What Will We Do? Soon, Said I, Will Know

Consider the osprey drying out her wings. Neck and face white, bent water wings outstretched just so; she, shaking them off perched high on a dead tree, no leaves. She sits. Quietly.
The rain has stopped. And she is stooped.
And you?
You are thrilled to see this excellent bird, precision fisher, gorgeous gal of the sky just sitting.
*
Consider the infant. The pink-cheeked tiny life who can not know why she cries. The mom, the dad -- they 'shhhh' and 'it's okay' until they just can not take it.
And I want to run to them and say 'shhh' and 'it's okay' and hold the tiny so they can breathe.
I do not and I am amiss.
*
Animal is animal is animal.

Let's Love Now Cause Soon Enough We'll Die

I have been unpacking the dead lately.

The rooms of my heart are stacked with boxes holding the dead all swaddled, nicely, and put away. I unwrap each trinket from faded newspaper, blow on it to get the excess dust, and place it kindly on the shelf next to my grandmother's mirror. 

Particularly, I've been searching for my dad's laugh. I thought I bundled it between his last catfish caught and his porch swing. (Sometimes, he'd get that swing going so fast my tiny-blonde anxieties were exposed.) I've sifted through the day my mom moved us out of the house on my 12th birthday and my black and white cat getting smashed on the highway in front of our house.

I need help finding it. I'm desperate.

 

Tell Me, Are you a Christian, Child. I said, Ma'am I am Tonight

Be careful with the word deserve, my papa says. Don't throw it around. 

* - * - *

Yesterday, like every June 11th for the last 16 years, I acknowledged the dead. Sacrificed to the fire gods, gods of grief and chaos, to the quiet, to the natural order of life.
 I swallowed down so many 'what if's' and 'I wish' and 'but, why's' to turn my stomach sour. I kept my body still or slow, hands close to my rib cage, and my mouth closed.

* - * - *

Sixteen years ago on June 11th, I woke up to my dad screaming around 3:30 am. There was too much noise, too much smoke, too much tired to comprehend at that moment that my house was burning down. I stood up out of bed and immediately was forced to the ground -- smoke, as they say, is no joke. Confusion and incessant screaming forced me, on my knees, to the living room: rage, hot, orange, loud. Instincts said back door. I saw his legs at the front door. He did not see me. He had a mole on the back of his right leg. I watched those legs walk out to clean air.

They say he went back into the house. They say they found his body in the kitchen. I envision, even still, half a body.

When I was 14, living in the country with a step-dad and post-divorced mom, one of our pigs got out of his pen in the night. I came upon the body in the morning before school, ripped apart and bloodied. Back legs and haunches in tact -- mangled in the middle, but head, heart, face gone This is always how I think of my dad's burnt body abandoned near the pantry.

What happened in those last few minutes? Do I deserve to know?

* - * - *

What if he could say: go on?
Could I?

Everything I Do I Do in Slow Motion

It's quiet right now.
Shadows are silk on my hands as I type.
The sun is about 6 inches from setting behind the vacant house next to mine. Once a group of people lived in the downstairs apartment there. Their troubles were heavier than mine in many ways; they let their dog shit in my yard. Once they drank beers on my porch with me and told about Diane's baby and jail time and working on mopeds and how hard it is to pay child support and how warm evenings remind them of when they were kids.
I remember feeling lucky. I still feel lucky.
How rude to feel lucky that my life isn't theirs.
What an egocentric circle to spin.
-
While on the issue of remembering, I want to say something here about summer. Something about milkweed. Something about a black dog named Cocoa; I used to press my ear against her belly, overflowing with puppies, and listen to the sacred movement. She was a good dog: my babysitter's dog with prune sized nipples pulled all the way to the ground. She followed me -- I was kind to her, to the ever flow of sweet puppies from her belly, to the snake my babysitter's boys killed with a slingshot. I ran to the cellar, sobbed; couldn't shake the writhing body, (innards ballooning out into the summer-evening, cool grass) out of my tiny-blonde mind. Something about cruelty. Something about growing up. Something right here about the sanctity of every Black Kingsnake. 
-
Look at that.
The shadows on my hands are heavier.
That sun found the roof.

You and Me, Babe, How 'bout it?

With fear of sounding over dramatic or forcing emotion from the reader like wringing out a rag, I want to tell you something:

There was a day in late July 2014 when I laid on the ground in the hallway outside my kitchen. We have a little runner rug the length of this hallway, and I just laid there on it sobbing. The consequence was all mine. The loneliness was insult to injury. The rubbed-red raw face was par for the course. This was the summer I thought I'd kill myself.

I didn't.

I only had a half-assed plan that probably would have failed -- but, each day that I was groping around in the dark, the plan was solidifying. The only clarity I had was accompanied by guilt -- and it just didn't seem like living was an appropriate response. I was in pain, my husband was in pain, most of my friends wouldn't talk to me, my family felt pity, my hair was falling out, I was losing weight, and I had stopped sitting in chairs, I only sat on the floor and cried about the affair.

That particular day in late July I was visiting my home: husband gone to work, my cats rubbing against my legs, the air smelling strongly of the familiarity I missed since staying in a friend's spare room. I lost my footing. Laid on the rug, cried, and called Sarah Miller Freehauf. Or she called me. I don't remember. I don't remember what she said, exactly. It was something along the lines of "you are still a good person" "still worthy of love" "still my friend" "still able to receive warmth and goodness" "still capable of giving warmth and goodness."

Somehow she convinced me to stand up that day and the many days after.
She and her (new) husband would hug me when others wouldn't look my way.
She called me everyday.
She would quell the panic by reminding me I was human.
She told me funny stories about her mom.
She told me things her mother said in response to my affair.
She picked me up some evenings and forced me to eat bar food.
She cried with me a lot of the time.
She wrote poems for me and about me and about the affair.
She was, by all means, at the ready when I needed her and I always needed her. And she knew it.
She helped save my life.
She was part of the very small troop who helped me off the rug.

I don't necessarily know how to write her a love letter that correctly and comprehensively covers everything I want and need to say, but this is the start of my love letter to her.


***************************
Thank you, Berry. 

You're My First Love

Monday I sat incredibly still for the first time in two years.

Added the last line breaks, capitalized the D in dad I forgot to, took out a few commas, and saved my 54 page manuscript-thesis as a complete and finished document.

Yesterday I packaged up two of these little babies and sent one to Mark Wunderlich and another to Ed Ochester. And as soon as I stepped outside the post office, I felt differently than what I anticipated. Empty. I felt empty. And maybe 'empty' isn't necessarily the *right* word; but I didn't feel great or light or unburdened.

I found a baby bird, almost dead. I brought the tiny thing back to life with care, intention, and food, lots and lots of love, mornings of conversation and even my own breath, sometimes. And, as time went on, that thing got gorgeous. She preened and perched everywhere; she fluttered throughout the house and slept quietly on my pillow. I loved her, you know? And when I sent her into the sky (when it was time); she didn't even turn around to watch me wave.

That's how I felt. Is that the same as empty?

I've Walked with You Once Upon a Dream

A woman I barely know told me, as I sat topless in a warm, quiet warm, that I am destroying my body; I am allowing stress to devour the structure of my physical being. I have allowed trauma to anchor itself along the fibers of my muscles -- I can't shake it and because of it, I'm breaking down.

I don't know how to exercise the chaos from my body. Where do I start? I suppose the better question is: when do I start, what time frame?

Life is, mostly, a hungry pandemonium. I want to starve it. There has to be a way -- so, I'm reaching around in the dark.

I'll let this healer heal me; knead my muscles and help me put my emotional injury in a box. I'll never be rid of that box, but I'll just pack it away in my attic and not in my tender back.

One day. One day.

This Gun's for Hire

Putting my manuscript thesis in a specific order and setting up an outline for my graduating lecture are the two things I have to do this month. Right now I have 37 poems finished. Waiting. They are waiting to be put in order so I have a manuscript. This is happening, people. I'm graduating from the Bennington Writing Seminars on January 16, 2016 with a Masters of Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry. This is happening.

I am overwhelmed.

But, surviving is not in the forefront of my headspace these days. In the way that all survival is instinctual, I am aware of it. But wondering if I'm going to die because of heart break or cellular decomposition due to grief, that's not there. Life is level. No vomiting over the starboard due to rough waves. And, I'll take it. I want my brain to concentrate on being overwhelmed with poetry. What an enormous thing: POETRY. But it's my thing. And I'm feeling ok.

Tomorrow We Can Drive Around This Town

All these things and what to do with them/ we carve up the world all the time.  - Richard Siken

There are parts of me everywhere. Lost in slate along my favorite lake's shore, in the sunshine that sets my hair on fire, at the bottom of a Gin and Club Soda, the crease along the spine of my favorite book, on the curve of every word I write, under my husband's fingernails, balling up on late summer leaves, in the quiet fizz of neon... just everywhere. I'm noticing this more.

I'm doing a thing where I'm listening to those tiny parts of me scattered around this world. It's proving to be beneficial on many levels: heart levels, brain levels, social levels. It is a good exercise on what is right and what is well; I'm excited about what this means for me. But also, sad.

Leaving the winery was not an easy decision; the dissonance is (still) tangible. I learned so much under the guidance of Eric and Dennis,  blossomed with creative freedom,  honed skills I knew I had hidden somewhere, made incredible bonds with people I would have never come across... Two-EEs has been good to me. But lately there has been a fragrant and deafening pull for elsewhere. I noticed when the pull was more of a subtle tug, and now I'm listening.

So. Onward! as they say.  

This is Your Heart, It's Alive, It's Pumping Blood

I admit it, okay?

Most of the time I do not think I'm a deserving human. I don't know where it originated; actually, I have an idea but I don't want to get into it today. But now that my poetry is being combed through by professional poets the issue is getting recognized. And called out. It's terrifying in all the ways it could be and therapeutic in ways I can't understand.

First things: 1) In your letter you say (casually), "I, mostly, am the worst person." No. You aren't. Dick Cheney is the worst person. You know what else? I think this steady self-deprecation of yours is really some kind of mask -- something you deploy to ward off the world and to beat others to the punch -- or something. 

That is an excerpt from the letter Mark Wunderlich wrote. To me. Yes, THAT Mark Wunderlich. And this Mark Wunderlich - and even THIS Mark Wunderlich. This man is my poetry mentor during my final term with the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Can you believe the goodness? My luck? Can you? I can't. I still can't. I'm overwhelmed.

I ripped open my correspondence with Mark as soon as Andy put it in my hands, sat down on our kitchen floor and sobbed.

You rely on writing how you're a bad person, how you hurt other people, how you had an affair and everyone hated you, etc. Life is too fucking short. He goes on: I wonder what would happen if you just wrote a poem about being awesome? About how much you love the parts of your body, or your mind...? What would happen? 

The letter went on and on with the most beautiful, personal, soul exposing words. He went through ALL of my poems and personally noted each one. Every single poem has his handwriting all over it. I am lucky. I am overpowered by what I get to experience, moved by my mentor, and down right scared to address the juggernaut of self-hate. But how exciting to think that I might deserve attention from an incredibly important poet, to think that I might be better than what I give myself credit for, to think that maybe, just maybe, I'll be okay.

I Don't F**k With You

I am not *just* your wine girl.
I am not a dying flower in your goddamned garden that needs dead-headed.
I am not just my figure, or my toned arms (though both are exceptional - I know).
I am not rude.
I am not just a loud energy you can't avoid.
I am not just a wife or a recovering adulteress.
I am not just the friend who suffers with depression.
I am not a gardener,
but I am a nurturer.

I am a writer -- a poet, to be precise. I am thoughtful and quite hospitable; someone has described me, even, as having a small town charm. I can navigate social situations with ease - avoiding awkward interactions with grace and making people feel comfortable are my specialities. With that said, I can also destroy you with just a few moves - strike that - with just a few words. I can be rowdy and reckless with your feelings, but only if I'm reciprocating. I am part hillbilly girl and sometimes she claws to get out. I am goddamned gorgeous, but that isn't it. I'm smart, too, you know? And passionate about a few things that could change the world if more people gave them the acknowledgement they deserve.

If we are friends: I'm tenacious about your feelings. If we aren't friends: I'm considerate and gentle. I can be rabid if you offend the sentiments of the people I care about. I know just what to do when emergencies happen -- all kinds of tragedies. I am familiar with birds and some trees and with geography. I can maneuver Indiana country roads with a crazy finesse. I am a hard worker -- I am an emotional worker. Nothing I do gets done without elbow grease and a tiny piece of my heart. I am a wife to a gracious, handsome man. I am mother to two beautiful kittens. And to succulents I'm trying not to kill.

So, let me tell you this: I am so much more than YOUR WINE GIRL. Limiting me exhibits more about your character than mine.

Dice Were Loaded from the Start

My therapist, recently, said that the universe is rigged in my favor. The energy I put out into the world is absorbed by an ever-loving, ever-growing, and balanced universe. I might find nuggets of love and little shoves forward hidden under rocks or in tall grass. That this whole big thing is some how tilted in my light.

My therapist, who recently, saved my life, said that to me in all seriousness.

I looked her straight in her eyes and told her, "I don't buy it." I don't mean to be contrary -- but come on. I didn't have time to recreate images of my childhood: alcoholism thick as humidity, emotional manipulation heavy on my little towhead, losing my dad to a hungry fire, my tiny best friend dying in my lap when I needed her most, holding on to what I could until my little finger nails were ripped from their beds... If the universe is rigged in my favor, why did I (why do WE) have to fist fight with it outside on the playground with rusty swings screaming in the wind?
*
Riding bikes downtown yesterday, I came across the carcass of this female Belted Kingfisher. It sickened and unsettled me in a way I can't really describe. She was roasting on the hot asphalt outside a bank pretty distant from any river where she should be diving. Yes, I took a picture. Yes, I screamed FUCK to the construction guys who were 4 stories up and heckling me: we shot it, they laughed. Yes, I took it as an offensive omen from the universe.  What an aggressive affront. A dead kingfisher might symbolize anything: my death or an act of terror at the winery via terrible customers or a foreboding cloud above my little head or plague or famine or drought. It might not, though. Who really knows. It could just mean everything is chaos and nothing makes sense.

In which case, nothing is rigged in our favor.

Heaven's Waiting on Down the Tracks

Jesus was either 30 or 32 when he volunteered to hang on a crucifix and die for me. Not SPECIFICALLY me -- not that he had visions of a small blonde sometime in the future, pouring wine, bad mouthing creeps, wearing all black and bright lipstick, and writing poetry -- but ME in the large sense. ME meaning you and me and my black cat and your mother and your mother's best friend's brother and his wife and his side chick and the person who checks out your library books. You get the meaning. The man was 30 (or 32).

Now, whether or not his dying for ME did anything in the cosmic scene  -- he felt he had to do it, so he damn well did it. He was a kind man, or at least he was rumored to be (except that one time he lost it and flipped tables (but who HASN'T done that)), who thought about other people constantly. He told the truth, though he sometimes talked in puzzles. And, if you ask me, suffered with anxiety. (How can one be part of the holy trinity and NOT have anxiety? Especially if you got the human third.)

This isn't about Jesus. It's about me. You knew that already, but I needed to point it out just in case. I'm a 32 year old human being. Let me be honest: there are only a select few of you I'd die for -- there are even more of you I'd NEVER think about dying for. I'm not like Jesus at all. But I'm going to start embracing his fervor for doing what I need to do.

I don't know exactly what that means though I have some ideas. And I feel the stir. I feel the stir and I know it's happening.

Sweet Potato Pie and I Shut My Mouth

Today I held 87 poems in my hand -- hot off the press -- I held 87 of my own poems in my own hand and had the incredible urge to cry.

I haven't had much experience with pride but today is the day I french kiss self-satisfaction. I might even get to third base. I held my poems in my hand. They aren't all great, most of them aren't even good, but they are mine. Each little word and line break hatched from intention. Each stanza a pick ax for mining my emotion with craft. Each a micro-universe. Each one breathing. And it's me, I'm the creator.

I can't stop touching the pages.

Today is pulsing.

I Got the Month of May

Let me tell you about what I did yesterday: I got out of bed, made my husband coffee, packed him a lunch, did chore related items, showered, marched up to my office and polished off a 20 page paper (31 pages with Works Cited and an Appendix).

Today: I got out of bed, made my husband coffee, packed him a lunch, did chore related items, went out to breakfast, and saved a nest of baby sparrows. It's true.

I watched a Blue Jay fly up to where I assumed a nest was - all the while 7 sparrows are screaming at him - so, I saved the day by hopping out of my car, clapping my hands together and screaming, "GET OUT OF HERE, BLUE JAY". He and 5 sparrows flew away and immediately, the petite female jumped right in the hole. I save birds in public. 

I've been taking walks when anxiety dips his toe in. I made hummingbird food. Bought pink roses. Wore my husbands dirty shirt. I'm doing important work, you guys. Every single thing I've done today and yesterday I register on the Extremely Valuable scale.

Three years ago, I was in the Painted Desert. Last year, in an emotional one.

And this year, I'm a better human than I've ever been.   

Got to be Something Better Than in the Middle

Saturday night, after a ridiculous shift at work, I had a few friends over to sip on a little Pecan Whiskey and talk about our lives before bed. Unwinding with girls and pecan whiskey is a good way to unwind. After Saturday shifts at my current job I mostly feel like blowing up buildings. Consistently. Instead, I drink and then go to bed. Where, coincidentally, I don't sleep well because I dream about the job soaked with job-related anxieties. What a terrible cycle, right?

Anyway - there were moments Saturday after work that I realized things have to change. There were moments in the goddamned craziness Saturday AT work that I realized things have to change. What a constant and terrible proverb for my life. So, these girls were sitting in my living room lamenting about bigger things in life, much bigger than jobs, and it hit me: I'm missing it because my brain is wrapped up with job related cellophane. I'm missing it.

How does it happen?

My Life Is Such a Weary Thing

I woke up this morning in the center of a paradise I know I don't deserve.

A warmth swept my entirety - my sweet husband's body curved around mine. His breathing ever steady in my ear. His familiarity surrounded me, the comfort I've known for over a decade. He knitted himself close even in his hurt, his tenderness always existing even in his sleep.

Draped over my shoulder, a purring cat. And another one sleeping on my exposed foot. I felt his little heart beat against my skin and his cool, tiny pads.

We were a winter tangle, a beautiful nest of gentle heat and sleepy bodies; tame mammals cooing and clutching one another. 

And for that one moment, I was the one thing every living soul in my home needed.

It only took a few seconds to remember that I don't deserve any of it. And that in a few hours (or minutes, who even knows about time in the middle of stolen contentment) I would wake up and it'd all be gone. And that the day wouldn't let me meditate on that sweetness. That instead I'd swell my eyes shut, crying, before lunch.

Feelin' Myself

I put my bed by the window because why wouldn't I? Why not wake up and look right out to a virgin Vermont morning, Green Mountains in the background? Why not be taken with a baker's dozen of crow minding their own business against a hazy-blue sky?

Sorry I'm bragging again. But I can't stop.

This is hallowed ground. I feel like I paint it like this: writers and deer and birds frolicking and bonding around a crackling fire, a world where poetry is even more a blood line than usual - and other people acknowledge the importance while braiding a bear's fur... I mean, it's not REALLY like that, but kind of. And books stacked up to my knees wherever I walk. And (this is a truth) a Red Tailed Hawk living in the trees near my room. Chickadees screaming their names and hopping from branch to branch -- and me, a part of it.

When did it become a reality that I, a poor girl from flat-Indiana, might actually be a writer by way of the mountains of Vermont?

Amen.

Look What They've Done to My Brain

It occurred to me, it might not be water pressure - it could be the shower head. I, then, did what anyone would do. I took the shower head off. It was disastrous for a moment, a fleeting and soaking moment, I probably should've waited until I was OUT of the shower, but it didn't seem right.

I had this weird little minute in the shower - water was unpredictable and heavy on my head and hot on my skin. Clark vacated, so I was alone in the bathroom. I don't know how to tell you this without just telling you this: I was having fun. This brief, chance moment in time nothing *really* was happening. Nothing really except everything was happening.

And as I stepped out of the shower (with a clear plan in mind: after work stop by Meijer to pick up a new shower head, new vinyl linings, and maybe, a loaf of bread) I realized that probably (knock on wood) I am coming back around. I survived this summer. I survived last winter. I survived the fall of my humanity. I survived hurting everyone around me (they survived, too). While kicking and gasping and fighting for life, patient people presented themselves to gently hold my head out of the water or convince me, wildly, to not give up.

There were other people, too. People who would theorize about my undoing and let it be known they had their theories. One certain person came to mind this morning: she's just doing this for attention she told one of my friends. He, of course, told me. That's okay, I needed to know who and how and why people were fighting me when I was fighting me. It's a particularly cruel thing to say about someone who, on a good day, could only stand up to lie back down again. And cry.

She's still out there in my immediate surroundings, I haven't seen her and that's okay. I don't really want to. I can't shake the thought that while I was crying myself to sleep she was telling mutual friends caviler-like that I wasn't hurting. Like she knew. Like anyone knew. She's still out there and I'm still out here - needing a shower head.

I'm coming back around. I survived summer and the winter before.

Hard Way Home

I have divided you up into camps. Three of them. I have discovered your camps more than created them. True, it may be unfair to clump you all together, but I have exactly no emotional energy to waste anymore -- so you are where you are. Most of you surprised me, ending up in sections of my heart that I never thought I'd put you. Keeping me on my toes.

I want to thank you all. Even the ones in the "doesn't give a fuck" camp - you've helped me along, liberated me. Down to bare bones vulnerability, in my darkest closet of self-loathing, you set me free. I don't have to worry about you anymore. Now, don't get me wrong, ok? This isn't to say that I don't *care* about you. Because I do. I just know that in times of need or reciprocation, I can't count on you - so I won't expect it. You know what I mean?

There was a moment, crying in my hallway, I didn't think I could stand up - nor did I want to - ever again. Decomposing in my hallway in July was exactly what I wanted to do. Sobbing paralleled to a grief untouched by daylight. A few of you came in with your flashlights -- everyone else walked around, barely glancing my way.

Those of you with flashlights: holy shit, I am the luckiest. And you know who you are.