we're basically just pen pals

Here,
there is music in the tapping of my fingers on this keyboard, in the way they push and pull and patter like raindrops clacking into the web.
there is music in my bed frame creaking, she groans and croaks and was a frog in another life.
there is music in the way my brothers have grown.

Meet Jane:
a princess; with long brown hair that swooshes over her forehead in the biggest, smoothest stylish bangs you've ever seen. If you're going to lose your pen, do it around Jane, she’ll have two tucked into her shirt pocket. We like to talk about the calluses on our hands because other people think we're being climbing snobs, maybe we are a little bit, but for now we haven't tired of running fingertips over changing skin.

---

Em is an enchantress. The boys love her. All of them. Love her. And she can't help it.  She loves them too, but never in the same way, and never in the way they want her to. A brilliant girl with stunningly clear blue eyes that draw everyone in like a stained glass window, like little kids looking up at a rollercoaster. She doesn't like breaking hearts. She just can't help it.

                              ---

Bekah is mom and a perfect one. We might not have been friends normally, but now I love how she looks ecstatic in every picture because she makes herself laugh. Bekah brings us together; Thursday is family dinner, and her apron is on and she cooks and scurries around the house doing everything and doing it wonderfully.

I live in the basement. With two other girls. But lately I've lived more upstairs, up top where the windows are bigger and open and I hear street sounds and birds as I do my homework on Bekah's chair, wrapped in Jane's blanket. where theres a breeze and we make a megabed. I like it there.

and im getting comfortable so I must be moving out in two days, moving states, changing roommates, changing jobs, going.
There is music in this, in the rotation that comes so often and in the cycle of acquaintance to friend to gone.
You’re part of that rhythm, of leaving soon and you've joined the others who came and went and now we've arrived at pen pals. Another new place.

this one is from Everett Mills

this is a college campus and I should be studying

but I'm watching. 

people who aren't trying to be beautiful.

we cut our hair
Smile
hug our legs adjust our glasses
cough and breathe
logic.
He is tapping his foot anxiously at the table, calculator in both hands.

She looked up and laughs, 
cross-uncross jeaned-legs,
Stretch shrug yawn 

eyes brighten on the phone,
bite nails or listen, still, smiling.

She is still twisting hazel hair around her finger.

I am still twitching my big toe to a beat only I hear.

we analyze synthesize wipe our eyes laugh and

this is not a zoo. I am not a fly and I am sitting in a chair, not on a wall

but observation is a strange feeling. It feels gentle and curious, the way clouds feel as they drift through the blue. It feels like peace. Like pieces of art sprinkled onto so many independent, moving beings and I, i get to watch them

we are all of the extended metaphors and we snatch them from the universal word bank of oxygen,
(it surrounds us and cushions our bodies against empty space)
inhaling
exhaling
existence.

we don't know what it means but
what is meaning but deep breaths of creativity,
taken human shape and crawling until they walk on two legs
all trying to grow and be

and succeeding wildly in the most subtle of
unexpected
ways?

[thursday in the library]

He always wore a mustache.

I used to inhale dreams with peaches
And exhale sonatas
On tuesdays.

At nigbt dad carried my hands
And tied them up in a bow
So i was carrying his gift

"Vision."

I saw it with those hands,
My eyes really liked the taste

It made me smile.
 Smile.
 Smile.

When i grew up i would be like him
My husband would be too--
He would sing tenor and
his hands would find tunes on the piano, name them after me and
be my soccer coach.

The future would taste like smoothie and grow like the tomatoes we planted in our garden
so we'd harvest it in colanders.

We were open, unrestricted circles of potential;
Dad drew it out on whiteboards to prove it to us.

and it was happy.
Because 4 words he didn't speak out loud
were always in my dreams, I traced them there, with my toes, in the sand:
I am good enough.

Sometimes its still hard to treat him like a friend, and I'd like to.

words are sometimes hard to push into motion through the air,

to let them

find the puzzle of bridges

over these multi-dimensional gaps

separating (even the) people (who love) from each other.

but my life acknowledges to his that his dreams fed me until I grew obesely idealistic

and threatened to smile too hard.

'thanks dad' is a bigger feeling than this keyboard can touch. 

I'm waiting for a typewriter and some jazz. 

some peach jam and cheese. 

He'd like that.

everett mills.  

three magi

a glimpse into Day 3:

Grandmothers 

wear scarves in their hair

lifting prayer books to their faces

where bobbing eyes have left tears on open pages.

(Prayers are written and folded like gum wrappers as Tetris players approach the wall one by one. How can we fit all these small squares of paper prayers?)

Girls in matching black skirts and ponytails rock forward and back, forward and 

but one girl in particular stands out.

Standing on a stool, her face is pressing tightly against the limestone wall the way 

I'd like to press myself to sunlight today. She's bright. Her lips move slightly into a smile, never mind that the wall won't let her in.

the phenomenon of the western wall:
here, i'm proud to be a Jew
and I'm not Jewish.

(a few months prior) Day 2:

Sometimes the world is so beautiful i start to cry.
Sunrise on the Dead Sea picks up the desert in its arms
 and gilds her gently.

The sun is up and painting, fingers dragging mirth across his canvas.
 (or
is he a blacksmith? his workshop begins to glow.)

Rising over groves of date palms, the sun
blinds
he is growing taller as we drive.

Once, I grew taller
and the sun was my constant.

Does he remember
little me with dusty palms and rubber shoes?
He will rise above me forever,
but
Today
we are just 42 people learning each other's laughs.

We're artists in a bus,
tracing the Dead Sea,
tracing groves of date palms,
tracing a beach day in our minds
pulling out a stencil for new friendships
again.

In the beginning (Day 1):

We miss their shining eyes.

These are more stars than i have ever seen and each one of
them left heart-craters.

Candles down below become explosions of light pricks

Twisting cords of

fairy lights

Nebulae reaching for somewhere else

They're happy now.

You and I pause in 

reflections of eternally

 expanding 

starlight.

(I'm waiting for an answer.)

who am i because of 10 minutes in a children's holocaust memorial?

--

the fish

Galilee is a blue chair in the sand.
the alternatives were white reclining chairs and
we are
"more numerous than the sands of the sea"

what if Christ fed the multitude with his toes in this sand?

let me sit here forever.

in the ocean of Abraham's posterity I'd like to be one of the grains that saw him, a pinprick in the multitude but he knew the shape of my life.

I was playing the guitar with my feet in the water
I was crunching seashells as I jogged
I was digging my toes in the sand
I was

"swollen with joy," he said. his heart was swollen with joy
and I finally found the feeling of this kibbutz

soft and gentle,
as if someone were spreading butter on my heart.
Sunset here is fresh acrylics replacing a sepia world.

I don't have the words to put Galilee into a box, and I don't want them.

what I want is
humility so I will always remember
what I want is
more time but its time for dinner
what I want is
more chances so what i give will be enough

abundantly so.

call to prayer

I am sitting in the world's first breath.
Five times a day, we all breathe together, and this is the first.
















We're in my favorite place.
A place of pattern.
cobblestone lines racing beneath my crossed legs jump into a fence
and the ancient cityscape beyond it.
The fence is white and checkerboard,
the valley is a soup of vectors and a horizon that is always dusty and faded
history's housetops run northward until they melt into sunflowers and olive trees

Breathing.
we've grown up on fresh
air
but here it breaks from the lungs of a Muslim man in an unnamed tower before its ours to inhale.
lets call him grandfather.

You can taste his patterns of sound,
they are woven together like straw hats.
Grandfather has a city to watch over, men and women to guide home through their streets on pilgrimage to bow at the waist and bow to the ground;
many times, daily, to prayer.

Allah.
voices from the minarets
are trumpets
they are proud
like opera singers
they are echoing from there to here on the hill where I sit, listening.
they are
many voices coloring the air, drops of water falling together
until they are swimming together
in our blood and waking up college students at 4:30 and at 12 and at 3:30 and at 5:50 and at 7 and we forget its there
like the air we breathe.

This is one time, today.
I pick it up like a bookmark
to remind me where I am.

Palestine, a series: Hope

We want to change things and it feels like fire.

not afraid of a dousing.