Making Art, Making Cake, Making Love

Let the sunshine in
Photographer: Carl Jackson 

I'm excited to tell you that I have three pieces in the Michigan Quarterly Review. It's a special themed issue titled "Caregiving." I'm in pretty darn august company, including Suzanne Edison and Heather Kirn Lanier. The review has categorized my work as "poetry," but between you and me, they are really prose poems or fragments that appear in my larger manuscript.  You can order a paper copy or download a PDF for $10. There's some amazing stuff in there, and let's hear it for supporting the work and art of caregivers. I recently sent about 180 pages to an editor. I have about 3/4 of the first draft revised and am determined to get the last quarter done by the end of the month. The publication in Michigan Quarterly Review is such an honor —I've probably sent out ten things over the last couple of years and have had all rejections, so this gives me that extra kick in the ass that I need.

Maybe I'll have a book published before I turn eighty but probably not before the Disunited States turns from plutocracy to autocracy.

I guess we have to just keep doing the work. Making art, making cake, making love.

In other news, my fellow co-host and friend Jason Lehmbeck and I had the most profound discussion with two women on the Who Lives Like This?! podcast. Jennifer Siedman and Blyth Taylor Lord spoke to us about their own families and lives, about palliative care, bereavement and the remarkable organization Courageous Parents Network.  Even if you aren't a caregiver, you must listen to it. I beg you to listen to it. Please share the link, too. Remember: we're making art, making cake, making love.

Here's the link.

What are you up to, Reader?

MQR 57|4 Fall 2018

Riding Ferris Wheels With Men

Sunset with Ferris Wheel in Distance

I rode a ferris wheel with the man I loved in the parking lot of a strip mall somewhere in Nashville, Tennessee.  It was the last century. It was the last millennium. The air was still dense with humidity even after the sun sank,  a pale disc that had hung baleful in a colorless sky for months. The Chinese restaurant where we ate beforehand was dark and cold. We ordered hot and sour soup and shredded garlic pork that came with rice. We read our fortunes. Men trip not on mountains, they trip on molehills. I know I threw my head back later and laughed into the sky, my hair damp on my neck, drops of sweat in the small of my back, our fingers entwined, legs dangling over the parking lot far below. I couldn't bear to look down. The bench creaked when we shifted. He always made me laugh. Did we marry later that summer? Did I betray him less than two years later?

That dizzy dancing way you feel.


Men watch football and they watch baseball. They watch basketball. When they aren't in the kitchen, men watch cars going round hairpin bends in foreign countries. The sisters of men watch football, too, and they watch basketball and crack nuts in their new teeth, crunch like the bodies on the screens. The girlfriends of men watch football in their team's jerseys, screaming at home on the couch or in sports bars, lunging toward screens, so many screams. I'm a girlfriend of a man who watches football and who watches basketball, but I don't watch. I can't bear to watch.


I was delighted to find myself swept upwards and downwards at such speed. But the wheel turned round so rapidly that a Greek who was sitting near me couldn’t bear it any longer, and shouted out “Soni! Soni!” (enough! enough!)

Pietro Della Valle, a Roman traveller visiting Constantinople during a Ramadan festival in 1615, riding what was known as a "pleasure wheel"

Launching Having Launched

The look the face that's launched me thousands of times
up
out
onward
inside


You ask, How do you do it? or you say, I could never do what you do. 

Think of body skin bone appendage organ heart brain eye borne in a boat and you are the boat.

I am the boat vessel rocked and rocking launched and launching

Boat (body) Body (soul) Soul (eye) Eye (look)

Do you get it?

Look (eye) Eye (soul) Soul (body) Body (boat)

Venus and the Moon

Why is the sight of a moon sliver and a bright star next to it so beautiful? I want it to mean something. So much coming at us, and I feel diminished even as I wax, as powerful and dumb as the moon.

Your silhouette crossing the lawn and away from me.

The urge to wrest from the gut when the words form in the brain.





In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

What Wings Sound Like

Fra Angelico: The Annunciation
Florence, Italy

I have always wondered whether Mary heard Gabriel's wings when he landed in the courtyard and what sort of sound they made. Was it a rustle belying sinew and skin pulled tight over cartilage and bone until he landed, a skid and thud? Blue-bled at the tips, fading inward. She drew back, then, afraid. Or did they whisper like the drapes pulled out of marble by some sculptor insistent on revelation?  She leaned forward, then, resigned.

The hedge outside my bedroom is full of nests. I have never noticed just how many birds live among us. I am drawn to the nubs that emerge from human backs, wings not yet pointed with only a suggestion of flight.

Notes, Words, Lines (Saturday)

Note: The sunlight is water on the kitchen cupboards.

Note: Sophie is a delicate thing, a bird in a nest made of lavender and vibration.

Note: I registered to attend the Abilities Expo downtown this weekend, but I don't feel like it.





I'm reading Anne Boyer's Garments Against Women. Who told me about this writer? She makes me shiver.

Here's a bit:

Some people believe to know the fin is to know a shark, but this is an incorrect belief. The fin is not a fin of a shark at all though it is a reproduction shark fin strapped on a boy's back, and the boy with the reproduction fin does very much want to be a shark, wishes it a great deal, dreams some nights of being a shark in a great fleet of sharks in some unexplored sea where sharks are in fleets and somewhat even more powerful that the sharks of the daytime world have shark banks full of money and minnows. One could be, also, a person with a fabulous malformation of a shark fin on her back, who says often "please excuse the fin" but others look at the fin and say, "look at that grand shark with that awesome fin" when she is, underneath the fin, a person who is fond of peeling carrots for soup and a person who could otherwise just not help the fin that fortune dealt her. Some could be real sharks, the fin an adequate representation of sharkly reality: that's just the deal.





Last night, Henry and I went to see the movie Hail, Caesar. Remember my Saturday Morning Three Line Movie Reviews? Three words would suffice:

1. Entertaining
2. Unfinished
3. Lazy