Angels

Imagine snow. Imagine the symmetry of falling snow. Imagine the quiltlike cocoon of snow covering earth. Imagine the silence of snow sounding everywhere softly. Imagine you are old and cold in snow. Imagine you are young and running in snow. You dash behind snowdrifts. You compile an arsenal of snowballs. You sprint, picking up speed, before you hurl yourself to the ground and bellysled across a lane of slick snow. The snow is falling in curlicues, in torn angel feathers. It is pooling frosty specters. From out of the snow, or from inside it, you hear your mother’s voice from a distance calling for you to come home. Kisten to your mother’s calling, but do not return home. Stand outside bare-faced to winter and imagine all the dead people you know. They are making snow angels in the snow.

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Tuning

Find an old radio. Instead of tuning to stations tune to years. See how far back in years the bandwidth goes. Choose a year that most suits your mood and mental state in the present moment. Stay tuned to that year for a long spell and see what it has to offer, what it reveals. Between stations, notice how much silence you can find, how much static. Clarify, or purify the station with vivid remembrance of the year from which you just came. Option to leave the radio on all night, tuned to a specific year, while you are going to sleep. The next morning, try to recall what dreams, if any, you had. Also, notice if your surroundings have changed, and if so, how.

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Dial Tone

Find a discarded old phone, preferably rotary, and call someone who is dead. If they pick up, tell them any number of secrets. If they don’t pick up, speak the secrets into the phone anyway.

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Cage

Find a husband. Throw him away. Throw him good and far away. If he returns, buy him a bird cage with no bird in it. Ask him to place a tiny mirror inside the cage. Maybe have him scatter several feathers on the bottom of the cage. When your husband is sleeping, suspend the cage over his sleeping body, his holy not your body. This is his Sword of Damocles. Except it is a bird cage with a tiny mirror and scattered feathers in place of a sword, and you have no husband, and you begin wondering about this body holy yours and the bed in which you sleep with that thing over your head.

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Disturbances

Write Do Not Disturb on a strip of masking tape and apply the strip to your forehead and stare at yourself and the message in the mirror before removing your head and leaving the tape where it is (you, now headless, reflecting on the floating strip of tape).

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Snowbound

Go outside on a snowy night and record the sound of snow falling. When you have collected enough audio, go inside and play back the snow and try to find the hidden silences in its music. Lie down in bed and listen to the recorded snow while recalling someone dead you loved. Find the hidden silence of the dead mingling with the snow. Fall asleep as softly as you can. As if dying and leaving no footprints. As if fading softly into the memory of snow. 

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Ship

Be alone in small solitude in a room. Place votive candles in a scale model of a famous ship, the Lusitania, the Andrea Doria, the Titanic. Close your eyes. See yourself on the ship mingling with the other passengers. Listen to the music the orchestra is playing. Enjoy delicious food they serve. When you are tired, go to sleep (a room has been prepared for you). As you lie in bed, imagine yourself alone in small solitude in a room. See yourself assembling a model ship. Imagine what it would be like to be a passenger on such a ship, to be someone who falls asleep abetted by the rocking lullaby of the ocean.

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Jar

Scream. Scream while dreaming of screaming. Scream inside a dream in which you find yourself screamless, the force of scream living without sound. Scream into a glass jar. Scream many screams into a glass jar. Label the jar Screams and notice how empty the jar, no matter how many screams you place inside. Do the same thing with dreams.

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Eternal Return

Ask yourself where you want to spend eternity. Consider eternity as noun and as a verb. Go into a bare room, a void sanctum of intimate dimensions, and sit with yourself, allowing eternity to feather outward as a flood. Notice how eternity, as a flood, does not fill the room, nor drown you. Repeat this exercise every day for a week straight, each time choosing a slightly smaller room, a progression toward deeper intimacy. When the seven days are up, consider eternity as a noun and as a verb. Consider the rooms you have left behind. Imagine yourself sitting in the rooms, and absent from the rooms. Tell yourself a vacant room is a dream. Tell yourself you sitting in a room is a dream. Forget eternity as a noun or as a verb, rid yourself of grammar altogether. Write a story about your experiences.

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Maraschino

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