. ”
Or something like that. The "more pure than an infant" might be edging into cliche territory.
You’re still getting at the fact that Danny has no idea how to act at this funeral, or that Betsy did nothing with her friends, or that Danny hates her so much without realizing why, but you’re avoiding the dreaded “because.”
I love this scene so much, though, because funerals suck as a kid. You never know anyone and you have to be quiet while everyone else talks, so I appreciate the fact that this isn't from a first person narrative, but rather a third, allowing the reader and the narrator to be above the action, making emotion seem further from the piece.

However, for a further draft, I’d love to know the history between Betsy and Danny. Is she his grandmother? Aunt? Mother’s cousin’s step-sister? Not even related to him in any way? There's a sense of context that I think is missing here, and I'm supremely curious.
And finally, why does the lunch line come in? It’s not necessarily an erroneous detail, because it gives us a way to assess the age of Danny's character, but is it a pertinent detail? What do we lose if Danny starts tapping feet or some other kind of fidgeting? Or starts watching someone else in the crowd? Either that, or utilize the lunch line to get off the topic of the funeral...which might be even more interesting...
Just some thoughts.