Jolene > Recent Status Updates

Worst sex scene ever.

How to respond, then, when someone you love looks straight into your eyes and says that neither of you should exist? What about if your agree with her, theoretically, and also would prefer she didn't die?

I asked how long ago they'd heard the gunshot. They said ten minutes. I asked in which direction, and they pointed in the direction from which I'd come. "Are you missing your dog?" the younger woman asked, as I turned back to hurry where she'd pointed. "My wife," I said, over my shoulder, and heard her groan like being struck, some broken bit of useless language: Oh my god.

Before me was a barren vista, a field of wild mustard climbing toward rounded foothills. The sun had gone away in the clouds. What I felt was a kind of thrilling sadness, something I have since experienced when looking out over other open spaces and lonely boundaries: and emotion that lives on the desolate edge of the known.

It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some non-descript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.

She thinks, vaguely, about Jason asking her to follow him into the coffee shop storeroom and showing her a line of what appeared to be sea anemones growing rough along the grouting of a wall.

Disaster movies, after all, come complete with pending resolution: the dash up the hill to avoid the falling rubble, the turning tide, the core of the slowing earth ignited at the cost of six courageous lives. Heroic fights, Hail Mary passes, et cetera. The rescue is the point, or at least the idea that rehearsal is still imminent. There is little of the imagination can do with an ending that is already assured.

Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company.

When, people ask, was the last time that you remember thinking, Oh, it's raining again. When was your last real sunburn, your last flying ant day, yout last good look at the stars. It is easy to think about these things, recollections of things passing fast from your grip, and decide they're simply too much to acknowledge. Easy to imagine inevitability when in fact there might once have been any number of options.

Agnes tries to think of something to say, imagines telling her there's no point in having lunch because, once they do, they'll have simply had lunch and nothing will be different. I don't think, she wants to say, there's anything to be gained from keeping on getting to know each other. And I don't mean that about you or me personally, I just mean in general, you know?

At the center of a heart
is data, the same
idiot degradation that turned the stars
into us.

From "Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats"

Plus, my sins
were practically devotional:
two peaches stolen from
a bodega, so sweet I savored
even what I lost from
my teeth. I know it's no excuse,
but even now I'm drooling.
...
Allow
me these treasures, Lord.
Time will break what doesn't
bend -- even time. Even you.

I knew them when they were just
geraniums when they
were still blood-pink ears in a pulsing
womb

grief requires
only a tongue and a crown ask
anyone ask a bell
it'll answer in
three slow wails

the heart is a muscle as stupid
as hamstring or a miniature
iris with its ridiculous blossoms
blooming only through ice

bright dust
pillowed floor
we see prayers
as we say them

They say it's not
faith if you can hold it in your hands
but I suspect the opposite may be true,
that real faith passes first through the body
like an arrow. Consider our whole galaxy
staked in place by a single star. I fear
we haven't said nearly enough about that.

They were put with me fully built, passionless as shoelaces, pitying even my name. To their credit, they weren't given what I have: majesty and the heft of a face. They want mouths like mine that can blow out tiny fires. The mercy of speech. Of sleep. Of they.

It is pretty to be sweet
and full of pardon like
a flower perfuming the
hands that shred it, but
all piety leads to a single
point: the same paradise
where dead lab rats go.

Behold the poet, God's
incarnate spit in the mud,
chirping like lice in a fire.
Songs to stir the arousable horn.
Songs to make money
which he treats like food:
fit as much as you can
in your mouth, never shit.

His most intoxicating delusion --
that evil might be soluble in art.

It became relationship architecture, like her insistence we eat outside and my tendency to say "You can never truly know." This phrase enabled me to forgive all manner of ills, usually those committed upon me: A man who lied about his height, friends who sided with the bully, a mother whose love got caught in her throat. I wanted to continue liking the person, which I guess means I wanted to continue liking the world

I sat fingering my gilded frame, counting
grievances like toes:

here my mother, here my ring,
here my sex, and here my king.

All still there. Wrath is the desire
to repay what you've suffered.

Kneeling on coins
before the minor deity in the mirror.
Clueless as a pearl.

That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering
but to experience it seems -- can I say this? --
a waste?

Listening on audio to review before the book club meeting that's apparently finally happening!

During our first years together, we offered each other copious tangible examples of our love. A vintage pencil sharpener, the kind you crank. New ways to make a hamburger. This grew tiring. Eventually, humanely, we allowed each other rest from being impressive, which was comforting until it became uneasy, something we weren't sure we'd invited.

Bravery pitches its refugee tent

at the base of my brain and slowly starves, chipping into
darkness like a clay bird bouncing down a well. All night
I eat garlic cream, water my dead orchids.

In what world does any of it seem credible?
God's word is a melody, and melody requires repetition.
God's word is a melody I sang once then forgot.

Jo is battered by the desire to protect this heavy, unwilling thing and understands that this battering is love.

Except for her father's orderly development, nothing in this town seems governed. Thin teenagers glare by the shop, curled like parentheses. Restless zoning restrictions permit a Kmart next to a real estate office next to an apartment complex. Jo cannot see the ocean but the ocean is everywhere: pooling in the swells between foxtails, frizzing the hair at her temples.

"I heard the sound of the last line before I wrote the story, which happens when I'm lucky." - Bertino about "Edna in Rain"

The difference between.
A real voice and the other kind.
The way its air vibrates.
Through you. The way air.
Vibrates. The violence.
In your middle ear.

THE VALUE OF FEAR

is in its sound, sewing song
to throat. The pale thrush

trills the snow while a lonely brute
hides in a fist of crickets,

hiding in the sound
under the floorboards
Is a brute, dizzy
with sound.

THERE ARE 7,000 LIVING LANGUAGES

Here is one:

Try to be more than merely good

Here is another:

[text in Arabic]

Of the others, I know mostly
Cuisine -- soufflé, berbere, tamale.

It's delicious
being so governed

by the primacy
of my tongue.

If you're immortal, God better be too. Otherwise? Otherwise. Hello, have you
disrobed? The nursemaid is stomping her hooves. Don't make her fret like that.

Dip a finger in your bourbon, tap it to your lip. Bad water. Bedwetter. Now watch
these hands through your blood -- jealous moths. How do they heaven, upset like that?