Pa came home after identifying his older brother and took off all his clothes. He arrived with no bag, I think he was on meth. He grabbed a plastic garbage bag and shoved all his clothes inside. “Where is your bag pa?” No answer. Just a slammed door in my face. Ma says, “he’s not doing well. Not sad, just says I smell bad.” We all went to bed and I dreamed Meghan put me on the phone with a retard, unable to understand that I had to wake up at two a.m. and didn’t want to swap suicide stories. God Ray, look what a mess you’ve made. I knew dad was alive because he kept rattling pill bottles from the medicine chest. Then later it was his snore that kept me believing he was alive. But what if he isn’t.

Brief passages of time and rhythm, don’t rush don’t slow don’t slouch
Evolution can’t be forced into a dominatrix position.
We were wrong.
We were all wrong.
Time is not international enough yet for the Kama Sutra. Don’t sit back and error space correct until it is all over, your life flown by like a dry grizzle of emotion never emitted.

Never speak what falls from most eyes, my father taught me that of most things. A pained princess of hard times of brick walls careening off into waterfalls of those more dressed for the catillian.

Never forgetting to write on Christmas is a luxury only some can speak of and many forget. I was once barren in the desert too. Running man, burning man, blue man all not as important anymore than being here, alone with you. Never really able to break free of my own self-importance, you stare at me, from above and from below, bellowing my current into the vibrations of your own lust. I thrust at your eyeballs to stop, but, pained as you are not, the whimpering of loss continues.

I regret not coming home this Christmas, but I myself do not, not dully not wholly regret never having told you a story of mine. This one was good too. Set not in the desert, but in the rain of sea and streets from whence I came. My own sail set years ago but you still linger on in someone else’s mouth, foul and potent as tiny magnetic dots driven as nails, scuttering to my own metal’s surface.

YOU forgot to call.

And so, I drift, compelled towards nothing in your field of radiation. Helix, my father said, Huxley said others, driftwood now am I. You smiled at my backside and threw saddened wedges of smoothed bottle glass in my direction. Try lonesome next time.

II.

Bone dry and run ragged I now feel better.
You and I can resist each other. But the real question begins when we ask
who is the state?
Why even begin at all?
Because no one hears us
And everyone laughs at us
But you do it so well
Is not enough for me to open up, even a tiny bit

I remember the swing set story.
Do YOU remember the car rides?

Sleet and Chinese, never to go out on a Saturday night.
A girl without a daddy is a girl with tight shorts and too much tea in her brain.

Whips of soft curls cannot save her, and they will be bleached anyway by nightfall.
Time well spent, but on someone else’s account. Can YOU be accounted for anyways?

A world can be shut down with one voice drilling, THEY’VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE. Heads of millions will turn, but there always has been and there always will be, those, plus ten million insects to conquer. Tell them something they don’t know about rain nine months a year, aching joints swollen like melon balls pressed into cages of twisted fig branches. Of party power stardust made on a rural rode where the sunsets
are pretty and the cool aid is not electric acid but usually served warm by a peyote girl shunned by her grandmother’s river for no longer being willow wolf but now being peyote girl.

She and all the others were sprung free one day when the moss was aggravating. Fishing boats teemed with jacking off kids away from their dry grass one-stories and slicked with salmon blood for the first time since preschool. Just wondering were you went, me again.

III.

This is not for me, I repeated a thousand times. I swear. It did not all
happen so fast that I have forgotten you. But, bloody battle after bloody
battle ensued and I wished that a wretched time with you had ensued.
Instead I flung heated dung your way with a distasteful smile of red punch
puckering my cheek corners. And then collapsed again into your stomach. A
fine place to drink and a night of roaring motors. By the time foggy
children lined on the curbs for morning rumbles of best friends and
seating assignments, falling into place at the exact alphabetical moment,
I pressed on, dimly lit by my own weight. Feeling shabby like the f*ck had
been but a scrap nearly hitting the bus. I tumbled and the girl in the
back spilled her English muffin.
THIS IS NOT FOR YOU
but she barfed anyways
losing her best friend seating partner,
and obviously her name in the alphabetically ordered line. Damn nitwit of
a troublemaking crash.

It was morning and I should have been in bed.

IV.

When asked by the people of the town how it happened, I can only say I
remember two things. Once, that I had ridden a poney which must have
contributed to it, and twice, that I had beaten the child on the head.
While still in your stomach?

WHY, YES! It is a nice place to rest but not for long, and besides, there
was an entire battle to be raging forward in the streets. THE STREETS?

WHY, YES! Can’t you see they are sinking like sand. But they are concrete
are they not? WHY, yes. They are. But you trouble me for the loss of your
mother when still somewhere thoughtless is a man who holds your blood.

I speak for my own will sir and I am driven by none other than myself to
accomplish this goal.

HA HA HA HA boardroom walls can clap with agony.
I do believe mam,
this interview is over.
We simply do not understand your story.

Do I not receive in your mind some compensation, some time for having
stopped by?

And break our code of ethics, sir, no mam, I think not. If we gave you
time, WHY, we would have to give it to all. As small endeavors go, we
simple couldn’t afford that risk. When you leave, I am sure you will find
it to be red.
Thank you, though, for taking the time.

V.

And where will this battle take place?
Is the sod yet laid?
I dreamed again of a car without gas, which was the ultimate salt and ice,
rubbed through on a hot skin.
If only we had that saying.

But the time to leave could never have been cleaner. It was not night,
now, although I knew night would soon return.
Get out while it is still day I was taught. Think before you leave though.
Never come close to getting what you want when you are thirsty-
because everyone knows you get thirsty-
you might as well be naked with a blade at your hole. If not ready to be
dug up, then throw some mud on and never turn away from the blade’s face.
It will slice you up the spine, but it will lodge in your skull for sure.
It takes a shotgun to shatter a skull. No wonder the Canadians leave their
doors open.

You could take it all in the end.
But not without your hands, pressing each pedal and guidance is not taken
lightly, there is a tendency with us for rubber to be not so softly laid.
I miss when I could eat a whole meal, real things unchilled.
A dime a dozen for lost people stuck in a one storie, waiting for those to
come home whom might have escaped might have been eaten up by two of the
most dangerous things. Fear bears and fear the world.
Never speak to a blanket three ways: when she doesn’t feel like talking,
when there are others about, and at night when her wife, the pillow or
anyone else is home.
Hug things often. But young man, don’t regret sunshine and funerals and
don’t ever
regret one thing: me.

I am fine and you are a museum of things gone fine. Now read to me or get
out.
Can I just make something up? Or should I make it quick.
Rub my temples and turn off the lights, anyway you do it.
Put your hands to your eyes and see if that relieves some of the pressure,
don’t push too hard though.

YOU may break down, but I will not. For YOU may be safe, hidden under a
blanket, but I live alone and free.

Love is a dog from hell. That’s what they say around those parts anyway.

I came out bleeding around 11:30.
By a quarter to ten I was shaking my head in disbelief.
Again with the red dwarf.
The horrors of himself at age 3.
Capitol it.

Sometimes I see bears AND funerals, sometimes on the same afternoon, but
nothing, not even the sunshine or you scare me anymore, just keep poking
and see what happens.
This bed is no longer my resting place and YOU no longer my protector. For
the first time in years the motor began to purr, even though it was night.

And from whence she withdrew a cornering stare, a young man approached, willing to try her. A Capitol Hill smacker with gums long and saggy. Jorjian would have none of it. But he commenced to concede Jorjian’s mind for her, a sly grimace paying no matter. What he willed to have, he certainly got. Her cropped bangs stuck to the cheek of her forehead. What a pallor she contained after such an affront. But Jorjian stared past her prowler. She put up an image of days in the valley. Alone with her mother, her maker, but sadly, things came crashing back as the wolf had just spat in the face of his prey. Jorjian wrestled with what to do, it was custom of her to ripen another with dew. She was trapped and saddened by her life’s noxious state. She lifted her skirt further and offered what of her was left. Jorjian Brown then caved forever into the hole in her breast.

It seemed there was no hope for a girl left to her own. Not in a city both gray and fertile. Not in a city full of fuel and rock. Ms. Brown had been left, alone on the beach. A forgetful image of a year downed by the dismal stocks of the east. The bells of New York ringing up and down as the markets sank and set forth. No one thought of Jorjian as her body grew soft. The ice salt of Alki washed her skin clean. And no one, not Moe, not Mickey, no one from home called out the name to which she knew best. It seemed she had never set foot in the barber chair that day. Never ate a lollypop from that corner store. Never drank a sticky drink from that barstool. She had never lived atop the hill that now rested in silence of fog and fall. It seemed Jorjian Brown, was never at all.

I stop and call for coaching. Slap cold rainwater on my cheeks. Sip a coffee. Swear to go buy breakfast from the vending machine. Get up off the alley floor, drag my feet along Harrison, clenching my pepper spray. I burp up smoke. My pants sag. My urge to use has skyrocketed. When will I string together a few clean days? Days when my emotions are stable. A good one, a bad one, things seems so fractured. Meghan is gone this weekend, with Erin, mom, dad, bleeding. I’m here. Along by Slices Deli, along next to empty warehouses and the new shells of condos. What if I’m addicted to shame?

Man set his apartment on fire then shot himself in the head because he was slated to be evicted for condos. Kid shot to death for trick-or-treating. Hit the gym, hit the wall. Palin prank-called. We can never talk again Travis. Don’t call the mother police on Jill. Dinner with Maurice and Lewis. Stew and beans. Smelled Lewis’s feet from wearing heels, blistered. Would have gone to work with smeared make-up on if Jen hadn’t washed his face for him. This is today. Things will be different come four am tomorrow.

But this time, I hid in a tunnel. I battled six-hundred girls. I crashed a bus. I called for Travis, in tears, but I couldn’t dial his number, over and over I tried to reach the T’s in my phone-book. There was evidence that I had crashed the bus. My drawings from the students on the school bus. My pillow left behind. A soggy Cheerio’s box, yellow and bent, under my forearm in the rain. I was naked in a shower and a kid kept trying to buy a ticket from me, bursting into my tent, over and over like a gerbil.

I dreamed I woke up on the fancy lobby couch at work. With a vision of my boss bursting in, standing over me in a purple shirt and thick glasses, his ID badge hanging over his taught belly. Firing my ass to oblivion. To no health care. To more bad dreams and calls to Travis I could no longer afford. I was asleep on the job. He would be justified in letting me go. But he didn’t understand. It was four am, I had been plucked from my bed where a man with a pale wood baseball bat staggered outside my window. Where a spider turned the same color yellow as my bedspread and crawled over my fringe. I threw it in the toilet, carrying it in my thong, and didn’t wake up Nathan. Like the cockroach that had scurried over my black shoes– the ones with the socks attached– only moments later.

Nathan. Our legs intertwined. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he had a f*cked-up foot or not. My foot kept circling his, trying to detect a defect. Or were his feet just long and flat? Or was he missing a toe? He didn’t limp, I noticed when he got up to make coffee. I spat out the coffee because I coughed. But also because I wanted to seem vulnerable and cute, and his. He wiped my chin. We still haven’t been together– like that. I told him about Patrick and how I wanted to get to know him too, and he called him a douche-bag. I laughed inside.

But my dream– I woke up wanting to call someone. Not Travis at this hour. Not dad– last time he was scared I would go outside and battle the man with the bat. In my dream I had called my God-father by accident. That’s how I knew it was a dream. I didn’t have a God-parent. Except for Sidney. Or Scott. I texted Meghan, my make-shift sponsor, and waited. Thinking about her Erin story and one-thousand plastic bags. Thinking about Poppy and her incessant need to chatter. Waiting for either for a reply, or for my boss to come fire me. Or to return to the couch when an opportune moment arose, when Don the weather-guy and used car salesman wouldn’t be taking his turn sleeping there. A beautiful woman was on the news next to me talking about anti-American rhetoric.

I hope someone reads this. Then I’ll know I’m real. My phone is next to me. All you have to do is call. Until then I’ll be unsettled, like I forgot something. I’ll be here, drinking cold coffee.

Jorjian remembered that her mom used to chase firetrucks. Like blundering whales sounding throughout the city streets at night, the trucks would haunt each alley, softly moaning at one another. And Jorjian’s mom would sit in her black car, transfixed by the sight, meant for her eyes only.

People burned that morning on Boren. A kid heard his mom scream and glass pop into his room. Deep black ash billowed as Jorjian’s pops watched it all unfold on the tube a block away. Jorjian called Meghan, now across the world, who told her things would clear up soon. And then she called her cousin, Abbi, who told her that pepper spray was illegal in Europe, so it was a horrible idea to visit. Jorjian didn’t want to visit. She wanted to stay. Go to Berlin maybe, someplace free of Boren and its atomic heat.

Boys playing men on a chain-link fence, slick and white, sneakers sliding, bending at will. Who will be the first to fall? Crack their head like Bowman did that summer night.
“Yo. Whooo! Oh sh*t, homie.” Skip and slip, bend and pour their tiny boy hearts out. The metal pings in the night air. Blood pops through the torn skull of the last tightrope walker to have fallen. Jorjian knew this is what it means to have a shaved head, to eat “sh*t like you for breakfast,” to die hard, to remember nothing, and always be walking along that chain-link outside Vietnam.

Sirens stop a skateboarder’s rumble on the clay. The man in the halfway house across the street claps over and over. Relentless techno crashes through an open screen door, and a government paycheck blows threw the wind and smudges its inky blot against Jorjian’s window. She laughs. Things seem relatively calm.
“Whoa!” And more clapping from the halfway house. This time for a reason. Another tightrope walker has tumbled. The others burst out laughing.

Over the mountain pass it would be crickets she would hear, thought Jorjian. But for now it was the sounds of the city that would have to lull her. TV’s, intercoms, buzzers, frowns, all things dismal, these were her things divine, she thought, as the neighbors moaned in ecstasy above and below.

Later that night, when Jen got home from her AA picnic, Jorjian and Jen made a promise to never let Calli in the apartment again. How’d she get through the gate anyway? Musta climbed over.
“But she was calling for you, asking about you.”
“There is nothing I can do.” But Jorjian wondered, who would Jen be able to turn away if they were naked, bleeding from the temple and screeching for her to save them?
“She swung a carburetor in my face, something rusty she had snatched while under the car.”
God she dug deep.
“Next time, you hold her put and one of us will go call the cops.”
Yeah, Jorjian agreed. She was sick of Calli’s sh*t.

She worried for him, because of his sister, and his mom. Word in the neighborhood, at least from the fat lady across the street with the smeared face paint and graying chihuahua, was that she had O.D.’d. Others wanted her kicked off the block. Too many late nights with her squealing, squawking at the cops. Her shirt always bunched over her tummy, her belly ring always glowing translucent. Others, including Jorjian, were jealous. Why did she get to have all the fun? Why didn’t Jorjian? Why was Jorjian now so cut off from all that she had been?

Things moved slowly on her walk home that day. Up one hill, two hills, three to where she had lived in that government housing or the next. All up the hill on Denny Way, apart from the rest of the city buried in grease. Things drifted for Jorjian, one could say. And then she recalled the bugs. Those tiny red beatles that had infested her mattress through the floor below her.
“No wonder,” the exterminator chuckled. “Just down below you there’s more bug than bed.” Crackhead we both agreed. And Jorjian watched as the man sprayed his soft patent air, white with chemical, clear of life, and she watched as he left her, now consumed with grief.

Who’s next on this hill of lies and steel, motorcycle repair shops and dismal dreams of speeding to grandeur? Jorjian wondered if she could make it to Canada within a few hours. She would hop a train, a Greyhound, anything to get her out. Vancouver was safe of knives and crack. Or so it seemed. She knew this was untrue. Yet how could she not regret the time wasted sitting in a tunnel of furrowed cement, rising like a tidal wave on either side of her split associations. She took another sip but it didn’t suffice. Her appetite was for the bland. The smoke that made her jitter. And it was only twelve o’ two. She had been up for two hours and she needed a nap.

He was a tall gentleman. A spindly dandy of the olden variety. Yet even with him in front of her, Jorjian’s depression lagged on that Thursday and she challenged all that had taken place within the spectrum of a week. There and back. A lie here. A fall there. She was strangely drawn to this man. He poured coffee into already black cups of dusted beans. Did she need another haircut, Jorjian wondered? Anything to offset the pace of doomed repetition. Sometimes he worked there too. At Rudy’s barbershop. And Stumptown coffee. He would walk the shallow tunnel hiding behind the two businesses, lurking in the soot of grinded beans and shredded human hair. A brush. That’s what he needed. He haunted the hill. With his head of shaved skin. It seemed to fizzle on his face, his scalp, his palms. Everywhere but the neck.

Things seemed to be unraveling. Why had he pulled her so close when they were talking? It was raining hard. Jorjian’s scarf had tucked away her face into a plume of deep pink and black.
“What. Have you gone Muslim on me?” Rob snorted.
“Naw. It’s like she’s a pilgrim.” Vinny vindicated.
“It’s just a scarf. Because it’s pouring out.”
But it was more than a scarf. It was protection from them and everything they could do to her. He pulled Jorjian close to his lap, sitting on the counter. She could sense a magnetic attraction to his gun.
“You wanna touch it.”
“I don’t like guns.”
“You gotta protect yourself.”
“I’ve got mace.”
But she needed a tazor. Or pepper spray. Or tear gas. Not for him. But for herself. Jorjian went home and lit a cigarette. American Spirit yellow. Within a second she had a burn in the center of her hand. Not her palm but the back of her hand. Where a man would smack a woman. Jorjian hadn’t felt anything but a slight tug from God pulling her hand away from the smoldering brush.
“Drop it.” God said to herself. “This is not for you to decide.”
But the cigarette smarted and Jorjian smiled. A masochistic curse and pleasure. Where were the stabbers now? She howled up at the gray of the shelter above her. To the gray cement of balconies beside her. To the gray of blistering rock below her.
“Come and get me now!”
But they never came. And Jorjian was forced to go back inside again, intact and defiant. Solemn that her neck was still unslit.

Jorjian counted the hours. She consumed goods and pillaged for more. Beer and junk, beer and junk. She counted candy in her mouth. Melting. She awoke in a trailing pool. Who had cut themselves above her? Why hadn’t anyone noticed and awakened? No. It was her that had vomited. On herself. ON the carpet. On the bed. Down her throat. And her roommate sat on the bunkbed across from her. Another distant drifter taken in by the grace of the Army, the Army of Salvationists, crying because the smell stung her nose and the sight frightened her upstate sensibilities. The roommate would return home to her cocker spaniel that week, forever to be away from Jorjian and all that she consumed.

She was wrong again, she supposed. She shouldn’t have eaten that joint. Jorjian grew sick with time, waiting for a mistake to take hold of her and drown out all worries. Things seemed forever frightened. Things seemed dismal under the shadow of her horrid bunk. Why had it taken so long for a world to be torn apart? Why had things corrected themselves so against her horrendous favor? She softly spoke the words of her counterpart, Jesus himself.
“I know you couldn’t be there. I know you had counted on me too.”
Drifting in and out of the day, things swung by gracefully that Friday. Into Monday. Someone cracked a window, letting in sooty fourteenth-street air. A can of mustard that was chilling on the windowsill’s outer point of no return, almost fell, darted towards the earth’s cold covering. She caught it. Whoever had cracked the window caught it. Jorjian sank under her wool, back till Tuesday eve.

She had to come up for life sometime. Her sweatshirt was ten times too big. A bleach spot stained her appointed air of confidence. Alone in her bunk, she was a sooter, an embankment of all things fractious. She shivered with an empty stomach. Ate a tortilla.
“Great party.” Someone mumbled from the bunk above her.

Now everyone would know she called the cops. Again. And they did know.
“They wasa just firworks.” But Jorjian knew they were shotgun sounds getting closer and closer to her complex with every thump.

Jorjian called Beatriz but all she said was,
“Wash your face and go to bed. I’m sending you big hugs.”
To herself she wondered, who the f*ck were you? Her mother-f*cking mom? If so, she’d rather take her mom. Jorjian hung-up missing Travis and feeling emptier than before. Someone kept howling outside. And Calli and her boyfriend lied to the cops.
“It was firworks. I saw him light ‘em.”
“A grown man with fireworks.” The young cop on a bike frowned.
“Man, weird sh*ts been goin’ down.” They took his word over Jorjian’s.
His word over hers.
He lied and they believed him. I sank into my covers. Ready to wake up at three am.

He is a righteous figure. Someone who never misses the number two bus. Someone who always hangs to the back of a line. Knowing he will get to the front in good time. He is a rock. And that’s why she clings to him. But now he clings to her. Fallen atop her white figure to be waxed. Slick, she is pale as glue. Another substance darts up her nose. Another wasted hour of his fingers lingering and waiting to grab her keys. Once they smelled so metallic she smiled and couldn’t stop herself from bursting out a hoot. She then sliced what she could of the key into her wrist unable to tell the difference between that and his fingers.

She had done it again. Wandered down the wrong gated alley. Saw the blackberries that no one would pick. Didn’t eat one herself because she was late to meet him. She had the shakes. But also because last night she heard a shove and the gate jingle and then the soft spray of urine onto the wall near the berries. A thorn mixed with some vodka vomited up the next Sunday morning, early like around four or five. When the skylight was full of blue and black and everyone’s eyes were glassy and the toilet bowl was open and no lines were left to take in, everyone was sweating now. A morning ritual. A shower, a sh*t, a shave. That’s what her father had said. Things like that tickled her. Words streamed into her eyesight. But things didn’t seem important to her that night. All that said anything was her mind, yelling about last night when they had huffed all the spray cans in her pantry. When had she the opportunity to scold herself anymore? When would the time come for her to feel the tiny sting of a sense of guilt? The relief of remorse for the killing of her own eyes?

The deep bricks in her brain panted with the heat of the song. Cat Power again. Crooning. But the party had died, the laughter was never there, but the party had died. The house had died and the paint chips crackled out front. Jorjian wished it would rain. Then things could get back to normal and this heat would dry up and she could kiss it away from him. Like when she blew on a flower but the petals stayed-put because they had been glued on and her dad said it was made of newspaper to save money. But they had smelled like glue and that is what she had liked. For the first time on this Tuesday she felt sad. Groggy, but sad. She ran the keys along a scarline on her wrist. The same scarline that had creased her arm and leg and head and breast for years and years, since Gordy stopped on the highway that night. He whiskered her bangs.
“How did you get that bump?” He smarted her with his dull eyes.
“It’s not a bump. It’s a scar.” She answered. The coke had run dry so her face had left the party feeling numb. A dumbness crowded her between the furrow of her sockets. Her armpits felt soft and the tiny hairs prickled her. She laughed as he came. She laughed as his hands left her alone. First time all night.

He had stopped on the highway to blow his brains to the wind. Scatter his thoughts to the gun’s tip. She stopped in her tracks. Had she wet herself? A gush of blood came rushing through the nozzle of her head. She fell to the floor. Again with the oxygen. Again with the ER nurses looking nice to her. Filling her with sweet flavors of pink and gowns of paper animals. They wore nice frocks and danced around the green room like ponies. Jorjian felt sad for these horses. The way they felt sad for her. Her mouth drooped and coins fell out. And she could see his hands covering her mouth.
“Keep quiet.”

Moe and Vinny knew it too. Travis knew it too. Things would be different now. She couldn’t tell what was good enough for her to take up anymore. Would knitting suffice? Would gardening? Fingerpainting? Baking? Snorkeling? Doing dishes was her specialty. Everyone could see it. And Jorjian did it with a smirk. It couldn’t get any worse and so it couldn’t get any better. She read and re-read the instructions on the side of the bright orange plastic bottle. Ingest. Ingest. Ingest. Before dinner, before sleep, before dawn, when he would be around her bed. The mattress is a folded spoon that Jorjian couldn’t wait to see him laying in after the time spent in a locked room with a young boy who she let roam her thighs. She would be seeing him after all those nights spent hugging the breast of a black nurse.
“You ain’t crazy. You just stressed.”
Her pink bracelet covered her keyed wrists that day. And she wore navy. From head to toe. And she asked him why he hadn’t come to visit her. He held up his hands. Not in question. But in answer.
As if they had prevented him from coming. But she knew that’s what they were meant for. He stood there. Hands in her face. Gleaming on dust.