Look:


The kids are on their screens.

I am on my screens too, big and little, googling questions as I drive, and I'm not even really reading, not even really listening, just asking again and again, "Blah blah blah blah?" The kids want to multitask on their screens. They want to listen to one thing while they complete another. So do I. So much for silence.

Yesterday I realized something: I know nothing. I was panicked and confused and spinning between the distant future and my whole past life, melted together into one long stream of naivete and innocence and internet. I am still spinning, still staring into the mirror of my life and wondering how I got here, typing and watching and listening and forgetting everything.

This is what changed everything: Yesterday I flipped upside down. My apartment and all of my possessions became strangers, and good-- the kitchen towel should not become my friend.

Lying on the carpet, looking at the world inside my home from upside down, I realized that the dark spot on my shiny ceiling fan was me. It's not hard to find reflection when you look for it. There's something shiny in almost any room.

My arm on the fan was long and thin like the second-hand of an analogue clock. It felt like libel to be presented this way, a streak of gray, a needle arm., hardly there at all.

I thought it might be me up on the ceiling fan because a few months ago I'd seen myself in the shower head, belly and all, as I took a lukewarm bath. I was beige and lumpy and dotted with holes. If I turned the knob, pulled the lever, water would have streamed from my body. Not me. The reflection.

I was ugly in both and undeniably there, neither a lie nor a spitting image. I was taking on the qualities of the object, I was seeing me for who I really was in the ceiling fan, the shower head. But who was watching? Who was listening?

Me. It was just for a moment. But still.




To Do List


I am once again in front of my hamper,
turning around like a dog for its master,
wondering if this is all there is to it,

wondering if things do get better or this is just How
They Are. This one, I know.
I know all about How They Are.

It’s hard to come to terms with the death of a kitchen
sponge, hard to pour out the last of the milk,
hard to face the end of things
you bought in packs at Costco,
things you surely thought would
last forever, but alas,

you’re back where you started, in front
of the hamper.
What’s done is undone.

The clothes go in the machine and spin in circles.

We’re told to push through,
as if the door is heavy and will open into a brighter room, but at the store, the door revolves.
Surely this will last forever, I say
as the conveyer circles it’s belt,
delivers another loaf of our neverending bread,

the everydayness reflected in everyday,
two mirrors thrusting each other into infinity.
I don’t want to go to the store anymore.
I would like
it to end.

And it will end, and likely it will all begin again.




Memento Mori: June

We are flinging wildly towards the solstice,
as the sun toys with its
peripheral light, as flower petals fall and become
the dirt

This summer I will begin to worry about
wrinkles as if I am a potato left forgotten on
the counter

We see it all

through the window of a moving train: a
glimpse, and then gone, bound to come again
in a new form

The angels say, “Come again?”
a polite invitation to be reborn
as a skeleton in the ground

I say, “Come again?”

But the train has left the station, and all I
have is smoke, skeletons, all my life, and
rotten fruit