I’ve been:
coloring notecards
trying not to drown

My hands smell like oranges and I keep dreaming about church.

Anna H. introduced me to Nine Inch Nails in ninth grade history class taught by the football coach whose brother would later be slaughtered on New Year’s Day after watching his wife and two daughters get raped and murdered. They named a stadium after him.

There was a benefit concert. I had sex with a member of the band.
twice.
three times.

In my 11th or 12th or 15th day in isolation, I finally allowed the children to penetrate my covid quarters. As an extra bonus, I let them do my hair. Ella directed the photoshoot, which is providing inspo for the cover shot for my chapbook, Mane, coming soon from Red Ferret Press.

Here is a picture of Quan and me getting sun on our tums.

Here is some art.

Sunday 1.9
What a nice, relaxing day!
Oh shit, my body feels weird.

Monday 1.10
I feel off. I should consider canceling my classes.
I cancel my classes.
I sleep hard for another three hours and go back to bed eight hours after that.

Tuesday 1.11
Greenleaf
Good Morning Veronica
Handsome

Wednesday 1.12
The only thing left to do is eat a pot brownie
and power through my emails
and do high powered bedroom yoga
and pass the fuck out

Thursday 1.13
That pot brownie was a good idea. I should do that again
(x 3)r
I should organize my sex toys!
I think I’m feeling better!

Friday 1.14
I wake with a crushing headache but otherwise I feel fine
The kids want to hug me but I tell them we can’t risk it
Am I a horrible mother?

Saturday 1.15
I give the kids one hug each while masked and holding our breaths
This day is yours, Sadhguru & Lego

(for Scott)

Eddie Money

Your Pontiac Firebird

Catfish

A stone that means forgiveness

You said I said Let’s Play

The Fashionistas 

Your hair, your beard

Your smile. Your smile.

Freckles

Shoulders

Taking the trash down the fire escape on Main Street

The Village 

Your broken foot

Your seizures

Twix + Whiskey

Lola

Quan and I are at the river. His harness is yellow. Butter. Limited edition. 

The rocks are rock colored which is grey, sort of brown. The shadows are shadow colored which is grey, sort of blue. 

The sky is blue hombre, getting darker as it gets higher. The bark is brown and sort of gray, maybe taupe but I don’t think taupe can be that texture.

The leaves are brown on one side and white on the other and they have curled themselves into little balls like crunchy, hollow snails. 

Some of the tree branches are white. Some of the wet rocks are brown. 

People are wearing bright, jolly colors. Day-after-Christmas colors. Soft patterns, soft solids. I don’t think my family likes me very much. Or at all.

The water ripples. White lines of sunshine coast across the brown.

It’s been a shitshow of a day and a shitshow of a week. It was a perfect storm that I tried to radiate positive energy into but I’m still not exactly sure what I feel about one’s ability to choose to radiate into a specific direction.

Side effects of today include

• the dog becoming aware of my co-dependence on him and figuring out to use it against me
• simultaneous laughing and crying in front of Don’t Look Up
• text badgering all of my friends to watch Don’t Look Up
• asking a box of wine how’d you like to look back at it and winking

Check this out though… LOL!

Dear Diary,

Do you ever think about the time I named you Whit after a drummer in a never-known early 90s metal band? Or the time when you had pink pages and a faulty lock and the defense attorney held you and read my bubbly handwriting from your pink pages so I burned you in a pot on the porch?

You were Joey once, with blue pages and lines too close together and then I went through the phases were you were The Moon Book and The Book of Roses and The Book of Nowhere. Remember when I only wrote in you with red ink? I burned cigarette holes through your pages alongside the burns to my arm.

Do you remember the online diary site where we played a stained princess? So many romance stories begun and tossed aside. I printed them all out and three hole punched the pages. I keep them in a floppy three ringed binder.

Do you remember the decade I left you behind? The Decomposition Books that followed, into which I’ve stuffed the past seven years?

Let’s start hanging out here.

Life Story IV

Background:
I didn’t do drugs because I knew I had color outside of my lines and I’ve learned to move in one direction and then another for as long as I can take it

1.
I left him behind, behind with the horseflies and he consumed me before he had me, no, he fit me, he rubs me, he leaned over my shoulder in woodworking class and I will hurt you and I will hurt you

2.
I am almost as pristine as Cruella Deville and I will never be a heroine and I will eat cinnamon toast crunch and I will be so special and I will forever keep reaching toward the spiral sophomore notebooks

that fall for my gently rolled jean shorts and my ironic cat tattoo
green and rose colored fronds, not stamens but stems not stems but buds not buds but laurels

not laurels but some thing that all together touched
like cheerleaders committed to praying hands like cinnamon like spearmint like sick

3.
remember the times you peel dollar bills up off the floor and remember the neck tattoo of the boy you did it for and remember the sugar that went into these syrupy drinks that filled plastic pitchers in the refrigerator that someone’s mom bought take a right before the movie theater

4.
that guy and breaking into a swimming pool in a gated community and that’s why he left me behind and that’s when he always leaves me behind or maybe I left. IIt just depends on what I want to feel.

To conquer them stay between the lines.