Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance)

9:26 am on a mid-October Saturday and I’m thinking
about the last time I woke up before noon and woke up
in New Jersey and because there was no free bed I’d been
sleeping on the floor of their apartment, wedged between
a guitar case and a coffee table. I’ve been trying to get pins
and needles out of my left arm, which I slept on again but it
is starting to seem hopeless.

Montclair is busy in the morning
and I walk two blocks to find a bagel place with an ATM. The
woman behind the counter smiles like she is celebrating a holiday
I don’t know about and I pray to her: “sesame toasted vegetable cream
cheese.” Chris sees me from his car and we sit in traffic for a while
listening to our old band on the speakers that still work with the
windows down, taking in sun and wind.

I’m not sure how I remembered
it being but the way it is is long stretches of boarded up windows on
the way to Quik Check, fever moving into my lungs and unwashed
hair. Whole place smells like cheap beer and gasoline, but I forget
that everything in New Jersey smells like gasoline, and we watch
Ghostbusters on my parents’ old couch trying to think of the word
for being home and feeling still gone.