thing-like

i like these cold, overcast days in houston that follow thanksgiving because i know it means that, soon, the stacks of grading that have piled to the ceiling will, with steady toil, diminish in size, and i will eventually be hitting the "submit" button on my grade sheets (only to realize i have two or three days to get ready to head back to the northeast and i haven't done a thing to prepare). it's true that i have been a bit overwhelmed the past week by the sheer institutionality of my place of employment -- the weird, pepto-bismal pink walls on the tenth floor where i have my office, the beige metal desks, the smell of dry erase markers, and, always, the looming jailhouse just across the bayou.

this happens at the end of the semester, when the hundred and twenty students i've been working with from all four classes (from the student who, without irony, compared zora neale hurston to sarah palin to the one who told me, also without irony, that my class was tedious) have finally sapped me, when i just cannot take any more committee meetings, and when the antics of my coworkers seem less colorful or charming and more like a sign of the sheer insanity. do you experience this? institutional architecture and infrastructure just seem so much more . . . pronounced, vivid, articulated, material, stark, concrete, solid . . . thing-like.

after mortification, the giggles

upon recently discovering that the neighbors have heard every god-awful note of my top-of-my-lungs singing of anything from bjork to yaz in the shower every single morning for the past three months, i resolve to continue.

protected only by the kindness of your nature

the secret is that sometimes i miss my sisters with all of my heart and i wonder what it would be like if i still lived nearby if i had not moved so many many years ago all the way down to texas to do this thing with my life about which of course i have no regrets but now that one of them my younger sister is pregnant and i mean really pregnant i feel the press of time more than usual i feel it sliding through the day the time that is not spent in her company like how i loved it when two of my houston friends got pregnant around the same time and i'd walk with them and smile it's what i want to do go for a walk with my sisters you'd think that with time one would become used to the distance and find closeness in spite of distance it is true that one certainly does but it is not a permanent state of being for all time the ache of missing comes back and i have to live with it these days i imagine a map of the u.s. by the gulf coast and picture little me just me so tiny walking down indiana street to la guadalupana for tres leches after dinner in my pajamas the sky carrot and gold the breeze just a little cool against my skin neighbors kids playing soccer in the yard the men outside the quik time food mart drinking cans of beer and then i think my sister is doing ? and i zoom out and think subway? cafe? apartment? cab? where is she now? so pregnant in her red and black stretch clothes i think cell phone email facebook blogosphere i just want to see my sisters both of them in the flesh i want to do that thing where we hug each other all three of us at once i have that antony and the johnsons song stuck in my head 'you are my sister' how does it go? you are my sister/and i love you//may all of your dreams come true.

creature comforts

i'm sitting on the futon with the lights out, listening to the cicadas, thinking back over the past two weeks, from preparation for the hurricane to panic to hunkering down to nausea and exhaustion to adjustment and now, seemingly, back to normal, what with the return of the electricity late yesterday. i feel funny whenever i hear folks get really really riled up about the power loss, especially when said folks have a lot of good in their lives, because, while the loss of power was very annoying and a bit bewildering -- eleven days without it shook our sense of time -- things are actually pretty much okay for everyone i know who weathered IKE in the city, and those nearer to the coast really got slammed. last night, the buzz of air conditioners filled the air much like the cicadas, and i wondered why. it was a rather pleasant evening -- perhaps to make up for lost time? i was saddened when our twenty-something neighbor reported to us, after day number 3 without power, that she wanted to get a generator because she was bored and wanted to watch TV.

we've been lighting candles, reading, playing a lot of scrabble, visiting friends with power to do laundry and eat dinner. we went for walks, sat outside, rode bikes. i had long, spontaneous, and much needed conversations with people i consider to be closest to me. the yoga studio where i study was open, so i took a couple of extra classes to keep myself limber. still, i took a lot of naps last week -- i am unsure if it was the weather or the sheer exhaustion of disaster-area living that wiped me out.

classes resumed this week, and many of my students are in bad situations. some lost everything. others are just as bewildered and tired as the rest of us.

i think the news about the economy (which seemed so distant until about two days ago, since all i could find to listen to on the battery-powered radio were hurricane-related reports) has further freaked everyone out. that, and since no one -- and i mean NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON -- i know would even THINK about voting for mccain and palin in november, i've grown increasingly alarmed by reports of their political support. how could two people who so many of us find absolutely terrifying gain the support of our fellow citizens?

i have no way to wrap this up. except for maybe these two things:

1) since, after the hurricane, the weather has been coolest in the early mornings, i took to stepping outside to sit on the stoop out back to eat my cereal and yogurt. the first morning, i noticed what i thought was a locust buzzing around. upon further inspection, i realized a gorgeous hummingbird was flitting in perfect geometric patterns, quietly sipping nectar from the strawberry-colored flowers that bloom on a vine on the neighbor's fence.

2) similarly, one afternoon, a baby lizard (of which there are hundreds living under the house) about thiiiiiiisssss big wandered inside the house and lept up on a photograph H has of a pair of broken glasses. i was in the bedroom, cooling off with a glass of lemon-water and re-reading james baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, when H brought him in and gently placed the little guy and the photo next to me on the bedside table before heading off to work. the lizard sat perfectly still on the photograph for about twenty minutes when, suddenly, he cocked his head, spied a drop of water splashed from the glass, and, in one unbelievably graceful movement, leapt, bowed his head to the droplet, drank until it was gone, and looked back up, regally. after a moment, i very carefully coaxed him back onto the photograph, took him out back, and scooted him onto a long blade of grass. i watched him until he jumped and darted under the house.

list (for ike)

fill containers with water

move plants and recycling inside

secure trashcans in garage

scrub bathtub and fill with water

make ice to fill a cooler

roast red potatoes, beets, and tofu

rent movies

check flashlights

charge phone

charge laptop

call friends

hunker down

object lessons

the first two weeks of my first-year writing courses, i ask my students to summarize and respond to a few short articles on the atrocious conditions inside our local county jail. i read these pieces and pluck from them choice sentences that exemplify some of the most common grammatical mistakes first-year students make: subject/verb agreement, no apostrophe "s" to signify possessive, incorrect verb tense, misspellings, article choice, sentence fragments, run-ons, and colloquialisms, mostly. (yes, i know it might be surprising to some that a first-year college student -- one who has already passed the first part of the two-part writing sequence -- will make these mistakes, but it is true.) these sentences become an object lesson in grammar, and it gets a rise out of the students because they will more often than not find their own among those needing revision.

checking out one of the examples of colloquial writing on the page, a plucky young woman claimed "you can tell this sentence was written by a man. look at it!" the sentence in question began with "matter of fact" and continued in a very conversational way, including a "just sayin is all" near the end. i happened to know that, in fact, a woman wrote the sentence, so i asked the student who assumed the author's gender why she believed this. "you can just TELL!" she said, and read the sentence aloud in what most of us what call "a man's voice" and we all had a good laugh. when i told her it was written by a woman, many of the students did not believe me.

later, during the same class but after the grammar lesson was over, i was reviewing the short book i'm having students read this semester that has a chapter on gender and incarceration. "what's gender?" i asked, knowing exactly where the conversation would go. one student replied, "like if you're a man or a woman." not exactly, i countered, and began to outline the way that some theorists conceptualize the sex/gender binary, and briefly glossed the biological, medical, cultural, and social ways that these two terms function in the US, at least in the contemporary moment. i said "penis" and "labia" and "estrogen" and "vas deferens" and "ovaries" and "testicles" and "clitoral hood" much to the amusement of the students (students seem to love any direct reference to the body and its functions -- probably because they don't usually think of them as having any intellectual substance, so to speak), and then made a case for gender as a more socially mediated category (although we all might know that "sex" is just as discursive as "gender," but i am trying to introduce them to the subject, so we were only going this far) available to us through the slippery variations of masculinities and femininities. they seemed to get it, but still some puzzled looks.

i returned to the comment about the sentence that my student believed was written by a man (but that wasn't). "you wouldn't call the sentence 'male,' right?" i said, continuing, "it would be more accurate to describe it as masculine -- it's not like the sentence has a penis hanging off the end of it," i concluded, much to the great delight of my students, who seemed to fully grasp [grasp!?] the concept. thinking i had really knocked it out of the park, i turned to erase the board, and behind me the voice of a young man quipped, loudly, "yeah, but you have to admit -- that sentence DO have its period."

it's rare that i am so tickled by a student's joke that i laugh to the point of no return, but this unexpected, smart, hilarious joke sent me over the edge. i laughed so hard i had to sit down and pound my fist on the desk.

best. grammar. gender. pun. ever!!

start up

if i opened a hair salon called MULLET, would you come in for a cut?

albumin

whose idea was it to move on a day so hot the sidewalk would not simply fry an egg, it would instantly scorch it into a sticky black smear? o right, it was mine . . . still too dizzy from the yolky sun to be able to hatch a smart metaphor, and plus there's loads of things to unpack but, yeah, it does feel good to be in this little blue house with so many windows.

zero

guess what today's account balance on the student loans i've lived with since i was 17 reads? i'll give you a hint: it's in the title.

who's got the crack?

I almost don't even want to write it down because it might jinx the whole thing, but I believe it is time: we are going to move into a new place.

This is what we decided: a place that is better kept: no rats, no rot, no crumbling and cracking. A place that has more room, preferably a bigger kitchen. A place that is bigger or that stands alone. A place that has windows that can open and close. A place that has an outside area -- porch, balcony, patio, or stoop. We've been quietly looking for about a month now, with our eyes set on some really interesting, almost unbelievable apartments in the area, including 100-year old buildings with tiny little drawers built into the kitchen walls, goofy staircases that lead to triangular sleeping lofts, walls painted black with lots and lots of track lighting . . . We might have said "yes" to any of these well-priced, groovy little gems, but the poor conditions of the walls, chew-holes under the sinks, and leak-stains in the ceilings would just be more of the same, and why spend more for pretty much the same? It was by accident that we drove past a charming, blue, multi-windowed house with a For Rent sign stuck in the front yard, not too far from where we live now. We scribbled down the number and called. When we learned the affordable rent, we wondered what would be wrong with it. Less than a week later, we were standing in the unbearably hot kitchen signing a lease.

Five years ago, when H and I were looking for a place to live and ended up here, we had went through a similar, perhaps more extended, search. One evening, we met with a landlord who let us in to take a look at the top floor of a duplex about a block from where we live now. The woman who was moving out was home when we arrived, and we asked her some questions about living there. As she prattled on about how terrible the landlord was and why she would recommend that we not move in there, I began to notice little -- what are those things called? (my mother calls them "sticky tabs" and it wasn't until later in life that I realized no one else called them this. post-it notes?) -- post-it notes stuck all over the apartment: on the kitchen cabinets, on the fridge, on the bathroom mirror, on the door to the bedroom, on the sliding glass door to the balcony, and on the inside of the front door on our way out. These little yellow notes all had the same uncanny message: "IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU!!" The tenant never made mention of these notes, and H and I didn't ask, but it made looking at the place an even more surreal experience in which, at every turn, we were reminded that looking for a place to rent is not all about "you", but something larger, more complex that might be at work and that, you have to finally admit, no place will be exactly what "you" want.

It is with this in mind that I return to the heat of the kitchen in which I scribbled my signature at the bottom of a lease a few days ago. After looking under the sinks, opening all the cabinets and drawers, checking out the tops of the closets and base boards along the storage areas, admiring the sheer size of the rooms, finding the tub immaculately caulked and sealed with none of the tiles broken or missing, and inspecting the perimeter of the property for signs of decay and/or varmint habitation and finding none, I said "yes" in my mind and "yes" out loud and "yes" as I moved the pen across the page. Stepping out the back door and onto the tiny little screened in muckroom to once again admire the small back yard area where we will certainly throw parties, I noticed what looked like the long butt-end of a yellowing cigarette. I stepped over it, and then, thinking again, turned around and looked at it more carefully. Cigarette butt, i told myself -- right? Right. Right? I crouched down and picked it up off the ground only to discover that I was, in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, holding a full vial of crack in my now trembling fingers.

An hour later, I was reasoned with. Just because you find a vial of crack in the screened in muckroom of a reasonably priced rental house does not mean that you have signed a lease to move into a former crack den. It doesn't even mean that the neighbors smoke crack, that the former tenants smoked crack, or that crackheads have been smoking crack in the backyard. We met the soon-to-be neighbor in the garage apartment in the back, she is certainly not a crackhead and she had nothing but positive things to say about living there. It is quite possible that someone saw the house was for rent, saw the back porch as a fine place to toss a vial to come get later. Once we move in and there are signs of activity, we should be okay. The street is in a decent neighborhood. Also, I have to remember, I see crackheads and methheads every day in this neighborhood. They're not going anywhere. A person who had most likely been smoking crack was found by our neighbors pleasuring himself in our garage out back not too long ago.

Perhaps I should take the advice of my friend RM, who suggests that this should be seen as a little offering, a premature house-warming gift . . . In any case, we'll be smudging the rooms with a large cut of sage and moving in on the first of the month. Wish us luck!

could cloud (two)

you could pull out everything you've ever saved -- your macrame owls, your peacock statuettes, your blow-up alien dolls, your thousands of pillows, your tapestries and blankets, and use them to throw a party. you could drive through a smoke-filled landscape, up into the mountains, and find ancient rocks that drip boiling hot water into muscle-softening pools in the earth. you could hang out with cowboys, work a corn patch, read books in a rocking chair on the porch of a unkempt building and smell the alfalfa growing in the fields. you could breathe the driest of airs, down in death valley, where the heat is so intense the boulders are bleached white and nothing lives except an eccentric 83 year old woman who runs what she calls her opera house, a space she painted and danced in for the past twenty years -- all by herself, at times danced for no one but herself. you could visit the graves of the unknown buried in the desert, mounds of dirt surrounded by rocks, little wooden crucifixes marking the head. you could freak out under the flash and neon of las vegas lights, a postmodern sublime wavering in the heat, the exorbitant cash flow ringing like a register from every corner. you could decide to move. you could fly to birmingham, quiet, dilapidated birmingham, check into an old hotel, listen to an old man stomp and howl with his orchestra under smoky amber lights. you could, with a crowd of downtrodden thitry-somethings, sing along to songs about the razor blade hidden under the candy surface of every day life. you could fetch a bottle of wine and a six pack of beer from a trading post on a dead end street, sit on the curb with your beloved and watch fireworks explode over the statue of a vulcan that sits at the highest point on the hill above the city, watch the kids run in the streets, and eavesdrop on conversations tipsy adults have about how long the owners of the building kept it in disrepair, and who would own it next.

sometimes a storm is what you need: this afternoon's clouded darkness, its rumble and boom, its downpour.

could cloud

fog of possible,
an atmospheric verging --
vaporized desire.

bionic tonic (for a summer cold)

one small onion, thinly sliced
three or four scallions or ramps, sliced
one bunch radishes, sliced; greens chopped
4 cu. water
one bunch watercress
olive oil, lemon, salt

sautee onions, scallions, and radish with pinch of salt for 3 mins.
add 4 cu. water. bring to boil and simmer 15 mins.
add watercress and greens, simmer 5 mins.
season with fresh squeezed lemon and salt to taste.

paparazzi

in the first released photos, i'm walking back from the co-op in mismatched clothing, a striped t-shirt and pair of plaid shorts, a canvas bag filled with carrots, fennel, beets, and chard swings from my grip and a pair of yellow sunglasses perches on my nose. i have bedhead and my face is pretty scruffy. i hold hands with an unknown woman in dark sunglasses, covered in tattoos. we walk down a sidewalk, turn a corner, and cross the street.

a second set catches me out back alone, talking on a cell phone. these are shot from above, most likely the neighbor's roof. it is dusk. i am barefoot, and i wear what looks like sweat shorts and a ratty t/shirt, like i've been doing yoga. i pace the driveway, bend over and poke at the plants. in three of them i gesture cartoonishly with my hands or make a goofy face to emphasize a point or as a reaction to some piece of news.

i turn the page and find the last set. in these i'm out at a bar. it's late and i'm with my friends. we leave the bar and the photographers take me by storm, the bulbs flashing in my face. i am tired and don't want them to see me like this. in the first few, i try my best to look uninterested, eyes elsewhere, leaning into my friends with sly grin, lighting a cigarette. but then the series changes and i am angry, getting closer to the cameras. my hand takes up a whole frame. on a diagonal from the frame, my friends hold me back as i try to throw a punch. my face contorts and eyes bulge as i threaten and curse.

sitar, or dijerydo

the puddle on the driveway next to the apartment has been growing, inch by inch, every day until finally it dawned on me that maybe, yes, there is a leak and, sure enough, when i squatted down and looked under the bricks where the hose comes out from under the building, a fine, needle-thin spray of water could be seen arching from the pipes.

since our landlord is, at best, absentee, the process is this: call the landlord, wait for him to never call back, call the plumber, pay for it yourself, deduct from rent check at the end of the month, and cross your fingers this is okay. so far, we're right on track, having completed steps one through three. i am currently listening to the plumber bang and jingle in the bathroom, where he not only laughed right out loud at the current arrangement of the pipes under the sink, which have been re-routed along a peculiar path that seems anti-thetical to drainage, but also advised us to "get rid of" the old, leaking faucets we have in there and replace them with new ones. and so, for the past two hours, i've been uneasily trying to settle into my reading and note-taking, but mostly i am distracted by this man, the fact that the water has been shut off, and that i've just finished my fourth cup of strong black coffee.

on memorial day, i got off my lazy ass and took the push broom from the garage and swept the mounds and mounds of tree-pollen from the back driveway/patio area. i swept up a final large pile that came to about the top of my knees, and shoved it into the little gated area where i sometimes toss the leaves of turnips or beets. suddenly, the back area was a fine place to be, again, and i built up some shelving out of old bricks and planks of wood in the garage, artfully arranged our flowers, herbs, and plants along them to make the sitting area look like a place where neo-hippies might hang out with a sitar or dijerydo. i noticed the infamous pomegranate tree has three new fruits coming in, and i listened to the mysterious warble of a red-headed bird that was hopping from limb to limb in the pecan trees that tower in our back yard. the weekend was so quiet -- HH and just about every one of my neighbors were out of town, so i felt like i had the whole block to myself as i walked to get some groceries and some beer, and then, after the sun set, i sat outside and scribbled notes to myself on the big ideas that have been governing my thoughts these days, watched the stray cats chase after frogs and saw bats flittering wildly over the rooftops.

i guess part of getting rid of that "unmoored" feeling is to remember that you might, in fact, have an anchor and that you might have to cast it down right where you are to -- what? not necessarily feel stable (i have problems with sea sickness), but at least get a sense of where you are, leaky pipes and all.

unmooring

when we were little, my grandfather would wake us up in the morning by pretending that the bed was a boat and that he was the captain, and that we were headed out from a dock that was the bedroom or whatever fold-out sofa bed we might have spent the night. "goodbye!," he'd yell to no one who was there, "goodbye, now!" we'd wake up, one by one, listening to the sound of the engine that he made low in his throat. pretty soon my sisters and my cousins and I would be yelling our farewells, too: "goodbye, mom!" "goodbye, uncle jack!" "goodbye, aunt ro-ro!" i would picture everyone gathered on the dock, the water dappling in the sunlight, the sides of the boat as we moved out to sea, unmoored, having departed for an imaginary world that, after several minutes, gave me great pause -- where, exactly, were we going?

it occurs to me that this is a memory of an act of imagination about departure that was performed upon awakening and, in a way, a reversal. you might, for example, expect your grandfather to take you on an imaginary journey for parts unknown as a way to bridge the space between waking and dreaming. for us, it was the opposite. and, from what i can remember, we never arrived anywhere, we just left and we had no real destination in site. at first, it was really easy to get wrapped up in the fervor of yelling and waving, trying to one up each other by remembering who we still hadn't said goodbye to -- distant cousins, neighbors, schoolteachers. but, eventually, you'd get to puzzling over what you were supposed to imagine was happening once we got out of sight, once we were at sea and there was, ironically, nothing to see, and then it was simply over. now that we were fully awake -- well? well, now what?

i'm thinking about departures and endings because, of course, the summer's coming, which means i'll be saying goodbye to the all-too familiar routine of exhaustion and, by hook or by crook, i'll enter a new way of inhabiting the world, just for a little while -- on my own terms, more or less, while i intellectually and emotionally recuperate from the drain of way too many students who exert an unbelievable amount of resistance. the goal is to read deeply, develop more Big Ideas, and write about them. keep on with the yoga. go for walks. listen to abstract music. communicate with smart people. maybe return to this blog, which feels distant from me, now, especially since i suspect that, yes, students are reading it and i am not sure if that matters at all or maybe just a little bit.

i'm also thinking about departures and endings because, of course, the above memory demonstrates the bizarre temporality of such moments -- the imaginary boat ride begins as an ending, as a departure, but it never formally ends in its own right. it just kind of fizzles out in a vague non-memory of non-completion. you might say it fails to end. it is a strong memory, this awakening to the beginning of an ending, but it leaves me feeling a bit adrift in the waters of my own in-between moment.

sister

the surprising thing about ideas is that they find other homes besides yours

wind rattles new spring leaves outside the window from about three blocks away i can hear revving engines of westheimer's traffic men's voices from the bar call across the yards the sun has just set the dishes are washed and stacked on the draining board the apartment is tidy and a quiet glass of something to drink makes rings on the desk next to me why o why is starting something new so incredibly difficult?

six word memoir

your

plastic

eyes

gave

me

warmth.

I was tagged by the other mother.

I tag:

ma green

green daddy

bad texan

daily noise

outta my butt

The six word memoir rules are:

• write your own six word memoir.

• post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.

• link to the person that tagged you in your post.

• tag five more blogs with links.

• leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

keywords (notes for the future)

domestic disruption
new buildings and public works
rogue and failed
airport as border
detention and delay
anti-lynching film
textual orientalizing
studio-backed film with Black themes
new talkies
desire for cinephilia
mumblecore
hand-held verite
world without adults
lo-fi
millenials
indiewood
niche audience
art cinema-lite
cinema of provocation
structured absence
cross-over film
gonzo v. amateur
queer caucus
authetification of female pleasure
aesthetic of disappearance
impossible addressee
surrogate's point of view
rhetoric of authentic sex
inability to communicate
freak status
indie-quirk
personal excess of identification
radically un-ironic

roobois

have you noticed how, in the rearview mirror, the little wrinkles under your eyes have become just a little deeper, and did you wonder, today, if the guy in his twenties, who called you and your partner up looking for a little guidance, might have noticed, and maybe that's what, in the end, made you seem more like you knew what you were talking about when it came to matters of being alive in this world, having lived the struggle to this point, having already been shaken to your very core by the unexpected meanness of the world, and having survived it, and come out feeling like you are doing just fine?

fine -- a fine afternoon walk to the teahouse leads to the meeting of this new young friend, you can call him your friend even though you never met him, and you sit outside, together with the one you love, and go from one question to the next, thinking and trying to say, like, how do you account for the decisions you've made, and why do, all of a sudden, decisions seem less like decisions and more like some sort of roll of the dice, some kind of cosmic kaleidoscope that set you turning and falling into strange but colorful patterns, suddenly there and seemingly together, and just as suddenly gone and rearranged? if he asks how do you know, when did you know, how did you decide, what was it like, what's it like now, you will pour the red roobois tea and sip and think it's such a wide, wide past to return to. you recall, in exact ways not, at first, the times and places and people but, more accurately, the unbelievable crisis of not knowing, when nothing made sense, and it all seemed terribly new and unavoidable, and you reach for an answer but you cannot quite grasp it. you listen with care.

how the story of not knowing must begin with trying to put into words what you do not know how to say, how weird this feels, how it makes you so sensitive and shy. when was the last time you felt this? what to compare it to? what the street smells like when new rain falls on hot asphalt. what leaves sound like when breezes blow at night. like sweeping the dust out of a corner -- you're not touching it with your hand, but you know something's working because your holding the other end of the broom. how to not be alone in the world when you start everything over. finding your way around the apartment at night with no lights on.

the sun starts to set. you smile and hug your new friend. he is red like roobois. you walk home with your beloved and think about the new wrinkles. you don't mind -- you like it. so much more to go. it's not even half-over.

in fifty words or less

how the day has passed: overcast and balmy, hammers and the boom of construction, with holler and echo. before me, an empty cup of green tea. the keyboard's lettered black squares huddle safely together -- snug chiclets, in a row, magically making paragraphs of light under my fingers.

fragments (in pairs)

storm and cold . pillows and quilts . jeans and sweatshirt . shops and windows . posters and tape . windshield and wiper . commerce and anxiety . crane and hook . bulldozer and nailgun . co-op and recipes . squash and parsnips . dreams and water . book and chair . sunlight and window . notes and coffee . sex and film . talk and manhattans . scent and memory . austin and time . email and facebook . clutter and desk . receipts and clipboards . depth and surface . frame and lighting . tacos and balloons . cap and scarf . mat and block . stretch and rest . ankle and sit-bone . ribcage and spine . steam and peppermint . towel and socks . rodent and drywall . empty and spacious . sirens and traffic . hollers and helicopters . calendar and ink . diamonds and cactus . moon and stars .

smile