Genre: Lyric Essay, Dramatic Monologue
Illustrations by Walter Gabrielson
"She's a real mess. And a very bad mother I'm sure, that Anna Nicole. Very bad, indeed. So I don't know what everyone is crying about. Just look at her. What'll bring you to tears is when you see her kid, the poor thing. That child hasn't a chance. Well, not that anyone is doing a very good job these days, raising their kids, I mean. The kids on this block nowadays. They're starving! My kids, they may have grown into strange people - my little Sherry, for instance, she's all talk about veganism and gluten-free pumpernickel toast and asparagus. But when she was a girl, you bet as sure as Sunday dinner she was well-fed. We were a real family. Oh, we were as happy on Tuesday afternoon as we were on Saturday evening. And my husband, may he rest in peace, he was a good man. We used to take the kids to the movies. I'd get all dolled-up and look real nice. My husband would tell me 'Sandy, you're as perfect as a painting. You're a real woman with pearl earrings.' The kids would have on their nice clothes. We knew how to do things up. And on Sunday we went to church with a real pastor, not these 'spiritual healers' they talk about nowadays. We were good Catholics and we never heard a word about 'Scientology' or 'psychiatry.' We were just good hardworking people. Not anymore, not these kids. They don't stand a chance. Not with the way things are now - Pop Stars molesting kids right off the street. Did you know there's parents who don't even let their little one's celebrate Christmas? They're all talk about 'commercialism' and 'where our forefathers went wrong.' They all think they know better. All these ideas these young parents have today... But I don't say anything. Dean and I just sit on the front stoop and watch them go by. Because I had a good life, look at me. I'm as happy on Tuesday afternoon as I am on Saturday evening."
29.6.07
28.6.07
Neither House Nor Harbor
Genre: Lyric Essay
My mother’s kitchen is filled with smoke from bacon that is being cooked in heavy butter on a frying pan. She is outside calling at a dumb-brained dog that I brought home from the pound when I was sixteen without her permission. She is yelling at the dog from the back porch that overlooks the harbor. Upstairs is a twenty-five year old woman named Lilith who works at the local organic food coop. Lilith lays on her bed and rolls her eyes at the sound of my mother’s yelling. Below Lilith’s room is the kitchen. The kitchen is old and wooden with counter tops that slant downwards towards the floor, sagging with their age. My mother runs inside the house, the dog following behind her with a grin on his face and mud on his paws.
The smoke rises from the pan and drenches the lace curtains, which have slowly turned yellow. Sunday after Sunday my mother cooks bacon in the pan, which is black from Sunday after Sunday’s worth of butter and bacon being left too long to cook. Sunday after Sunday the lace curtains are drenched in the smoke from the bacon. My mother scuffles into the kitchen and grabs a blue-and-white-checkered cloth and swoops up the pan, landing it on the butchers block counter. The bacon continues to sizzle as the butter slides across the pan with the slope of the counter top.
My mother turns around and bumps into the dog. When she looks down at him she sees his muddy paws and begins squawking at the trail of prints he has left behind him on the pine floors. She shoos the dog back out the door, waving the cloth at him as he cringes at her squawking. She bends over and attaches him to a leash that is tied to a post that holds up the porch roof. The porch roof is also sagging with age. The entire house looks as though it is melting.
Inside is the dining room, which is next to the kitchen where the bacon has stopped sizzling but continues to smoke below the lace curtains. In the dining room there are piles of magazines that my mother reads on Sundays as she eats her bacon and biscuits. Three years worth of The New Yorker spill from the wooden bookshelf that sits next to a down-stuffed chair where my mother does her reading. My mother runs back inside, not noticing that the kitten that belongs to Lilith, the woman who lives in one of the house’s three bedrooms, has ran out the door and into the yard behind her. She goes back into the kitchen waving at the smoke with the blue-and-white-checkered cloth.
Billy Holiday’s voice bellows from the stereo in the dining room. The volume of the music drowns out the sound of knocking on the front door. As the song ends my mother hears the knocking and scuttles from the kitchen, through the dining room and into the living room where she sees Levi on the front porch. Levi lives in the second spare bedroom and he has forgotten his keys. Lilith comes downstairs when smoke from the bacon has crept up the stairs and fills her room. Lilith is a vegan and hates when my mother cooks bacon on Sundays. Levi storms past my mother, who is blocking the stairs and past Lilith who is coming down the stairs. He runs up the stairs to get his keys. He is late to get to work at the wood shop where he works restoring antique sailboats.
I am on the phone with my mother as all this happens. I have never been to see her house on Squirrel Island. She moved there three years ago and rents out her spare rooms to young people because she 'can’t live with too much silence.' I have spent the last ten minutes listening quietly from my bed in my loft, a converted warehouse in in Bushwick, where my roommates are either not home or still sleeping. There are three of us living here and I have not seen anyone in three days.
I am listening to my mother mutter cheerfully through the phone about how much she loves Sundays – about how much she loves having a house filled with people – about how the dog loves living by the harbor where he can go on walks without a leash – about how Levi is helping her find a sailboat to buy before the summer – about how Lilith hates when she cooks bacon – about how the kitten and the dog are getting along – about how the lace curtains in the kitchen are turning yellow – about everything, until the three of them, my mother, Lilith, and Levi, collide at the staircase, which is now filled with smoke from the bacon and butter.
Lilith asks where her kitten is. Levi yells from upstairs asking if anyone has seen his keys. My mother says she must get off the phone ‘Levi lost the kitten’ she says ‘and Judith can’t find her keys – oh, and I think the bacon is still on the stove.’ I try to engage in some sort of formal good-bye but find the line dead before I can speak the words. I hang up the phone an turn into my pillow which is yellow because of one summer's worth of sweat and my hatred towards the long, quiet walk to the laundromat. My neck is damp and hot, though the fan is directly beside me. It doesn't cool my neck, just moves the warm air of my room which has no windows to the outdoors, just two squares cut into the top of the wall which look into the living room. The living room windows look into an alleyway. The alleyway looks down.
My mother’s kitchen is filled with smoke from bacon that is being cooked in heavy butter on a frying pan. She is outside calling at a dumb-brained dog that I brought home from the pound when I was sixteen without her permission. She is yelling at the dog from the back porch that overlooks the harbor. Upstairs is a twenty-five year old woman named Lilith who works at the local organic food coop. Lilith lays on her bed and rolls her eyes at the sound of my mother’s yelling. Below Lilith’s room is the kitchen. The kitchen is old and wooden with counter tops that slant downwards towards the floor, sagging with their age. My mother runs inside the house, the dog following behind her with a grin on his face and mud on his paws.
The smoke rises from the pan and drenches the lace curtains, which have slowly turned yellow. Sunday after Sunday my mother cooks bacon in the pan, which is black from Sunday after Sunday’s worth of butter and bacon being left too long to cook. Sunday after Sunday the lace curtains are drenched in the smoke from the bacon. My mother scuffles into the kitchen and grabs a blue-and-white-checkered cloth and swoops up the pan, landing it on the butchers block counter. The bacon continues to sizzle as the butter slides across the pan with the slope of the counter top.
My mother turns around and bumps into the dog. When she looks down at him she sees his muddy paws and begins squawking at the trail of prints he has left behind him on the pine floors. She shoos the dog back out the door, waving the cloth at him as he cringes at her squawking. She bends over and attaches him to a leash that is tied to a post that holds up the porch roof. The porch roof is also sagging with age. The entire house looks as though it is melting.
Inside is the dining room, which is next to the kitchen where the bacon has stopped sizzling but continues to smoke below the lace curtains. In the dining room there are piles of magazines that my mother reads on Sundays as she eats her bacon and biscuits. Three years worth of The New Yorker spill from the wooden bookshelf that sits next to a down-stuffed chair where my mother does her reading. My mother runs back inside, not noticing that the kitten that belongs to Lilith, the woman who lives in one of the house’s three bedrooms, has ran out the door and into the yard behind her. She goes back into the kitchen waving at the smoke with the blue-and-white-checkered cloth.
Billy Holiday’s voice bellows from the stereo in the dining room. The volume of the music drowns out the sound of knocking on the front door. As the song ends my mother hears the knocking and scuttles from the kitchen, through the dining room and into the living room where she sees Levi on the front porch. Levi lives in the second spare bedroom and he has forgotten his keys. Lilith comes downstairs when smoke from the bacon has crept up the stairs and fills her room. Lilith is a vegan and hates when my mother cooks bacon on Sundays. Levi storms past my mother, who is blocking the stairs and past Lilith who is coming down the stairs. He runs up the stairs to get his keys. He is late to get to work at the wood shop where he works restoring antique sailboats.
I am on the phone with my mother as all this happens. I have never been to see her house on Squirrel Island. She moved there three years ago and rents out her spare rooms to young people because she 'can’t live with too much silence.' I have spent the last ten minutes listening quietly from my bed in my loft, a converted warehouse in in Bushwick, where my roommates are either not home or still sleeping. There are three of us living here and I have not seen anyone in three days.
I am listening to my mother mutter cheerfully through the phone about how much she loves Sundays – about how much she loves having a house filled with people – about how the dog loves living by the harbor where he can go on walks without a leash – about how Levi is helping her find a sailboat to buy before the summer – about how Lilith hates when she cooks bacon – about how the kitten and the dog are getting along – about how the lace curtains in the kitchen are turning yellow – about everything, until the three of them, my mother, Lilith, and Levi, collide at the staircase, which is now filled with smoke from the bacon and butter.
Lilith asks where her kitten is. Levi yells from upstairs asking if anyone has seen his keys. My mother says she must get off the phone ‘Levi lost the kitten’ she says ‘and Judith can’t find her keys – oh, and I think the bacon is still on the stove.’ I try to engage in some sort of formal good-bye but find the line dead before I can speak the words. I hang up the phone an turn into my pillow which is yellow because of one summer's worth of sweat and my hatred towards the long, quiet walk to the laundromat. My neck is damp and hot, though the fan is directly beside me. It doesn't cool my neck, just moves the warm air of my room which has no windows to the outdoors, just two squares cut into the top of the wall which look into the living room. The living room windows look into an alleyway. The alleyway looks down.
25.6.07
The Desk Dream
Genre: Lyric Essay
I, like you and any other attentive person, hear a good deal of interesting things day to day. Some are more interesting than others (last January during a horrible storm my building's super told me that more than 10% of the world's salt is used to de-ice American streets and sidewalks). And some are not interesting at all (the dull-voiced boy at the market loves to remind me that 'Eggplants aren't vegetables, they're really fruits,' which, I'll add, I'm not sure is true). Like most attentive people, I have forgotten a great many of the interesting things I've heard. Often times, the less interesting things pass through my mind as I lay in bed at night trying earnestly to recall the interesting things. That is how it happened I came to fight Virginia Wolfe (oh yes, I know - how boring).
Did you know, Virginia Wolfe once mused on her life? I'm sure you did. What I mean to say is there was a time before the river. Before her mind had come to questions like, how heavy a stone to sink a woman my size? (large, but small enough to fit in the pocket of her coat). Yes, she wrote of her life without considering her sort of mortal end. She wrote of how she imagined her life in furniture form (with corners and shelves).
She imagined her life being a great big desk, or so she wrote.
This is not an entirely interesting thing. A desk, holding papers, dripping candle wax and bleeding ink from it's oaken pores, like her (oh that drama queen, the Sinking Princess). And it was this less than interesting thing - a relatively dull musing (The Desk's) and my musing upon it that brought her to my dream.
Many have told me not to bore others (and I suppose myself) with writings about dreams and meanings. I rarely take notice of what other advise and will do just half of this. I will tell you of the dream and spare you the meaning (anyhow, you'd be at a loss, I'm sure). Nonetheless,
Because I am too late (too young and have seen The Hours) Virginia (The Desk) looked much more like an actress playing herself (Virginia 4.0, not Nicole Kidman - no prosthetics, but a cheaper, softer version - yes).
As I lay in bed thinking of her, I asked myself... would you (me, the dreamer) be a desk? and falling asleep I answered,
*
Why, yes. What a desk I'd be. I'd be wanting. If I were a desk I’d be wanting to be a bed. And I agreed. That is, before she came hammering. Yes, Virgina came to my door. I opened it and thought: Virgina's fist are peculiar little acorns, and turned to see her rattling the windowsills of my apartment.
'All in the name of! All in the early hour of!' I screamed (which, in a dream, sounds like a scream but underwater) .
'All in the name of misinterpretation,' she said. She continued, 'you've misinterpreted me.' And I told her, 'I am bored with you, Pestering Woman.’
'What did you say?' - Her question.
And my unexpected answer was to let her in, and sit her on my couch. I reminded her that she knew boredom well. I reminded her that she understood bitterness, like mine. I told her I was bitter with her for stealing all my short paragraphs, for taking out narrative and filling it in with tea parties and ‘I’ll get the flowers myself.’
(It’s an awful thing to quote an author in your coy assault on them) And when she bit her lip and turned to the side, I saw her then an awkward girl. Not -The Desk- but more The Cafeteria table. She slumped beside me, and I pressed my thumb on the nape of her neck. And then (with something like a sniffle, but in poetics and with rhyme) she said:
‘If you, The Dreamer, were a book it’d be Kundera’s' (somehow she knew I hated that book). I stopped and thought of Prague (it's not really pink, you know). I grew angry. How dull. Unbearable Lightness, a sham. I yelled.
'Life and death, I?'
'Heaviness and Lightness, I?'
'From first to last?' and I put my index finger over her mouth.
‘You're nothing but a shallow conflict. ’ she went on ‘The reader, left to try,to decide which life is happier: light or the dark? grace or weight?’
'What is so unbearable about lightness, Fickle Heart?' she asked.
Only she doesn't (didn't, or never did) know the charm, that Virgina, that smoked-fruit. She was never light. She could only write with lightness. And even then she wrote of flowers so as to describe the grey hallways in which they sat.
*
And then, that falling feeling. From the bed to awake as loud as the alarm clock stops. And I was awake – awake and with the the realization that, with no hope of knowing the right, the shady pathways from the wrong, there is no wrong path.
Absolved of mistakes. The necessity of significance. And she wasn't there in my bed (because then was a dream and now was awake). I thought of Virgina and her sense of weight, a stone in her coat. Because what happens once never happened. And I fell back asleep with no stone in my pocket. It did not happen once for her, but over and over until her final waltz into the currents that be. And now here I am, telling you (in some detail) about this less than interesting thing, a dream about Virgina Wolfe. But I will not tell you the meaning. That would be boring. Which is, of course, to assume you are like those who advise not to write of dreams - those stubborn minds who have yet to realize that the dream is the meaning as soon as one tells it to a third party. That is to say all this really means is I'm the sort of person who dreams about The Desk.
I, like you and any other attentive person, hear a good deal of interesting things day to day. Some are more interesting than others (last January during a horrible storm my building's super told me that more than 10% of the world's salt is used to de-ice American streets and sidewalks). And some are not interesting at all (the dull-voiced boy at the market loves to remind me that 'Eggplants aren't vegetables, they're really fruits,' which, I'll add, I'm not sure is true). Like most attentive people, I have forgotten a great many of the interesting things I've heard. Often times, the less interesting things pass through my mind as I lay in bed at night trying earnestly to recall the interesting things. That is how it happened I came to fight Virginia Wolfe (oh yes, I know - how boring).
Did you know, Virginia Wolfe once mused on her life? I'm sure you did. What I mean to say is there was a time before the river. Before her mind had come to questions like, how heavy a stone to sink a woman my size? (large, but small enough to fit in the pocket of her coat). Yes, she wrote of her life without considering her sort of mortal end. She wrote of how she imagined her life in furniture form (with corners and shelves).
She imagined her life being a great big desk, or so she wrote.
This is not an entirely interesting thing. A desk, holding papers, dripping candle wax and bleeding ink from it's oaken pores, like her (oh that drama queen, the Sinking Princess). And it was this less than interesting thing - a relatively dull musing (The Desk's) and my musing upon it that brought her to my dream.
Many have told me not to bore others (and I suppose myself) with writings about dreams and meanings. I rarely take notice of what other advise and will do just half of this. I will tell you of the dream and spare you the meaning (anyhow, you'd be at a loss, I'm sure). Nonetheless,
Because I am too late (too young and have seen The Hours) Virginia (The Desk) looked much more like an actress playing herself (Virginia 4.0, not Nicole Kidman - no prosthetics, but a cheaper, softer version - yes).
As I lay in bed thinking of her, I asked myself... would you (me, the dreamer) be a desk? and falling asleep I answered,
*
Why, yes. What a desk I'd be. I'd be wanting. If I were a desk I’d be wanting to be a bed. And I agreed. That is, before she came hammering. Yes, Virgina came to my door. I opened it and thought: Virgina's fist are peculiar little acorns, and turned to see her rattling the windowsills of my apartment.
'All in the name of! All in the early hour of!' I screamed (which, in a dream, sounds like a scream but underwater) .
'All in the name of misinterpretation,' she said. She continued, 'you've misinterpreted me.' And I told her, 'I am bored with you, Pestering Woman.’
'What did you say?' - Her question.
And my unexpected answer was to let her in, and sit her on my couch. I reminded her that she knew boredom well. I reminded her that she understood bitterness, like mine. I told her I was bitter with her for stealing all my short paragraphs, for taking out narrative and filling it in with tea parties and ‘I’ll get the flowers myself.’
(It’s an awful thing to quote an author in your coy assault on them) And when she bit her lip and turned to the side, I saw her then an awkward girl. Not -The Desk- but more The Cafeteria table. She slumped beside me, and I pressed my thumb on the nape of her neck. And then (with something like a sniffle, but in poetics and with rhyme) she said:
‘If you, The Dreamer, were a book it’d be Kundera’s' (somehow she knew I hated that book). I stopped and thought of Prague (it's not really pink, you know). I grew angry. How dull. Unbearable Lightness, a sham. I yelled.
'Life and death, I?'
'Heaviness and Lightness, I?'
'From first to last?' and I put my index finger over her mouth.
‘You're nothing but a shallow conflict. ’ she went on ‘The reader, left to try,to decide which life is happier: light or the dark? grace or weight?’
'What is so unbearable about lightness, Fickle Heart?' she asked.
Only she doesn't (didn't, or never did) know the charm, that Virgina, that smoked-fruit. She was never light. She could only write with lightness. And even then she wrote of flowers so as to describe the grey hallways in which they sat.
*
And then, that falling feeling. From the bed to awake as loud as the alarm clock stops. And I was awake – awake and with the the realization that, with no hope of knowing the right, the shady pathways from the wrong, there is no wrong path.
Absolved of mistakes. The necessity of significance. And she wasn't there in my bed (because then was a dream and now was awake). I thought of Virgina and her sense of weight, a stone in her coat. Because what happens once never happened. And I fell back asleep with no stone in my pocket. It did not happen once for her, but over and over until her final waltz into the currents that be. And now here I am, telling you (in some detail) about this less than interesting thing, a dream about Virgina Wolfe. But I will not tell you the meaning. That would be boring. Which is, of course, to assume you are like those who advise not to write of dreams - those stubborn minds who have yet to realize that the dream is the meaning as soon as one tells it to a third party. That is to say all this really means is I'm the sort of person who dreams about The Desk.
20.6.07
Limp
“Unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity. While the female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.”-George Gilder 