running parallel to him, and you'll never meet

Vanishing Point

by Freya Manfred

The moment arrives when you say,
"I don't dislike this man,
but how did I marry him?"
Something about his wintry voice,
the way he can't or won't show his face,
and how small and alone you feel
out here on earth's curve,
driving day and night,
never reaching a destination,
until you realize you're running parallel to him,
and you'll never meet.

"Vanishing Point" by Freya Manfred, from Swimming with a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

I really like this poem.  It's simple but beautiful.

From Verse Daily...

City Beach


Your mouth said so long from so long said high
tide's not a timid girl is what is missing.
I could clap flippers skip the asterisk
and hop a plane. Some mouths say nets and not
nets to trust around anyone's daughter.
Ask what's on tap in the shape of a ship.
A mouth in a bottle is no kiss sealed
to sender. In it remainders and no answer
and a thin relic at that. Any ocean
is old enough to know better. Your mouth
to mine is departures arrivals a flawless ledger.
Some mouths say swim at your own risk say salt
again is stingy dinner. My mouth remains
a faithful measure. Some mouths say shark
in shallow water but I suspect the waves
wash in on empty and someone had to
truck in all this sand from elsewhere here.




Copyright © 2009 Dora Malech All rights reserved
from Poetry London
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

stays for a long time on each cornstalk

From today's post at The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

 

Autumn Waiting

by Tom Hennen

Cold wind.
The day is waiting for winter
Without a sound.
Everything is waiting—
Broken-down cars in the dead weeds.
The weeds themselves.
Trees.
Even sunlight
Is in no hurry and stays
For a long time
On each cornstalk.
Blackbirds are silent
And sit in piles.
From a distance
They look like
Something
Spilled on the road.

"Autumn Waiting" by Tom Hennen, from Looking into the Weather. © Westerheim Press, 1983.

I feel really stupid writing this, but I just finished the fifth and final season of The Wire, and I am just flat-out depressed. 

Like I just feel like the world is full of nothing, no hope.

It's fucked up that I feel this after watching television when this kind of shit happens every second in reality, but it's something I feel, I don't know.

his new, expensive shoes

This Morning

 

I wish I had tossed the roses,
rinsed the vase of stench,
soaped and scrubbed it clean.
That kind of end to it.
Not this chitchat
in the waiting room, our son
in the OR, again, being
saved. We too, again,
sitting it out, after years,
the same straight-back chairs.
You seem fragile, he says.
I cannot bear his beard,
his new, expensive shoes.

Barbara Helfgott Hyett

Rift
University of Arkansas Press

Back from SF.  I had a wonderful time, but I miss my mommy and Emmie terribly. 

It's so calming at home, too.  The water, the green. 

And now I won't have a home. 

I'm so excited--I start work on Thursday.  I'm nervous, but I can't wait.

Flew home today, sleepy and dirty.  Need a shower.  Good to see mom, Em.

a good way to fall is with a rope to catch you

I've thought about this, falling in love.

In a Beautiful Country

 

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn't matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you'll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry
 
about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You're thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

Kevin Prufer

Poetry
October 2009

I had nightmares again last night.

Just a few minutes ago I was dreaming that the father's real estate agent wrote me an encrypted email. She called me a twat, said she knew what I was doing.

God, why is this still happening?

though you seldom achieve such grace

Today's post on Verse Daily:

Animal Lover

A horse rises in a balloon
full of writing.

You could ride it yourself
and get no farther than brother,

the animal inside clawing out.
You are an animal

though you seldom achieve
such grace, except in cars.

The animal that directs your dying
Over here! with the wilder cells

bunches in familial nests
very close to I said that.

But birds still fly as birds.
They blue themselves with sky

up-side-down in your iris,
the brain a penguin turning one egg

with its toes in such cold.
When the animals call out:

Human! Human!
you shout back:

I am nude enough.

Copyright © 2009 Terese Svoboda

whatever a moon has always meant

From today's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor...one of my all-time favorites:

I carry your heart with me

by E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

"'i carry your heart with me (i carry it in'" by e.e. cummings, from Complete Poems 1904-62. © Liveright Publishing, 1994

Happy B-day, Tim O'Brien!

In high school, The Things They Carried was required reading--I absolutely loved it. This is a bit from today's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

"It's the birthday of Tim O'Brien, (books by this author) born in Austin, Minnesota (1946). His book The Things They Carried (1990) is a series of linked short stories about a group of soldiers in Vietnam, including a soldier named Tim O'Brien. The title story is one of the most anthologized short stories in contemporary American literature. It begins: 'First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.'"

a seam with staples

From today's poem at Poetry Daily:

Weird Hotel

When he says the word tumor
I'm noticing the doctor's hip new
minimalist glasses, green titanium
with non-reflective lenses,
which make him look worldly and kind.

I wake up in a weird hotel
tethered to various machines.
Pain is confined to a faraway pasture;
it gazes at me over the fence.
When it leans its huge body
against the spindly rails,
I push a button that shocks it,
and it backs off, but continues
to watch me, waiting for a chance
to come lie down with me
because my body is its one true home.

A seam with staples runs
from navel to pubis, sealing a body
now devoid of female parts. All gone!
Only the common human ones remain.

The dogs come to visit,
but they live with the wolves now,
and keep outside the circle of light
around the bed, in the snow,
their coats burdened,
and will not let me touch them.

I dream I lie in my slippery green
sleeping bag on a hard bunk
at the monastery, vowing
Desires are inexhaustible;
I vow to put an end to them.
And it's true, I have no desires here
among the chirring and chiming machines.

How strange, to have left the world
and returned to it
having taken nothing with me
and bringing nothing back.

Chase Twichell

Provincetown Arts
Annual Issue 2009/10

Also, I think DJ AM is a pretty neat human being. He took something he struggled with, he was open about it, and he was working with others to help them fight their battles with addiction. He did a lot of good. Plus everyone close to him said he was nice, compassionate--no one could say a bad thing about him. I hope this encourages others who do not know the horror of addiction to view it more compassionately, and less like something sinful or wrong. At McLean, they'd talk about addiction as a disease process, like cancer. I mean, I don't know one kid on that unit who was happy with the way things were when they used, and yet many in society will tell you just that.

So the tox results are in, and it appears that DJ AM, a celebrity who died last month, died from acute intoxication secondary to a combination of Ativan, Klonopin, coke, Benadryl, oxy, hydrocodone, Xanax and Levamisole (which is apparently a drug used to cut cocaine).

This kind of thing makes me so sad.

I can't tell you how many patients came in to detox after some PCP prescribed them benzos they didn't need. Hell, a pro athlete came to the unit after the team's shrink had prescribed him benzos to cut down the anxiety he felt that led him to use oxy...so then he came to us not only addicted to oxy, but to benzos, too. It's like, do these people think of what they are doing? How much power they have in being able to adversely impact someone's life forever?

I know that all of this has been the topic of controversy in recent years, what with the deaths of celebrities like Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson making headlines. There is thought that while a person like Mr. Jackson may have doctor-shopped (going to someone who was going to prescribe meds to him, and not letting other docs in on what he was getting from someone else), it is the MD's responsibility ethically to protect the patient from harm. The healthcare system needs to be ameliorated so that doctors can access patient records in some sort of universal fashion. This would be costly, but the impact could be staggering...imagine, people coming into the ER, on the brink of death...you could pull up charts and see a patient's history, what medications they were allergic to, so that though they can't speak for themselves, they are out of harm's way. And the script shopping would be helped, I think. Doctors could catch the patients who needed counseling, not just allow them to fall through the cracks of the system and fuel the fire so to speak.

This is so sad to me. I saw so many older patients, patients who would tell me they didn't belong in detox, that they felt sorry "for the kids doing heroin and cocaine"--but that wasn't their issue. A Vietnam vet told me he made it through the war without touching anything, and yet when his doc prescribed oxy and other drugs for pain relief post-op and didn't question the continued scripts, the prelonged need for these drugs, the man found himself an addict. That is so sad to me. These people don't realize that prescription drug use is every bit as dangerous as illicit drug use. In this country, the sale of alcohol is legalized. I can't tell you how frustrated I could be at BC, when I would see these kids partying till they puked three, four nights a week, and then these same kids would look down on heroin addicts and coke heads. It's all the same, it's the same struggle, and it can have an equally horrifying, sad outcome.

I needed something to do with my hands (so I can stop picking compulsively and let my sores heal), so I recently took up origami. I walked down to an art supply store and purchased gorgeous paper ($4 for 50 sheets--that's a lot of practice for your buck). When I arrived back at the apartment, I started to work. I like the quiet of it, being able to create and be still inside even if my hands are busying themselves with folds and creases.

I miss Cassie.

Sometimes I wish I could talk to her, or be still next to her, listen to her soft, deep breathing as she sleeps. Watch as her paws curl all at once, the eyes roll back and flicker like a bulb about to burn out--she's running in dreams. I miss that bond that is stronger than anything I have ever known.

I don't miss the father or the sister. I still have nightmares about the father, I don't know when they'll cease. I have some part of a deep peace just knowing I'm rivers away from him, that I'm safer in an urban city, alone, than I am in the suburbs with him close by. I feel sorry for my mother, and I do not know the depths of the pain she feels, what that kind of loss could feel like.

I have a lot of growing up to do, a lot of work to do before I can help others. But I'm trying.

I cannot wait to start my job as a pediatric staff nurse, I love kids so much. I do worry that I'll get too attached, that I'll get morose, flatter, if something bad happens. Mostly, experience has taught me that children have this special something adults forgot long ago, they have a tenacity and a toughness about them that is awe-inspiring. I'm always motivated to be a better person when I'm around children in a hospital. They're really strong, and they don't even know it.

I am so sad, and so sorry.

I want to make a difference in this world, to give back. I don't know how.

she thinks, but doesn't say

From Poetry Daily. This is my life right now:

Anniversary

She says he isn't as funny as he used to be. About fifty percent as funny, maybe less. He thinks, but doesn't say, no, it's you, you're depressed, you don't find anyone funny anymore. She thinks, but doesn't say, I've always been depressed. I've never found anyone funny—except you, once.

Jason Whitmarsh

Tomorrow's Living Room
Utah State University Press

on a scale of one to ten?

I'm really sorry for anyone who has ever been wronged by people working in the psychiatric/mental health field. I will choose my words more carefully and think before I write.

Intake Interview

What is today's date?

Who is the President?

How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?

What does "people who live in glass houses" mean?

Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the
avalanche?

Name five rivers.

What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?

How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?

If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you
say to him?

What should you do if I fall asleep?

Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?

What is the moral of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"?

What about his Everest shadow?

Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one
else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination
of indigenous populations?

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent
absence?

Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an
even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?

Would you visit a country where nobody talks?

What would you have done differently?

Why are you here?

Franz Wright

Wheeling Motel
Alfred A. Knopf

Happy Birthday to a fellow Minnesotan;)

From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (books by this author) born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1896). He's the author of dozens of short stories and of the novels The Great Gatsby (1925), This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and Tender is the Night (1934).

After his first novel was published, Scott and his wife, Zelda, (books by this author) became New York celebrities, icons of the 1920s and of the Jazz Age, a term that Fitzgerald himself coined. But before there was Zelda, there was Ginevra King, F. Scott's first love, who some scholars argue was the most important woman in F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary life, even more influential on his writing than his famous wife. Many think Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby is modeled after Ginevra, as well as, Isabelle Borge in This Side of Paradise and Judy Jones in "Winter Dreams."

Ginevra, named after a Leonard da Vinci painting, was a Chicago debutante from an old-money family. She and Scott met at a sledding party in St. Paul when Scott was 18, home on winter break from Princeton, and she —16 — was in town visiting one of her boarding school roommates. Almost immediately, they became obsessed with each other and began a prodigious correspondence that would last three years, in which she wrote up to 24 pages of letters a day, often ditching Scripture class to sit and write to him. In the first letter to him, dated a week after they met, she asks him to send a photo of himself, saying, "I have but a faint recollection of yellow hair and big blue eyes and a brown corduroy waist-coat that was very good-looking!'' And she signs that first letter, ''Yours Fickely sometimes but Devotedly at present — Ginevra."

She was hugely coy and flirtatious. A couple weeks after that first letter, she wrote to him: "I hear you had plans for kissing me goodbye publicly. My goodness, I'm glad you didn't. I'd have had to be severe as anything with you! (Ans. This — Why didn't you?)"

Though he was devoted to her, King's commitment to Fitzgerald fluctuated greatly, and despite his seriousness and discussion of their future, she often appeared blithe about their relationship. At one point, she wrote, ''Don't forget our plan of elopement — That mustn't fall through.''

During their courtship, Ginevra's father said to F. Scott: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." Scott wrote it down in his diary in August 1916. The line appears in The Great Gatsby, coming out of the mouth of Daisy Buchanan herself.

Their correspondence tapered off in 1917, and soon Ginevra King wrote to tell him that she was getting engaged to another man, the son of her dad's business partner. When her wedding announcement appeared in the newspaper, he clipped it out and put it in his scrapbook, along with one of her handkerchiefs, and he hand-wrote a caption under it that said, "The End of a Once Poignant Story."

In July 1918 — the same month that Ginevra announced her engagement — Scott met Zelda for the first time, at a dance in Montgomery, Alabama. But even after he'd begun a passionate courtship with Zelda, Ginevra loomed large in his mind. In 1919, he published a poem in The Nassau Literary Magazine about Ginevra entitled "My First Love."

Twenty years after they stopped corresponding, Scott and Ginevra met up for the last time. It was in Hollywood, where he was writing movie scripts and trying to stay sober. Shortly before the planned meeting, he wrote to his daughter Scottie about Ginevra: "She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect. I don't know whether I should go or not." The two of them went to a bar, and he began drinking again.

His copious correspondence with Zelda was published in various volumes, including Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Banks (2002) and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (1994). In recent years, Cambridge University Press has been publishing the Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, replete with annotations. Nearly a dozen volumes have been published so far: The Beautiful and Damned came out last year, and Spires and Gargoyles: Early Writings, 1909–1919 is due out in the spring.

Fitzgerald wrote, "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade

The Writer's Almanac's post for tomorrow:

What I Understood

by Katha Pollitt

When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn't understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I'll be
thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

"What I Understood" by Katha Pollitt, from The Mind-Body Problem. © Random House, 2009.

I try to seek and find poetry that speaks to something within me, something that resonates. I read selfishly, clinging to words I find truth in, wanting someone to know the shape of what this feels like. I try to think of what I'm saved by. The fire escape, the pigeons strutting down sidewalks, the little dog attached to the little leash.

I miss the foghorn sounding in the night, the curls of waves licking shore.

I am so deeply sad, and I can't explain to you why.

I feel very bored.

I don't get excited anymore.

i feel like i'm on drugs, but no, it's only music

Listening to Ellie Goulding's Wish I'd Stayed on repeat.

Seriously. Over and over.

This song makes me feel like I'm underwater, I'm lost...but not bad lost. It's like tripping without drugs. My brain gets this reprieve of sorts, and I don't have to think about the father and the sister and my mother and her faded heart...sometimes it is too much to bear, the way things have come down around me. Nothing is certain, nothing is stable. I am more skeptical than ever. But here, in this pseudo dance/dream state, I am surrounded by familiar rhythms and voices. I am someplace else, I am not present in the broken world.

I want my mom to be okay. I want her happiness. I am so angry with the father for what he has done to her, for the way he broke her spirit and how he strangled her lightness, dragging her down to his depths. And the sister, how she lives only for herself. I do not feel we shared a womb, that we share blood and cells and strands upon strands of DNA. I don't want a part of the ugliness that the father and the sister represent to me. Their world is one of lies and hard words and loud sounds, slamming doors and a throat clearing itself on repeat. Those eyes, the blank coldness, frozen lakes. Did the waters ever run?

God, I am scared. I feel happy at times, like this weekend when I went out with Priya and Amarilys, whom I hadn't seen in years. It felt as if no time had passed, it felt like I could talk with people, and not people who had to listen to me by virtue of us occupying the same space (e.g. Chris--though he doesn't act like this, it's me). And then times I feel like that was some cruel trick, because things are back to the way they were and I'm sitting here alone and sad and angry. I'm not doing anything good for anyone right now, I feel worthless, a sheer nothingness. God, is it okay to be like this right now? Is it right, or am I letting you down? I want to be good. I so badly want to be good, to be happy, to show gratitude for all that I've been given.

The father was forever disappointed in me. I wonder when I will shrug off this attitude of his I've come to hold dear: when will I be good enough in some moment, some moment where I can accept how I am and not be thinking I'm a failure because there is no good enough, there is no good there is only trying. I don't even know how to say what I feel.

On Friday my pulse was 96/60, HR was 90. Does this show how I feel? Anxious and low, low and anxious. Dreaming through this life and listening to Ellie Goulding's voice..."cause you can fall if you want to, and it's just a matter of how far".

i don't give a damn what anyone thinks

Another one from The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

Everything Is Beautiful from a Distance, and So Are You

by Michael Blumenthal

The young clarinetist, playing Mendelssohn's Sinfonia #10 in B-minor
in back of the orchestra may be exceedingly beautiful, it's hard to know
from here, just as I, to her, may be gorgeous myself and the day, in

retrospect, divine, as all the past loves of my life have been, and that boring
evening in County Derry as well, oh yes, they are all beautiful, now, when
I look back upon them, as, no doubt, my life will seem from some calm

and beautiful distance, some rapturous perspective, but here in the here
and now let me say that it's midafternoon, my lover is on her way over,
it's been a long chilly day in Budapest, what I thought was a herniated disc

is not, after all, a herniated disc, Mozart's 250th is behind us, as is the 60th
anniversary of Bartók's death, and it is only James Taylor on the stereo—
sweet, sentimental James—and I don't give a damn what anyone thinks

of my taste or emotional proclivities, I only know it's Thursday and in
an hour I'll be making love, and, looking up at me from the pillow,
my lover may or may not consider me beautiful, or even desirable,

but the deed will be already done, the evening before us, there
are roasted red peppers and goat cheese in the refrigerator, I'll be
as far from death as a man can be, oh can you imagine that?

"Everything Is Beautiful from a Distance, and So Are You" by Michael Blumenthal, from And. © BOA, 2009.

Happy Birthday, Stephen King!

From today's post over at The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

It's the birthday of horror novelist Stephen King, (books by this author) born in Portland, Maine (1947). He's the author of many novels, including The Shining (1977), Pet Sematary (1983), and From a Buick 8 (2002). His father, a merchant seaman, deserted the family when he was two. He has no memories of the man, but one day he found a boxful of his father's science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, including an anthology of stories from Weird Tales magazine and a book by horror author H.P. Lovecraft. That box of his father's books inspired him to start writing horror stories. After college, King worked jobs at a gas station and a Laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin' Donuts. He said, "Budget was not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on. It was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March."

His writing office was the furnace room of his trailer home. He sold a series of horror stories to men's magazines, and he said that the paychecks from these stories always seemed to arrive when one of his kids had an ear infection or the car had broken down. His first novel was Carrie (1973), about a weird, miserable, high school girl with psychic powers. The hard cover didn't sell very well, but when his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000, King couldn't believe it. He said, "The only thing I could think to do was go out and buy my wife a hair dryer."

the great, flaming D

Story of my life, haha...

The Long Dream of Falling

by John Haag

Half my life ago I read
on the back page of the daily paper
of a boy-child in his eighth year who,
in his father's garage, hung himself
rather than suffer parental
revulsion engendered by
the great, flaming D
D for deficient
D for defeat
D for die
on his report card.

Bad news rains leapers from parapets
and everywhere unrequited lovers,
the irreparably damaged and
the merely gutless spin
the turnstiles to surcease.

So why does this kid
still wake me in the middle of the night?

"The Long Dream of Falling", by John Haag from Stones Don't Float. © Ohio State University Press, 1996.

little beads of headlights came unstrung

Wow, this poem knocked my socks off. It is gorgeous. It's from today's post over at Poetry Daily:

The Family Silence

A hill came out of nowhere.
My dead brother said nothing;
he never did. Where was he leading me?

Up. On a night this clear, you could see
the broken bracelet of some small town
scattered at our feet. The little beads

of headlights came unstrung,
rolled down a black ribbon of river.
Sixty years of silence had turned his voice

to the whisper of cottonwoods.
You’re right: you don’t want to come back
until you’re dead, he said,

who’d died at birth. Then everything looks new.
The family silence trails at my heels,
doggedly sniffing other silences.

Did the man my brother had never grown into
slip through the slick streets?
The sound of footfalls turned to rain

and came out dry, and fell away.

Debora Greger

The New Criterion
September 2009

JOY! JOB!

Oh yeah--yesterday, I was offered a position over at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn. Pediatrics! I'm set to orientate October 15.

I cannot wait. I love kids, love them to bits.

the cardboard box with the baby

Another from The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

Eight. Doing the Dishes

by Jeanne Lohmann

We lived in so many houses, Gloria: Indiana Avenue,
Summit and Fourth, the double on Hudson Street.
And that upstairs apartment on North High we rented
from Armbruster's. Mother thought it Elizabethan,
romantic, with its leaded glass windows and wood-beamed
ceilings. Our entrance was at the side, at the top of stairs
that creaked late at night when we came home from our dates.
You had more of these than I did, even if I was older.
It was 1943, and our brother Harry was in the Navy.
I'd had a year away at college, and you were
still in high school. On this particular night
in the kitchen, doing the supper dishes, you
drying while I washed, you told me that your friend
Monabelle had a premature baby, and you'd been there,
helped to find a shoebox to put the baby in. I tried
to imagine this, kept seeing the cardboard box
with the baby, Monabelle bleeding and crying.
You didn't want our parents to hear, so we talked
softly while we put the dishes in the drainer
on the sink and hung the towels to dry.
The pilot light on the range burned purple blue
and I saw both of us new in that light, you
with so much to teach me, my self-absorbed
studious life, so intent on saving the world.

"Eight. Doing the Dishes" by Jeanne Lohmann, from Calls from a Lighted House. © Fithian Press, 2007.

the loneliness and all the errors a heart can make the other end of a stethoscope

From today's post over at The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

Getting to Sleep in New Jersey

by John Stone

Not twenty miles from where I work,
William Williams wrote after dark,
after the last baby was caught,
knowing that what he really ought

to do was sleep. Rutherford slept,
while all night William Williams kept

scratching at his prescription pad,
dissecting the good lines from the bad.

He tested the general question whether
feet or butt or head-first ever

determines as well the length of labor
of a poem. His work is over:

bones and guts and red wheelbarrows;
the loneliness and all the errors

a heart can make the other end
of a stethoscope. Outside, the wind

corners the house with a long crow.
Silently, his contagious snow

covers the banks of the Passaic River,
where he walked once, full of fever,

tracking his solitary way
back to his office and the white day,

a peculiar kind of bright-eyed bird,
hungry for morning and the perfect word.

"Getting to Sleep in New Jersey" by John A. Stone, from Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems. © Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

Positive Dr. G session today.

Received my NY certification in the mail today, think I'm going to apply for a photo ID card also.

Sometimes I get so angry I want to punch a hole in the floor. Or I get so pissed I just want to rage and cut myself or something. Just for attention. Just to be like, fuck you, you fucking asshole. How can you sleep?

You said you would read to me. You got off, you promised you'd read to me, and now you're in bed miles away and I'm up at fucking 11:35 and I'm pissed at myself for being so fucking pissed.

And I think to myself, you're never going to marry him. I let myself imagine myself with others, former others and future others, and I wonder if it's because I'm angry or if because I'm full of doubt, that I was just waiting for an excuse to look.

she could mean the sudden breeze

From Poetry Daily:

Susurrus of Sheets, Goodbye

He leans across his arm, peeks
at her hose-crotch bed-height,
her breasts doubling over.
It's no artist's pose, feet in a basin,
pin shivers in pointillesque,
but the hair she holds off her neck
sends heat into him. Otherwise,

color and motion, the day's
global positioning ratchets
into place with a purse click.
Sweet, she says into the near dark.
She could mean the sudden breeze
except he catches her hand
against his rough cheek.

Wooly Bully

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.
—SAM THE SHAM AND THE PHARAOHS

Something is too late,
her walk, her look?
Those in the know know

she could fix it with effort,
the transparent lie.
She could walk further

but she leans away from the path,
she stops to check the time.
How do you change it?

Her spouse tries out
an answer. There,
in the air, rushing

toward them at a fixed
rate, comes the sound of a sound—
watch it now, watch it.

Terese Svoboda

Weapons Grade
The University of Arkansas Press

In college, I was friends with a man who had substance use disorders and had a history of psychiatric/mental health issues.

A few months ago, I check in on this person by using facebook. To my shock and horror, I found that this former friend was serving time in a federal prison.

Serving time for dealing cocaine and heroin, and for selling these drugs to minors. Worst of all, his actions contributed to a 16 year-old girl's overdose.

At first I became very sorrowful. This person spent extra time at college (not two years like me, but an extra one all the same), and I spent time with him in the recent aftermath of all that had occurred. He never divulged any information to me, but I knew something was wrong. Little did I know the wrong had already happened. I worried that his parents, his little brother, they would be devastated, so sad. I worried this man might die by his own hand (though he was the type to bemoan his issues with depression and suicidal ideation, not act on these things) or by the hand of another, since he ended up being, in essence, a snitch. I was so sorry for him.

But I was also very angry with this man. He was one of the brightest minds I have encountered, but he did not make use of his talents. Instead, he drank heavily, he smoked weed. He wasted what could have been. He was passionate about theology and philosophy, but he did not seem to manifest this passion in the way he chose to live his life.

Deep down, I still see a person who is afraid and lost. I have a lot of compassion and empathy for him. I wonder if it's compassion wasted, if he might be a psychopath (text messages were recovered after the teenager's death--he did not tell the parents of the child about the drugs when asked directly, he even tried to cover this up in messages to a dealer).

I pray that one day I can work in child and adolescent psychiatry and help these children to be independent, to make positive choices for themselves in the face of tragedy and abuse or whatever. The poor girl who died lost her dog to Katrina, her parents were divorced, she became reckless in the aftermath of the hurricane by her mother's accounts. And my friend, with his mental issues...it seems likely that he is one of many in this country that suffer from comorbid Axis I and II psychiatric illnesses and substance use disorders.

I just want to hug his parents. I cannot imagine what they are going through. I also want to hug my friend, because I believe in my heart he will never forgive himself for what he did, and he will suffer all his life for the act he committed.

It's all just so sad.

without conscience: read it

Okay, I'm sure Candice DeLong is an extremely bright, successful woman in her own right. But watching the former FBI agent and profiler speak on the television show Deadly Women kind of pisses me off. I mean, some of these women murdered in the late 1800s, and she's speaking as if she's some sort of authority as to the exact kind of person she was. She makes this blunt, absolute statements, and I'm scratching my head wondering how she can say this as a professional--given the fact that she didn't even interact with these people in life.

In this book I read, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, the author, Robert Hare, briefly mentions that when a DA requested Dr. Hare testify on behalf of the prosecution regarding psychopathy, he politely declined. How can you speak to what you don't know?

By the way, I read that book because the father is a psychopath in my opinion. I have a lot to learn in the field of psychiatry, but I'm well versed and I know I possess knowledge that surpasses the average primary care psychician's take on psychiatric mental health. At least in particular fields, like bipolar disorder and some personality disorders and psychopathy. Dr. Hare is a world renowned psychologist and has studied psychopathy for years, he even invented a clinical checklist that has become a standard of practice in the identification of psychopathy.

Point is, you need to get the heck away from these people.

if one is polarized to change its spin

Today's poem from Poetry Daily:

Particle Physics

They say two photons fired through a slit
stay paired together to the end of time;
if one is polarized to change its spin,
the other does a U-turn on a dime,
although they fly apart at speeds of light
and never cross each other's paths again,
like us, a couple in the seventies,
divorced for almost thirty years since then.
Tonight a Red Sox batter homered twice
to beat the Yankees in their playoff match,
and, sure as I was born in Boston, when
that second ball deflected off the bat,
I knew your thoughts were flying back to me,
though your location was a mystery.

Julie Kane

Jazz Funeral
Story Line Press

September 11.

I became licensed as a nurse in New York State today.

and being happy alone afterwards

This poem is from today's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. I thought it was beautiful in a quiet, small way--it isn't full of big words or complex structure, but it is pure and true and beautiful:

Summer in a Small Town

by Linda Gregg

When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it's Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is gray, the air is hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.

"Summer in a Small Town" by Linda Gregg, from All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems. © Graywolf Press, 2008.

The sister is too similar to the father. If she doesn't get her act together and change soon, she will end up exactly like him. She understands nothing about psychology, and her interactions with me are always volatile and out of control.

I am no longer in contact with the father. It makes me feel so much better.

And now I am electing to break off contact with the sister, because she compulsively yells at me and speaks down to me. Unfortunately, she likes to play both sides, and she is evil (though not even close to as evil as the father is). The bitch aunt is also evil.

The whole lot of them are pitiful.

I want them gone, I want them out of my life completely.

God, please give me strength. Please help me get the bad out of my life, and to turn toward the good and the light.

light another silence in my head

I don't always choose poems based on the way I feel. Here's a good one from today's Poetry Daily:

Crossing

I stash my heart in my boot.
I've got a broken knife for you.
You're not dying for love,
you're not even injured.
Not a scratch, not a nick,
no throb in the bones,
no slight headache
starting behind the eyes.
I'm walking on a dead ocean
all the fish in my body in free fall.
I adore you sinkingly.
You're what. You're whom.
In every room. A dog starts racketing:
it's you. Siren
ratcheting off the blue.
I tie myself to the table.
I bolt myself to the bed.
When the phone's black call comes
I light another silence in my head.

Kim Addonizio

Chris and I ate lunch out in the cute place across the street. It was a nice Labor Day special activity of sorts, those burgers with bacon and fries. We walked along the Promenade afterward, which was nice.

Chris is sleeping with the US Open on television. I attempted to nap, but I am unable to quiet my mind. I struggle with feelings of hate toward the father, and subsequent feelings of guilt as I wonder if God would be disappointed in me. That lost feeling I know so well resurfaces after holding breaths.

I miss Cassie. I miss being innocent and naive, though I am still in regards to certain topics and themes.

I miss.

I'm scared.

I love you, Cassie.

This is from The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

It's the birthday of writer and activist Jonathan Kozol, (books by this author) born in Boston (1936). He grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, went to an elite boarding school, then studied literature at Harvard, where he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. But he dropped out of Oxford and moved to Paris to try to write a novel. He lived there for four years, then went back to Massachusetts. He was pretty sure that he wanted to get a Ph.D. and become an English professor, but he wasn't sure what to do for short-term work.

Then he saw an ad for summer tutors for kids in Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston, so he thought he might as well give tutoring a try. And he found that he loved that work — loved kids, loved teaching — so he scrapped his plans for a doctorate and became a public school teacher in Boston.

Since then, Kozol has written many books about the sad state of public education in this country, and about how segregated our schools still are, all based on his own experiences in classrooms and working in poor neighborhoods. His books include Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991) and Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995), about kids in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. He said: "Of all my books, Amazing Grace means the most to me. It took the most out of me and was the hardest to write, because it was the hardest to live through these experiences. I felt it would initially be seen as discouraging but, ultimately, sensitive readers would see the resilient and transcendent qualities … that it would be seen as a book about the elegant theology of children." His most recent book is Letters to a Young Teacher (2007), in which — through a series of letters — he combines his opinions on vouchers, No Child Left Behind, and racial segregation with constant reminders about why teaching is so important and beautiful.

He said, "Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."

google!

From The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

It was on this day in 1998 that Google was first incorporated as a company. Google was the brainchild of two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They designed a search engine with one important difference from all the others: Instead of giving you results based on how many times your search term appeared on a Web page, they created software that would figure out how many times each relevant Web site was linked to from other relevant Web sites and sorted those and then laid them out for you, all on a clear, simple screen. Google is now an incredibly powerful and profitable company. At a time when most major companies are losing money, Google continues to grow, and reported revenues of $5.52 billion in the second quarter of this year. In June of 2006, "Google"was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb.

Although September 4th is the official day of Google's incorporation, as Google's own help center explained: "Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake." Most years, it is celebrated toward the end of September.

Doesn't everyone like to Google? Good thing those computer gods went out on a limb to create it. I mean, I don't think anyone is planning to add "Bing" to the OED as a verb. I do so love technology, especially Macs and Google and iPod Touches and all the glory that is white, streamlined architecture. But it also entirely changed my existence, and I'm not positive it's all for the best.

Also, the boyfriend makes fun of the character Jesse on Breaking Bad, the way he speaks and everything. But he says, "Yeah, dude...okay...yeah, cool, dude" till I want to vom all over the floor.

I mean, he could sound like he paid for four years of undergrad and two years of pointless grad school.

gag me

I'm irritated.

The boyfriend just falls asleep for hours upon end, napping on his days off. Which is cool--I'm independent and shit, I don't care. But then someone calls, and he's like, "Hey man...yeah, I'm cool" blah blah blah fucking blah and the air goes off and it's hot and then he's telling the voice on the line, "Yeah, it's not gonna be an ideal living situation for you, but you can stay here...yeah, I definitely don't want you shelling out $200 a night for a hotel". Ideal for voice on the line? What about me? Hello, awkward--especially since I don't have a job.

I love how the boyfriend can be so attentive and kind to his friends, and then he doesn't make half that effort with me.

I suppose all people do this? They take things for granted?

So fucking annoyed.

I mean, we do live in a box and all. And when I'm doing work on my computer, he wants to fuck around. UGH. I knew this would happen, I just need to figure out how to mentally escape this. I'm a total loner, and this is going to be an adjustment.

darken inside you like rot around a peach pit

From today's Verse Daily:

Selfish

When you are always right, it is hard to diet.
When your longhand thank-you notes flutter off,
pretty stamps postmarked like dawn at the beach,
it feels awful to wish death on a person.
In a nearby city children have no food,
bodies simmer by the curb, old men drown
in attics, while you measure out sixty
calories of chardonnay. On the radio
an expert says, we are all nine meals away
from murder. Dieters must be ruthless.
You scream at your offspring. Your unbuttered
bones scrape in your hip sockets. When your spouse
telephones from his mother's apartment
and says, her friends put her on a suicide
watch, you think, those sadistic bastards,
she might be in pain for the rest of her life,
why shouldn't she kill herself? because you
have become unsweetened and fat-free.
Bruises darken inside you like rot
around a peach pit although the rose
skin still glows. If she does not kill herself,
you realize, she will die slowly,
pulling him back for longer and longer
weekends, she will cry in his arms while I
starve. Like dawn at the beach, you see how bad
you are, a vast salty empty badness
so hateful its words fizz against the shore,
so hungry it could swallow love whole.

Copyright © 2009 Lesley Wheeler

amble away over the lawns in black

Girl Walking Barefoot

Girl walking barefoot over the crematorium lawns in black
I see you like the feel of the covering of the earth
Green over black and damp, I see
You like the thought of the look of yourself in black
Sauntering over the lawns between the blocks
Of numbered roses. The hearses
Ply like birds with mouths to feed, the parties
Form in the sun like clouds until their own
Hard seeding docks. But you
Girl amble away over the lawns in black
On two crooked fingers swinging your dressy shoes.

David Constantine

Nine Fathom Deep
Bloodaxe Books / DuFour Editions

their nest, their young, in the hollows of broken concrete

This is from Poetry Daily. I enjoyed reading this poem, the construction of it and the way the writer took the familiar, the birds everyone loves to hate, and made a poem out of it.

The Messenger

I

On the way to visit a physician,
a friend, who would soon suddenly die,
I saw a pigeon on a heap of rubble
standing more like a gull,
other pigeons in wild flight
searching the wreckage
of two Times Square theaters,
razed to build a hotel.
They were looking for their roof,
their nest, their young,
in the hollows of broken concrete,
in the pink and white dust,
they fluttered around the wrecking ball
that still worked the façade,
the cornice of cement Venetian masks.

2

I'll be no messenger for pigeons.
I can not help but see
how like their markings—
the yellow, red and blue dots
that speckle the trout and butterfly.
The roof, a giant bird of tar paper,
takes its last breaths on the broken stage.
There are no tragic pigeons.
I mourn my sweet friend
fallen among the young,
unable to sustain flight,
part of the terrible flock,
the endless migration
of the unjustly dead.

3

When I was a child, before I knew the word for love
or snowstorm, before I remember a tree or a field,
I saw a white bird in a blizzard, huddled in snow
and ice on our kitchen window sill.
My first clear memory of terror.

4

This winter I hung a gray and white stuffed
felt seagull from the ring of my window shade,
a reminder of good times by the sea,
of Chekhov and impossible love.
It pleased me the gull
sometimes lifted a wing in the drafty room.
Once when looking at the gull I saw
through the window a living seagull glide
toward me then disappear—what a rush of life!
I remember its hereness, while in the room
the senseless symbol, little more than a bedroom slipper,
dangled on a string.

5

My childhood hangs like a gull in the distant sky.
Its eyes behind mud and salt
see some dark thing below:
on a trawler off Montauk
I am heading home cleaning my catch,
seagulls dive close, desperate for the guts.
A little above the Atlantic we race toward port,
their different struggling faces inches from mine.
I feed, they take. I feed, they take.
For a few minutes I am part of the flock.

Stanley Moss

It's funny the way they advertise for (500) days of summer now. The commercials make the film seem so comical, so humorous.

I just remember feeling overwhelmed with sorrow at the end of the movie. I tried to cheer myself up, but I don't know.

Anyway...went to a job interview in Manhattan today, on 5th Avenue. The man I met with was very nice; he works for this consulting firm. Anyway, the job was for a plastic surgery office (as an RN). He took my photo with his camera! Haha we shall see if I get a call back. Secretly, I'd prefer working in the OR at NYP hands-down to working in a private practice.

And then there's peds at SUNY Downstate. So perfect. I like dream about that position.

I love you, Weens. I feel you every day, and I want to love like you did and be less fearful.

Went to the First Presbyterian of Brooklyn today. It's on Henry Street, right across the apartment. The singing was amazing, I was floored. The choir was ridic, the congregation was welcoming. It was truly wonderful.

Lucia's coming to visit today. Did some serious apartment cleaning.

And I'm crossing my fingers on the job front:) It's looking up!

I am grateful for this life. I asked God for strength, and He answered me.

I love you, Cass.

they look like chips of flint

From The Writer's Almanac:

Not Swans

by Susan Ludvigson

I drive toward distant clouds and my mother's dying.
The quickened sky is mercury, it slithers
across the horizon. Against that liquid silence,
a V of birds crosses-sudden and silver.

They tilt, becoming white light as they turn, glitter
like shooting stars arcing slow motion out of the abyss,
not falling.
Now they look like chips of flint,
the arrow broken.
I think, This isn't myth-

they are not signs, not souls.
Reaching blue
again, they're ordinary ducks or maybe
Canada geese. Veering away they shoot
into the west, too far for my eyes, aching

as they do.

Never mind what I said
before. Those birds took my breath. I knew what it meant.



This is so beautiful. It is also true. It makes me think of Cassie and Grandpa, and when I rationalize in the moment but then know in looking back. But I knew all along.

I can appreciate the humor in wanting to do something for others that one cannot do for herself. For example, I want to be a psychiatrist...and I think I have a knack for sitting with people and helping them figure themselves out when life seems overwhelming. Yet I don't take my own advice...those positive coping mechanisms I know so well, the meditations, the progressive muscle relaxation, the deep breathing...I mean, I do these things, but inconsistently. And when things are really unpleasant, I do my typical check-out bullshit. Avoidance is like the most maladaptive coping mechanism ever. It solves shit. I mean, I worked with dual-diagnosis patients (those with substance use disorders and comorbid psychiatric diagnoses, both Axis I and II)--I can recognize that addicted self, the way it's easier to pick the substance or event to bring you that predictability than it is to be present amidst chaos, darkness, instability.


It's the same thing, basically.

And I don't want to be one of those doctors who espouses one thing and practices another. It drives me nuts, like the obese docs scolding patients in the primary care offices on the dangers of hypertension and metabolic syndrome.

I've always been able to intellectualize shit. To sit and think, to dwell.

It's as if I'm going through the motions, I can watch as the car approaches the guardrail in slow-motion, as it readies itself for destruction. I'm the driver. And yet I never swerve, I will myself to make impact.

These days I know I'm only getting by. I don't cry, I don't mope. I check out of life, I disappear. I clean, I shower, I do my ADLs. I don't worry too much, at least not consciously. But I know this isn't living.

The First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn (across the street from the apartment) has this message board; someone changes the board weekly and the quotations are always beautiful (perhaps trite, but just because it may be familiar it isn't any less true). It's by Nadia Boulanger: "It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift".

I feel like I've been so unworthy for so long. And yet it doesn't change.

Yesterday I saw (500) days of summer. And--not giving a shit about Augustine's bs about the dangers of doing this--I saw myself in each of the main characters (I'd like to think I resonated more with the guy than the girl...random aside). But every day things change. One moment I will be so in love with everything around me, and the next I'm disillusioned. One minute I can't even comprehend the absence of true, pure love, and the next, I wonder why the fuck anyone ever marries.

I feel so lost at times. But today I was running in the rain, running down the Promenade, and I felt like I was capable, like I could do this. It felt a bit flimsy, like I was this actress and that it's some temporary manner of being, but it still felt. I don't know if that makes sense. I mean, sometimes I wonder what I am doing in Brooklyn. Am I running away from everything? Am I facing life, and growing up? Am I loved, am I in love?

I am 24, I am in no rush to have the map to my future. But there's this scary, lurking dread that says, you never had to have it, but a sketch, an outline of sorts, it might help. Without it, maybe you'll never have anything, because you never had anything to be accountable to. You never had to make anything happen, you were just floating.

This is what the father always said of me, I was floating through life. I will give him my college years, they were a bit of a float. But I also want to know I am more than this, that I am not the things he needs me to be.

Some days, I wish the father would just die and get that bit of the story done with. I think it would save him and everyone involved a lot of grief and pain. I am not saying I wish him harm, I don't. I would never do anything to purposely hurt him as he has hurt me. But his parents died when he was 18, and part of me wonders if this would help us all, for him to be gone. I'm never going to be accepted by him, never loved unconditionally. I feel I do not need this, and I don't think I'm kidding myself. But he is such a miserable human being, he is a psychopath. And they do not get better, there exists no salvation, no rehabilitation. There is no empathy, only emptiness. And I want my mother to be happy, since she is capable of this. He is not happy--he is not able to feel what this means, and he is cruel without restraint.

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that these people just live on and on. In my life.

Part of me is this howling beast, that roaring sadness drowning out the quiet. Part of me somewhere is so beaten down, so hurt, so afraid of life. I miss Cassie, I miss my best friend. I miss my mom, I can't say I miss my sister because she's never really been one to me. There are times where I am all heat, burning with that question why--why do I get the worst kind of father, why has he abused everyone I care about for so long, why have we allowed it, why did the one being I loved and who loved me in the purest, deepest way die, why am I left with the broken home, the heartless heart?

Will I choose to be alone forever, since I'm so afraid to trust? Is it too terrifying to believe in those bits of words, the story of loving and losing besting never loving at all?

Am I building up walls as everything around me is collapsing?

God, please help me. Please give me strength and comfort me. I want to heal but I need to be healed.

a thing can't be saved from its parts

From Poetry Daily:

Prospect

It grew at that slant
alone, down there
beneath the cordons
of pitch pines
some lapse in definition
unsteadying
the trunk state—
the bristled shot branch
deposits its blossoms through branches.
The parts have no portion why not?
They cannot be counted why not?
They make the thing whole?
It grew at that slant.
Tints flashing up
from the buds
from the scaling off
barks, sap in the germ-slots of cones.
It had to stoop to come up.
A thing can't be saved from its parts?
It had to be blunt.
It grew at that slant.
And blooms back up in the branches.

Emily Wilson

Micrographia

Saw (500) days of summer today at Cobble Hill with Chris.

Thinking.

Love you, Cassie.

Really want the pedi job I interviewed for today. Fingers crossed.

Love you, Cassie.

Miss you, Cassie Marie.

I love you, Weens.

I love you, Cassie. I miss you so much.

Love you, Cassie.

Love you, Cassie.

I miss Cassie so much.

I love you, sweet baby.

remembering the prostitute in new york

From Poetry Daily:

Remembering the Prostitute in New York

Today I learned some lizards eat baby monkeys,
and am better for it, because I've been noticing
some things. Like, the older I get, the more
I resemble a baby monkey, wrinkled and hairless, small,

and lizards seem to be all around me.
The special on PBS showed one, a baby monkey,
get snatched by a lizard. It made me
feel like closing my eyes for a long time.

Next, the camera zoomed to a special, red-faced monkey
safe in a tree. I thought, my wife.
Next, one with a yellow mustache.
I thought, me again.

Tonight is part two and I'm excited to make my little connections.
For example, its preview showed a flat-faced monkey
with what looked like blue eye shadow. Immediately
I remembered the prostitute in New York.

Joe Betz

Michigan Quarterly Review
Summer 2009

frank mccourt's day

Sorry, Coco. It is Mr. McCourt's birthday today as well. I remember reading Angela's Ashes in eleventh grade, in my English elective (memoir).

If I need a reason to love Brooklyn, I have Miss Francie Nolan and Mr. Frank McCourt, one of whom was a living, breathing (tremendous) writer.

Here's a piece from Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac:

And it's the birthday of a great writer who passed away just last month, Frank McCourt, (books by this author) born on this day in Brooklyn (1930). His parents were Irish immigrants, and when Frank was four years old, the family moved back to Ireland. McCourt had a difficult childhood, living in extreme poverty with an alcoholic father who was often absent. Three of his six brothers and sisters died from malnutrition and disease. He wrote: "People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all — we were wet."

When Frank McCourt was 19, he managed to make it back to America, where he worked at a hotel and at a hat factory. Then he was drafted into the Army and fought in Germany. Afterward, the Army let him go to college on the GI bill, even though he didn't have a high school education. And from there, he became a teacher. He taught English in the New York public schools for 30 years, and he frequently told his students stories about his childhood.

And then, after he retired, he started to write his story. But he struggled with the voice. He had written about 20 pages, and one night he made a note for himself about something he wanted to write about the next day, and he jotted it down in a simple present tense. And it felt right, so the next day he started writing in the voice of a child, and that became his memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela's Ashes (1996). It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it stayed on the New York Times best seller list for two years. He followed it up with two more memoirs, 'Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005).

He said, "After a full belly all is poetry."

happy birthday, coco chanel

From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the woman who created "the little black dress": Coco Chanel, born Gabrielle Chanel in Saumur, France (1883). Her parents were poor, she was an illegitimate child, and when her mother died, she was sent to an orphanage. When she turned 18, she went to work for a tailor, and she also sang in cafés and concert halls. She was a mistress to one wealthy man and then another, and with the money they gave her, she set up her own millinery shop, which she opened in 1910. Soon her clothes became popular among the elite of Paris. She took men's styles and made them feminine — loose clothes made from jersey, short skirts, suits — and women were relieved to have comfortable clothes suddenly be stylish, and to get rid of the corsets that had been popular for many years. She expanded into the perfume business and created Chanel No. 5. She was still at work when she died in 1971, having ruled over the Paris fashion industry for almost 60 years.

She said, "Fashion fades, only style remains the same."

full of a silence that lodged itself like a stone

Two Poems

The Good Son

If God had come to me and said,
if you are willing to forget your self

you will find the cure for heart attacks and compose
the greatest symphonies,

I wouldn't have been sure of my answer.
Because there wouldn't have been enough

attention to my suffering. And that's unforgivable.
But I keep on forgiving myself

with God's love. And it's strange I should say this
because my mother died of a heart attack

after months in a hospital room full of a silence
that lodged itself like a stone in her throat.

And she thought I was wonderful

and would do anything for her.

Ocean

Goodbye again. Say there is a little song in my head

and because of it I can't sleep or change my mind
about the future. Now the song runs all the way down

to the beach where I sit as if the sky

were my room now. No one, not even you,
can hear me singing. Not even me.

As if the music rose from the mouth of the ocean.

No mouth. Like rain before it reaches us.
Like wind twirling dresses on the clothesline.

Who has no one has the history of the ocean.

Lord, give me two more days. So that
the last moments may be with someone.

Jason Shinder

Stupid Hope
Graywolf Press

Chris and I made cookies today.

My interview went well and everyone was so nice. Update soon.

Interview tomorrow. Nervous/excited!!!

Wii fit day two. Vitamins, exercise, fresh air, water...mmm, feelin good.

Wii fit today. Apparently I'm doing just fine. It was nice to sweat a bit, to let things out.

Sweat is good.

It's Saturday in Brooklyn. I had a Betty Smith bit to post for today, but I'll save it for next Saturday. I forgot about Francie Nolan today.

Love you, Cassie girl.

friday, one week in brooklyn

It is Friday and I'm in Brooklyn.

At this point, I'm less adept at stepping back, viewing myself from an outsider's perspective. I don't have the self-knowledge to know if this is okay, if my heart is opened or closed.

Sometimes I think there is nothing there at all, that this is not my reality since I'm 3000 miles away from family and starting over. I've always been a nomad, a traveler with no place to call home. Sometimes it's as if there is nothing there at all, but then each morning I wake after fitful stories of murder and terror in sleep, and I realize it must be there, buried underneath the calm.

Chris awakened me again this morning, I was yelling out in my sleep. He said I yelled, "boring and uninspired", "get the hell out of my room", and "get out" amongst other things.

I wish the father would flee from my dreams. I suppose he is but a prisoner there, chained and gagged by the jailer, by me.

I tell myself in the bright hours that I've released him, that he's gone. That he cannot hurt me 3,000 miles away from here.

And then I dream of the father brandishing knives, wielding fear as his weapon of choice.

Why do I subconsciously choose to bring harm to myself? I want to be freed of all of this. I want to cease dreaming of murder and chaos. I want to be happy during the daylight, truly joyful. Right now it's like an earthbound purgatory, a between state. I am invisible.

Yesterday the father emailed photos of new black Cocker Spaniel puppies after I requested we cease all communications (he lasted a few days before he started up again). I had a facial cleansing mask on and wet grief turned to mud on my face. I miss Cassie so much. There exists no one and nothing that shall ever replace the place she keeps in my heart. To see that new life--it scooped out the pulp of my heart. I know Cassie isn't gone, but to be comforted by her presence, her smell, those warm brown eyes, to hold her in my arms once more.

The days pass and I am getting better but I need to get it together faster. I need to go out and explore, I need to finish my med school applications so they aren't hanging over my head anymore. I do want to be a doctor, but right now I'm only stopping myself if I choose not to work on them. The funny thing is, it's mostly busy work, not even hard work. And I have an interview of sorts on Tuesday. I was estactic as I've been in a bit yesterday when I found out. I think working and getting my mind to focus on something else will only help heal wounds time can only mend.

they quit, they stop like pumps

Depression

by Henry Carlile

He is pushing a black Ford

through an empty street -

a car like his father's

that beat the flat roads like wind

in summer and brought him here.

He never forgave his father.

That was the year he left home.

Then there was talk of weather

and everyone was packing.

Windmills were stopped

all over Kansas.

He is thinking of fathers,

the ways they never forgive you,

withholding love like lust.

But they quit, they stop like pumps.

There is no way to

set them working again.

He is thinking of mothers,

how she could not know how he

half followed girls down dark streets

of his heart, how that loneliness

is passed to sons,

to the fathers of sons.

He is pushing a black Ford.

Its problem is such a heart

you cannot give it enough care.

Like a father it will quit.

And there is no end to this.

"Depression" from Running Lights by Henry Carlile. Copyright © 1981 by Henry Carlile.

The father sent photos of black Cocker Spaniel puppies via email. We are not communicating, and we had a conversation where I explained the reasoning behind this.

I opened the attachment and all I could see was my little sweet Cassie.

God, I miss her so much. I know she is forever in my heart. But I cannot wait for the day when we are reunited in Heaven.

I lost part of my soul, my heart. I lost my little sister. She is lost but a piece of her is found.

She gave me so much joy and I will always hold onto this but without her I am lost, I am in darkness.

I've applied to so many jobs.

I'm hell-bent and determined to land one soon.

I am a great RN, and it will happen. I believe the universe will hear this and an opportunity will arise shortly.

:)

By the by, I am exhausted and still looking to apply to offerings online at 11:30 pm. It's hard work but it shall pay off!

at the heart of a bramble

The Heart Under Your Heart

Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart
under his heart.
—James Richardson

The heart under your heart
is not the one you share
so readily so full of pleasantry
& tenderness

it is a single blackberry
at the heart of a bramble
or else some larger fruit
heavy the size of a fist

it is full of things
you have never shared with me
broken engagements bruises
& baking dishes

the scars on top of scars
of sixteen thousand pinpricks
the melody you want so much to carry
& always fear black fear

or so I imagine you have never shown me
& how could I expect you to
I also have a heart beneath my heart
perhaps you have seen or guessed

it is a beach at night
where the waves lap & the wind hisses
over a bank of thin
translucent orange & yellow jingle shells

on the far side of the harbor
the lighthouse beacon
shivers across the black water
& someone stands there waiting

Craig Arnold

The Paris Review
Summer 2009

Told the father I was in New York today.

Stressful day, update soon:)

Moved in officially today. Update soon:)

Brooklyn here I come!

Brooklyn tomorrow. I'm actually excited.

I'm free, God. I'm really free.

The father is sick, Jessica is too. I hope she gets strong and gets away. Mom is already on her way.

I feel a bit scared, even 3000 miles away. But I realize it's my own brain, it's my decision to live in fear. I have to cut myself off from the father and realize I am worthy, I am intelligent, I can become a doctor and get a job as a nurse.

I can do it.

Free. It feels funny flying on my own, but a good kind of funny.

So tired.

Today was a bit of trashing/collecting items for Goodwill. Brooklyn soon...nervous still.

This is scary.

I miss my Mom.

And the West Coast.

But less the West Coast because the father occupies that region.

The East Coast just isn't home to me.

I love you, Cassie.

Oakland airport tomorrow. Packing isn't even close to being settled. I abhor packing more than anything (not really, but it is up there). Tomorrow should be interesting.

I am nervous to move to Brooklyn and leave my mother, my sister, and Em.

I'll miss Kat and Nicole.

Everything will be foreign and new, and I know Chris and I are going to have a rough time getting used to living with one another.

I love you, Cassie.

grateful and weary

Today I received a card from EB about Cassie.

It really meant more than I can write in words.

My mom got the bill for the euthanasia as she was going through the mail this evening. She broke down.

She said today, "I hate your father for what he's doing...he didn't give us any time to grieve". And she is right...Jon is so ill at this point. He poisons everything he touches.

I have decided I'm shipping off to Brooklyn, my plane leaves Monday night. I'll be pretty devastated to leave my mom and Emma, but I need to do this for the both of us. I need a job and I need money, and I don't have either here in California. I'll miss Kat very much, too.

I'm strong. I don't really have a choice.

I love you, sweet Cassie.

happy birthday, j.k. rowling!

I loved the Harry Potter series. I read the initial book when it first came out and I've looked forward to the new books each year for seven years (and, since my birthday is July 23, I always received the book for my birthday and I looked forward to it each and every year!). It's funny to me since the actor who plays Harry in the films and I share a day of birth as well. I must say I was not into the movies until later and I still adore the books even more than the films made based upon Rowling's amazing plots.

As an English major, I've listened to a lot of people trash her as a writer. I have to set my foot down and disagree with them. Her plot is so complex, yet everything works. I respect the television series Arrested Development for the same reasons. Plus, she's achieved so much success as a writer...and she's a woman. Pretty damn inspiring! So here's a piece from The Writer's Almanac for today's date:

It's the birthday of children's fantasy writer J.K. Rowling, (books by this author) born Joanne Rowling in Yate, England (1965).

Rowling grew up in rural England. She tried writing a couple of novels, but never finished them. One day on a cross-country train trip, the idea of Harry Potter just appeared in her mind. She didn't have a pen to write things down, so she said: "Rather than try to write it, I had to think it. And I think that was a very good thing. I was besieged by a mass of detail, and if it didn't survive that journey, it probably wasn't worth remembering." As soon as she got home, she started writing what she did remember.

But her personal life was falling apart. She said: "A mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. … I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

It took J.K. Rowling awhile to find a publisher for her novel, but finally it was published: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (published in the U.S. as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone). It started with a print run of 1,000 copies. The last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), had a first print run of 12 million copies in the United States, the largest first printing of any book in history. Altogether, the series has sold more than 400 million copies. She said, "I would like to think that readers enjoy my stories because they are simply good stories."