January
The suicidal urges have faded.
I lie hidden in my lair.
Snow falls heavily, and I know you’re watching it.
I’m reading the breviary, mouthing the words as if talking to you.
I would like my speech to be noble and beautiful.
Something that would sound like love.
Insomnia: I hear water drops on the window sill.
Too lazy to go running, though I purchased waterproof shoes.
So I’m reading a Harari graphic novel about romantic myths.
E.g., the illusory aspects of vacationing as a couple.
Yet I crave intimacy, and that takes me to the other side of the stage.
Also: to become better people together.
I’m still trying to learn to live with less of a footprint.
But it’s hard to un-thing the home.
I gladly accept the romantic myth of intimacy, but without the travel.
Consumption is not to my liking.
But I’m also not a fan of poverty.
I feel ashamed in front of my daughter’s classmates.
The snow that so astonishes you falls like salt.
We chew on other continents, ones that are not so worn out.
Because over there, there are no poor, suffering, and outcast people one could help.
Other continents need to be put on film, though there is plenty to see here as well.
There are unpopular ones that few try to get to.
They can’t fit them all in.
But they’d like to.
I just love samsāra and all of its binding ties!
The feelings you believe in, the messages, the lion from the breviary.
Everything you aren’t allowed to desire if you strive for true happiness.
Happiness in the godhead.
Understandably, almost no one strives for that.
February
I am going to the Senukai store to buy boxes.
I need boxes because our parrot showers seeds from its cage.
If I remember, this shopping mall
sells peremech pies and chebureki by the door.
I can’t imagine who eats them – maybe the security guards.
“I am nothing,” I repeat to myself. “I am one of a million screws in this store’s storeroom.”
God, help me better understand that I am nothing, and not the ruler of the world.
My trajectories are meaningless, my thoughts unworthy of a home.
Let me believe that I will melt in this hum like a marshmallow cooked over a fire.
Bird-feeders, wallpaper, nails, vases, citrus trees.
Writing desks, garden gnomes, dollhouses.
In your thoughts you could make of them the most beautiful home.
A dwelling-place for Being, which only the well-read would need.
At first, you learn to have, then to have not.
You look around to find where you could stick the things that grow like coral reefs.
The boxes are not the right size. Maybe they’re just for garden beds.
The parrot is going to keep littering the house with seed.
Our books are a myth.
Nobody needs them but us.
Yet we fool the others, palming them off as products.
Ontological products which will ostensibly help them understand (something).
They won’t.
Lately, there seem to be more signs that suddenly,
splat! and we’re all dead with no opportunity to understand how or why.
Or, I’m sitting with my daughter in KFC and some normal-looking guy walks in,
sits down next us, and I start imagining that his backpack carries a bomb,
I’ve consumed too many films.
June
Of all the things… I decided to learn how to drive.
I went to the required medical check-up.
First, they asked me if I have a real job.
Then, why did I wait until now to learn how to drive?
I answered that my life was not easy,
my parents were ashamed that I was a lesbian,
so they distanced themselves from me.
Later, I became a drunk, so it was a win for all that I didn’t drive.
After saying all this, of course, they sent me to a psychiatrist.
I never did fit into any system.
Our poetry books have become photo albums.
Here I am traveling. Here my first tooth fell out.
Here I am working things out with my first love.
And so on.
The road signs are so simple!
The answers to all the questions.
I used to just read them and read them.
After classes, I would fall into deep sleep.
It’s hard to endure the world sober, so
most of us escape through sleep.
While we sleep, the rivers in our veins don’t stop.
They interrogated me as to what car I would drive. I said, “My wife’s.”
Then they stood aside and discussed whether this was possible.
“But why do you want to drive?” Well, I told them
I would have to go see my elderly parents more often.
The same ones who are ashamed of me.
I’m forty-three, and one way or another,
I am striding into adulthood.
July
So I started to drive. It feels like swimming.
I didn’t think it would be so interesting.
It’s so fine to be in your lane –
bounded by a dotted or continuous line;
maybe I have my inner boundaries too.
My instructor turned out to be laid back. He didn’t ask if my husband drives.
I began consulting a dietitian.
It turns out that losing weight is meaningless.
It will just grow back – the law of conservation.
The body is my news.
Everything is written there that others need to know.
And they need to know that what I experienced
is not so easy to forget.
Drought. Dusty sandals and toes.
The heat is like thirst after excessive pedaling.
A slight sense of autumn, judging by the sun’s rays.
The dietitian advised me to praise the parts of my body –
my arms and legs are like a cyclist’s.
Flags hang from windows.
Lithuania/Ukraine, Ukraine/LGBT,
Ukraine/Vytis/the tricolor.
I haven’t seen anyone hang a Vytis/LGBT combo.
As a cyclist, maybe I could do it.
August
“How would you like to live?”
asked the dietitian.
I have no such vision. I live to survive,
not to live.
Rain. Tropical heat.
A thunderstorm took out utility poles.
We edit texts that have no meaning.
What joy it is not to create!
To make believe you’re a normal person
who is sensitive to what they eat.
The world really doesn’t need any new poems from us.
Or a professor’s letters.
Is it possible that some of these scribblings do more
than all the Minnesota programs, years
in AA meetings and psychologists can do?
I would like very much to give you my remaining years
so that you could teach, care for someone,
write, and create.
I think you would use them more meaningfully,
and what does it matter if I just vegetate?
I gave up intoxicants long ago, but now
Lithuanian poetry intoxicates me – and how close you all are.
