ft ground

[pdf]

enjoy this first full draft of the short fiction piece i have been working on [pdf]

Far away again in autumn. The sunlight through a flat cloud as you stood on the sidewalk outside a door without a handle flat into the glazed bricks was quiet. The one week of the year had come across trees that had enough leaves on them to blot out the southern sun and the shade was warm enough to sit out in. You spent the long afternoon in a plaza downtown sitting on the swept bricks. In the absence of those faces you couldn’t retain your eyes filled with the white sky. You worked your way back through the mosaic, around cavernous voids that you could feel between your eyes and your skull where whole weeks had been handed over to some black vessel willfully, intentionally. You rock back and forth in the gathered up twine of time hanging down from Atlanta. In some phrases you are there, like now, under a sparse pear tree in the plaza, or slipping back down, not as a journey into that empty Valley, but a plummet, or a twinkling transmigration into a moment. When you began at the end, as a human destination with a trail let out behind it, there was nothing concrete enough to withdraw from but the euphoria of the continuing tides of the hotel, to step backwards from your death and gaze upon it from life. You knew the debris that ended every story. The same things with different connotations. You felt like a bronze cast. (more…)

In the autumn you got an efficiency apartment, found the ditched car, and unpacked all of the contents, including a large, wise-eyed brown cat asleep on its roof. You hadn’t noticed how much had been left in the car. It seemed to be everything. Everything was just barely enough, for a long time. (more…)

This is another artifact. I can feel when one gets caught up in me, physically, in a layer of my skin that feels sore in a continuous dull sheath around my body. I have thought, at the onset of the feeling, in the past, that I could not physically soothe it without clawing through myself, and I didn’t know what I would find. I shivered like there was an old man in me, right below the surface. If I bled myself he would seep out and dry onto paper his real voice, when, every so often, I feel him struggling to whisper through my skin. An ink wash of some time out of sorts. (more…)

You left early and left the bed made, you slept on top of the bed clothes and left the lamps on. They show through the curtain and the milky condensation. Jacky’s car was still there. It looked blue in the morning. It didn’t matter to you if it was the same car or a different car, his, someone else’s. What had mattered quickly seemed like a weight in your thoughts, like a lead apron draped over the breathing of days. He hadn’t been anything more than passage to this moment. What mattered now were the uncertain, shimmers in moments.
You weren’t far from where Interstate 70 split off, a huge divergence in flat open space, and you were heading due east. It was still before 9:00 a.m., still before breakfast, if you had been hungry, or aware of it, instead of aware that every other wash of feelings that a body could have pooled into the room you holed yourself up in at the Book Cliffs Lodge in Green River. The sun and air were hot but they looked cold, they were clear and pure but you believed them dusty. It is easier to think everything else is corrupted and ruined. You pulled back the oil cloth curtains and leaned back in a chair in the enormous room.
You tried to nap. It was too early and regardless of the solid curtains and doubted lamps, it was too bright and you felt your eyes on display. You lay on the floor underneath the table, held its wood cabriole feet and looked beneath the bed. There was a note stuck on the carpet. Someone had written “blood stains” on it. You found more of them around the room. Some merely described the things they were stuck to, others might have pieced together a history of deficiencies so local and anaesthetized that you wanted to be sure not to be recorded. The objects or their losses didn’t have significance. They had to be named, and you wanted to take names as you ran, and you didn’t want to tow a suite of new visions with you.
You had been in the room for hours without eating or seeing the sky and was impregnated with motel grog that you felt in the back of all of your senses, the back of your throat, the back of your eyes, the inside of your skin. Night woke you. You dialed Jacky’s number from a payphone in a cloud of white light. A lantern hung from the wall above it that made your hands yellow. A different voice spoke. It had a southern accent, it sounded tired, it sounded ceramic, from a room full of hard surfaces, and narcotic, like the mouth and lips were gauze, all in one word, “Yes?” and you hung up. You bought a huge bag of corn tortilla chips and a jug of orange juice and shut yourself back in the room.
When the lights at the road came up and the joint in the oil cloth curtain went from orange to diaphanous turquoise, you pushed open the door and walked along the row of cars parked outside the windows, each for each, and around to a detached building with more rooms. It smelled like paint and carpet. Only a few lights were on in the double breasted hallways and they had red dimpled glass shades, like a pizza parlor dipped in night’s blood, and each door, below the peephole, had a sticky note with the same handwriting on it as the one in my room. Each one listed what was missing from the room. You read down the hallway until you could piece together a rather complete picture, from what was missing, of what embodied the minimum semblance of living. The room was what made you exist. It was the least you could tumble into and allow yourself to fall asleep for six hours. You never touched the bedside table, or turned on the teevee, but its absence, a blankness there, would have awakened unknown unease, a misalignment in your charade of stability, and when you returned to your room to get sick on tortilla chips and orange juice, you sat wondering what was missing from this room.

this room that we’ve sat in, on the floor as it pulls itself between the frames of the parted door
is our space of all movement and growth as our hands skirt the coarse surfaces like a chime rising from dark plain depths to roadside florescence
the green night is cloud laden on sidewalk arcades of windows with parted curtains windows with pulled tight overlapped curtains windows with slung open curtains as green seeps across the sparse floor where we lay
the moulding of wall where we lean and the tile lattice we pull ourselves across the stillness when we make it still falls on pressed wood low cabinets like breath dust
we’ve sat in this room and skirted fixed croppings of stability peered into corner’s grates for days on end and lay on piers rising and softly tossing in the side lamp light.
I heard you sitting in the doorway and around spindlelike legs rising high above shagpressed scruff I saw you sit in grey light between blinds scoring shadow on your skin from blinds hanging like masks in window ports to move stable rooms.
I see you in this room with me, slumped oblong at wall groin and me stretched from the low lying green to the dark spot where we have felt pavement where my hand reaches to.
At the second level windows hanging in the volume of the vaporous stars casting yellow through matted screens against many painted tenant walls. And walls reflections hold the night as captive to be read as stains when the silver sun soon rises.
Los Angeles has the cruelest morning, slipping through the empty predawn streets in the tightest time of year, stripping the coats now cats beds to nestle. I’m away so much of the time. Hermetic spring by now oscillating fans are spring breezes and the refreshing showers of Atlanta are hot afternoon bathing stepping across cat litter scattered on the bathroom floor. And my bed gets hot when I lie there ’til 2pm. When I’ve been sleeping on the futon for days and not waking up.
low wall corners grey striated smudges where cats have struck their sides so many times
This room is too big everything feels groundless and distant like a poorly stocked thriftstore. The table and lamp next to one another look useless, there are cords stretched across the floor rising up to outlets, tan on a semigloss white wall. The room is Green River to me, too big each piece of furniture each trinket in the gift shop each home in the town is afforded with too much space, and no acknowledgement that that place is where it actually belongs. But for some reason there is a sense of striving to find a place within this vastness, each room in this motel has summoned a balance, a catalogue of elements, that seems so programmed to perfection, that deficiencies can be found listed on post-it notes outside rooms. Yet it still feels empty. The air in the rooms and hallways smells the same as it does outside, warm, dry, and unbreathed. And this room, with its stretch of mauve carpet, its pockets of furniture legs meeting the floor and its white walls and ceilings, seems so big, as to swallow up the town, as to leave me as a spectator who is just passing through its endless migration.