We Wrote a Letter to Jesus and He Told Us To Buy a New Car
There were sinister red marks on the dog where its hair came off
I had just moved back to the city after having been away for three years at school
It was around the same time I went out on a blind date with someone and dropped my keys under the bar at the Villa de Roma
Although I had no money I had several typewriters
In our childhood, we were all victims of DDT
I kept wiping my mouth on parts of the table napkin that I hadn’t soiled with my lipstick
The more I learned about my driving from rude strangers, the more I understood extinction
It seemed like everyone back then was making a film using one of those toy video cameras Fisher Price had come out with
On the ground, an egg sandwich absorbed the rain and disintegrated down the gutter
The sound of the CAT scan was just gaining prominence, getting louder and louder with each passing season
Poor as I was, I had friends with less
The museum was free on Sundays but I had to buy them coffee and once, a tuna melt
Since that day at the beach my digestive tract began to exist outside of my body
In the back of our heads somewhere—voices of our great-grandparents speaking in German, comfortable in their lonesome canal-town
The new car turned out to be a rainy-blue ’64 Buick Skylark with taped-on plastic material for the rear view mirror instead of glass
The way I’m lighting all these candles to save electricity makes me a real fire hazard
A lot of pretending goes into the appearance of water and electricity
For larks, we used to pretend we were courtiers, and our dog was of the 5th rank
I documented many aspects of our lives, but not our dog’s
Fifteen years later I remember the look of the crowd but not what the speaker said
Once I start listing them I can remember hundreds of these crowds
That must mean something
I see plenty of famous people (celebrities) around town but I forget them within seconds
Dear Me, I used to start a lot of letters that way
One conversation stands out, on a beach in Atlantic City
We had nicknames for everyone both consequential and inconsequential
I got a bit of advice from sisterly types about what to do about my name at the neighborhood bar
We heard people spray graffiti on the side of our house and it wasn’t even that late
Homes were sinking too, there were sinkholes
The whole time everything was happening I kept trying to find words to describe our own small, austere circumstance
Dogs woke us up early each and every day
It was alright to waste our time as long as we could choose how to waste it
by Arlene Ang and Valerie Fox
Download the MP3 (reading by Arlene Ang and John Vick)
For process notes, see “In retrospect, 1984 made a fine sausage“
qarrtsiluni 
I find the fragmentary nature of this piece quite attractive. there is something exciting about leaving it to the reader to put the mortar around the bricks.
:-) and oh, my, i love the title.
and the lines”The more I learned about my driving from rude strangers, the more I understood extinction”…
“Since that day at the beach my digestive tract began to exist outside of my body”
i am curious as to why there are no full stops in the poem. did you do that on purpose?
this is a very rich and wonderful reading, a real object.
i wondered what an accompanying video might look like.
I love this style, it reminds me of the work of Jenny Holzer (example: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~field/holzer/living.txt), who I’ve admired for many years now. So many evocative lines, I just keep re-reading it.
Thanks for these lovely comments–they’re inspirational, really, will give us ideas…
I think sometimes not having full stops can create a fairly pleasant kind of floating feeling…you sort of have it both ways, connected yet unconnected (meaning-wise) if you know what I mean!
Valerie
From the title I could already tell Arlene is involved in this piece – marvellous titles the pair come up with (and also “In retrospect, 1984 made a fine sausage–”).