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Fire

29 Friday May 2020

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The sun is travelling out now, rising over the water instead of above the pavement in the mornings. We witness its return, soft, silent, and bright. We sip coffee or notice our breathing or stand in tree pose as the morning mist burns away.

This morning before I got out of bed studying the sky, I wondered how to cook the chicken I bought yesterday and realized I have no rice to pair with it. I could feel my face furrow and frown with concern and disappointment and concentration. It’s just too early for this. Then I read the news and I paired my concern and disappointment with pain and that overwhelming helpless feeling. Minneapolis is burning and for good reason.

I am an advocate for loud and inconvenient protest. Nothing changes unless the world sees it and hears it and says, “Well yeah, by golly, maybe cops shouldn’t keep killing unarmed black people.” Yet it seems only meaningful change comes after the wings of fire sweep in. Got your attention, forcing you to ask the question “How did we get here?” Well my dear, it wasn’t via a peaceful knee on a playing field. The sun burns in the morning, a police station burned all night, and I am burning now because I can only type a little screed on a little screen far away and not be with you, wherever you are, to demand equal justice for all.

I am not in favor of harming people or property to deliver a message, though, looking back (and I do so much looking back), it seems we are wired for fire and nothing short of that makes real change come around and *stick.*

Do you know the process for treating genital warts? It ain’t pretty so put your helmets on: by freezing or burning them off. They don’t go away with nice words and fancy words and throwing money at them or prayer. Big change comes after fire, after pain, after enough is enough.

I’ve taken stock of my morning, my life, and re-prioritized. Cooking my chicken is the least of my worries today. My other concerns will be dealt with in some sort of fashion. All I know is, right now, I can’t get “four dead in Ohio” out of my head because our president said, “When the looting starts the shooting starts,” which is not an original thought of his. We are angry. We are grieved. When will real change come and stick?

We Hardly Knew Ye

24 Sunday May 2020

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I did not want to see the attendants take his body away, though I knew it was coming. If I had waited just five minutes more, or checked five minutes before, I would not have witnessed the transition. But maybe I should have seen, maybe it was for the best that I saw the pattern of his blankets.

He was a character. That’s probably the best way to describe him, one all us residents would agree on. He said silly things, used conspiracy words, he played little games with conversation. He made us feel uncomfortable and cringey and weird, befuddled, and some of us downright pissed.

One summer weekend some kids were visiting from out of town, riding their bikes, playing hide and seek everywhere, including our balconies which he did not take kindly to. After he got no satisfaction from their parents he called the cops on the kids. The next day we came out to our respective balconies, he on his, me on mine, (we rarely stood next to each other except for that one time), and I called him out on it: I told him that was a shitty thing to do, calling the cops on the kids. He was angry and went back inside and … after a few weeks he went back to waving hi to me.

They told me not to loan him money anymore because he uses it to buy pot. I often wondered if his lack of filter was due to a head injury. He told me stories of his youth, that once he was in military school. His hair was long and gray and white and braided, then one day it was cut back short like a regular dude hidden beneath a ballcap. I liked it better the other way. He used to take short walks down the balcony, and I think half the reason he went out was to look for someone to tease or be a wiseguy with, not hurting anyone, just looking for someone he could interact with in his weird little way. He had no one else to talk to.

He left the world, he left us, he left everyone, by himself and that’s what bothers me most. I hope his transition, his dying was peaceful. I wish I could ask someone if it was so. I want to believe that it was.

Well, J, it’s someone else’s turn to look after you. I hope you don’t tease and annoy them too much. Take your ease, bro. I think you’ve needed it for a long time.

A Post From A Most Imperfect Mom

20 Wednesday May 2020

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I awoke thinking about connections. That we were once connected. My body has proof, it says we were. I remember your flutter when I sipped vanilla shake from McDonald’s, I could feel the cold going down and sure enough, there was the movement, like you could feel the freezy vanilla, too. Your angles alive in my bowframe, pushing or kicking like a boxer on the speed bag. Today we are connected by the green phone in a speech bubble app. Technology brings the distant close? Is that our miracle? Sometimes it is because when you sent me that hug I could really feel it from here.

We are in strange times right now because of a contagion, one we’re racing to understand, mitigate, and hopefully vaccinate off the planet. We are in quarantine or semi-quarantine, struggling to cope with who and what is essential. No paychecks. Trapped in our homes with wild children or good children turned wild and spouses we thought we recognized but never knew. Many people are turning to their creative side, making, mending, sorting, doing the best with what is at hand and making it better, bringing their children into the activities. Many are bend-breaking in the stress because they feel trapped. Some are sharing cruel words about their kids on social media which brings me here this morning:

I used to laugh at the commercials of parents singing and dancing while going back-to-school shopping as their children dragged themselves miserably in the wake of their parents glee down the aisles. Ha ha, that’s cute. Or teachers who post “here you go, parents, take your kids back, they’re all yours” in June. And now we feel “trapped” with children we chose to bring into the world? How did we lose our connection to our children and families and neighbors and each other? Oh I know how we lost it, the question is rhetorical.

I ask you today, what *will* we do to get our healthy connections back?

May For Me

01 Friday May 2020

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Today is the first of May. A familiar time for someone who grew up in New York disliking winter with its 10-foot piles of snow, the dirty frozen kind you fall on as you’re walking to school and cut your knees on. Come spring, save us from stiff fingers and toes while we’re locked out of the house and snow angels are for people who can breathe and laugh and run in this dry scene, not the rest of us gasping for air.

Welcome, May, a doorway to peace, winter not so far behind, a time for skin to relax and receive heat without fear. I grew up in echoey castles devoted to candles and hymns and discipline. I wanted so much to taste the beef broth that was simmering in the halls when we walked from here to there. In May we went outside and crowned a plaster statue with living flowers and prayed to her, that was somehow supposed to relieve me of the passion and suffering, the bleeding torture and death of the christ we experienced year after year?

My kindest memory of May was a prayer when someone said Mary was the Star of the Sea. I do not know why this went down into me and kept me and held me. Mostly I felt strange to honor a plaster thing in white and blue robes or nearly naked on a bloody cross. All my young being asked what exactly am I doing here and why does this feel so strange honoring a thing with things when what we are feeling is incomprehensible?

Today I recall hearing the prayer that mentions Mary Star of the Sea. I appreciate and approve that devotion though I have never been. The sea is incomprehensible, a dangerous mystery to me, and perhaps I will never comprehend. I feel closer to the mystery outside of me because moonlight and sunrise. The End.

Strange Days Have Found Us (Again)

25 Wednesday Mar 2020

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September 23rd, 2001 was a strange day. Mom-in-Law urged us to go out and celebrate our wedding anniversary. We both felt rather numb and confused by the situation. We felt like this is no time to celebrate. We had a gift card for a place we’d been meaning to try, we heard the food was great, and Ellen was ready to babysit our son. Why the hell not, I guess. It was a most interesting evening at the Lobster Place*, a meal we’d never forget. There’s something wonderful and charming about being dressed to the nines and walking in to what was essentially a cafeteria, the only diners there. We ate fresh fish on plastic plates, tables draped in red and white-checked plastic, drinking coffee from plastic cups. We were out of place, it felt a touch surreal, but it was a good night in a terrible time.

It was hard to know how to behave in those early 9/11 days. Everything was uncertain in ways our Gen X had never seen. We were stricken, wounded, counting our living and dead, wondering “what’s next” and how do you go back to work after something like this? I wandered grocery aisles looking at soup cans like, “What am I even doing here?” It wouldn’t be the first time I felt that way. Every time I lose someone I love, it’s the same thing: Am I really stirring soup? Am I really folding socks? And why the fuck why?

In January I began to worry about COVID-19. I’d heard about it but had no idea how real it was going to be. It is March, and I’m in week two of social distancing which is hilarious because if I get any more socially distant I’d be in a pine box pushing up daisies. I have my books and notebooks and pens. There is an ocean out there that speaks to me endlessly. What more could I want? I don’t want to be bothered and I try not to bother anyone around me. I can be social when I choose but I am not a team player: I’d rather be home watching the game, shouting at your dumb play safely and ignorantly from the comfort of my home. And now all the weird things are happening, like I understand why the young people hit the Florida beach on spring break because there is only One spring break (and graduation) that may happen in our lives. Weird things like people hoarding TP. This isn’t the blizzard of ’77 when nobody could get to the store for a week because the snow was piled ten feet high. Weird things like being asked to stay home with the people we love, the children we brought into the world because we wanted them, and then complain and ridicule them endlessly on social media. Weird things like measuring the worth of our Greatest Generation against a woozy economy. I feel woozy about my place in the world. What I want, what I need. How to worry, when to worry, and dealing with the shock of people who say “I don’t care about Italy’s dead, I am with America first.”* It’s weird trying to manage how to deal with soulless people without losing myself in the abyss. And all that, the weird, the worry, the sorrow, is ok.

So it is March 25th. There are a lot of numbers out there ready to overwhelm. I hope to do more than wander from room to room avoiding social media. I hope to create and help in some small way where I can.
In the meantime, I haven’t forgotten.


*name changed
*trumpist who has 500K viewers

When Science-Author-Types Play Tricks on Me (Bastards)

25 Wednesday Mar 2020

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I reached into a bag of Scientopoetism.
Darned thing bit me in the knuckle without so much as a
“Howd’ya do,”
Not properly introduced and teeth in my metacarpals, I asked
“May I have those back?”
She said no.
Never reach into a bag of Scientopoetism without an offering first.
Coffee beans dipped in espresso might do well, though
the bite might yet be deeper, you never know.
I began writing with my left instead of right,
which I suppose only adds to the experiment,
and for that I suppose you want my thanks?

Perfect Black Shoes

21 Saturday Mar 2020

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I sneak downstairs to dispose my trash in purple twilight
before the morning rush
before the sun is too bright
and I am stunned by what lay on the damp asphalt
two perfect black shoes, velvet
empty
abandoned before the belching dumpster

I stopped short and wondered
could someone bring chalk and make this an invisible
crime scene
for a woman lay here and all that remains are her perfect black shoes
sideways

When I returned from inspecting potatoes in an empty grocery store
I discovered the shoes upright, side by side
pretty as the day they came from the shoe store.

On my midday inspection of the balcony, I saw a man carrying
a pair of perfect black velvet shoes.
Halloo there I hailed.
I inquired.
He replied, they are perfect size for his wife,
they just need a little dusting…

Seaman, you of all should know better than to bring
discarded clothing into your life?

Bonfire for E.

14 Saturday Mar 2020

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welcome enter
how did we find each other
doesn’t matter
our candles burn the same

i am crone in the cave naming
sea life remains
one long tide at a time.

the mother of me sees the mother of you
i have balm for that.
you are still spring and fight
where I am retreat and ruminate

the world is blind at night,
but for a little moon
we are unsafe on the waters
and deepest african shores
still we prowl, seeking danger

we are eating and drinking and laughing
when we should be
writing
writing
writing

when next you see me, darling
bring your book and your pen
refuse all distraction
enter the cave hungry and wet
and longing

bring basil and pepper and vinegar
ghost pepper
empty cask
bring your longing and prepare to
dash it on the rocks
fearless woman, rise up
stain your fingers with woe
and love and find liberty.