Metro Reel

Melanie ducked through the doors of the metro, careful to hold her violin case in front of her to avoid any bumps. The oppressive cold of Montréal had abated somewhat now that it was March. On this comparatively balmy Tuesday, Melanie found herself leaving the house in a long plaid skirt and a grey cashmere sweater, her brown hair in two hasty braids.  She settled into a seat and stared past her fellow passengers into some middle space. The train snaked through the tunnel.

            “Prochaine Station Place-Saint-Henri” offered the smooth voice over the intercom. Despite it being her second year in Montréal, Melanie still barely spoke French. She could get through customer service interactions, usually order what she meant to, and navigated the metro more by memory than any sense of understanding. Being a conservatory student gave her more than enough to practice and memorize, and she couldn’t find it in herself to do much else. Everyone was always talking about the language of music, but it wasn’t a particularly useful one in this city.

            “Prochaine Station Lionel-Groux” prompted Melanie to refocus her gaze and grip her case tighter. She was always enamored with the way the metro moved and the smooth connections between cars that allowed her to get totally lost at the edge of what her eyes could make out. She exited the train, switched lines, and rode the four subsequent stops to school. She arrived at her first class, found her usual seat, and was immediately accosted by Ryan, who was already mid-sentence before she sat down.

            “-knew you wouldn’t. And you didn’t, so I was right,” he finished, glancing at her expectantly from his seat next to hers. Saying hello wasn’t Ryan’s way. This was his issue in music too – he always started the piece too fast.

            “Say that again? Also, good morning.”

            “Yeah, yeah good morning, you totally stood us up last night. Sarah was really sad,” he offered, nearly all in one breath. Sarah liked to joke he was wasting his lung capacity as a pianist. She probably wasn’t that sad, though.

            “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Should have texted,” Melanie mumbled as she reached into her backpack for a notebook.

“Yeah, you should’ve, we barely managed to find a third, we had to go with Sarah’s friend who didn’t know anything about anything at all.” Melanie knew that Ryan wasn’t really upset, but she still felt a twinge of guilt. As she paged open her notebook, she pondered the previous night spent alone in her room studying. They’d invited her out at lunch the day before, but she had those pieces to review. Never mind that they only took her two passes through each and she was done before 10.

Ryan settled down, and the class passed in a blur. Theory and Analysis 3 was exactly as bland as the name would suggest. A compositional form being common to the 18^th century didn’t make it interesting, but Melanie was still required to know its name and be able to recognize and replicate it in a vacuum. She had spent a lot of hours studying the midterm and would spend many more cooped up in the library before the final. If that was what it took to get a degree in classical violin, so be it.

            After class, she found a practice room to warm up in before her lesson. She tuned, played through a few scales, and reviewed the piece she’d been assigned. Her limbs worked through the motions carefully, precisely, each finger right where it needed to be, each note perfectly translated from page to air. Her movements were smooth, and her face was placid.

            At her lesson, her instructor didn’t have any notes.

            “Well done,” he said. “That’s a difficult piece.” He was in his 40s or so and had a tight beard that was gradually becoming less blond. Melanie knew that meant the praise he gave.

            “Thank you,” she replied. She barely remembered how what she just played had gone, but it was up to standards. That’s what mattered. That’s what had always mattered to everyone else.

            “I’ll send you something for next time,” her instructor said. “I want to find something with pizzicato. It’s been a while and you need to stay sharp.” Melanie didn’t mind, but what she was staying sharp for was hard to say. Orchestra wasn’t hard, and her lessons were technical but uncomplicated.

            With that, her lesson ended and she began her journey home. On longer days she would wander stunned into the metro station after three classes, private lesson, and orchestra practice. She would miss her stop and ride until the line ended, swaying.

She lived in a tiny apartment on Sherbrook above a crepe shop. There were always four or so guys behind the counter, and only two or three customers, so she was about 90% sure it was a front. It made her apartment smell nice, though. She unlocked the door, set her violin on the table, and lay down on the couch. She had a piece to memorize for orchestra tomorrow, and the sheet music taunted her from its stand in front of the window. Its rigid staves and flowing clef that was always the same stared at her as she drifted off to sleep.

            The next day was Saturday, but Melanie, along with Sarah and Ryan, had been asked to help audition some prospective students. Melanie showed up on time in her concert blacks, hair carefully pinned back. Ryan waved at her from the audience, and as she walked over, Sarah smiled. They exchanged hellos, and Melanie put her things down and went to check in with the professor running the auditions. Upon her return to her seat, Sarah and Ryan were engrossed in a crossword on Sarah’s laptop.

            “Melanie! Rare bird: O blank blank I blank Y,” Sarah prompted. Sarah was a lot like a bird, with wiry limbs and a high-pitched voice. Melanie thought for a moment.

            “No clue, sorry,” she resigned. “I’m not very good at those.”

            Over the course of the afternoon, a string of students took the stage. Sarah or Ryan always had something to say.

            “Wow she’s nervous. Can barely sit still,” offered Ryan about a blond pianist who somehow still had braces.

            “You would think he’s never heard a metronome in his life,” said Sarah, referring to a scruffy cellist.

Melanie kept quiet, keeping her marks to herself. A missed note here, a lack of finesse there, but she didn’t get personal the same way as her classmates. Sometimes it felt like she was the only one who remembered being a freshman, even though she was at the top of her class. As they were leaving the concert hall, Sarah invited her to trivia that night. She said yes and promised that this time she really would make it.

She spent the remainder of her day trying to focus elsewhere. She spent a few hours watching TV, and another whole hour just sitting in the crepe shop downstairs. Knowing she would be early but wanting to leave the house, she walked out the door and down the busy avenue to the metro. It was just three stops to the bar. It wasn’t a large venue, only six booths in a ring around a handful of smaller tables. It had a dusky air to it, and not many college students went, but Sarah was especially crazy about trivia. She had a schedule of every bar with a trivia night within half an hour of her apartment and made her rounds on a weekly basis.

            Tonight was quiet so far. Three men sat in the far corner. A few more had been smoking outside. And there was one man, sitting alone at a table, with an open case at his feet and a violin in his hands. Melanie walked to the bar, ordered her dinner, and sat two tables over from him.

            The man was stocky, older, perhaps 60, and had a very white beard and moustache. The beard was short, rounded, and neither well-trimmed nor unkempt. He had a raggedy baseball cap, a half-smile, a flannel, and a half-drunk beer. As Melanie watched, he began to play. She didn’t recognize the piece, something with a fast, jumping, melodic tempo. He played with beautiful economy of motion, each finger slowly moving into place, each draw of the bow as smooth as a raindrop running down a window. The tune furled and unfurled around him at a pace that seemed far beyond his body. Melanie couldn’t say how long he played for, but when he finished, she realized she was staring.

            “What’s your name, miss?”

            “Melanie”

            “That’s a lovely name.”

He then began a slow tune which, if she had been thinking of such things, Melanie would have recognized as being in 3/4. The tune had a melancholy to it but swelled to new heights after the resolution of each phrase. Melanie found herself moving with the music, head swaying and a foot slowly tapping. When he finished with a drawn-out note, she found her eyes were wet.

            “That was beautiful.” She was smiling. He nodded.

            “That one’s called Melanie’s Waltz. I learned it once upon a time in Texas.

            “That’s really very sweet,” she stammered out. “What’s your name?”

            “I’m Tom,” he said, and pulled at his beard a bit. “I’m this pub’s self-appointed fiddler. I’m here playing most days, and when they get someone else in, I’m here to listen. What brought you in the door?”

            “I was supposed to meet some friends from conservatory for trivia,” she said. At the mention of conservatory, his eyebrows raised. “I’m a classical violinist,” she continued. Each sentence felt like work to her, her brain still swirling with the beauty of his song.

            “Well, I’m sure you could tell me ten ways what I just played was wrong then,” he chuckled.

            “No! Not at all.” As Melanie spoke, her phone began to ring.

“Sorry, let me get this. Hello? … Yeah, I’m here. Where’re you? ... Oh! Okay I’ll be there soon, save me a seat… Yeah, bye.” She glanced up at Tom, a little stunned.

“Everything alright?”

“Yeah, turns out I’m in the wrong place. My friends. I’ve got to go but, uh, would you be willing to give me that first song? Do you have a chart?”

            “No charts. I could teach you though. Come back sometime, any time, with your instrument.” He had put his fiddle back in the case and took a deep sip of his beer.

            “I will. I definitely will,” she said, putting on her coat. “Goodbye Tom!”

            “Goodbye, Melanie. It was lovely to meet you.” He waved as she walked out the door.

Melanie’s head wasn’t really on trivia that night, and it wasn’t really focused on her classes the next morning. The first tune he had played was swirling in her head, and she was constantly trying to remember pieces of it. It was stuck in a way nothing from her lessons had ever been. In orchestra, she made a rare error, mixing some of the song into her solo. Her conductor reprimanded her afterwards for her lack of practice.

            Over the next few weeks, Melanie went back to the bar whenever she could. Tom was always waiting, with a pint of beer and a new tune or two to teach her. She mentioned it to Sarah once, who told her it was a waste of her time. It certainly wasn’t easy for her. She could play all the notes, but Tom stubbornly refused to use charts.

            “You don’t feel the music that way,” he would say. “A chart is a way to detach yourself from it.” She had a suspicion that he was making some of the tunes up on spot, but they were still just as beautiful. On the last day she’d see him, he encouraged her to do the same.

            “But how?” she asked.

            “Simple, just play what you feel. Surely you’ve got a note or two in that brain of yours.” He looked at her expectantly. She felt frozen. Of course she had notes, it was her whole profession to have notes, but none of them felt important enough.

            “Just put your bow on your strings,” he said. “Your hand’ll figure it out.”

            “I don’t think it will.” She looked down. “You can just come up with something any time you like, but I just don’t work like that.”

            He didn’t say anything, just looked at her and took another sip of his beer.

            “I can’t do it!” she said. She put her violin back in its case and closed it.

            “Alright, I’ll see you next time then,” he offered.

            “Sure, next time.” She walked out the door.

            It would be a week before Melanie would go back. It was finals week, she told herself, and she needed to stay focused. When she finally did return, Tom wasn’t there. The bartender’s face fell as she walked in the door.

            “Hey Melanie,” she said.

            “Hey, what’s up?”

            “Tom’s dead. He got hit by a car on Tuesday and died in the hospital. I’m really, really sorry.”

            Melanie couldn’t answer. She turned and ran out the door, ran into the cold, ran down the street past every bar-goer and their cigarette, past the trash and the busses, and down the stairs onto the metro. She fumbled swiping her card, taking three tries to finally get the turnstile doors to open. As she walked down the second stairs, a train was just pulling in with a soft hiss. She boarded and sat.

            The train picked up speed again, rocking gently. There wasn’t anyone near her, but she wouldn’t have noticed. Her eyes blurred as she pulled her fiddle from its case. As each fresh batch of tears worked their way down her face, she began to play. Standing in the middle of the empty car, she played like she never had before. She was scared when she started. She was scared in a way she had never been scared to play before. She had a stake in it. She cared about the music more than she possibly could’ve before. She played what Tom had played that first night, and she played something else entirely. Her music was blisteringly paced, carefully metered, and echoed down the long train as it stretched into the tunnels. Melanie played to the end of the line.

elvis & his pet cloud

another internet research rabbit-hole for you! this one was sparked by the professor of my creative writing class, who read us the following poem:

Elvis Moving a Small Cloud: The Desert Near Las Vegas, 1976

David Wojahn

after the painting by Susan Baker

“Stop this motherfucking limo,” says the King,
And the Caddie, halting, raises fins of dust
Into a landscape made of creosote,
Lizards, dismembered tires. The King’s been reading again -

Mind Over Matter: Yogic Texts
On Spiritual Renewal by Doctor Krishna
Majunukta, A Guide on How to Tap the
Boundless Mental Powers of the Ancients.

Bodyguards and hangers-on pile out.
His highness, shades off, scans the east horizon.
“Boys, today I’m gonna show you somethin’
You can tell your grandchildren about.”

He aims a finger at Nevada’s only cloud.
“Lo! Behold! Now watch that fucker move!”

it's a nice poem, and it's got a quality image to it with a bit of humor. the professor said that despite looking it up he was unable to find a picture of the painting. he joked that if anyone managed to find it, they would get an A and not have to come to class for the rest of the semester. now i want to go to class, it's likely my favorite i'm taking at the moment, but i also couldn't resist the challenge.

i began in the straightforward way, trying to find copies of the poem. it barely exists online, but i found it in a couple places, one of them being some random person's blog from 2013 with a dead image. using wayback machine i discovered the image is sadly just a photo of elvis. of course it couldn't be that easy. the comments section illustrates how those who trod this path before me have failed:

astute readers will note that that comment was posted earlier this year, doubtless by another student of the same professor. my journey continues, and having failed to find my quarry through the poet, the poem, or elvis, i resort to the remaining piece of information left to me: susan baker.

annoyingly, susan baker is a very common name. i search susan baker in any combination of the poet, elvis, vegas, nevada, anything that might get me closer. i come up empty handed. i am beginning to think this is the end of the path, but then i realize i can do something unthinkable: contact the poet.

so i find his website, look at his contact info, and send an email. i expect to wait a while, or maybe not even hear anything, but he writes back the next day. below is his email. 

 

his point about writing from an image is probably good advice, and something i find applicable to me, but it's not what i'm looking for. however, he has given me a crucial piece of information: a place and time to find susan baker.

i search up "susan baker provincetown" and am immediately rewarded. my results include an interview with her, listings of her paintings for sale, a book for an exhibition about her early work, and the website of the center mentioned in the email. i comb through these results, but none of them seem to be the painting i'm looking for. i like her art though, and it's fun to see her evolution as an artist.

luckily, included in these results is the susan baker memorial museum. this tells me that she's dead, but it also gives me a very clear next place to contact. i email them.

it's been a few months now and i haven't heard back. i imagine i won't. if by some miracle i do, you'll be the first to know.

Carolina's Bugs

On Monday, Carolina loved spiders. She woke up a bit before five, snoozed twice, and dragged herself to a sitting position on the edge of her bed.

“I gotta stop doing that,” she mumbled to herself, gathering her hair back in a messy ponytail and half-stumbling to the bathroom. She turned on her speaker with a small chirp and considered her options. Mississippi John Hurt and his layered fingerstyle trickled out of the speaker, and water poured over her curls and down her shoulders.

Blues all on the ocean, blues all in the air…

She pumped soap into her hands, worked it to a lather, and washed herself. Getting out of the shower, she appraised herself in the mirror for a moment, eyes drifting past the bruises covering her torso and fixing on their reflection.

“Stunning,” she whispered, then turned and broke eye contact.

When my earthly trials are over, cast my body out in the sea…

Descending the stairs, she grabbed her bag, packed the night before, and walked out the door. 20 minutes to drive to work. 20 minutes to weave through the cars on the highway and stare into the middle space between them.

Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.

Arriving at the library, Carolina began her daily duties. She unlocked the building, grabbed her pushcart with its broom, bottles and mop, and started her cleaning work for the morning. It would be a few hours before anyone would talk to her.

“Good morning, Carolina. Beautiful day today, isn’t it?” said a voice, cutting through the rhythm of her broom. Her head jerked up. Lewis had been wishing her a good morning for a month now, and she still almost missed it every time.

“Yeah, good morning,” she hardly managed.

Lewis had already walked away, on to another staff member. As the library’s director, he was technically her boss, connected to everyone in the library and everyone in the larger community. He knew what was happening with each member of the town, their marital troubles, their financial situation, and even their favorite book. His network was wide-reaching, and he felt each small disturbance. Carolina wasn’t sure what he got out of all his this. It seemed a bit overwhelming. She liked her music and her simple, methodical job. People are complicated, but Lewis was sweet.

The spider was in a random back corner of the stacks, somewhere near the end of the alphabet in the adult fiction section. Carolina liked fiction, but she never got books from the library. They had given her the job partially because her love of reading was one of the only things she’d been able to properly express in her interview. She hadn’t read in months, though, and was sort of worried she’d become defined by a past version of herself that she wasn’t living up to.

The spider sat in the middle of its large and impressive web. Carolina spotted three new trapped bugs: two bluebottle flies and one tiny housefly. The corpses were bound in silk, bounced in the web by the air currents of Carolina walking past. Carolina knew the spider well. She looked for it whenever she cleaned there. She wished it good morning when she walked in and good night before she locked up. She never spoke to it through — what would be the point?

ººººººººººººººººººººº

On Friday, Carolina loved cockroaches. She was at a DIY show with a friend under some bridge in the South End. She hadn’t been to this particular spot before, but she knew all the bands playing except one. They didn’t know her, though, or at least she didn’t think they did. Her friend, Nora, had invited her, was trying to get her out of the house, but Carolina was going to go anyway. Nora probably didn’t know that she went to nearly every hardcore show in town, that getting battered in the pit felt good. Being fairly new to the scene, Nora stood a bit away from the edge of the crowd, passing a half-smoked cigarette to Carolina.

“How was work this week?” Nora probed. She was in grad school, and they had met at the library, instantly recognizing something in each other. They hung out probably once a week, and each liked the other a lot, but they hadn’t quite broken through.

“It was alright. About how it usually is. I haven’t seen you there in a while,” said Carolina, her voice rising.

Nora laughed it off. “Yeah, they locked me in the campus library. Can’t get out. Five thousand years of reading about boat construction. No clue how I always end up on something like that.”

“Yeah, that’s a weird one.”

They would’ve said more, but the first band kicked up, a sheet of overdrive cutting off any further potential conversation. Bass thumping, Carolina wanted to join the mass beginning to scrabble, but Nora wasn’t ready for that. They stood on the side the rest of the night, Carolina fiddling with a bottle at her feet and watching the cockroaches scuttle around the side of the bridge.

ººººººººººººººººººººº

On Sunday, Carolina loved maggots. Every weekend, she went for a hike. Sometimes someone joined her, Nora or April or Mads, but today she was alone. She had been for the past few weeks, actually. She went to the same spot she always did when she was alone, a small mountain off some dirt road. There wasn’t a lot or a trailhead, it might’ve not even been a trail, but she always left her car on the side of the road and walked into the woods, following the twisting path.

Carolina would never describe herself as a hiker. She wasn’t serious enough about it; she didn’t have the appropriate equipment. She just wore her old sneakers. No boots, no poles, not even a particularly appropriate outfit.

On the trail, she passed a series of large maples connected by a stone wall. The trees were some of the oldest in the forest. Their sprouts first broke soil long before the land was cleared for grazing. They had been left, alone among their fallen siblings’ stumps, to serve as property boundaries. She stepped up onto the stone wall, dancing her way down the line, testing each rock before stepping, hugging the trees and whirling around them. Eventually, the wall petered out and the forest opened to a large meadow. Walking to the middle, she found the corpse and the rock she knew well.

The corpse smelled today, resting in the sun. Maggots had made their home in about half the face, but from the other half one could tell it used to be a man, probably around 30. He was splayed out, clothed in jeans and a hoodie, muddy, and not particularly nice to look at. Carolina didn’t look at him, but sat against the rock next to him, pulled out her notebook, and sketched. Quick pencil lines and smooth strokes filled the page, with Carolina only briefly pausing to get a sense of scale of the landscape.

She sat for a while, pencil working in her hand. At some point, she took an apple from her bag and ate it, core and all. Then she returned to her sketch. When the sun was starting to touch the horizon and the cicadas got loud, she headed back.

At the end of the trail, she put on Amyl and the Sniffers and started the car. It was dark now.

Guided by angels, but they're not heavenly…

The engine came to life. Shifting into gear, she pulled out into the road. Winding turns lit up by headlights sped past, and all the roadside trees slipped into the forest.

They're on my body and they guide me heavenly, the angels guide me heavenly, heavenly…

Bats flitted across the road, chasing their prey. Her mind turned to the week ahead.

And they pray for forgiveness, never give it, I never want it…

She was seeing Meg on Thursday. Work as usual.

I always carry on heavenly, energy — fuck!

She merged onto the highway, no cars in sight.

 

 

author's note: the songs in this piece are real, and i encourage you to listen to them. the first is "let the mermaids flirt with me" and the second is "guided by angels." the albums these songs are on also respectively have songs entitled "spider, spider" and "maggot." thank you for reading!

biking

memoir for creative writing class. please be aware of the format as you read. there are some things i would likely say differently if i was writing for myself.

I don’t remember the first time I rode a bike. I probably lived in Burlington then, only a few years old toddling and around some patch of grass or asphalt. I’m sure I was a little terrified and giddy when the training wheels came off. You don’t need me to tell you all this — the image in your head from countless Hollywood-produced mock home videos is good enough.

I don’t remember the first time I fell off my bike either. Surely it was while I was learning. If I was a biking prodigy, my mother probably would’ve told me. I don’t remember the first time I kissed asphalt and realized just how much something so intriguing could hurt. I don’t remember learning that stoves are hot, but my mother has relayed the story — I kept wanting to touch the burner, and eventually she let me, albeit only for a moment. I reevaluated what I wanted after that.

I don’t have any scars from falling off my bike as a kid. I have a scar on my lip from splitting it on a jungle gym, but that’s not even visible if I don’t show it to you. We biked a lot then, all over town. We biked before I could bike independently, a contraption attached to the back of my mother’s bike that gave me half a bike of my own. We biked through the dead of winter, long underwear layered and muffs on our handlebars. We biked to campus, we biked to my preschool, and we biked along the waterfront.

I do remember flipping over my handlebars when I was in first grade. We were going down to the intervale, probably to pick up our CSA, and I, impulsive child that I was, decided to bomb the hill. I would do the same now, but just as I was reaching top speed, I made the fatal error of only pushing the front brakes.  My bike bucked me, and I went tumbling.

Thankfully, I wasn’t badly hurt. The fall shook me up, though. It took several years before I felt comfortable going down a hill with that much reckless abandon. When we moved to Brattleboro the summer after my accident, I didn’t ride my bike nearly as much. The town was smaller, hillier, and my new school wasn’t really practical to bike to. I don’t remember much about moving to Brattleboro — it’s all sort of in a haze of locations. I have only vague senses of the people I left behind, and I know the people I met through later versions of them. Now that I’m back in Burlington for college, new memories get overlaid on old ones, fresh grease building up on the chain.

My new school was entirely uphill from my house, and a long ride at that. It was called Hilltop, and the name fit. The only people dedicated enough to bike up there on a regular basis had electric bikes and were really, really into them. Maybe you know the type. Maybe you don’t if you’re not from a hippie-filled small town, where, as your grandmother says, there are “a lot of windchimes.” We didn’t make the mounted pilgrimage up to school very often, and when we did it was an event, not a method of transit. As I slowly rebuilt my confidence, the hill was still too large. Even so, Multiple switchbacks, steep straightaways, and an overlook of my town nestled among the mountains made for an excellent ride, as liberal as I was with applying my brakes.

In fifth grade, I joined the mountain biking afterschool activity. It was mostly middle school boys, and I was there with my rigid frame, no disc brakes, and padded gloves my grandmother had gifted me. I’ve never considered myself a biker, and this activity certainly cemented that. I couldn’t keep up with them socially or on the trails. It always felt like I was the butt of the joke or last in the pack, like there was something they all knew that I didn’t. Maybe it was just about masculinity, or experience, or age.

We moved outside town to a small dirt road, I got a new bike with some half-decent suspension, and I started high school. In the early-pandemic lockdowns of my freshman year I spent a lot of time speeding down our road, riding without my hands. Those rides gave me an outlet in a lot of ways; blitzing to the end of the road and back got me away from my desk and away from the house. It didn’t require the endurance and commitment of some longer ride, but it got me moving. I would’ve had a much harder time that year if it weren’t for those small escapes with the wind in my hair. I don’t remember any of these rides, but I know they happened. I can see the tapestry, but not the threads. Most of my memories of the early pandemic are like that.

I didn’t ride my bike at high school. Some friends were in a mountain biking club, but it wasn’t appealing to me, mostly because of last time. My freshman year I was pushed away from sports after dealing with malicious teenage boys as teammates, so I continued to do an odd panoply of activities, riding my bike sparingly. My first two years of college, I brought my bike to school and didn’t use it once. The barrier to getting off campus felt insurmountable, and I wasn’t as confident in the city as I had been as a small child.

This summer, I fell off my bike. My partner, who was staying with me, hadn’t rode a bike in years. They’re from a city and went to our boarding high school, so they hadn’t really had a chance. We dug my old bike out of the shed, pumped up the tires, and set out down the less-steep portion of my dirt road. They told me after we finished our first ride that it was the most comfortable they’d ever seen me in my body. Something about the way I knew the road, its texture familiar, riding past the trees I’ve seen hundreds of times. Something about my hands being out and the wind in my hair that was longer than it had ever been. On another ride, I think I was lost in the beauty of the moment, a moment that was, in a way, a culmination of thousands like it. I was myself then, a version of me built on everyone I was before. My foot slipped off the pedal and I fell hard, hip scraping. I got back up though, wiped off the dust, and rode home. There’s still a mark, a reddish circle blending with the stretch marks on my hip, telling the ways I’ve used and changed my body.

It’s hard to write in a new and exciting way about a story you’ve told a hundred times. Sometimes it’s easier to write one you haven’t, one that you don’t already have language for. I’ve told a lot of the stories in this piece before, and I’ll probably keep telling them. I’ll keep riding my bike — I ride it to class whenever I can. I might forget the details of the stories, I might rewrite them in my mind, and they might blur and merge together, but you know what they say about riding a bike…

 

five haiku

from the first assignment of the semester for my creative writing class.

strange marks cross my skin

but bring me no pain. i woke

late, my sheets tangled.

 

twelve bells envelop

the neighborhood at midnight.

who said they should ring?

 

cascading cups lie

stacked, filled with playing children

in a narrow gorge.

 

i carefully pinch

and pluck strings at the right times

but my thumb fails me.

 

of the two streetlights

outside my window i much

prefer the softer.

 

slaughter blackout

today in my creative writing class our professor brought in a certain campus newspaper and had us write blackout poetry from it. i haven't really read the article and would probably have a bad time if i did. one day i'll write about ai and that's not today. 

corner the edges upon

us and come out

to nothing. we will be inescapable

and no wonder. accept

help, heft hundreds of echoes.

try women, and have god

for yourself. now we live

plagued, but so what? big deal.

 

 

power washing

one weekend i went up the mountain

to powerwash the porch. i biked

past the stream, small bugs swirling and

gravel spitting from my tires while i swiped

sweat aside and spat on the road.

we painted the bathrooms first, me and some girl

whose name i don't remember. she was old,

or at least older than me; my curls

 

weren't yet long enough to tie back, connect.

later, layers of dirt came at my feet, 

all the dust that shouldn’t have been swept

out the door and whatever else had steeped.

 

"too long in one spot and you’ll damage the wood,"

you said. it's gone now, though it used to be good.

loose sonnet i wrote for creative writing. feedback very welcome!

how do you know that?

 i wrote the bit of this before the question yesterday, and the rest just now. i changed the tense.

yesterday i was hanging around after my black feminist anthropology class to tell the professor i like it when she starts class with songs, and specifically talk about music ethnography. yesterday's songs were uncle bud and wake up jacob. both recordings are sung by zora neale hurston who, if you didn't know, was an anthropologist in addition to being an author.

while the music is cool, it's not the point. the point is, while i was waiting another student was talking about how they were confused about the mentions of zombies in the reading. i said something about how zombies have been bastardized by pop culture and are really interesting because of their roots in Haitian plantations. the professor agreed with me, and then the other student asked me a question.

"how do you know that?"

i didn't know how i knew it, and i told them that. everyone laughed. i'm not sure why. it doesn't matter much. i didn't feel like they were laughing at me.

a lot of things i know have no source. i picked them up at some point and they've been floating for that long and the serial numbers have been rubbed off with handling or have been covered in residue from lack of use. then i need them, and i find them, and i can't say where i got them.

other facts are memories. they're tied. i couldn't tear them apart if i wanted to. 

both are fine, and both are useful.

state machines

i'm taking a class this semester called computability & complexity. it's one of my favorite classes i've ever taken. it's a computer science math class, and for the first three weeks we've pretty much only been working with state machines. the technical term is (non)deterministic finite automata (nfa/dfa). essentially, they're a way to test if a string follows a particular rule. a string, if you don't know, is a sequence of characters. functionally, dfas and nfas are a little like a flow chart.

scribbles from class today

 

each state (labelled with a number) has some number of edges going to other states depending on the next character in the string. if the automata is deterministic, each state has exactly one edge leaving it for every possible character. if it's nondeterministic, the states don't have to have any particular edges and can also have an edge that you can traverse for free (labeled with epsilon). each automata has a starting state and some number of accept states. if the string ends and the automata is in an accept state, the string passes. otherwise, it fails.

 

the top diagram in my notes from today is kind of complicated as it's a conversion of an nfa into a dfa. because nfas can be in multiple states at once, to convert it to a dfa you have to make states that are hybrids. the bottom middle diagram is an nfa that recognizes strings with 1s in odd positions, and the bottom right diagram is a dfa that recognizes strings that have at least two 0s and no more than one 1. i also wrote some test strings and if they pass or fail.

 

i really like this class. it stretches my brain in fun ways, and everything is a problem i can solve. i think i was a little rude to the people i was working with today because i really got it and i wanted to go go go but they were moving a little slower.

 

on the page, i wrote "i love holding multiple possibilities in my head at once"