Whenever I traveled, I’d find a Jesus souvenir for my mother, something that she didn’t have or wouldn’t have thought of but undeniably something she’d like, and I too enjoyed it when she felt pleased by life but there was another component to it, if I’m being completely honest, because I desperately wanted to feel sanctified in her eyes.

My mother knew what it meant to walk on water and how you can’t show you know you know it the majority of the time. Just be cool period with whatever you believe in and be there. Presence goes a long way.

The last time my mother and I sang together, no one around but the two of us, we sang a song called It’s All for the Best.

She was a soprano, classically trained. She never bragged but did appreciate a compliment every so often. Somewhere in her tapes are recordings of her singing. Four years after her death, I have yet to listen to them. Whenever I choose one from the stacks and hold it, I get a feeling of something wholly private.

I wonder if her singing not only strung a week together but an entire personal life together, and in the doing made her life one of consecutive big days full of big feelings.

Maybe that’s where I get it from.

+

Such days have a lot of parts, not always a significant entirety of them but still. Anticipated, dreaded, looked-forward to, rowdy, and impromptu parts, a plentiful smattering.

And any day can’t help but contain autobiography but we’ll typically set that aspect off to the side in varying degrees because the day involves others and we go back and forth between the two poles, poles which overlap as autobiography makes its way in and out.

An individual’s story, if there is a focus on one, will make stories for all included, present or not. On a big day, see, on a different note, stories like those invented in the game telephone proliferate, and are good in the telling, subject matter assuming second place to the telling.

Like it or not, we talk to ourselves. If you haven’t given solitary telephone a shot, think about it. Poets and artists do this already.

+

I wish I were an Alice Neel painting.

+

If I were a shirt on the back of a chair, I wouldn’t wish anything. I’d relish my long sleeves descending and drifting when a breeze came into the room

If asked what I want, I’d answer a beach in Mexico. The same feeling like when a long time ago when I wanted a certain someone. The night I replied to a Craigslist ad when I was feeling earnest, that kind of wish.

+

This was before they changed things on Craigslist when you could blatantly attempt to hook up, and a guy had posted he was looking for a trans woman. I wrote to him anyway because I liked how he said what he said. How often do you see real-thing sincerity? I told him I was not trans and meant no disrespect to anyone who was or him, but if he didn’t find what he was looking for, and wanted to make a friend, I would be down for that.

+

I forgot about the email.

A year or so passed and he emailed back saying he had only seen the message then on the current date. Covid was underway, and I didn’t know what to say. And when I thought of a good reply, a month later!, it was too late. I didn’t feel bad. The gestures in the exchange felt good and it was enough.

+

I had a lover. Nico said that. Jackson wrote it. At some point, everyone catches themselves singing it. That pretty melody. That pretty melody.

+

Lately, I’ve had ample room to space the fuck out, like world-is-gauzy lose myself-spaced-out, and I opened the piano lid and began composing a song by ear.

Playing by ear feels supernatural when you’ve learned to play by sight.

It’s a worlds-apart feeling.

+

Walking down the aisles in Blockbuster Video came second to walking sideways along the new release walls, the three of which followed the rectangle of the room.

The aisles, though, let you partake in the flirting ritual whenever you and someone else traded looks. You had to bend down to see the titles arranged like bookshelves anyhow, so you could always bend down without looking conspicuous when you needed to collect yourself during the shared secret.

If you had come to Blockbuster with a friend, they were often picking up and examining film choices in another genre or the same category but on a separate aisle. You always had me time.

And time kind of floated.

Once upon a time it did float.

We knew nothing about splitting up time, and organizing and putting a stamp on it in the now, nothing about feeling compelled to immediately share something. The only scope of the world we felt came from the films surrounding us.

It was air and it was live. We were air and we were live.

+

Something I re-read in a chat
from a DJ’s recent video: 
broski wann in Wien? 
when will broski be in Vienna? 

A couple of comments later, 
someone said
I like your jacket.

There is nothing better on our internet than a sincere remark.

[The DJ’s jacket was nice.]

+

After lunch one day, Birsen and I video called one another to catch up, and she was listening to the very same DJ video.

We were live and she had seen it when it was live.

+

I seem to be drawn to the word live today.

This is a good sign because I’ve felt near-dead. It’s relatable; some days fall down that old well. Oh well. Feeling doesn’t make something a fact, and the next time the bad feeling wants to start, I will try to remember and stop it. [Sometimes I want to edit everything out.]

+

I feel better now. I will try to remember this next time too.

Th DJ set is from Chris Luno, and it’s Alpine House Therapy.

+

I keep replaying a 
song by Powel. 
The title
Ich Warte translates
I Am Waiting.

I am waiting and I am good at it.

+

I went to get the mail earlier. As I walked across the unkempt end-of-summer yard, I thought about what I was wearing and it’s what I call my uniform, although I hadn’t thought of that at the time this morning but had simply grabbed all the items and got dressed.

It’s been a minute since I’ve worn the uniform (see, I had been feeling bad for weeks), and I guess subconsciously that registered somewhere too, the not wanting to remember feeling bad, therefore not recognizing the uniform, definitely not associating my actions with the subtitles reaching for uniform and putting it on.

My favorite combination of clothes and shoes, my uniform, is a Fruit of the Loom white t-shirt; no-name oversized khakis; and black, chunky Adidas.

+
A certain friend of mine abhors khakis, and it doesn’t matter; they don’t know everything. We needn’t care too much about our friends’ opinions about silly things or about our important things like our personal life either. Friends always get things wrong because they can’t help it, and that’s good. I would not want a friend to know my feelings that well anyway.

Admitting this doesn’t mean the friendships are any less important. It’s the exact opposite; it reinforces the bond. I can forgive a bad judgment passed on me. I might not forget it so easily, but I can forgive it. It feels like a pact of unspoken reciprocity. So that’s that, and when we do things together like go to the coast, we have a great time.

+

When we looked down the beach, we saw the sun rise. Where’d the night gotten to? Yesterday, um abraço.

I can’t not think of Miguel.

+

Line after line, the poem Bob & Simon’s Waltz, will remind you of hanging out with friends. It’s by Alice Notley. I knew a poet who went to see her in Paris; and the poet loved Alice. When the poet talked about Notley’s poems, her voice was different. It was pure. I reached out to her the day after Alice Notley died. I didn’t hear back. But this isn’t about that, it’s about Alice Notley and what her poems made. Bob & Simon’s Waltz makes funny funny and sharp sharp, much like the other poems in Margaret & Dusty.

I like to think someone is writing Alice Notley’s biography, if not now, then soon. When it is a physical book, it will sell out and go out of print because it will be a conversation about the complex, no-bullshit facing of feelings one experiences in and toward the world, and in and toward existence, half of the facing that’s lovingly self-drawn, and the other half that’s unfairly forced upon one from outside, and always always precisely how Alice Notley wrote about it and how she lived such a long time. She will need a careful and wise biographer. A line by Alice Notley is like no other, especially as one follows another follows another.

+

I’ve read a modern poet who I think understands this, this ability to write unforgettable lines. There are many poets today who can do these things, but Molly Ledbetter is the one who’s really on to something. No one else comes close. She crushes it with Althea.

+

I once curated an exhibit with another curator. One of the pieces was a light sculpture that was plastic and at the artist’s request it sat on the floor. The plastic on the outside and most of the inside was white but some of the inside was mustard yellow and the yellow was appealing. Seeing the sculpture for the first time on the floor like that when we were testing it out with the artist was like seeing a new person’s face for the first time and thinking, God, that person has a really good face. I can’t describe it any other way.

Some years went by, and the artist, who I spent time with every so often, told me he hadn’t thought he would ever do anything like that in his life and I asked him why and he said because you told me I was an artist and I couldn’t believe you said that but I believed you.

+

That was something to hear.

+

Many times, I’ve let people down or hurt them. I don’t feel bad but I have felt bad about it and did for a long time whenever that kind of shit happened.

Everybody has the same story. Even saints.

Everybody has the same story in varying short-and-long-playing scenarios; it’s embedded in our imperfect humanness.

At one time saints were human.

+

Will I write a poem called Lightbox? Will you write a poem, or something? If so, what will you call yours?

If I write a poem, I will mention nothing of sadness because, um, gross.

You can write a poem with sadness in it, but if the poem’s good you’d never know sadness was in it just looking at it because the sadness goes unsaid.

+

The other day a student quoted Wittgenstein and it turned out not to be a direct quote. That could have been the translation tool she used getting it wrong. I would like to think she translated it herself because the wording is beautiful. She said he said, “The bond of language is the bond of imagination.”

Suddenly, I saw trees, people dancing, horses and chairs, a scratch on the arm, blood.

I hear music.

+

David Mackay remixing If I Could Stop the Sunset a little after it has started when it’s...

+

The third stanza of Canto II in Paradiso in Mary Jo Bang’s translation goes:

The waters I’m sailing have never been crossed.
Minerva inspires me. Apollo guides me,
and the nine Muses show me the Bears. 

+

Then put that next to:

And there was Leticia,
dressed caipira with a polka shit,
cheeks all jestly freckled,
a straw hat barely capping her wild lion’s mane of hair,
always untamed.

That’s , from his brilliant novel, Tropicália.

+

The funny thing about the Leticia passage is when I encountered it in Harold’s book I already knew about Festa Junia because I have students in Brazil and a student had mentioned to me about how high school seniors put on a performance then to celebrate their school journey. She shared something about it with me. I could watch it a million times.

+

I talked with my friend Jack the other day. A happy conversation full of news, gossip, and revelations. One of the things we talked about was wanting to live to be old men. With conditions.

+

All the while, my dog was sleeping.

+

I tell myself how I want to read the new book I got on Saturday and haven’t had a chance to crack open. It’s called How It Feels To Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves. When it came out, I read the digital preview and what I can remember was my thinking out loud that Megan O’Grady can write!

+

The pleasure of early days.

+

Once I wanted to crack the code of transcendental meditation. I didn’t have the 1K necessary to go and do the thing and get my own mantra, but I think I got pretty close to the feeling you drop down into especially after reading everything I could find that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi wrote and said about it.

And I was already feeling a lot more. In my quest, one of the things I’d read was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s book about God being love and that killed me. It’s personal.

For a brief period I continued to try to practice my approximation of transcendentalism, combined with what David Lynch had to say about it (he was still alive then), but then I thought, yogi, superstar, and super me, or not, let this go, let it go. So I let it go, and when I did, I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss the wanting, and I didn’t wonder about it any more.

No wondering when broski would be in Vienna.

I emailed Miguel.

image
Giovanni Battista Bertucci,
Madonna and Child (ca 1506 Renaissance)
The Walters Art Museum

What about Rafi? He mentioned a recent love, and I didn’t press, and what I’ve meant to say from the start is we began by talking about friendship. Friends, how we dearly love some of them, and friends, and how we change and lose contact, and then how a friendship, the real thing, grows gnarly, pretty roots and remains the same, as is the case with his buddies whom he’s helping in a new enterprise baking quality hamburger buns for wholesale. Hamburgers in Istanbul (I want one), and so far a hit with one game proprietor’s shop; the buns sold out within a day and a half. That kind of success is plenty enough to reassure you, to make you want to go home after a job well done and lie in bed. If it had been me, I would have felt delirious.

Most people I know say their favorite thing to do, above anything else, is to lie in bed.

As Rafi and I were talking, his mother came into the room to see if there was any laundry. He was not in bed; he was in a chair in the living area. He and I haven’t known one another long, but it’s easy to bond over anything. Right off, we start talking.

But now, where to begin? That beloved, or not-so- beloved, tempered, at times disbelieving, perfumed, almost always excessively personal, timeless question. How many instances do you think the words have appeared together in history, specifically about writing?

Imagine the magnitude if every utterance were documented with a photograph of the person saying it or writing/typing/texting it out, and where they were, what they wore, how they sat, stood, or reclined, and whether they were alone or had a pet or a human or both, close by. Think of how many containers and warehouses the photos would fill. Yours would be in there, and mine would too. Open any warehouse door and scratch your head when you step inside.

Where to begin?

It’s five a.m. The house is dark. Two lamps illuminate my desk, a former dining room table where the family, aunts and uncles included, sat together on holidays (children in the kitchen, thank you). My dog looks out one of the living room windows as the light fills the sky above the trees. I wear a St. Jude T-shirt, dark blue shorts, black Adidas. Without these chunky, round eyeglasses, everything’s a blur. This is the photograph that doesn’t exist. I’ll begin with a haiku and two short poems.

with friends

look the Atlantic
seaside, Andy, Kodachrome
chicken flowers beer

Recognition Memory

a relief to know fires 
aren’t necessary
in our lifetimes, 
a relief, the many,
the many live
times rolled in one, you your
self,
you yourself 
said, 
hey, you! 
and reviewed some 
of them - lifetimes a, b, c
with Duncan over beer

you lost your 
hat
and your legs grew long
your bodies' toes and fingers 
fluttered
and rewrote grammar

The Rooftop

A smooth rock

beside a pool in dusk

a cloudless

day I sleep,

was going to sleep a long time where

my body had a canvas, had its

tremors and they came

today they come and go 

and come again

it’s normal and I

made a house identical

a house inside of me

and you with yours becomes

what and how

it’s saying

what it’s saying over there

with your 

face it

looks up to the second floor

I was going to say something really pretty now, something like someone you know does, something out of the blue, as if you’re sitting in a room with me with the door to the outside world open, but I’ve said enough. I want to listen to you.

One time, while talking with a friend about fate, they said, Personality is important for everyone. I will never forget that.

On some of these August days: reading Eve’s Hollywood; Alice Notley, particularly Margaret & Dusty; rereading Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus; and Lucy K Shaw’s Woman with Hat. Watching One of Them Days; rewatching A Bigger Splash; and Anatomy of a Fall. With Woman with Hat, which I heartily recommend, I’ve come back again with my pencil, and for this reading the new marginalia include a little 2 beside them with a circle around it.

Of note: a couple of weeks ago I found ; this post won me over big time.

Tredecko

Flowers bloom faster when I talk to them

I wrote this surreal essay for Amsterdive’s June prompt on Anticipation. It’s an excellent theme for this time of year, as we come into full bloom…

Read more

5 months ago · 19 likes · 4 comments · Trevor Cohen

seven prompts

You can go anywhere with a prompt.

a poem
fiction
memoir
a David Hockney exhibit
the sea

A different version of Recognition Memory first appeared on Medium in 2020.
A different version of The Rooftop first appeared in Resistance Poetry in 2020.

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images
glc-ii, thumbnail and post photo
Toilet Paper, dog on phone

Here is a short piece of fiction.

Welcome to the City of Those Who Love This One Book

After a meeting with staff about a group show, I look in the bathroom mirror. There we are, my hair and I. So I change into khakis, a God Save The Queen t-shirt (I know) and comfortable shoes, and cut across campus where groundskeepers make meticulous cuttings. They are in their green jumpsuits clipping hedges and riding mowers and cutting back what summer and the sprinklers have brought on. Collected everywhere are shallow puddles and the cool water seeps through my ratty tennis shoes.

I get my hair cut. I can feel where my hair is not. I can feel the breeze across my shoulder blades when I slip back outside.

I go to the cinema to see Toby but he is out running business errands. I want to tell him about Deidre. The cinema is showing a series of revivals.

The film starts late in the day with a creepy island and an approaching storm. In front of the island the water is chopping purple with white edges that buoy into each other and fade. The purple has some blue to it but it’s all bruised water. Behind the island hangs heaviness: a blooming monstrous cloud.

You get to see Michael Caine’s name and then it goes to a different day — a speedy little yacht full of middle-aged men fishing and talking about fishing — here the water is gorgeous it is aluminum and rolls light across the sky’s reflection. Later when the men are making gin and tonics the water is dark like oil and upon it a rotting craft floats up and bumps into the yacht carrying a sound of flies.

Every row, in every seat there is someone sitting, most for the air conditioning. To my left a kid in a red baseball cap and handfuls of popcorn. On my right, an older woman ebullient in a yellow pantsuit. She has silver hair and smells like gardenia, light and not too sweet. I imagine her wanting to kiss Michael Caine when this came out, a day in 1980.

Blair Maynard (Mr. Caine) does a lot of running around to try and save his son. The pirates are in a time warp and you get to feel a little humanity for them, what would you do anyway if it were an island or not and time had suddenly put you somewhere else? The older woman is pleased with the end.

She and I walk out into the lobby where sunlight lands on the carpet close to the glass doors and the concession stand is busy with tan faces waiting on one side and sardonic townie faces working on the other. We walk outside along where it’s cooler in the shade and wave each other goodbye.

Aha. Down the steps across the courtyard and on the other side of the street in the park beneath a tree Toby sits on a bench.

Toby is peaceful about everything, not aggressive like the old days. He likes men as much as I like men and women.

He is a cinema cup, worn-thin patterned shirt, industrial pants; his legs stretch out long and his arms loose at his sides, eyelids closed like tentative wings. A bandage on his forehead.

He’s mindful like that, does things on his own with no regard of how he appears and what, if any, importance his good looks may place on things. Our looks always touch something though, people, animals, nature, people who are animals, animals who are people, wild animals, people who love us or hate us.

Now, I say to myself, you are pure animal. When were you not wild?

For a short sweet time at university I was born for Toby, and he could not get enough of me either but that took awhile to happen. He did installations and I made plastic sculptures and eventually we collaborated on books in limited editions. One edition went up to one hundred. Attraction became math.

Our first collaboration began when he was being a fucking smartass about everything and I needed someone to dislike. We abhorred each other and I could read him, and there were not enough misgivings to stop us. We found one another charming but worthy of derision. We spray painted exteriors of shit buildings downtown and cursed one another over who was better at it.

And then we became a fine thing we slept on. The derision ended. And days passed by like we let each other in on a secret: he didn’t need anything from anyone or anything and I confessed I wanted to be that strong, to know that truth. All along I still pretended I was stronger than he was but the truth was elusive to me. I wanted to feel love wasn’t illusory but wasn’t certain I could handle the real real thing. There was no illusion about the bed we broke fucking.

Toby’s headphones are around his neck and the music sounds like mosquitoes. His hair is dirty brown and curling from the heat, it falls over each end of the bandage. His lips move to the lyrics, how someone asleep does their talking except there’s no movement around their closed eyes.

When she’s sleeping, Deidre does this thing where she yips like a young dog. I’m curious to discover what else she does asleep and awake. She’ll surprise me and then I’ll start over, unlearning what I thought I knew and learning in a completely new way.

I cough and Toby cracks his eyes, then his hands make a roof over them.

He says, Hey, Joel.

Want some? he says and holds out the soda. I take a sip, it’s cherry and for a second when I hand it back we both hold it. He has brown eyes.

Did you like the movie? he says. I saw you go in.

I rather enjoyed myself.

It’s kind of ridiculous, he says. His plum lips come together and go wide.

I might be going to London, he says.

London?

Yeah, thanks to Rummy. A production of Three Penny Opera. They want a set designer no one’s ever heard of. A painter, not a theater person.

That’s cool, I say.

I’d be into it, he says. Rummy gave me a recommendation, can you believe it?

When do you leave?

If I leave, he says. You know how Rummy likes to talk.

In our day attending classes Rummy was the head of the art department but had made a name for himself with experimental films and didn’t care about anything students did and handed out grades like bombs. When it became apparent Toby and I were seeing one another he grew jealous of that, and it was difficult to stay on top of the game for him. It made me a better artist. Love, Toby liked to say, is a drug, and they say that for a reason. As for me, I didn’t trust love. It always comes too easily. Shit, my parents.

Toby says, I need to get back. A new projectionist. He’s still learning.

He says, Why don’t you come to mine sometime?

He’s gone before I can tell him about Deidre. On the bench is a book he’s left behind. The Origin of Peace. I recognize it from the paint-smudged copy I’ve seen on one of Deidre’s bookshelves in her studio.

I sit down, and when I lean over to pick up the book remember my haircut. My hair now stops at the shoulders, barely touches them, and I’m already used to it? I don’t miss the length. I feel clean and I feel dirty like sex is floating in the air. And I feel like I’m the color blue like a whale but not cool. I feel hot and sort of mean and tough like I’ve been in the sun too long. I kind of feel like screaming. I haven’t thought about Toby in a long time and I don’t want him but there’s a little something about that that’s about to start pissing me off because the little something is history and will never go away and I’m tired of my mind and this momentary irrational thinking.

I open The Origin of Peace and read and after awhile like this the noise around and the noise inside me is not so loud.

As the sun begins to set, I’m three chapters deep. I’m somewhat familiar with the subject of consciousness and the body. I take care of my body. I like it that way. Consciousness is not entirely separate from my body. I am awareness.

I laugh at myself. The book is full of orange highlights, and here and there legible notes in blue ink spruce the margins. I hold the book down so the purple and violet sky reflects on the pages. Someone keeps texting me and I don’t care.

When it gets too dark to see I take out my phone and turn on the flashlight, maybe I’ll get falafel after this and go home or get a drink somewhere.

Notice everything that goes by, the book says. But do not be connected to what passes by. Do not identify with what is outside you. Do not identify with your image. You are not your image. You are not outside you. Do not think. Do not fall to the calling of a willful mind.

I smell sandalwood, it’s coming from the book and I press the book into my face. I sniff a strand of my hair. It’s something like lemon and bergamot? I want to see Deirdre. I close the book. Nearby someone calls out for Lindsay, Lindsay, someone unworried, and a second later there’s silence. The voice has gone by, out here, into the night.

That story is ancient, but I like it just the same. It’s not really a story but something from a novel I cut my teeth on.

Back in the real world, I’ve read a great book I hope I’ll write about soon. That kind of writing deserves a lot of care and focus. The book is Woman with Hat by . The story is not old; its voice stays constantly new. I’ve a feeling the book will never get old and will change every time someone reads it. Once I started reading Woman with Hat I couldn’t stop myself from going back to it and I read it over two days. I had to lie down when I read it and I lay in the biggest bed here in the house. You see, to match the way the book made my me feel inside and out, I needed to sprawl.

the 8 prompts

You can go anywhere with a prompt.

a poem
fiction
memoir

Welcome to the City appeared in a different form in The Junction in April 2020.

This is Cloud 8. I’m glad you’re here. In the Welcome post, you can discover more. Everyone is encouraged to follow a prompt and write something. If you feel inspired to do so and would like to share, post your writing in the comments. Mostly, I hope the prompts prove useful to you.

Cloud 8 is free, so consider subscribing if you like what you’ve read. You’re also welcome to subscribe and support Cloud 8 for two dollars a month should that sound inviting. Many thanks.

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image
Jay Kim thumbnail & post

If I were to call and invite you over for something al fresco right before dusk tonight, would you come? This is rhetorical, Sally. Stop laughing at me, because you are gone gone gone. And it’s not like, if you weren’t, I could forget your ever-loving fondness of any opportunity to say no. However, it would delight me if you said yes. If you did reply, where would your voice come from? It doesn’t help you live somewhere five thousand million miles from here. Are you breathing where you are, wherever you are? Do you still like laughing when you pee when you’ve had too much to drink? In the heart of this country, the fields are going dry because the sun is burning them up. I’ll pee in the thirsty dirt and write your name in it for you to fly over and look at.

I’m putting on The Lovely Linda.

Do you remember listening to it and the others that come after, the songs Paul wrote and sang? That reminds me. We’re out of cherries and a shit ton of everything else. I’m certainly not making any kind of list (I have not changed) before I go. I’ll be there sooner than later. Can I get you anything? La, la, la, la, la, damn. Damn, I love this and I love loving it. Think about coming home please.

Ardently,
W—

Paul sings Junk. After the lyrics are done, his voice ribbons a sound that wraps around you, beguilingly primal and raw.

Once, once upon a something you wanted want, you write, the story of a girl woman.

A car flying down a highway. Bye-bye.

Dear Maya. I was happy to see you’re drawing again. I was also happy to hear you are tired of teachers telling you how to do things and are no longer taking any classes. For the record, I never thought you needed them. You said when you draw you like to listen to music, and you might choose to listen to the Bryter Layter songs, their lyrics painterly next to Nick Drake’s honest baritone. I can imagine the music in your apartment as it spills out an open window onto the streets of China because that’s where we usually meet, you in the studio and me in the little room with the oak dining room table standing in for a desk. Sometimes on WeChat you are walking down the street. At night, at night. We talk during your p.m. hours; always my morning. What does Nick Drake sing in Hazey Jane II? He says, take a little while. I took a lot of pages from that book, Maya. I’m forever a slow boy. It’s added up to a lot of pages. I want to write about them as if I’m writing on them. I try to write about them. I’m writing about them as I write about our conversations.

You showed me your drawings, and after that you showed me your bergamot plants. They’d matured significantly in the three weeks that have sped by. When you held one of the plants up to the screen, it had turned from green to banana yellow, not quite that bold in the yellow’s yellow but getting there. They’re producing the scent now, you said and held the plant close to your nose. Your hair is getting long again. You’re telling me about happiness without saying the word. You aren’t listening to any music. I go through phases with music and lately it’s jumped up like a dog. I think it was after reading an interview with Madonna about her new album. Last night I started watching the documentary about Paul McCartney getting killed in a car accident and being replaced with a lookalike. Confabulated and kind of thrilling that someone put that much effort into making some kookiness seem almost plausible. It’s funny and better than a lot of what’s streaming.

Who said serious was something anyway.

Dazzling and funny and serious without doom. Mirror bald, gilt frame. I have not ever read a poet more fair.

the prompts

You can go anywhere with a prompt.

a poem
fiction
memoir
Kroger
Substack

This is Cloud 8. I’m glad you’re here. In the Welcome post, you can discover more. Everyone is encouraged to follow a prompt and write something. If you feel inspired to do so and would like to share, post your writing in the comments. Mostly, I hope the prompts prove useful to you.

Cloud 8 is free, so consider subscribing if you like what you’ve read. You’re also welcome to subscribe and support Cloud 8 for two dollars a month should that sound inviting. Many thanks.

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Gaetano Rap

Later On
                                for Boris


It's been a year
because it's ours,
I say to myself, and thank you, 
for the flowers. It is what it is, can't 
you see? can't we tell them
to stop at once?
The old forever and
a day know our 
names without worry
yes, no, they don't need to 
do that anymore, 
have concern for what either you or I think 
or think we think, now have something
with me. I
expect a painting is about to walk through
the door. Remind me
of the philosopher's name 
again you know
the one. No, it's not Mauricio,
he's the biologist with the dog, see him,
try and see him like he would see you,
and he 
speaks many languages, otherwise known as
you know the word. It's already here 
hear that?
hear them talking in the street below?
I asked them
let me rephrase that, I requested they
be careful with the work,
it is what one does while we surf our moods
and preoccupations, various and predictable, a bowl
of salty nuts and foggy foggy atmosphere, here, some vodka 
for you and I. Pass me my water please and look out 
the window over my shoulder. I'll be
earth gone dirt 
and bones below stone
while new women and men will
sometimes still stop what they're 
doing and linger,
without time, 
like you.

F. Scott, are you listening? The radio? Tom, are you? Culture Club? And Mom. The water, it’s running, going schwoosh.

Eleven prompts

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Daniel Kuhn photograph

Some Tales

The Coca-Cola drinking glass is sweating. You are,
are too young for deodorant. That's only for wry
adults those who say look, kid, you’re young, even
under your arms, you smell like a kid and that’s how
you're meant to smell. No, one brother says, he just
smells like a wet dog. You imagine rolling the scent 
on other parts of your body, which you are going to
do as soon as they forget. Beginning with the center 
of your chest, then driving it around the belly-button, 
singing the song about flowers and soldiers, girls and 
graveyards. You eat an orange and wait.  


On one morning I was walking up the street to
Habitat in a pretty calm rain, it was a Saturday. 
A neighbor who was also a friend was out on  
his porch and he asked me what I thought about 
going with him to check out a house he was 
considering buying and fixing up. I’d figured
the house was empty because it looked so alone 
although it sat handsome up the hill. Someone 
had loved it before. He knew the code
for the lock and we stopped and looked at 
one another. Someone, he said, lives there even
though they’re not supposed to. I said, Why  
didn’t you tell me that, and didn't want to
continue after the sinking knowledge of
bad tenants but I did, and I am scarred.


The girls drink the cold beers too and the boys wear 
women's slips and they dance to Leonard Cohen in a
wooden house. Hot summer, 1990. No one is aware
that one day tears will fall and never stop. If you walk
far enough north, south, east or west with any of
them, except the ones the years had made to vanish,
you will smell deep, dark, dank, sweet pot. The ghosts
have a different kind of scent around them and
it doesn't have a name but no problem you know when
it’s there because it's a scent you have always known.

                                     
What's in there, pointing to the kitchen?
Is this a personality assessment kind of thing?
There is a bag of oranges in the fridge. Growing up,
we were never w/o fruit, and oranges came from 
the A&P. A memory? Oh, no. I have a memory 
about oranges and it is not mine to 
share though I do love to sit with it and
hold it close. Thank you for asking. Ask me something
else, anything else. Yes. I can hear you. 

                                            
Laurie Anderson sounded great inside The Fillmore.
Her show was about to start when the guy of the
couple sitting next to us asked me if we were brothers 
and when he did he looked so damned happy at the 
possibility. We couldn't help guffaw because we were
in love plus we looked nothing alike. We smiled and lied. 
He seemed satisfied. We’re big fans, he said. L.A. was 
performing the Bright Red Tour. Her energy was 
so much on the surroundings I got the distinct feeling a lot of
fucking was going to happen when everyone there got home.

                                            
The rectory was full of stacks and stacks of moldy dishes,
piles and piles of clothes, an 8mm movie camera and reels
of stag films that were covered in dust. The toilet was black
with fungus. I wondered where on earth the evicted father shat.
When I’d worked almost all day cleaning and things still
looked mortifying, I had to call the office and I asked them
to send Michael. By the end, the kitchen and the bathroom were
spotless and smelled good, but the rest of the place only
God could forgive. Sorry, like a sorrow. Poor old living quarters.                                          

Many thanks to the new subscribers, most of whom I know well.

I began getting into poetry with Theodore Roethke. I began seriously reading poems with the little ones that Rolling Stone sandwiched between album reviews. Off the Wall had blown up and I’d instantly subscribed with the money I’d stashed away instead of eating a proper school lunch. To be honest, I had yet to read the magazine so finding poems there shocked me. I’d thought poems were Grecian urns and the garbage that filled Hallmark cards. After the day’s classes had let out, any creative writing I attempted were horny imitations of Scruples or dead-on descriptions for shows I’d develop for my television weekly lineup. To be sure, my depraved and deluded mind full of yearning and limited vocabulary soaked up every poem Rolling Stone had to offer.

I wish I had saved some of the issues. I would read it front to back over and over until the following month and do the same all over again until the next issue arrived. In one issue, there was a poem about tennis, one stanza and nothing more, that made me dizzy like I was observing an unknown, and I doubt I cut the poem out because I wanted to preserve the archive. I recall having the feeling the poet was out there somewhere living and breathing the same time I was and not dead like Keats and the others and did the poem mean anything to the poet or was it only words and impressions to them? Furthermore, what did poets feel? They seemed bizarre writing stanzas (in context, this was the days of American Gigolo, etcetera). The poet whose name I’ve forgotten had made me feel like I was playing real live tennis on the court but that wasn’t what they were talking about. What a long way I had to go before I would understand life and poets better. I knew I had a thing for poems and poets, and I knew that meant some poems and poets and not all. One is taught to be discerning. To a lot of youth’s chagrin and often to that of adults, one has learned or must continue to learn to hold the tongue.

Regarding silence. Much later in modern poetry class spring term, I began getting into it big time with Theodore Roethke. I’m entirely uncertain how often the class met. It must have been every week but it feels like maybe four times; I daydreamed a lot then and ignored most of the poets in the textbook. The professor didn’t seem to mind. As for Theodore, I proceeded to check out every book of his the library had and kept renewing them until summer beckoned their return. My final paper was about The Lost Son and Other Poems. In his office my professor returned the paper to me and said it couldn’t get any better. His voice lit the air like magnificent show lights. Silent me. Silent with an appreciative nod. I was thrilled to hear his praise but I kept any real personal responses to myself because I was torn. It hurt to think that Roethke had killed himself but that had nothing to do with the mastery of the poems, and I could only reserve a place for Theodore in a place that was only for him in my heart.

Cute Accelerationism. Love it or hate it. It’s Forever. Hurrah.

the prompt

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Whenever we talk it’s almost silent there.

“Is it always so quiet in your neighborhood?”

“Yes,” she says. “Is like a dream.”

Later in bed, I close my eyes and pictures start returning.

Recent draft for a poem:

The Street Corner

Again, it seems a longish strand of my hair
I know you lay quietly on that pretty white shirt you got
from
somewhere

Anna can hear the ocean from not far away. She has come to the beach with the other ladies in the Garden Club, bringing their one-piece bathing suits. Hers is black and simple. Her legs still look good. Since their arrival, she’s gotten in the ocean once and it felt like 1920 and something similar to the innocence she knew then. Most of the friends on this trip wear pants nowadays. She has not worn them at any time or tried them on just to see and she never will. How many vegetable gardens has she planted in dresses? She prefers not to count but smiles at the thought of the years of seeds and seedlings and turning over the soil and the garden hoses mouth to mouth ten of them stretching from the main barn to reach the rows of growing plants. She does not like pesticides in her gardens. It is the summer of 1975, and she is seventy-one. One of her grandsons, the smallest one who stays at her house every night, has made a request, please bring back something with Dorothy on it. On her expeditions to the gift shops nothing turns up until finally the next to last day of the trip, in a pharmacy where she and Geraldine have gone to get lotion for sunburn, she sees that well-known face. It is on a paperback book on a swiveling rack. “This is not appropriate for a child,” she says to Geraldine while she glances through the pages. “Oh,” Geraldine says, “you’re right. But look, the words are too big. He’ll look at the pictures and put it down and never try to read it. I wouldn’t worry.” So Anna does not give it a second thought. The boy will do exactly as Geraldine predicted, and the book will live on a shelf next to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. When the child is not in her pool by the mimosa tree, he will play the Bob Dylan cover songs from the box of Readers Digest records and lie on the rug in the formal front room and draw. He is the only person who uses the front room. About then, Anna asks him to come and help her and set the table for lunch so they can sit down and eat.

Road Dancers.

A few years earlier, around the time I first saw The Wizard of Oz, I got a frank introduction to cruel realities of life, many of the terrifying variety, one of which again involved Hollywood. Here’s how it happened. One night on television one of the three networks was airing The Wrecking Ball and toward the movie’s end there was a sequence on a train. Dean Martin is the dude. And then (think all caps) there’s Sharon Tate and the first time I ever lay eyes on her. Part of me wants to be him and part of me wants to be her; they’re in the same part. I am too young to know or care what the hell is going on but she’s funny. They’re both funny, but she’s better. I ask my father Virgil who she is and he tells me her name and right away he says she is dead. He says, It is a sad story. I am shocked. And for the first time, again that night, when they are countless first times every day, I hear about (think all caps again) a man, a man named Charles Manson, and then after that he is on the nightly news a lot. I am horrified and riveted and cannot look away with he’s onscreen. Soon I begin to develop a complex that sprouts inside like a carnivorous plant. It grows in my gut but isn’t satisfied until it’s traveled to a spot where it lodges in my brain. It has the capability to seize my heart any time it likes, and I know he will murder me one day. My heart beats faster at the mention of his name, and it isn’t long before I start to dream about him. There’s one I know by heart and will take to the grave. We are in a meadow. It is morning and the light is out but it’s not bright and a mist hovers around sitting in the air around the trees way above the grasses. There ought to be rabbits but there aren’t; there’s Charlie. He chases me. He lopes though instead of running and he keeps a far distance that ratchets up my fear and physical tension. The trees are scared too. Nothing stirs, except me, and except him. For what seems like a long time I hear Charlie’s voice drift through the air. He keeps calling out for me. In a loud but soft voice, he says the words sweetly. Come here.

the prompts

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Cloud 8 is free. If you’d like to contribute, monthly subscriptions are only two dollars.

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Harold Rosson / Warner Bros. (MGM 1939)

I’m calling, Dad, to say I’m fine really, and to share something that happened while Lolo and I were out walking.

We had ventured down to the farmhouse and I was preoccupied with two things, making sure Lolo was safe from cars and looking at the grass to figure out when I need to cut it again. Eyes on Lolo, check. Eyes on the grass, check. While I was looking, a presence made itself known. I saw the colors first, red and white. It was Madame. She was standing by the back door in one of her kitchen dresses.

I’d gotten a glimpse of her shoes and her bare legs and her dress but it took a moment to register. I thought, Is that? and when I looked again, I saw the back door, the ivy climbing, and the century-old brick steps. And there was that too, the house upright in its weathering, in the airy atmosphere under the trees, a once bustling house fragile in disrepair yet breathing out history full throttle, a wooden house with brick steps, the top back porch step making a flat surface stretching across the place where she had stood season after season.

What does it feel like? To be here around people and they can’t see you.

I have the papers you wrote, with a flourish, unabashed. You were absolutely right to admire your own handwriting.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about poetry, in books and online. One book stands out and it’s Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf, 2009) by Stephanie Burt, a professor of English at Harvard. She wrote it, she says, for people who read poems in “glossy magazines” and wonder if that’s all there is to poetry. In all seriousness, what she conveys for any [poetry] reader goes far beyond that. I can’t recommend it enough. Burt’s erudite observations are revelatory, and like clear direct verse, free.

As for the trade paper’s physicality, Graywolf’s production is clever. Close Calls is wide and curiously tall, a combination that provides the pages with thumb-sized margins and plenty of room for the healthy font size to peruse and linger along Burt’s surveys of select poets, including Rae Armantrout, John Ashberry, Laura Kasischke, and James Merrill. In total, they’re almost thirty of them, poets who know words like everyone knows air.

Regarding reader-usability and comfort, the book’s neither heavy nor cumbersome, and I would know as I’ve tested it out on several occasions with it propped on my stomach and chest, on sofa, chair, and bed. This is a good feeling.

Without a doubt, I know you have books that make you feel like this.

fiction/the house was open and from inside drifted the smells of roast in a slow cooker. fact/I wrote a poem after dinner.

Lore

on the beach snow blows
up to you in the cold
—Y waves, Y of all people, WAVES
Y typically reserved, a seal
-ed envelope
why not Y, yes why
not Y too
no return to sender precious
face, tomorrow, today,
baby, we’re fucked,
perspiration plaster and peonies
we’ve been ruled out and shot off, unduly,
bye now bye, good
seeing you sweet-smelling
clothes in the back of the station
wagon radio music scratching over
the ocean coming
its glorious waves kept coming
in summer again
hello hello
your coming to visit us
is blue and violet, purple and red
like history’s flowers
the women and men
from other countries know what
I mean distant
shores American
shelf
you X and you Z tipsy and swearing
on the prettiest
thing you’ve seen
watching nothing not not freeze,
nothing out of
place watching everybody
want to burn

Stories.
A friend took me to New York.
When we got there, we parked on Broadway because that’s where his father lived.

Stories.
The orchids had new, lonely times.
Harriet was not there. Occasionally, the stranger thought to look after them.

Stories of another sort.
Two videos on YouTube, you may have seen them. A famous David Lynch video about what it’s like doing transcendental meditation and it’s connection to being creative. I watch it and never tire of it. Then there’s the video about a little boy sitting in what appears to be a family kitchen. His mother’s filming him and asks him questions off camera. She says he is an Indigo Child. Actually, I don’t think she says that; it must be in the title. Their conversation reveals how she sees this nature in him and believes it to be true. Some might write that off as hippie but I’m believing it wholly, word for word. When the kid’s talking, he’s coming from what feels like the same place David Lynch describes. There’s a word for that place and it has four letters.

About that transcendental meditation thing. A lot of what takes place when I’m writing are long silent passages where I’m sitting with words, bringing the language inside as far as it can go, dropping any preconceptions, and having no plans, watching whatever appears flip around, stand straight up, or turn completely upside down. When I get to that place, I’m writing and I’m not there. Nothing is there, except what’s inside coming out.

write your face down until it turns into a poem until it turns into a sycamore until it turns into a story set in Kansas & Oz

There’s a Michel Gondry film, I think it’s up to something around Criterion these days maybe, with the translated name Maya, Give Me A Title. It’s animated by hand, was for his daughter. She inspired it and is in it, and you can tell she’s inherited his love of imagining grandly. There’s already a sequel. You can find interviews with him talking about the work and showing the film’s figures he cut out from paper. Michel made it all and used stop animation to have movement just so. Then he filled it with dreams.

about Prompts for May

In the coming weeks, I’m redesigning the frequency and number of posts. You’ll see shorter, off-the-cuff posts with one to two prompts each time, occurring casually on no set days. As always, thanks for reading.

the prompts

You can go anywhere with a prompt.

a poem
fiction
memoir
essay

If you’re reading Cloud 8 for the first time, check out the Welcome post, which details how Cloud 8 works and how it encourages you to participate. If you write from a prompt and feel like sharing, post it in the comments. It’s a pretty good way to establish consistent writing and let other writers hear your voice.

Cloud 8 is free. And if you’d like to contribute, monthly subscriptions are two dollars.

Get 60% off forever

image
Arto Pitkänen watercolors
Lolamademedance photograph

My parents were alive then. They stayed inside the family home except for doctor visits, and my sister and I took care of everything for them. I couldn’t help but worry we might die, but the indoor world was marvelous.

One evening I was away from Mom and Dad. That night I saw Scott.

We’d reunited at a mutual friend’s house, and everybody sat far apart so we could ditch the masks, and joke like old times.

Afterwards at Scott’s house, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling sick. It had been almost a year since I’d had a drink. I was glad to be back! Chug a lug, chug a lug. Hugging a fancy European toilet can satisfy a person. I highly recommend it. I felt close to my beating heart, wrapping my arms around a peculiarly wonderful, mysterious love.

Later that morning when the sun broke some orange across the sky, I started coffee, and Scott and I sat alone on the screened-in back porch. I wanted to return, but fuck. Again, I was missing (again!). Mine and Scott’s eyes blue and wet as bright seas.

I could write a memoir about him.

A rectangle in most seasons, sometimes glossy, sometimes not, heavy paper, or paper thin, a small mirror to your planet. Someone writes one now. And if you say something back, planet, just don’t mention hatred, shame, or shit policemen.

Now while I’m writing I’m thinking about two things—one of them a book—at the same time. The book’s called The Order of Time. Carlo Rovelli wrote it. His book makes me want to kiss him, and weep, kiss and kiss him, his face, and his feet.

The other thing in my head is this picture which I cannot seem to get enough of. I say picture because it’s already hanging on a wall inside the me of me. Not happening but you never know, when I’m dead and gone, anyone who stumbles onto this post can see the picture below and honestly say William B loved the feeling the picture gave him.

Not me, and not my dog. Mine is here with me on the sofa.

Sigh of joy. Dogs.

One dog for me these days and it’s early almost summer hot. Doing anything feels like a crime. What can I do for fun? If I leave the house now, I can make it to Flannery O’Connor’s house I guess around midnight or some dark hour and drive by and park to wait for visiting hours to commence. I’ll wait and do nothing but think pretty thoughts.

A friend of mine might as well go by the name Everything O’Connor. Talk about love, the girl (woman now, a girl when we met) knows those books better than any other writer’s oeuvre. I’ve read a lot of O’Connor but not anywhere approaching that, and I keep meaning to watch the Ethan Hawke movie he made with his daughter. I did watch the preacher on the corner film, Wise Blood, and what about Amy Wright in that? Genius. Eyeball-popping, lifegiving genius. She’s the only actor I know who does everything the way a poem does, fuck. In other words, miracle.

Another friend of mine watched Wise Blood and to this day still gets Amy Wright confused with Linda Mans, who stole Days of Heaven which she also saw and got right, Mans, who I get confused with Laurie Bird, who stole Two Lane Blacktop. That’s how we roll sometimes. Aren’t you so and so? No, that’s not me.

Considering performances and the work that generates them, I’ll say this. In the university theatre department, for awhile, we playwrights/directors would put on plays in the afternoons. A play of mine had a cast of eight or so, and some of the actors were non-actors, and one was a volleyball star. Her name was Madeleine. For her character, we’d dug out a rotting, immaculate lace dress from the costume department. Lovely tot the touch but so fragile by the end of the show it didn’t survive; it had to have been about seventy years old. Before the performance, I helped Madeleine into her dress, and close to curtain time and having not acted a day in her life she was nervous. I hugged her, and onstage she acted so well, far beyond her expectations. The whole cast did, and that night we celebrated at the campus bar where Madeleine came up to me and said, You saw my titties.

In those days, for the first time I didn’t only feel like me. I also felt like the me inside of me. To feel one and then another. Anybody can tell you this or tell you that, but the inside them says it feels differently, and likely has.

In the Covid-centered film Suspended Time, two brothers confine themselves to their family home where they have no problem expressing their feelings. I won’t spoil it but will relate here that one of the brothers, Paul, Paul Berger, has online sessions with his psychoanalyst.

Towards the end of the quarantine, Paul’s says to her from outdoors, “I like the idea of starting over, if we start over.”

To slide that envelope a bit further across the table, Tom Stoppard’s Guildenstern says, Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.

You can go anywhere with a prompt.

a poem
fiction
memoir
essay

If you’re reading Cloud 8 for the first time, check out the Welcome post, which details how Cloud 8 works and how it encourages you to participate. If you write from a prompt and feel like sharing, post it in the comments. It’s a pretty good way to establish consistent writing and let other writers hear your voice.

Cloud 8 is free. Please subscribe. And if you’d like to contribute, monthly subscriptions are two dollars.

Get 60% off forever

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Niceness thumbnail and post
Music Box Films, bottom photo

Charlie reaches into a stack of books and pulls out a copy of Uncle Vanya. He reads aloud, “I used to think every fool was out of his senses, but now I see a lack of sense is a man’s normal state, and you are perfectly normal.”

Charlie says, “Enough sadness, Anton! Is that what you wanted? It worked!”

Send a postcard, Charlie says, and follows with more declarations! Life is fleeting, life is fleeting, says imaginary Chekov.

Make words your own, make your own things very well, and make each the exception.

A little spring rain does not make anyone any less horny. I have never met a soul who doesn’t like, doesn’t desire to fuck.

People are getting it on everywhere, and that makes the world a better place. We fuck, we shower, we cook and eat, we plant vegetables, we do not support wars, we live here, and we live there. A friend of mine moved to Germany this week. I said, Teach me how to say something. That something turned out to be schatzy gehe ich ins markt. Honey, I’m going to the market.

Yesterday, I was at a supermarket. While there, I chatted with a man visiting from Osaka. He had a terrific haircut. His name was Yuta. He was looking for a snack. We talked about ice cream sandwiches because we happened to meet on that aisle. He admitted to having a hard time deciding but was in no hurry.

It was only this morning that I reflected I hadn’t even stopped to think whether I wanted any snacks or not, or to look around and examine things. Had I done so, things would have been different. I would’ve gotten Chili Cheese Fritos. I would have considered plums. I would’ve sniffed Elmer’s Glue. I would have leaned in and read labels. Yet, somewhat certain it was time to leave, I purchased what I’d gathered and left. The bright sun sent glints off the windshields of vehicles in the parking lot.

I was missing all my friends and being in a car with them, and driving as fast as we could with the windows down. On my face were my glasses, and on top of my head was one of my father’s worn-in baseball caps.

Good grief. The world can be wonderful and horrible when you think about the state of things. I wanted my clackety keyboard to sort/of/say that, but something much more and with better words, something casual though, like I like it with some beauty in there. Life was calling for metaphors and writing, and honestly, I was failing because I couldn’t come up with any. Despite all the political shitstorms being purposely blown across our daily world, I was too alive to let that stop me from wanting to breathe. Around me, there weren’t any heavy fumes in the air to keep that from happening. If there were, from a semi of grocery stock pulling in, I would have held my free hand up to my face and sniffed deeply, registering the scent, my scent, one of the many, and discovered another unknown.

Words from recent conversations & life + one word from Sigrid Nunez writing about Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover.

This month, I’m posting fewer prompts in the posts, as I’d rather provide something useful. It seems most helpful.

You can go anywhere with a prompt.

a poem
fiction
memoir
essay
airplane window
bat mitzvah

If you’re reading Cloud 8 for the first time, check out the Welcome post, which details how Cloud 8 works and how it encourages you to participate. If you write from a prompt and feel like sharing, post it in the comments. It’s a pretty good way to establish consistent writing and let other writers hear your voice.

Cloud 8 is free. Please subscribe. And if you’d like to contribute, monthly subscriptions are two dollars.

Get 60% off forever

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Theodor Borowski thumbnail and post

You tell me you’re a sweet potato, I say I am a watermelon, and we sigh in agreement that each is delicious. For all we know right then, there’s only us. You’re across a lot of water in your kitchen in South Korea. For all we know today, we’ll not see one another again. It is nighttime for you and morning for me. Both of us craves sleep. You came home from the gym to meet for class, and I’m awake, going on three hours with my dog who’s sleeping again nearby.

I don’t want to say goodbye but am okay with it. No questions hang in the air. Smiling, I say, send me a message when you know what’s ahead. Before we disappear, I think about how neither of us needs a thing to feel happiness.

I think three thoughts. One about about Ron Padgett’s poems. They’re always so passionately stirring me up, like he’s let me inside the house and saying there’s trust to be found if I’ll try and there’s no need to take off my shoes. His Very Collected Poems does something besides make a reader laugh. I think too about some altogether different poems, those written by Robert Hass. They’re always so bewilderingly personal, I would gladly listen to him tell me about who the last poet was he saw walking on a beach in another part of the world and the sand beneath their feet, the sound of the waves upon their ears. And I think about how I’m saying so and always a lot in this passage and that I just italicized them, and I don’t care. My Very Collected Adverbs, they don’t care either. They are just imperfections.

If you’re setting up a house, perfection goes a long way, but that’s different. Unlike rooms and furniture, words are meant to appear and evaporate. It’s our blessing and work and our work’s blessing to make them linger, with or without perfection. That’s a way writing is much like the human condition.

I wonder about nicknames. Almost everyone I’ve ever known intimately has given me a nickname. They stack up like dishes for a meal, a salad plate, a dinner plate, and the smaller one for dessert. They add up like magic numbers. One billion trillion zillion. I’ll tell you about one. A good friend calls me Lucky Pierre. She knows I’ve had my share of heartaches, and regardless I feel the luck and my ears eat up the nickname whenever she texts or says it. Firstly, I love anything and anyone French. And second but foremost, I can count my life’s days on brilliant fingertips. Even during the days that were wanting me fucked and fucked over, ruined and obliterated, a wind blew in—I know its name—and saved me from ending up cold and dead.

My house is warm. What sounds really good about now is bread and chocolate.

You can go anywhere with a prompt (and these prompts are really fucking great).

a poem
fiction
memoir
essay

If you’re reading Cloud 8 for the first time, check out the Welcome post, which details how Cloud 8 works and how it encourages you to participate. If you write from a prompt and feel like sharing, post it in the comments. It’s a pretty good way to establish consistent writing and let other writers hear your voice.

Cloud 8 is free. Please subscribe. And if you’d like to contribute, monthly subscriptions are two dollars.

Get 60% off forever

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Bruno Marques thumbnail
Sara McGuigan top
Ben Barnett middle
Jay Kim bottom

T…

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The possibilities are endless.
Try it and see what you can do.

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Manners, occasions, cake and flowers, blood and scabs, salt and tears.

Down the street from where A and I lived stood a tree where one could choose a ribbon from the wooden box beside it and t…

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memoir
poem
essay
fiction

the center of a story
a periphery of astonishment
a changing room
surrender

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fiction
essay
memoir
poem

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You can go anywhere from a prompt.

a poem
fiction
memoir
essay

the grocery store
the underworld
next door
Hawaii
within

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