12 Marzo: Olga and José

Days & Days

12 Marzo

Franny says she’s not afraid of the sewer rat,
she likes that rat, that rat is her friend. What will 
you name him? I say. “Sewer rat,” she says. 

Don’t join the Fundamentalist Latter-Day 
Saints, Nico. I wake and give him life advice.
Pants and a library card are where it’s at. 

Things I learn during insomnia! A white lady runs 
up the callejón after me, in white-lady specific distress. 
It looks like I found a healthy bread? She sounds pained. 

I hold up my biscuit made of shortening, sugar, white flour, 
possibly in that order. It has that pleasant Safeway sheet-
cake scum. I have failed my demographic. 

Bess is reading about the Black Plague. The octopus. 
Bess is telling me about Korean embroidery. Fina invents
new dance moves, v shaky. A man sings us the cucaracha song.

Where did he learn to hold his instrument like a tie, 
that sort of bowing arm? Lucy has equations for lines. Lucy 
wants to do some pull-ups now. No one at this dinner table 

Can explain why languages are so often sorted 
into masculine and feminine other than something 
something things need sorting and Latin did it first. 

Japanese is fast, Nico tells me. Spanish is also fast. 
They are the fastest re: syllables per minute. 
All of Lucy and Bess’s Japanese friends have gone home. 

That country is shrinking, it may just disappear. I am going to 
lie down behind these two large planters, each with its jade plant, 
representing the dead artists, Olga and José. 

I am going to listen to their stand of bamboo clack, 
until a guard tells me to quit that, because I didn’t know 
that a stand of bamboo clacking was one of the prettiest sounds 

In the good wide world, but now thanks be I do.



P.S. Huge thanks to the folks who have pitched in here with dollars; I am humbled and grateful. High five. Deep bow.

Here's an interview with Sommer Browning, Aaron Cohick, Corie Cole, and me in the most recent edition of The Brooklyn Rail, discussing American Weather, should that interest you. That work against gun violence as a kind of American weather grew out of earlier work, like this.


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Sketch I did in the Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato this week of an undated painting there. Her nose is at a weird perspective like that in the painting, too.