I’ve been in Chicago for four days now. My plane landed on a cold and rainy Thursday night. I kept thinking the plane would start hydroplaning the minute the wheels hit the runway.  But it doesn’t seem to matter what the weather is like, I always expect a tumultuous landing. I walked out of the airport to too-cheerful Christmas music and near-freezing drizzle. I was back in the Midwest.  My tired taxi driver was listening to horrible rap songs with ridiculous, easy rhyming patterns about things like garlic and onion breath. I ventured into the realm of conversation by asking him about his evening; it might have been a bad idea. He only offered me a grumbled reply that I couldn’t decipher. So the ride brought me into this city in a weird way, but that’s how things go.

Chicago holds so much in such a compact space on the shores of Lake Michigan. I’m continually surprised at all the different restaurants and stores along the streets near my sister’s college. There is Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Indian, Filipino and Korean cuisine all on he same block. Hookah bars and International Food Markets and woman selling mason jars of honey out of her truck near the El stop. It’s drastically new and exciting compared to the small southwestern mountain town that I live in now. But it’s a good change. I went to a thrift shop this afternoon and listened to woman yelling at each other in Hindi about the price of a chipped antique teapot.  I watched a young mother lead her crying child around the store, hushing him in gentle Spanish, letting him choose one toy to calm his sobs.

I guess I had lots of expectations surrounding my time here. I still do, I want to welcome it as a time to relax and gather my thoughts, yet I’m fighting the urge to go out and do things, tour museums and see a comedy show or go to a poetry reading. I think none of those things are going to happen. My mind is overrun. It needs a break.

So I wake up each morning in my sister Mary’s living room and begin each day just like the last. I read. I do yoga. I drink rooibos tea and black coffee. I watch documentaries and movies with strong female leads, as suggested to me by my Netflix account. It’s hard to leave the comforts of indoor heating and padded carpet when the world outside is cold and grey. My sister’s home is a sanctuary, with endearing little rooms and a fireplace painted white, and wide windows that face the street lined with similar old brick homes. The girls who live here call the house Camp Walden. They compost and write darling little quotes and notes all over their kitchen tiles, like grocery lists and suggested names for the mouse that lingers under the kitchen cabinets. The space is a little cluttered, the way college students tend to be, too busy cramming for a history test to take out the trash before it overflows or wipe the coffee grounds off the counter. But it’s lived in and I’ve been living in it. I’ve spent copious hours transitioning from the living room to the kitchen and back again. I have a spot on the left side of the sofa, it’s got my butts imprint by now. I’ve finished reading a book, a murder mystery set in a small, secluded Indiana town. I’ve written two poems, one on the dunes of Michigan.

Too often all I do is stare at the snow falling outside the windows.  I think entirely too much. I search for cheap airline tickets to Southeast Asia.  I daydream about spending time in an abandoned beach shack in Indonesia, or an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. Tonight I went to my sister’s friend’s apartment and ate acorn squash and tomato soup and homemade applesauce with cinnamon.

Now I sit in a busy coffee shop and write this piece, while two Russian students complain; I only know this because they throw in random English words.

Tomorrow I might do something; I hear the Art Institute of Chicago is free on Tuesday evenings. Or maybe I’ll just snuggle with a blanket and a book; I started Reading Lolita in Tehran.

It started snowing crossing over to Michigan

Flurries of white

So light it fluttered off to the sides of the road,

Collecting in the dirty brown ditches.

We had pulled over on Kedzie Ave for gas,

cheap coffee.

There was an unexpected energy in the car,

Like we were doing something dangerous

in a 1930s picture show.

Our movements surreal and strange.

We had escaped Chicago.

City of bricks and jazz.

Stone faces buried under thick scarves

Everyone in black waiting for the train,

The tired man on W. Armitage,

begging for a dollar.

Color and flickering neon signs.

Warm bread bakeries and dark cafes.

When we arrived we ran out past the old wooden steps

Out onto the frozen sand

The long dry grasses trampled down by the snow

Ran out to the waters edge

The waves were foaming.

Gusts of harsh wind burning our faces raw

My sister tripped over driftwood

It was so cold all she could do is laugh at herself.

When we finally drove back that night

we played Elvis Presley’s Christmas

on the radio.

The ship sank a week ago

And I went down with it

I was washing the dishes

Pinned down by the weight of a man

Balancing a food tray at the truck stop diner

Draining the last of my whiskey.

Cramming for an exam on the nebular theory

Taking too many sleeping pills to wake up in time

I send up bubbles of desperation

Off and on. Maybe someone will take notice

Maybe someone will figure it out

That I’m trapped down dying at the bottom

of a polluted ocean of life’s sorest tragedies

Remnants of others lost lives float past

Rusting, scabbing picture frames with no faces inside

A child’s bicycle, clams attached to the handle bars.

Everything is turning green down here

This color is supposed to calm patients down

It is why hospital walls are painted this shade

But I find no comfort when I can hardly breathe

I watch the starfish that graze on my knee

I feel the stingray slip silently past

Its knifed tail nearly touching my bare toes

 The ship sank a week ago

And I went down with it.

Went hiking on the sand dunes on a chillingly cold morning. I ran back to the cabin after I couldn’t feel my hands!

A Tribute to Anne Sexton

Here,

In the room of my life

Collected images shape my walls

A tapestry of old faces

Places I’ve been

and long to see.

And faces I’ll no longer see.

Old posters I’ve snatched off bathroom walls,

In dingy downstairs venues late

Iron and Wine’s album cover,

The Shepherd’s Dog

Empty eyes

Yellow almost hollow,

blood red jaws,

it was these subtle ballads

that lulled me to sleep

on restless nights.

A nocturnal drug to pounding thoughts.

I’ll never tire of it of its corroded sound.

It’s as if the ancients of this earth created it

A sound that comes from the depths

of canyons and windswept gorges,

towering spires and burning wastelands.

“Flightless Bird American Mouth”

We live in this constant condition.

Yet somehow,

some of us break the snare.

Find the quiet back roads

Escape the monotony that tears us,

like white lace on barbed wire

Here,

The Buddha

He sits in dust ,

beside pieces

of granite I’ve picked.  Felsic and igneous in kind.

The stone

that lies underneath

and on the very surface of

this town.

I bought the statue for 200 rupees from a Tibetan

He had a silver tooth and an easy laugh

It was raining heavy that afternoon

Monsoon season in the Himalayas,

when monks walk the streets

with bright umbrellas

in their somber wine-red robes

only to stop in tea stalls

for steaming chai

to wait out the storm.

The same summer storm

that sent livid waters

Pouring through

the streets of Rishikesh

flooding the valleys.

The  giant revered Krishna was uprooted

His golden form seen floating

along with the debris.

That was several months ago.

And we’ve all forgotten now.

Their worried faces replaced

by fat, haggard old US government officials

Playing a stupid game of cat and mouse.

Eventually they  all just give up

They shutdown.

They leave us to pick up the pieces.

Here,

The air smells faintly of jasmine and sage

Cedar and dry earth.

A worn hand-printed textile from Jaipur on the bed

the ink runs red and the flowers bleed black

There are stacked books,

I’ve poured over time and again

They are like sacred scripture these words.

White Oleander. The author’s words are like the ocean and the orchid

And the poisonous white flower,

that killed Him.

Her words among others,

are the strong undercurrent that holds my life in bound pages,

keeping my own stories together.

Here,

A grocery bill is tacked near the door

32.50 for a weeks worth

Reminding me.

And here,

A friend sent me a picture of a weathered woman

Her eyes cast downward

Like a similar abstract drawing,

the woman who’s hand grips a chain-link fence.

I like to think we’re all the same,

These mere sketches of women and I

Just waiting for something to happen.

Someone to show up and release us