If I was looking for proof of us, our fingerprints would be on nothing. If they marked the skin of a tomato, we’d have cut it up and reduced it to juice for a sauce. If they were once on the window on the twelfth floor of that hotel room, housekeeping would have wiped them, and anyway it would have been only my palms splayed there. Your hands would have been on the square bones of my hips, those open windows. If they were on wine glasses we abandoned for each other, you’d have rinsed that evidence by morning while [...]
When I was seven, I was a girl who disappeared. Annie and I were riding our twin pink bicycles down the beach by the ocean where the sand is damp and firm and bike wheels make trails like the mark of a sea creature that has slithered onto land. It was early evening, and the beach was empty except for the cursive of our wheels, and ahead there was only one obstacle. A man and a boy were sitting in beach chairs, their fishing poles stuck upright in the sand, a cooler beside them. They were the only fishermen left, [...]
I dislike people, as a general rule. People are things ahead of you in line, stealing the cab you hailed, shoving past you, inflicting their neurosis upon you like black magic. I think most people dislike other people. It’s why we misuse car horns, our elbows and wear sunglasses in the shade. It’s also why people consider New York City to be the greatest city in the world. Everyone is bothered, and everyone suspects that they are bothering everyone else. There is a peace about that understanding, as there is in any understanding. Keep moving or be moved. [...]
There is a woman who never had pets or children but she owns three brooms. Each broom serves a purpose. One solves the leaves in the fall and the pollen in the spring. One solves the grains of rice and the kitchen crumbs. And one keeps everything else out, things try to follow her in on her shoe soles and bits of wrapping she’s picked off the mouthwash, the dish soap, the juice-those proofs that no one else has touched the content of things. There is this woman who has never petted her dog because she hasn’t the [...]
A man pushes a cart down the sidewalk lifting the back two wheels over the patch of broken cement where the rain and the wet leaves collect. That swamp is there no matter how long a drought has lasted, so he’s named it Swamp de Leon as it comes just before the intersection of Briarcliff Road and Ponce de Leon. In the south, Ponce and Swamp almost rhyme. He calls the cracks by their names as they stump the cart, “well, hello to you too, harry!” “That’s a mighty firm handshake you got there, emily.” “Horace, it seems your family [...]
The Near Nothing Man was not always near nothing. Once he buttoned clothes, sat on chairs, rested the numb skin of his elbows on tables, touched things like objects and subjects, some subjects in triangular places that turned them into objects, drank from a cup and filled it depending on his desire and not merely what was available. You must imagine everything was available to him because it was, anything: absinthe, urine, breast milk, Coca-Cola from Mexico where they use sugar derived from the cane and not corn syrup, the syrup of anyone wearing candy, the content of anyone in [...]
This song never made me happy before I had a dream in which I attended my own funeral. I didn’t have the best seat and was under the impression that I was in a theater to see a Cirque du Soleil performance. Then this song came on and the lights went up instead of down. A parade of carnival characters came out from the stage entrances. It took four clowns to carry my casket which was covered in a white sheet. They lifted it over their heads and back to their shoulders like it was a tuba. Women with painted [...]
After midnight, my street sounds like the ocean. It’s low tide, but rolling in, resin under five-no-six lights which make the constellation of a sailboat, an oak connecting the dots. I have a secret no one knows, and I have a green bottle from which I drink it up, in which I’ve written it on a scroll of paper and tucked it in like it is a child who I want to sleep soundly. It is also a message I want everyone to know, but only if one person finds it when it washes up on the shore [...]
Formerly a seven franchise chain, The Near Nothing Museum has only one remaining location. It’s worth the ticket ($12.34) and the drive out of your way for the Room of Latitude and Longitude where crossword cut-outs dangle from the ceiling, the clues grazing the top of your head and where blank squares spread the walls and you can reach all the way from 34 across to 59 down, a clue no one has yet solved. You climb inside the black squares. I won’t ruin all the surprises therein. Inside one of the squares familiar poems are communicated by sense of [...]
My hands hover over a Ouija board. Our hands are almost touching. Our hands are listening to plastic. I’ve begun to decode every last contradicting sentence you said to me, parsing them into Ouija language, spelling our names over and over again, then just our initials, then just yes or no, then sun and moon. I understand the message, but I don’t know if I am communicating with a living human or a departed ghost when the oracle moves to the bottom of the board and you say, “I swear I’m not making this move.” MP3: Bright Eyes- Land [...]
Yesterday an email came through, but it wasn’t you. It was a deal on flowers, which never come when you actually want to send someone flowers. But I clicked anyway and chose a bouquet of white dendrobium orchids for $69.99 plus a vase, plus a charge to ship them, plus a tax, and I almost sent them to myself but I didn’t know what to write on the card. Then, I thought about receiving them: Oh, you shouldn’t have. Then I thought about where I would put them, if I would even give them water. [...]
In the future we have a pack of dogs, all of whom know how not to get cactus spurs stuck in their paws. They nose scorpions around in the dirt, but one of them gets bitten. His nose grows three times its size, and he turns out fine. We let him sleep in the bed after that, even though you hate it, even though you say you can’t breathe with both of us in there, even though you say this is the reason you wanted a life where you can go anywhere and be with anyone anytime you want, and [...]
Go to a place of worship that is not your own, pray to your God and see if theirs will answer. Tie a yellow string in between two cans. Put one face down on the ground and scream into the other and see if all the earth voices-the bassoons and the tubas and the old oboes come poking out their sleepy gold ears and long swallowing necks. Dive into the coldest body of water you can find and have a conversation that sounds like you’re being strangled and see if anyone offers you air there. Get to the top of [...]
Among the lures and hooks and webs of fishing line in my grandfather’s old tackle box was an amber prescription bottle, the label removed, that was sealed so tight that neither my eight-year-old nor my twenty-something-year-old hands could open it. Coiled inside was something vermicular, dark and slimy, clearly dead, if it had lived at all. And if it had lived, it would have surely been a creature to both seek and avoid-the two battling and primary aims of childhood exploration. It was the prospect of slime that made it such a desirable object to my brother and I when [...]
for Dave Once there was a story that only ended and never had a chance. Once there was a plot in which nothing happened. Once a story had every word in every language in it and nobody died or broke up or fell in love to begin with. Once there was a story that catalogued the breakfasts of painters but was written backwards so most people thought it was a tragedy and threw eggs at the page. Once there was a comedy that had no characters, only settings. In that story, a cloud narrated by changing [...]
When he said it, she put her middle finger in the inner corner of her right eye to soothe that sting that occurs there when you’ve meant to correct but in turn been corrected, when you feel shamed: that needle-thin stab right where your eyeball rounds off and leaves a tiny pink triangle exposed without skin. Other than the navel, it is the most sacred place on the human body. (The most profane being not the genitalia as some Christians and Muslims and Texans would have you believe, but the elbow, that angular bone designed to abet sloth, indecency at [...]
I heard this song at a restaurant called White Tiger while waiting for sriracha tacos to- go. We were late for a football game. I had taken half a little blue pill that made the world slightly lopsided and cocked like a rabbit with a lazy ear and a perplexing question. The walls were covered in art made by elementary school students. My favorite was called “Elemental Crazyness” and featured a tornado challenging an erupting volcano, a tsunami taking out the stars. And, inexplicably, a peace symbol in the midst of it all. I wanted to keep this [...]
For Which the Art was Made: Why Art Space Matters Can a piece of art ever truly be independent of the wall or space in which it is displayed? Most people, I believe, would argue yes: A Rothko hanging on the wall of a CEO’s office is still as mesmerizing as one displayed in the pristine gallery space of the MOMA, right? Well, a lot of artists here in Atlanta might argue differently. Everywhere I seem to go these days, there are building sized murals on the faces of our barest street corners; turning brick [...]
I had to change from my comfortable plane clothes into my dress in the car while the driver waited with his hands folded in front of him outside the door. I was two hours delayed and had to meet my boyfriend and another couple for dinner in New York. I’d packed for New Orleans, where I was going to spend a few days alone taking photographs before he met me there but at the last minute, he asked me to come to New York first for a night. A surprise, he said. After dinner at the reincarnation of [...]
Helium is bleeding from our planet into space, large lungfuls of inert air sucked into the stars every single millisecond; but this is not what is causing the shortage. It is, of course, us. MRIs, scientific research, a man who longs to fall from space. We are using it all up - the largest reservoir to be completely empty in just a few years. It is a million lazy balloons hovering silent over the same identical birthday party acted out in a million sleepy homes. Happy Birthday, dear darling. Happy birthday to you. There is a leftover [...]
Seamstress for the Band
Disclosure - 'When A Fire Starts To Burn' [Listen]
Earl Sweatshirt: “Guild” (feat. Mac Miller)
Series Preview: Cleveland Indians vs. Boston Red Sox – Terry Francona’s Return to Fenway
