12:20

There are no ghosts left in New York.


I have been dreaming, but my mind is interrupted by life, anger, and animals, so I have only known physical rest. The air smells like shit in the city and the trees are thin, without souls, their vein-arms reaching into a sky that wears pollution like a wig, human voices drowning the sound of thought.

There are old churches, but I do not believe that the dead are interested in stones; the bodies of the living fill their muscles with ego and worry until they bulge out of the skin like tumors. People keep speaking like their voices will build antlers but the sounds dissipate into the air, uncalcified, strengthening the smog. Artists lose their minds cleaning tables and sweeping the floors of bars, remembering a time when the avenues were full of clay that embraced the curves of their feet.

I am tired and hungry and I feel concrete pouring down my throat, cutting into my intestines and breeding with my blood, charming its way into the valves of my heart.

I am leaving with my lover, to a place where the air is full of water.



Jesus has left Brooklyn. The graffiti has been washed off the brick to make room for works by paid painters; the words of prophets were cleaned from the streets when the people of color were taken from their blocks.

Ask God if New York deserves your prayers.

10:15

Dream -- May 05, 2014

I buy an army bag at a yard sale from a woman with messy, cropped, bleached hair, who looks older only because of her desperation to sell her belongings. I like the bag because it reminds me of the one I own now, but thinning and stained; I rummage through the pockets, watching the muscles on the woman's arms stretch the dried skin around her tattoos. I find handfuls of beautiful crystal jewelry in the bag and I rub them in my palms, hiding a pair of square-cut earrings surrounded by diamonds that I can see my reflection in.

The woman panics, searching for a specific piece with enormous sentimental value. I deny knowing about the jewelry while fingering the stones in my pockets, the edges wrapped in an antique silk scarf covered in gold script.

9:30

May 1, 2014.

Where are all the ghosts in Brooklyn? It is 2pm and I am drunk on wine, writing with a pen given to me by my partner. A beautiful man is sitting across from me on the L and I want to see him as a mirror, reflecting my face and tattoos back into my eyes. I want to see myself; I want to know how I have the same neck and eye sockets I had as a child.

I have dreams about snakes and human teeth found in the fossils of ferns and I think about my partner, a person whose loss of gender gives them the strength to grow fur.

How do we know ourselves without animals? Where does the tissue of dead minds rest between all the boroughs and brownstones? It is easier to find ghosts in grass and deer.


May 2, 2014

Life is alive in Bushwick -- I have skin, capillaries, oxygen, and ice cream.


May 3, 2014

I do not remember my dreams from last night, but I know I drunkenly moved through Manhattan, my laughter disgusting, fouling the air.

When I think of wanting I find novels, animals, and Matt's limbs braided with my bones.

3: 19

Dream:

I am watching a group of people take pictures by the ocean. The waves began to move, throwing them to their knees, and they smile, feeling foolish for not watching the tide. The water grows thicker, taller, and eventually they are killed by the weight of a breaker, heavier than cement. I hear them scream and I place my palms over my eyes while others laugh, pointing at the cameras bobbing near the surface, the film ruined.

I covered my eyes, not my ears; I listened to them die.





I have had a night of intense dreaming, and I now feel intellectually and physically clean -- I read without difficulty, with understanding and passion. Paragraphs come without struggle, smooth, rinsed with Haitian water. I see myself as an adult woman, full of a self-empathy that is maturing into artistic discipline, and a personal form that is losing its markings of adolescence. I look forward to aging, because it is all I have left; I have developed enough to understand that life is a victim of circumstance and the chaos of my being-born happened almost thirty years ago. I should learn to stop suffering over it.

I woke and wrote and read, wanting words and my own imagination, which is made of beauty, comfort, solitude, femurs, murder, and blood. I wanted to talk about death because I feel it is a part of me as much as my legs and hands; I wanted to tell you about the nightmares of rotting teeth, the disintegration of health, the inability to eat, the fingers poking out of the jaw once the roots broke off, as if another person was trying to come out of my body, wearing my bones.  Molding incisors are a part of my mythology; I am made up of the accumulation of genetics and cellular horror, and when I am quiet I feel a progenitor removing an abscessed molar or giving birth in a small stone home, staining the wooden floors red, listening to the dogs sniff beneath a closed door. The fairy tales of the future will be the translation of dreams and science, a hypnagogic, Jungian view of the soul being alchemized from the animal's experience. People will view life as if through a cathedral window, praying over the bulbs of flowers; magicians will be known for teaching their spirits to clean the petroleum out of food and water. We will not be eroticized without the thoughts of semen gathering into moles that can break the soil or cracking ovaries against the side of a glass bowl to find a small yellow bird singing. Culture and sex will be expressed with the telescope-eyes of the perverse, those who cross boundaries and their child-fear, who fall asleep and speak to the bears in Tibet, who are becoming bodhisattvas. 

I look forward to the future, because it is all we have left. I drop the aversion to insanity to become curious, to give my vision of time so I may have a voice for the development of the years after my death, when I am an immaterial apparition of intelligence. I want my blood to soak into the soil so when a young woman eats food that grows above my body she dreams of sea foam bubbling from her mouth and screams coming from the ocean.