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NOVEMBER


ENTRY 8: November 20. 2024	I started skateboarding on Tuesdays. I'm learning how to stay on the board, and this week I started steering. I'm definitely the most beginner of anyone at the park, most people there can skate around easily, and I want to get like that, so I can go fast and not be afraid, and skate up and down the slopes without thinking so much about the concrete. Obviously, there's lots of cool people at the skatepark, and A brings me on flinta night so it's all dykes. It's very intimidating. I like the people who don't even look at the board, it's like another part of the body, they stop and flip it into the hand, always skate instead of walk, someone said 'fakie' to me yesterday. I was learning how to flip the board over with my feet and land on it, the first trick. I'd done it last week but I hadn't really understood the motion until yesterday, when I was trying it over and over and then suddenly I understood what to do, I felt the muscles click into place in my brain and I understood that I'd do it the next time I tried. It's also like guitar, the muscles clicking into place. It wasn't really like that with running, it wasn't about finesse, you just pushed more and more until after a long time you would do better somehow, without even realizing what was different. Last night I dreamed I was in a trailer with my grandma, like the sleepovers we used to have. She made me dinner and then said goodnight and went to bed. I stayed up and started cleaning up the kitchen, then heard the sound of someone throwing up in the bathroom. My grandma appeared in the hallway, do you know who was sick in the bathroom? Then I remembered,
ENTRY 7: November 18. 2024	Often the morning is like a tightrope, I balance between dreams. the streets I know begin to end at the ocean, as I imagine salt in the wind. I don't know where you are, but I also didn't know that before I met you, like death, or the certainty I had when we met, stepping into a room and seeing you on the other side, a storm comes into Berlin and we cover in place, I speak German with my roommates in the kitchen, and make plans, the person wobbling towards me on the train, brings news, brings change, like always, I dream I heard from you, that you sent two poems, One I couldn't read, the other words over a picture of a construction site at night, a street of streetlights, and you finding me.
ENTRY 6: November 14. 2024	[Interlude] Our old house had a window in the shower, it glowed deep blue at night and showed the black trees in our backyard, and the purple flowers that opened at dusk, some nights the moon aligned with the small window, a half cresent to match worn trim and cracked tile. Three things; the moon, the window, and my small growing body. Writing is like this for me. I remember something through the window, usually my mother, then I add the moon, displacing my body with hers, letting her look out and placing myself outside, in the dark bed of purple flowers, instead it's her thin face with curls framed in the white side, sunk in the side of the night house. At last, I feel my body, the cold beginning to hurt my teeth as my gums receed, revealing white stones, tossed and broken in the river of my mouth.
ENTRY 5: November 13. 2024	My bag flies open in the wind. I think of the birthday we spent alone together, one cupcake on the floor between us, and I thought you'd be disappointed, but you told me it was your favorite birthday you could remember. You saw me. You wrote about seeing me smiling and laughing, with butterfly clips in my hair, falling out, I was never a fantasy, I was myself. Something's stuck in me. I want to show you the songs I learned, I want to sit in chairs by the window at night, I want to play pool again but this time I wouldn't forget anything, I can't get to work today, something's stuck in me. I want to be kind like you, I want to know like you. Of everything, you wrote about my smile. I don't know how to apologize. I don't know how to fix things.
ENTRY 4: November 13. 2024	I'm coming home for Christmas, the fields are cold outside my car window and I am alone, the sun is setting and soon the fields will be dark, molding orange to grey, The fly used to look like a centipede, but he fused his front legs into a syringe. Now the legs extend from the body and carry him nowhere, but in. A woman is coming towards me on the train in Berlin, she runs to the engine and pounds on the glass, we couldn't see where the blood on her hands was coming from, tension rose while warm drops fell to the floor, But we pressed away from her, onto the walls instead, making the void where she was, making her turn and tunnel back into us. Come closer, was the fly afraid of it's new organ? As it pressed the bed of hair into fruit, this was the first year I found myself afraid that you would take something from me. I think I like you, I find myself wanting to take your spoon to my lips and press the metal into me, spinning from the sharp edge to the smooth center. I looked through the doorway at you standing in the kitchen, looked secretly at your back and your chest, desire in an unconcious way, that everything was tense, it was your stomach that I wanted, wanted to scrape my fingers across the skin, wanted to see your body move under light as though it were mine. My classmate tells me everything in a poem sent from the airport, I want my eyes to darken, to dig in my face, to get bigger and resemble the deepness of yours. It's exactly what I wanted, to be turned into the casing of someone else's body. I send him a letter about my mom, he responds with even more. I suddenly understand the secret, you, who first allowed me to see myself, you, who lives somewhere in the desert now. Within your disjointed body I found my own. We surround the woman until she becomes our same temperature. We become hers. Last year, I lived in a city made of you, the view outside my window was always cold and white, the white page and black letters on my screen bled into the walls and out the windows, absorbing into the concrete and becoming all I tasted, this year, I trade my hands for a mouth.
ENTRY 3: November 13. 2024	Dreamed that I'm in a haze, a hazing ritual, there's hundreds of us and we run and hide in different parts of my small town. Everyone looks familiar but I don't know anyone. The people in my group are whispering that they'll hurt us if they find us, I believe them but I'm still not worried. I keep moving until I'm at the top of the bleachers and I find my parents, my mom comments that it's strange they're using physical violence, we all nod but are still unconcerned. I'm hiding in a woodpile when I'm caught, the woman takes my arm and leads me to a man with a chop saw blade, we're going to cut the tip of your finger off, I break out of her grip and run past her, but stop at the door. She hasn't chased me, she's just watching, the other people who've been caught just wait in line, staring at me. I realize the tip of my finger is really not so bad, and I get back in line.
ENTRY 2: November 6. 2024	I pressed the net into the stream, I leaned forward with my body and held it under the water, I caught the dragonfly floating on the surface, it was limp, and full of water. Water had soaked into the windows in it's wings, it's body was loose on the center, it felt like beads. I laid it on the table and left, I didn't even watch, as it's body dried in the sun all day, and come evening, was alive again.
ENTRY 1: November 2. 2024	Sweet Refusal let you down as we speak, don't love right, take life out of me and leave it in the road, walk towards the water, don't look back, don't live right, don't look away from the hillside ahead, crawl on towards the place without control, slip my own hands behind my back, blindfold my own eyes, leave you behind and walk on, smile to the dark and extend my body, place my body in the water and let blue slopes pull me from you, I am afraid, and walk forward, towards the hole at my center. There is a bridge ahead of me through the fog, grey arch stretching over my street, like a hillside, maybe I am coming out of Berlin and entering a forest, it's only an overpass, or the side of a façade, a roofline so high above that it is also a bridge, I see both at once, seeing switches between; a house, a hillside, a bridge, none are right.