(Sometimes) overwhelmings

I'm sitting in bed. Cold rooibos tea in a glass. Thinking about other people's kitchens.

Supermarkets, airports, and other people's kitchens can make me feel like I am still sick. It frustrates me. The getting stuck staring at fridges and pantries and shelves and menus, getting stuck walking circles (nothing's right, none of these are it...), getting more overwhelmed by the choices and the false sense of weightiness to the decision as I get hungrier. It's 2013; I haven't had a relapse in a while; though it is a little harder lately my ambivalence towards eating is mostly resolved — I want to live my life, you know, and I like how I look with some light in my eyes — but the practical things can still occasionally be tricky. I tell myself: let this be simple. Just choose something. Don't let it take more than [x] minutes to decide...

Needing work, taking hairspray naps and poetry naps. Sylvia Plath today. I've never liked her poetry all that much...but just letting myself flip through her collected poems, I think she could grow on me.

Hi.

Out here among the stars

Out here among the stars where fathers aren't sociopaths, where fathers won't make you afraid just because they can. Voices. And promises white as stars.

(On the moon there is a replica of my house, and I am climbing its stairs. The stairs I am climbing belong to the exact replica of my house that was built on the moon some time ago...)

To move casually to another continent. Is there any other way? Everything is of the greatest LEVITY when taken moment by moment. Everything is of the greatest GRAVITY when taken moment by moment.

/

March 3, 2012, 2:54a

Walking with Nikki

New Bedford, August 2012.

Read in January 2013

Titles link to the pertinent Goodreads page — feel free to add me as a friend.

1. Shout Her Lovely Name, by Natalie Serber

2. Astonishments: Selected Poems, by Anna Kamieńska

3. Selected Poems, by Leah Goldberg