swiftsparrowswallow

BIt In My Mouth

2012-03-11T13:15:00.000-07:00

*WARNING* This piece may be triggering for survivors of incest or sexual abuse

He put his hands on my hips

pretended fatherly affection.

I stepped through a doorway

into a vast unrecognizable terrain of

blind, eyeless mothers

I felt my face where my mouth used to be—a smooth hollow inits place.

He squeezed one small breast,

testing for ripeness.

I froze from the point of contact to my core

I crumbled to slivers of ice.

He waited in the dark hall,

a sentinel of masturbation.

I grew horse hooves &

clomped through the mobile home park.

Tossing my head with crazed, frightened eyes—a bit in my mouth.

How Do I Punish What Is Not There?

2012-03-07T08:47:00.000-08:00

Maybe, I could blame the war

the draft

Richard Nixon

Gerald Ford?

Whoever sent him there.

Maybe, if he didn’t come back

so scared

olive drab Christmas trees

the family next door

ice cracking like a whip in the lake.

Maybe, she wouldn’t have startled him

turned him to a stag

sent him skittering,

loping away across the ridge

a waning light on his velvet antlers.

Maybe he would have stayed

or come dashing back on his tiny hooves.

He could have enough beer to close his eyes

to stop flexing his fingers

around the door knob.

I could blame the war

but, it is too difficult

to slam doors

to throw fits

at war.

Difficult to scream

“I HATE YOU”

with hot tears tangled

in my hair

at war.

Even more difficult

to stay out without calling

to sulk at the dinner table

to refuse to talk

with war.

This Work is Never Done

2012-03-06T08:25:00.000-08:00

I like to tell my students an anecdote I read somewhere about the painter Monet.

The story goes that he was found in the Louvre with a paint brush working on a large painting in gilded frame. The guards didn't know who the hell he was and when they were ousting him it was revealed that he had been reworking one of his own paintings. He never felt that the work was done.

I woke up thinking about the poem I wrote yesterday. I got up early and re-worked it. I am re-posting it as two with additions and subtractions. The first one needs a new title. May the writing process remain recursive.

Childhood Can Be Confusing

Snow patched the playground.

A crow flew over without flapping just floating.

When I stood from kneeling in the crocus

blood ran in ribbons down my shin

stripe-ing the white knee socks

I couldn’t keep clean.

That kid, John, had it worse than me

he smelled like pee, was new, like me.

Three schools in one year can cause confusion;

when the buses line up,

like identical yellow loaves of bread.

impossible to know

were to go.

At the end of the line,

when the driver sees you in the back

& shouts through the cavernous cavity

the empty bus.

Just us.

Where do you live?

I don’t know;

Brown trailer

gravel road

steep hill,

too steep to bike even when standing.

Somehow we make it.

***

Quaking Aspen

Mama hadn’t worried about me.
I was late again.
She wasn’t playing the piano that day.
No Chopin clinking up the walk.
She sat on the stoop in the gloaming,
smoking a j.
Scrub Jays and Blues fought for her attention.
She was not waiting for me.

The quaking aspens were just where I’d left them
leaning together in a confiding cloister.
The sound of glass and gravel mixed
under my penny loafer,
Abe Lincoln tilted in his frame.

Something else had happened here
there was glass in her long hair,
a cut dripping on her palm,
a blue ridge rising up under one eye.

Inside, dimly lit in dusk was a version
of homecoming
my former baby self lay frowning
from a broken oval frame.
A chair lay splintered.
A window was broken.
Somewhere water was running.
What had happened here?

A Warbler sounded.

In my room I righted a table,
pressed my face to the pillow,
lolled on the pallet on the floor.
I felt a trickle on my lip,
a rushing from my brain,
felt something wet on my mouth
and was surprised by blood again.

Quaking Aspen

2012-03-04T17:00:00.001-08:00

A crow flew over without flapping just floating.

Snow patched the playground.

When I stood from kneeling amid the crocus

blood ran in ribbons down my leg

stripe-ing the white knee socks

I couldn’t keep clean.

That kid, John, had it worse than me

he smelled like pee, was new, like me.

Three schools in one year can cause confusion;

when the buses line up like mirrors

it can be impossible to know, where to go.

And at the end of the line,

the driver sees you in the back

shouts through the cavernous cavity

the empty bus. Just us.

Where do you live?

I don’t know;

Brown trailer,

gravel road,

steep hill,

too steep to bike--even when standing.

Somehow we make it.

Mama hadn’t worried.

She wasn’t playing the piano that day.

She sat on the stoop in the gloaming,

smoking a jay, not waiting.

The Quaking Aspens

were just where I’d left them.

The sound of glass and gravel mixed

under my penny loafer,

Abe Lincoln tilted.

Something else had happened

glass in her hair,

a cut on her palm,

a ridge of blue under one eye,

her hand shook a little at the end of the red tipped joint.

My former baby face frowned from a broken oval frame.

A chair lay splintered.

A window was broken.

Somewhere water was running.

What had happened here?

A Warbler sounded.

In my room I righted a table &

pressed my face to the pillow.

I felt something wet on my mouth

and was surprised again by blood.

boomerang

2012-03-01T15:20:00.001-08:00

we came back to the bluff

Granddad’s bluff

the driftless zone below.

Granddad still sowing in Alaska

Grandma got her driver’s license

Molly, the youngest, was a cheerleader

our crown jewel.

Danny, still at home, was moody

then he joined the army.

Mama, the fifth, had me to show

she was crawling again.

but, we’d been to the mountains

much taller than the bluff,

Mt. St. Helen’s ash had fallen on us

I drank from jelly jars, half-pint,

just my size.

Mama’s diet pills spilled from her bag

pellets were freed from capsules

and fled under tables and chairs.

my right leg was still in a dirty cast

from a Colorado gravel road and
a Colorado deer.

my grimy toes like sleeping mice peeking out.

the cast came off, pennies & Barbie
hangers in the heel

to relieve the itch

Danny dropped me again from his

slippery hip

we had to start all over again.

bluets

2012-02-24T12:57:00.001-08:00

An Ode to Maggie Nelson's "Bluets"

2012-02-24T12:42:00.001-08:00

My god. How did I go so long without reading Bluets? It has been out since 2009! Where have I been? I read it cover to cover and then turned to the first page and started it again. I've studied the author photograph trying to find some answer as to how she go to me so thoroughly with this book. I have an addressed and stamped envelope with her name on it and as soon as I can muster the courage I am going to write a gushing fucking fan letter.

In writing group I found a sympathetic audience to my raving over this book. Mykhiel did their final paper in grad school partially about Bluets. There was a lot of chest clasping, adoration happening in the room. We decided to do our writing exercise from Bluets--the old fun game of flipping through the pages until someone says "stop", then another person says "left" or "right" and then the book holder traces a finger down the page with eyes closed until someone else says "stop". The group then writes from the phrase, word, thought that the finger stopped on. This is what we got:

You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned too. pg 52

This is what I wrote:

First we must descend.
We learned this, all of us,
from reading Dante
or from someone who had read and/or been to the Inferno.

We must descend
and look at the faces pressed against the blue aquarium glass
and it will not be clear
if we are looking in or being looked in at.

Ascension will come too, and we will either float
or pull ourselves as if from drying concrete.
We will have learned to breath underwater.
The blue faces that were once red, ruddy cheeked in the dusk slathered street playing kick-the-can.

All this descending and ascending is inevitable, it is customary.
As it is also customary to lay out the dead in the good front room,
to keep it company for three days, to eat cold-cuts with grief thickened fingers.
Custom to look at the opalescent face and pass a bell to tell stories, this is how it's done.

We can pray the rosary--if there's comfort in it
or we can drink a glass of gin disguised as water.
This is all part of the descending that comes before the ascending--the raising up,
the plead not to pull back, to unclench the hems of our garments, push away,

up, up, up.
First we must descend.

Marguerite Duras on Writing

2012-02-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

It's uncomfortable sitting at a round table: your elbows aren't resting on anything and you can't lean on them to rest from writing, and while you're writing they're sticking out into nowhere, and if you don't notice that right away you tell yourself, "I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm tired," and it's because your elbows aren't resting on the table.

Inky Fool: The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

2012-01-19T13:45:00.000-08:00

Inky Fool: The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

Sleep Walker

2012-01-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

I never knew it was called theforest. I believed it belonged to us, she and I. I made flightless kites fromthe twigs that fell, rescued small birds that had flown into our window. Theconcept of suicide didn’t exist. My bed was a shelf in the closet, she walkedby in the night, looked through the cracked door and saw me lying there with myeyes open—I hate sleeping in this closet—mytiny fists were clenched. I couldn’t explain sleep talking to her. I wokesitting in the place I had eaten dinner, the house at night was a shroud. Ikept the birds in a cage until she found their mangled corpses along with mystash of cheese. Couldn’t explain that either. I woke at the front door, tryingthe lock, the house sat still behind me wringing its hands. Picking up thebirds was cheating the forest, holding feathered air—close your eyes and dothis. I made nests of doll clothes and lichen, laid them gently under my bedbefore falling asleep.

look

2012-01-18T13:57:00.001-08:00

Another Prose Poem

2012-01-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

It’s ok, skeletons live inside all of us.

Jimbo had only one leg. Jimbo was a tall man who fancied mother. Jimbo was jolly and knew how to draw mountains—he showed me. Jimbo steppedon a landmine—I imagined his leg flying up into the air, intact and spinningtoe over thigh. What is a landmine? Noone would say. Jimbo had been given another leg made of smooth peach-coloredplastic. Jimbo’s new leg was stiff and he propped it against the door when heslept over. Jimbo could take off his leg to make room in cars packed withdirty-faced kids on the way to the circus. Jimbo laughed when we screamed.Jimbo was jolly. Jimbo could fold dollars into hats and bowties. Jimbo alwaysbrought me something—kettle corn, paper and crayons, a puzzle with monkeys.Jimbo cried in the bedroom, I heard it through the door. Jimbo hopped to thebathroom on one leg, I tried it too.

Colette

2011-12-30T16:37:00.000-08:00

Just finished the behemoth biography of Colette by Judith Sherman. Thus ends the December of the French. Thank you Baudelaire, Gide, Balzac, Rimbaud and Proust, and especially thank you to Colette:

New Direction

2011-12-29T13:09:00.000-08:00

I've been keeping this blog for almost four years and this is the 453rd post. To look at the archives is to see relationships come and go, interests rise and fall, disciplined writing, lazy photo posting, self-disclosure, complaining, rejoicing, more self disclosure. I think I might benefit from having some sort of theme, or actual direction with this blog. These are some ideas I have:

Weekly/daily writing prompt
Literary gossip
What I'm reading/Reading lists
More self-disclosure
Daily list.
Pictures of my cat
What I'm writing.
What I've found for you on the Internet.
Even more self-disclosure.

I could go on. Do I continue dabbling in everything? Do I start three tumblrs dedicated to various singular subjects? I would love to know what you think.

Here is a picture of my cat:

Here is a writing prompt from Poets & Writers:

Ruminate on the past year, remembering both your achievements and your failures. Write a story about one of your failures or regrets from the perspective of someone other than yourself. Consider rewriting the past, to transform this incident into an achievement by changing the facts around it or by changing the way your protagonist perceives it.

Just GO There

2011-12-28T14:05:00.001-08:00

A reading list to love and live by.

Looking at 2011

2011-12-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

My friend Liz has a nice tradition of looking back at the the previous year. I always enjoy the lists that Liz makes, but I've usually leaned towards looking at the year ahead and making long lists of goals for

the upcoming year. This is my list from last year:

I will resist the urge to detail which of these goals I accomplished, which fell by the wayside and which seem strange and obsolete now. Either way it's an interesting and humbling exercise to look back at earlier attempts at dictating the future. This year, I want to follow in the footsteps of Liz and look at the past year.

Memorable Books of 2011 (not necessarily written in 2011):

1. Parrot and Olivier in America (Novel) by Peter Carey

2. Steal Away (Poetry) by C.D. Wright

2. All The Pretty People (Flash Memoir) by Ariel Gore

3. Chronology of Water (Memoir) by Lidia Yuknavitch

4. Stop-Time (Memoir) by Frank Conroy

5. Paris Spleen (Poetry) by Charles Baudelaire

Memorable Films of 2011:

1. Bill Cunningham: New York (Doc)

2. Our City Dreams (Doc)

3. The Saving Grace Series (TV)

4. Man on Wire (Doc)

5. 50/50 (Feat)

Memorable Events of 2011:

1. Getting married.

2. Trip to Philadelphia

3. Leaving and coming back to The Thank You Writers

4. Teaching my second year of Creative Writing

5. Taking a class with Lidia Yuknavitch and getting feedback on my manuscript.

I'm A Matron

2011-12-09T16:30:00.001-08:00

It is still a little hard to believe that last week I got married, that I'm leaving for our honeymoon on Sunday and that I am indeed a Mrs.

I wrote this the other night, because I was startled by my own hands.

The Hands of Donna Reed

Red tipped fingers.
Diamond ring.
Who is took my hands?
Did you clean the bathroom?
I'm sorry.
Household items wrapped in cellophane.
Slightly prophane.
Pans in the sink.
Eggs for dinner.
I have a rash,
of things to think about.
Did you scoop the kitty litter?
What now?
Garbage out.
Dinner on.
Breakfast with.
Dishes in hot water.
There is more than one.
Way to skin a cat!
Horses and carriages.
Love and marriages.
Hand down the front
of your pants.

I know, it's a little strange. My friend Thomas wrote this in response:

Yes I cleaned it and it is the way I cleaned it, that might come up again later.
The supplies, ok yes, the supplies what I noticed most about them is how they are somewhere around here, right, somewhere around here and not exactly here, here. How to clean something, as you might without too much backwards, too much of the smell of old clothes, too much sitting or kneeling, too much TV dinner, but the last one I could not escape, and I wrapped the house in cellophane.

I don't know what that means either.

A Gushing Of Thankfulness

2011-12-04T13:57:00.001-08:00

This is what I am so grateful for now:

Thankfulvember Day 18: Portland!

2011-11-18T14:30:00.001-08:00

I moved to Portland on November 18th, 2007 on the Empire Builder train.

There was a special someone waiting at the train station with a soy latte (how appropriate) and a bouquet of flowers (which turned into irony later). My cat, Bernadette, had flown ahead and all of my possessions--except for my bike which was boxed and sent along with me on the train--were in 18 boxes and going UPS ground.

As I rolled in, bleary eyed and anxious, the city was overcast and bright with fall leaves, much like it is today. I was indeed anxious but also excited, scared, naive, and breathless. It was one of the hardest things I ever did--to pick up everything and move to a new city across the country from everything I knew. It was also arguably the best thing.

I am grateful for four years in Portland.

Thankfulvember 16/17

2011-11-17T12:02:00.001-08:00

I am grateful for perspective--when I have it, the ability to laugh at myself when I forget to. I am so grateful for my nook and cranny home, for yarn that can be pulled into a flower without a pattern, grateful for to-do lists that can be crumpled up and thrown away, or framed and hung on the wall--but either way are obsolete. I am grateful for the red leaves outside my office window. I am grateful for a job that means I get to hang out with Lidia Yuknavitch for a little while. I am grateful that I have woolen things that keep me from feel liking the the poor little match girl. I am grateful for electricity when it gets dark at 4:30pm. I am grateful, sometimes, for denial. I am grateful, most times, for acceptance.

Thankfulvember 12,13,14 & 15

2011-11-15T10:51:00.001-08:00

Day 12: The ability to laugh despite retail madness.
Day 13: Sitting on the same side of the booth, the better to lean in and smell that smell.
Day 14: Having the ability to give one hell of a pep talk--and to feel pepped by the act of pepping.
Day 15: This song and the way I react to it, no matter where I hear it, or how many times.

Thankfulness days 10 & 11

2011-11-11T11:49:00.001-08:00

Thanksvember Days 8&9

2011-11-09T14:49:00.000-08:00

grateful for acupuncture clearing my head and allowing me to sleep well. grateful for my sparkly green bike and the legs to push it to work. grateful for new friends at coffee shops with discoveries of commonalities that used to feel like anomalies. grateful for not-so-new friends converging onto Ethiopian food and The Tempest. grateful for three run-ins in one day miraculous spotting of lovely people.

Thankvember Day 7

2011-11-07T22:14:00.000-08:00

I am so very grateful for long brisk walks with my pajamas tucked into jeans.

Red-orange-yellow-gold leaves everywhere.

A toddler who hugged the back of my knees while I was waiting in line at the library.

Mostly, I am grateful for the wallop of intuition that I get--not always but sometimes--that tells me what the right thing to do is. It happened tonight, thank you.

Grateful Day 6:

2011-11-06T13:45:00.001-08:00

Oh friends. Friends who bike an hour to help can jars and jars of wedding apple butter. Friends who bring deviled eggs. Friends who get up early and make apple gallete and shallot stuffed mushrooms. Friends who listen to litany. Friends who make that perfect playlist. Friends who notice when my face is bright, or when it's dark.

Thanks November Day 5

2011-11-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

Today I am grateful for Interstate Hwy 84 that runs along the Columbia Gorge and it's ability to bring Burton from his little camper all the way to my front door in 2 hours and 10 minutes.

I am grateful for Goldy the Volvo and her studly studded tires for getting him here and for the way his neck smells and the feel of his hand on my low back after a week of missing.

I am grateful for laughing so hard in the rainy morning, while driving to meet Tom for brunch, that tears run down my cheeks and I run the risk of crashing into a building.

I am grateful for tables that have griddles built into them and friends who make asymmetrical slap-dash peanut butter pancakes.

I am grateful for the option of movie, book or bath with nothing much else on the agenda.

Thanks November.

2011-11-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

I've seen some people being grateful as a Facebook exercise for the month of November. Now, while I usually shy away from this sort of platitude riddled, band-wagon sort of activity I do have a weakness for gratitude.

I really do believe in the magical restorative powers of positive thinking and tallying of the good that happens in life. I've seen great minds taken down by negative self-talk and doomy-gloomy focus.

I'm not Pollyanna, I can be cynical and more critical than most--but I want to be Pollyanna.

On my good days I have the capacity for grace. I'm one of those people who are suddenly serene when the shit hits the ubiquitous fan. Give me terminal illnesses, abject poverty, abuse, tragedy--I will give you calm strong resolve. However, give me a stubbed toe, paper cut, dropped ice-cream cone or flat tire--I will give you tears and tantrums.

So I am consciously, conscientiously, attempting to imbue grace and gratitude into my daily. I'm starting by listing the multitude of things I am grateful for, every fucking day, for the month of November.

I am grateful that I found a person who makes me laugh and that I get to spend the rest of my life with that person.
My health! Pitter-patter heart, riddled ovaries and all!
In general the community I am a part of--more on that later.
The inexplicably punk look of Black capped Juncos in my yard, slipper, hot coffee and a tail twitching cat.

That's November caught up. I might need more than one month to make my list...

Wedding Bells

2011-10-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

I've been engaged to be married for close to a year and originally I wasn't planning on getting married until next September, as in 2012. I had leisurely begun to look at wedding magazines, thought vaguely about colors and cake flavors. Burton and I had been going back and forth about guest lists, he kept adding to the list and I kept taking away. No stress, plenty of time.

Then, I went to the free clinic and found out that I may have a heart condition. I need tests and possibly a "procedure" which is a kind euphemism for scary heart surgery--all things that would be close to impossible for me to fathom going through, let alone pay for.

Burton has a new job and is insured in about 60 days. So, surprise! We are getting married 10 months ahead of schedule.

a few of the things I have become consumed by:

who to invite, who we can afford to invite.
feeding 30 people three different meals
wedding favors
cake
flower arrangements
a wedding dress
a fucking veil
a ceremony
writing vows
registering
announcements
families colliding!

I've neglected many other things in my life, everything I can afford to. I haven't written a word since setting the date (November 26th, 2011--holy fucking shit). I will come back, I just have to get hitched first.

A Life Story: Part One

2011-10-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

I eloped* alone from the mobile home. I eloped from the woodpaneled portals to back bedrooms with a queen water bed that belied the generaltone. I left behind; foil packets of Oriental flavor, my mother’s twin hands,cassette tapes of Bonnie Raitt and Vanilla Ice, a pan of forgotten boiled eggscrawling with maggots and secret maps drawn on the underside of all the tables.I was hit by a car in the crossing, my lope stumbled, I admit. I kept oneloping. I eloped to Wisconsin, Washington, Arizona, South Dakota. I eloped toVermillion, LaCrosse, Seattle, Glendale, Stillwater. I loped in circles, incars with boys with rottweilers named Peace. I loped under sand dunes withpsychedelic trips in tents, back-rub trains sprinkled with men who struck astep-father chord in me. I eloped again to tattoo parlors where I took off myshirt and pointed to a place that needed filling. I followed people home andcried in their kitchens. I rode in small spaces. I packed light. I threw thingsaway. I kept notes then burned them. I lied about my age. I had sex with my boss on a table in anoffice in the University District. I made out with my friend’s ex-boyfriend ina dark bar—he wore a paisley shirt, Marvin Gaye on the jukebox. I laid in waitfor a blonde girl with short spiked hair in 1999 and ached for the first time.I licked cum from bellies for free, called potential buyers for money. I cut myhair, pulled at my tight shirts, shortened my skirts, swam naked in theMississippi with a girl from Dresback where all the German farmers were—lonely.I fell in love with a violin and never learned to play. I read Tropic ofCancer—angry. I was called babe, baby,sweetie, honey, hon, sugar, bitch, cunt. I yearned for Big Sur in 1952 andother impossible things. I slept on couches, foam mattresses, alongside snoringsoldiers in twin beds. I loped across fields in bare feet with a stitch in myside. I ate peanut butter and apples for weeks. I made lefse in a borrowedkitchen. There was a chimney fire, an electrical fire. They were broken bonesand hang-nails. I fell ill and had to crawl home. People died, some quickly andsome slowly. I went to funerals, when I could. I kept loping.

Elope:

1. To run away with a lover with the intention of getting married.

*2. To run away with no destination in mind.

two irreconcilable eyes (eggs)

2011-10-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

I am in a writing group. Sometimes we write, but, mostly we share the space with other people who love writing as much as we do. We drink wine and sometimes tea and eat blonde foods like hummus and corn chips and chicken. When we do write, it is a magical space where everything feels heavy with potential. Sometimes, in the light of day, they still do. Like this collaborative exercise we did:

Thank you writers. September 13, 2010. SocialLists.

By: Liz Moyer, Remy Jewell, Timmy Straw, Thomas Mowe, Y. Madrone and me. Facilitated on this date by Y. Madrone.

the sunroom on Claremont avenue with the whiteleather couch

we had bouts of decorum where we were more brittle

glass bottles hanging

ten feathers sticking out of blue jean pockets

one feather gulped on down

thank god I’m a country boy

I wish I could move to the big city and be a radiocity rockette

bet it’s the minutes that count in those days, younever think of it like that when you’re on the jump

I would open jars for you

I wouldn’t talk in my sleep about ex’s

I know the secrets that you keep

she grew up in an Indiana town, with a goodlookin’ momma who never was around

better listen to me, or you’ll grow up to sellwatches at the mall and read the backs of potato chip bags on your breaks

check the forecast for winter break.

pack: glitter, eyelashes, boa and balls.

body: two irreconcilable eyes (eggs)

making make (me) believe you’re married to me

tidy little corners—hospital

satin with a hard stitched quilt—cabin in thewoods

trust covers—the therapist

will she open the door

three kids trapped in a cabin in the woods with noelectricity

it wasn’t a conversation to catch them

she said “catch as catch can”

I said “I never worry past Tuesday”

I lifted something heavy and it was fine and peoplewere impressed

chef’s knife

cast-iron frying pan

like “damn son don’t speak til you know who you’respeaking to”

Sanford and sons at 5pm on channel 7.

Michael Jackson videos mashed up

VH1’s top 100 sexiest videos of the ‘90’s

white linen sashes

ancient lace

new faces to get behind

rose of Sharon in your hair

caddis fly

jewel encrusted sarcophagus

urn thrown overboard

the cold, sinking

ice ice baby

dum dum dum da da dum dum

warble, wince or whatever. I’ll only know what youhave to say. Because you list the species, the bait, the position, or likethat, and so on into the pine trees

a watch hanging down.

the moon also

behind a waterfall

cab of a pickup truck

the forest between crescent city and eureka

I would throw them back because I couldn’t killthem quick like my dad could. He’d been spoiled by woodness

wool blankets on a bare bottom.

the backseat in my dodge dart with the radio on& AC & gummy bears

the master bedroom

I’ve got a meeting in the ladies room

I’m sorry, I’m busy that evening feeding myhamster

like Ricky Connecticut

Rimbaud’s Wise Music

2011-10-04T12:52:00.000-07:00

I read Rimbaud's Illuminations on my way to work this morning, I felt cracked open from the heart on out, riding on a click clack max train. I had a flash of remembering my first brush with Rimbaud-in the lyric's of Bob Dylan's "You're gonna make me lonesome when you go" another reminder that we all come from everything that came before us.

Lydia Davis breaks it down better than I can:

A review of Illuminations translated by John Ashbery

Some associations with the name Rimbaud are very familiar:the highly romantic photograph taken a few months after he first settled inParis, already at 17 the dedicatedly bohemian artist, with his pale blue eyes,distant gaze, thatch of hair, carelessly rumpled clothes; the startling, muchinterpreted declaration Je est un autre (“I is someone else”); the fact that heproduced a masterly, innovative and influential body of poetry while still inhis teens; that he stopped writing around age 21 and never went back to it, engagingthereafter in various sometimes mysterious commercial and mystical enterprisesin exotic locations, including a period of gun-running in Africa (and, oddly,an attempt to enlist in the United States Navy).

He died of cancer in a Marseilles hospital in 1891, stillyoung — having in effect compressed what for others would have been a longlifetime of artistic revolution and exotic adventure into just 37 years. Adeepened and more detailed acquaintance with the legend does not disappoint: heis one of those exceptional meteoric individuals whose very eruption andsubsequent accomplishments remain dazzling and difficult to explain away.

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville, in thenortheast of France close to the Belgian border, to a sour-tempered,repressively pious mother and a mostly absent soldier father who disappearedfor good when Rimbaud was 6. He excelled in school, reading voraciously andretentively and regularly carrying off most of his grade’s year-end academicprizes. Early poems were written not just in French but sometimes in Latin andGreek and included a 60-line ode, dedicated (and sent) to Napoleon III’s young son,and a fanciful rendering of a math assignment.

He had announced in a letter written when he was only 16that he intended to create an entirely new kind of poetry, written in anentirely new language, through a “rational derangement of all the senses,” andwhen, not yet 17, he made his first successful escape to Paris, financed by theolder poet Paul Verlaine, he came prepared to change the world, or at leastliterature. He was immediately a colorful figure: the filthy, lice-infested,intermittently bewitching young rebel with large hands and feet, whose missionrequired scandalizing the conventional-minded and defying moral codes not onlythrough his verse but through his rude, self-destructive and anarchicalbehavior; the brilliantly skillful and versatile poet not only of theoccasional sentimental subject (orphans receiving gifts on New Year’s Day) butalso of lovely scatological verse; the child-faced young innovator whoseliterary development evolved from poem to poem at lightning speed.

In Paris, he became close friends and soon lovers — openlygay behavior being very much a part of his project of self-exploration anddefiance of society — with Verlaine, whose own poetry Rimbaud had alreadyadmired from a distance, with its transgression of traditional formalconstraints including, shockingly, bridging the caesura in the alexandrineline. (Although this line occurred in Verlaine’s third book, Rimbaud may wellalso have been familiar with the first, “Poèmes saturniens,” or “Poems UnderSaturn,” which was published in 1866 and has recently appeared in a deftlyrhymed and metered new translation by Karl Kirchwey that offers it for thefirst time in English as an integral volume.) Their stormy relationship, whichextended into Belgium and England and lasted a surprising length of time, wasrichly productive literarily on both sides.

Rimbaud has therefore been the perfect subject, for 120years now, of sanctification, vilification, multiple rival exegeses,obfuscation, memoirs that rely on often faulty recollection — all of which hasgenerated, of course, many times the few hundred pages left by the poet himselfin the form of letters, juvenilia, some 80 poems, including the 100-line“Drunken Boat,” written when he was still 16, and the nine-section confessionaland self-condemnatory prose sequence “A Season in Hell,” besides what was closeto his last work, the sequence of mostly prose poems called “Illuminations.”

If the dating of all the poems in this last work cannot beverified precisely, neither can their proper order or the circumstances leadingup to their publication. The rather unreliable Verlaine tells us that after hewas released from prison in 1875 — he had shot Rimbaud in the arm in a Brusselshotel room — the younger poet handed him a pile of loose pages and asked him tofind a publisher. After passing through several hands, the poems appeared inthe magazine La Vogue 10 years later, in 1886, having been prepared forpublication by Félix Fénéon (journalist, publisher and author of the bizarrecollection of police-blotter-generated newspaper fillers published as “Novelsin Three Lines” by New York Review Books in 2007).

Asked many years later, Fénéon could not remember whetherthe order was his own or whether he had preserved the order in which hereceived them — although, since he did not receive them directly from Rimbaud,that order was not necessarily the author’s. The work was greeted at the timewith some laudatory reviews, though not many copies were bought.

Formally, “Illuminations” — the title may refer to engravedillustrations, to epiphanies or flashes of insight, or to the productions ofthe poet-seer who has transformed himself into pure light — consists of 43poems ranging from a few lines to works of several sections covering multiplepages; some are in large blocks of type, some in paragraphs so brief they arevirtually two-line stanzas. (At least once, a single comma at the end of theparagraph magically turns it into a strophe.) Only three poems have brokenlines.

Despite the uncertainty of its dates of composition,“Illuminations” is quite clearly written after Rimbaud’s most defiant andscurrilous phase had passed. It does not contain the explicit playful orlyrical obscenity of earlier times, but rather a subtler incandescent orecstatic range of congruous and incongruous, urban and pastoral imagery, andhistorical and mythological reference often grounded in near-recognizableautobiographical narrative. A wealth of images — mineral, industrial,theatrical, royal, natural and nostalgic — often develop by leaps of immediatepersonal association rather than by sequential or narrative logic, employingthe techniques of Surrealism decades before it existed as a movement. The poemsshift in tone and register from the matter of fact to the highly rhetorical (“Oworld!”), the statements from the simple (“the hand of the countryside on myshoulder”) to the more abstruse (“He is affection and the present since heopened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer”), while alwaysdeparting from and returning to a concrete, sensory world. The more narrativepoems — faux-reminiscences, exhortations, modern fairy tales — are punctuatedby verse consisting almost solely of exclamatory lists of sentence fragments,what sound like celebrations of repeated amazement, contributing to create whatJohn Ashbery, in his brief but enlightening preface to his new translation,calls “the crystalline jumble of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations,’ like a disorderedcollection of magic lantern slides, each an ‘intense and rapid dream,’ in hiswords.”

Ashbery has said he first read Rimbaud when he was 16, andhe clearly took to heart the young poet’s declaration that “you must beabsolutely modern” — absolute modernity being, as Ashbery says in his preface, “theacknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishespoetry at every second.” When Rimbaud’s mother asked of “A Season in Hell,”“What does it mean?” — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and ofAshbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, “It means what it says, literally andin every sense.”

If Rimbaud anticipated the Surrealists by decades, Ashberyis said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yetthough nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration ofindependence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence ofimagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately,what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines. Enough others, however,find the “crystalline jumble” intellectually and emotionally revitalizing andsay, Yes, please do interrupt the reverie you have created for us to allow anintrusion of Popeye!

Besides his early absorption of Rimbaud’s work, Ashberybrings to this translation a long and deep familiarity with French life,language and culture, particularly artistic and literary culture, and theexperience of having translated many other French works over the years — byPierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob, Pierre Martory (as well as at leastone detective novel, as the amusingly renamed Jonas Berry). These translationsare part of a larger body of Ashbery’s work that has served to offer us — hislargely monolingual Anglophone readership — access to poets of another culture,either foreign or earlier in time. (Notable, for instance, is his keenlyinvestigatory, instructive and engrossing “Other Traditions,” the six NortonLectures that open our eyes to the work of such luminaries as John Clare andLaura Riding.) In tandem, then, with his own 20-plus books of poetry (not tomention his teaching and his critical writings on the visual arts), Ashbery hasextended his generous explicating intelligence to the work of many others, mostrecently in “Illuminations.”

In a meticulously faithful yet nimbly inventive translation,Ashbery’s approach has been to stay close to the original, following the lineof the sentence, retaining the order of ideas and images, reproducing eveneccentric or inconsistent punctuation. He shifts away from the closesttranslation only where necessary, and there is plenty of room within this closeadherence for vibrant and less obvious English word choices. One of thepleasures of the translation, for instance, is the concise, mildly archaic Anglo-Saxonvocabulary he occasionally deploys — “hued” for teinte and “clad” for revêtus,“chattels” for possessions — or a more particular or flavorful English for amore general or blander French: “lush” for riches, “hum of summer” for rumeurde l’été, “trembling” for mouvantes.

Even a simple problem reveals his skill. In one section ofthe poem “Childhood,” there occurs the following portrayal of would-betranquillity: “I rest my elbows on the table, the lamp illuminates thesenewspapers that I’m a fool for rereading, these books of no interest.” The twowords sans intérêt (“without interest”) allow for surprisingly many solutions,as one can see from a quick sampling of previous translations. Yet these otherchoices are either less rhythmical than the French — “uninteresting,” “empty ofinterest” — or they do not retain the subtlety of the French: “mediocre,”“boring,” “idiotic.” Ashbery’s “books of no interest” is quietly matter-of-factand dismissive, like the French, rhythmically satisfying and placed, like theoriginal, at the end of the sentence.

It takes one sort of linguistic sensitivity to stay close tothe original in a pleasing way; another to bring a certain inventiveness toone’s choices without being unfaithful. Ashbery’s ingenuity is evident at manymoments in the book, and an especially lovely example occurs in the same poem:he has translated Qu’on me loue enfin ce tombeau, blanchi à la chaux as “Letsomeone finally rent me this tomb, whited with quicklime.” Here, his “whitedwith quicklime” (rather than “whitewashed,” the choice of all the othertranslations I found) at once exploits the possibilities of assonance andintroduces the echo of the King James “whited sepulcher” without betraying themeaning of the original.

Some of the translations in this book have appearedpreviously in literary journals one by one over the past two years or so —evidently done slowly over time, as translations ought to be, especially ofpoems, and especially of these poems, given their extreme compression, theirtonal and stylistic shifts, their liberating importance in the history ofpoetry. We are fortunate that John Ashbery has turned his attention to a texthe knows so well, and brought to it such care and imaginative resourcefulness.

Lydia Davis’s most recent books include “The CollectedStories of Lydia Davis” and a translation of “Madame Bovary.”

i loved that penguin

2011-09-28T14:52:00.001-07:00

i loved that penguin, originally uploaded by OMalley In The Alley.

here's to 31 years, on to 32.

Flannery O'Conner: Why and How To Write

2011-09-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

On any given morning Flannery O'Connor would just wake up and bust out a short story, for example "A Circle in the Fire" ("Sometimes the last line of trees was a solid grey blue wall a little darker than the sky...") and that was it. She really didn't have to do anything else during the day. One morning she was like, "I have some opinions about the Holocaust, and bam, "The Displaced Person." We could all stand to be a lot more like her, although that can never be, since she knew nothing of the internet.

Point of view drives me crazy when I think about it but I believe that when you are writing well, you don't think about it. I seldom think about it when I am writing a short story, but on the novel it gets to be a considerable worry. There are so many parts of the novel that you have to get it over with so you can get something else to happen, etc, etc. I seem to stay in a snarl with mine.
Of course I hear the complaint over and over that there is no sense in writing about people who disgust you. I think there is; but the fact is that the people I write about certainly don't disgust me entirely though I see them from a standard of judgment from which they fall short. Your freshman who said there was something religious here was correct. I take the Dogmas of the Church literally and this, I think, is what creates what you call the "missing link." The only concern, so far as I see it, is what Tillich calls "the ultimate concern." It is what makes the stories spare and what gives them any permanent quality they may have.
I beat my brains out this morning on a story I am hacking at and in the afternoon and I am exhausted is why I haven't got down to the typewriter. It takes great energy to typewrite something. When I typewrite something the critical instinct operates automatically and that slows me down. When I write it by hand, I don't pay much attention to it....
There is really one answer to the people who complain about one's writing about "unpleasant" people — and that is that one writes what one can. Vocation implies limitation but few people realize it who don't actually practice an art.
I don't know how you would tell anybody his writing was mannered, except you say, "Brother this is mannered." I once had the sentence: "He ran through the field of dead cotton" and Allen Tate told me it was mannered; should have been "dead cotton field." I don't hold that against Allen. Give him something good to criticize and he would do better.
I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re: fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Housefire + Me =

2011-09-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

I've never been solicited before, but this time I was:

http://www.housefirepublishing.com/fiction/everything-can-not-be-terrific-a-m-omalley/

This last week and a half was the kind that usually gives me strep throat:

Friday: Fly back from Philadelphia
Saturday: Find out a friend and co-worker has died five minutes before getting on stage to read a silly story at a festival of impressive writers; bomb the reading.
Sunday: Go swimming in the middle of a forest fire, find that the water is too cold.
Monday: Back to work after 10 days.
Tuesday: Post Office, Bank, Library, Work, Dinner with Burt, Writing Group
Wednesday: Unexpected out of town cousin who now has facial tattoos and no money. HUGE event at work.
Thursday: FUNERAL, drink too much, insomnia
Friday: Desperate attempt at quality time with boyfriend before he leaves for two weeks and then forever. Lend cousin $200.
Saturday: Teach a class, drive to Olympia for a house show/reading, drive back. Insomnia.
Sunday: Drop boyfriend off at the airport, Brunch house show/reading, three Bloody Marys, six hours of lying in bed, then ten hours of sleeping (a little fitful week).

Is there anything else I can possibly say?

Philly loves me

2011-09-12T15:54:00.001-07:00

Into the Woods

2011-09-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

What is Your Metaphor?

2011-08-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

This last weekend I went to a class taught by Lidia Yuknavitch. It was called "Writing Yourself Raw: Why and How to Break the Rules in Fiction and Non-Fiction"

Coming across this class felt like destiny, I have been working in between genres, grafting genres in my laboratory--trying to create the hybrid that fits me the best.

I recently read Yuknavitch's Chronology of Water, and was compelled by her disregard for traditional form. She doesn't bother to put things in chronological order, she rhapsodizes freely about literature, she tells her story the way she wanted to tell it. I knew I would be in good hands.

The class was four hours of gold. I wrote the beginnings of four new pieces. Lidia reassured us that our form would find us, that we just needed to charge ahead.

She said bring big into the tiny.

She said to go deeper we must step around the literal and embrace the figurative.

She said if you are going to use a metaphor, you better train yourself on how to exhaust it. She said that she and her pal Cheryl Strayed have a theory. The theory is that all great artist are working with the same three metaphors. That we all, as creatives, have our own core metaphors. Some examples; Faulkner has Death in the Family, Borges: Ladders, Annie Dillard: The Forces of Nature, David Foster Wallace: The Mathematical Equation. I thought of John Irving and his dancing bears, Salvador Dali and his ants and clocks, Isabelle Allende and her caves. I thought of my own propensity to use birds and trees to impart what I am trying to say.

Lidia handed each of us a scrap of paper with a word on it, a metaphor. She asked us to write ten truths about it. I got Ants. These are my truths about Ants:

1. Ants carry ten times their own weight, or maybe it's a hundred, I don't remember.
2. Ants always find the sugar in my kitchen.
3. Ants march in a line, but seem mindless.
4. Fire ants once found my watermelon covered legs.
5. Ants can be tiny or distressingly large.
6. Ants are resilient.
7. Ants work harder than I do.
8. Ants are selfless.
9. Ants love their queen.
10. Ants are eaten by ant-eaters and bears and sometimes by me on accident.

After listening to my list, Lidia suggested structuring an entire story around those ten truths. She then challenged us to think about our own personal metaphors and to then write 200 truths about them.

I challenge you to do the same.

I was there

2011-08-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

when she decided to quit. The smell of pot in our living room was a secret that came from the coffee table drawer. I lay under that long low table and drew a map on the underside. When she didn’t come home I found a cotton nightgown that smelled like soft n’ dry and cigarettes, tucked it under my pillow. Boyfriends got more upset than I did. Grateful Dead. Broken glass. Slashed tires. A rose sulking on it’s stem. I put a card in the spokes of my bike. I lay in the lawn and listened to her sing while she washed the dishes. It was not necessarily a playground; the smoky rooms, with twelve steps leading to salvation where I rocked in the corner kicking the wall, wishing for a castle. The smokers around the tables laid out darkness in neat rows. A man from those rooms with BC glasses and a bald pate gave me a small hard-bound copy of The Red Pony, I wrote my name with sloping letters in the inside cover and didn’t read the book until years later. So, it was only later I found out about the boy and his helpless nursing of a damp furred pony and could look back at my own helplessness. When she decided to get married. When she decided to have another baby. When she decided to stay. When she decided to quit.

Where The Hell Have You Been *Young Lady

2011-08-12T11:39:00.001-07:00

I've been making good foods for myself:

I've been drinking plenty of water:

I've been eating cold things too:

I've been getting irritated with surly vegans:

I went to the Portland Zine Symposium:

I've been hanging out with Wren:

I've been picking blueberries:

I've been going to writing group:

I've been snuggling with my cat:

I've been baking chicken:

I've been serving it up home style to my boyfriend:

But, I've missed you. I also changed the format of my blog after I found out that a hate-blog had the exact same template.

To Be That Old

2011-07-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Barbara has long hands, narrow and nicotine stained--I did not inherit them. When she made potato salad for 35, she took off her thin gold wedding band and the mother’s ring with ten small stones. She stirred the radish, boiled eggs, cubed potatoes, celery and onion with those thin hands. Bits of yellow yolk clung to her fingers as she tumbled the vat of salad. Barbara wiped the counter tops with her long hands, hung wallpaper, mowed the lawn, drank Folgers coffee with Sweet n Low and Coffee Mate Non-Dairy Creamer. She smoked endless cigarettes, sometimes Winstons. My mother was her fifth child, first girl. When the moon was full the three of us think about each other under that same sky. When I sit close to her on the couch I hear the ticking of her heart—the artificial valve long past it's expiration date.

Hazel had paper parchment hands filled with a bones and jam that leached through into bright purple spots. She held things in her paper hands to show me; dolls from 1890, silver spoons from Moscow, glass eggs from China. The room where she kept her collection was a room of a thousand eyes. I stayed in there on a soft cot, muslin sheets. I lay very still, tried chatting to the dolls before falling asleep to insure that they would not rise up against me. Ken, her tall husband, had thick hair the color of egg wash. He had slung my bag over his shoulder, jauntily, when they picked me up at the airport. I knew then that he wasn’t willing to be that old. I was eleven; my mother had married their son. They fed me canned ham, ambrosia, packeted gravy. When it was time to go, I took a soft square of muslin from a doll—her handkerchief—I tucked it into my pants to bring home.

I met Nonabelle just once. I don’t remember her hands, only that tall beehive of hair and beige three-inch pumps in a dark kitchen. Braunshweger sandwiches with Miracle Whip and enriched white bread. Bread & Butter pickles on the side. Sun outside with unknown cousins. She sat down with me on a twin bed in the spare room and placed a book of scraps on my sun burned legs, the edges dug into my tender skin. She pointed out the draft card that sent my father into a different life. She showed me other things; I only remember the sting on my legs and the smell of Aqua Net in her hair.

A Letter From Vladimir Nabokov

2011-07-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

December 24, 1945
Dear Bunny,
There are several reasons why Hamlet, even in the hideous garbled versions current on the stage, should be attractive both to the caviar eater and the groundling:
(1) everybody likes to see a ghost on the stage;
(2) kings and queens are also attractive;
(3) the number and variety of lethal arrangements are unsurpassed and thus most pleasing-

(a) murder by mistake,

(b) poison (in dumb show),

(d) bathing and tree climbing casualty,

(e) duel,

(f) again poison-

and other attractions backstage. Incidentally it has never occurred to critics to note that Hamlet does kill the king in the middle of the play; that it turns out to be Polonius does not alter the fact of Hamlet having gone and done it. Anthology of murder.
We somehow hoped that you would come here these days. I am working furiously at my novel (and very anxious to show you a couple of new chapters). I detest Plato, I loathe Lacedaemon and all Perfect States. I weigh 195 pounds.
cordially yours,

V. Nabokov

I Was There

2011-07-24T15:08:00.000-07:00

I was there when she decided to quit. The smell of pot in our living room was a secret that came from the coffee table drawer. I lay under that long low table and drew a map on the underside. When she didn’t come home I found a cotton nightgown that smelled like soft n’ dry and cigarettes, tucked it under my pillow and fell quickly into sleep. Boyfriends got more upset than I did. Broken glass. Grateful Dead. Slashed tires. A rose sulking on it’s stem. I put a card in the spokes of my bike. I lay in the lawn and listened to her sing while she washed the dishes. The smoky rooms, with twelve steps leading to salvation where I rocked in the corner kicking the wall, wishing for a castle, while the bodies around the table laid out darkness in neat rows, was not necessarily a playground. A man from the tables with BC glasses gave me a small hard-bound copy of The Red Pony, I wrote my name with sloping letters in the inside cover and didn’t read the book until years later. I didn’t find out about the boy and his helpless nursing of a damp furred pony until I could look back at my own helplessness with vague regret. I was there when she decided to get married. I was there when she decided to have another baby. I was there when she decided to stay. I was there when she decided to quit.

Somehow

2011-07-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

“What can I tell you that you don’t already know?” We waited together in the high captain chairs of a blue suburban that she still owed thousands on. I was in the driver’s seat, the leather pressed close to the steering wheel. She had a confession to make, a sequence of events she began to arrange for me. She set the scene, thirty years ago, homeless with a baby; there was also wicked ex-sister in law, a small cocaine habit, a feeling of isolation, and an angry scene. Somehow she wound up—these words have been applied so liberally to her life—somehow she wound up wandering the streets of Denver with a small bag, a medium sized baby, and no where to go. Somehow she wound up in a four-season porch with a small crib in a house of longhaired bikers. Somehow she wound up leaving me for an hour to have a quick beer at the tavern down the hill. Somehow she wound up being beaten in the parking lot by a pack of vicious women screaming that she had left her baby alone. Somehow she wound up bleeding and crying in the four-season porch, quietly, the baby was sleeping. Somehow she wound up talking to the police, they didn’t mind that she had been beaten. Somehow she wound up watching the lady-cop gently picked the baby up and carried me away. “What can I tell you that you don’t already know” I sat in the captain chair, my anchor shifted in the sand.

The Bride

2011-07-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

I asked her, thirty-five years later, why she had married him. I asked her, reminded her that she had been 17 and not pregnant. In 1976 women were burning things; tuna casseroles, maiden-form bras, their lips on roach clips. She had younger sisters. She had older brothers. I asked her with a pen in hand, we sat in soft chairs and I resisted the urge to look over her sad head at the wood paneling. I asked her, the answer was something about beer in frosted mugs, older boys with trucks, shorts so short that they required constant extraction, fishing in tapered sunlight. Gary Hartung. It rained on their wedding day. Valentines Day. She had danced with her father in the Elks Lodge. She wore a veil like the one from her first holy communion, scalloped around her dark hair. Rain on your wedding day means good luck, or travel. I asked her about the fire on their wedding night. The window piled with weddings gifts. She had lain on the bed, drunk with her wedding. Everyone in the hotel woke to thickened air. I asked about when he left her in the stairwell. Her bridesmaids wore dusty rose, bell sleeves, hair parted in the middle. There is just one picture; she is almost off the frame, but smiling with her eyes cast upon her hand in his. I never met him, but she says that once I did.

Roe V. Wade

2011-07-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

I was a cluster of cells. I was a zeitgeist of 1979. She was a 1970 Dodge Dart, green. She was misplaced. It was already February. She sat in the 1970 Dodge Dart, green, with the engine on. She had manifested me with Joe Cocker and a barge on the Mississippi and now, here she was, staring through the foggy glass at a door to a low cinder-block clinic. She had driven 123 miles in the 1970 Dodge Dart, green. She had been in the driver’s seat, she had intended to get out and walk through the door to the low cinder-blocked clinic. It was her father’s car, the 1970 Dodge Dart, green, he hadn’t asked why she needed it. Her father’s work was stressful that year what with the gas shortages, and he had nine other children. There was a small bundle of 20-dollar bills in the Dodge Dart, green, the heat was on—but barely. She had driven the 123 miles in two hours across stubbled, frozen fields with steamed breath. She had driven with two hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead. She had passed Prescott, Alma, Oshkosh, and Menominee to Eau Claire. January had bled into February and the only red she had seen were on drooping door wreaths that reminded her of when her older brother Timmy had been killed. There was a radio in the Dodge Dart, green, but it was turned off.

One Year Ago

2011-07-05T16:09:00.001-07:00

I went on a ten-hour date that included a haircut, a long bike ride, cumbia dancing, sweet potato enchiladas and so much laughter I woke up the next day with a side-ache.

That morning, I also woke up to a text message that said; "You have wonderful, breathtaking calves."

A year later, and I'm incredulous that my most perfect mate is going to marry me. He also reported yesterday that my calves are still inspirational.

Why and How to Write: Gertrude Stein

2011-06-29T10:41:00.000-07:00

Every writer must have common sense. He must be sensitive and serious. But he must not grow solemn. He must not listen to himself. If he does, he might as well be under a tombstone. When he takes himself solemnly, he has no more to say. Yet he must despise nothing, not even solemn people. They are part of life and it’s his job to write about life.

Be direct. Indirectness ruins good writing. There is inner confusion in the world today and because of it people are turning back to old standards like children to their mothers. This makes indirect writing.

A writer must preserve a balance between sensitivity and vitality. Highbrow writers are sensitive but not vital. Commercial writers are vital but not sensitive. Trying to keep this balance is always hard. It is the whole job of living.

When one writes a thing — when you discover and then put it down, which is the essence of discovering it — one is done with it. What people get out of it is none of the writer’s business.

Every writer is self-conscious. It’s one reason he is a writer. And he is lonely. If you know three writers in a lifetime, that is a great many.

You do not have to write what the editors want. You can write what you want and if you develop sufficient craftsmanship, you can sell it, too. I want you to write for the Saturday Evening Post. It demands the best craftsmanship.

Sequence Poems: in the style of Anne Carson's 'Short Talks"

2011-06-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

A Case of Mistaken Identity: The Mother Who Wasn’t

The children followed her from room to hollow room.

Irish twins, two sets, imperfectly matched.

They opened the door to spy her sitting in the private tile—

Her face a surprise.

A Case of Mistaken Identity: High Heels in A Small Town

Lipstick, Fox-fur hat, miniature skirt, stalactite heels.

“What the fuck, are you a man?”

a shrug, then

“It’s been a long winter and I’ve watched a lot of T.V.”

A Case of Mistaken Identity: Footsteps

What I thought were your footsteps,

turned out to be

fighter planes crumpling up the horizon.

A Case of Mistaken Identity: Height

I was under the impression

of your boot heel—

the ones you wear to make you look taller

than you actually are.

Writing Advice from Margaret Atwood

2011-06-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Love is Brick & Morter

2011-06-21T14:57:00.001-07:00

Kenton

2011-06-17T14:18:00.001-07:00

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Jay-Z: Rap Is Poetry : Harriet Staff : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

2011-06-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

Jay-Z: Rap Is Poetry : Harriet Staff : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

I Don't Remember

2011-06-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

Charles Baxter wrote "What we talk about when we talk about memory is, often, what we have forgotten and what has been lost. The passion and torment and significance seem to lie in that direction."

I don't remember meeting my father, though when I was four, my mother says we did have a brief meeting. I don't remember being born, but I know it happened. I don't remember the moment I learned to read, though that might be the most important thing that ever happened. I don't remember the first meal I enjoyed. I don't remember the first smell that disgusted or delighted me. I don't remember the first time I touched silk. I don't remember the first time I broke a glass. I don't remember the first time my tongue was burned. I don't remember all the places we lived when I was small, though I know I must have inhabited those spaces with awareness. I don't remember the police coming to take me away from my weeping, bleeding mother. I don't remember the foster parents who kept me for a year and who fought to keep me. I don't remember all of the winding mountain roads my mother took me down, but I remember some of them. I don't remember being placed on a chestnut mare in a high Colorado meadow, but there is a photograph that proves it--I seem happy to be there. I am wearing a bright red sweater, a plaid jumper and buster brown shoes, all clothing I also don't remember. I don't remember the turkey cooked upside down in the wood stove in our little cabin in the woods, but I know it happened and I've told the story as if I do remember. I don't remember the bird flying into the window, but I do remember picking it up and keeping it in a birdcage in my closet. I don't remember hiding the cheese in my dresser drawer, but I do remember finding it when it was covered in velvety mold. I don't remember the first moment my mother brought my step father home, but I remember the years of tormenting presence that followed. I don't remember the moment I was hit by a car on a rainy April day, I remember stepping off the curb into the street a moment before, and the bumpy ambulance ride after. I don't remember the songs we sang in choir, I remember the shaky feeling of walking on stage with the long swishing robes grazing the tops of my shiny black shoes. I don't remember the first moment I saw my brother Sam, but I do remember the first moment I saw my brother Micky. I don't remember the moment I knew that I would never come home again. I remember waving good-bye to my mother from the window of a Greyhound bus. I don't remember my grandfather picking me up from the station, but I remember him waving good-bye from a train station later. I don't remember how many times I've driven or rode across the country, but I remember sun baked afternoons in the back seats, driver seats, passenger seats. I don't remember breaking my leg, but I remember the cast. I don't remember why I kept leaving, but I remember the good-byes. I don't remember writing the story, but I remember reading it aloud to a room of people and wondering how I could do this every day. I don't remember falling in love, but I remember speaking the words "I love you" a thousand times. I don't remember the smell of my first lover, but I know it was distinct and precious and that I tried to keep on my self for as long as possible. I don't remember my 20th birthday. I don't remember the order of my books. I don't remember where my favorite shoes are. I don't remember when I started to hate late-comers. I don't remember when I became so controlling. I don't remember when I forgot to keep writing letters to you. I don't remember what time the trains leave Portland. I don't remember what the weather is supposed to do tomorrow. I don't remember how to be patient. I don't remember how to be at parties with out getting irritated. I don't remember all the dance moves. I don't remember to bring my umbrella. I don't remember.

The Birthday Party

2011-06-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

Amanda's mother swore it was all right for me to go, that my mother knew about the birthday party. She promised that I could come with them and eat birthday cake and take home a bag of party favors. Amanda's mother crouched down in front of me; she was smiling reassuringly, a stand of her long blonde hair was caught in the crease of her eye and I looked at it sticking there as the other girls from my 1st grade class streamed past me, down the concrete steps of our school, and piled into the bright green Dodge van that Amanda's parents drove. The girls were laughing and squealing, twelve or thirteen of them, piling like puppies into the carpeted floor of the van.

Amanda was the sort of girl that I secretly watched for clues, she seemed happy and confidant, she sang songs at recess, and shared her 24 pack of colored pencils with whoever asked. Amanda had long blonde hair that curled at the ends; her ribbons always matched her jersey dresses. She was best-friends with Jennifer, another source of curiosity to me, the two girls were like twins. One with blonde hair, one with dark brown hair. I watched as the girls settled into the van, Amanda and Jennifer were sitting in the two captain chairs in the back, the rest of the girls lying at their feet like courtiers. Amanda's father was sitting behind the wheel of the van, smoking a Marlboro like my mother did; he was looking impassively out the window at something in the distance.

Amanda’s mother put her hand on my sleeve; I shook my head slightly, and looked down at where my big toe was wearing a hole through the dirty canvas of my shoe. I didn't remember my mother telling me about the party, I didn't think she could possibly know. I looked towards where the buses were lining up and said I had to go home. The girls in the van were still yelling with delight.

Amanda's mother straightened, her pants were pressed with creases down the front, her toenails were painted and poking out of her sandals, she shrugged her shoulders and threw a look at her husband in the driver's seat, in response, he started the van and it roared to life like Dodge vans do. Amanda's mother threw up her hands gently, rolled the van door closed with a thunderous slam and they were gone.

I boarded the yellow bus, rode in the front behind the driver, the long ride home was quiet without the usual company of my friend Brittany; she had piled into the van too.

I got off at Pleasant View Mobile Home Park. The late afternoon sun was hot on my head as I walked past the rows of single wide trailers. I went quickly past #45 where the rottweilers barked viciously through the window. I walked quickly past #47 with the music that blared throbbing bass heavy music at all hours, glad that the shirtless men were not outside with their cans of beer. #49, home, my mother was there in the kitchen standing over a saucepan of frozen broccoli pieces boiling on the stove.

"Why aren't you at the birthday party?" She hardly looked up from the pan.

Later, she would console me with the steaming broccoli, slathered in butter and salt.

Now, a quarter century later, I can't remember if there were tears and recriminations, all I remember are the girls in my class, the next day, all wearing matching plastic rings--smug with cake and a ride in a carpeted van.

Sorry I haven't Posted

2011-06-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article in the New Yorker, about the artist Cory Arcangel, He is an artist obsessed with technology and the forgotten recesses of the internet. Amongst his many projects, is a re-blog of posts that contain the words "sorry I haven't posted". I've been reading the blog and am a little obsessed, much to the chagrin of all my other daily responsibilities. I had an idea that I might use the words "Sorry I haven't posted" in every post from here on out, to see if I eventually make it on to the Cory Arcangel site...

But, seriously, I'm so sorry I haven't posted. I have been writing a collection of poems about broken bones, both physical and psychological, and I am making great progress. I'm fascinated with what can break in ourselves. What can not be broken? Do you have ideas? Also, what can not go extinct? Is everything with life susceptible to being broken or becoming extinct? Please, dear reader, tell me.

In other news, I've been attending readings in Portland. I have realized that there are many little colonies of writers that exist independently of one another. I am determined to infiltrate most of them.

This Saturday I am going to the Work/Sound Gallery for the 6th installment of the Bad Blood Reading Series. I am excited about it, I've been informed that there will be a drumcore performance at 8:15.

Non Sequitor: I can't stand hearing people chew their food, even if it's totally reasonable.

Have a good week. Please answer my questions. It's supposed to be 84 degrees here on Saturday, I'm hoping that will make people stop complaining about the weather.

Blue Basin

2011-05-31T13:28:00.000-07:00

read this blog every chance you get

2011-05-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

A poet/magician/sequined goddess named Franciszka Voeltz is someone I am proud to call a friend. We lived together for a short time at a secret garden, and during those hot summer months we cohabitated, we spent most of our shared times laughing our underoo covered asses off.

I read Frannie's blog every day. I have for a long time. I just realized that even though her website is at the top of my google homepage, I have neglected to link it on my blog (palm to forehead). So, here is my gift to you:

http://frantelope.wordpress.com/

Uncle Danny

2011-05-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

The second time the tibia went it’s separate ways inside the neighborhood of Baby’s Anne’s leg

That break was a perfect portrait of innocence. A wholesome case of slippery oak and sycamore leaves on a hillside slightly too steep.

A young uncle, Danny, he was 16, skinny as a string bean, with a wiggly half-grown girl, Baby Anne, slung across his miserly hip.

He was soft-soled sneakers and peach-fuzz. He was a voice that cracked and broke and teeth with white calcium deposits from where braces reined in his bucking mouth.

Baby Anne loved this young uncle. She ran squealing to him when he returned from track practice.

Those oak, those sycamores were causing a ruckus, swishing and swaying singing a song before fall fell.

Sudden as only a hillside fall can be, the young uncle went down without so much as an Oops! He trapped that feeble bone under his narrow back. He snapped it--along with a handful of sticks and an errant pine cone that happened to roll by.

The yelp, or scream, or wail or cry—what was that? It was the cry of a bat, the scream of a coyote that came out of Baby’s mouth. The sound of it would pinball through Danny’s brain for decades. He would lie with the inky waters of night to hear the cloying scream of his tiny-legged niece.

The memory of it gained a dull protective varnish that became a ceramic captive in a museum of familial stories.

Though, for years no one was allowed to mention it. Not at the dinner table, not in bedrooms while making up the beds;

“Danny doesn’t like to talk about it” “Shhhhhh” Mother would say.

But thirty years later, after his own girls were safely formed, their bones fully fused, he found himself grey at the ears and round where he was once narrow. At a dinner table at Acapulco! In Minnesota--here he was re-telling the story to Baby Anne--all grown up in womanly sleeves, margarita drinking, the story now told as a funny anecdote—and the leaves, the sycamore, the tibia, the screaming Baby Anne all there floating over the half-eaten nachos.

Help Fund My Chapbook!

2011-05-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

These past months I have been slaving over new work that is part prose and part poetry. The project, which I am calling Tiny Bones deserves some beautiful production. This is where you can come in! Please help fund my project. If you contribute $20 or more you will receive a autographed copy before anyone else does.

Thank you!

Reading This Friday!

2011-05-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

Here is a little sneak peek for my reading on Friday. The reading is called Take Off Your Sweater, 7pm at the Waypost (3120 N Williams), and is put on by The Thank You Writers.

Red Rambler

The first, the femur, came in a Red Rambler with rusted peepholes in the floor—patches of road scampered by under the combustible engine.

Doe, a deer, a female deer.

All hooves and tail, all hooves and tail. Spared in the headlights. First it was a swerve,

then gravel,

then a wall,

then glass,

then whatever happened next—none of us remember it right.

We only remember the taste of metallic red on our lip,

And the crickets complaining about the noise,

And twin lights cresting a hill down the road.

It happens this way,

When time slows,

Then runs to catch up, CATCH UP!

When gravity is busy,

Keeping us in our place.

The os coxae with the fused bone of the ilium,

the ischium,

the pubis all these things that I call the hip, the pelvis, the grinding machines—

spared in the headlights that night along with the hooves and tail.

The bones of the foot--the talus,

the calcaneus,

Cuniforms I, II and III.

The phalanges, which I’ve always called toes—these were spared that night too.

Oh, that ill placed wall

that mother driver

who may or may not have been drinking,

but who felt bad!

Certainly!

With certainty.

Either way, either way.

Batshit Crazy Dream

2011-04-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

I dreamt that I was in Italy with Ari and a bunch of other people. Juniper was there. Liz was there. I was sleeping and I awoke to the fear that Juni was eating poison. I got up and scared her out of her sleeping spot in a crowded closet to a pool of poisonous liquid which she then drank. I picked her up and she immediately started to shiver and shudder and she turned into a small human child with patches of fur and hives. I sat with her and Liz examined her and we looked at her back and it was covered in red bumps and blotches. She shortly thereafter died in my arms. While she was dying I licked at her mouth and got some of the poison in my own mouth. Soon, half of my own tongue started to rot off; I kept peeling bits of it off until I only had a long strip of flesh left for a tongue. I called my mom and asked her what I should do. She said that something similar had happened to her. I was frustrated and I asked her what I should do. Meanwhile everyone was leaving. Liz stayed, but we were stranded in the country in Italy. My mom finally said I should go to the hospital and she rattled off the name of some medicine, Tzotyrill or something like that. I asked her to spell that so I could write it down and show it to some Italian doctor, but she said she had to go. I was still holding Juni in my arms, she was a cat again. I started to gather my things to go to the hospital and I realized that all of my most precious belongings were in the house. I packed things in a hurry and suitcases and boxes kept breaking. Liz kept saying that I needed to get everything and that I shouldn’t leave anything behind. Then, I realized that there were things that belonged to other people, things that I wanted. I kept trying to shove them into bags and meanwhile my tongue was disintegrating. I became resigned to the idea that I wasn’t going to have a tongue. That I wasn’t going to be able to do readings or teach or talk. Then I panicked and woke myself up. I was so glad to be in my bed with my whole tongue and Juni purring under the covers.

Domesticity On Notice

2011-04-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem in response to a series of images from the book Semaine Bonte, Max Ernst.

rather than listen again
she looked up
and back
as far
as she could.

her socks slipped on the wood floor
and sudden
like a cough in the audience
she was falling, maybe,out a window
backwards, or maybe,
just looking back
or up.

casually falling
ass over teakettle
it all seemed fine
even though.
even though what?
even though her ankles and knees
were exposed
in the falling.

the air rushing by,
almost a comfort,
it had to be better than what was ahead.
and who cares about whats ahead?
broken bones, sackful of marbles.
tracheotomies, air rushing by.

she remembered the day before
the boy, left-handed, who had acted
like a man,
except for his tiny showing,
his small round buttocks,
his bowed dark head.

falling
or looking up
whatever this was
was, at least, better
than that.

better than eating when she wasn't hungry.
better than walking to the store for sponges.
better than hanging a string of lights where no one would see them.

(thank you carrot, tom and burton for the lines)

When We Talk About The Weather, What Are We Trying To Say?

2011-04-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

During the first sun split days we walk around smiling—just happy to be soaked in that irresistible combination of sun and chill. Then, soon, we joyfully complain about the weather again. It is joyful because we have no control and we know that absolutely, we can blame endless amounts of things on the position and color and dampness of the clouds in the sky. It’s all an exercise in acknowledging the inevitable.

One thing is true though; Springtime can kill you.

Go down the backroads
Don't take it too slow
You don't have the time for a long flirtation
You don't have the time for the least hesitation

Roses all are blooming
Lilacs all aglow
Honeysuckle vine shine shine
Oh get out, get out of your house

Springtime, springtime can kill you
Just like it did poor me
Don't you see we're all hurt the same way
So get out, get out of your house

High on the moonshine bodies entwine
Don't you see it's better this way
Don't you see it's better this way

You can't be too shy
You know the reason why
If you don't go get what you need
Something's going to break on the inside

Springtime, springtime can kill you
Just like it did poor me
Don't you see we're all hurt the same way
So get out, get out of your house

-J. Holland

My blood is bubbling, and thinning and pressing at my temples. Sleep has been a fit of throbbing pulses and the dawn chorus of birds, bursting as I am.

I just have to remember to slow down, hold on tight, ride the wave.Wish me luck.

Back In The Nest

2011-04-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

We rode the highline through North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and through the Gorge into Portland. The train rocked back and forth, I stumbled up and down it's line, restless for home.

Just after the Cascades everything was green. BDF and I sat in wonder, watching Eagles, Herons, and big black Crows swoops alongside the ambling train.

Home. I went back home and then I came home. Found out again that Portland is home. My room is as I left it, the cat acted as if I had just stepped out, the air is thick with spring.

Coming back is actually a slow process, I am stretched thin across the country, and parts of me are still arriving. I need to be moving slowly, treading lightly, tentatively reaching out to touch the walls of my room, the handlebars of my bike.

Saying goodbye to my mom at the train station was a moment filled with white noise, BDF was hugging my frail granny and I was hugging mama, we were a mirror of gentle clasping and I sensed a removal of myself, as if I was watching from above. It wasn't until the train pulled away that I felt the sharp shard in my chest, the question of whether I would see either of them alive, again.

This all feels profound and dramatic and really what I'm thinking about the most today is how to pay my bills, and whether to write a romance novel and hoping that I can sell my bicycle to have some money in the bank. The mundane is encroaching, as it always does, and I am welcoming it with wide open arms.

(you can buy this bike if you live in Portland)

Like In Every Story, There Once Was A Beginning.

2011-03-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Tracy was 21 when she gave birth to a healthy 7lb baby girl. She had expected a boy, had decided to name him Padraig. The baby girl had come into the world despite a general lack of planning and a good amount of heartbreak in her conception. The season before the baby’s beginnings, her young mother-to-be had gone and watched her father-to-be play baseball. He was tall and lean, with a shaggy head of light brown hair--there still exist grainy photographs of him silhouetted against a summer sky. If the baby was ever a glimmer in anyone’s eye it was on that baseball diamond, in the precious few warm months of Wisconsin.

Tracy was 21 when she gave birth to a healthy 7lb baby girl. Her mother, Barbara, drove her to the hospital in River Falls and they came so close to hitting a dear deer that my mother, in the throws of a contraction, looked right into the doe’s eyes. Later, she told the baby girl, whom she had named Ann Marie, about the deer, she told the story with a little magic woven in, and Ann Marie thought that the doe must have been trying to talk to her mother. She imagined the deer had been wishing her good luck.

Tracy was 21 when she gave birth to a healthy 7lb baby girl, the labor was late and short. Earlier, Tracy hadn’t been able to give up cigarettes during her pregnancy, she had had a couple beers and once, before she knew she was carrying a baby, she had taken half a tab of acid. Tracy had also made an appointment to get an abortion, she had driven to the clinic and sat in the parking lot, she had cried and looked out the windshield at the snow everywhere. She had thought about the tall lean father, who was long gone by the time Tracy found out about the cluster of cells growing. Tracy started the car and drove home slowly on the February roads.

Tracy was 21 when she gave birth to a healthy 7lb baby girl. Six months later she went alone to Colorado. She was young and she lost her way, and for a time she lost her baby girl. She slept under a tree and, twice a week, visited her baby in the arms of another woman--a woman who wanted to keep the baby girl and raise her in a Christian home. Tracy fought, for the first time, to get the baby girl back. She made a home, stopped drinking beer won for a while.

Tracy was 21 when she gave birth to a healthy 7lb baby girl. The girl grew up long and lean like a string bean. The baby became a woman, she learned to dance and paint and sing. She became a thrilling trilling echo of her mother and the two were an inseparable, irrefutable pair, and that is just the beginning.

Another week has gone by

2011-03-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

I'm back in the north woods. The old troubles have started.

My step-father has started up with his old antics. He can only behave himself for about four days. He came home from the store with a new chain-saw, brought it into the tiny house, started it up and revved it directly behind my head, I jumped up and ran outside, which seemed to be the most hilarious thing in the world to him. Today he called me a stupid bitch. Honestly, I am not surprised or even that upset by this behavior. I knew it was a possibility. I mostly just think it's surreal that I've been associated with this man for 20 years, since I was 11 years old. I'm shocked that I've had to deal with him for most of my life.

His name is Vince. He grew up in rural Wisconsin, solidly middle class. He proudly identifies as a redneck, he thinks Bill O'Reilly is a genius, he wants Newt Gingrich to be president, he watches FOX news religiously, he is a rascist, a bigot and a sex offender. He is my mother's husband and the father of my baby brothers.

When I was 14 he started trying to touch me. Our house had burned, it was hollowed out overnight by a chimney fire. My mom and Vince got an insurance settlement and decided to rebuild the house themselves. One afternoon I was in the bathroom, angled over the tub, sanding drywall. Vince came up behind me and put his hands on my hips. I froze, my armpits went cold. "Good job, Ann" his usually a taunting voice was warm and confusing. I didn't say anything, I didn't move a muscle. He dropped his hands and left the bathroom. That was the beginning--for the next three years, until I finally left in the middle of the night when I was 17, he tried every trick in the book to get at me.

The facts are that I fought, I ran away, I blew the whistle. My mom stayed with him, she said it was for their sons, she said she didn't want to be alone. The fact is she was a victim of abuse too and so somewhere, deep down, she didn't really know it was wrong. I didn't talk to her for years after I left. I went to therapy, to Al-anon and struggled throughout my 20s to move on.

I slowly came around to forgiving my mom. I have a relationship with her, of sorts. We don't talk about certain things--she isn't allowed to complain about Vince to me, something she wants very much to do. She says that staying with him was the biggest mistake of her life, and that her penance has been paid. She says that when the boys finish high school next year she is going to walk away--if she can make it that long. I've heard this sort of thing from her before.

As a result of all this rocky emotional terrain I am hyper-vigilant here. I go for walks in the afternoon, for two or three hours to unclench my jaw and talk to friends on the phone. I don't look at Vince, I talk to him only when neccesary. I focus on my mom, on helping her, on holding her hand. I'm tired though and I get irritated with her really easily. I try to look at her face and remember that she is fading away, that this time we have together is not endless--doing that helps me deal with the bullshit Vince tries to pull, it helps with the fact that I miss my life, and helps me remember what is important.

a post from the north

2011-03-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

Week One:

What struck me first, as I flew over Minnesota, was how intricately beautiful the snow and ice looked from thousands of feet above. Snow flowed in waves over pastures, rivers black and glistening. The ice on Lake Superior had a thousand different testures, cut with giant ice breaks caused by great gusts of wind. I remember the winters I spent here, it all comes flooding back, how the snow eventually took on such a monotony that it pressed down hard against me as I tried to go about my day, until all I could do was drink whiskey and wear fur hats to break up the long nights until spring.This time, on this trip home, the snow is a novelty again, it is abundant and dear and I am delighted by it's tenacity.

I finally made it up into the northwoods where my mother lives. The house is small and heated by birch wood. It is always blazing hot and my little brother suffers with his asthma in the high dry woodfired heat. He took walks with me in the woods, with the four dogs and the faint sound of screaming foxes in the distant dusk. I laughed at the antics of the nuthatch and chickadees and at the bouncing dogs. I drew in the smell of these woods that smell differently from the woods anywhere else, they are hardy and unbothered by months of cold. Micky, my little brother, was quiet and we walked in companionable silence. I wondered what he was thinking about the woods, the foxes, the cold air, the tancious snow--and then I remember that this is all he has ever known, so his mind must be on other things.

During my first three nights in the north woods, I had terrible nightmares, all the psychic pain of coming home is manifesting in dreams of rape and violence. I woke up at dawn and grimaced at the residue of the dreams, I held on to the main parts to write down and look at later. The dreams make sense in obvious ways, but I resolved to take a sleepaide and get a full nights rest rather than enter into darker territory.
I spent my days trying to be useful; cooking meals, cleaning, running to the clinic and pharmacy, orgainizing the kitchen cabinets. I try to entertain my brothers and I sit with my mother and hold her hand, look at our fingers twined.

Somewhere, somehow I caught a germ that blossomed inot a virulant flu. My reality became clouded by chills, fever, congestion, a racking cough and with this physical pain came a deep cut of homesickness. BDF told me on two occasions that I sound tinny and that he can tell I am lonely. He always sees right through to me, and I get off the phone and realize that I am lonely, and that the feeling of loneliness is familiar.
Other things happen, I go south to spend time with a friend I've had since I was still a pupua. I pull off the highway to pee behind an abandoned building that bashes me with deja vu--I am in an almost constant sate of deja vu here in the midwest. I work hard to mend my influenza racked body in a beautiful house alongside the great Mississippi River. I drink endless cups of Earl Grey tea, I eat smoked salmon and cheese with slices of raw red onion and cucumber. I pick up a pen again and write letters and postcards to people far from here.

something that happened yesterday that I can't stop thinking about.

2011-02-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

There is a woman I’ve seen walking for the last three years. When I worked at a small café in North Portland I would see her walk back and forth, four or five times during my shift. At other times, I would see her walking in other North Portland neighborhoods. She always had the same stoic expression on her face, her eyes seemed dull as if she was far away, or dead inside. No matter the weather, she wore slip on sandals on her bare, swollen feet. Usually, when I saw her, she would be wearing a purse on her back, the strap slung across her throat, the bag bouncing against her. She is a big woman, her head always wrapped tightly in a scarf. I’ve watched her progress for years and wondered where she is going.

Yesterday, I saw her sitting on a bench, it was the first time I’d seen her sitting still. We were both waiting at the Killingsworth MAX station. I sat beside her on the bench and pulled out a book. She looked at the pages of the book for a few minutes and then she asked me if I would write something for her. She had some small scraps of lined notebook paper and a tiny pencil that said Multnomah County Library clutched in her hand. I took the paper and pencil, and this is what she asked me to write, to the best of my memory:

When you build a house on a hill.

Do not wait for the slippery fish.

Fish on the other side of the river.

3 bedroom house $650

2 bedroom house $325

When you have chickens, ducks, turkeys,

wash before you sell them.

That is all I can remember. It was hard to understand her she had a thick accent that sounded African—I’m not sure. She watched closely at what I wrote, and was very serious, we sat with our heads close together, side by side on the bench. When I asked her to repeat herself, so I would get the words right, she was patient and mimed what she meant to say. She ran her hand along my arm when she said “slippery” and mimed a roasted bird when she said “turkey”. When I filled the scrap of paper, she thanked me, stood, and walked away.

sometimes when i should be writing i make postcards instead.

2011-02-17T13:01:00.000-08:00

If you leave me a comment, I'll send you a home-made post-card. xoxox

on the Max today

2011-02-07T15:30:00.000-08:00

pillowy breasted pigeons flying alongside the train.

the coagulated blood color of the Broadway Bridge against a mostly grey with blue patches sky.

the muscles in my legs throbbing from earnest early morning exertions at the gym.

Dear Diary 1994: I met a wonderful dancer and publicly proclaimed my singleness and independence in the powerful language of dance.

2011-02-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

Last night BDF and I laid on my bed and read my diary from 1995. It was much darker than the year before, I realized while reading it that I had avoided writing about the issues that I identify that whole period with now: my step-father's abuse. I focused instead on boys and school and friends. Despite the avoidance we could both read the sadness. Oh, 15-year-old-AnnMarie I wish I could go back in time and be your champion. I wish I could call the police and tell them what was happening, I wish I could have the words to ask for help. I wish I could take you out of there and put you somewhere safe.

Here are two entries from a lighter time, for the weekend and because they go so well together.

September 11, 1994

Dear Diary,

Why can’t I have a pure mystical relationship with someone? I’m “going out” with C but although I feel very affectionate towards him I don’t have that deep emotional attachment and I know that the reason is simply that I am too young to have those feelings. I get scared and frustrated in relationships. I feel like I’m stuck and I’m beating to get out. As a result I take things out on other people. They can’t understand me! How can they when I don’t understand myself. It’s not that I don’t want to go out with C anymore, it’s just that I don’t think I like him. I would probably be better off alone. I need to find myself but I can’t do that while I pledged to someone. I’m going to just take it slowly and see how it goes.

September 18, 1994

Dear Diary,

So much for my plans to take it slow. I guess I should know myself well enough by now to know that I don’t do things slow. When I decide what I need to do, I do it with quick, cold efficiency; otherwise it just tears me apart. Even unconsciously, what happened was I went to the school dance to let myself go. I met a wonderful dancer and publicly proclaimed my singleness and independence in the powerful language of dance. Monday has come and I stayed home to let the words of others kill off the last of my bond with C. At least I hope things go that way, but you never know how fate will dance.

Diary Entry #3 from 1994: Life is so fragile it’s like this beautiful little flower, so vibrant, and so utterly full of life

2011-02-04T12:57:00.001-08:00

When I was 14, I read every book that Anne McCaffrey wrote in the Dragon Riders series. I was really into it:

Undated

Dear Diary,

Life is so fragile it’s like this beautiful little flower, so vibrant, and so utterly full of life. One swift action and it can be mercilessly crushed. That fact really makes you realize that every day is wonderful and every breath you take is precious. The reason why all these emotions have come upon me so quickly is that I just read the last chapter of the book “Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern” and out of the blue she goes on a last minute mission to save Pern and after succeeding she dies unexpectedly. It effected me so much that I just burst out crying, and it also gave me a total rush. I love life and I mourn Moreta.

Diary Entry #2 from 1994 : I should definitely talk to him soon.

2011-02-03T13:24:00.000-08:00

I had a boyfriend who wouldn't stop touching my boobs. He couldn't keep his hands to himself, it was deeply irritating and I didn't yet have as much gumption as I now possess.

August 29, 1994

Dear Diary,

Nagging thoughts are a bane of my life. I try to have peaceful serenity, but thoughts about what I have to do and who I have to talk to and what’s going on with so and so always manages to bug me until I can’t do anything. For instance, I have to talk to C, about us. I love him and everything, and I like having him touch me but not constantly and not intimately when we are around other people. He does things like stick his hand under my shirt or down my pants when we’re just standing around with my friends. That is totally not cool at all; I don’t think he realizes how disrespectful it is. I don’t do that to him and I expect the same courtesy back, it makes me feel cheap, like he doesn’t care about my mind and only wants my body. So, I should definitely talk to him soon.

1994

2011-02-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

A year ago I went to my mom's and rescued a mildewy box of diaries from the 90's. This is the beginning of what I found:

August 19, 1994

Dear Diary,

I think this diary will be a success, as the other one was, but I’m not going to have any expectations because they usually prove to be dropped. I’m having a normal day (so far) kind of bored but still content. I’m happy about one thing and that’s the relationship I’ve been having with my mom. We’ve been able to get along and actually communicate. I know my mother is a good person but being her teen daughter, I usually have trouble seeing that. But, lately I’ve seen the other side and I’m glad that I do because my mom has a lot of problems and I hope that she can count on me to be there. I tried to put a cover on this diary but so far it looks pretty bad. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some neat stickers to cover up my mess-ups. Well, I gotta go.

A Reading Life

2011-01-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

I’ve been a voracious reader for almost 25 years, since the 1^st grade. When I was younger, my grandmother suggested I write down the names of the books I’ve read, to keep track. I have tried over the years, with minimal luck, to record the list but often lose it or forget. I sometimes wonder where the books that I’ve read go. Not in a physical sense, as in who else holds those books at night, but in the sense of memory. Those books have passed through my mind, each word fitting together to make cities, pictures, people appear in the eye of my brain. They flit through and for a time I am in that place, with those people, I am transported. When I was younger I had to be careful about what books I picked because I was so easily swept up. I couldn’t read Stephen King because the nightmares he gave me were vicious. I couldn’t read stories with too much despair, heartache, hopelessness. The protagonist couldn’t be too desperate or misunderstood. I’ve gotten better at steeling myself against it, better at distancing myself for safety. But all those books, at least 6 per month—at this point in my life, where do they go? The brain holds on to everything, somewhere in the folds are the thousand romance novels I read between the ages of 13 and 15, somewhere in there is every word of East of Eden, deep in the crevices are the sage words of Thich Nhat Hahn and the smut of V.C. Andrews.

I read a tumblr blog once, I can’t remember where, that was made up entirely of scanned pages of a prison inmate’s notes on the books he reads. He is doing three consecutive life sentences and reads whatever he gets his hands on—this makes me think of something I read somewhere that prison inmates are the number one consumers of romance novels—this guy writes the title and author of each book and then a sentence or a word or a paragraph about what he thought of it. It’s fascinating and I felt inspired and strangely jealous of the time he can dedicate to reading.

So, it’s January—a new year—I bound a little book with thread this morning. I want to record my reading life. Up until now, it has been primarily private, but oh so rich, and I want to look at it on paper. Maybe I’ll start with the history of my relationship with reading. I taught a group of second graders yesterday, and after we finished the zine making activity I saw a little girl sneak a book out of her desk and start reading it on her lap surreptitiously. My heart strings pulled in recognition, I was that girl once. I read through recess, I read through junior high. I read instead of doing drugs, though often it felt like a similar addiction. I read as an act of survival. I read to go away, to escape.

The first book I remember reading was Where the Red Fern Grows, but I know there were books that came before that. Then, it was Little House on the Prairie, then Narnia, Lord of the Rings, A Wrinkle in Time, Anne of Green Gables, Choose Your Own Adventure, Babysitters Club. With puberty I started reading bodice ripping historical romance novels, preferably Regency era. That went on well into my teens. I also dipped into murder mysteries and fantasy. Then, Catcher in the Rye changed everything. I finished it on a Sunday afternoon—I had started it that morning—I closed the book and pressed it to my face and bawled my eyes out. I could never get through a romance novel again.

I am surrounded

2011-01-24T12:52:00.000-08:00

I am surrounded by pieces of paper with the names of books, authors, to-do lists, letterpress prints “My god, who wouldn’t want a wife?”, screen-prints of bearded ladies and cobras. I am surrounded by shy but driven zinesters, by writers who fill their pockets with scraps of poems and things to remember. I am surrounded by the sounds of commerce, printing, transportation. I am surrounded by rain drops, mud puddles, condensation on window panes. I am surrounded by coffee cups, half-empty French presses of shade grown grounds, containers of couscous and kale. I am surrounded by dust motes, germs for the common cold, electro-magnetic waves. I am surrounded by questioning interns, giggling tweens, sweaty dancing queers. I am surrounded by raving maniacs, liars, creeps and showboats. I am surrounded by quiet geniuses, skilled baristas, kind strangers. I am surrounded by painters, magicians, musicians and plumbers. I am surrounded by words, words of every variety; elongated, foreshortened, circumspect, superfluous, abysmal, glorious, elbow. Spanish, Russian, French. Catholic, Jew, Protestant. I am surrounded by one sex, the other sex and then the other sex. Cats, birds, so many dogs. I am surrounded by passive-aggression, dying wishes, last chances. I am surrounded by french fries smothered in gumbo, taco bars, gluten-free baked goods. I am surrounded by stiletto heels, multi-colored pumas, disposable slippers. I am surrounded on all possible sides, inside and outside, by love.

“just another astral high-five.” -Franciszka Voeltz

Stress, the great medical mystery.

2011-01-21T10:47:00.000-08:00

The physical symptoms of stress:

• Palpitation
• Chest pain
• frozen shoulder
• Cold clammy skin with gooseflesh
• Flushing and feeling of warmth
• Breathlessness
• Dry mouth with difficulty in speaking and swallowing
• Abdominal discomfort
• Aggravation of Peptic Ulcer
• Loose stools
• Increased blood glucose levels.
• Headache, back ache and neck pain
• Depletion of energy stores
• Flare up of diseases like eczema, psoriasis, arthritis
• Difficulty in concentrating
• Memory disturbances
• Sleeplessness
• Decreased sexual drive
• Loss of appetite
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Outbursts of anger

Word of advice; when your mother is dying and you’re broke and you feel like shit, it isn’t a good idea to look at that list up there. Suddenly, you’ll see yourself in most of it and you’ll wonder how long it will take until you just roll over and expire.

What you should really do, when your mother is dying and you’re broke and you feel like shit is, you should think about how lucky you are. You should think about the fact that you have a job, you think about the fact that you have friends who love you. You should think about the fact that you are really ok.

Then you start to remember how the word “should” was supposed to be eradicated from your vocabulary. How you were supposed to let that go and let everything else go and FUCK isn’t the word “supposed” just as bad as “should”.

I don’t know.

What I do know: My cat crawls under the covers in the morning and stretches her paws out as if she is reaching to caress my face. I am turning into a cat lady. I have a quiet room, a window over my bed and books to read under a warm light. I have friends who bring me soup and juice when I am frozen by stress induced endless illness. I have all the things I said I wanted ten years ago, five years ago, one year ago (except for money but who needs that); a job that feeds me in a thousand ways, a person I want to spend my life with, a community, a place to go dancing, a city that can surprise me, a fireplace, a creative life. I have writing as a way to figure it out, get it down push it out and see that, yes, I am ok.

what is new

2011-01-18T12:40:00.001-08:00

So, I go.

2011-01-12T13:52:00.000-08:00

"Sometimes I think you can tell when someone doesn't have a family. You can hear it. They carry an open space around them like an aura resembling loss. They are missing a piece, and part of them is lonely. You hear platitudes: You have a new family now; Your friends are your family; At least we have each other. But none of that is true, not if we're being literal. Instead, you learn to succeed within your limitations. You map your terrain, work with what you got."

-Stephen Elliot

I like to think that in reality, my family is comprised of people with no blood relation to me. I have picked them out of rubble and endowed them with a familiarity that most reserve for brothers and mothers. Technically I have a huge blood-related family; cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, parents, even a grandmother is left. I have known them all my life. In that same grim undeniable reality, though, they are far away from me in a thousand small ways. We have distanced ourselves from each other through alcoholism, abuse, lies and passive aggressive jabs around the dinner table. I often feel I wouldn’t be recognizable to them on a sheet of paper, one listing facts about who I am: zinester, writer, queer, lover of sad music, happy movies and just about any book.

Well, my mother might recognize that last one. She knows I like to read, but, only because that’s all I had the last several years I was at home. I wanted only to stay in my room to escape the re-enactment of Bastard Out of Carolina going on in the living room of our double-wide. I didn’t have a TV in my room, and so I was left with words. I read words, I wrote words, I took words and gave them a religion—my religion. I wrote them in sharpie on my bedroom walls, I carved them into the soft wood of my dresser. I screamed them through the door. They were what I had, and oh what a great thing to have.

This latest email from Stephen Elliot made me sink back in my chair in recognition. I know that open space, that aura resembling loss. And that platitude that I just wrote, not two minutes ago, about my chosen family picked out of rubble—the truth is that even though I love that chosen family, it isn’t the same. Chosen family can fall away with a bad visit or misunderstandings that go on too long. I still interact with my terrible uncles and bitter grandma—they recognize my blood, they are my blood. We laugh the same way, about the same things. They torture me and mirror me.

I am going back to Minnesota, for four weeks, to spend time with my mother who is dying. I will be sleeping in the living room of their tiny house on a fold-out couch, without the sanctuary of a bedroom. It will still be cold outside and I will be forced indoors, with the step-dad, the teenage brothers and mom. It won’t be easy, and at times I will get irritated, angry, horrified and possibly full of despair. But, I won’t ever get that time back once she’s gone. So, I go. Mom wants me to help her write her life story. She said that I will hear things I’ve never known about her before. We will sit and talk and talk and drink instant coffee and I will record her voice on a tiny recorder. This trip, this decision to go, isn’t just for her, or my brothers, it’s for me too. Maybe it’s mostly for me.

what I came up with

2011-01-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

From the Daily Rumpus

2010-12-31T11:29:00.000-08:00

I get a daily email from Stephen Elliot. I signed up for it, but, at first I deleted the emails because I have an inherent aversion to bulk emails, appointments and time clocks--even if I volunteer for them. For some reason, I started reading them, though, and have found them to be thought provoking, which is a dear and simple gift.

This is from yesterday's email:

Last night we talked about lobsters. There was a girl arguing with a boy. She said she loved him, she thought he was a genius. I didn't like the term. I thought, There are a lot of geniuses. I thought, It's rare, but it's not precious. It's not a good reason to love someone. It's harder to find a woman with a wardrobe full of latex, who is only attracted to cross-dressers, and has her own dungeon space, than it is to find a genius. We all know a "genius" or two. That's the tragedy of the genius, that it's not enough. Whatever your talents it's likely there are others just as talented. Maybe not many, but some. In literature certainly. The singular voice is far far less common than the stunning debut, the author of great promise.

So we were at this party and the girl told her boy that his sister had told her not to marry him. And she said, Maybe I shouldn't have told him that. I do love him. I think he's a genius.

I kept coming back to, "I think he's a genius." "He's the smartest person I know." And then we say it's not a competition. Good person, bad person, genius. It's all wrapped around this idea of birthright, that we're owed something because we're special. It's not enough that a tiny sperm waged a terrifying campaign against overwhelming forces and succeeded in populating the egg. The coincidence of our existence isn't enough because everyone we see had the same fortune. And we want more than that. Even if we're not geniuses we want to know geniuses. All those geniuses who fall short, the great writers who never finish their books, the guitarist who quit the band, the masses are writhing with potential.

We're owed a better life.

I don't mean to sound Republican. I'm not talking about bootstraps. The most likely way to have your genius recognized is to come from privilege. Or at least a good home with solid parents. You don't want to start with your hands behind your back, already half-deranged, unloved, afraid of commitment, afraid of abandonment. If you can have time, and confidence, things will be better. It's idiotic to think we all have the same chances, we don't. The percentages don't lie. Of course there are exceptions, but exceptions don't mean anything, you only learn from the rule.

That's a complicated idea. But the idea of genius is somehow linked to the idea of bootstraps. You pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You get, in life, what you deserve. It's patently false. You don't get what you deserve, for better and worse. Bootstraps only work with safety nets, something to catch you when they snap.

I say this from one lucky sperm to another.

My friend Bob visited from Duluth, MN. We haven't seen each other in years, but, we used to be creative collaborators and poet comrades--back when I still wrote poetry. Bob came to Portland and saw my life. He was a little taken aback. I've done well for myself. Before he left, this morning, he said
"You seem to be doing pretty well. Not a lot of my friends are doing that well right now. You can't just tell someone to reach for the stars, they either do or they don't"

It was a tiny dose of perspective. My life, for all it's hardships, looks pretty good.

The Hands of Our Mothers

2010-12-29T15:21:00.001-08:00

I always wanted to be spare and lithe, like Jack Spratt who could eat no fat, sadly I’ve always been generous and square in shape. The shape of my hands could never claim any sort of elegance. My grandpa called them peasant hands--he said it proudly and with a spreading of his own square hands to prove their dominance over the hands of weaker nobler people.

My grandmother was very proud of her hands, they were long and slender like willow branches extending from her arms. She enjoyed wearing rings on her ring and middle fingers and gesturing like a ballerina.

My mother takes after her father in build and not in demeanor. She is squarely built, like me and she has hands that match mine. When I miss her I look at my own hands and see hers. We also have the same skin, my mother calls it banana skin because it is velvety soft and gets bruised and scratched easily.

Miss Piggy

2010-12-28T16:59:00.000-08:00

When I was seven or eight years old they told us in school that someone was kidnapping children in our town. That it was a middle-aged man with a large green van that had bubble windows in the back. The man was telling children that their mother had sent him to pick them up. The principal called an all school assembly and asked us all to choose a code word with our parents that they would pass on to anyone who picked us up. He stressed the importance of keeping the code word top secret. My mom and I chose the code “miss piggy”

Christ Was Actually Born in July.

2010-12-26T13:46:00.000-08:00

Christmas happened. It was good. It was spent with my new family of one, my best beloved. We did all the things we wanted to do, I was reminded that I am an adult and I can make Christmas what I want it to be. I have control over how it is spent! I don’t need to feel obligation and disappointment. I don’t need to spend all my money. I don’t have to feel lonely. I can sleep in, eat Chinese food, open a couple of hand-made gifts, and eat a brownie. I can go to the movies. I can have sex in the afternoon. I can take a bath, read a book, and drink a whiskey. I can do whatever I want. What a revelation.

Old Iron Insides.

2010-12-24T12:23:00.000-08:00

When I found out about my mother’s cancer, it was in a typical roundabout way. She called early in the morning;

“Hi honey! What do you want for Christmas!? What does Burton want?!” The tone of her voice was a bit too bright.

This question was a red flag for two reasons, the first reason being that I knew she had gone the morning before to find out the results of an MRI scan of her liver, she had promised to call me that day to tell me the news and she hadn’t. The other reason was that my mother subsists, and supports a deadbeat husband and two teenage sons, on a very meager allotment of medical disability and food stamps. The main theme of many of our conversations is that she has no money, she is in debt, and she can’t afford to pay for gas or her utilities during the cold northern Minnesota winter. So the question of Christmas presents offered in this excited and magnanimous way could only mean one thing: credit cards. She had maxed out her credit cards once before, when she was first diagnosed with Hepatitis C, that Christmas I received a digital camera and an ipod. That was ten years ago, and she’s been paying that shopping spree down ever since. The digital camera and ipod are long gone.

I had to pull the news from her; she would only tell me after I had requested some pots and pans for Christmas. Then, finally she told me that yes, the doctor had found nodules on her liver and that they were cancerous. This was a diagnosis we had been looking for, not with eagerness. She made me promise not to tell my little brothers until after Christmas.

In 2001, when my mother was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. There was no real conclusion from her doctors as to how she contracted it. Hep C is contracted primarily via dirty needles, dirty tattoos and the occasional dirty blood transfusion. She’s never had a blood transfusion but she had exposed herself to plenty of dirty needles and dirty tattoos. She had been clean and sober for ten years when she got her diagnosis, but when I was young, my mother was gone most of the time. She was a drug addict and alcoholic, she got tattoos at parties from bikers. When I was 11 years old, she came home in the middle of the day, I was standing at the sink washing dishes, and she came up behind me. She thrust her wrist under my face, a fresh tattoo of a rose vine wound around her wrist. I looked at her with disdain and asked how she was ever going to get a good job. She laughed and told that story for years. I can’t help but think it was that tattoo that did it.

When she was diagnosed, we all got tested. We aren’t a family who share razors or toothbrushes, and luckily no one else had it. My mother felt a lot of shame, she had turned her life around, gotten a masters degree in Psychology with a focus on Addictions. She had received a fellowship to study at the Hazelden Center. She had done all the things she was supposed to do and now she was suffering from a disease that junkies die of.

Two years after her Hep C diagnosis, she was diagnosed with Hemochromatosis. Hemochromatosis is a disorder that interferes with the body's ability to break down iron, and results in too much iron being absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. The nickname for Hemochromatosis is the Celtic Curse. While no one is immune to Hemochromatosis, those with Irish, heritage have a significantly higher chance of carrying the gene mutation that may cause them to develop it.

Some researchers believe that Hemochromatosis originated more than 40,000 years ago in the area we now know as Ireland with a single person whose genes mutated so that he or she could over-absorb iron to compensate for an iron-poor diet. The poor starving Irish, still can’t get a break.

The Celtic Curse causes my mother’s liver to hold on to every scrap of iron that goes through it. She can’t eat broccoli, red meat, or any other iron-rich food. She can’t even eat food cooked in a cast iron skillet.

I don’t understand how Hep C led to Hemochromatosis, but I do know that the Hemochromatosis caused Cirrhosis of the liver, which caused Esophageal Varices, which has now led to Liver Cancer; a domino of deadly disorders.

So, my mother has been sick for the last ten years. She has been dying for the last ten years. She has been dying for the majority of my baby brothers’ lives. She has done two treatments of Interferon, which gave her brain damage. She went from being a sharp and fearless woman who knew the names of all the birds, who picked up and moved because she wanted to see a new mountain range, a woman who fought her way back from drug addiction into a woman who stops in the middle of her sentence with a frozen look on her face because she lost track of what she was saying, into a woman who needs to sleep 18 hours a day, into a woman who won’t drive in the city any more.

She has a yellow sheen to her skin. Her shit is white. When she takes of her clothes there is an orange discoloration from toxins coming off of her skin. She sleeps all the time. Her liver aches in her body, it is swollen and hardening. She can’t eat more than a cup of food at a time, she is constantly nauseous.

I thought, when she called and I made her tell me about the results of her MRI, that it was just another step. That the cancer diagnosis is somewhat of a blip on the radar screen. I can’t help but feel that she shouldn’t be suffering any more. I can’t help but hope that this will be over quickly. I can’t help but hope that she will get a liver transplant and live to be 80. I can’t help but want her to be at my wedding. I can’t help but avoid her calls. I can’t help but think about her as I lie in bed at night, trying to fall asleep.

News from the last 7 days.

2010-12-22T16:01:00.000-08:00

I'm engaged to be married.

My mother has cancer.

I adopted a cat.

It seems my blog could go in three totally different directions at this point. I could do a bridezilla blog and rename it something like "Our Special Day". I could dedicate this blog to the process of illness, and possibly losing the person I've known for every single heartbeat of my life. Or, I could just post cute cat pictures and videos of Juniper...What to do?

my new baby

2010-12-21T12:12:00.000-08:00

photos

2010-12-07T12:28:00.000-08:00

for now

2010-11-30T16:51:00.001-08:00

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

2010-11-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

Copy and paste into a comment. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I guess I'm more well-read than I realized. Reading 55 of these is what happens when you are an unhappy and poorly adjusted teenager. When I was 14, I didn't leave my room for days at a time, my mother delivered food and books and I peed in a pan. I mean it. I also read a lot of romance novels.

some have it worse than i do.

2010-11-22T17:02:00.000-08:00

home is where your penthouse writing nook is

2010-11-20T10:55:00.000-08:00

textual transmissions: part two

2010-11-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

8/21/10 1:11pm

Am I so in love?

8/22/10 7:11pm

k. Babe. I love ya!

8/24/10 1:48pm

I love love love you you.

8/30/10 3:51pm

I am so so so crazy in love with you. All I want to do is spend every single day of the rest of my life with you. I am absolutely sure of that.

9/01/10 6:34pm

Then I am the luckiest man in the world.

9/03/10 2:01pm

You: I love

9/13/10 2:41pm

I love you!

9/13/10 11:05pm

For real? Exciting! I spent the eve with ___, who was feeling ruff, but he’s ok. Just needs to find his annmarie…Talk to ya tomorrow, I hope.

9/14/10 11:08pm

Goodnight beautiful dreamer.

9/16/10 9:39pm

Gnight my love. I had a fun day with you.

9/18/10 11:03am

OMG, I want it. I love you!

9/18/10 11:08am

Good luck my baby!

9/19/10 12:44pm

I feel bad for him but I feel really good for me and you.

9/20/10 7:03pm

Good luck! I love you!

9/20/10 11:09pm

I’m going to bed too. I love you my baby, so much.

9/23/10 11:29pm

And if you want to know me.

9/24/10 7:52pm

I am so in love with you. You are absolutely beautiful inside and out. Gorgeous, smart, sentient, hilarious and true-hearted. No one but you could make me this happy.

9/25/10 12:40am

Never a doubt in my mind.

9/25/10 10:43am

Goodmorning my love. I hope you are having a good morning so far. I had a dream about dogs.

9/25/10 11:13am

I had a dog that I was protective over. I fragile, injured female dog. A giant black dog was dominating her really ferociously. It was upsetting.

9/27/10 7:43pm

Bebe. Hi. I love you.

9/28/10 2:46pm

I love that quote from Anne Micheals

9/29/10 4:33pm

I'm baking myself in a cake.

10/02/10 5:50pm

I love you more than IPA

10/02/10 5:54pm

We won the big door prize.

10/06/10 10:04am

How you feeling cutie. I hope you know I find you totally beautiful and hott.

10/06/10 10:47am

You are perfect. Touching your skin makes my fingers feel spoiled.

10/07/10 1:11pm

I love you like a gamer loves larping.

10/07/10 8:57pm

You are the best.

10/11/10 4:02pm

You are such a babe.

10/11/10 8:09pm

I love waking up next to you. Even when I don't sleep. When it's 7 in the morning, I don't even mind. I'm the grumpiest human and somehow I'm not with you...

10/13/10 3:41pm

I think Ma and Pa Joad drove through a wormhole and got pulled over by the Portland police on 4th and Everett.

10/13/10 3:55pm

Their truck was from the 20s they were broke down, they didn't have insurance or license.

10/15/10 12:20am

I'm sorry your day was crappy. I love you so much and I know things will be okay. Even better than okay when I see you...

10/19/10 5:06pm

You are fantastic.

10/21/10 9:22pm

Dya love me? Dya love me? Dya love me? Dya love me?

10/21/10 10:01pm

Yep. So very much.

10/23/10 3:08pm

Taking a nap on the filthy pink couch.

10/23/10 3:09pm

Felt dizzy all day. How's your head injury my baby?

10/26/10 1:40pm

Yeah, with a nap, errands, cat cuddling and maybe some annmarie cuddling later?

10/26/10 1:55pm

Sleep in with me, I'll make you breakfast.

Little Stories

2010-11-15T15:41:00.000-08:00

The first place I heard about the ugliest truth our family has was in Arizona. We were living in a single wide trailer.

***

They told us in school that someone was kidnapping children in our town. That it was a middle aged man with a large green van. The man was telling children that their mother had sent him to pick them up. The principal called an all school assembly and asked us all to choose a code word with our parents that they would pass on to anyone who picked us up. He stressed the importance of keeping the code word private. My mom and I chose the code “miss piggy”

***

My grampa Jack took the same posed picture with all of his children and grandchildren. The the photograph he is studying the face of the tiny baby and the baby helplessly looks back in bewilderment. The photograph is a tradition in Grampa’s sense of documentation. He knew that even though his son’s mocked him and his wife rolled her eyes at his little traditions, that someday that tiny baby would be an adult who studied that picture and wondered at the man who held her.

***

I want to be spare and lithe, like Jack Spratt who could eat no fat, sadly I’ve always been generous and square in shape. The shape of my hands could never claim any sort of elegance. My grandpa called them peasant hands--he said it proudly and with a spreading of his own square hands to prove their dominance over the hands of weaker nobler people.

***

My grandmother was very proud of her hands, they were long and slender like willow branches extending from her arms. She enjoyed wearing rings on her ring and middle fingers and gesturing like a ballerina.

***

My mother takes after her father in build and not in demeanor. She is squarely built, like me and she has hands that match mine. When I miss her I look at my own hands and see hers. We also have the same skin, my mother calls it banana skin because it is velvety soft and gets bruised and scratched easily.

***

Grampa took me to the library and laughed at the giant stack of romance novels I picked out. “Smut” he laughed, “smut” he repeated for good measure. It wasn’t until later when I was 15 that I discovered literature, in the form of ‘Catcher in the Rye” and ‘On the Road’ but, by then he was gone in his mind and didn’t know that I had gotten past my obsession with bodice ripping smut. He never found out that I evolved into a reader like him.

***

Driving in cars is a part of being a teenager in South Dakota. In the farm states; Arkansas, Iowa, Kanasas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Texas kids can drive at 14. The laws were built to serve the tractor driving kids but the rest of us used it to our advantage. We were driving all over the back roads in old trucks and busted cars our dads had let us fix up, or had fixed up for us.

***

Growing up in the country means you learn to drive and you drive whatever is available. There is no issue of pride over shiny cars in the rural towns of South Dakota--if it goes you are good.

***

I drove a 1967 Dodge Pickup with a choke and four on the floor manual transmission. I stalled that thing at every stop and every corner, but if I wanted to go somewhere that goliath was my chariot.

inspired by my friend Liz who wrote a similar excerpt of her life

2010-11-12T11:53:00.000-08:00

life is getting up when the light is only making a half hearted attempt at pushing through the sheer curtains that hang over my bed and sitting up and putting my feet on the braided rug I bought at a yard sale in the west hills while coming back from a hike in forest park with Carrot and feeling the line of soreness that runs down the length of my spine and up the right side of my neck and making percolator coffee in the bright south facing kitchen, that kitchen that is bright even in November, and drinking my percolator coffee over a bright blue notebook and a black pen that must be used because it slides easily over the page which makes my hand cramp less and eating some eggs or oatmeal and putting together something for lunch in the silver tiffin usually peanut butter and homemade apple butter with carrots and hummus and driving downtown along the I-5 and 405 and Couch/Burnside exit, because my bicycle is being painted pale green with silver sparkles and getting to what I think of as “my block” downtown on Oak between 9^th and 10^th where Reading Frenzy lives and the coffee shop that used to be Half and Half and isn’t as good anymore and sometimes running up the stairs and sometimes taking the elevator and being the first one to work, walking through the little office and flipping on only the lights that lead to my little desk with south facing windows and setting out my planner and phone and thermos of percolator coffee from home and answering emails and writing down lists of what must be done before Friday before the 1^st before the end of the semester and staring at my red well-worn planner and checking off old to do lists and writing down tasks that I’ve done just so I can cross them off again and eating almonds from my stash of snacks and watering the Pointsetta, always forgetting when I watered it last and going by the color and droop of the leaves and leaving the office to walk quickly on rain coated sidewalks dodging Greenpeace and HRC canvassers and buying a Street Roots and giving the change in my pocket to the elderly one-eyed lady outside of Whole Foods and sometimes eating at Whole Foods when I forget my tiffin in the fridge or on the bright kitchen counter and eating brown rice and chicken and greens over the Mercury or the New Yorker or the Oregonian crossword and walking back and smiling at the man who sits at the intersection of 10^th and Burnside with rubber rats and other jokes and gathering zines and glue sticks and scissors and driving to Gresham and Beaverton and North Portland to cut and paste and draw and write with 3^rd and 4^th and 5^th and 6^th graders who speak Korean, Russian, Spanish and English and driving home with other cars and calling Burton and laughing at something one of us says and making dinner and Burton eating with me and laughing some more about what one or the other of us says and talking about all the thoughts and realizations and funny things that happened that day and going to bed, sometimes in his warm loft and sometimes alone in my wood paneled room and closing my eyes to the sound of roommates moving around downstairs or Burton’s cat making his evening rounds, depending on where I am and laying my hand on Burton’s chest or tucking it under my pillow or between my knees depending on how cold it is and where I am.

happiness is a warm photobooth

2010-11-10T12:18:00.000-08:00

revisions. what do you think?

2010-11-08T11:36:00.001-08:00

The Man in the Headlights

It was 1995, We kept him in the headlights for only a moment as we backed out of the parking spot in front of the Motel 6. He stood there illuminated with one hand up, a lump of tobacco in his lip, his legs knobby and mottled under long swim trunks. We turned and the sweep of the headlights turned with us, his spotlight was extinguished. Our headlights lit upon the two-lane highway that wound through the little town that had witnessed the reunion.

We rode high in the seat of a grey Ford truck with an extended cab and thrumming diesel engine. I pictured the man still be standing in the dark by the door to his motel room. I think, while sitting high in that truck, that he could just stay there forever. We pick up speed on the other side of the little town peeling the two solid yellow lines away to reveal the turn towards the gravel that leads to the double wide trailer with a porch where I live with my mother. I am flying through the night looking out the dark window into fields that are tall and fighting off the brown of early august. I am looking out, still looking for the man standing and waving somewhere. Maybe he won’t exist anymore, maybe he will float into dust and salt and the perspiration on an old rancher’s lip. Maybe he never existed to begin with—but then, what would that make me? He made me, even if it was unintentional. My existence hung on his.

From outside the truck window, a beast wakes and stretches in the browning field. He dips low to test the spring in his leap and sets out on the crest of a hill past the leaning barns and sparse line of white spruce. He crashes over the field, gaining momentum and girth like a rolling frothy avalanche. He crushes the tender waves of beet and grain under the pads of his manhole sized paws. The beast is nimble as a jack rabbit bounding, he is focused on the grey truck speeding through the night. He is muscled and drooling—the myth of Grendel.

That autumn, before the night at the Motel 6, I read and reread Beowulf—at night as I fell asleep in my small room I imagined what it would feel like to be snatched away in the dark, to be devoured and remade into a pile of bones in a greasy cave where only the rattles of my former girl-self could find me.

The salty beast chases after the speeding truck, it‘s haunches tense for a leap and it crouches low next to the gravel spitting tires. I look through the rearview mirror, and see something flash into the bed of the truck. I turn my head to look out the small window, that’s when it comes straight for me. The fierce monster made of sinew and salt crashes through the back window and spills a deluge of tears out of my wide-open eyes. My face is drenched and I am crying the salt and sinew out, waves spilling crashing, racing each other in a track down my face, filling my mouth and the back of my throat. Very little sound escapes.

The high-school boyfriend, who is that moment was monumental, is there to bear witness. He is pale in some places and red in others, blonde and pimpled behind the wheel that is twice the span of his shoulders. His baseball cap curves in a perfect arch that every boy in the county strives for. That curve of the bill spent hours cradled in his palms, rocking back and forth creating the arch that shields his eyes on the baseball field and in the cab of this truck.

I had found him so quickly, the man in the headlights, with the help of social security and a blood test. It had been an effortless task all along. It had taken me fifteen years, all of my life up to that point, to ask after him. I had seen fathers, in the park and had my friends’ houses, I knew that all girls were supposed to have one and that mine had climbed trees and worked in the mill town along the Mississippi were the first concept of me was formed. I had been too busy up to that point biting and ripping my way out of the amniotic sac, with growing teeth, with learning to love Laura Ingalls Wilder and falling down on roller skates on dirt roads where no one should attempt such a hobby. When I did ask, I saw that the question was cruel.

After we found the man in the headlights with the social security administration and a blood test he sent a letter through a lawyer. The letter said that yes, he had never helped pay for my food, for my brief stint in catholic school, for my shoes, my leg broken three times, but that he wouldn’t meet me until I promised never to sue him for all that money. I added up the sum before we signed, just to see, our hearts in our hands—it was a big number and for a moment my eyes blurring with the dollars that could have been. I eagerly sent off the piece of paper and waited for my man in the headlights. It was much later that he finally arrived, he drove west in an Econo-line van with a small wife with ruddy cheeks who smiled with her head tilted up—she was being brave.

The man and his wife stayed at the Motel 6. My high school boyfriend and I went to swim in the pool and eat pizza. I felt enormous, I had grown from him but had no proof of my once tiny self, I couldn’t show my tiny kicking baby legs or be held easily in one arm anymore. The man was quiet, as my mother said he would be. He tried once to say something about not knowing and not believing when he did know. Even then, half grown as I was, I knew that he had chosen not to believe. I knew the story of the late night phone call from a phone booth when my mother told him she had a little girl and that I had been born on his birthday. Years later, I would write letters after letters to prove to him that I knew, without ever saying it.

As the headlights navigated the gravel turns, I succumbed to the monster that had waited for me, he had been kept at bay the entire weekend, I had felt mostly twinges of longing and regret—no devouring in sight. Now, I was hiccupping and sobbing with viscous drowning me.

Back in the truck, with the monumental boyfriend. I heaved pockets of air into clenched lungs. He glanced at me under the graceful bill of his cap, one icy blue eye visible in the glow of the Steve Miller Band flooded cab.
The headlights sweep to the left into a field we’ve been to before. The diesel engine quivers and stops as the boyfriend turns the key, the headlights fall too and then it is just us. The cab is no longer filled with the tale of Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue, it’s just the gulping noise of me. He opens the door to the truck and spits out the tobacco in his lip. He swings the bill of his cap to the side so that I can see his face. Then, with the seatbelts digging into my back, he comforts me in the only way he knows how.

Text message transmissions:

2010-11-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

7/03/2010 12:44pm
Hi, This is ________. Any chance we could steal out of game night after some hours to dance cumbia, salsa and bachata with the queers? (I checked your horoscope profile to see how Libras deal with slight changes in plans)

7/04/2010 3:44am
You have wonderful, breathtaking calves.

7/04/10 3:39pm
Wow, you are on fire.

7/04/2010 3:44pm
Yes, of course. I haven’t seen your body stuff

7/04/10 4:09pm
Morrison/Mitchell/gonzalez. Diggin deep on youtube.

7/04/10 4:40pm
j.m. California 1970. Just a horse faced beautiful canadian and her dulcimer.

7/04/2010 6:47pm
I also had a terrible time last night. I haven’t thought about you once today.

7/04/10 11:22pm
I will be there soon

7/05/10 1:03am
Ha. I am naked at the ponde

7/05/2010 1:22am
I am done as well.

7/09/10 3:34am
Classic

7/09/2010 11:08am
Well, I’d like to see you if only for a minute. But, can you put it in a bag for me?

7/09/2010 11:28am
Thanks cutie.

7/09/10 1:30pm
Have you eaten lunch yet?

7/09/2010 3:25pm
I would like to escort you. And thank you for being totally irresistible.

7/09/10 8:20pm
I will push you.

7/10/10 2:59pm
Isn’t there anything else I left at your house that you could bring to me today. Maybe some epithelial cells?

7/10/10 3:29pm
As it happens, I am very salt deficient.

7/10/10 4:54pm
That makes me very happy. Thanks for saying.

7/10/10 4:55pm
I was hoping to leave more things on your bedroom floor.

7/11/10 9:46pm
See you shortly

7/12/10 12:44pm
I’m so glad you think so.

7/12/10 3:05pm
I did just fine. I was just a bit too happy and relaxed to tear myself to pieces over each minute detail like I normally would.

7/12/10 3:22pm
Maybe, maybe and definitely. Powernap, the heavy bag, and electrical power.

7/12/10 4:22pm
I thank my lucky stars for that.

7/12/10 4:49pm
This is a meritocracy?

7/12/10 5:19pm
Its probably just tiny piece of my heart.

7/12/10 5:22pm
You keep them.

7/12/10 9:13pm
I’m cleaning my place so that you can see it when you feel like it.

7/12/10 9:16pm
And also because I like it tidy.

7/12/10 9:43pm
Please keep me up on a school night again sometime soon.

7/12/10 9:54pm
I was satisfied with her…

7/12/10 9:55pm
I love that one.

7/12/10 9:56pm
It’s from your zine, dum-dum

7/12/10 9:58pm
Ha! Did you think I was texting one my boyfriend’s about you?

7/13/10 7:27pm
Yeah. I’ll tell you about it. I’m gonna see her later and I can’t fuckin wait.

7/13/10 9:04pm
Can I come pick you up?

7/14/10 5:45pm
Brain first.

7/14/10 8:49pm
Yes.

7/14/10 9:01pm
Soft spots yes.

7/15/10 1:43 pm
Hoka Hey!

7/15/10 3:05pm
Yes, but it doesn’t really mean “it’s a good day to die.” It’s more like a general rallying. Actually, I bet there’s no English translation for it.

7/15/10 3:11pm
I care for that!

7/16/10 3:20pm
Abundance. Whenever I need it.

7/18/10 2:27pm
re: no helmet. Brain damage is not sexy. Xo

7/19/10 2:34am
re and re-reading your letter to me. Goodnight.

7/19/10 2:10pm
“I’m in my body the way most people are in their cars.” –Laurie Anderson

7/20/10 7:54pm
I’m not playing around

7/21/10 4:16pm
Don’t bust that heart!

7/22/10 1:32am
Gnight o’malley. Not a minute goes by.

7/22/10 7:24pm
There is a tropical fungus killing people in the northwest. The Willamette seems to be running backwards. It’s dry and sunny and the sweat is doin git’s job correctly. Its piney and high desert smell out here in Transylvania. I’ve survived mostly on chex mix for two days. Whenever I think of good places we could go together I remember that every place seems amazing when you are there.

7/23/10 2:21pm
I feel the same way. And more.

7/23/10 2:48pm
Well, today I finally stopped missing you entirely. I haven’t spoken about you to people I hardly know. (opposite)

7/23/10 7:21pm
I got a candy necklace and ate a plum off the ground. I’m missing your throat and neck today. I can only think about one part a day. My heart explodes.

7/23/10 11:36pm
We know something.

7/24/10 2:27pm
I’m with you there every second.

7/26/10 5:07pm
I am patiently waiting to touch your face. (opposite)

7/26/10 7:48pm
The pearl is in the liver

7/26/10 7:53pm
The lotion is in the basket

7/27/10 2:12pm
Thank you. I want every little piece.

7/30/10 10:37am
10:35, not too bad. You are a beautiful and amazing creature. Have a brilliant day.

7/30/10 11:14am
good, I hope that lasts and deepens and lives.

7/31/10 12:49pm
I was ambushed by a grey kitty on my way to work. She was wearing a bell and her back legs were running faster than her fronts.

7/31/10 1pm
I hope the sun comes out for you beautiful.

8/02/10 3:23pm
Don’t draw lines in the sand rosemarie mcnally

8/02/10 6:13pm
My love.

8/02/10 11:17pm
Good god, woman.

8/05/10 2:16pm
Joey wants to pickle. Wants to know if you learned from a book. I told him you keep secrets…

8/05/10 2:49pm
Gallop over here.

8/06/10 11;32 am
You are a beautiful woman and a fine, fine creature.

8/07/10 2:34am
I can’t wait to spend days with you.

8/10/10 11:36am
And I love you and I wrote you a letter and I’m sending it and you are my one and only.

8/10/10 9:24pm
Hey, I’m the luckiest boy in the world. I can’t wait to ramble around with you and show you how strong my love is for you.

8/13/10 11:17am
Damn, you looked fine last night.

8/16/10 12:57am
I.Love. You. So. Much. I. Don’t. Know. What. To. Do.

8/17/10 5:53pm
Yes, my love-I will be so excited to see you and kiss your lips.

8/20/10 12:40pm
If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dream, would you find me?

Limerick Champions

2010-11-02T18:25:00.001-07:00

Text Ball, originally uploaded by OMalley In The Alley.

there once was a cat named wolfrabbit
she developed a nasty habit
she like to be spanked
and not even thanked
what a good girl wolfrabbit, dagnabbit.

teaching in gresham

2010-10-29T17:54:00.001-07:00

Jesús begs for violence everyday.

Luckily, I’ve already written No Violence

on the board with a sliver of chalk.

So, I just point at it with the back of my hand.

My eyes are elsewhere, a twice folded letter.

I urge Nai’Shawn to sit (the fuck) down.

Angela won’t look up.

Jesús looks at me with eyes made of silt and sand,

so disappointed that he can’t draw guns and blood.