The next time I leave your side will be when my body's burning

I woke this morning to the smell of coffee and the bright angles of autumn light around the edge of curtains. It made me think of staying with my grandparents for the High Holidays; I had a very distinct picture of their kitchen with its dark cabinets and the blue-and-white-checked oilcloth on the table and rye toast and bagels on willow-pattern plates. I was on a couch belonging to Michael and Farah and their Halloween kitten Herman, a traditional ginger Persian who is four months old and composed primarily of caramel-brindled fluff. His enormous plume of tail curls over like a skunk's. He has an insatiable desire for shoelaces and also my braid, which he chewed appealingly whenever he caught it outside the blankets.

Despite the extremity of yesterday's travel shenanigans in which the regional Amtrak was almost three hours late by the time it pulled into Penn Station, I made it to Queens just in time to grab an enormous platter of chicken and rice from King of Falafel & Shawarma and shotgun at least half of it in my hosts' kitchen before we fled to Q.E.D., after which the evening was deeply enjoyable. Andrea Wolanin, Fiona Maeve Geist, Livia Llewellyn, teri.zin, Carrie Laben, LC von Hessen, and I all read by turns in a nicely bohemian black box space with an overkill of spotlighting and an audience we really appreciated showing up for reproductive body horror and Planned Parenthood. I saw Sandi Leibowitz and Gabriel Mesa. Michael took a photograph afterward in which we all look impressively punk rock:



Today was supposed to include a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, but I am sufficiently dead on my feet that what I appear to be doing is listening to Farah and Fiona drink coffee and talk to the cat. I am pleased to note that the Criterion Channel will in fact run a bundle of Val Lewton for Halloween. I read a bunch of Mynona and Albert Ehrenstein and Albert Sanchez Piñol before bed and I don't think it did anything to my dreams at all.