Postcard: Bar in Alphabet City, NYC

My friend collects hugs at the door, says sorry to Meta the lead singer for running out early last time. It's small and intimate inside; about half the people woven together through friends of friends or exes. The bar leans into the small corner where the band starts to play. It works up hot right away. Music moves sinuously, seepingly, out into the room, smooth as molasses, filling up every crevice, including the ones in your mind, slowing it down. My friend dances inwardly; she steps out her soul in careful patterns, head bent down; her energy's curled up, like it's for her alone, like this moment's hers alone. One tiny woman wears cobalt and grins slyly as she dances, spreading her small frame out, arms up and loose; she holds thumb and forefinger together and dabs and darts her hand to the beat with an unconscious precision, it's like she's weaving delicate embroidery on the air, or writing some intricate script with an invisible brush. Smiles are traded for free. Meta sings Marley and his own songs, standing there with a woven hat pulled over the bulb of his hair so that it's built out from his head like a honey-bee hive of striped yarn. A sweater vest hangs straight and loose on his thin torso; a blocky amber pendant rests on the wool neck of it. The hand not holding the mic moves in jerky, quirky, but fluid movements, fast and certain. His arm is like a maniac weather vane, swinging this way and that, responding to systems of winds inside him. A line of young men lean on the bar, watching, always watching, the line of women dancing in front of them. I look back and their eyes gleam from the stagelight.

Postcard: A Jungle Walk to the Beach; Bastimentos Island, Panama

The lullaby waves. The drowsy air. The blanket of insect sounds. We strain up and down the rainforest ridges, picking our way carfully between roots and mud and rocks. Somehow it feels like taking a nap instead of hiking; it's easy to walk yourself into humid reveries and gentle daydreams. Spiders with a cruel mechanic design, bulbous jelly fruits, tiny red frogs like hopping jewels. A sweet fermented smell from fallen apricot-colored fruit. The ground begins to feel granulated under your feet; the air changes in your lungs to a salty wind. At last you see the waves.
There is someting about round shapes, curves, circles, that we love to see. The water gathers itself, dips down for momentum, and then heaves into a beautiful transparent cylindar, delicate as if made of blown glass; turquise, aqua, tan, all shot through with light. A finale of white froth. Past the artwork of the breakers the water turns a darker blue, and then at a certain line it is darker still, where the impossible distance to the horizon folds in on itself, creating a dense midnight tone.

Postcard: Karaoke Bar in Shanghai, China

A dingy elevator box hoists you up to the third floor. At once you're hit with the discord of a dozen desperate wailings leaking under the doors of the karaoke rooms and through the heating vents. The howlings as private and strange as sounds made during dreaming; you pay your money and enter your own room, knowing soon it too will feel as internal as a dream.