Perpetual Relationship Status: Complicated but I make it that way.

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind."

-Dr. Seuss

I think you're like a squirrel, putting women away like nuts for cold winters.

Reasons to Survive November

Tony Hoagland


November like a train wreck –
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze –
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.

– Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

I've printed out numerous pages of paper, i've edited and scraped and gathered and cut and pasted and torn and spilled ink on unimaginable amounts of letters and punctuation. My first short story is finally done, roughly. Mostly I cannot stop reading it over and over and tripping over my words and listening to my heart beat through the slow trains of sentences sounding their whistles in my brain while the impact heads deeply down to my stomach. I think im fastened to this place of tenderness and devotion and adoration and idolization and loyalty. Im stuck in a place with blurred lines and wonderment, where the possibilities are endless and more then anything really, you just want to hold hands. I assume too much, and I take too much to heart. I hurt easily and i've failed to build up the walls that so many around me have slowly constructed over each passing birthday party, each added year, each drunken night. Im thrown into full body nostalgia when this or that song comes on. Im cuddled up to movies, im sobbing in the piano room, im smiling at a letter, im driving in the car with my head on someones shoulder. Im lighting incense and laying on the floor watching shadows on the ceiling while the wind creeps through open windows crossing delicately across my arms. Im watching footage of young small animals, with fast pulses and hurried breath almost making me cry, because my pace is not slow and steady and thought out like it should be, like hers was, or his was, my pace has no direction or resolution, my pace is quick and going no where and crouching low and ready to pounce and at this pace, everything feels like something else.

From the Adult Drive-in

by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

VI.

O dark barns who will move me now?

I am undone by the flickering screen

By all those girls thrown against the coal black

Night. We, all of us, go back to the field

Scene of a back that went on forever,

The closed eyes, the want that entered us

As we drove by and tried not to look.

How will I ever learn to tell the truth

After the places my hands have been?

It is darker here than other towns, leaves

Burn clear through December. After that

We light beasts of the field to keep ourselves

Warm. Everyone has weathered each other's want,

Familiar as the feed store's smell of grain.

Every time I leave my grandmother, she cries. I'm used to it by now, the consistency hasn't budged since I was just a young kid. I remember watching her in the driveway of the house in Colorado, smiling and waving and blowing kisses while heavy tears streaked down her face. Watching her fade away until she was just a small speck in the distance, standing and watching us go for as long as she could, as if nothing was as valuable as that last glance.

At 19 I have recently packed up my belongings, put my little studio amount of furniture and knick-knacks into storage and flown one way to Portland, Oregon. A big part of why I did this was because of my grandmothers beckoning, my grandfathers support of alternative pathways. I was driven into the large industrial landscape, the huge steel bridges and light rain on concrete and brick. I couldnt see beyond a couple miles, something that im not used too, coming from the desert where you can see as far out as you want from almost any point on the terrain. I felt like I was going to cry, my body fell into full anxiety mode. I realized I had no idea what I was doing there, I was going to be sleeping in my friends attic bedroom, no job, no school, no relationships, no nothing. I just had two suitcases full of vintage dresses, a ukulele, and my laptop. My first couple of weeks have been full of making friends, riding bikes, drinking tea and beer, going to house shows and old photo booths. They've also been full of obsessively calling home, spending hours on facebook longing for some word from my friends back in New Mexico, crying in the attic, and sleeping through full days.

My grandmother caught wind of this and promptly bought me a ticket to visit her again. Staying at a new house in Port Townsend, Washington. Nothing is as comforting to me as these visits, the security of her presence, as though anything I need can be taken care of. Watching her lovingly look out at the docks and the bay and the mist in the forest. She tells me that the northwest makes her feel at home, the gray skies a warm blanket to sit under day after day. She walks me by the lighthouse and brings me to her favorite cafe for salmon scrambles with yams. She tells me about her days of living on military bases, dropping out of society and woodstock while her hands shake out the swiss chard she's so excited about making for dinner. Her age is starting to show more, the usual qualities of growing older; forgetfulness, pains in her hips and back. Both of my grandparents are relatively younger, closer in age to some of my friends older parents then my mother is. It's the first time i've considered the prospect of their retirement, their moving out of the southwest to a place more familiar, their settlement in Washington. It's the first time the prospect of them not being around when im 30, 40, 50 has hit me.

Im waiting out my 4 and a half hour layover in Seattle, watching two girls that must be ballerinas from Cornish College of the Arts use all the strength in their flimsy frames to carry a single suitcase. Im returning to Portland with a job interview, familiar faces, my 100 pound bicycle, and a better sense of finding my way. Remembering my grandmother's teary smiling face dampening my cheek as she tightly hugged me goodbye. Observing her standing in the Safeway parking lot, watching the bus rumble down the road until the fog had completely come between the two of us. As if that last glance was the most important moment in her whole world.