last kopeck

One sent him postcards while traveling the world. Another doing meaningful work and being paid handsomely for it. This one celebrated a newborn baby. Where was he in life? Nights at the bar, dropping his last kopeck. Then at his desk writing furious without any promises.    #katyamills

drops like that

Backs pale against the carpet. I knew I was getting close when the titles stood out. The Shining, his pained psychotic face at the door. American Dream I got from a yard sale in Largo, edged in blue, Mailer and his shotguns. She pressured the 20th Century Russian Reader with her palm and we came. I held her as we slipped down into cotton fibers. I turn my head to the side and face The Waves. They are breaking and rolling outside. Russian vodka drops me like that, blacks me out. Soon I will be far away. Another city. Another state. - by #katyamills

Royal. [8.16.1998]

The sleep would not come the ink would not run. Close to paranoia in paralysis on bleached sheets, drag off a newport, shallow lying on my side on this borrowed mattress on brown paint roses and thumbtacked vinyl on a slanting floor. And when i drop off a car alarm rebukes me, setting a dog to barking, a call gets a response, and now they all are howling like wolves in a forest. The sleep will not come again. the ink will not run though i try, opening up my journal to the blank page bookmarked. Without words so i sketched a poor rendition of your face from the side, the image vivid in my mind, too bad i am no good at drawing. I make up a wonderful imaginary eye. The following night made up for the last with relentless dreams. Riding around in cars. Running too fast down a hill with a friend and he gets close and crosses my leg and i tumble for a fall. A man walks confidently into my bedroom (plush and much nicer than the real one) to steal me away. My mother getting stoned and accidentally telling me i am beautiful.   

by #katyamills  on 8.16.1998

Royal [8.15.1998]

Exertion to almost dawn evolved into something effortless… the whole production seemed almost pointless but that’s what made it carefree… the later the night the heavier things got… the drinking, the smoking, the chasing… powder folded up with mirrors hide the life lines cracked like former factory floors, the pores like potholes clogged with oil and dirt… rising up from the basement of tax brackets into some starched shirt’s arms… lush Cadillac interiors rolling low on tired struts below the immense buildings… the money clean the language dirty. wanting it all. coffee stains the teeth like lacquered tables. a simple twist of a blind loosens tongues behind loveless lips. service workers bending backs for high tips. exhaust bubbles up over a line of pipes along the curb, a stone’s throw from a great lake, outside clubs with cathedral ceilings. sometimes life is a mess, empty pockets and hurt feelings.

by #katyamills from 8.15.1998

suffer 4 not believing

Millions of phones ring simultaneously every second on earth. A couple side by side at the top of twenty stone steps. The relaxed lips of lovers before the heavy orange door. A car drives past, music blasts. Kids shouting out. Coming so close on a scratcher and losing. The one who caught the bouquet at the wedding again and still unmarried. Sunflower with a dark center. We are possessive, scared of losing, of who we are without it. Apartments and homes hopelessly cluttered beyond recognition. Drawn away from whatever we are doing. Tempted to drop the cigarette on the carpet and walk away. Life is simple and absurd. Breaking the truth to someone way beyond what they believed and having them stare at you tearfully wondering why you are unreal. Life is complicated. Now you are the one to suffer for not believing. Life is strange. with nothing to do you drink vodka and join in song home on the range feeling emotionally withdrawn.   #katyamills. 8.20.1998

Royal #9.14.1998

Not trying to be anything other than you was beautiful the same way silence was. When I dropped the fear of precursory judgments it was easier dealing with situations in general: strangers and transactions, getting measured up to standards. I was in my mid-twenties and on my own in the world when i figured this out after so many fails. They saw right through you out there, the ones who were surviving out there by staying alert. They tested me less once I made it. Coming off capable if not fearless, not so awkward and green. You can feel it when you have entered this dragon. You are the city in its many expressions and the streets are within you. My eyes turned asphalt and my body to clay under a soft rush hour rain.

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [9.13.1998]

The top of the back stairs looks over the string factory and the windows filter out all the sun’s colors excepting the blue and can barely be seen through. On a Saturday night the workers are wishing they found another calling trapped in this ball of yarn. The potatoes are ready to come out of foil after I go down three flights to give the dryer my washed and spun clothes. There’s a heavy Mexican in the apartment below stirring beans on the stove, door open, television singing over the baby’s cries. I can see the tomato cans lined up in the pantry. The canned goods they don’t embrace change, either, you have to shake and hit the tin with your palm, they don’t want to come out, it’s better in there than being dropped into a pot and cooked into another life and consumed. My cactus keeps dying and coming back to life. Same with my guitar. It’s my fault. I keep playing favorites and the typewriter always wins. I have to turn down my stereo to hear my phone ring. Lenny Kravitz is a romantic. I am paying attention and it doesn’t cost much. If your phone never rings you distrust people. If you keep your phone off or off the hook, you cannot trust yourself. A candle that is melting without a burning wick tells of summer in Chicago. A single word in any book is less trivial than any single image on all of television. Which is a demonstration of seeing the world through my values. The secret to happiness is acceptance of suffering. People living in a hard part of town are more decent and less frightened. Reality is scarier than fiction, but not as scary as not being real. This paper is thin legal. This is the best typewriter paper around.

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [8.30.1998] part 2

 8.30.1998 (part 2)

There’s always one you say I love you to but you cannot love because they make you suffer, and the more you love them the more you suffer. And you know you’re not easy to love by any means. The red sky and screwdrivers settled the tension in my head. Can you blame the vodka for the first kiss that started it all? Spin the rack and pick your poison. Early autumn air tickles the throat and we share a hot shower on a winter night, candlelight. Here I am again. How? Why? Cea Cita sits by the bathroom door in cobra watching the curtain ripple, jabbed by elbows, and the auburn dye is bleeding off my head and into the drain as you hit me with the sponge. Tonight you will leave the party with an old acquaintance of mine and I will have to wonder why, of all the people in the world I had to run into randomly, that fateful night in Wicker Park, when I was so wonderfully disciplined in avoidance, it was you. I could not resist the euphoria. The dangerous way our blood spiked in contact. It surprised me as much as you. Your eyes were so wide. What was I to do, say hello and goodbye? In the intoxication of a Chicago night in July? Maybe it’s time to change the locks. Take the silver key you gave me put it in an envelope and slide it under your door.

 

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [8.30.1998]

This night they called the lover they wished they did not love, broke off the call and got a call back, not needing to communicate to read minds and end up together, effortlessly, despite both trying hard to stay apart. They felt like they were running stop signs. About to play out another drama in the heat of a summer night in the city. They walked six blocks to her house with a bottle of red and let it breathe on the table next to the cork on the screw while they caught up. The Persian cat lay on the arm of her beat up old couch with a casted paw she had broken from the three storey fall. She was going on about an incident between the couple who lived below her and how her girlfriend had come up crying because he was out of control again. They poured two glasses and took in the bitter taste, cheap wine, and put their elbows on a window sill and looked down. Their was an abandoned school bus on the corner of Washtenaw and Division. It was a pretty rough part of town and the streets were poorly lit. A few glasses of wine and she was getting moody. They anticipated something popping off and sunk deeper into the couch. Division was a thoroughfare and steady hopping. Could it be so bad even the cat wanted out?

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [9.30.1998]

I searched the dials for intelligence and found none. I stopped at the Chicago Press to pick up a letter and took the bandana off my head. One woman stared at my birds nest. She was old enough to have given birth to me. I stared back at her and noticed a touch of fear like she was worried the untamed mess might reach out and strangle her in this antique elevator which was no more than a cage in a shaft with shiny buttons smelling of oil and grease. There are many of these in the art district near north of Chicago. Here was an attendant sitting on a stool who operated the thing and I imagine whose secondary role was to watch over idiots or children tempted to extend limbs through the collapsible metal gates in the back and front. As we ascended he began fiddling with a small battery-powered radio searching for intelligence or a clear signal. Sometimes I get a feeling like elevator attendants are one with the elevators over which they preside. I know it's fucked up but I imagine they never have to leave, they have no appetites no urges no homes; that they occupy a time and space curled back on itself like an eyelash with super hold mascara: a complete circle, inseparable, unitive. I loved being in there with them and my birds nest. For a sacred moment my problems went away. The lady who could have given birth to me didn't ruin it with words. Her perfume was pungent and as offensive as my head. When I reached my floor I followed the signs in the hallways and everything went black and white. I'm in a Perry Mason episode. The frosted glass. The long quiet halls of oriental rug. The Times New Roman fonts. The antique lamps lighting the way. Film noir. A lady at a desk had my letter but it wasn't a letter. It's an architectural firm and a blueprint safely rolled inside a cardboard tube. Hazel eyes. A streak of gray in her brown hair styled around her round face. She smiles. They are not alike. I would have said this morning they are all alike but they are not. She saw something in me which I could not see in myself. A becoming? How mysterious. I did not dare ask because like many things it's better not to know. I prodded the truth and it did not yet hurt, not like the white lies. Not like the black coals that taught cats how to dance. I will hold on to this smile because it's the only one I'm going to get on this ten hour shift which will end far out past the suburbs on a deep stretch of highway, inhaling midwest farmland.   by #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.1.1998]

 10.1.1998

The cold front is here and I shut my windows which upset Raccoon who lost communication with the alley cats. Out of love for her I open one and she stretches down before me on her front paws with gratitude then leaps up to the sill. I had a cold but the cold front was so cold it killed my cold, swear to god. I am driving for a messenger company in my grandma’s Mercury Sable, may she rest in peace. I broke out my wool hat with the bulldog and pulled it over my ears and hit the road with my cell phone, pager, a boiled egg and green apple. There are leaves falling across my windshield and football on talk radio. I am waiting at a light on Ohio facing a billboard of a woman smoking Slims. I wave off a Chicago Sun Times salesman in a tan leather jacket and the junky asking for money at the gas station will have no luck with me today. The street cleaners left a neon orange ticked under my wiper blade demanding a fifty spot. You wouldn’t know they clean wallets. They don’t advertise that. Downtown a black man is passionate about how the whites are trying to put him down. A well-dressed woman in heels and a fur coat hails a cab. The modern art installments in front of the state administration buildings are eyesores to me. The sky high Amoco building gives me bearings; I am disoriented on Dearborn. I don’t get a lunch break but my mind wanders between deliveries. I am thinking of a guy I bailed out of jail in Florida last year. He called me again last night. Somehow the court has my address for him and sends letters about his failures to appear, and when he calls I open and read them to him. Are you wanted in many states? I asked him. This was meant to be a joke but he answered it seriously. Only two. He is a troubling glimpse at a chapter in an awfully frightening book. But when I think about it, he’s not that bad… it’s not all that bad. I am peeling and eating my egg. I’m curious about one thing… how did that nice guy who owed him money, die?  #katyamills

First Year In The Valley

She quit smoking and began running to teach her lungs how to process oxygen as they seemed to have forgotten. Being in recovery she was trying to be helpful anywhere anyhow. She stood on the Tower Bridge watching the starlings flit and spiral around the golden verts, exploding in color, showing their bellies to river and sky. Thinking back on her first year in the valley.   #katyamills  1.10.2024

Royal sessions [10.2.1998]

What if it was premeditated what if it was orchestrated what if they broke in and attacked her what if she wasn't strong enough or fast enough to get a dough roller and crack it over their skull? The slightest movement or sound and she played it out to the fearful end. It took a precise and steady routine, a military exercise almost, to get herself back to baseline. She knew she was ridiculous. The dude was locked up in a max state pen and he was too miserable and weak to risk getting sliced into ribbons by barbed wire. Of one thing she was sure. She wasn't gonna let fear get the best of her. Bad things happen to good people, which explained why her grandfather was lying on his back in his small bedroom dying of a terrible and punishing disease. She got up and brushed her teeth until they foamed. She talked to someone with a big reputation without a voice without a face without a driver's license or an address whom she called god. She sang the most joyful songs she could remember at the top of her lungs.  

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.3.1998]#2

Shadows, shadows. Sleeping on the mattress on the floor her head and feet were cold. The night before they went to the Montana for drinks. Someone told her she dressed like a common thief and she took it as a compliment. There were scratches up and down her arm where the cat thought she was a fish. She and her neighbor walked to a Costa Rican restaurant where they served up these phenomenal oatmeal shakes. Monetta kept her style big and loose to reflect her personality, and the many black curls were always reaching and playing and tangling. The world needs a good shake.

by #katyamills

Royal Sessions [10.5.1998]

Storms carry clouds over Lake Michigan like a doomed zeppelin. They boarded up some of the many vents in the apartment to mitigate the wind and make it through the winter without too high a heat bill. The needles on the tops of the Sears and Hancock towers puncture the clouds and the yellow cabs slide on bald tires across the oily streets. Her oldest kid got a job in a hardware store making keys on weekends. Hands grip hammers and pliers and the sound and smell of metal being cut up into unique patterns, silver and gold slid on to rings with other older keys which makes your world seem bigger but really it's smaller as you leave behind the wide open spaces that most find unbearable as they drive into their garages as the final joints pull the door up and parallel to cement floors. I will survive was declared the best disco tune of all time yesterday and she was feeling it, gosh darn it, she got all her life to live, yes. She fucking hated disco for some reason but the song was great great great. It would be a busy day at work and she was loading up on coffee and getting ready to conquer. There would be no more sitting down at any kitchen table because who has time for that? She was always moving about, taking care of the kids, the pets, and herself if she was lucky. Gone were the evenings of saying prayers before meals and patiently cutting and eating one's food. Gone the breadwinner and patriarch, too. The kids were very little then. Yes she was irritable, anxious, stressed, and not so happy. But when she was happy watch out, you might not be able to handle it, she was really fucking joyful. A contagion of fear and doubt had swept over the land a long time ago. Everyone relied on keys and it was considered ridiculous and stupid to leave your doors unlocked anymore, which gave her son plenty to do at the store. When he came home he helped take care of his brother who spent long hours watching the world through the windows like a cat, the rain beading on the glass and streaming down into the rivers to the street. He wanted them to know where he was, he wanted to show them where he had been and make them guess where he might end up. One day to return to the anonymity of a cloud that learns to cry. He had lost the ability to express it but he wanted them to know. The sun would pull everything together some day.   

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.8.1998]

Someone had broken the lightbulb in the hallway. Someone had been breaking into the mailboxes. Someone kept unscrewing the front door knob. Danger in the air but she didn’t mind. The landlord kept having to change the locks and the landlord’s helper slipping shiny new keys under the tenants doors. She would rather live here than in the wealthy part of town where people were often smug and pretentious and could be so entitled. She had to have another talk with the postal worker and caught him just as he was leaving. Someone’s been breaking in again. Let me show you. She keyed her slot and pulled it open and then gripped the metal with her hand and pulled and the upper metal rim that ran along the tops of all the mailboxes pulled out slightly from the wall. See? Anyone can access anyone else’s mail! Can you get this fixed? He had already lost valuable seconds on his route. Miss, I just deliver the mail. He pushed the row of boxes back into the wall. Please don’t mess with that. Yes! But who do I talk to? If I have a credit or bank card coming, it’s likely to be stolen. The man shrugged. He started to wonder if she was a thief. People were strange like that and would show you something just so they wouldn’t be fingered for a crime. You all have got to talk to one another. Find out what’s going on. Someone probably just lost their mail key, so they’re opening from the top to get into their own mailbox, not yours. But sir, she protested, the box is broken! He shook his head. You all need to communicate. Knock on doors. With that he walked out the front door and on to the adjacent apartment building. But it’s a federal offense! She yelled after him. She put her hands in her hair and sighed. She was worried less about the neighbors and more about shoddy careless government officials. The people here were kind and demure and often just trying to get by. Grounded in reality. She could hang her messed up head of hair out the window on a Sunday morning and scream at god and nobody would care.


In the drug store on the corner a two liter slipped from her hands. An older woman was pulling sugar from the shelves and the bottle was rolling toward her soft shoes. A nagging back ache prevented her from helping physically but she had kind words to speak which in her youth would have remained kind thoughts. Be sure to open that over the sink when you get home, dear … but if you put it back and get another, well, I didn’t see anything! She tried to wink but due to a faulty eyelid she blinked.


She smiled and picked up the bottle at the older woman’s feet. What, and let someone else buy it and get blasted by soda? That had happened to her before. She took it home herself and loosened the cap a little over the sink to let the pressure out. Then poured herself a glass over ice and lit a candle for company. Her face could breathe. She was tired of people and sick of being on television. Her life was a nightmare of giant human-operated cameras staring her down. She only had tonight and she would make every second count. Tomorrow it would start all over again. She would shower, make tea, dress, lock up, wait for the bus, take an elevator up the high rise, greet everyone, small talk, get made up, compose herself, become all business, sit up straight in her seat, deal with any and all last minute adjustments of lighting getting situated, check the clock, the teleprompter, look into the lights. This life was not the one she had imagined for herself but it paid the bills. At the end of every day she went home alone and, despite everyone and their mother prying into her love life or wondering why in her late twenties she wasn’t yet married with kids, it was her choice and this was how she liked it.   

by  #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.11.1998]

Like boiled water feels tea. Like rhythm it could not be seen only felt. Like empathy pervades a room of liquid bodies in cotton polyester and leather. Giving made it all run. Giving your all for nothing in return. Oils and canvas looked into the sun of a thousand thoughtful inspired faces and the artist long since deceased. Outsiders were not insiders though no one was actually excluded. The meaning seekers often ran with false narratives they claimed to be true. You can make money but you cannot actually exploit it because it could not be exploited. Yes, the newsprint in plastic at the dewy morning doorstep brought it to peaks and valleys of world eye watching, falling under scrutiny and misunderstanding to an unceremonious public death. It had a difficult sincerity about it. A paragraph in one of history’s tomes would do it no justice at all whatsoever. But this would not matter because it did not need justice or publicity or anything else. When the course of the earth was navigating too close to the sun, basements and attics would be frantically searched for it, so to bring the world back to some fantasized forgotten condition, it would not resist being rediscovered, mourned and celebrated all at once. Not at all.

by #katyamills

Typewritten on my Royal (2.26.98)

2.26.1998

A fifth of liquor followed four days of anger and then I was done. Done drinking, done being angry. I uncurled my toes like a good boy and sat patiently. I did not look up until she was standing above me. She was awfully still which meant she had made a decision. Well? I asked, what is it? I prayed she might surprise me but my prayers went unanswered. Now I had to take her spoken words seriously and bring myself to believe, though I could not be moved by them, by anything.  I had next to nothing left after a hundred hours of basic misery, watching tv until tv was essentially watching me, locked in my house, seated in the center of a room, dangerously safe, talking to myself, lost in a language full of images only I could decipher…Wrap the dutiful land with sky and milk, the clouds round and full with the dimmest hope, waiting to be sucked. The side of my face presses into an interminable chain link fence. Blood dripping like a leaky faucet. The pastures turn green. Sweat off the iron palms. My fingers wrap around the links and my body goes limp. Inseparable against the sky. Do not care if we live or die. The ghosts within me began to wail, long slow and rising from the caps of my knees to the pupils of my eyes. I woke from semi-consciousness to the aching of my calves and feet in Japanese position. My arms were somehow upraised with a power I had not bestowed. I remembered her and what she told me, before she even told me. And after she gave me her decision I was unable to be moved, I was speechless. I was sorry but I could not apologize. The good news was that the air began circulating again and the oil began lubricating my pores and I was no longer suffocating, and I could bring water to my lips and the chain link fence was gone. God had carved our lifelines and the sky was still with us.  

by #katyamills

the green bridge

there was a man who appeared to reside on the green bridge these past several months. often seated, his back against a bolted cross, facing southwest toward the confluence of rivers. with drink and belongings in packs. for months now any time i passed we signaled. yesterday (on my approach) i became excited to wish him well for the new year but he was gone. i looked down through the gaps in the rail. the waters swollen brown with mud and runoff from the hills. and wished him well regardless.  #katyamills

23,000 steps

we are inside a pyramid, light show on the wall. a solo horn feels its way into our hearts. the kids all look spaced. we are in our hotel room on the 15th floor and i slide the curtains open. sky meets mountain in a ragged line becoming more defined. pulled up to perpendiculars by the various hotels. the Westin, MGM Grand, the Hilton, the Platinum. our time here is ending after 23,000 steps. what will 2024 be like? i promise to be the same. someone who you can rely on.  #katyamills