On the Web
"Minutes Are Just Seconds Aren't Minutes" in Literary Mama
"Mix Tape" in The Nervous Breakdown
"Spell" in The Nervous Breakdown
"Field Notes" in The Nervous Breakdown
"Research On the Imagination" in The Nervous Breakdown
Interview at The Coachella Review blog
"Listen" in The Coachella Review
"Newly Wed and Quickly Unraveling," Modern Love column, The New York Times
"Jumbo's" in Specter: A Brooklyn-based Art Journal
"Interiors" in PANK Magazine
"Black Car Land" in Specter Magazine
"The Fence" in Gender Across Borders
From the now defunct website Earthly Delights, a blog I wrote until 2009.
July 18, 2007, "what seclusion does to the appetite"
It’s not strictly the seclusion, but I will call it that. There are lunches packed away, and on Sunday, dinner. I find myself rising in the morning, boiling water for coffee and laying on the hardwood floor, on the blue Oriental rug, stretching. Two hours later, I want something. There is always bread, different varieties, from the plain slices of whole wheat to fists of thick, brown bread, to discreet cuts of something whole grain with raisins or seeds, nuts embedded like jewels. I dip my knife into the peanut butter that is lasting me for a week, maybe two; the jam is untouched. After coffee it’s time for green tea, countless mugs. Sometime after 1pm, unless I’ve been working since early morning, I hunger for something else. Today was black beans and corn with small triangles of corn tortilla, pepper jack for melting. I sit in the window seat with the outdated issue of Harper’s and eat, spilling something for certain every time—my clothes with their little stains in this place where I can change clothes for dinner and no one will care or know the difference. My sweet buds seem to have been turned off, not even to be flipped back on with the bit of homemade apricot jam, or huckleberry pie, the latter I carved a smidgen triangle of. Ice cream and rice dream don’t tempt me right now. I take a walk in the forest, sidestepping banana slugs and come back to a chilled kitchen, perfect for chai black tea with a bit of half and half. I brought two cookies home, to try them out on my appetite, this suddenly fickle thing, moony as it has been, constantly wanting to stop and look at the sky instead of be satisfied, and the chocolate chip and coconut send messages like galvanize and alchemize coursing through me. At dinner, I shift into social gear, required for the communal meal. I’m always glad to sit down with the masterpieces I’ve put on my plate, fresh from the garden, fresh from the hands of women who so completely put their love into the cooking that you can’t overlook it; it’s the main ingredient. There’s the baby eagle in the tree, the inlet, the mountain in the distance, the dormant volcano. I return to my seclusion and wait for the moment when a Belgian beer would be most right, once night has fallen and the tree canopy is silhouetted against the inky blue sky. A day is finished. Seven days are finished, eight. My appetite rises, falls, sweeps like a wind. I go with it.
Literary Journals
Metro Diaries in Palabra: A Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art, Issue 1, otoño 2006
[Times are approximate. There is really no accounting for the passing of time. I don't wear a watch. Please do not hold me to such minutiae.]
10:55am. Walk out of building, after speaking in pleasant, even tones to the new apartment manager, who, in his kindness (which I can tell is his innate manner, and this makes me glad), tells me his plans of calling the main office and asking them to waive the $25 fee I was assessed. I suggested they fax him a copy of the postmarked envelope, to prove my rent was received late. The classical music he listens to instantly soothes me and instills trust. I think of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where a monster, an ape? a Tasmanian devil?, is soothed by accordions or pianos, swooning around the room, forgetting his rage.
Chemical Wash in Lounge Lit: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction by the Writers of Literati Cocktail and Rhapsodomancy, 2005, LitRhap Press
Sitting in the theater with the only man I have ever imagined a wedding with (I had known him only weeks, and knew I wanted a blue dress, like my mom wore in her 1969 Las Vegas wedding to my father; Shawn would be in a dapper classic tux, standing at an altar, on a cliff, yep, a cliff overlooking the ocean, like a fucking soap opera [which it all was, it all was], knowing this boy would be mine forever...), I bunched myself up tight in the cushy seat and constricted any impulses I might have to touch him as we watched a nude woman squatting delicately over the face of a blindfolded man on a 60 foot screen (but I don't really know the size of the screen, the important part is that you get the picture).
The Gentle Symbiosis in KNOCK 2/1, 2005, Antioch University Seattle
Name another pair of writers in this decade--hell, I'll raise you a quarter-century--that are at such odds with one another as this pair. And who also share a bungalow or two. And who are known for their slight eccentricities and their vibrant natures, equal to none but themselves.
By now you must have heard of X & Y. With X's first novel, A, it was clear that there was a formidable presence peeking out somewhere from behind the nuclear glow of Y, who exploded onto the literary scene with her memoiresque, B. Is it right to say I caught up with them at their Silver Lake bungalow?--there's no catching them, really, unless you believe you can harness a wildfire and ask it to sit, stay.
