Prompt: My home makes me think of...

My home makes me think of...


summer. the way it always blows gracefully through white curtains and urges us outside. Running barefoot through the yard, skipping across the hot tar driveway to the next island of grass. The nagging of a knotted bikini tied behind the nape of my neck. Sweating glasses of iced tea. The cricket hush dusks. Sheets hung on the line, blowing crisp in the breeze.
"That summer fields grew high with foxglove stalks and ivy. Wild apple blossoms everywhere. Emerald green like none I have seen apart from dreams that escape me."

The way the rug felt when I was young and used to slide down the stairs headfirst, steadying myself with my arms. The carpeting smelled like burn, and it was cream colored and rough. My knees were always red after those headfirst slides.

Daisy crowns and watermelon, even though I never liked watermelon. Lupine reaching its purple arms through the meadow.

My father's painting sweatshirt. Stained with blue and whites, mostly, yellowed in the armpits, smelling like cars and gasoline, heat and garages.

Sitting in her window seat, how I'd fold my legs to my chest and listen to her in the dark. Our giggles would always reach downstairs, but it was always worth those late night conversations about who was cute, and what it might be like to smoke a cigarette, and what did we want to be when we grew up? Conversations in the dark. Laughing at midnight until it was time to go to school again. Her big eyes looking up to me, always.

Smoking a cigarette in my bedroom at age nearly 23. Watching how out of place its smoke looked against my teenaged walls. The feeling of being outgrown, as though my legs are suddenly too long for my bed, as though I am trying to squeeze myself into a doll house. Staring at bills piled up beside a vintage paddington bear jewelry box and my 7th grade music collection.

My Ithaca home(s) remind me of...

those sideways conversations we'd have at 2 a.m. Me, lying on the floor with my feet propped up against the sofa. You, beside me, taking the same stance. Us, talking about the past, the present, and the future, and all the things found in between.

incense ash. the way i'd spend hours watching the smoke twirl itself beautifully around my pencil that needed to write but couldn't. the way i'd let it fill the tiny room until my roommates complained it smelled like a church sanctuary. how the ash would pile on my desk, and it'd be weeks before i'd brush it away. remains of yesterdays.

A rainy day where I walked to town in the downpour. How when I returned home, I stripped off my clothing and hung it over the balcony in a thunderstorm. How I watched that storm from the balcony & watched it wash away the rotting pumpkins. Blasting Neko Case, glasses of wine, eating only pieces of toast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The puddles that'd form from our boots in the kitchen, and my soggy socks and how each boy that kissed me had horrible breath. Being alone.

A rooftop where we'd watch the fire station and wonder about the passerby. How we carried pumpkins all the way from Wegmans and carved their insides onto that rooftop, and you propped your rickety speakers against the windows and turned it up loud. Melted candle wax - how we'd talk for hours, and you'd pull my hand to your heart, sometimes.

Love letters in London. A yellow room with a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. A lace curtain billowing in an early spring. A constant siren, a cracked coffee pot. Marijuana and our clothing hanging on the doors, the chairs, the sofas and doorknobs, our socks hanging neatly from crooked drying racks. Hardwood flooring and their singing and strumming, the weaving of melodies that saved me when I started to Miss Things. Talking ourselves to sleep, always.

Watching a sweat bead drip between my breasts. Blue dresses and the tickle of grass against my bare legs. White wine in my throat and the sun rays cradling my dizzy head. Tangled bare feet, tangled in four years of laughter. Gulping sunshine together. My beautiful friends.

Watching winter from a window on Prospect St. Passing green smoke between fingers and eating scrambled eggs in bed and letting the snow fall and watching the orchids you loved to take care of grow tall. In those hazy days, the snow was always so sharp - I was always looking for it, those pieces of reality falling silently around me, cold and welcoming, breaking a high fever.

These are all snippets of various places I've known well, that resonate most vividly in my mind when I think of home. It's very nostalgic, I know. Too much so, and part of me wishes I'd just written a poem. In these, I found myself linking many of these "homes" with various important (& in some cases, unimportant) people in my life.

Brief moments from autumn, 2009.

drinking from the back seat
of a car, shivering
in October,
always.

then.
we scooped the moon beams off
that lake at midnight
held them
briefly for a moment.

argentina, the hills
and the orange houses
so far away.

We don't dive, we cannonball.

it sure does.

today i did manage to pour coffee all over myself. everywhere. down the front of my nice white shirt. spattering my arms. along my pants, my shoes. i didn't mind, not at all.

because i've come to realize how much i love this place. sure, i hate it the vast majority of the time. but with my new schedule, i'm only in two days a week, and well...i find myself looking forward to them. the cafe has become my space to breathe - to be myself. i realized this today as i crammed myself into a small spot inside of a cabinet (i can fit into tiny places & Really Clean) to wipe down some spilled espresso...i realized how at home i feel in this little place (the cafe - not the cabinet).

a lot of this is within the people - those regulars that i've come to look forward to so much. they've all remembered to ask me how my new job is going, and they even tell me that it's not the same without me there. there's comfort in still knowing that T will still have his large iced skim latte, that B will still have her french roast with a refill, that the three o'clockers will still come and that i still know all of this the way i know the street i grew up on, or the back of my hand.

this place has a heart and soul. as i clean out the floor of the fridge for the 1,000th time, lining the counter top with the cold milk steamers, wiping old milk to make room for more old milk, i feel part of it, for a brief moment. and because everyone, and everything, needs to be taken care of, in some way or another.

in other news, the Boy from Next Door has come in and we've exchanged e-mails for networking. it's nice to know that people are helpful, and that i can somehow manage to network (this is not the first e-mail i've exchanged regarding publishing/"real" work) from behind the counter of a cafe as the Coffee Girl. however, as enthralling as the Boy Next Door was to me for some time, life has once again proven to be very interesting and unexpected, in that you might find yourself driving with the windows down on a sunny winter day listening to Thao ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=966nqAtqWzE ) with a good friend who suddenly shines in a new light & makes your heart beat a bit faster.

job shifts. perspective shifts. the unexpected. some sunny days.

From a Freshly Scrubbed Floor

my good friend Olivia and I have started to find writing prompts in an attempt to save our creative writing habits from dying away forever (thank you, post graduate and non-inspirational life). This prompt was to write from the view of a freshly scrubbed floor. I ended up writing this brief (& pretty lousy) poem about the cafe...it can be read from the perspective of a floor, but it can also be read from my (the barista's!) perspective. here it goes, who knows:

they come and they go
the old woodwork rotting into
brown coffee in brown
mugs and brown counter tops,
the grit from important and
careless shoes that
walk

all over me on a daily basis,
these walls dripping orange
now, so dulled as i spill
coffee across my skin

it kills the pores
covers the dirt with grounds
hot grains of brief pain.

they come and they go.

in other news, a recent music suggestion is TV on the Radio - amazing! and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes. I will leave you with this song that I can't, for the life of me, stop listening to (warning, it's a strange song). It's just so...great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHKuB85EgnI

The Louvre, from a high school photograph.

I remember the birds. The way their wings sounded like fragile paper against the air. The way they used the air to elevate themselves high above my head.
A memory:

We stood in the square and examined the architecture, the way the angles of the buildings were so unique, so fresh, so frigid and unfamiliar. Our cameras snapped shots of the sight, preserving our moments of viewing this new and astounding place. Around us, people did the same, pointing, snapping photographs, preserving moments.

The Louvre is a maze of history, fingerprints, brush strokes - corridors of glimpses into artists' minds. Walking the halls is like winding through the centuries, a collage of evolving ideas, color schemes, faces.

And yet all I can really remember are the birds. Pigeons, to be exact. the way they would fly through the air outside in large flocks, as if to say We are here. We are now.
They made me want to lift myself into the air - their flapping so loud and ringing so clear above our heads, above the noise of our cameras, our minds, our busy, busy lives.