I clipped pillows, candles, lamps, bedding, jewels, flowers, blue skies, and blondes from the vast array of things I can’t afford, don’t need, and can’t fit into an apartment as small as mine, a place with only one closet, a fairly un-American sort of situation in 21^st century California.

I made a paper crown for the tenant-farmer husband of Allie-Mae Burroughs, and

A brittle glory shineth in his face.

I gave wings to field workers, halos to card players, cloudless days to those who strained to sing. I moved angry young men to the front of the line on sheet music about blue skies.

Now I was working with lots of photos from the Farm Security Administration archives, not just the images by Walker Evans. It was just after Christmas and the winter rains had begun.  Night fell early. All of my losses came back to me in the dark.

I opened Ellison’s Invisible Man. The parts I’d marked upon first reading it years ago still spoke to me. The narrator lives in a basement wired with stolen electricity, 1,369 light bulbs surrounding him. “Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers . . . Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a thinker-tinker.” 

I opened another pot of rubber cement. I cut and pasted.

There were cracks in the wall of my bedroom, and water stains. That dark January, I covered them with a hundred and five collages, stolen grey images lit with halos, flowers, and wings.