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🍽

date idea

The sharp scent of rain tumbles clumsily in as you tease window-hinges wider with the pads of your fingers. A siren trails close behind, uninvited, sears your eardrums, dies off down the block. Your neighbors are arguing again. Laundry, loans, lack of commitment… like yesterday, like the day before. You think it would be suffocating to wrap yourself up in someone else’s sheets.  It’s five o’clock. Leaning against the sill and flicking the radio dial with one recently manicured nail, you tune into the local news. Roaring wall of static, then calm conversation between two anchors bubbling up through an old set of Panasonic loudspeakers. You are feeling incomplete today, like yesterday, like the day before. Rigatoni boils in the kitchen. You check the leftmost cabinet and find strawberry jam, unopened. You check the cupboard and look over a tub of tahini, a collection of canned soup, and a stack of pie tins. You check the counter, behind the cutlery. Finally, you check the fridge, ducking down to see only your own brown-eyed reflection in one last — now empty — jar of Prego. Your shoulders dip. You slip on white sneakers, not-so-white-as-they-once-were. Why did you try to paint the front door? It is peeling now, ugly like a fledgling losing young feathers. Flecks of buttery yellow dapple paisley carpeting. The great outdoors wait for you at the bottom of a cramped stairwell with twin light fixtures, both broken. A sky like an old sweater is draped above Brooklyn, ready to wring itself out again at any moment. Once around the block, rubber soles brushing damp cement, you walk briskly. At first you fling yourself against the humidity, then become self-conscious and adopt a slower pace as you near the corner store. Two dollars, sixty cents. Like last week, like the week before.  You and I, we are looking down at our phones and stumble into each other, halfway home. It is no one’s fault. You recognize me from somewhere, you say, and feel like a bad person for lying. You have never seen me before in your life. I ask for your number. That night you eat too quickly, knowing you’ll wish you’d saved some leftovers. I come over once, then again. We go out for dinner at tacky restaurants, where art deco posters from the nineteen-thirties have pinned themselves up in scattered flocks across worn-out drywall and the menu is printed with strange font on laminated placemats. The appetizer sample photos are unnerving; the bruschetta cowers like a scared animal awash in excessive camera flash. I make a joke about it, and you laugh. We order dishes to share. The food is always better than I expected, but not quite as good as you wanted it to be. You don’t mind. We talk for hours. We agree, ballpoint pens are better. I hold you, and the ten p.m. bus pulls you out of my arms and through the dusky streets, past crowds and utility poles. I hold you, and we rhyme our steps. Burgundy is around us in the leaves and in the dirt. You wear a coat I gave you. I hold you, and we swat flies out on your porch. The days are getting shorter. I hold you, and we watch blu-ray CDs you found on sale. Soft light from the flatscreen plays across your face as you fall asleep. I keep the movie on a little longer. I hold you. In December, we bring a blanket to Long Island and listen to the sound of snow falling on the dunes. You call in sick for work too often. I hold you, and you know my callouses well. We share the same sheets; we are wrapped up in each other. I hold you, and kiss your hair. You smell like candied oranges. The afternoons eat away at one another. Dishes pile like uneven layer-cakes in your kitchen sink, crested with suds. You say you feel uninspired. Now we argue about laundry, and the sounds of your unhappy apartment are heard through half-open windows.  You shout, eyebrows furrowed like the pages of a book. A white plate soars from the grip of a trembling hand, misses an upturned chin, and interrupts us with its shattering. This time, it’s different. Sleep escapes us ‘til the sun is already planted on the easternmost rooftop. I hurt you the way I learned to, and stay awhile, but don’t know why I stay. We sink into sweet, heavy things: the saxophone in “Charcoal Baby”, shared creamsicles on hot Saturday evenings. I see you less and less, and remember less and less of you. Will I see you next week? Yes, if you text me. You forget, just like we’d both hoped.

@ad

Sep 17, 2024

🖋

leaving montgomery park

we’re careening— well, that sounds dramatic. not careening— but sliding, holding you and myself in place— because my disposition leads (and has always led) to believing abandon reckless will kill if I let it as close as myself and yourself held only by bicycle rope or kayak rope or moving box rope side beside inside truckbed backseat forgone throats slicked with City of Roses forest gin and Artemis Moons I’m sober and you’re not I’m anxious and you’re not you’re carefree spit-balling about side parts and saying love and love as we pass long-haul truckers— eyesclosed Lyft drivers— that pinkie-promise coworker to fast friend elbow to elbow barefoot to clogs off in the cab shallow river dipping mask off cheek pinch I-tell-everyone-you’re-my-cousin kind of love that no mother could ever that no father could ever that kind of love that door we kicked down and threw into that mustard bonfire of before that old worthless hinge don’t work so won’t bother not ever not now not in this truckbed— I toss my thoughts to traffic fine me $900 for littering lock me up for language you say what a beautiful city my glasses are in my pocket those empty offices stacked apartments and windowbeam glitterblurs fall into the nightvoid I’ve seen beautiful and more unmatched in those words you weave so keep weaving them— I’ll be here listening long after we pull into the driveway. (& if u like it, I linked my poetry newsletter :)

@chickeninshoes

May 14, 2024

🥄

What’s that - anne sexton

Before it came inside I had watched it from my kitchen window, watched it swell like a new balloon, watched it slump and then divide, like something I know I know - a broken pear or two halves of the moon, or round white plates floating nowhere or fat hands waving in the summer air until they fold together like a fist or a knee. After that it came to my door. Now it lives here. And of course: it is a soft sound, soft as a seal's ear that was caught between a shape and a shape and then returned to me. You know how parents call from sweet beaches anywhere, come in come in, and how you sank under water to put out the sound, or how one of them touched in the hall at night: the rustle and the skin you couldn't know, but heard, the stout slap of tides and the dog snoring. It's here now, caught back from time in my adult year - the image we did forget: the cranking shells on our feet or the swing of the spoon in soup. It is real as splinters stuck in your ear. The noise we steal is half a bell. And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street and are there and are true. What else is this, this intricate shape of air? calling me, calling you.

@Shadowbeni

May 7, 2024

Top Recs from @evan

🎢

Not knowing anything going in

its the best way to consume media. DONT show me a trailer DONT let me read the flap on the inside of the novel DONT tell me there’s even an alien in it. Dont tell me what it’s about just be like “it’s good you should check it out”

@evan

Jan 20, 2024

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Sitting somewhere, eating sunflower seeds, spitting out the shells

just remembered you can do this. hell yeah.

@evan

Feb 22, 2024

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Lifting weights in the unfinished basement

but god….i want to do this in a garage so bad….

@evan

Feb 7, 2024