cracked tomato 

The Interloper

You should see the tomatoes I can grow. Every summer. I have come behind some planter and found her secrets, crystals in the ground, mirror shards in the garden, dimes in the driveway gravel like fallout of unknown frequencies, fractal coastline of intersecting matter. I collect them, suspicious they might not be mine. I am addicted, unable to suspend the urge toward "mine"-ness. Cannot tune my RAM to register, "Just pass by the thing."

Truman Capote

Truman Capote said that dimes were the best jingle of all of the coins:

"Lovely dimes, the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles." from "A Christmas Memory"
http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/capotechristmas.html

chicken wire, translucent ribbon and Christmas lights 

Fables

I'm in the fetal position and it's not over yet, I realize.

Knot.
I am a wrapped up ligamentous vine. Prickly, even. Sap, sour. Jaundiced juice. "Once upon a time..." there was a girl, about 10, she seems, making wings out of papiermache. She scared her mother when she flew too close to

see, there is no end to the sentence. I can put a proper period (.) there, but that doesn't make it end.

List

....the pizza place, the coffee shop, the movie house, the gas station, the pharmacy, the florist, the antique shop X3, the baptist church, the bank, the funky gift shop, the jewelry store.
I've taken inventory of the landscape, where the four lanes lead to and away from out in front of my house.

I like watching the traffic from the upstairs window.


Ever wonder what happens to your shopping list when you throw it "away"?
www.grocerylists.org --for you list-people

pointy-eared dogs

"You're supposed to be afraid of the pointy-eared dogs, Aunt Zoey," my niece reported.
Maybe something some stupid kid said out in the road, leaning on a bike he thought was faster than her's, or during a game of hide and seek in the dusk when it's scary and her resistance was low.
I pigeon-hole, again. Maybe it was some annoying girl who wanted her to play Barbies. She could have said something about "pointy-eared dogs."

About the dime in the middle of the street along my run: my location has changed, the environment, I'm in a completely different time zone, using a different cable provider, heavy traffic outside my house. (Even though it still feels like some stranger's house. I need to paint a wall.)
Whoever or whatever drops the dimes. I never thought the coins could be for someone else. Today I am The Interloper. A comic-book, lean, big-breasted thief trying to decode my timeline and identify who, possibly, could be just behind me.

I'm missing a page.

kitchen sink

it's just sinking in that i'm not going back.

iron

I drove to CT with the half-moon in the back of my pickup. A gashy-edged, oxided slice of iron, cut through with a smile and big eyes.

I've been unpacking and not unpacking for days. I'm at once sick of it and then, again, in love with the motions. Reviewing my belongings. What I ended up with of Lil's-- really only one thing-- a book in which she had written notes to herself. Opening it, I felt like I was invading, somehow, the inner leaves of her, layers of some dry epidermis I had once run my fingers achingly along-- spine, edges, inner folds. That was an intimacy I could not bear now. I slid the book back on the bookshelf between two others with similar spines thinking perhaps her's would just disappear into the edges of them.