Commuting 5/31

Shoot, shoot, shoot.
I am late for work.
A blue, a rusting, a metal intersection.

Shoot, shoot, shoot.
This to order my chaos.
A spray, a slice of light, a corner.

Shoot, shoot, shoot.
An attempt to effect visibility.
A loop, a red, a dissolve.

Gutted like a razorback hog. It’s always open season, death can descend at any moment. And here I am, with a deep slash, from hipbone to hipbone, stomach muscles completely severed. I remember the operating room, I don’t remember my doctor frantically incising me when it became clear something had gone terribly wrong.

A little star exploded inside me. Not big enough to be very much, just big enough to be a glittering beautiful moment, a tiny wild hope. And now I am alone, on bloody sheets, unsure of how much of myself I am missing. My bare feet at the end of the hospital bed shame me, they speak of the disregard, he has not even brought something to cover that vulnerability, a small vulnerability, a manageable one, in the face of the greater vulnerability of near death.

I grieve, I am furious, I am frightened. I do the only thing I know how. I work. A week, two weeks, is too early I know, but I am driven. Here I am at my office with my colleagues awkward at my loss, their eyes not meeting mine in the hallways, my shock rendering their tongues still in their mouths. And here I am in our nascent community garden, dragging blue stone to make a pathway, to make something beautiful, to make a gift from my rage and helplessness.

Noticing:
The reddening strawberries planted last weekend.
Someone on this train car smells like cucumber.
Sap on my hands from clearing trees from the back of the house.

I have business to conduct in the still-sketchy part of my neighborhood. My business is legitimate, but there is plenty of other business being conducted, on street corners, snugged up against protected stoops, groups of men working in loose confederations that are opaque to me.

I am blasting music through my head, music that makes me walk with a luxurious slow hip roll, it is warm and gorgeous out, heading into evening. Ahead of me is a bunch of local "businessmen" hanging out and one of them has headphones on too, his head bobbing in the same time as my stride. As I approach he turns to me with a grin, a come on, gesturing for me to dance with him, pelvis aggressively forward.

I smile a little, duck my head, tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear, pretend to be shy. But if it were not a seven-on-one situation, weapons surely being held in waistbands and front pockets, and dusk coming on fast, I might accept his invitation. I might slide my fingers through the belt loops of his baggy jeans, draw him to me, pull his leg between my thighs and surprise the hell out of him for a couple of bars, in silence, each of us in our own musical world, our faces close and grinning in concord.

After all, today I am wearing a red dress.

It is a crowded train and there are many people between us, but I see him from the eyes up, so beautifully blue and with such an elegant curve to his eyelid, a lyrical browbone.

The train goes deep underground. I am standing by the door and the seal is imperfect and there is wind flowing over my hand, the dark air from this tunnel.

I had a vision of my body with a vertical slot in it, positioned over my rib cage. A photograph would slide out of it, easily, but the last few inches needed to be tugged, painful.

He lit me up like a birthday cake, nine candles, one to grow on, pink icing rosebuds, even. He left without blowing me out and I am still burning.

Letting Go

I got a note card with a rent check from one of my tenants this month. She says:

Thank you so much for having us in your beautiful home for these two years. I feel like we are breaking up with your house. Thank you again for everything.

And so the four delightful girls that have giggled and fought and dreamed and planned in the little rowhouse are leaving. And I have put the house up for sale. And I am so sad and so overwhelmed. That house has borne the burden of so many of my own fights and dreams and plans and now it is just time to let go. Letting go is something I have never been good at.

Stevie Wonder Karma Wheel

At the cafe, the doors are flung open to celebrate the passing of a rain shower and the glorious sun that is following. I am staring out the door, falling in love with a fire hydrant, not only because it is a silver-strewn rusting red but also because it is wet with rain and sparkling so.

The storm over, a kid charges out to climb on the hydrant. He is charmingly unselfconscious, clambering all over in his own play world. Now he is standing on the hydrant, beating his chest, King of the Hill, silverback gorilla, King Kong. His shirt has a picture of Stevie Wonder on it, and in his childish glee, unaware, he is beating the living crap out of Stevie Wonder, pummeling his 2-D face, punching the blind man over and over right in his dark glasses. I am laughing at how absurd.

But I shouldn't have. That was flirting with disaster, for a few moments later the kid has slipped off the hydrant and plumped down rump first into a puddle. Instant retribution...the Stevie Wonder Karma Wheel turns quickly.

That would have been a delightful goofy 10 minutes of my life, but I got an extra few minutes of wonder, as it were, when a car pulls up, bearing this license plate, which is both awesome and funny because, well, for a lot of reasons, pick one.

Thanks MD!

A friend blogs over on that *other* site, posting a goofy haiku take-off every day. The structure isn't rigid, it's more about word choice and feeling and sometimes it's great fun, with people adding on and getting quite ridiculous or quite revealing, or both. Here are a couple from me:

classes done until fall
now I'm late with my taxes
and collecting rent


it's not the dying
that scares me, it's the living
unseen, unspoken


red dress, windy day
delights construction workers
"hey! hold down your skirt!"


"Intimidating"
so grow a pair already
or ask to share mine

We are sitting at the bar and my friend takes out her current art project and with pride and confidence puts it into my hands. And I look at the images, cooing and commenting. They are lovely, some lyrical, some frantically kinetic, some smooth and balanced and I make the gesture I do when I am enthralled or delightfully overwhelmed, I press my fingers to my collarbone, my hand to the bones over my heart.

Last of the Red Hot Oranges

I clatter down the steps of a familiar subway station after an evening with friends. I am tired and hope for a seat on the bench at the bottom of the stairs, even though this station, always oddly warm, is a popular oasis with the indigent.

It's no different on this night, there are two homeless guys sitting on either end of the bench and that's fine with me. One of them looks pretty generic, but the other, hair matted, shoulders jerking, ashy skin...I head back up the stairs to the station attendant.

"There's a guy on the platform bench with no clothes on."
"Like, no clothes at all?"
"Well, he was wearing his hands. If he had on something under that, I didn't get close enough to see."

And I wait while he makes the call, then head back down against the tide from a just-emptied train. I look into their faces, some are distressed, angry, upset, and I know what they have seen. Some are laughing, shiny-eyed, giddy, and I have no idea what they think they have seen. Suddenly, I want to cry.

O is for Orange

A certain Someone (oh, I'm sorry, Dr. Someone) will be made happy this week, as it will be brought to you by the letter O and its compatriot, the color orange. As an anodyne to my hideous sojourn in Bushwick I allowed myself to take more than my daily allotment of photos, and whether there or my usual subway-office beat, everything was coming up oranges.

I am still haunted by something I saw on Friday afternoon. I don't think I know how to conjure up more horror than the phrase "public hospital in Bushwick." But that's where I was. There was the working girl berating the security guard when she found out she was at the wrong entrance and would have to continue to WALK on those stiletto heeled red latex over-the-knee boots. The bathroom stalls with no locks or handles even though I was in the "teaching and learning" seminar wings. The elevator where pushing 1 takes me to the empty echoing basement and every sense in me says danger.

To get there I had to walk two blocks from the subway. Two blocks that were undergoing road construction work and were covered with refuse. Tangles of security fencing, scattered hills of lumber, buckets of bolts, animal carcasses, piles of garbage. No one cares about this, it has all clearly been there for days if not weeks. All the hospital staff have to walk past every day, and no one has made a call. No one has taken responsibility, no one has tried. The abject sense of degradation, of no one gives a shit is so palpable and I am so horrified.

Beckett on East Broadway

Standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change, the Corner of Perpetual Road Deconstruction near my office. I am always peeking into the work site, curious to see the stripped layers of City revealed and so I am watching the construction worker standing waist deep in a trench in the middle of the street.

He catches my eye and smiles and I can't help it, I smile back. He yells something to me but over the noise of traffic all I can hear is something about lightning. The roar of trucks down-shifting, the sudden pop of the welders sparking up and this shouting man rooted in a hole is trying to give me a metaphor.

I Love Where I Work

Today is the Mother’s Day pot luck lunch at work. I’ll go, bring my dish, even though I neither am a mother nor have a mother--two facts which occasionally, intermittently and alternately gore me--because where I work, one thing we do well is celebrate each other.

We do this with such openness, such humanity it is astounding. Perhaps it is because we have to, we understand how precious, seeing every day what happens when you degrade, when you are caught under the wheels and dragged by illness, poverty, ignorance, cruel public policy.

And this is such a special place, with an esprit de corps like no place I have ever been. Not too long ago I was working on a project and feeling completely overwhelmed by horror, the horror our works are trying to ameliorate, and I was writing the phrase “generational poverty and pervasive despair” when someone came on the intercom system with “there are doughnuts in the dining room!” and the absurd juxtaposition had me grinning. And running to meet my colleagues for a doughnut.

Commuting 5-10

At the subway station in Brooklyn: this morning and there is a line of four people in front of me and I can hear the train coming. I won’t make this train. Three people in front of me, and the train enters the station. I won’t make it. Two people in front of me, it is a short train and pulling ahead to the far end of the station. I won’t make it.

Finally I am through the turnstile and it is a clear shot down the platform so I make a run for it. A real run, not a jog, not a quick-shuffle fast walk, a sprint, chest up, stride long and I do make it. Not just to squeeze into the last car, I take that joy of movement, that thrilling, competent release to the second car and long before the doors shut on the shufflers and joggers behind me. A teeny goofy joy.

On the platform in Chinatown: there is a pinched and hobbling man arranging pieces of garbage around a bench. Moving around and around with great deliberation, placing a flyer here, a wrinkled tissue there, touching touching touching, patting into place. I watch him for a moment, sad, he is what the Chinese social workers I work with call “out of harmony.” As I leave I hear the rumble of an oncoming train, feel the rush of air I know will destroy his work, his world, his attempt at balance and part of me aches for the destruction he is about to endure.

On the street on the Lower East Side: One lone enormous bearded iris rises and unfolds its white wings over the greening underplantings and groundcover in the park I pass every day. I hope that soon there will be others to join it, a flock of cranes bobbing and nodding on their long stems.

G is for Gutless

Walking to work on an overcast day means I can’t take any pictures. The apparatus I use is crude, a tiny aperture, and the odd angles of my photos are me trying to work around that limitation, to get enough light into the oculus to create a viable image. So instead I think about the things I pass every day that I have not yet been able to shoot with any level of success--a mauled set of blinds, a dissolving bicycle, a dead fire hydrant with open rusting sockets. They have not told me how to speak them, how to frame them, they don’t resolve, coalesce.

And I think about when there was a man, and he was a mauled set of blinds, a dissolving bicycle, a dead fire hydrant, and he was a gorgeous spreading white peony with a flick of red flame at the center and the orange popsicle that you break in two to share and the fleeting precious blue hour when light is soft and magic and you never want it to end.

When I watched him sleeping in the morning, he resolved, he coalesced, and I knew how to speak him. I kept a camera by the bed so I could crawl over him, make him into a deck of images, pick one, any one, and you will see how I have papered the inside of my ribs, the room where my heart lives. To affix him, to give him back to himself ordered, disordered, wonderfully arrayed as he was, as he arced through me.

I had so many opportunities to do this. But I never took the chance.

Good Morning, Beautiful!

This morning I stop at the bodega across from work for a croissant and coffee. I need neither, really, but since it has been spring, since I have been wearing red which gives me the super-power strength to pick up my head and look people in the eye and become visible, since then, the counterman says to me "good morning, Beautiful!" and I am starting to think that is something I would like to hear every day, and why wouldn't I.

Out of the store with my unecessary breakfast and a guy on a bike is taking the corner in one long, perfect, traffic-less sweep, his girlfriend tucked in front of him on the seat, into the curve of his body, the rush of air blowing her hair over his shoulder.

Next to me is a man with a ringing cellphone. The tune is "My Girl" and I guess I know who is calling. It makes me smile as I step off the curb.

I went out alone last night to see art, to be whole and anonymous and moving through crowds without register, to feed my eyes without social distraction, to keep the words that are so pale locked behind my teeth. And I am so moved, so surprised, a revelation that makes me dizzy, an image that makes me bark with laughter, a story so poignant and hopeful it forms a lunar eclipse in my chest.

At home I lie in the dark, the lights from the adjacent property striping my walls. The neighbors are having a party, there is laughter, a mariachi band, and I run my fingers over my ribs feeling for my heart, for how it beats, the message in its rhythm.

Twenty years ago: I am on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. Dolphins freeload, weaving in the pressure wave off the bow while we drag the fishing nets aft. We dump the slapping flipping take on the deck and start sorting the critters. I am taken by a squid, the spots on its skin, phosphenes pulsing off and on, racing across the surface, flickering and signally wildly as it dies.

More presently: the sense memories flare up and fade out, race over me in a desperate attempt to preserve love, their fire and glow trying to stave off obsolescence: the voice that comes from somewhere over my shoulder and it has his timbre, the same cadence; on the train sitting across from me, his wheat colored hair, his thin skin showing the tender darkened smears of a paucity of sleep; this crowd that contains someone with his smell and it turns my head to only strangers.

Tonight: the air smells like water and I look out the window to the lights in the buildings behind mine. If those soft glows had their axis shifted, if they were horizontal instead of vertical, they would be the jellyfish reflecting moonlight on a Texas beach and the flaring and fading memory I have would be just the squid expiring in my hand.

Trouble with a Red Dress

I have confused a colleague today, by wearing a red dress. I was wearing a red dress when she saw me last, walking away from drinks after work, a diminishing crimson blob on the thronged springtime streets.

She thinks today I am wearing the same red dress as yesterday. Thinks that I left the gathering and then was swept up, consumed, engulfed to the point that all I could do today was stumble in to work stunned, spent, without passing "Go" as it were, without changing my clothes.

I know the truth, but still I blush ferociously.

Because Today

Because today my mouth is full and my hands are full also.

Because today on the train I saw a woman who could make words with her hands, slicing the stale air into meaning, her red sleeves signalling as sure as a toreador's cape.

Because today my world is pinned to my hip, its deep and imperfectly healed wound, its relentless metronome as I walk, its restless unclaimed invitation.

Yesterday I wore a red dress patterned with cherry blossoms and for hours and hours sat in the sun under the blossoming cherry trees and laughed and drank beer and walked and made jokes that would be impossible to share.

Today I look in the mirror and I am wearing the inverse of that red dress, my white skin a ghost of where the dress lay and a red sunburn where it was not. And I laugh at myself as this was predictable but I just did not care.

There is a man with ginger colored hair on the train, the same orange as his t-shirt. He is hip and sliding into middle-age, his face rounding out with contented fat, of no longer playing games of pick-up soccer in the park, and when he looks down I can see his father in his face, his grandfather, his generations of unbroken.

A soft bump against my hand on the pole and I look over to see a short woman fiddling with her CD player, her breast carelessly pressing against me as the train jumps into motion. It happens again, and again, and she does not look at me or even shrug an acknowledgement and I wonder would she be so unconcerned if I were a man and what would it take for me to become visible to her, for my presence to matter.