I’m reading Annie Ernaux’s Happening, again. She is completely readable and delicious. I skim so fast and yet it remains tantalizing even within my page jumping.
Like a pack of gummy worms while watching romantic comedy: contemporary, automatic. It’s BoJack Horseman in the bed we fixed, a routine emerging itself short and forever.
What if you change and what if I don’t change? What if I feel like this forever? Show me how to change, what if I don’t change? I dreamt of sweat and I felt upset.
—Dijon
Jacob says we collect stick note marginalia like it is a game.
I don’t even read them anymore, I just throw them away.
Not really
Open space coolness
pretend fields
made by the light
during open caskets,
just in time
for the details
of a past you
I owned a 2012 Forte with roll-down windows. A steering wheel that locked as soon as it rained. The car spinning like my ceiling fan. I used the Forte to drive to Jimmy John’s deliveries. And inside my heart was a trunk filled with video cameras. I would buy CDs from Target like State Champs and Sia then just blast them. I used the Forte to drive to Dallas on dates, or back home where mom would say, “I told you so.”
After all, imagining and remembering are the very point….apart from my engagement book and diary, I have no indication of what I thought and felt,
-- Annie Ernaux
In the Fall of 2023, I wrote a letter to my friend Sarah. But never sent it because I am a better writer than a speaker and this bothers me. I go crazy. I thought I ripped it from its flowery language and trite descriptions, but found it quickly after moving.
“I would be good on my own forever if I needed to be. There is an entire ecosystem of queer artists who move about without any commitment to anything at all. But it would be disloyal to myself to sever all ties to anything with a sentimental meaning. I fall in love with people and it's the Before and After. I feel like you would understand that, that’s all.”
For weeks I’ve wanted to rename this blog. And when I say “renaming” I don’t mean rebranding. I don’t know what to think about it.
As of today, I’ve lived off North Avenue for three days now. The weather cools over the water tower facing California. The wood from my back patio opens up to a select handful of stars at a time. I close my eyes and I’m Lenu looking out her patio in Ferrante’s Naples. I’m Anne from the Green Gables, looking out past Nova Scotia. It’s calming in kitchen and schedule and books.
Silence creeps over the park just right. In just forty-eight or so hours, a week will have come and gone.
Glory
Glory, Glory
I could cry, and I do.
His face a drawing
unfamiliar in
found sweaters sieged from
containers of burials
rotting out by my obsession
to winning things.
What’s beautiful in the magnitude,
about size,
is the anonymity of knowing
no one until you do;
that curious reckoning
with a failure to love you so much,
eating you, demanding it,
falling over
but I still drown
in unspeakable and even perhaps
malicious pride
from those
beautiful stories
of a James Baldwin caliber,
and a love like mine
Note: this blog has been retitled Poetic Classifications. Thank you for subscribing.
love this! I read Annie Ernaux last month and your description is terrific