nothus_a_um

water seeping into the sidewalk's concrete
like a stain over the dry heart of the city;
letting loose the disparate
smells and sounds of a mummified concern;
(treasuries and armories of aching beauty)
and empathy captured by a teasing
Indian Summer andallofthis
blows away
with the cold wind against a paint store window

a man sitting in a puddle of red acrylic

the tin open...
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His dentures were lying on the stairs. She discovered them after the undertaker had left, so she saved them for the Chapel of Rest. His teeth, she said. They popped out when he took the leap. Clearing out the drawers later she found three tubes of denture glue, all unopened.

On the bus today, a woman sitting in the aisles below mine stared out the left-side windows too. We looked at the flock of pigeons the bus had run into - a natural part of their lives, as bears must be to salmon. But framed in the salt-rime of my back-window, a pigeon in mid-flight framed against an old warehouse building. In her window, framed...
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I try to spend as much time there as I can, in many different kinds. But I don't belong, I can't shiv like the natives. I guess one generalization I can make about prison is what Mark Twain said of hell: youre sure to meet interesting people there. That doesn't mean they'll be interested in you.

The athletic fleece she'd bought that morning is sticking to the small of her back, sweat-sodden. Muscles burn as her heart pounds, and there's blood roaring in her ears. Marja could no longer hear the steady thump of her sneakers against the dust path in the park. The view looks out over the burgeoning industrial squalor of Tacoma - in the distance, she hears the...
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First wife called me a pack rat. I guess she
was the only one that saw me that way.
Second wife didn't stay with me past the
honeymoon.
Third wife saw my collections and panicked.
Fourth wife seemed eager to join the others.
I wish I would have married them alphabetically.

I dreamt about a doll's house last night. The one in the attic just outside of Covington. You could hear the horses snorting white, phlegm-flecked steam at 1:00 in the morning. Perched cross legged in front of the mouldy toy structure in pyjamas and the red windbreaker I stole from your closet. Something like the time we built a sand castle city in Carolina, so...
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Under the paving stones, the beach? She wondered. Was this compressed block of sand under her feet once a million tiny grains someplace far away, where the waves licked the shore like salty tongues? If she put her ear to the ground, would she hear the roar of the ocean? In the middle of the crowd, on the pier, a solitary figure in grey began...
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In Seattle, at the Elliot Bay Bookstore, reading Cannery Row. I love this place.

It took several seconds for the car keys to disappear into the center of Twin Lakes, leaving us to wonder why we didn't immediately dive in after them, if that had even been possible, and how we were going to make it back to the campus housing, eleven miles away.

Two days left in Alaska. Feels weird to be leaving. Someone tell me something good...
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