N. is out of the hospital and strangely already herself, texting in paragraphs. She’s happy.
R. opens my door without knocking, sits on the tatami with an expectant air and has no idea what she’s expecting. She wants the world to be more than it is.
Tao Te Ching: “nothing is lacking.” If you really meant that it would leave nothing standing.
Supposing I built a Moorish garden out back, what would come bathe.
A whisper on the walk home: you don’t have to keep trying to do the impossible. Meaning what, though?
The sun came back and the shadows got darker. Void splayed sideways. Tree-shaped by courtesy. Put on your dark glasses, there’s no bottom to it.
One thing you don’t get in Zen is the figure of God as absent lover. For me that might be a safety feature.
Dirt, cold gust, hawk. The elements.
A few months ago I hiked up to this stand of eucalyptus and it frightened me. I thought there was something pagan in the glade. Today it’s still strange, the giant stems split almost down to the root, but the guardrails seem to be back in place. I haven’t had a drink in twelve days and the effect so far is that I sometimes forget why one does anything.
Waiting for the text that they’ve sewn N. into her new shape at the hospital. I saw her dozen packets of post-op medication and exclaimed, God, I’m never going to get bottom surgery, and C. said, as long as you’re prepared for your mind to change.
I brought Miguel Hernández up the hill.
Yo no quiero más luz que tu sombra dorada
donde brotan anillos de una hierba sombría.
En mi sangre, fielmente por tu cuerpo abrasada,
para siempre es de noche: para siempre es de día.
I don’t have a peninsular accent in my head and read abrasada as abrazada without thinking. No, it’s more so.
Hello again. I’ve been doing a stint at the Oakland Review of Books (uh huh, we made one), so my bit for the day is over here. Back here tomorrow? Perhaps?
(Previously I went to the opera, saw a gay movie and attended the spicy release party. In the future I hope to read a book.)
I was first interested... in the letters to and from the old lovers, significant and less so, the charcoal portraits, the photographs, and the diary entries detailing every fluctuation of those courtships. I pored over them so carefully that I couldn’t even glance at the mirror as I brushed my teeth at night, so gross the trespass. I justified my behavior by believing that a woman is the most interesting version of herself when she’s enraptured, but that’s not true. Romance is a closed circuit. Nothing makes a person less comprehensible to others than being in love.
—Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
Crying in the car is a kind of sex. You’re present for it, there’s release, you feel complete when it’s over. How it compares to release of other kinds, and which are the more valid, is a problem of many bodies. Solve it by approximation, smart girl.
Tired, often.
When I drove home there was lightning on the hills.
Portola Paramita
Sick of the new lessons about ourselves
we took to the pier for the weekend, to dance in color,
and when the sun fired the fog around Sutro Tower
I thought of you, old queer arhat,
crying in the trash at the Mission Creek rail yard
for trains and sunflowers. You wouldn’t know this city.
It’s given up its right to be ugly.
I wanted for so long to be a sunflower,
and then I was, and peeling back the grimed petals
I found locomotive underneath, and sunflower again,
and it seemed there was no extricating flower from machine,
that form was emptiness and I was a nausea.
This is why I can’t take ecstasy.
The music says to everyone, I am,
but in pure form, only redeemed in substance
if our bodies receive, you are, from the bodies around.
The day we meet no look of recognition
is the erasing edge to come. We dance in karma.
The drums of the angels signify all
and nothing. This won’t last long.
San Francisco, 21 Sep 2025
It’s one thing to be wistful, it’s another to meet up with Am-mut the devourer of souls multiple times in a week.
You ought to be a bride of quietness; that’s who will dance with you. So I told myself last night under the mirror ball. My broken vestibular system is easily tricked, and thinks the points of light are resting still at my feet while I and everyone around are being swept away.
molle meum levibusque cor est violabile telis,
et semper causa est, cum ego semper amem
I will drink cerveza preparada and play the prepared piano, and in that way I will be ready for anything. Even the Spanish Inquisition.
