in the presence of the real

So many things today brought out the goosebumps on my arms.

sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor

I'm trying to be glad. I should say I'm glad for a ride home though the rain today after work, and yesterday it was me being glad for the way the purple dress swirled around my knees just as the wine swirled in my glass. I am so thankful to have been grafted onto a family of strength and goodness and perspective. I thought it was just me biting back tears during the speech, and I thought that was just me being a girl. I guess not, though--I wasn't the only one.
You quicken my pulse.
Anyway, in less oh-please-just-SAY-it news, I'm pleased to have come up to the three day weekend I always forget to anticipate. I have just a few things in it: a wedding to attend in a church whose name made my father giggle, a lunch date, a loosening of my hamstrings and a pas de deux with an external harddrive full of music.
I was always planning on letting tonight's sleep stretch out long enough to ease the tightness in my belly. There's no way I won't wake up feeling better in the morning.

BREAKING DOWN

I want you to know, receptionist,
that you should take this attack
personally. It is because of you,
and your policies, that I am not
believed, cared for, or even,
however inexpertly, cradled against myself.

I am forced to rip the telephone
from its wall because I am unable
to read any longer the names in the directory.
I have to kick chairs across the floor
to make one small point.
I want you to know
I am not impressed by your computer
which has denied me admission.
I can scream all night right here,
kick the policemen in the leg,
tear the thermostat off the wall
with my own hands and run
with it into the parking lot,
because I don’t care about consequences
or decency or my reputation as a citizen.

I can see the end of my life
in each parked car, hunched,
shivering over each wheel. I can see
the moonlight falling from the sky like knives.
I can see the sad buildings of the hospital
with the sick in their arms, grieving,
like the Virgin, the broken bodies
falling like rubble after a bombing.
No wonder I am screaming. No wonder.

-Deborah Boe

blessed limitation

I'm glad today to be up to my elbows in scholarly articles whose titles I can't even begin to understand. Cyanogenesis in Acacia subgenus Aculeiferum. Formal and Systematic Operations as Observed in a "Piagetian" Balance-Beam Task Series. Cross-cultural applications of Yodai mnemonics. It is such a relief to me that I lack the ability to comprehend everything that comes across my desk. It's like the way I feel when I hear an unfamiliar language, like Russian, maybe, or Chinese, being spoken. It is fluid, sonorous, and so unfamiliar to me that it skips right over bewildering and lands at beautiful. I don't have enough power to differentiate fragments of meaning, so it's a whole. And there's so much relief in coming into contact with an unfamiliar whole, especially on a day like today when, besides my mind, all the muscles in me are uptight and aching.

I am not overwhelmed. I feel fine.

Today I am a one-woman earthquake, shaking the carpet with the balls of my feet, a surface of scars that heal in the rain long before I've memorized them.
I am not overwhelmed. I feel fine.
I feel psychedelic carwashes and pinto beans and stretched out quadriceps. I am thinking of cracked heels and moonshine, the way the one feels and the other tastes, and how last night they were the same.
I suppose I'm not ordinary, in the way everyone is not ordinary, but I do feel it. I feel normal. I feel like I'm not-that-clever and not-that-brave and not-that-kind. I am enough, but I am the same brand of everything as everyone else is. So I take solace in the way that (I am sure) there is beauty in a blade of grass or a big bowl of chili. I mean, the way a thing you could find anywhere else is still exactly what you want when it's right in front of you.

stranger self

I have been thoroughly and most convincingly divorced from the lumpish, unhappy and jealous self I saw in the old home videos from twelve years ago. What startles me, though, is that I cannot remember how I felt, so how can I guard against once more sinking back into the couch, leaning forward so my hair covers my face? I can't atone for those failings, and I can't communicate back to who I was to warn, clawing at the soft arms and sad face, that I should stop, and hold steady, because it's true--I beg, on behalf of a dozen years onward and the stranger I did become--that with this poison, I am being held accountable for the actions of a miserable alien.

spoiled

I curdled because
I was jealous
and how do you admit that?
I love you and I'm glad
you feel this
but I congealed and
turned my back on
you
because I only wish I could feel it
too.

one year

I don't trust the soles of my feet or the upward bowing of my back away from the cold morning linoleum.

Virginia

I feel like I was in the south today, and I think it's because I was in the sun and because today I ate like, four kinds of meat. But maybe also it was the Civil War this morning, with the dusty blue and gray and proud horses and Dixie. And the peanut butter merangue pie for lunch at a place called the Southern Kitchen and the bumpy golf cart ride through knee-high grass to end in a timeless afternoon on a blanket on riotously green hill, watching the hawks and the swallows glide and dive up above our heads.

rum and silence

am drunk
and trying very hard to move in a way that
doesn't remind you of my mom's cancerbald head
or
the dark red blood welling up in my cuticles from where I bit them off
or
the stupid i-know-i-shouldn't
upwell of guilt from (again) (always)
feeling like there was more (or less)
i should have done
and the
i should not have pushed you away but how was i to know
you wouldn't follow

working it

I should very much like to have someone to flash today.

red silk

I'm pretty sure THE way to fix a rainy day and a
frustrating
escalating
desiccating
run of errands is to come home to a package in the mail
with your name on it and a perfectly uplifting gift inside.
And the way to keep the ball rolling is to
put on a coating of happy confidence and to
spend the evening with your family and your boyfriend's family
all together around the table
with the good food and
the hey, it's not so difficult.
And the way to absolutely ensure that you have won this day,
even in the face of the dreary rain and soggy bills,
is to
quick before you leave
wash all the dishes and scrub out the sink and
drape the dishcloth over the edge and walk out humming Norwegian Wood.

stiff

I am brittle this morning. I dealt with a sore neck last weekend—spent the last few days of the move holding myself gingerly after sleeping on it wrong. It hadn’t quite fully reverted to normal when yesterday I took a nap at an angle and woke this morning with my head too heavy to lift off the pillow. Ow, damn. I wonder if I’ve been wrecking cars in my sleep. And walking to work, that, too, hobbles me. I get to the office and take off my sneakers and sit down heavily in my Susan-chair. When I stand some minutes later it has to be gingerly. I keep my neck stationary and I uncurl my legs just a bit at a time. My first few steps are uneven and slow. It makes me feel flimsy. But I should be feeling good. I should be. Yesterday I had a dumb afternoon and took that out on the world and on my neck by sitting in stiff silence. My boyfriend asked, ‘are you ok?’ and I said, ‘I should be, shouldn’t I?’ Yes, I should be. I will stick my head right back into the sand as soon as my neck stops hurting.

only just getting started

I am sitting on the deck of my new apartment in the lounge chair that I kept leaving out in the rain. I can face the sun and stretch out my toes and my recent spate of over-dramatization seems silly. The air of urgency has flickered out.
The move is complete. This deck is mine. The inevitable panic and flurry and then loneliness of finals week at the university is over, and I can begin to adjust to fewer voices and fewer distractions. Sometimes this summer I will find myself turning to stare out the window for entire minutes at a time. It always ends up.
My mom found out she isn't a carrier for the breast cancer gene, and so it's more, well, it's more bad luck than fate that this is its second generation in our family. I guess I'm not surprised--carrying such a gene around doesn't sound like a thing a good little Mennonite family would do. So I no longer feel like I, too, am powerless against the seeds in my body that will one day begin to eat it away.
I have ideas again, and schemes. And an old Casio keyboard that is a pale comparison but still a workable substitute for the piano I've been missing. My day's only just getting started.

LOSSES

In time the missing limb stops throbbing;
the absent hand stops reaching out for cups
and keys and flecks of lint;
the lost foot stops its tapping.
Slowly the mind unlearns nerve ends,
learns to ignore what in this world
is impractical: an ideal finger, hand,
or foot, the insubstantial twinge of wings
we sometimes feel beyond our shoulders,
or the vestigial tail that in a drowse
of alcohol or carelessness
wags its full and shaggy length.

The dead, too, finally give up
their place at the table,
surrender their side of the bed,
stop insisting on present tense.
They come less and less often
to the shaded room,
speak less frequently in dreams.
If sometimes we hear ourselves talking
with their voices, find their eyes
in our mirrors, their hands
at the ends of our wrists,
we shrug in a way not entirely our own
and go on.

~Neal Bowers

fingers in my ears

I walked to work this morning with nothing in my head but my own voice talking me into and out of and into again following my gut versus following my brain. In the end, I decide on neither, and I sit at my desk, proverbial fingers in ears, striving blindly toward denial.

just GO AWAY and save yourself the angst

The filter between my thinking and my feeling was breached today, and so I did what I always do in these cases: eat Turkey Hill chocolate peanut butter ice cream straight from the carton and attempt (in vain) to convince everyone I come into contact with that I am just not worth the effort. It sucks so hard that neither of these ever sews me back up.

with apologies to my sister and any near enough neighbors

I'm sorry, but there is just something about this new apartment that makes me want to walk around without pants.

weekendstream

My baby brothers are college graduates and I have a wide open space on my bedroom floor--I've never had this before, and I've never had these sorts of shadows. Time has been making, apparently, less progress than I thought it was, and all the same, the toddler with the dark brown curls is inching ever closer to intelligibility and my head is finding the crook of your neck always and ever more my home. I walk barefoot through public restrooms and I grind my teeth behind your back. And you know why? It's because I can sense the pain inside you and I can't do anything to take it away. I've had a sore spot working its way down the edge of my spine and I've been trying to figure out how to make coffee for one, but I seem to end up three spoonfuls short. We're totally going to be ok here. I remember well when I thought I would be ok back there, too, and then I just started dropping things, like I was carrying heavy bags full of groceries up the stairs myself and one by one the eggs slid out with a wet cracking and I was left holding empty cartons and looking around for the first, the only thing that could keep me up. I love. I really do. Your undefinable charm, the way the ice cubes clink in the cup as I tilt it toward my mouth, and the way I what I give, I get back. I'm proud and I'm exhausted and dusty. It's been another day.

today's trilogy of greatness

I obviously have things to work out, like where to stick a third person and how to park without starting a war and how to get into my bed without losing my footing, but I'd have to say, on the balance, this apartment is a boon. It's a gift. Like the internet connection we can share with our across and down below neighbor, because we're cousins. True story. And the way my new bed is so large and so high above the ground that I can dangle my feet off the edge as much as I'd like.

It is gift number three in my today life. Number one would be a family to whom I will always look up, with parents who are warriors and siblings who are me, but better. And number two, which should actually probably be written in bold: I am so very loved by a man who's strong and sensitive, who makes me laugh and holds my hand, who finds the light in me when all I feel is heavy. Those, those right there, if you add them up--the lovely new home and the refuge of a family and the incredible burning assurance of being loved--that's why I'm sending thank yous out the open windows.

All that hoping on my behalf? It was not in vain.