To The People I Pass On The Train At Night - Jordan Bolton

crystal lupa, "horse of candlelight & grass of nightingale," 2023, oil and gold foil on linen

E. Hughes, from "My Mother at Twenty-One"

my uncle was somewhat of a rascal. we were hanging out on the roof of his barn when i was ten, and we saw some shooting stars. he told me they were angels carrying messages from god. then he handed me his old hunting rifle and taught me how to nick one out of the sky, even when it was travelling all fast like that, and how to triangulate its location — taking me out in his rusty truck down dirt roads, unerring and unceasing, until we saw that gleaming lantern. he pocketed the note from god and took me down to a pinboard where he was working on deciphering the language with his friend who was a linguistics major but got kicked out of grad school. after they shook hands, they held on for just a bit too long and i started wondering why my aunt doesn’t live with my uncle anymore, but then my uncle took me back up stairs and taught me how to fry the angel up real nice, halo and all. it was tasty

I made a list. It's incomplete. Working title:

The pre-apocalyptic "omg moooom" phase:

- ww3 memes

- organising climate crisis protests at 14

- Not knowing the "before". Before the housing crisis. Before 9/11. Before Reagan laws. Before debt.

- no going out. No dates in cute restaurants. Do I look freaking rich.

- Amazon or Nestle owning everything you have ever had

- America just.... I'll just say America.

- Being 5th grade when Trump came into office

- No being able to turn off the ads. The manipulation. Ever. The deep psychology approach to making me despise myself since I learnt to decode information

- constant exposure to violence and suffering numbing us until we're called ignorant and heartless for not reacting

- social media algorithms specifically designed to crush and turn me into an addict. Since before I got my period.

- no more girlhood. You know how to pull an eyeliner and perfectly curl your hair in 7th grade or you die.

- no public spaces. There's Sephora, there are some chain restaurant. And if you feel like feeling a drop of relief you buy a Starbucks.

- Cyber. Bullying. Being on your own. Your parents have no goddamm clue.

Where's My Fucking Teenage Dream but it's real. Where's my fluffy 90s hair, my glitter hair combs, my shopping-as-a-hobby, my milkshakes, my prom? Where's my "my favourite colour is yellow?" Yellow like Butter Flowers, not like toxic waste. Can we talk about growing up in the years before a global system snaps? I was 7 when I read a picture book about Anne Frank. Who knew the early knowledge of how to spell 'death' would be so handy.

how many times can you live through the apocalypse?

when you were little there was this beach that was free to go to. you didn't really like it on account of the litter. at one point, a white bag caught around your ankle, and for a moment (fish child), you panicked about jellyfish. on the foam, the red-pink words read thank you, stacked on top of each other, tangled in the kelp.

they have a new program (three thousand american dollars) to send your dead relative to the moon. there is a lot of evidence that our local orbit is becoming ever-more dangerously populated with "micro" satellites - debris in a round miasma becoming a thick web above us. maybe angels cannot hear us through the pollution.

you used to picture deep space like a thick membrane, or a blanket. someone said to you once the universe has no edge and that fucked with you for a long time, trying to picture what shape infinity has. your coworker is writing a short story about ecological collapse, which she is submitting for a little side-money so she can survive the current economical collapse.

the birds haven't gone to sleep this winter. that is probably bad. something that actually freaks you out is the natural temperature of human bodies versus the survival temperature of certain fungi. there is a podcast called s-town, in which a man kills himself over climate anxiety. he was probably meant to seem sort of unhinged. it just seems like it is becoming increasingly clear he was being honest.

space is not empty, we have put our dead into the stars. at some point they will figure out how to put ads into our sleep. you need to pay for the greenlife subscription service to be able to save the world.

there is a lot of ways this poem ends. but you have been wearing the same jeans and shirts since you were, like, 18. it is a hard life, sometimes, watching the entire foundation crack. there was this one moment over the summer, where you were shaking with heat exhaustion and dehydration. you were offered a nestle water bottle.

for three thousand dollars, you can send your ashes into space.

instead, you wash out the peanut butter jar. you put the avocado-toothpick spiked seed ball into water (even though they never grow very far). you borrow what you do not want to buy. you pick up any litter you find. you do not have a lot of control, really. but where you do - if there is one thing you can do, you do it.

something about that. you need to believe that must be true for the rest of humanity. or maybe - you need to believe that to be true, or else there will not be a rest of humanity.

Oh my god I'm listening to California Dreamin' with headphones and. Did you know it's one of those songs that are hardcore spliced up between headphones. Like the female and male voices are mostly coming from seperate headphones.

This makes no difference except for a cool listening experience unless. Unless you take one headphone out.

Ohhh, there's still the faintest echo of the female voices in the male voices' headphone, but half the instruments are missing. It's haunting. It's majestic. It's Denny in a old rehearsal room. It's not really a designated space, it's the backroom of their bar. They jokingly used to call it the backstage area. It's wooden panels that were never glossy. It's Michelle and Cass on old stools with cheap cider. It's Denny alone. It's Denny's guitar, with John's handwriting on its side. It's an empty room that's not used to being empty. You know when rooms sound the most loud when there's supposed to be a hundred sounds and you know every one of them? You think you can hear it out of pure fate.

He can only play as many instruments as his hands can hold. But he plays them as well as ever. There's no tremble in his fingers. He can definitely hear Cass. He can almost see John. When he closes his eyes, he can believe they're through the door, in the bar. Hearing him play. Singing back to him.

California dreaming. On such a winter's day

You know, Tumblr says some pretty wild stuff. And wild stuff that sounds sane, but actually doesn't hold up.

Not this line. I've thought about it over and over since I saw it on Pinterest once, and it's solid. It works in every situation. If you wouldn't go to someone for advice, don't take their criticism either.

If you wouldn't go to someone for advice, don't take their criticism either.

I'm 19 and I stand in my room. Have you accomplished anything if you spent the year running just to end up back in the room that saw all your tears? Isn't the point of running to slow down somewhere else? But then I hear my mom chuckling at a joke I sent her through the door and remember that she didn't do that. Then

I am 18 and I am standing in my room. Sometimes I have to remind myself of how i carried so much stress in my neck then. I sat perched on my bed like a stranger too polite to mention the unusual offered seat. I had slammed a door behind me confident the next one was already open. The dread when the knob doesn't turn. I escaped through a window just to end up on this carpet again.

I am 19. I carry less stress in my neck. I devide friends into neat piles; healing and burning. Like an acid drip working unstoppably through your jeans. It doesn't actually hurt yet but god chemistry was your best subject. I see the acid on her jeans but we're adults now. Adults don't grip each others' arms until the circulation cuts off to keep from the cliff. I can make you a tea.

I make tea. I've always made tea. Perhaps that's the beauty of 19. The only novel thing in this poem, the oldest of all things. It's called an adventure at 8, a hobby at 15, a habit at 19. Hello. Would you like a tea. I was making one anyway. Really, I'm quite good at pouring it now.

sometimes you are 19 standing in the kitchen wondering how you forgot to have breakfast and lunch today, how you will exit the teenage in 47 fridays, how you used to love watermelons 4 summers ago and now you can't even stand the sight of it, how there were floors that saw you wipe them clean off your own tears once, how you changed your favourite coffee recipe last summer because your bestfriend liked it and you guys haven't talked since then, how the new book you're reading was never really your type but you love it, how you hated your hair for 9 winters, how the windows of your new house are bigger, how you feel bad for hurting them, how maybe making mistakes is okay, how maybe you don't have to not eat that cupcake when you go out today, how the wind feels too right whenever you snuggle into your bed, how you were 17 and all the winter ache wanted you to open your kitchen drawers and look for warmth. how then you didn't know someday you'll be 19 standing in the kitchen wondering if you forgot to put sugar in your coffee again.