Tub of Legs (A Poem)

I have risen and the morning sounds like the incessant cooling action of my refrigerator

The counter top is riddled with dirty dishes and empty containers

Bed sheets are in a twist and spilling over onto the floor

Crumbs and dust line the corners and creases

Photographs of my grandmother, girlfriends, and sisters sit about singing sweet hellos to me

I want to bathe in women

Feeling their smooth legs tangle around me

To bury my head in their naked breasts

and my face in their empty crotches

for protection, for warmth

For a reminder of me, to be closer to myself

I AM A WOMAN

So be it. Thanks and Praise to the Goddess who came before me.

Friendship (Flash Fiction)

There was an old woman who often had her friend over for tea. The friend was even older than her old, old friend. Among other details this friend had wobbly hands. And with these wobbly hands she held the same cup each time she came for tea. And without fail the very old, old friend would drop this cup on the ground, admitting the fault of her wobbly, old hands. The old woman would smile and collect the pieces of this cup, set them aside, and sop up the spill with a handy kitchen rag. After the old, wobbly friend had gone, the woman would go to her drawer and take out the glue. Each time the old, old friend returned for tea she would drink from the same cup, that grew larger with glue seams, and the friends would converse as usual.

Bridge Over the River (A Prose Piece)

The river splayed her legs before me; one long, wet piece glimmering in both directions with panes of light settling in sporadic patterns, taking on reflections and teaching them that a tree is not what it would have you see. The river between two bustling trunks of land knows better and has the gentle faith to bathe rock, stones, small islands, wood planks, duck bellies, and wanton roots. Her voice comes out like a kind warrior caught between train caterwaul against her small clear ebb with the sincere grace to let the pebbles show before she’s ended her domain. I scoop her up in my heart but she is too light and I too heavy to hold her bounty; she is the fierce source of thousand year old blood running through me, giving me the consciousness to behold her trembling naked unabashed form. I am ignominious; I am humbled; I am brittle dry before this Queen of wise force. Her shapes are pure and true; mine awkward and manipulated. I sit at the ledge of this bridge, watching her disappear into the shadow where she tells all of her secrets to no one, and I sing to her. I wail and feel the tumbling mane I wear to protest the short time I’ll have to make love to this river and her cousins. My sounds are caught in thick wind; but she receives my cries like the tears of so many, and carries them along, gaily, earnestly, turning our sounds over and over again inside her into pearls. And another day, all that I come to offer at this advancing night will settle into the bed of her form. And I become the river. The mad woman laughing and howling over the ledge of the bridge at sunset isn’t dying how the people who don’t stop or honk or think passing in cars expect. She’s already more dead alive than she could ever become leaping off into the river.

Bosto Continued...

By the time we arrived in Cambridge the sun was out, and as I watched the Victorians and esteemed brick schoolhouses planted behind plot after generous sidewalk plot of every leaf bearing neighbor extending their pink blossoms over our view of kempt students passing through their days with lugs of volumes stacked into brown leather shoulder bags, I was overcome by the feeling one has in a new place she wishes to know as her own.  My heart rushed to imagine myself as one of those students, or another bus passenger, and perhaps someone standing at a fourth story window worrying about a paper while watching a girl cross the lawn.  I put my face behind the bus driver and imagined how I would smile at an emerging passenger.  The bizarre flavor of this whole trick seems to be the element of my trip that resounds in me; that this happening was casual, natural even.  I didn’t say oh boy, this’ll be fun, getting a sense of life at Harvard by pretending I’m each person I see on my path.  However, this imagining did help me to form an impression of the place so that I could understand how to mesh in, and of course how one might not.  Similar to what we so freely do while watching a movie that promises to take us places otherwise we perhaps would or could not go; we watch the actors on the screen and embody a gangster, a princess, or a child again so as to get a sense of the story and what it wants us to understand as a whole.  Of course, the difference with life being that we’ve got to sew our own meanings together, and the meaning we derive once we’ve stepped off the bus and into the free foot world how we come to be in this world has something to do with how we see and something to do with how others see, all of us ourselves and others.

 

We carried my things to the second floor and placed them in the corner beside the modern black leather sofa set on silver stilts.  I felt like I was back in England or shopping in the section of IKEA that I can’t afford.  The sparse, muted décor was offset by a lone gathering of tulips atop the table in the adjoined kitchen living room expanse.  It wasn’t spotless, but neatly kept, and in the ensuing three days we would trash it with take out, bottles with varying alcoholic contents, high publications, an iron and its board, cheese bits, cigarette butts, and a spattering of a continually disjointed blanket set escaping from a dim-witted, self-impressed, and charmingly deflating air mattress known as my bed. 

After a quick change out of the star printed ill-fitting beater I’d taken on loan from a little sister Stef and I bumbled past the wooden sided homes into Cambridge town center to meet with her boyfriend; the apartment’s permanent resident.  

My Grandmother in Winter (Flash Fiction)

A classic plays on the white TV at the kitchen counter. She faces away because she’s seen this story. In spite of herself she stays beside it; constant sound and electric energy emoted. The bowl she ate soup and crackers from at noon with a pill dries beside the sink over a towel and its picture of a basket filled with wheat. She rests against the worn back of a high kitchen chair watching the snow, water frozen around dirt, rage against the openness. The window is larger than the empty dining room table and outside her friends change by season. The dear, the squirrel, the rare blue jay, the morning doves, the groundhog, and the bees keep watch over my grandmother. Doing her part she tosses ears of corn across the lawn and fills the miniature farmhouse with birdseed. And somehow, at her age, in the summer, she still pulls weeds from the garden. For now, her white Keds dangle above the heating vent in her quiet, clean ranch house. It is winter and she is lonely in her kitchen.

Wants to be "..." But is "..."

If only my pleasures weren't tainted now by the sting of a love that seemingly can never be. Pity I don't deal in absolutes. What a wonder we can still go on feeling so hacked up and heartily dishevelled. Mend the torn shards of my heart together oh Great Spirit! Swoop down upon me and gather this quivering vessel into your body of power! Make me whole again, though I can't recall having ever been but when paralyzed in the motion of love. I long for paralysis in bliss and a return to something I cannot conceive of, but aim arrows at in my every daydream. Arrows that go straight through the target and come into my reality like daggers who've fashioned worn bedding in my heart and tuck themselves here as though once welcomed, as though cordially received. Oh world! How you ebb at my every fear from all sides, while beckoning gingerly that I come a step closer towards life, though it falls upon my chest like a great heap; a blinding curtain before the blinding light of blissful paralysis, of completion, of love, of truth, of God(ess).

What I meant to say was that this glorious weekend is now overcast by the tarp of my thickening heartache. What I intended for this piece was a retelling of the joyous exploration and inclusion of three small lives under the leafy arms and Eastern sky over our adventures in Boston. But the story has changed over night, such is the case as its fickle and most whimsical author has yet again allowed her indomitable, steadfast dedication to direct her life by a passion bound within a skim, translucent skin of professionalism to have wrought the leveling clarity of reality upon her intoxicating hallucination. Therefore, as I would be remiss to dismiss the retelling of such a bountiful occasion, I shall do so with regrettable commitment to my current sight, for though it may be un-exotic, this truth is the best I have to offer and I see no sense in providing less.

I prepared for the trip by scraping what little monetary excess I pretend to posses and building a slight wardrobe in the breezy, mariner style; cream, coral, and peach hues in simple, classic cuts. I read no literature about this state; it seemed unnecessary when I could draw upon the many remembrances of Bostonian culture implanted in me by my fondest former love, a former Bostonian. My grandest effort for preparation was simply to enjoy the budding anticipation swelling within my being that was to make room for the intended bliss and vignettes of the cultural variety surely to be ushered in by this new adventure.

Alas! There was much joy. Even in the wake of swine flu I enjoyed, as always, the bizarre and horrifying thrill of passing over so much earth and human life in so little time while being completely unaffected by and ineffective upon the ins and outs of so many tiny--inwardly gargantuan--lives breathing their people thoughts and this human heart beating its person beats. I landed and made my way by bus to my lovely friend.
At this time I would like to include an excerpt from my Mead Composition Journal:
"Silver Line Bus. 2$. South Station. A mentally disabled woman who appeared to be normal by her physical attire and expression began striking up conversations on the silver line bus. To see such gentile innocence, candor and kindness in an aging body moved me to tears with the natural rhythm and sincerity of life that causes a bud to flow into its blossoming. So pure as to appear like a dance inspired by the hand of the God of awesomeness.
I wish I had better words to capture how this woman-child moved me. But the experience itself practically drained my heart of all energy.
However beautiful this moment is, I cannot help but realize how dangerous, troublesome this creature's lack of insight may become in a panic situation.
Two women, a grandmother and her daughter, come on to the bus with their small girl and boy. I gave them my seat. And the simple creature began asking for the kid's names and initiating conversations. Yet, with her incessant warmth and helpfulness she's managed to woo the grandmother with her spell of s-"

Unfortunately I stopped writing at that s, so I can't tell you, dear reader, what she possessed that I'd never witnessed expressed so organically and fully before--sweetness perhaps. What I can offer is that she chanced to ride the same subway car with us once I was received by my lovely friend. She even chanced to sit beside us and strike up a conversation, wherein we both revealed that in the past we had been prone to stealing clothing from Goodwill. I imagine some of the eavesdropping passengers had some inner-response over witnessing a retarded woman and a fashionable urbanite exchange tales of their former lives wherein theft from a Goodwill presented itself as a viable option.

All the more I will say is that this experience as a witness to this creature I was reminded of the vastness of this world and of its possibilities and abilities to send icepicks through the daggers clutched within our hearts. How a moment can be the spiritual wrecking ball whose wake constitutes a trail of technicolor flower heads and the passport to oblivion for any choice wound. This is how our scars heal: By the sight of human tenderness.

To be continued...