Use your mouse and keys to navigate through the streets. Click on any orange location markers you see on the ground.

To see where all the poems are located, look at the small map on the lower section of the screen. There is a poem at each orange location marker. To change your position, drag the yellow person figure to the location you want to move to.

I meet the girl I used to be at a cafe in San Francisco.
Her mouth bursts with wishes that rise to the rafters
and crash to the floor, delicate as a coffee cup
and coarse as the grounds left floating there.
The man beside her is shaped from the voices
he has stolen from throats left gasping and dry.
His eyes are bitter and burned.

She slides her hand into his and shrinks, molds,
takes the shape of the empty space inside the cave
of his palm. She has hollowed herself for him.
Her heart is the flesh of a melon, spooned from the rind
and slipped between his lips: the edges of his teeth
jagged with the strands of her body, his nails filed
into points to cause the most pain
when they force their way into the rawest places of her.

She and I stand still in a surging room.
Unfamiliar mouths distort the air between us,
unfamiliar eyes take up the space
we have forgotten how to share. I reach for her,
hungry, until I am reaching for who we were
and who we are afraid we will become.
Our fingers touch and slide apart.

The three of us walk outside as though strangers,
into a world that has darkened without our notice.
From a porch many blocks away, "Harvest Moon"
wends its ghostly way between the streetlamps
and the lights that glow over doorways.
Soon enough they will both be gone, called south,
on the long flat highways home.
To the place where it happened,
where it will happen,
where it is always happening.
There will be no more boundaries between her and I,
between our body and his, between our tangled
legs and the blaze of the Southern California sun.
Hold on to your mind. You will not have it for long.

I found the letters I was never supposed to read.
The electric shock of her lovely handwriting and the geometry
and her purple ink; the paper worn soft by your two pairs of hands.

She said that to be a lover was to savor and swallow the parts of another
that are ugliest. To map a globe on the body and to plant a flag there -
here, Sicily, on the back of your knee, Sri Lanka in the part of your hair.
That some mornings, the current breaks your bones
until they push through your skin
and your body washes up
onto the breathing land.

Do you remember when we could still split open in one another’s hands?
When we collapsed against one another, exhausted from nights of no sleep.
When you were wet from the rain, and good, and kind. When were wounded

we slept among the philosophers, fingers sliding into scars
and the unprotected places of our shared hurt.
In the winter the light grew thin and failed
to keep out the heat: I never wanted one more time,
for then I would want a thousand. Better none at all.
On the last day, for a moment:
the slope of your shoulders as you walked away,
and I knew.

Many years before I met you, a professor committed suicide
two weeks into the fall semester on the porch of a house
a few miles from his office. I walked past that office daily,
back then. When I was with you I understood. Save me, I said,
when what I meant was, Save me from you.

Because I could not contemplate my own anguish I contemplated his.
I imagined that the grand arc of his grief stretched under him,
like a hammock or a crescent moon, and that it was possible to sleep there
and to rise from it in the morning. The hot hallucinatory pavement of Sixth
grew more real to me than the rough tips of your fingers at my neck,
the snarl on your face when your anger burst the dams of your body
and poured its way into mine. I wonder if they weren’t the same, in the end.

I read an article about the professor a long while later
and I searched for the address of the house where he died.
Not to find it, or to go there, but to see how near it was
to the places where I died, piece by piece,
and scattered myself, unknowing, to the wind.

Somewhere along the way I lost the plot. The desert encroached
and the edges of the road bled and ran. I woke in a world
unfamiliar and saw the darkness as you did, through eyes
that could not focus because they were not mine. When I spoke

the words fell through the earth and were lost to me. I imagine
they reappeared in the inky water of the Thames,
beneath the statues in Florence, used and wasted, or unheard.
If I collect every word from every corner of the world

and force them into order, maybe the years will fall into sense
as well. Maybe I will track pain along its path like pins on a map,
until its origin is clear and alive. Pins on a map, pins in the body,
a winding line between our hearts that aches sometimes when it rains.

That winter, a girl who was in love with you
led me by the hand into a shop that sold yarn.
Our breath fogged into the air in front of us
and evergreens gasped for water in the windows
of the empty street: a stubborn refusal of drought.
She wanted to knit me socks to keep the cold out,
although that far south there is no cold so bitter
as to require wool. The needles that stuck
out of her backpack were as sharp as her ribs,
as the thin December air,
as the loneliness she and I felt around one another.
We could scarcely breathe for the knowledge
that each of us knew you in a way we wished we did not
and in a way we tried so jealously to keep for ourselves.

I think perhaps that girl is still there,
in the shop with the yarn. She wraps herself in wool,
disturbs the dust on the floor each time she moves.
Back then the world was a series of anguished highways,
all of them winding on to somewhere other than where you were.
My body learned the way to you and I knew the street signs
like I knew the beat of my heart.

I knew the San Francisco fog that burned off early in the morning
as I started south, clinging to the pavement like a promise I forgot
to keep. I knew the unpicked fields of Salinas, the long straight fences

and yellowing churches of Chualar, the towns where freeways slid
into highways and became barren and cracked. I knew which mile
makers were the most alone. I knew the endless expanse of Kern County,

broken only by the crooked thirsty trees. I knew the the boundary lines
where the smog started, thick and gray; the hills that blocked the way
back. I knew the emptiness of my own throat as I searched for words

that you would understand. Years pass and every place is Los Angeles,
gluing me to the long straight miles before home.

Back then there were rules for survival. With you
there were rules for sanity and for staying alive.

One: you must never sleep through the dying
of the light or drive through the setting of the sun.

If you do, you will come to in the dark of a country
foreign to you and your body will wash up

on the shore there, unknowable and unowned.
Two: you must never fall asleep and wake

when the landing gear hits the runway, a jolt
of land and enclosure, or you will wake up one day

to find a pillow over your face, a hand at your throat,
the beating of your heart in your ears replaced

by the steady rhythm of a voice that used to mean love.
Three: you must never forget that every stocky body

disappearing around a corner, every broad back
sliding past a courtyard or through a doorway,

could be his. Chances were coins I threw in a fountain,
none amounting to much until my pockets were empty

and the roads going north were closed, blocked with rain.
When did I lose the chance to survive unchanged?

In the house with the shutters, the wet grass began to burn
early, on fire in the unrelenting light. Behind every corner
was the still-sleeping body of a memory I can’t look at
anymore: the hush of the palm trees whispering their fronds
against the heat, the screams that went through the walls
and woke the sleepers there.

I cannot unlearn those sullen southern freeways
or the late-night Technicolor restaurants made hazy and gray
by the dawn. In the desert they are the tallest things around.
I cannot unlearn the clocks that ticked off-time
from one another, the hearts that pressed themselves
against other hearts,

Are you what I am needing?,

and never found the sameness of identical flesh
or a common rhythm. Your tongue is over-brewed tea:
sharp, sipped, half-swallowed, spit back into the cup
when no one is looking. I still taste it and some days
it tastes good. Some days I am on fire too, falling to the ground
with the few leaves that resisted the unending green,
the unending brightness, so vivid and so unreal.

When I drove away for the last time, I realized
I had left without the prayerful goodbye
my prayerless body did not know how to make.
I left scraps behind me: notes to a future archaeologist
and my certainty that loss doesn’t change.

I hope she finds it, someday. That she stumbles
upon the stuccoed walls of the courtyards and mistakes
the crumbling tile for holy. That she scrubs the dirtied
columns until they glow white and burn the hands
that touch them. That the relentless blaze of light strips
the rooms where I slept to the transparent language of bone.

The cracked porcelain of a bathtub,
the rough stone of a bench:
a church, a god, some hope.

I forgot that rape is physical.
Forgot that as it bruises your mind
it bruises your body and stains the skin.
That it will not leave the past
but will not remain there either,
that it maps the worlds of your future
onto the hours of your past
and leaves you slow and staggering

like a sleepwalker. One day the roads
going north will open again
and I will sleep by the side of the road,
listening to the rain batter the roof
of the car and knowing it is better
than the hush of the palm trees
and the screams that went through the walls
and woke the sleepers there.

It’s a subconjunctival hemorrhage, they said.
It’ll go away on its own. What they meant
was that the white of my eye had turned red
and the word had gone orange with artificial fall.

I was a collage of the marks I had asked for
and those I had never wanted, a museum
that strangers entered and tried to touch.
Fingers across the point of my cheekbone
to brush away an eyelash, to feel me,
to ask with the urgency of pressure
the questions no one knew how to vocalize.

That night I became legible to anyone. Anyone
who knew that pressure around a throat
bursts vessels in an eye, who knew what it was to wake
to fevered air and find the sheets tangled, damp,
unclean. Anyone who knew the slant of light

as it rose over the elms in the morning and blazed
against the white sand, the white buildings,
all of the purest places.
Anyone who had walked paths that turned
under their feet
into memory, wordless and communicable only
by touch.

Anyone who dreams of a cool room, a dry bed,
the sanctity of loneliness; but, too, anyone
who is terrified of those things, who cannot

be left alone.
Anyone who knows the layers of things.
First anger,
then mourning,
and at the bottom is love, curled and lurking.

That night I said Red but you must have been reading
some other language,
invisible but for the welts on my legs, the bruises
on my ribs. My words must have erupted
from my throat and flooded my eye,
colored the sclera so no one, not even you,
could claim illiteracy.

Like any good American, I learned to grieve
by hitting the road. To stagger into shelter
as the winter rain rolled in and to tumble
to the streets with its exit. I learned
the gas station songs we sing to strangers
as tired night eyes meet over the pumps - these

were the songs I sang, the flat desert songs.
But I know now that some heavy mornings,
wakefulness is the same thing as heat,
and that to travel is to carve the land
with the days you leave to the people you’ve left

behind. A summer storm surprised us once -
do you remember? - and, for a few hours,
washed the miles from the wheels, from the road,
from our eyes. The bruises that painted my body
faded and the defeat I wore like a coat slid away.
I thought the exhaustion in our bones
would wash away too. I thought, then, just then,
that all obedience was holy and all subservience

pure. But some exhaustion won’t be shaken.
It sleeps by the side of the long dry highways
and drags us south by the hair. There is no shelter
but the weight of remembering when grief
could be eased with the rhythm of the road
and when pain could be left to the days we leave

behind.

The first time I felt the uncomprehending weight
of the things you’d done to me, I stood in the dying
three p.m. light and watched the last shards
of the sun slide across the face of a man who loved me.
He knelt in the snow, camera pointed up to the arches
and turrets of the grand red buildings above us.
His fierce concentration, his numb hands,
the flush of his face: students moved like water
around our stationary bodies and he was still,
calm, waiting with the constancy of the candles
that had begun to burn in all the windows.
Sweden in January and he was on fire with waiting.

I regret that his was not the hand I wanted to hold
as I stood in front the runestones outside the cathedral,
as the clouds gathered and blocked what remained
of the light. Believe me: if I could have stripped my skin
of California and left it there, to be buried by the storm,
I would have. If I could have chosen the life I wanted
to share, if I could have chosen the face I wanted to touch:
if I could have chosen, I would have. But he and I
were separate people, in our separate skins.
I could not know him the way that I still know you.

Because the dust and heat linger in the cracks of my palms.
They trap me in the body of the woman who tried to leave,
my body, when I was twenty-one and traumatized,
afraid of the wastelands of the Inland Empire
and the long dry roads going north. Afraid of the elms
that shaded my mortarboard, afraid of the golden
evening light. Most of all afraid of the words
I will never find to capture the impenetrable loss
of remembering a place that may or may not have existed at all.
I read the runes at Uppsala and saw the lines carved
into the skin of California.