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.

Dan and Dina Observe a Sky Writer

The things once said to you, long ago, appear now in the sky above the tower, trailing behind a small red airplane, and this saddens you, really, because flight is always melancholy and these little planes remind you of the past, which is also melancholy.

You believed you had forgotten these words, and that because you'd forgotten them, you'd buried them. Hadn't they been put to rest safely in the coffers of your own blank spaces? No one else should have had access to them, but you were handing the key to anyone who asked, and they are there now, emblazoned on the sky, words that had been private, that had unsettled you as they ceased their confused silence at the end of your tongue. What ambiguous treachery, seeing what you've written, somewhere other than where you had initially written them. The lines become more definite as their ambiguity is made more available. For everyone else, you wish to speak quietly.

At one time you had felt chosen, privileged with language, though you did not know why, and though really, a reason was not really what you were after, but a promise of continuance, solidity.

Of course, it isn't possible the sky-writer write them all, for there is only so much sky a plane can cross, and of course you can't read them all, there is only so much time before the wind sweeps the text away, returns the sky to its primary blankness.

But then this is okay. Their ever-approaching difference is what excites you, and they should be moving, endlessly on the verge of disappearing; but for you specifically, as though there are no other people looking up at this particular moment and seeing these particular words.

Dina and Dan Return From Abroad To Find Ulrich In the Tower

It would seem silly of me not to become "the hero of my own novel". After only a few days, I've shut this entire place down. The windows have been sealed with tar, a blackish distillate. There in the mirror stands my image. What a strange place to find yourself, in a mirror, in a tower. It is I who live here now. My name is Ulrich. It's very dark, dank--which suits me perfectly. Ulrich, the dank, Ulrich the dark. I came by the tower via fashionable literature. It is my tower now, I who live here. A man in a red suit coat offered the position and his carriage. I was dropped off, bag in hand, no more than a week after my acceptance. That was it. I took the ring of old keys and turned the locks. Now there's no manner of my interacting with "the outside world" except for a little hole I've fashioned in the top part of the wall, so that I can keep an eye on things.

One recognizes very clearly the scar on your forehead, from when you slammed it against the table, covered with papers, on which you've written your observations. For instance, the weather here is particularly fascinating. For instance, what is weather? A condition for the appearance of things, whose forms rely on that which makes forms sensible. It means for example the puddles of rain on the streets of the city where you were born, or the hill covered in snow, where you went sledding with school friends. This is exactly why I'm here, the form of being here.

One must strive to exist in weather, not as it is, but as you would have it. It rises and falls according to the whims of your intellect. It sears and burns, then the wind stirs, cool and plaintive, it makes its first gesture, and something emerges. It looks like you, feels like you. It as though you were a parent or guardian, seeing life, new life, adjust its mouth, as it opens up to howl

Dan Abandons Dina For Greener Pastures

It is nighttime then it is daytime and then its nighttime again and we are under the big orange tree balancing ourselves against each other and it is light enough for the street light to not come on but dark enough that when I look down I cannot see the distance of ourselves between each other under this large orange tree that should have dropped leaves so long ago. We are in these hills together, you and I, and we are in these hills because, you and I, must say goodbye, even though what does this even mean, we see in movies and TV, it's not goodbye but so long, see you later, see you soon. You send me a text that says my love I love! but it is not this orange tree that dies eventually, or these hills that will pass, too, no. These hills will be here forever, I say to you without prompting, the first thing I say. When we take trips we look up the mountainside to see lumps of houses that skew our view, most cities have skyline orders, you tell me, these ugly houses cannot break this mountain skyline so that when you look up for a view you don't just see money in the form of walls, rooms. My love I love! not this light and dark moment on Conlon Street, where everything is a photograph, half-developed.

It is daytime and then it is nighttime, and then it is daytime again. I am reenacting a dance move in front of the mirror, my body awkwardly working this way and that, my body awkwardly moving.
Remember when we danced in my living room, your head nodding back and forth to an awkward rhythm from a stereo I left behind when I left that summer. As of today, at that time that year, we only had a few more weeks left, and you were in love with another, so soon so soon. When the tables turn. Who do we call to fix the loose screw, the loose nail.

My love, I love!  but not me, as we are distance in the form of the blackest hole, this vortex of suck, in and out and in and out. If we could pry open my ribcage, among the others, is a heart the shape of a baby's two fists shoved deep in their mouth, up and over the dimples of knuckles, as if fisting itself, fisting itself. If we could pry open my ribcage, an organ the shape of a state in America, a city just as big, these rolling mountains of scraggle, this unending doom of West. If we could pry open my ribcage, you could see the promise of gold if you just dig, the arrangement of settlers that if you till the land and make something fruitful, you can keep the land. But it's not so easy when the conditions are sour. It's not so easy, this dream, this dream.

What if I gave up completely? It is daytime and nighttime, so much a blur already.

Dina and Dan Ride Public Transportation

When I get on the bus, there are eight women and children and I cannot help but feel as if this is the Titanic and we're all going to go down, deep into the dark concrete, deep down underneath the soil towards the center fire core, where we would say we were going to dig to China, Australia, like the heart, down deeper below where we thought it would be, we are going to dig and keep digging into the sternum, into the pockets of yellow fat like you saw in the frog that you cut up in science class, you didn't refuse, you relished in it, in fact, asked if you could have the frog tongue to keep in your pocket with you the rest of the day, your teacher of course said yes because he was a creep, too. Later, before this particular bus ride, you will remember being a year out of his class and going to his class and saying to him "you loved having me in class, I rocked your world" and he blushed but did not say that it was inappropriate. I told him you were a lesbian, seen at the football game holding hands with another woman, seen holding hands, "so what?" was the teacher's response, who cares, no one cares if she's a lesbian "ew, it's gross" I said, but what I really meant was, "I want another woman, too."

There are eight women and children on the bus and we are stopping at every stop, every single stop is requested but no one gets off and no one gets on. Still. We jerk past the stops the way your arms tingle before a heart attack. I thought I was having a heart attack once, I threw up on myself in my car on the way to the hospital. Turns out it was just gas. Still. What more to a heart attack than the body eating itself and stopping oxygen, the torture and beauty of it all. The heart says, enough. The heart says, enough. You should have stopped a long time ago. You cannot simply snort heroin and stop all of a sudden, you puke on yourself on the way to the hospital, that is what you do. You feel like you are having a heart attack, the biggest anxiety attack you've ever had.

The last stop a man gets on and it changes the dynamic of the bus ride. All of a sudden, all the women are flocking, they are asking him questions, the children are vying for his attention as if he is the leader of this pack, as if he is Daddy to every child, Husband to every woman. I am on the bus and we are going down, the strongest ship to ever sail the sea, we are all going to die. The man is tipping his fitted ball cap towards me, saying hello, hello, with his yellow stained teeth. Eight women and children riding around waiting for Daddy, waiting for hubby.

Dina and Dan say Happy New Year in July

Across the fence, there would be different strokes of ringing for the need, the want, the necessity. Across the fence, there would be a different bell and long song, a different singing, a warranted eventual warning sign, across the fence, different strokes of ringing for need. Ring Ring, we would hear and we would come running, we would come running, or maybe not running, underneath the bell here we are, here we are. Across the fence and into the basement, God Bless America, it is July and the bells are even further south, the King of the Forest is no longer the King, de-crowned on this day of independence and freedom. Across the fence, the bell rings and we respond, we look towards the sound together, we look towards the sound. Here is the time that we can remember our feelings, we can remember the ways in which we are who we are. Today across the fence, the ring and and the silence, I cannot remember anything but the silence. We are in France, in Paris, and we are celebrating the 4th of July which no one cares about there, no one cares. We light sparklers that a police officer puts, out says "Pardon" in French says "you cannot do that here" in English and we put them out like cigarettes, the burn the soft folds of our hands. Across the fence, there would be different bell strokes, two rings for this, five rings for that, like a really bad morse code across a sea through different lines, across the fence there is need and want, we are all de-crowned, sitting in our own sweat, waiting. Here we are, bells and bells. We are in the basement with the fireworks with the fireworks that pop too close to my eardrum, I am deaf in the right ear. I cannot see out of the left eye. In this city in the west, there are no fireworks this year, every surface area of land from here to the state border is on fire. Out west, so much fire. Out west, so much fire. I cannot see out of the left eye, cannot hear out of my right ear. In the city in the west, deaf, deaf.

Dina and Dan with Moths

The little girl watches the other little girls tongue kiss and she wonders what other little girls taste like, do they taste like her, like the way mothballs smells, what does that mean that she tastes that way. When she gets older other little girls will wonder why she smells that way, too, as if her outside skin smells the way moths' inside skin smells like, all dust and garbage.

The little girl wonders what this means to smell of dust and garbage, how this means that the ocean is filled with moth corpses when they went swimming, the saw so many insect corpses that they could not swim anymore, she was afraid of the insect corpses in her bathing suit laying eggs in her brand new pubic hair that she shaved when it first came in because it made her uncomfortable and she shaved with a dry razor and it hurt so bad she had to wear a maxi pad all week when she didn't even really know what a maxi pad did for anyone.

Dina and Dan: I Dont Care Mom and Dad Rock N Roll Makes Me Feel Like I Am Always About To Cry

Then in the tiniest passes

It’s first behind the sky, in the wind

Because that’s the plan they came up with

It’s the weather they have

And I moved along the roof

The air smelled like evening

Maybe a feeling like that

Imposing itself, my time overseas

Dripping through boughs

Long ago setting out,

Only to come by desire

The considerable façades of friends and evenings

Without knowing for what

But still elbowing for a spot to talk

And look, the hemline of Jillian’s shirt

Saddened the way you looked so desperately

At the young kids standing around

Wearing clothes

You no longer fit into, the same

Breasts on Sunday morning,

And in the vapid haze of middle age

The little sky hung watery

Shot through with steeples

I used to write poetry about moonlight

I braced myself but that was all I could do

Before I lost my balance, I went out

Headfirst, or sideways, the sound

Fell away as I fell and the sky flashed

In abstraction, I saw things

It’s always these and feeling so

I let go, I mean I really laid myself

Out, but did not mean to

Though I had long desired  

Its elegance, tumbled over the drain

Pipe into bushes along the garage.

You came running out, yelling, you fell

I told you, you were going to fall 

Dina and Dan, Yr Parents Totes Dont Luv U & U Will Be Alone 4EVR

Dream of evening

then the bubbling mess

at my arriving on time in fits of spit up and drool that identify me as a speaker of language variously establishing itself.

The globe and map were drawn of artists, for the sake of new thinking, and we were supposed to believe them, growing beautiful in constantly discarded minutes, as they collided with new lands, horizons of their own fashioning.

. The extremes are actually rather broad swaths. The middle line is but a hair, says Emerson.

I imagine I go outside. There is

nothing.

The marvelous thing is that even if he says it's painless it actually really hurts and it smells worse 

Dina and Dan Lose a Baby

There is a bedroom preserved in time in a museum of the little girl, her things are all arranged, everything that was donated from her parents, the little girl's room is set up as if in a time capsule, this is what her room would look like had she lived, she was a messy little girl.

There is a river down the hill where a body was a found, a body is found every summer washed up from the ocean. Once in the news a pregnant lady was found, her baby still intact inside of her but her head and arms and legs where eaten by sharks. All that washed up was the torso and the baby and the bulging breasts still kept inside a maternity tank top.

There is a river down the hill from the museum where you can look out of the replica of the little girl's bedroom and see the river where the bodies are found in July, always July. The river is a mausoleum, a final resting place, the river is a mausoleum, if only for a little while.

There is a bedroom preserved in time in a museum of the little girl, her things are all arranged, everything that was donated from her parents was not actually hers. They had gone to a thrift store and bought things to bring. They could not bare to give anything of hers away, and besides, they did not want anyone to know that she was a tomboy. She did not have any frilly, girly things in her bedroom and now that she had washed up on the shore, they were embarrassed. Before she had disappeared, they were not embarrassed, but now they are, they should have bought her more pink and more dolls. Maybe then she would not have left her home before school that day. Maybe she would have locked the doors and called her parents. When the museum asked for some of her things to help educate others, they could not give away her basketballs or her playing cards. They gave dolls she never owned.

There is a river down the hill where bodies are found in the middle of the summer, you can look out of the window of the replica of the little girl's bedroom and see where she washed up on shore, her arms and legs and head still intact, her torso fine but bloated with heat and salt water.