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I AM NOT AFRAID OF WINTER
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a twenty-something queer butch feminist rides freight trains, hitch-hikes, and talks about privilege
Recent Posts Tagged With 'carrot quinn'
the young Annie Dillard
. . Once upon a time when I was on the internet, I found these photos of the young Annie Dillard. I don’t remember what site I got them from, or who took them, which is irresponsible, I know, but I saved them to my computer and I look at them...
are you out there?
Dear reader, did you know that I can reverse-spy on you? I have a statcounter and sometimes I look at it, and it tells me what city you’re in, and that makes my head spin, because you’re from so many different places, places I have never been- li...
we’re off to a good start
We’ve got this breaking dawn over the warm clear waters, we’ve got this ocean-going vessel made of solid wood. I’d been building it for years the way a snail builds a shell from calcium from his own body, and you brought the sails. We’ve got ...
The fastest six days that ever did pass
I looked at this thing and saw that I hadn’t posted in six days. That never used to happen. I don’t know how fast time passes right now, I don’t have any way to measure these things, but I know that it passes swiftly and cleanly, like a little ...
I am glad that I am not as smart as David Foster Wallace
and I mean that in all seriousness. One needs to be a little blunted, I believe, to find contentment in this three-legged mortal’s life. Watching this video makes me sad, and inspired, and nostalgic for something that I didn’t even realiz...
eight years and for what
The hard drive in my brain is working too hard today. Trying to process all of life’s possibilities now that all of these doors have opened and I’ve finally admitted to myself that I can actually go to college if I want to. Thinking if I start no...
Dispatches from the night-time
It’s so late, and yet here I am. It’s cold in Portland, cold, cold, cold. Not Alaska cold, but cold for here, and clear, and all the stars are stuck frozen like glass slivers in the dim lid of the sky, the night sky that’s all milky and faded f...
everything
I sleep with the windows open and it’s cold now, as wintry as Portland will get. In the mornings I come up as if from the bottom of a deep hot pit and the cold air bites the tip of my nose where it sticks out from my ten hundred blankets and my sle...
challenging the ocean to a fistfight
I am applying for a fantsy-pants two year writing fellowship, the likes of which I have never applied for, and which over a thousand people apply to each year, and this is what it feels like- it feels like buying sixty dollars worth of scratch ticket...
t-bird’s shack
If there’s one thing I like to take pictures of, it’s the gently-lit shacks that some of my friends get to live in. Here is t-bird’s. We met today in the afternoon. T-bird bought me a tamale and a tiny persimmon in the bustle of the...
Your eyes are like the ocean
Do they make their own light? I think they are like the sunset, backlit. I look at them and I can see tomorrow, somehow, I can see everything that could ever be. I look at them and somewhere, a man guides a skiff up a river, the wind blows, leaves ...
Polished! Done! So shining I can see my own face in it!
Friends and strangers! I have been working very hard here in my little wooden shack, with the rain pouring down outside, or not, and just this very moment I finally have something to show for it- a finished story! Finished as in polished, no holes an...
to my anonymous donor, who I just googled
I wonder if you know, anonymous donor, what it means to me, to write these words, here in Portland, where rain lashes ceaselessly from the heavens (but I don’t mind) and then infinity splits and for a moment the yellow milk of the sun pours down, b...
the woods and what I thought about
I got a craigslist ride down I-5 and from there I hitched on a road that ran wide, narrow, wet, and then dry past a couple little towns and through some bottle-brush doug-firs to get to Paula, who’s living in the woods. The people who picked me up...
morning
I woke, and all the walls had fallen around the garden of my heart. I went to pile them up again, but I had lost my trowel. I had been spinning, blindfolding, your hand on my shoulder, and I no longer knew where I was at all. You told me that...
the parchment-like partitions of the pods of honesty
. Dear internet- it’s been a minute. It rained today, internet. It hailed actually. I know they don’t have hail where you’re from, internet. Well I’ll tell you what it was like. It was like the sky fell down, but the sky was made of water, a...
Everything that’s wrong
This morning I straddle my bike and ride to Sellwood, eleven miles with the wind at my face. My naturopath meets me at the door with a hot cup of nettle tea, invites me into her stucco kitchen, toys strewn across the floor. You see, my child has been...
For Pearl, who is leaving to go east
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For the moon
Dear moon, I am fading How many of you are there left? What are you, moon? I do not know if you are hollow, or made of solid gold Dear moon, I am fading. I am not like you, moon. I fade in and out, I melt into the sea, I rise up again like fields of ...
Jasper
My good friend Jasper was in town. Jasper, I have decided, was put on this earth to be my personal fashion model. We did a photo shoot. . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . ...
WE WENT TO THE COAST FOR THE EQUINOX, AND IT WAS MAGIC
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after you left
After you left, I fell back asleep. To the sound of rain on the metal roof, the infinite gray like predawn skies that stretch into the afternoon, the faded light through the green gauze curtains, the low window shaded in the raspberry canes. The whol...
i went shopping
P U R C H A S E D: A pair of boat shoes, new-old, brown leather, dark and soft, unintentionally like moccasins, with stiff laces that betray their poor quality, although I suspect that all shoes, good and bad, come from the same place; the place of p...
after eating
After eating I feel fatigued (don’t ask why) and so instead of going to hip-hop dance class I lay in the hammock and try and soak up the beauty as much as I can, I am too tired to read my book about birds’ nests in winter. The sun is warm and dam...
This is the first time I have ever been published by someone other than myself.
I’ve got a story in Rolling Thunder #8, the Fall issue. It’s magical realism, a total winner, and has never come within fifteen feet of the internet. The story features Pie, Pie With Ice Cream, An Invisible Snare Drum, The Thing That Cann...
READ MY FRIEND’S BLOG
. . DO IT . . ...
But how?
I watched in awe as the bicycle floated past. I, a humble toaster oven, in the great flood of Tuesday afternoon. A biblical flood, for sure, but really, was there any other sort? I’d gathered crumbs for ages now, decades, and I’d had plenty of ti...
Dream
Dream We were on the rushing beach, in the pitch dark, the milky way above us, the great river of stars- and squatted on our heels, where the tide met the dry sand, and I was piling wet stones in your fingers- and the night was endlessly dark, and em...
For Pearl
Pearl lay sprawled, limp, in the fallen oak leaves, the mid-September heat warming the coarse white hair on his side. Orange spots drifted like continents across his ribcage, and on his belly the pink and black mottling of skin could be seen. Oh, the...
not a day
I have so many things to do, in this wet and golden month, warm month, swampy month. Set the course of all eternity! I am, somehow, responsible for all of it. I do not know how these things fall on me. The nostalgic planet! The incredible richness an...
