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a shooter knows what a shooter takes / so I’ll take two shots of whiskey down / a cowboy in a comet race / the dark is getting darker now

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(we spent a week by the sea. the coast was much of a muchness—golden grass in the evening, sea lion barks through the night.)

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i wanted to see the world through your eyes until it happened / then i changed my mind / yes i lied / i'm a liar

phb brdgrs

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Chester Beatty Library W. MS 94 (by Master of Walters 219) — left to right: calendar miniature for May, Visitation, and elevation of the Cross. 

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pristine — snail mail 

(we can be anything / even apart / out of everything)

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heads and bodies in tuscany!

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The girl stands very straight at the top of the pile and surveys everything around her with the fresh completeness of a discoverer, who has just felt the right key slide into her lock, the last piece pressed into her jigsaw. She stands and speaks with the sunlight fearlessly. Her ear, tilted up to it, is transparent. She bends toward the water, to get a closer look at some flashing silver school, and I watch her all the while in silence. Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn't been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn't?

Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy)

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My interest was far too personal and not strictly academic and so my methodology came across as nostalgic and my perspective rather naive since I ignored the usual critical frameworks which were anyhow quite incomprehensible to me and instead pilfered haphazardly from the entire of Western literature in order to strengthen my argument, which I cannot now recall. It had something to do with love. About the essential brutality of love.

Claire Louise Bennett (Pond)

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the great day of his wrath — john martin  the opening of the sixth seal — francis danby

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tour — the courtneys

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Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her, and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. She remembered a thousand trifles; they started to life with the spontaneity of a shiver. She had thought them trifles at the time; now she saw that they had been weighted with lead.

Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

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(actually a (slightly modified) STOCK PHOTO of bernini's ratto di proserpina)

if new year’s eve is a sort of precedent or prediction for the coming year, then mistakes await within these many days. i navigated drunken crowds and broken glass as i stared at my own shadow, who had skinny shadow knees emerging from her coat and tiny shadow tangles sprouting silhouetted from her head. 

i told someone — dw — that i would meet him on a corner; it was his suggestion and my responsibility to qualify the suggestion: bad. the northwest corner of the circus maximus was not a clever meeting point. obviously! you will not be able to find yourself in roman crowds, much less a friend, i should have said. 

but i went out and past the coliseum, skirting the barren thing, skirting all the people too and the numerous police vans and yellow tape. i arrived at the circus maximus, now a makeshift night club, 15 minutes late and 4 before the continental european clock hands tipped (just barely!) into another year. everyone was yelling and counting and then, in 2017, they were kissing and hugging and drinking champagne. i was very happy to keep the moment to myself and i wondered if dw, somewhere in the crowd, was happy too or if he would have liked to share the hopeful minute with another human being, flushed with cold and wordless things. 

i never found him, on the northwest corner of the ancient race track. i walked around for almost an hour, down the little hill and up again, searching for his familiar face. no one paid me any heed, besides some men, easily dodged, who blocked my path and barked their friendly (scary!) blessings for the coming year.  

the crowd thinned out near the apartment and as i turned the corner towards my street, i felt a sudden fear, like a piece of shrapnel moving toward a vein. i have worked and lived around the fear for many years, but rarely has it taken such a sharp and violent form. 

i have been careless with my body time and time again. yikes! i have met men where they’ve wanted me to meet them: by the circus maximus, for instance, or lying (pale and naked as a turkey) on my back. they have picked the rules and the conditions, times, places, and positions — i have long considered my consent to be a form of courage. i have thought: if i learn to play the game, then i can win it. which is wrong, duh. women are not even players! to be a player is to 1) master rules, then 2) pave a path to victory with those rules, and 3) walk the path in question. when a woman tries to do the same (1), she simply paves a path (2) for men. she can only wave as someone ambles down her road (3) and celebrates a victory he did not earn. 

a few nights ago, back in 2016, my mother, sister and i sat around discussing birth control and pregnancy. i told them, laughing, that i often sleep with men who do not want to use a condom. well: neither woman found this very funny.

i kept groping for an explanation, through my laughter, but what explanation could i find? i always say something at first — wait, let’s use a … — but then the second, third, fourteenth, whatever time, no one mentions any condoms. oops! i am at fault, sure, responsible for my body and its eager gametes. but why do i sleep with wormy sophists? with men who move through loopholes underground and surface only when i fumigate the lair? 

anyway, again: no one mentions any condoms. we fuck and i think he is doing me a favor. 

i finally got my period this morning and the blood was like a blessing: today is the fourth day of this new year and i will keep more moments to myself. i had the shrapnel in my body for about a week; i moved with caution, sure any jolt would kill me. something awful and unwanted was inside me — i was sure — but i also crossed myself in roman churches and addressed desperate prayers to ignorance: please protect me. if i look away, will the future disappear? 

she took my side, but i cannot count on her benevolence. i will use condoms! i will be better! i will not obey the rules if one of them is silence.

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november was, as it so often is, an awful month. i have been using the word awful too much, but to me it means something very specific: there is a fault line somewhere in my mind that i cannot look at head on. when i do, i start to leak out of myself, flowing, pouring through the crack and towards something formless and inevitable. Leonard Cohen died in the awful month of november and so everyone started using that quote: cracks are how the light get in. i have hated and continue to hate the expression; i have listened to it and wanted to cry; i have spent hours looking at every part of my mind but never the jagged hole towards which all of my happiness tends, as water tends towards a drain. k's voice on the phone last night was something like magic. but i knew as we spoke that magic is never enough, that magic relies on distraction and weakness.