I could be the waitress in the airport restaurant full of tired cigarette smoke and unseeing tourists. I could turn into the never-noticed landscape hanging identically in all the booths or the customer behind the Chronicle who has been giving advice about stock portfolios for forty years. I could be his mortal weariness, his discarded sports section, his smoldering ashtray. I could be the 70-year-old woman who has never seen Hawaii, touching her red lipstick and sprayed hair. I could enter the linen dress that poofs around her body like a bridesmaid, or become her gay son sitting opposite her, stirring another sugar into his coffee for lack of something true to say. I could be the reincarnated soul of the composer of the Muzak that plays relentlessly overhead, or the factory worker who wove this fake Oriental carpet, or the hushed shoes of the busboy. But I don't want to be the life of anything in this pitstop. I want to go to Hawaii, the wet, hot impossible place in my heart that knows just what it desires. I want money, I want candy. I want sweet ukelele music and birds who drop from the sky. I want to be the volcano who lavishes her boiling rock soup love on everyone, and I want to be the lover of volcanos, who loves best what burns her as it flows. Alison Luterman
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