While walking Friedrich, Will and I saw a woman in distress fall in a crosswalk and stopped to help her. Monday April 11, 2022. I’ve never been in the 7-Eleven at the corner of First and Cherry, but there are always people milling outside of it: talking, exchanging, arguing, smoking, laughing, yelling. Wheeling, dealing. Coming, going, loafing, waiting. That night, the light from the door spilled across the sidewalk onto the dark street, forming a backlit halo around a Black woman’s head as she lifted it from the asphalt, dangerously close to the wheels of a Subaru. Feet shuffled and cars passed on First where she lay in the cross walk, chest down, head up, crying like a baby who was trying desperately to crawl but couldn’t.

I decided to go out for lunch one day last week instead of holing up in the loft. Wednesday April 6, 2022. I walked up Yesler on my way to Uwajimaya for lunch. A man in his 20s with a mouth in its 90s walked past me, his head shaved, tattoos faded across his forehead. Tall and thin, he swayed down the sidewalk, like a stalk of wheat in a Palouse wind. He wore a flannel shirt — too big, corner edges flapping. Paired with black and red stretch pants. Finished with brown leather oxfords and low profile socks.

On our way home on the 24 after foraging nettles in Discovery Park. April 3, 2022 at around 7:00 p.m. She got on the 24 at Queen Anne Avenue North and Denny Way. Fake eyelashes thick and black. Her bosom the most buxom I’d ever seen. Breasts soft and white, plumped up like water balloons about to spill over and plop out onto the bus floor, then roll under the seat as we turned south onto Third. Her hair was blonde and short. Body thick and juicy. I thought maybe she was a guy dressed in drag but her bone structure denied that. You know there are…

Bourbon passed my lips and warmed my chest as I looked down across the Emerald City at night and wondered what I would see if this were not America, but Ukraine. What if I saw fighter jets zooming like flies over Mt. Rainier? What would Occidental Square look like filled with splintered trees, broken glass, and crumbled brick? What would Smith Tower’s white spire resemble crashed to the ground? Lying across Yesler on top of a bus, windows shattered to Westlake…

Saturday February 19, 2022 at 4:52 p.m. Downtown Seattle at the corner of 4th and Marion. When I met Gavin, I thought he was dead. Walking west on Marion Street, I stopped about 15 feet from the Fourth Avenue intersection. He was sprawled on his back in the vestibule of…

Sirens blared and lights flashed red and blue as I passed Seattle’s Central Library. I saw cops and paramedics huddled at 4th and James giving an unconscious man rigorous CPR, his head one with the concrete, ashen and gray. It was weird, violent, and intimate. Two male bodies moving in unison up and down, one of them half naked, the other on top. It felt like walking in on a rape. I felt embarrassed, then sad. Overwhelmingly sad. I parked and just sat there for a minute, putting my head down on the steering wheel. Then I got out of my car and walked two blocks up the hill to see what happened.

Shorebird, pick me an oyster on the rocky coast. Find me a mollusk. Kick me some sand. Orange bill jutting from a charcoal head like a snowman’s carrot, fading into plump feathers of chestnut brown. I see you in desultory flight, invisible hands of air at the moment of lift. Soar, then glide. Pink claws delicate against a pile of mollusks the color of charred blue jeans, texture like shards of kiln glass. …

On Wednesday, America attempted to leave her abuser. While I watched our national horror unfold, I felt triggered. Triggered because I have been here one too many times before. I know what it’s like to leave an abusive man. So did my mother. So do my sisters, my niece, and my daughter. Leaving an abusive relationship takes courage, planning, time, money, guts, support, strategy, luck, and a village. It takes a village. Because it is dangerous. It is terrifying…

The floor was warped but he tried to fix it. He was always fixing things for me. Kneeling over a hole in the floor, squatting next to a…