Fourth Wall Break Me Harder

Requiem for an Undead Cat

Sometimes, in a little growl

Dry tongue

Old enough to drive by now,

You tell me, with a hiss and a swat and then a low, eventual hum

That you love me

That this life was all that it was.

Sometimes, you rap on the door for hours,

Only to leave my bed,

Begging for food,

Begging to beg, hitting the dog,

Coming back again

Only to die — sometime, in the next few years, i guess

In a couple years, they will all lean so far I won’t remember them anymore.

We will celebrate a birthday on an unspecified date for a double digit year

The dog will be thirteen. And I will be someone who says “this is my dog, she is thirteen” and the woman at the park will kneel and say “she looks good for thirteen”. And we will come home, and you will swat at her again, your spine frail and boney, vertebrate up to the neck, one by one, I pet you and know it hurts a little bit.

When you outlive the dog, I’ll hate you for it and when the dog dies, I will know pain like no other.

And when the dog dies I’ll get a tattoo, or a hickey, or eat too much fried rice.

And you’ll be there with me, kicking, clawing, meowing,

Because you are my undead cat

Requiem for a dead Cat

each lock of hair falling onto west hollywood wood laminate

peering into infinity from circular salon mirrors

writing refrigerator poetry at the party

miraculous symphony, pretty music

finger tap sticky into the solo cup

at the field later, crested Baldy peering down on mom

Forget i like springtime every year

constellation of birds on the grass tremble when we’re near

crumbled oreos in the handicapped spot, big gulp

and springs in the sofa

these brittle claws scratched me once and now with each

Small rise

And fall

Of her trembling stomach, rocket lays dying

what earthworms and ants will make homes in her ears

nasty things we all think about. decomposition part of the process

I’ve always loved this tiny set of bones

The Sweater

I have a plan for what I’m going to do when I eventually get my sweater back. I’m going to open the door and take it out of Paul’s hands and I’m going to hold my breath while saying “thank you it was very good to see you but I’m in the middle of a meeting” and then I’m going to run back inside all the way to our laundry room. I’m going to put the sweater in the washer and if someone is doing the laundry — I planned for that too — I’m going to put the sweater at the door to my room and then I’m going to go back to the laundry room and wash off my hands. When I walk down the hallway, with the sweater in my hands, I’m going to hold my head (and my nose) very far away from the sweater.

In the 1920s, architects in Los Angeles made hallways very, very long. It will be long enough for me to wonder where the sweater has been all of these months. I don’t think it’s been shoved in a closet; you were resourceful, you wore it with suit coats. It will be long enough to remember all of the cities where we took the sweater. Maybe the apartment doesn’t smell like coffee and patchouli anymore, and maybe the closet where it’s been all these months doesn’t smell like you. But this is all just in case it does.

When I get to the laundry room and put my sweater in the wash, there will be a small voice in my head challenging me. The voice tells me to dip my nose to the cotton and take a short whiff. If I smell it and nothing happens, look how strong you are. I feel nothing. And I’ll think I am Awesome. But instead, I imagine that if I smell the sweater, all hell will break loose. That is simply not true.

I’ll walk with urgency so my roommates will think I’m in a hurry. There will be no meeting to get back to. The letters of my last name on the back of the sweater have started to peel off one by one. The left edge of the H in my last name falls into my palm. The sweater is from the 2011 Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Girls Basketball Championship game. We won.

I had a sprained ankle from jumping a fence the weekend before the game. Before the game, I went to the bathroom with Mary Gordon and I was afraid that she would hear me pee. She was the point guard, I was the left forward. The game was in central Los Angeles during the day and it was hot. I read a book in the car on the freeway and I was nauseous when we got to the school. I think the score was 37–32 and I remember wearing the sweater right after the game, polyester beading together and wicking sweat off my sides. The way that black beads of fabric get stuck in your armpits.

You probably never got to wear the sweater when you were sweaty. You never got to walk out of basketball practice with Mary Gordon while the sun was about to set. The way that an October Southern California sun rests itself close to the horizon and far from the peninsula. You never got to walk out of the brick gymnasium into dusk while the stadium lights still weren’t on because we had just barely set the clocks back. You never went for a walk in your basketball shoes, sweat dripping down to the laces, shorts rolled one roll too high because you had been “trying something” that summer and wearing them all the way down made you feel like a boy. Parents have a problem whichever way you roll your basketball shorts.

I don’t know. Maybe the sweater doesn’t smell anymore. I’m still waiting for Paul to drop it off. The needle reaches the edge of the record. I flip it over.

I found a photo of you in the sweater.

I don’t have many photos of you anymore. Whenever I go to erase more, I think you happened, let it be now. I just think I should start playing basketball again.

Last night

For the very first time

I touched your arm in the dark

I grazed it

And you turned

Held me

Blossoming together in the sheets, hot, summer, sweat

It was all coming together

I wrote a euphemism on a post-it note that really said i love you

Four days later I drove my bumper into the curb in front of your house

I’d do it again at the house where you grew up

I’d do it again after being stuck for hours in the green room

I’d hit my bumper so many times that eventually i’d take it off of the car and put it in the garden in the front yard and use it as a planter box

I think i mainly like playing darts and pool

One time,

At the carnival

I threw a dart at a balloon and the side of the dart ricocheted back my direction

And nearly hit a man in the eye

I’m sure he’s doing fine

But here

We are sweaty and magnificent and no one can breathe

Shed

I, for the longest time,

needed a reason not to sleep with the windows open.

There’s a hoax about the wind:

a bevy of truths about strength and stoicism.

There’s bravery in erosion,

and in sheds I think we find ourselves

Or in the grand canyon, our reflection in the backyard tools, shovel shine

Cactus pressuring the cement.

at home

His iteration of american baseball

Gardening gloves as a second base,

Truths that are strung together like chopped and bruised oleander.

Open the windows at night,

become renewed by something that isn’t a dirty sweater.

No jacket for the sake of feeling alive, sweating, freezing, dying

weeds grown over the watergun, planter box cat

Dirt stuck to the weird parts, between toes

Things that will be the best when you are older.

The plants eclipse, resolving the note of the day,

where the light ends in the yard

Well

the toughest part about being here, for me, is realizing how much I like it

until the gift is no longer mine to borrow.

Don’t Leave the Refrigerator Door Open

“Consciousness,”

I begged the wall,

could be a messenger

Or a cruel and deep sonder,

The latitude needed to birth a nation in the frontal cortex-

then, looking back in the mirror one more time,

Like opening the refrigerator and the undoing of it all,

I wanted to be nothing.

So I watched TV

Happy new years are you serious (journal, january 5 london, 2025)

January third and all of the cars are frosted over. I stumble up to the second floor of the bus, my breath fogging the windows. I wait 20 stops, get off at the wrong one, walk the right direction, over-correct. Walk into a bookstore that sells wine. Jazz fusion, orange low light, ikea lamp. I don’t know why suddenly being somewhere else makes it even harder to order. I will do something with the weeks I’m in London, something that makes money. I have to make art out of all of my experiences, I have to make money out of my art, if I don’t I will not only be unable to pay my rent but I will also be unfulfilled.

Then, ordering a beer and picking out a paperback I won’t buy anyways, I sit down on a toadstool and pretend to be comfortable. The bookkeeper-bartender pours me a beer into a glass that looks like the cups my grandma had. She is cute, I think. You are just expecting someone to come talk to you and tell you how great you are and that you don’t know it. I want everyone to initiate everything. Then, the other four women in the store must think my posture is terrible. I sit up straight, I fumble to the first page, dropping my hat, unsure where to set the beer.

I can overhear the dynamic of the two bookkeepers, the divine feminine, one more knowledgeable than the other. One keeping score, the other proving knowledge. I take out my phone every couple of minutes and write down something about the place. I realize, again, that I am afraid of my art being too similar or even minimally similar to my own life even though I feel my life is thorough and meaningful and loving — why should anyone read, listen, feel something about something so small and repeatable and insignificant. What if I only come up with ideas that have been had. Long lineage, human form: billions before me.

Days later, after the first gig, I bang my guitar flight case on each spiral step in the tube station; a train sucking wind through the tunnel. Shamefaced sometimes, I could melt through a subway grate. When I got to the pub, I thought I would be playing background music but the promoter went onstage himself and introduced me, asked the audience for their attention. I told them not to give it to me. Back underground now, waiting for the train, I imagine lying down on the grate above the trains. Warm pieces of me sliding in between each hard, cold steel rectangle and down onto the tracks or wherever the steam comes from. Three pitches ring out to signal the doors closing. In New York, the MTA’s sound for doors closing is a reference to Gerswhin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Or maybe the other way around. The woman next to me on the bus airpods buzzing with something above 130 beats per minute. Experiencing the aural illusion that it could be African dance or house music. Everything all at once.

It is so easy to be forgiving around people you don’t know how to stereotype. Derry girls versus people from calabasas driving G wagons. Part of that must be that wealth is so much harder to see here because transportation is so egalitarian. I’ve been so selfish post graduation from college. I learn so much about myself these days and am able to detect big shifts, sure, but I’m not making big observations about the world. This combined with the mid-seated feeling that what I have to say doesn’t matter. Not in a masochistic or real way, just in a neutral way.

I cleaned up at Cecilia’s where I spent five days sick and lonely. I moved all of my stuff over to Gabby’s for a couple hours before checking in at the hotel. Gabby lives in a soviet era social housing complex in Hoxton next to a massive brutalist building that looks like Bunche hall at UCLA. I sat at a coffee shop for a few hours then went back and got my bags. The hostess and I talked about guitars while I thumbed through the electronic check-in. My room at A point hotel / point A hotel? In shoreditch is so small.

The room fit a bed and about a foot in each direction. Drop down tray tables on the wall like an airplane. I went to a pub called The Fox finally to have dinner and after I sat down, a fox ran past my window. I go see John Coltrane’s Love Supreme anniversary show at the jazz cafe. At the end of the first bass solo, the audience claps and, like a dj pulling a fader down, everything goes soft and quiet again, back to the original uptempo swing, musicians meeting each other calmly at a new dynamic. Foggy stage lights form straight edges, triangles on the players. I imagine them all going out afterwards. I imagine what to say to the drummer or however to relate to someone that good at anything.

Yesterday morning I woke up grumpy and had the weird free hotel breakfast, put on my running shoes and just walked based on vibes. I walked down to the Thames then west to the bridge that takes you to the Tate. I ran around the tate for a few minutes. Art museums always feel like a maze I want to get through, and then into a church back on the other side of the river. Then to the maughan library at king’s college london where I wrote for a few hours, feigning student. I walked all the way back from there. Called Jordan, had a veggie burger and talked to the bartender about the Lakers. Went to the old blue last and bummed a cigarette from a group of people. Then a tap on my shoulder and it was Dom. thank god. We had a drink together and watched a band. I went back to the hotel in shoreditch. Now im in east dulwich after a chaotic ride with many bags.

After this I sobbed about the fires. I actually don’t know how life will go back to normal after something like that. It’s really hard for me to look away. Been stuck on my laptop just watching everything burn down.

I dropped my bags off with Luce’s roommate Roíse, from Belfast. Aggressively irish and someone who boasts confidence in a way that almost makes you scared, tiptoeing. After realizing no one was there to tell me to make myself at home, I guess I’ll put my bags here, get myself water, sit on the couch, heat up water, where are the mugs.

I go for a walk and no one answers my knock at the door. I looked down the row of pitched, tudor roofs, cookie cutter all the way down Playfield Crescent. The novelty of watching my breath. Luce opened the door and we hugged and said nice to meet you and I awkwardly followed her up the narrow steps to her tiny room. We all sat on the couch for a bit, not much to say, hard to explain the fires. How long have you lived here, where did you go to college.

Condensation coloring in each single paned window in the back mudroom, sun starting to touch the frosted crabgrass.

I went to meet up with Lola, we sat at a coffee shop for no more than twenty minutes. I walked all the way back from peckham to east dulwich and couldn’t find anywhere to eat. I slept in luce’s bed that night, a good night of sleep actually, warm in her room.

In the morning i pretended to have plans but ended up just sitting on the couch with the girls talking. We went for a walk in the park nearby. They played on the swings. Every glance at my phone about the natural disaster at home. Them with their own language and inside jokes and warmth that i wanted to worm my way into. Wanting luce to like me a little bit.

I went to meet up with gabby all the way in hackney to see jazz. We ate at a place called the love shack where i slipped in snow a few days before.

The next morning i went out and walked around near the thames, in a weird mood, homesick and shoulder and rib all messed up, torn muscle, stress, etc. then back to dulwich to get ready for rehearsal. It took us forever to get there and we had to uber some of the way. Finally feeling a little more normal on the train.

Margo’s place had burned down

Dancing alone, third wheeling with luce and margeaux, feeling awkward, then feeling so myself and feeling like fuck this. We go home and they tuck me to bed on the couch with 5 blankets, i can barely fit there. Luce said text her if it got to be too much. And thus began, i never slept, ever. Maybe at 6 am for two hours but it was just too cold.

Yamado / walking

There was grease on my shirt. I smelled like garbage, I’d spent 20 minutes petting a horse after the diner. It was August and the East Village was a blister. Don finally said we could walk back: Don’t pick people’s flowers. Walk if it’s red. All sorts of people used to come into the shop; do you know Chet Baker? Do you know Carol Burnett? You’ve got to know Carol Burnett. How old are you, seven? You’ve got to know Carol Burnett.

It felt so wrong to have less energy than a 75 year old. He said all of this in an Americanized, ashkenazic drawl. Law was lauer. Water was wudder. Walk was waulk, waulk, waulk, waulk and don’t stop waulking until you get to tomorruh.

I had to walk everywhere with Don, it didn’t matter the occasion or the location. That same summer (I was six), he took me on his motorcycle, but not to go anywhere. We saw the giant M&M in times square then went back to his apartment and walked where we actually needed to go. Unlike LA, the walking always started from the get-go. I would never be driven to the place from which I would walk.

Moments of respite were sparse. In the photos from these trips, lying down appears some maudlin performance art. Park benches, sticky orange subway seats, hotel lobby couches; the world was my bed. It wasn’t the walking that bothered me, it was the characterization of walking. It was brevity, circumstance, and hurry up and wait. But autonomy is one constant of childhood; you usually have none.

Don turned to me at one point and asked if I knew what a contraction was. I said like ain’t and aren’t and you’re. And he said do you know what my favorite contraction is?

Yamado? Do you know what I am going to do? Yamado.

I really do like walking. I like it when the road signs are on a human scale; where the “1” in the “I-10” is not the same size as my torso. I like walking where I will not feel the gust of wind rustle my jeans as a car drives past. Where I don’t have to read gas prices. Where the sheer scale of one intersection will not consume me, where I will not think about North American intersections with gas stations on every corner for the next 20 minutes.

I gained some mobile agency when I met my friend Andrew. Andrew was a long haired self proclaimed hippie, righteously dancing on two barefoot feet. He made walking everywhere look effortless. We spent a few summers walking and biking all around the Port of Los Angeles. Sometimes we could get a bus or his mom to drive us to Hollywood or Pasadena. When you walk through a city inspired by haste and hurriedness, it’s impossible to find a bathroom. And so you very quickly become two dirty preteens in running shoes walking through galleries, jewelry stores, Beverly Hills bridal shops. Can I use your bathroom, to the Beverly Hills Rolex cashier. Around the city, to the beach, through abandoned boat yards, and back again. We were never in a rush, but we walked everywhere with conviction.

Then, suddenly, you are 16 and the world is systemic and brief.

You are: in a car, getting a parking ticket, pulling off the 405, wishing there was some sort of infrastructure for one to rest.

This is: frightening, will never get any better, will sometimes not be horrible, will always be uncomfortable.

Sometimes, you can feel yourself falling out of this game. Sometimes, in crowded lecture halls you find yourself slipping back into the walk that carried you through someone else’s idea of a good afternoon — a museum, a park, a field trip — and you start to think — why not that? When will it find me again?

I keep a skateboard with me most of the time so that I can skate when I’m in a hurry. A good walk that must be sped up is better spent on a fast skate.

Trains

We kissed for the very first time when we woke up. We were arm and arm, drowsy, groggy. I woke to steam horns and the thunder and bells of railroad crossing arms. I got up and leaned into the spout of the sink, wetting my throat. I looked at her through the washroom mirror, tousled in pillows. She was sleeping again. Then I looked at myself, dead in the eyes. There was no delay, no change in vision, my eyes in the mirror moved just as fast as reality. I could see a new color and yet felt nothing. All new but still completely unchanged.

The conductors’ quarters at the junction had concrete walls and the mainroom was accessed through a dark stairwell. I tripped coming down here when we came in last night. Yesterday, we rode all the way from Lake Lowell (a couple hours outside of the Boise junction). We only stopped at Latourell Falls. We hopped on the train at a farm near the lake when they were dropping off hay. Alice met me in Wyoming — I guess I should start further back in the story — and we took the First Western Railway to Boise and then we met Albert in a shotgun shack eating oatmeal out of a shoe.

Albert was second to the conductor and he said we could ride if we both promised not to steal any grain (apparently this happened a lot on the FWR). Albert was wearing penny loafers and a double breasted jacket even though he was covered from head to toe in soot. He had a nasal voice and sounded like he was from the northeast. I’d never met anybody from the northeast. We sat with him in the shack while he finished his shoe oatmeal (there weren’t any bowls) and then he showed us to the junction.

He gave an extensive overview of the grain car, I remember him saying:

If you girls take any of this grain, I’ll make sure we stop this train in the dead of the Oregon desert

He showed us his favorite part of the train:

The caboose is the best part because you can see the furthest from up here

He showed us how he shines his shoes.

You can use the old napkins from when this used to be a passenger car

And then he showed us the car with the hay bales and gave us each a rope to hold onto.

I told him I’d been train hopping before and that there was no reason to worry. But the rail on the FWR was different. Twisted and often making sharp turns, with branches coming up in parts of the track.

The ride was short — 10 hours. The desert went on for miles and with each twist and plateau, came more and more dust. When the sky finally turned, we were almost through The Dallies.

We stopped at a derailment next to Latourell Falls, where the Columbia splits the new state from the old. Washington was green.

Because the train was running early, Albert took us up the fork in the trails that went to the top of Latourell falls. It was a 250 foot drop.

Then Portland came up quick.