Like Spun Glass

Acrylic on linen , 120 x 90 cm.

Chiffon Cake with Blueberry Compote and Honey Lavender Chantilly Cream

I keep waking up in different beds and in this same body. I have to say this right away so you know it didn't start with limbs slackened, hair oily, a cruelty towards the sun. It started in the backseat of Jessica's Pepto-dismal truck. She tied my hair back with rubber bands when the freeway passed clean through us. Jessica says I can feel like a cherry blossom tree wobbling under lightning. Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else. That night we lose the 7/11 lottery but I draw my lucky number, no quarters so we scratch our tickets with fingernails. Jessica says that's the sanctity of ritual — a ceaselessness in how I look at every drop of rain before it touches ground, the way Jessica mouths my name in her sleep eating each syllable like a minor god. I'm coming out as someone who loves things unevenly, my theologies strewn out in the dark, this iPhone an almost oracle. Jessica forces me to watch every sunset even when I am full. She puts her fingers in my mouth and says open your eyes. Open them. You see the small-town girls on big billboards? One day that's us.

instagram.com/bonjoursimonleclerc

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Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts. I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks. I want to see how many stars are still in the sky that we have smothered for years now, a century at least. I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all, and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know. All that urgency! Not what the earth is about! How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only. I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts. In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

London Fog Cake with Vanilla Buttercream Icing