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Minnetonka Blvd

July 31, 2009 2 Comments

How could we bear to live here then;

These large green lawns spilling into curbs, winding roads
the flatness of it all
strip malls, Kohl’s, DSW
mailboxes at the end of each driveway
some with a little painted bird

Sweet mother of God I am 26 years old and
Hairphernalia is still here!
Best Cleaners still here
Ax Man Surplus and Eric The Bike Maaaaan and
Beek’s pizza —

We’d wander here when school got out and
maybe even order something, if we were feeling rich, I’d
play with my hair
like I’d seen girls do in the movies.

I stood outside that Elks Lodge the night I dyed
my hair platinum, he would see me
standing there, grinning love in a Penzoil boy’s t-shirt

and it was over, he didn’t like blondes.

The swamp where we used to play
and the woods where we built our treehouse, dragged
the slab of concrete for a table has been
paved over, now

Houses with roofs bigger than ours
stuck into new lawns like
mailboxes

and the neon pink house with brown trim has been
repainted:

a more agreeable beige.

Across from the unpink house the road to Johanna’s
has a new wooden fence, which at first makes me suspect
I never knew her at all,
she never existed

and then I get lost trying to find my first job at the two dollar theater, but when
I turn the corner and it’s there! I cry
oh
I miss you

we are betrayers! how could we
have left this place

Dialogues

We were enjoying our billionth screening of Lost In Translation when I stuck my fork into a container of Drunken Udon noodles, hit a particularly succulent green bean and a two-out-of-three pepper rating shot directly into my right eyeball.

“Bwah!” I cried. “Bwah!”

“What?” Jurvis cried back. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Bwah!” I ran into our bathroom and stuck my head in the sink.

“Oh. Did some of that get into your eye or something?”

“Bwaaahh!” Gurgle gurgle. “Bwah!”

“Well,” I said a few minutes later, staggering into the living room, “it still feels like I have a spicy delicious optical nerve. But whatever, I’m sick of throwing water at my face. What’s the worst that could happen, right?”

“My uncle got pepper sauce into his eye and went blind,” Jurvis said.

We returned to the bathroom with a carton of milk, and in this fashion the meal was finished.

Poetry

The Swans

July 22, 2009 1 Comment

Prologue:
We have always compared ourselves to ugly ducklings.

I.
After the swans had surrounded us
we headed home

Grabbed bicycles and adjusted helmet straps and
got back on the trail,

to land, smack dab eventually
in our kitchen

As if all of this had been nothing out of the ordinary.

I said,
“Did you put the cheese in the fridge.”

I said,
“We’ll wash those later.”

Plastic plates clattered in the sink.
I washed the sunscreen off my face, brushed
sand and grass off bare legs.

Darling did you see the swans?

Road Trip

Flea Market Finds

July 20, 2009 1 Comment

Jurvis and I visited his family in Connecticut this weekend, and when other plans fell through (ocean! summer homes! sunburns!), I went with his sister and parents to the weekend Moosup flea market. It was the second flea market I’d ever been to; also, the first in around ten years.

First score: the Agfa Optima Compura.

It was listed as twenty dollars. I have haggled just once before in my life at the age of twelve; this event was unsuccessful in lowering the price of a rusted tin lunch box, but was very nearly successful in causing me to flee the city in shame. I put on a determined face.

Oh hello new friend. (Larger.)

“. . . I would give you fifteen dollars for this,” I said. (Best to keep it simple.)

“Okay!” they said.

The wee, Chris-Ware-like faces are my favorite part. (Larger.)

The bad news is, it may or may not function as a camera. The good news is, I found out what the “magic release button” does (that’s literally the technical term), and I want one, everywhere.

Second score: some book by John Updike I apparently should have heard of. Fifty cents. (I can’t believe I didn’t try to talk her down from that. I was on a roll! I’ll give you forty!)

This is probably like that Sting song (Larger.)

It was nestled in a box of bodice-rippers. I think someone was tricked into reading something good.

Other things flea markets can offer you: the complete collection of The Babysitters’ Club books, a Rice Krispie Treat maker, porcelain teddy bears in top hats, ancient televisions, decorative mirrors, somebody else’s robe, pizza.

Anxiety

How To Fear This

July 18, 2009 4 Comments

At some point I became afraid of lakes. Not (I hope, obviously) in a general fashion, of their existence, but specifically of entering them. Oceans too. We could blame it on a few too many years of city living, but I like to think it is something more sacred.

This isn’t fear, I tell myself, it’s reverence.

Which isn’t to say I don’t find it a little ridiculous. I give myself the same look that you do. Come on. Just get in there. This is supposed to be fun. Quit ruining the fun! Or Look at Jamie, in her bikini! She is having fun! Why can’t you be fun like Jamie?

And sometimes I close my eyes and I run into the lake and it feels wonderful and we’re all happy and splashing around and that’s great. Somebody ride the rope swing! Yea! Cannonbaaaaall!

But then, inevitably at some point, I’m standing in the water, staring into it, and I’m thinking about all these grains of sand and the crazy shit that happened to make it sand, the soft piles of decomposing mush and the things that feed on soft piles of decomposing mush, the leeches in the shadows and all the different sizes of fishes and the microbes and the snapping turtles and everything that lives here, everything that’s just trying to get by in the unseeable murk and here I am trampling and splashing all up on its grill.

If you’re not at least a little afraid of entering a lake, I think you must just not have thought about it too much.

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