Will I lose my front tooth? Will I lose my front tooth to a corn chip? Will I lose my front tooth to a corn chip and swallow it accidentally? Will I ever comfortably eat beef or an apple again? Will I lose my tooth while in California or Florence or even Worcester and be instantly transformed into an Irish hag of fairy tale horror? Will I lose my front tooth tomorrow morning when I take out my mouth guard and there’s that tiny bit of suction? Will I worry so much and eat so little that I lose weight? Could I eat so little and get so attached to losing weight that I get all weird about food? And if I count cooking and food as two of the remaining pleasures in life, how would I fare without them? Maybe I’d bungi jump or go axe throwing on Friday nights or learn to play a vicious hand of bridge or throw out almost every thing I own.
* Can you tell I went to the dentist yesterday? “Ready yourself,” she said after gluing my post and crown back into my mouth, “for an implant. The crown could come loose in a year and a half. Or tomorrow.”
Good grief.
There are many stories to tell about my front tooth, beginning with the time (I was six? Eight?) when I walked into an automatically opening grocery store exit thinking it was the entrance and continuing to when I was maybe fourteen with a poorly executed inward gainer off a very springy diving board. What’s that? Sixty years. It’s been sixty years since I’ve had a live, healthy tooth there. I guess I’m lucky it hasn’t been problematic before now is another way to think about this.
PS I was weeding right before taking these pictures in case you’re wondering about the dirty fingernails.
Yesterday, I made a cake and it is delicious. It combines two almond cakes from the NYTimes cooking app. That makes it a bit of an effort but since my not-hungry-for-three-weeks brother had a wedge, it was worth it.
If you haven’t read Maggie’s comment from yesterday, do. A vivid description of her aunt.
Another day of grey here. What can I say?
I tried to walk Lila just now but a pop went off and she immediately turned around. Done. We trotted back to the house. She is scared of loud bangs and if too loud or prolonged will hide under the guest room bed.
Rescue dogs often come with shadows of trauma.
Trauma came up in my writing circle this morning. As a prompt, I posted a writer’s description of coming home to a completely wrecked house after Hurricane Andrew. I wondered if it would be productive. Was it ever!
So much insight in that group! It is the best thing in my week, week after week. I hesitate to gush, as if doing so would jinx things, but the most amazing words have come spilling out so regularly that I now think of these fellow writers as unstoppable. Unjinxable.
I’ll close with this Apple TV drama recommendation. Eight episodes. Incredible writing. Beautiful cinematography. It has: family secrets, betrayal and redemption, bad parenting, and lots and lots about wine. I love too that a lot of the show is in Japanese or French.
One of the writers also contributed to CALL MY AGENT. That’s the one about a talent agency in Paris. Also very good.
“I wonder if it’s possible to will myself into spontaneous combustion.”
Aleyna Rentz, from Cincinnati Review
That was the prompt for this piece of writing
Charred bones hold a certain
appeal. A ravaging by fire
before crumbling into the dirt of
death.
Malva up the street bloom
in the palest of pinks. And now
hosta send up the sturdy
stalks of their flowers. July,
this July coming, is still familiar
to them in a way to me
it is not.
Hair shooting out of my scalp
transformed into poison darts
would more clearly show
the neighbors who I am
than the little waves, nods,
the purse across the chest,
holding phone and dog treats
as if the old rules of communication and reward still apply.
The house remains standing. The grass
grows in the fits and starts
indicative of shade. This morning
the dog sat on the deck planks
still wet from last night’s rain. He
was listening. Dogs are always
listening.
Would it help to shave my
head? To craft an embroidered
badge saying I’M DONE or WAKE UP?
To make visible the roiling
disappointment, so roiling,
so disappointed as to render the
words useless.
Old styles of rebellion will not
hold. Saving democracy is
not a style decision, as much as
we might like it to be.
Revelation after damning revelation
and STILL we wonder: will it matter?
We’re talking a femoral bleed.
Grasping around to find
a tourniquet, placing the life-
saving band around the body
but forgetting how to tie a knot.
“No July 4 for me this year,” say
some, while many others have
never had much to celebrate about
our so-called independence, our
so-called freedoms.
A flawed past does not
condemn us to tyranny. Please, someone,
make magnets saying that so I can put
them eye-level on the fridge, linking
hunger and hope and reason.
We don’t forget to eat, so
why should we forget to dream big?
To believe in possibility?
The squirrels chip at the air
with their throats. I used to think
it was the cardinals.
Somewhere, someone mows a
lawn. Somewhere, someone gets
water off a truck because lead
contaminates their water. Local
jack hammers signify home
improvement. Federal jack
hammering comes in the form
of 6-3 opinions. They
are blasting away at basic assumptions,
at long-held rights, at
the beliefs and needs of the majority — at
their own jurisprudence.
Who do you talk to in the
still of the night? Some nights
it is the ghost of my mother.
Other nights it is my own
nervous system. Sometimes
my children show up as absence
and silence and that keeps me
awake longer.
Not all loss is national and
collective.
I have my snacks ready
for the next set of revelations.
A friend is coming to sit by and
watch with me.
How we connect now matters more than ever.
Last night the sky blazed
orange. Chips of light between
maple and beech trees like mosaics.
It’s hard to remember the world
when you are perpetually walking
between kitchen and living room,
bathroom and bed. COVID, anyone? Or should I say: COVID for EVERYONE!
The world as defiled. The
world as holy. I don’t need
to shave my head to show
how my heart is trembling.
*. *. *.
This was written to a prompt in my Tuesday Amherst Writers and Artists workshop — the last until mid-August. The prompt was the Rentz quote above which appeared in a piece titled The Land of Uz. Cincinnati Review, Fall ’21.
The photo of Hutchinson was taken from a PBS website, but it is everywhere. I ran it through a filter in the Prisma app.
P.S. if you look carefully at the fairy-lights-photo, you will see Finn behind the glass door.
I don’t normally title blog posts with dates, but it feels important to note the time. Five and a half weeks since the shooting in Buffalo. Four weeks since the shooting in Uvalde. The day before the fourth Jan 6 Hearing. The day of the Supreme Court handing down long-awaited decisions. The day after Beyonce dropped a song from her new album.
The paragraphs below were written in a go to a prompt and are not edited.
The prompt: “She stopped listening to weather reports.”
She stopped listening to weather reports. It was a matter of self-preservation she said. “I want to remember how to sniff for rain,” she said. “Enough with the apps!” Stepping onto the blue stone in the cool of morning with bare feet had also receded into some primitive time of “before.”
The local screech owls died when they tore down the Newton Andover woods to make way for townhomes. She found one of their bodies. The neighbor who had called out to them in the dark of spring evenings when the bats came out, was gone now too.
Speaking of sniffing, just yesterday on a dog walk with her husband, she’d said, “That smells like fox. They spray too you know.” Of course he knew.
She’d collected skunk bones from under the deck one summer, their vertebrae like candies in her palm, but neither of them had ever seen a fox.
The very next morning, her phone chimed at 6:40 a.m. — too early for Patty’s daily wordle result. It was her husband. He’d resumed hoofing it to the T two or three times a week. “You’ll never believe this,” it read. “I saw a fox on Cypress Street this morning.”
It was as if the universe was playing with them. Maybe, she thought, she ought to start picturing the FBI raiding Mar-A-Lago. After all, it was the Solstice, which is one of the corners of the year when the Old Ones believe that a crack between the worlds opened up. Possibilities unlikely on an ordinary day might fly on the longest day.
Today she sat and watched her phone, waiting for the inevitable. At ten a.m., the Supreme Court started publishing opinions, the whole country holding its breath — the bad of it all about to get so much worse.
It wasn’t like she set out to learn political minutiae, like how reconciliation bills were exempt from the filibuster or how tight margins in some primaries triggered an automatic recount, but she did. This morning she learned that the highest court released opinions by reverse seniority. Kavanaugh’s came first and when Breyer’s dropped, it meant Dobbs would hold another day, since Alito is junior to Breyer.
A Roe expert on twitter wrote “Sobbs” by mistake and then said, “Well, that fits too.”
Beyonce’s first single in years dropped last night proving there is still good in the world. Talent and beauty, gifts to us all. If only her singing, “You won’t break my soul,” applied universally, unilaterally. Could her message be like the slight scent of musk which had been received with disbelief only to be met the very next day with the actual embodiment of what was believed impossible. Jump suits for everyone!
Her therapist will only read the news (not watch) and some days only the headlines. She says it’s too much otherwise. Silvia says the same.
At the doctor’s office yesterday, the form asked if she ever felt anxious, restless, depressed, or hopeless. Suicide screening is nothing new. She checked “often” for a lot of them. When the doctor held up the form later with a raised eyebrow, she just waved it off saying simply, “I watch the news.”
The fox crossing the road, the very first sited in over thirty years, seemed a kind of miracle — a call and response between imagination and reality. These days, she couldn’t tell if her hopelessness was being tamped down by some efficient and reliable defenses, or if it was denial battering her, forcing her to adopt notions, hopeful notions, that simply weren’t supported by reality. We all know denying reality creates tension. Tension.
“How much hopelessness is appropriate?” was a question she never expected to ask herself with such regularity.
A fox crossing the road. A sweep for the good at the midterms. A musky scent confirmed. Indictments handed out all the way to the top. A summer dance tune: “You won’t break my soul.”
* * *
Yesterday’s hearing, as it turned out, gave cause for hope — the brave testimony and acts of ordinary poll workers — Ms. Moss and her mother, Lady Ruby Freeman. But it was also cause for fear because it demonstrated that the right has “operationalized violence,” as Nicolle Wallace said, and these ordinary poll workers, also Black women, were targeted in an extreme and gross manner that speaks to Jim Crow and the lengths trump and his cohort have been willing to go to hold onto power.
This lament was written to the prompt of a black and white photo depicting a waterfall with rowboat suspended as if weightless at its base.
Color me grey. Remove gravity. Add rushing water, but make it still. Strip the leaves off spring trees and tell them to rustle. Pick the ants off fists of peony-buds so that the flush of pink stays tightly balled inside. Put one paddle in my row boat instead of two. Hide all partners. Put sky in the water. Remove sky from above the horizon. Dangle untruths like earrings on beauty queens. That old saying, “If you piss on my foot and tell me it’s raining, it ain’t raining,” comes to mind. Gravity might have governed once. Now we float above institutions and look down and wonder how they ever worked.
We ready ourselves to row and row hard, really put our backs into it, only to discover that there is only one oar. The old push to get out the vote is so cute anymore. The sticker on your lapel not a badge of much if your vote can so readily be thrown out. Men on the national stage are pledging to do just that and they’re not laughed at or removed with a cane.
One Texan speaks up and makes good trouble. He’s not even shouting. The armed men on stage point and holler with a Klan-like vicious unity. Get out! Get out! Get out! A Texan in a blue oxford shirt surrounded by arms raised, cameras filming the moment of infamy. Theirs, not his. Get out! Get out! Get out!
The water of time keeps falling over the ledge. So there is gravity — just not in America — where up is down and down is up and nothing rushes anywhere except violence. DNA of grieving parents required to ID some of the ten-year-old bodies. What does that tell you?
It almost sounds like armed officers escorted the shooter inside. You’re not “containing” anything if the perpetrator is locked in a room with an entire classroom of kids.
Why won’t shadows behave anymore, as in calling evil evil and not publishing a nuanced view of evil’s view of good. The Fourth Estate. Give me a break. Get in your boat and row. With one oar, you’ll go in circles, illuminate nothing, perpetuate everything.
The sidewalk rolls up in protest. A press conference of lies. Parents demonized instead of the supposed good guys with guns called out for their cowardice.
Beer bellies hemmed by holsters. Angry men raise their arms and point. Get out! Get out! Get out! as if demanding answers was the problem and not a room full of dead fourth graders and their teachers.
Enough. Enough.
I hear the children playing at the near elementary school the day after and wonder, Have they been told, and if so, how, in what words, with what omissions, and with what false assurances of safety.
How the mind splits. It happened to them. It having happened to them means it can’t happen to me. Nice try. The Boulder shoppers gunned down at one son’s regular grocery store. A man shot in front of my brother’s Glendale pharmacy, the flowers lining the sidewalk in ineffectual witness.
What did their parent tell their elementary-school-aged children when I can’t even tell the story to myself?
