trying

Dipping toes in

a nip

of a fish

threatens

the clipped sound of I

A blanket of numb

wraps around me

between me and the urge to write

encased and unsafe

in pain

all the time

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what would it be to take thanks

Slowly it dawns on me that writing is not easy, that all of the voices that say this is not real work deserve to be put to rest.

I’m not the first to say this, but it is my dawning. A mechanism turning inside of me, a key, letting me know what this is, my writing.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a new poem.

I jotted down a dream a couple of weeks ago, a vivid dream of a thin emerald-green book of unusual size, leather-bound, the cover rich in color and texture.

But no poems per se and not much desire to share my thoughts here of late.

Sometimes the time quickens, sometimes it drags.

What is this calling? I appreciate silliness and I love to write nonsense. But I only want to write down the most important of my thoughts just now.

Yesterday, we drove from Massachusetts to Northeast Ohio. It had been a very long time since I’ve made this trip in the car—the last time was the summer of 2009. It is close to 600 miles.

I have never read Watership Down, but we have been listening to it in the car for long stretches on this trip. The narration is excellent and I am reminded of how much I love to be read to, how much of a pleasure to all humans this gift of stories being told aloud is. I feel thirsty for it now and I have decided that I will read at open mics even when I don’t have my own work to read.

Such is the thanks I would like to give. I love reading out loud as much as I like singing out loud. It is a great pleasure to me, like the emerald-green book from my dream. The richness of the color I can summon in my mind’s eye. How I would like you to know it, too, to take it from me. I will hand you the book so you can feel its richness, the animal skin, the creamy parchment of the pages, crisp and soft at the same time.

I want to leave politics behind, the truth of war and rape, the way humans have of tearing down what cannot be shared.

I want to take and drink and give back.

Thanks Giving and Thanks Taking

Peace

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RANT

I’ve mentioned this before, but you may not have been reading carefully, so I will repeat: If you take yourself seriously as a writer, Why Oh Why must you have white words on a black background on your website? OUCH!

Jump back, Jack, Tina Fey got something to say:

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fact or fiction–feathers

1. The beautiful mobile with swirling feathers was one more place where dust collected, one more thing to add to the work of the household, one more reminder of the filth of life. That one could never get out from under evolving piles of dirt was what kept her up nights. She wanted to live encased in a room free from debris and detritus. She wanted to be clean.

2. Annie’s boyfriend, Hanford Fletcher, was a drunk and an asshole. His alcoholism was a given from way back when, as a boy, he started stealing vodka from his uncle’s liquor cabinet. The asshole part could only be attributed to Hannie having made an early fortune as vice president of Bonnie Bell Cosmetics. Retired at 35 with millions in the bank, he had turned into an entitled playboy. If only Annie had realized it sooner.

3. He figured he was around 5 when he bent down and picked up a small black-and-blue striped feather at the edge of the parking lot. His mother swatted it from his hand. “Don’t you know how many germs are on those things?”

Today, as he walked home from high school, he saw the matted pile of what was left of a dead bluejay. He scooped it up into his leftover brown paper lunch bag. This time his mother would not chide him when he got home. Everything dies.

4. While Bertha distractedly did the dishes, she turned over a jar in the wash bin and began to notice its unusual heft. As she let the suds drip off of it she realized why it felt so heavy—it was made of glass. How uncommon glass jars had become, she thought. But this one was special, the last jar she had from her grandmother’s company, Featherweight Face Treat. She smiled as the heat from the jar pulsed into her hands. Her grandmother would be proud.

5. Pugnacious pugilists pummel porcine porcupines.

♥

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fact or fiction

1. The postman was good-looking: graying hair, chiseled features, blue-gray eyes. But he was no less an asshole than if he had been as ugly as a toad.

2. Professor Brentwood strode into the steel-gray hallway that connected each of the studios in the industrial-arts building. Her golden curls cascaded down the front of her shoulders; her white smock, which protected an ankle-length black dress, was covered in layers of clay and glaze. When Annalee saw her, she knew. This was the woman who had stolen the heart of her husband; this was her sworn enemy.

3. Dogs bounded in the fenced park. For the most part, the wrestling and barks were of the friendly variety until Stan let Middlebrooks off his leash to join the rollicking herd.

4. The bed, the clock, the curtains.

The metal bed.

The low humming buzz of the clock.

The flimsy curtains that let in too much light for anyone to get any rest.

The army hospital where no one visited and no one left alive.

5. Only Jim could see the truth, only he knew the wool was being pulled over their eyes. Though he was not a scheduled speaker, when there was a pause between the candidates, he rushed onto the stage, stood behind the podium, cleared his throat, and spoke loudly into the microphone. “All is not lost,” he said.

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falling out of the blogosphere

Long stretches between posts are now commonplace for me.

I learned a new phrase (and concept): uncanny valley.

I love the sound of it tremendously, but I don’t like the meaning. It’s a theory, nothing provable, but certainly it sheds light on the way I am simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by plastic surgery.

I am glad to know that I can still learn new things. Maybe I’m not hip, that I never knew the concept uncanny valley. The world is too big for any one person to know. We keep chipping away at it, gaining knowledge in pebbles.

I fell away from my writing and into an uncanny valley

I notice that my sleep is very disturbed lately. This is due in part to the fact that I have to wake up every weekday morning at 6:30. I still get up to help support my kids in that transition between home and bus and school. I am happy to do it, but I hate my lack of sleep.

I’ve pretty much given up on cooking. I still clean the few rooms which are not filled floor to ceiling with clutter. I couldn’t even clean when I was in the worst of the pain and immobility.

I still love the laundry. I like my fridge to sparkle white and bright inside. I organize to an extent. But I don’t give a crap about cooking for the most part. I feel so burned out. Maybe this is only since I’ve been injured, maybe longer. I can barely remember a time before this injury.

Instead of my summer schedule when I may wake in the early morning hours and can fall back to sleep until as late as 9 or 10, I wake around 4 am, am up for an hour, then have to wake up at 6:30, but I barely fall back to sleep most nights. I am getting about 4-6 hours of interrupted sleep–that’s it. I’m not too happy until I have my coffee but I can fake it most mornings til then.

When I feel good from good and long rest, I forget that I’ll ever be a victim of my insomnia again; and yet after all these years, it still rears its ugly head.

It’s been 5 months since my initial injury and I’m still not able to do yoga or to bike or swim. It’s been draining, frustrating, painful, disturbing. I am getting better, but I have really bad hours and days and nights. Soon, I hope, soon, I will be back to my old self. I know the sleep will change once I’m not in pain throughout the night. I am seeing a new physical therapist who does a particular kind of work that is unlike most physical therapy. After one session, I was monumentally better, but now my body is fading back into the habit of injury. For the next 3 weeks at least, I will have 2 sessions per week and I am hoping that will turn the tide for a good long while.

This is only the beginning. I need to write here. I hate to have such a long body of text without any images to break it up. I hate to write about the minutiae of my life and subject you to it, though you read by your own free will and I am grateful for your presence.

I will try to do better from now on out. I think my active mind will calm if I write more regularly and I won’t wake up at 4 am thinking the words.

I have so much to tell you.

♥

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published again!

My second publishing credit in an online arts journal, up today at qarrtsiluni.com

http://qarrtsiluni.com/2013/05/24/recognizable-trappings/

XO, twinkly

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until further notice…

…since I haven’t posted since that last one, the longest I’ve ever gone without writing here. Makes me sad kinda like the rest of my life right now. twinkly

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grammer grammer

I woke up with a peace settling over me: for the time being, I do not care if I’m not writing poems.

I also do not feel compelled to submit poetry to anyone or anywhere right now. It’s so great! I feel especially confident that journals which include in their submission information statements such as “if you can/can’t, do/don’t x, y, or z, then don’t bother submitting to us” are assholes and do not deserve my work. It almost makes me want to write some purposefully crappy sappy maudlin shit and submit it just to make their eyes roll, clench their sphincters, and congratulate themselves for having a completely relevant and hip publication. But hey, I’m sounding bitter and bitter only hurts me.

from my blog’s spam folder:

obviously like your web-site however you need to take a look at the spelling on quite a few of your posts. A number of them are rife with spelling issues and I in finding it very troublesome to tell the truth nevertheless I will surely come back again.

You can pretty much tell me anything if you throw a bucket of charm on it. To the credit of the author-bot, I just found a post from 2 years ago in which I misspelled grammar. Twice.

Here is a photo of my cat:

XO, twinkly

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Yup, it’s that time again when I write a poem

It’s been a while since I’ve put up a poem. As usual, it’s pretty rough. I like a lot about it and I think I can make it work.

I’m almost done with my manuscript, but struggling to make a couple of poems tighter. AND I HATE writing cover letters. Oh, help!

Vinegar and Sugar
(the German word for please is bitte)

In my mother’s brain,
the area responsible for taste
has interchanged
with the area responsible
for memory

She does not ask me for “Vinegar sugar soup, bitte”

But when I make lentils
for dinner,
she slyly opens the pantry door
(as if her desire to have a secret makes her invisible),
takes out the bottle of white vinegar,
and pours it into the soup

Mom, it already has vinegar in it

I like a lot, she says

She moves on to sneak the sugar bowl from the cupboard
and dances teaspoon after teaspoon
into her vinegar soup

All my Oma really wanted to eat
when she reached her 90s
was Schokolade

She stashed it in drawers
and behind books,
wrapped it in cloth and kerchiefs
in her little room
where they put her
with her little window
high up on the hill
at the top of the small
German town where she lived
most of her life
and died her only death

Now my mother
wants only sweet and sour
around her

She forgets
that she hates soup
and soup with beans
and that all they had to eat during the war
was soup
and beans
and her father’s rabbits and rooster

So,
sour or sweet,

who am I to stop her, bitte?

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