American woods and highways. Scraggily bits left between paved sides of the road and anyplace build-able. Mounds of dirt from Eisenhower, reclaimed by roughage next to any highway are the totally visible but unvisitable oasii I dreamt about running to in my youth, LA, always in the car. This was my great wide somewhere and flowers grew. There is a patch behind the parking lot at Menards, a sliver between the Metra train and the shopping center and I, on bike, try to bring the flower home. it holds on like the wild thing it is, claws. We wrestle and a bee sting but I win. It revolts in my vase.
My neighborhood juts against the 90/94 expressway. Keeps us undesirable, at least at its noisy edges, safe. A triangle of poorly planned nothing, where three streets begin or end and no lot to speak of. An underside that would feel dangerous if it weren't mine, still I run past the park barely large enough to call itself a playground no children are ever there and its name rhymes with rape, like a warning. But the highway, as it rises unaware gives up the best view of the city, truck top halves, occasional light posts, and cement to sky.
Today the line is undistinguishable. Grey above, grey below. Breathtaking, neither in its ugliness nor beauty, but because it is true. Tangible atmosphere, perfectly framed like Romaine Brooks at the english seaside in a painting group, 1901. The scenery she managed to get that exact grey none could lie and say they didn’t recognize, the color even of their literature for heaven’s sakes. 1901. yet they continue to repeat a depressed Russian who seven years later, sure nobody is first at anything but—
The dandelion deserves a field, noble. If given even a crack or nothing at all will still flourish. Contrary growths are called weeds, they prefer you did not want them there and if cultivated they sulk. Everything about their thieving defiance a metaphor so I make free wine popping yellow heads into a vat each year. The only alcohol that is actually replenishing, I repeat myself too, at the solstice party I like to feed my friends to celebrate celestial revolutions manipulative they say cause I control the scenery, so what.
She corrects me, “evolutions.” I fell in love with the woman whose name means the sky each thing unfolds itself backward here and my favorite view, solitary. I gave her a new name we met at the precipice, no hill, no horizon. Narrative is about working against the inherent perfection of a story, finding ways to derail it, startle the third party, be scared. Remember how we could stay up at night in our anger, the blue under your skin opening? Bursts and blossoms teaching each other from pools of different wisdom. Still knowing you my whole life; the one I went into the bathroom to know, promises made in the mirror and the word god.
Mistakes— I wanted to be understood by the world. Thought this meant self then I wanted to be seen by a woman thought this meant love. Everything is mine now having traded either for the highway alone from below, Avondale and grey.