in a Missouri motel cigarette bed, I am overwhelmed by the sweetness of you, the fellow child with whom I gladly share so many of my hours. i do my best to push away the fear that edges at me nightly, before my legs wrap between your ankles, the worry of all the days that come after and after–when I am dead, what will I have done? when I am old, will you have loved me well. it matters little in the day. I am laughing, I am ignoring family phone calls, I am making daydream plans for all the coming months of art and pleasure. I am riding in this car across the country.

Kansas is long and flat and makes me nervous, but even now it is behind us. I make my promises again that yes, yes, soon I will work hard, I will turn the machines in the basement until my dreams come true.

the past few weeks have been a haze. booze and sex and pills and hospitals and bad news and more bad news. vision going in and out, stumbling through white halls, waiting for someone to prove to me that i’m not going blind. i must not be–since the clouds cleared once I swallowed everything they gave me, once I took that shot like a champ even though it ached for hours. and he, his taller body that somehow has a face like mine but younger, he is walking in white halls without me.

i’m sorry. my writing all feels cheap these days– either incapable of grappling with the severity of experience, or petty for addressing some young folly in light of graver matters. my younger brother has been in and out of psych wards for months, before and after someone attempted to murder him and my father. my cousin dropped dead, suddenly, in her 30s, leaving two young kids behind to be tended by an alcoholic ex-husband. my parents’ marriage has been falling further and further apart, each into their own private thoughts and barnacled resentments.

I know it’s in poor taste to be so direct, and so self-pitying. I blush especially when I acknowledge that, while these things affect me profoundly, they are not truly my troubles. Despite my well-wishing, these labors are not my life.

And my life is, really, not so difficult. The love of my life is in off-season, I’m broke all the time, and from time to time my eyes and head are overwhelmed by pain, but all in all my life is fine. it’s better than it has been at many, perhaps even most, points in the past. I’m just struggling a bit.

“Do you realize how important this next year is for you?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

a memory, because the things that are close to me now are too close. the ones I love now are in such a storm. the last three months or so have held a lot of tragedy for me, a lot of fears and losses both petty and great, and I’ve been struggling with the task of how to address them, both in writing and in life. so to force myself to say something, some faded talk of things behind. 

time for a few words I’ve heard before, because I spoke them, and now years later I pull smoke in and spit them out again.

oh, you pearl skin girl, you were the only thing I wanted when I was bursting, catching fire and falling apart all over the highway divider, getting stuck in the beach glass and broken bottles. in those years when my hands shook, your little shoulders were what I wanted to be steady on. the lines and circles on my arms they were for you, for you. I tore my hair out, burned it in my hands in a high school cafeteria, orange and white, orange and white. your black boot, cracking a small square of plastic–all I could give–its injury echos even now, even now. 

you took my little girl’s mouth and swallowed it. you took your body to my bed as an apology. or so I took it. 

oh, I’ll write when work calms down, when I get back to town, on the weekend, on the weeknights, I’ll write when rehearsals end, when my nose stops bleeding, when I quit feeling so damn sad, when I quit drinking, when I am not so busy trying and failing to accomplish some trivial sexual conquest. I’ll write as soon as I get out of this taxi cab, out of this dentist’s chair, out of the blankets on this mattress on the dirty floor. I’ll write when people I know stop being sent to the hospital, when I never again have a reason to dial 911. I’ll write when I stop feeling afraid walking around late at night, when I stop needing to keep telling myself and everyone else what it means to treat somebody right. I’ll write when I stop pretending I know all the words to a song everyone else seems to like, when I stop pretending to be a lesbian when I don’t have the balls to tell some guy that I just don’t want to talk to him and the word boyfriend isn’t enough. I’ll write when I’m fiscally responsible. I’ll write when I floss. I’ll write when I don’t cringe every time I think about everyone I dated in high school. I’ll write when I’m dead. Or… no, that’s not it. I’ll write when the stereotype of a female writer does not include only posthumous success. I’ll write when I have something to say. Forgive me. 

Forgive me, it’s late, early, malt liquor’s no dinner, and I rarely feel completely at ease.

In a record store on the South Side of Chicago, the clerk told me I was the first person he’d seen buy a Sam Cooke record in seven years. For a moment this made me feel awful, a sadness perhaps inappropriate, but genuine.

The name on my birth certificate is Samantha Branca Cook. One of many reasons why I no longer go by that name is that Sam Cook is not a name that belongs to me. It belongs to that man’s beautiful voice, and his tragic young death. 

I bought the three records they had, and I gave them to my boyfriend for his 21st birthday. 

So I just want to make sure that every single one of you has heard this song at least once. 

substitutematerials:

The scientists of The Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials (LDSM) have prepared for your examination Mirror City: A Phantom Experiment, a confusion of medical case study, living room slideshow, and amateur variety hour. Like the LDSM’s Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment, which dealt simultaneously with physics, Shakespeare, and architecture, Mirror City conflates the city with the body, suggesting courses of treatment for three divergent case histories, each of whom present with personal sites of loss in the city of Chicago. The LDSM holds its odd theatrical mirror up to these anonymous subjects in order to sort out how it can still ache in places that no longer exist.

To be presented at the 2011 Rhino Fest, February 4-6

http://rhinofest.com/shows/Mirror_City.php

I will be involved in the turning on and off of several lights, come see.

We are all sleeping in the same room. You keep a flashlight, big, beside the bed. There are boards over the door. The phone is disconnected. He shifts in his sleep, his arm bothered by the cast. He sleeps with his eyes open. Even as a child, curled up on the couch. He knew it was not safe here. It is not safe here. It is not safe inside. It is not safe, a thousand miles away. Any wall can have words. O, and what words can say. I know you know, and machines can speak, and there is no escape from dreaming in the dark.

You raise your arm and it cracks open. You open your eyes and the room skitters away. The mice in the hall are stealing, slowly, every piece that remains. A gentleman with a shimmering moustache is waiting just outside the door to take you away. The armies raised to protect are all buried in snow. The Christmas lights flash on and off. Your mother is crying, your mother is sorry. There was nothing any of us could have done. How could we have known? How could we have known?

How could I have known, as you sat crying on my bed, that any word I said could have spelled out the difference from disaster? The bullets I always said I’d take for you are scattered on the floor, and where was I with my gun? Sitting drunk on my living room floor, the heat turned up to 80 and my friends all gone. 

O, brother, the dye running from your hair down the shower’s drain, tears on your face. The drain is gone, the hair, and where are you? The child I did not know is wrapped around your broken arm, is stitched across your aching head. The stranger in my mother’s house, this stranger is my father’s son. And I, I, I, my family’s daughter when the breeze blows right. Your blood is in my temples too, and it is lapping at our kitchen floor, catching in the tiles laid by our father’s hands. What a pity that I am such a poor protector. Even I can strike down a man, given the right weapons. Even I, even I, but I did not. And these small hands, these hands like our mother’s, they are no match for the panic in our blood, the voices in our ears, the truth and falsehood in the night. 

nope, still not ready to write about it.

Due to the crazy blizzard in New York, my family’s travel plans got royally effed. So they are staying until Friday. This will mean a total of twelve days of my family staying in my & Griffin’s apartment, which should probably explain the pretty dire lack of updates here. 

merry christmas (or whatever you’re into) from this bed is a ship & the whole family here at bright bone city

(semi-regular updates will perhaps resume some time next week when my family is not staying with me for winter feast days)