a. lobster

foggy on the internets

2008-07-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

heya friends. i'm roaming, with sometimes-internet. i'm leaving for california on friday, for the dalles on the 18th, and for spain on the 31st. so 'scuse my looping.

patience as predator

2008-06-28T00:44:00.000-07:00

i'm thinking about the position of your arms in that moment and everyone back-patting themselves. what's the difference between fishing for you and being you, dormant you, you without the soundest mind but with the intention of one. or you on the screen. or you with the benefit of a quiet law.

i'm moving. again. sort of. i've been floating since the beginning of the month and won't have a permanent place until september. oddly at home with the whole thing.

today is the longest day for a while. i'd like to not sleep. i'd like to not be faced with tomorrow's accuracy. i'd like to call from california to say i won't be back. as survivors of one violence or another, i think we're compliant to an extreme most times. i'm pleased to please by default. i'd like to be able to say i need to go without the anxiety of it.

tonight is so hot and it doesn't bother me like normal. my skin is dry and (i dare say) the teeniest of browns. the loveliest one is beside me and i think i'll be fine if i sleep very very close.

a wednesday

2008-06-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

continued mastering the art of finally peeling out of bed too too late and still arriving to work on time. dully comfortable at work, at repetitive movements, at herding non-readers, at knowing what to do, at swift completion. put 370 lanyards in a box. walked for cookies & lemonade. left shoulder started to peel. walked more, checked the mail, private library, The Transformation. best mac & cheese ever. parcels in the air. the perfect cool evening walk. the slight spin of the room, all my leg muscles.

the last of the poetry night poems vol. 1 (sleepover style)

2008-06-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

Your Female Voice in Stereo

All the marks of soft sounding creaks
in your elbows, the shape of you peeling
away. Please, an extra few days and
I'll take you into the sun for hours, touching
your skin until it's tender with knowledge.

Outside of waiting is the wind on stilts.
Your hands for folding. Your thighs on the
ground. Your keeping your forearms soft
with wonder. A leap for eying. A fall
of sound. We, like lifting the soles.

We, a unit of breathing where the solid
became a piece of the air.

Some methods harder in action, feeling the
walls with a solid eye. The inside of the
arms, not where the marrow lives but further.
The soft curve of the same aching. Wanting
without all the fanfare. Trimming our secrets.

The sky of falling anchors doesn't want to
please you anymore. These our joints in
tandem. These our friends without breath,
sipping small air from cupped palms. We
will not suffer the branches to wither.

You, in three pieces on the carpet, bleeding
whiskey to burning. Your sandwiched muscles.
Your sweet mouth wider than anything.

---------------

Carrying the Weather for Sharon

Her thousand singing ways
in a careful row.
Her severed speech patterns
lining the doors.
I love the insides of you.

Our cancer of arms is a
separate issue.
Our outstanding function
deliberates weight.
I'm counting the number of vessels.

Your wincing contraption for
lingering forward.
Your palms out in order
of trust.
I fell into breathing from habit.

We woke up debating the weather
with bells on.
We threaded our toes with
the heat.
I'm wishing your eyelashes buckled.

I AM GOING TO PLAY THE DRUMS UNTIL YOU KILL YOURSELF

2008-06-21T14:28:00.000-07:00

No one'll admit to praying
like you, comrade.
Aren't we wailing siphons?
Can we calculate looping pidgeons
to equal breath?

I sat down to imply rootedness in
something stuck down.
I stood with the intentional grace
of skin pulled harshly.
I can't imagine a sound we meant
to be sound.

Under all this face grabbing
we put our eyes back
in. No luck, topsoil.
No real favor in seeping.
Let's a rhythm.
Let's wrong lovely
hands in
the wrong places. A bit
southward.

I saw you wincing when
the mail came in. Old
razor cuts. Old grinding
calls. A methodical
race up to the old door, hacking.
No one would envy you
a runner.

When I say the
drums I mean the
potential of the walls, the
softness inherent in air resistance, and
the rumble of real work.
When I see you
in the hallway I'd like to vomit.
The floor will
stick to my
ankles for hours on.

revisiting old prose. bearing. bear w/.

2008-06-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

(untitled)

Hallie was always the stinging feeling in my lips, the way the landscape drips out something you can nearly hear the hum of. She never drew back from wanting or trying.

Sometimes my fingers are the shape of fan blades and my hands spin on the ends of my arms. I am sandy-haired roadkill. I am a mattress for late deliveries. Sometimes I push myself away from the wall until my wrists buckle.

We walked miles on the roof. Hallie said it made her feel in flight. I walked a steady line up and down the center. I tripped a lot. Hallie would hold out her arms around the perimeter and the birds moved so fast in the thick dark they seemed to travel backward.

Her dad died the year we moved to Sixth Street and Hallie got the flu for five straight weeks after they buried him. Her fevers meant we could save a little money on heat. She used to say she wished she could paint her eyes green and we laughed about what some things feel like on the surface of skin and we were silent with what other of those things feel like. Hallie's fingers were never softer than in laughing. They would reach out in little flicks on my shoulder.

Hallie told me once her first boyfriend was chosen for her by default of eighth grade sleepover parties where her friend Samantha's mom would get drunk and let the boys stay too. He was shorter than her and a junior. He pushed her against the baseboard. She said the wood floor smelled cheap but solid.

*

I don't know anything about the way the winter comes on so fast. Someone at the grocery store is buying twenty cans of soup and it seems the strangest thing I've seen since summer. The soup woman's children run the cart against mine and throw boxes of Jell-o at each other and she picks up a can of minestrone and puts it down and picks up a can of chicken and rice and wavers and blinks. I wonder about the circumstances of the last time someone put their hands on her and I look at her children and then cry into the produce section when the misters come on.

I work with a woman named Sue who spent five years having sex with her father before she turned eighteen. She used to live with a sixty-year-old who called her little one and took her to bed with the kind of hands that comfort children. Last week, we went for a drink after work to celebrate her thirtieth birthday and she just stirred the tall thing and told me that thirty years is really too many. The first time I heard her tell her story in a casual way, I looked around and saw people's eyes getting heavy and wishing they hadn't heard a goddamn thing.

Someone sets me up with a guy from accounting and I don't really care but I notice his small hands at dinner and decide to ask him up. Hallie's picture is under my pillow. He is gentle and doesn't look at my face. Hallie used to sleep so close I could hear her dreaming. He takes his time. Hallie's voice is somewhere in the street noise from the window. He doesn't ask who Hallie is.

*

Addie is a small accountant with a picture on her desk of the Virgin Mary holding the earth cracked open in her arms. She says she wants to be more joyful with her hands and Sue says something about this week's therapist and how she hypnotized the air around Sue's eyes and gave her cold sores from the stress of it. The hallway buzzes sometimes with all of us in this echo-and-light space, with the way a dozen women will slowly move toward talking about their bodies and the bodies of those they know with their hands.

Sue's nose twists with reentering the atmosphere. She has a honey stick in her mouth and looks at Addie as at a small and maybe moderately troublesome animal.

"You know." Addie throws her hands with less joy.

"You just need to go down on them more," Sue says. Addie keeps a count on the back of her time card of how many times Sue says the phrase each month. Addie says things like "man parts".

"You know," Sue says and Addie's mouth rounds and I'm sure Sue's going to say cock. She's doing something with her tongue. I think about Sue's process of sleeping with men according to name. I think that openness must be nice and then open a new email and write to you in present tense.

I'm getting to know your body and it is a new thing almost daily. I save it for a better time.

*

Some fall afternoons, I can see the rain coming down on one side of the house but not the other. The sun is out and I'm thinking about how Hallie could be shining even with the streak of tears and how the glow hadn't quite left her apple cheek when I found her on the roof with her arms dangling off the side.

Today I am Hallie's ghost. I'm sweeping the things I say into a neat little pile with my fingers and then blowing them in peoples faces. I've counted forty clouds so far that illustrate my inability to breathe. Three of them also look like Hallie's hands.

Today I am very ugly and I think Hallie must see and I try to apply a series of putties and pastes to make the gray in my cheeks the color of normal and healthy thought. The red on my cheekbones is a side effect of how light refracts through the same glass for years. My face is heavy. I decide when I die I want to die without the smallness of feeling.

I erase all Hallie's messages on my work phone. I listen the pauses before she speaks and punch the buttons and remember the feeling and taste of her breath.

*

I start a word document titled "weekly reports" and spend the afternoon making a list of things the people at work don't know about me. I write Hallie's name seventeen times.

*

Sue has a drugged kind of reservation. Some song about some girl's eyes is playing. I know a skeleton of her story because I heard her tell it in that panicked way we do one time when people were just standing around being casual and I thought if I spoke that way I would throw up on everyone's shoes.

This morning, her fingers are not thirty-year-old fingers when they pick at the seams of her jeans. I remember how Hallie sang to me through the phone but not the way the high notes sounded and think if I tried to explain it to Sue it would fill her with too much sadness for not understanding.

She asks, "Was yours charming with everyone else?" and we wonder how they learn to do that. We wonder how we learn so well to be compliant and afraid. I think about how those little packets of silica gel say DO NOT EAT because someone must have poisoned themselves with the small hard beads and I wonder why sex education doesn't already include a section on how it's not appropriate to fuck four-year-olds.

*

One afternoon at work Addie blocks me in the corner of the break room and asks me to go to a potluck at her church with very kind eyes and I think about all the times Sue and I are asking each other questions in passing and touching each others' shoulders and say yes. I use one of my grandma's favorite recipes and the edges of the casserole tighten with black while I'm taking the makeup off my eyes. In the car, Addie says I look tired and turns the radio to soft static.

Addie's church is every church I've ever been in. The pastor says hello with his arms and I'm reminded how much that feels like panic. There are long tables and round tables and lots of things written in crayon and shoes that are supposed to be shiny and noses that aren't supposed to be shiny and too much macaroni salad. I pull at the hem of my skirt for an hour.

*

I'm thankful for every bit of skin still in place. Last week I was going to visit Hallie and hit the pavement hard when I took the corner too quickly on my bike. I run my fingers where the skin isn't scraped and memorize the places Hallie's touch is still settled in.

Kelly works in the warehouse moving boxes around. On Thursdays after work I take her daughter for a walk by the lake while she works late doing inventory. Anna is tall for her age and very aware that she hasn't grown into her legs yet. Anna and Hallie have things in common we don't talk about. The last time I saw Hallie she told me that people don't change and that the worst people are the ones who have everyone fooled.

Today Anna has a small purple round on her collarbone. She hasn't bothered with foundation. She wants me to know where she's been. Anna and I rub the past week off our skin with hands that know too many methods for erasing. Dear Kelly, I say, I am sorry but you don't know what's happening. I am sorry that good men are not the ones that seem good.

Hallie used to have a way of looking pretty when she wanted to disappear.

When Hallie and I met we were both twenty and her father made careless pasta for dinner and put his hands on my back while I rinsed my plate. Hallie was sneaking vodka from the basement freezer. Hallie's father said, "I don't know what Hallie told you, but you're the prettiest thing I've had for company in a while." Hallie passed out on the basement floor and I called my mom but the phone just rang and rang.

*

The mountains are only showing up in two dimensions today. The sky's a sheet pulling a haze forward over everything, like it's waiting for some horror. Everything in the sun looks faded.

We assign faces to things that don't have them. In the dream, all the man did was hide his face and hide his face and then turn to look at me from the stairwell and it was the most frightening thing I'd ever seen. I didn't recognize him. He had unextraordinary features and no trace of kindness or fear.

*

This is morning: The barista pulls caffeine out of the air, swirling his hands to make some sort of point. I waver. The man behind me is standing too close when he reaches for the sugar. A woman in line keeps saying names like she knows where famous people sleep and what they dream about. There are thirteen-year-olds squealing about the straws in their mouths.

*

Anna's asleep on my couch because Kelly disappeared again. Hallie used to get so mad and then pull Anna in between us and sing wind into her hair until she was sleeping. I would watch her fingers on Anna's neck. I would watch her make a family out of wishing.

Tonight, Kelly bangs the door nearly to splinters before I pull it open and she's screaming something. Her skin is so dry she appears to be crumbling. I convince her into the tub and she turns the water to scalding. Her body is a sterling wrecking ball. I pull the shampoo through her hair in sweet strings. I can hear Anna crying in my bed.

*

Everyone is practicing somber faces. Allie tells me Sue is in the hospital. James got angry when she burned a pot of rice and cracked the plaster with Sue's body. Allie, and I take a long lunch to visit her. James is in the hallway. I peek one eye around the door frame. Sue's wheezing has the same tone as her voice. I hit James right in the temple.

The nursing staff push me against the wall and make calls. James spits and calms his eyes in a way I don't want to understand. Everyone drops their voices and Allie holds my hands all the way to the car.

I call all of Sue's accounts with a tender voice and make up a story about production delays. I say "unfortunately" a lot. Allie calls Sue's doctor and she has three broken ribs. Everything else is minor cuts and bruising. I call the doctor back to tell her "minor" is never an appropriate word. Allie gives me a ride home and we stop by her church to pray for Sue's swift return. I scratch Sue does not believe in God into the pew while Allie's eyes are closed or fixed on the rise of the ceiling.

*

Hallie and I had our best year right before her dad died. We spent the longest hours holding hands. We slept outdoors too far into the fall and built easy nests during snowstorms. We made that year our thousand years.

We took an October road as far north as we could, and then east, and then settled in by the coastal waters for four days, wedged in by the rocks in the early morning, burning the news without reading it to make sorry cups of coffee to warm our stomachs and stain our sleeves pulled around our hands. We spent most of the darkness in the back of Hallie's dad's wagon, kicking our legs when the cold wedged a space between our bodies. We wrote the things we meant to say on the other's arms. Our last night there, the sky woke up around midnight with a lot of grumbling but it stayed dark and we stayed awake waiting for it to crack and spin, kicking and losing each other and finding each other and trying not to think about going home.

We spent Christmas writing letters to each other and hiding them in familiar places. Hallie's dad called a dozen times and we wrapped the phone up in an old t-shirt and watched it disappear among the trees.

In the spring we made things with our hands.

*

Sue is ready to come home from the hospital and decided not to press charges. Addie wrings her hands the way one should wring hands. I leave work every day expecting to find James in the parking lot. If I see him coming I will not make a single noise and his hands will be fast and effective.

*

I haven't seen Anna for almost a month. I see Kelly on a cigarette break with her clothes hanging in buckets and she just looks at the cracks in the ground. She sits hard on the curb and I sit on the grass not too close and pick the blades to pulp. She mutters "Anna" under her breath.

"I thought I might take Anna to the coast this weekend," I say. Kelly nods and pushes her fingers into the sidewalk until the gravel sticks to her knuckles. Her face is falling apart.

*

Thursday night I work late and James is sitting on the pavement when I leave and just watches my car move away.

2008-06-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

Just so with our fingers out

and it's going just that way.
That flailing way. How to appeal to
non-human entities. She said the
"complex," I think, for soothing. I left
her on the counter for the two days
I'd need her. Goodbye, soft empty.
And the other at the door, almost,
but I can see movement through
tonight's think air. Let's drink up
our goodbyes. Goodbye, your
hands. Mine staying put in the
dirt. Yours thumbing boundaries.
Mine with yours, thinking of it

and joking like we do. Some things
waiting to validate. Oh, size 3T red
wailing in the bottom drawer,
tangling the others to choke. I'll
think up the words to translate. No
longer plainspoken. The one I could
just say to. Feeling the two months
in my hips. How 'bout?

i do not write fiction

2008-06-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

but i have a short story up at PEQUIN

a ruby-assed jamaican caught my eye

2008-06-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

bryan & i have some sick iamb-pent up at DRUNK.

please rejoice.

the sand in your ears is smoother sped-up

2008-05-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

we went to observe the new road
the hundred trenching yards
the sentiment
the sediment you removed from the lobes
the cheeks
the memory of lurching forward is
in every person stepping around the wall
they're becoming animals of habit
they're carrying the extra weight in their cheeks

if your grief has an avatar
its cheeks are cut close
its mirror image is two-dimensional
its impact is made of the weather

we were busy building you in shambles
in crooked-cut pills
in porch smoke and oil
in waiting
in the number of brake pads
in emptying
in the holes in your belly
in the holes in the door

did he punch out the back window?
was the moon out?
the sound?
the sting?
now we're watching your aches
moving the skin tight against your kneecaps
now we're watching the house board by board

spring break stragglers

2008-05-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

capacity

the slash-mark on your
temple make for ways
direction is soft but not
important in this example
please exit without harboring

*

capacity

the middle of you notes
color, contrast, foreshadow,
and guilt. my hands are
making you in desert shades
and wind flowers and hail

*

capacity

browned and covered, light
on side or back, open near
joints but sufficiently tied
forward in the ways of prayer
all up to dripping sun
all near to the outbound

the thing between two and two

2008-05-21T17:46:00.000-07:00

for your elephant eyes

how full your hands are
with our funny sips
how many times there are for glass
the wires getting wider
with the components of fear

i tried but my fingers are shorter
i thought about closenesses
and the weakness for wheat
and the softness of film

i thought about numbering up
forgot the reference
made up words for imaginary
made myself apt and off-putting

how about everyone without
the bullshit numbers
how about i found your number on the floor

Inhabited your elbows once

2008-05-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

So without our reaching fingers on
So soft my eyes breaking
up tumors
No one's worrying what will have to
Nothing means to cease to take
in numbers
in particles

Our sorting is a wreckage
Our skins don't work
Our skins
Our skins don't stretch anymore
I wanted to wipe you on the wall
I would like to make you fever
with our skins on
I would like to crawl up
to change our skins out
for ones we make better use of

Our skins are using resources
for a mattress
for parking
Our skins wide out there
where you'd think them up

2008-05-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

sorry, but i am about to inundate your readers. i'll be re-posting a bunch of my no-longer-published archives for this.

i may panic.

for the project, i was asked for specific archive periods, including the first three months of a.lobster's existence. which no longer exists. not to mention the additional spontaneous and necessary-feeling editing, deleting, and re-facing. i feel unable to expand on any of this though i know it's important and explanatory.

of late, i'm spending less time making these changes en blog and more for real. i'll be shuffling my belongings (yet another time. 2008 = not yet my year for not moving) to a family headquarters in northern CA. i'm working, and it's nice. i'm finishing this term even if it scatters the rest of my brains. i'm returning, with a heaviness, to Ashland for absolutely only one more year and it will be something i didn't quite plan and it will be something not of earning or making, but something i only really want to do.

in the middle, i'll be a floaty type of thing.

i meant the bridges we build between the stories lodged in our stomachs

2008-05-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

not some skipping thing
not some instinct to hold
i wanted to put my arms around the plural you
not the vacant you
not the you i own pictures of
i meant the pit in your gut that matches mine
i meant the plural you at a personal distance
i wanted to tear your stupid face out
not some softish thing
not a thing with a desirous center
i meant our breaking history
i wanted the plural you to hold my hands out
i want the story in all the angles
not some dirt story
not some wind story
(the elements aren't a suitable disgrace)
i want to be sorry for the parameters but
i want to gouge you with all your thinking fingers
your not-so lonelinesses
your not-so fastnesses
i want the plural you (no, not you)

she walked in and i had crumbs on my shirt

2008-05-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

something is going to burn
my head to a cinder. i look

ridiculous most of these
days. will you assist me?

i will deconstruct my well-
being. i will slowly finish

with a sharp ability to
keep you if i'm lucky. i

want to waste away and out
of these terrible beautiful hills.

fuck you, April

2008-04-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

(∞)

the tick-tick the objects make after

My body is rejecting your sister city. My ears don't stretch to Wednesday
now. Is it possible just this time last week we dropped our livers on the
sopping floor? The splatter made my skin turn limp.

What we've learned is not withstanding. It's a good thing I don't drive much
now. I will be constructing your arrival out of straws. I will name the birds
in hats (their patterns, their wicked sense of smell).

Apples in my eyes are what anyone else would call losing. I'll peel them to
seeing the sky only in reds and points. I'll peel them and wrap them up for
your birthday. Don't worry about the paper stains.

Clearly there is documentation of how I arrived. These are the little fingers
wrapped in the threads of my shoes. These inks more permanent. These or
others denoting obedience. These, fossilized but readable.

These carving out the stone to live in. These living, decomposing skins and
heart muscles. These letters to promise to stay. These letters I can't form
with only my fingers. These days I prefer a dullness.

But we will be standing when the summer ends and we will be breathing the
ocean in quarter-notes and we will be husking our outsides with all our good
marks and we will be breaking up the waves with the unknown source of us.

fuck you, NaPo

2008-04-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

i am failing April.

so i got drunk and made something with my hands. it uses words and primary colors. i say that counts.

it belongs to Alex, so you can ask him about it. or not.

severed canopy hands

2008-04-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

(14)

we'd fix to run but plank the soupy tines
so fast we've rendered killing things in cork
so new in pretty pedophile couture
so let's out-breast the washers, nails, & tacks
to knee the fucker center-like with flair
we'd stretch our little mandibles for hire
but no one needs a molar from our kind
no one's loving satan for his shine
no one isn't angry after sands
no one likes to wager against faithful
we'd offer cakey crowns in place of air
where trooping phantoms rest their tricky heads
we'd bubble thick with rubies where our ears are
and bite the paper bodies from the sky

plaster of hands where the hands would tremble

2008-04-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

(13)

wanted a replacement arm for obvious
i am wanted in pursuing
this like built-up/this like blood vessels
i thought to number you on my elbow
wanting a sip level
want of sandbar leaving
you/where and with our backs exposed
i dug out your real sound
you like faster in person/you
but not steadily
but not wanting in this manner exactly
but with checkers
but out of/of counting tics
i am wanted in these areas of the face
i wanted to say to you

for those about to rock

2008-04-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

(12)

look at your camel hands but
do not count the seconds for
building our history out of
pints and whistles. you were
my only way of saying. you
said i might amount to some-
thing or maybe you just sneezed
real close to the mic. i wanted
to be the thing you had arms
for. now i am made of carpet
sparks. the seat was like the
weather. we brushed the
crushing out slits in the floor.
i say we and you say i'm ready.
i say we and you make extra
room where the spaces are
empty anyway. we're too old
for fearing or wasting away.

twice as many days as poems

2008-04-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

(11)

the coughing like breadcrumbs in the
cracks of us, the cedar fill to our sap-
soft lips.

i sat to absorb our wincing.

i am sung out in every kick.

the knowing is better with clip-ons
but you'll take the grasping to harm.
we're like almost-touching things.

you have unfortunate hips.

you are holding seasons.

the loosing the spotting from out
all our sciences, forming a weather
to cause neighbors concern.

to not waiting after dark.

to the sealed things.

NAPOWRIMO** (10)

2008-04-21T11:41:00.000-07:00

the woods and all their saving parts

the shadow is an acid home. i woke you for
the suffer things. the door crack said you'd
like to change your mind about the scent
of rain and why it waits until we're sold
and why it needs to hold you down and
how the trees would open up to wet you
till you're sunken.

we'll eat up all the woods to call the sun.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**THE MODERN BIRDS is on hold. I am full with other things. Thank you.

2008-04-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

family stuff over NaPo this weekend, friends. working on catch-up with a little hole in my heart.

-----

news: some of my capacity poems up at elimae

-----

note to self: the woods

post-internet-less roadtrip tightwad update sale!

2008-03-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

fuck you! paperwork, gas prices, scheduling, word count, roommate, etc.

fuck yeah! barnaby, listenlight, napo, coast buzz, beer, beer, beer, etc.