La Altena

There is a certain rule to the art of charm. Some of it can be learned, some of it’s a natural skill. The answer to every question is always “yes.”

I sat with wide eyes in my dining room chair, looking out the window at what might pass by outside. Curled on a podium the cat was a white statue beside me. We were a pose, waiting for the mechanism of the clock to unwind us.

The next day I climbed into the desert, where the wind blew through my blue hair. In my hands was a broken and mended heart tied with string, bound with twine, with little wings made of goose wings stapled to it. It was still trying to move. My eyes were dilated like belladonnas,, and the desert was wide and empty, hills and mountains of sand rising around me in every direction, but up where the saucer of the sky spun with a million stars. Snakes and scorpions scuttled over my feet. Birds watched me. I was waiting for someone who never came.

I was sitting in a café waiting to see who walked by the street outside. I asked the bartender if he was a drummer, because the café was throbbing with the beats of something broken in the background. The bartender replied, “Yes.” I sat in the cafe with the windows and doors wide open to the world and watched the mariners and soldiers and orphans and cripples pass by. Finally a man came by carrying an orange. He asked me if I was also from the Valley of the Moon. I replied, “Yes.”