“I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees”

We are all off to Washington D.C. tomorrow—that is if we can pack and actually make the plane. Vacations are too much work. Vacations to visit ones family or family in law should really be called something else. I adore E’s family. I’m just not ready for them.

Ready would be having clean clothes to wear. Ready would be having children packed with thus clean clothes and ready would also mean being relaxed and not having to take piles of work with you because your boss doesn’t truly understand the meaning of “famcation”.

I want to see trees in bloom. I want to look at amazing art. I want to lie in bed with the one I love while grandparents feed my kids pancakes. But right now, I’d also settle for a clean pair of jeans.

happy birthday my oldest one...

 

There are poppies blooming on my kitchen table. Orange, red and one that looks like the inner pink of a shell when it is still in the water. I love that pink. I have spent the evening being a human taxi and it also seems that while I was sleeping, or writing or trying to figure myself out, my eldest child decided to grow up and turn 15 this week.

Side note: people are continually asking me how old my children are and then completely freaking out that I have a 15 year old daughter. I want to take this as a compliment, but most of the time I just think they are making judgment about my decision to procreate at 26.

I really want to believe it is the vitamin C skin cream I wear but I don’t.

I haven’t read a good book of poetry in what feels like a 100 years and it is really making me sad. I want a really good, good, good book. Please poetry gods send me one. Please. I’ll share my skin cream.

Yesterday was a good day. It was almost 40 here in Minnesota which is like 60 in other parts of the world. People were out jogging, wearing shorts and I swear to god I smelt Barbeque. We went to our favorite Salvage place that we haven’t been to in about six months and dug through all the furniture and junk and ended up buying an old church window frame that Em says is for the wall and I say is for the garden. My garden deserves beauty damn it.

We also go this really funky dresser for our bedroom which will hold all the clothes that the Clothes Whore posses. Well maybe. She really is a clothes whore.

I’m over my funk of facebook and looking up certain people from middle school and comparing my life and publications. It was short lived but it was painful.

We also went to see Rachel’s Wedding after drinking several pitchers of beer. Light beer. So really a half of glass of real beer and it was brilliant. The movie not the beer. I want that wedding minus the drama. I want the music. I will take the friends but not the little black dog with the spangles around his desk. I do have my limits.

I also went to the book store and got:

For Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander for a buck
Gilead by Marilynee Robinson which I started a year ago and somehow lost under my bed…2 bucks
At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid….three bucks but so worth it
Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson…I love buck day
Moby Dick…I working on my bbc list. I swear to god I will get that whale
and Digging To America by Anne Tyler which was 6 bucks and I could see E’s eyes bulge slightly when I walked out with a bag of books but hey it was topical outside and this is what I do.

Do you remember the first person you were ever compared to and not measuring up? Maybe you were both equal in something, maybe both brilliant. How different roads can be. What a role class and society play in a child’s life.

I hate the computer for giving me more information than I want sometimes and for making the myths I’ve told myself more real. But mostly, I hate that I only get this one life. Bust or burn. I only get this one life to be everything I want to be.

I’ve hated that since I was seven.

Okay so it is Saturday morning and I woke at 6:30 because poor Em has to go to work and I tried to be a good spouse and share the pain which meant basically just turning on the coffee pot. I have to go to a poetry craft talk this morning, way before poets should be allowed to walk the earth.

In fact there was a round of emails floating through the world last night about how no one wants to go and maybe if we all revolted in an organized manner it might be avoided. But as in life, there are always several kiss asses that just need to be good and ruin it for the rest of us.

And if you’re the famous poet giving the craft talk today and for some reason reading my blog. I’m sorry. I like you. I even like some of your poems. I just cannot be told to show up on a Saturday morning with a new poem that embraces music, takes on my personal weakness as a writer and turns it to strength, talks about race, loss of innocence and actually not be crap.

I can turn water into wine but I can’t do this.

Poetry Meme from Lloyd

What are the ten lines from poems or songs that stick in your head when you are walking around your day. Or if you stop a minute and think of some lines or poetry, what comes up? It’s fine if you distort the line as you remember it, if you mis- remember it. I think that’s interesting--


1. lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. – Anne Sexton

2. I could see as I laid the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes--Brigit Pegeen Kelly

3. One day it happens: what you have feared all your life— Marie Howe

4. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary-- Margaret Atwood

5. I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning. Stevie Smith

6. And the three men I admire most, the father, son and the holy ghost – Don McLean

7. I am in love with a certain kind of cloud – Olena Kalytiak Davis

8. Smart lad, to slip away from fields where glory does not stay--A. E. Housman

9. All my gods are profane, speak without purpose or memory--Ballard

10. We whispered yes, there on the intricate balconies of breath, overlooking the rest of our lives—Carolyn Forche

I started the day by trying to roast some Poblano Chiles with the gas flame from my stove. I researched it last night by watching a google video, where this nice old lady gently turns the peppers while humming a little Spanish melody.

So that was my goal for the day and not the burnt fingers, or the pepper catching fire like some Indian god or the swearing but I roasted them god damn it, peeled their skin and stuffed them with goat cheese and walnuts, dipped them in batter, fried and served them on brown rice.

I think I could have cured cancer in the time it took to make ‘em but Em says it was the best thing she has ever put in her mouth, which both insulted and pleased me greatly.

I don’t think I am making it for breakfast tomorrow but I do want to try it with a bit of mango next time. I can't believe I am actually uttering the words, next time.

okay so I had to write a 900 word short story that had such a distinct sense of place that it could not happen anywhere else and only involve one character in that place. Oh and it helped if it was interesting and not total crap;) Yes, I know it is 908 but hell other than that......

Scope

It was amazing how quickly the gun became an extension of his body, if he moved his arm the gun raised slightly and if he turned his head, the gun itself changed direction. When he was a boy, he was so afraid of the climb up the tree to the stand, the gun tucked under his arm, even with an empty chamber he imagined somehow the gun would discharge and he would be like those armless boys in war or worse, like that boy in his high school class, who chopped off both his arms in the turbine.

Ed moved his left arm and wiggled his fingers out from under the cuff of his shirt and put on his favorite hunting glove, just one, leaving his trigger hand free. Serves him right, the stupid shit, there are rules to be followed. If you want to get totally wasted do it in a tree, or boat, or in your father’s barn, don’t climb a damn tractor and take it for a joy ride.

But those sorts of types always won. Hadn’t he seen the boy on T.V., all proud, two empty sleeves waving, as if he just playing a joke on them all, tucking his arms tight against his body. Possibly, it was a joke, maybe it was a joke on the whole town so he could get a bit of money, move away and now he was probably finger fucking some girl in his fancy car, with the roof down.

A redwing blackbird landed on the tree, his gun rose, and Ed took aim. Maybe if he was a boy, he would have shot the bird, but here’s the thing. Now that he had begun to work, his mind started to add up the cost of the bullet, time of cleaning out the gun. Everything had lost its swagger and it took twenty dollars just to make his truck move out of the driveway. He now knew how much things cost. Besides he was hunting, and one shot would be heard by every house for miles and they would wonder why he was hunting out of season. Besides, a shot would make her change her path and he had now been waiting two hours, just for the two of them to walk home from school.

His brother was one of those boys, like the tractor boy. He was not as tall as Ed; his brother looked like a willow branch that broke off in too many directions, whereas Ed had been born a man. His father’s first son, even if he didn’t bear his father’s name. See, this is what he was talking about, here he was everything a father would want in a boy and his father took one look at him and named him after some dead uncle that Ed had never met while John, this weak mewing kitten had his father’s name, and he was a third for Christ’s sake, John Richard the third.
So Ed, spent his boyhood explaining that yes, he was older and people looked confused, when they met both boys together, as if Ed had a secret blemish that only his father understood. Well, it certainly wasn’t physical. Ed leaned his back against the red maple and raised himself up so that he was crouching now in the thick of the leaves. He practiced watching the bird move in and out of his scope like a cameraman setting up the pose.

Yes, his brother would think all this was beautiful and take out his sketch book and draw the bird, the bark on the tree, even Ed crouched down like this in the cold. John would believe all this was something.

But Ed just wanted to follow them with his scope, taking in every inch, losing himself in her, like he always did when she was in the room and he was still her first, wasn’t he? He was indeed the beautiful boy, he had driven her out to his father’s field behind Oven Gully Road, fucked her on top of the hood. He had done all this before he had even looked at her. Before he had noticed the way she tucked her hair behind her an ear, or raised her chin with even the slightest noise, before she loved his brother.

Now it was as if all of her was in him, like the smell of animal while he was tracking. It separated itself from the rest of his body. He believed he could find her anywhere, even if they had hidden her body under the earth. He wanted to smell her underwear, the fresh dirt of her cunt and know her taste again. Now that he was paying attention. He needed Mary to know he was paying attention.

And it wasn’t that he wanted to scare them. He needed to know, for her and John to know, that he held them. Even though John would never know about the hood of car, as tempting as it was, to walk into his room every night, while he was sketching her in his book and to say by the way, I fucked her, you know, the girl you never touched, the one whose shoulder you are now tracing. I’ve had her in my mouth. I was first. And now, I can hold you both in my scope. I can decide everything.

Ed just wanted them both to know that.