1
" For JennAt 12 years old I started bleeding with the moonand beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.I fought with my knuckles white as stars,and left bruises the shape of Salem.There are things we know by heart,and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,but I could never make dying beautiful.The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myselfveins are kite strings you can only cut free.I suppose I love this life,in spite of my clenched fist.I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,and I wonder if Beethoven held his breaththe first time his fingers touched the keysthe same way a soldier holds his breaththe first time his finger clicks the trigger.We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.But my lungs rememberthe day my mother took my hand and placed it on her bellyand told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.And I knew life would tremblelike the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,like a prayer on a dying man's lips,like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…just take me just take meSometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,but you still have to call it a birthday.You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recessand hope she knows you can hit a baseballfurther than any boy in the whole third gradeand I've been running for homethrough the windpipe of a man who singswhile his hands playing washboard with a spoonon a street corner in New Orleanswhere every boarded up window is still painted with the wordsWe're Coming Backlike a promise to the oceanthat we will always keep moving towards the music,the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open.The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert,then wake us washing the feet of pregnant womenwho climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.I know the heartbeat of his mother.Don't cover your ears, Love.Don't cover your ears, Life.There is a boy writing poems in Central Parkand as he writes he movesand his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,and there are men playing chess in the December coldwho can't tell if the breath rising from the boardis their opponents or their own,and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subwayswearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrunwith strip malls and traffic and vendorsand one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home. "
6
" New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that " promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian " planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the " antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas. "
8
" March 12Dear Stargirl, Hey, you're a big girl now. Stop being such a baby. You think you're the only one who's ever lost a boyfriend? Boyfriends are a dime a dozen. You want to talk loss, look at all the loss around you. How about the man in the red and yellow plaid scarf? He lost Grace. BELOVED WIFE. I'll bet they were married over 50 years. You barely had 50 days with Leo. And you have the gall to be sad in the same world as that man. Betty Lou. She's lost the confidence to leave her house. Look at you. Have you ever stopped to appreciate the simple ability to open your front door and step outside? And Alvina the floor sweeper-she hates herself, and it seems she's got plenty of company. All she's losing is her childhood, her future, a worldful of people who will never be her friends. How would you like to trade places with her? Oh yes, lets not forget the footshuffling guy at the stone piles. Moss-green pom-pom. What did he say to you? " Are you looking for me?" It seems like he hasn't lost much, has he? Only...HIMSELF! Now look at you, sniveling like a baby over some immature kid in Arizona who didn't know what a prize he had, who tried to remake you into somebody else, who turned his back to you and left you to the wolves, who hijacked your heart and didn't even ask you to the Ocotillo Ball. What don't you understand about the message? Hel-loooo? Anybody home in there? You have your whole life ahead of you, and all your doing is looking back. Grow up, girl. There are some things they don't teach you in homeschool. Your Birth Certificate Self, Susan Caraway "
11
" ...though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind.
But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast's rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God, he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior. "
― Claire Vaye Watkins
14
" Oliver Marley supposed there were more dignified ways to end his life. A lifelong victim to the twin sins of an infertile imagination and pragmatism, the thought of travel simply never crossed his mind. Had it occurred to him, Oliver could have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, into the abyss of the Grand Canyon or said au revoir off the Eiffel Tower. But truth be told, Oliver never was much of a traveler. Even locally there were certainly higher quality casinos to choose from, taller parking garages from which to leap. Instead he found himself perched atop the nearest appropriately-sized structure to his home, that being the parking garage of the Circus Time Hotel & Casino. His view not of Alcatraz Island and the rough waters of the San Francisco Bay, nor the breathtaking vistas of the Arizona desert, or the romanticism of the Paris skyline for that matter. Rather he found himself bathed in a noxious blend of pink and green neon, staring into a pair of giant blinking pastel eyes belonging to the eighty-foot clown staring down at him like a frilly guardian angel. Then again, when your primary objective is to pancake yourself on a public sidewalk, perhaps you’re not in the best position to nitpick over the intricacies of what does and does not constitute bad taste. Oliver would just have to live with the clown, at least for another minute or two. "
― , Marley
15
" All the various time travel devices used by Verne and Bert were stored in the repository, Poe explained, including the ones that had never quite worked as they were meant to. There was one that resembled a blue police box from London—“Stolen by a doctor with delusions of grandeur,” said Poe—one that was simply a large, transparent sphere—“Created by a scientist with green skin and too much ego,” said Verne—and one that was rather ordinary by comparison.
“This one looks like an automobile,” John said admiringly, “with wings.”
“The doors open that way for a reason,” Verne explained, “we just never figured out what it was. The inventor of this particular model tried integrating his designs into a car, an airplane, and even a steam engine train. He was running a crackpot laboratory in the Arizona desert, and he never realized that it was not his inventions themselves, but his proximity to some sort of temporal fluctuation in the local topography, that allowed them to work.”
“What happened to him?” asked Jack.
“He’d get the machines up to one hundred and six miles per hour,” said Bert, “and then he’d run out of fuel and promptly get arrested by whatever constabulary had been chasing him. The sad part was that Jules figured out if he’d just gone two miles an hour faster, he’d likely have been successful in his attempt. "
― James A. Owen , The Dragon's Apprentice (The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, #5)
