Soul Like a Spider

racing thunderstorms again
i beat them to the south
still bright when I got home!
before His Great Darkness swept over my head.

“are you ready to have the conversation you’ve been dreading?”
arms, stretched to wrap around my rib bones
“intentions?”
i don’t say a word, you know precisely what i mean
eyes fall, a heavy “oh dear.”

the italian cookies travelled with us all day
they crumple, swelling with sweet crumbs and dust
you haunt me at night
(you haunt me at night and you believe what i say!)
you haunt me at night and make my teeth hurt
the same way they do
when i forget to eat

no more candy hail or earthquakes now;
just dreaming about the devil.

My house is quiet and dark. The BHE (best husband ever) went to bed with a headache, so I am in the kitchen waiting on chocolate chip cookies to bake. They may or may not turn out. The baking gods have been kind of generous with me lately, so perhaps the fact that I substituted a stick of butter with some oil won’t ruin everything. (I really just didn’t want to put in a full stick and a half. Seemed like a bit much.) My oven is a little wonky, so I may be here for a little while.

I just spent a paragraph telling you about ingredients. Why waste my time with such trivial things? But that’s the weird part–all these things matter to me. It’s not like I was able to appreciate the sublime and cast off the trivial things, but now they suddenly matter to me. Like the new couches we got this weekend from my previous roommates. While our old couch was quite uncomfortable, I still didn’t think the couches would do so much for my mental space. I feel like I can breathe, relax, and finally stop freaking out at the thought that we just did all this unpacking and we will have to repack again (in two years, which will feel like months). It’s just kind of bizarre.

I’m experiencing the life I’ve kind of always wanted. Just married, a great new place to live, and doing all the domestic things I’m supposed to do. I’m sure I’ll get tired of it soon, but for now will all the new kitchen things at my disposal and a desire to make things with my own hands, it’s really been wonderful.

My mom just did all sorts of things in the kitchen because she knew how. Like making mashed potatoes. I tried to make them tonight, and they mostly turned out except for the fact that I don’t have an official masher, and I was too hasty with the last round of boiling, leaving some of the potatoes slightly undercooked. Also? How to steam broccoli. I have an asparagus pot, perfect for steaming other vegetables. The last night I over steamed it until it turned yellow, and tonight I under steamed it. I’ll try a few more times to see if I can finally unlock the secret to perfectly steaming broccoli.

The mysteries of the universe that I have been pondering lately:

1. How do dishwashers actually clean things? I’m not sure how a spinny foutain thing can get off what I can’t with my scrubbie. It seems like magic.

2. Parking garages. Incredibly efficient, and yet I can’t seem to wrap my brain around how they are actually structured.

3. Graduations. Millions of high schoolers have graduated before, millions will graduate later. How are we still fascinated with these things? I mean, I understand it’s a great accomplishment, but it makes you feel really small and silly when you realize that the 600-kid graduation ceremony is just one of a dozen high schools in the county with their own graduates, and those are only a tiny fraction of the thousands of other schools across the country all having their own ceremonies. And this happens every 12 months? Exhausting.

4. The weird feeling I got at the Tiger’s game the other night. I felt like I was watching a set of miniatures playing out a game in front of me. It never quite feels real. I’m also continually impressed at how well of an oiled machine Comerica Park is. They have thousands of people come, the whole of downtown Detroit locks up because of the crowds and parking several nights a week, and yet it is continually successful and runs easily. Amazing.

I think the cookies are done. We’ll see if the batter held together or if I just made another Almost Great Dish.

The holy birds are folded away in a box
incomplete, sleeping.
I pray that as they rest in the dark–though their
flock is numbered and partial–that if they
can’t keep the spirits out, perhaps they could keep a cold away
and not swallow me in my sleep for not freeing the rest of them.

We take the blue line into town, our purple neon city.
The streetlights and Christmas lights are her jewelry
and we are her blood cells as we arrive through the tunnels.
(It’s always prettier than I remember, and I always feel like I’ve been gone for years.)

I sit on the stairwell and talk to a french boy who changes seats for me
He asks me if I remembered to bring his floral pattern glove with urgency
like I forgot a prophecy told to me as a child.

And while we wait on the pavement for the accident to be cleared
the top of my arms are sweating and I feel like I’ve misplaced something.

And even if it is all just nonsense, I still saw your face.

Doom, the stray cat, is crouching behind the chair
She slipped through the door from the hallway of consciousness
into my waking, rainy living room

She will grow to be the size of the couch and
swallow me with her golden teeth, yellowed
from eating too many birds in the backyard

All I can do is brush my teeth
watch in the mirror
and wait for her to eat me alive

I’m so anxious to slide my feet into cold sheets and find warmth from on the other side of the bed that when the lights are all green before I get there, I feel the universe is pushing me towards home and that my life is a tunnel.

I wake at four with rambling pain in my leg and dreams of adopting a little girl who changes size everytime I see her.
She is the size of cookie, a snow pea, a toddler, and only sometimes a newborn.
They call her after a flower, but whatever flower they call her, it is always the wrong one.
Everytime I see her she is looking at me with brown eyes so dark, it’s as if she has black marbles sewn into her peach face.

(They call to me through my twisting sleep.)

I find the right pill without turning the light on and eventually fall asleep on the couch, feeling like the cavities that arrive in my soul sometimes when I am lonely might be filled by those black marbles.

(There is nothing more.)

I am yanked into morning by the radio.
It’s bright outside now.
I go back to the cold sheets, happy, and without pain.

I.

I can’t get the Wedding March out of my head
even though we didn’t play it.
It’s snowing today, and April is still pumping through
my arteries. I am your long-distance compass, and
you are like a book character I like too much.

II.

I will
for the rest of my life
live off the blue that poured into the room
and the sheets of ice that floated down the river.

III.

Rain, the one-hundred twenty-first guest
watching the wedding from outside the museum.
He drove from Chicago overnight
to be there when I woke up.

The frogs are awake in the ponds. They chirp at night and sing during the day as I’m carrying my groceries to the car. They are all I want sometimes. Like the lobsters inside the store, all I want is to cut the rubber bands or ask for their release, just so that they could wave at me with their claws and black pearl eyes and walk home.

come to me quickly, day of white
the snow is holding your place in line

until you arrive i dream of swans with silk black faces
and crave vanilla ice cream, the beans and cream melting on my lips

i wait at dusk
the moment that for my city of the planet
hangs, lost in time
between coming and going

i am not waiting in the morning (preparation, carnations)
and i am not yet in the evening (ties, lace)

so for now i wait patiently in the hallway with my swans
waiting for the light under the door to be mine