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Missed Connection,

Thanks for visiting again! It was very nice to see you. I hope you enjoy your half-pound of hard salami, making all sorts of delicious, meaty creations! Eat it quick so you can visit sometime soon, preferably before my last day (May 16).

Love,
Deli Wench

PS. I like your beard.

BAM! it’s the BIG BAD BOOK.

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TODAY IS A BIG DAY. Kind of.

Approximately Yes, the book, is Blurb-ready—meaning, it’s up for grabs here. I made the book for a final project in my Lit editing class, compiling all of my favorite images, poetry and writings into 54 pages of homemade love.

This is something I’ve always wanted to create and it feels so nice to pull through with it. I really edited it down to what was most meaningful to me, tossing out a lot of the so-so ramblings and hubbub.

I certainly don’t encourage purchasing it, but the preview (click below) is so much fun!

I want to keep flipping through the pages. If I had the time, I would. Really.

Love,
Jenny

Fourth Grade’s Dreams

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IN FOURTH GRADE, I WAS ASSIGNED my first research paper. We could select the topic of our interest, go to the archaic library and pull together sentences that were as unplagiarized as was possible from a fourth grader, and type up several pages on the gargantuan PCs that bowed the desks they sat on. It was the assignment of the century.

My topic was—no questions asked—the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d never seen it, but loved the bright crimson arcs, it’s magnitude, the photos my grandparents had taken during their visit. I plugged away at the paper. I wanted to be a part of the paper.

At 10, as I recall, everything outside a 10-mile radius seemed miles away. Europe, Africa and Asia were on another planet. Sphinxes and Van Goghs and gondolas on Venetian canals were only images seen by 1960’s photographers, published in Little Flower School’s musty, crumbling library archives. The Golden Gate Bridge was somewhere, lain across a span of deep blue, cars sliding across it day by day. I’d never been on a plane. Back then, I never even imagined state lines.

Now that I’m 22, I grasp distance and the concept of velocity—that I can be somewhere, can go places with just time and patience (maybe a little money helps, too) and be far away. Now that I’ve been to every corner of the United States, and seen how the states are united from forest to forest, Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, Roswell to Orlando—I understand. There is an Interstate, a highway system, back roads patterned across every terrain that want to be driven on.
Come June, I will see Golden Gate when I finally visit—and for the summer, live in San Francisco. I’ve never been to California, but I’ve never met a state I didn’t like. And this 10-20 mile radius I’ve been circling for the past months will, for the while, lay by the wayside as Fourth Grade’s dreams transpire.

Fake Nails

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THERE WAS A TOILET, AND A BATHROOM STALL, and a fake nail on the floor. I looked at it, it looked at me with it’s faux french tip, nude plastic and glue shriveled around the contours. It was a lifeless, detached from the digits it clasped to, whose fingers it ran through the hair of, perhaps nose-picked, stroked, licked and scratched. On the bathroom floor, it was lost.

Never, I thought to myself, would anyone catch me wearing those. And, I haven’t, not since prom two-thousand-something when my date picked me up in his dad’s SUV, I wore a $25 eBay lace wedding dress, and that was that. I’d never thought about fake nails since, like holiday decorations on clearance after the fact, like your high school mile time—you forget.

I looked down at my paint-stained, stinky cream shoes, yesterday’s socks I’d slipped on my feet in haste after a morning run, my long jeans rolled to accommodate my legs, the broken zipper on my pants. Shit. Fake nails are yet years, years away.

Orchestra

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Seat 8, Row L

Fixed on the great slate of stage scattered with
things and strings
black
shoes shiny, collars white, a parade
to orchestrate.
Seat 1, third from left
Wooden lap covered in Italian sap
black
look out, I came
to
Lights dim
watch you play.
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“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”
—From a card I received from my mom

The Expressers

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RICK, OR ROGER, OR BOB the amputee is sitting in his duct-taped wheelchair at a table on Thursday afternoon, talking about the weather to Roy or Vern or Dennis, a lonely elder who frequently sits in the corner and stares out the window. My mind decides they’re on their eighth cup of coffee grain water, sipping between words, gazes out the window, tapping the empty cup against the table, chud chud chud—like time, too, is drying up.

Ike, age 73, comes in in a neon vest. He just got off a day’s worth of construction, looking for a doughnut, or a can of nuts that he didn’t need, just wanted to stop and say hello again.
And Dennis—the real Dennis, with both legs, the Dennis that comes in every day, three times a day to read the employee paper and talk about “Senator Shithead,” to circle the donuts, then go eat dinner with Mom—he shows up.
The conniving Vietnam War Veteran (his hat says so every day) that looks like a Larry but acts like a Clyde, the grocery-store-free-donut-abusing-maven (then again, he fought a war), raccoon eyes, leather jacket, waddles in, inspects, walks out. Routine.
Dorothy’s not here today—doesn’t come around much but Sunday mornings since the accident, in the store, in her pants.
Ike, age 73, swings by again after a shower and pacemaker checkup.
When it starts to flow, when limbs and wives and bladder control are lost and a retirement is reckoned with, counted, leaned on, hearts stimulated by artifices, as mornings grow longer, days shorter—you begin to amble within the scene. It’s lax. Rick or Roger and Vern, Dennis, Clyde and Ike—they lean back and stare out the window together, to South University where the college kids fly by and large women—always large women—wait for the next bus on another bygone day, chud, chud, chud, as time dries up.
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Emilio Sosa: I love you. Mostly because you are exotic, hip from Harlem, all-too-confidently gliding through project runway (if you can withstand the swimsuit incident, you’re a WINNER in my eyes). Okay, you’re completely arrogant, but it’s never stopped me before. An ego your size wouldn’t leave room for the both of us. Whatever. Still love you.
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When I begin to think about it too intently, and recall how it unfolded, and where the feelings lie, and every day spent curled up in bed in the basement, and running through the park to run away from everything unfolding, lying, curling up in a basement bed, when I recount on two hands the number of times I dreaded the day, four a.m., defeat, defeat, repeat, curled up in bed…

You’re never going to be

…and trembling, he-who-he-who-he-who’ing until my breathing leveled, de-anxietating, talking myself down to a dull sleep, a song, a happy thought I couldn’t fathom, all brought on by a photograph, an accomplishment, a succession of stark epiphanies. You don’t want to eat, or speak, or become well—you want to curl up in your basement bed and feel defeated—and I did. When I think too intently I recall, I was defeated.

And I could turn off the lights and slowly, he-who-he-who-he-who myself to sleep.