this is the cutest thing ever: bear hug!. it arrived via liz-at-smith and greeted me in the midst of stat shitwork w/ becca and stef. last nite the three of us met at 8:30, intending to get a substantial chunk of it done. instead we sat at the table, drank moon cycle tea — so reminiscent of home — talking about sex and history and … well, that’s about it but it lasted us six hours. i covered an entire sheet of paper with doodles. the highlight: a angular naked woman with googly-eye breasts and stick-straight-up hair proclaiming, “i live to serve you, phil!” we didn’t get much stat done; by 4 we gave up the pretense and went to sleep. today we worked all afternoon until we finished just a little after five.
co|motion met in my room to watch a movie without me. i met up w/ them and they took me to sharples, sarah c. (the “c” stands for “cool”) announcing formally on the way that she’s very sorry i’m leaving and wants to be friends w/ me, which melted my cold stony heart. (stuff like that thrills me to no end.) fun sharples holiday dinner featured fondue and wandering waiters offering deceptively good-looking sweets. eventually elizabeth and i wandered to kohlberg to do dramatic readings of choice literary magazine poems. i have two in scarlet letters, the all-women mag: question marks and flower. i kinda like “question marks” because it has the word “shat” in it so i think i’ll put it here:
question marks
Smoke rises like question marks
above our heads. Neither he nor I has a cigarette but the city
seems to exhale wearily all around us.
He stops to take a picture of a pigeon
who has alighted on a ledge at eye level. It would never occur to me
to photograph a pigeon, tho I kicked one
once in Venice. They cover the stone there
like cigarette butts, grey and filthy with fingerprints. Later that evening,
one shat on me. Maybe even the same one.
The birds here are decorous: they pose. And
what will come of this, I wonder as I wait. A new appreciation for fowl?
does anyone really know what she wants?
Maybe just to be looked at like a park-bench pigeon,
fleetingly fascinating, hunted with a flash. Maybe just an end to question marks.
He clicks. Still side by side,
we glide on. (spring 2001)
i really did kick a pigeon in venice and i really did get shat on. my brother didn’t stop laughing for a week. and i really do want to be fleetingly fascinating. see? sometimes poems tell the truth. (do you like it, darling? it’s only the beginning, you know. just wait til small craft warnings comes out. hehhehheh)