katy's blog

it's all sick-sweet
trances and
i've been drawing commas

everywhere

just to pause the
end.

five people i'm in love with
and

zero
here to hold:

you'd think cygnus might
be kinder
with this
balance

but i'm too sick-sweet enthralled
now
to question all
the scales.

You know when you swallow a large pill and can feel it slipping uneasily down your throat, into your chest, and it settles itself there for a little while, and you're drinking water and you're swallowing more air and saliva to try to prompt it to do what is necessary, to make your body accept it and take it in but it's there and you've got this awkward knob forever lodged in your core?

I feel that way about everything.

You're always hurting on holidays because you're always expecting to not be alone. Always hoping that there's some sort of magic that roots itself into certain days and moments and you're missing it. Grasping and losing. And I'm with you always, too. I'm always empathizing with your fury because I'm always feeling it. Truly. Always.

my poetry is choking because someone taught me how to wring it out and staple-prison it to windowsills (the east-end neighbors stare but do not comment audibly -- they have dogs and cats and children half my age, the dears (the rats!)) and someone taught me how to cry cry cry until the words beg for my attention again and i'm listening but they whisper hoarsely harshly only hardly ask and hardly pray for me to look and write for them so

I miss when everything was sharp. When everything was sharp and whetted and underlined and forced me to tip-toe amble through the streets, prompted me to look around corners and jump and fall and grin until my teeth bled. When everything was loud and warm and and new and magnetic, a start in my chest and a slip in my step. I miss moving and feeling myself move, falling and then noting the trip. I miss the records of failures. I miss my strange old acuities: recording patterns and observing actions. I miss colors and screams.

the boy wears button-ups and is always in search of constants: the people with whom he can commiserate, the records he loves, the "925" printed on every piece of sterling silver jewelry. the resonating sigh when you're tired and allowing yourself to be so. the first-sip, roof-of-the-mouth burn from his black coffee. no sugar, no cream.

i have never been anything, never been anything more than (real & ready
& dead) "the grass is always greener on the other side"; that is me and
only me or at least
mostly me. simplest abstract mathematics word-problem ever to
lope and amble your path and quickest way
to sum me up, to determine my
weaknesses. and my favorite was the part
when they make it home. but i'm torn and afraid and
is this home? this feels like home and in new york i am

i'm fucking spinning all these poetic threads out of everything and it helps nothing, changes nothing. they instead sit still and unused beside my school books, beside piles of things transferred between my weird and parallel worlds. i draw scraggled lines at the contrast.

i can't write. or i won't write. it's happened in the past but i'm noticing it now.

and i'm packing bags. a giant blue duffle and a less lofty leather carry-on that took a small beating at heathrow. i ignored the wounds.

You are made of stars and soft linens and I am made of dirt and gravel. This place is morning coffee but so many other mapfold-cities are cigarette sparks and midnight chalk-drawings. People only live in New York, I think, because they are terrifically stuck or terrifically bored. It is the most cliche escape and I am fed up beyond "no vacancy." There is nothing here that isn't everywhere else -- except it is bigger and stronger and more daunting. I am not impressed any longer.

My grandmother speaks English with needles in her mouth and gritty bits of German clicking and folding in her throat. She says things the way I imagine a child learns to talk, running the words through her head again and again and checking them over. Assessing their pleats and lines. I remember internally correcting her for her little language substitutes freckled here and there, und and ich and ist in every sentence-mess. And she would place them there as if they belonged nowhere else, as if they blended and meshed so well. So fluidly. I caught them always but liked them always, too.