From a secret project, different version

When you are in, you are in love with everything and everyone responds in kind. I have played to crowds of millions. In person, on the airwaves, you have thought about me at night. You have been entered from behind and scuffed your kneecaps on a carpet. I am the lit-up dashboard of your potential boyfriend’s car. I am a tight T-shirt. I am just-washed hair. I am the smell of your own sex coming to greet you after a trip downtown. I am the taxi cab you let someone else get into. I am a strawberry milkshake. You think I wouldn’t be as good as chocolate, but I am.

The other day, I played a benefit concert for the Pine Creek Fire department because a lot of houses were lost recently in a fire in my town. I didn’t have my voice back so I played guitar with a country rock band who has one Grammy to my seven. I’m not saying anything about it, I know. I understand. It’s a senseless metaphor, a singer songwriter who can’t sing. But I saw you in the front row and I want to tell you publicly that your stupid needles pierced my heart.

From a secret project

There was a time when I was beautiful. I did not move, I shined. I didn’t need food and sleep, hardly. I had electric eyes.

There was a time when I was everywhere—I mean it, divine. I was in your airspace. Your television. I was on your mind.

I was the rug that burned against your kneecaps when you let him fuck you from behind.

I was the smell of your own sex coming to greet you.

I was your first lie.

You are going to tell me that my time is over; that my music is irrelevant; that I’m out of touch; mistuned. The time has come for me to admit some things to you about the differences between how I used to see the world and how I see it now. I am going to tell you that for a long time, I ordered strawberry milkshakes when I really wanted chocolate. All of my life, I wanted to be interesting, and for many years, I was. And despite my vocal problems and my personal catastrophes, I was feeling even more interesting and I was feeling very strong, and I was feeling vulnerable and sensitive and aware and full of grace, and then I took the stage at the Pine Creek Fire Department benefit I organized for the lost homes in my new Montana town, and I saw you with your knitting needles, and your needles pierced my heart.

From an entry in progress for Emily Spivack's "Worn Stories"

My father’s vintage Ralph Lauren cardigan is age-stained and moth-nibbled, the cuffs are all stretched out. Although I don’t have any memories of him ever actually wearing it, it certainly corresponds to the type of man that he was then. In the early eighties, he had great hair and a mustache—a long-legged, rare-steak eating, tennis playing man who belonged to clubs with letter-pressed stationary in royal blue and cream. He always gave me a sip of wine at dinner, but would tell me to smell the bouquet first. This will give you the impression that my dad is cultured, snobbish. He isn’t. He pushed the wine across the table to me to piss my mother off.

From "Tropical Storm"

Something here about the happy times. Who wants to hear about my mother’s drinking? Would you like to know instead that I once had a horse? My parents let me name it and I named her Fantasy. I feel no embarrassment about this, oddly.

From "Tropical Storm"

            Every time we come down from Massachusetts for a visit, I think that if I can stay cheerful, the visit will be different. As long as we have fun during the daytime, I will be okay. That when five o’clock comes and my mother loads her wineglass full of ice and vodka, I will think: today I touched a porpoise! I went for a bike ride! I had shrimp on a bamboo skewer! And I will look the other way.

From "Tropical Storm"

She knocks out four pins on her first roll, none on her second. I pick up my pink bowling ball and feel a certain amount of pressure. To our left, the lanes are filled with small gentlemen in collared shirts and khaki shorts. Their shorts feature utility pockets. They’re wearing high socks. Their legs show the weary tendons of a once athletic life, but their bodies are sloped lines now and supple semicircles. Gentle foreheads, many chins, everything moves downwards. Their balls roll slower than our balls, they rotate with intention. They move like manatees up and down their lanes.

From "Airs Above the Ground"

            Everyday with Peter felt like a confirmation that three hearts could make a world.

Their routine followed a pattern that was instantly familiar in that it replicated the daydreams of the life she’d always wanted. After coffee and the ceremonial splitting of the paper into his section, and hers, one of them would ride Belltello while the other mucked the stable. Then, after a weird breakfast of leftovers and fruit and this horrid, Swedish fish paste that Peter pushed through a tube onto whole wheat crackers, Lydia would go to her studio to paint, taking breaks at the window to watch Belltello and her lover—what other word was there for it?—dance.