silica on asphalt

the vernacular of a friday night 

in the city punctuated by tires 

sketching patterns on asphalt 

carbon black and silica

synthetics form symbols 

of collective youth rebellion

in the haze of drift

#katyamills

seven

you recently got off the streets. you aren't getting any younger, and you feel your age. chronic pain has kept you from doing the work you love. i was just listening to you tell me your story, all the 'lost time' after you lost your kids and your purpose. but you don't feel sorry for yourself. you found a way to connect with your grandkids and even took them fishing. you still want to live even if you cannot always understand what for. i elevate you to survivor status. we laughed when you told me the story about the time you got shot in the back. you were under the hood in the garage, working on a carburetor, when a stray bullet flew from San Pablo Avenue and knocked you to the ground. once you realized what had happened, you dragged yourself to the office for help. they got you to the hospital and most of the fragments were removed and you walked out of there in under 48 hours. when you got back to work, you walked to the office to thank them. your boss had a parrot he kept in there, and the moment you walked in, the parrot saw you and started screaming: 'I'm shot! I'm shot! I'm shot!"

JOURNAL # 05.31.15

corvette summer by Katya

Thoughts passed and flashed like headlights in the night. Searching. Remembering how it was when we were a little younger and times a little bit brighter, or so it seems. Someone was always killing a pack of Menthols a day and didn't care. Someone might have words with you. The colors of the cars will never look that way again, those lead paint jobs are gone forever. Someone really cared and they still do now... only we won't let them act out on it the same way. You could get sued if you try to help. These things are hard to talk about. The way we get to show we care. Hey, isn't it the last day of May? Let's go have coffee and make it up as we go. Paint the town in some of those beautiful old dangerous colors.

she whose temples -- iii)

She was not homicidal, but violence was in her nature and yours. Her parents became decidedly pacifist in the wake of all the bloodsport they boasted, as documented in the ledgers. Nobody read the ledgers, so pacifist was an unconditionally accepted facade. Neighbors only knew something funny about the spicy chili they spooned out at the annual neighborhood watch block parties, so spiced up with habanero and wasabi to silence the smell of powdered ear lobes, sending a rush of icy air through your sinuses and mine, getting accolades blockwide and block long. Nobody heard the powdered cries of the powdered owners of the powdered ear lobes they could not discern. Suffice it to say, the neighborhood watch was not watching.

She wanted to live, and made that choice early on. Probably around four or five years. Suicide was dystonic to her and distasteful. She knew this clear as her favorite drink in her hand; one part lemon, one part tonic. She held it up quickly at times when her arm and wrist began to falter. To prevent its being corrupted, she drank it quickly. An old and tired lemon and tonic was sad like the first rainfall in the city and all the imminent inevitable car crashes slding on the oils arisen from the asphalt. She approached the Bible the same way. She was confirmed in a Protestant Church, and the version was Good News. She scanned it that year, and basically never picked it up again. Except to box it with the other books every time she had to relocate. Why she held on to a text she found so sad and possibly corrupted, no one can say and certainly not herself. Maybe it was her name engraved on the leather cover? She was hard to figure.     - to be continued

cold steel got love like us -ii-

cold steel got love like us  -ii-
by katya mills
dedicated to my junked 19080 chevy impala


Fresh enough to commute with me. despite her thirty years. and mine.
rough and ragged we went. city to city. sometimes spent. sometimes
full up with gas, speed, and adrenaline. she held me up. she moved me.
city to city. all around the bay. we looked hard 2 most. until you looked
close. we looked funny 2 hustlers, rough & ragged, pushin' double dubs
down international boulevard. They laughed at us girls slidin' on down
macarthur... rollin' slow like gangsters down market or west.

Some stopped and wondered how we came to be. Then pushed easily
past us in their escalade suv's. She and i liked 2 steady watch the watchers
watch as we steady dust them...nahh. not usually, anyway. but we didn't
need to wipe the dust off. My baby was color of dirt.

To get behind the wheel was rollin' back the years for sure. that heavy chevy.
 the steel. the weight. i can feel it. i roll my head back 2 see through clouds.
dust and cracks in the mirror. the wheel like a snake through my black gloved hands.
she rolls us into the far most lane and i kick her train-in-drive. In a second or less,
she kicked back.

We roll over and outside the lines. any poles in our way get bent. i floor her
down the final corridors of early morning fog...her old school. pedal steel. collapses the
wide acute-angle  press 2 floor.

She had had enough of me. i couldn't get enough of her. me and my panic patterned
adrenaline rush commutes over the bay. she lived a life volcanic. She ran best hot.
moved slow in a way, with gravity. Memories always euphoric on my mind.

She was hot by birthright-- sweet, patented, american steel.