2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051)
Read 2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) Online
Authors: Nath Jones
Tags: #millennium, #zine, #y2k, #female stories, #midwest stories, #purdue, #illinois poets, #midwest punk, #female author, #college fiction, #female soldier, #female fiction, #college confession
2000 DECIDUOUS
TREES
~
NATH JONES
ISBN:
978-1-9-37316-05-1
Copyright © 2012 by Nath Jones.
All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic
form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or
reviews.
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PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA
Book interior by Gin Y. Havard
Cover Design by Ryan W.
Bradley:
www.aestheticallydeclined.net
For Chris
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
For
the Man Who Bought Me Coffee and Was Shot in the Head Soon
After
*
Monday Night
Rain with Football
Last
Year My Sister Drove Me Up a Mountain
Too
Much Sugar Twang in Voices That Sometimes Get Choked
Sunday
Morning Hangover in a Smoke-Darkened Corner
Eight
Weeks They Told Me to Call Hell
He Asked Me
How to Light Up Love
Reactions to the Broken Heart: a Monthly
Planner
Love Near a
Fireplace in Winter
About the On
Impulse eBook Series
INTRODUCTION
There were only four issues
of
The Skirt
—one
of those reality-bite kinds of zines—before 9/11, which, for me,
changed everything about the grungy apathy and artistic incapacity
of the 1990s when we had endless potential and the freedom to do
absolutely nothing with it.
We were a generation on couches. We had a
fuck-all attitude and considered this a luxury. We wrote what we
wanted and stapled it together for friends.
Of all the moments of Scotch tape, scissors,
darkroom chemicals, cardstock, sketches, fonts, stacks of paper on
the carpet, heavy-duty staplers, cool pens, trips to the copy shop,
coffee, and collages, my favorite production memory is of my
boyfriend taping the black, duct tape bindings of that first hot
pink issue. He was so precise about something bound to be
informal.
Hundreds of copies
of
The Skirt
were
mailed from my little apartment at Purdue. The zine was sprinkled
everywhere: Chicago, Madison, Indianapolis, Austin, Grand Rapids,
Lancaster, Alameda, Poughkeepsie, San Antonio, Boston, Santa Fe,
Brooklyn, Rochester, Denver, Athens, Springfield, and to the guy
upstairs.
Issues of
The Skirt
went to a
friend stationed on a military installation in Korea and also sat
in a Sarasota hospital waiting room between checkups when another
friend was having her finger reattached.
The Skirt
was the subject of academic discussion in Poland
and was read with late-night laughing cigarettes by the cool kids
in New Orleans. A friend teaching physics for the Peace Corps
received issue number 4 in Kenya while another copy traveled across
thirteen time zones with a dear friend who told me in a letter, “I
went to a native island in Indonesia where all the natives wear
loincloths, etc. I missed a perfect chance to get a picture of them
reading (er
looking at
)
The Skirt
.”
It’s strange to look back at this writing.
The maw of one’s twenties is frightful. But I’ve left most of the
pieces intact with all the embarrassing vigor and hope of their
careless origins.
ANY PILE OF
WOOD
Alone
isn't one day of sitting on a rock exactly the right size for
you. It isn't the deep furrow in your father's brow. It isn't
Mother’s giving-up and watching the window eternally. It isn't the
neglect of the community or a lack of friends.
It's a force, an emotion, like love. It's
wanting someone to come in the door when you're naked. It's talking
to a dinner guest who wasn't ever invited. It's noticing that the
grout between the tiles in the bathroom is black and taking the
time to paint it deep forest green.
It's crying when you see a mannequin being
dressed in a storefront window. It's endlessly arranging the
furniture in your mind without the strength to move your arm or
your feet or your back to move the couch or the bed or the furnace
or the recliner. It's waiting for the phone to ring and pretending
that’s what you wanted. It's throwing yourself at an illusion. It's
nothing. Nothing but you. And that can mean anything at all.
Alone
is petrification in the bed in the morning, finally giving up
inhibition, imagining what the cat feels as the whiskers escape
slowly from her head, or wondering what the dog’s collar might feel
like, choking on your own happy leash-length run.
It's showering with a mirror between your
legs. It's building an altar over the sink. It's asking that the
clothes you buy for yourself be gift-wrapped. It's patience. It's a
beer belly. It's strong lean muscles. It's repetition and it’s
divorced from reality. It's faith, a religion of constant prayer.
It's worshiping beauty without pursuit. It’s learning. It's
understanding the world and falling through reason over
yourself.
It’s memory with or without regret. It’s
pain.
Alone
discourages living in the present. It is dreaming of an
unattainable future and it’s a consumption by a hole somewhere
inescapable but often postponed. It is the electric bill and
late-night television. It's
Jesus, I guess
I have to
and calling that other fool from
work. It's compromise. It's knowing your body and fearing the
mind's retreat. It's nothing to be fooled around with.
Alone
is the
impossibility of fire as much as any pile of wood and a wet
match.
It’s the soul's house—and often you’re not
even welcome there. It’s void of sensation. It's deafening but
drowned by any interaction. It cannot be staved off by music or
art, no matter how collaborative. It’s the knee against the breast.
It’s the arch of the foot on the edge of boredom tipping over the
furniture. It's forgetting about children and death, dismissing
both in confidence or contempt.
Alone
is never having to wash your hair on an island named by your
mother. You are used to the smell of yourself. Until you get sick.
Time is measured by what's outside the window. And one is reminded
to inhale by the cigarette and
tick,tick,tick,tick,tick,tick,
breathe,
says the second
hand.
Alone
is never without vice: knitting, ice cream, brandy, pink
plastic margarita blenders on the credit card, and empty bowls
lined with popcorn grease, with slippery layers of understanding
and self-pity enmeshed, entangled, one pleasing the other, the
other wanting more.
It is input and
recognition.
Alone
is the time one has to change the world and to think, or
integrate, or study, or believe. It's not too bad for a little
while. It is forever until someone's eyes meet yours.
There’s a time before the choices are made when we can all be
friends.
MY CHAMBERED
NAUTILUS
Haven't you begun to believe
in the twisting fate of this wet
world? Always between building
up, breaking free, and starting
again. That's love swim, you know,
you and me beginning.
Brown striped cream. Your hair,
your skin and eyes. And I
watched with such admiration as
you neatly sewed the bubble day's
film onto the walls of your
circle world. You take such care
with the sunshine of things.
People may be barnacle fools and
cut your feet with their parasite
quick kind of (open close open)
habit world, eating their surroundings.
Snatching up the world’s
fastest times and making
your irregular life so hard.
But you have moved on again, haven't
you? On to the next little room.
I can't imagine in there with you
learning me. I can only see the
afterward. Broken open and dry.
But I'll bet it's all fleshy pink
joy, inside. Filling up new
