Indiana is very flat. Women whose eyes don't extend to deep pools of soul and sharp winds that cut right through you without buildings to keep them mollified - december leaves cornfields without stalks and storms can be seen approaching like grey armies at the horizon.
Pictures are taken through dirty windshields - there is no walking around to know yourself by. Yourself is wheeled from place to place and therein you are defined. Accents are flat, too, and I wonder
where the vowels went. The distance beyond offers new depth and offers insight to pioneers and wanderers, that there might be something beyond this, the flatness.
me tall and mountainous, my bags and hips
and breasts are weighty. I am curvaceous,
mountainous, busty. I am not flat.
The city calls to Indiana men like a centerfold, opening its wonders out and up
into the air - she is not flat and the ground is unknown where you cannot find the sky of ceiling
those who venture rarely return, losing air and gaining soft whole lovely voices, vowels that roll off their tongues like jewels
and make the parents blush. A return makes you find the city in its absence, calling you back like a lonely mother.
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*While sorting some old files, I came across a stack of drawings and writing that I did on a short trip to Indiana around this time of year with an ex boyfriend. It's always an interesting thing to note how consistent one's voice is in certain respects, even when we know ourself to have experienced such vast changes. It's comforting? illuminating? fascinating sure - how some relationship of observation and language has remained; perhaps it suggests that beneath a sense of self when poetically transmuting one was able to capture and "see" in a way one intellectually or rationally achieved much later...
This isn't the best work ever written, but it wasn't meant as such, and I find it lovely and easy, the opposite of overwrought. Written in a quick hand over sketches of the Indiana airport I know it to be my 22 year old mind biding its time, considering the strangeness of this land so alterior to me.
