northwest

seattle, you are my new god - i can't wait to see you again!

last fall

i miss me babies and i miss the words... thank you new york for having me, even if it was only fleeting..

placentas in jars

Sal is always drunk and showing up at Mike’s.

Ruthie is home; she shows me jars of kombucha she is brewing.

Like a big placenta in a jar. Green tea kombucha, ‘it’s a fungus’.

Ruthie digs out a piece of the placenta and places it in a plastic bag to take home with me, ties it up. Now I can make green tea, sun tea, and jar kombucha for free.

Ferment 7 days and begin again.

I take the kids home. They always rebuke homework, in magnet programs.

I get them to do their math by going shopping at the thrift store.

Two hours of digging in used clothes, labeled by male or female and occasionally colors but unorganized. They scream at the thought, until now, until the ‘thrift shop song’:

‘I’m gonna pop some tags. Only got twenty dollars in my pocket.’

When I pick up Zane from school, he’s excited about losing a tooth –

said it popped out into this girls afro.

Chelcey begins texting me from the university bookstore.

One after the other, “don’t reply yet”, she says.

I’m gathering 15 novels together. Twenty years of school;

ever since the community college course years ago,

sitting on the San Jacinto River, backdrop of industrial smokestacks,

the World War II Battleship, and the sound of the ferry.

The toll of its horn as it carts the vehicles back and forth.

Miles away, near the Houston/Pasadena border – the underground tunnel used to leak, drip river water down its tile walls, curved and rusting.

When we were children, we used to hope the tunnel would cave in while we were driving, crack and drown the old steel cars; water pushing against the windows, wondering how long before it came inside, wondering how long we could hold our breath before we were crushed by the cement worm.

Long before I realized ‘near-death’ meant – no one cares if you’re lying on a sidewalk somewhere, they will walk past, unless they can get a piece of ass out of it.

Chelcey lives in an apartment in the inner loop:

• the firemen and coroner are next door
• it smells incredibly bad
• the old lady next door has been dead for several days and they just found her body
• the cat is over here at my house
• I’m going to have to leave because of the smell, stay the night somewhere
• I can give you one of my cats to keep the dead ladies cat company
• No
• I think I should go with pink instead of purple. For the restaurant, pink underneath. It’s a bit more modern. Do you think I’m too old for pink hair?
• Like manga. It’s horrible here, I have to get out, glad I’m working a double.
• They know it’s too late to get rid of the smell. You’ll have to burn the apartment down.
• No
• I will
• No
• Someone needs to burn down the whole neighborhood. And get rid of the cops. Just riot and kill. Clean up the streets, know what I mean?
• No
• Fine. You’ll come around one day.