Rhapsody in blue pt 1

Rhapsody in blue dish soap:

My friend and I are eating chilaquiles at the breakfast diner before we head to the penitentiary. It is 8 am and we are talking about secrets. Somehow I am comforted by the space we keep digging at like a sandbox that I can’t even contain my surprise. How relief floods each new crack. How we are able to make new fissures.  

Ileana sighing from the other side of the counter,

'Thank you for letting me watch you wash dishes. It is very calming, the way you do it.'

She comes up sometimes from Mexico City, Paris, wherever, and plops her sweet black linen sleeves and philosophical woes on the counter and I say what would like darling and she says just a small teensy coffee please merci beaucoup d’accord.

I’ve been searching for words to write and they’ve been in the palm of my wrinkled hands.

The obviousness of it; A rough through line of dishes. Clean and warm and scraping and scrubbing and of using the wrong device to clean non-stick and using Irish spring soap in Yellowstone at midnight by the campsite bathroom, giggling because we drank cheap whiskey sprites in that burgundy truck and there was a snowstorm coming that morning after fishing in t-shirts..

Dishes; how I contribute. How I take up space without taking. The domesticity of nourishment.

How I remember my dad’s yellow dish gloves and having to finish before I could go out for the summer night. The wide sheet pans of the galley. The wide coconut-oiled pans of that vegan co-op.

Hiding out at every dinner party in the kitchen sink. Friends knowing. I remember the way I’d bumble around the choppers and the preppers not knowing how to help. A sigh of relief when a pot was tossed into the empty sink. 

I dreamt of a sadness or a crick in my side that shows up as not knowing what silk shirt to put on, when everything else seems so easy to the room. When he doesn’t show up or when he does, annoyed.

We discuss my dilemma while sautéing mushrooms in the cast iron as I pick through edible green beans out of the pile and he sears the ribeye. 

The problem is my lack of confidence we say

I met a poet today and we both sat on the patio- the one I decorated with prayer flags and potted begonias. Am I doing it all right?

A house in San Diego was near the dog beach and it was light blue. There was a giant avocado tree in the small yard and the avocados had a sour taste so we didn’t eat them because the dogs would pee under that tree. And there were jasmine flowers along the way to the field nearby. He was Australian and illegal. We’d make spaghetti off the back door hatch and drink boxed wine and go to reggae shows at the night market. If you stood on the top of Montalvo you could see all the way to the ocean.  We didn’t have a kitchen in that apartment. It was a basement studio with a dutch half-door that we’d keep open on top in the heat of the night. The dog would bark at the birds in the avocado tree and whenever people would walk by we’d say oh hey. There was a bathtub and I would scrub dishes in the sink. We had a coffee pot and a cast iron hot plate and a Weber grill. We used a blue tapestry to make a bedroom out the corner of the room and there was a shelf for books and we had a giant slab of white marble leftover from one of his build sites and we used that for a coffee table.  I would ride my yellow bike to work and he would drive the Subaru that the landlord sold us on a fair cash plan.  There was an Air album stuck in the cd player it played Sexy Boy each time I started the engine. It was a manual and it reminded me of when I lived in Colorado before that layer....