moonlauncher

scribbling on scraps san francisco 

[moonlauncher]

Les garcons, ils me distraient. je ne suis pas amusee. j'ecoute a Billie Holiday quand je dois travailler. Mais la musique ne fait pas de bonheur, ne reduce pas le tristese. alors je pense des garcons ce soir quand je dois travailler, ni amusee, ni heureux mais distraire

[moonlauncher]

poem on the street corner

 The barefoot shuffle round the trashcan 

The door man’s smoke 

The woman pacing as she waits 

The people looking into their phones.

I look at the last message you sent me 

Four weeks ago.

I let autocorrect connect my mistakes 

into something I never intentioned to say.

[moonlauncher]

My heart beats quickand yours slow you saySometimes you can hear your heart At night and it helps you sleep You gathered me in your arms I felt all my scattered worries Bundle and break openAnd I said in my head Am I lost And I said no, I am not lost here I ate a sandwich once In a far away town in ocher hills Off the highway in California I had to walk across a road Which felt like wading across a river The heat was the currentThe cars were witnesses I proved my boldness to  I got on the bus home Wanting to do it again

[moonlauncher]

woman in the park

The woman’s purse sits next to her on the park bench. Her white hair retains a youthful curl beneath the brim of a felt hat and she appears content, though she is overlooked by every passerby. She remembers the leisurely song of the carousel that used to spin round over there, the people to whom, in her career, she had once been a terribly although, yes, temporarily important figure. Bikers and joggers constantly pass, intent on their destinations elsewhere. But just across the way, a young man carrying a leather bag surveys the sidewalk, kicking some rocks aside, unhurried. A cloud briefly passes before the sun—sitting, he opens the cloth that wraps his art supplies and places a hat in front of him. Watching the young man’s concentration, the woman feels joyful. His shoulders hunch as his hands, holding various colors of chalk, move about on the concrete. Her former thoughts vanish behind the memory of a lover she had long ago who used to draw with pastels, too. She smooths her skirt, picks up her bag, and excitedly walks down the path. Nearing the young man, however, she is struck by how much he actually resembles him and unexpectedly saddened by how beautiful he now seems. He nods to her. The woman grins and searches her bag. Her fingers are crooked, her hands, spotted and bumpy. At last she has a few coins to drop into his hat. Standing there, she wants to tell him, but of course she does not. Instead, she gazes downward at the young man’s art, and he continues drawing as everyone else goes around.              

[moonlauncher]

that kinda night

i leave bed for the kitchen where i see a pane of moonlight  on the floor. i want to descend the stairs that creak and stand outside on the sidewalk alone to smoke a cigarette and think about love, facing the moon,  nothing between us like there is here-- a rhythm comes to my head, that I wish I was loved then that I wish i loved, instead and I swear that tomorrow I will go out to look for a love the way I would a pair of jeans. how will I approach them? 

i do smoke outside. Not the moon’s face but a pale white one of a man sitting by a tree far away, in the park, facing me. I think of him, and paranoia, people not seeking but looking. 

in the kitchen again, someone climbs the stairs and I hear my neighbor enter her apartment, quietly placing down her keys, shuffling things. she opens a plastic bag and then turns on the lights. our windows face, maybe she can see I am awake still.  she sneezes and places something, a cup, on the counter. it is near 2 am. she pours liquid into the cup, and turns off the lights. 

[moonlauncher]

learning spanish

i put on headphones in the dark and join my world again remembering a good moment, when he said “que tienes?” and i said “no me gusta el mundo.” he understood, “pero la vida es bella,” and tried english so I would understand. he described, pointing to them, the stars, the galaxies-- and here i am again in that moment above the world, in the universe.

you don’t need such a song, but i do because the news makes me ill, i cannot sleep. feeling the earth and thinking of men as monsters. i need it to soothe me   or else I fill with hatred and frown, and you could ask “que tienes?” and i’d say “no me gusta el mundo.”

i play the song again.

[moonlauncher]

July 18

I dreamt of a party

we were all beautiful freaks

spilling cups

In the shower

I didn’t want to use your water

I take a vow of silence

and stay hungry for a while.

The sun there

the light and dark always same

a light

the dark

born

old

again

on to the

earth

a baby--

Start with darkness.

Night as metaphor for 

incubation.

Dark not to say evil, but peaceful. Dark as good. Dark as food Dark as dreams.

I was tired and trying to sleep in the light I covered my body with linen and sweat and turned and stayed tired.

You were tired and ready to sleep at night. You laid your body on pillows and when it was dark you slept.

Souls tumult to find peace.

Light through a cloud

(of gold dust)

Trust

that you have been measured

Trust

that you are understood

Trust

the heart

pumps a hundred-years’ worth of blood

through a body

for one-hundred years.

I told you to imagine.

You said, “Trust I am, darling.”

I am scared to trust.

To believe.

I am always scared

of deceit.

[moonlauncher]

excerpt from forthcoming CHARLES GATEWOOD biography

Larry Clark, the acclaimed photographer, asked Gatewood to write the text for a new book called Teenage Lust. Clark liked the words in Forbidden Photographs (e.g., “My roots. Ha! A long line of Southern misfits. Whiskey and women. Intoxication. Pleasure. Pain. Ecstasy. Terror. Desire. An overwhelming need to get drunk, to stay stoned.”). The men’s styles were similar; both captured junkies and outsiders up close. Both men had abused the drugs of their subjects, too, but now, after a disappearance and stint in jail for shooting a man in New Mexico, Clark was sober, and increasingly successful. Gatewood interviewed Clark in Woodstock and at Clark’s home, a Tribeca loft with 14-foot ceilings, a maid, and his young fiance on the phone with a wedding caterer. Clark said he shot with an M-4 Leica with a fast Noctalux f/1 lens. He never used flash or artificial light, and he never posed his subjects. Gatewood asked his secret to getting intense, real photographs. “F/8, and be there,” Clark said. He asked Clark about the famous photo of two teenagers kissing naked in the back seat of a car. “I was smashed against the windshield,” Clark said. “I let this crazy kid drive. Big mistake. The motherfucker had never driven a car before, and he was going way too fast. We were about to die--but I wanted that shot.” “What’s your best tech tip?” Gatewood asked. “I overexpose my film, and I overdevelop it. I really like that look. You know my picture in Tulsa, the pregnant chick shooting up? You know how her skin glows? Now you know why. I also shoot against the light. It’s very dramatic. I learned that trick in art school, actually.” “What else have you learned?” “Stay pure. Ralph Gibson taught me that. I don’t do commercial work at all. None. Everything I do is art.” Gatewood finally asked, “So, exactly how rich are you?” Clark told him to turn off the tape, he’d just ruined their conversation.

To transcribe the tape, Gatewood consumed bootleg Quaalude, hash, and liquor, adding insights from Walt Whitman and Groucho Marx, comparing Clark to Rimbaud, and mixing up Clark’s stories with his own. He began the text, “There is something slightly off about Larry Clark’s eyes. It’s the look of the lunatic in the subway. It’s the look in the eyes of Van Gogh, the eyes of an artist whose life has been based on derangement of the senses.”            

Clark called when he got the forty-page manuscript. He said that there was nothing in that manuscript he could use--what was Charles taking when he wrote it? Gatewood told him. Clark responded that he needed to leave bootleg drugs alone, that bootleg ‘ludes mess up a person’s head.

[moonlauncher]

iPHONE NOTES

Bay used to live in Chinatown. I met him at Caffe Trieste, outside, near where the fish splash in basins on the sidewalk. He wore two sweaters. The Chinatown band dressed in flat shoes and basic hats, tapping their feet across the street, hanging hands on their bows, moving the laundry on the lines.

Blue in the mural, white, and corners in this mind: to move from Kansas to San Francisco, to cross and become nearer, while some music fades. 

A boat's blue and white letters. A scene cast over me. So much that you couldn't know where I was, am, what time it is, was. Because the bay is a dream. Not the boy, but the water. And those fucking houses set into the hills like teeth.

Like the little white stones in a creek, thrown out here, as I, to look something like grit, in a way, and chalk, against new—

The corner of another mind: to sit and watch the leaves scurry, the masts behind the window of buildings, the bay. On the Embarcadero, a new sunlight pours onto the bed. My little floral dress and black shoes. At 5 a.m., I used to hear trains, now, fog horns.

Two suitcases of myself; I left everything else. I find a night-shift job and walk fast through the night and dawn of the infamous Tenderloin. In the chill morning, Fell street pulls the park past the apartment; Oaks splay the low light that lifts the dew the runners go through.

The beauty of the bay makes me mad. North of this neighborhood, the bridge, cast, lands where cliffs rise. Red-orange in and on the scenery. Bay-blue pushes into the shore. Soon, the sun will sit on the Pacific, scatter colors like scales, and north, still, in meadows, golden hills will fade.

We have shared wine on the beach after dark, but we don’t go to watch again. At 5 a.m., fog flies over the flowerbeds.

My head aches in bed, the air spills in. Sight in my mind of the bridge, the bay, the blue and white breaking. Young professionals everywhere, their phones, they’re photogenic.

New words in a new place: “Think of the body as a landscape.” A valley, a plain. I feel like a bridge, like what connects two others, assessing their beauty, and as the judge, as the outsider. Beauty in the eye, the nose, the cheekbones. If any truth can be found in them, it's that youth is beauty, beauty youth.

The walls rattle, wind moves the Venetian blinds in the kitchen. These sojourns of the draft, keeping me awake, the floors, too, making noise like people stepping back and forth. The wood moans, I imagine the building toppling over.

I dream of an earthquake. The earth groans. We sit on gelatin, waiting for the movement to pass, wondering if the ground will split. It does—

My changing world: My changing company. I begin to fear my flesh; I fear the earth, the earthquake, the wind, the building.

San Francisco cut my mouth and I tasted money; a splice came undone; a canyon carved to hold insecurity, longing, golden with clay, shallow crystalline blue—the heart’s memories like water there. I would have the land meet. Blend into itself again, never parted. No scars. Beautiful, new.

The bar fills as the sun falls. I sip beer and read alone. I do not like the men's conversation. They talk with an air of omniscience. They talk of Kerouac. Remember how I deleted my Facebook after I moved here? I wanted to be forgotten. I finish my beer and go.

Time rolls. I write, “I am far removed from a not-so-distant past.” The bus comes, I take it. The Tenderloin at night is sparse with people.

5 a.m.: I have a hunger that is specific to the graveyard shift. I have a restlessness from looking bland. I have the mood of waiting at daybreak with an accordionist playing at the turnstile, trains going opposite ways before and behind me.

I could miss my train. I could never eat again. I could hide forever. All the noises make me nauseous. The sound in my head of words makes a steadier cadence to listen to or rely on, until the rhythm goes away as it does, and I look at my dirty hands and think a girl should be cleaner and hope nobody looks at them.

Yet I was up all night working and wishing someone would. I want breakfast, suddenly, and fresh juice and to wash my face and sleep straight through the larger part of the day. My roommate wakes up to me walking in.

I google “will the ferry sink on Saturday?" I look out the window to see what day it is.

Following the beaches that round into the inlet. The red-orange bridge and the birds swinging in blue: A slow cargo ship. Spry white sails. Blue held here by rich hills, full ports. A bus through the fog at 5 a.m.—Memory defined as “a feeling that exists in the past.”

In bed, I think about my eternal soul; it disintegrates above me. My hand rests on my stomach in the sheets as the sun rises. I scroll Facebook. In Palestine, the Taliban just killed 135 school children. I turn over and think of the other side of the world.

When I wake up, it is 5 p.m. and slightly dark. 

Finally, different birdsong from the tall park trees. The night turns blue. Neighbors leave to catch the N. Stores have not opened. The world turns white. I want to sleep now. I dream of going out in the daylight.

[moonlauncher]

NIGHTSHIFT

Nothing ends the watch for day. Awake alone a little longer, soon I’ll see a morning sky— But night, vast, withholds  my longing to be beyond and lingers.

[moonlauncher]

FORCES

The storm batters my building’s walls loose windows rattle. The system became a river on the sea to be here

To create the atmosphere that concerns me.

Outdoor objects clatter down someone stands them up.

In a lull, a lonely  car alarm.  

Was this weather in the news?  Or did it enter unannounced.

My bones remember our encounters–

When I came home shaking but I was not mad.

Shivering in the shower I knew I would never

Return to you, but move beyond and better 

Because I live, I try to manifest as much as you

like money, like food like love–

Still I come home strange and go out strange,

a cycle,                looking for—

A river storm that guides me.

I let men in in my own way.

I go out  into.

The sound abates. The storm quiets.  

But why do I miss the rain.

[moonlauncher]

PREFACE TO ON THE TRAIL

On the Trail documents a walk to Washington DC that protested the construction of a highway through wetlands in Lawrence, Kansas. That highway, the South Lawrence Trafficway (SLT) plan 32B, was controversial for almost 30 years. Some thought of the project as unnecessary, expensive, and suburbanizing of a small liberal college town. But most upsetting to a minority in Lawrence, the proposed SLT would occupy 6 miles of the Wakarusa Wetlands located behind Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU). The wetlands, which are integral to Haskell’s history as a Native American boarding school, are also considered sacred.  

HINU was founded as the United States Indian Industrial Training School in 1884, just north of the Wakarusa River. Native American children were sent or taken from their families to the boarding school to become assimilated into Christian culture. The school evolved into a four-year tribal university, retaining that history, some buildings, and the wetlands as its backyard. In the nineties, research into the National Archives supported the rumor that many of the boarding school’s earliest students had been buried in the wetlands. Yet lack of physical evidence pointed to a paradox that has burdened other sacred places across the country: the disclosure of Native America graves is prohibited by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, but without that proof, what law protects such a site from desecration?

Lawsuits against the Kansas Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration were coming their ends, and the courts were supporting the construction of the SLT for economic reasons when my neighbor, Millie, began to organize a walk to Washington DC, connecting the SLT issue to the larger context of “protecting sacred places.” Millie contacted Suzan Harjo, an American Indian policy advocate, who sent her a piece of draft legislation that would amend the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to include the federal protection of sacred sites, defined as spaces where ceremonies, observance, or worship occur. We named it the Protection of Native American Sacred Places Act and carried it with us to the capitol.

Navajo, Blackfeet, and a former Army cadet, Millie spoke with power. She was a junior at Haskell who led tours through the wetlands. I could envision people following her on this walk, too, so I was eager to help with and join. Millie’s strong personality, however, lost many people’s support. Nevertheless, by May we had wrangled 13 people, and we left Lawrence with the plan to travel 30 miles a day, with teams walking 10 miles each, like a relay. We would also have three cars, creating the first ambiguity about our journey. From the beginning, the Trail of Broken Promises, as Millie named it, constantly battled to form a truthful group identity—after all, we were on the Trail of Death for half of it, the route of the removed Potawatomi from Indiana to Kansas, gaining media attention.     

Drama among the group members aside, afraid that our campaign would be ultimately forgotten, I compiled journal entries and news articles from the walk and held interviews in order to reconstruct the Trail, thinking about the disappearance of wetlands, indigenous history, and memory in general. I consider the work a documentary—it describes the SLT controversy and the sequence of towns and trials we encountered—but it is also personal. Through the process of writing it, I relied on my observations and moments I considered meaningful. I used poetry, prose, and documents to weave a narrative broader than that of the Trail of Broken Promises, one related to protest and defeat.

After the walk, none of us could explain what we had argued about, or why the Trail was so difficult to endure. This work, then, is an attempt to find meaning in a two-month trek, during which we retraced—backwards—the 1838 Potawatomi Trail of Death, repeatedly crossed into the history of Tecumseh and the Prophet versus the US army, and created our own path to the end.

[moonlauncher]

WAKARUSA WETLANDS

In the Haskell garden, the dirt plot on a hot field, notice a storm darken south in the spring. Somewhere in those trees, know a tributary branches: the quiet Wakarusa, meandering the outskirts of town.

This was the United States Indian Industrial Training School. The government “bedded” the land, let the water out and the boys pulled tools through the soil in rows. The cemetery sprouted headstones, water gathered still.

Ledger and legend differ: 103 tombstones. 1,000 missing students. Epidemics of Tuberculosis, Trachoma, Runaways. The children went into the wetlands in all three cases, where the Wakarusa floods onto the clay-based plain.

[moonlauncher]

THE PROTECTION OF NATIVE AMERICAN GRAVES

Some put their dead in boats and they drifted off to sea others built pyres and put their dead in the sky. The 103 students in the Haskell Cemetery lay in boxes. They were given Christian names when they arrived, Christian burials when they died. But those who died in the wetlands are buried freely. A professor told me about three skeletons he found chained together beneath a tree. One had been shot in the head, another’s jaw missing. The roots had grown around them.

[moonlauncher]

THE BUFFALO HARVEST

To promote the walk, Millie had invited the Buffalo Council from western Colorado to have a Buffalo Harvest ceremony with us. It was a week before our departure, and the buffalo had been shot in its cage at sunrise. I stood behind the canopies that sheltered the Council, six of whom were women and one a child, from an erratic spring rain as they worked. All around, people were hurriedly preparing the last of the feast additions in a cautious humidity. When it thundered, it was like a response to the six men drumming.

LaNada Warjack, our honorary guest who had occupied Alcatraz as a young woman, drifted amongst the people. Smoke flew from the sage braids she waved and to would offer to a person standing near. Sometimes the thin smoke would go out. She blew into the braid until the embers were alight, and the smoke would circle around her again. Like this, LaNada was near Shireen and Shireen’s mother. Shireen saw the braid extended towards her and did not know what to do. The woman’s long lips curled into a smile.  

“Wash,” she said.

LaNada’s hand cusped at airy smoke and brought it close to her shoulder, then up over her long hair.

At the boundary of trees, a van appeared. I walked away to join Mary. She was near the steel table, on top of which thighs of the buffalo were chopped and thrown onto ice.  

“The news is here,” she said.

We watched where a camera was set up and around which a group stood, and Mufasa and TC were quick to join them. Mufasa and TC could talk ecstatically about issues like the illegal trucks that cracked the roads on their reservations, all the while playful yet grave. Some of us were uneasy then, too. The feast was underprepared, a storm neared, and though people expected her, Millie stubbornly had stayed home.  

Finally the food was ready and a long line formed, but by the time Mary and I sat down with our food by our friends, the fry bread was gone and still half the people unfed.

“This is all wrong without Millie here. She should be giving a speech, or talking to the news."

“She said these people were mean to her face.”

“Well, I don’t believe that. She did something to deserve any reactions she got, I guarantee it.”

“This meat is hard to chew.”

The meat had a wild, gamey taste. Impossible for the teeth to tear, people gnawed as they could on the meat, but eventually spit it out for the bolus to decompose on the forest floor where, increasingly, rogue drops of rain fell. Then, one profound clap of thunder tore what resistance the clouds had kept for most of the day. Parents took the cue to fold up their chairs, pick up their children, and run up the hill to the car. The teenagers reacted behind them, and the Buffalo Council worked soberly under the tent, watching their patrons vanish between bouts of lightning.

Millie was in her room, in her bed that took up most of it, sitting upright. On the walls, Millie had made tally marks with pink chalk that counted down the days to May 13th. Mary, Mufasa, and I sat with her, telling her about the harvest. Several beer cans adorned her table. We played music on YouTube, and behind it, we heard the rain stop.

Mufasa tried to change a song Millie had chosen, and she became agitated, seemingly climbing out of the covers and into them at the same time. She told us to get out, and I did. The others were on the porch. We stood outside in an orange evening—the sky was pink, the trees turning sepia, the clouds purple, traveling fast overhead. Mufasa came outside and said Millie had a knife to her arm.

In a moment of quiet, we heard the storm coming back. Inside, we felt static in the apartment and the Buffalo Council arriving outside as we stood around Millie. Millie had scars on her arm already. She called her dad, and when he didn’t answer, Millie closed her eyes and started singing in Navajo. With one hand she hit the walls until thunder was distant and three women from the Council opened the door.  

Mille stopped, leveling a dark stare at them. They saddened, and asked if they could pray for her. Mufasa said they could. They lit sage and the woman most inside the room, which was only big enough for two of them, said that they appreciated what we were doing. She said that if she could, she would come on the walk. Millie said to get the fuck out of her room. The young girl in the middle started to cry. Mufasa tried to reason with Millie but Millie held the knife closer and yelled louder to drown out all other words, blending her anger back into the song and hitting her fist again against the wall until only she and I were left.

We sat facing each other, but her head was bowed and her hair fell like black curtains to her calves. She said she was glad I wasn’t saying anything, and lit a cigarette. I did, too, and watched the smoke curl through the space between us.

[moonlauncher]

JACKSONVILLE

[Jacksonville—Old Jacksonville Road]

We thirteen bring the electricity to the grove. Wayne kept walking when no car came for him charged ahead to the great trees where the Potawatomi camped and where a man now lives in a house of treasures, who welcomes us with cryptic talk a lady swooning on his elbow. He breeds sapling seeds talks of the royalties with metaphors, and winks. The marker stands at the entrance of his driveway. Visit Instructions: Give a good log of the adventure. Our march was made short on account of the scarcity of water— this being the only watering place nearer than 10 or 15 miles. Make sure to include enough to verify your visit. “A child died a few hours after making camp. He is buried near this spot,” the marker reads. Thunder shreds the sky near midnight. Rapid taps on the tents, we scramble around the grass to cover our negligence. Morning dew; the leaves under feet, a reexamination of our possessions still aright in the sun; We erupt into a cyclical argument. What’s changed? Nothing has been done to fix any problem, and the guys say "She said to go home," taking up their backpacks while every one of us shouts at someone— In a low voice, Moey shepherds us around heads touching, listening to his murmurs, understanding or not, a story about a bullet

and having already overstayed our welcome, Millie by the biggest tree gives the boys gifts and apologies, and finally we get on the road to meet Dr. Godfrey.

-

West of the Old Salem United Methodist Church facing Old Jacksonville Road, the marker stands like a tombstone, weathered and rectangular— it casts a long shadow to the white sneakers of Dr. Godfrey—an expert on the Potawatomi an ex-professor at Haskell University. The history he tells us seems redundant— Removal (exile, emigration) Exhaustion (hunger, drought)

[moonlauncher]

Walk a narrow shoulder. A walk that doesn’t need to be short or long it just needs to keep going farther through many different scenes on one road! One road and the big creek bed and same bed but smaller and the homes on one side and the forest on the other and the forest on both sides and the field of crops and the secrets of the left and right horizons and the pee in the thistles and the ditches all overgrown and the heat reflecting everywhere and the cool entrance of shade and the bend and crossing the road and spotting the car fly into view and waiting for the car to pass and hearing the car coming behind and waiting for the car to pass and roads with lots of cars that quickly pass and roads that don’t have any cars but tractors and the tall land and low land and the way the road looks going on.

…

But it is not the road that is beautiful, the opposite—the road is the thing on which the land’s little and big animals lay dead on whose sides there is more trash in two hundred feet than one bag could collect the line that rips the land in two the line that tries to mean progress but comes to a threshold which is the last heart of a people; a long growth of destruction, of each other each thing by the millions the line that keeps us in eternal desire for the thing we oppress (nature) the line pouring out from fortunes; the permanent line.