10.05.24
Week 40
A dark square room with crimson colored walls.
A spotlight shines,
a hand appears—palm up,
holding a red crayon.
The VO says, "This is from your migraine."
9.28.24
Week 39
Pirulinpinpina!
Amy Sedaris for the win, again.
Julio Torres, let's marry.
I dreamt of family.
It wasn’t all bad.
Rest remains a mystery.
Had a good day with horses.
Darby’s got a pony.
He never wanted to be a father.
It’s hilarious and heartwarming.
“I’m not going to wait for the bus anymore,
I’m going to walk.”
9.21.24
Week 38
While vacationing with my mother in a cobblestoned European villa, we stumbled upon an archway that led to a grand operatic room, like the Green Room in the Veterans Building—Beaux-Arts, chandeliers and mirrored walls, gold curtains and 24 karat gold leaf. Except this room wasn’t green, it was painted the softest, palest pink.
My mother and I rushed to the far end of the room, toward a broken arched window above a grand piano with its lid propped open. Water filled the space behind us, turning the parquet floor into a lake. My mother, not knowing how to swim, panicked. She insisted I do something, but she didn’t know what.
I got ahold of a small canoe and paddled out toward the archway, but the canoe quickly took on water and sank. I decided to sink with it. Outstretched like a body set in a narrow coffin, lungs bereft of air, I let the cold water entomb me, keeping my eyes open until the light from the chandeliers flickered away.
When I resurfaced, my mother had gone. I swam to shore and found you waiting for me by a staircase that led to a platform swarming with vicious snakes. We beheaded the snakes with longswords we kept in our backpacks and ran happily away. <3
9.14.24
Week 37
Spindly buck rubbed trees in a Wild West town at night. Café lights zigzag across the only street in town. It’s a night of celebration. Horses are led into saloons and storefronts. Someone explains, “It’s bring your pet to work day.” The horses rear and buck in the narrow doorways, then settle down and clomp inside. Heavy hooves on timeworn boards. The air is celebratory. There are smiles. Men say “I love you” liberally, but refrain from making promises. Some women are contented, some are confused. Some women sing loudly and hop from one man’s lap to the next. Others pace the dusty Main Street and sit forlorn on dirty porches. I am inside and outside a saloon—a happy, sad woman, unsure and satisfied.
9.7.24
Week 36
After an hour spent interviewing Rebecca Mendoza as a potential food columnist, I decided I did not like Rebecca and therefore could not recommend her for the job despite her popularity and published works, all of which I found boring, predictable, and uninspired; however, Rebecca was given the job of food columnist and my rejection of her application resulted in my demotion to a lesser job on a lower floor where I was trained on "how to game" by a balding red head with pale skin and freckles.
8.31.24
Week 35
I’ve been sick/sickish since Wednesday, August 21. I’ve been taking medicine since Friday, August 23, sleeping a lot and ceaselessly dreaming.
On the night of Sunday, August 25, a cadre of mean girls stole Henry and replaced him with other dogs. They were nice dogs, but they were not Henry Dog. I begged them, “I just want my Henry back.” The mean girls would laugh and flee the scene on jet skis. I started saying, “I just want to get out of this dream. Please, let me out of this dream!” But I couldn’t wake up and began to think it was real. Eventually, I was brought by bus to Denver International. I wore a vibrant track suit and had no money. I put my backpack down to call “Someone” for plane fare. While I was on the phone, my bag was taken. A mother with a stern face pointed to a sign: See something, say something. “But that was my bag,” I told her. “I was only making a call.” She gathered her children and brought them inside a Smashburger. When I went to find my bag, I realized my hips were broken and I could only walk sideways, like a crab. Every step I took was filled with pain. Again, I said, “I just want to get out of this dream. Please, let me out of this dream!” I cried and felt sorry for myself.
Monday night, I stood in a sea full of ship wrecks and capsizing boats. I was aboard each ship and boat, standing on their hulls wearing my long wool coat as they sank. Later on, I was stranded on a desert island watching the ships wreck and boats capsize and all the people in long wool coats go under.
On Tuesday night, Harrison Ford kidnapped me and brought me to a spiraling underground lair he had filled with imprisoned women dressed in orange jumpsuits. He fed us beans, chicken fingers, and fries, and would slap our hands if we ate too much. “You’re getting fat!” he’d yell. “Fatso! Fatso!” he taunted. He injected us with something called: Immunity. It turned our ears red and made us puke green. At one point, I managed to escape in a gold sedan with upholstered seats and a pineapple air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, but Harrison tracked me down and ran me off the road in his armored dump-truck.
Wednesday night I was forced to complete my friend’s husband’s art project and drink tequila grapefruits naked in a bathtub while she pet a kitten she kept on a pillow inside a laundry basket, all the while arguing with her husband, both of them insisting neither could do anything on their own. “You’re helpless!” she’d yell. “You’re helpless!” he’d yell back. It went on and on until the scene faded to black. In the next scene, I awoke wearing a pants suit in a brightly lit, minute classroom with another woman with long blonde hair wearing a matronly, floor length, red dress. I was there to hang my friend’s husband’s art project for the school's art show. The prudishly dressed woman kept asking me if I needed help. I told her, “No, I’m fine” and she would say, “You don’t look fine” then criticize my choice of adhesive. “That won’t work,” she’d say. “The bond isn’t strong enough. Let me do it.” “No, I’m fine.” “You don’t look fine.” And so on…
On Thursday, I worked with an underground counterculture group. Save The Whales meets the Weather Underground. The group was composed of old coworkers from different jobs, all of whom I liked. We wore dark gray coveralls. There was a lot of belaying, ascending, rappelling, and red paint pouring. We climbed towers, often right before dusk. The group had been at it for a while. I was new. I felt like I wasn’t fully understanding the message. I think we were diverging. There was a lot of on the ground movement, hunched over running down sidewalks full of wide cracks with tall weeds and grasses growing out of them. I remember the look of my bootlaces. I remember the green of the grass blades. I remember the group felt envious and inspired.
Last night, Friday into Saturday, I had the displeasure of working at a hospital. Fortunately, I worked in a side wing by the receptionist in a no-loose-body-fluid area, it was free of frenetic energy and that non-stop beeping, it had soft lighting and comfortable armchairs, it was warm and smelled good. I was responsible for the intake of at-risk teens. The teens were kind. I bonded with one. He was very tall and his parents didn’t approve of his lifestyle, which included wearing lots of bracelets and dying his hair blonde. He was snarky. Earlier on, I was at an airport I did not recognize and a man followed me down an escalator and pinched my butt cheeks. Later on, I was driving down Elmwood toward Reservoir when I noticed a side street that had recently been repaved. I pulled over, took out my skateboard, and rode down that sweet, smooth, unsullied road to an ice cream shoppe, where I ordered a vanilla frappe with chunks of Snickers and entered to win $742. The man next to me was on a first date. He was very proud of his date. She went to the bathroom to wash her hands and while she was gone he collected trash—napkins, Snickers’ wrappers, straw sheaths—signed them, and put them in his pocket as keepsakes.
8.24.24
Week 34
You have a special power — you can go between worlds. The worlds you choose are your life above ground and your life below ground, where I am, stuck in a rich tropical condo with rich people wearing rich clothes drinking rich wines. I can’t get out. They want me to pay for the wine they've served me, they also want me to clean up after them, they also don’t care, they just like to tease. It’s a game for them, "What insult will make her go shoo?"
When you are below ground, you spend your days at the piano. I spend my days fretting about, ape-like, scurrying from room to room, finding refuge in closets and large pots. I lose the keys and everything else. I'm forever lurking, looking through wooden slats, peering around corners.
One night, you play music at a narrow bar. The walls are painted red. You wear my bathrobe. A woman likes you. She cozies up to you. You don’t care one way or the other. All you care about is playing the piano.
My lips and chin are stained red like I’ve bitten into something fleshy and gotten messy with it. My hair is unkempt and falls from my elastic like a tumbleweed. I search inside a tote bag for the keys, even though I know they're not there, even though I know exactly where they are — on top of a snowbank in a time and place that is far from here, a distant past, the vision disembowels memory:
I spy with my little eye a red ribbon tied to a skeleton key like a piece of iron atop a pool of blood. I lean forward and nab the key with my mitten pincers.
8.17.24
Week 33
In one of those dreamy void-like places, songs flash like fireworks. I breathe in a desert roadway and exhale a car.
We stand on the side of the road admiring the car's boxy shape and cream color; music bursts above. You encourage me to repot the leggy inch plant in the car's engine block, noting: "The vine will climb up the antenna and when it reaches the top it will glow." You flick your fingers by the side of your face like blinking lights. "You will never lose the car."
8.10.24
Week 32
The woman with the long coat dreams of an early afterlife.
The man still dreams of horses.
There is a perforation in the sky.
Widening it requires Kelly clamps and scaffolding.
Saliva seeps profusely. The corners of mouths are crystalized.
It is impossible to find permanent housing.
Expectant mothers smoke cigarettes and gather beachside.
They rock strollers like they cook hams, knowingly.
On the horizon sits a beetle. Green iridescence beats yellow to a pulp.
I want desperately to be inspired.
"Here," calls the monkey. "Here."
I think exclusively of cake.
A mama sparrow does something with its teeth.
If it bears fruit, it's well hidden and red.
I'd like a wonderful thing to happen.
A lucky streak or a windfall.
8.3.24
Week 31
Per usual, the party takes place at night in a modest ranch house in the middle of an amber field of grain. The twelve foot tall woman stands by the front door holding a pair of kitchen shears and a glass orb. She wears a long, loose-fitting paisley dress and as people enter the house she sways on her abnormally long legs so the skirt of her dress billows about and she appears as a harrowing bohemian specter.
There are many two-faced persons at the party. People with pointed Spy v Spy faces, sickly thin, and tightly dressed. I am stuck or perhaps hiding in a bathtub when the old two-faced hero walks in the room to “rescue me” (his words).
“What are you doing here?" he asks. "You don’t belong here. Let’s go.” He nods to the door and shows me a world that puts me on top. “Come on, you’ll have everything. Let’s go.”
He treats the space around me as not a space. His chest has widened since I’ve seen him last and his face has ballooned like an inverted teardrop, taut with sunken eyes and bruised darkness cast beneath them. He looks at me with a pitiful desperation, sorry for my state but sorrier still for his own. The encounter looms on the edge of predator and prey, and it is unclear who is doing the rescuing. I get the impression that he will absorb any energy I put out and use it as fuel for an ensuing attack he will inevitably launch as soon as his current act of heroism grows stale. To elude him, I leave the bathtub for the pool.
The pool is outside on a concrete ledge with a view of a crowded valley busy with aspens and peaks. The old two-faced hero follows me to it and is disturbed by what he sees. The scene is not good enough, not clean enough, not hip enough, not rich enough; nobody knows who he is here. The two-faced partygoers slouch around the pool. They are drunk and sloppy and seconds from embarrassment. Again, the two-faced hero says, “Let’s go.” The urge to follow is strong — I want to get out of here, I want to see the world with me on top — but I have followed this “hero” before, enough to know whatever world he puts me in, I’ll only be a doll.
I swim deep underwater toward a hidden cave to rest. There are chalk drawings on the cave walls, indecipherable lines, crosses, and exes that swirl together when examined, deliberately blurring any sense of understanding. A sodden seaweed mat lays out before me. I curl up on it and take a nap and when I awake I am overcome by an intolerable need to fuck.
7.20.24
Week 29
I dreamt we held hands. We went for a walk and you apologized for your calluses <3
7.13.24
Week 28
The world is in pursuit of the number 200. A group of us gather in a house and wait for the world’s parade to pass by, and when it does, we follow along.
We are brought to a small home with a grand kitchen, a table is at the center, on which sits a vase of wildflowers positioned beside a coffee pot. Fresh coffee is brewing. We pour ourselves a cup, then leave the house for the couple that comes next — a young couple in expensive dress, leather shoes, and expertly coiffed dos. They arrive on bicycle, the woman rides sidesaddle.
En route to the next location — a cottage by the sea — I leave the parade for the moors. Patches of grassland appear here and there, but mainly the land stretches out in a frozen gray whiteness. Slush and semi-frozen rivers traverse the landscape. It is daylight, the sun shines brightly, the moors glisten in snow. I run to a patch of purple heather, toward an oncoming summer, close my eyes, and outstretch my arms.
On the run back to the cottage, I leap over the slushy, semi-frozen rivers. At one point, mid-leap, I'm aware I’ve miscalculated my jump, I won’t reach the other side. My foot slips on the semi-frozen riverbank and I plunge backward through slush.
The water is white and cold, rather, I know it's supposed to be cold, but in reality, it's warm. I wrap my arms around my chest and sink deeper and deeper, watching the sun on the surface slip out of sight. I know to stay alive I need to swim to the surface, I know this is expected of me — to swim to the surface, to climb out, to run to the cottage, to join the others, to stay above water. But I like the silent descent, I like this slipping away.
7.6.24
Week 27
The world is gray, slick, a dirty knife. The shops are cloistered, set away on a single street in a town the color of the sea. Most shop windows are boarded up, some have unlit neon signs, their curved shapes hang like exposed plumbing. There is a saloon with no one inside. Behind the bar is a dark corridor that leads to a red velvet room. There is an ice cream parlor with a navy blue awning with a Neapolitan ice cream cone decal in the center, above the vanilla scoop is the number 27. A block letter poster stapled to a street pole reads: GUERRA. The streets are empty, not an animal in sight. The only sound comes from wind sifting through invisible leaves. The vibe is stasis. Like a rolling plain, a drive through Nebraska after it rains, a wild stretch of land and waving grasses, asleep then slowly waking on a county road the day after a great something.
6.29.24
Week 26
In the Land of Laundry, a man is at the center. He lives in a gloomy high-rise, bags of laundry cover his floors. He has a washer and a dryer, which you can use while he's away.
6.22.24
Week 25
The act begins in a screened in front porch facing a fictional city street that is half Oakland, half Providence. The sky is California blue, the air is warm and smells of honeysuckle; bougainvilleas grow liberally. The grime is Northeast claustrophobia, toxic masculinity, entitled girl derisiveness, and arrogant persons pompous in their versions of cool and correct, assured they've discovered "it" first.
I sit in the porch working on a computer, an enormous iMac I can't believe I own. Through the screens, I watch the sidewalk traffic — people stepping in and out of cars, people rolling heavy trash bins down their driveways and setting them on the curb. Every now and then someone walks by talking on their phone and I overhear snippets of conversation. One woman with graying hair is concerned about funding, another woman wearing black pants tells her mother, "I'm working on it, ma." The sun sets and the sky turns gray and suddenly I am consumed by thoughts of theft. Why did I set up my computer out here? There is no lock on the screen door! I rush inside to find a solution.
No longer lit by sunlight, the living room furniture turns monstrous. High back armchairs and tall cupboards blot the room as towering shadows with strong gravitational forces. Through the darkness, I discern a human form sitting on one of the armchairs. It is a man in a black T-shirt. He has black hair and broad shoulders. He holds a shotgun. He's yet to notice me. He places the butt-end of the shotgun on the floor between his feet and puts the muzzle in his mouth. He struggles to reach the trigger. He tries curling his shoulders downward to extend the length of his arms, but still, he cannot reach it. He tries again and again and again, and then he notices me.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"I'm going to kill myself," he says.
"Don't do that," I tell him.
"Then I'll kill you," he says with a smile, then chases me throughout the house.
I run to the bathroom and curl up on a ledge in the tub; hidden by the shower curtain, I wait for him to find me. His heavy feet plod down the long wood floor hallway, getting closer and closer; he laughs and he whistles. My stomach is a cinder block. My mind races in terror. My heart beats a swollen pain with the familiar pulse of loss. When he busts through the bathroom door, he knows, as I know, he's found me.
"Ready?" he says. Through a tear in the curtain I see him standing there on the tiled floor. He is enormous — tall, broad, the weight of him is silencing.
"Don't do this," I tell him.
He raises the shotgun to his shoulder and pushes the shower curtain inward with the muzzle.
"Don't do this," I plead and he laughs. Through the tear in the curtain, I see his wretchedness — an embodiment of hate, privilege, and power. A body that greedily, happily, without-a-second-thought takes and takes because it's never learned to stop itself.
Cemented in place by fear, my heart slows and my mind accepts the inevitable moment that will either be or not be now. If the moment is not now, this terror will ripple through all that's left of my time, haunting each shadow with a gravity strong enough to absorb me in orbit. But if the moment is now, this terror will end and a great unknown will follow, and it is this finality combined with the curiosity of what comes next that changes my fear to relief and terror to peace.
Perched on the ledge of the bathtub, I relax and face the muzzle.
6.15.24
Week 24
Lots of dream action. Short skits. More tunnels, and wading and rowing through waterways. Multiple moments with vibes like the falling: A MAGA prep boy infiltrated my protest, pretended he cared. Took footage on his mirror phone. Laughed when I told him to stop. His rich girl counterpart attended, too. She took my diary, copied it, recited it, stole my ideas, pretended they were hers, giggled an atrocious sound. I told them both to go straight to hell, then boarded a ferry to the Frisian Islands, walked around deck, fell overboard, climbed back on, stood on the prow, looked into a blue gray mist with less anger and intense purpose.
6.8.24
Week 23
A group of us go to the middle of the country to get away for the weekend.
In the middle of the country there are underground castles and moats. We break into homes by popping out window screens and climbing inside. A thick-legged black spider crawls across a windowsill then hides in a split in the wood. My dress is short, black, and sheer. When I pass a mirror I see the inverted triangle outline of my underwear. I am impressed by the perkiness of my ass; the more I work with horses, the finer it gets. We make our way through a labyrinth of underground waterways lit by wall sconces. Candlelight flickers on dark water, the cobblestones and walls glow faintly orange. I have been here before. I am an expert in American Medievalism and quickly become the guide, leading the group like a gondolier through Venetian canals. The vibe is forgetful, irresponsible. The notion is discovery.
I wake with a Hail Mary earworm: Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
6.1.24
Week 22
Last night I dreamt of my cancer. It started on my face. Red dots appeared and took over my cheeks and forehead then my skin disappeared, so we thought it was skin cancer. Then the cancer ate my stomach, so we thought it was stomach cancer. Then it drank my blood, so we thought it was blood cancer. Then it ate my brain, so we thought it was brain cancer. Then in time all that remained were my eyes and heart. My eyes looked out lidless, my heart beat slowly, openly, exposed, so I saw and felt the pace of things, the rhythm of the world. Felt like sitting on the bench at the marina watching boats bob up and down, that subtle lapping of waves, an ocean on a hull, a feeling felt through observation, a steady oneness and peace.
5.25.24
Week 21
The view is the exterior of an inner city home, it is just one of many homes in a row of homes that abut each other, exterior wall to exterior wall, constructed no more than a foot apart so conversations travel from house to house and words said in one home’s bedroom are heard in the kitchen of another. The view is a low-angle shot positioned on the sidewalk in front of the home, what’s shown are the four brick steps leading up to a small stone porch in front of the home’s front door, which is made of fiberglass and preceded by a screen door, the top part is the screen, the bottom part is white aluminum, the type of door that always crashes closed and never fully closes. Above the porch is a white awning with brown stripes. Along the steps, runs a twisted wrought iron railing. A motorcycle is on the porch and is kept locked to the railing by a thick silver chain.
A large man walks down the sidewalk. A gentle giant type. 6’3”, 280. He wears a loose fitting white T-shirt, blue jeans, and keeps his dark hair wrapped in a black turban. He’s been given a second chance. He is starting again. Nothing is lost on him. He walks up the steps and enters his home. Moments later two cops arrive. From somewhere out of sight the cops take the man’s bicycle. The man steps outside his house and asks, "What are you doing?" The cops tell him, “We’re taking this.” And off they go with the man’s bicycle shoved into the backseat of their patrol car. The man is confused, upset, and resigned — a confrontation over a bicycle he does not use nor need is not worth the trouble. He lets it go and steps back inside.
A couple days later the cops return. This time they ascend the home’s front steps and snip the chain that locks the man’s motorcycle to the wrought iron railing. The man comes outside and asks again, this time more urgently, “What are you doing?” And again the cops tell him, “We’re taking this.” The two cops struggle to get the heavy motorcycle down the front steps. The large man paces back and forth in front of his house, shaking his head, exhaling nervous heavy breaths. “Why are you doing this?” he asks. “That’s my bike!” he says. “I need my bike!” The cops stay quiet. The man’s pleas travel through the exterior walls and get the attention of his neighbors who join him outside on their identical small front porches beneath their white brown awnings, they speak through the screens of their screened front doors, they lean out their windows, they stand with the man on the sidewalk. “What are you doing?” they ask. “He needs that bike,” they say. “That’s his bike.” “You can’t take that.” “That’s how he gets to work.” “This isn’t right.” “That’s not yours.” “Why are you doing this?” “He needs that bike!”
5.18.24
Week 20
Pink cast stone balustrades. Arched shadows. Dream sprints through khrushchevkas. Upset stomachs. Desperate trees.
In a sticky pub, the central character toys with the notion of surrender over sodas served in pint glasses. Her drinking companion, whose smile she can never fully see, is an unsettled man who eats peanut butter sandwiches and encourages her to cave. She is a woman who looks sexy in a sweater, and he is a man who will never tell her so, telling her so gives her a beauty he cannot possess. Crumbs spit from his mouth as he talks. He is a vile man. It is easy to picture him screaming invectives at her mother (who wears floor length denim dresses, who she loves dearly, who she calls: Mumba).
The central character excuses herself from the pub. Her drinking companion bloats, turns ashen, smiles in his covert way — his lips half-hidden by a shadow perpetually falling from an unknown object, granting him access to that sordid plane of kink tortures and coerced consent that anyone of pure intent is ridiculed for avoiding, surely their smarts are fear, ignorance, and that contemptibly mockable prudish notion of female security.
5.11.24
Week 19
Scattered flagstone winds through a field of tall grasses — prairie cordgrass, big bluestem, blood grass; you say they are the color of my eyes (our waking life bleeds in).
We walk barefoot toward a row of trees — red maples, orange bright — to a house we cannot see. The stone cools the soles of our feet, the grass brushes our thighs with soft, tickle-less tickles.
We are industrious in a private way, our way. Alive at the same time, like mayflies, like fireflies. The world exists beyond us, busy degrading meaning, busy at war, busy for likes — look at me, look at me, look at me! We look, and look away.
The sun sets magnificent. Yellow, pink, warm. No need for poetry. I feel beautiful. We reach the row of trees and the house appears. It is brown, worn, easy. Floorboards creak, breezes sift through curtains perfectly.
From the porch, we watch the end of light. A blue orb far off in the distance catches our eye. It blasts what's left of magic in one exultant flash, then goes out, extinguished save for our fireplace, our heat, and glowing table lamps.
5.4.24
Week 18
It is wrong to decode the meaning of the fox beyond the meaning of a fox:
Clever headed, bushy tailed, an eager sleeper, an egg eater.
At dawn, he lopes along the horizon whistling;
At dusk, he stretches out to sing:
Lullaby and good night. With roses bedight…
For the child in the window,
For the starry world her mother pities:
“They’re not as brilliant as they used to be.”
4.27.24
Week 17
Not many dreams but more dreamy realities, which left me thinking many times this week about the sweetness of happiness after the bitter punches of struggle. So in a rare moment of self-congratulation, I’m patting myself on the back for all I've endured — sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse; a stretch of homelessness; workplace sexism; rejection after rejection; and, so on — to be sitting in the sun today, feeling lucky of all things, with a head full of cliché affirmations. And so, despite my lifelong, preternatural understanding of ephemerality, I hereby declare: I have always been, and always will be, in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. <3
4.20.24
Week 16
Three girls in straw bonnets flank a horse that pulls a wagon transporting a closed casket. The girls are tearless in blue dresses, freckles sprinkle their noses. The horse is a dear friend, the fourth member of their cohort.
The day is sunny, warm. There are no plains, no buildings, no mountains, no landscape. The scene unfolds with Brechtian sparseness. There aren't any views of an ocean, but it’s known an ocean is close by, furthermore, the tide is on its way out. As the water recedes, it pulls base feelings from the guts of the three girls and the onlookers dressed in black who’ve gathered together to watch the procession go by; the receding ocean leaves everyone emptied and lighter, and confused by the weight of sudden absence.
If there is judgement, it is indiscernible, too insignificant to be felt. And if there is pain, it is consumptive, essentially commonplace and effectively null — a numbing agent that allows the scene to progress with a tranquil slowness that stretches outward through a featureless expanse and entombs an unavoidable solemnity with grace and an encompassing white light.
4.13.24
Week 15
While dressed in my finest wool tunic and living deep underground, I was forced to choose between stopping an oncoming flood or freeing an animal from its cage. I choose to free the animal.
It was a large white tiger with a Fu Manchu and bushy brows that outlined its cheeks with face-framing tendrils. The cage was small, rancid, windowless, and when it lifted to free the tiger, the tiger stretched, stood upright, towered over me, and nuzzled my neck like a secure and satisfied horse, then took off running through a stone arch doorway.
Water seeped in through cracks in the walls and rained on us through overhead light fixtures. The underground hallways stayed lit long after the flood waters poured in; the orange light from sconces flickered on the water and surrounded us in a sea of dancing gold.
People panicked. There was much screaming and running, many worried faces. Everyone wore crimson wool tunics — some had gold markings, others had silver, but most were simply crimson with black piping.
We all seemed to regret something or miss something; our fears and sorrows aligned. Whether anyone drowned remains unknown.
What I remember last was running up wide, white stairs like the marble steps to Bates Hall half expecting to see you at the top waiting to share a joke with me. But I knew very well you wouldn't be there and all I'd see would be the WWII propaganda posters and handsomely dressed Gatsby talking about his evolutionary biology themed poetry.
I kept running and eventually found a door.
3.30.24
Week 13
People live in homes the size of palaces and grow exotic plants that bear neon fruits they feed to pigs and goats they tether to their exterior palace walls; the animals laze around moats.
“Moats are a stable water source,” the gardener tells me. He is a man in his eighties with the acuity of a border collie. In the distance a pen rolls off a desk, he runs to catch it, and when he returns he is younger and concerned with the pH level of the largest palace's moat. He puts on green waders and blue rubber gloves and rushes into the water while talking about credit unions. He asks, "What is the value of a thing?"
People leave their palaces and gather around the moat to watch the young (formerly old) gardener collect soil and water samples. His wading disrupts the still water and noxious smells escape. Wafts of foul, sticky cecal droppings and septic algal stench permeate the air along with the aural cicada rattling of people chit-chit-chattering. The youthful gardener loses his bearings and begins to cry. In between sobs he asks for privacy. The people detest this but grant him his request and return to their palaces; burn-bridged spiteful by their expulsion, they slam doors and draw curtains and call each other on the phone to gossip well into the night about the age defying gardener's dubious "crocodile tears" charade.
It begins to rain and the gardener's youth begins to fade, soon he is old again, older than before, broken somehow, as if he's lost or gained an unnameable, questionable sense. "Love is the crux of lost mankind," he says to the sky. "You drip with it or you stand rigid." His body coils, droops invertebrate, then slips underwater where it remains out of sight like an elusive, recondite nymph.
3.23.24
Week 12
I am warm in the Amazon sucking milk from a coconut, then abruptly walking down a city street in winter at night. Pink dolphins drape over icy snow mounds, freezing rain gathers in giant water lily cups, jagged-toothed caiman walk the street with me, a Jesus Christ lizard runs frantically by.
Up and down the street, elixirs are sold on the cheap in colored glass vials etched with images of human tongues, hands, and hearts. The elixirs are made by smocked artisans who test their concoctions on the very ill, the criminally insane, the indigent. After taking an elixir, some people recover and are forever free of their affliction, notably greed, poverty, and pain. Others only get worse. The elixirs induce perpetual full-bodied rocking at torturous speeds — violently fast or imperceptibly slow. The afflicted are branded 'Forever Invalids' and shut away in cold, unfurnished rooms save for padded rocking chairs that are bolted to the floor in drab buildings the recently un-afflicted walk by on route to the bakery, where they'll fill a pink box with confections to enjoy after a home cooked meal of roasted chicken and fingerling potatoes served in a white wine and garlic, shallot sauce. Perhaps they will sit by a fire.
The worlds blend again and now I am inside the kitchen in the dark looking out the window at the leaves blowing across the street, with the leaves blow the soiled paper plates from Yuri’s Thanksgiving barbecue. I have seen this scene before. How much of a life is spent reliving? How much is spent imagining?
You’re here now and we are present. I like the cold patter of snow. I like the dirt-y smell of your coat. I like when you come in from outside. I like the winter on you. We sit wrapped in kaleidoscopic scenes of strip malls and tender spots where everyone has a word for me. You pull the wool and the cotton and soft down over our heads. We are safe beneath the weight of your blankets.
3.16.24
Week 11
Quietus-induced dreams of office parks, cubicles, grey, beige, drones, clones, filing cabinets securing paperwork for my safety (show me fear then sell me home security), hundreds of text messages, thousands of emails, and uncertain waking hours tenuously anchored by brown boots.
3.9.24
Week 10
It has started to bleed together. The oppression and the disdain, the ill-conceived and ill-informed perceptions, the dialogue, the weighted feeling and claustrophobia, the blocked passages, all blended and spitting out the demands of a brutish cohort protective of a power they pretend to need, and smug women believing their agendas hidden, their planned deceptions ingenuous confusions. Deciphering the difference between imaginary worlds and living history is now dependent on instinct and the willingness to slip into unreality and abandon the concept of "known".
Trapped in a restaurant with house music jamming on about a retro, played out scene — sequins and bottle service, bob cuts, and roofies. Girls saying they’re the best, then crying. Boys saying they got this, then beating. Beating hair jerk-offs, beating their girl parts. All sorts of screaming now.
I wait at the bus stop. The Tamale Lady sits beside me. She can’t unfold the corn husk. I help her and she nods, then I watch her eating corn mess. Your grace sustains me like effusive honeysuckle nectar.
His big foot lover dives into the shallow end and comes up bloody. He's embarrassed at the sight of her broken teeth, by the hot blood pouring down her chin and pooling around her enormous feet. I am appalled and so is she but she thinks she’s won something. She smiles, taunts me, and swallows his conceit but is not satisfied, and it is then she knows she has lost, suddenly she’s twisted, wants her money back. One evening she takes out a pair of kitchen shears and stabs him in the chest; he crumples, shakes, spurts, tries to erase her. Clouds gather around her and she disappears.
Beside the barn on the stretch of grass outside the paddock, there is quiet. Tall grasses grow from sloped roof gutters. Rabbits eat clover. Swallows dive expertly — forked tails, orange bellies, luminescent feathers, the swooping alacrity of low-flying bats.
Outside my house of glass come the tigers. I stand inside and watch them running at full speed up the hill toward the house at dusk. When they are a few feet from the glass they lunge, airborne, all four paws off the ground, and slam headfirst into the glass wall that does not shatter or crack, nor does the impact of skull on glass faze any tiger.
A large Bengal tiger looks at me with glowing eyes symmetrically set in an orange face contoured in white and black. I imagine throwing my arms around its neck, burying my face in its fur, then it lopes away, back down the hill to chase the horses and deer out of the woods, through wild fields of rising fog where the brutish cohort waits to catch an animal and call it prey, and the women sharpen knives with which to skin it and giggle "I love you, you brilliant thing" while deriding its beauty, its fragility, the weakness of its trust, of moving slow enough to see.
2.28.24
Week 9
Getting a jump on dreamreporting because I'm going on vacation :)
Nothing too notable this week, just a naked man with a rat tail lounging on a wooden bar bench; he was lonely, a pariah, women laughed at him. Also dreamt solitary dreams of smoking cigarettes in ornate basements with grand pianos, French doors, fireplaces, and bathrooms stocked with fine lotions. I had one very lucid dream through an Eastern European landscape. It was incredible. Everything was free. I did a lot of travel, walked everywhere. But overall, it was an insomnia week.
.
However, I enjoyed some learning and relearning: 1) sea lice exist; 2) some buoys transmit data; 3) certain books are popular for good reason (eg., The Overstory); 4) I love fog; 5) "More Human than Human" is a perfect highway driving song; 6) asking for help is a pathway to betterment; 7) my dog is very important; and, 8) Snoop gets hockey
I love you. Dream big <3
2.24.24
Week 8
The screaming came from within. And there was a lot of it. And it was nonstop. It was understood and openly discussed, the type of conversation people had over dinner, but still generally disliked. People were uncomfortable with the thought of going next, yet understood and accepted that it could, at any moment, be their turn. They worried and worried openly, but they didn’t defy or reject. There were no protests, no martyrs, no rebellions, no underground networks of organized dissent.
People wondered more than they worried. They wondered about the discomfort that they could, at any moment, face. What would it be like? It had been leaked, by the man who used to control the front gate, that a lot of attention was paid to the extremities, to pulling the hands and pulling the feet, to popping shoulders out of sockets and dislocating hips, and in between the pulling and popping and dislocating, the body was flipped from supine to prone and back again, like an over grilled sausage, until eventually, the body lay still. But it was also a wonder how the man who used to control the front gate could know such things, after all, he was outside, and the screaming came from within. Surely, he was letting his imagination spin.
People wondered what was the use. They thought it barbaric, this keeping of secrets and impending pain. But they understood and openly discussed: it was for their safety, it was designed to protect them. Perhaps what bothered people the most was the colorless building. A cement gray fortress that occupied an entire city block — imposing yet ignorable, enormous yet forgettable; the looming gnaw of lifeless. If it were aesthetically pleasing, perhaps painted with murals or draped in ivy, or if bougainvillea climbed up its sides and covered the cement in paper flowers, perhaps then it wouldn’t bother people so much. But then again, that would defeat the purpose, and people knew this, so the wondering of aesthetics was a juvenile conversation people didn’t have past the age of 30.
The night before my number was called, my pillow turned hard and my arms kept lifting up and lowering down, repeatedly, like I was raising my hand and immediately putting it down. Right hand raised, down. Left hand raised, down. This happened throughout the night. I couldn’t get any rest. I tossed and turned. I beat the hard pillow to fluff it up, but it only got harder, flatter, until eventually it became a single sheet of paper. The crumpling noise beneath my head was too much. I reached for the paper to throw it on the floor but moved too quickly and gave myself a vicious paper cut that slit my cheek in two. I thought of crying but didn’t see the use. Somehow the night passed and in the morning I received the news: it was my turn, my number was up. I thought of running, but where to? I thought of begging, but who to beg? I thought of hiding, but how? Everything was known, all locations tracked. So, like everyone who came before and like everyone who’d come after, I gave up the ghost.
On my walk to the colorless building full of screams and secrecy, I had a dream within a dream. All I looked upon turned to light. I felt my heart rise inside me, buoyant, as free as a helium balloon set loose in the sky; I floated. My hair blew in wisps across my face. My body, supported by tufted clouds, blew this way and that in vibrating wind. My skin, warmed by the light I approached, shone brilliantly, until in time and then forever, I was visible no more, and my every utterance adopted the abrupt silence of an extinguished, yet once raging, fire.
2.17.24
Week 7
Asleep (in dreams I’m told are nightmares), your sweetness is saccharine and saturated; you’re a travel agent in a bright blue suit hawking all-inclusive Disney packages wrapped in neon cellophane. But awake (when you’re beside me or beneath me or on top of me or just nearby), your sweetness is savory and long-sought; you’re a heart-shaped habanero honey pizza after a winter storm's turned the world to wrought.
2.10.24
Week 6
Derrick sucks ketchup from packets and sits cross-legged beside me at the kitchen table. He keeps trying to speak but no words come out, only ketchup spit. The toad woman without a neck emerges from the hallway, her eyes bulge like golfballs. She rattles, croaks, makes noise. Derrick asks about Moses and Gaspar, wonders if they are dogs. I tell him dogs would never. They are cats or they are demons. The toad woman crouches on the ground and plays sexy with a spatula the width of her tongue. She disturbs me. I think of paste. I leave the kitchen for the porch and stand on the steps leading to the backyard. The arborvitae towers over me. A parade goes by led by the brass-bangled, raccoon woman who makes such a racket with her smile; her ego is her noise, her vanity her cheer. She disturbs me, too. I wonder: Why is everyone so loud? I find silence in a cave. The tide is out. There are drawings on the wall. Rock furniture. Tree stump tables. Slate plates. I am quiet. Spirit is quiet. You are loud. I am blue. Spirit is blue. You are red. I am deep. Spirit is deep. You are shallow. I am everywhere, always. Spirit is everywhere, always. You are nowhere, never.
2.3.24
Week 5
So I says to the guy,
“Your minute phrasing
Like a pallbearer’s box
Piled on top, like loving, in Boston —
Hip sore and too hot —
Beats the laughter at the viewing;
Painful, how apologetics cry.”
And he says,
“There we have it,
Meggie speaks rotten.
Finally, sincere applause.”
1.27.24
Week 4
She went by Manhattan but her name was Lily. She wore all black. Her hair was cut short and also black. She had two tattoos — a circle on her right hand, an X on her left hand. She wore thick black glasses and spoke softly and precisely, the enunciation of a stage actress. She disliked when people said “cigarette butts.” “Just call them cigarettes,” she’d say. Butts, butts, butts, the word repulsed her. She rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, hugged her chest tightly. She wore black oxfords and black blazers. She did not suffer fools wisely. She lamented. She was tortured, took it out on us. She wrote about fabrics rubbing against each other — the dissonance of pilled silk rubbing against starched denim; she hated that. She hated chenille on corduroy the most. She carried on about an evening subway ride, about the sickness in her gut, worried about her next drink, how she needed it, how the subway never went fast enough. She stomped her feet and kicked the chair back in front of her. She wanted vodka and she wanted it now. She was sickened by frailty. She talked about her lovers. She loved women best. She taught us how to touch them. She named her women Cheyenne and Dixie but their names were Jennifer and Becky. She dreamt of stormy oceans, abandoned city streets at night, inner city trash. She didn’t believe in viable communities. She kept to herself, ate sparingly, slept on a mattress on the floor in a one-room apartment with a faulty lock and a broken toilet bowl. She shat in a bucket and peed in the shower. She did not care if anyone liked her. She kept a kerosene lamp and a box of matches by her bed, she liked the drama of it. She was opposed to being photographed and eventually she opposed language, so she stopped talking, said not a word and disappeared quite silently. Refusing to be seen, refusing to speak, she shrank into the world of shades where daylight cannot stretch.
1.20.24
Week 3
No dreams this week, too much insomnia. But I "ice skated" HORSES in the arena underneath a Pippi Longstocking's mom-styled sun... that was dreamy <3
Photo cred: Lindsey Farm :)
1.13.24
Week 2
A woman wearing black lace up boots stands before a suburban pharmacy greeting card rack. She leads us out back to a forest, through stripped trees vacant and worn as tattered flagpole kindling; I’m not sure why or if I believe in her or if I have use for whys and beliefs anymore. It is like being a flame. Growth in destruction, growth indiscriminate, growth til I cannot breathe — Imprinted, Inherited Mantra.
There is a person making movies. Dark, slouching, they are a dust bunny off in the corner — they want to be seen as who we are, but they are stuffy, their face powder makes me sneeze. They pose, and you, of course, are enamored; even here, attention is your everything. You perform your act and I take off running.
I am a pocketful of limitless without shoes on; me, my only death; me, barefoot running on forest debris — damp, decomposing leaves shift underfoot, sticks switch slashes across my soles, occasionally the pointed edges of rocks puncture my skin and raised tree roots send me tumbling. All throughout are flashes of paradise, life’s ecstasies, the usual gimmicks — soft smiles, huddled winters, August sunsets, subway cars painted orange and pink, October rosebuds, silver glints on lawn chairs, biking by the river (no hands, no shirt, no eyes), the grit of sand on our scalps, floating in salt water, sinking through fresh water, suspended fears temporarily not a part of us.
Fry two fish tonight, let’s eat by candlelight, let’s wear our special dress, let’s decide on this — a loss or a draw?
1.6.24
Week 1
I add to your mythos in an oil drum. Half a moon, no clouds. Underneath us, in the basement, there's a tunnel, cogs turn and pistons churn; they move without lubrication, pumping production out to sea. What a racket.
If I lived in Victorian England, I’d be home by now, I keep thinking.
The world is dark blue, grey, and dreary; always a mist rises from the streets — at night it is spectacular, during the day it is particulate. I am torn between the need for manic light and the eerie dark of blue. I want footsteps and running and sneaking and pawing. I want exposure and sin.
The woman with the perfect teeth and red boa says, “You are the girl without a feather in her cap.” And I tell her, “Yes.” My heart races. I think for a moment I have fooled her. “Come on,” she laughs. Faceless shapes surround her, they wear torn suit jackets, their hair is sparse, greasy, they emit foul smells masked by saccharine lotions; I am neither attracted nor repelled, their poverty impresses me.
I am a green emanation, I have decided. I have also decided to board a ship; the moon is bright enough for travel. I book a porthole seat. My dress is grey with velvet piping, my hat stacked with dark roses. I yearn and know it's growth.
If I lived in Victorian England, I’d be home by now, I keep thinking.