cold ghost 

he calls me that

and i like it

half empty teacup

faded blanket on the porch

if the phone rings 

i don’t hear it

the air i exhale

from weary lungs

just like sweetgrass

medicine

whenever i have been 

falling in love

i take them to the old church

on the ranch

because the church is me

can you love the drafty sanctuary

and the paint peeling rafters

like my ribcage and skin

can you stand before

the sad eyed jesus

like you stand at the end of my bed

can you love me

as both hewn architecture

and blight on the otherwise beautiful horizon

blood stained carpet 

bruises on my knees

they’re going to bulldoze this place

and i will chain myself to the steps

i lived on the bad side of town as a kid. run down houses, low income neighborhoods, scruffy kids, the older adults called it “wrong side of the tracks”. 

i grew up in an old house with a pool and spent many white trash summers playing mermaids by myself and my pastel coloured sea ponies from my little pony. i didnt know we were white trash or i guess mixed race trash. my drove a shitty copper coloured van and my mom had lots of gold jewelry and a house with pink carpet. 

she would stand at the chipped formica counter top with the 1970s kitchen dinette seating and she would cut up strawberries and mix them with sugar in a big old yellow plastic mixing bowl that was also used for salads and tea for sunburns and vomit if someone was sick. 

she would let the strawberries macerate in the old shitty fridge while my skin browned and my hair lightened in the sun. i had an old barbie tshirt and id sit in the fading evening light after swimming myself exhausted and id eat the syrupy strawberries until my mouth and fingers were sticky. 

i would listen to my parents laugh and smoke cigarettes. those summers smelled like chlorine and strawberries. 

on sunday, i realize my 2lbs of strawberries bought on sale are starting to turn and without a second thought, i cut them up and make my own macerated strawberries. i stand at my own shitty counter in my own shitty house with my gold jewelry from the thrift store and white trash beer logo tshirt and i wonder if this is how we become our mothers. 

i share the dessert in the fading light and eat every last spoonful under smoky skies. i would still love to play mermaids. i would still wear that old barbie shirt. 

something has shifted, again. 

i don’t yet have the words for what, don’t yet fully know why or how it happened so fast. 

it makes me feel strange and new and there’s a humming i can hear but maybe it’s only me. 

things have slowed down. 

i realize how angry i am. 

i realize the rage and the sorrow. 

i realize that i am surrounded by small annoyances and large ones too – things that test my patience and my will and my faith. 

i am and we are surrounded by an increasingly false world filled with false gods and false promises and i am succinctly aware of how much i want out. 

i am and we are surrounded by advertisements – flyers and jingles and influencers and social media. i want to look at art and someone is selling something to me. i want to fuck and there’s an article telling me how, how to wax my pussy and please my man and look good in a sports bra crop top pastel leggings matching set business casual girl boss girls girl girl world way and i hate it. 

there’s grocery store flyers advertising bananas made by chatgpt. did you need ai to advertise bananas?  what the fuck are we doing?

i see the worst people in kamloops calling themselves gurus and coaches and mental health advocates. im sure you advocate for mental health – was that before or after you told me my fat friend should kill herself for the i guess crime of being fat. im sure what you have to say on the subject of mental health must be very interesting. 

everyone’s trying to be someone and say something and be that guy that girl that bitch that one you know and i guess i empathize because ive been there too but god it’s fucking tiring. 

i don’t think we were ready for the internet. 

or facebook. or this level of connection. 

i read somewhere that said we only have the capacity to know and care about our group our tribe our family our village and that the world is too big and too small and now too close. 

i don’t know if that’s true or whatever but it sounds correct and if you say it with your whole chest it probably sounds convincing. 

i want to change who i am but can i even change for the better anymore. im forty im fucking old. maybe i should stick to soup making and fucking on my daybed because the world seems a little too big for me now. 

ive been wearing this shirt i got that says “internet hangover” from this old brand no one cares about anymore and maybe thats my problem you know. im sick of the internet and fake reality. but lets get real i also do kind love the internet too. i met him there you know. so when he’s in my bed and kissing my neck and pulling my hair i only have reddit to blame. but i guess i really did like abba so that must have been it too. always had a thing for the vikings. but maybe i didn’t need the internet to find a lover. 

maybe i should delete instagram or throw my phone into oncoming traffic. 

i don’t recognize my fingers in my mirror selfies. 

black coffee and my mother in the kitchen. cleaning out my cupboards and humming and old folk song. i feel different, again, and suddenly.  yet, i dont know if i could tell you quite what has changed. i feel lighter and simultaneously heavy with wisdom. i have been thinking a lot about love and identity, grief and nirvana, oblivion and ice cream. 

it is desert summer and my mother and i sit in the parking lot that smells of wildfire smoke and we talk about the radio and people we don’t like and, as we always do, grief. 

grief hangs in the air between us, ever present since my fathers passing. sometimes, we don’t talk about it. sometimes, it is easier not to. 

somehow, later, i talk to my lover in sweden on the phone and i end up talking about swimming and how my father taught me how to swim in our backyard pool. i never needed swimming lessons, i had him holding me and telling me to kick. i haven’t thought of this memory in years and i swear i can smell the chlorine even now. 

a girl went missing after shambhala this year, they found her and it sounds like she had a bad trip or took some bad drugs or something. i dont know how to feel about it. the desert and the drugs and this land and this climate are unforgiving. those who know, know. 

its got me thinking about shambhala and how i would go in my friends hippie van in a ramshackle group of kids. almost twenty years ago. when did i get so old?

my mother doesn’t believe me when i say it was twenty years ago. she thinks i was still dropping acid and dancing with my tits out wearing crystal necklaces just a while ago. maybe that’s the nature of mothers. 

she tells me she likes to drink wine and smoke weed and go through the drive thru at mcdonalds and get fries. she asks me when that stopped being enough for a real party and i laugh and laugh. dad used to drop acid in the woods around the old reservation and my mom would pretend to not hear him when he was telling us stories. 

my dad grew weed when i was young and he thought this was really funny. i remember taking big bags of dads ditch weed with me to festivals and rolling joints and using them as currency. i got high with a guy from quebec once and he made me a balogna sandwich in return and it was so fucking good. just a couple smelly hippies lost in the woods, before cellphones and instagram, talking about love and eating sandwiches.  i wonder what that guy is up to now and if he’s still making sandwiches and getting high with strangers. 

i used to set up a little mexican blanket on the beach at shambhala and tell fortunes by donation. i would make medicine bags and crystal necklaces and trade them for food and drugs. a guy from alberta stopped by because his girlfriend wanted one of my crystal pendants and he offered to trade me herbal viagra and told me it would make my clit really hard and i laughed so hard i thought i might pass out and i politely said no thank you. he bought the pendant instead and i didn’t try his herbal viagra. i wonder what happened to that pendant.

i told a girls fortune and i guess i nailed it because she started crying and asked how i learned to see the future. i overheard her at a food booth telling people i was a real witch. i just wanted a really big piece of pizza. ham and pineapple please. 

i think of the summers of the past but then i start thinking of the summers of the future. maybe i should dust off my tarot cards and start telling fortunes on the beach again. 

i wonder if i can still pass as a witch at forty. 

i can buy my own pizza now.