jillian gillian and other poems

TOUR DIARY PART 1

Rachel B Glaser and I drove to her parents' house in New Jersey. The Glaser dog, Rocky, tried to catch a chipmunk, but the chipmunk was too fast. Rachel's dad is growing eggplant in his garden. Later, the Lakers blew out the Celtics with the help of a fly that kept darting across the TV. Rachel's mom does not like Roger Federer. She baked us some potatoes for the road. We drove to Philadelphia, took the Ben Franklin bridge, listened to Devendra Banhardt's first CD, and met up with Natalie Lyalin and her husband Josh Bolton. I ate a Cuban(o) sandwich. The cook came out to tell us how he'd put mint and triple sec in the strawberry shortcut. We made "And Other Poems" jokes, but I can't remember any of the good ones. Natalie and Josh talked about how people in Israel can't form lines, so they shout a lot. Natalie's friend Juliette had a nice birdhouse made from scrapwood. We saw a busted TV and two human statues. Someone outside a convenience store said "Gonna kill somebody, gonna get killed." Juliette and Natalie bought each other socks. It was very windy, but it didn't rain until much later. A man without a shirt was directing people into Bookspace. He looked like the guy from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, a little bit. Bookspace was amazing. It is a giant warehouse full of books. It used to be an elevator factory. They had an in-tune piano and an air hockey table. I found a book called The It's Just Lunch Guide to Dating in Phoenix, but much of the advice seemed unspecific to Phoenix.

We did our reading. There was a semi-dramatic lamp. Natalie read from her book, then read new poems about birds and minor stigmatas that were very good. Rachel read "The Magic Umbrella," which was good and funny with such lines as "Growing up, her best friend was a spoon." After the reading, I talked with people about sincerity, and Brian—Natalie's and Juliette's friend—made an interesting well-digging analogy. Rachel and I stayed with Rachel's cousins. They took a zany route home. We talked shit about Apple. We ate some organic Cheese-Its. Their cat, Henry, has paws that look like cookies'n'cream ice cream. I slept under the record player. Now we are off to the "nation's capitol." Thank you for reading.