• bought twenty small vials of perfume, a hair brush, a pot of blush
• my neighbour hands me the miss-delivered package and mock-groans under its slight weight
• I laugh, turn and fall down his front steps
• not a single break in the bunch

(Incidentally: I know)

• shearling
• darling
• yearling
• needling
• darling darling darling

• something bloodless
• call and response and
• hair hair hair

• Went about burying the dead in the guest rooms, went to make lunch in a sun-soaped kitchen and to fix the drip in the tap.

• slogans
• something chipped inside the body, rattling there like an uneven engine idling in the driveway in the near-dark after work, someone deciding whether to come inside
• the dog split in the softness of her belly, the grass irritating the stitches
• "come inside" vs "go inside"
• or not

• like a pitcher of water
• like a picture of water

• lowered by ropes into a bed made of ropes
• sediment, etc.

Young days, some weeks ago,
when I muscled my way through to the front
and stood right next to my own special brand
of indecision, my cart full of really shoulds,
of what do you think is bests, sacks of grain,
and my father's limitless capacity for salt

• To say it has been easy would be saying too much, too easily
• Woke up with a head swaddled in pain, spent minutes with the heel of my palm pressed against my left eye
• Specific noises, something about the road, something about the roof lifted off

• "I always lock the door when I creep by daylight"

• Drink


• Drank


• Drunk

Currently Reading

• Moby-Dick


• How to Be a Woman


• A Visit From the Goon Squad


• Super Sad True Love Story


• The Lottery and Other Stories

peach pit in my stomach

1. Slept on the couch in the living room, listening to the sick dog breathing unsteadily, to her shifting in her bed (on a chair, under a fan) and standing up uneasily in the darkness, wanting something.
   


2. I'm writing fiction again because it's another way to write a list: names I like, men I've minded, lines of dialogue I trapped in a lined-paper notebook and never though I'd let out. It's going, but it's going slowly, unevenly. With poetry I do the drafting, the scraping together of lines and images and breaks, measure out my punctuation and sift through it for the best ones. With fiction I feel exposed, ugly, writing a character walking across a movie theatre foyer takes me all day and even then I don't like the way he sees the line of people waiting for tickets.
   


3. I turned 24 on Sunday. Messages from two people made me feel something unexpected, a window cracking open just a little, or something not quite so trite. I began to miss them, I think, to begin the process of missing and wanting. Or maybe it's just the attention, a low-level craving which will go away when I realise that I'm too much of a chicken to ever be the one who makes plans.
   


4. Above and beyond everything else I'm waiting for my dissertation marks, confirmation of my overall grades.
   


5. I'm waiting to be done, to do the next thing.

1. A little wanting goes a long, long way.