Slick-bodied brown wings brushing silver surface, black beak first and he at the river edge, stepping into the water, the only man in the world, entranced by broad and stretched wing fingertip, brings cupped palms of water to lips and swallows his mouthful, lips curling at the end into, “Mine,” this claim from the deep, so resounding, so sure of itself, and it struck me because no, not even God had sounded like that.

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We share beginnings

and endings, will all have a

final, chiming home.

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There was once a woman who heard ice before it spoke.

She had learned this like you learn any language untaught, living inside it until its grammar lays flat on your native tongue. A house doesn’t fall at once. The collapse has a way of saying give before it goes. A door that used to close now needs a shoulder. A stain in the shape of a country filling in its lines on the ceiling. The silence of a person who’s decided something and not said it yet.

She kept a list of the sounds, but she never wrote it down.

The first winter, the ice was thick enough to drive on. Everyone said so. She waked the family out to the middle of it and as they lay down and looked up, she understand that this was the most dangerous kind of safe. This is the forgetfulness that enables the living to stop listening.

She never stopped listening.

She heard the checking account balance tick behind her ears. She felt the cough that lasted one day longer than it should. She saw the sparks in the empty gray space of the messages. Something was always about to give.

This wasn’t a thought she had that she let float by. No, this was the floor she stood on. The others waked the surface with freedom, laughing and certain, and she loved them for it, but she couldn’t join them because someone had to stay near the shore and watch the color of the ice. All that grey, all that air trapped beneath. But the clear ice, that would hold. A memorization of facts so no one else would have to learn the hard way.

Then, one spring, the thing she’d braced against didn’t come. It just, forgot about her. The checking account held its balance and grew some. The cough faded when the first rains came. The person who’d gone quiet came back into the room to ask her to dinner. And she stood at the edge of the unbroken ice, full of the grief of a catastrophe dematerialized, and her body, braced for impact, shivered and flinched through the absence of reaction. The emptiness of protection from nothing to protect.

The ice really only followed one rule.

It didn’t care how carefully one listened. It broke when it broke, it held when it held, and listening for the cracks changed nothing except the listener, who grew an ear so fine that it could hear danger in the floorboards and no longer the people laughing on the surface, calling out in the middle, saying it’s safe, it’s safe, come see, come lie down and look up, the water is a hundred feet down and none of us will touch it today.

She’s still at the edge, reading the gray. Out on the clear part, people lie warm on their backs in the sun, on ice only she can hear.

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How hard it is to kick the tires on the tongue and let the words run and take you wherever it is deep someplace you’ve been thinking of, or dreaming of, or imagining, or dreading, see that’s really it, isn’t it, the duality of it all, the brutality and tenderness of the thing wrapped and cloaked in the filmy residue of becoming. Pull the perspective back and the frame out, but it’s so hard to do so when there is so much pain in each frame, that pulling back only emphasizes just how much is there in the first place, just how much hurt there is floating in the ether, a scorpion tail poised, a fire ant hill under the leaves. I am interested in the way we wound each other and I am interested in the way we each deal with those wounds, but I am not yet interested in forgiveness or crossing the bridge to the other side, I still am drawn to the funk and pull of the swamp. I think pain takes on angles and makes us all more beautiful, but is what why I keep diving into it more, deepening the line between the polarities, a cleaving in the chest you only really feel when a life threshold is there and permanence waits on the other side. See, there are some things you can’t go back to and some choices that when you make them, you close certain futures forever. I have ambition, or did, but it was direction I allowed myself to be pulled in, letting my waterlogged compass soak in the orange, allowing the river of choice to overtake my boat. For a long time, and even now, I’m afraid to lay claim to or place ownership over things because they can then be loss. An item once named is an item grieved. Marriage even feels like this. Like I have officially told the universe, this is my love, my heart outside my body, this is how you can hurt me deepest. And I wait for the hurt, the shoe, the tearing, the cleaving, the absolute shattering of enjoying with gratitude what today is and knowing a day may come where things could be different, harder, a loss entirely. But I have to tell myself that there is abundance here, there is joy, there is much love and wonder to be felt, and that to live in scarcity is to invite more of it, a reunion of bumbling mishaps and deeper, darker accidents that, upon reflection, don’t feel that accidental.

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Jellyfish learn with

no brain, they remember and

avoid the tank walls.

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There’s a woman with long grey hair that comes into the bakery every Tuesday and Thursday. She is heavier than her knees want to handle, and she limps to her left. I smile at her, try and reach across the counter to lean in close and help her. What can I get her? Every week she asks for a loaf of Sunflower Whole Wheat unsliced. Her thin lips barely say the words – if I did not recognize her, I would have to ask her to repeat it week after week. I have never seen her smile. The only free sample she will take is Sunflower Whole Wheat, week after week.

Every week I will check the shelf and grab her an unsliced loaf if we have it. More often than not, however, we are out. The problem with bread is that you cannot un-slice what has already been sliced. So I have to tell her we are out of stock, that I am so sorry, what can I offer her instead. And every week when I disappoint her, her eyebrows above her wire-rimmed glasses will well with tears and she will swallow a lump in her throat and say she can’t believe it. Every week, I offer to take her name and phone number, to save her that unsliced Sunflower loaf in the morning the minute it comes out of the oven, but she refuses. I don’t know why, I don’t understand. She is near tears whenever I have to disappoint her, but she refuses to let me help her prevent her disappointment.

I have no way of knowing her name to do this. Her card, when scanned on the computer, holds no name, just a series of numbers and an expiration date. I want there to be so much more. I want to know her name. I want to save her that loaf of unsliced Sunflower Whole Wheat. Want to make her smile. Joke with her about the weather, or the absurdity of parking spaces in The Village. Ask her what she bought from McGuckins. Hold her hand as she walks in and out of the bakery every time with that left-leaning limp. I think she looks like a Roberta. I’ve never met a Roberta, but somehow it seems to fit in my mind.

Roberta with the unsliced Sunflower Whole Wheat. Roberta in the navy puffy coat, with the simple black leather handbag, with the long grey hair. Roberta with small grey hairs growing over her thin top lip. Roberta, Roberta, Roberta.

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with shivering clarity I see the threshold of the dark, glittering Seine beyond his beautiful head, the arc of bent knee, this chasm behind him and it was that he chose, would be that I would choose, and in choosing him, taking a hold of an outstretched hand from the veil, walking into a river I’d only ever thought I’d see in thick fever dreams, this lightning bolt from his hip helmed by love herself that the line of my life illuminated, rising and falling with the 20,000 bulbs of the Tower winking welcomes, the path is here, an endless time, a fusing surge of then and now and next.

The lamp’s always on

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July 2026

He finds the overpasses the way graces appear in a city that never texts back: by accident, which is to say, to start getting lost, used to being lost until one night, the road has risen and he with it, up above and the light sprawl of spider web concrete, a man-poured mausoleum of fractals that say the world is generous with space and indifferent to bodies inside it. Pull over, the radio station DJ says and here he stands at the railing, his eyes funneling down the keyhole gaps of the lanes below and the cars snaking with such mechanical regularity, it couldn’t be true. Does any body roving under him feel his glare?

The overpasses were alarming when he first got here because the roads were flat where he’s from and generally, known quantities, two lanes in each direction and a stoplight every half mile with geography that makes no demands on you and isn’t easy on the eyes either, nothing of scale, but here—here, the infrastructure stacks itself, one road over another over another, handshake piles of safety, and the sourface is bleached bone and its scale is purely inhuman and sterile, not entirely alienating, and whoosh, the world washes over him as a small being inside an enormous entity, the self a brief and mercifully irrelevant gasp.

The first rock catches the headlight, then tailight of a passing car. It’s just there near the railing when his eyes focus outward again, an aggregate piece like him edged out of the rock somewhere along the way of a thousand bodies passing by and none to notice, and its weight is a comfort, needing no effort and still not crumbling to grit, and he holds the jagged rectangle in the oval center of right palm, his left having dropped it there for safe care, when he extends his arm from his chest straight toward the lights beyond his knuckles, turns his upward facing palm to the earth and one by one by one by one, a finger unfurls.

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It’s a free fall but through jelly, the paralysis reverberates, turn that reverb up, we are part of the reverb society, and the jelly constricts and contracts but you are enough to slide through it to the other side eventually, you have to relax to let go, to let it happen, to seep out cold and slow like methane from the ocean floor, over there and there, I can’t say because I’m not there yet, I’m still here, but you’re almost there, you’re really close to there, and there are ways you will do your things and I mine, but there are also ways in which these blend seamless together, a stitch witch iron-on sealed by heat and adhesive.

It’s not all for naught, it will add up to something. You have to believe it. I’ve to believe it. I do! Incredulous as it makes me, I really do. I’ve always known it, the way Helene Cixous can say that she has never thought she could not do it at all, that doing it was in the thrill. There is no way to tell you what it will be, no way to know or go or roll or flow or swing or slide or grip or split or hold tight, the unfathomable, resounding truth is that we are all floating in this unknown too, whether or not you care to realize just how far down below goes.

Well, I have a lot of opinions, and still, I push the glass of screen away and leave my fingerprints there over and over and over and over again. This is how I am at my most, me. Not my best, but this voice, growing louder with each failure or humiliation, all necessary steps for nothing can unravel perfectly, even in its unraveling, it is a hoisting, a true blast out of the cannon toward something infinitely larger than you in which you play an integral part, how special, how Renaissance, the magic is in us, our job is to divinely express creation and gratitude for this sheer and simple fact, so sheer, we blow away so eyelash fast into the night and even in the early morning hours of the day.

Well of course, there are ways to move past it, therapy breathing exercises, ways to anchor oneself in the present for we don’t know our expiration dates, they are not printed on our feet at the bottom like yogurt cups, but if we did know, how would we evolve to meet that date?

Would it feel heroic like the ancients who played the game to win and to win was to die for the gods, the highest honor, sacrifice. Would we become like wilted flowers, a self-fulfilled prophecy of decay, arriving perfectly on time to waste away at our final date of resting place. Would it be at midnight or anytime of the day, would that excite us or torment us the way not knowing at all torments a little now? Would we live with it or rile against it, studies upon studies built upon longevity now that we had a solid date to point to, against, we humans love a way to force Mother Nature’s hand.

The lamp’s always on

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You know it until

you don’t, until it comes to

in the bands of light.

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I’ve long loved the week between Memorial Day weekend and June, this one jean pocket that’s the beginning of an expansive everything, before it all becomes something else. Let the summer begin.

To capitalize on this summer momentum, I’m starting what I’m calling Do It June. Any and all, there’s no task too small. The goal is to knock of all those tiny little things that stack up without an end date.

And finally, I want to say thank you. Your support, both emotional and your patronage, are incredible, and I really am so lucky to know so many fine, kind people in this world.

Now, a new series. Below is everything I read, watched, listened to, and absorbed in May.

Read

• What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton: I thoroughly enjoyed this. I love a novel where the entire plot really exists inside the character’s head. Polly Barton is smart, with a capital S. If you like the stream of consciousness narrative of Infinite Jest (like seriously God help you, promise you finished it???), then you will love this take from a lady’s perspective who, as she deftly puts in near the end, has a “stable but loveless life,” I’m paraphrasing here. Also she’s English and I fucking love being inside the melody of an English person’s head. Plot twist: I lived in England during middle school! I went to a school on an Air Force base happily because I was terrified at the prospect of learning the metric system. #NotAllNewExperiencesAreNeeded

• Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy: I think this book is acclaimed because it’s being auctioned for TV stuff and it’s about ~conservatism~ and ~guy money power~ but there’s also a lot going on under the surface that holds its weight in its expression of friendship through Avery and Frances. There are a lot of narratives similar to this, where the outsider view is the main POV, I’m interested in anti-that narrative and what if it does work for someone, and it feels good, like Seinfeld but for the reality too that good things happen. Hm, puzzling.

• Currently reading Famesick by Lena Dunham: Of course I was going to read this…

Watched

• Eddington, then Bugonia at home: I recommend this viewing order if you haven’t seen either. In the way Matt Damon is a space man in both The Martian and Interstellar, you see Emma Stone’s characters play hilariously together when stacked.

• Gummo at home: This is obviously A R T ok, but IMO, didn’t age well, and its sour milk stare and shock value exploit rather than endear for me. It came out in 1997 so go off, but something about Chloë Sevigny being an official ~actress~ and the rest of the town used a literal set piece, THE MOST INFURIATING moment for me when the middle one of Helen Dot or Darby came out and sat across the laps of two redheaded women. It was that moment in which I no longer trusted the care and kindness behind the lens, and IF YOU DO THAT IS FINE, I LIKE MY MOVIES LOVELY IT IS FINE!

• Amadeus at AFS Cinema: Everyone should see this on a big ass screen once. I first saw this in three hour-long watches during Music Appreciation class, something me and like six other kids did with the choir teacher Mr. White who truly was and is now an angel in heaven, because we couldn’t sing and had proven to be smart at other things and not just loafing. So I learned the history of music and we were rewarded with this movie and at the time I had no idea BOOBS COULD BE THIS BIG AND HIGH but Constanza Mozart, you dirty diva, you SHOCKED US ALL! Also love the POV from Salieri here, too hilarious to give the mediocre rival and a voice and the priest at the end, lol. I! could! write! about! this! for! awhile! It was fun to see this with other people who happily laughed and that’s cinema baby!

• Uptown Girls at Hyperreal Film Club: The wardrobe in this movie, the opening song is still such an ear worm for me, It’s a charmed life, innocence wild, Crayola skies for a thousand miles… SO GOOD

• The Summer House Reunion pt. 1, Live: So much to unpack here. Absolutely insane anthropology happening right now.

Listened

• USB by Fred again..: It’s! ELECTRONIC MUSIC SUMMER!

• You’ve Come a Long Way Baby by Fatboy Slim: See above

• Waking Up by Annabelle Chairlegs: The first live music I saw in Austin was Annabelle Chairlegs at the OG Radio right after I moved in and 11 years later, she’s still out here absolutely sssssSHREDDING. I wish more of my friends knew this project because she’s one of the best things coming out of town right now. This album is fucking brilliant, it’s time you start listening and telling all your friends, too.

And I made you this playlist of the Analog Lava Lamps Top 10 Songs of May

Absorbed

• Cherrywood Yard Sale: We participated in our first neighborhood thing! How freaking cute.

• Manor Road May Day Festival: This was, weird. A for effort! We did miss the bug parade because the yard sale.

• The Magic Flute at the Austin Ballet: A Masonic journey of fun costumes! I’m loving it more and more and more the more I reflect on it.

• Rock the Park at Mueller: Can’t believe this is in our new neighborhood! Stunning.

• Big Dumb Fest at Mohawk: A festival of friends! Always a pleasure to see good people doing good things in a big way. Made even more sweet by finally hearing “Dickhead” after all these years, thinking Rickshaw had retired it from the lineup.

Summer Bucket List

And of course,

• Volunteer at the Este Garden

• Go to the Drop In, free music at the Long Center

• Deep Eddy day

• Barton Springs day

• Blanton Museum day

• Zilker post-up picnic

• Beach camp

• Polly Potluck: lady potluck dinner

• Schlitterbahn

• Lone Star Float House

• Lake Buchanan

The lamp’s always on

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• Feel free to email me: smrcreates@gmail.com.

May

Today rises in front of him like a wall and sometimes a fog and usually a twinge, but not normally so thick like this. He wants to feel lighter, the earth loose under his feet, toes bouncing off more gravity than ground. The city seethes and breathes, he can see it in his waking hours whatever time of day, the handful of skyscrapers visible from the yard of the coffee shop piercing the blue, levity far from him but lingering somewhere down there. Or maybe not down there but to the south, where he didn’t live but wanted to, this main corridor, the romanticism of a one-way road into town, two turns to the right and straight onto the street he came here for, hoping for packed bars and only met instead with gaping open dark rooms, the bartenders even jaded enough to not care to nod their heads unless they meant it, unless something miraculous, magical happened on stage in their ears first and then their eyes, shoulders bopping, but this is all you could hope for when the rooms were this empty.

While it was this or the army, this or a tech school degree, this or a coal mine, this or an Amazon driver, this or that, the options many but so few as promising. I wanted to serve, he tells those who have, his way of acknowledging their service, unbeknownst to him that those who did serve, that linger around him now, brains marbles inside the jar where the contents of spirit used to be, those who like him having made it this far having held onto some shred or long let go of the ego that writhed under all our skin, our seeker who does not yet know that there will be people in life who will grin at the sight of your bloodied mouth and take you gently by the hair, pull you back and gaze at the smooth seam of your throat to neck, and slam your voice into it all the same.

He got here too late, convinced of it, this very fact that he can’t live on a reasonable bus route or bike route, that he lives with eight other guys, one of whom is in the backyard in a makeshift tent that the old lady next door threatens every morning by waving the green of the 311 app of her phone over the fence, a warning made worse by the fact that she needed to stand on two end tables stacked together to accomplish it. I got here as fast as I could, he tells people who have lived here longer than him when they ask. He laughs and they laugh, but it’s not for the reason he thinks and his admittance, the cliche phrase thrown over the fence, only adds to his outsiderness.

The house itself is a fact he’s still learning to live inside, the way eight people can occupy the same square footage and still manage to exist mostly parallel to one another, the kitchen a relay race of mismatched mugs and someone else’s leftovers fermenting gently in their tupperware, the bathroom a negotiation that nobody articulated but everyone understood, the living room belonging to no one and therefore to everyone in the way that public spaces belong to everyone which is to say barely and briefly and only until someone better arrives. The tent guy’s name is Reece and Reece is somehow the most functional person in the building, which includes the building proper, Reece who works at the plant nursery off 35 and wakes before anyone and sometimes leaves coffee in the pot without announcement or expectation, without the particular performance of generosity that the others occasionally attempted before abandoning it when nobody noticed, and he thinks sometimes that Reece has already worked something out that the rest of them are still circling, that a person can opt entirely out of the room and still be indoors enough to matter, still present enough to leave coffee, which is its own quiet argument about what presence costs and what it doesn’t.

He plays Tuesday nights at a place that doesn’t advertise it, a residency being too grand a word for what amounts to a handshake with a guy named either Rob or Rod, he can never hold it, the name sliding off the moment after it’s given, Rob or Rod who books the music the way certain people tend bar or run lights, not as a stepping stone to something else but as a calling that the world hasn’t yet agreed to call a calling, the kind of person who understands a room before anyone else in it does, who knows by the second song whether the night will open or stay closed, who has a genius for the social temperature of a place that has no credential attached to it, no office, no way to become anything other than what it already is, which is indispensable and invisible in equal measure, and sometimes after the set they stand out back in the heat and someone produces the cocaine the way someone always does, quietly and without theater, and the night elongates itself, becomes generous, and he talks to Rob or Rod about music with a fluency he doesn’t have at any other hour, the sentences arriving whole, and he thinks he can feel the city through the soles of his shoes even sitting still, the thrum of something below the street that has been going longer than him and will go longer still, and by two in the morning it feels almost like belonging, he’s almost got it in his hands at four, and by noon the next day it’s crept out the front door.

The music’s good, he knows this, not in the defensive way of someone who needs to know it to keep going, which is also true, but in the way that he’s been told by enough people who had nothing to gain from the telling, the old woman at SpinZone who hummed something back to him that he’d played three nights before across town, who couldn’t possibly have been there, who must’ve heard it through someone else or from the open window of someone else’s car, which meant the song had traveled, had moved through at least two people before landing in her throat, and that seemed like enough of a miracle to file away and occasionally retrieve. He files it. He retrieves it less than he should.

What he hasn’t told anyone is that he called his mother last Thursday and said he was fine and she said fine like a period at the end of a sentence she hadn’t started, and the silence after was the particular silence of a woman who won’t say what she prays, who believes something she will never be asked to prove, which is that he will eventually come back, not to her exactly, not to the town or the job or the life that was possible there, but to himself, whatever version of that makes it back through this particular fog this particular wall this particular twinge, and he thinks of this now standing in the yard in the morning watching Reece zip his tent from the inside, the sound of it like a held breath releasing, the old lady’s windows still dark, a temporary mercy, the skyscrapers to the south catching the first light before anything else does.

The lamp’s always on

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CHOCOLATE ROOM

Warm and wet, the river works slow muscle beneath fake grass. Pipes inhale and a jellyfish in the side tank pulses: twenty-four eyes, bell and perimeter, no center and all sensation. One token in motion, pattern is what stands in for a self.

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There was once a girl on a bike with a walkie talkie pressed to her mouth, and on the other end a mother in a kitchen, and between them: static, oil snapping in a pan, tires on gravel, three houses down a dog, the soft interruption of breath before the voice came back.

You pressed the button. Someone said go ahead.

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This place where the skyscrapers grow scales, born from borrowed light bouncing off the tall, spindly walls. Every year I forget what time of year the mosquitos die, or if they ever do.

I rejoice the little bothers, I sing under warming sun on an earth hoisted like a model set up for photoshoot, wide wings tacked to her arms and the pinpricks dripping little droplets of sanguine blood in concentric circles as she drifts over us. When the blood lands in your glass, you’re supposed to drink it, the woman to my left said.

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It was the way the belly of birds flashed and flickered against the sunset at seven in the afternoon in April. Like stop motion right before your eyes as they faded high up there until the flat planes of their bodies shifted and you lost them against the outlines of the bubbling blue clouds in the distance that always threatened to break, but rarely did.

How a body can become surface, how fast something alive turns into shape, into outline, into something registered and lost, a kind of flattening. The sky does this. So does the act of looking too long.

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I wrote about Emily Dickinson and Miranda July’s Old Dolio for Hyperreal Film Journal…

I. The Unyielding Self

Old Dolio lurches and lunges. Green tracksuit jacket zipped to the chin, navy track pants pooling, shoulders curled forward, curtain hair obscuring her face. The main character of writer-director Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, she’s a 26-year-old woman in Los Angeles, raised by two peculiar, petty grifters who teach distance as survival. Emily Dickinson arrives here not through the film, but through the shared instinct between them. Dickinson, who hovers in her signature white dress with that slight, deliberate tilt away from the observer, was a poet in nineteenth-century Amherst who built her own solitude. Her gesture and Old Dolio’s are the same: reduce the surface available for contact. Two women, separated by centuries and circumstance, enact the same ritual: to remain nothing but themselves, no matter how lonely the weather.

READ IT ALL

There was once a woman who organized the world into what she was sure of.

This was not arrogance. It was architecture, an archway of keeping the ceiling up. She stacked certainties the way you stack good dishes: carefully, in the order you may need them. She knew the weight of particular griefs, which rooms, how someone’s voice changes when they’ve made a decision but haven’t told you yet.

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A voice clear amidst a morning of worry. Keep faith. Enjoy this, it is here to be enjoyed. Be cognizant but joyful. You are here to generate joy like an engine.

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