I am having a bad morning after an even worse night.

My daughter, whom I care for alone and drive to daycare alone every day, is having a tantrum and screaming so loudly the neighbors can hear. The neighbors I never invite over, because I don’t want them to see how empty my house is, how I can’t afford to buy a steamer and paint to cover the ugly wallpaper my daughter compulsively rips off, how collection agents call me every few hours and leave angry-sounding messages on my machine. I am alone in this chaotic mess my life has become, because I am a single, alone mom of a restless four-year-old, working overtime to keep us alive.

I am ashamed. Of all these secrets. 



But let’s put all that aside for a moment—because I am going to work.

When I drop off my daughter at daycare, I return to the car and drive the 20 minutes back to my job at a local spa, where I work as a front desk receptionist. When I step out of the car, I am a different person. I have applied a coat of fairy dust to my ruffled feathers. I have put on my smile. I have perfectly tied my imaginary kimono and tucked my obi into place. I am ready to serve. 



Everything is clean, pristine here. The lighting is perfect. I am suddenly someone else. Someone who is happy all the time, who is gracious and fluid, who creates beauty.



When I answer the phone, I say, “How may I serve you?” When asked how my day is going, I smile and say “Excellent, and yours?” When a plumpish 60-year-old guest comes out of her facial appointment, I look at her as if she were the only person alive on earth—as if she is my best friend. “Wow,” I tell her. “You’re glowing!” And she is. 



The skincare therapist is busy cleaning her station, so I offer to do the guest’s makeup—that’s part of my job. Slightly nervous, as I’m still new at this, I assess her face and pray to God, Krishna, the Virgin Mary, all the Muses and Kevin Aucoin: please let me show her she’s beautiful. And she is.

She is a talker, so it’s a little tricky to work on her. Her fine lines (which I will never in a million years refer to) pose a challenge as well: makeup tends to collect in them if not applied carefully. I explain to her what the primer does and how it is enriched with seaweed extract that will hydrate her skin, create a base for the orchid-extract-fortified foundation to adhere to. I ask her what look she usually likes. Peachy, sun-kissed; shiny lip gloss, no foundation, bronzer. I can see that she’s outgrown this look. I don’t tell her this. I’m thinking she could do something a little more glam, more regal. I ask her if she’s with me on that. And she is.

I am going to give her a new look today. Her face, only more stunning. I can see that her dark eyes have a wonderful Egyptian look. I explain to her after applying powder and concealer, that I’m going to use this gold eyeshadow with a little olive green in the corners, to make her eyes stand out and look glamorous. I use lash-lengthening mascara, smoky umber smudge pencil along her lids, and a very subtle cream blush in a bronze hue. I finish that up with a subtle look on the lips: I want her eyes to do all the talking. Just a little lip gloss in a sheer rusty hue is all she needs. The shimmery colors help add a glow that smooths fine lines, but the colors are stately and do not pretend to be teenaged and foolish. She is curious about every step as we go—what is this for? Can you write it down for me? She tells me about her granddaughter’s soccer tournament, her renovations on her deck, and I listen and comment approvingly. It is easy to win people over when you listen and care. It helps make sales as well, but it’s not about selling to me anymore. Sure, I need to make more than the pathetic $8 an hour I’m making here. Sure, I need your commissions. But I am not fishing. I am acting. I am forgetting my pain by creating joy in others. And I am believing. When I show the woman the mirror, I ask if she is happy. And she is.



I know I will go home tonight to an empty house, an empty refrigerator, a crying child who is ready to finally unleash her pent-up aggression on me and only me. I will hear the phone ring and know it’s about a bill. I won’t answer it. I will drive to Taco Bell and sit in front of the cold blue flourescent light of the drive-thru, and order some .89 cent bean burritos fresco-style, because I’m worried we’re not getting enough vegetables anymore. I will sleep alone on the couch or put my daughter in bed with my ex in the middle of the night, and take over her bed—which is already drowning in Care Bears. I will sit in front of my computer because I’m too tired to clean the mess in front of me, and dream. Converse. Plead. Write poetry. Bleed. Try to remember what it is like to have real flesh-and-blood friends around me, to be held, to be talked to with a live human voice. To live in a house where I feel myself spread out like butter, that I am proud to inhabit and maintain. To live in beauty, feeling my power and my tribe of friends encircle me snugly like a hug. To give gifts freely in abundance, and feel that the ground under my feet is my own.



But until then, I struggle. I know I will get to this place of peace—one scraped handful of bricks at a time. Until then, I have this discipline, this practice to help me imagine. For the space of today’s work, I am creating luxury and graciousness. And as easy as it’s become to put aside my problems in the morning, it seems to get harder and harder to put away that grace at the end of the day. Sometimes I find my kimono is still tied, my obi still fastened, my hair still lacquered into place as I set down my daughter’s homely Taco Bell burrito on a plate, discussing the nutritional benefits of beans and tomato salsa.

And I wonder if this practice can become a calling. If somehow, this mood of service is sinking into my bones. If I am learning that through pleasing others, through transforming them and helping them see their own inner beauty through new eyes, I am doing the same somehow to myself.

And I am.

© Sarah Noack 2007

eternally—

you never needed shelter
and I never detained you
in your flight to the stars,
yet here you are—
following me like the tethered moon
across the pale blue morning.

you are pure helium,
floating and drifting
along the glittering edge
of akasha,
playing in treetops of my highest canopy
where rare birds nest,
whose feet evolved
in spiderweb delicacy
from lack of contact
with the earth—

you are the guardian
of my breath,
home of my laughter,
resting-place of my secrets—

and because of this,
you will always follow me:

I who grasp the thread,

because you ask this of me.

Have you mistaken me for the star
you were programmed to seek?

Each time I release you,
you keep returning
with stories of heaven
for which you show no awe—

forsaking its splendors
for the earthly warmth of my hand.

© Sarah Noack 2008

Nothing here is what it seems, and anything is possible. On baking hot days like today, I can almost hear the ether singing a sort of Ayers-Rock creation hymn from deep inside the fabricated monoliths and underground passageways, secret caves trickling with taboos of toxicity that leave their scent: strange perfumes of grease trap, anus and exclamation points of perfumes, all weaving into an ambrosial urban pheromone helix in the stagnant puddles above the ground. Somehow, the smell of cities, this one in particular, never bothers me. I feel the swamplike mysteries of life forming, as it secretly does, in the womb of collective thoughts and fears.

It is hot on Canal Street today, hotter than Egypt, and I am walking across the desert through the pyramids and tattered Sphinxes who gaze at me with truncated pupils as I fix my courier bag on my back. The pavement glitters. The drillers drill. Crowds congest the narrow sidewalk, making their way around construction shelters and baby strollers. All around me, vendors hawk the same just-off-the-boat wares in the same noisy storefront boxes: bootleg CD’s; knockoffs of sunglasses, watches, perfume. Ribbon-candy colored studded belts. Michael Jackson shirts. Tiny turtles the size of silver dollars, and real-looking windup puppies with canned barks. A man yells, “Do you like Movado! DG! Vuitton!” in a Caribbean accent. One storefront is boarded up due to police activity, which surprises me. Canal Street, to me, is as off the map of business law enforcement, as Antarctica.

Every place I pass, another memory. This is what is unique about walking. There is no distance between subject and object. Canal Street, Chinatown, Little Italy. A hundred memories under my feet, theirs and mine.

My own: a lover from a place in West Africa where you could hear water run and balafons all day long. He played them, perfect, indistinct from the flow of water over rocks. His skin was the blue of a ripe eggplant and his smile was the tropical crescent moon, huge and supine in his night sky face, dilated with the joy of singing. His seriousness was ancestral in magnitude, but he was so small, so soft, his face untouched by life. I was weak for his smile and smoke-stained voice, and introduced him to his first lychees before his concert at Lincoln Center while he looked at leather sandals I found ugly, yet endearingly African. He liked the lychees. He bought me pink sunglasses from this storefront…

Pearl Paint. 18 years old, I was first sent here by the artist with whom I lived with as an intern. I was young and knew very little about anything outside of my fertile, self-contained mind. I didn’t even know the store had more than one floor, and was sent back to retrace the steps of my botched errand. There was so much I didn’t know then. Later as a student at Pratt, I would dread climbing the infamous five floors to reach the graphics department. The city, in my youth, overwhelmed and titillated me. Everything was so big. I had no filters. I didn’t feel good enough for this place; everywhere I went, I felt judgement and loudness. I felt old then, up against this city. I had to prove myself, and was constantly feeling shouted down. For some reason, at almost 40, it now makes me feel young again to be here. Have I grown stronger? Or it weaker? Is civilization itself crumbling under me, making way for the birthdays of vines?

I don’t know.

I walk on.

Street food. Scallion pancakes, two for a dollar. Fried rice sticks and tofu, one dollar. The seasons of fresh Asian produce. Loquats are the most elusive of all, as they come only for a few weeks in spring. Mangosteens… whenever they come, and expensively. Lychees and rambutans in late summer. Fresh durians, which I don’t like, and jackfruit, which I do but can’t carry whole without a car. (A falling one almost killed me once in Puerto Rico). Just as I think poignantly of longans, I see a longan pit, smooth and brown as a tiny horse chestnut, on the ground by my foot. Like a dog tracking prey, I know the coveted fruits must be close by. My eyes are everywhere on my surroundings, but I am always aware, seeking with all my senses.

There is no fruit that compels me like the longan. Its powdery brown clusters resemble balls of dirt on sticks. But inside: the carob-honeyed, musky tumescence of an angel clitoris, its translucent-pearled moonstone flesh grooved with folds like a brain. Undoubtedly, this fruit is intelligent. What must it be thinking, the longan? I’ve often wondered as I peeled off its papery shell and popped the pearl of fruit into my mouth. Like all brilliant, sensitive nerds, the longan conceals its fragrance from the world. It is too painfully pure, like the cloud-fed scent of orchids. And yet it’s so unflinchingly erotic, like a Georgia O’Keefe flower money shot. I find it impossible to bite it immediately; it’s so soft against my tongue that to do so seems a violence.

If it is possible to be romantically infatuated with a fruit, I am. I love it. It disturbs and seduces me. And I have found the object of my affections, parceled out in newspaper squares on a folding table by Christie Street. Paper bag in hand, I walk on, my mouth full of moonflesh. I don’t often betray a smile while walking down the streets in this city. But right now, I am.

Tribeca. Chambers Street. More memories. I have traversed through universes with the soles of my feet today, from Union Square to Ground Zero. I am working at the Whole Foods in Tribeca today. Eight years after 9/11, the store is still the dustiest in NYC. I bring my box of nontoxic bamboo cleansing wipes, and get to work on the layer of white powder on the lipstick displays. Fallout from a fallen star. The WTC PATH train is still encased in its temporary skeletal sheath as construction continues into the next decade. Areas are shielded to the public. The Cortland Street BMT subway stop is still closed. I wonder if the rats have learned of this place, and formed secret societies here.

This city transcends not only borders and nations, but space and time. When I walk through its streets, I experience all my life—past, present, future—at once in my mind. Memories overlap and become real. I think about going back to Africa, about needing new shoes, about returning to the Brooklyn Museum. I am in a trancelike state as I navigate this city’s crowds and sidewalks, adding my footprints to the patina of human life that accumulates on its concrete veins.

But do I even really need to travel, except to see friends far away? I have everything right here. Today I have been to Italy. To China. To Mexico. To the peace and quiet of empty lots and green places. I have seen sights far more interesting than any circus: a man and his Bichon Frise with matching pink and lemon yellow fauxhawks. The Union Square greenmarket with its swirling miasma of green tents: the Bacon Hypnosis guy, the fairy rights T-shirt lady, the depressing paintings lady, the little elfin mutton-chopped man who scoops rocks of aromatic maple sugar candy from glass jars into my waiting palm.

And that was just today.

I have descended from this world, into my little parallel universe via a tunnel carefully constructed under a deep river. I emerge on the other side. I live in the place where people live to be close to the city, within reach and yet outside of it. Everything is smaller and cheaper here, and more obscure. New Yorkers rarely travel across the river. When I lived in New York, Jersey seemed as vague and mysterious to me as the inside of my colon. In a way, it feels like a shadow world, reflecting the desires of the Promised Land on the other side. I think this is what I like about it. There is a striving, a clouded envy-humility I can feel here and like. I understand it. And I feel peaceful here. I can see the city here. It is beautiful, from the cliff where I like to stand at the end of each day, looking out.

I have distance here in my alternate universe. I have space. On the streets here, children play more loudly, unafraid of traffic. The houses are beautiful here too, sometimes. Immigrants sill set up their stands, longans are still sold, although they are harder to come upon. Small jitney buses drive by me, run by people who don’t speak English. They remind me poignantly of the “bush taxis” in Africa I used to like. I have learned where they all go and how to take them. Everything in this alternate universe is forged in the fire of wanting and hoping. These are easy to do in this parallel universe. It is no accident we are closer to the heat of refineries here.

From the cliff’s lookout point, I see the city blinking like a thousand eyes before me.

Only from this vantage point can I see such a sight.

I want summer
and all that is golden
right now
in my eyes
on my tongue
like the way your hand feels
holding mine in my pocket

I want sky and clouds
and the white squint of light,
not this hollow gray night
rent through with a whistle
but the salt truck came again
today
and yesterday too:
my shoes crunch on the crystals
collecting in drifts
and I’m tired of running
past shanties and tracks
on an electrified bridge
trying not to step in the cracks,
and wishing I could just
get back home
to you

like a child,
poems don’t heel—
they just feel
and come at the most inopportune
moments

I’m tired of fighting with the sun
it’s so simple, but it overwhelms me now and then—
even in my polar remoteness,
you find me
(and bring a coat)
and in this northern light,
you can see any color
and there are no numbers and shapes,
even this you and me is just
a phenomenon
of magnetic friction—
the music of the spheres
cast before us like dice,
painting this glittered world
of snow and ice
these cities and lights
reflect so plaintively—
but darling, don’t let me forget
to be lonely
because it’s these moments
only,
these split seconds of transcendence
that heliport us out of codependence
and make me remember
why I summoned you in the first place.

I want blue days
with white cumulus stories
working their lazy ways
across our fields of vision.

I want summer
and the blue playground of your eyes
as my personal sky
to write on

because your mind
is so full

and so beautifully empty,

a canvas for our dream-clouds

that drift and merge
through various stages
of yours and mine,
twisting through lazy incarnations
from swirling polar color-cupids
into tempera hues
of the temperate zone

like living shapes of abundance
who,
schooled by the wind,
learn to breathe on their own.

© Sarah Noack 2009

if you read between the lines
that striate my iris,

you’ll find a hidden reservoir of blue
with a name written on the other side
in invisible ink—

a poem written so long ago
and with such a young and heavy hand
that pen trespassed paper and broke into sky,

until I cried because no page could contain
the words that could describe him—

a many-volumed encyclopedia was required
just to codify each moment in his presence:
innocent Minoan friezes of memory:
a lost cult of beauty
that in its fragility,
was forgotten in the utility of Rome

and whenever I remember birds,
I think of him
and each petaled, faded detail
I somehow buried
because I felt unworthy
of such tenderness

and the way he stayed so high
but always returned to my finger
to tell me of the strangeness of heaven

and in dreams, I chase a whisper
through stone cloisters and attics,
and despite dust swirls indicating a recent presence,
all exits are locked
and the fire escape too
and there is no way to reclaim this mystery of wings,
no way to enter this room
that somehow I thought I could always come home to—

and how I’ve looked and looked for his pale blue smile
until the homesickness makes me dry heave
but the power’s gone out
and I’ve lost the map
and he’s gone and swallowed the skeleton key.

Sometimes I wonder if I light a match,
if the night will release him to me
like a sphinx moth
with a report from the other side,
but then I remember this glass separating us,
invisibly
but so palpably—

there’s no comfort in archaeology,
in this unearthing and sorting of relics:
stripped of their contexts,
tagged and body-bagged
with reports on pathology and cause,
shipped to safe havens of conservation
with relevant fragments on public display

but even technology won’t save them
from this monsoon
that keeps me under lock and key—

and there’s no solace at all
in these rains that fall endlessly,
awakening pastel trees of memory
when each flower only serves to adorn the dead.

© Sarah Noack 2010

From OSHA’s website, Safety and Health Topics: Radiation: “Radiation may be defined as energy traveling through space. Non-ionizing radiation is essential to life, but excessive exposures will cause tissue damage.”

it occurs to me
late
(really late)
around that time when internet research decays
from topics of insolvency and fellowships
to tongue splitting, furries and Rasputin’s pickled cock
that I am really, really lonely
for you

and my brain,
radioactive and glowing,
has decided
(after all possible avenues for defilement
that Google and the human race have catalogued)

that it is so hungry
right now
simply for your breath

and the radiance of your unadorned skin
against mine—

I don’t need any toy or script,
fetish or artifice,
only this:

just these novels in your hands and lips,
each dedicated to me as wholly
as stars to the night—

and when you burn and sparkle
as you fall through the sheath of my atmosphere,
my arms will always be there to embrace you,

because even when you feel most fallen,
I see only pure light

and even in my darkness,
you are the one I can always read.

© Sarah Noack 2010

sugar and sugar
salt and salt
I am swimming too far
from the shore today

but somehow you’ve found me,
cradling me
with infinite starfish arms
in a yellow room
beneath this blue infinity
where even islands hide

salt and sugar
sugar and salt
I hold my breath
in nacrous layers of dreaming

and waking into dreaming and dreaming
into the white constancy of you:
my brow marked like sealing wax
from the signets of your shirt-buttons
as you grow new arms to support the weight
of all this dreaming me.

Soul swimmer,
you scaled my dream cliffs
and held your breath underwater
to bring me these oysters you’ve collected
in your pail—
calcified secrets of ocean candy

surprising me from sleep
with the sweet liquid shimmer
of oyster-flesh—
slipping pearls through my parched lips
as I fall back into dreaming
with the taste on my tongue
of poetry
from a luminescent benthos
so deep
language cannot penetrate—

sugar, sugar and salt
I’ve sunk my tired feet
in the smooth sand of your heartbeat.
I soak in this silence
of warmth and you
and the intimate sunlight
as it climbs to its height
before dipping into twilight
caressing this instant
before it slips, too fragile
to survive the daylight of waking—
just hold me close:
close as water to skin
close as the seafloor is far
beneath these rocking waves,
farther than the edge of stars
waiting to awaken
under our blinding veil of daylight—

don’t let me wake—
here in this fever, I have access
to all the secret rooms
with their mirrors and melting clocks
of persistent memory
where you find me,
always

in this sea of mad Escherian
potential, possessing no dimension
or sense, doorways in the sky open and
displaced barn owls prowl above seafoam;
coy angels flit—
who keep their distance
who never loved like this
who were never blanched silver
with such innocence
or they would have chosen
voluntarily
to fly so close to the sun
that their wings would have melted
in waxen impotence

I understand now
the love of the barnacle
for its whale
and I understand also
the fathomless floor of the whale-cry
as I wake into dreams upon dreams,
each one more false and motherless than the next
and yet there is this you
somewhere
in only one liminal tidepool
at one cruel pink eclipse
I keep setting my watch to,
but the sun itself is confused
between day and night
and my second hand has stopped
in its tracks
as you slip away again as I wake,
dancing the silver thread
of forgetfulness

I feel you fading,
but I will be waiting
right here for you
in this secret place
where fever takes the soul.

A part of us stays here
always when we drift back to shore.
When I awaken,
I’ll touch my forehead
where your shirt-buttons rested.
Follow my sounding
into the surf and grottoes
where I wander, lost
but tethered safely to the tide-rush
of your heart—
awaiting your presence
within the sweet death
only dreaming permits.

© Sarah Noack 2007

As I’m watching an ancient X-files episode in the Lamashegu hotel courtyard in Tamale, northern Ghana, a rock sails past my head.

This has been going on for three weeks now. In a bizarrely punctual evening ritual, every night at 8:00 PM sharp when the X-files begin airing, large rocks are thrown from somewhere behind the roof. This goes on sporadically during during the show until 9:00, and no one can ever find the culprit. The hotel staff has been a little evasive about the matter; most likely they don’t want to draw too much attention to it and scare away potential guests. And all in all, it’s a good hotel. For four dollars US a night I have a small veranda to call my own, under the shade of a large almendra tree. And the terrorism is oddly predictable; it’s easy to stay out of the courtyard for an hour every night.

Ibrahim, the hotel’s proprietor, looks out from the kitchen with a dishtowel over his shoulder and sees the rock, which has added to the collection of dents in the cement floor. “I am going talk to the chief.” he resolves, storming out of the compound. Ibrahim rarely “storms”; he spends his days quietly scrubbing other people’s dirty laundry, manually flushing broken toilets, and praising Allah. In Tamale, an arid, sleepy, largely Muslim city where I’m studying batik with a local artisan, contacting the police is not a possibility one considers immediately. Tamale is a place where ten-year-olds fast during Ramadan, where you’re considered selfish if you don’t invite beggars in for dinner and put aside five percent of your money for the poor, which by our standards would encompass most of the town’s population. So in Tamale, things like throwing large rocks into hotel courtyards don’t happen too often. And when they do, one consults the local chief.

The chief comes by, dressed in a traditional Dagomba indigo tunic and cap, sporting eyeglasses and a beard – for some reason I still haven’t figured out, Tamale is the only place in Ghana I visited where men sported either. That particular combination – billowing shirt, beard, andretro-chic black spectacles – seems to be a sort of unspoken chief’s uniform in Dagomba country. With his deadpan demeanor and rakishly embroidered white leather boots, he’s a monolith of cool. So when Ibrahim return to the courtyard with the chief peering in his chiefly way up at the tin roof where these rocks had emanated, I expect something important to happen. After scratching his beard for a few minutes and adjusting his glasses, he turns back to Ibrahim and says,
“This is not good.”
I could have said that.

The X-files drone on, an ironic commentary on our current enigma. Muldor has fallen for a woman who turns out to be a vampire. Ibrahim’s 14-year-old brother Alhassan is engrossed and giggling, oblivious to the dangers of getting his head bashed in. “The woman, the this one, she likes the blood,” he informs me gleefully, pointing at the screen. Alhassan speaks hardly any English and uses every possible opportunity to demonstrate it, speaking in laborious, cryptic monologues studded with compound articles – especially when he sees me writing. But he’s a nice kid. He shares his boiled yams with me. I don’t want to see him hurt.
“Alhassan, they throw tonight,” I say, motioning to the tin roof. “You must go inside.”
Alhassan smiles confidently. “The chief,” he points, as if everything will get fixed now. “Now I will pray.” he decides, but not before approaching my doorstep and, as he does every evening, painstakingly arranging my sandals so they line up. “They are not correct,” he informs me solemnly. Alhassan, anything but fastidious by nature, has an almost obsessive-compulsive fascination with arranging my shoes. My dirt-encrusted sandals are always playfully kicked into the air as soon as I enter my veranda. It’s considered rude in Ghana to wear shoes inside anyone’s house, so I use their removal as an excuse to throw something. I secretly resent having my inner chaos ordered by a pesky, occasionally lovable boy with no sense of personal boundaries. However, whenever I consider updating him about our cultural differences, I decide against it. Between the vastness of that divide, my status as guest in his land, his limited English and my limited Dagbani, it would be an exercise in futility. Besides, whenever Alhassan is just on the verge of making me scream – listening for hours to rap songs with elephant mating calls, the daily shoe arranging, swatting flies by my head while I’m writing – he’ll always do something overwhelmingly kind. Like sharing his few yams with me when I’m sick, going into town to get me medicine – or the fact that whenever I try to tip him, he buys me fish. What could I do?

Ibrahim, concluding his conversation with the chief, decides it’s time to join his brother in the evening prayer. The rock thrower, probably intimidated by the chief’s presence or maybe just by the fact it’s 9:00 PM, has not thrown any rocks for a few minutes. Maybe he too, full of praise for Allah at his successful destruction of our courtyard, has gone to pray. We still haven’t caught them, but the chief has vowed to make an intimidating announcement tomorrow on the radio.
The courtyard empty, I climb to the roof terrace, watched by two iridescent blue morning doves. Lying by the water tank there, I listen to the crickets. They aren’t soothing and mood-making like the ones back home; their wings screech tormentedly like fax machines in the night.

I never sleep well here. The days are hot, monotonous, and almost postapocalyptic with their pink haze, like an Islamic version of Mars. Only at night do I really feel energized. I toss and turn under the hum of the ceiling fan, unwanted now in the Harmattan night cool. The Ramadan prayer calls wake me before dawn, a surreal pocket of longing in the stillness. When the rooster crows, Alhassan and Ibrahim return from morning prayers. Energized by their morning Lipton, they begin their train of Dagomba wake-up greetings.
“Desbaa!” I waved. Good morning!
“Nnaa!…numasim?” Fine, how is the morning cold?
“Nnaa!”
Ibrahim goes into the kitchen to resume sleep, while Alhassan enters my veranda and fixes my shoes. I can’t help but notice how he looks at me when he does this; it’s become almost accusatory. Why is he so compulsive? Softened by the pre-dawn reflection, I decide to get to the bottom of this.

“Alhassan,” I ask, pointing to my sandals, “Why is it that every morning and every night, you must make these correct?”
He looks puzzled. “It is not correct,” he says, looking at me as if he’s stating the obvious.
“I know, Alhassan,” I say. “I know they are not correct. But, it doesn’t matter to me. They’re not bothering anyone here.”
Alhassan looks pensive, then urgent. “Maybe,” he says, “maybe you no understand.”
He struggles for words. “The this mans,” he says, “they come look at room. Then go away. Why?”
After a rhetorical pause, he shrugs. “Shoes not correct,” he concluded.
“What do you mean, Alhahssan? My shoes?” I ask, confused.
“He think bad place,” he explains, “then go away. Then,”– he points to the tin roof – “They throw. Bad things. You see, shoes not correct.”
What is he talking about? “Alhassan, boliballa? What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Shoes.” he states curtly. “Shoes like the this one.” He points to his pants pocket, turns it inside out. “This one hold money. You turn not correct, money go away. They see you in market and go away, no buy.” He points to the roof. “Then the other one throw the rock. Shoes not correct, very bad. Good thing run out of house, bad thing come.”

Something clicks. I’m suddenly recalling a museum in Kumasi, where I’d seen an exhibit about sandals. The sandals worn by Asante kings were considered sacred, and much attention was paid to their care, because they were believed to house his soul. Perhaps this was somehow connected to what he was trying to tell me; now that I think about it, Alhassan paid far more care to his own ancient rubber flip-flops than to other aspects of his wardrobe – rinsing them every night with water, bringing them indoors, chiding me if I walked barefoot through the courtyard. Alhassan was trying to tell me that my careless treatment of footwear was bringing bad luck – not just to myself, but to the hotel. I can’t deny that we’re currently experiencing the cartoon-anvil variety of “bad luck”, and I don’t need a scientific explanation: in Africa, anything is possible.

“Alhassan, why did you not say anything to me?” I ask him. “I had no idea I was doing this bad thing.”
He shrugged. “I do not know.” he says evasively, looking downward. I didn’t want to hound him further; he’d obviously been showing respect by not calling attention to my ignorance. I’m embarrassed – not at having mistreated my sandals, but at second-guessing this kid.
“Alhassan,” I assure him, “I am so sorry about this. Garafa. From now on I will always put my shoes correct myself. OK?”
“Toh,” he concedes placidly. “Now I go sleep again.”

It’s 6:00 AM; the sun is rising, heating the air. Alhassan has forgotten to turn off the radio, and the Dagomba and Gonja news broadcasts have given way to the English one, which I listen to idly as the day billows into its hot air balloon of eventlessness. The local happenings – a marriage of a local chief, a birth of twins to another, pass through my ears until one announcement grabs my attention.

“A young vandal was apprehended early this morning on the the new Cadbury Ghana Headquarters rooftop in Lamashegu district by local police following last night’s call to action. She had gone mad after being sacked from her job at a local hotel three months ago for pilfering. Found barefoot in tattered clothes after a long pursuit in the night, she confessed to weeks of destroying hotel property with her rock-throwing antics. She has been sentenced to seven years of labour in Tamale’s public works department. This of course is a horrid portrait of how our youth are becoming preoccupied with the cares of the modern world and neglecting their duties to Allah, from which we should all take grave heed.”

The announcements go off, giving way to the impeccably timed second morning prayer interruption. Small childrens’ ardent, staticky voices fill the air, belting out praise to the previously neglected Allah. I look over to the kitchen, where Alhassan and Ibrahim are fast asleep on their straw mat, unmindful of the growing shapes of sunlight, worn flip-flops neatly tucked into a corner. What were those two doing last night? I need to wake out of my stupor and take a bucket bath. I’ll walk into town today and buy them a special gift, something they can’t piously trade in to buy me fish. As I head up to the water tank, I’m thinking about the cool new leather sandals they’ll be wearing tonight.

© Sarah Noack 1999

Today I accidentally washed my iPod Shuffle in the laundry (it was attached to my gym shirt), and then knocked a 2GB memory strip into the AC floor vent as I was trying to back up my hard drive. Argh! Even though I’m kind of a nano-human at 5’1″, I’ve decided I’ve had it with small.

I’ve had it with digging into my purse to find cell phones that mimic the contours of a credit card. I’ve had it with keychains overflowing with assorted electronic thingies. I’ve had it with thingies that clip onto your ears or clothes like inconspicuous parasitic insects, sucking assorted waves and bytes out of thin air. And I’ve definitely had it with shoving my entire life on little thingies the size of boogers.

I’m claustrophobic. I used to have freak attacks in elevators when I was a kid. I hated the last two months of pregnancy because I felt so squished and crowded out. So when I think about my tax returns and design files bumping up against ultrasounds of Jeni, complex applications, and MP3′s of Madonna and Meatloaf, I feel deeply anxious for them. I wonder how such a motley crew (sorry, back to the M artists…) of data can possibly stand being squished nuts-against-butts onto something that could fall into a floor crack.

I understand that big isn’t what I want either. I am really happy that computers don’t take up a whole room anymore. I thank God for laptops, and do not want to revisit my stepfather’s old cell phone from 1991, which was about the size of a small gerbil cage. But at least, back in those days, everything had a special place and device. It wasn’t all just DATA that fit on one do-it-all thingamajig. There was uniqueness in the world.

Somehow, it just feels wrong to have my friend’s cherished songs live alongside my demo invoices and font “read-me’s.” Shouldn’t they have a special place where they can bask in their specialness? A place that is easily found, easy to notice, an album I can hold in my hand, smell, touch and lovingly re-read the liner notes while doing absolutely nothing else but relaxing? And what about poems and love letters I’ve collected over the years? Shouldn’t they be stashed away in a silk-lined box under my bed… the kind that has a real key, not an encrypted password? And what about all these pictures of Jeni? I can’t think of the last time I printed them out and glued them in an album. They’re all just backed up on more and more little sticks of data, data, data… little 0′s and 1′s I can’t even see, like some kind of exotic digital alpha-bits cereal all jumbled into a heap that somehow points to beauty in its various forms. Looking at all this data… I half believe the idea that life could begin from a pile of gases exploding out of nothingness. Everything feels so random. It’s up to me to make sense of all this data, all these bits and bytes of my life, heart and soul stored onto various inconsequential lumps of plastic the size of tiddlywinks.

I wonder sometimes if those little flyers the religious fanatics used to throw on my doorstep—you know, “The End Days are Near… Don’t Accept the Number of the Beast on your Hand,” are coming true. Maybe we really will start getting barcodes and data chips embedded into our skin, because there is no more “nano” left to go without going within our very cells. It creeps me out. I don’t want nano. I want “manageable, function-specific macro.” I want a device that plays music and a device that watches movies. I want to be disciplined to do one thing at a time, to enjoy each thing for what it is, to not start mixing up all these bits and bytes inside my brain. I want to experience the integrity of a moment, a song, a picture as something solitary and unique—not a “file type” among many others, all squashed up into the same crowded bedroom like transients in an Amsterdam youth hostel.

What’s particularly interesting is that the more “nano” electronic devices get, the more “macro” we get… our meals, our bodies, our cars, TV’s, businesses. It’s kind of disgusting. I feel like the two are directly proportionate. Do we really need to eat 20 ounces of steak? (I don’t need to eat any, but theoretically). Do people really need to drive Hummers if they aren’t in active military service? Do three national banks and one coffee place need to own the entire share of these markets? Do we need to drive everywhere? Here in my town, the county planners didn’t even bother to build sidewalks in the main commercial areas. It’s ironic how, to me, moving to a city, my life will be, in so many ways, less “macro,” and more “microcosmically conscious.” I will be without a car, I will be able to compost and buy fresh fruits more easily, I will have sidewalks to walk on and resources for living soulfully. I won’t have to go to big chains for everything like I do here. Cities are becoming the place where it’s possible to live an organically empowered life.

One of these days, we’re going to be so disproportionate in our mini/maxi tendencies that we’re going to lose all our ipod shuffle extra-minis and memory microchips in the folds of our burgeoning sedentary flesh, while consuming whale-sized burgers in front of TV’s that take up entire rooms. We’re going to have such big needs for space, despite all the downsizing we seem to be doing, that we’re going to have to send half the human race into outer space just to survive.

I have only one thing to say about this:

Nano-Nano!

© Sarah Noack 2008

“Got a light?” he asks strangers in Central Square.
He talks to black dogs, looks at moss under trees.
I never want him to cut his hair.

He straddles extremes — the debauched, the austere.
He calls on my birthday, but loses his keys.
“Got a light?”, he asks strangers. In Central Square,

he shoots Super-8 porn starring old teddybears.
In his photos, kids watch him but never say “cheese”.
I never want him to cut his hair

or stop blasting those ancient LP’s of Slayer —
grimacing, drumming long fingers on knees.
“Got a light?” he asks — strangers in Central Square

approach him; he’s broke, but always will spare
a quarter, dime, or some takeout Chinese.
I never want him to cut his hair:

it falls to my wrist, as we’re poring over
Miro, or some “True Stories” rags from the ‘50’s:
“‘Got a light?’, asked the stranger…’” — and in a Central Square

bar, he’ll hold the door, buy me a beer
and just listen. “That sucks,” he’ll say earnestly.
I never want to see him cut. His hair’s

still in curls — like that first time I saw him years
ago: fourteen, shy, easy to please —
“Got a light?” he’d asked; strangers in Central Square,

we’d combed Second Coming and In Your Ear
Records. “Wow,” he’d laughed, “groovy! It’s ‘Best of the Bee Gees’!”.
I hoped he’d never cut his hair.

I’d lie if I told him I’ve never stared:
rafter-high, sleepy-eyed cherub of sleaze.
I never want him to cut his hair —
his light’s stranger than anyone centered or square.

© Sarah Noack 1996