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Showing posts from 2018

First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Don’t Let ‘em Get You, Dear Digital Childhood

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We had no childhood, it was all digital, all fake and subject to subjective views and Facebook likes, here one day and gone the next but no bruised knees and no memories. We had no childhood (why are we unhappy adults?). Sit the child down and give him a screen to play with. It’s sunny outside, there are so many choices. These games keep him quiet, he will sit still for hours. (Why is he jittery and hyper and unable to focus in school?) There must be something wrong with him. Off he goes to the clinic. Your child wants to move around and run during the immobile times? He must be diagnosed, we’ll put him on drugs to sedate that need out of him. (Why is he overweight?) He is a teenager now, out with his friends. He has a phone that he answers whenever it rings. Such a good boy. He had practice as a child, living through a screen. He must be happy. I know he is happy, he is smiling in all of his Instagram photos. They use emojis, isn’t that great? (Why don’t we have any meanin...
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Breathing Fire

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Breathing Fire Recently acquired skill sets:             Living from a suitcase. (Three suitcases.) Making myself quite at home in other people’s homes. Parallel parking. On the sidewalk. In the snow. I drank a shot of bourbon and heard that living feels like fire. I know what you mean about feeling fire. There is so much fire burning inside you that you don’t know how to channel. Like you’d breathe fire if you could. He had the knife to his wrist. To his throat. Look into my eyes. If you’re looking into my eyes, I want to believe you won’t do it. Why have you chosen this picturesque city, so different from the sprawling freedom of Texas? (The rest of you all have such logical reasons, I pinned a map to the dartboard and shot north of Houston.) Why? Is it enough to say that I chose something different? Rational friends beg practicalities. Was he dressed to go out? Did he have shoes on? You’re asking the wrong questions. I d...
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Hiraeth

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HIRAETH (Half My Heart) Children of kings, with a strict code of living             That I learned selectively. The righteous don’t wrong us Their values don’t haunt us Until the moment that they trade us all for richer things. Discord Enthroned Me Midas died lonely Trust and Integrity Must be Roiling in their graves. Deceptions are beautiful so long as they bring you peace I think it was over the moment that he touched my wrist. *** I am a warrior, but you were better than me And the blame, when it came, cut deep So I say again, leave me out of it and practice what you preach. And I’ve been Struck across the face By the rubble, when it fell, Of the pedestal I placed you on. Should have known it was too perfect to be stable. So you take the treachery, I want the memories You keep the blasphemy; I’ll treasure the taste of a million long-gone Halcyon moments Cling...
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November 3rd

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It wasn’t a clean cut, and it isn’t a clean scar. I was going to change my life. You changed my life in a moment. I was never able to write these all at once. A thought at a time, a poem carved out through weeks of running in the rain. But this one had to be today. I fell hard. I rose up, to more than I was before, more than I ever could have been had I gone where you wanted. You forced me to rise up like this. I denied my friend, when they insisted on anniversaries to mark traumatic things. Traumaversaries. We believe that our holidays resonate with the power of their instigation, that they hold a special place in time accessible to us each time of that year. For decades. For centuries. Don’t do it, I tell my friend. Don’t give this that kind of power. I don’t forgive you. I don’t need to. But, like my sister said so many months ago, the scars are something I would choose to wear now. A lot of us have scars like these, from people like you. Most of us don’t show them...
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What The Hell Is Shock For, Anyway?

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Shock is a bandage. In the beginning, the very beginning, it is necessary so you don’t bleed to death. But a wound can never really heal until you take the bandage off. Shock is a tourniquet. In the end, the thing that was so vital will turn your body toxic. It is not necessary to remove the tourniquet to heal. It is necessary to remove the tourniquet to stay alive. I can keep things numb. Phase out, compartmentalize, water emotions away. It is my tendency to avoid conflict—internal conflict just as much as any other kind. Necessary to function, to live as fully as I can in other aspects of my life. A prolonged state of shock. But pain—all pain—has a reason for existing. This numbing out is toxic, too. I was in shock for three months. Three months, two weeks and two days. And when all the barriers finally came down, I very deliberately chose to keep them that way. It doesn’t feel that way at first, but this is part of healing. I met someone who tells me they thin...
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Went for a run and wrote a poem...

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First right at the train track Trying to find my way back Pulling faces at the others As we pass them by. Replay the day but I lose track Trying to get it all back Bon Jovi on the radio Still make me cry. Three months now and I’m still pretending. I’ll write myself a better ending You know I hate goodbyes. And so I’ll keep on running! ‘Cause I’m fast enough to outrun you. Leave the past few months behind me But the memories still find me. I’m fast but I’m not fast enough To outrun the memories too. Rewind, I’m fine, it was nice to meet you. I tell myself that I don’t need you. Maybe this time around, I’ll get it right. Today the gray means more than ever Fragments don’t fall back together Been down that trail too often now, I thought you understood. (And if it ended somewhere different, well don’t you think I’d know?) I wove this chain, I’ll break the ties Unlearn the color of your lies Thought we would change the world but I...
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Living with Intentionality

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It’s pretty much become the American norm to blare television screens at every opportunity. The convenience store, the doctor’s office. The elevator (I mean, really?). Sometimes it’s standard items, like the weather forecast or the news. Sometimes it’s convenient items, like the news broadcasting a local shooting the laundromat you were just about to go to. And sometimes its boring dribble and marketing routines aimed to fill our every idle moment (can we talk to people, please?) with background noise and advertisements. We’re a consumer culture, but we let it get too far, I think. We let the billboards line our streets, we welcome the sales pitches into our homes each night and we’ve come to look forward to the personalized ads on our computer screens. They are everywhere with their toxic message: “What you have is not enough,” day upon each day. We don’t just let them, we have come to rely on them, expect them, a perfect constant. Stalking to a whole new level. Don’t buy in. ...
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Insert Reason Here

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This is the post I’ve been hovering over writing. Finishing, editing, returning to for days on end. The one I tell myself most needs to be said, the one I tell myself that I can’t say. A few month ago I was molested by the husband of a very close friend. I’m writing these posts for those of you that have been there. I’m writing for anyone who needs a safe space, who needs someone else to just come forward and say it first. I’m writing for the ones who still need to know that you can take something hideous and turn it into something productive, even something empowering. Some of these posts will be empowering. And some will simply be raw, vulnerable and not the least bit sugarcoated, because sometimes that’s the way that life is, too. I feel like when I tell people, kick to the knees, strike the eyes, we’re all picturing some variation of a ninja with a ski mask lurking in the alley. (The truth is, I did meet someone once who carried metal throwing stars in the lining of hi...
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We Are Legendary

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I’m adding Best Buy to that list of places I can never show my face again. In my (ever more common) sleep-deprived state, I was trying to make a really simple purchase.  (A CD maybe?  A charger for my phone?  Some candy?)  So it was time to pay, and it took about 10 minutes of digging through my wallet and unearthing the following: An ice-cream rewards card Some Romanian pocket change Hotel card keys from  Dallas ,  Budapest ,  Key Largo A metro fare card valid in  Chicago  (and expired) Another ice-cream card Etc. …before I finally dug up something resembling an unexpired credit card valid in this country.  By this time the cashier was sufficiently frustrated, my sister had long-since stopped pretending that she knows me, and I actually started wondering why I kept so much…STUFF… in my wallet to begin with.  Have all those months I spent living out of suitcases finally caught up with me?  Do I need to ...
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Rage Against Emoticon

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This is essentially a rant. People are forgetting how to interact with one another. The other day, I wrote a message to a friend on Facebook. I was hoping we could talk about it; her response was a thumbs-up sticker and a smiley face. Because that just says it all. Ever have dinner with your family only to look up and realize that, though everyone you care for is sitting at one table, they're all staring at their phones like zombies and talking (or texting, or IMing or tweeting, etc.) to someone else? And you know what? I bet that when they finally meet up with those other people, they'll spend the whole time staring at a message screen. I believe the capability for human emotion is seriously regressing, and this is scary. We are losing the ability to relate to one another, even to understand the depths of our own emotions. It's like we've become characters in a video game. Martha waves hello. You can either: A: Smile B: Frown Perhaps you're in a very soph...
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On New Year's Resolutions

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February 13, 2018 So how many of you still write “2017” on your papers?  Honest show of hands. So, dear world, what’s up?  We were counting down the days.  I saw you at that party that went on ‘til 3 am.  Times Square on television.  You had fireworks.  Southwest served us free c hampagne . And yet we can’t get it straight.  (It's already February?) So what exactly happened? The answer is, quite simply…nothing. New Years was a vacation.  But at the end of the day, or the year, we all revert back to our (monotonous?) jobs/classes/bills/taxes/hassles/lives.  And we expect it all to change just because the clock struck midnight. We’re the ones who have to change. Let’s start with New Years' Resolutions.  (Is this a sore topic for anyone else?)  The procrastinator/nonconformist in me chose to write about them two month past the deadline. So, did you change something drastic in the face of all this stifl...
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