I Want to See What You Got in Store

I just had an quick, but meaningful, email interaction with Major Jackson. Let that sink in.

What the hell happened? How did I stumble into this luck? How is THAT poet even reading my words and AND AND and taking the time to comment? He called specific moments in my poetry "magical". He called my heart a fledgling. He calls me by name. I'm still shaking my head in disbelief.

And this morning, I had a question. I asked it. He responded in THREE MINUTES. If I ever take this opportunity for granted, please, please, please someone punch me in the throat. 

This sounds braggy, I know, but that isn't my intent. (Maybe a little, but moving on...)

I get to learn and sharpen my craft and panic and ball my fists, shake to the sky and drink and dance (like, literally dance) with other writers, some of them famous as hell, twice a year - AND correspond with them all year. I'm lucky.

Holy shit.

And even if we bare bones this whole overwhelming situation: I was afforded the opportunity to learn to read. To learn to write. To punch my emotions until I vomit them up in poem form. To have people who encouraged that from an early age (even if it was misunderstood).

So glad I didn't die from rabies.

a change is gonna come

A year is a long time.

One year ago, my Nena went blind. One year ago.

I counted out her pills once a week. I became familiar with over-reactions, under-reactions and depression from the only strength I've ever known. I learned words that no one should ever know. I laughed at inappropriate times and also cried. I fought with medical professionals. (Fought). Took pills that weren't prescribed to me. Stayed up late to do dishes and laundry that wasn't mine and prepared the Mr Coffee.

One year ago, I was one year younger.

Less wrinkles around these eyes. More elasticity. Less poems written, less life lived, less heartache, more rabies. Since then, I've nearly died 4x. Once for real, the other three times, just emotionally. I've been accepted into a MFA poetry program. I've had more wine than I can really understand, I've gained and lost 5 lbs pretty consistently and I've been through approximately 12 menstrual cycles.

What can ya' say, though, you know? Shit keeps on moving. Blind or not, sad or not, old or not.

Heart Beat Runnin' Away

What can I say? I drink beer now. Any beer. I don't even care. I listen to pop hip hop/pop music. I don't care - I've turned into a stereotype that pretentious college-Erica would hate. But I have something that college-Erica doesn't have: first of all, I'm skinny. Take that! I'm skinny AND I'm just getting better looking!!! Second, people are people, you little bitch. Quit being so stark about rules and the rights and wrongs and all the bull shit that you get so wrapped up in, that's what i'd say. I don't even know what I'm saying.

I got a deep tissue massage today and it was all the things: good. bad. healing. sad. But whatever. Please, don't ask me about it.

I, also, researched Shore Birds of Indiana. 44 of them. More than 44 shores. I think.

Seriously, though, MAYBE I've had too much beer, but can you believe life? And, like, everything that goes along with it?
Don't answer that.

Also, do you know when I started liking the Violent Femmes? You don't know this, but let me tell you. 6th grade. Sixth GRADE. I hadn't even started my menses when I knew all the words to Gone Daddy Gone. Jealous? You should be.

Do jelly fish feel pain? No, seriously. Do they? Because, if not, what do I have to do to be a jellyfish? I drink too much Miller Lite. And wine.

I wrote a poem today and it sucked. I can't believe I"m going to poetry school; i guess i can't even believe poetry school is real.
WTF.

This Old House Is Falling Down Around My Ears

I'm doing the most graceful pirouettes in this dizzying time of interim. A year from now seems blurry. A week from now is blurry. But right now, it feels good to pick up the fruits and eat them, to get red faced with whiskey, to pick apart the scales of the freshwater mermaid.

Life is myth. Or some lives are myth: superstition buried in the sand of Utah, love swirling around, tap dancing with the Tropic of Cancer, destruction with a fancy paper mask.

(Destruction with a fancy paper mask.)

I'll Keep This World From Dragging Me Down

I keep making deals with myself.

"Pay this bill then clean the house, ok? Run to the library then clean the house. Listen: if you clean 2 rooms, you can watch a Star Gate. Write a blog post THEN clean the house. Clean the house then you can go on a bike ride. Clean a few rooms and read your library books. Start at 12n. Well, just start and be done by 3. Do this and get FroYo later." And so on.

Listen, I know I'm lazy. Also, irresponsible. And, while I'm at it, I'm messy.

But, I'm happy right now, so it's hard to wash the dishes and scrub the toilet when I just want to marinate in this feeling. It's familiar. It's waking up at my nena's house. It's excitedly anticipating. It's *just* buying Season 5 of The X-Files. It's Architecture In Helsinki with the windows down. It's right after my first rock and roll show. It's seeing a Common Loon dive for the first time. And so on. And so on.

So, I'll start cleaning the house after I have a tiny dance party in honor of how things are going. Okay? Deal?

Deal.

let's talk over mai-tais. waitress, top it off

Life shifts often. My skin comes off everyday and my hair falls out and my finger nails grow, get dirty and I bite them off, but here I am, the same human. Kind of.

The shifting. The death. The life. It's all too much at times. The standing up tall and watching everything change, that's something else, too. I barely can stand it.

All of this to say: I'm getting old. I can see it around my eyes and in my blood. And with the friendships I've cultivated for so long. The shifting. The slow transfer and melting away and putting our hands into the cold river that never stops - these things tell me, you know, nothing fucking stays the same.

And I mean it: nothing.

pull me out from inside

I can't get Jeffrey Dahmer out of my head.

There. I said it.

I'm not in love with him. I don't like him, I don't forgive him, but I just can't stop thinking about him. How lonely, you know? In addition to the devastatingly sick desires he couldn't smother, he was lonely. But fuck him.

In this mess of being surrounded in my thoughts about this killer, I wonder, if he knew, like he claimed he knew that these longings were straight from hell, why didn't he just kill himself. And is that fair to even say? And it's not like this is a gray area, but he was a person, so where does that leave me as a person? But where does that leave the families of his innocent victims as people?

And that poor baby, the one who almost got away: Konerak Sinthasomphone. You know, he'd be 35 years old if those assholes in Milwaukee did their jobs. But, should I blame them? And the women, the mary and martha, who comforted the poor baby who was bleeding from his rectum, nude in the street, do they weep and drink wine in the mornings because they almost saved his life?

And then he cut off his head. And his arms. His 14 year old arms.

There's one thing I keep coming back to: What if the baby I have and love and raise and cry over and discipline and teach and cuddle and nurse.. what if my baby grows up and becomes a murdering lunatic who eats organs in his spare time?

It's scary shit.

I Think I'm Cured

It's been a long time. And I'm not going to sugar coat anything, so, be prepared for facts that slice through human bodies easily and without remorse.

Let's start with the basics: life can fuck you up. That seems circular, I know, but go with it. Truths are vague and ever changing and unfair. Existence is hard, because it is, and also because, if we go in and out of it, is it really existing. Okay. Basics covered.

Now, on to the hard-stuff: Remember my grandma who had the health scare? Well, it wasn't over. As it is with life, things only got worse.

She was finally diagnosed with Giant Cell Arteritis. The devastation is, though, she was diagnosed too late by her back-woods physicians. She has lost complete vision in her right eye and approximately 80% in the other. No peripheral. She'll close her good eye and cry about the "gray mud" she sees. "Gray mud" she'll cry - that's all I see. Now, the 20% she has retained is dim. She calls life the "Dark City" - and it wouldn't be so beautiful if it wasn't so shattering. She'll smile and shake her head and cry and convince me that she'll be fine living in the Dark City.

Yesterday morning she woke up and everything was a little dimmer. She began shaking and crying and we admitted her into the hospital again. This time in Indy. (We'll never go back to Ball Memorial in Muncie. Fuck those guys).

Blindness, guys. We are battling an auto-immune disorder that attacks blood flow to the brain- it's already killed one optic nerve and it's trying so hard to slaughter the other.

We're sad. My papa cries and cries when she's not around. She cries and cries when he's not around. We're all dying in the Dark City.

But I suppose we all are.

I will write more about this somewhere, sometime.

I'll See You in Heaven (if you make the list)

There are big things to write about all the time. And mostly, I don't do it. There are HUGE things that should be completely unavoidable: meaning of life, ancient atoms forged in the sun, Buddha, Gandhi, Jesus..all being born from the same mother - you know, big stuff like that. Mostly, I'm all selfish and little and petty and "my problems this" and "my problems that".

Today is going to differ this way: I'm going to talk about good, solid, salt of the earth stuff. And it's going to revolve around my mom.

My mother was a tile setter - one of the first women in Indiana to move past her apprenticeship and become a full fledged Journeyman, you know, Master. Not kidding. She worked hard as fuck for the money she made; she'd haul bags of dry concrete mix up and down stairs, she'd work in the freezing cold or smouldering heat surrounded by construction men, who, more than once, taught my worldly mother a new colorful phrase or two. My mother essentially became "one of the guys" by working her hands to the bone.

Before that, she was a hairdresser. Before that, she was a teen mom. And before that she dropped out of high school to ran away to Texas, following a boy with blonde hair and big teeth.

She decided to have me, despite having made an appointment for an abortion. Can you believe that? She was actually IN THE WAITING ROOM before she and my dad decided, "you know, we can do this..." And they did do it, people. Here I am.

She has given me her work ethic. She taught me to fry an egg perfectly, in bacon grease. Devotion and loyalty and to utterly lose my shit when a bee or a mouse or a moth is around. I know, because of her, that I'm strong. Even though mostly I'm insane, I know I could take this world on. I have learned through observation that we can all move past our pasts. She was beat, emotionally and physically, and while I was young, she was better to me. She always told me she loved me. There wasn't ONE NIGHT that I spent with her that she didn't give me a ridiculous amount of "good night"s, and "sleep tight"s, and bed time kisses.

She instilled in me a serious drive to always have clean sheets. She never once told me I was ugly, or a whore, or stupid like her dad told her a lot. She only spanked me with a belt once. She let me listen to Nirvana and Violent Femmes and Green Day. She didn't ever give me permission to date that older boy, I mean, I did anyway - but I also got that from her.

So, what I'm saying is this: most of my life was good. The "men standing around with one foot on the truck's bumper drinking beer and women gathered around clucking about weather and kids and men" good. There were some hard times - some of my deepest wounds are from her, but some of my strongest characteristics were cut from her mold.

This post is for my mom - and if I'm ever a mom, I can't wait to tell my daughter about the good things her grandma has done.

i am ready, i am fine (guilt shame and pain)

Human bodies are strange things. It's an odd idea to be alive - to be moving these bones around with a mystical force - to allow this blood to pump all alone to every single space inside my skin.

Today is a day that requires lots of thought. I feel like I'm on the cusp of understanding something big. But I don't know why. And, especially this, I don't know how. I feel this way when I'm saying my goodbyes to people (and whether you know it or not, I've probably said my goodbyes to you). I feel this way when I know that this body of mine could fail at any given moment. I worry too much, I know. Quit telling me that. I've known for quite sometime. I live this life with this brain and this anxiety. I get it. I'm a big ball of worry, but guess what - it's true. We die. Quickly and without reprieve.

Someone asked me this weekend why I'm so fearful. I answered them as I would've answered anyone. And the song is sung like this: "wouldn't you? wouldn't you worry if you heard your dad scream as he died in a house consumed by fire and fear? Wouldn't you worry if you watched the electrical lines bounce around alive outside your childhood home as everything burned down? wouldn't you if you were haunted by the half corpse that was collected by the firemen who couldn't have cared less?" I didn't say that. I didn't. I wanted to. I said, "because my dad died quickly - and it makes me nervous for everyone i love."

He said I was tormented, this person. I told him that I knew I was. People who live just are. People who live and know how close they are to death just are tormented. And I will be far longer than I want to be.

see no future, pay no rent

I'm not kidding when I talk about religious experiences in my car. I have them a lot. Once I was listening to Africa by Toto. I don't understand, and honestly, I will never try - but one rainy day I was on my home from Huntington, listening to the radio. I ended up singing about as loudly as a human can and crying my eyes out. It remains enigmatic.

I write - or not really WRITE, but mostly come up with most of my ideas behind the wheel. I do. I just can't stop it. I jot down crazy and messy words that will trigger a memory or a thought I serenely had alone on 600 N. Or I'll text a short note in my phone on I-69 that punches me with poignant emotion...for example:

"Harvest-dust smells sweet, settling in my lungs under a sky I won't ruin with words" or

"Sometimes the tree bark in my blood gives me a rest. And I think the earth is turning like it should."

And let's face the reality, Toto and writing blows any other kind of religion I've tried out of the water.

So, lets not forget about what happened yesterday. The clouds were sickeningly insane. I can't begin to comprehend the overwhelming sense of warmth coursing through my blood. I was driving into the best mixture of moisture, light, dark and earth science. I needed to pull over and dip my hands in mud near a cemetery. Or offer some sort of gift to the universe that might make it think about gracing me with these skies everyday. Or lay flat in the fields near homes nestled comfortably in a county kind of forgotten.

I didn't do these things. Instead, I took pictures.

And I thought, I'll blog about this. I, also, thought that my car just might be the only real sanctuary for a gal like me.