I dreamed of it again, my dad’s body lost to us again but finally found again, we set him in Dickinson’s coffin, wooden, painted white, where had his body been all these years, things felt strange,
We wake up in the badlands when the sun begins to rise. It was a mistake to keep walking in the dark last night. Every pathway the same, we could have walked in a hundred circles. We put our hands on the ravine walls and used the planets...
We were quick to tell each other what we wanted. I said, I want to be cremated and then I want my ashes to be tossed in the Pacific and the Atlantic. He said I was greedy for wanting both coasts, but he’d do it.
The book of Kings tells that the mothers of two newborns approached Solomon, that wise ruler, to settle a dispute. One of the babies had died, and each woman insisted that she was the mother of the survivor.
After the pigs and lambs and rabbits were sold off at auction they bought a 30 dollar goat and named it Snowflake Brownie and then a second one called Cookie Dough the third Brandon but the names melded into dubbing them the Healing Goats...
By the time Kathy Acker died, in the autumn of 1997, I was nineteen and fully under her spell, having discovered her just a few years before. Her work brought me to all sorts of feelings—lust, rage, shame, guilt, rebellion, liberation...
It was actually a good year, the year before the downfall, a surprisingly good year in our little town. It was a year of bread on the table, a year with a new IPA in our glasses, a year with friends who visited with great frequency.
