in Colorado,
his name was Alex.
I am passing 3rd street unaware
of my hands withering,
clutching my phone.
another bad habit of mine,
not wearing gloves and never
placing my hands in my
pocket.

he was very young and
wide eyed and used to doodle
through meetings
watching the layers of people
shift in their seats, gathering
outlines with his pencil.
I would try to peek,
said hi to him only if I passed
him but mostly enjoyed the thrill
of picking a home group full
of freshman in college,
the perversion of me
unfolding like that,
so uninhibited in my quest

for sobriety, spreading my
legs in the chair
in my turtleneck dress and
brown tights.

three children catch me muttering
and smile.      they watch
my fingers curve around an object,
then divide as I tap each tip
with my thumb like
I’m counting.
they are thinking
I have secrets,
not that I am crazy.

one time,
he kept his eyes closed as everyone
in the circle shared.
when it was my turn, he popped
them back open and stared
the length of my story.
I was too confused to make
direct eye contact with him;
this being so flagrant
and sudden, I fluster
with bold advances.
I spent one whole year fantasizing
about him. not lured by his youth
which makes him easy to command
but the way he was clearly taken
by me, his insouciance,
and his right to be that way,
being only eighteen and
forced here.

the children notice my
mouth moving as I walk down the
street, reviewing.
they all think I am writing about
them. I am writing about a cloud
I passed once.
cry cry cry and then
just start fucking laughing,
I say out loud
so the ten year old widens
her eyes
as she passes.

“Something spreading underground won’t speak to us,
under skin won’t declare itself
not all life-forms want dialogue with the
machine-gods in their drama
hogging down:

whats for dinner?
bad guys.”

–anselm hollo

where I grew up summer had
an intensity. the days were long,
bright and humid.
we would be drenched in sweat by
noon, loitering outside of 7-11 asking
for change to buy slurpees and
the mosquitoes could pile up on us
until we were just slick with
sweat and blood from
both smashing them onto our thighs
and cutting the welts off with our
paper clip knives
we had begun to use to scratch our itches.
and then these winds would hit you.

first, you embrace the coolness
because it was 101 degrees
and when the air drops ten to twenty
in a blow,
it is welcomed.
you feel this more at the beach
but I remember many times shivering,
coming inside after
rains hit to jump
in the shower and others
peeling back the slick of
my shorts, completely stuck

with now rainwater and
my perspiration to my hips
and feeling no respite at the beginning of August.
people forget that February is the coldest month
and that August is a swelter.
even if it was bright outside,
the sky would cut to black.
this was monsoon season.
hurricane season.

when a storm hit,
we opened the windows
beckoning the air to come in.

 I watched the
weather channel every morning to
see around what time they predicted the
afternoon thunderstorm would hit and
being more fixated on some measurable instance
of rightness that was public,
was obsessed with dressing exactly appropriately
for the weather each
day before meeting my friends.
on anything sixty nine degrees or above,
I wore shorts and anything above seventy-seven,
a tank top.
I ran and sweat a lot.
also I love getting caught in pure raintstorms.
I was often turning the channel on
and off to time it..

to this day I have not found anything
as soothing as preparation
and facing things
with as much immensity as a southern
coastal storm. 

the thunderclap is so
loud it is alarming.
you feel it.
it is a bomb going off
and lighting quickly follows.
we were taught to count the beats
at the end of the thunder clap
and the sight or sound of
the crackle of lightning
to see how many miles away
the storm was.

but sometimes they coincided
and you saw the lightning hit horizon
if you were on the shore.
waves growing in size.
these clouds moved faster than the current.
rain falling so hard
it felt like needles
or sleet and we named
them:

Allison

Bernard
Cornelia
Duke
Elana
Fred
alternating gender
alphabetically each year

as if they
could be shrunk like that,
these wild beasts that
pummeled us,
our uncontrolled.

“Oya”

of course i would never kill
a child, I continued with her,
but the question was
how do we make something like
the death penalty less of
a moral argument?
and the only way to take morality
out of law is to write clauses that
outline exactly what will happen
and under what circumstances and
then without reneging, go and
enforce it every single time.
these are authoritarian things.
but I didn’t agree with any of it
so I felt like battling me
was moot but I enjoyed the spectacle
and had, for no reason, invited
a male friend to join me in
class that day.
I too was interested in
motive but we cannot prove
intent truly, without
absolute confession
and even then, we may
doubt what we hear.

then I see your friend three times.

this is where formulas come in
handy and I am grateful:
formula for probability of
A and B.
I am thankful for my AP statistics course in
the 12th grade.
to begin to find the probability
of two events (events being actions or interactions,
not literally events but )
co-occuring you begin to
first choose the right formula,
then map it.
I loved this class. I aced this
class having been removed from all other
advanced math classes. there was nothing
confusing about finding probable
cause.
and when she brought out the dice
to teach us statistics, it kind
of coalesced: luck is when
things occur against all
odds.

this year i decide i am a descendant of harry houdini

realizing my audience
is mostly male,
a little scared to play
myself; the villain
but also literally can’t go
one more step forward pretending
I did not orchestrate an
entire clandestine destiny.

I don’t know, sarah,
you’ve been wrong before.
but once i start writing names,
they feel the difference in truth
and a lie; I feel them
sort of pulsate, getting ready
to confront this absurd idea
that you are using actual events
from their life as a barometer
for some sort of seething,
sidewinding violence
in which former victim
grows into a constant
predation and all
senses.
also me being unable to lie.

one by one,
precious line,
them being hung
like witches and
all labeled the same
way.

“xxx”

or

“the black book”

in Colorado,
his name was Alex.
he was very young and
wide eyed and used to doodle
through meetings. one time,
he kept his eyes closed as everyone
went around in a circle and shared.
but when it was my turn, he popped
his eyes open and stared at me.

I spent one whole year fantasizing
about him, not lured by his youth
but the way he was clearly taken
by me and how he didn’t just
act strange, but possessed it.

they all think I am writing about
them. I am writing about a cloud
I passed once.
cry cry cry and then
just start fucking laughing.