On Leaving

I've spent many days in the second half of this year feeling slighted, undervalued, and unattractive. I spent the day sick, mostly, falling asleep on my desk and waking up with globs of drools on important papers, thankful to be going home soon.

I've spent the last three hours enjoying my own company, holding a necklace in my hand and imagining it on my sister, putting on leather gloves. I spent a moment talking to an old classmate named Ben who recognized me beneath my hat and scarf.

I spend my last night in New York alone enjoying a small piece of chicken liver pate some cheeses I had leftover from a get-together at Jenny's. I spent $1.50 on a loaf of sesame seeded bread from the corner store and heat it over our electric stove.

Now, I'm packing and listening carefully to Charlie Brown Christmas. Home can't come soon enough.

A Good Wednesday

I met up with my new and beautiful friend Jeanne tonight for a mid-week reading and cocktail. I quickly excused the pretenses put on by Happy Endings at 302 Broome St. (their super swank interior is disguised by a Chinese pharmacy store front) when Joshua Henkin got to the mic and sang the Time Warp in Hebrew. Kate Christensen read a letter she wrote to the Queen of England when she was nine and the ethereal and swoony tunes from Clare and the Reasons made me jealous of all the daisy field moments I've missed out on. We got two easy to drink cocktails at bar in the Village where a short and frumpy man in boxy Prada glasses made an off-handed remark about his brother who was in a band..."you might know them...The Scissor Sisters?". Noticing the $1,400 bar tab while signing my $20 one was enough to make my hippie sub-unconsciousnesses speak up...Jeanne's must have too because we got to our feet and bolted toward the door faster than you can say Christian Louboutin. Of course, our anti-materialism self-righteousness slipped through the gutter the second we saw an incredible window lit up to show super high suede boots in all colors and mini designer coin purses painted with baby deer and robots.

New York has got me in a crisis. It makes me incredibly sad and self-conscious when I notice that not having enough pairs of $690 shoes makes me sad and self-conscious. In May I was wearing jean cut-offs and the same $12 men's plaid button-up every day and feeling like I had more style than I knew what to do with. I've been investing a lot of my thought time into what's coming next...I think about drinking fresh goat's milk at 5 am in the Pyrenees or sleeping on trains and being forced into fluency again in Venezuela. Walking through the East Village my thoughts were in the mountains in France, a mango farm in India, a small, sustainable restaurant in Portland, in Montana...every work day, before noon even rolls around, I re-bandage my blistered heels and wonder what the hell I'm doing in East Midtown. I'm idealistic! I want to save the world through sustainable agriculture! Why the hell am I in New York instead of the millions of other places I can be in? I'm constantly worried that my life is going to roll by before I find a place that I'm absolutely happy in.

But seriously, having that thought is almost more of a luxury than being able to buy $690 Chanel pumps. I'm not even 22 years old. I can do whatever the hell I want. I can have cocktails in the East Village tonight and still save the world, right? My internal bitching subsided pretty quickly this time, because the thing is, I just saw a great live show with a fun new friend...and my cucumber martini was damn good.

Seventeen Magazine, I'm Your Woman

I've been meaning to take a second out of my ridiculously busy day to catch my New York adventure up to speed...however, I've deliberately refrained knowing that whatever I would have written would have sounded like something straight out of a sappy teen magazine from 1997. Though I'm fully supportive of honest journalism, I am likewise supportive of pride and it's preservation. Thusly, my post must be brief and superficial until I can quit the whining and get over this nagging urge to buy a one way ticket to the Bay Area.


In short...it's been a rough week.


One day I'll make this work.

A Poem

this poem is supposed to be in very long lines...but the formatting didn't take to it well.

I: 2

This valley also lends itself
to the sort of performance
the girls would put on in the tall cedar theatre
just behind their closet doors. Or
in winter time the plays lit up against
the kitchen wall, some parts lost against
the window dull from frost and bittered branches.
Solemn they hanged their heads shrouded
in veils and tasseled dish cloth, being
the crying women in desert processionals
flailing their skinny arms and elbows toward
the ceiling and windows and slinking
their covered hip bones in secret rhythmic circles.

Look how she crumples her fingers
to make deers with antlers she says move slowly
in their grasses and take careful steps
through parts with snow. We watch the other
covered in a sheet hunched like a hungry mule
across a desert with small knees and paper
hooves. We close our eyes to commission
the sounds of the other scene performed
behind a door closed upstairs, a chorus of falling
glass, shards against the hard wood
are the rains the smaller one prayed for
on the fourth and driest night when the sand filled
her lungs and her sister made the sound
of the mule’s dry throat from under the table.
with their knees on the tile, they stretch
their shoulders to feel their mirage happen
in their sweaty palms and move their cheeks
closer to the scented water. The painted paper
shudders as her thirsty beast bends to drink from
the water on the floor.Know that they do this in silence.
That their silence mutters the divisive orchestra
they have disowned. That sometimes
they are those sulky wandering queens in a kingdom of rock.

Dead Pigeons on 51st and Other Violent Moments

Firstly:

Dear Jack Morgan,

I am sorry to disappoint. I know I said I would write many nights ago and I did not. My inaction is explainable for thousands of resaons.

And then:

Dear Everybody,

After work the other day, the beautiful Kim Miller and I went to a poetry reading at the world famous KGB Bar. The thing was weird start to finish. The room felt deader than the Romanovs when we got there only two or three minutes early. After long moments of fidgeting and smiling uncomfortably, a puckered face, 55+ crowd hobbled in, changing the ambiance from post-Blitzkrieg Guernica to St. Petersburg-members only-bridge club. The reading was hosted by "Behind the Book", a non-profit that does pretty much exactly what 826 Valencia does but not nearly as well. The night included narrative poems translated from French about a man who desired deeply to be the world's most premium serial killer but was left in a state of misery when he found himself unable to slice the face off a woman he believed to be a prostitue AND a woman reading poems "inspired by" poems written by women in state prisons...which really means "stolen from"... generally about bludgeoning, bashing, shooting in the face, or heating up one end of a coat hanger and carving off a nose, lip, or eyebrow. The most violent moment was delivered by the president of "Behind the Book" herself whose dislike of the poets she had invited became apparent when she exclaimed to her partner that they were all "cunt bitches" whom she "fucking hate[ed]". We couldn't take it anymore. Needing to escape as soon as humanly possible, we lunged at the door, only to find that we had been locked inside. Forever. The whole crowd turned their heads and watched in silence as the bartender tromped slowly toward us with a ring of 100 keys, only one of which would lead us to freedom. We ran with our eyes closed all the way down the stairs, out the door, and well past the end of the block.

The next morning I watched a woman place her high heel into the carcass of a pigeon splayed into the concrete in front of the CitiBank building.








Come Sunday, all I needed was to spend some time far away from Manhattan, and from blood, and from thewholegoddamncityandeverythinginit.

So we got in a car and drove to a farm.

(To Follow)

Corporate Hangover

I've spent the morning devising clever configurations of masking tape and cotton balls in the insoles of my shoes so that they are minorly less abrasive... I would hate to bloody another new pair of heels.

A Poem

above a windowed department store.

a canopy of gulls in swoop nets,
patterned turgid, blackly lined with corrugated
feet and legs



skate the frozen over
river. the ankles of the smallest children
fold like paper, frost in bittered leather.



shards of vanished wingtip, hoping
to linger hurled in the R’s of Furniture
signs, meeting valleys of dander and salt.