i like who you are.

there's this kid I know who makes me do crazy things

2010-01-05T23:59:00.001-05:00

Like try to write and illustrate and bind a children's book though I lack any and all skills associated with these activities.

Once upon a time, a small friend (and roommate) of mine was about to celebrate her third Christmas. So I made her this silly book. You can view it here.

It was a pleasant distraction from grad school applications and super fun to make, though it's probably riddled with issues that would make any designer/illustrator throw up her hands and say, "holy Helvetica!" Oh jeez. "Good golly Garamond?" I need to go to bed.

Merry Christmas, Iris!

Oh! And a super huge thankyouthankyouthankyou to Claire for teaching me how to make a book from cloth and board and screws and glue, and for drilling the holes because I was too much of a scaredy cat to do it myself. And thanks to Bob for helping me write words. Yay.

ballooning

2009-08-15T10:54:00.003-04:00

Messages to my grandfather.

my future in calendars

2009-07-28T15:15:00.001-04:00

bird!

I Suppose I Could Have Just Closed the Window

2009-06-03T14:23:00.000-04:00

There’s this thing we say whenever my roommate is eating ramen out of an old shoe or someone’s joint has set the fire alarm to chirping ceaselessly for three days because no one knows how to make it stop. We say, “man, we are so in college right now.” And it’s more than just being enrolled in an institution of higher learning. I think there will be moments when I am 35 and trying (failing) to make my daughter dinner with too little water and too much pasta and all the forks are dirty and there’s nowhere on the table to put a plate and I am frustrated I still feel so in college. There will be nights when I’ll want to ride a bicycle away from the clean home I have made for myself, sprawl on top of abandoned trains and talk and talk with bead-haired, nomadic strangers. My neighbor is so in college. And I am in college but trying to go to sleep at 10 p.m. on a Friday, which is so not so in college. My neighbor with the paint-streaked forehead and too-big pants is playing college standards very loudly on his guitar while lots of girls sit cross-legged, leaning long hair against splintering wood, singing along very loudly. Huddled together under the porch light, voices rising carelessly from their beer bottles to the plants perched carefully on my windowsill. I am thinking my neighbor must, at some-point-hopefully-soon, come to the end of his repertoire. There’s got to be a limit to the songs he knows. But he is still strumming as I stare at the red glow of my alarm clock about to go off. I think that maybe he knows every song I know, and many I do not.

Newer Cut

2009-05-28T12:25:00.003-04:00

Untitled from Annie Agnone on Vimeo.

Soul of Athens 2009 launches June 1! check it out at www.soulofathens.com

Rough Cut

2009-05-28T12:23:00.001-04:00

a rough cut of a project on pentecostal women in athens, ohio:

Setting Themselves Apart: Women in The Pentecostal Church (Rough Cut) from Annie Agnone on Vimeo.

On Becoming A Mother

2009-04-29T14:07:00.003-04:00

ON BECOMING A MOTHER

Small things are cute. I’m pretty sure this phenomenon is an offshoot of an animal drive to mother anything that is ostensibly weak and motherable. Puppies, babies and old people who have begun to lose height are obvious. But the rule extends, deeply and somewhat bizarrely, into the realm of the inanimate. Like finger-sized plastic-peapod key rings: squeeze it and the smooth green peas bulge forward slightly (highly adorable, prime nurturing material). Also: colorful umbrellas to put in piña coladas, vegetable seeds and the clippings of the pinkie toenail.

But the 6-year-old slamming tiny fists into my abdomen with Pokémon-inspired fervor and screaming his favorite curse word—honestly, “sucka-ducka-fuckin-nigga”—was, at the moment, not cute and I definitely did not want to be his mother. I just wanted him to come in out of the rain and to stop having nightmares about being beaten by his stepfather.

I spent four hours my first day at the child center reading admission summaries. I sat on a low, scratchy, child-size sofa streaked with dried applesauce and snot. She killed three puppies. Threw them down on a hard kitchen floor. When she thinks about this incident she wants to touch herself. Can’t be left alone with younger children. He was prostituted to his mother’s friends so his parents could afford to buy drugs. He was 4. Problems with encopresis requiring supervised showers three times a day. Favorite foods: french fries with ketchup, ice cream cake, teriyaki chicken tenders, mashed potatoes. Triggers: “no,” excessive praise, room time, salad. Especially Caesar.

It crossed my mind to try to adopt one of them. 21 is old enough to foster and adopt and there are thousands of kids, living in transitional homes, whose parents' rights have been terminated. Now and then I still think about it—“just you and me, Joshlynn. We’ll be okay. We’ll get by.” But I can’t take care of a cactus.

When I was five my mother and I found a short, fuzzy orange caterpillar and put it in clear Tupperware with a generous offering of foliage collected from the yard. I cut holes in the top but they were too big and pretty soon the orange caterpillar wasn’t in its bed of leaves and sticks anymore. My mom found it under my bed a week later. A quarter of its original size, it hadn’t found the way back to the Tupperware where there was fresh water and it quickly dried up. We kept it on the windowsill, perched on a mossy rock, and sometimes late at night I would stare up at it and say I was sorry.

Most of the summer I worked at the child center never made it to memory because I tried not to pay attention to too much of it. I remember mostly that the air smelled like tea tree oil and that blackberries seemed to be slowly engulfing the city. Late one night I watched a raccoon get hit by a car ten feet away while his raccoon friend stood next to me at the bus stop. When I was stressed I ate peanut butter, jelly, margarine and banana sandwiches and cookie dough from a tub, letting crumbs fall under the oven for the sublessor to deal with when she got back from Vietnam.

The kids at work asked if I’d come back for a visit during the holidays (special dinner, state-subsidized presents under a plastic tree). I thought about the way my mother made our house smell like Christmas by dabbing oil she bought from a department store on the metal around the light bulbs and how when I found out I felt cheated somehow. I thought all that spiciness and warmth was really from baking cookies and felled conifers. “I’ll try to come,” I said. “I’ll try.” But I couldn’t.

My aunt came to visit with three of her children. We hiked to a field of bluebells and 11-year-old Isabella complained because she was afraid she’d be sore for her lacrosse game. My aunt promised her a Bob Evans cinnamon roll and pointed out the wild flowers she and her oldest used to pick to decorate their tiny house before they had money. My aunt has seven children. She had the first two before she was 20, one in medical school, two to celebrate earning her M.D. and two more after she opened her own practice. I think some people just know that they will be good mothers and others know they won’t be but have kids anyway.

Some large things are cute, too, and only narrowly escape my desire to swaddle and breastfeed. That summer working at the child center I took the bus home every day to a tiny studio where I watched my relationship heave and writhe like an upset child.

I tried everything and I probably tried to hard. I encouraged him to share his feelings and use his words and take time alone to process. I tried (usually failed) to maintain a flat affect when he was escalated and not to engage in power struggles. I employed the entire Therapeutic Crisis Intervention model: managing the environment (triggers include: bobby pins in the bathroom, bobby pins on the floor, bobby pins in the bed, bobby pins in anywhere in sight or not adequately hidden), prompting, caring gestures, proximity, time away, directive statements, planned ignoring and positive attention, redirection, hurdle help, physical restraint.

It didn’t work. I couldn’t really take care of either of us and I watched everything fall into a sobbing pile of scraped-up elbows, lonely shoes and fist-dented walls and I just didn’t know how to pick it up and wipe its nose and tell it to go outside and play for a while.

i have pretty friends

2009-04-28T18:17:00.002-04:00

on the delicate art of swooning (a draft)

2009-04-28T18:06:00.002-04:00

TO DO: SWOONING, NOT SYNCOPE

He says, “you are the light
that makes my camera lens flare
and I’m afraid to touch anything
because the pressure inside my index finger
after an hour with you is enough to make my chest explode,
so just think what I could do
to a little ballpoint pen.
And so I guess it’s goodbye
to photography and writing for a while.”

She says, “You make me want to sleep and sleep,”
meaning sleep forever in some old sweatshirt,
head against seersucker against chest,
ear sliced with spikes of 4 o’clock light.

But we’ve got to keep on
cooking the cow, match by match.
We’ve got to sweep out all the crumbs
before they harden under the lip of the cabinets.
We’ve got to make lists
so long we can use the stuff we’ve done
to wallpaper our living rooms.
We’ve got to swoon, real hard,
but keep that cerebral blood full of oxygen,
so we can stay standing, so we can believe
our love’s not useless.

revisions

2009-04-28T18:01:00.002-04:00

Hiya. I've been trying to revise things recently. The first one is super new, the second one is super old.

THIGMATROPIC

I read only the same peeling-paint bathroom wall
for two years and five months, going to visit
the same person every night, before gathering the skirts
tight around my knees and waddling the twenty feet
required to enter another world. The new walls say,
who bats their eyelashes anymore anyway?
ink reminiscent of birds and summer and Washington.

Black birds with oil-spill feathers,
laughing though Pacific woods.
You can’t forget, Dana said, they aren’t woods
until someone cuts them down. Reaching up,
his bony hands brushing hoary moss hanging thick as tinsel,
the same in Appalachian college towns
as in the wealthy suburbs that bracket
my lucky life. It’s hard to give things up.

I will not cut for stone, my aunt said,
and saying so was the right thing,
even though she sometimes believed
she could fix anything. She did
what she could and had her patients gargle
salt water for everything.

And Eritreans don’t have a word for it,
to tilt the head back and let cold,
dark liquids alternately rise
and fall, sliding past tonsils. Cauldron-like, mysterious
sounds breaking through bubbles. Just being
silly, Saba said, just being silly.
I used to be silly every day and between
serving cups of coffee I listened
to co-workers’ stories: beauty pageants, marinated
chunks of lamb, English classes, a husband stuck in Africa.

There are people I can’t see anymore
except when I notice pillows folded length-wise
behind my neck, cutlery arranged along the lines of the table,
my car gliding tangent to the curves of the road and never above 55.
Forgotten stories: a learned efficiency.

HURRICANE SEASON

You called to tell me you spent days tinkering
with thermometers and waving palm fronds
so the temperature and wind would be just right
and it would rain on me today.
I inform you that the drops fell into my tea
and cooled it down
and I love my rain boots anyway.

I tried to send you a happy anniversary! hurricane,
hoping it would fan up the shingles
on your roof, tear the pictures of us
off your doorframes and scare you
into coming home.
But instead it flooded your house.
and you had to stay at someone else’s,

you’ve always had the prettiest friends.

Let’s meet in Asheville. There are mountains there
with crags like embraces and if we hide on the leeward side
maybe we can forget for a minute
all the violent gales and thunder,
the wall-punching and teeth-baring,
the heat lightning nights
we watched the sky flash brown
then white and then brown.

Maybe you’ll begin to notice again
when I toss seismic waves to slam your body
into the rocks, or fix the sun on your face
for when you first open your eyes.
When I wake up extra early
just to run my nose across your eyebrow
or punch you in the stomach.

no-title, drafty mess.

2009-04-17T13:32:00.002-04:00

I want feedback and lots of it, please. And I'm gonna post a revision on Thursday.

xox

I read only the same peeling-paint bathroom stall
for two years and five months
before gathering the skirts tight around my knees
and waddling, with near-thigmatropic elegance,
the twenty inches required to enter another world.
The new walls say, who bats their eyelashes anymore anyway?
ink reminiscent of birds and summer and Washington.
Black birds with oil-spill feathers,
laughing though the woods.
You can’t forget, Dana said, they aren’t woods
until someone cuts them down. Reaching up,
his bony hands brushing hoary moss hanging thick as tinsel,
the same in Appalachia as in wealthy suburbs.
It’s hard to give things up.
I will not cut for stone, my aunt said,
and saying so felt like the right thing.
She made her patients gargle
salt water for everything.
But Eritreans don’t have a word for it,
to tilt the head back and let cold,
dark liquids alternately rise
and fall, sliding past tonsils. Cauldron-like, mysterious
sounds breaking through bubbles. Just being
silly, Saba said, just being silly.
There are people I don’t see anymore
except when (late night, working)
I notice pillows folded length-wise behind my neck
or the car gliding tangent
to the curves of the road and never above 55,
forgotten stories:
a learned efficiency.

there are things in my life sometimes

2009-04-11T16:48:00.003-04:00

my buddy the poacher.

lifepoint pentecostal church.

on a hike. found a bone.

old man. old man's cave.

photo credit rjc.

j-swell being intense.

VOTE!

2009-04-08T16:28:00.001-04:00

hi! vote for jason+annie's video so we can win wilco tickets:)

here.

jason and annie wanna see wilco real bad!

2009-04-07T16:14:00.003-04:00

HELP JASON AND ME WIN WILCO TICKETS (PLEASE).

Hi.

J-swell and I made a movie to try to win tickets to see Wilco. Please check it out (via the link above) and then starting tomorrow go to www.backdropmag.com to vote for us so we can win because winning's great plus it means we get to go see Wilco. Yeah:)

xox,
annie

Holiday Spirit in Shenandoah National Park

2009-03-04T19:24:00.003-05:00

What Lucas and I found near the end of hiking Old Rag in December:

:)

-annie

I wish I took these pictures

2009-02-16T00:09:00.004-05:00

valentine's day photo fun with my dear friends Jenny and Neil. and Jenny's homemade ring flash.

PHOTO CREDIT JENNY CECIL

Eggs And The Great Beyond

2009-02-11T00:14:00.002-05:00

This past weekend was OU's 48-hour Shootout. Thanks Andrew/Eli (and co.) for letting me help out:)

http://vimeo.com/3155192

pictures to unfreeze your pipes

2009-01-19T15:04:00.003-05:00

I feel right for the first time in a while, thanks mostly to these beautiful people. And the cows.

bad pictures from a pretty fantastic day

2008-12-19T04:10:00.005-05:00

Wayyyy back in October my good friend Jason and I went on an adventure to Moonville, Ohio. I just got around to going through pictures from that day. Moonville is one of my favorite places. It was formed in the heyday of the railroad and has long been abandoned. Only a few old foundations, parts of a trestle, a tunnel and a graveyard are left.

(different day...still awesome. The Magnetic Fields!)

xox, annie

Lb.

2008-12-03T12:55:00.004-05:00

things i like:

my father and i found the knife by the side of the road. he will add it to his sharp object collection.

pound: check your mailbox in 2-4 days. i will see you when it's colder and i have a newer, warmer, prettier hat.

But, more urgently, did your father enjoy the fox hunt?

Amanda

2008-11-03T01:04:00.001-05:00

Amanda, 15, of Albany, Ohio, attends Lifepoint Pentecostal Church in Athens. She let me photograph her doing her hair which she has never (in her life) cut.

Mistaking Rocky Coastlines for the Foothills of Appalachia

2008-11-02T15:21:00.001-05:00

Mistaking Rocky Coastlines for the Foothills of Appalachia

It was easier than one might imagine
to see an elated congregation in those rush hour drivers
creeping, frustrated and frantic, along the highway,
longing to get somewhere
untold and amazing.
All full of a frantic joy
capable of simultaneously captivating
and scaring the crap out of small children.

In Ohio the light comes and goes
but in Washington it comes and comes and comes
and is gone.
Before my hours of sleep slowly began to outweigh
my hours of trying to keep up
with the two tires racing ahead of me,
reading in green parks, singing (terribly, windows open, too loud),
skipping through mossy canopies with slugs underfoot, smiling
at affectionate couples on buses,
we had to leave.

Much like the way a city
can quietly and steadily be engulfed by blackberries,
it is easy to fall asleep for a while:
cheek on imaginary goose down,
caught (trapped, protected) between ribcage and hip bone.
And upon waking it is easy to hear the thunder of a trucker’s laugh
And the low, pre-dawn whistles of freight trains
in the silence between two people separated by three streets.

And imagine knowing that yes, the past two years of your life
are leaving, getting on a plane, going away for a very long time
(at the end of the day november 21, 2008, and there is nothing to be done about it).
But when you look at each other you still think that sometimes you see caves
and coal tipples peeking out from behind one another’s ears.
And you worry that maybe when those two years are gone
this place won’t be your home anymore.

You imagine telling him all this so matter-of-factly
like driving through that crumbling hillside gap at night.
You see the cows and tilled fields and trailer parks,
but you know what’s there.

But when you imagine telling him,
you imagine also his eyes getting big.
Not like the eyes of the deer, but of a driver
staring in disbelief at the warm body standing
helpless where high beams cross.
Eyes like the driver’s: guilty then sad then angry,
steeled for the crash just meters away.

pentecostal youth-->first deadline

2008-10-20T12:17:00.003-04:00

this is part of why I only got 3 hours of sleep last night.

2008-10-06T17:26:00.007-04:00

(p.s. sorry if the toning is terrible.)

Oh hey, it's been a while.

2008-09-29T22:44:00.005-04:00

I'm working on a project about the youth of the Lifepoint Pentecostal Church in Athens, Ohio. Here's an image from my first shoot at the church in over a year.

Big humungous thanks go to Rachel, Elisha, Pastor Doner, Brother Jason, the youth group and the rest of the congregation for letting me try to tell your story.

pretty things.

2008-09-26T01:15:00.001-04:00

here are a couple pretty things from bare valley. i'll post a rough edit from the past week after my stats exam is over. rrrrrrrrr.

Nancy!

His name is Norman Bates and he was just skin and bones when he showed up at Bare Valley. Today he was sick. Barney thinks he might have eaten a bad spider.

<3

Old.

2008-09-23T09:42:00.000-04:00

Things I've seen.

Hiya. This is a link to my old portfolio, so check it out if you want to see what I've been doing for the past couple years. <3

the details.

2008-09-23T00:04:00.000-04:00

Today, two years ago.

2008-09-22T23:59:00.000-04:00

R.I.P. Patrick J. Gibbon.

Bare Valley

2008-09-20T07:29:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I went to visit my friends at Bare Valley Family Nudist Camp. I'm going to be spending some time there over the next few weeks trying to show what it means to be a nudist. (This post is dedicated to my parents who I know read this blog sometimes. Enjoy!) Also, thanks to Barney, Linda, Jerry and Nancy for letting me into your homes and lives. You guys are the best.

The sweetest couple I have ever met.

Sun. Flowers.

Ink.

The Williamsons.

It's pronounced "glaw-sturr"

2008-09-11T20:53:00.000-04:00

Glouster, Ohio.

So cute. Yay first loves.

Not-so-cute conversation that followed:

Glouster Girl: Hey, JD! Tell me what you're gonna get tonight. What are you gonna get tonight?

Toddler Boy: Pussy!

:( !!!!

Navigating Atlanta’s Northeast Expressway

2008-09-05T00:21:00.000-04:00

(*I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.)

Sharpened teeth and sucked in breath, each finger
bitten off, no pain, no mess. No more
long nights, dream tugging too-short digits: stretching
the cartilage while sleeping. Mother glazing
the stubborn, swollen joints with some viscous Sicilian remedy
(honey, perhaps, olive oil). It was no good, still couldn’t
make a finger church for two or touch new life lines,
bluer veins, knuckles dusted white by winter.

I dragged them, one after another, to a muddy demolition derby,
tricking them with offers of cotton candy, elephant ears,
plastic bags of live goldfish. Prodding, separating,
weaving long, clean fingers with my own shattered stubs.
Pretending that I believed this warmth, this new skin
pressing urgently against my own
made a difference, I oscillated:
a sleeping dolphin, without the muted shine
and the great sense of humor,
listing easily to the surface for air and back down again.
Forgetting what I asked just to watch green eyes
get sad and struggle not to look away:
why do anything at all?
Hands in my hair quickly growing awkward:
why did we come to this party?
We don’t know anybody here.

We are experiencing the third worst traffic:
hurtling, screeching, and frantic instructions
funneled into the right ear. I do not hear
“merge now, don’t look, don’t slow down.”
Instead, I am imagining I have been told I’ve done all right
by my traveling companion. Allowed an Oreo, a handshake,
a kiss on the eyebrow. I am imagining
I have done something so terribly important.
Something history books, for sure.

It’s just nice to want to shove the tension rods into place
when the curtains come down. Nice to feel
like vacuuming. Like the dust and bobby pins in the bag,
rather than on the rug, make the world a better place.

green space

2008-08-19T04:38:00.000-04:00

pictures from a trip to the olympic peninsula in washington state (kingston ferry, elwha valley, olympic hotsprings, hoh rainforest, the hall of mosses)

Comforting the Dying

2008-08-03T12:39:00.000-04:00

This is the project I did audio on for Soul of Athens. Photos are by Dustin Finkelstein and Dan Krauss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB6eUxy6RSY

(while you're at it...www.soulofathens.com)

Three-Legged Dogs

2008-08-03T12:34:00.000-04:00

The way my roommate thinks about girls that I have trouble understanding: “Girls who are so drunk they can’t walk in their high heels are adorable.”

As it turns out, an unsettling number of other males agree.

What I tell my friends from high school about the town in which I chose to go to college: There’s a man in town with a cartoon jaw and mossy hair and a back like a mountain. He walks around with his head by his knees.

I see him a few times a week, holding his hands up to people as they pass. Patiently grasping at strangers, murmuring. It takes seven or eight tries. Seven or eight uncomfortable twists away from his outstretched fingers. Seven or eight people who suddenly become fixated on the lovely spring foliage or engrossed in a sign in a shop window that’s been there for years. Seven or eight nothankyous before someone takes his hand and leads him across the intersection.

You should really come up some time. It’s only a six-hour drive.

What I pretend to believe to keep from staying in bed twenty hours a day: He chose to walk that way because the world looks more hopeful from down there, looks brighter. Because it reminds him of when he was 6. He can almost feel his mother’s hands again, her fingers raking gently through hair that’s almost gone.

How my friends from high school respond to my invitation to share my remarkable and fascinating college town with them: Oh, yea. Maybe.

What I realize I need to fix on Wednesday, April 9: From a block away I can see him, waist-high, reaching purposefully for the hands flapping past him.

I cross the street away from him.

The best sense I can make of my roommate’s bizarre attraction to bleached-blonde, orange-tinted, unnecessarily public pathos: It takes a lot of work. I picture a pack of small, puffy three-legged dogs. They are well dressed and over stimulated, tripping across a street lined with uneven bricks.

And they are yapping. Hobbling, tripping and yapping.

They are pretty adorable.

You Remind Me of Me (and you suck)

2008-08-03T12:31:00.001-04:00

I. My Father Writes His Own Eulogy And It Freaks Me Out

John loved Starbucks. Every day he stirred one packet of sugar in the raw into his Grande Cappuccino. He sprinkled another packet on top. Flecks of foam and brown crystals cascaded neatly onto the napkin-placemat arranged under his cup specifically for the cascading of flecks of foam and brown crystals. He’d fold it up and throw it away. Very tidy. He was a good man.

That’s what I want you to tell them.

Okay, Dad. Okay.

When I die.

Okay.

II. Fallen Apples

Eighth grade. The stone house has a deep purple door with curly silver numbers and it shouts, “look at me! I am fascinating! I look like a fairy house. You can tell people about me and they will think you are fascinating, too. Go ahead, they’ll never know better!”

I loved that door, looked for it. Passing it, I pointed. “That is my favorite door.” I imagined the people living just on the other side: a troll family sitting on gnarled wooden rockers, sipping tea and smiling a lot. Walls plastered with sequins, paint swatches and faux fur. Unopened pots of purple paint filling the cupboards.

And then one day, the door turns yellow.

Sunflower yellow. Yellow like being really happy and being packed into a tube and squeezed, plopping, onto a wooden entryway in the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. This door! This must be magic.

People I’ve never even seen painted their door a different color and I wrote about it in my diary. Told all my friends. Had to resist grabbing hold of unsuspecting people in the hallways at school, to drag them outside to see for themselves and better their lives by exposing them to what was, unquestionably, the most important thing they might ever see.

At 14, I fell in love with a fresh coat of paint on a door down the street from my house.

That’s what I want you to tell them.

Okay.

love.

2008-07-17T20:11:00.001-04:00

Fighting

You called to tell me that you spent days
tinkering with thermometers and waving palm fronds
so the temperature and wind would be just right
and it would rain on me today.
I tell you that the drops fell
into my tea and cooled it down
and I love my rain boots anyway.

I tried to send you a happy anniversary hurricane,
hoping it would fan up the shingles on your roof,
tear all the pictures of us off your doorframes
and scare you into coming home.
Instead, it flooded your house
and you had to stay at someone else’s.
You’ve always had the prettiest friends.

Let’s meet in Asheville.
There are mountains there with crags like embraces
and if we hide on the leeward side maybe
we can forget about the violent gales and thunder,
the wall-punching and teeth-baring behind us.

You might even be able to feel it again
when I wake up just before your screaming alarm
to run my nose across your eyebrow
or punch you in the stomach.

the word is that girls are crazy

2008-07-17T20:09:00.000-04:00

Pioneer Girls

I built them up into some sort of heaven,
those little girl friendships.
We were a pristine society,
journeying at 3 a.m. to tie ribbons
to stop signs or lampposts,
finger painting the walls yellow
when the sun wouldn’t come.

We were pioneers,
conquering the wilderness of my basement
where potato bugs were known to carry scarlet fever.
We were and secret-whispering,
foveas locked, beaming, on each other’s faces.

Every day with them was the same
optimistically myopic excitement
like the first time I leaned over
my sleeping mother post take-off
to see the world below, all doll-sized and ideal.
Those toy cars could never melt the ice caps.

We simply ignored that there would always
be other people, more complicated, older and alluring,
reclining in the corners of our eyes.
Supine, backs against the watery pink and feet up,
boldly, on our thick, newly-mascara-laden lashes,
waiting to cannonball into the real world.
Waiting to splash all the cool, simple calmness
up around them and make us forget
how we said we’d all move to a house in the woods,
sleep in hammocks we’d weave from the collection
of our cats’ shedding, stain the floors with sparkles
and play our music as loud as we wanted.

In that house, I waited until the objects
in the crowded room were coated
with a bright, soft, intangible fur.
I puffed a red balloon as full as it would get
and set it afloat, gave it just one last tremulous trip around:

beaten back and forth, bolstered up
toward the brilliant white light bulb.
Keep it up keep it up keep it up
don’t let it touch the ground!
or it dies.

And it did make it around the room
for a while. But some people got restless,
some got bored, and others simply lost the strength
to keep supporting something
that was just never worth the effort.

something I learned in 10th AP bio

2008-07-17T20:06:00.000-04:00

Homunculus

You have become homunculus.
Lips, once thin as clown balloons,
have now swollen to moon bounce proportions.
It takes 17 ½ arm-swinging bounds to get
from flap entrance to netted back.
Afterwards, a nap for exactly the amount of time
it takes to massage your expansive feet
leaves a person with leg hair pouring to the floor,
ribs reaching out like fingers,
surprised to see you haven’t yet noticed:
your core has gotten bored
with disuse and has become
the preferred skating rink of local children.

How your ears and eyes must gently protest,
stuck with the onus of dumbly and gingerly
sensing but not quite feeling the many things
done for them: yearning and disappointment
of the man who looks like my best friend’s dad,
and so I call him Ralph. He strolls around all day,
alone, arms filled with pornography, toboggan pulled
and tied little-boy tight under his hoary chin.
The chin that crumples as if to say,
“if the doctors had not removed so much of my brain,
I should very much like to stroke your hair.”

Your bulging, vigilant lenses
cannot feel the paper cut sting
behind your brother’s eyelids
as he sits down to write your father’s eulogy,
only to find the same blank page
three days later. He remembers everything:
from the father-son assault on the wasps’ nest in the backyard,
to the day your father began forgetting
both his dislike of squirrels and his sons’ names.
And even though it is your brother’s mouth that moves
slow and wide like a scream on silent film,
and his lashes that spit furiously flecks of moisture,
you are the one who speaks at the wake,
vocal cords sturdy,
the sympathy card pro.

I take you on one more trip,
trying to make you remember
how you used to get headaches
over each dead bird and drive
thousands of miles to listen for hours
to strange old women you’d never met
talk about the wedding ring dents
slicing across their fingers.
I smile as I pretend to sleep,
your knit cap sandwiched
between my cheek and the seatbelt.
Slumber-shifting and meticulous,
I’m pleased with the challenge of getting you
to look into my deceptively peaceful face.
But you do not move your gaze
from the task of preserving our lives,
calculating gas efficiency,
and counting road kill.

from a long time ago

2008-07-17T19:57:00.000-04:00

The Visit

I keep this room clean.
A purple quilt, white sheets, white pillows.
A wooden desk.
Nothing on the floor,
except a green throw rug,
which has not been so much thrown
as carefully placed.

And then here you come,

visiting from your sunny, less calculated habitat
with its furniture upholstered in dirty laundry
and its pervasive smell of home
rather than disinfecting spray.

Here you come for three
devastatingly-unproductive, light-pouring-in-
through-slits-in-closed-shades,
you-basking (me-glaring) days and nights.

It is four in the afternoon.
Now tell me,
why has the purple quilt my grandmother’s best friend made me
when I was born made its way onto the floor?
The floor, which now resembles a recently unearthed grave
for Twizzlers wrappers, towels, flakes of deodorant and worn out socks?
How did it get so far from the bed
where it must have been so comfortable?

Your answer:
perhaps it felt like a third-wheel
up here with us.

You do not let me move from this bed
where we lay, tangled,
all weekend.
You do not let me move,
no matter how many hours I lay awake,
grumpily planning my escape,
unless it is to take a shower (with you)
or to watch you creep, early in the morning,
naked and giggling into the kitchen
to boldly dip your fingers into the splendid plate of brownies
my roommate made the night before.
Then back to bed again,
hands unwashed and sticky.

And then you leave.

You, with your falling-off-bicycles
scrapes you never clean.
You, who holds on tight
to my uncomfortable and uninviting back
all night, conforming to my elaborate combination
of twists, turns and bends
like some comatose rodeo clown.
You throw my quilt on the floor
and leave only confectionary messes
that I will still be washing and vacuuming away
two months later.

I begin to fantasize about what it would be like
if you never came to visit:
the quilt would never leave its place,
pulled strictly up to the head of the bed.
The carpet would stay the same color it was when I moved in.
I would get out of bed once in a while.

And I would get so hungry at night,
without bits of chocolate stuck to my sheets.