5.25

A Toyota Supra rolled loudly down the cul-de-sac past me. I pulled back on the dogs' leashes, trying to keep them to my side of the road. The car stopped at the edge of the orange grove and two men got out. They walked into the oranges, three trees deep, and left their car running. Two minutes later, they drove past me again, leaving for points west. I can only assume they were stealing oranges.
The sunset washed the earth with pink-orange light, and the wind filled the trees with a soft sound of oceans. The dogs pulled lightly at the leash, eager to see anything, everything, as long as it smelled interesting and wasn't at home. The evening air was already chill with no moisture to speak of holding onto the heat. I walked the dogs home and pulled my brother's oranges out of his tree with a long claw on a stick. I haven't even plugged in his fantastically expensive juicer. I think I've juiced fifteen citrus now, by hand, with a terrible juicer that feels at any moment like it will fragment into thin slivers of plastic across the floor, spilling the juice I've fought for and forcing me to mop. I stop, my hands wet with juice, the dogs dancing with each other (mouths wide open and lightly encompassing each other's heads), and thought back to the boys in the Supra who stole for their fruit.
I drew no conclusions. All I know is that I have the taste of oranges on my lips, and so must they. It's strange to have that connection with two people I will never meet.

5.24

I spit out my toothpaste foam and always hold back a nauseated feeling. The mouth contortion I've developed to scrape and push the paste out of the back corners of my mouth doesn't help. There's something about spitting out a nonliquid nonsolid mush mass of bubbles that sickens me instantly.

It passes, but it's always there.

5.22b

I just watched the Netflix documentary about Rachel Dolezal and I am soul-tired. I have positions and opinions but I'm struggling recently with sharing what I believe online. About transracialism, and flat earth conspiracies, and socialism, and gun control, and the American health care system, and more.

I have a voice and an opinion the same as anybody else, and sometimes my voice and opinion matter? But I prefer conversations in which I can ask questions and moderate my verbiage to be sensitive and intelligent. You can't do that online, in a text thread, shouting to the void.

So, with that in mind, I think I've been lucky enough to be handed a set of identities at birth that I just don't care about, that I don't HAVE to care about, and I'm extraordinarily glad I don't feel like fighting with whatever opinions people have about me.

I have the richest sort of privilege: the honor and joy of not giving a hot fart about whether or not you think I'm any label or none. So, to address transracialism: Love yourself for yourself and give your haters the bird.

I'm here to love you, child, and you, and you, and every soft bag of flesh that feels out of sorts in its skin until someday (the Lord willing) we all feel like we can give our haters the bird. Because on that day, there shall be no haters. Selah.

5.22

I'm getting wrong calls from an inmate at the Bledsoe County Correctional facility. James. I wonder what his life is about? I wonder what would have happened if I had accepted his call? I'm suddenly wracked with regret. What would it have been--five dollars for a connection to someone? Five dollars for a lightning-strike chance of a new friend?
I've called the warden's office and they've offered to tell James that he's been calling six-one-five instead of nine-one-five. I hope he gets a laugh from his mistake. He's wasted a full day on me.

5.21

"Should we . . . ?" He's holding the menu like a wall and looking over it plaintively. She told the waiter that they had, in fact, been here before.
"Hm?"
"An appetizer, I think?" To go with their water+lemon price-saver special.
He orders nachos. ("There's only one . . ." "Yes, only one way we make nachos.") She orders a wrap, and he a burger. Both with fries.
I phase in and out of their conversation. It's inane, quotidian (a word I've stolen from the last thing I read, not ripped off the domepiece). It's safe. I'm not interested. When Vanilla Ice's opus Ice, Ice, Baby starts very quietly in the background, I cover for my involuntary "Haha yeah" by leaning away and remarking, as though to myself, "It's the nineties all over again."
When they need a box from the waiter, she sees him and makes a hand motion and a mouth noise that sounds like she choked off a call just as it thrust itself through her mind. They eventually get the box.
My waiter is earnest and kind as he explains why there's some unsolvable difficulty with the charge. The Internet is out or some such. A waitress with an attractive haircut is commiserating. She sighs and we all three laugh just a little. Our conversation is just as inane, just as quotidian (again, that stolen word). But we're in it, so it feels immediate, visceral.
I pick up my bag and walk five paces.
Wait. Did I get everything?
I turn around and hold my hands out as though the mere act of reaching will draw any lost belongings to me. My waiter has gone, but she's standing there. Her shirt says Certified Teaching Staff on the sleeve. She gives me a look like she would prefer I wasn't one of her employees if I'm incapable of remembering whether my phone is in my pocket after five steps. I close my open hands into dual thumbs-up, smile, and spin away.
"Have a good night!" she says.
A wave over my shoulder is all she gets, and then I'm out into the night. Maybe it's this place that makes me feel so commonplace. Maybe it's the weather. Every day has a gravity to it. Every day feels predetermined. It won't rain. It's likely to be sunny. There's a light wind from the west. People will drive their cars too much. And Tommy and Nicole will go back to work serving wraps and burgers and nachos to people who need boxes for their fries.

5.20

Somewhere in the high desert, there's a small patch of disturbed sand where I buried the letters you sent to me during the war. It's between two crusted stumps of Joshua trees, beneath a cholla that bit me while I dug. I didn't know until afterward that I was waiting for someone who had moved on. I didn't know until afterward that you were writing letters to assuage your conscience. Well, I lived, just as you didn't expect, and you live with someone else, which I didn't expect. I don't know which one of us is more disappointed.
It's okay, I think. You have a lovely family, and I'm lying on the still-warm sand, staring up at the stars. I had better move, though, before a scorpion finds me, before I forget which direction the car is in, before I change my mind and dig back into the hole to get back the past that has left me.
I can feel my bones shift as I stand up. I can hear the night swallow up my footprints behind me. I can see the car over the hill..
Maybe I'll ask that carhop for her number. I pulled in just a few hours ago. Maybe she's still on her shift. Maybe she'll remember the chocolate soda I ordered and didn't drink. Maybe it's time to move on. The desert seems to think so.

5.15

I have a sudden rush of memory. It's a tactile assault, as it were, from the history of my brain. Suddenly, I'm there in the bed with you again, the open window making no dent in the oppressive heat of our room, and I'm uncomfortably hot against the furnace of your skin. There's a difficulty in moving my limbs, too, as though the skin is stuck to the air around me. I peel away from your back and roll over, kicking the last of the sheets from my legs. I toss myself upright and lean against the wall. Am I in a dream again, or is this real yet? I look back in the darkness and I would swear you're not there. It's just an empty bed in a different room in a faraway place, but all the same--my legs are weak and my skin is shining.
I close my eyes and remember you again.

5.9b

I've never had a dream in which my teeth fall out.
I have never dreamed sex.
I can't remember dreams of being dead, taking tests, or growing older.
So what dearth in my life has robbed me of these common dream tropes? What paucity of will? Do other people just have smaller choices, accidentally limited by the dreams they've heard of, limited to things they've seen before? I can't imagine, but I know: whatever gamut I've been granted hasn't only been for me. If you'd like it, if you're piqued now, I would share a dream with you.

5.8

I built one wall of the building I needed to live in. With one wall standing, I walked away. Each time I rounded the corner of the driveway, I saw it haunting me. I dropped my tools and left again. This slip-shod work of half-heart power has stopped me, stopped me, stopped me, halt--and now I realize my fault. I'm going to tear the wall apart, use the bricks for different art.

Don't let the something of the past stand in the way. Destroy, then start.

[I wrote two and a half pages of a play, hated it, and didn't work on it for a week because it was impossible to use and too scary to delete. I couldn't throw it out because I thought I would be wasting my time. Cursed hindsight--I wasted my time regardless.]

5.7

I am madly in love with my girlfriend of three years and I have been trying to convince her that I have read shakespere and all that stuff, but she hasn′t been convinced. She′s so smart--I just need help for a love letter written like that guy so that she will take me seriously. PLease, you have to help! Thanks. SHe is goofy and a lot of fun, so she will appreciate it I know she will.

::I will write a convincing love letter

Thank you so much! This is such a life-saver.
Do you need more piectures of her?

::I will write a perfect letter that will make her give in
::Yes, you may add one picture
::Should the love letter focus on convincing her that you have read Shakespeare? Or should it be a general love letter to her?

I do want it to be a love letter, but can it like show that I have read shakespeare?

::So I should start with the love letter, then I conclude by convincing her that you have read Shakespeare

Yes, please. Omg, this is a lifesaver

::Great. I will make it perfect

[$31.40 is an investment in the future. I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Supposedly, this person guaranteed has a masters degree. Thank you, Dr. Don Papers.]

5.4

I think I take with me the microbes you've left on my skin. I'll have the memory of every person I've ever met, unless--my biome too strong, no purchase remains. There are those whose bacterial signature is thunderous loud in the microbial world. There are those who listen. Which am I?
I shake your hand anyway, not knowing if you'll house my flora, or perhaps you'll spread to me. Either way, someone is leaving here changed.

5.3

What right have I to write poetry? I have not studied its greatest works. I have not dissected the choices of its finest minds. I have not practiced its forms. Yet, in brief: I write, the right rights or wrongs left undone, a tapestry woven tight and bound with song.

5.2

When first I slept, life was cold in the ground hard by. As I watched, the morning sun could not, its beams a thousand piercing rays, once breach that venerable crust. My crust is a self-made prison, a rime of ancient tales and mounting fears that took me an ill-spent youth to build; a prison of myself, to myself, for myself. Where once anon you planted seeds, I saw no fruit thereby. Where yet again I saw you tread, the earth's unmarked thereby. Where now and then we passed the time, my heart is rent thereby. When first I slept, though spring encroached, life was cold in the ground hard by.

When last I slept, the world was all awrack. A noonday sun and a quiet glen had my cares belied, and I, (once careworn, cold, and clumsy,) allowed myself to sleep. What cosseted place had this once been! What blanketing power to renew! The rime away, the man remains. And yet, and yet: the time explains. It cures all wounds, dulls all pains, breaks down walls, compounds gains. I can with perfect expediency understand life's softening effect on my own jagged bones, but why have things gone so with you? Why has the wearing of the calendar served only to file down your cutting words and soften your carbide will, when in me I see the year wear down my finest features? Why then has it refined you? I take it as an attack. In my sanctum of rest, a keening lack. Suddenly, the life in me wants you back, for when last I slept, with what was all the world awrack?

When next I slept, I owned the world in pride. What blooming lavish fields lay there beside? No cares have I, or should I "we" for our sake be? I'll tell a story of a sunset. I cannot open my eyes but you are there. I cannot move my breath but it stirs your smell. I cannot fall to dream or it blanks my mind. And yet the blank would not unpleasant be. The rime forgot, the glen forgot, and only this, a field where your hands sow and my hands reap. What of this field where we sleep, our might combined to hold against all odds a dream (against the odds of time and daylight a dream we both can live to love in). Where once was morning light, the sun has crossed the wide expanse of heaven to bring in the tide, a rising urgent question I'll decide: when next I slept, I owned the world in pride: the fields I lay near were just you—heart. Mind.

I hold you whether the sun will set or no.

5.1

Today, fourteen and a half miles from the house and up in the hills where the snow only melted a week ago, I have stopped riding my bicycle. I made the ridge line, or the pass, or whatever you would call the highest point on the road, seventeen hundred feet above where I started. I have drank half a liter of water and laid out on the road in the sun with my shirt off. Where's that bird I hear, I wonder? Who put in the culvert behind me to divert the water gushing through? What was the person's name whose hands sunk the signpost for my bike to lean against?
I've regained my breath. I'm about two thirds cooked, and I know I overdid it today. I can make it home, I know I can. It's all downhill really, and some of it very steep. Besides, there's hours until sunset still. I flip my leg over the saddle and push away down the hill.

There's red cinder on either side of the road, and my tires crunch into and through it, down the lane. I'm going fast. Maybe twenty, thirty miles an hour. I'm not even pedaling; I don't have to. And then--an oscillation--(small at first, but enough to be troubling. I have had the bike worked on only a few weeks ago, but I have also been extremely hard on the old girl for a very long time, so who knows how well a check up would catch and solve all problems with her anyway) and the tire has begun to overcorrect itself, despite my hands gripping white-hot, driving all the blood up my arms and into my panicked heart, my breathing fast, my brain incapable of any thought but slow down. I squeeze the brakes ever so slightly. I can't remember which brake is front and which is back. I wish I could pull the back full-bore, but I can't risk pulling on one only to find out it's the front, to feed the shimmy and send myself into the asphalt. I'm still going twenty five, maybe. Too fast. I would lose a lot of skin. I could break something. Many things, if I land especially badly. I'm pulling on the brakes and pushing hard against the bars, hoping against hope that the oscillation will abate. It doesn't.
It gets worse.
The front wheel is flipping back and forth crazily now, faster and faster, and I'm staring at the road ahead, willing there to be no cars. The shoulder is across the opposing lane, and it's wide and rocky, and at its lip is the line of red cinder. If I cross that badly, it's game over. there's no friction in the cinder, not for lateral movement, and it seems like all my tire wants to do is move side to side. I unclip my feet just in case I need to jump from the bike. I'm panting. I'm squeezing the brakes. I'm slower, slower, slower, stopped. Putting my feet on the ground, I can feel my heart ripping against my tongue, trying to claw its way out. My mind is blank.

I lean down, pull the quick release, replace it. There's nothing wrong with my tire, nothing wrong with my wheel, nothing wrong with my bike. I push off, waiting for the worst. The brakes are singing at me--maybe it's that? I'll buy new rotors, I swear it. The tire behaves. It rides true for fourteen more miles. I feel like I'm going to die for the next half hour. I'm fine.