RachelVB.com

Month: April 2011

  • The Monday after a storm

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    rachelvb
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    Please go away, Mr. Chainsaw. Even the birds say so.

  • Odd Block, by Kay Ryan

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    rachelvb
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    Every Swiss-village calendar instructs as to how stone gathers the landscape around it, how glacier-scattered thousand-ton monuments to randomness become fixed points in finding home. Order is always starting over. And why not also in the self, the odd blocks, all lost and left, become first facts toward which later a little town looks back?

  • Quick cold

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    rachelvb
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    The worse is when you feel it coming. The sandpaper throat when you swallow. The itching in your ears. The high school marching band wailing off key in your head. I loaded up the vitamins, drank some tea, but it’s too late already. It’s like trying to pee on a forest fire to put it…

  • Pictures in a dream

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    rachelvb
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    I woke up scanning the beautiful, haunted images of a friendship lost in a dream. Gray mist and youth. Two girls holding together because they had nothing else to hold on to. I stumbled upon these photographs, set up on a page memorializing the lost time, the lost relationship the regret of letting someone you…

  • Leaderless

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    rachelvb
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    There’s no one “in charge” at work yet. And somehow, despite the 9 years that I’ve been out of high school (I realize that’s not very much, but it seems, looking back, like a long time ago) I’ve been transported right back into a classroom with no teacher. Paper flying, voices screaming across the room,…

  • out on a limb

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    rachelvb
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    Sometimes, like today, I feel like I feel feelings too much to function in a normal world. The everyday work. The chaos. The cellphone world. The internet world. The connected to wires and everything connected back world. I can hardly handle my own feelings let alone reading about, seeing, being a witness to everyone else’s…

  • Run the dogs

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    rachelvb
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    We got up at 5:45 this morning. The alarm was set, but my internal clock was off. 4 to 4:30 to 5. I didn’t dare check the time, but I could sense through the half sleep, the rotations to my side, to my back that the light wouldn’t break for a while. I kept seeing…

  • Converge

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    rachelvb
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    Rain and spaghetti sauce dive together through the house. Sweet and salt. Warm and cool. The birds click in the clouds. If I close my eyes for just a moment, erase the woosh of cars on the street outside, I feel surrounded by light and trees. I feel a forest wild. I feel like walking…

  • Rach and mom do DC

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    rachelvb
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  • Purple lightning, a rusy saw

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    rachelvb
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    I had a dream in DC that I was on an island. The sky was moonless, black. It was a sparse island dotted with only a few trees. There was no way of telling how large the land was because I could only see a few feet in front of me, but I got a…