Northern Forest, cont.
Mary Beth thought it would be harder to touch her dead grandmother’s hand than it was. She spent most of that evening, back at the Fraser house by the fireplace, stocking feet tucked beneath her on a stiff, high-back loveseat with Jack, tuning out relatives telling stories about Alice and thinking about that journal. While Elizabeth laughed, remembering the first time she’d tried to make Alice’s pot roast for Arthur, after they’d married, and she’d filled the house with smoke and called Alice in tears, only to find out her mother-in-law already had a backup pot roast prepared, just in case, Mary Beth wondered whether or not they’d covered the coffin with dirt yet. She watched relatives shuffle around the large Fraser formal dining table, picking at finger sandwiches and fruit salad on small plastic plates, basket of cloth napkins in the corner, and tried to imagine how cold the hands she’d have to move would be. Once, she and Jack had had a pet rat that died while Jack was out of state, looking at the site for their place in Wyoming and Mary’d had to take it out of the cage to bury it in the backyard by the sycamore tree. She’d jumped when she wrapped her head around its tiny furry body, at how cold it was, just hours after death. Mary Beth didn’t know why she wanted to dig up her grandmother: it seemed to her a horrible thing to want. She couldn’t get away from the desperate, consuming wanting-to-know. She’d never had a problem with getting her hands in the dirt, with digging or heavy physical labor that strained her lower back until sweat beads burst onto the back of her slender neck. She’d helped Jack put up the drywall in their new house and install the porcelain sink in the bathroom and had planted her own expansive vegetable garden and built her own worktable for the art studio out back. But she knew that digging up a grave, however little dirt had already been laid on top of that dark, oak coffin, would be harder than any of that.
There hadn’t been much dirt, yet, not packed in with whatever monstrous piece of equipment they used to pound people back below the surface of the earth, just loose clods of it dumped on, as if by the back legs of a horse. When she smeared the loose soil off the lid of the coffin in the yellow glow of that moon, she felt calmer than she had at the wake, staring at creamy pink walls and folded hands poked out of suit coats too formal for the men of Berlin and trying to avoid looking at those brown, mannequin hands. Mary Beth felt the sweat mingle with the dry dirt into muddy trails running down her cheeks as she bent to creak open the lid of her grandmother’s coffin, heavier than the dirt in the shovel. In the darkness, Alice looked like the woman Mary Beth remembered from childhood, the women who kneaded and punched sourdough loaves and had flour permanently in the creases of her face and neck, who would gather her grandchildren up in her thick arms and whisper the Celtic prayers her mother’d taught her young. She looked asleep, peaceful, praying some Hail Mary from the center of her rosary and silently resting beside her long-dead husband. Mary Beth shook, reaching out toward the softly wrinkled fingers of the left hand. They were cold, colder than she could have imagined, but it didn’t startle her: instead she ran her own fingers tenderly along the soft pillows of the undersides, taking her grandmother’s hand in her own as if they were praying the Our Father, lifting it and slowly removing the bulging black notebook from underneath. She lowered her grandmother’s hand back to her chest with a pang of guilt. Would Grammy notice the absence of the journal? Miss it? Mary Beth shook her head. Catholic or no, she knew that nothing of her grandmother was left in this body, that she wasn’t sleeping but slowly beginning the process of decay. And if she did believe in heaven or any of it, she knew her grandmother would want Mary Beth to understand her own grandfather, would want her to read their shared history and would want to teach Mary Beth, in any way she could, the heart of the father Mary’d long since given up on understanding. If Grampy had been connected, somehow, to the Gorham Pulp Mill, Mary Beth had to know.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Monday, May 04, 2009
"Northern Forest" continued ...
Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, had told her that her grandmother had probably been dead for a few days before anyone had found her. It was the maid who stumbled upon the body, sprawled across the bed, apparent heart attack, four days’ worth of Berlin Daily Suns stacked on the doorstep. But even knowing all that, even hearing the gruesome specifics that Mary’s mother wanted to, needed to talk to someone about but couldn’t mention to her husband, couldn’t bring herself to force him to think of his own mother that way, even those details didn’t prepare Mary Beth for the way her grandmother looked at the wake. Mary Beth hated wakes, an unfortunate Catholic tradition that the Frasers happily upheld, because there was her grandmother: face and hands tan with makeup, looking like a plastic mannequin empty version of herself, long nails painted a pearled pink, clutching a wooden rosary and a creased, black leather notebook. Unrecognizable. Mary Beth and Jack knelt together in front of the casket and Mary Beth stared at her folded hands for what she felt was the appropriate amount of time, trying to avoid looking up at her grandmother’s body cocooned in white satin.
Later, Mary Beth caught her mother’s elbow at the mourning meal—buffet style roast beef, herbed carrots and potatoes, salad, rolls and bottles of Sam Adams at the Country Tavern special events room—to ask about the book she’d seen.
“Mom,” Mary Beth whispered, leaning against an exposed wooden beam near the staircase, where her parents were shaking hands and murmuring thanks to sorry for your losses and we’ll miss hers and she was a great lady’s, “what was that notebook Grammy was holding?”
“Oh, it was your Grampy’s journal,” Elizabeth replied. “Uncle Bill found it in Grammy’s nightstand when they were packing up her jewelry and they thought it would be nice to bury her with it.”
“Did they read any of it?” Mary Beth had been just fifteen when her grandfather died, a quiet funny old man who Arthur had never wanted to spend much time around, always nervous and overly formal, shaking his own father’s hand until the day he was gone. Mary could count on one hand the number of times she’d been alone with either of her grandparents and had never known much about their lives before her, let alone before Arthur.
“Of course not,” Elizabeth replied, mildly horrified, as she turned back to embrace Mrs. Harrendanks from St. Teresa’s knitting circle and coo a thank you back to her I’m so sorry. Mary Beth turned from her mother back toward the room to find Jack. He stood by the buffet, laughing with her Uncle Bill: Bill’s meaty fist clutching a beer, face red from the laughter or the alcohol or the crowd. Jack’s smile still cut across his face like a wide gorge, just like in high school, his tousled brown hair ruffled against his forehead and Mary Beth smiled to see him so comfortable at a Fraser family gathering. Jack had always been closer to Bill and Mary Beth suspected it was construction that did it, men who worked with their hands understanding each other on a physical level. Jack was a framer, worked in the skeletons of future houses, and had a scar on his left hand from the place a nail gun had pierced straight through, pinning his palm to a two-by-four. Mary’d had to squirt the antiseptic fluid into the hollow wound for a week, Jack’s friends holding his shoulders down so he couldn’t thrash, roaring and wild against the pain. And Bill was a contractor, the Fraser family’s version of blue collar, who spent every day at his job site, blueprints balled in his fists and yellow hard hat teetering on his massive, balding forehead. But more and more frequently there was no job site to visit. Plenty of land up here to build on, Bill would say, thanks to the once-booming business of the pulp mill clearing out most of Berlin’s northern pine forest, but not many people left who can afford to build on it. The second half of that sentence went: since Arthur Fraser closed down the pulp mill last year but that was the part nobody said unless Bill’d been drinking.
Mary Beth watched Jack bob his head respectfully, his mouth pursed in that tense way men have when discussing serious business, as Bill’s voice lowered.
“No, it’s been a long time since Fraser Paper was that kind of company,” Bill said gravely, “the kind that cared about their workers, knew their faces and made sure they had food on their tables.” Jack shook his head and studied his feet hard. He didn’t have to ask how long or what happened, because he knew. Mary Beth knew. How long it’d been was since Arthur Fraser bought the Berlin Paper Company, ten years before Mary Beth was born, parlaying an MBA from Harvard Business into the title of youngest CEO and his own name on the sign at the gates.
“Berlin Paper used to own the pulp mill, ‘dya know that?” Bill asked, and Jack nodded politely, glancing around for his wife and Mary Beth made her way over to rescue Jack from the awkward rant he’d heard more than once before. “Yup, owned the pulp mill and paper factory and still they made that kind of effort to know their own people. But not anymore. Now it’s cutbacks and cost-effectiveness research reports and Fraser Paper, like the name mattered more than the place!” Mary Beth slid her arm through Jack’s and leaned in to kiss her uncle on his hot cheek just as he slammed his bottle down on the edge of the buffet table and swore under his breath. Mary’d seen it before. Bill would drink too much, his hometown pride mixed with what must’ve been jealousy at the brother who’d made it in the big city and come home to work his little town into shape and he’d start to bubble over. First the rant, then the bottle-slam, the quiet cursing and then,
“God DAMN it, Arthur!” Several heads snapped over to Bill then away quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught judging one of the grieving sons. Others never looked up, having heard Bill’s tirade before. Arthur’s head snapped over to his younger brother and didn’t look away, his eyes narrowing, his chest moving with the deep inhale that meant you were just another burden on his already laden shoulders, as he moved towards them.
“Show some respect, William,” Arthur hissed, his hand clamped down hard on Bill’s shoulder, “this is your own mother’s funeral.”
“Respect!” Bill replied, swerving around to face his brother. “Like the respect you showed shutting down the pulp mill, putting all those folks out of work, folks just like your own father? The last tie we had to him, Art!” Bill poked his finger into his big brother’s chest, then stalked away, muttering, “the last damn thing we had left,” straight out of the room, straight down the stairs and straight out of his own mother’s mourning meal early. Arthur took another deep breath and looked up at Mary Beth, their matching grey eyes meeting for the first time since she’d set foot back in Berlin last night and gave her a curt nod, same for Jack, and went back to shaking hands with the crowd.
Mary Beth exhaled slowly, rubbing the creases between her eyebrows with one hand, willing away the headache she could feel working its way into the foreground. Jack rubbed her neck gently and leaned in to whisper,
“What was that about your grandfather?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth replied, glancing up at her husband, sagging slightly against his chest. And she really didn’t. Mary Beth remembered her grandfather in fragments: she remembered he wore bow ties to mass and his great, shaking laugh, belly full and spreading like syrup. She remembered his pressed blue jeans and his gnarled, scarred hands that she’d love to run her little-girl fingers over, riddled with arthritic bumps like the knots of a tree stripped of its bark. She remember his string art of the sailboat hanging over his drafting table and how he’d always microwave her a can of spaghetti-os and him holding the pencil, feet up in the recliner, filling out the weekly crossword. But she couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said to her and she’d never known he had any connection to the pulp mill or Fraser Paper.
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth repeated, headache throbbing like the dull shine of fork against ceramic sink, but preoccupied now with memory. “Do you know that was his journal Grammy was holding in the coffin? Wish I could get a look in that and find out,” she murmured absent-mindedly.
Jack leaned in and kissed his wife’s forehead, sensing her tension. “Mmm, not unless you dig it up. All that’s down in the dirt, now.”
Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, had told her that her grandmother had probably been dead for a few days before anyone had found her. It was the maid who stumbled upon the body, sprawled across the bed, apparent heart attack, four days’ worth of Berlin Daily Suns stacked on the doorstep. But even knowing all that, even hearing the gruesome specifics that Mary’s mother wanted to, needed to talk to someone about but couldn’t mention to her husband, couldn’t bring herself to force him to think of his own mother that way, even those details didn’t prepare Mary Beth for the way her grandmother looked at the wake. Mary Beth hated wakes, an unfortunate Catholic tradition that the Frasers happily upheld, because there was her grandmother: face and hands tan with makeup, looking like a plastic mannequin empty version of herself, long nails painted a pearled pink, clutching a wooden rosary and a creased, black leather notebook. Unrecognizable. Mary Beth and Jack knelt together in front of the casket and Mary Beth stared at her folded hands for what she felt was the appropriate amount of time, trying to avoid looking up at her grandmother’s body cocooned in white satin.
Later, Mary Beth caught her mother’s elbow at the mourning meal—buffet style roast beef, herbed carrots and potatoes, salad, rolls and bottles of Sam Adams at the Country Tavern special events room—to ask about the book she’d seen.
“Mom,” Mary Beth whispered, leaning against an exposed wooden beam near the staircase, where her parents were shaking hands and murmuring thanks to sorry for your losses and we’ll miss hers and she was a great lady’s, “what was that notebook Grammy was holding?”
“Oh, it was your Grampy’s journal,” Elizabeth replied. “Uncle Bill found it in Grammy’s nightstand when they were packing up her jewelry and they thought it would be nice to bury her with it.”
“Did they read any of it?” Mary Beth had been just fifteen when her grandfather died, a quiet funny old man who Arthur had never wanted to spend much time around, always nervous and overly formal, shaking his own father’s hand until the day he was gone. Mary could count on one hand the number of times she’d been alone with either of her grandparents and had never known much about their lives before her, let alone before Arthur.
“Of course not,” Elizabeth replied, mildly horrified, as she turned back to embrace Mrs. Harrendanks from St. Teresa’s knitting circle and coo a thank you back to her I’m so sorry. Mary Beth turned from her mother back toward the room to find Jack. He stood by the buffet, laughing with her Uncle Bill: Bill’s meaty fist clutching a beer, face red from the laughter or the alcohol or the crowd. Jack’s smile still cut across his face like a wide gorge, just like in high school, his tousled brown hair ruffled against his forehead and Mary Beth smiled to see him so comfortable at a Fraser family gathering. Jack had always been closer to Bill and Mary Beth suspected it was construction that did it, men who worked with their hands understanding each other on a physical level. Jack was a framer, worked in the skeletons of future houses, and had a scar on his left hand from the place a nail gun had pierced straight through, pinning his palm to a two-by-four. Mary’d had to squirt the antiseptic fluid into the hollow wound for a week, Jack’s friends holding his shoulders down so he couldn’t thrash, roaring and wild against the pain. And Bill was a contractor, the Fraser family’s version of blue collar, who spent every day at his job site, blueprints balled in his fists and yellow hard hat teetering on his massive, balding forehead. But more and more frequently there was no job site to visit. Plenty of land up here to build on, Bill would say, thanks to the once-booming business of the pulp mill clearing out most of Berlin’s northern pine forest, but not many people left who can afford to build on it. The second half of that sentence went: since Arthur Fraser closed down the pulp mill last year but that was the part nobody said unless Bill’d been drinking.
Mary Beth watched Jack bob his head respectfully, his mouth pursed in that tense way men have when discussing serious business, as Bill’s voice lowered.
“No, it’s been a long time since Fraser Paper was that kind of company,” Bill said gravely, “the kind that cared about their workers, knew their faces and made sure they had food on their tables.” Jack shook his head and studied his feet hard. He didn’t have to ask how long or what happened, because he knew. Mary Beth knew. How long it’d been was since Arthur Fraser bought the Berlin Paper Company, ten years before Mary Beth was born, parlaying an MBA from Harvard Business into the title of youngest CEO and his own name on the sign at the gates.
“Berlin Paper used to own the pulp mill, ‘dya know that?” Bill asked, and Jack nodded politely, glancing around for his wife and Mary Beth made her way over to rescue Jack from the awkward rant he’d heard more than once before. “Yup, owned the pulp mill and paper factory and still they made that kind of effort to know their own people. But not anymore. Now it’s cutbacks and cost-effectiveness research reports and Fraser Paper, like the name mattered more than the place!” Mary Beth slid her arm through Jack’s and leaned in to kiss her uncle on his hot cheek just as he slammed his bottle down on the edge of the buffet table and swore under his breath. Mary’d seen it before. Bill would drink too much, his hometown pride mixed with what must’ve been jealousy at the brother who’d made it in the big city and come home to work his little town into shape and he’d start to bubble over. First the rant, then the bottle-slam, the quiet cursing and then,
“God DAMN it, Arthur!” Several heads snapped over to Bill then away quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught judging one of the grieving sons. Others never looked up, having heard Bill’s tirade before. Arthur’s head snapped over to his younger brother and didn’t look away, his eyes narrowing, his chest moving with the deep inhale that meant you were just another burden on his already laden shoulders, as he moved towards them.
“Show some respect, William,” Arthur hissed, his hand clamped down hard on Bill’s shoulder, “this is your own mother’s funeral.”
“Respect!” Bill replied, swerving around to face his brother. “Like the respect you showed shutting down the pulp mill, putting all those folks out of work, folks just like your own father? The last tie we had to him, Art!” Bill poked his finger into his big brother’s chest, then stalked away, muttering, “the last damn thing we had left,” straight out of the room, straight down the stairs and straight out of his own mother’s mourning meal early. Arthur took another deep breath and looked up at Mary Beth, their matching grey eyes meeting for the first time since she’d set foot back in Berlin last night and gave her a curt nod, same for Jack, and went back to shaking hands with the crowd.
Mary Beth exhaled slowly, rubbing the creases between her eyebrows with one hand, willing away the headache she could feel working its way into the foreground. Jack rubbed her neck gently and leaned in to whisper,
“What was that about your grandfather?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth replied, glancing up at her husband, sagging slightly against his chest. And she really didn’t. Mary Beth remembered her grandfather in fragments: she remembered he wore bow ties to mass and his great, shaking laugh, belly full and spreading like syrup. She remembered his pressed blue jeans and his gnarled, scarred hands that she’d love to run her little-girl fingers over, riddled with arthritic bumps like the knots of a tree stripped of its bark. She remember his string art of the sailboat hanging over his drafting table and how he’d always microwave her a can of spaghetti-os and him holding the pencil, feet up in the recliner, filling out the weekly crossword. But she couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said to her and she’d never known he had any connection to the pulp mill or Fraser Paper.
“I don’t know,” Mary Beth repeated, headache throbbing like the dull shine of fork against ceramic sink, but preoccupied now with memory. “Do you know that was his journal Grammy was holding in the coffin? Wish I could get a look in that and find out,” she murmured absent-mindedly.
Jack leaned in and kissed his wife’s forehead, sensing her tension. “Mmm, not unless you dig it up. All that’s down in the dirt, now.”
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Teaser from my seminar paper for Environmental Lit (20 page critical literature research paper), aka the bane of my existence for the last three months. Due tomorrow and never looking back... (Seriously, it's pretty boring and pretentious-sounding, but I have to do something with it!)
Word as Weapon: Dismantling Hierarchy Through Boundary-Crossing in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living
"The establishment has always feared writers, because writers have the power of clarity, and when they choose to use it, it can be deadly."
–Arundhati Roy, DAM/AGE, a film with Arundhati Roy
Contemporary writers across the globe such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy combine environmental and social activism with literature, employing creative literary devices to reach a wider political audience. The willingness of such authors to blur the lines between nonfiction reporting and creative literature is indicative of a holistic approach to solving the world’s social and environmental ills that is also reflected in modern political movements. In an article on the relationship between postcolonial and ecocritical literature, Graham Huggan recognizes that the similarities between these literary movements are rooted in a shared holistic view of social problems. Criticizing a primarily European American approach to ecocriticism, Huggan suggests that postcolonial literature is characterized by an insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse (702). However, western ecocritical female writers are exploring similar links between environmental and human degradation by aligning specific human and ecological communities, often going so far as to link the landscape to the physical human body. Terry Tempest Williams, an ecofeminist author from a developed nation, and Arundhati Roy, an ecocritical writer from a developing nation, both seek to challenge the traditional power structures of their various environments by analyzing the deep connection between their “othered” groups and the specific ecological locations they inhabit. In doing so, these two writers demonstrate the similar techniques and approaches of ecofeminist and postcolonial literary activists, despite their different geographic locations and personal backgrounds.
On the surface, a Mormon naturalist from a wealthy family of developers in Salt Lake City, Utah may not seem to have much in common with a former student of architecture and novelist from New Delhi. But the differences in the backgrounds of Terry Tempest Williams and Arundhati Roy lead them both to a life of activism, devoted to the communities—both human and ecological—from which they came. Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge is a book devoted to two such communities: her immediate family, a Mormon stronghold shaken to the core by the deaths of its women, in this case, Williams’ mother, by cancer; and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which, during the same season, suffered a devastating loss of habitat due to the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Arundhati Roy’s collection of two essays, The Cost of Living, explores the relationship of Indians to their modern environment: in “The Greater Common Good”, addressing the close ties between the Adivasi and the Narmada River; in “The End of Imagination”, analyzing the potential physical and psychological impacts of Indian nuclear proliferation on the country’s people as a whole.
In both works of literature, the authors share a common goal: to bring together the fates of a people and their ecological community in a way that challenges their domination by questioning the traditional structure of power. To this end, Williams and Roy employ similar literary techniques, namely: aligning the identity of a specific group of people to a specific place and linking the physical human body (often female) with the natural landscape, in order to place their texts in a larger political context by refusing to adhere to preconceived boundaries on which the exploitation of resources is based.
If you got this far, bravo. Tell me what you think!
coming soon to a conference near you?
Word as Weapon: Dismantling Hierarchy Through Boundary-Crossing in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living
"The establishment has always feared writers, because writers have the power of clarity, and when they choose to use it, it can be deadly."
–Arundhati Roy, DAM/AGE, a film with Arundhati Roy
Contemporary writers across the globe such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy combine environmental and social activism with literature, employing creative literary devices to reach a wider political audience. The willingness of such authors to blur the lines between nonfiction reporting and creative literature is indicative of a holistic approach to solving the world’s social and environmental ills that is also reflected in modern political movements. In an article on the relationship between postcolonial and ecocritical literature, Graham Huggan recognizes that the similarities between these literary movements are rooted in a shared holistic view of social problems. Criticizing a primarily European American approach to ecocriticism, Huggan suggests that postcolonial literature is characterized by an insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse (702). However, western ecocritical female writers are exploring similar links between environmental and human degradation by aligning specific human and ecological communities, often going so far as to link the landscape to the physical human body. Terry Tempest Williams, an ecofeminist author from a developed nation, and Arundhati Roy, an ecocritical writer from a developing nation, both seek to challenge the traditional power structures of their various environments by analyzing the deep connection between their “othered” groups and the specific ecological locations they inhabit. In doing so, these two writers demonstrate the similar techniques and approaches of ecofeminist and postcolonial literary activists, despite their different geographic locations and personal backgrounds.
On the surface, a Mormon naturalist from a wealthy family of developers in Salt Lake City, Utah may not seem to have much in common with a former student of architecture and novelist from New Delhi. But the differences in the backgrounds of Terry Tempest Williams and Arundhati Roy lead them both to a life of activism, devoted to the communities—both human and ecological—from which they came. Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge is a book devoted to two such communities: her immediate family, a Mormon stronghold shaken to the core by the deaths of its women, in this case, Williams’ mother, by cancer; and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which, during the same season, suffered a devastating loss of habitat due to the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Arundhati Roy’s collection of two essays, The Cost of Living, explores the relationship of Indians to their modern environment: in “The Greater Common Good”, addressing the close ties between the Adivasi and the Narmada River; in “The End of Imagination”, analyzing the potential physical and psychological impacts of Indian nuclear proliferation on the country’s people as a whole.
In both works of literature, the authors share a common goal: to bring together the fates of a people and their ecological community in a way that challenges their domination by questioning the traditional structure of power. To this end, Williams and Roy employ similar literary techniques, namely: aligning the identity of a specific group of people to a specific place and linking the physical human body (often female) with the natural landscape, in order to place their texts in a larger political context by refusing to adhere to preconceived boundaries on which the exploitation of resources is based.
If you got this far, bravo. Tell me what you think!
coming soon to a conference near you?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
I wrote a little something about starlings. I started this last fall, shortly after we watched a starling die, and then had a little encounter with one this weekend that made me want to write more. I'm not sure if it's finished, or what it's really about, but I have a few little vignettes and maybe they will become something bigger.
A starling peers over the edge of the gutter, looking straight down at my face through the window, his head cocked and considering. I find my neck at an angle too, gazing up at him through the streaked glass of the window, watching his sharp twitches and speckled neck and long, thin beak until he hops backward, into the wet pile of leaves on my roof and joins two friends. They launch, swooping suddenly up and over my watching eyes to the power lines across the street. Three black parallel lines sag slightly against the grey-blue Saturday morning sky and three starlings wait there, one on each cable, feet grasping the metal in silhouette. The pale yellow sun of late autumn is still below the tree line, but lightens the sky to the shining of sun on water, backlighting the birds on the wire.
It’s early autumn and I am new to Iowa, but not to starlings. They live scattered across these United States—I have seen them in every time zone. I know of the animosity that even bird-lovers hold for these large, simple birds. I know they’ve edged out native species across the country. I know they were brought over from Europe centuries ago, for a nobleman who wanted to populate the new world with all of the birds referenced in Shakespeare’s scripts. A testament to the transformative power of literature. I know Shakespeare has inadvertently changed the dynamics of bird population and migration in this new world. I watch the starlings chirp and squawk at each other. Some people even go so far as to intentionally starve starlings—their goal is to protect the native birds, so they set out food for those species, and pull it back indoors when the starlings show up to scavenge. It seems unfair to blame these three starlings for the disruption. It seems cruel to starve them. But I also know that nature is often cruel and would let all the natives die out. Starlings are stronger, and therefore more fit to survive.
*
Last week, I watched a starling die. We found one sitting on the floor of the magazine office, its brown flecked wings tucked beneath its body against the cement floor, just sitting and waiting. Rachel took it into her cupped palms without a fight, and sat on the yellow sofa, stroking it and speaking in a low mother’s voice, trying to coax energy back into its tired body. We had no idea how it got inside.
The starling had one last fight in it, and leapt, falling out of Rachel’s hands, fluttering sideways and scared beneath an old ottoman. She got down on her knees and bent, fingers crawling tentatively under the furniture and cradled him softly out again. He needed food and water and hope, so we took him outside and kneeled in the wet bark mulch and tried to feed it bits of white bread crust from Rachel’s roast beef sandwich but he wouldn’t take it. Instead, he tried again to fly. We were suddenly elated, his weary wings beating like a pulse three times and then he lay on the ground with us. Oh no, we all sighed, knowing. We knew he didn’t have much time left, we knew as he arched his back, showing us his smooth white belly feathers, flecked with mud from the plot of garden outside our office building, we knew a life was about to leave.
*
Nearly a year later, I stand outside in the rain, waterproof hood pulled up over my hair, huddled under the slight overhang of my front door. I wanted to watch the downpour up close, to see the April rain beat the pavement into puddles. When I scuffed a sneaker against the cement stoop, a starling suddenly appeared from above and behind my head, flapping wildly up and away, to a tree just across the small lawn, near the sidewalk. I looked up at the corner of my gutter and saw the small hole stuffed with mud, loose twigs poking out the entrance. I think it was a she-starling, but I don’t know, saw only a grey-black shadow of a bird scuttle out of the nest it was building, startled by my presence.
The starling danced with my for the next ten minutes, as I waited out the storm outside my front door. She would swoop in for a landing, wings beating backwards ceaselessly to slow her descent as she scuttled back into her nest-box. She’d stay for a few minutes, and I stared at her small opening, hoping for a glimpse of a furrowed wing, nestled in against the rain. Then I would move too suddenly, clear my throat, shift the weight to my other leg, and she’d flutter out to the tree. Once she dove down toward the nest but lost her nerve at the last minute, hovering above my head and then retreating again. Or perhaps she was warning me, flying at me like a predator, pseudo-attack in hope of my retreat. After another ten minutes in the tree, she began squawking at me, angry staccato calls like get away get away. I should know, but I don’t, whether or not she’s laid eggs. Is this a mother’s defense of her babies? A standard response to anyone too close to the nest? Am I reacting in a way that surprises her or frustrates her or am I exactly what she expected?
*
When the starling died last September, it took a long last breath. It’s back arched further, stretching into an angle that looked like a question mark, further than I thought possible. At its furthest point, head curved back against its wing feathers, it quivered slightly, as if a chill ran through its hollow spine. I know this sounds too appropriate to be true, too much like a metaphor, but it isn’t. Birds are flying metaphors, full of the hope and potential we land bound mammals can only dream of, but this one wasn’t flying anymore. Its eyes pinched shut like a baby falling asleep against all its best efforts; it quivered, and sighed a giant exhale of its whole life and then relaxed. The tautness of struggle left its body, its feet curled up towards its white, muddy belly, and it was gone.
We had to go back inside for class, Rachel and I. I could see she was upset and I felt tears welling up from way down in my throat. We sat through workshop and put what was left of Rachel’s sandwich back in the refrigerator and didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. When I told Kevin about it later that night, I started to cry and as he held me I thought myself ridiculous for allowing something so mundane as the death of a wild bird that got trapped inside a building for a whole weekend without food to bother me so deeply. But I had never seen a living thing die before, never seen the life actually leave a body or feel the tiny heart actually stop beating and perhaps I had never really know that death happened. But now I knew, and couldn’t escape it, couldn’t move back from the knowledge that when a starling dies it shudders.
A starling peers over the edge of the gutter, looking straight down at my face through the window, his head cocked and considering. I find my neck at an angle too, gazing up at him through the streaked glass of the window, watching his sharp twitches and speckled neck and long, thin beak until he hops backward, into the wet pile of leaves on my roof and joins two friends. They launch, swooping suddenly up and over my watching eyes to the power lines across the street. Three black parallel lines sag slightly against the grey-blue Saturday morning sky and three starlings wait there, one on each cable, feet grasping the metal in silhouette. The pale yellow sun of late autumn is still below the tree line, but lightens the sky to the shining of sun on water, backlighting the birds on the wire.
It’s early autumn and I am new to Iowa, but not to starlings. They live scattered across these United States—I have seen them in every time zone. I know of the animosity that even bird-lovers hold for these large, simple birds. I know they’ve edged out native species across the country. I know they were brought over from Europe centuries ago, for a nobleman who wanted to populate the new world with all of the birds referenced in Shakespeare’s scripts. A testament to the transformative power of literature. I know Shakespeare has inadvertently changed the dynamics of bird population and migration in this new world. I watch the starlings chirp and squawk at each other. Some people even go so far as to intentionally starve starlings—their goal is to protect the native birds, so they set out food for those species, and pull it back indoors when the starlings show up to scavenge. It seems unfair to blame these three starlings for the disruption. It seems cruel to starve them. But I also know that nature is often cruel and would let all the natives die out. Starlings are stronger, and therefore more fit to survive.
*
Last week, I watched a starling die. We found one sitting on the floor of the magazine office, its brown flecked wings tucked beneath its body against the cement floor, just sitting and waiting. Rachel took it into her cupped palms without a fight, and sat on the yellow sofa, stroking it and speaking in a low mother’s voice, trying to coax energy back into its tired body. We had no idea how it got inside.
The starling had one last fight in it, and leapt, falling out of Rachel’s hands, fluttering sideways and scared beneath an old ottoman. She got down on her knees and bent, fingers crawling tentatively under the furniture and cradled him softly out again. He needed food and water and hope, so we took him outside and kneeled in the wet bark mulch and tried to feed it bits of white bread crust from Rachel’s roast beef sandwich but he wouldn’t take it. Instead, he tried again to fly. We were suddenly elated, his weary wings beating like a pulse three times and then he lay on the ground with us. Oh no, we all sighed, knowing. We knew he didn’t have much time left, we knew as he arched his back, showing us his smooth white belly feathers, flecked with mud from the plot of garden outside our office building, we knew a life was about to leave.
*
Nearly a year later, I stand outside in the rain, waterproof hood pulled up over my hair, huddled under the slight overhang of my front door. I wanted to watch the downpour up close, to see the April rain beat the pavement into puddles. When I scuffed a sneaker against the cement stoop, a starling suddenly appeared from above and behind my head, flapping wildly up and away, to a tree just across the small lawn, near the sidewalk. I looked up at the corner of my gutter and saw the small hole stuffed with mud, loose twigs poking out the entrance. I think it was a she-starling, but I don’t know, saw only a grey-black shadow of a bird scuttle out of the nest it was building, startled by my presence.
The starling danced with my for the next ten minutes, as I waited out the storm outside my front door. She would swoop in for a landing, wings beating backwards ceaselessly to slow her descent as she scuttled back into her nest-box. She’d stay for a few minutes, and I stared at her small opening, hoping for a glimpse of a furrowed wing, nestled in against the rain. Then I would move too suddenly, clear my throat, shift the weight to my other leg, and she’d flutter out to the tree. Once she dove down toward the nest but lost her nerve at the last minute, hovering above my head and then retreating again. Or perhaps she was warning me, flying at me like a predator, pseudo-attack in hope of my retreat. After another ten minutes in the tree, she began squawking at me, angry staccato calls like get away get away. I should know, but I don’t, whether or not she’s laid eggs. Is this a mother’s defense of her babies? A standard response to anyone too close to the nest? Am I reacting in a way that surprises her or frustrates her or am I exactly what she expected?
*
When the starling died last September, it took a long last breath. It’s back arched further, stretching into an angle that looked like a question mark, further than I thought possible. At its furthest point, head curved back against its wing feathers, it quivered slightly, as if a chill ran through its hollow spine. I know this sounds too appropriate to be true, too much like a metaphor, but it isn’t. Birds are flying metaphors, full of the hope and potential we land bound mammals can only dream of, but this one wasn’t flying anymore. Its eyes pinched shut like a baby falling asleep against all its best efforts; it quivered, and sighed a giant exhale of its whole life and then relaxed. The tautness of struggle left its body, its feet curled up towards its white, muddy belly, and it was gone.
We had to go back inside for class, Rachel and I. I could see she was upset and I felt tears welling up from way down in my throat. We sat through workshop and put what was left of Rachel’s sandwich back in the refrigerator and didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. When I told Kevin about it later that night, I started to cry and as he held me I thought myself ridiculous for allowing something so mundane as the death of a wild bird that got trapped inside a building for a whole weekend without food to bother me so deeply. But I had never seen a living thing die before, never seen the life actually leave a body or feel the tiny heart actually stop beating and perhaps I had never really know that death happened. But now I knew, and couldn’t escape it, couldn’t move back from the knowledge that when a starling dies it shudders.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
A start the long project I want to work on this summer (a series of essays springing from the ideas in my "ended up midwestern" essay revolving around issues that were going on in Montana and California when I lived there that I may not have necessarily been a part of). This is the beginning of something about homelessness, or something?
The stench of fish guts has sunk into the wood of the Ventura pier, its wide thick planks sticky and wet with the blood and juices of fish that died there, and of the ocean. Salty Pacific water sprays the pier constantly, embedding sharp crystals and dank, faint rot into the meat of the wood. You become immersed in sea there: the loud caws of circling gulls like buzzards, the spray stinging your porous skin, the hot July sun sizzle into the top of your shiny hair and the stink of fish.
Some fish for fun: white and Chicano families gathered around one or two poles, a red plastic cooler with long necks of juice boxes, a portable stereo hissing a crackling connection from the mainland, sometimes a picnic with Zip locked bologna sandwiches, sliced cheese, and grapes. The fathers wrap their arms around children, guiding the long, thin line down into the sea. They throw fish bodies onto ice or the plastic cutting boards nailed to some of the piers’ benches. They laugh.
Some fish without laughing. These are the men—mostly men, almost always men—you see sitting cross-legged on sidewalks outside the Main St. Ben & Jerry’s or curled, sleeping surrounded by garbage bags beneath the trees in Fir St. Park. Men who walk more slowly than any others you’ve seen, not just because they are laden with all their worldly possessions—flannels tied around their waists, leading scrappy, matted dogs on leashes of rope—but because they have nowhere to be. These men fish off the pier with scrabbled-together equipment, with branches, actual tree branches stripped of foliage, and worms not purchased at the smell tackle stand on Fifth and Laurel, but dug from the ground or gather, after rain, in discarded Chinese take-out containers.
The stench of fish guts has sunk into the wood of the Ventura pier, its wide thick planks sticky and wet with the blood and juices of fish that died there, and of the ocean. Salty Pacific water sprays the pier constantly, embedding sharp crystals and dank, faint rot into the meat of the wood. You become immersed in sea there: the loud caws of circling gulls like buzzards, the spray stinging your porous skin, the hot July sun sizzle into the top of your shiny hair and the stink of fish.
Some fish for fun: white and Chicano families gathered around one or two poles, a red plastic cooler with long necks of juice boxes, a portable stereo hissing a crackling connection from the mainland, sometimes a picnic with Zip locked bologna sandwiches, sliced cheese, and grapes. The fathers wrap their arms around children, guiding the long, thin line down into the sea. They throw fish bodies onto ice or the plastic cutting boards nailed to some of the piers’ benches. They laugh.
Some fish without laughing. These are the men—mostly men, almost always men—you see sitting cross-legged on sidewalks outside the Main St. Ben & Jerry’s or curled, sleeping surrounded by garbage bags beneath the trees in Fir St. Park. Men who walk more slowly than any others you’ve seen, not just because they are laden with all their worldly possessions—flannels tied around their waists, leading scrappy, matted dogs on leashes of rope—but because they have nowhere to be. These men fish off the pier with scrabbled-together equipment, with branches, actual tree branches stripped of foliage, and worms not purchased at the smell tackle stand on Fifth and Laurel, but dug from the ground or gather, after rain, in discarded Chinese take-out containers.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The first scene from my latest short story for fiction workshop ...
"Northern Forest"
The moon hung full and low, a heavy June weight pulling it down close to the horizon. Mary Beth paused, heaving, and sat back on her heels, feet tucked against the cool, crumbled cemetery dirt. Clumps of soil stuck in her hair but she glance at the yellow moon and bent forward, picking up the small shovel she’d swiped from her father’s garage earlier that evening. She watched the spade dive into and out of the moist earth as if beyond her control, mesmerized by the white tendrils of root that poked like tendons out of the precisely-cut edges of her grandmother’s grave. Moonlight illuminated the thread-like root structure, looking like someone had sewn a hem in the soil, crooked and crossing, four feet below the surface. The shovel clanged hard. Mary Beth jammed her small wrist against the kickback, dropped the shovel and swore, shaking her hand in the cool night air, and then remembered she was in the St. Teresa’s cemetery, standing on the grass grown fourteen years over her grandfather’s grave and halfway in her grandmother’s and quickly performed the sign of the cross. She’d hit the coffin. Mary Beth said a quick prayer under her breath, looking once more to the haunted moon, her chapped pink lips moving silently, then hopped down into the grave.
"Northern Forest"
The moon hung full and low, a heavy June weight pulling it down close to the horizon. Mary Beth paused, heaving, and sat back on her heels, feet tucked against the cool, crumbled cemetery dirt. Clumps of soil stuck in her hair but she glance at the yellow moon and bent forward, picking up the small shovel she’d swiped from her father’s garage earlier that evening. She watched the spade dive into and out of the moist earth as if beyond her control, mesmerized by the white tendrils of root that poked like tendons out of the precisely-cut edges of her grandmother’s grave. Moonlight illuminated the thread-like root structure, looking like someone had sewn a hem in the soil, crooked and crossing, four feet below the surface. The shovel clanged hard. Mary Beth jammed her small wrist against the kickback, dropped the shovel and swore, shaking her hand in the cool night air, and then remembered she was in the St. Teresa’s cemetery, standing on the grass grown fourteen years over her grandfather’s grave and halfway in her grandmother’s and quickly performed the sign of the cross. She’d hit the coffin. Mary Beth said a quick prayer under her breath, looking once more to the haunted moon, her chapped pink lips moving silently, then hopped down into the grave.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
This one doesn't have a title yet... I actually wrote it as part of a short series of experimental nonfiction last semester, but I am workshopping it as an individual poem this semester. Any title ideas?
I have only one memory of our first move:
Nuns carried the refrigerator into my new house:
The house on 67 Constance Street,
which would become 4 Paige Drive.
My mother says this memory is false was
born is because I was only three. And
it rained on moving day.
And the movers wore black raincoats with
hoods drawn up against the wet March cold.
One move in the first eighteen years:
Nine moves in the next seven.
I still have the same desk
I received for my ninth birthday and a
Ziploc bag of New Hampshire leaves
My mother sent me in the mail.
I have only one memory of our first move:
Nuns carried the refrigerator into my new house:
The house on 67 Constance Street,
which would become 4 Paige Drive.
My mother says this memory is false was
born is because I was only three. And
it rained on moving day.
And the movers wore black raincoats with
hoods drawn up against the wet March cold.
One move in the first eighteen years:
Nine moves in the next seven.
I still have the same desk
I received for my ninth birthday and a
Ziploc bag of New Hampshire leaves
My mother sent me in the mail.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
We've been experimenting with forms in poetry workshop (getting to choose which one we write) and I've become intrigued by the sijo (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sijo)
I’m thinking about doing a series of sijo about the many places I’ve lived and think of as homes. The brevity of the form seems to lend itself to isolating a single image, while still allowing me to attempt an incorporation of the larger ideas of nostalgia and loss.
Ithaca Spring (sijo)
In March, the ice of Lake Cayuga begins to crack,
Shattering sounds like thousands of falling crystal bells.
I can still hear the ringing from Central Standard Time.
I’m thinking about doing a series of sijo about the many places I’ve lived and think of as homes. The brevity of the form seems to lend itself to isolating a single image, while still allowing me to attempt an incorporation of the larger ideas of nostalgia and loss.
Ithaca Spring (sijo)
In March, the ice of Lake Cayuga begins to crack,
Shattering sounds like thousands of falling crystal bells.
I can still hear the ringing from Central Standard Time.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Girl
For my sixth birthday my mother gave me a music box:
Pink, lacey, pristine, golden hinges folding back to reveal
Plastic painted ballerina in classical bell tutu, en pointe. I would
Never train en pointe: my prima instructor told my mother
Six-year-old bones are still soft, vulnerable to
Sinking in like clay. I would quit ballet at age ten to
Pursue yoga and modern dance, still years away from
Having the right toes for grace.
After two weeks I snapped the ballerina off and
Watched just the bare, metal spring quiver and rotate
To tinny “Edelweiss”.
For my sixth birthday my mother gave me a music box:
Pink, lacey, pristine, golden hinges folding back to reveal
Plastic painted ballerina in classical bell tutu, en pointe. I would
Never train en pointe: my prima instructor told my mother
Six-year-old bones are still soft, vulnerable to
Sinking in like clay. I would quit ballet at age ten to
Pursue yoga and modern dance, still years away from
Having the right toes for grace.
After two weeks I snapped the ballerina off and
Watched just the bare, metal spring quiver and rotate
To tinny “Edelweiss”.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Family Tree
I.
Corsini/Squillante:
My Papa had to pay an Irishman
to buy the land for his house.
He and Nona saved for years—
he making shoes while she folded greeting cards
at the factory in Needham.
Now the tiny white house:
wine barrels in the cellar,
rows of tomato vines in the back,
an enormous dining room table.
Papa played the banjo at our only family reunion.
Nona and a league of aunts laced fingers
around my wrists and fed me
giant hand-rolled meatballs off plastic forks.
II.
Corsini/Zimmer:
Gampi’s full name is Oresti Corsini, Jr. but he
Prefers Joe.
Lanky and laughing at the picnic table in
his short-sleeved dress shirts.
Drafter retired from Korea retired from NASA
Won’t discuss Apollo 13 which he helped design.
Towers over his little German wife.
My Nana, bulging at the belly, fierce,
pummels him playfully with tiny fists,
then throws a genuine tantrum over an
empty bottle of Italian dressing once
tore up my mother’s hand-sewn prom dress.
III.
Landrigan/Corsini:
My mother, their only daughter, fits here,
on the New England coast of the Mediterranean,
her dark olive skin carrying
turquoise eye shadow, her wild black curls
pinned down with two combs. She is
barefoot in the kitchen, pumping the hand-crank
pasta machine, birthing new yellow linguine
to dry for tomorrow’s second-day party.
Tomato sauce splattered across the
cream collar of my Laura Ashley dress,
I hide from the boisterous neighbors, from
the cowboy kids play-firing at Indians.
Pale freckled Irish-from-my-father skin
and blonde hair and big glasses and too-thin wrists,
fingers tracing the genealogy chart
Gampi printed on the Commodore 64,
taped across the back of Papa’s house.
I.
Corsini/Squillante:
My Papa had to pay an Irishman
to buy the land for his house.
He and Nona saved for years—
he making shoes while she folded greeting cards
at the factory in Needham.
Now the tiny white house:
wine barrels in the cellar,
rows of tomato vines in the back,
an enormous dining room table.
Papa played the banjo at our only family reunion.
Nona and a league of aunts laced fingers
around my wrists and fed me
giant hand-rolled meatballs off plastic forks.
II.
Corsini/Zimmer:
Gampi’s full name is Oresti Corsini, Jr. but he
Prefers Joe.
Lanky and laughing at the picnic table in
his short-sleeved dress shirts.
Drafter retired from Korea retired from NASA
Won’t discuss Apollo 13 which he helped design.
Towers over his little German wife.
My Nana, bulging at the belly, fierce,
pummels him playfully with tiny fists,
then throws a genuine tantrum over an
empty bottle of Italian dressing once
tore up my mother’s hand-sewn prom dress.
III.
Landrigan/Corsini:
My mother, their only daughter, fits here,
on the New England coast of the Mediterranean,
her dark olive skin carrying
turquoise eye shadow, her wild black curls
pinned down with two combs. She is
barefoot in the kitchen, pumping the hand-crank
pasta machine, birthing new yellow linguine
to dry for tomorrow’s second-day party.
Tomato sauce splattered across the
cream collar of my Laura Ashley dress,
I hide from the boisterous neighbors, from
the cowboy kids play-firing at Indians.
Pale freckled Irish-from-my-father skin
and blonde hair and big glasses and too-thin wrists,
fingers tracing the genealogy chart
Gampi printed on the Commodore 64,
taped across the back of Papa’s house.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
I'm such a huge nerd, that I decided to write a poem about the Cursive show we saw in Omaha by mimicking the rhythm/syllabication of a Cursive song... and then named the poem after that song. I call it... a Kasher-elle.
In the Now
I think there’s blood in my mouth
It tastes like rust and I need
Another Pabst Blue Ribbon
In a can warm with my sweat
A hoodie slide off my shoul-
Der pumping arms in the air
As a man—one hand on the
Keyboard, one on the trumpet
Keeps circus time with Tim K
Barking anti-religious
Rhetoric into the mic—
Rise up!
Rise up!
Dance and shout and fall and hair
Sticks to my face my make-up
Smeared with hot guitar solos
Drums knocking against my chest
Hear music in the bathroom
It was snowing when we left
In the Now
I think there’s blood in my mouth
It tastes like rust and I need
Another Pabst Blue Ribbon
In a can warm with my sweat
A hoodie slide off my shoul-
Der pumping arms in the air
As a man—one hand on the
Keyboard, one on the trumpet
Keeps circus time with Tim K
Barking anti-religious
Rhetoric into the mic—
Rise up!
Rise up!
Dance and shout and fall and hair
Sticks to my face my make-up
Smeared with hot guitar solos
Drums knocking against my chest
Hear music in the bathroom
It was snowing when we left
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Four Personal Addresses
1. Eastern Standard
A grey cape with forest-teal shutters. Backyard pool, a luxury attracted all the summer block kids. Wooden play set with balance beam, monkey bars, a white trapeze. Wide sloping hills perfect for sledding, covered in dirty snow over dead orange pine needles slick with autumn. Chain link fences dividing lawns. Enormous granite boulders. Bikes with handlebar baskets and stickers, skinned knees and sticky hands.
Later, cramped dorm rooms with generic grey carpet and tiny closets, white-cement walls dotted with Polaroids from parties and hand-cut photos of scrawny men with guitars and microphones. One sagging brown Victorian, slanting balcony porch for typewriters and cigarettes. A secret rabbit. The road below unpaved, mounds of dirt piled across the street where someone scrawled “love” in red spray-paint.
2. Mountain Time
No apartments, only houses. Split-level at the foot of Peet’s hill watching the sunrise on the walk to work, coffee and cold hands in September. Orange cottonwoods, unfamiliar. All-boy roommates messy with climbing gear, carabineers in the kitchen. Craggy movie-set mountains, everywhere, at each horizon, smattered with snow, snowshoes, snow pants at the second-hand sports store, pray-for-snow parties, snow in October.
Men dressed as cowboys in the gas station casinos, 48-packs of Keystone in the mini-fridge, lift tickets scattered across the dining room table. Our own bedroom, his striped comforter and my throw pillows, his bookcase stuffed and stacked with my books, and his half-empty closet full.
3. Pacific Daylight Savings
Hummingbirds in March, enormous shiny green ferns and a hot tub in the condo complex. Dinner parties with wine and three different kinds of cheese, all the groceries from Trader Joe’s. Flip-flops and bathing suits, sandals and shorts so suddenly. Saturdays at the farmer’s market three blocks down, four parking lots full with yellow, green, red tomatoes, peppers, homemade sausage, free-range hen eggs, lumpy white goat cheese, black bean and jalapeno empanadas, avocados, lemons and lemons. Fields of lettuce and strawberries.
Kids on skateboards in the apartment-building’s driveway, cement basketball court surrounded by chain link fence where they signed autographs and needed help spelling their names. Sand in my sneakers staying in the carport after studying for the GRE at the beach. Riding bikes to the beach, surfing, watching the sun set, walking to the end of the Little Miss Sunshine wooden pier, for soggy salty French fries and apples. The ocean. Glittering and strange and no end in sight.
4. Central Standard
A stucco duplex, mail slot and a wooden number plate, covered with red ivy. Basement with microbrewing equipment and old Christmas decorations, extra wooden chairs. Cracks in the kitchen wall by the back door and hand-me-down furniture in the attic bedroom. New flowers in the vase every week from the green house, clumps of dirt on the rug by the front door. Clutter. Paper. Backyard hammock and pepper garden, three birdhouses, a wooden swing and a wild bunny.
Railroad crossings every few blocks, noisy trains and tornado sirens. Pantorium, antique stores, Whiskey River Saloon nestled a block down from the power plant, booming stacks, purple-grey smoke. Giant pitchfork and corn fields and soybean fields and corn and soybeans and trains of corn and soybean headed East.
1. Eastern Standard
A grey cape with forest-teal shutters. Backyard pool, a luxury attracted all the summer block kids. Wooden play set with balance beam, monkey bars, a white trapeze. Wide sloping hills perfect for sledding, covered in dirty snow over dead orange pine needles slick with autumn. Chain link fences dividing lawns. Enormous granite boulders. Bikes with handlebar baskets and stickers, skinned knees and sticky hands.
Later, cramped dorm rooms with generic grey carpet and tiny closets, white-cement walls dotted with Polaroids from parties and hand-cut photos of scrawny men with guitars and microphones. One sagging brown Victorian, slanting balcony porch for typewriters and cigarettes. A secret rabbit. The road below unpaved, mounds of dirt piled across the street where someone scrawled “love” in red spray-paint.
2. Mountain Time
No apartments, only houses. Split-level at the foot of Peet’s hill watching the sunrise on the walk to work, coffee and cold hands in September. Orange cottonwoods, unfamiliar. All-boy roommates messy with climbing gear, carabineers in the kitchen. Craggy movie-set mountains, everywhere, at each horizon, smattered with snow, snowshoes, snow pants at the second-hand sports store, pray-for-snow parties, snow in October.
Men dressed as cowboys in the gas station casinos, 48-packs of Keystone in the mini-fridge, lift tickets scattered across the dining room table. Our own bedroom, his striped comforter and my throw pillows, his bookcase stuffed and stacked with my books, and his half-empty closet full.
3. Pacific Daylight Savings
Hummingbirds in March, enormous shiny green ferns and a hot tub in the condo complex. Dinner parties with wine and three different kinds of cheese, all the groceries from Trader Joe’s. Flip-flops and bathing suits, sandals and shorts so suddenly. Saturdays at the farmer’s market three blocks down, four parking lots full with yellow, green, red tomatoes, peppers, homemade sausage, free-range hen eggs, lumpy white goat cheese, black bean and jalapeno empanadas, avocados, lemons and lemons. Fields of lettuce and strawberries.
Kids on skateboards in the apartment-building’s driveway, cement basketball court surrounded by chain link fence where they signed autographs and needed help spelling their names. Sand in my sneakers staying in the carport after studying for the GRE at the beach. Riding bikes to the beach, surfing, watching the sun set, walking to the end of the Little Miss Sunshine wooden pier, for soggy salty French fries and apples. The ocean. Glittering and strange and no end in sight.
4. Central Standard
A stucco duplex, mail slot and a wooden number plate, covered with red ivy. Basement with microbrewing equipment and old Christmas decorations, extra wooden chairs. Cracks in the kitchen wall by the back door and hand-me-down furniture in the attic bedroom. New flowers in the vase every week from the green house, clumps of dirt on the rug by the front door. Clutter. Paper. Backyard hammock and pepper garden, three birdhouses, a wooden swing and a wild bunny.
Railroad crossings every few blocks, noisy trains and tornado sirens. Pantorium, antique stores, Whiskey River Saloon nestled a block down from the power plant, booming stacks, purple-grey smoke. Giant pitchfork and corn fields and soybean fields and corn and soybeans and trains of corn and soybean headed East.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Silver Lace
The soil cool against my cupped palms, I cradled the root structure of the silver lace plant removed from its pot. Tiny white strings snaked around my fingers like scars in the dirt.
Seeds had gone into the same plot of soil together but were sprouted now: the plants needed more space, needed to be removed, needed distance from the encroaching roots of their brothers.
We sat around a picnic table outside the greenhouse and extracted the seedlings with silver spoons. Delicately, I dug my fingers through the dirt to untangle one root from the next without ripping them apart. The roots had to remain intact or the plants would die.
My hands have extra lines, creases dividing and subdividing my palms and fingers into separate territories so dirt sticks easily there.
I placed the silver lace, free of tangling roots, into its own new pot, tucking extra soil around the base, so the roots could grow, spread out like interstates across a map.
The soil cool against my cupped palms, I cradled the root structure of the silver lace plant removed from its pot. Tiny white strings snaked around my fingers like scars in the dirt.
Seeds had gone into the same plot of soil together but were sprouted now: the plants needed more space, needed to be removed, needed distance from the encroaching roots of their brothers.
We sat around a picnic table outside the greenhouse and extracted the seedlings with silver spoons. Delicately, I dug my fingers through the dirt to untangle one root from the next without ripping them apart. The roots had to remain intact or the plants would die.
My hands have extra lines, creases dividing and subdividing my palms and fingers into separate territories so dirt sticks easily there.
I placed the silver lace, free of tangling roots, into its own new pot, tucking extra soil around the base, so the roots could grow, spread out like interstates across a map.
Friday, February 06, 2009
Puncture Wounds (zuihitsu)
Note: Some lines from this poem were harvested from “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by Johnny Cash
Kevin cut himself washing dishes, badly, his knuckle punching through a pint glass, slicing a triangle of skin sliding down the drain. How bad is it? I saw white, heaved. Shoving a mess of paper towels against the bright blood, grabbed my keys, swallowing vomit hard out the door.
A pack of crows is called a murder.
Go tell that long-tongued liar.
Go and tell that midnight rider.
Winter in Iowa a painting of a black-and-white photograph of a Victorian house, haunted. Stark bare trees dark grey against the lighter clouds.
The sounds of crows being tortured pierced the freezing night as we left the emergency room: shrill, long aching calls, cawing like cats or monkeys against unseen violence. My hands shook without gloves as I read to him the symptoms of infection: tell me if you feel feverish.
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angels’ feet.
Along I-35 South to Des Moines, snow pools, revealing bumps and curves I couldn’t see in summer.
Two crows picking at the flat body of a road-killed squirrel, its matted grey-orange coat speckled with blood dry and dull. The sharp white of a protruding tendon or bone. I cock my head at the silhouette crows waiting in the branches above me. Keep walking.
I pass a billboard of the crucifixion: “Jesus, the ONLY way to God.” Blood leaks out around metal nails hammered into the delicate wrists.
Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news.
Note: Some lines from this poem were harvested from “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by Johnny Cash
Kevin cut himself washing dishes, badly, his knuckle punching through a pint glass, slicing a triangle of skin sliding down the drain. How bad is it? I saw white, heaved. Shoving a mess of paper towels against the bright blood, grabbed my keys, swallowing vomit hard out the door.
A pack of crows is called a murder.
Go tell that long-tongued liar.
Go and tell that midnight rider.
Winter in Iowa a painting of a black-and-white photograph of a Victorian house, haunted. Stark bare trees dark grey against the lighter clouds.
The sounds of crows being tortured pierced the freezing night as we left the emergency room: shrill, long aching calls, cawing like cats or monkeys against unseen violence. My hands shook without gloves as I read to him the symptoms of infection: tell me if you feel feverish.
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angels’ feet.
Along I-35 South to Des Moines, snow pools, revealing bumps and curves I couldn’t see in summer.
Two crows picking at the flat body of a road-killed squirrel, its matted grey-orange coat speckled with blood dry and dull. The sharp white of a protruding tendon or bone. I cock my head at the silhouette crows waiting in the branches above me. Keep walking.
I pass a billboard of the crucifixion: “Jesus, the ONLY way to God.” Blood leaks out around metal nails hammered into the delicate wrists.
Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Lost Boys
Once, when I was seven, I think
I saved a boy’s life.
He laid unconscious, blood tinting the brook rusty orange,
The cold water rippling around his forehead.
We’d fought with twig swords,
Dueling Peter Pans on our fallen tree bridge
Until he slipped off the mossy wood and fell,
Forehead cracking against the muddy brown bark.
I ran out of Neverland panting, braids bouncing,
Calling for grown-up help.
He got stitched seven times and
Praised for big boy bravery.
But still, two years later,
He lied to his mother about
The black eye I gave him
For calling my sister a cow,
Made up a story about a bully
Boy on the basketball court throwing elbows.
Didn’t want to admit he got punched—
Or saved—by a girl.
And still, in another four years,
It was I who bled rusty orange dripping
Every month into the toilet thinking
I don’t wanna grow up.
Once, when I was seven, I think
I saved a boy’s life.
He laid unconscious, blood tinting the brook rusty orange,
The cold water rippling around his forehead.
We’d fought with twig swords,
Dueling Peter Pans on our fallen tree bridge
Until he slipped off the mossy wood and fell,
Forehead cracking against the muddy brown bark.
I ran out of Neverland panting, braids bouncing,
Calling for grown-up help.
He got stitched seven times and
Praised for big boy bravery.
But still, two years later,
He lied to his mother about
The black eye I gave him
For calling my sister a cow,
Made up a story about a bully
Boy on the basketball court throwing elbows.
Didn’t want to admit he got punched—
Or saved—by a girl.
And still, in another four years,
It was I who bled rusty orange dripping
Every month into the toilet thinking
I don’t wanna grow up.
Monday, January 26, 2009
I wrote this for poetry workshop last week and I actually kind of like it. (This is a new thing for my poetry).
I fictionalized some parts of it (which the participants will recognize!) and obviously time-warped a little. I wanted the end in future tense even though these events happened months ago...
Finger Lakes
I stand inside my pantry in Iowa and
Pull the door shut, my eyes shut and
Smell deeply the wooden box of
Apple cinnamon teabags I bought
From a boy scout in California.
Waiting for the arrival of autumn in the Midwest.
My fingers search for the brown crumbs of
Dead leaves in my hair; red tips fiddle discontentedly with
Farmer’s market apple bushels something
Different about the season here and I miss
Childhood in New Hampshire
Eating the tendrils of apple peel my mother discarded before baking crisp
And serving it with tea and whipped cream after school. And
Pushing the wheelbarrow full of dead needles
Into the woods and making
Leaf angels on my back getting
Sap in my braids.
Next week I’ll go back to New York to see two
Of my friends get married and I will buy them
Kettle corn from the street vendors as a wedding gift and the
Sun will stay over the Finger Lakes for them.
Cayuga Lake is the index, long and pointed and
Golden with autumn.
I can’t think of a better time for a wedding than the same weekend as
Apple Fest, in late September, with
Sugar-sweet maple syrup smells and
Slanting rays of dusty yellow light over the lake and
Sweaters over our party dresses.
Eating apple brown betty with our mouths off paper plates.
I fictionalized some parts of it (which the participants will recognize!) and obviously time-warped a little. I wanted the end in future tense even though these events happened months ago...
Finger Lakes
I stand inside my pantry in Iowa and
Pull the door shut, my eyes shut and
Smell deeply the wooden box of
Apple cinnamon teabags I bought
From a boy scout in California.
Waiting for the arrival of autumn in the Midwest.
My fingers search for the brown crumbs of
Dead leaves in my hair; red tips fiddle discontentedly with
Farmer’s market apple bushels something
Different about the season here and I miss
Childhood in New Hampshire
Eating the tendrils of apple peel my mother discarded before baking crisp
And serving it with tea and whipped cream after school. And
Pushing the wheelbarrow full of dead needles
Into the woods and making
Leaf angels on my back getting
Sap in my braids.
Next week I’ll go back to New York to see two
Of my friends get married and I will buy them
Kettle corn from the street vendors as a wedding gift and the
Sun will stay over the Finger Lakes for them.
Cayuga Lake is the index, long and pointed and
Golden with autumn.
I can’t think of a better time for a wedding than the same weekend as
Apple Fest, in late September, with
Sugar-sweet maple syrup smells and
Slanting rays of dusty yellow light over the lake and
Sweaters over our party dresses.
Eating apple brown betty with our mouths off paper plates.
Friday, December 19, 2008
I need your help!
Next semester I will be a teaching assistant for an undergraduate intro-level creative writing class. Our job is to lead a once-weekly mini-group workshop, using basic writing exercises and longer works as our basis. As a result, each TA gets to choose their own novel and their own memoir to teach. Memoirs? I'm good. I read like, seventeen a year. I have some favorites and many ideas.
Novels? I need help, and here's why. Most of the fiction I read is either a)short, b)classic (see:old and not cool for freshmen), or c) too advanced (garcia marquez, kundera, all out). So far the only idea I have is the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, because I'd love to do something modern and international, but that's really not Lahiri's best work, so...
I need recommendations for novels that do the following:
1. Will appeal to young undergrads (so are interesting, modern, and not too complex).
2. Not super long.
3. Still in print so my students can buy it used on amazon for cheap.
Basically, think of those books you LOVED in high school, especially those books that made you love books, love writing, and maybe even want to do some of your own.
Next semester I will be a teaching assistant for an undergraduate intro-level creative writing class. Our job is to lead a once-weekly mini-group workshop, using basic writing exercises and longer works as our basis. As a result, each TA gets to choose their own novel and their own memoir to teach. Memoirs? I'm good. I read like, seventeen a year. I have some favorites and many ideas.
Novels? I need help, and here's why. Most of the fiction I read is either a)short, b)classic (see:old and not cool for freshmen), or c) too advanced (garcia marquez, kundera, all out). So far the only idea I have is the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, because I'd love to do something modern and international, but that's really not Lahiri's best work, so...
I need recommendations for novels that do the following:
1. Will appeal to young undergrads (so are interesting, modern, and not too complex).
2. Not super long.
3. Still in print so my students can buy it used on amazon for cheap.
Basically, think of those books you LOVED in high school, especially those books that made you love books, love writing, and maybe even want to do some of your own.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Here's another short piece from Percy's workshop. I actually finalized this piece awhile ago and have sent it out for submission, but it's footnoted and I didn't want to go through the trouble of figuring out how to do that on this blog. Now I apparently have lots of free time on my hands and can do that.
Scarred
I have seven scars on my body: three accidental, and four intentional. One soft, white dent; two red-purple skin blemishes; two former holes, pulled shut by time; two tattoos.
I got the first, accidental scar, when I was two years old. I don’t remember it happening, but I’ve memorized the story: a nightmare drove me into my parents’ room, fumbling through the dark, bumping into their bed, toddler hands grasping in front of me for the familiar warmth of their bodies. After my father soothed me back to sleep, he, in his bare feet and pajamas, was carrying my limp body back to my bedroom, when he slipped and fell, sliding down the staircase with his oldest daughter in his arms. My small freckled forehead, laced with towhead-blonde wisps of baby hair, knocked against each wooden step on the way down. Minutes later, my mother cradled me on the floor of the bathroom, held a washcloth full of ice to my forehead, screamed at my father, tried to prevent a scar. Human skeletons remain malleable throughout childhood, to allow for growth, so the bone remains slightly sagging even now, more than twenty years later, my skull with a small swoop in the upper right corner, smooth and barely visible. (footnote #1 here: When I first told that story to Kevin, it reminded him of one of his first scar stories: as a child, he was hit on the head with a baseball bat during a Little League game. He ran my fingers over the small, white ridge of a scar on his forehead.) There was no cut, never any blood.
Age 20, years deep into a rebellious streak, I got a secret, spontaneous tattoo because my best friend was having a bad day. We walked to the convenience store and withdrew fifty dollars in cash each from the ATM that didn’t charge a fee, and walked into Medusa Tattoo Shop. Cesar didn’t have any appointments that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a gauze bandage between my breasts, hiding a small, black ampersand permanently injected under the skin. The first people I showed it to laughed. Explanations (which depend on who I’m talking to and how much I feel like revealing): a—I love the English language, particularly grammar and punctuation, and I think ampersands are lovely (true); b—it’s to symbolize that I am an unfinished work and can always be added on to; to express my eager, interruptive personality; to keep my heart open to change (footnote #2: A few years ago, AT&T began running a television commercial whose slogan was “The conversation never stops with ‘and’.”). But I usually leave out the part about deciding on the symbol twenty minutes earlier, in Caity’s dorm room, because she told me to come get a tattoo with her.
A year later, I got my second tattoo, much more meditated, but equally a secret from my conservative parents, to memorialize the massive geologic scars of the places on the earth I have called home. Four hours bent over a black leather pillow, clutching it, crying into it, biting my knuckles, fighting the involuntary spasms of the lower back muscles. Black outline, grey ink, a permanent sketch based on the print of a t-shirt. Craggy mountains with snow on top, pine trees along the bottom: the White Mountains of my childhood, my coming-of-age Rockies, Adirondack future homes (footnote #3: A friend who saw my tattoo exclaimed, “I’ve been there!” Once, when I wore a bikini at a public hot spring in Montana, a complete stranger ran up to me, yelling, “That’s my mountain!” She literally had tears in her eyes.). I wanted a lasting reminder, a physical manifestation of the buried internal effects of those ranges, far beneath my skin.
I’ve never broken a bone, never had an operation, never spent any time as a patient in a hospital since the day I was born. But each land has laid its own marks across my body, just as time and weather and geology have wounded those lands.
Scarred
I have seven scars on my body: three accidental, and four intentional. One soft, white dent; two red-purple skin blemishes; two former holes, pulled shut by time; two tattoos.
I got the first, accidental scar, when I was two years old. I don’t remember it happening, but I’ve memorized the story: a nightmare drove me into my parents’ room, fumbling through the dark, bumping into their bed, toddler hands grasping in front of me for the familiar warmth of their bodies. After my father soothed me back to sleep, he, in his bare feet and pajamas, was carrying my limp body back to my bedroom, when he slipped and fell, sliding down the staircase with his oldest daughter in his arms. My small freckled forehead, laced with towhead-blonde wisps of baby hair, knocked against each wooden step on the way down. Minutes later, my mother cradled me on the floor of the bathroom, held a washcloth full of ice to my forehead, screamed at my father, tried to prevent a scar. Human skeletons remain malleable throughout childhood, to allow for growth, so the bone remains slightly sagging even now, more than twenty years later, my skull with a small swoop in the upper right corner, smooth and barely visible. (footnote #1 here: When I first told that story to Kevin, it reminded him of one of his first scar stories: as a child, he was hit on the head with a baseball bat during a Little League game. He ran my fingers over the small, white ridge of a scar on his forehead.) There was no cut, never any blood.
Age 20, years deep into a rebellious streak, I got a secret, spontaneous tattoo because my best friend was having a bad day. We walked to the convenience store and withdrew fifty dollars in cash each from the ATM that didn’t charge a fee, and walked into Medusa Tattoo Shop. Cesar didn’t have any appointments that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a gauze bandage between my breasts, hiding a small, black ampersand permanently injected under the skin. The first people I showed it to laughed. Explanations (which depend on who I’m talking to and how much I feel like revealing): a—I love the English language, particularly grammar and punctuation, and I think ampersands are lovely (true); b—it’s to symbolize that I am an unfinished work and can always be added on to; to express my eager, interruptive personality; to keep my heart open to change (footnote #2: A few years ago, AT&T began running a television commercial whose slogan was “The conversation never stops with ‘and’.”). But I usually leave out the part about deciding on the symbol twenty minutes earlier, in Caity’s dorm room, because she told me to come get a tattoo with her.
A year later, I got my second tattoo, much more meditated, but equally a secret from my conservative parents, to memorialize the massive geologic scars of the places on the earth I have called home. Four hours bent over a black leather pillow, clutching it, crying into it, biting my knuckles, fighting the involuntary spasms of the lower back muscles. Black outline, grey ink, a permanent sketch based on the print of a t-shirt. Craggy mountains with snow on top, pine trees along the bottom: the White Mountains of my childhood, my coming-of-age Rockies, Adirondack future homes (footnote #3: A friend who saw my tattoo exclaimed, “I’ve been there!” Once, when I wore a bikini at a public hot spring in Montana, a complete stranger ran up to me, yelling, “That’s my mountain!” She literally had tears in her eyes.). I wanted a lasting reminder, a physical manifestation of the buried internal effects of those ranges, far beneath my skin.
I’ve never broken a bone, never had an operation, never spent any time as a patient in a hospital since the day I was born. But each land has laid its own marks across my body, just as time and weather and geology have wounded those lands.
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