Dina and Dan Forget, and in the Forgetting

The lights are always so much brighter in the evening, as the color descends and then dissents like a spiral but always in motion, we are becoming bigger and we are becoming brighter. You take out your phone and take a picture of the sky but it never quite comes out the way you expected it to. You put it on the Internet, I watch you, but its all pixelated and weird and kinda wonky and you are disappointed and you are prone to be and I kind of don't care.

We are at a very fancy bar that stays close for the month of Febuary because, even in this big city, they stay money ahead when they close they tell us. We sit and eat truffled frittes and drink some wine I can't pronounce and we are sitting closely, speaking in whispers about movement and action, someone should do something with this godforsaken city.

After the fancy bar: a walk. After a walk: my house, which we've been in exactly 28 times together but you can't ever seem to remember which floor I'm on.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, I am startled, as if someone is standing over me. But there is no one there, the window is open and no wind, I can't even pretend it was the horizontal mini-blinds making noise. I feel a presence and you are snoring. I turn on the light and I am scared and I am sitting on the floor, I am freaked out that you are here, like it's high school and I'm waiting for my parents to figure out that I sneaked you in but this is adulthood and its my apartment and its the middle of the night and people are walking incessantly back and forth because it is the basement and we can see out the windows to the street, it is street-level this window, and there are honks and arguments and drunks and clicks of high heels. It never ends. I am freaked out and sitting on the floor now in the dark and I am smoking a cigarette and you shift in the bed to your other side, grab the pillow, don't even realize I'm not there, which is fine. The way it should be.

Dan, listen to this

The last time I had my period I was with the person I fell in love in a 17th floor hotel room in a city I used to live in and know well. We were discussing all of the red flags they saw that told them they could not love me and that they could not even give me a chance in loving me even though I have been in love with people three times as good looking and have received love back in return, even if for a short while, even if years later.

I am in this hotel room and they fuck me with my tampon inside of me because I am afraid of taking it out and bleeding all over the bed, them, my legs. I do not want to see the blood. I only want to see blood if it is because they caused the blood. I do not want to remember that I am bleeding and have been for a week, a week early, of course. They wrap their fingers around the string of the extra large tampon and begin to jerk it in and out of me, every time a little deeper inside, so I gasp out of pain, mostly. When we are done doing whatever it is we think we are doing, I have to run to the bathroom and struggle to pull it out of me, it is so far inside. I am worried for two seconds I won't be able to get it out. Finally, I do, and it is oversized and full of fluid, heavy, weighty. I throw it on the bathroom floor. I run back out and they are masterbating but with the covers over their body and I ask what are you doing, what are you doing and finally they throw back the covers and say this, is that OK, and yes of course. The next moment I am jerking them off. The next moment it is the middle of the morning and dark, I am watching the fog lift from the city, they are on the edge of this huge King size bed, they never reach for me once, in the morning they leave so quietly I don't hear them.

Dina Remembers Things Maybe Dan Forgot

There is a certain permission we give ourselves to feel however we want to feel because if we don't give ourselves the permission, we'll kill ourselves eventually with all the things we feel buried deep inside, so deep that even we can't feel it for years and years.

You tell me that if you would have met me a few years earlier than when we met, you would not have been able to handle the relationship, it would have been too much, that the intensity could not be matched accordingly when you were 20 but when you were 23 you were so happy to simply be seen by someone that was like you. Peas in a pod, pigs in a sty/blanket.

What does this mean, when I walk down the sidewalk on Christmas Eve and it is snowing and I am alone in this big city. 7-11 is open on the corner, that is all. I am stumbling. I am sitting on my front porch and watching you stumble. When I stand outside of my building, I understand dancing more, why people do it, why people go anywhere at all. I understand why and how you danced with me all those years ago in a shitty club in our hometown small city and I told you danced like a fag and I mean it in the most loving way possible, you are the most beautiful dancer.

Do you remember in that same club to the '80's music we wept and held each other twice. Once before I left for another state for another life and once when I came back after 2 months for a visit because I had fallen in love with a woman that lived 18 blocks away from you. We were standing there watching the dancers and crying, crying, don't go you said to me why did you ever have to go and all I could do is rub the inside of your hand that had been bleeding earlier because, you said, you got into a fight with the guys at the shop and started throwing shrapnel like metal bits at each other off the floor from the machines and this time, this time, what was being thrown at you hit and stuck, inside of the soft perfect palm of your hand. You wince when I rub and I stop. I'm always hurting you and I don't even know it.

I told you once a long time ago that you broke my heart and you didn't understand and I didn't understand why you didn't understand, its really easy, I loved you and you didn't love me and it broke my heart. But, you said, I never had your heart to begin with. I never asked for it. I don't want it. I'm sorry, you said, I'm sorry. But this is ridiculous.

And you are right. It was ridiculous. I was young and in love and not willing to admit it.

It is 4AM and I am dancing by myself in my living room. I had no idea that this is where I would end up at 30 years old. (Almost 30, you remind me, almost 30, you are not 30 yet Dina. Because, when I turn 30, you are only 40 days behind me, 30 here we come, summer babies.) I am dancing by myself and I am remembering your chest and shoulders and how I could probably still hide behind your body if I needed to to avoid people as I did at that club downtown so long ago. You are the perfect human shield.

2013 Dina/Dan

I have lost everything I love, Dan. What happened.

I am in a 17th floor hotel room and I am asked by a person I am in bed with to tell them a story and when I say that I am not very good at stories, they tell me that is what I do, I tell stories, so let's hear it and so I give them this story:

My older brother knocked up my best friend after high school but kind of just on the outskirts of in high school. Our younger sister loves to hotbox ganja. My best friend + my brother's baby contracted a disease where it did not live but yet she had to wait to be induced to get rid of it so she looked very pregnant when in fact the child was not alive. Our younger sister, not that she was insensitive, but more that she had this job at H&M and was very interested in being downtown and in her car and on her phone and smoke a lot of weed around my best friend. One day we were outside smoking a cigarette and this elderly couple came up and lectured my best friend about smoking while pregnant. I learned a good lesson about compassion and mercy that day. After they left, she said she wanted to kill them and the whole time she was listening she was imagining gutting them from jugular to asshole. Because the baby was dead. Why didn't we just tell them that? I don't remember. I remember that we walked into the house and my little sister and her little sister who also worked at H&M downtown were watching Faces of Death, the one were the very diplomat looking professional man goes up to a podium and kills himself with a gun. What the hell. Why would anyone watch that.

I tell this story to the person that I come to find out I am in love with. It is winter and it gets dark early and we are up so high we can see the entire city West, East, North, beautiful. They tell me it is not a good story, not the story they wanted to hear, don't I know any uplifting stories, why is everything so violent, so gloomy.

So I tell them a few fragments of other stories, run-ins with celebrities when I followed jambands across the country and sold drugs, comedians, musicians, not impressive but what they wanted to hear.

Dan, don't you see. The next day they left me. They next week the woman that I love left me. Dan, you have left me. What kind of story do you want to hear? Tell me first so I can get it right the first time.

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.

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.