(f) So To Fellow I Did Say (a poem, a song, I don't know/care)

And so I did fell away
And so to fellow I did say,
Why’d the minute hand join the evening clock?
When it’s only been morning since dawn?
But time to shave and give her all my love,
Waste the page, with hyperbolic troub.
el
UL
Le
If thirst breaks the water trough,
Then your god will come in a rain cloud,
Her god knows I’d give all I’ve got,
But it’s yours and mine I’m bothering about.
Mine forms the keystone at the top.
Of the Roman arch constructed thought.
Te
Te
Te
Kenya man said you can’t find him,
Not in flash of sun or lightning,
Just inside the vessels of the righteous,
Carrying, pumping, until the blood quits.
I never said you were my only one,
But all of it’s for you, my truest love.

(f) The Cooperation of Anarchists, Part 3 of 45

There are visiting pirates. They go by the names Cookie, Monkey, and Jeeep. They hold classes for us on how to avoid the authorities and keep anonymity.

Their ritual deaths gave them a new life in the forest. Cookie, Monkey, and Jeeep. They have no other names. They have no other history.

At midnight they canoe to the sail boats and set sail while everyone else is asleep.

(f) The Cooperation of Anarchists, Part 2 of 45

Pollen, a drop. It all comes together.

That’s what the piccolo man said. On the steps of the old library, closed up with asbestos and no running water. A rotting nod back to 1968, which is also when the piccolo man was born. Maybe that will be important, though it isn’t now.

The honey bees can turn the pollen of all the different flowers into one, unified substance. A drop in the ocean both is and isn’t a drop.

His lunchtime sermons could gather a small crowd given the right conditions. The right conditions: warm sun and a cool breeze from the lake, school in session, lunch specials from the carts on the square, no live music on State and Washington. Aware of these conditions, the piccolo man prepared most carefully for Tuesdays in September, October, April and May.

Everything is the pollen. Everything is the drop.

Who are the honey bees?

The piccolo man sometimes made me believe in god. But Tuesdays were six days in between, and in all that meantime god would be replaced with herbal tea or marijuana. But this time, God as honey bees and the tide. I couldn’t get it off my fingers.

I didn’t like to look at the piccolo man directly, or speak to him before, after, or during his talks. It was best to avoid his attention altogether, because he had bad habits. (I was there when the members of my house banded together to get him off the property. I hung toward the back and hoped he would not recognize my face.)

Wednesday night I was still consumed by thoughts of the honey bees. I could not wait until next Tuesday. Yes, who are the honey bees? Who are the honey bees? I would have to speak to the piccolo man.

(f) that was when i figured it out, catherine.

it was that day he lost 300 dollars. it wasn't lost, really, it was stolen. from the car window he left open at cherry wood park.

it was that day. we went over to that family italian place, and he ordered mostaccioli to last him the entire week, and bread sticks. the mostaccioli was enough for 15 people. it was in one of those catering tins. and it was expensive too. $45 dollars or something.

he knew the girl at the register from highschool. she rang him up and only charged him $2.05. just for the breadsticks. he turned to look at me when she turned to run his debit card. his eyes were triumphant, excited. when he signed for it he signaled to me to follow him out fast.

"she could get fired for that." i said to my feet on the glove box.
"i wasn't the one who rang me up."

it turns out, she did it on purpose. charge him for only the breadsticks, i mean. she thought she was doing him a favor, and he thought he was pulling one over on her. he was stealing what she was giving him.

mushroom channa (spiced garbanzo beans and mushrooms)

(this one is for lauren, who loves food blogs.)

1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/4 teaspoon black mustard seeds
some cardamom pods
some cloves

in oil, until they're poppin'.

3/4 cup diced onion (i like the purple ones)
1 large tomato, diced
1/2- 1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 -1 teaspoon garlic/ginger paste (or 1/2 teaspoon minced ginger)
1/4-1/2 teaspoon tamarind paste
1 diced green chili, seeded (optional)

mix it up, on medium.

2-3 bay leaves
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1/4-1/2 teaspoon coriander powder (optional)
1/8-1/2 teaspoon cayenne powder (i do more, actually)
1 teaspoon turmeric
tiny pinch hing (asfoetida)
1/4-1/2 teaspoon garam masala
salt, as you like it (i like a bit more than 1/2 teaspoon)

spice it up. when the tomatoes and onions are soft...

1 can garbanzo beans, drained
2 cups sliced mushrooms (baby bellas are nice)

done when the mushrooms are. serve with rice or chapatis. or both. or wheat tortillas, heated on a dry skillet, if you are short on time.

serves 2-3. takes about 25 minutes from chopping to serving.


p.s. you can use this general spice outline for several different vegetables (sabzi): sliced okra, baby eggplant, cauliflower, diced potatoes... leave out the cardamom and cloves if you aren't making garbanzos.
p.p.s. the spice measurements are my best estimates of what i do by taste. i suggest you do it by taste, too.

(f) the occasionally true tales, part 1

I was born by mistake. My mother was a girl, just a girl, and as it was announced that I was a girl she was already gone. I was raised by a heavy stick and a heavy accent and a tight grey bun. I was raised to wait on her children and her back, bad with arthritis. I learned to hate the season change and the rain.

My hair reached to floor and she made me sweep with it. Every night she made me sweep with it. And their gnarled grey fingers and buns would grab at my stomach and arms as I flew above their heads each night as I slept. When she combed my hair she would yank until I cried and each night their gnarled grey fingers and buns. My own fingers red and swollen. Do you hear that? She would hit me with anything she could reach while she held on with her other hand to my scalp by my hair.

She dressed her sons up like girls because she wanted girls, but not me. She didn’t want me. She didn’t want me even after my mother came and took me away. I was two years old then. I remember when my mother came and snuck me out one afternoon and we drove off and all around town and she sang to me and her hair blew in the wind. I was a missing child in the paper for weeks. Everyone was looking for me but no one wanted me. When the policeman caught us and took me back and the first thing she did was pinch my ear between her grey fingers. Her sons standing there, silent, staring, in their lilac and yellow dresses and long curled hair. I don’t know what happened to my mother.

I gave the empty bowl back to the poor, painted with stars and moons. A lick for the small boy, cream for the starving child. I made an instrument out of the bow and arrow, and sang songs to the darksides of the branches, and felt the lines the sun made on my face. My condition was that my temperature rested at 96 degrees Fahrenheit. For its heating properties, the medicine man prescribed ginger.

The teepee burned one night in July. We stood and watched it sink into the earth. I kept waiting for the waves. The dying embers gave way to the sunrise. When the morning broke, my fever broke. My partner told me in gentle tones that I had to leave. That the prescriptions had not helped my condition. I was not above begging. I lowered my body to the ground and kissed his feet.

walk it off baby, walk it off. i could have done you worse. i could have been another woman. i could have pulled you apart like the loose end of the knitted scarf.

i wanted to but stopped short. why? because i look at liz, i look at my grandmother, and i see that they are alone. their own sons have turned their backs on them. they forgot to prepare the ground for autumn, and now the winter months get longer as the days grow shorter and they are skin and bones, baby, skin and bones.

I had my first child when I was a girl, just a girl, and he was a boy from a boy. And he was born by mistake, like I was. He left, they both did. I was just a girl, just a girl, and he was grown before I wasn’t.

I did not learn to brush my teeth and by my second girl and my second husband I could take them out and make all the kids laugh and I laughed until I cried and my make-up would run and we would all laugh harder. And we cried harder. I cried a lot in those days. I sat on the floor because there were no chairs, and cried because there were no chairs. Just seven hungry stomachs and no chairs.

no, baby, you got off lucky. you still have everything you came in with. and what you were looking for, honesty. you thought you found it in my pretty face. well now you’re getting it and it isn’t what you wanted.

and me, honestly. i can’t tell the truth with a straight face. the stories my grandmother told me when i was young. i could remember love only for the lack of love. harvest nothing but weeds when the summer ends.


I got so skinny then. Your dad and Jim and Liz would trade off bringing me portions of their free lunches from the school. I ironed the neighbors clothes and my fingers, red and swollen, made me think of grey. My fourth husband had left and I was so skinny you could tie a rubber band around my waist.

The medicine man offered to drive me to the highway. I picked my stomach off the ground, filled with fluids and an incomplete body. It was my only possession. The medicine man took me to the highway, where I bared my belly, my misery, and my thumb until a car stopped and an open window offered its help.

Backseats and voiced silhouettes brought me back home to mother. I knew no place else to go, and my stomach weighed me down. I had no enemies, but no friends. A locked door. Strangers inside.

I found them across town. A yellow house. I watched the patterns in the carpet until they came up to greet me, and waited. No reaction from mother. There was no bed for me there, but the father of my youngest sister had left. I slept in mother’s bed.

I could never stay skinny for long. We were facing the fourth eviction notice and Richard had a car. And a steady job. My stomach was growing again and I thought if I could only get Richard to adopt them all, I could kill myself. But Richard wouldn’t sign the papers and the baby girl wasn’t his.

you should have stood up for yourself.

no. you know what that is? i’m trying to sneak my own sins into the bag you will carry away with you when you leave. like my grandmother does, like liz. both of victims. my grandmother locked in her tower her whole life, liz with no dress to attend the ball.

they were going to wait there whole lives for someone to save them. so it meant, next in line, baby. it meant packing the dishes every two years. it meant seducing a man with a job in the knick of time, so he would think the swollen belly was his doing. it meant eight wedding rings.


Bowls, hands, cream for the poor. Paper boats and poetry for the children in the street. No balloon, no lullaby for us. 17 years. I don’t know the sound of my mother’s voice.

I never dressed my sons like daughters. I never made my daughters sweep the floor with their own hair.


Mother was ironing the neighbor’s clothes for two dollars the day I left. I put leftover macaroni and cheese into a Jewel-Osco bag and left with my stomach. The body became complete. I would no longer need to carry it.


as the fat in my cheeks dissolved and my hair grew long, my mother scrutinized my face in the mornings.
hushed voice to my father, “john, she looks like…”

i cried when my grandmother held me. her hands were very cold, they had been empty for many years. liz did not come for my birth. the mirror showed my eyes were not my own. in liz’s face i watched my own beauty recede into lines and skin and bones. in my grandmother’s, the transformation was already complete.

you know what she told me, baby? she told me there is no right and there is no wrong. there are only the guilty and the guiltless. guilt, a restrictive force, limiting our ability to get what we really want. i listened, baby.

so morality, then, relative. but freedom doesn’t pay. like i said, i see them now, baby, and they are alone.

(f) The Cooperation of Anarchists

glyphia has stopped eating sugar. she collected the elderberries from the trees at the university and made wine. the man with the piccolo followed her home, and we all had to band together to get him off the property. zylon was the most forceful. he is the most invested.

there were rumors alix and i needed to squash. rumors about bosco and kat. kat starting the rumors maybe, turning bosco into a predator. bosco played for alix and me folk songs and taught me to play ancient mayan stone games. bosco slept curled up in alix's chair, purring. caught in transition between lives, the beast, the man. bosco never spoke above a whisper.

i thought alix would stand up with me. as all the house sat around half naked in the summer time, drunk on elderberry wine, four hours of seated aggression, i stood and defended bosco's integrity. i looked to alix. he responded.

"if there are members of the house that feel threatened by a member, we have an obligation to remove him."

that was not the right answer.

"no." i said. "no, no. members must keep personal grudges to themselves. we have an obligation to expose the truth."

alix and i were bosco's alibi. he was with us the night in question. our testimony means everything. and alix's testimony means i'm not a liar. glyphia and zylon whet their spear heads.

alix's eyebrows said, "sorry caerie." my eyebrows said, "you dirty liar."

the Vote was in. bosco and i spent that night curled up under roots with the piccolo man by the lake.