bits and pieces

It's fun finding things you forgot you wrote, started and never finished. I found a few tonight:

To put you in the cemetery or keep you with me. Leave you there with all the others I pretend I’ve forgotten, I’ll call them onesies and twosies and the in betweensies who wait in a line under the burch tree for a permanent spotsie. But the problem with onesies is they dig their way out beneath the gates and are soon floating down the streets you told them to stay off of. The twosies are no better, they come around, just not as often. They appear in the morning in your closet while picking an outfit for the day, when you’re starting the car,



This is the morning, when the fog hovers over the roads
and a man on his way to work smears his finger across the
foggy window as he sits in his car at a red light. He tells
himself today will be a good day. He will have coffee in his
new mug, and he will talk about nice things with everyone,
like the weather. He will be patient and gracious, and he
will sign all his emails with a friendly salutation. “All the
best” or “Have a lovely day,” he can’t decide which.
When he gets to the office, he folds his sweater neatly over
the back of his chair and fills his new coffee mug in the
kitchenette. On his way back to his desk, he greets
everyone he passes warmly and compliments someone
on their new haircut. He begins his work, proofreading a
twenty page informational booklet about sexually
transmitted diseases. As he reads over the symptoms of
Chlamydia, he tells himself he is lucky-




Last Summer in Baltimore

Wondering why steam rose from the sewers,
why everyone here wanted me to run
them over with my car, why I seemed to be
a finalist for lots of things but not quite right,
why I had to jump over a metal pipe every time I crossed the street
to the supermarket, why nothing here stayed fresh
between June and August, and where I should go –

Nights I sat in bed until the sun came up,
eating yogurt for old people with digestive problems,
wondering if my stomach pains were real or not, whether
I would ever leave this room again, reading Sylvia Plath’s
journal checked out from the public library, where the man
with the big curly hair who always sat by himself at bars
pushed his cart through the stacks, watching me in the next
aisle over the tops of books.
I was hoping for advice or signs somewhere in the pages.
The book was old and poorly cared for, pages separating
from the spine. Nights when I did sleep, I woke up with
loose pages crushed beneath me, like
August 9, at the beach house, Sylvia makes tunafish salad
for the children she nannies,
and
January 10, 1953 Sylvia breaks her leg skiing.