from Laaura Goldstein: city story

i’m just walking and blessings come in from all different directions under rainclouds, 

split by the trees’ new leaves, bounce off the sidewalk. flung above the city is a vast 

gray sheet that feels cool and soft. it’s been quiet here in this room so far but more 

people will soon come into the building. a message from you came in earlier with more

information about how the past is the past and all that. i keep worrying that newcomers 

will attempt to come in to this room, that they’ll try the knob, which i’ve locked. i try to 

settle and sink in to a different story, or a few. as my senses go peripheral, i go about 

first finding the shape of this space 

i get tired all of a sudden. i had been reforming families by drawing lines between dots 

in my periphery as i finished flying in from the outside to this exact spot. i settled and 

sank into myself like I always do, finding the shape of the space around me, its lines 

fit like a room. it continued to get dark for a while as i pieced together the afternoon: 

a gaggle of dancing children skipped in and out of dance studios one and two. I 

started hoping for quiet way too soon

it was raining a couple hours ago when i went inside but i’m not sure what it’s happening 

out there anymore. i met the caretaker of the building briefly when he came through and 

he asked me if i needed anything but i had just found the forks after two days of opening 

drawer after drawer. like most things, they were up high out of my reach. they were above 

me. until, still exploring, i noisily dragged over a kitchen stool, climbed up and discovered them

this story, our story, it’s a mystery. why she wrote what she wrote and why I had thought 

there would be more but now I understand. when I got here, i cried about it, the part where 

you can’t go any further and as you get older you learn deeper and deeper the places you 

can’t travel to. find the balance between negative space and the day’s real shape, a snapshot of

space is only flattened when examined. the room you are now in will soon be a different room 

i create more space and draw lines that pull further from my center, stretch me out and i can

finally feel the world again, breathe through the green fingers of leaves as it all arrives in poetry.

of course i dreamed about how to respond to you, fragments of oh of course i understand and

that’s what people do, and when i wake up i realized i dreamed the whole letter to her, top to

bottom, through and through. would i really be that effusive? embark on an entirely new dream

language, then translate it, to prove something to you?

sometimes i’m inside two storylines (or a few) at the same time. one where you are you and 

one where you’re her. even saying that this gives me perspective would be an overstatement 

in the event that i return, say, in a dream, to how desire and despair spill into the first forms 

of language. so here i am now standing in front of a huge weight suspended in the middle 

of a room by an artist who put a huge tire on a huge hook all coiled in chains, and it hangs

there, unbelievably still, all storylines equidistant and real