"The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willin' to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin' I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: 'O.K., I'll be part of this world.”

"Alright then. Two of 'em. Both had my father in 'em. It's peculiar. I'm older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he's the younger man. Anyway, first one I don't remember too well but it was about meeting him in town somewheres, he's gonna give me some money. I think I lost it.

The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up…"

“All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”

I’m battling with something new.

I’ve never been afraid of ending up alone, never doubted that I deserved the people in my life.

Since I could remember, I’ve always reserved hope for solitude. The day would be sent in stasis until the screen door slammed shut. Then suddenly, nothing would seem difficult anymore.

But now, I see that I am reaching always and often. It scares me. I sit and tremble with this unfathomable want. I linger too long on the doorstep, willing to beg if it earned me the shelter of someone’s ribcage. We’re playing pool in the unmarked bar with the cigarette smoke and the blinding lights and all I want to ask is, “Which version of me will you love unconditionally?”

When I was 16, he and I were in the house alone. Everyone else had gone to the beach. I laid on the couch feeling nauseous and he walked up and placed a hand on my head and brushed away the stray hair with his thumb. I replayed it over and over; the simplicity of that simple gesture had fed a part of me that never learned hunger. Now I think: who am I without solid ground beneath my feet? who am I without the weight of being assured?

In order to know myself better, I litter my identity with stories of other people's imaginations. I lock the door to my own suffering. I cannot, I cannot. It’s too scary. I'm not fully equipped to understand myself as I am plainly, truthfully. I am like a gardener with a pair of tweezers; picking at new growths. I ignore the dry tender beneath the surface.



"redwoods"
I woke up from a dream. The night was still a deep, passionate blue. I was in the back seat; flush against the door. My neck hurt from how we were crammed in together. He was crushed down like a soda can; his head pillowed by my abdomen, torso between my thighs as half of him hung off the seat and piled together in the floor space. He looked like he was in a position of prayer, holding onto the ridges of my pelvis as if I were some totem of last rites. He was trembling.

I wondered if I should wake him up—wondered if I should speak, when he let out a quiet sob and I froze. Wetness tracked the red rawness of my stomach and I closed my eyes and bit my tongue as hard as possible; tasting iron. I’m no longer there in that back cabin. Suddenly I’m gone, way gone. I’m 6 years old and running through misty groves, stains of orange juice on my frock and picking seeds from between my fingers. I am my father’s daughter again. I am holding the hand of someone who protects me. I turn to look back only for a second and disgust earns its way up my throat.

I lose myself in the metronome of the world. I count the pulses in my own head—the electric sound waves of crickets. Anything to drown him out. The urge to cut and run overwhelms me.

No, I think. I am guilty too. I deserve to feel this way.

I remember what he told me that night in Oklahoma, headlights flashing in his eyes. We shared a joint that I hated the taste of. He said “Sometimes, the path we’re on is the only one we were ever meant to walk.”

2022
I was in the kitchen cleaning up when C’s dad came in carrying a guitar case. He set it down on the counter with some effort and a grin. I looked up at him, confused. “For you. Happy Birthday.”

I open the case as he explains how he won it in an auction. It’s an acoustic guitar; well-loved and old but more beautiful for it. I lift it out of the soft lining, eyes roving in awe. It’s submerged with the smell of something heady; oil, dust and wood. The pick-guard is breaking off, and while I run my fingers across the body he offers to help me replace it. He tells me he’d cleaned out the inside and got new strings before making it mine.

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t expecting a birthday gift; hadn’t even mentioned how I’d been saving up to buy my own guitar that summer. He said he’d seen the way I looked when everyone’d come over, plucking quietly on the porch with T’s old guitar. He said he’d figured I’d get use out of my own.

I smile but say nothing. I want to ask him: What do you say when thank you isn’t enough; when politeness doesn’t repay the fortune of being seen without words?

It’s unfair, how easily it comes to some but not to others.

“Thank you so much…” I said, my voice wet. He nodded. I gave him a hug, held on tightly. He left me alone.

I took it out that night on the back porch to tune.

Lonesome Traveller by Jack Kerouac

 “But in the morning — Sunday, July sixth — I was amazed and overjoyed to see a clear blue sunny sky and down below, like a radiant pure snow sea, the clouds making a marshmallow cover for all the world and all the lake while I abided in warm sunshine among hundreds of miles of snow-white peaks. — I brewed coffee and sang and drank a cup on my drowsy warm doorstep. At noon the clouds vanished and the lake appeared below, beautiful beyond belief, a perfect blue pool twenty-five miles long and more, and the creeks like toy creeks and the timber green and fresh everywhere below and even the joyous little unfolding liquid tracks of vacationists’ fishing boats on the lake and in the lagoons,”

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

 —The nearest I’d come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

 —He leaned up against the doorjamb, smoking, looking out at the big pepper tree and his pickup truck in the yard. He sipped his beer, which he held in the same hand as the cigarette, dexterous for a person with two missing fingers. He crinkled his eyes against the smoke as he exhaled out the screen. “He just wants to ball her. Pretty soon he’s gonna tell her to get rid of me, that’s when I get my thirty-eight, teach him a fucking thing or two. Then you’ll see a little Blood of the Lamb.”—

 —He looked at me in a way that made my heart open like a moonflower — his eyes on my face, my throat, my hair over my shoulders, changing color in the TV lights. On TV I saw the white of snow, the wolves hunting in pairs, their strange yellow eyes. I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

 —In June, true to his promise, Ron rented a cabin in Oregon. —In the forests of the Cascades, we fished in high green rubber boots to our waists. He showed me the fly reel, how to cast like a delicate spell, the glistening steelhead trout like secrets you could place from the water. Claire poured over bird books, wildflower guides, intent on naming, as if the names gave life to the forms. — Or we’d sit in the big meadow, propped up each by our own tree, and Ron played cowboy songs on his harmonica, “Red River Valley” and “Yellow Rose of Texas.” — I dangled my line in the McKenzie, where the sun glittered on the surface between the trees, and the shapes of fish darted deeper, where the trees laid their shadows across the moving water. — I felt at home there, the spectrum of green under a resonant sky ringed by the tall fingers of Jeffrey pine and Douglas fir, a sky you could expect to see drifting with dragons and angels. A sky like a window in a portrait of a Renaissance cardinal. The music of flowing water and the resinous perfume of the evergreens.

 — I took the hammer and whacked the fish in the head. Claire turned away. I knew what she was thinking, that I was siding with Ron, with the world and its harshness. But I wanted that fish. I took out the hook and held it up, and Ron took a picture of me like that. Claire wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the afternoon, but I felt like a real kid, and I didn’t want to feel guilty about it.

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

 — “I wish to hell it had been different,” he says. “I wish you had the person you deserved and not the one you had. But it’s just you and me now, kid.”

 — “Goddamn,” he says, looking intently down into her face. —He is fixed there in the firelight, as if looking down a well. “What are you? What are you, and what is in that little bitch mind of yours?” She just shakes her head, trembling against his restraining hands. He has her head in his grasp as if he can crush it, looking fixedly into her eyes. “What is in that little head of yours?” he says. “And how could I ever know?”

 — She closes her eyes. In the blackness, colors chase across her lids. She can see red adumbrations of the burning trailer. Smears of red and orange. Over everything, the high constant ringing tone. She could keep her eyes closed and lose herself in that monotone. It is emotionless and constant. Martin squeezes her neck and she opens her eyes to him.

 — “There is a terrible inwardness to you,” he says. “Look at you. You are such a goddamn pretty little thing. Your goddamn eyes. I look at them and I don’t see…anything. They say you can look into someone’s eyes and know them, that the eyes are the window to the soul, but I look into your eyes and it’s dark to me, kid. They have always been dark to me. If there is anything in you, it cannot be read, it cannot be known. The truth of you, if it is there at all, exists beyond an unbridgeable and irreducible epistemological gap.”

Epithalamium by Louise Gluck

 — “Here is my hand," he said. But that was long ago. "Here is my hand that will not harm you."

sugar coated
A twin bed, still there though I'm taller now. The dresser—large and immovable. The little matching desk under the window. All from the same furniture store, years and years ago.

A brand new mattress lies on the bed slats, wrapped in plastic like a giant mint. I run my hand over the handmade quilt, folded neatly and tucked beneath my pillow. Some foreboding feeling crawls its way up my spine, settling itself around my shoulders, reminding me of all the time that I have yet to face.

My father helps me unpack boxes. He hangs photos of me from a past life, arranging trophies and cerulean ribbons earned by someone else. He sucks his teeth as he goes; anxious and furious. The folds of his jacket disperse like nerves against his back with a starched rigidity. He’s barely spoken to me since I’ve arrived.

That evening, I sit alone; wind at my back, knees pulled up to my chest. I hear crickets; the faint static of jeopardy from downstairs. My dad fries something in a pan as I count my belongings to the tempo of blood that pounds in my ears.

letter to a friend

Dear W.M,

A great expanse of earth and time stretches between you and I and it is all felt too greatly. You are here and not here. Your absence has shape. It has weight. This is what I try to convince myself, that in this emptiness there exists more than what is. But then I return to knowing what’s real and can no longer convince myself. The pain of loss is immediate. It is real; real and cavernous.

I’m sorry, I can’t speak on it anymore. Truly.

Despite everything, I would hope to see you happy. I envision you reading my letters as I write them. In my mind you are resting now beneath a cottonwood; the sun bakes your surrounds. Beyond your reach, the sun-soaked hills and the rocky mountains and sulphur springs stretch on and on forever. I can smell the spice of yarrow; the dry and resinous sagebrush. I hear the creak of your ankle as you roll it, propped in the dip of your knee. There’s a soft breeze on the back of your neck that cools the sweat there. Everything is okay.

Tell me I’m not far off. Tell me you’re happy, now, in this moment. That you’re the same as I imagine. Tell me that the rot of change has not found its way to your doorstep; has not burrowed in the foothills of our home.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound so harsh. It is not change that I hate. Not the natural change of all living creatures of earth that I would resist with dirt-crusted and bloodied fingernails. I love and treasure it—our making and unmaking. To change would be our cast in this temporal foundry. I would not resist that. No, only that rot which is found in the insatiable wheel of all-consuming desire. The abstract disillusionment of need beyond what is a shady tree, a gentle breeze. A letter from a friend. Tell me you’re safe there and I will rest easily tonight.

What I wish for you, Wes, is nothing. Nothing but what you are already, nothing but what you have. All that our world has provided you from birth; your good health, a tender hand, a moment of respite. In that simplicity, know that you are cupped in the hands of God.

And know that I yearn now for your steadiness. In my dreams I reach for that empty, unravelled roll of life that bleeds together for you. I feel alone in my existence of noise. Here I am misunderstood, Wes. I am transient. I am everything and anything. I exist across worlds, across planes. I exist forever and ever. I am only birthed with the gift of impermanence and everyday I am robbed of it.

I want to hold your hand, to be a friend. I wish to look and to be seen and understood without words. And I want you to look back and to feel the very same in the reflection of my eyes. To exist together and know we are nothing, we are less than nothing. You would wrap me in that quiet and my body—my identity—would tether there forever. I am dying, Wes, and that does not scare me.

It will never abandon us.

I apologize for the deep emotions of this letter, but I know you do not mind. And it means more than you know. I’m thinking of you, and I hope you’re well. Please write back.

Reaching,

- K