Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 192

Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

My white bones crept out to have a walk around while I was sleeping. I was deflated. They tucked the covers up to my chin.

Outside, in stark moonlight, my white bones walked only the back roads on their way out of the city. They left the comfort of our culdesac and ducked alleys in old neighborhoods. The dogs barked, but no other creature knew me, or had the senses to sniff them out.

At the edge of Wake and Chatham, my white bones licked cold stones below a highway. It was gravel, refuse, dust. They slipped into tall grass where the ticks live, and into dark trees with rough baubles left by some other traveler in the branches.

At the river, cool water stopped them. My white bones found an old dead beaver and finished its work, wrapping its teeth in reeds until the tool could fell a rotting birch. There were no splashes when the tree fell, only whimpers. My white bones had found a route to cross the river, and they did.

It was the swamps they were looking for. An old bog in the forest that’s too crowded in oak groves to be seen during day. But the moonlight had it, and my white bones knew how to seek it out.

Each night, it happens like this: the branches clear. Soft black snakes wreath the space where there used to be arteries. In the Chatham bog at midnight, my white bones sink below the surface. They spend the hours passing into peat and pumice, and just before the sun comes up they surface a little darker, creeping back into me, still wet with what I cannot know.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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Thank Goodness I have nearly
unlearned
folding my desire into itself
being afraid to claim it.

Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

Coffee Log, Day 130

Hi.

Coffee: Fair Trade Ethiopian Medium Dark, Harris Teeter Brand

The sun beat sweat out of everyone’s backs. I took a walk beside the apartment pool.

Today’s been good. I slept in, but not too much. I ate well, but not too much. I heard from a cousin who I haven’t heard from since my grandfather died. L came over and we’ve been hanging out, catching up, playing games.

I finished History of Wolves and wrote the review. It’s posted here! I won’t say much about it on the blog, but I will say it’s one of the best books I’ve read. Fridlund’s snow-capped prose opened a couple doors in me; if I met her, I think we’d drink cold beer in a crowded bar and talk about the way talking about the weather is really always about the people who’ve changed you.

I made fried rice. It came out fine. The night settles now like a ten-year old bulldozer. You’ve built every house, paved every road, your city can sleep for a while.

Currently Reading:

LaRose, Louise Erdrich; I’m only sixteen pages in; so far, it reminds me too much of every other book that’s trying to say something.

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“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property.” – Joyce Carol Oates

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