around the house

The way our arteries pulse at night -I could substitute our market of clocks with the microphonic bang of contractile body bells to resonate in the corners of my ocean-colored study. I feel the rise and fall of fluid permeating under your skin, and fleeting to your fingers. It has the permanent sound of a flea market on a Saturday morning.

The candle on my nightstand is muted by remote controllers that burned the wick; to a point I hear requiems at sunrise, when the clouds, blueish-white, are waiting in line to shower.

The curtain on the North window is squeezed around its navel to fit an eye lash of the wrought iron grille that was put up in 1942 to prevent burglary in my tenement. It looks like the cut-out of a corset, pleated like a skirt. Mary Wessler said, it's so vanilla, i could lick it. So I took pictures this morning and sent them to Cherry magazine, because they sell posters of lonely curtains. 

There are four glasses on the floor, sweating from the cold water that I poured into them 3 minutes ago. There were fruit flies in them this afternoon that I chased around the house, and blew air behind their wing pockets till they flew away into the air outside the confines of 319 east and circled back to the neighbors faucet. I broke their fly families, and felt a little sad. How long do fly families survive? I wonder. 

And I flipped through four or five books since I got back from the sauna; my skin reddish-violet from the 184 degrees inside. I love the feeling of sweat trickling down my shoulder and chest hair, and the strength of the heat clearing my mind of unnecessary worries. The books were tragedies. Personal tragedies. One, a bronchitis story. And others about autistic kids or disabled infants. I started thinking about Grandma, and missed her terribly. Her lungs wrestling -this mental image of her skinny, bony body tiring away to remnants of soot from charcoal stoves. Ones on which she cooked, post-Independence when my father was ten, and flying kites against clear blue skies in the July of 1963.