from my aunt upon reading a letter I sent to her.

You are a GREAT letter writer!! I truely enjoyed your letter and will keep it forever to read and read again! Yes, I will go on any adventure with you, and bring my dimples free of charge! I am so proud of you and ALL of your acomplishments! I cannot wait for your first novel to be published! I will buy a gazillion copies and give them away for free to the masses just to share the beauty of your words!
I think we are more alike than I ever realized! I L-O-V-E to travel (anywhere new is on my list) and make up stories. Unlike you, I never had the nerve to write down my imaginative ramblings. Probably from fear of rejection. Instead, I entertain Steve with my spun yarn. He thinks I am crazy as a result, but secretly I think he can't wait until the next story I have to tell him!! It's love :)
Finally, I just have to comment on your closing of "Come with?". That brought the biggest smile to my face! People down here don't say that and when I first moved here and would say that they would either laugh at me or ask what I meant by it. It was so nice to get a slice of "home" just with that saying. Thank you! You are precious and mean the world to more people than you realize! Enjoy your studies and all the memories surrounding them. I am with you always!



(I love these encouragements.)

Subterranean. Chapter 1.

My valley town has trees. And lampposts. And other things that are so tall, you feel most peculiarly small, like a toddler trying to reach the kitchen counter. Majesty is the town's canopy--wrought with copper sconces above banks who hold everyone's assets. But the kids bring it back down by a whole codex of symbols sprayed behind tiendas and pizza parlors named after towers. If the trains could get down through the mountains into the town the kids would color inside their boxcar's lines. Paint curls from the Welcome signs and the Lion's Club crest sways from the one nail left to hold it in place. It acts as the town's greeter, I suppose. Waving at every minivan that pushes past the sign.

The speed limit is ridiculously slow, but the townspeople know no cops are on duty most of every day. It's okay, because the people are decently conscientious. They swerve away from pot holes and avoid driving by schools around when the kids are let out.

The young people buy National Geographics and decide to travel so they can get some ethnic fabrics and to get some colored yarn to wrap their hair in. There is a lake-pond mid-city where haphazard teenage love affairs are written into poems after they skinny dip in secret. The lampposts don't dare to reach out there.

This place, it was a fine place to forget and quite easy to forget. My parents have a house that isn't beige but is the beige of blues, a slate color of the winter sky that peeks through about when the middle-schoolers are let out. It blends in. Even the garden, which my parents spent the entirety and beyond of their mortgage payments to perfect, blends in without an inch of deviation from the neighbors, either side. My dog is the only thing that keeps our home from being immaculate. I used him as a pillow growing up, not caring so much about the grunts he gave. I would come home to rest my head on his thumping breast.

And, it is of this town that the gods get to choose.

here is the thing:

it is slightly said that to come about
a lovely beingness, we must
change our nature
to be not a nold but a new one.
Nature is the sacred realm
a new nature is a sweet realm
But will it be sacred
We are a very messy spect
though everything isnature, we are hardly sweet.
is that sacred?
We are just so messy is all.

-Benjamin Kane

cheap is not free

with the Internet, those that
can't read good
have to climb up the rocky side
and wait their turns maybe 6 or 7 times longer
but, hey, at least they were let into the nat'l park,
if you know what I mean

and then there are the proselytes given much fodder for spooning--

and soon we will be packaging up the cosmos into
upper east side condominiums,
townhouses with red stones, and then
for them the studios that reek of the next door neighbor's smoke & thai curry dishes.
the connections will be poor (maybe up to three bars?)
and the heat will not stop escaping from the cracked windows. the stars
and space of space will be hard
to see from beyond the smog.

free access to most things

A Series of Lies: dandelying

I am turning your hands
when really I should be folding these eggs
and in between my fingers I
feel hopeless disgust

& then bedtime.

and it must feel, in my dreams,
like a hunt sent out
against my legs

because mostly I feel my joints
ache when you are around
not when I spend my days
in dandelion fields tirelessly escaping
the idea that your face

is not quite right.

HATERS ARE GOING TO HATE PRICES ARE GOING TO BE CHECKED>WHY NOT THE JOY OF ONESELF.

i said “did yu enjoy urself?” and she said,

“yeah, i don’t see why I shouldn’t, yu always gotta enjoy urself”

breathed a sigh of reknowing, reknowing it, the joy of it,

the fact we are here, the face that there are no other facts than that we

are here. cue old town flavors and substance loving comrades. PEOPLE ARE GOING TO SEX AND COME IN FROM THE BACK> THE COFFEESHOW>LITTLE HYPHEN OF

adjectivity. mostly the rural sense comes from the beauty

but the town of Bethany hopes to eliminate a physicality at all

just a ghost in the shell of ineluctable modality

(of the visible). invisible Joyce sits at a table,

molding it like he molds a text,

illuminating brains around with convoluted misdirected

psychotic breakfast breaks, i type the word s,

he hisses like a snake, we know the end

is only a soliloquy, but he still plays it off like

THERES MORE TO SAY.

-Bethany V. Price

never trust a tree

"...like the way people's voices sound after getting up early in the morning, something faintly wistful and hoarse and eager in it, ready for a new day." -from Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

-----

baby, I been brewed
to the bone, can't breathe on through
my calendar's dates & dues

but I must ask you
would you mind holding the phone
for a quick moment of two?
(my boss called me while I was stuck in between two boulders
twice.
and later that week I explained why my voice was cracking
and I seemed to want to end the call so soon
and she asked, why would you answer?

and I guess my reason was, "because it was you.")
----

K: Is this safe?
M: Yes.
K: Mike, is this safe for me?
M: We...will catch you.

___

Orangutan pine
resting in the melted snow
painting with vine
;;;;;;;;;;;
short nap on the boulders
hydrate with the dirty snow, biting every
few minutes on granules.

animal parcels

my heaven is smashing tapes that are going to be thrown away anyway--

" ," Bethany sent.
and all I can imagine is how
a life with just a music box sounds.
it sends me reeling down the side of the
curvature of the earth, 3 thousand horse power
down a five mile street and not enough in her pantry to eat
spins and twists and helpful back pains and I'm primed to laugh again.

baby, I see my falcon with the snowstorm
practicing her pirouettes and pulling, by proxy,
at the ebbing parcels
of bone marrow inside of me
favor & heart break,
flying,
flapping beside me (a heart as
big as all outdoors)

tornadoes 2010

last summer kara, sam, rondon, and i went all the way to new glarus to join a volleyball game with too many guys and two salty girls. we only knew kevin. We should have stayed in the church or some place when the tornado hit. But, we drove back. Windows down.

dumb but fun. i had my iPod with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on it and because I drove like a crazy person there, Sam was chosen to drive us back. Through the storm. And it was so strong it pushed the car sideways. It felt like our wheels and road were playing a game of tug'o'war. I texted my mom that we were lying low and staying outside of the tornado's way.

And we could see funnel clouds on either side of us. Sam, silent. Rondon smoking his entire pack of cigarettes. Kara panicking in the passenger seat. And me, gleefully hanging out the window hoping to never forget the feeling of being our Dorothy.

momma's coming over to exchange the dresser for the vanity

Am I supposed to make myself scarce or hang around when your mother comes over? Because you say from time to time that your body aches by how you miss her (and I don't want to get in the way of that quality time, man) but maybe you want her to better get to know the crazy person you live with? Because I am sure what she has heard about me must not be terribly reassuring for a mother. And if I hung around there is an 80% chance that she may like me and then trust me more. Not that she has reasons to distrust me?

But, dude, should I go to the library and run interweb-errands or stick around and bleach the sink and read a science fiction novel and make nice chit-chatting sounds with her?

Because I am inclined to hide and find a dark corner to journal about making the wrong decisions all the time.

My brother and I stayed up most of all night last night texting each other on how obtuse we are because when we care, we care and it becomes intense in how we focus on those and the thats that we do care about. And all else falls away, as they say.

So, damn, can you spell it out for me? Hold my hand a little? Because I am so very willing to make an ass of myself for you.