Inquiry into Coil

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Enough of obsidian
and enough of fine linens
and figs, let’s thrash

down onto a maelstrom
of tusks, a madman’s
pinbone blanket.

We’re not woodmice,
so let’s roil around
properly like a den

of prairie vipers.
It’s too brilliant
for all this formality,

let’s clamor loud
enough for our echoes
to frighten the wilds.

Inquiry into Architecture

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My sleeve isn’t full of trickery.
I don’t have a magic box to take you

away but return you unharmed.
I don’t have a key for the underwater

straightjacket and chains, and I hide
no impossible doves in my coat.

I don’t have visions or communion
with the beyond, but I’ll hollow

my body until it’s a crater, a posthole
for you to sink your tether into.

Or I’ll grow hair like a blackbear
cub if it’ll soften your sleep some.

Lay your head right here,
my lungs can be your creaking bed

or I can crack my bones and weave
a hammock from my tendons

for you to stretch between two
linden trees. Or I’ll eat wool

and down and rearrange my belly
into a nest for your kneecaps.

I can’t conjure. I don’t have any
sorcery to offer besides the will

to break this body into whatever
shape will keep you closest.

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They come for us with their hacksaws and pipe cutters, their chainsaws and drills. They brace themselves, boots on the rotting pier, and bore into us with their shrieking machinery. We submit to them. We let the yardmen strip us down to our rusted guts and watch the customers barter for our parts. We are the Miss Atlantic and the S.S. Ticonderoga, the Lady Betty and the Sallie Ann. We are the wrecks of the Rossville boneyard, towed here years before these men were born.

The ex-Marine with the hobby sailboat wants a box compass for seventy. The grocer with the rosary tattooed around one ropey bicep wants a gill bracket for eighty. The natty antiques dealer wants a brass bulkhead light for twenty-five, and the college boy with the ginger scruff just wants to take our picture.

The grocer rolls his eyes at the college boy and mouths the word fag to the ex-Marine, who rubs his palms together as he fakes a laugh. The ex-Marine relishes the black grease chapping his knuckles. It feels like an honest day’s work.

For each part the yardmen scavenge, we sink lower into the filth of the Arthur Kill. We wear ribbons of oil that shimmer like dark amethysts. We remember the woman whose jewels flashed at her throat on the ferry, a banker’s mistress who caught glares from secretaries dressed like mourning doves: gray taffeta, brown tweed. We remember the ivory nipple on the end of her parasol, tapping the sunlit deck of the Betsy Ross. At night, the parasol was still. The little buttoned boots crossed tiredly beneath her bench.

We watched the buttoned boots slim down to oxford pumps, the oxfords stretch into stilettos that left deep scars in our varnish. Some of us survived to see the children in moccasins, clutching protest signs heavy with exclamation points. We recognized their mothers, flicking cigarette ash; we recognized their fathers from the City Island yards. Their hands reeked of blood and metal, a smell we recognized again on the sweaty thighs and breasts of Times Square hookers on the ferry at dawn.

These men don’t bother to learn our names. The customer says, How much for the engine telegraph? The yardman says, Boss, you want I should row out to the tugs? They don’t know that the sunken tanker is the Harriet, that her mast used to blot out the sun like a skyscraper. They don’t know that the little tugs stripped bald of all paint are the Eleanor Roosevelt and the Hound of the Baskervilles. They don’t know that the prettiest ferry, the bridal white tiers of her wheelhouse rotted to lace, is the Mary Malone. The yardmen measure us in units of distance, depth, and sweat. The boss, in car payments and private school fees. The grocer keeps glancing at the sculpted arms of the ex-Marine, who introduces himself as Moe, instead of Mohamed. The college boy can’t drag his gaze from the camera’s screen. He clicks through the close-ups of us rapidly – wood swollen with water, nails penetrating pine – until he reaches a naked blonde on a dormitory bed. He fumbles for the lens cap, blushing.

Our harvested parts lie scattered on the dock. The grocer is in a mottled fury, the cords in his neck flushed and erect as he tells the boss where he can stick his buck fifty. We are familiar with this kind of stringy, strutting man, ready for a cockfight as soon as money is on the table. We remember them as nimble in the old schooner sails, understanding us perfectly, without loving us. They would heedlessly risk their lives on the fireboats, bolting into gusts of burning ash. They would knock out a shipmate for winning at cards the next night.

The ex-Marine nudges the box compass scavenged from the Hudson Queen. The charred bone of its needle quivers before it swings back north, like an act of faith. He waits for the grocer to pause for breath, then says he’ll take the compass for eighty, no problem. The ex-Marine worked in finance before September 11th. He is no stranger to negotiation. But even now, he remains ill at ease in the salvage yards and watering holes of his hometown.

He knows that all he has to do is mention Parris Island to see the men’s posture stiffen with respect, their eyes light with camaraderie when they rattle off their division number, name-check Fallujah, Kuwait, Saigon. But floating starboard to this reality is the one where he eats takeout sushi at a conference table, managing a Blackberry with one hand and chopsticks with the other; he is squinting at the glowing screen, oblivious to the dazzling constellations of the Twin Towers’ windows. Floating to port is yet another reality – the parking lot of St. Mary’s. Cleated Timbs nailing him in the kidney. Fucking terrorist and a thin spool of blood in the urine.

We know his kind, too: the boy who runs away to sea. They love us perfectly, without understanding us.

But every kind of man leaves his woman behind. We remember the dredgemen’s wives with their fresh and pimpled girlhood swaddled in shawls, the oilmen’s wives with gold crosses glinting beneath coiled hair. We remember the soldiers’ girls with cherry lips who waved their handkerchiefs as if in surrender. We remember the soldiers’ dead-eyed mothers, arms pressed against their wombs. They all grew smaller on the dock behind us.

We took their dredgemen under the tiara of the Bayonne Bridge and out to the Mud Dump, where they built underwater landscapes – plateaus of Flatbush garbage, hilltops of Greenwich Village cellar dirt – before guiding us home through the channels they had carved for us that day. We took their oilmen out to the great blue silence of the Atlantic. One of us prodded the snorting, heaving tankers through the Narrows with her squat tug’s snout. One of us was stripped of her curved oak benches, where commuters once crossed little buttoned boots, and carted off to Normandy. She felt the men trembling as the gray coast drew closer. She felt the heavy thump of their bodies as they leaned to vomit down her sides.

Some of us moved from port to foreign port for years, carrying sailors who swore fidelity only to us – the Blue Dolphin, the Molly Pitcher, the Mahicanituck and the S.S. Knickerbocker. They left us at night for the young girls in Hong Kong, who, they said, had perfect fragile skin and hair as heavy as tarred rope. They said that the tough brown broads in Marseilles drank bourbon like water. They said that the lithesome artists in Cartagena knew when to scream like they were possessed, when to stop whipping their hair around and feign doe-eyed submission, when to knock off the theatrics already and get busy with their efficient mouths.

But we were the ones they came back to, dawn after dawn, year after year. We were the ones who brought them home, hoary and frail, to Snug Harbor. The nurses tucked them into wooden wheelchairs. They spent the landlocked hours making models of us in bottles, the Nellie P. and the Golden Eagle, the Sallie Ann and the Spirit of Victory. Hunched between the wall with the clock and the wall with the crucifix, they assembled us from memory. Their fingers traced each narrow bottleneck. They slipped inside as far as they could reach.

Now the dock is empty of all women, the salt-blasted boards beginning to collapse. We know that the antiques dealer will take the shapely brass light to the East Village, then snip off the price tag when a leggy queen enters to admire it. We know that the college boy has his phone in hand, our portraits flickering on the screen. The photos are good, his classmates envious. He dodges their hungry questions: why did he choose us? Where did he find us? How did he know to venture beyond the nail salons and bakeries, the curry joints and churches?

We know that the grocer is home, scrubbing rust off the gill bracket. He labors over the Sea Ray that leaks more fuel onto the driveway than it consumes at sea. He had to let his manager go. He no longer spends weekends fishing in the harbor and gutting stripers for the grill. His rosary flexes and shifts across his arm as he works, the jet ink faded to the color of money.

The grocer is holding our body, washing away our blood. The nuns taught him about transubstantiation, but he no longer recalls the word; the concept has become part of him, like his desire for ex-Marines with perfect golden arms. We know that a man like him stops interrogating the warmth that floods him at the sight of other beautiful men, swirling down to the groin like water circling a drain. He accepts that this pressure will not leave him until he is in bed with his wife. He accepts her soft curves as both familiar and strange; he accepts the mystery that she contains the men that he has glimpsed and lost throughout the day.  He has to believe that this is a holy transformation.

We understand. We know that the five boroughs could sink into the sea, but if only the docks survived, you could still make out the silhouette of the missing land. We know that the ex-Marine is guiding his little sloop past the cramped smokestacks of Elizabeth. We know that the box compass is propped on an empty seat. Two years ago, his girlfriend loved to perch across from him, shrieking happily as she dodged the swinging boom. Now, she stays late at the office and later for drinks. She leaves for the ferry before he is awake and refuses to be roused on weekends.

Two years ago, the ex-Marine dropped his tuna wrap and walked out of the lunch meeting, crossed the dusty barricades on Broadway and entered the recruiting station on Chambers Street. Only now is he learning what it means to be left behind.

The ex-Marine sails past the woofer at the mouth of the Arthur Kill. We remember that salty blast of wind, with its notes of burning rubber from Bayonne. We remember skidding across the blue prairie of the bay. The ex-Marine does not need to look at the compass to know that its needle bobs northeast. He has been sailing around the harbor since he was a little boy, and the Statue of Liberty’s heavy-hipped frame is as familiar to him as his girlfriend’s. He floats behind the sloping curves of her generous ass, admiring how she faces out to sea like a sailor, until he remembers that she is not supposed to be poised to leave.

He turns his back on Staten Island to look at the silhouette of the Financial District. He is not thinking about us, the Ticonderoga, the Hudson Queen, the Lady Betty, the American Star, wrecked off the shore where he was born. We are bleached like the bones of whales, silently rotting in the currents that carry him forward.

The water laps gently at the fresh wounds left in our sides today. We are aware of the absence of each stolen part – of the spaces that cannot be filled.

We are aware of the graveyard at Snug Harbor, where the nurses toasted each coffin with brandy as it was borne uphill. We are aware of the ships in bottles that now collect dust in closets and garages and display cases of small forgotten museums. The old sailors had painted our names in gold, gripping the doll-sized brush with both arthritic hands. They had clipped silk string for the rigging. They had trimmed the tiny sails. They had carved our figureheads in miniature: an eagle. A dolphin. A tiny woman with cedar breasts bared, tilting up her blank oval face.

How they must have ached at the sight of us, nearly resurrected, but untouchable behind glass. We looked just as they remembered us. Nothing missing, except them.

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Baby feet kick her ribs but she still had all of them not like Adam. Her organs busy knitting baby limbs, rows of stitches can’t drop a stitch they must be perfect. Back when she was a little girl her mother folded her wings bought her hoodies sewed into them extraordinary inner wing-shaped pockets, tucked them neatly. As a woman-girl in a dirty bathroom she begged him to make her like everyone else, cut off my wings, cut them off, cut them off. She took a picture to jail them in a frame: bloody wings on grimy tile. Babygirl’s wings flutter-swim inside and grow lacy.

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Alanis warns of Mr. Play-it-safe
whose first flight ends in demise,
          and I think my nephew Jacob, fifteen, autistic,
might grow up to be like that guy,
though his first flight was this fall
to my brother’s wedding in Ohio.

Jacob wet himself rather than
risk getting up to use the bathroom
          with its toilet seat that could suck
him out into the clouded air, into
the space he can’t grab on to.

His mother didn’t hold his hand
because Jacob doesn’t like that
and it’s good, too, because Jacob says
          it reminds him of Jack on LOST
when he comforts Rose while
her husband, of course, is in the bathroom.

The plane still crashes, Jacob tells me now,
and Rose and her husband are separated
for a long time, so where’s the use
in that? Her husband said that planes
          WANT to stay in the air, but he
was wrong. And there was that plane
in Russia with the hole in the engine.

Jacob, I say, that plane flew, it was fine,
most planes are. New strategy: I try
          to explain Say Anything, figure he hasn’t seen it,
but after I describe the boombox talisman,
two lovers boxing out the offense, how at the end
of the movie, it’s sweet that the boy holds
the girl’s hand waiting for the seatbelt light
to pulse, to gently announce that they’ll make it,

Jacob interrupts me, says, No
that’s crap, the screen goes black then,
we don’t even see what happens. Most
          people die during takeoff or landing
anyway, the in between is just biding time.

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Among the lessons you ask, this one
about the tongue-what I hunger for

is not the only territory. The body exists,
surrounded on all sides by currents

of nothing, this suspension we call late.
Over the flame, you break chocolate

from the bar. No words, just the sound
of the gas, my hands separating oranges

into their interior forms. It’s January,
it’s February, it’s a place gotten to slowly,

and between our two houses, this is
all we have tonight. Sometimes in California

whole things drop, go rolling for lower
ground, their sheer numbers a kind

of poverty. I want you to let me strip you
of name and skin like this, until want

and need cannot be separated.

NEW ENGLAND OEDIPUS

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With eyes that debrided sleep,
he’d been the only sound on this side

of New Hampshire, except for
a cough somewhere, the lisp

of a kite in perfect wind, snap
of a stick, what went unsaid.

At home, her ash hairs spread
like tinders, dimmed

L’s receding, skeletal.
Fall would be thin this year.

This time things would go
listlessly: To side-stepping

chirps of the clock, the woman rocked
through dark until one blind blood-

scripted eye was opened
and she groaned with surprise.

“Don’t,” she shushed, to young thumbs
thirling her back, red singe

of her brooch-scratch, sunset
easing her into senselessness.

And as her mistake gave in
to disease, she opened her mouth

and told her last child
(these clinging nerves,

this gossiping chorus of leaves)
how beautiful he was, how much

they had to share: the gin, the sky
all riddled with clouds, everything

coming and going, so little
remaining between.

SIGNS BY NO LAKE THAT GREEN

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I.

Past droplets racing up the wind like insects, voltage
cracked the passage between me
                                                                                          and the mountains.
Geese had been gathering like authors, ruffled dignitaries
                                                                                                                                                 at the edge
of the lake, their feet black-rubber-stamping
sand pocked with human knee-prints.
                                                                      A gull cried,
puffed, and plummeted
                                                            to peck one Canada goose
on the nape. Shivering stripes of life obviously symbolized loss and conflictedness
for an instant.

II.

                                                                 Through smoke stripes coiling
                                                                                               from the open gas grill,
                                        I recalled a poet I’d long looked to, leaning in his white
pinstriped suit pants,
a towel where the white hairs on his nape
stood up around the thin green pool
                                        in his collarbone. He must have been thinking his way
                                        around lines
                                                                      like these in this poem you are reading
until he came to the part
concerning a dream in which
a goose was quacking about the tranquility
                                        of the natural landscape, how lightning, in contrast, once set
                                             a mattress factory in Brooklyn on fire.

III.

                                                                 As wide awake then
as I am now, I marveled at how phosphorescent algae
on my fingertips created five firefly lakes.

                                                                                               Like the mirage of a plume
                                                  in the poet’s quick-blinking hand:
the green tail of a pony that my grandmother once painted
in Brooklyn, back when one
could gallop anywhere.
                                                  By that time, the pink goose-crossed
band of clouds in the sky had spiraled
between the mountains and behind both
                                                                           his eyes, the caduceus of sentence
and line, mercurial as the gesture with which I wanted him
to ratify my expression, my torn Pumas, even the scribbling goose-plumes
                                                            I was going to write about. He smiled and signed
the blind air between us,
                                        a hair-thin lightning charge
as his medium.

MY DIRTY CHAI

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You, no mere au lait, clove-spiked,
big mouth watering

                                   by a thumb toned like a bean in the sun.
Eye black as devil as coffee,
breath of tea, complex leaf.

Your fleshy kisses
above the rim, your emerald eyelids slanting rhyming

lashes. To press another kiss to the skin of the milk.
To taste the lotus

beneath the verdigris.
How to articulate-

steam whisper suggests a navel-cave, a spice-store
powering wide-moving swans

past the low sump of today.

O, my concoction
re-enacted within the drinker’s knowing,

deepening feelings to inhuman depths
of cacao of Maya, edible
                                                            gold waves
                                                                                of heat.

What lies beyond that, the tongue knows,
but it cannot speak it.

Golden teeth glistening
In the mouth of the city
Silver clouds colliding
At the tongue tip of the day

Bite off all the darkness
They whispered;
And chew the light well.

O fireflies, fate in a fire’s worth of open bellies:
we wander the afternoon air ardent in prose’s
possibilities, prick those savage eyes, prying
loose the dust of rumination, rudimentary room.

I want, she said, guarantees of safe death, napes
of naked irritated Chinese characters stretched
and scratched, loafers burning the airless street,
children hurrying home to catch the dogs falling.

There is conversation in these dreams of yours.
Singularities asking to be fed like throatless
lizards, bookish towers ready to fall, washed
women in wooden walls, making out alone.

gay boys and the bridges who love them [II].

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saw it with my own headlamp.
lit halogen filament, breaking

between a thirteen year old’s haunted
hands, costumed in our realest ghosts.

we went door to door. unwrapping
hard candy and hard boiled eggs.

mouths of spray cans melted around pins
so the shaving cream flew in thin

white beams of light. toilet paper streaming
from three hundred year old trees.

you leaned into my shoulder as the cop
car passed like a black horse drawn

carriage, mouth ghosted my neck,
that first clean cigarette pulled

from the pack. we rubied in the blue
light. after the cavalry passed,

you turned to me. your face, a dark mask
hanging on the museum wall.

you leaned in.
you warm apparition.

when you pulled back
a thin bridge of spit.

prescription poppies at sixteen

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perfect, to escape in whiteness.
under the counter cabinet medicines.
the body, dreaming only of itself.

what numbness carries its warm
lantern through my starless blood?
what science can bottle a stoned

eucharist? let me lay here another hundred
years, until each knuckle grows a tiny beard.
both eyes burrowing into the dark

television, comforted by it’s darkness.
let me lay here, mother standing above me.
her face slack as an umbilical chord.

she holds a million tiny white eggs
inside her, each one a bottled god.
an orange bottle empty in her palm.

god mother, your blocking the screen.
calm mother, i’m dulled by the pharmacy.
i swallowed ten perfect white eggs

each one hatched suns in my stomach.
the children of distilled smoke dragons,
can’t you see them? their ten warm yolks

singing heat to my blood. your first grandsons
numb as my young body slung across the floor.

aren’t you amazed at how quiet i lay?
at how much labor goes into the terminus.

congratulations!

it’s a boy.
it’s a carton of expired eggs.
it’s a bleeding lamb.

prescription poppies at twenty-six

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careful sam, remember this body
is your last. already, so many friends
have damaged their wiring or flooded

entirely. twenty six is the year talented
people die. thank goodness you’ve had
to work at this. sweating over the page

until it became something. equilibrium
is no high. good, you’ve stopped profiteering
off your friend’s injuries.

every mouth surgery and broken rib
was a beacon glittering sex in the distance.
your salted tongue pulling

you toward sustenance. when your lover
gifts you a wreath of medicines for your birthday,
with his brother’s sick name etched

into the bottle. stop. even when your tongue
sweats a hungry gutter, know that tongues
are supposed to water. what alchemy turns

gold leaf to bare trees? it is a war,
you know, the body pitted against itself.
the brain refusing to flood

your desiccated blood, unless you pray
to the appropriate gods. i’ve knelt for years
at a time before strange medicine cabinets,

swallowed entire beehives for a single
drop of honey. after all the opium
has been burned from the water,

after the smoke clears over this flaming
apiary of a home know you will only be left
with what you were born with

your breath,
your clean blood,
your new bones.

1. Revel in how good-looking he is, how he channels Jude Law when his lazy eye doesn’t wander, how his weaving a ghillie suit that he keeps in the rusted hutch of his white pick-up shows exceptional dedication.

2. Convince yourself it’s meaningful because he plays Nina Simone as you disrobe and paw at each other for the first time. Pay no attention when the music flips to “The Piña Colada Song.”

3. Find a point of adherence, your death-by-suicide fathers, and make it the only thing that matters, the very force that brought you together. Say destiny. Say you’re the same kind of wounded creature and flap your teary lashes like the wings of a condor.

4. Walk in the woods behind his family’s farmhouse fixated on the abandoned tool shed behind the weepy Spanish moss until the sun recedes and more fireflies than you’ve ever seen appear. Pretend you don’t see his mother watching you from the kitchen window.

5. Keep him away from your friends. But when the streams must cross and he agrees that George Eliot is great-insists he’s read all his books-try not to look repulsed or notice that everyone avoids your eyes but meets one another’s.

6. Lock up the apartment early after he doesn’t show for your exciting, Saturday-night date of barhopping the local dives and chain-smoking.

7. Wake up petrified in darkness thick as ink when he touches your arm after having broken in.

8. Freeze your hands into fists so tight your muscles cramp, but insist he stay on the couch because, like always-like all of them-he’s too drunk to drive.

9. Warn him that the next time is the last, and when it is, you’ll be gone for good.

10. End it three weeks later on a date after he follows a girl into the small bathroom of a wine bar and offers her cocaine that he bought with money stolen from your purse. Suggest he drive into a live oak on his way home. Confirm the feeling he has that everyone hates him is true. Remind him he’ll be replaced within the hour. Declare, as his chin quivers and eyes plead for mercy, that you will never, under any circumstances, speak a single word-not a grunted syllable-to him again.

11. Receive five emails and two texts the next day that alternate between declarations of love and pointing out your lack of soul. “I’ll never be the guy who shows up in five months,” he writes, “wishing you were still with me.”

12. Wake up the next day to nine more emails and twelve texts, the language so 18^th century that you picture him in an ascot. “My worth may be nil to you,” and alone in your apartment, you nod your head in agreement.

13. Find flowers on your porch and a chicken-scratched love letter that romanticizes your time together so much that you pace the hardwood and wonder if he’s actually crazy, dangerous.

14. Google the words delusion, alcoholism, frontal left lobe, DSM IV, and pizza delivery.

15. Stalker Pamphlet Tip #1: “Tell the stalker to leave you alone clearly and firmly. Do not negotiate with your stalker.”

16. Email words clear as Saran Wrap: “Do not text, email, call, or come by my house or work.” Hope this will put an end to it.

17. Ignore his fourth emailed request for pictures of the two of you together and his fifth that calls you an abominable asshole.

18. Ignore the Peter-Cetera inspired one that reads, “I’ve been so lucky. You are my hero and inspiration.”

19. Look up from behind your bar to see his mother standing there with Basset eyes. Exercise patience when she tells you that you were the one and hands you a stringy, stuffed mouse for your cat.

20. Don’t bring his belongings to his house, miles out of town, in the middle of the woods. Imagine your head on a pike.

21. Agree with friends when they say, Police, but you don’t call because he’s on probation and don’t want the responsibility of him in a jail cell. Maybe you’ve always apologized for people. Don’t think about that.

22. Discover your belongings in a box on your porch. No note. Sigh relief.

23. Stalker Pamphlet Tip #2: “Keep a log of incidents. Even if you decide not to pursue prosecution, you may change your mind.”

24. Roll your eyes, 3am Facebook message: “Lately seeing the light at the end of the tunner hasn’t been easy. I muss you.”

25. Stalker Pamphlet Tip #3: “Save any packages, letters, messages, or gifts from the stalker.”

26. Arrive home to a Shel Silverstein book and lamp on your porch with another love letter. Assume the lamp is to illuminate the pages. Stick both on the table in your kitchen that used to house a sewing machine but has now become a stalker repository.

27. One-month tally: items on porch, 7; letters in mailbox, 9; Facebook messages, 28; emails, 64; text messages, 117. Responses from you: 4.

28. Open a letter that begins as a Just-Wanted-To-Let-You-Know-I’m-Getting-My-Life-Together note and devolves into a barely legible offer of a private jet slated for Paris.

29. Ask bouncers to remove him from your bar on a Friday night when you see him skulking behind a pole.

30. Tell your mother on the phone that things are great-have never been better, in fact.

31. Stalker Pamphlet Tip #4: “You can have your phone reject calls from anonymous or unknown callers by contacting your local telephone service provider.”

32. Rise on a Sunday morning to find a picture text of his lacerated arm that reads, “Cheers to bleeding and feeling anything, love.”

33. Block his number. Enjoy silence for three days, and almost stop jumping when your phone makes a sound.

34. Discover a hole in AT&T’s service when you awaken to a picture text of breasts with the caption, “great tits.” Mistake them for your own until you realize they are not freckled. Tell your friends this and endure two days of them calling you Old Freckle Tits.

35. Open another letter. “Let’s make babies to save the degradation of plant, wildlife, and anima. P.S. Studying for the GRE.”

36. Think of your ex, the one you almost married, who in your early 20s snuck into your room and hung every stuffed animal from the ceiling fan by nooses.

37. Stalker Pamphlet Tip #5: “Acquaint yourself with 24-hour stores and other public, highly populated areas in your neighborhood. If someone is following you, never go home.” Wal-Mart; the vegan coffee shop that smells like cumin; a gas station. Check. Eyes on the rearview at all times. Notice every other vehicle on the road in Florida is a white pick-up truck.

38. Stop sleeping in your bedroom. The couch is now home base, the TV on, light. Dream of knives, forests, tsunami.

39. Blank email with the subject, “having hand surgery next week, wanna watch?”

40. Pay out of pocket, 1/3 of your rent, to learn that transcendental meditation isn’t your thing.

41. A misspelled message: “Just give us a chnce. What do you have to loose?”

42. Ignore the email he sends that reiterates his mother’s holiday offer of turkey and no pressure.

43. A small, stuffed bear appears at your door, paper taped to its leg. It’s the I-Want-The-White-Picket-Fence letter. It’s the Soul-Mate letter. Develop a language of groans.

44. Hear from him less. Rogue shark in a small ocean that will occasionally graze your leg as you swim but probably won’t bite.

45. Say yes when the Scotsman you’ve had a crush on asks you out, but feel your muscles seize when he drapes his arm across your shoulder. Go home early.

46. Say no when the handsome, bearded guy at your bar invites you to coffee.

47. Say no some more.

48. Buy a new, ergonomic vibrator from Sweden.

49. See him behind you in traffic almost ten months later, and despite having just gotten a dynamite haircut, your hands shake so badly you have trouble downshifting.

50. Go home. Throw out tax returns, expired warranties, love letters. Pack all dresses too short and jeans too tight into Hefty bags. Learn to cook Indian, the apartment stained with garam masala. Ignore the zip of shame in your blood when you climb into bed and knead your pillow into the safe shape of a half man.

Stalker pamphlet tips taken from: http://www.safehorizon.org/index/get-help-8/for-stalking-36/what-should-i-do-if-i-am-being-stalked-4.html