school's out for the winter

edward and jenny on our roof / manhattan 2.10




TODAY IS GREAT
SNOW IS GREAT
LUV U GLOBAL WARMING SEVERE STORMS
COME ON BEBE LETS FROLIC
AND THEN DRY OUR BOOTS BY THE RADIATOR
AND HAVE A NICE NIGHT IN YOU AND I ON THE LOVE SEAT.

I have not felt this sad or lonely in a long time, and now I have both

somebody with god & candle @ kent box / brooklyn dec 2009






But it's been so long that I forgot how to fix it

sometimes i want to live with these folks so i'll make more things

bonnie ken rishi & tambourine @ kent box, bklyn oct 2009


no but seriously i need to make more things
maybe i need more floor space
that means i have to leave manhattan (there are only closets left here in this borough)



OH WAIT and HAPPY HALLOWEEN

what is everybody being tonight?

Reasons

Assorted Stars Of The Sagaponack Sky (In August) (In 2009) (Above Us)

• Embroiderer for the curtains that go behind people in photobooths
  
• because no cameras in the outside world
  
• 
  
• Also, rhythm of the church bells chiming five w/ the sirens.
  
• Someone took a photo to save you.
  
• And your blushed face from being drunk in wintertime.
  
  
  
  
• Things want to exist.
  
• Things have been so been persistent about existing.
  

this cold front is so welcome so loved

matthew - smith's point nantucket MA 7/09

YES

self @ moonrise madaket MA 7/09





I am in love with my EveryDay
And it is all the romance i will
ever
need

ninety

jim 6/09




ninety-five, five away from 100 degrees it was and I saw an older man so bored he was playing with the garden hose. hosing in the alley at the tiles. drawing on the aluminum siding like a child but gray and top-bald.
that kind of day with the air again. thick like a soft pillow all around you pushing in so that all your movements are slow. the light tags behind the sound now, its first embarrassing loss in its race to you in Ever.

home life

annalise and jess on our roof, manhattan. 6/09

women with swords

annalise & jessica, manhattan june 2009

climbing out the weekend

madaket, nantucket mass. july 2009

a summer of welcome backs

annalise, manhattan july 2009


Okay okay i love manhattan again

there's sand on you let me get it

madaket, nantucket MA july 2009


so i'm back from my one month leave which was so much quieter and so much more exciting than the new york city
things are loud and slow now
things are manhattan now
eighty degrees and the hot sun air puts me to sleep but i'm rested
i'll get back to the rhythm i promise.

summer began for me today

cara, visiting us from the district of columbia. manhattan june 2009




new york just you walk around and it insults you like you're nothing you're gonna die and then you're going to have to leave.




BUT THEN YOUR FRIENDS EMBRACE YOU

a man of fiction reads the bible

long island railroad at sunrise, ?, 2008

ripe youth

valentines day, manhattan 2009



this is exactly how i feel right now

everything there's no room for on the form

brooklyn flea, may 2009



most of what i've been savoring are the kinds of things you leave out the second time you tell a story, it's better this way, i'm quieter in general

Good bye

cara darlin, east river park nyc. may 2009



back from Istanbul, back to a city lacking my favorite faces in the world. give them back, DC and Ohio and Oregon and Texas and everyplace. Even with the sirens it's quiet.

human nature walks

prospect park, brooklyn may 2009.



my life falls together
then falls together again

DON'T YOU WISH YOUR TIME WOULD JUST STAND STILL

easter sunday, yair and molly jo. park slope bklyn 2009.

dedication

mike crowley, sudbury mass. november 2008




it is a beautiful fifty-three degrees of warm fahrenheit here in manhattan, a beautiful fifty-three there over my massachusetts love. the clouds look like a new england spring. no spring at all. my mind is back home. our air is the same, except mine has pollution from light and noise (which is really magic when you think about it) and theirs has sea salt you can taste 30 miles inland and the smell of thawing leaves and bad car radio blasting from high schoolers graduating that i've never met (which is really sad when i think about it.)

i love it here. manhattan is a home.

but talking to my roommates last night, one an tough army brat and another who's lived all up and down the west coast, i realized that my word for "home" means something different and impossible.

i've lived in the same bedroom for 18 years. my body's dead skin settles like sedimentary rock in the carpet with the wrinkles i've memorized. i know all of the pictures i saw in the plaster when i was six years old by heart. there's a witch and a prince in the upstairs bathroom wall, a sneezing man in the family room. at three thirty pm in the summer rainbows appear on the wall in the foyer. there are hidden rips on the lower left corner of the blue and brown rug my brother and i used to pretend was full of rivers and islands. there's a plastic swiss-army toy in the left-most drawer that's full of bubble wands instead of knives and corkscrews. i didn't grow for four years and the kitchen wall's pencil marks tell all of our guests. i am always embarrassed and always glad they're there.

to know a place, to have every inch memorized, has only recently revealed itself to me as a gift. stagnancy only gets more and more rare. it was like falling in love too early in life, you know you can't marry, you feel so lucky and so murdered.

so today is dedicated to massachusetts. i only write to you. my life, my past 18 years are a memoir of a place. i'm the lucky secretary to the most beautiful place in the entire world.

sometimes i wonder if i was just born an empty shell, waiting to be filled with a place. that i would have loved wherever i was born so deeply because that was how i was born. but then i realize: no. i feel like a psychologist accepting that i love someone and ignoring necessity and proximity. but it feels so real, this must be how psychologists can manage to have friends.

happy massachusetts day,
happy 53 degree fahrenheit day
happy wednesday
happy memory day
happy hands in old boxes of photographs day
happy moving day
happy missing day


because really my birthday is just the anniversary
of my first time in massachusetts.

love elise