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six mile run!!!!

by Paige Navalany!!

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A collection of poems inspired by the dailiness of life. The smaller things we see and do, but often forget. !Reflections on the same walk to class— six-mile runs, inherent repetition. Bits of wisdom heard in passing, hypotheticals with coffee. Summer camp and “moving on”. Forward or backward: moving. !!! Everything, always moving. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!

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My deepest thanks goes out to those who have encouraged and inspired me throughout my writing process.

Thank you Ben Raphael, Joanna Fuhrman, and Richard Dienst. !!!!!!More thanks to dearest friends, Belinda and the thesis group,

and of course, the Huntington Poetry Club. !!!!!!!!!!

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form If you feed the mayor Wheaties you’ll get something close to the anxieties of the the single dog-owner staying late at work doing payroll in the face of dyslexia. It’s the twenty-first century gold-rush. I won’t care for cats until I’ve spent a milestone birthday alone doing the dishes after an organic carrot cake. We don’t talk about our feelings every day. Instead we read pulp magazines in the bathroom. “DIGEST- SIZE.” When our neighbors take our packages we break into their apartment and steal the pens from their everything-drawer. We’re in love until we’re at Best Buy ogling TVs so thin we’re making plans to roll sushi with them. We’re in love until we find ourselves so desperate for the jungle we’re looking on Amazon for a hemorrhagic fever. We’ve all got this STUFF I want to leave the candle burning and the stove on so when I get back from buying paper towels at the grocery store it smells like Rosemary and time I want to eat the fields of Andrew Wyeth ones that wouldn’t taste like a starch I want to see the lady in the window drink the water from the shower-head because she’s never felt something so accepting of her form.

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!!poem to the young poet !!Last night I left the window open and accordingly woke in the morning remembering that it was, in fact, October. The pen on the table blew off from the wind. It looked up at me from the floor like a dog from the counter, helplessly regretful. A similar trap with a different weight. I picked it up and played with it a little, scratching its head against the paper where I knew it really liked it. But I stopped before getting carried away. I was already eight minutes late for work. !Ohh, it started whimpering, please, it went on, looking up at me with its Bette Davis eyes, a hereditary trait of all ballpoints. I started walking for the door when it threw itself onto the floor again. “I can’t do this,” I told it, “not now.” Okay, it whispered solemnly from behind a fallen rigatoni. It seemed far from where I was, stopped in the doorway, looking out toward my car, all 18 miles to the gallon. Here there is nothing to pull me back— no pad thai leftovers I’ve forgotten to wrap up, hidden away from the poodle. Not even yet is the seasonal slippage of mind when the heat, left alone, waits to be lowered. Instead it’s just the figuratives: the amorphous what-ifs and their usual scapegoats. This time it’s the pen on the linoleum, silently echoing its windy possibilities, summoning up some mossy revelation that no one but me can write. !!

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what we want !!Every ten to fifteen minutes reality loses its bottom and falls out, a chewed up seagull after a confrontation with a rooftop wind-powered generator. They clean up the birds’ bodies but the feathers are too much: aimlessly floating around, following whichever breeze looks good to them. !My mother started working again last fall. She’d leave in the morning with a pearl barrette tucked gently in her hair and come home without it. Now she complains every night and I’m not sure what she wants. My sister tells her to “quit” and I nod, unsure if it’s a cork in the conversation but hoping it’s blunt advice. Most nights I know that I don’t want pasta or an MBA or a nose-ring. The next day will be hot, no wind to make a head turn. Someone will complain and I won’t write a poem. And someone will forget to hide a body and a crowd will gather around the bird. He died in his best shirt, someone will say solemnly, disregarding the dark yellowed spots beneath his wings. The collar was so wrinkled, no one could look away. !!

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practicing patience porch #2 !!I bought a string of wind chimes but the breeze is never strong enough. I take them down before it storms, put them back up the next morning. I check the weather twice a day. The dragonfly exists between two polarities: moving and not. Today one hit my lemonade so hard it nearly spilt all over the porch. The glass rocked back and forth like tick tick tick, waiting for the grandest of all tocks but it never came. Sam came by eating a grapefruit cut like an orange out of a plastic bag. He sat on the second porch step and talked about sentiocentrism or why he became a vegan. I gave him my ear but struggled with the eye—the dragonfly had landed on his shirt collar without him even noticing. Usually I’d shoo it but it’s not often that a perfectly good haiku comes to you just like that: ! Sam’s hands thumbing the beets. The feet of a fly find stillness by the neck. Sam walked home before the sun began to set. The breeze picked up. A garbage can blew over. I made some tea and waited for thunder. !

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reflections on a hotel elevator, 5 mph Maybe it was the stillness from the tension in the cable, but ascending sixteen stories within a few seconds can really make you think that most things are magic. Take for instance the small stuff: A found glove. A sleeping pup. And I’m sure sometime you have noticed that not unlike the bathroom lighting in a luxury hotel, the mid-day sun always becomes you. But this is a no-credit-card-on-file type of deal, like the glance of recognition from the skinny cat on your porch step or the taste of the first mowed lawn on the morning of your April birthday, crisper than what you didn’t yet know tonic was. See there’s always a train or a park or a water cooler to haunt when all the day’s charm seems to congeal, it might even be the puddle of oil beneath an exhaust pipe, each drip shattering your impossible reflection into a kaleidoscope of corneas and migrating geese over and over and over again. !

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porch #1 !!There is a man on my porch and we haven’t spoken. He has the face of a Sid but the body of a policeman. His cheeks are rosy like an unproductive pie chart. He cries into a saucepan but winces when I touch his shoulder. I’d tell him it’s alright, Sid, but he won’t hear me over the bulldozer. !They’ve been doing construction on my house for fourteen years now. I think the workers are nice when they sit on the porch. They drink tomato juice and sneeze. I laugh and talk about pears. I don’t think I’ve ever sneezed. I’ve gotten used to the noise, sounds like hopscotch to me. But Sid keeps crying and he can’t hear himself but I can hear him and every tear hitting the pan is an elephant pounding its fist because it has a statement to make. I can’t figure out what he has to say the elephant or Sid, they’re both so loud !

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Lots. 2014

at the bus stop !!Why’s it always the antihero that catches the bus? Not everyone can wear a parka and still manage to gesticulate their way out of a parking ticket, let alone run after a bus with a driver more persistent than a season. Maybe there’s a finite amount of motions that are deemed ‘worth it’ or ‘not’— the bad guy’s indifference to a light sweat is what sets him apart from the rest of us, depressed while reading the graffiti. But that seems fine to me—today there was a drawing of The Creation of Adam and it wasn’t a parody. The artist must’ve used his finger to shade in some of the pencil strokes, Adam’s side was warm with shadows. I thought to myself that his muscles were too precise for a glove, I thought how cold the artist’s hands must have been. Beside me a woman in a leather jacket complained into an earphone about the weather. Someone beside her turned purple to reword a text. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel standing, not on his back. But standing required him to crane his neck upward, which to me seems impossibly worse. I thought if the bus didn’t stop this time I’d run for it. If the pepper was up high I’d reach and jump— and only then I’d pull out a chair. The antihero is the hero and vice versa the same, like waiting for the bus to stop for you is just as immediate as chasing it. Just decide and follow through. !!!!!

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your average proverb for Michael!when I said be very careful stitching your quilt of American proverbs I really meant you only get one honeymoon so don’t assume she’s only a nursebecause when you refrigerate the strawberries they lose their sweetness, their red, and that’s why you always write it down on the same piece of paper, which is, by the way, the problem with your generation— you’re always plugged in somewhere elsemeaning go outside so you don’t kill yourself but do keep avoiding the people— they’ll kill ya and Jesus,and hasn’t anyone ever told you that everyone’s baby pictures look exactly the same? !

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!telescope !Two hundred bucks will get you a cheap telescope: a neighborhood peep show and a lone-ticket-Best-Available of Orion. Try to sneak a friend in and you’ll be in deep— those black holes of space that no one quite understands, up there with all the dry ice and citizens arrest. Eventually you’ll realize they meant it: one per person. And it’ll sit there, collecting dust like all of the others you’ve seen in suburban sunrooms. And just like that the mystery’s gone. It’ll sit in the exclusively purple room with the exclusively mahogany furniture—an accessory collecting half of the dust that a nebula itself is made of. But the dust won’t sparkle orange, or yellow when the sun hits it. And occasionally you’ll pass it, only to be reminded of that which is white and phallic. Sigh. Or maybe you’ll think how sad it is that everyone has stopped touching it, but never these two consecutively. Soon the nephew with the jellied-red fingers will grab at the viewfinder. You’ll snatch his small fat wrist and tell him no, Billy. We don’t touch. You’ll hand him his kaleidoscope instead. You won’t sell it at garage sales. And you’ll move. And it’ll shatter the mirrors in the back of the U-Haul. And still you’ll let it stand in the new purple room like a perfect gentleman who hands in his resume and waits indefinitely for a reply. But someone will be curious enough, someone will get their hands steady enough to find Orion that one time, see its yellows and blues and truest of purples. Just as the bruise marking a good day heals tomorrow, it is gone. And someone else will try to see. Now, Billy, it’s one peek per lifetime. Are you sure you’d like to take it now? Who knows? Besides, you’ll never find out whether or not Billy takes a look when you’re out of focus. The telescope will be aimed at the curtain anyway. See, the babysitter has bad aim but even she managed to catch the last episode of Twin Peaks up there. She couldn’t grasp it so she tried watching it again at home— and what a wonder it was! That’s persistence for you. So why not let him look around? What’s blackness to you isn’t all trampoline insurance and natural disasters to Billy. And what’s blackness to you isn’t all trampoline insurance and divorce and natural disasters and David Lynch to you. !!

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!tow-truck melodrama !!on a wednesday in the second month of summer i sat on a pile of fire ants waiting for a tow-truck. !and in a thick moment of melodrama, i thought id i die at the end of a tragedy i hope it’d be by accident: the Ophelia who truly couldn’t swim, lightening in the pastoral storm. !scratching at the rash beneath my back left pocket i was sulking, looking down, trying to milk a tear, !and then there was pizza sauce, crusted on cotton. !!!!

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!!what else !!gentle things !A fawn in the early weeks of winter. Smart phones. Angel food cake. Monogamy. !!!indulgent things Bad moods. Figure skating. Candelabras. Polyamory. !conflicting things Neofeminists. Runny eggs on a paper plate. The period after the long period of isolation is followed by the long period of binge-everything. Polyamory. !!things I think we all knowThe distinction between real and the non-real which is not fake, but closer to moments of being and non-being as Woolf describes it in the language Caroline and I didn’t yet have at fifteen sitting in her father’s Hyundai Sonata. (She went on to study philosophy and I went on to scribble this down.) !!

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surprising things !Whole milk. Anything velour. Gary Snyder at a cellphone kiosk in Seoul. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I stop to think while vacuuming after Robert Hershon Moments have come and gone and never once did, not ever for a second did I stop to think: oh! If only I had stretched, all these 36 years during commercial breaks… Nope, not once. Unless—that moment waits, years ahead, when I’m 86 doing a steady 40 in my navy Camry, mourning the salt they’ve taken from my mashed potatoes, when, overcome with thirst, I reach for the reusable water bottle in the passenger seat but my shriveled fingers can only go so far and just as I feel the plastic, Kim, the yoga instructor I turned down last fall, appears doing downward dog on my grey cloth seats and steals the water bottle away with her mouth. And in a great sigh of defeat all my lumbar vertebrae shatter into non-recyclable shards and my last dying word— water— is muffled by the rain beating down on my windshield. !!!!!!!!!!

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!for once the balloon pops !Sometimes a metaphor equals an object + a groaner. Just like a simile equals sticky lipstick + poetry. Someone said it’s a bunch of hoopla so I said with a bunch of footwork behind it. They said footwork?I said I’m just trying to move forward. When I walk to class there’s sixteen poems. The sidewalk as a beauty pageant, everyone moving forward, lookin’ for the trophy. Or is it a Cowboy-Easter egg hunt? They gallop on. The mascot of an immigrant dad says they’re halfway there. “Pay atencion.” The object this time is a balloon, stuck in a tree. Someone stops to stare, but it’s too cold to keep a thought. Everything continues despite the balloon. ! —How many poems can start there and end in the sky? !!!!!!!!!!!!!

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life from the sedentary sea-level !!I. Reproduction The male anglerfish is known to bite and fuse to the female, living the rest of his life as a gonad. II. Predation Named for their characteristic mode of predation, a fleshy growth from the head acts to lure in their victims. III. Behavior Many of the species are deep-sea dwellers. Due to their prey- scarce environment, the fish minimize their energy use by remaining lethargic. See: lie-and-wait hunting strategy.

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Find the biologist 6,000 feet up gorging himself on the sunlight. It is a humid Sunday. In one hand he carries a towel to fend off the fine sands. In the other an irregularly pulsing rectangular growth, thought to be the mating call from a different time zone. While the species may appear dormant 96% of the time, their nuanced brain receptors allow them to continue creating throughout the day. Witness as they grow up in the food chain and witness as they grow out, corporeally. Watch them build it all. Now watch them destroy it. Or, part I: Life from the Sedentary Sea-Level. !!!!!!!!!!!!!

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holiday around eleven we’ll fall asleep praying to the thunder dreaming nine times only one that we’ll remember sixteen loves between us back in Rio de Janeiro back in Rio de Janeiro back in 1981 back in 1979 I can never quite remember 1981, I think back in 1981 back in Rio de Janeiro our sixteen loves that November !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Her Bedroom. 2015

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washer & dryer !She kicks her feet up on a Saturday. !The phone rings. “Hi, this is Merideth Summers from Sears. Is Mr.  Machine there?”  … “Wash”— she calls him, carefully. “you’ve got a phone call.” He’s laughing at something loudly, smoking a Cuban between bubbles. She hands himthe phone. Like every other day she mulls over his name: Wash, Washer. Mr. Machine. But what aboutFranklin and Eleanor? Woody and Diane? –No. It’s not the same. After all, Diane was always a Keaton just as Eleanor—well, was always a Roosevelt. !And she’s just Dryer,part of a whole, every so often shrinking inside herself,

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mourning the absence of a maiden name.)

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Camp Topanemus !!It was an alright camp: archery on Wednesdays, splash pool on Fridays. Kids talking about television shows wearing t-shirts picturing The Beatles. And there was Danny, all four-foot ten of him, kicking rocks with his sandals on, pudgy nipples poking against his shirt. “No, no! We have eleven!” a counselor would shout to another while pointing in his general direction, a massive lot of gravel adjacent to the pool. He thought all the counselors looked alike, all androgynous Camerons. But there was one boy who took to his liking: Brian. They talked about time travel and guitar. Brian went home sick one Wednesday, a case of coxsackie leaving Danny to eat his tunafish sandwich alone at lunchtime. He broke the news to his mother that same afternoon. “Don’t swim,” she said. “Why?” Danny asked her. She was walking away but turned her head back to look at him— very Scorsese, very Italian-American— “You’ll ruhgret it.” Danny drank his orange juice, an inherent caution in him. !Thursday came bright as a Saturday and Danny shuffled through the gravel, too bored to motion a kick. “Just ten today,” one of the blondes yelled. Brian was out again, bummer. But today there were steel barriers around the pool. “Father Matt will be coming at noon,” the blonde said, whiter than usual after a long whiste-blow. “He will be exorcising the pool.” For a moment it was still. But soon the children cheered, their shirts spontaneously ripping off of them, Bruce Banner with a prepubescent belly. But Danny was judicious as ever, mindful of the questionable syntax. “One cannot exercise a pool.” And he was right— the blonde demanded for all shirts to be on and for all children to stand back

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as he reached beneath the diving board, propping it up. Danny and the children watched as his hands discovered a lever, releasing another diving board, tiny and perpendicular to the first. The letter t! What in God’s nam— No. Danny recognized it. It was the cross. !The children jumped and squealed, thrusting their fingers to their chests where they found equivalence on a smaller, silver scale. Danny watched his campmates: some rising and falling weightlessly like a cherry blossom in a spring wind, he thought, while others stood like him, among rocks or mud, still jumping fiercely, but alone. Expressionless. Soon the chlorine was released. —A fog. A Cameron hung a picture of Brian on a tree in the distance. And the children danced blindly, a general “whatever” about them. And Danny wept for his friend, grasping at some deep sadness and confusion but lacking the words to shape it. “There was a bad virus inside tha pool, Danny,” his mother told him that afternoon, “ ’n someone had to get it out.” “No,” he thought to himself, “that’s not all of it.” He lingered on the distant words he heard his mother say but “tax-payers money” didn’t seem to get it right. Something about sanitation, but bigger. He hesitated to sip his orange juice, something devastating about the tiny bits of pulp. !!

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birthday!my father’s new wife is clarissa dalloway and last night she threw me a party for my seventeenth birthday. “thank you Clarissa” I told her warmly “though this was not necessary” “oh?” she pretended to ask. she looked at me in a way that my real mother wouldn’t. I told her “it is like a nicety, to say that, but thank you” I hugged her body. “I am just surprised” I said. suddenly as if embarrassed by her silk dress she crossed her arms though still holding her wine (she had great hands). “what a lady” someone else’s father might say she was quiet and appropriate and thin but now — now she was displeased. “here,” I wanted to say, “let me express my gratitude in serving myself to a redundant amount of this cake you bought” I would say and then eat, four or five pieces, all the while smirking. and my real mother would watch from a distance, like a conscience, kind of, and then leave, disappointed in her girl. But mom, I thought it’d be funny. like Elizabeth Bennet you know ? even hypothetically I can’t get it right. anyway, I couldn’t because it was a pool party and I wanted to swim. !

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Six Mile Run. 2014.

when april came!Its breeze blew the dust off of chrome-plated everything. When April came, cars went a cool 25, windows down like the end of the first bad day. Even the teenagers showed their faces, sprouting up from the cracks in the curb in their borough of Wherever. Women walked home without incident, pregnant squirrels lived another day. When April came there wasn’t a Christian !to ignore, there wasn’t a pamphlet to recycle. —It was like the first green grape had popped its virgin liquor between the molars of America. It was the one day that year that no one bought a thing, !except maybe a loose cigarette from a stranger on the street. !

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love poem #1 !!You salt each chip and I give you the eye. !I had read an article on the top ten food myths in Men’s Health: If you don’t already have high blood pressure, salt’s alright. Just try to get some more potassium. !Usually I would tell you what I had found but it’s too late—you’re already mad. Besides, your fingers are so swollen they’re lifting you up toward the ceiling— you floated off the chair twenty minutes ago. You basically walked out on our dinner date. !Looking up at your ass I smile and keep quiet because I know you eat a lot of bananas.

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!coffee at the library If it were a television series we’d sip out of unlabeled cups and not smoke cigarettes on breaks. If it were a dream we’d be considerably productive despite the air conditioning and our naked bodies. If it were a bad joke the redhead would be reading to the blonde while the brunette would be getting married in the stacks. If it were a Friday we’d find a seat. If it were an answer to an obligatory question posed by the uninterested but pointedly cordial roommate, it’d be “alright” while biting a banana. If it were a teen-novel we’d be broken up and the only seat left would be the one beside you and the hurricane we had heard the adults talk about but didn’t truly consider just began to hit so we couldn’t leave— in fact, we’d have to sleep there. If it were a disaster they’d only have small cups and hazelnut. If it were a disaster they’d close at nine.  !!!!!!!!!!!!

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seconds between moments !!The moments we know as momentous never really pan out that way. There’s always percussion in the tunnel, someone forgetting too loudly in the library. Some really great shit waiting to be documented so it can go on to be replaced. !In Uganda, King Oyo of the Toro Kingdom came into throne at the tender age of three. “I don’t remember much before nine,” he wrote in his memoir, “except all the goddamn mutton.” His parents show him pictures of the party. He doesn’t really care yet. In a bad joke a woman asks her husband about her haircut. We all sigh at the punchline. Red blood cells replace themselves every few months, never seeking recognition from the human when they’re new again. “We keep you alive on a quarterly basis,” one of the cells shouted from the closest orifice, but Lisa couldn’t hear them—everything was one discordant noise, what with all the pots and pans dripping from the hole in the roof of her brand new 2.6 mil Santa Barbara summer house. !

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american realism !!Wow, I think to myself on a still Tuesday morning, looking out toward the landscape of America. Have you ever seen such green hills? The way they tumble over each other like clumsy children in a January snow?And have you heard the phantom bird, humming for a sun as brightas a city airport? (Think Beijing.) I dare you to find mea perfume sweeter than the young flour, baking beneath the stove oven heat. Other than your classic baguettes, they also make bagels there, that French café on the corner. “Artisan” bagels, in fact— a term I’ve learned to distrust after drive-through coffee franchises shipped them in on the regular. One morning, hungover at work, I sat at my desk with a fried egg on a spinach-asiago I picked up en route. Hunched over the keyboard and queasy from the commute, I ate my artisan bagel and stared into the image I had chosen for my desktop: a macro shot of a dewdrop on the white petal of a daisy. !

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I imagined the photographer on his lunch break, sitting outside of the retail/office complex’s sort of French café. He carries his camera on sunny days, in his off timeshooting the landscaping of America.

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