dinner was served. She could see the olives tilted, pimento up...fresh figs on the sideboard for later, heavy cream...espresso. Guests pulled at the heavy-skinned peasant bread....Marco slapped the back of her hand that lay next to his on.... 

rss

my feed-- she lives!...

"All Work Done on Premises"

I had something scribbled about the flourescent light tubes leaving yellowish light....blah, blah, but the marker's green ink had bled out into the fibers of the mushy coffee napkin and it now looked like cartographic doodle. She didn't see me, anyway. She was inside and I was outside in my car. "No soliciting." It was a uniform shop with big windows--"Peach's Uniforms." Inside, cardboard signs hung from the dropped panel-ceiling with "Look!" and "Save Big!" in large black type across gold backgrounds. All of the colors of the place-- and her-- were saturated from where I sat. But with a couple layers of glass between me and the uniform-globe-world, there was a good chance for that to happen. Like a shallow lake bottom is magnified and sharpened, rippled through too, with the thickness of water illuminating its pebbles and flashing minnows. The contents are pressed down and outward.

She was butter and fresh spinach leaves. Peaches was the smell of cigarettes and dull tobacco-skin. Their layers became forced together, depth foreshortened like a kid's diarama-- found objects glued, like props, in the shallow background. I became audience, all eyes and watching.

Foreign Land

My side of the bed definitely leans downhill.
The whole house, in fact, seems tipped into the center of itself. It's old so I can forgive and, for the most part, not really be bothered by it. But I'm not sleeping well, solidly, through the night. When I wake up my back is sore and stiff like I've been clinging to the side of a cliff.

And I'm turning white again.
I have vitiligo, a skin pigmentation disorder that serves as a distinct visual measurement of my stress level.
I am caucasian, "white." But you don't realize how not-white you are until you really go white, in odd Rorschachian patches, -- albino spots. I have been all sorts of beiges, linens, and when I used to lifeguard my skin was the color of New England beach sand-- that is, an amalgam of the teeniest black silicas, smoky quartz, pink granite, garnet, mica, when dissected in the palm of your hand (which would remain its true pink, remarkably lined self, regardless of the sun).

"My" side of the bed.
We do get used to that specific territory. I don't think it's just me. Lil even offered to change sides with me, said she would "sleep downhill." The mattress would be compressed into different topographies. The whole opposite side of the room was over there. The horizon line would be altered and the sunrise would occur in an infinitesimally different angle to my line of sight, along with the moon buzzing like an electric tranformer overhead each night-- just slightly askew.

Dear Troilus and Criseyde

I prop the window open with "Chaucer's Major Poetry."