High wind, daily. Static in its call. Contact dermatitis from my patch, the veins in my hands rising just blue. What is the opposite of being scholarly? I wrote years ago that I was letting time “inflict itself upon me.” Use me is what I actually meant. Perverse inversion. I’m determined to regress as far back as I can. The state of my hair has me looking like a river troll, but I refuse to cut it for what it now represents: the old life, pre-New York. What was the image? “You with the long hair, stitched-up skirt slit in Appalachia?” Other things are more coincidental: [X] and me, sheepish in rebound number two, almost five years later. He pointed out that it seemed more like two and that we’ll be dead soon. Walked past [X]’s old place on my way to pick up my first Klonopin prescription in two years. Three, oops. They sent the same blister packs I had when I first got here, and putting that little raised pill under my tongue tapped an old feeling. If I could really get in touch with my 21-year old self I’d slap her. [X] remembered her well at the Roxy hotel. Strange things that eluded me, some of it could be jogged but others came with a zap of humiliation. Yeah, four years when he stopped me in front of Luxembourg last fall. Strange pleasure to remember all the ways he is—the sheer amount he talks and how quickly, the humor and trickery, the put-on chivalry, the erratic, smash-bang on the mouth kiss—he hasn’t changed, I’d just forgotten all about him, like waking from a coma in some irrelevant corner of my life. Looking at art that way was impractical, or maybe I just don’t like the Romantics, but how Sex-and-the-City it all felt to dash across the crosswalk to the steps of the Met with [X] in her peacoat and to riff with [X] in the back of a yellow cab, “just go downtown, drop us below Canal,” the bridge opening just emerging in the windshield before we careened to the curb.
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Cheers’d identical lozenges with Dad on Pearl street, just as I feared he was taking out a cigarette. I wonder if we both want the other to die. Just kidding, but my patience with his impatience is wearing thin. Bought two silver rings at the Flea and turned the pointy tip of the Claddagh heart away on my pointer. Then he dragged me to the 9/11 memorial museum—the only thing he apparently “feels” like doing besides drinking or watching basketball in his hotel room—and the worst possible place to visit during partial withdrawal, where I started to cry and then composed myself and then started to cry again probably one hundred times over, winding frayed and aimless through the whole thing. The wrecked columns, the warped steel, the tentacles of the hollowed comms antenna, the dark blood dried on the side of a leather mule, and always the paper “like confetti.” One twin and then the next, as if they had a suicide pact. The night before Dad bitched about telling [X] to call me twice now: “he lives in his own world.” Who’s the evil twin? I described the last time I saw [X] and he said that when Mom moved out, he went to Vegas. Nice. They don’t make men like that anymore. Last night [X] came over and sat on our floor and cried over one. My post-Memorial mood was lifted by the good coffee [X] makes and her expired Nicorette but then I didn’t really sleep at all. Back to square one with that layer of discipline.
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Half a martini with [X] at Sabarsky, and a crab-stuffed avocado after Esther Green, raining on Park, the grotesque faces upstairs at Neue. “Better to be an object than a subject,” she said. I learned that Friday, the four of us brown-haired girls wearing matching off-black clothing clinging close to our hips. I liked your poems of course, but your body was tea: many such cases. Mon semblable, mon contempt. Unexpected gambit, I don’t know how determined I am, I am essentially a brick wall. Lost in the hinterlands, the styx. Purr. Seismic. Jettison. Palimpest. Chalkboard green. Electric and gas.
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The interlocutor comes from stage left in white. Tells you you’re weak, but composed, and come off to others as a fumbling, bumbling savant. As contradictory as the South. I had one single globby desert tear when I woke. Turbines keep guard over parched humps, winding, stentorian. Just peak, just pink, dome, globe, porcelain glaring from the window, bowling alley fluorescents, big red signs, baja, tajin on the rim of a plastic cup.
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Noah Purifoy’s anthropocenic abandonarium, scrapyard, the rotting cot which mirrors my own: roar of highway rocks the motel daybed: O to touch the dead spine end of a yucca: coming to a point: feeling of gaze, non-feeling of no-gaze: take a gamble: gander: the well-worn wasteland of my birth which I roll: Los Angeles is Disneyland: uncanny: [X]’s eyeballs diffuse my desires: rather than effuse: that’s semantics: a metaphor is a substitution: the camera will steal my stall: soul: land of roaming hills: roving hills: screen of smog: transparent layer like milk film: seasonless: smells like a childhood: grass sweet but illegal in lawns: yucca in a name: view out of the jeep: memory will kill you says [X]: terraformed: freeway a long ribbon let go of in the wind: put simple on abstract: he shows every new visitor his Roman coin collection: silver eroded by hands for bread or sex: Nero, Athena: Tyrant and [X]’s first name: in their plastic sleeves in the little leather book: [X] in dusk plum strums the little instrument for the camera click: that’s showbiz: a landscape we hardly know: mother says: dry hands: crawl back into the cave like a womb: look for footholds: no time exists in Los Angeles or there exists all the time in the world: healing psychosis: [X] moves like a permanent ballerina: shot of frozen Maker’s with [X]: shot of frozen bison vodka with [X]: the smoothness of sweetgrass: “fuck it to death”: kissed lips who kissed lips who kissed lips: all the people placid: it all reminds me of Elliot Smith’s slight, disaffected singing voice: hummingbird: and the possums in the abandoned home as lovely as lesbians: I can’t work the singing bowl: opposite of New York’s freneticism, stench: in Joshua Tree [X] said first thing she can hear the poet she knows in all of my jokes: I quote herself back to her: O heron sun!
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[X] said it was a parrot in the morning, wheezing, but I second-guessed myself, thought the noise a neighbor turning over a dead engine, restless. Dog-rose under the pillow for sleeplessness, and no planning beneath a branch that bears them. I stared at [X]’s idea of a face, contactless, and said I felt like my body had been put into something like a coffin and then thrown down a rickety flight of stairs. Baby bender. Morel the cat is as starving as a dog. Pistachio and Cherry, who are border collies with air quotes, remind me of the dogs that Joan Jonas would have: lithe, wolflike, nearly identical, good reflexes, talkative, and they hate men. [X] and [X] live up in Laurel Canyon. We saw [X]’s fluid metal hitched high in Topanga, cables binding together an arced explosion of old-school grocery-store pogo sticks, so patina’d. And [X]’s disasters in the back of a Parisian flower van: hard to tear myself away, are sure you want to move to L.A.? We stopped getting it at the Getty. All that harsh white stone, the identical international school kids who asked me for a picture, made [X] want to quit her Invisalign. At the party, I talked to their novelist friend who looked like Johnny Cash for probably two hours in one of my states. He had a stutter and [X] said I was making him even more nervous. [X] had skidded and fallen suddenly on the dance floor, just walking over to where I beckoned; a stranger and I swept her up. Authors Writers Poets, bad joke. Backpack party, but I didn’t think it was that bad. I dueled the son of Metallica’s drummer in Haikus and he won. The next night, spooned bruised [X] on the couch after I realized we’re neurotic in the exact same ways or close enough, and because she makes me laugh. I admit I’d expected to shed my vices. The Museum of Jurassic Technology was the crown jewel, but it’s a secret. I’ll tell you only about the chain mail in the columbarium and small birds, real and un-stuffed. Diatoms leave exoskeletons ripe for designs under the microscopes, crystal cathedrals, the pope in the eye of the needle, mourning doves in their roosts. Bestiary, mice on toast. Cure for love in the egg of an ant on the tip of the spoon only visible with a magnifying glass: all of this semi-fictional. I rubbernecked twice walking by two trembling chihuahuas stuffed in a tandem bike and the woman simply said, “chihuahua.” We shared a vegan hot dog in the Jeep while a man in a tent sang Don’t Stop Believing. That’s Los Angeles in the memory bank. Last stop was walking to the end of the world at Dockweiler, stepping over a slaughtered chicken, burned trash, kelp tangles, and looking out over the Pacific I’d demanded like a drink order.