dead maple leaf

"There is beauty even in that which terrifies the heart."

i

At the rest stop we are on the run. From his habit, my nightmares, a city too familiar. We crossed the Mason Dixon line six hours ago and suddenly everyone is so friendly. I stand up after waiting for him in the grass and before we get into the car a crazy woman says form across the water fountains, "Girl, you have bones and feathers hanging from your dress!"

I look at her eyes and there is no confusion on my face. I want to remember what she looks like and everything else I can in this moment when someone snapped me back into who I want to be and always thought I was. I'm so tired. I haven't slept. I smile as he comes up behind me and pulls the dead and dry five pointed maple leaf from my ass. She laughs, "Oh it's a leaf." I wait. He's already in the car with it running. The janitors are watching, smirking, they know her well, but still never know what to expect. She shakes her head and looks confused. She narrows her eyes and nods like she understands everything.

"It sure looked like bones, girl. Sure looked like it."

ii

C texts me at three am, "dad- mom and i are in jail. call us call us."

I laugh into my pillow. My lover stirs and turns to read it. He loves C's texts as much as I do, even if they wake us up in the middle of the night. They are so bizarre and creative and alive. I write them all down in my journal. He is such a vibrant fallen star. It's sad to see his shine dying when he's twinkling like broken Christmas lights on the pavement outside of the show. I couldn't stand the music so he took me outside to sing me Jandek lyrics.

I don't even care if I'm in a wheelchair
Or in a bed
Unable to move
For all I know
It's better than what I did today

I'm out of beer money so I drink his light. He's blinding the gargoyles on the rooftop above, but nobody here even notices us.

iii

As I fall asleep I see a dead girl suspended in the sky. Everyone is asking me what happened. I tell them she drowned. Up there. In the sky. Somehow in that doorway of a dream, it made sense. It was possible.

International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers!

Today, Dec. 17th, is a day to remember and mourn and get angry and get behind the committment to always speak up when sex workers are being stigmatized or bashed or assaulted. Click on the link to read suggested activites and/or stories of victims. It's real and it matters.

Best City To Embrace A Broken Heart In.

Scrying antique shop windows in the city of feeling and floods, I lose my face in the Virgin de Guadalupe right next to the civil war saber and the heavy plantation keys. Three hours of rain and my boots are full of water. Lightning behind me. Like the not too distant past,it strikes and splinters the sky. It sends my aura into disarray- radiant vibrations of remembering, real enough to break down my walls and send me whirling. I'm holding my own hand trying to hold on. What a small world. How can she hold so much love and hurting?

At the coffee shop, the traveling kids adorned with bells and patches had their dogs sleeping under the table. They smelled like trains and sweat. I recognized their faces so far away from home. They are Rick's friends and she was definitely wearing his sweater. That is whats-his-name, with the van named Pheobe that we parked next to Kenai when we were all healthy and whole, calling ourselves vanarchists and van cousins. What are they doing here where I ran to to forget? I say hello and we talk, they ask about him and they tell me exactly what they were doing when they found out he was sick. We remember together and she gives me a letter. I say it's lovely to deliver a letter by hand that traveled over land and sea. She says it's very Rick. I agree. I walk out before I show too much worry. I stop in front of a window and pretend to be looking inside of something besides myself.

We need Mary's and Saviours that cry and are remembered crying. How else can we trust the divine unless they are human? And why did the traveler girl tell me she thought of me and my tarot that day as the death card of her new deck laid daydreaming in her small, pretty hand. Are there always two cities inside me, there and here never clearly marked, never clean? Marie Laveau, was it torture doubling your spirit, being at two places at once? If you could choose your remembering, what would you forget? Do all these shrines and painted portraits keep you here when you need to be somewhere else? Maybe no one is as carefree as they seem. Maybe every drunk reveller on Bourbon street has a secret pain burning inside them. Probably. Surely.

I walk away from the me in the glass and I feel so guilty for not being able to just let go and have the perfectly happy vacation in a city of constant celebrations. I want to feel completely carefree and unattached. I want to float, not fight to swim. If I could cry, that would be better than numbness.

I sit down to coffee and I hear a man singing outside. It isn't unusual. This city is full of charm and life. People are always performing, singing, selling art and destiny. On any night, rain or shine, you can find a psychic reading palms and tarot cards on a milkcrate in an alley with one candle and two bricks to sit on. But this song- I know this one and it is exactly what I need to hear. Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come." Everyone inside runs to the door to hear him. In this city everyone has a hustle and the homeless have big, amazing voices full of duende and feeling. He sings with his whole heart and body and I listen and cry. Behind him the old world cottages and colonial houses sit timelessly with gas lanterns and elaborate iron fenced balconies and lazy, enchanting spanish moss swaying in the wind. The skyscrapers jut up in the distance, perfectly out of reach. A frosty the snowman figurine leans against a palm tree. His wife waits under an awning, smiling, watching over their shopping cart as he sings. He keeps his eyes on my sister and me and we hold hands and listen. The song is so sad, but so hopeful, translating into something spoken that small seed of faith you always have deep inside you, no matter what you've been through, no matter who you've seen hurting when you couldn't help them, couldn't save them from the betrayal of bodies and flesh and time. He finishes and we drop money in his box and I run into the bathroom to cry privately. I cry hard and it feels like everything I have been through in the past two years is having its final say and leaving, happy to move onward. I realize there is no better place on earth to be sad in. Why not be broken hearted and humble and hurting here, New Orleans, where everywhere you walk, someone sings your pain right back to you as something beautiful? New Orleans, voted by me to be the best city to embrace a broken heart in.

I wipe my tears and my twin sister and I walk out into the rain. I feel so light. No pressure to pretend to be happy if I am not feeling it. But suddenly, I'm feeling it. Out of nowhere a huge crowd of people dressed in decadent Santa Claus costumes rushes past us. They are drinking and singing and all of them are half naked. They smile and cheer and try to drag us with them. We break free, laughing. We are walking to the riverfront. Seeing the Mississippi at night is big on my list. Two years ago I was driving home from Alaska and I was so surprised to find the Mississippi running way up in Minnesota. I knew things were hard and getting harder, so I left a prayer there by the shore behind a reststop and I said I'd meet it down here when it found its way. I saw where it began and now I need to see where it ends, or, at least, lets go into something greater.

New Orleans, Heal My Heart..

My twinsister and I are in New Orleans! Cities of the dead today, swamp tour tomorrow! Who dat?

I haven't been writing much.

sorry.

No Place Like

Girl, I envy your every line. Your skirts, how they swish and swallow.
Tulle and tulips and lace. How they hold our eyes and lives
unscripted. On the street

there's a dead pigeon. Its heart got runned over [sic].
You would take a picture and I would hide my eyes
and the neighborhood kids laugh as I take a feather

for a dreamcatcher full of nightmares
that I wouldn't change for nothin
because when I say I hurt, it don't mean I'm unhappy.

She writes me from the next world,
says they got her on robbery charges.
Says home aint changed
and Johnny King's still kickin.
He got caught smokin crack in a chicken coop.
She says can you believe it? I say I can, cause
aint that your dad? She says, nah, we aint sisters.

and we laugh. We are. Alive. We are. Sisters.
Somewhere in the stars we are a constellation
that never got a name, gets no representation:
hard-ass beauties riding death around like an old caddy.
She asks me do I remember the time we

Of course I do.

Then why you talk so fancy.
Why we aint seen you in so long?
Because I'm gone. Smoking the last one
and someone has to have it-

the escape. The fire-escape.
I'm circling it like a widow's walk,
watching for ghosts, wanting that morning
crow to call my name,
just once. I want that hand-planted city gingko
to turn into a catalpa
full of history and indian beans long like snakes
that fall like friends and slither toward water
to show me home

again I'm painting black mermaids. Again. Angry.
That the world can't give me one black mermaid
with dark, dark skin
and a skirt of scales that swallows all
of this appropriation.

Girl, I envy your every line,
but the country kids are laughing
at your skirt that says you never
tasted squirrel.
So put away the banjo and put down the pabst.
There's a lot more to it than that.

uninspired, depressed, and sleeping all fucking day.

man, i can't write shit.

For Sarah

By Ari

Four months have gone by since Sarah's passing. The following words were composed over that period of time, a time that has been extremely difficult for all of us. We continue to remember Sarah and in that spirit of rememberance, I offer these words:

These are tear stained words on soaked pages. Anyone who was blessed to have known Sarah Anne Goff would understand that. How could it be any different? For just shy of 24 years her spirit lit our world. For many of us, it will continue to for as long as her memory endures. An enduring spirit is one of the many gifts Sarah gives us. I am able to recall a vulnerability that was almost impossibly reconciled with a kindness that has never before been seen by me. I fear selling her short, which would be easy to do, but, I do not wish to mythologize her either; the battle is in finding the truth that lies in the middle.

The middle is where most of us live our lives, it is mundane, routine, and for the most part, not extraordinary. Sarah is not very different from us in that way. She woke up, went to work, spent time in class, and had a rich life filled with the people she most closely touched. What makes her special is that she made the ordinary extraordinary. She loved those in her life so intensely that the most cynical of us would have called her foolish. Foolish for always believing in the good in people and discounting the bad. Those of us that miss her the most undoubtedly feel the absence of the gift of love that she possessed, preserved, and shared freely.

It would be remiss to speak of her incredible internal beauty without mentioning her stunningly attractive physical features. Her looks will forever be preserved in photos, on tape, the internet, and our minds, but, she was no ordinary looking woman. Sarah is unique, and I will never again catch her in my eye walking down the street. I will never mistake someone else for Sarah, Sarah is one of a kind.

I deal with the pain of her loss all day everyday. Her impact is that deep in me. The void that her loss leaves in us will never be filled. It has been my belief that we too will never heal; But this is at best a half truth. No, we will never experience her embrace, or cherish the childlike wonderment of her smile. The things we won't experience are both devastating and innumerable. When thinking only of what we won't have, life itself becomes intolerable. Sarah may have at times felt this kind of despair. Like us now, she may have envisioned giving up. Most of us, in our darkest moments have considered such drastic measures, it is only human. Her pain, like ours, is most intense in the dark, it dies in the light of exposure. Some may think that Sarah let go. That in the final analysis she chose to give up on her suffering and travel on alone. I want to take Sarah from the darkness back into the light where she did so much for so many. This is how she deserves to be remembered.

Life, like so many things is spectral in nature. Sarah waxed and she waned. she had great joy and also tremendous sadness. She encompassed a gamut of emotions unique to all people. She is the consummate expression of the duality that is found in all humankind.Her passing was not a choice she made to abandon herself or those she loved. It could not have been, she still had too much she wanted to accomplish. When she went to sleep, she intended to wake up. She simply had too much to do and too much love to give.My fear is not that she gave up on living and loving, but, that some deep part of her felt unlovable . My one regret is not in losing this amazing person, but, that this beautiful person may not have known what a blessing she was to those who miss her so dearly.

ARI