Living on Air

Growing up my mom's diet consisted of meditation and grapefruit; I am accustomed to poverty. There is a grapefruit tree in Healdsburg, on the corner of Johnson, just north of the library. I go to the library on wednesdays as they are open until 20:00. I love libraries, all of them, especially the ones with books and periodicals. I saw the grapefruit tree much earlier in the season, september or october, and mistook it for an apple or pear. Upon closer inspection I find the yellow orbs of a citrus and that the tree us not pomaceous. Ignored, the tree and the fruit continued to hang and ripen, the branches grow heavy under their burden and hang close to the ground. Ten days ago at the grapefruit tree: It stands proud with dark glossy leaves in an empty lot. Liberating pounds of fruit into my grocery sack, I freed the tree of the burden of production without appreciation. There is an abundance of food here, growing and hanging and waiting to be eaten by strangers because most people are too nervous to eat the food that grows in their yard and would rather eat food that comes from a truck. I eat what I find and supplement my diet with the fresh eggs my neighbor gives me for keeping an eye on her goats. Though comfortable with basic survival, I wonder if it will always be this way. I remember back to my father and his liberty to do as he pleased, there is liberty in poverty, time becomes more important, the reality that time is all we really have. Time and love and the abstract idea that there is nothing outside of love and time.

Long Winding Roads are Scenic and Worth the Effort

Here it is Sunday morning, the week before Christmas. For those of you who know me and are a relation, jam is in the mail. For those of you who would like a jar of preserves, send me your current address and I will put a package in the post for you. If I am feeling particularly generous I may include a spoon so that you can stand in the sun, somewhere far away from here, with a mason jar in your left hand, a stainless steel spoon in the right, eating the fruits of this season thinking of me. These days I circle in closer to myself; I feel the touch of the starlings wings in my ear as their murmurations escalate into pulsing sculptures of light and silence, the air is redistributed and catches me up into the wind before settling me softly back below the oak that has lost most of its leaves, the one by the gully that needs to have the girder removed, you've seen it, you know. I move towards myself. Close to the surface, tears in moments taken alone course down my cheeks, cut through the dirt, oil, manure. Laughter fills my heart as I remember the touch of starlight on my soul.

Why people set their alarms and don't get up

Why do I wake up a little bit grumpy and rough around the edges on a perfect cold morning? I have everything I need (to survive) and thanks to the California food stamp assistance program, more than enough to eat. Food tastes funny on ebt; the cardboard coffee from Trader Joe's I was drinking for months was something I had learned to tolerate. I had stopped dreaming of french press stumptown or cellar door coffee roasted the day before, too dark to see through, rich with oil, hot but never boiled. All of that slipped into the past as I became increasingly inventive with my morning routine. I would have continued this from now until some other day, unseen looming on the horizon of my future had someone not told me that my coffee tasted like dirty socks. I was a tiny bit offended as I had even purchased 1/2 & 1/2 (a luxury of fat and flavor) to add to the brew. Attempting to create a drinkable cup of Trader Joe's coffee, I first tried a single cup pour over. Admittedly that was a grayish mix of hot water, milk, and with the subtle flavor of paper from the cone. Improving on that wasn't difficult. I began filling a mason jar with hot water and grounds and letting it sit for five minutes before sending it through the cone and filter. To me, this method was a huge improvement in the color, if not flavor of my mornings. The flaw was in the fact that one of my roommates decided that my two mason jars (one for brewing, one for containing) made great ToGo containers and started to take them to the barn everyday, at which point one broke, and since I am to old to keep doing other people's dishes, I had to find yet a better method. I moved to the soak simmer, which I believe is also called cowboy coffee, but since I am a civilized dressage trainer cowboy coffee sticks in the back of my throat and rubs the bottoms of my feet. This has become my preferred method. Put grounds in water, heat slowly to just below a boil, reduce heat, let stand and cool for a few minutes, filter through a fine sieve, add milk, day starts. Simple. There was the dalliance with an attempt at brewing a toddy like concoction. Soaking the grounds in cold water over night before heating them in the morning. I found this to be an extra step with no perceptible benefit. Yet, my morning still tasted like old socks and it was suggested that the weakness was neither in my preparation nor in my creativity, but was inherent in the dusty old beans. This is where ebt swoops in disguised as flavor-man wearing a mask and cape and offering me freshly roasted beans all for the price of pride and the color of my day will improve if I can just accept that I am poorer than dirt and let that be okay. I can let that be okay. My mornings, no longer stale, are filled with rich solitude and the sky before dawn.

Comfort the Fallen

I got the deep itch of doom last night, the sense that I am far (miles, more than five hundred) from family. It made me toss and turn, the thought of the world ending and me walking north towards an unknown border with few supplies and no knowledge of how to set a bone or suture a wound. The world can press down on my being; I must be lonely for rational life.

Slip into Wake

Between routine and compulsion is creativity My shadow leaps against the sky of my mind: it is fangs, talons, wings, and claws. I wait for it to surface; it is off hunting shards of glass, bits of rock, feathers, bones to fills my pockets. A slow voice speaks and (sonorous, lugubrious, oneiric) words flow in to fill the void which is not empty. Be still in this discomfort, be quiet in the night, sleep and dream, and wake now early before the light of day. Build a fire, build a dream, burn the dream into being across the backs of your eyes, and in that moment when the sun slits the horizon and all is ablaze with the thick light of late fall, pregnant with all the richness of the year and you are blind in that moment, yes.

with thoughts colliding, doors fall open

Needs Must

Fog from the creek coils up the valley and into my open window.

The meadow, where their laughter carried over the morning, is being readied for spring, manure worked into the soil, water lines set beneath, rows staked.

Planters and Harvesters, there is no rushing time

Quietly Dissolving into Air

I woke from a nap and behind my eyelids I saw all eternity for a moment blazing across the neurons of my brain.

Limitless

I woke in the morning one day not too long ago and the cacophony of one thousand song birds was so intensely titillating that I threw open my window to hang my head out with them in the first rays of light.

Dawn

I cannot get the smell of her perfume out of my nose. My head is aching from the manufactured odor of elegance.

Reveal

Position, No Action

We do without doing and everything gets done

Our bodies are full of thoughts, muscles carry memories and charges of electricity run through cells firing off commands much faster than one can comprehend. The first step is getting to place of intellectual knowing; the next letting go of knowledge so that the body can take over. My brain longs to control, my body responds with tension, the horse is uncertain of my request. My brain shuts down and is still for a moment, my body relaxes, energy flows, the horse moves in harmony. Simple.

Bent to Breaking

This week I am taking that which I hold precious and close to my heart, and redefining my perception of it in one week. It is pushing me to the edge, the breaking point looms, to be in a position where the less I know the easier and better off I will be, this is a time for unlearning, unwinding the ego, yet this is a process that must be handled delicately as if it is crushed all that will be left is a quivering pile of unfocused goo. I cannot describe fully how to unlearn years of learning, but it happens and I am grateful.

Serious Lounge

It is Sunday the eleventh of September: my first day off in a month. I woke at my normal time, quarter passed six, since then I have been lounging in bed drinking coffee in a clicker trance (I learned fancy diy nail-polish tricks that I will put to use in all of my spare time.). It takes 21 days to form or break a habit. I am not concerned that listlessly shuffling through websites will become a habit. Yet, progress calls! Rumors of an heirloom tomato festival and the fog of Bodega Bay lure me from my sheets.

Long-Term Agreements,

The natural state of entropy and disregard have their own gravity. I was three, possibly four, when the nightmares began. Giants would swoop in from the sky and hunt me through the forests and skies of my dreamworld. They would come alone or in groups, cannibals hungry to eat my nose. I lived in terror of sleep. One morning I was sitting outside of the cabin and using my thumb I was squishing black ants. I had no conception of life until this moment, when I realized how unjust it was for me to squish an animal simply because it was small relative my the largess of my three years. I stopped killing bugs and made an agreement to not take the lives of other beings. This week I cleaned the small barn so that the horse of my heart could move into safe, clean, welcoming environment. This consisted of removing years worth of cobwebs from the walls, ceiling, corners. If I were a witch who needed spider silk for potions, I would have had gallons of tensile thread at my disposal. I uncovered a spider larger than a silver dollar, her round black body shone in the unexpected light of day, her eight legs, talons, the telltale hourglass mark on her back. She was guarding the nest I had just swept away, "Please get on my broom so I can take you outside." She didn't listen and pulled her legs close into her body to appear less dangerous or even dead. I looked for a jar to transport her out of the area, no dice. I tried again to encourage her to come with me on the broom, she would not leave the destruction of her former nest. My heart sank as I realized that this was the worst moment I had faced in years, I had a real and absolute choice to make. Afterwards, I wept, moved her body outside, left an offering for the life taken. I said a prayer and thanked her for her ferocity, the care that she put into her home, and the power of her life to help me remember the promise I had made long ago to honor all life.

Shuffle the Deck, Take One, Pass the Rest

There are blogs about a lot of things: how to eat and dress, do a fancy side-twist braid; the importance of awareness; loads of blogs about babies and the people they boss around; sand-crabs of santa cruz; however there are not a lot of blogs about learning how to live with roommates at the ripe age of 31. I have no solutions to this, I am not about to start, but I can say that it is a new challenge for me to learn how to define what matters to me in a shared living environment and what is not worth bothering about (why do people not always think of things in same way that I do at all times in all cases and about all things? what a bore. It is a treat to live with new people, the challenge is real, present, and an honest delight. ... Things I love: ... bananas, hard-boiled eggs (foods that come in portion appropriate portable packages) ... and... half-cartons of eggs and six-packs of beer ... 137... Love, chaya ;:

The Road to Hell is a Bowl of Cherries

I had a friend, once, who arranged my refrigerator magnets to say "the road to hell is a bowl of cherries." I saved those nine magnets for years before the tide of progress caused me to through them in the goodwill bin.

Half-way there. Things are falling apart--my car is having electrical problems owing to the fact that the muffler needs new rubber bands so it is hanging on by a thread; the mechanics who last replaced my air-filter used the wrong size, so I have been cruising for the last 13,000 miles with basically no filtration; the #12 fuse keeps blowing up; the battery fell out of my computer this morning.

Mercury retrograde always hits me a few days late and all at once.

Yet all of this is simple and relatively easy to fix and I am here in Ashland, the town of $2.50 cup of coffee (they try to serve me single origin Ethiopian as if I will be please to drink the cardboard dust) and it is beautiful, amazing, and I am happy to be stranded here, if only for hours rather than days.

And, it's September, the air at five this morning was so chill that I had gooseflesh running up and down my arms. I slept with the doors open, under three woolen blankets, listening to the crickets, the creek, the stars moving across the dome of the sky.

Juxtaposed between departure and arrival I dance in this limbo to get comfortable with these feelings of frustration, addiction, emotion. I move into the day fresh as sleep falls from my eyes.

manifestation

Pulled from my notebook:

24 June 2011, I make my living riding, training, working with horses. This work is deeply meaningful to me and I am consistently amazed at the possibilities that continue to offer themselves to me. I work with a trainer who challenges, motivates (and may I add, respects) me. They are kind and generous with the animals in their care. The relationship is mutually beneficial.

At times I make a practice of writing out exactly what I want so that my subconscious brain and the universal id that makes shit happen line up.

Pulled from life:
12 August 2011, Offered the chance of a lifetime to work in a classical dressage barn in Healdsburg, CA.

Now, I am overwhelmed with all of this manifestation. On my list of physical things that I needed were living off the I-5 corridor, a better climate, living near a small town; my mental and emotional list be a horse monk; be able to bring my horse; be able to live on the farm; respect, value, love the people I work with and for; have a living stipend; have enough time to take it all in.

Every item on that list is covered, every damn one. When does that happen? overwhelming gratitude

Ticking Clocks, Off Time

In a previous life as a sensitive ticking clock phobe, this house would have driven me mad. There are no less than two ticks in the room where I sleep, three in the living room, one in the kitchen, and others scattered aesthetically through out the rest of the home.

This cacophonous din became white noise as I slept: through people arriving late in the night, through dreams disjointed dreams, through the anonymity of waking without a name to attach to myself the clocks remained vigilant. Waking as the sun cracked the eastern rim of the sky lighting the dew, the horse's backs, the spark behind my eyes.

I wake and feed the animals, make coffee, the air is damp and clear as I pick the manure from their paddocks. Tomorrow, I will ride before dawn.

Poison Rattles

I was three when I dreamed of compassion; I was four when I learned the cold hard truth of life; I was five when I knew that compassion and humanity are not happy bedfellows; I was five when I was kicked out of kindergarten for fighting.

The Rogue River was close to the place we were living in late spring of 1985. I saw dead salmon in that river. Huge teeth and a long tapered jaw, its teeth were black and yellow with age and rot. The salmon must have been spawning; it was bigger than me.

There was a mama duck. I found her nest in the cattails; I didn’t touch the eggs, she was my friend. I was fascinated with her concentration as she sat on the next but after all of the eggs but one hatched, I was so sad that I didn’t like watching her living ducklings because the one egg in the nest just sat there lonely abandoned dead.

I saw a lot of death that year. The worst was when the creepy Jesus Lovers killed the rattlesnake in the drive way. I was four, almost five, and we lived a studio above a garage in Grants Pass, OR. It was the first time we lived on a street, had a sidewalk, or neighbors. Our neighbors were also our landlords; they hosted revival style meetings in the garage on Sunday mornings. They would bang-bang on drums and sing to heaven about sin and salvation. I was pretty sure that everyone was their neighbor's landlord, right on down the block to the very end to the last house next to the park and those people were in charge of the park, that way everyone had someone to watch over them and keep them safe. Some boys lived next door, they had a grape arbor and taught me to swear with the biggest four letter word. I learned that if you say fuck your mother will swoop in with a bar of soap and teach you that words are so powerful that you have to eat lye to absolve their hold over you.

One day the landlords drove up with some of their friends. I stood up in the window watching them as they pulled a styrofoam cooler out of the back of their Lincoln. Tipping the cooler gently onto the baking driveway, the all stood in a circle as a snake twisted hissed coilded in the sudden light. In a flash, one of them had a jack knife. Running for the stairs, wailing nooooooo I burst through the door and into the daylight. The majestic snake in its final death twitch blood pooling. I ran at them and tears and mad and fists and why why why did you kill it? They told me, so that it wouldn’t get me first. But, they had trapped it and brought it home and slaughtered it right there for an eight ring rattle. That was their prize, and I’ll bet that they shook that rattle early sunday mornings as they worshiped Jesus and all his creation.

a fruit once plucked will never ripen

The tub was small, deep
and round, rather than
long and coffin like.
The water, pulled from
a cistern then sun
warmed, hid our legs below
the murky surface.

Upstairs, our parents smoked
joints
on the futon listening to
records. A narrow
window stretched from the
roof to the basement,
connecting
us. We shared a view
of an old gnarled

apricot tree. In
the green tiled tub our
toes turned from raisins
to prunes as scarlet
and fucia flamed,
a fire of sunset.
The fruit, still hard, green,
sour, hung silhouetted
in twilight ripening—
waiting to be eaten.

five years of stories, mostly lies

and as the note I wrote to myself (I leave notes for myself, so I don't forget to remember) says: mix truth with fiction, real with imaginary, to explain why I am here.

Here, There

The small bead pressed against the mound of her clitoris. He rolled the smooth and round ball over the tightening vessel. She broke against him, loosened from her body one fraction before she retracts; as a wave onto the shore, the edges of her being fell over his in an awakening; that forgetfulness of form carried them onto the sofa.

"As one drop this rain fed the root of my spine, and I, now more awaken, more livened, can step further from the bough and harbor my scent in a bottle."

"It will crash through walls and shake the sky. There is little to contain if not the wind of our minds, this breath already passes."

"Oh, union of senses! The breath inhabits none, the breath inhabits all: it is no more a limiter of time than that of the iron in our blood."

"Push onward now and return to the base sense of mortality, this is nothing, the invisible world of void and shadow dreams too far from this field I hold you, too, as the night moves perpendicular to day."

"Loneliness presses people, solitude taunts their substance; there, that the temptation for contact, charges them headlong to live in boxes with strangers."

"Friction creates heat and the bodies too closely packed flair personalities and discourage calm thorough thought."

"Feet on the sidewalk deafen the canals of ears and the heart beats too close to the throat."

"When nervous I feel the pulse in my sternal notch, it calms me, to know that my heart beats when my mind detaches and searches outside the room for respite. With the first two fingers of my right hand I count the push against my fingers."

"The sense in the fingers is not of the organ, nor the organ of the fingers, but that which is perceived lies in their union."

"My soul lifts and before making its journey across the firmament it moves between the mist and between clouds."

"I press a small bead against the raising notch of your clitoris as the first two fingers of your right hand touch the base of your throat and you shutter against me."

Dead Opossum

Wishes granted today

The horse and I walk down to his meadow and stop to watch a large turkey vulture tipping its wings on a thermal
before circling in and down and landing on the electric fence
slipping to the ground and sunning its huge wings in the paddock and then just as quickly up to nearby fir

I take the horse to the paddock and as we walk I see what the buzzard is eyeing
Opossum, freshly dead in the hogs-fuel arena
a thin grin of pointed teeth show around the still pink gums

I wince over its death and leave the horse to graze
Walking up the hill, I turn back and notice that the vulture has now landed on the carcass
Settling into the grass I watch from hundreds of yards away wishing I had binoculars

I walk closer and sit in the shadow of an alder
Far enough away to leave the scavenger to its feast
Close enough to have a view of the process

The first bird rips the belly open
and I imagine that the smell of fresh carrion is pulled up the thermals
two more birds join the event
one lands in the fir, the other chases off the first bird who joins the second bird in the fir

Two juveniles circle above and express their interest but make no attempts at a meal

The first bird opens its wings in the fir tree, stretches from wingtip to wingtip
and the wings must say something to the other birds about being huge and strong
because the juveniles fly off in search of an easier meal.

This commotion of stretched wings
and the masculine display of feathers
is too much for the female sharing the fir
she flies across the valley and takes refuge behind the mottled shade of an oak

The first bird, alone again in the fir
Swoops down to god's table
and the other bird does not fly off but steps back
as the female soars down and lands on the opossum spine

Her mate keeps the competition at bay as she gorges on intestines, fascia, organs
She shares scraps with her companion

All of this I watch for hours, until there is nothing left, not even bones
and all I can think of is the poem by Robinson Jeffers,

Vulture:

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, “My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.” But how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him.
To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes–
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.

tell me more

I lose myself and the questions at the forefront of my mind which go unasked; I, too, lose thoughts and words that I imagined saved yet skip from the peripheries into the abyss of thoughts not-to-be-remembered; the quick shift of a key those words, thought safe, return to the sea of mind from which they sprang: Little lost, nothing found.

Tell me, tell me all that can be unspoken

Poets, who speak clearly with less

I am on a rampage: Tearing through anthologies, looking for a poet who says what is in my heart; if they say it, I won't have to expose my bones and I can pick over theirs.

Scavenger, that is me.

My arm tastes like minerals, raspberries, dust, sunscreen; I squint against the backs of my eyes and catch the sun's orb silhouetted against the lids.

The horse moves over the July grass in search of clover and shade. I sit astride holding a thin piece of rope that attaches to the leather of his halter. Sweating his hair mats and sticks to my bare legs. I wait, he eats, clouds and birds roll across our horizon

Hot in the Vein

My stomach shifts in my midsection and I cannot tell if it is dread or disease as I stare at the online application page for a new credit card. Dread. I close the browser. I will not go there, yet, but fucking close; the distant walls are ever changing.



Paper, pencils

Collect cobwebs.

Shearing time

Peals waken

Rending

Moments ripen

Split

Join anew

Eating Crow

Well if I was a carnivore, crow would be the last thing I would eat because those highly intelligent birds would stalk me all over the city and my life would spiral out of control.

That being said I am making a horizontal list right here (colon) rip every single thing out of my room and then put it back in a nice way (semi-colon) keep it all together (semi-colon) keep waking up before six for the rest of my life (semi-colon) find something that makes sense of all of this confusion (semi-colon) learn how to identify the questions before trying to answer it.

Living life through a fractured lense (and yes, I checked, it is okay to have an e on lens, it's better that way, for me, more clear and really what else matters?) takes a toll. I am looking forward to being able to focus and direct my energy toward a specific target, in the mean time, I hope to find ways to express how truly grateful I am for this human experience. It seems that more wildly unpredictable it becomes, the more the steel fibers in my heart soften, the deeper the sorrow the greater the joy. When I find a way to describe that everyday, I will be getting closer to asking the right questions

June is more than summer

This tide is momentous and perhaps at some point the high will match this low. As this year progresses, I learn that there is no way of knowing or holding onto water or sand, I work to flow out and disperse into the greater waters of the ocean. I fantasize about floods, their hunger for low laying lands and trailers. Floods are things of beauty which cannot be suppressed. Fire, in its consumption of all things which leaves only charcoal ash soot, shoots fear to my bones. Fire is individual, a flood is bad luck and low lands.

So this tide that carries me, I drift on it.

I lose my second job of the year, the third of my life, this is not a year for having jobs if you are me and I am, so I don't have jobs. Again, fine, and better still, because the sucking of marrow from the inside of my bones to deliver it into the waiting maws of man ends.

So catch my breath, find a minute, breath deeply, and wonder about all of this.

standing in the dark

Every few months my sleep health goes to hell and my days turn into endless streams of lost moments and missed opportunities. I wake drenched in sweat, legs trapped in my sheets having forgotten my name and hoping that the stranger in the bed next to me doesn't mind my nakedness. Heart in my throat, my eyes search the dark room for clues, until slowly I come back into my body which has been sleeping in the same bed next to the same stranger for years.

I push pull my mind now. I heard a quote from a famous man whom I will not attribute as I have no desire to fact check and the last time I failed to fact checked I got checked publicly for not doing my research: "When your dreams turn to dust it is time to vacuum."

It is father's day. I love you.

unwashed vs prewash*td

Time in all its glory follows the sun. It is no small act of truth that time in all of its implications is uniquely personal. My time is marvelously slow and as minutes linger under the beading rim of a glass, I know my skin over bones hides more than it reveals.

There exist one pair of cut-off levi's, faded, almost white, loose around the pockets and thighs; one black tshirt with printing, including, and, yet not limited to the search for Carmen San Diego, a graphic, and a streak of turquoise oil paint; one gray graphic tshirt which can never be washed, a sliver ghost to hang smock like over my torso; one pink and yellow tie-dye, worn down to sheer threads: That is love.

Time is in those clothes. Their folds hold the soft scent summers past, long warm nights that dipped into the mind of a tomorrow that has never unfolded. These shirts are crickets and roller skates and speed and the rolling years, years of ambiguity, there is moon in the fibers and sun too, and when I wash them all of that gets a little further from my fingers and my eyes see less and heaven knows I remember much less than I hoped.

New Faces

I wish I knew you, knew your life, what it looks like each day. What your bliss is, if I knew that I would wager that we'd be friends. The world is so big small, and, yet, each day, I struggle to connect.

Transitorily Honest

I consider myself to be an honest person. Most of the time. I cheated on a test, once, in college. It was my second term at community college and I was figuring out the ropes of how to juggle the grief of my father's death with the academic rigor of a twelve credit term. I took night classes and kept my mouth closed. I pulled A's for the first time in my life. I don't know what I did during the days besides sleep and ignore the pounding hangovers my insomniac brain demanded.

Is that even honest? Honesty is a mistress of opportunity, she ages well and if not provoked to rage will offer lessons in reality. At that time, I was as honest with myself as I possibly could be. The trappings of truth I invented kept me safe from too much self harm and away from desperation. Now, I look back and with the clarity of time can see a different truth, the truth of the broken spirit that needed spring to come with warmth and flow blood up through my veins and into my heart. The heat of those March days crept into the ice and thawed out my bones, steam rose from my feet as they touched the ground, and that is lucky for if we spend too long frozen our souls will be trapped under ice and may forget to surface. That is what happens with time, the pain, while no less tangible becomes less visceral and safe to look at, to inspect the shards of ice beneath a microscope to learn that ice is teaming with microbial life.

With frozen veins I made way in and out of class rooms. I showed up physically into rooms full of strangers and sat in hard chairs under florescent lights which hummed inside my ears. The sound pulled me out of my body where I would wait for a chink in my thawing veins and reenter my body disoriented and unsure of my surroundings. I fell in and out of my body. Time moved forward without me. I cheated on a test. Time was so slow and my body so light that I hovered above the room looking at answers, marking my sheet correctly. It was terrible to do so well as the professor wrote out our rankings on the board. "And, one of you," he said his voice full of pointed accusation, "Received one hundred percent." That was me, I shrank into my chair. I am not supposed to be seen and now all the eyes in the room shift focus on to me and I am visible as their eyes cast disbelief in my direction.

I had to study so hard after that. To ensure a repeat performance when one cannot rely on out of body experiences to succeed, one must take notes and study notes and spend hours examining them from every angle.

Dishonesty took more work and even if no one knew, I did, and it was wretched. I proved nothing only that I had to overcome more isolation as the space between me and my peers grew ever wider. So I studied and read and sat on the earth warming my legs and felt the breath of summer on my neck and melted into the body of flesh.

Gravel

Leggings as pants are wretched, we all know that, right. So tell me, how does the girl packing an extra 35 pounds not know that?

More than leggings I despair when I am faced with the thought that I may not have enough creativity to manage getting through this month with my tongue as I am growing sick from biting it. The inside of my cheek is welted from my incisors; it is the holding of thoughts that drives my teeth into my tender flesh. That sounds morbid and it is not entirely untrue.

More than the taste of pennies, I hate when I am a coward. I am a coward now because I am biting my tongue instead of speaking up and saying what I believe to the few people who need to hear it. It is an adult decision not to call someone out, ask them to sit down and have a conversation. I suppose that I could write a letter I never send, or I could burn an effigy, or, like a normal person, drink too much.

Until I realized why I was so damned angry. I was mad because I felt my power stripped away. By being 'let go' from my not so reliable, horribly underpaid, working almost for fucking free for a year without so much as a thank you very much, I felt myself adrift on the wind of chance and it scared the living shit out of me. When change is forced upon me, I tend to spiral.

What an opportunity to recognize that no one has the ability to dictate my response. What a chance to realize that I am now more in control. In the odd twist of fate the awakening to the fact that I do have a choice even while my options are being limited. It is not that I am no longer angry, but I recognize that I am not beholden.

Also, for the record, I think that people tell all kinds of stories to make themselves okay. Self reflection is not a quality for those weak of stomach and tender of bone.

And finally, I dreamed I had cloudy vision as if my dreams were out of focus.

Rock's Bottom Line

Braiding twigs, straw, smoke and mirrors together I made a life. I thought that I could run a little faster than my shadow, but as we all know shadows are tricky and have a way of leaping from behind bushes, scaring horses, exposing a chinked chimera fastened with duck-tape and putty. Now exposed my shadow feels better and is doing a great job making me work harder to have less.

I convinced myself that I need a truck—a big fat fuel monster to haul horses to expensive events where their coats would glisten in the sun and my boots would be polished mirrors—with some hesitation my bank said okay, I with no hesitation said yes. I told them, hey no problem, I've got this and I pretended that it would. But now, oh now the pain of a beast with no hope for resolve, gulping fuel I can little afford. It is my own little budget ceiling and I have hit it.

The plan is simple--sell the beastly truck for pennies on the dollar--take the hit of a poorly invested venture and add in the depreciation and I'm talking thousands of dollars lost. But, that's what it is now, people everywhere have lost thousands of dollars, I am not alone on the Titanic.

But no one wants a truck a big beastly truck. Especially now and especially not from a young lady who can barley put boots on. No it's not that, what it really is is that it's not no one who buys trucks. Men buy trucks and my flitzing floating voice over the digital wires throw them into a state of shattered world view and no one with a shattered world view spends money on a truck.

So now, what now? Maybe I'll start advertising, 'this rig is being sold by a lady,' or as my brother kindly suggested pose in a camo bikini on the hood of the truck, or maybe just put my husbands phone number on the add, because at this point the sexism is not the point of the bottom line.

Fine.

I was what, seventeen, sixteen? who knows now, riding shotgun while my mom drove five miles under the speed limit, "Chaya, how are you?"

The ubiquitous 'fine,' seemed less than satisfying to my mother who replied, "I don't remember what the eFF stands for, but Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional."

Well, now I know, Fucked Up completes the acronym and am happy to say that I am far from fine, I am dandy.

spilled milk

Sundays are slow. A day for books and easy meals, movies, and rain. I made macaroni-and-cheese from a box last night: a little garlic and olive oil in a pan, heated to allow the garlic to sweeten, shell shaped noodles, milk, the cheese packet, a little grated cheddar, a little sour cream to be sure that everything blends. I steam a bunch of kale on top of the noodles while they boil and it's a ten-minute meal until milk is spilled down the cabinets, into their drawers, on to the floor, under the edge of the stove.

I hear my mother's voice tell me not to cry over spilled milk as we sit in the dollar movie theatre.

I am eleven, maybe, or twelve, possibly I am ten. It is a big event for us to go to the movies. We drive ten miles north up I-5 to Medford, she must have had something to do there that afternoon. Twenty years is a long time to remember clearly.

The dollar movie theatre, the house of the second run, no longer on the blockbuster list, not eight dollar movies, dollar movies are for people who want to go but have to wait till the market weakens. I harbored a fear of being spotted there, miles away from home, by someone I knew or even a someone I didn't know, but was my age, that they would mock our poverty.

I got a small soda, which cost more than the price of admission. It was a sprite, I have never liked 7-up, but sprite is cold and clear and clean, it doesn't leave the taste of chalky vitamins in your mouth. I got real soda with cane sugar in it maybe twice a year. My mom was a real stickler for not allowing sugar in the house or in my mouth, so it was a big event. Soda at the movies is expensive and I felt the double pleasure of seeing a feature film and drinking a forbidden beverage slip through my hands, down my seat, and spill over the slippery floor.

Tears came. Not that I had spilled and was ashamed of the childish action. But that I had wasted my mother's money and my moment with her, that I had been clumsy and it had ruined my opportunity to forgot our poverty in the darkness of the dollar movie theatre.

"Don't cry over spilled milk," my mother said as I held my breath in my hot throat. If I could hold my breath long enough I could stop crying. I knew that. She bought my a new soda as easy as that and it tasted good on shame.

Easy come, easy go.

comestible

Sometimes I think in words and pictures that my brain cannot unwrap. They live inside the marrow of my skull looking to export themselves, but my fingers and eyes shift the meaning as they join the world of dense matter. No matter, they are fodder for my soul.

living it

I haven't sat down to write in one hundred hundred days. I don't know how long, not that it matters, not really.

I will now, though, sit here, and write. I believe that the moon must be in a house of communication as I am full of words and organizing and filling in small numbers in my checkbook ledger. My room is no better for it, still a rampant mess.

The blood bank called and needs blood, 14,000 units down nationally, and it's my duty as a citizen to be a hero and save a life. So I will take my bones and blood to the bank and they will jab my arm with a hollow needle while I sit pumping life into a small bag. Then I'll have a hot chocolate and a box of raisins. Raisins are high in iron, for those of you who are anemic.