Medicine Ball: Playwrights v. Poets - (D)Constructing Seattle was a collaborative writing, directing, and performance event. I wrote twelve pieces of flash fiction—or prose poems, if we must—that were passed on to a director and two actors to interpret. Some of the pieces below are linked the grainy video evidence of the result: two Seattle bros, one joint, one couch, one dream, trying to get to the heart of what made Seattle the beautiful mess it has become. And yes, I absolutely recycled these; they eventually became this book.

Ritual for Making a Home

Go down to the shore. Find an unbroken mussel. Lick the moonbeam inside of it. Think back to a time when you were not afraid. Are those mountains or clouds? Are those cranes? If they are cranes, draw what they obscure. Go to Ikea. Furnish the apartment in your mind. How many mussels fit into 150 square feet? How many moonbeams?

Ritual for Finding the City Under the City

Take a piece of paper and smooth it with your open palm. Crumple it and toss it over the edge of the world. That is mountains. Light the city on fire with other people’s memories. Walk backwards over every bridge. Be sure to ignite each as you pass.

Ritual for Reenacting the Founding of Seattle

Do you see a piece of land you like? Take it. Is it freely given? Take it anyway. Possession is a kind of violence. Fuck anything that moves. You do not have to use your dick. Do you see those beautiful things? Destroy them with someone else’s hands. Find eighteen perfect things. Mix them into concrete. Pour over something I love.

Ritual for the Times Before Time

Find the folded hills. Shake them out. Use light to draw an outline of the mountains. Find the center of downtown. Dig a hole. Fill it up with ocean. Don’t stop until everyone you know is dead.

Ritual for Dispelling a Flock of Cranes

Clap your hands. Clap your hands. See how the cranes have not moved. Remember who you are. Eat a Xanax. Lay down in the shadow of the city of your dreams. Under you, the tumblers of earth will shift and lock. See how the cranes haven’t moved.

Ritual for Rebuilding a Broken City

Swim to Alki. Find nine pieces of satiny driftwood. Make a raft using only your mind. One by one, destroy your memories of the city. Eat a handful of sand. Slowly. Choose one broken shell to take with you. Board your raft and float toward the open water. Face the dwindling shoreline. Say aloud: ok bye. Now face the clean horizon. Name your raft: Seattle.

Ritual for Finding Lost People

Sit down in the cupped palm of a yellow Caterpillar excavator. Touch each tooth in turn. Place the upturned dirt on your tongue. Chew until it forms a paste. Spit it out and mold it into a person. Make more. Make more. Make more until you have a small army. Tell this army, this is your city now. Give each soldier a name. Take them to each of the seven hills. Tell them, find The People of the Inside. Find the People of the Large Lake. Turn them loose. Watch them wander in ever-tightening circles until they fall off the edge of the earth.

Ritual for Having Feelings

Learn the language of the whales. Fill a bathtub and slide beneath the surface of the water. Pull water through your baleen and swallow the living krill. Down here, you will be able to say anything you want. In your new language, sing all the things that have invaded you today. Scream and scream. Is there a song that is always in your head? Do not sing it. By this time, your lungs should be burning. Enjoy this feeling of panic. Remember the first time you saw the Cascades on fire with morning’s cleansing light.

Ritual for Recreating the Feeling You Had the First Time You Saw the Opal Face of Mt. Rainier Rise Above the Rain-Washed City

Eat a green blackberry. Drink from the rainwater pooled in a heavy red camellia. Find the still-burning cherry of a discarded cigarette and set it like a glowing jewel in your chest. Break skin. Anyone’s skin. Ride the 27 as far as it will take you. Feel the collected weight of the bus’ breath and its song of stops. Listening is presence. Look up as the bus crests Yesler. Maybe next time you will see the mountain.

Ritual for Remembering All the Places You Have Lost to Progress

Chew the bark of the madrone. Cinnamon, mushroom, wood smoke. Do not spit it out. Are you experiencing visions? If no, spit it out. Walk down a street where you used to live. Find your former home. Who lives there now? What kind of animal would they be? What kind of animal are you? Turn to the first tree you see. Dig a burrow. Sleep for many days. Wake up. Let your heart take off like startled geese.

Ritual for Finding Your Way in the Mutable City

Find a spirit duplicator. Ok. Then find a mimeograph. Mimeograph these rituals. While the paper is still warm, hold it to your cheek. Inhale until the stars behind your eyes blink on. With your eyes closed to the earth but open to the universe, move toward the heat of the breath of any living thing. Give them a mimeograph. Again and again until you run out. Open your eyes. Find your way back. There is no back.

Ritual for Making Use of a Deep and Unnamable Sadness

Cry a small stream. Let it cut through the city, Let it carve a new gorge behind your eyes. Let it run until it loosens the tight spool of sadness in your chest. Find someone with braided hair. Ask them to shake it loose and weave it with the ribbon of your pain. Together, look over the new city, divided by your tears. Say together, fuck this city. Fuck this city and its beauty and fuck this city and its bloodied shore. Say fuck this feeling of unnamable sadness. Now your chest is empty. Fill it with the just-washed light of the wet new streets.