missing summer, home, mom

My mother and I sat at patio furniture in our backyard, the heat of the summer had let up and we wore jackets over our scant summer clothing. We drank wine and talked until we began to feel the distance waver and spin before us. We shifted uncomfortably while we swatted thickets of mosquitoes from our legs. The pale skin on my thighs had pushed its way through the metal mesh of my lawn chair, reminding me of how exposed and large the warm months can make me feel.

Serra da Neblina is a Massif in Brazil that was unexplored until 1954 when an American Expedition led by Bassett Maguire successfully climbed the massif's northwestern slopes.

Sierra Neblina is a new age radio personality who claims to be an ex CIA operative, model, veteran, and discoverer of a small grey alien in her apartment in the 90s.

Sierra Neblina has a deep respect for my grandmother who claims to be the human host of an ancient lemurian shaman named Okamahia.

my family sends bad news in texts with as few words as possible.  my mother sends: "fyi: I might have melanoma." then she sends a picture of the dog in a sombrero.

i don't even know what melanoma is, i imagine little pac men eating away at her breasts before i remember the strange mole on her back.

some people see cancer everywhere. i might be one of those people now. other people say you can create a cancer in yourself simply by dwelling on it. I imagine a pure white light boring little holes throughout my body. go ahead and eat me out light.

at work i am moody and wanting to bask in it. my coworker explains in great detail how she burned out her planters wart using salicylic acid. she asked if her kids wanted to come look at it, they didn't. she thanks me for not being disgusted by her. she describes the experience using the words follicle and viral core which i do like.

a friend texts me "i have gonnorhea...can't believe from julio. we go to the library together n shit. damn"

someone left a pink gum wad in the drinking fountain and it looks like a spleen. as if to say "let me share with you the most abhorrent parts of me." 

blood lust

I recently heard that heroin addicts can be found eating their scabs because little bits of their vice preserves itself in dried blood. This is strangely intimate? This is profoundly sad.

A poet on my Facebook feed likened watching the electoral votes come in to watching a cancer screen of the nation. What we saw was widespread malignancy. This spoke to me not only because I fear malignancy of our collective soul as well as our corporeal whole, but because I spent the evening and early hours of the morning in the ER waiting room with my partner who had been having difficulty breathing as of late.  If this sounds to you like the birth of another metaphor, I mean to tell you that it is not.

It is not revelatory to say, but to love another with a body capable of failing is the most vulnerable thing. To hold that body and love every inch of it knowing it might be the cause of your undoing is a pure and sickening thing. I would do it over and over and over again. Absolutely I would.

Waxy, Camilla Grudova

In a cafe I met a girl named Ann who played the electric Hammond organ in a Bar to entertain the Men, jolly songs to help them relax. She was bulky and had a downy moustache and very thick legs, I think from sitting at the organ all day long pressing the pedal. She smoked very quickly, bringing the cigarette to her mouth the way a greedy person eats little snacks.

She danced her fingers across the table, her shoulders wiggling along, making a buzzing with her mouth to demonstrate the organ sound.

She told me she used to have the most beautiful curls but had to cut them off because intoxicated Men would grab them. She now had a closely cropped bowl cut. She wore a blue dress with a plastic corsage safety pinned to her chest and had sweat stains under her arms.