Clotted Sleeping Bags

1954

2011-03-06T15:21:00.000-08:00

Happy 72nd Anniversary, Nana & Pop

High School Journalism: February 10, 2005

2011-02-24T14:11:00.001-08:00

My dear friend Ashley asked me if I could dig this article out for her clinical psychology program to show "what she brings to the therapy room" and to explain her culture. Pregnant teenagers in Dillsburg, PA, circa 2005. Dillsburg Banner. Click to Enlarge.

Sweet Marie

2011-01-30T23:35:00.000-08:00

Rest well, dear girl.

I was fifteen.

2010-10-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

My sister Katie is getting married this weekend. I'm home, my whole family's home, and I'm writing a speech. Searching for blank paper, I opened an old notebook in my girlhood bedroom, found this journal entry. Before I could drive, when I'd get wanderlusty, I'd take walks down the road, past the drive-in movie theater, to the park and the nearby housing development, hoping to see someone I knew. I'd take my notebook and a pen, and I'd write down what I saw. Tonight, something otherwise unremarkable feels even okay.

If I stare at a certain pont in the ground, I feel as if I'm drawing back from the world and the rest is moving forward.

Young dads with dark hair and goatees driving their daughters to soccer practice.

Freshly cut green grass in front of a house, trees planted a few years earlier with orange, yellow, blue plastic Easter eggs among the small, barely firm but budding branches.

Decorative flags blowing in the breeze, their bottoms torn from the wind.

A boy and a girl, fifth grade, playing basketball in a driveway with a grey minivan.

Yellow ribbons hanging from a white porch post, five miniature American flags on the post beside.

Weeping cherry tree. Bush, small and blob-like with seven yellow flowers blossoming beside.

Houses so carefully and artistically laid out, as if begging one to wonder who's inside, when they were married, how old their children are, and when they gave up hope of having the perfect life and family.

A small dark-haired girl riding her bicycle with white rubber wheels, fringes hanging off the white plastic handles. What's she thinking? Is she humming to herself? Blue pants, zip hoodie. I walk past, she smiles at me. Curious. Does she look up to me, want to be me? As I so longed to be old in my younger days of youth.

A girl tap-dancing on the sidewalk in school clothes and black tap shoes, her mother holding a puppy from leaving vicinity of the house. Girl and boy (playing basketball earlier) ride bikes past scene. I glance at a boy who looks about my age. I don't get a good look, but I know he keeps staring as I approach from the other side of the road. As I walk away, he comes out from the garage and walks; for a second our feet step in time.

An Open Letter to the Editor of the Daily Item

2010-07-19T09:39:00.001-07:00

Sir—

Regarding your article on Joel Snider’s 2nd targeted victim (“Detractors: 2nd Snider target runs cult retreat,” July 18th), you were wrong to link Sudharman’s intentions to those of Andrew Cohen—a man he did not know. Ms. Petryk used faulty logic to equate Sudharman to Cohen, citing murderer Joel Snider’s own manifesto as evidence against Cohen, and using these invalidated statements (made by a man on anti-psychotics) to tarnish the name of a deceased community member.

Ms. Petryk also erroneously reported that “Sudharman was clearly worshipped by those who rose at his memorial service.” Sudharman was no more worshipped by his friends and students than any person who is honored at his or her funeral. Do we not all sing praises of the dead upon their passing? Is it wrong to honor the memory of a murdered man by discussing his influence? Sudharman was human and he, as well as those he knew, did not pretend he was otherwise. On the contrary, he put others’ needs and wants above his own. If, as Ms. Petryk reported, “…there was no one who said he was trying to set himself up as a god,” why did she imply otherwise?

I am offended by this sensationalized and under-researched story. It is a shame that Ms. Petryk never met Sudharman—she would have remembered him for his kindness and willingness to do what he felt was right instead of what was common. Instead, she crafted him into a cartoonish cult figure. Poorly researched journalism is not just a travesty to the art of writing; it also warps truth and, sadly, in Sudharman’s case, unapologetically mars the memory of one of the kindest people I have known.

JULIE LOUISA HAGENBUCH
Photographer
Lewisburg

Collaboration with a person I once knew.

2010-07-01T05:50:00.000-07:00

Just under four days' drive, camping on the way and drinking coffee at the diners like a tattered Steinbeck novel. He and I, our nightly allotments of writing: we sit with a moth-beaten lamp and fill our pages. A trip of states is nothing without a record of our writings, a record of our physical entwining. A trip of states seems nothing without his chest under my elbows.

The night before, in cold summer breeze flowing from the ocean, we drank wine and he kissed me in the open air from the top of my feet to the inside of my thighs. And there he fell asleep, rough beard against my smoothest skin.

We write separate and when we need advice we switch our papers. When still we need advice, we lie down on woolen blankets. Our campsite is buggy and we zip ourselves inside the tent. I press my lips against his shoulder-bone and soon afterward, he falls asleep. When I cannot, I return outside to the table and write letters to my grandmother. I write about her burlap dresses as a girl.

In the mid-day bluing shore, we see another sea, one different from our own. We see whales in the Pacific, the concert on its dock. The square room with the bridge and the buildings behind musicians. The warmth of strings mix with warmth of people. We get drowsy; classical music relaxes him. Always he gets drowsy. It is cold out. I have a bottle of wine, hidden. No one has found it, and we drink it.

Corners of Eyes Are Salty

2010-06-23T18:20:00.001-07:00

I put my glasses back on my face and he fans his fingers to block my view.

"Don't do it," he straightens his legs, then relaxes. Drops his arms. His face is patching at places and by night he's rubbing raw egg on the boyish blank arenas.

"I could ride a horse in those," I whisk my finger at one. He doesn't speak. "A stallion. A peach-cobbler trojan." He makes a lock-unlock the stables motion. Crooks his fingers. "Roams the grass. Too ripped for cooped-up doors."

I straddle him in jeans I swore--at his age--I would never wear. I'll only wear cinch-waisted dresses as a lady. His blood-thick pants are pushing at my leg. "Would you still like me as a man?"

"No," he says, "I"d throw you in the hay loft and shred your clothes and push myself inside your most sensitive manhole covers." I am not looking forward to being a woman. Sexual peak in five years.

"Tell me something men know that boys do not," I say. He thinks until his pinky taps the table.

"Language is salty. Corners of eyes are salty. Call this number to release my captive girlfriend from behind plexiglass. Just say Alabaster."

T H A N K Y O U V E R Y M U C H.

February.

2010-06-23T18:11:00.001-07:00

I picked food from his beard and this upset him.

"Why?" I asked.

"It's my face. I don't need a reason," he said.

A silence in bed--he read, I slept, until he asked questions, over and over about Aunt Barb and I, mostly asleep, said, "I don't feel good, turn the light off."

"Want me to get you water?" he asked and before I answered, he stood. Got my water and turned off the light. Maybe we talked then, my head resting on his chest, but then silence for a time and he turned on the light to read.

"No, don't," I said. He called me cute and smiled, mostly with his eyes but also with his lips. I did the same. We held each others' stares for five seconds.

The next morning, early, we drank coffee. There was a toast crumb in his beard. I said, "Hey, there's a crumb in your beard," pointing somewhere close, and he stroked it out. I put my foot up on his leg and he held it, smiled at me. Most of his smiles were genuine, but some meant more than others. This meant more than others.

Ten minutes later, I stood in the garage in stockinged feet until he scraped the snow off his whole car. I was not wearing glasses, could not see if he waved or nodded or even looked at me. I stood cross-armed until he sat in his car, turned around in the driveway. I pressed the grey button and the door went down. I walked inside.

A common condition.

2010-06-08T12:12:00.000-07:00

At night, a stranger visits. He is unguarded as a feather scraggled along its edges from the weather. His teeth are parted in the front and we drink seven beers between us.

Among the odder humans I've met. He keeps his eyes open. Mine are partway closed and when I open them he is smiling just slightly, a tiny twinge at his lips' corners. Until he finishes.

Time unfurls in curves. In patches. More slowly than minute's tick. Time thickens and coats each of my fingers, pushes apart but joins them, as webs, together. Time globs inside my brain, whole masses congeal as a brass bucket of milk swished with lemon juice.

I have learned in twenty some-such years how people screw into my brain.

Examples including:

A ll A buttonhole in my sister's jacket. She wore it to the sixth-grade social and I, four years later, fastened stitches which allowed its button to hold in place.

B ll Plot lines dipping deep enough that they flash through my dreams at night. Hours. I fell in love with characters and we consummated ourselves after I fell to sleep. I swore these people would remain important to me; I would name my children for their stories. Five years later, I have no idea which book is which and who touched whom and in what chapter the best paragraph is written.

C ll In Philadelphia, a bed. We undressed as quiet as we could. He leaned over me, unclasped my necklace that he bought (without speaking), re-clasped it and laid it on the bureau.
.
...
..
I can't stop writing history in present tense.

Receiving Record 029201: 3 / 30 / 2010

2010-06-06T12:38:00.001-07:00

My cat got fleas and I don't believe it,
not in the twofold bloodied
baldness above her eyeballs, but
underneath her ears.

The stuff that rots. Scabs wear away
into layers of dark pink blood
and quite suddenly, most obvious and
for the first time,
I feel sorry for the creature.

Feel a steady sorrow that's called love--
the wish for pain to abate.

Her chin is nestled in her arms
as she sleeps beside the heater and,
for the second time today,
I cannot see her eyes.

..
.

...
.

The man stutters. I am sure he is new to his job, I am the first person he's called to interview by voice, and he dresses in a modest manner. Three: three times he stutters over the word "yes." I picture his knees kicking out under his desk and locking, as a chair, into proper place. His name is Charles. He, I'm sure, is thirty-four years-old and overweight or just a little ugly.

"Do you have any medical or psychological conditions?"

"Yes," I say, "I have acne."

Six, seven sides.

2010-05-19T13:18:00.001-07:00

We drove to New Jersey on our way to Pennsylvania. Lost in a development, searching for the address of his accountant. Two miles down the wrong road.

Once there, he handed me his keys and, in silence, stepped into the building. I stayed outside and turned the corner to a major road. Its sidewalk was dull with recent rain--a deep tan spotted black with chewing gum. I walked for twenty minutes, arms crossed with morning's cold. It was March.

After a mile, I saw a strip mall and crossed the street. Bagel Deli with its red flashing sign. I walked in. A Puerto Rican man stood behind the counter, one eye much larger than the other.

"May I help you?"
"Not yet," I said, lifting my palm.

Bagels with cream cheese were two dollars, which I dug in my purse to find--all quarters from cafe tips. But he and I'd be eating soon. Hungry as I was, I didn't want to ruin lunch.

"How much is this juice?" I pointed to the cooler.

"One seventy-five," said the large-eyed man.

I counted my change, stacked it on the counter.

"I think that's enough."

He hit a few buttons on the register and nodded. I took the grape juice and walked outside, back to his car, swigging from the plastic bottle.

I used his keys to open the car and sat down, tossing my empty juice bottle to the back. I picked at my face, thinking that the moment I began to embarrass myself, he'd come out of the building. He didn't and, before long, I fell into an even sleep. I woke to tapping at my window and I shouted.

It was him, his hair golden in the light, that which normally was colored like oatmeal. I unlocked the door.

"You scared me," I said.

"Hey," he said, "Sorry that was so long."

I minded, but not now--now, he was here. "I walked," I told him.

He sat down and put his file folder between us. Sun reflected off his face, small spots of light that shone between the tree leaves and reached his skin. Bright geometric forms of six, seven sides. I wanted to pull them from his face and paste them in a book, or take a flashless photograph of him. But then he'd moved, his face slightly tilted, and they were gone as though it wasn't the sun that'd created them, but the angle of my eyes.

I do not know where we were. Just some place he'd driven me, some town built of concrete and siding. Suburbia didn't seem so rotten that day, didn't make me feel vapid.

I reached for his beard and touched my palm to it. He looked at me. It felt like enough.

With whom I've slept and eaten simple foods.

2010-05-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

"How can I tell you I'm in love with you when I don't want to be in love? And I don't think that's okay with you."

It's not.

... . ..
... .

"What should we do?" he kept asking. "I can't stay much longer. The drive was awful--thinking about this conversation." Still, he showed up with a bulking McDonald's bag in hand.

"Can we throw that out?" I laughed.

My drive to meet him, I listened to Daniel Johnston and when he greeted me by the park, he kissed me on the cheek for the first time since our first date.

"Fuck," I thought. "This is it."

I blanked out most of our conversation, most of our relationship until it became fuzz along the edges of my shirt sleeves.

Nothing good. Just waking in the night to talk. Just this past week when, sensing (correctly or not) something was wrong, he of course would call me back but barely would speak. To the point that I did not want to talk because he would say nothing and our relations felt dead.

I can barely remember. Only that he had made up his mind we would part ways and then, after telling me his reasons and my slight-smiled response with nodded head, he said he did not know. He did not know what we should do, as with every time we'd had this conversation.

"I think it's up to you," he told me. We'd both agreed we would not last if he went abroad for one year. "What do you think? What should we do?" he kept asking. We walked through Lewisburg and at some point I knew, knew I would not get him back at all--not in the same capacity and not in any way that would satisfy me, and so I knew I'd ask him to leave.

There were times I told him the complete truth. To test him, perhaps--"I just want you to stay," I said, staring at the river. "I don't want you to go."

"That's not the issue," he said, "It's more complicated than that."

"What do you want?" I asked him.

"It's not about what I want. It's what we should do."

This is why. This is why everything. Because, for him, it's not about feeling.

..
. .... .

"I'll go and we can talk about this tomorrow?" he said.

"Go back to New York?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"I don't like being in-between. We should just make a decision."

"What should we do?"

"We can go on a break," I said.

"What does that mean?"

"We're broken up, and--" I paused, knowing that breaks are no more than distance with a (usually unevenly distributed) hope of getting back together, allowing no room for healing or growth--a glorified in-between that'd end with me clinging faster to him.

"I don't know," I said, "I've never done it."

"Me either," he said.

"I'm going to give you space," I said, "You should leave. I am considering myself to be single and you can feel free to do the same."

"Okay," he said and hugged me for a matter of seconds, crying at my neck.

"I need to leave now," he said.

He did.

.. . . .... . .

Perhaps I could be at peace. All is okay. And yes, this peace is better. Knowledge that he will grow and learn to love in deeper ways. But I am pissed at him for not loving me enough. For never writing me a letter. For leaving. For never telling me I was his best. For always making me guess.

I gave him a card and he closed it, crying.

Now, five days later, I cannot figure our relationship. Cannot know whether this is something ever worth wanting back. A big portion of my logic says no, I still am blinded, it was nothing great. But my otherness knows it was good when it was good--in its simplicity and loving-kindness and the way we'd rarely fight. I do not much care that my family did not know or care for him because he was good to me and I know this is what matters at all.

But was he good to me? I cannot accept his saying, "How can I tell you I'm in love with you when I don't want to be in love?". This suggests there is a choice in the matter, a decision to turn it on or off and this is not true in any real way. He is bad. He is very bad. He has allowed this to happen and I have only been able to agree to it. I cannot stand for anyone who would let this happen. I cannot stand for him.

2010-01-25T11:05:00.001-08:00

A LOVE POEM ABOUT MY BOYFRIEND

Cold in the cellarway's concrete light,
his legs are folded Indian-style, his
eight fingers trim eight fingernails
too long.

The clippings flake like tender bugs that have
scuttled down the window,
that've brittled to the touch
beneath the four-post bed
where he grew up.

He brushes fingernails into
one spiny hill, scrapes them with
a single sheet of paper to the basket.

"Now?" he asks.
"I'm done."
More strands of hair hang from his head
than times he's brushed mine from my face,

than clear pots of coffee
that go cold and
he's splashed them down the drain.

2010-01-17T21:15:00.000-08:00

2009-11-18T17:04:00.000-08:00

THE STORY OF MY GRANDMA DYING

Nothing wears me out like a good drive to my grandparents' house. The sightlessness I suffer toward nightfall, the potted peonies rustling among my seatbelt straps.

In a more perfect car I would reach outside my window. I would adjust my mirrors manually, with both hands, to see that my manners keep (as buttermilk) for days, which is plausible if only I'd give birth to one or two fair speaking children with a man--a minister--and his well-trimmed moustache.

I follow the dots while I talk on a telephone. I won't get pulled over in P.A. A sort of photographic fantasy, I am driving toward a belt down south to take photos of poor farmers, to take Walker Evans' camera strap, take his hand until I have enough money to develop my relationships. Until I have enough shuttering disclaimers that my boy is willing to read. Take a break from my boy lifting his hand under my skirt, I shake a bag of tea leaves in my mouth. Crunch as I chew. A pile of people. My boy Walker Evans is asleep and always wants me back to bed in the backseat of his van. He and I don't even walk in the winter, a pattern I've noticed. Nothing to do but sleep until it's time for coffee til it's time to eat until his hand is up my skirt and we are pushing our heads against each other.

My grandfather peeks in the door crack, then turns to my grandmother. "Layin' on her bed writin'" he says.

THE DAY I GOT HERPES: a short story of fiction

Half-way between the sidewalk where
my wrists smell of brass & trumpet oil
is a Tupperware bin of midnight snacks
I've had this summer: cheese and margarine
on white bread inspired by The Thirty-Nine Steps,
strawberry shortcake while I wrote letters,
and stuffed shells I shoveled in my mouth
while my boy, stoned, stared. Mostly
I get thirsty and I get worried.
"Don't you trust me?" he asks.
"No," I say.
"That's bad."
And I have lied.

Sure. Here is my poem.
Summer all I drank
was seltzer water with
no-calorie syrup.
The poison stuff. The
rot-your-brain.
I de-toxed by vomiting, by
raisin bran into the
toilet. All coffee
only. A minister grabbed
my ass. Texted me: "Elusive,
Obama is the anti-Christ."
We went vegan, or he
ate two hotdogs, we drank
water from teacups in the
fellowship hall. "To be young
and beautiful," the sneakered
organist muttered as I
passed. Smack and smack.
My thighs are rubbing
together under my red dress,
sweat between them. I think
of friction at night in bed,
the minister looks Norwegian
with a red face and blond
hair. He is tall. The spirit with
him. Some things seem
stupider than others. My
vegetarianism. The out-of-state
Primate Act. Seem stupid because
infant boys are raped. Because
I can't roll up my collar. Take
a photograph at waist-level.
And re-writing my grandmother's
epileptic fit can be summed up
in one picture: strings of drool
dropping on her lap.

All childhood my parents helped
me know that I was far more logical
than adults. What a cruel world
to find not every person sees this
on first glance. I'm better!
I am the best.

Deep in Brittle Waters

2009-07-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

On this day the wind blows up my shirt sleeves. I lie so long flatbacked in the grass my temple and my upper forehead ache as if they're losing blood.

How strange that a thing can focus briefly and retract. That the women in my Pennsylvania bank have accents from deep south. That I begin to speak with coffee on my breath and without gs on gerunds. That the women in the bank, they handed me candy and I did not want it but I accepted because it made them happy to see me happy.

A STORY

In the night she hears her grandmother cry out. It is a dreading voice, starting at a fevered pitch and lowering in slow descent. It reminds her of crackling black and white movies, a slim and muscular man grabs a woman with his hands and she cries out until he presses his face against hers, or carries her off-screen. This is the sound her grandmother makes in the night.

FINISHED

How strange I had convinced myself The Ending of a thing, I cried for this thing and deleted its history from me. And then it changed and did not disappear. How strange that there have been so many goods I can't remember all of them. So many that I can afford to forget months at a time.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

Nana is the name I've called my father's mother for twenty-two and some-such years. She was weakening last winter and I did not realize those would be my last days with her as Nana. Before her conscience went away. Before she crippled physically and all her knobbly grandma fingers dug themselves into a hole and pulled whole clumps of dirt on top. Now she hardly looks up when I greet her in the morning. Now I forget to kiss her when I wake and when I bake her casseroles they are too difficult for her to chew. The table is not set quite properly. Everything is wrong, the window is not closed, I have slept too late and talked to her the wrong way. "What's with this lid?" she asked Pop when his 92-year brain forgot to close it. When I say she's being mean, she tells me: "If you'd do it the same way the second time…" Her days blend together. She is wrong and I see she is wrong but there is no use, Julie Louisa (the way she'd write it on ceramic ornaments), no use in proving that she's wrong because my point is not to beat her down. My point is to let her know she's making me sad and upset. Appeal to her, Nana you are hurting my feelings. Do not beat her down though these are the feelings she provokes in me. She is a dying woman. Do not beat her down.

Holding Still

2009-07-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

It becomes clear and obvious to me what Nana is. She is not a ringing, clapping cellphone on a bus. She is not the cask of fireworks ten miles outside New York City. But I see her in this skeleton, this skull of a face looking at her ceiling in the morning. There are sheer white curtains behind her and they do not move. Neither does she move except to ask if I am helping her get up. This fragment of a woman. Fleck of paint from house. When I change her pants the muscles of her small buttocks are childlike in size and smoothness. Her husband helps her change the pad that catches her excrements. They speckle dark against her milky skin and I see how her body has evolved from teen-aged legs and arms, living off her grandma's bread, cookies always in the jar and each day on the farm pressing harder in this land, walking for more hours to the weathered schoolhouse. She awakes in bed, lofted beside bags of flour and she gangles to the touch, the fingers of my grandfather who wears suspenders touch her, a fresh white shirt on Sundays, even now at ninety-two he props his felt hat on his head. I ask to take his picture. "Ooh," he makes a snoot and I say, "Outside?"

The night the lightning strikes our power out, Pop taps my door and opens it. I hang up my phone, sensing something wrong. "We'll get the oil lamp," he says, tinkering through Christmas mugs that Nana painted when her fingers once were steady. He feels the glass curves of the lamp and pulls it out, slow now, as I spread my palms up near (in case) to catch the fallen.

The night a thunder growls so loud it sounds as though a plate has cracked on top us. The picture frames are swirling in my view of gas and wick fumes. An oil lamp, my first time that I've seen one--it's the same my grandmother and grandfather were given when they married, same from the house they first lived together. Nana was nineteen. Seventy years later, now, her bowels give out--she leaks brown circles through her pants and onto chairs. This same man across the room from her, this man with his same set of bones, this man who put himself inside her on their wedding night stark broke deep in depression--this man, he changes all her clothes four times each day, he presses buttons on the washer and pours capfuls of blue liquid on the clothes before he shuts the lid. This man who's seen her naked body for almost three-quarters of a century.

Morning after the big storm, I walk across the rain-soaked lawn to Pop's car. Going to New York by bus, I wait and buy my ticket, step up to take a seat. Except two others, it is empty. I rest my head against the glass and fall to sleep.

Eight AM, there is a voice: "I got you something from the Disney store and I picked you up three Mickeys." It is a woman back behind me. "Walked up to Trump Towers and had an ice cream. I had fun. You know, it was too short. I'm sorry that you're sick. Sat down after supper, watched Mama Mia, and fell asleep. I've been up every morning at quarter to six, can't sleep past then. Well. Take some lozenges, gurgle with salt water. There's strep going around, don't you get sick. Alright. Tell Sally we said 'Hi,' tell her hello. Love you. Mhm." I turn around. A thick-striped black bag. Her Disney Store merchandise, gold watch and pink nails. Four bracelets on one wrist. Dark bobbypins in pale hair. I smell an orange. She ate at Planet Hollywood.

In New York with friends, my time is rested with caffeine. Soon Tuesday arrives, the night I wait in a hotel chair. Sit across the room from a Jewish couple, one boy and one girl, looking to get married and then touch. It's about the jaw-line of this girl, her tight-dark undershirt. White ruffled, crop-sleeved overpiece. Earrings and the hairband on her head. A voice that whisps through front teeth. The man speaks through hand motions, an upturned palm that lifts and then the other hand (previously resting on the chair-arm) joins to open downward, then points over. "Many girls wouldn't have this discussion," he says. She responds, "I have a friend--" the chatting laughter of the black siblings behind me--all boys--raise over this good Jewish conversation. There must be a wedding here, tomorrow morn.

The Jews, they speak of shabbos and the girl looks with a parted mouth. A skeptical-lined forehead. He pats at his yarmulke and says something I cannot hear. The girl giggles. Her hair is dark and layered in front of her shoulders. The man's dark hat is on the table. The girl smiles. The man says, "Very good question, very good question. Trying to turn the myth into the movie." The girl: she speaks faster and with breathy, whistling accent. New York for sure, she clicks her tongue and says "gaw" instead of "go." She nods her head when speaking and a black baby screams up loud back me from the hallway. She talks about her synagogue, a program for the girls with privacy, each girl--she is assured to know the family before she stays there. She wears a linking necklace. So much money, her mother (with a wig), she must be gorgeous. This music is a soundtrack to all 1940s movies--the movies where the thin-slacked pants rise up men's bellybuttons. The movies where the women, they are bombshells and wear gloves, make love to men by falling back into their armcrooks and they kiss by pressing at each others' faces, holding still.

The Jewish girl is speaking of the summer camp she worked at and was counselor. Woodward and four-corners, right down the block from here is where the camp is. "No, I'm saying Sarah's cute," tongue-click, "She's so much fun." I look up and she sees me. Uses her hand to straighten from her wrist and motion where the camp is, out her house and down the block.

My ride here on the subways and a bus. I got misdirected four times. Walking out of Devon's neighborhood, a boy my age passed me. "Hey snowflake," he said and stopped, "What's your name, girl? Need a little chocolate in that cream?" I told him, "Have a good day." Though confronted, I was comfortable there, the families and the lack of tension as when I lived in Fort Greene. There was a contempt, a fear from all the white people that black people will hurt their skin and steal their wallets. A huge tension with all the inequality. But there--at Devon's, in that neighborhood--there is comfort. People are not avoiding. This is how mothers lived and how these sidewalks formed, grilling on the street and there is little catcalling. When it happens, it is a different dynamic--different from the aggression of Flatbush. It is tender, ready for acceptance or retreat. An actual response is sought. But Flatbush--those hisses and snide comments on my breasts and upper thighs, those comments that pulled my body from its skin, slabbed it on the floor and kicked it.

The girl, she just stood up. Smiled, and she pointed to the bathroom. A starched and wired ribbon cinched around her waist. A black skirt reaching past her knees and stockings tan her three inches of legs, top of her feet until her loafers. The man who I await is here now and I can't pick up his scent yet but he must be here.

In the morning I will call my grandfather, he will tell me what he's done. Ask me if I've called my father, if I know what's happened to "her," his name for my grandmother. I will tell him "Yes," and when I say, "I love you," he will say, "Yep," in response.

Cut up red beets.

2009-07-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

Irene:

Just thought I'd drop a line. Yesterday I did some baking--hope you like it:

Hamburger Helper.
Carrot Cake.
Blueberry Muffins.

It was such a beautiful day. Butch mowes my lawn. Sure looks velvety. The weeds grow so fast.

Barbara gave me a beautiful bouquet. The Baby Orchids are so pretty.

Take care and May God Bless.

Love,
Ellen.

. . ... . .. . . . . . .. .

Homer and Irene,

I enjoyed being at your 70th Ann. get to-gether. It was so nice to see so many of your family. And I enjoyed the food. The ice-cream was so good. Grape-Nut esp.

As I left I told the young people in the garage that I would not remember their names. Johnny's little one was so energetic.

I was very surprised to receive the $10.00 Gift Certificate from Weis for being the oldest woman. When John (pres.) gave the prayer he mentioned you (Irene) for better health. Hope each day you gain strength.

Take care and May God Bless.

Love,
Ellen.

Trees Growed Up

2009-06-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

Two things have affected me today: Seeing my grandmother nude. Reading in the Home Instead journal: "Slight Dementia" in my grandfather. Yes. And I suppose I've never viewed it in this way. They are dying, yes.

Woke up at 8:30. The Home Instead Lady came, reminded me of Lisa Emig. I felt comfortable with her, the paunch around her middle and the lumps curved outward at her thighs. She bathed Nana, did exercises with her, cleaned the sink and swept the kitchen floor. When she left, Nana said to me, "You see how that woman was cleaning? Always doing something?" This was a nudging to me: be a better granddaughter, a prodding. Dust the shelves.

I asked if she would go to church tomorrow. "Why don't you want to go?" and she said, "'Cause," as she does. "Because why?" "Just 'cause." "There has to be a reason you do not want to go," I say. And then it comes: she is afraid of not making it up the ramp, inside the church. Afraid of falling, of fainting. "We got you to Maxine's," I say, "church will be easy. I promise you." She looks from the television to my face. "I didn't feel as safe as I do other times," and I ask her to repeat. I do not understand. I do not understand until she tells me: I did not help her over the cracks in Maxine's walkway. I did not support the way I should have. I spotted her, ready for a waver or loss of balance. I did not wish to insult her by helping her through everything. "I will be better, now," I tell her, "Now I know."

Later, I ask again: what of church? She says, upset, she will not go because she does not feel well. She has not gone to bathroom in so long. "Okay," I say. I will not ask again.

Pop read what we'd written yesterday in To Our Children's Children, said he wanted us to write more. He and I, we drove to Harold's and I was frightened (for the first time) at his driving as he sorted through his mail against the steering wheel, driving into traffic. "Pop!" I shout and he aligns himself.

We had conversation about how she wasn't sleeping well. Again she said she'd only slept til 3 AM and so I told her: you are sleeping in your chair too much. Maybe it would help if you got up more. "I think I get up plenty," she said, to which I said "Alright." But it seems this made a difference--today she walked around most every hour of the day, and even asked me (at 5:40 PM, walking to the kitchen) if she should come for supper. At 9 PM she was tired, dozing in her chair and so I sat typing at the table near her, coughing or knocking at the table when her mouth dropped open. I wish I had a tuba.

We watched Polka Dance and Doctor Schuler. Pop took shower for tomorrow morning's church. His and my relationship, it grows and grows each day, he laughing at the strangest things. "This one's always a mix-up," he says while finding the top of Nana's comforter--the purple stripe that covers her pillow--and pulls it overtop. There's joy in him. A man accepting all his body as it leaks and slows and sallows yellow. He can't taste, he says, nor smell, and yes this bothers him but he speaks of it as his wayward child: still he loves it, all its flaws and mishaps.

The clocks in my grandmother's house. Their tickings and the cuckoo bird that pops his head out from the roof. The inventor of the german clock has died. His legacy is fleeting and his buck's antlers spike upward on his wall.

Here is what I see when I am sad: my grandmother in the photo booth. Age nineteen, just married. "Irene Hagenbuch," she writes across the back in scratching pen.

When I cry for my grandmother, I am sad because my fading girlhood hope ends here as she, with a husband who does laundry, heats her food. She mutters "Homer" seven times from her chair and yells at him for never being good enough. Never being good enough to help her live forever.

In the night, I hear them shouting from their bedroom. "You can see it," Nana says, or maybe: "You can't see it." Pop walks out in white boxer-briefs and v-neck undershirt. An angel. He goes into the bathroom and emerges seconds later. "Is everything okay?" I ask and he does not respond, just walks onward to the closet, grabs a washcloth (maybe wets it) and goes into the bedroom. I walk away and hear more shouting. "Shut the door," Nana says. Pop responds, "Now what?"

On the street, the night we're in

2009-06-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

the car, he's touching me,
the kitchen wall, thick fingers.
Overlaps and folds
long streams of paper until
they resemble tissues.

For the first time, twice,
I press my hands against the mat.
He holds my face, my arms
while I, over, over,
and he tells me: take a breath.

The lowest shelf of books
at our faces. He will
--arms hold straight
my shoulders to his chest and
we are talking to each other.

Be Outside Most Constantly

2009-05-28T17:17:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows another and we are best for it. Here we are with work. Complacency shutting down the left side of my brain that speaks until only I'll see objects.

These are moments that take work: these public moments. It is quiet here, as though these twenty people only number three.

Is this the condition of adulthood? Such a deepseated dependence that I feel I'll vomit from these nerves numbing the unders of my skin. I can barely stand this. Only a distraction of humans will do me any good.

Blankly Back

2009-05-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

"i am going into town for an hour, is this okae?" i ask nana and she tells me, "i guess."

"is this not okae?" i say.

i'll be starting a new website soon, an extension of this one and not replacement. something about livingwithmygrandparents. the foods i eat. the things my grandpa says.

i beat him in checkers today. never thought it possible.

a place

2009-05-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

the plans have reaffirmed themselves. for those who need know, i'll be in Lewisburg, Penna, this summer's months. taking photographs and cooking meals with Nana. what will you have done?

send an address. pen-pals are a breathing space in summer's humid solitude.

In Conclusion

2009-03-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Harold,

Last Tuesday I left home one final time. Driving toward the highway, I stopped in a playground paved with gritty limestone. This land where I first bled across my kneecaps, stones sticking in my skin. I thought of you, my cousin, born in nineteen twenty-three.

These days I spend away I find you buried in the wood of scalded tables. Only those that are burnt, as your skin--a fallen candle or a pot. The scars are brown and oblong like thumbprints inside trees. They are pervasive, and they multiply as pocks of cancer.

When I last saw you, Harold, you ate oatmeal. I drank water from a metal cup, watching as you pressed your tongue onto the inside of the bowl. Since then, I have been searching. In the tangled beard of a man I sleep beside, inside the mildewed plastic of my shower curtain.

Sometimes I find I am the same as you, licking at the insides of an oatmeal bowl, reaching for something that will only coat my teeth with greying film. But I remember: always you have lived here. Always will you lie across the floorboards of my skin.

And Harold. If you're looking--you will find me huddled in my body, my skin flaking in the air and wafting south.

I love you, Harold. I know I'll see you soon.

Julie

Thickveined

2009-03-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

This series of days. I am unable to write our pass-between. Unable to fumble enough. Here he is. Here he smokes brown cigarettes and expects me to know them. Perhaps I am not dirt as much as I'm on top this hill. The land should always thump me, I should use a thimbleful and never know the rest. But here I know it as I know this lover's body: there are times in its existence I never will have known. But now I feel I own it, each inch I can explore with proper timing.

A common condition.

2009-03-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

Always I am surprised to see his face. Chinbone close to nose, close as woodshed to garage. Turn the corner and I'm walking down his steps.

Almost untouched. First there is the writing. First is my grandfather's face and not his hands. Still I wonder. Days burn into one another. He feeds me cereal, a crust. He feeds me fingers.

I experience him most in coffee, in contentment wrought by hissings of his heater. Where is the oven? How many forkfuls might we need?

The solitude of desk lamp, Bible opened halfway through. Thick stack of pages. Here is what I realize: my feet against his chest. I put my head to the inside of his elbow and he pulls me closer in, this creature who breathes deep while sleeping. While pushing his thumb across my scalp. The quietest of ways I slide my knee between his thighs and he clamps harder.

Adrenaline, but that is wrong

2009-03-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

I stay awake as defense, a primitive evaluation of safety. It happens with humans I spend nights with, in same rooms or next to one another. I have no interest in sleeping because this is new and I want to experience it and sometimes I would like to solve it.

I will make this night my day. I have slept through my day's hours.

cobwebs spun back and forth

2009-02-16T18:49:00.000-08:00

When my father says "God" he means "life" which is the ability to think about frying an egg and then actually frying an egg.

"That's not what I asked," says my mother. "That's not what I asked." Someday she will die and I will be peaceful with the dry skin of my fingers and my callused heels: the parts of myself that first were hers. As if I am more complete when she's gone. Now I'll stop scratching my skin.

A story: In the morning, High School wrestling match with Erin. Her brother competes. Sauerkraut in disposable bowls, chopped hotdogs. Her mother rips perforated tickets. A space shuttle blows up.

"Doesn't this happen all the time?" I asked.

It doesn't.

Outside our borders as well.

2009-02-05T01:47:00.001-08:00

1. There are crumbs on my tablecloth, crumbs of brownies that I baked without eggs or a creamy product or a recipe, but with the power of Kevin McKenna's pure cinnamon honey watered down it turned out a miracle in my oven and in our mouths.

2. I biked to the synagogue this morning with tires that Devon Shaughnessy says are flat and to this I would agree. Really, though, I'd thought I was sluggish and out of shape and that my bike had gone kaput. After all, I thought, it is from seventh grade, it is from seventh grade and it has rattling gears that make people stare from the sidewalk.

3. Rubbing up against my laptop cord is a glass jar labeled white that reads "Bonne Maman Strawberry Preserves." This jar was my suitemate's until I ate all of her jam in one day because I wanted to eat it and then I didn't want to stop because strawberry preserves produced in France and distributed by the state of New Jersey are delicious, they are stingingly sweet and crunchy because of the seeds on the outside of the whole chunks of strawberry.

4. I ate my suitemate's preserves and now I am drinking lemon tea from its empty jar. I made a whole pot with two teabags from a box that my paternal grandmother sent with my brother Andrew to New York City for my twenty-first birthday in 2007. It tastes like stale flowers, but this is alright because it is the only tea in this apartment right now and it is from my grandmother.

5. When I was twelve, my first boyfriend named Cole Tocket broke up with me because we'd distanced ourselves from one another, because two days straight I'd gone to Erin's locker instead of Cole's when school was over. When I was at Cole's locker it made me feel nervous and I never knew what to say to him besides to ask him how his day was and that was boring and we both knew that it was boring, so I went to Erin's locker instead and then we broke up.

6. When I was twelve, my first boyfriend named Cole Tocket broke up with me and I cried in my bed at night staring up at the plastic glow-stars on my ceiling and I switched my pillow to the other end of my bed and pulled my sheets and blankets out so I could face the other way while still covering my body.

7. In October of 2008 I paid one hundred dollars to a hair salon in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, because a stylist had dyed my hair a few shades darker and cut some pieces off of it.

8. When I decided to dye my hair a few shades darker I was hoping it would contrast with my white skin in a way my hair never had before October of 2008. I loved it, in the way I have loved a new friend or historical document or story my father has told me, until I have thought about it or seen it or spoken to it often and then it is normal and I like it, still, but not with the commotion I once had.

9. I think that I am special.

10. When I stare blank into a mirror and especially when my lips are red, I look like my brother named Andrew.

11. My only interaction with my female color-photography teacher prior to our first class was in the black and white developing station when she yelled at me and my elderly male black and white teacher, telling us that we should wait until the water got warmer. "Sometimes people speak abrasively," he said to me and lifted his eyebrows and I said that I had experienced this many times in my life. One year later this woman is my color-photography teacher and she also is my boss when I work on Mondays and Fridays in the photography labs and she is beautiful. She wears worn jeans that are baggy in the legs and tight around her waist, her hair is frizzy and long and thicker than mine and she is the age of my mother. Last Friday at 9 AM she flipped on the lights of the darkroom to set up chemicals and Mickey the darkroom cat pattered toward her. "Mickey, poor thing, you were locked here all night," she said to him, "Poor Mickey, let's get you some water. Did you poop in the dark room?" Later, remembering this moment, I told her that Mickey was a sweetheart and she raised her eyebrows because Mickey is fickle, Mickey scratches, but Mickey always is there and that is what makes him a sweetheart.

12. Sometimes I will base my interactions with human beings on the emotions and decisions of fictional show-tune characters. This is okay.

13. She bought a sanitary napkin from the dispensers in the middle school locker rooms for twenty-five cents. It was packaged in a cardboard box and included two safety pins.

14. The last text message I received on my telephone was from Kevin Carl McKenna and it said this: "Should I bring beer?!?!?!"

15. The last text message I sent on my telephone was to Kevin Carl McKenna and it said this: "Uh probs."

16. I'm excited to leave but ultimately think groundedness and sense of community are the catalysts of contentment.

17. Erin Lynne Mattos and Sarah Jennings and I once were dropped off by Erin's father at the fire hall in Dillsburg for the first of a series of Teen Dances. When we peeked our heads inside, the lights were low and four, maybe five people moved around inside (including the adults) so we shut the door and ran away, giggling, and we called Erin's father to pick us up. Before leaving the streets of Dillsburg, we met Kyle O'Toole who came with us to Erin's house where he took muscle relaxers and sat unmoving the whole night in Erin's father's easy chair while we slathered makeup on his face.

18. Mostly I think this all is a search for a place to stay and to feel welcome to stay.

19. Sometimes I lie to myself and tell myself there is more meaning than this. I do not think this is true, but I do think that others find groundedness and a sense of community through thinking this. That all is alright.

20. I often am paranoid. I blame this on my genes, but probably it is because of middle school.

21. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever begin eating meat again.

22. I don't think it will happen. But I might be wrong.

23. I find fulfillment in organizing, I like young ones and people in general, I like talking to young ones about young life experiences because these experiences are full and well-articulated in a way from which older life experiences stray. All this means that I would like to be a Girl Scout Leader.

24. When I bridged into Girl Scout Adulthood, I wrote a note to my parents after they had gone to bed that said, "One day I might have daughters and I would like to be a Girl Scout Leader, so maybe you could pay for a lifetime membership for me?"

25. When I bridged into Girl Scout Adulthood, all the leaders put their hands up in the air and I ran beneath them until I reached the end.

Love Letter to my Cousin

2009-01-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Dear Harold.

In this childhood living room,
you sleep alone.
Flat against back and
pinching blanket between
thumb and forefinger.

I do not know what you grasp at,
nor I,
but I know I could clench my fist
and say it holds.

Maybe always it has,
these nighttimes I mutter
in front of my sink.

Remember the day you lost hearing
on the left side of your body?
You were clean.

I wonder if pain
was different, if life was able to reflect
so forceful it punched wind
out of organs.

.
.

Erasing. I have
painted skin across layers of pencil.
What happened here?

Why do you peel backward,
circular around an apple until
it turns red again?

Until the skin realigns itself. Until
I pull my mother's hair and she tells me
I should have called sooner.

.
.

My parents spoke to no one
when I was a child.
On his back, my father slept
beside my mother and, out of habit,
slid his foot between her ankle bones.

Of course.
God is capable of greatness,
I have seen His wonders every day.
Translucent leg hairs
on the tiles of my kitchen,
fingers redden as I scrape
ice cream to the bottom.

Pour slowly.
Each day's attempt
to hold back splattering
a microwave's door.

I huddle inside surfaces,
the familiar: eleven year-old boys
squinting in the quietest of ways.
Back to hallways,
my spine against wall.

An attempt to recreate partitions.
Chicken wire slices days, sleep
lasts until a dense scent of butter
wafts into the bedroom.

.
.

When I woke this morning, Harold,
I remembered swimming,
splashing my mother.
In the backyard pool, I chase after her,
she gasps over and over and
this is the first time I have ever
heard her laugh.

I am eleven years old.

Children are a way to recreate denial,
to reflect thick against a carpet,
each lightbulb pulsing
from the corners of my room.

I hope you're well, Harold.

I love you.

Julie

Quarto

2009-01-21T23:24:00.000-08:00

Trying to request “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?," age nine, I called the radio station. An old woman in her home answered, over and over, and each time I apologized. She said, “It's okay, honey. Just keep trying.”

I grabbed Jessi’s fat and she told me it was the most offensive thing anyone ever had done. But several days prior, she had told me, when complaining and joking, to grab onto it, and I had not. Now I did. Andrew, every day, grabbed her belly—called her “chubby tummy.” This, I realized, was different.

I sat on my bedroom floor, cross-legged in my swimming suit with Ashley. We talked about the Spice Girls and boys, then stood up to walk outside to the pool. I noticed a red line across my skin where it had creased and I wanted the red line to go away. I did not want red lines across my stomach when I sat down. I did not want Ashley to see it. I wrapped a towel around my body.

I left my diary beside the computer. Andrew read it, but worse: Mom told me, “He didn’t read it.” She said, "Someone read it to him. He did nothing wrong."

Elizabeth Alexander, Modified

2009-01-21T16:39:00.000-08:00

Woman and son wait for bus.
Farmer considers changing sky.
A teacher: "Take out pencils. Begin."

Voice. Ancestors on tongues:
stitching hem,
hole in uniform. Repair;
in need of repair.
Patching tire.

Cross dirt and highways.
Someone, others,
"Need to see the side;
something better."

Each word spiny,
whispered to consider.

We are safe; walk into that we cannot.
Say it plain: many died for this day.
Sing names!
Dead laid tracks, picked cotton and lettuce,
built brick by brick
glittering clean and work inside.

Praise struggle; praise hand-lettered sign;
the figuring at kitchen tables.
Live, "Love thy neighbor,"
take no more.

The mightiest beyond marital, national.
Love's widening pool of light.
Today's sharp sparkle, winter air
can be made, a sentence begun
on the brink, the brim, the cusp --
no preempt, grievance--

Praise. Walk forward.

Brown Eyes

2009-01-15T20:16:00.001-08:00

"I'm thinking about the town my high school was in, back when it wasn't as run down and the world was tea-colored. I'm thinking of pictures of children running in its sepia streets; pictures of pigeons and thriving businesses selling candy."

--Casey Cosker

Slop

2009-01-13T20:43:00.000-08:00

His accent like a student of my mother's in the mountains of Pennsylvania. There where tongues leave spaces below the mouth top, where there is a tightening, a curling constriction of muscles when a downward word is spoken.

"She's too big for the crib; she sleeps with me," he told me, pointing at his bed with no frame, clean laundry littered on top it. "At night she cries and when I touch her arm she stops. I do not know what this means," he said, and somewhere beyond the place from which he speaks is a bin of sloppy fingers all over each other, grabbing and forcing themselves to touch the arms of little girls, of roommates, and of mothers.

In the morning I spoonfed fingers to his chest, an attempt to hold his conscience in a cup like it was water and I was brushing my teeth, over and over and would not stop. A need to feel clean and able to fall asleep. He did not hold his hand around my hipbone, not at all, not once. In the morning I pushed myself further to his edge and when he moved in the same direction toward the wall I stood up for the bathroom, stared at my skin, and covered it with makeup before lying back beside him.

Lull

2009-01-04T15:56:00.000-08:00

This is the thing she likes about backwards. You start out with all the answers, and after a while, someone comes along and gives you the questions, but you don't have to answer them. You're already past that part. Things get better and better until you hardly even know each other anymore.

Family Isn't Poor

2009-01-01T23:12:00.000-08:00

Skated with a Boy

2009-01-01T23:07:00.000-08:00

Not a Mansion

2009-01-01T22:37:00.001-08:00

Looking Forward

2009-01-01T22:30:00.000-08:00

Tousled

2009-01-01T21:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Harold,

I rode home by train last Saturday. Here, with my bedroom and the roads I grew up running, a pubescent energy topples in my belly. Here, with your letters (the great deterrent of loneliness they have always been to me) and feeling tousled--that the human childhood now extends through early twenties, that when my mother tells me she does not miss existing as fifteen or wish to carve her name into a desk, I am sorry but I do not understand. As though skimming this surface might be my pinnacle.

And with a cloud of smogged perfume I will stop apologizing, because all feeling is joy and, if Kurt Vonnegut is right, existence on a planet where the smartest animals on earth hate being alive so much means never having to say you're sorry.

Or maybe he meant only physicists.

I'm sorry, Harold. And I miss you.

Julie

Lumberjack carrying axe through Lorimer/Metropolitan - w4m - 22 (Fort Greene)

2008-12-14T16:31:00.000-08:00

You: bearded, flannel-wearing, lugging an axe through the train station.

Me: non-bearded, flannel-wearing, farm-bodied Pennsylvania girl.

Is it just me, or did you share a moment with my grandmother in winter of 1937? She was your square-dance partner over in the grange hall. A year and a half later you married and late one night she miscarried twins, kicking you through nightmared sleep. In the coming years she birthed two children, you chopped wood and then got drafted. When you came home she baked you pies and cried on top your chest at night. The next year she had a second son, and then another.

This last one cooked me scrapple when I was five years old and returned my library books before I could forget. He helped me water sweet potatoes with a metal can. Even still, he adores my mother on the quietest of mornings as they awake beside each other.

Please respond if this describes you. I can't handle missing you much longer.

Something Clean

2008-12-13T10:06:00.001-08:00

When I was fourteen, Mom and I decided I should take ballet lessons. I'd quit when I was six, which put me years behind most other girls, but I didn't much care. I wanted it, badly. I craved the community, the exertion, the bloody toes and lumpy feet. I wanted a muscular dance-body, and I wanted to work for it. So what if I was ten years behind in skill level? I was doing it for myself.

We pulled out the phone book, flipped through the pages of dusty print to find a studio. Dad, sitting nearby, asked: Really? Why would you want this?

Girls start dancing at three, he said, You do not want this. You couldn't.

And so I didn't.

Now, at twenty-two, teetering on the brink of this life wherein I choose a structure, I find myself repeating this moment. Stumbling again into it. Researching, getting whoozy in my belly for a place or a task or an idea, the way I was whoozy--at sixteen--for New York.

Telling someone about it, my mother or a friend from home who's graduated and who prods me in the kindest of ways, says, You do not want this. You couldn't. Try something else. Take a risk, or Do not take a risk.

These people have experienced the world in ways that I have not. So I listen and I let these doubts pulse through my body until I no longer understand what life after education means or how I function, and I begin to clamp at Judaism, to huddle up in New York and fear leaving, because here I have something, here I could convert and here I have a family.

As a child, never was I homesick or gripped with fear to leave. Only now.

But I remember dance lessons.

I will do as I feel compelled. Please stop convincing me otherwise.

A Horror Story

2008-12-11T19:39:00.000-08:00

Potato is One Word

2008-12-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

Harold,

When we awake, our feet will sink lower until the grass grows. Let the grass grow. Stretch, an upward spiral because it is too long flattened beneath us.

I love you.

Julie

-

Persistence in these Searchings for a Savior

2008-12-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

Harold,

Today I feel toothless, unable to grasp anything permanent and root it in skin. Truly, how can we reach our hands into soil and expect them to stay? To find solace, a space of their own.

Yours.

Julie

-

Static

2008-12-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

Creep into the kitchen to
tap water into teacups.
.
Clink and sip in remembrance
of a grandfather who once
pattered through these hallways.

.
.

Snacks line rows across
wheeled cart,
parents fill seats, need
emotional feeding.

.
.
.
.

The Great Depression
punctures memory, this
stigmata marking palms in a
.
tight twine bundle.
Something clean.

.
.
.

Patterns of hair
follow stories to
sources,
cross leg over leg.
.
Grandfathers' tread
on this carpet
is a fossil.
.
A desk imprinted
by fingertips.

Vaporate

2008-11-23T10:29:00.000-08:00

A fair where
stocky sixteen-yeared
boy scout bags fish.
Dump deeper
into bowls, watch--
over weeks--
water lower from
algae rim
down
algae rim.

Two fingers line

stacks of rings
in mug where
morning's coffee
lessens before we
drink, before

we wet and cut our hair
without scissors.
A technology

rooted in
need. Our feet burrowed
through legs
pulled two different directions

above ground. With no
sunlight, hair
falls strand by
strands of sentences
written by boy

whose wrist once arced,
tossed a
ball on top
of water.

Trindle Spring

2008-11-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

Youth pastor, thirty-five
rutches around in his chair.
Squints outward at his wife
with eyes that--
by nighttime--
line the streaks of
stretch marks down her thighs.

Saint Matthew

2008-11-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

"She was young," he tells me,
"She didn't understand

what it's like outside of high school. Not
waking up at six AM, not
seeing familiar. Not

always knowing
every person in the world."

Sabbathday

2008-10-25T02:18:00.002-07:00

I fail to realize the size of my feet
and how easily my fingers peel.

This morning
my father is shirtless.

Quotidian Poetry Class

2008-10-25T02:18:00.001-07:00

"Prepubescent decisive indecision." --Robby

Straddled: My Legs Pulled Two Different Directions

2008-10-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

Home, a way of rediscovering emotions. A grasp of actions now, except constancy, the constancy of my family of five growing past this place but always fitting into it. Grasp my falling face first for old friends.

Once I had emotions and enjoyed them most. Growing old, a way of strapping myself and finding solace. Finding love in lack of community. In stares from my roommate that tell me high school has been over, has been over and will only sprinkle itself into my mental health if I point my toes in one direction.

I travel to challenge, to grasp at the roots of my hair. Approach the end of an era I've only known, no other. Pulled constructive, my mother screaming in my face makes me a better person.

A Christian nation, a Christian town traces patterns on my thighs. Boy-men I fall for carve crosses across my arms. Linked, linking, I pray hard for a god who inhabits myself and maybe no one else. Last months of life between systems that slash me until I grasp away. This is a straddling, a pushing forth to an empty corner of my kitchen.

Family, and God who is probably inside of me and also in teenage music, places I store my clippings including Watsontown and Dillsburg, then Brooklyn and some spaces between. Between the time I send a text message and the time when I receive it. The time when God will probably not respond.

A Schedule

2008-10-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

Delivered. Here, a family. On Friday I see a family, too long detached and they kiss my cheek, feed me coffee and a kitchen chair.

"How are you?" they ask, then, "Here."

On Saturday, I meet a creature, opened and rarely there is an attraction between another unless he is an old friend. He is an old friend.

A growing. Knowing, always, or at least since eighteen: I could love him. I could wish for him, I could feel nervous in my chest like too much coffee, like an oral presentation at the chalkboard of my class.

I tell him: as a friend, and so hard I do not speak because I refuse to ruin this. I refuse to appear anything but worthy. I am myself and nothing but myself; I begin and end in this shell, this tapered skin and if he can not speak through this skin he will not speak at all.

I look at him and I see greens. I could boil him, pour him in a jar to preserve until the winter. Until I'm feeling lonesome, which is always, which is weatherless. I could boil him. By all means. He should flicker his eyes, his fingers clamping past me. To Harrisburg. By all means, I deserve him.

Striving, a Sunday at one o'clock past midnight. He strives. He will strive. He has always striven. Toward. At home I scrap, I putter to the kitchen where I pour mugfuls of thinning coffee.

Bible on the table beside me. I will wait.

Opa's Study

2008-10-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

There's a huge cobweb there.

"Over daddy's desk."

Over daddy's desk.

A Wednesday, Here (Traveling)

2008-10-17T00:32:00.000-07:00

"They sucked out every good thing about me," says Joan. In Manhattan we sit late on her couch as the children and father sleep.

"One hundred to one thirty after marriage, then Orion," she says, "Beauty. Color. Body." She lives, spreads peanut butter onto bread and I think, this impact she's shared, projections are scalded into me. No amount of shining hair could teach me relationships, children, and diapers the way of she and Michael. A discourse on welcoming all peoples to home. A discourse on mealtime.

Amen, says Little Michael. He picks with his fingers, slops across the noodles.

Friends, and those I detach when I am unsure. I wear reusable pads. A diaper after childbirth.

I begin to dig through medicine chests of my families. I hold codeine for each mother and momentarily I stark, still. Then, remembering this child pushed through.

Open, and wait again. Spend the night across her couch, wake up stretched inside a sheet scented of skin and exertion: dough, then spice. As the sun streaks through city's buildings, Little Michael crawls onto my legs to drink whole milk, to eat cheerios light as styrofoam.

"Morning," he says, picking at my kneecaps. I stare until he looks away.

Sunday Prayer

2008-10-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

As if he would care, or flinch, or open wider than this floorboard. Wider than the gap that opens inside of me when I feel God moving over the face of my bath's water.

On Sunday. Here is where I am, where he visits, where he tells me "I'm not great," and I agree. Because he speaks to me, speaks to me about loss and this tension on the surface, this bath I take with tension rippling the surface, rippling as rubber, as my skin. Wet, against the tiles of the wall.

"This tension," he says, "This is where my feet--"

"Could slip," I say. Down. Over my knees, across my fresh clipped fingers, across this spirit, his idea of commitment. Locked God, as through torture, a dunk tank. Throw a ball and--down.

Push. Pop out, strike down, and down, and here is where he visits me, where he tells me how he feels. Where he shakes his head, hair long and shaven face. As when I visited and he wore jeans tight, pulled toward all patches of his thighs and I told him, "Your pants are tight," by which I meant, "You're beautiful." And then he was embarrassed, like a woman, and removed them.

Both removed, later, a stream. Water on the surface, this tension between us as our skin, as smooth across, as paint before it's dried. By film on warm milk.

I will remind him again: all goes away. Asleep. Come, Lord Jesus. You are here. Here is where you are, where I startle, where amends, where--again. Yes. Here. Here is where you are.

Quotidian, Poetry Class

2008-10-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

"Clear, but good at tangling."

-Robby Snyderman

"Clearly stated, complicated magic."

-Anna Moschovakis

1507

2008-10-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

To my neighbor:

I heard you yelling today,
today as I washed my kettle
I heard you yelling
like my father's
force rising.
Spirit, snapped,
knees unlock.

The passion, and
force you use to deflect
and to pull.

Yours.
1506

A Sunday, Here.

2008-09-28T17:45:00.000-07:00

I click my alarm until I can no longer put this off. I wash my face, rub colored cream onto it. Remember my baptism as I conceal my imperfections. A Sunday, here. Here is where I am.

A Sunday, he calls me.

"Julie," he says, "Soon I will be grown."

I work all day and picture him, dingy-haired and ragged from the rain, schlepping to Brooklyn unexpected. But I know it will not happen. I know he does not change.

I know he would not research, would not exit away to the bathroom, would not make excuses for me. I know he does not change. And I will not make excuses for him, except the excuse that he is not home, never, and will never find courage to fix this. Will never find courage to stare at his worn-white fingernails and tell me:

This is why you happened upon me. This is why my palm between your thighs, this is why I breath through my nose. This is why I have not called you until I am one mile away and will not move nearer.

This is how I ferment, how I close around your neck. This is filtered coffee in my throat and the scent of your cigar in my hair. This is why. Divide, grow.

Go home.

My Own Family Altar (Watsontown)

2008-09-25T05:04:00.000-07:00

As if this is holy:
sprayed parking spots
on grass.

Lines traced
toward church
one casserole at a time.

He and I
hide in the
craft closet.
He shrugs:
"Religion is outdated."
Then, "Come over for spaghetti?"

I shuffle Tupperware-stacked
popsicle sticks,

sequins in
jars that once held olives.

His test: God dwells in:

1) . and . and .

2) threatening

3) leftovers we'll use next sale

Let's make this really big.

A Thursday, Here.

2008-09-25T04:54:00.000-07:00

Alone, a hovel in the wall. All grows bright, like submarine, like the only color reflected back is bubbles.

Blessed. A series of bars behind which I keep my most intense. The car door took the brunt of my energies, slicing my arm and bluing my leg, causing it--over a series of days--to mound upward like a sandbag in my thigh.

I ride, stupid and victorious (for now) over death. Over the Williamsburg Bridge, past Hasids whose children trail the sidewalks as though Brooklyn is a playground.

My Own Family Altar (Traveling)

2008-09-25T04:44:00.000-07:00

I know my Hebrew-NativeAmerican name: Lying in a Casket.

Maybe now I'll rub my palms
across the inside of this box;
maybe I'll get splinters.

Breath,
inventing words like "claustrophilic," like
"alone."

It helps to remove
the tumor I tend, I give
room to grow but

mishap; make up.
No space here.

Swelled too huge. Still I feel upset.

True Blue

2008-09-25T04:41:00.000-07:00

We had voted to sell the soup for $2.00 a quart, but instead sold it for $1.75. We had very little expense.

We sang "Jesus Calls Us," and I opened prayer, followed by sentences.

We discussed ordering vanilla and decided to order thirty-six bottles, to be sold at $1.25 each.

A Short Pause to Remember Middle School

2008-09-25T04:32:00.000-07:00

Did you ever wonder why you don't have a boyfriend? Don't. Boys suck. If you ever tell me you have never thought that in your life, stop reading and never talk to me again. You are too obsessed. Sure, they're hot, but 95% of them are not worthy of you. If you have ever heard or read this in a note, "sorry, but I'm just not ready for a girlfriend, " then that person is in desperate need of a creative mind. The least they could do is tell you that you're an unorganized slob who talks too much.

The top 5 things wrong with most boys:

5. they lie
4. too immature (if younger) too mature (if older).
3. their choice of music sucks
2. they're football jocks
1. they like themselves better than you.

Jesus translated to a cake of soap

2008-09-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

A vaguery: out of Bethlehem shall come a ruler.

If I have a mosquito bite, a reddened blotch on my underwrist, at what stage of development will it be closest to God? At the prick of my skin? Or the moment I notice it? Has God already held a conference with Himself about my mosquito bite? Maybe time goes slow. Maybe the cocoa powder under my fingernails is the part of my body closest to Him.

These messages are wishy-washy, under the bathroom tiles. I discover:

Mental Illness is God rolling around in asbestos powder, his limbs caked and dry and nobody knows whether to hose him off or to wipe his skin inch by inch with a sponge. Or maybe just let God be; it's curious to see him vulnerable.

Why does God get sick? Did he do it on purpose, did he tweak himself just to see what would happen? A case for vegetarianism: we kill God every time we slap down a slab of calf on the cutting board. A case against vegetarianism: we are putting into our bodies a place where God once dwelled. A shell of God. A holy briefcase once containing the life of--God.

I refuse to do this any way than on my own. Maybe God will rear up inside of me. Maybe he'll swell and push this foggy illness out of my system.

Lamentation. Friday night Sabbath; a crate: "This is where Jesus kept his...sandwiches." The Jews laugh. I don't know how I feel, as for the first time my loyalties wrap around Jesus's fingers. How about--Bologna. How about...Rye.

How gluttonous, how insecure reading while I sit and, bored, bake cookies. Jesus straightens pathways.

And we all, in our own godly ways. A matter of trapping, of feeling sorry for ourselves. I wonder how drugs alter God in the body: enhance him, and God gets worn down, ragged from heavy spurts.

If I cannot define what makes this spirit in a cell, sex creates God. A new form infests.

I deduce: the more spiritual the sex, the more powerful for both parties, the more God will dwell in a child.

But Jesus was created without reproduction. Or just: a different reproduction? I wonder if Jesus looked like Mary. I wonder if--Mary was the mother, and Jesus was half God, half woman. Man and woman house God. But take away one of those, take away man and replace him with God. Can we make clones of opposite genders? Does God have a shell?

Unformable. He feels original in this.

As If This Will Flinch,

2008-09-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

a bedmite. Flinch in a wheeled open bed, a foot pushed overboard. But when? An arid strike. A stroke over forthwith. Open into spiked orchard heels.

Mostly, I am myself and uppity down. I flicker the lights two times before walking for the morning.

"You aren't leaving," I tell him, blinking hard and reaching my thumb to wipe dust off his ear.

A regret: the singlemost instance of death within a spiderweb.

"Kendra, you done with your hoagie?" a mother. A festerbrand. A scalded ankle. Small. I'm opening a crack, a wide node, a death between friends. Push off the precipice. Creeping, peer over the edge omits all mystery of--dark blotches left from scabs. Bent knees of a chipmunk. Mother staring at me.

"That girl--" That girl soaks brillos in the water. That girl sops up my soup. Mary, me--a sundress. Printed--stitchwork. My grandfather's suicide. I ruin twine rope.

"How entertaining this could be," he says while scratching my neck. Thorough. Digging around brown clusters.

I resign. Give me your covered basket draped over with fabric.

Ten Chunks of Toes

2008-09-03T22:28:00.001-07:00

Spoons, my dear, and a fork I will throw at the microwave. In the morning I wear overalls that sag and a t-shirt cut tight across my neck. I am warned to remember my lover's studies, the dog-eared pages that riddle him as night tiptoes into morning.

Here is where I've seen an eyelash in the empty space between my breasts. Please sir, pluck it off into the pail; by night I will pile it with magazines to be burnt. Tiptoe the backyard, flick a match and watch an advertisement: Lucille Ball play Ricky black-faced, then ashen.

At noon I purchase a machine complete with fingerprints that overlap the glass screen. Its box I pull from the floor of the department store. An empty space among wobbling clothesracks where I stand to watch Santa blast air into a sousaphone. His carol crosses the Misses' Department.

Burrowed into my machine is a folder of quiz questions: Lucy and Ricky divorced because--

1) .

2) Little Ricky

3) Under evergreen he fucked another woman

Mutters of My Grandpa

2008-09-03T22:27:00.000-07:00

Where's that robin goin'? Across the porch?

I don't chew tobacco, I chew these.

Funniest things they do today.

Motorcycles!

I was born there ninety-one years ago. Got there ahead of the doctor.

Lived up on that hill for one year. Went to Washingtonville, worked in a big chicken house.

See all them trees up there? Don't farm that, gee whiz, some good ground there.

Whoop, there was a stop sign. Don't see no cop behind me.

Garbage man must go, there set the garbage can.

What people do...steal stuff, gee whiz.

Ah, haha. Different world.

Between Fingers

2008-09-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

My creases form around him, crack and chap.

Flick him away before he seeps too deeply inside of me.

Rustled Oak Leaf, Rustled Backbone

2008-08-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

I reach under his passenger's
seat and pull up a ceramic bowl.

"What's--?" he looks from
the road to me and I vomit
into it, palms splayed like
spiders reaching across
cracked earth.

At once, it spills. His mother's
jug of liquor seeping
in the bathtub.

If we owned a cat her name
would be Potato and she
would not be female. Gender is
less about the stretch marks that
skid across my inner thigh.

Beside me, he exhales and palms the
wheel with tender pads of flesh.
"Again?" he asks. Then, "Why?"

When neutered, male cats
reek of alcohol and train tracks, split
because there's been a quake. His fingers
tremble for the road, for his grandfather, for

urine-webbed pants.
To me, he puzzles and I say:
It's about the muscle of his arm,
the risen slopes of skin that curve
us upward, into hills
on top the continent divide.

Janet

2008-08-23T17:10:00.000-07:00

"I haven't always been old and fat," she stares at my dress. Coughs, hobbles to the lettuce jar.

Tongue: Tickling her Mouth Top

2008-08-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

Her handwriting, how it's changed.
Young creature who savored this name and
tasted each letter's slope.

I read impressions,
paper waved in ink over
stamp corner, catty as a woman
fanning humid air
against her neck.

At Eleven

2008-08-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

According to schedule, she wakes.

She inhales and stretches her arms outward as, from the hallway, her mother shouts. Her mother who has awaken three hours ago. She knows what her mother has done in these three hours: in bed she has kissed her husband goodbye. She has showered, pulled on a velvet robe and crept downstairs. She has pressed the rubber button of the television's remote. As a man and woman talk about the creases in this season's pants, she has prepared a single breakfast of cinnamon toast and, in a glass, chocolate faded into milk.

She has heard her mother's phrases each day. In bed, she grits her teeth at them, presses her jaws hard together until her head shakes. Her mother's voice sounds like shouting underwater. It is all vibrations, deep-toned and nasal like holding nostrils, but no air bubbles glopping to the surface.

Nine o'clock is much too early to hear this voice. But there is a peace, a peace that she, upon waking, pushes from her chest. She feels her body open forward, project her from this tangle of sheets.

Only then will she anticipate.

Scattered from Here

2008-08-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

May 16, 2008

Dear Casey,

Perhaps it's because you're the least guarded of my friends, least jaded or hopeful of presenting himself in a specific way, but right now as I flipped through ideas of whom to send a letter, the answer was you.

Summer so far. What has this summer so far been? I've begun to drink Oma's sulfur water (her tap water carbonated naturally with sulfur bubbles) which no one does but Oma and the late Opa. Something's been accomplished. I always expect my self consciousness to fade when I come back to Central PA, here where the high schools are populated with maternally chubby girls, here where I'm normal sized, not overweight. But maybe that only happens at camp, or maybe that only happens when I weigh 135. I'm not about to start telling myself that this appearance is what matters most about me, but it matters in situations of sex and impressions and that's what plagues my mind in a new place like this.

Casey! I didn't even think of this. It's your name! Casey! There's a boy in the kitchen at Zelda's, a boy who's kind of stupid, rather dopey, but full of character, hippiedom, and friendliness (not to mention male beauty). My family ties knots backward in these parts of Pennsylvania, and this boy Casey's grandmother attended Prom with my Uncle Bobby Hagenbuch, now a resident of Kansas City, Missouri. He skates in the skate park each night after work until he passes out, works part time on weekends at Central PA's swingers club (in the kitchen), has a dirty youngman 'stache, a beautiful ruddy face, muscle tone on a body type he calls "sluggish," a nasal-low voice, and tattooed arms. When I bring dishes to the back, he says, "Thanks, Jules. Is it okae if I call you that?" and I tell him, "Yes, that's what my dad calls me." There isn't strong sexual tension between us because we think and live very differently, but he is a beautiful boy and I am a well-dressed girl so there is a twinge. If I wasn't committed to a boy returning Monday (the internet friend) or guilt-struck for a boy back home (Ted, who I've been leading on since sixth grade and relationship blocking when he returns interest), I'd actively pursue Casey, my slightly dumb, fully friendly and lovely coworker.

Oma is grand, told me "I hadn't always been 108, only on my wedding day. Working at the beauty shop I got up to 125." Told me, "You eat enough." Told me, "Jesus came to the earth to show us a different way to worship."

I've been riding my bicycle with cousin Nathan, exploring rural highways and pushing my way up five hills in a row. "I can't make it," he tells me and I say, "Yes you can!" pedaling past him with a jolt of ego. Like my father, who's never been thin but has more willpower and muscle than a toned Buddhist.

I will finish Samantha Hunt's book tomorrow (Saturday), drive to Nana and Pop's after church on Sunday, and go back to work on Monday at 11. I'm meeting all sorts of friendly people around here, one of whom is a 34 year-old grant writer and lobbyist/cyclist named Eric. He comes into Zelda's every day to work (uses our wireless), orders herbal tea and a burrito, and looks like Christian Hawkey. Is genuinely curious about everyone's life story, told me I took over for a girl named Erin who quit the weekend before I arrived. Casey had a crush on her. She was petite and "too friendly," always bubbly and got stressed by the job so she quit. I'm jealous of Casey's affections for her but know I don't really care, that I'm intimidating in my strength and character or just seemingly independent. Something like that. But I like that, and maybe that's not the reason but I tell myself it is so I don't change, don't back down. I am what I am, not everything that works for others works for me and I know what feels right.

I love you, Casey. Hope all is well.

Love,
Julie

This is among the simplest things I can do:

2008-06-17T08:37:00.001-07:00

Cream cheese in
sandwiches Mother

severed into angles. Thick as
her thumb. I perch
the counterledge and trace
the shape of fingernails.

My legs, two heels beat cupboards in
continual pattern.
Batter the slowing strength
of heartbeats.

Mother, your
pulmonary spill. Crackle
popcorn or the splattering of
smooth white bird shit
on my eyebrow.

Real Nicey-Nice, Fancy-Like: A Biography of Julia Hagenbuch

2008-04-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

Christmas break of last year, my father met me in the Harrisburg train station wearing a canvas winter jacket zipped against his belly. Down his jaw, grey-specked stubble peaked up unshaven and I wondered: when did this face toughen? It reminded me of the calluses on his toes that I stared at as a girl, lying on the couch while we watched television. Now, as people passed around us, he kissed my cheek and stared at my face like he was inspecting what had changed and what, relentlessly, never does.

He named me Julie after his Great Aunt Julia Hagenbuch who died in 1968 childless and unwed. Every morning in her Baltimore apartment she smeared bright red lipstick across her mouth, combed her hair--a fake, soot black--atop her head before work at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her annual two-week vacation was the beginning of each August, when she rode the train home to Central Pennsylvania and rekindled relations with her seven siblings, their mates and offspring.

That first thick-aired Sunday every year when my father saw her was a treat. Leaning forward in his church pew, he peeked between the shoulders ahead of him to watch her fanning her neck with a paper print of Jesus. Across her body, a cinch-belted dress hugged her hips, similar to the fit of her white pocketed nursing uniform she wore in Baltimore. But my father didn't know the Julia who dumped bedpans and wiped vomit from the dried lips of decaying men. To my father, she was elegant even in old age, everything the hardened farmwomen surrounding him couldn't be. And that's what--in boyhood--caused his fascination: Julia wasn't like other old women he knew, especially those who were unmarried. In his experience, unwed elderly women were crabby, deep-voiced spinsters, round and marshmallow-faced from years of biscuits and cream.

After celebrating Christmas, I drove north to Nana and Pop's: my father's parents. Pop took me to the local livestock auction where we stood on a catwalk, peering down at goats getting bolts punched through their ears. Around noon, we walked into the concession stand and Pop ordered his weekly fish sandwich. I asked for French fries and a coffee.

Sitting across from me, he asked, "You don't have a man, then?"

I breathed a laugh. "Nope," I said, "No man." I could've elaborated, told him "I'm picky," or "People aren't friendly in New York City," but I knew it was more complicated than that, and it's best to keep explanations short with Pop and his failing ears.

"Aunt Julia never had a man," he told me before holding his hand in front of his face and circling his tongue inside his mouth to clean his dentures.

As a boy, Pop's family wrote a letter to Julia every Sunday. Gathering around the dry wooden table, he and his siblings took turns scrawling penciled paragraphs on lined gray paper. Pop--the second oldest--volunteered to lick the stamp, pretending it was a two-cent candy with a tangy-pulp taste. After pressing it onto the envelope with his thumb, he carried the letter outside, down the long, dusty lane, and slipped it in the metal mailbox, pushing the door closed and trapping it inside.

Every Tuesday, a postcard arrived. Returning from plow work, Pop saw it on the counter ledge, the screen door slamming behind him. "Afternoon," he greeted his three sisters, and, walking past them, slid the postcard into his hands and tilted it toward his face. The Hopkins Savings Bank, its doorframes chiseled from bony grey rocks, was illustrated on the front. He flipped it over. On the back was written in slanting scrawl: "Love and best wishes, Julia." They received this same five-word message every week.

My last day of Christmas break, I made coleslaw with my father. "Dad," I told him, pushing half a head of cabbage downward against a grater, "You named me after two Julia Hagenbuchs who never got married." I was speaking, of course, about Great Aunt Julia and also Cousin Julia who's ninety, blind, and lives alone in the farmhouse her father built. He stopped whisking and looked up. "You'll have to break that tradition," he told me.

He hadn't noticed this when he named me, and if I'd realized it sooner I might have felt cursed. But as a college junior slouching into my train seat back north for spring semester, the idea of staying single comforted me, like I was already living up to something. Pressing my temple against the window, I wondered if Julia had ever stood against the rail overlooking Baltimore Harbor and wanted anything different from life. Or was she satisfied with her breakfast of coffee and toast, her job cutting pills in half and stroking a sick child's forearm with her thumb? I imagined twenty year-old Julia, new to Baltimore, squinting out at the water and wondering how many ripples overlapped and at what point they began to form waves.