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ENTRY 6: October 22. 2025
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ENTRY 5: October 21. 2025
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My father was at the wheel. He looked out of the dust covered windshield and continued, I watched sand hills pass
and looked over to my brother slumped over in his seat, his head rolled with the cracks in the road.
My mother would look back at my brother every so often, she asked me to watch him while he slept, so I positioned myself so I could see his small face with the hills
above, I watched both and when his face turned pale yellow and he coughed I looked up into the landscape. My father only drove and said almost nothing, except when
he reached into the front of the cab and said he was putting on music. My mother and I didn't answer and the rolling hills became drowned out by a lone voice, I
did not know at the time that the graveyard he wanted was nowhere around. My mother tapped her fingers on the car door while the
woman on the CD cried long notes around us. My brother turned red and a rash spread over his face, I said nothing and only daydreamed of walking over the hills myself,
at some point I will be alone, I thought. The light slanted in yellow and late in the sky. My father stopped looking in the rearview, my mother also turned
her foggy eyes out the window and imagined something of her own. The graveyard took shape in a ditch a short ways off. My father aimed the car and put on his
jacket, he rolled down the window and my brother started coughing in the wind, my mother closed her eyes, the woman singing floated away and we barely heard her,
only the crashing of air coming in.
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ENTRY 4: October 16. 2025
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This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About
It's an interesting place to be at the end of a desert and the start of an ocean. There were still large patches of grass below the mountains,
planted of course, and the towns got more rain as you went West.
On field day I went out to that aforementioned patch of grass. I was never sure what to do, my friend was
never sure either so we watched everyone else. There were high tension wires that went over our town, you could go up to see them through a small hole in the forest
by my friend's house. She showed me once while we walked the horses.
Her house was set down in a valley, and the fields flooded in winter. It was a dark house made of black wood, and it smelled American inside like beige carpet and
dogs. She had seven siblings, and they all brought their friends to the house so it was always loud. The backyard had a pool and I was surprised once that she invited
me to swim, I didn't have many friends then.
It was nice of her to invite me, but I didn't really fit in that house, I felt even at the time that I was observing. I wasn't born in a farm town, and I still
remembered the suburbs more easily, things like the highway cutting through. My friend had always lived at the base of the foothills, and she didn't imagine much
beyond the warm fire in the center of the living room.
It wasn't concious when I stopped coming over, it was fall time and the barn was getting cold, I still wasn't sure if she liked hanging out with me. I had to
pretend to know what all the equestrian stuff was. One day I got in the van to leave and looked at all her siblings talking in the driveway, an empty basketball hoop hung above everyone. It seemed it was only a matter of time until they realized I wasn't really like them. So I didn't go back to
the house, only looked from the road, and kept going to the place she showed me.
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ENTRY 3: October 15. 2025
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Scaffolders outside the building
smoke from 10 cigarettes
they build a city they understand,
I'm the one who doesn't.
what is the signal to begin?
In the morning we fly out of nearby windows,
brick homes along the street
I write about things I don't understand,
the things I do I stay quiet about.
I was raised by
a man standing on the street in the early morning
he's waiting for the truck
barely speaking,
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ENTRY 2: October 14. 2025
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I think often of wasted time. They took me to another part of the country and set me up in a hotel room. Another girl was my roommate, it felt strange to
share a bed with a stranger, so we looked at the cow painting on the opposite wall,
It's ugly, we said.
We went down eat the Marriott breakfast. Some eggs and some orange juice.
The cow painting looked down on us those two days, I guess we're in Wisconsin, we said. It's snout was only half drawn, the rest falling away into absent
brushstrokes and circular grasses, I could hardly sleep as I wondered about running, how much pain would I be in?
Another city far away, another cow painting but this time it's my own. I wonder who lay in bed those nights next to the other girl, whos slow breath coming in and out,
I walk down the street a mile later, cars come late into the night and they look cartoonish, they are only black with yellow lights, yet I imagine them pink, green,
they seem to come forward and backward around the bend, the road bends as though it is drawn, signs for mattress sales and autobody shops, it's only Marzahn, it's
only another language, I can read easier now, the sky around becomes known,
It isn't Auburn anymore, it's a different street, but the trucks on the sidelines are the same, their engines pour fumes into the night, four lights keep watch in
dim fog,
I ran well, down in Wisconsin, I'm sure, I can't remember now, but we left anyway.
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ENTRY 1: September 30. 2025
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I dream you wrote a poem better than mine,
it had words I hardly understood,
My father has a small hole behind his ear. I saw sometimes, a silver screw,
he says it's from the day his father shot him,
a misfire, he laughs,
in the sunlight behind his ear the metal glints like jewelry.
My father thinks of a woman with silver hair smoking on the beach, he's staring at the wall of his room and looking out from the bed, only his hands
grab on the edge of the blanket, he looks his little eyes out at mine,
My father loves ceremonies, he thinks of the silver woman on the beach, swimsuit reflective, his drink cold enough with a single ice cube, he touches on
the silver at the back of his head, he thinks, because I haven't won anything yet,
In his dream, the woman comes with a slip of paper, it sparkles above his bed, it lets him keep sleeping,
light bounces around the bed, sparkling from the frame to his silver limbs.
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