Backwards, he kept saying

Backwards, he kept saying,backwards. I thought of the red-haired Australian woman who'd used that word. I thought about her Italian husband and a murder in the non-descript mountains and her newly published novel cover-- how they'd changed the title. You just have no say in a thing like that, she'd said. Its all backwards out there.

And here I am writing in a new pen. And here I am in my new handwriting, my old rooms. I'd been down in their basement, stacking t-shirts.

I'd been down to the river, where was I? I looked up at the city of Richmond. This was all Bob's idea, of course. He didn't trust the water there.

I was driving to Boston and off the highway a tractor trailer caught on fire like a raw animal. The treetops singed and curled under around it. The highway went silent. The fire hoses spritzed and dribbled at the thing, which passed me by clear as a photograph-- real as it could manage.

There was a change, then, and we all had to crawl along on our stomachs for hours. Philadelphia came on full of Christmas tree lights. It looked like a dream. Only later did we see it was a factory. A man was saying "engine" like "injun". All I heard was injun, injun. Nobody saw her coming.

The cats are panting cadillacs. It drives a U-haul around town, pays 50 cents for red feathers and sticks them in its hair. I'm not good at these things, said Bob. And Bob, we can stay in our rooms, I said, we can read all these books! Oh, spine and brain, old whether or not...

This is how it felt underwater: like a tunnel. like its green.

Now keep moving. Take a left, sure but keep driving. The brickman lays his bricks down and you expect arrangements to be made for your shoes, don't you? What makes it so hard to say things straight is the peculiar shape of your pockets? To Ramona, you say, as if this means anything.

Ramona would not notice you on fire in her kitchen, dear. What does anyone mean by sickly, to Ramona? A man waters his plants and dries his kitchen counters with a dish towel. If the sheets had been there when we'd said they were, we'd have remembered. We are forever picking up these glass jars, saying heavy.

The truth was I'd been fired from my waitressing job on Wednesday morning the week before, information I was still guarding from my mother but joking about regularly with the woman who took care of my grandmother, Josephine, and lived on the third floor of our building. Both my Uncle and mother were coming in on a Tuesday to take Josephine to see the neurologist. I was still a bit high when my Uncle arrived and then my mother, who came in and immediately peered through the door into the living room where I was caught standing, waiting for her to walk toward the kitchen. She could see my feet I guess and stood there a moment, saying tersely "Hello Jess, come out and say hello" as if I had been hiding in the room all afternoon and had not come out to greet my Uncle and if not for her instruction would probably have stood silently in the room until they both left with Josephine.

Love's advice

Love's advice, he called it
pithy. He mixed his paints in
empty cardboard tubs
of popcorn. If it wasn't that
it was at least very close
to that. The tubs themselves
were always neon blue and orange
but he didn't mind much, talking
about them. My neurologist
had thought I was attractive,
but we don't see eachother anymore.
Sort of squirrelly, thin...and handsy,
one might say.

Beth sits at home and thinks of
terrible things. She places things
in lead jars and lifts them,
saying, heavy.

the orange cat, impeccably sawed in half, who keeps herself surgically groomed-- in the dying hours of sunday down, down and tucked well in, her teeth out on the table-- four times i called and heard the noise before the voice came back again...again...again. we are all here for the same thing, he'd said. we are all here to make money. does anyone disagree, he asked like a bullet aimed, his charm coming down all around him. inside a large room i once looked down.

i'm out on the street and emptied, free.

the empty street is like a vacuum. i play the zombie-part, the last one alive, so i thought or thought of believing-- out of all the many ways to say and to not say i love you, you asked that i not go scaling mountains, then you took it back. i returned to sleep like a cat laid open on the table, the rat they leave beside my bureau surgically gnawed in half. The orange cat keeps herself impeccably groomed. the grey cat bats at her food with both paws. i am alone, i say. onto the doorstep of failure: william, i need a costume. cigarette ashes fall in circles. ten thousand forgotten thimbles. a swig of whiskey in your sister's old car, your mother and father sliding on coats. we fall in two. i am curled in the chest of something where i can forget myself. i make the bed for the first time in years, startled at the ease of things. i am filling my high heels with blood-soup. do not make it dark, dear. i am shelled in flourescent lighting, counting the dropped breaths. arm in arm all the way to the zoo, truman capote goes to feed the yaks, and there is warhol by the deer cage. there i am in the deer cage, darling, relying on peripharies, leaving rings on my mother's furniture. is it back into the cringe again? i take long cold walks to offset the sundowns. girls in paper hats are twirling in the gutters of south boston while my grandmother sleeps and argues with the dead. she travels back and forth through her mind like a tricked fuse. i maintain the space ship, feed and water the cats and the space-plant. antique figurines orbit the rooms. the great piano sleeps like death, an injured lion crouched in the corner. the green leather chair days slumped in the half-door closing of it. the mighty snore of death but a whimper, a dead rat. the color coming through and coloring everything. my dear is here and gone again.

In their secret rooms

I wrote down each turn, every street name, all the way to the library at Copley Square. It was a grey fogged up evening made for walking. When walking, I kept glancing down at the hole in my arm where another arm could have fit right through it. It kept feeling like a hole. When I crossed the bridge home, this woman in gym clothes walking towards me and her small girl waddling behind her and calling out, her on the telephone saying "don't ever have children, i swear", and its starting to rain. Its been long, time walking and walking all day; Arlington, Abington, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The library at Copley Square, it was much too large, and I hadn't known what to do there. I looked for the books. They were all hiding, in their secret rooms.

58 people have been murdered in boston so far this year...