Latest Entries
a feminist diatribe about ass.
20 March '10 by admin, under Journal.
Let’s talk about naked people.
Last night I watched a naked woman cross the television screen in “Up in the Air.” Her back to the audience, a man’s necktie around her waist, the forty year old character laid down on the bed to flaunt round hips most women in their twenties would envy. Assuming that was the actress’s real ass.
Tonight I visited American Apparel’s website for the first time in a few months, to discover they’re marketing their “Best of Bottoms” campaign. What looked like a seventeen year old Ukranian girl with long dirty-blond hair was flashing across the screen in a thong unitard. The animation had the same efficiency a car manufacturer uses to demonstrate its latest model, with front, back and side views. (This photo is not of her- when I revisited the site an hour later to find an example, I couldn’t. But hey, this one, also from the website, is close enough).
I sometimes visit the small branch library up the street from my house. It carries about forty-two books, and a bank of computers patrons use to surf the web or print documents. The sad, generalized truth is that a lot of the people you see using these computers are either drooling, stinky, or lack fundamental verbal communication skills. As I passed the bank of computers, and a vacant-stared man who was rising from one of them, I noticed behind him a copy of a major fashion magazine, resting on a shelf between Gourmet and National Geographic. On its cover, a naked woman covered her breasts with one arm. You couldn’t see her nipples, but it was an easy “fill in the blanks” shot. It occurred to me that this was probably not the audience that model had had in mind when she asked for or agreed to do a nude cover shoot on a major fashion magazine.
She probably imagined her usual companions: turtleneck-wearing art directors and gay male models. But, like the subjects of the photos I pulled from the American Apparel site to use here, her bare skin will be available for anyone to see, at any time, forever. Including the drooling and the stinky.
I like naked people. I love sex. I masturbate when I’m not having it. I think we should all have more sex, talk more about sex, wear fewer clothes, go naked more often, vacuum in the buff. I appreciate my body and at the same time admit I could stand to lose a few pounds. I enjoy roleplaying in the bedroom. I’m not criticizing these girls’ sexuality. But, pun intended, there is a “but” coming to this conversation about butts.
George Clooney shows one demure, naked arm in “Up in the Air,” whereas his female costar, whose name wasn’t even on the movie posters or DVD case, shows her entire back, butt, and legs. Open up a women’s magazine, you’ll see naked women, open up a men’s magazine, you’ll see naked women. You cannot watch hip-hop and R&B music videos without getting a hard on, regardless of your gender, and it’s not because Kanye or Akon is shaking his booty on that screen- it’s because women whose names we’ll never know are shaking theirs.
I used to work with production artists who create advertising images. I remember talking with one who laid up the pages for J. Crew catalogs. She pointed to the collarbones of one model, mentioning casually that she’d “smoothed out” the model’s shoulders. When I asked her what she meant, she said that she had to erase, in Photoshop, a lot of the bones sticking out of these models necks and shoulders, because they were so skinny they looked unattractive.
They had to be that thin to look that way in those clothes. So the models walked around looking like Holocaust survivors, and then got the most unsightly bits erased from the photos prior to printing.
If my cousin or my aunt or my coworker bought one of those dresses, she would inevitably feel angry with herself for not looking as good as the model in the catalog did. I’m not making this up, I’ve had this conversation with women from twelve to fifty, in multiple countries: women think they’re fat, even when they’re not. They think it’s their fault if clothes don’t look good on their body type. They think they should eat less, enjoy life less, have more bones poking out.
They feel this way because they are surrounded by idealized images of women. They live in a culture of judgment, and no one even notices.
I grew up in the motorcycle industry, where women still parade around trade shows in skimpy skirts, straddle bikes in bikinis on magazine covers, and have to work double or triple time to prove themselves as mechanics or salespeople. You see a lot of nudie calendars in those shops and garages, and often the calendar owner defends it with, “I find the female body beautiful.” Which is a great conversation-stopper, because no woman miffed at the sight of a dirty calendar is going to tell a man “You should find women unattractive.”
But the shoe’s not on the other foot yet. Sure, we have Chippendales and the occasional Ladies Night at the club. But men don’t have any idea how it feels to see images of other men, buffed, polished and waxed, on every newsstand and every TV show, all the time. I’d rather they didn’t have to find out. Maybe our future will see women going to male strip clubs, paying for sex, and watching female-directed porn, as often as men do those things today. But it’s not a happy place to be. It’s a place where boys would fixate on their thighs, offer sexual favors in order to be liked, and do weird things to get on “Spring Break” videos. As envisioned futures go, I could think of a helluva lot more interesting alternatives.
Look, I’m not Tipper Gore, and I’m not Mr. Rogers. I don’t want to ban anything or start singing happy songs about yesteryear. I think the photos I used in this blog are sexy, I’m just tired of seeing them sell everything from t-shirts to deodorant. I’m tired of hearing women talk about themselves like they’re fat, boring puddings. I’m tired of men spending thousands of dollars on strippers and online porn. I think it’s a stupid place for a society to have gotten itself into. I think we could all be having a lot more fun. But it starts with the woman on the magazine cover. She has to go. Until she does, or her boyfriend starts joining her, girls are going to feel insecure. And guys, instead of griping about it, just put yourself in your girlfriend’s goddamn shoes and think it over. You’ll find strengthening those ol’ empathy muscles work wonders in the bedroom, too.
To those fellows I’m lucky enough to know who don’t define sexuality by American Apparel’s standards, women everywhere owe you a very special thank you. We’ve come a long way, baby… with your help.
1 Comment
poetry scribbled in a journal on the NYC subway a few years ago (mostly unedited).
15 March '10 by admin, under Uncategorized.
Uno
The pinstripes on the PATH train
Wall Street boys in overcoats
a scarf’s dash of orange on black
and the sockless men
with scabby feet
curl over subway vents
or in crannies of Penn Station.
I was living on Apple Street when the flowers came and took away all our hope. All our school-age schoolchildren living in the sea climbed from sludge onto the beach
to walk primordially
from the stinking fetid
swamps
and into hearts and homes and stoves.
Dos
His eyes like thunder
rolled to me
his weighty jowls silenced
poetry or silk cascades
of beauty
crystal stemware
sparkle twinkles
light upon their faces
and I think
if you were up here
then this
chandelier’s bath
would warm us in its light.
Tres
I live in silence
until stirred with sugar.
I live with power
until asked to move.
I move to tremble
I speak in whispers
and shout loud enough
for no one to hear.
Quatro
The bearded boy across from me
knows the hurt of sunsets
finds lore in zines he
collects in bookstores
covered in dust, he
covers in dust
his assets, figure, working muscles,
truth of his heart
the truth of his heart
he hides in a cyclone of Thoughts.
Profound urbane shocking
or witty
his thoughts like brussel sprouts
his thoughts like weed
heady, distracting
useless smoke covering
all of his shame
the shame a little boy hides
in his first class
when he learns he’s alone
surrounded by unseeing eyes.
Cinco
The next book has started
the first not yet evoked
I can write laundry lists
of funny silly happenings
like Fruit Loops for a baby’s dinner
different colors flavors reminiscent of reality.
I need to reach inside.
I wish for: someone to love me for reaching inside.
Someone to love
regardless of chaos
regardless of place.
No Comments
the inside of my head.
06 March '10 by admin, under Journal.
No Comments
seeking fabulousness, or, making one’s own magic.
02 March '10 by admin, under Journal.
My “inside the revolution” series of three will be concluded as soon as I figure out how the hell the revolution is going to end. Meanwhile… I’m pursuing fabulousness.
Fabulousness is one part treating yourself, one part scaring yourself, and one part decoration. Decorating your life, yourself, or the world, with a project, love offered, or even the right handbag. It’s anything that celebrates, embellishes, and magickifies life.
To use movie analogies, 2009 was a Clint Eastwood western, full of stubbly chins, sweaty chaps and torn Wanted posters. It was real, it was hard, it was… Buffaloan.
Buffalo teaches you to make your own fun. Mix one 20-piece chicken wing with a half-case of beer and a hippety-hoppity station on Pandora, and you’ve got yourself a winter party in B-flo. Throw on your Uggs and wade off through the snow and ice. Bar hop. Drive out to the ‘burbs to go shopping at the shiny new big box stores. Life here is like the childhood our grandparents reminisce about, when kids didn’t have all those “newfangled gadgets,” and just entertained themselves with sticks and pebbles. Buffaloans can do a lot with sticks and pebbles.
Our family’s emotional life has had a similarly rough-hewn texture, with tearful conversations about my parents, my romantic stumblings, job drama. It has been a period of growth and discovery, but there’s very little about my life, for the past twelve, maybe fourteen months, you could call “fabulous.”
Even my hair, at its most awkward face-hugging phase while I grow it out, contributes to what you might call a period of “enh.”
When I go on Facebook, on the other hand, and see photos of my friend’s upcoming theatrical performance, or an old boss windblown and relaxed on a ski trip, or a couple smiling on a tropical beach, I feel awe. Because those things are fabulous. Wearing costumes onstage, traveling, finding gorgeous sunsets, loving a new person, painting a mural, raising a baby, carrying a pink patent leather handbag, and learning to tango, are all fabulous.
But especially travel, creativity, babies, and pink patent leather handbags.
One can be unfabulous in a big city, and completely sensational working as a waitress. It’s not about one’s circumstances so much as what one makes of them.
I wrote the other day about appreciating life’s imperfections, rather than expecting sudden magic. The distinction I’m making tonight is to not only accept what life gives me, but to give something back to my life. I used to think fabulousness was granted to the special, but after having a few fabulous moments myself, I know it’s something one has to create for oneself. Fate may have plunked me in Dodge City, but that doesn’t mean I have to walk around with mud on my boots, shooting strangers. And while the rough-hewn, unfabulous periods of our lives are inevitable and necessary, I’ve come too close to believing that’s all I get, or deserve… or want.
The weather is warming, snow melting. We’ll probably have one more big storm before March is over, but I didn’t even need to wear a coat today. Like so many things in my life, I’m always surprised when something horrid- like winter in Buffalo- can just end, without my needing to take out a warrant or sign a petition to ban it. It’s a pleasant thing to re-learn.
I’ve been offered a fun but low-paying job, here, that I have to either accept, or decline, in the morning. As I do so, I’ll be pondering the topic of my last blog: location, and how it affects one’s… fabulousness. I don’t think any city will ever satisfy my every desire, and I don’t think any city can be blamed for most of my personal problems. But I do think some cities are harder to flourish in than others. And if I have to go, I can’t think of any better guide than, “Where would Starina go?”
Now she was fabulous.
No Comments
inside the revolution, part two: life is just a chicken breast.
26 February '10 by admin, under Journal.
My mom’s fond of cooking chicken- breading it, baking it, frying it, putting it in sauces from Asian to Mexican, tacos, salads, pastry shells. When she’s stressed or bored, she goes into the kitchen with a package of skinless thighs and goes to work. She’s never made a chicken omelet but it’s only a matter of time. And that’s the nice thing about chicken- it’s a meat of many colors, adaptable and diplomatic.
I’m twenty-eight years old and have moved twenty times. I’ve lived in six states and three countries, although Spain was only for a month, probably too short to count. I leave it on the list, though, to give my brother a reason to call me pretentious.
What defines relocation, in that context? I had a boyfriend who used to startle me by asking, “are you moving in this weekend?” when he only meant, “are you staying with me this weekend?” To me, a “move” does not require a certain length of time, but intent to stay. You can travel to Thailand for a year, but if you train from village to village, staying with strangers and at hostels, you’ll probably say you “traveled around Thailand for a year.” Move into a Bangkok apartment intending to marry a local, however, and you’ll probably say you lived there, even if he calls off the engagement a month later.
I count the two or three weeks I spent in Seattle in the summer of 2008, because I fully intended to stay, but I do not include the three weeks my mom and I spent in Vegas in January of 2009, because we had no intention of leaving our hotel room. Only two of the locations on my list lasted less than a month, the longest, five or six years.
To finish up the illustrative statistics, roughly half of those moves were initiated by my parents or as a family decision, the other half were solely mine. That means I’ve caught up fast with my parents, absorbing, without realizing it, both their fearlessness and their fear. The logistical challenges of packing up one’s belongings and carting them across the country to a foreign city do not bother us- the logistical challenges of staying put, do. If we had a dispute with the neighbors, or the kids in school were horrid, my brother and I rarely had to compromise, wait, or adapt. We’d soon be on our way. It bred a certain arrogance and dissatisfaction that’s hard to root out.
Over the years, my willingness to move evolved into a sense that, if or when anything went wrong, it was my duty to move. We moved several times for promotions for my dad, causing both his professional growth and our financial comfort. We moved to flee neighbors who held loud late-night parties and parked dead cars in their front yards, again to avoid forced busing to a school forty-five minutes away, a third time because pollution was making us sick (I found my hormone test results taken after we left Spokane- wow). In those cases, staying would have been simply due to fear. Ergo, if you’re unhappy and you’re not packing boxes, it’s because you’re afraid of change.
Those concepts, of location, happiness, and fear, are almost inextricably linked in my family’s consciousness. We’re addicted to change, convinced that unhappiness is our fault, and only curable by renting a U-haul.
This has come to a head here in Buffalo, a city a recent Forbes survey dubbed the “eighth most miserable city in the country.”
Twenty moves in twenty-eight years… but I’ve lived in Buffalo for more than a year.
When I visited my relatives in Seattle before Christmas, my aunt told me, “don’t stay there just because you’re ready to settle down.” I think about going home, about the Puget Sound, the superior jazz, the pine trees, family members who I know I could have a margarita with on a Friday night. I also think about the family members who stiffen when I mention Obama, meditation, or sex, the region’s fondness for Goretex, and the obese people who wheel themselves around Wal-Mart in electric carts.
Buffalo has a similar balance sheet. Relationships I tried to build here, have not lasted, my job’s kaput, the weather’s awful. On the other hand, living is cheap, bars are the best in the world, and my mom, brother and I know a lot of people here, whether by face or by name. It’s here, oh-so ironically, where we find a sense of community we haven’t experienced since I was in high school.
Could we find that community again, if we lived in Seattle in the same spirit? Maybe. Probably. I’m not sure if it matters where the next chapter of this story takes place. I’m not sure if it ever did.
I was jabbing a knife into some raw chicken breasts last night, duplicating something I saw Rachel Ray do to pork chops on the TV at the laundromat last week (we don’t have TV at home). As I stuffed the slivers of garlic into the white flesh, I thought, this is what it always comes down to: hum along to the radio, wash the dishes that have collected through out the day, turn on the oven, and try a new recipe. No matter what I do or where I go, from Portland to Devonshire, if you give me an evening alone at home, that’s probably how I’ll spend it. I usually wind up taking so long with the cooking that I’m not very hungry by the time I sit down to eat. I usually feel angry with myself for not having a nicer dining space in which to eat it. And I usually stay up too late with a craft project or blog afterward, like I am tonight.
But instead of staying put and changing my habits, I move, thinking I’ll establish a different routine somewhere else. That I’ll find myself eating with a lovable man instead of the cat, preparing great meals instead of “could be better” experiments, sitting down in a cute little dining room instead of at the Ikea thing mounted on the kitchen wall. But here I am, ten years out of high school, after so many different apartments, cities, roommates, jobs, weather patterns, sink-to-stove arrangements, and still, if I’m by myself on a weeknight, I’ll probably just cook some damn chicken and eat it alone. And by god, if that’s what I tend to do, what’s so wrong with that? Why am I looking for instant perfection?
Because at some point we forgot to enjoy the benefits of our fearlessness and started feeling compelled by it. We forgot that it’s okay to settle.
Mr. Hotness told me a few weeks ago that instead of changing my life, perhaps I needed to change the “writer’s perspective” on that life. That I needed to go into the “room of my depression” and sit there till I got bored and left. It was a beautiful metaphor, and one I’ve had in mind ever since. Sticking chicken into the oven last night, I kept mentally poking myself, looking for signs of having walked into that “depression room-” but I hadn’t. I even had fresh rosemary, for Pete’s sake, and my, how the asparagus glistens when it’s been burnt in olive oil. So my cooking skills won’t “catch me a husband” any time soon. I’m starting to find real, plain, boring old life just a little more interesting than my quest for an imaginary, perfect one.
The equation is pretty simple. If you say, “I want this kind of apartment, this kind of companionship, this kind of entertainment, this kind of landscape outside,” you can expect to be dissatisfied. If you say, “Ah, a night to do anything I want! Let’s put on a ‘Frasier’ DVD and have a beer,” with the cat snoring in the corner and your fuzziest slipper socks on, suddenly, you’re having fun. I’m not talking about rose-colored glasses or blind complacency, just acceptance. Or “acception,” as that cab driver in Chicago told me last December.
The chicken, by the way, was delicious. When I cooked asparagus again tonight, I did not burn it. And that little forward step, my friends, could have happened in any city from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.
No Comments
Sorry about the ugly design…
14 February '10 by admin, under Uncategorized.
My site was hacked, unfortunately. Fortunately, I was able to keep all the posts and re-install everything so we still have the Palmer’s Blog we know and love. But the problem is somewhere in the folder where I kept my design, so until we figure it out, we’re going to look like toilet paper for a little while.
No Comments
a little ado about some things.
05 February '10 by admin, under Journal.
What in the world has your favorite unemployed blogger been up to? After finishing my web design portfolio, I started work on a website for a local winter festival, which is almost done. I also received a batch of gorgeous business cards, that I’ve been pinning on every available bulletin board in Western New York. And of course I’m racking up Craigslist frequent flyer miles responding to ads for web design gigs.
My parents met in Cleveland, over the weekend, to discuss something. The topic caused a lot of emotion and subsequent processing in our household.
An unspoken truce in my circle of friends was broken, the other day, hopefully temporarily. It reminded me that any group of people can become like a family, with the cousin you hate, the lecherous uncle, and the niece everyone adores. You have to put up with all this less-than-perfection in order to have the good nights, when everyone gets along, the beer is fresh, and the jokes all truly funny. And you have to choose your battles carefully.
There are a few other things going on I can’t talk about publicly, among them, the fantasies I keep returning to regarding Mr. Hotness, as we talk once again via short emails sent and received on my erratically effective cell phone.
People keep asking me what I’m going to do or where I’m going to go. I have no answer. I just know that I’m making decisions differently than I used to, and everyone, myself included, is going to have to wait to see the results. 2009 made me tougher, less inclined to question my instincts or needs, and more patient. I’m not the same person who threw everything in her brother’s U-haul and lived out of a suitcase for half a year. Very basic lifestyle requirements I’ve never paid much attention to, like my own apartment, a career with management potential, and a mirror by the goshdarn front door, now seem almost insanely important.
I’m so unaccustomed to valuing these things, I have to readjust my entire decision-making process. When I get crazy-bored hanging around our cat-filled apartment, I remind myself to be grateful I have the time to do this.
Meanwhile, we’re all still in the one bedroom living like refugees. But as they say, admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.
Anyway, not much news, but much love to you all, and I’m sure I”ll have more to say soon.
2 Comments
dirty little secrets.
23 January '10 by admin, under Journal.
I have a confession to make. I have always wanted to live just like my deeply Christian, politically conservative, gun-owning, Ford-truck-driving grandparents.
They live in a big house surrounded by tall evergreens that are usually dripping wet from a recent rain. My grandma has room for both a decorative and vegetable garden, plus a shed and huge mulch pile. They are part of the generation that considered DIY a necessity rather than a hobby, so if my grandma decides she wants a rock-lined stream flowing down to a fountain accompanied by fake deer statuettes, she and my grandpa build it. Until recent chemotherapy weakened and made my grandpa colder, he would meander out most afternoons to pursue various experiments in his wood shop. A new method of making chess boards, turning out a couple display boxes to sell at the local swap meet, a plate or two for my grandma to tole paint.
My grandparents don’t consider themselves particularly creative, and they don’t particularly value creativity in others. But they’ve lived, in my lifetime, an essentially creative life. They get an idea into their heads, be it a new way to germinate tomatoes, or how to improve the second bathroom, and they do it. Often, together, or with the help of friends and family.
When I moved to New Jersey to live in a million dollar home with a CEO and her two daughters, I was continually surprised by their household’s need to outsource. Cleaning, landscaping, setting up a closet organizational system, retrofitting the upstairs bath, even grooming their dog fell to someone else. My efforts to solve those problems myself or find cheaper solutions usually failed to impress. To that family, doing something oneself was a sign of poverty.
To my grandparents, and my mom and her two sisters, doing something oneself give one greater control, is rewarding, and saves money. My generation is not so self-reliant, but most of us still paint our own walls, dye our own hair, and groom our own damn pets.
In my grandparents’ case, doing things themselves did make them wealthy. Not to the standards of the CEO in New Jersey, but certainly to their own standards. Building their own construction company, raising three daughters with sometimes too-severe thrift, and more than three decades’ dedication to a major Seattle construction firm, has left them with an enormous home, a cabin, that well-outfitted shop, and a big shiny refrigerator.
Perhaps more importantly, they’ve earned the freedom to pursue the activities they love. Together. With family around them. That is my standard of wealth, a standard no one in New York or New Jersey replaced.
I don’t share many of my grandparents’ values. But deep in my roots, under the soil, and hanging over my branches, they are there with that life they built together. In their partnership. In their mastery of their respective crafts. In the importance they place on family rather than status or acclaim. In their home- with the three squares a day, clean sheets in the cupboard, guest room ready, every pipe and beam familiar to each of them.
And, despite everything that’s happened between my parents in the past couple years, I still consider their traditional marital roles equally rewarding and healthy for both of them. It’s still difficult to raise children, make a pleasant home, or nurture growing people, while competing in the outside world. Particularly if you can’t afford to pay people to help you out.
Just like I did when I left Oregon four years ago, I want children, time to write, and someone who loves me enough to make it possible for me to do both, with him. Pretty old school stuff.
At the same time, I want to explore new parts of the world and pursue whatever whim comes into my head next, unencumbered by the responsibilities of property or children. I want to nest and I want to wander, and I have always wanted both. I don’t know if that conflict will be resolved by going through phases of both, or if I’m struggling to reconcile my childhood role models with what I’ve learned about myself as an adult.
I spent most of 2009 reacting to life. To my parents’ conflict, the triad of evil, my job, this town. I haven’t had a lot of time to think about my own goals or desires. Mondo beyondo wishes fell to the wayside in the face of much more practical concerns. So I’m asking these questions, looking at what I want, now that moving and finding another job have gone from theoretical needs to genuine necessities. Settling down would require making very different choices than living the catch-as-catch-can life I’ve lived so far.
At this point, I can barely keep a pair of slippers for a month without losing them.
No Comments
irresistible forces and unmoveable objects.
20 January '10 by admin, under Journal.
My mom and I went to Buffalo’s ritzy suburban shopping mall, today. Ordinarily I suffer from involuntary tremors at the thought of crossing a mall door’s threshold, but a week and a half after walking out of my last job, I instinctively knew today was a once-a-decade time for some shop therapy.
The gods did smileth upon us the entire trip. The clerk at Frederick’s of Hollywood helpfully advised my mom and I on garter belt sizing. The soundtrack in New York & Co. kept me bopping while trying on skinny slacks. Fergie, unbeknownst to me, designed a line of sneakers so adorable, I had to buy a pair even though I already have three pairs of sneakers and hardly ever wear any of them. Bath & Body Works was paying people to take away their excess inventory. And when we finally collapsed at Jack Astors, weak and empty of wallet, the waitress greeted us warmly with cheap booze and cheesy, garlicky meat ‘n potatoes fare to strengthen us for our journey home.
Why, you may ask, does an unemployed person spend $150 at the mall on hi-tops and stockings? In my case, an unemployed person spends money because she has a disturbingly strong sense that she won’t be unemployed for long, and she’ll need those black slacks and skirt to look all, like, professional. She also does it because she needs a distraction from sitting around the house fixating on her new design portfolio or emailing the eight hundredth apartment ad.
I keep waiting for someone to say “Snap out of it and just move somewhere!” I am trying. I don’t blog about my attempts to find a volunteer homestay in Europe, or the families I’ve discussed nannying for, or the quantity of Craigslist ads I’ve read and responded to, but that’s how I spend a lot of my time. Since mid-September, I’ve explored every method of moving that I know of or people have suggested. I’ve tried, for months, to take responsibility for my happiness, by initiating change instead of sitting around complaining.
But nothing takes. And I’m starting to wonder whether the best way to figure out why, would be to shut the heck up for a minute.
So I went to the mall, and bought the dangling beaded earrings at Old Navy. I will probably wear them tomorrow, with my hi-tops, and layer the skirt over the pants over the garter belt, and top it all of with a heavy layer of sweet pea scented Bath & Body Works bath foam.
Something’s gotta give. Until then, at least I’ll look (and smell) fantastic.
1 Comment
two old poems.
15 January '10 by admin, under Fiction.
The other day, my mom and I visited the storage unit where we keep everything she and my brother moved from Oregon after selling our family’s house last August. We used dustpans to shovel the snow away from the doorway, and filled up the car with boxes of my belongings.
Sorting things I still wanted to keep (a pair of black leather boots with ruffles and spike heels) from things I didn’t (a six inch thick English text book from high school) I discovered a stack of high school papers. I have no idea why I kept my AP history and English essays, handwritten and generality-laden as most such essays are. Unless it was to prove that I’ve always been fond of titling things oddly, such as, “Betty Freidan vs. Martin Luther,” and “The Fascinating Issue of Power as Viewed by Orwell, Plus a Few Frogs.”
A few months after graduating I went on a poetry-writing kick, and two of those poems have remained my favorite pieces of writing, ever. They were also lurking in this pile of old papers. So I thought I’d share.
“a friend I wish I’d had”
You appreciated so much of me, that year,
or tried to. But as April turned to May,
this was one thing you never understood.
… Please listen, children. Just one more sonnet before we are through,
one more month before you can leave…
You never believed my concern: My room is a mess.
So is mine, you’d say.
You’d smile.
Mad with thirst, I’d sneak from class and find you in the hall,
sit next to you on the bench with your books.
We’d talk, your hands punctuating the air.
I would drink and drink and
drink,
drink your conversation until the ashen hallway of that sheetrock warren
warbled away.
I saw only your chin,
jutting upward when you laughed.
Then the halls would fill with students, and we’d stand
(In my dreams, you pass by unnoticing)
… Just one more day, children, and you will be free…
Moving through the revolutions of bells, wishing she was wrong,
wishing I had the chance to talk to you…
always.
But, My bedroom floor is covered, I can’t make it to my bed.
Things I haven’t used in years are floating to the surface.
You listened sympathetically, but did not see the point.
Perhaps your mess was different.
The layers covering your floor, the clothes on your chair, books on your bed,
(I have lost so quickly what was never really there)
didn’t frighten you.
My room’s a mess, too, you said, as we stepped around the curtain.
… Just one more step until you have gone…
Sometimes I wish we were still there, laughing around her as she
read aloud a sonnet.
“Senior Year: Girlfriends”
Stalking hallways in black and curvy shrouds,
you girls taught me how to savor
insanity and pain.
Letters on your rumpled t-shirts;
your madness was a slogan.
(I was crazy before it was cool).
With dark eyes and limpid hair, they/we
ate lunch: a manic coven circle sitting
in a crowded high school hall.
Anger and joy passed through unwelcome:
genuine emotion unbalances woe.
Better sorrow, the clothing fit.
(The mall has a whole store of Misery)
Dismal bedroom, suicidal frustration.
Parents who are Mean.
Sorrow is never your fault.
Stepping briefly from our baths of tears,
we had a good time, sweeties.
Thrift store hunting, Mambo Lattes,
cigarette smoke fogged our nostrils.
Nights spent imagining what life looked like.
Remember, not the anguish, but:
sitting in the grass,
blowing glitter on each other’s faces,
cuddling around a scary movie.
Books of revelation, shared poetry,
coffee and rain and
laughing till I could no longer stand.
The lightness when we pretended we had no homework,
and it would always be spring.
That year, you needed a stranger to your sticky, spider’s web.
I needed the glimpses of genius,
your weeping pasts,
loud music in the car and a cloister to dance within.
The puzzle shifts and people who didn’t fit, now do-
pieces once perfect, now cannot be wedged into place.
Funny how so brief a space
can slay a common language.
I returned and asked:
What do I do now?
You couldn’t tell me.
