Excerpt From Mind WIthout a Home

Professor Caram, my playwright instructor, stops me outside the library below the crisp sun and says to me to stop playing solitaire. He says to me to write, tells me people need to hear what I have to say. I don’t know how he knows this.

            I try to imagine saying more than tree, dog, hat—the hat of the tree covers the dog in the shade. This is what I know. This, all I want to know. The rest belongs in the shade with the dog.

            I sit still, lean against the outside wall of the library, and forget that I know how to read, forget I use to find pleasure in books.

            There is something occurring in me that is quiet. Cotton falls 500 feet to land on the back of a pigeon. Quiet. The bird takes flight. The cotton sticks. The bird is untroubled by a bit more weight.

            I am the place of my feet. I am the place of my heart. I am the place of my mind. An iron pole runs up my back, forcing me to be tall. The tall forces me to see. A giraffe nibbles on the leaves of an African Acacia. The Acacia protects the giraffe by releasing ethyl gas when  predators approach.

*

            I write outside the library, the woman is crying in her bed. Gershwin plays from the radio on the night stand. The smell of an extinguished wick curls around her ear. Beauty is being lost in her bed sheets.

*

              I don’t know that I can absolutely stop playing solitaire. I don’t know that I want to. The wool blanket is heavy. The wool blanket is heavy, is red, is too large to bury. I cry. 

*

There is night everywhere. The kind of night that lies on me like a wet beach towel that is hard to wring out. It stretches the length of a cactus. My arm span is just not that long.

            The night living in me steals from me my voice, steals from me soft laughter in the stripe of pink painted across the foreheads of young girls heading into the library.

            I pocket kind eyes as I do scraps of paper.

            In night, the dawn waits behind the bulletin board in the park advertising avocados. Is there night where you are? The kind that sucks heat from your brow, leaves you kneeled in the stones of your rock garden.

            The desert night is not thick with leaves. Gray wanders the side of the mountain, a silhouette of strength.  A bat flies just above my head, not threatened by the smell of me.