Dina Says

Dan, where are you, I miss you.

Dina and Dan and Ol' and Nu Ma

In a way, its like, what am I doing with my life, and in a way, its like, I'm already doing what I set out to do, in a way, its like, I'm practicing for the future without even realizing I had a future to begin with, do you know what I mean when I say that the future is not real for me anymore, do you know what I mean when I say that, Nu Ma said to Ol' Ma.

Ol' Ma shakes her head, the world of possibilities are endless. They are jumping on a trampoline the size of a sweet potato and pushing each other off, playing war, as they call it, we are going to war.

Ol' Ma is teaching Nu Ma how to survive in this world. They are tired and their calves hurt and all they want to do sit so they do, in the shade of the large log cabin. The log cabin has stenciled flowers on the kitchen floor, violet and maize, what does that mean, to call something corn when it ain't, Ol' Ma says.

Ol' Ma says down the road there are these twins that are stuck together, they are stuck together, don'tcha know, they are stuck together, fused.

What you mean, says Nu Ma, no babies can be born that way.

Ol' Ma says, yes they can, and when they are, we throw 'em away, we gotta tradition round these parts, you just throw 'em completely away if they are bad like that, you know, you can't keep the bad ones away, you just gotta get rid of 'em. I got three mine shafts in my property for just that, disposin of those monster babies.

Dina in Splitsville

I knock on your door and you don't answer. I hear you wrestling around in the background through groans and you swear something I cannot hear and you keep swearing, you open the door, what do you feel, how do you feel, surprise.

Through the picture window the sky writer again, tell me the words that weren't ever meant for me in the first place. I am snorting cocaine and watching the world weep for you, the sky cries for you, rainy days are my absolute favorite, I detest the out-of-doors.

Through the big picture window, I am watching us walking into the water below hand-in-hand and if you drown first, I will go to. If you go, I go, too. Isn't this how this pact was signed.

Weird things always happen when we are together. You receive a love letter written in blood, you receive a sign to walk into the water below the house, the picture window where when we looked up we saw someone looking down but no one has lived in that house for years. A face looks down at us. It is not us looking at us. Who is looking at us. No one has lived in that house for years.

You receive flowers and you destroy them. You receive flowers to the funeral home one year later, someone has just found out, someone from your past has just found out, they are sending flowers now. Isn't this what you always wanted, to know someone cared beyond what you thought they did?

I knock on your door of your parent's house to get a good look at your mom, a better look at your dad, we are floating in between the spaces of lying and forgetting, of protecting whatever relationships are most important at the time and being able to rely on something bigger than whatever that is. We are in this in between space together, what does this even mean. I am looking at your mother, I am looking at your father, they both look so much older because of us.

It is raining, look at the rain. Brick outside of this window in the city, the picture window left on a beach to fill with sand and wild animals, there is a cheetah, there is a lion. Shhh, we crouch and wait, no sudden movements, do not turn your back, do not run, make yourself bigger than them and if they swipe at you, fight back, it has been known that people have survived through fighting back. I go to Whole Foods 100 times a day, might as well live there. I am even more ornery in person, I am even more grumpy than I used to be standing in the frozen food section of Whole Foods because even in the best, most healthiest grocery store in the country I can find the shittiest food to eat.

How much do you weigh now, you ask. A portion of spontaneous abortion around my waist, I carry these words of Rilke's in my body like pregnancy, things given and things taken away. What size is your waist now, I want to order you a dress. What size is your waist now, I want to order you a life.
It is raining, you deserve something better than things. I am taking a good look at your parents and I am running back to my car, I am driving fast to the other side of town, I am going to tear this custom made dress off my body and throw it to the water, I am going to drown myself tonight.

Dina and Dan, With the Exception of Perspective

Its 5 o'clock in the morning mountain time but I'm not sure I've seen a mountain in weeks. Yesterday, in the mountains, the bears caught on fire, every single one of them, the bears caught on fire and rolled themselves down into the gulley and put themselves out, no tax dollars were used to save the bears. In a state away, a bear got stuck in a tree and authorities had to taser it to get it down, it bounced twice off a trampoline and almost bounced itself dead. How to bounce yourself dead. Ask the bears.

If walking was safe.

If walking was safe.

If walking was safe for us, dear sister. Maybe for me, not for you. For neither of us. We get outside and the air smells like when the whole city lost electricity after the huge storm and the grocery store's generator was out, too, and the whole place smelled like rotting fish. We live in the middle of a very ordinary state, whatever that means, no mountain or sea. If it was safe to walk at this hour, we would be walking and stumbling. To walk is safe for you but not for me, or vice, there is no versa.

How to stumble well. Perspective. Half way from downtown I want a cab and that does not make sense for a place with a population of 100,000. Walk your ass home. Here is a couch on the street, should we take a rest? No. No. We watch a woman drive into a light pole across the street, a man shoves her into the passenger seat, he is behind the wheel now, he pulls the car out from the light pole, gets out and inspects the lights, flicks them off and on, off and on. Checks for leaking fluid.
Gets the hell out of there, dent in the car, dent in the light pole.

If walking was safe, we'd be home right now.

If walking was safe, I'd be to you right now.

If we were home right now, it would be us with a cockroach in a huge apartment with no furniture, waiting for the cockroach to die before us. Cockroaches live for millions of years, some have survived through the jurassic period, you know, you say, but what are you even saying about life and death, anyway. What are you even saying about life and death. We live and then we die and then what more shows up. There is a bridge between two cities and we cross it every single day, but then we don't and then we read in the local newspaper online that the bridge collapsed and three cars went into the lake but no one was killed, too bad.

Dan and Dina Avoid Danger

Dina and Dan talk to their father about their mother. She is deteriorating so quickly. We will build a ramp but no we won't, she won't be back for a long while.

Mother dies in the flower garden over and over again, a memory they watch play out everyday from the inside of the sliding glass door. They watch and listen, see her back give way, watch the paper boy on his stupid BMX bike that looks like a child's whip the paper across the lawn, up the drive way, almost but not quite to the garage door. Fine, it was a fine throw, he keeps peddling, paying no mind to the woman in the garden that is now bent over, elbows on knees, hands on knees, panting, panting. They are watching, they are watching.

Between the two houses grew a fantastic row of aspens that guided their way, they lived among those aspens, they shift color as in look and look, they shift color, it is a different season. The way they looked out the window at the 70 foot tree on the other side of the street, even for the suburbs.

Dina and Dan's father and mother sit them down and talk to them, tell them that they have disappeared or are about to disappear, they are going to disappear any second they tell them their whole lives, we will all go up to the sky one day, a nondescript sky, a nondescript day.

We will all go up to the sky, what does that mean, what does that mean? We will all go up to the sky that day, what day and what will happen, Dina asks, what will happen in the sky and her father slaps her across the face, don't ever ask about what will happen, don't ever ask again.

Mother dies and we have dreams we never had before. We have dreams, what does this mean.

Dina and Dan pretend nothing happens. They are on the city bus and a woman ahead of them drops her oxygen tank and it hits the ground and no one helps her and she can't breathe and there are men in front of us that are closer and have more access to her and they will not help. Dan begins to rise but finally she says can someone help me and yes of course someone can help you and one of the men puts down his paper and grabs her tanks and hands it to her but it was very unclear what she wanted help with, wasn't it? Dina asks, I think so.

Dina Stalks Reality

There was a time when I felt that love was nothing I can feel or something similar, as if love like Crazy Horse, is being built and built, being built with the widest face near other wide faces, its actually very small, Mt. Rushmore, you tell me, very small, indeed.

This love I'm speaking of, is what I thought at one time I wanted but I do not because it is complicated and extreme, you know, like when the muscles in your cheeks seize from laughing too long, when you are doing nothing wrong and someone yells at you anyway.

Deep down inside, I feel like a failure. I feel like something that has not even begun, half-way through life, at the end or beginning, birth me anyway in a city far away, I want to be reborn, I am putting on too much eye makeup, I am putting on too much mascara. I am waiting outside of the ballroom on the sidewalk it is snowing and it is freezing, the streets are all headlights and train whistles and people hailing cabs. Before I knew what a city was I had a vision of this scene, I am waiting for you or something like you to happen. My hair in a dancer's bun. Why am I in this doorway, why do I see things like this anyway. You are late to pick me up, you are late and I am fretting. You are down the street at the church saying prayers. Even though it has only been an hour it feels as if time is much larger than this moment and moving very slowly, steeping, steeping.

We are in the city and now the desert, huge arch shaped rocks larger than five men. I had a deep dream that someone was killing our mother, because now our mother is conflated, now our mother is the same mother, dear Dan, I had a dream Mother was dead and I woke up weeping and holding myself even in a bed full of other people. I wept for one hour straight after I woke. I could not stop thinking of her head in someone's hand, her neck veins hanging down to the ground, her eyes so hollow, beheaded but how. What year is this? Who gets beheaded anymore?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: It is so strange to know streets so intimately but also know you will never return to those streets ever again. When my heart breaks, I am even further. Hopefully one day, everything will stop.

Dina and Dan Break Hearts

Here are all the ways to break your heart:

Here are all the ways to break my heart:

I laid down on the sidewalk to look up her skirt, to see what I could find, to see what kind of magic there was underneath there. I laid down on the sidewalk to look up her skirt and saw that she wore the same underwear as my mother, what a shame. I wanted there to be some flare, some color, something I have never seen in the Spiegal catalogue or the infomercials caught on tape when we didn't stop the VHS from recording after the show we wanted was done, it ran into the night, into Miss Cleo and underwear models. I laid down and looked up to see a mound of fleshy hair peeking out of the sides of massive white cotton, wide and long. Get up off that sidewalk, boy, some old man said, get up off that sidewalk, boy, don't be lookin up no girl's skirts, you kiddin' mean, god damn.

When we fish off the pier, we are trying to catch a catfish with a heart in its mouth, side tentacles out of its face, we are trying to catch something that would eat another organ, what about a bottom feeder, I say, what about something that eats the worst of the worst. When we are at the bottom of the bottom, what more to say than this? Compare organs to see if they are the same shape. The same color. What is yellow in the body but fat? What is pink but nothing. Where is the heart but lower than where we think, what side of the body is it on, what side. I want to catch a fish with an organ in its mouth, catch a fish with underwear in its mouth.

A catfish pulled from the sludge with balled up white cotton underwear my Mother used to wear in its throat, how it suffocates to death on clothing. How we suffocate to death on clothing. Who suffocates and why.

I laid down underneath my desk for bravery. I am brave. No, I am not. Holding a beaten organ in my hand, pulped, pulped. I laid down underneath my desk to disappear, head between knees, in a sort of way eating myself metaphorically, eating myself in and in and in. I am wearing a skirt and I forget and I am opening my legs and anyone walking past can see my underwear, the way the thigh indents on the sides, muscle contracting.