Notes on Energy

I walk from Atlantic to downtown Manhattan

I walk from my house to Heather’s house

I walk to the subway and back from the subway and back to the subway and back from the subway and back to the subway and back from the subway and back to the subway and back from the subway and back to the subway and back

What I read about energy informs me that the keys are exercise good sleep and conversation. What I read makes me believe reading about energy isn’t the same as exploiting it

So I bike in loops around the lake

I buy a guard to stop my teeth at night

I beg my friends to call, to revitalize me with talk, but all they can hear from my end is shulth shulth shulth

A better biker at exploiting the self-perpetuating nature of energy laps me then laps me again

Much like economy, which layers goods on services til output serves its source

What I provide in the economy is the care of sick and injured wildlife

Even though there are texts and visuals in people’s homes and schools and workplaces about the importance of wildlife, wildlife, as it is, doesn’t do much for the economy

Wildlife can be converted into food or companions or exhibitions and in those states does much for the economy, sometimes makes whole economies in and of itself, but once converted it can’t be called wildlife as it isn’t really wild and no longer lives the same way

In its eponymous state people find wildlife mostly a nuisance

So,

When I walk from the subway and enter the facility where the wildlife are cared for I have to gather whatever energy I have left

When the bittern growls at me from the back of the oversized carrier I use my energy to calm them. I extend a hand and another hand and I place the towel over the bird’s head

When the opossum pushes open the door to their carrier they use their energy to escape to the back of the storage unit where they hide, fearful, until Tristan corners them and grabs them with both of her hands

Sometimes I use my energy to move pigeons from their carriers to cardboard boxes and I punch small holes in the boxes and shovel seed from the bin into a grocery bag then grasp the grocery bag by the handles and the boxes by their handles and walk with the pigeons to Central Park and locate what we in the wildlife economy call the “pigeon tree” and put the boxes down and reach into the bag and close my fist around a handful of seed and throw it! all over the grass then I turn the boxes on their sides and open the tops and the pigeons fly out or sometimes walk or wait until there are enough other birds bobbing plucking seeds from the ground

What I read is an article called “Energy, and how to get it.” I clipped it out of the magazine and stapled the pages together and put them on my desk because I wanted to know

The author’s argument must mean a lack of energy builds on itself too

Another article from the magazine called that feeling “political despair”

Another article from the magazine claimed “although Americans are flush with cash, many have a negative outlook”

Other articles attempted to sell me services or products aimed at increasing or optimizing or transforming enhancing clarifying

One article described how wild salt marshes absorb rising sea water, and how sea waters are rising because the energy people expel producing and servicing has gotten trapped in the earth’s atmosphere, and how wild salt marshes are disappearing even as the waters rise

In all of it the energy of the economy makes a sound like WHERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRK

It shrouds the earth in a film of dead air, of leftover frequencies, it turns sunsets into incredible, literally unbelievable landscapes of color

Regret Diaries (July to October)

DAY 1

Whenever I send a text, my body exists outside of me

Sometimes one of my letters ends up in front of another letter, the wrong letter, and I try to save it like a drunk parnet, stumbling into stumbel or stumple I’m oging donw

I thought I would feel more real the older I got, but time is phantasmagoric, the way it exits my body or my body exists outside of me

I don’t get enough out of my windchimes or understand sex, I’m not even present for it most of the time, not up at the ceiling, not sober, just moaning, glancing at the calendar, suddenly halfway through a year that began tomorrow

DAY 4

My gut tells me what to feel and my brain figures out how to think it

The synapses shift into blanks where sleeping dogs used to lie

I don’t want to join the army or call my grandmother

I want to walk the perimeter of the park and pull wet branches into a bouquet

On the branches are clusters of chokecherries or are they airplanes?

The story goes: in her final years, dementia made her forget everything that had happened to her, and she was happy

DAY 5

Reasons not to believe that there is a measurable difference between what is real and what is not real: the haze of smoke over Brooklyn, the fires burning into it from a continent away. None of it speaks to how it feels to wrestle a lead-sick swan, all the rage of the last century pent up inside a heavy, wafting wing, the draft and her hissing driving you and your knees to the cold tile floor. None of it even touches the swan. It’s not splints or lead tests. No matter what the pundits say, it doesn’t bleed. It does not fly in circles until collapsing on a busy city street, neck torqued from chemicals. It goes outside the apartment and looks up at the sun and moon hanging in the same sky, like lovers turning away, rung in red, almost imperceptible, and even then we barely speak to our neighbors about it

DAY 6

I mean, we’re not all on fire, she says, making a point about the distance between here and Oregon

But I haven’t seen a string of 90 degree days like this, he says in response

While ants multiply along the edge of the window

Conceiving briefly of New York as a god instead of a big town built on a swamp, I’m overcome by grief, but there’s nothing to do about it, so I sip my tequila, courtesy of Arnie, who waves at me from the other side of the bar

DAY 8

Even if sitting with sunflowers, the cloud around my head can be breached by a pair of scissors emoji from any one of the fifteen people I communicate with

My emojis are being sold as private property to some CEO because the way my emotional interior is tethered to the program is profitable

I get depressed at my desk, readying myself for another day

There’s a window, or the feeling of something watching, which I can’t relieve, even if I pour my entire laundry basket into the teething void

The agent of sorrow guides me, scrolling, through a garden where every animal begs for my attention, and in every animal I see a sea of black boxes and me asking for any reaction any reaction at all to let me know you’re there

DAY 10

While my students work, I scrub the fan blades and face shield. I pull wet clotted lumps of fur and dust from the grate. I think about being a sleeping dog with its tongue poking out of a dream about chasing a different, smaller dog. I dream of anything but chained by my eyes to a set of pixels. In that space what I touch is an approximation of a fan; sometimes I even think I can smell the hair caught in it. I turn my laptop camera to the fan, newly cleaned, whirring into a false breeze. This is biology, I tell my students, none of whom look up

DAY 12

Having recently asked my phone for some space, my feelings are hurt when it lights up in the middle of this sentence

DAY 15

My dreams lately have been about boats; in real life, I toss and turn the day’s events over til they turn pink as raw meat

My dream persona I call Tess of the Violences because she whips her long braids at the overripe fruit instead of flopping her hands helplessly at the open window, whining

She doesn’t nap: she witnesses!
She isn’t intimidated by the trees scraping up against her building
She knows the length of a lie from her forehead to her nose
She gets on her scooter and goes goes goes

Two house flies ballet above the mango, although it’s getting cooler
I need my dreams; I mean, Tess and I need each other

DAY 17

In the days leading up to it, I become capitalized by the idea of choice

I stop buying into the language of open windows, and start speaking in tongues to the person I love

I walk two paths at one time, and both are true paths

I put on a suit and then another suit and so on until my body is too big to attend the ceremony

I forget that being seen means being witnessed, then I’m standing in a hotel lobby with a clutch of flowers crammed into my mouth

I’m like, there’s no mirrors in here so how was I supposed to know?

DAY 21

Time passes like rosary beads through fingers

Passes habitually, as if practiced often in secret

Passes more and more quickly the more of it that passes

Passes in drafty reels but lasts in the body

Passes as sun in the kitchen

Passes as it eats up the facts between us

Passes uncontrolled and uncontrollable

Passes marked by indicators, many of which can be found in this text

DAY 23

The floaters don’t disappear no matter how much water I drink

I try amethyst, I try breathing exercises

Matter being the disappearance of other matter, I try not to fret over which exercise to do first

I long for physical and intellectual relief, moonrise over 29 Palms, whatever way of doing eggs

The things I don’t have enough time for go higher than the sound of smoking cars, higher than the smoke itself, illuminated in broadband waves more golden than gold

DAY 27

The new couch doesn’t fit into the space where the old couch was as well as the old couch did. Lying on the new couch--which unlike the old couch is big enough to lie on--I read a line in an Anne Patchett essay that nearly tears me open: “What I understood was that there was no one keeping anyone safe”

Outside in the trees that grow ever-closer to the apartment, and inside where the fan rotates on its patient stand, time passes like a current up and over my head, no matter how high I raise my hands to grab a hold of it, please, give it all back, Peru, the church, being between classes, lockers, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the feeling, driving an interstate late at night, that everything you love most is right here in front of you, and all you have to do is reach

Suzanne Highland is a queer writer from the gulf coast of Florida. She is a curriculum writer, high school teacher, and wildlife rehabilitator specializing in the care of wild birds. Suzanne has received support from the 92nd Street Y, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Brooklyn Poets, where she was a fellow in the summer of 2018. Her work has been published in Apogee Journal, Redivider, Yalobusha Review, and in the anthology “Home is Where You Queer Your Heart” from Foglifter Press, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.