Last Swim

Because of the timing of my travels this summer, today was my last Early Bird lap swim, peaceful, meditative, and smooth, with country music and Carole King on the pool loudspeakers in the background (and louder in the locker room). I continued with naked meditation, today being the Throat Chakra, about communication, a troublesome spot for many women, given...all of known history. And now. The mantra for that meditation stone is "I speak my truth freely and positively," which is pretty much true for me. I am not afraid to say what I think, modified in certain situations by politeness, professionalism, and compassion. There is also a time to be quiet. 

But once again I am glad to be reading the right book at the right time. After sitting peacefully with the throat chakra, I read these words in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*, by Junot Diaz: "the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton." Wow! I'm still scared of my own bruja feelings when they take the form of dreams or premonitions, but when they come "singing out of my bones" as poems, I am more than grateful! And that narrator is Oscar's sister, Lola, the name of my grandbaby, the one I am going to see!

*Kim, you get the book as soon as I'm done!

King Cake

When you work in a public library, supporters bring you food! Today I had a yummy wedge of King Cake, and a colleague found the baby* in her wedge! Later, I wore numerous strands of beads to a committee meeting, distributing them to my fellow committee members. And when I got home, there were two poetry postcards in the mail, after days of nothing. 

A Fat Tuesday, indeed!

*Luck and prosperity!

I doubt that I will give up anything for Lent, except accidentally. Except a Lenten online writing workshop I participated in last year (and the year before? oh, Time, where are you?).... You should see my skinny calendar, all marked up with penciled commitments, meetings, rehearsals, deadlines, appointments....

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and we have no plans. Except, "Please bring home food, as I have back-to-back Zoom meetings." Must add milkshakes to the request....

100 Books

In 2023, I read 100 books. That's according to Beanstack, where I track my reading now. I read all kinds of things, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, murder mystery, young adult, and even a children's book, the marvelous Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo, which I had heard about for many years. And I gave some books as Christmas presents, favorites from the year or from the recent months spent escaping, slothlike, on the couch, covered in fleece blankets. Speaking of sloths, I have already earned a sloth as a "completion prize" in the library's winter reading challenge, set up as a bingo card, where I have scored a Bingo from slothliness.

I gave Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, to my son, in hopes he will share it with his girlfriend, a big reader, and they can discuss it. It's about gamers, friendship, love, and compassion. Yes? With some sound and fury and meaninglessness, despair, and regret thrown in but also hope. OK, it's about being human. Also enjoyed The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki, a lot of which takes place in a public library! On p. 276, the Bottleman says, "Let me tell you something about poetry, young schoolboy. Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness." It sure is!

All my poems these days are about my mother, even if they are ekphrastic or written on postcards. "Grief deranges," says Gish Jen in The Resisters, a book I read in January, actually. "Healing is slow." It sure is. I am participating in a solstice-to-solstice poetry postcard project and have sent 8 postcards and received 3. (Maybe that will pick up after the holiday mail...) Some have gone to Santa Cruz, CA and Portland, OR, where I have family, and one went to Japan! I love the random coincidii...

I loved Stoner, by John Williams, which I hope to discuss in 2024 with an online book group, an occasion to reread it. Life as it is lived, academic life, at the University of Missouri in Columbia. I loved The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, a quiet Wow! book, a revelation, also, in a way, life as it is lived, but by someone not fully paying attention, until, well, until... I liked it so much I sought out the movie I had remembered shelving at the library, with Charlotte Rampling in it. Well done.

I gave Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett, to my daughter and my sister, who had already heard Meryl Streep read the audio version but now has a hard copy to cuddle up with on the couch, like a sloth. It's a mother-daughter story with a production of Our Town in it, perfect for our theatre family. I gave my dad compression socks, but I've been steering books his way all year. Stoner was one of them. I am very, very slowly getting back to real life. But thanking all those books.

Peacock on the Roof

 

It's a beautiful day in Portland, Oregon, sunny, with bright fall leaves blowing down and gray clouds massing in the distance, after days of rain, and that's a peacock on the roof. I came here to help my daughter have a baby, and that has indeed happened. A beautiful baby named Lola, 8 lbs, 12 oz, 22 inches long. So far, she likes to sleep in the daytime and keep her parents awake from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., like lots of babies who sleep while the mother is active by day and kick around nocturnally. I am happy to hold this baby and stare at her. The activity that rocked her to sleep in the womb included a daily neighborhood walk that I got to do with the family a couple times before the birth, and that's where the peacocks come in. Just as there is a flock of wild turkeys back at home, or trail turkeys, since they walk the Constitution Trail as well as the neighborhoods, here there is a flock of wild peacocks. Or you might say a pride of peacocks, a muster of peacocks, or an ostentation of peacocks. Although these local peacocks are quite modest and unostentatious. Shortly after getting this picture through my son's window, I got to witness this one fly gently down to earth.

Then time stood still, as they say, suspended itself, and we had days of labor in a hospital room. The baby was born, and then my mother died, as if she had been waiting for the baby to come into the world before she went out of it.

Food at Work

I am not going to blame the food at work for the extra pounds I have acquired this particular winter. Nor the prolonged winter, the coldish winterlike spring, relieved by a week of summer in the middle of April. I am only going to blame ME, for eating all the Jelly Bellies, plus some chocolate, around Easter, and lots of yummy food at work during National Library Week and at the library in general, where we are loved and receive many treats. And wine drinking on my own, when family visited recently for the opening of an art exhibit by my hubby!! It's been a good and busy and hectic month. And it's no longer that month. April. Now, somehow, it is May!! The sun was shining today, the sky was blue, but the chill was still in the air. Tomorrow, perhaps, I can resume walking to work, that is, walking off the jelly beans.

I did write a poem a day in April, plus a tiny poem a day on my black chalkboard. Plus some Lenten writing, that was often a poem, during Lent. I guess I am still writing the chalkboard poems on into May, thanks to people wanting them! And a poem, "Slippage," came out in Quartet, an online journal I have been admiring for a long time! Click here to see the fabulous cover art and here to see the current issue, with poems, interview, book review, etc.! April also held Poetry Sunday at my church, where people get up and read favorite poems aloud and say why they love them!And now it's May, it's May, the lusty month of May!

Dude, ...Car?

I had a "Dude, where's my car?" moment today. I left work carrying two bags and a  large framed photograph of a gorgeous egret and went up to the 4th floor of the parking garage and on up to the unroofed deck, sun shining, where I had left my car. It was not there. There was this long, unhappy, awkward moment, a little drift into the future, police station, trying to explain, insurance, etc. Then I thought, "Maybe that was yesterday."

It is very strange that tomorrow will suddenly be March. Yes, February is a short month. Yes, it can have wildly variable weather. Often there is a lovely thaw right around my birthday, with warm temperatures and sunshine. Sweater weather, even. A feeling of spring!

Will March come in like a lion or a lamb? We've already had a wind advisory. (See chalkboard poem above!) I am still writing a poem (or more) a day for Lent. The chalked-in date should help me keep track of day, month, year. But, dude, I lost my car.

It was in a ground lot. Back down I went, on the convenient parking-garage elevator, found my car, secured the art, and drove home, stalled for a time by a freight train, pretty common in my little town. We got lots of work done on the tracks and crossing signals, to make way for a bullet train, but it hasn't quite come. Instead, these long freight trains. My excellent plan, were I in transportation power, would be for laborers to build tracks around the town for freight trains and save the in-town tracks and crossings for passenger trains. Jobs for rail workers, peace and convenience for the town, financing from the railroads. The government already paid for the previous work.

I got some of my work-at-home done before family chaos ensued. I don't know yet whether that has been resolved, or ever really can be. I'm sad about the falling apart of everything. And joyful and grateful about all the rest--the ongoing love, the sweet memories. The shiny green Mardi Gras/ St. Patrick's Day beads.

Meanwhile, alas, people are suffering from so many things. Another earthquake! Ongoing pandemic. Political tension, divisiveness. And those wild, private eruptions, where someone somehow thinks murder is the only answer. It isn't. But you have to have some empathy and imagination to find another. And maybe your upbringing prevented that...for a while. But now, hey, aren't you a grownup? Couldn't you take some responsibility? I don't know. I haven't been driven to murderous impulses, but I did lose my car.

Also meanwhile I was reading This Body I Wore, a memoir by poet Diana Goetsch, who previously lived and wrote as Douglas Goetsch. I so admire her transition! I am grateful to have learned so much from her book, and so glad she got to be who she really is! Again, so many of us are suffering, and some of us find a way through to joy, freedom, and light!

Meanwhile, as well, I have elevated Fat Tuesday into February itself, gaining winter's usual 1-3 pounds in one short month. Need to resume walking and swimming soon, so this body I wear won't get too heavy to carry around with me up to the 4th floor of the parking garage...

Fat Tuesday

I often forget that Fat Tuesday is actually one of the "eight days a week" of this blog. Now it actually is Fat Tuesday--Mardi Gras--so I have the opportunity to remember! We got a little cake for Valentine's Day and had just finished it up when my husband got another one to celebrate my birthday. We haven't eaten it yet because we had chocolate milkshakes as part of my requested carryout birthday dinner while we watched episodes of The Last of Us, based on a videogame, recommended by our kids. It contains some hungry people and some excellent eating, plus comic conflict over sandwiches. My birthday dinner involved a cheeseburger and fries. I am still full and still awake, and Fat Tuesday has arrived, and I've retrieved shiny Mardi Gras necklaces and hung them from doorknobs, planning to take some to decorate my mom's doorway when I visit tomorrow. Some are green and can stick around for St. Patrick's Day.

My life has a lot of this rolling, get-goofy-things-done quality these days. My tiny chalkboard poems have begun again. Yoga, for various reasons, has once again been set aside, so maybe a poem a day for Lent and a tiny poem a day on the chalkboard will be my new Yoga of Poetry. It's a new deep black chalkboard, as I felt the urge coming on and ordered it...when?! The green chalkboard I used before has been retired, like a basketball star's jersey, as it was the Welcome board for my daughter's wedding and still bears that greeting! In this tiny poem with no punctuation we are both growing older, the poet and the afternoon light.

I re-read A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, for a book group and to prepare for reading its sequel.* The goon of Time makes this a Random Coinciday in the blog, too. I loved this book, which feels really pertinent right now--the "pointers" (babies who like songs and point at them) seem like "influencers" on social media--as does The Last of Us, with a pandemic caused not by a virus but by fungi. There were no mushrooms on my cheeseburger.

*The Candy House. Yep, Fat Tuesday!

Mardi Gras Lost

I fully intended to write a blog post for Fat Tuesday, since Fat Tuesday is an actual category here in my blog, one of the "eight days a week" on which I am (supposed to be) writing. Since I am not, and since I missed Mardi Gras, it is instead a Slattern Day...and, I suspect, will turn out to be a Random Coinciday and a Poetry Someday.

Indeed, I notice this random coincidence in my current reading: a cormorant, a kind of black and white aquatic bird. Satan, a shape shifter, sits in the Tree of Life as a cormorant to observe Paradise in Book IV of Paradise Lost, by John Milton. That was a surprise,* as we usually picture him as a serpent. Perhaps that's in Book V. So far, he has also sat "[s]quat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve," trying to invade her dreams. He is surely up to no good.

*a surprise, even though I have read this book before...but it was decades ago, in college... Now I am re-reading it for a Zoom book group.

But, back to the coincidence. I am also reading The Colour, by Rose Tremain, about gold** digging in New Zealand, and on p. 212, in the point of view of the character Pare, is this: "She heard a cormorant shrieking in her dreams." I hardly ever read about cormorants, but here are two in the same week. Plus, the bad dreams...

I didn't even eat a devilish sweet on Mardi Gras. Instead I am eating Harry & David pears,** a naturally sweet gift from my son and his girlfriend for my recent birthday. The pears, ripening gradually, are so delicious! Ah, perhaps they will make their way, plum-like, into a poem soon, as I am writing a poem a day, for Lent, with 40 Days, 40 Writes.

**One was wrapped in gold!

And I did submit some poems, by the deadline, yesterday, to a magazine I admire. Yesterday was also the "deadline," as in "best by" date, on that blueberry goat cheese sitting in the fridge since Christmas, slattern that I am. Why? I loved that cheese! Why didn't I eat it on time? I had my reasons, but still. And, hey, it's cheese, it's probably still good, but also probably not something I want to take a chance on. Sigh...

So here, instead of blueberry goat cheese, is a beautiful cormorant, by JJ Harrison, thanks to Wikipedia. See that random coincidence of the serpentine neck?!

And There is Many a Good Thing

I turned to Jon Tribble's book, And There is Many a Good Thing (Salmon Poetry, 2017), not only for its perfect fall-is-coming cover, but also for the positive, optimistic sentiment in its title. The cover image is "The Blue Leaf" by Allison Joseph, poet, Jon's wife, and, alas, now his widow. I have the Irish cover, with the leaf turned sideways, as you can see here. Shown is, presumably, the American cover, which you can also see at Amazon. Either way, a lovely cover, though I prefer mine, probably because it is mine. 

Once again, I read alert to the intersections of this poet's book with my own life, and this book with the others I've read this August for the Sealey Challenge. This book goes to Mexico, like The Death of a Migrant Worker. It has fishing poems, like The Mysteries of Fishing and Flight and Night Angler. It has constellations and whooping cranes, free verse and pantoum, elegy and grief, "and there is many a good thing," like music and food. These things do sustain us, as I hear in the final stanza of the opening poem, "The Divine":

     as the final note possesses Sarah Vaughan, possesses us,
     documents the sound we should define as pain,
     as regret, as love and loss, as human.

And I realized this book contains two of Jon's poems I had included in an anthology some years ago, poems of place and origin, Where We Live: Illinois Poets. Good to meet them again here.

Yesterday, telling you about Men, Women, and Ghosts, I also told you about my dream of a wild, baby pig. Strange and delightful to encounter Tribble's poem titled "Long Stories About Short Pigs." In the first story, a beggar boy takes a wild ride on a metal pig. Then my heart broke when the poem shifted to "the last Vietnamese family / pressed into the metal belly of the cargo / chopper" and made the connection, as many have been doing these last few days, of the exit from Vietnam and the exit from Afghanistan, leaving people behind. More heartbreak in "Banner Days in America," a poem that starts with burning a flag and ends with folding one.

Indeed, for all the delights in this book, heartbreak, injustice, trouble, or irony are right there in the background, perhaps in a restaurant, enjoying Chinese food, while a boy and his grandmother talk about things you'd rather not have to overhear. "A pig is never only a pig," Tribble reminds me, and, alas, "a fairy tale is only a fairy tale." Sometimes there are no happy endings. In "Lucky Life," about the need for riverboat casinos, "[a] few spindly antennas" in small towns are "shaping these lives to All-American mold.

          Huddled about the pixilated fire,
     cartoon promises guarantee That's all,

     folks! with piggish glee, but is it?

Ah, yes, the pig of my childhood. But this is a grown-up book.

I was grateful to see Jon and Allison get married again in "Indiana Marriage," a poem I'd heard them read when they came to my town to read at the library. This time, the Key lime pie made me cry. And the last poem in the book, his "Spirit Currency," a double elegy, for a mentor and a friend, resonated now for Jon: "Wherever we travel, / there is no destination loss has not visited before us."

Where the Wolf

The cover, title, table of contents, and my past reading of the work of Sally Rosen Kindred all led me to expect some fairy tales, revisited, in Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021). And isn't it a fantastic cover?--the illustration by Kelly Louise Judd!

In the very first poem, "First Night," is the first mention of the wolf: "outside, in grass moon-wet with night, / a ghost Wolf guarded the yard." The Wolf is a "Her" and a "ghost" and is a presence throughout the book. Crows and the moon are part of the natural landscape here, as well as being images I found in some of the other books this month, but it was also a delightful surprise to find "witchgrass" again, right after yesterday's adventure with Gluck & Chang! And it is not August here in Kindred's book--more often October or November: "Dear October," "Which Way is November..."

There is a complicated mother-daughter relationship, and in "Wednesday's Child" the daughter is at her mother's bedside for a bittersweet couplet:

     You have forgotten you're sorry
     you had me.

And a truly sweet ending with cake:

     ... You do not want us
     to die now. You want me

     to try it, try it honey,
     dulce, it's so sweet.

"The Grief Dress" shows us the beautiful, sad family romance. And in "I Tell What Kind of Girl" is the liberation of telling one's story:

     Through the white door

     she could hear
     the pinched hearts of asphodel--
     and then it opened
     like mercy, like breath,
     when she began to tell.

"Wolf Hour" brings us into the woods and into a timeless hour in numbered sections. Section 2:

     Still you'll walk
     these woods dulled by oaks,
     dusk-muddled, staggering their golds--

     the leaves torn,

     withholding--these woods
     without wolf's throat, her cape, and the wind
     all hinge and pity.

Gorgeous. I love how the sounds and the scatter of words on the page help the wind do its work. In the same poem, the line, "You had a mother once" hurts. "She spoke in the language of wolves // and the moon heard and shut its stone door."

And the poem "Mast Year" taught me what a mast year is, one that contains a bumper crop of fruit or nuts. The internet tells me 2020 was a mast year for acorns. "My mother still knows what a mast year is" though she's forgotten her daughter. Such sadness in this book, such beauty, such resilience. 

And, as it's still August when I emerge from these woods, I find joy in a bumper crop of peaches! Ah, a Fat Tuesday in the blog!

A Juror Must Fold in on Herself

Wow, this chapbook, A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, by Kathleen McClung, a Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, was a wonderful surprise and a real tour de force of form! It's got the suspense of a courtroom drama and the necessary silence and discretion of being on a jury, along with villanelles, a pantoum, a ghazal, a sestina, a rondeau, a cento, a double sonnet, and a sonnet crown! Maybe more, my head is crammed. I don't think she wrote these in court, as we learn that the steno pads jurors take notes on get destroyed, shredded, maybe "wire and all." The story of what happened, condensed, not fully told, is heartbreaking. I'll let you find the verdict. I found the coincidence that makes this a Random Coinciday in the blog--that I'm reading in August about a jury sequestered during "those August days." Anyone, even a father, might get arrested, pay a fine. Anyone, even a grandmother, might spend her days at a courthouse, typing. And in this chapbook, they do! I love how everything ties together. How, in the poem "Summons,"

                  ...I seek peace,
     a juror sworn to silence on this case,
     this endless trial--victims and police
     and video, an endless loop of loss
     we twelve appraise alone. Grave calculus.

McClung's choice of repeating forms, tightly rhyming forms, connected stanzas is just perfect for her content.

Finna

FINNA, by Nate Marshall (One World, 2020), begins with a "landless acknowledgment" containing this line: "we lost the land we were custodians over before i was a twinkle in the eye of a twinkle in the eye of a twinkle in the eye." I love how I get lost in that. I wanted Finna the first time I saw its title, its cover, and I'm so glad to be reading it now for the Sealey Challenge, Day 3. My son wrote "finna" on the window of his car. I wanted to learn from these poems what "finna" means. Thank you, Nate Marshall! The poem "FINNA," an on-beyond-definition poem, teaches me

     finna comes from the southern phrase fixing to
     like i come from my southern grandmothers & finna
     is this word that reminds me about everything next.
     even when i've been a broken boy i know i'm fixiing to
     get fixed.

I'm learning lots more, too. For instance, that there are lots of Nate Marshalls out there--one a white supremacist--and several poems about these namesakes. In one, these heartbreaking stanzas:

     1 time a dude i knew hit me up relieved & shaken
     when his timeline told him Nate Marshall had been murdered
     but it was a different me somewhere on the North Side.

     definitely peace to that Nate Marshall
     & to his people who would have been relieved
     had i been the news article instead of their sweet, beautiful boy.

I love the poem "step." It begins:

     learn this or get out my house
     is how mama started my dance lesson
     when i was a boy.

And it has this stanza of possible other names:

in Chicago we call it steppin'

but perhaps every Black

neighborhood has some version

they call swing or bop or hand dance or hustle.

The book is full of Chicago, where I used to live, where I visited this weekend and played volleyball on the beach with old friends, family, and new friends, who fed me, fed all of us, like family. This couplet resonates for me now: "but fam, understand, if you treat the fam / like strangers, then you a stranger, fam." I am shy, but no longer a stranger.

I love how some of the poems in FINNA are sideways; some of the stanzas are upside-down. Another definition poem begins

     scruples

                      is the word i tell anyone who asks

     for my favorite. what sounded

     to me like a doctor's instrument was just a

     name for the hesitation respectability births.

And the poem "slave grammar" defies definition:

                                           whole time

     i'm writing this down its obsoleting

     itself. whole time we talking we ain't got

     no dictionary we guessing the spelling

     we deciphering the phrases through

     our slurs we slurring like we ain't sure until

     we murmur a sure vow.

This book has great titles. One example: "welcome to how the hell i talk." Today I went with my mom to a neuropsychology appointment. Today I read the poem "what can be said" in FINNA, that ends:

     once Alzheimer's does what it do
     you never really have conversations

     it's more a man becomes a poem

     a lot of repetition & love with something

     indecipherable in between.

I think today is/was Tuesday, but "wednesday feels like a funeral" is the poem that says

     what i know 

     of hate

     i learned early

     & then every

     day after that.

I might have a favorite poem in this book. It tells a story and explains the world to me; it's called "let me put it to you like this fam." It gives me a new golden rule: "who you believe in is a matter / of who you mattered to." And it's referenced in the title poem, too, a poem of praise and hope

     & it's finna

     take on this wide world

     with a whole slang for possibility.

Christmas Movies 3

Well, 1) I did watch The Shop Around the Corner, and it was charming. The scene in You've Got Mail where Tom Hanks has his friend (Dave Chapelle) look in a coffeeshop window to check out the blind date waiting there (Meg Ryan) is just like the one in The Shop Around the Corner, down to the dialogue, but with Jimmy Stewart, Felix Bressart, and Margaret Sullavan. 2) We saw two more not-really-a-Christmas-movie Christmas movies in the tradition of Die Hard: Peppermint and Olympus Has Fallen. I love 13 Going on 30 and Juno so was happy to watch Jennifer Garner be strong and vengeful in a Charles Bronson kind of way; yes, it was sort of a Christmasy Death Wish. Sigh... 

I also watched Miracle on 34th Street and its remake, and I'm sure I'll get around to It's a Wonderful Life. Because it is a wonderful life. On Thursday it was sunny and 60 degrees, and I took an extra walk on the trail, after walking to work and back. I ran into Santa!! At first I didn't recognize him, because he was wearing sunglasses and he wasn't wearing his Santa suit. But he will be! I saw him back in May or June in his Santa suit, waving at cars on Vernon Avenue, and he plans to do that again next week, bringing lots of joy. He's sorry he can't have kids on his lap at Santa Station, as in past years, but this will be good, too.

That same day I walked the outdoor labyrinth and ran into a live concert, sort of. In the bandshell, a group of guys with guitars and one harmonica were sitting in a socially-distanced circle, playing music. Lovely! I was a bit worried for them, as there was some singing, and their circle faced in, but I am hoping they are OK because they were outdoors. I was at a distance on a bench, with my eye also on an adorable toddler Husky out walking his man.

And today I did some holiday baking: chocolate oat bars. This is something I baked for my husband 39 years ago--what?!--dating during our first holiday time together. Now it's almost our 31st anniversary, so they're here to go with the champagne, which is already purchased (on "datenight," our weekly early-morning grocery shopping trip) to remind us to celebrate. **runs off to put champagne in fridge** So it's a Fat Tuesday (on a Saturday) in the blog, thanks to the chocolate chips melted with sweetened condensed milk and buttery cookie base. Good thing the oatmeal makes it healthy! 

And also a Slattern Day, because my work is done! Ta-ta and toodleoo!

Update: Speaking of Die Hard, you might prefer the lesbian Die Hard mentioned here.

Soft Joys

Probably a cherry cordial Hershey's kiss is not a healthy breakfast, but today it was one of the soft joys keeping me (emotionally & spiritually) alive. We had our weekly grocery shopping date early this morning, and I got the $2.99 special on Hershey's holiday candy (if you buy 5 packages), an item actually on my list, because I had been decorating my house, and it was time to put colorful (individually-wrapped) candy out in the various dishes...for us to eat for several months, as nobody else is coming in our house... Sigh... 

But, back to the joy part, I had no trouble picking out 5 bags of what I wanted, including mint, almond, plain milk chocolate, and peppermint bark bells. Instead of eating breakfast, I was placing the dishes around the house. Somehow, this helps.

Mid-morning at work, I saw the email showing a picture of (individually-wrapped) goodies and little Starbuck's iced coffee bottles! So I had some! Then home to a Honeycrisp apple, and the Governor, live, telling us we are back in Tier 3, to please stay home, starting Friday, to keep us all alive. I am glad that my little chalkboard poems are "soft joys" for those who see them here, or on Facebook or Instagram. I'm grateful they are hitting the spot.

Likewise, I was delighted with the response to my story, "A Retiring Woman," and grateful to Calyx for publishing it online. My daughter and her boyfriend were gripped by it, and she quoted a passage on integrity of voice. My son said he laughed out loud! Yay! It's a long story, and so many people read it and responded. I am wowed. 

Those are big things in my life, but the little, goofy things help, too. One day, I found myself gardening in pearls. Ah, it was Election Day, a lovely warm day, and I was wearing (fake) pearls to honor RBG, and there was yard work to be done. Another day, I was dusting in earrings, post Zoom, which is the only time I put on drop earrings. It felt good to dust, and to re-stack my stacks of books awaiting the second lockdown, as I sometimes think of it, but nobody likes the word "lockdown," and the Governor is just announcing a return to Tier 3, for all of Illinois, to help avoid a firmer stay-at-home order. This is a stay-at-home-as-much-as-you-can situation. Till then...(on a Fat Tuesday in the blog) I've got candy.

Check & Balance + haori

Today I read two lovely chapbooks by Luisa A. Igloria, the new Poet Laureate ofVirginia and also someone who has been writing a poem a day for years, years! You can find them at Dave Bonta’s Via Negativa and learn here about how she used his short musings at his Morning Porch as prompts for poems! 

Check & Balance (Locofo Chaps, an imprint of Moria Books, 2017) gave me the news of the day, which is all too pertinent still—hatred and expulsion of immigrants in “Color Theme” and in “Restriction,” about how the US denied visas to the “first / all-female soccer team from Tibet,” alas! “The sign once said ‘guest,’ / but I read ghost,” begins one such poem. 

There was a poem about the “Thrilla in Manila” fight of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, with an internal refrain of “anything can happen.” Indeed! 

And there is the beautiful anchor of the title poem, where people come forward to help a man in the station who has fallen on the escalator. Everyone, with whatever is at hand, comes to help! 

                                              All this
     happened swiftly, with very few words
     exchanged—only the movement of hands
     and bodies wanting to save: strangers
     lifting the stricken one…. 

I sighed in astonishment and relief! 

The Check & Balance cover image above is ©2017, Nash Tysmans, a photograph taken in Kalinga, Philippines. The cover art for haori (Tea & Tattered Pages #2, 2017) is by Jennifer Patricia A. Cariño, for this hand-stitched chapbook. A haori is a kimono-like Japanese jacket. I so love learning things in poems. 

Let me give you some beautiful lines from the poems in haori!  They come from a sectioned poem called "Arguments with Destiny":  "The commercial said Love does not comfort. Perhaps not by itself / is what they mean; perhaps the top of the piano must come up." I have not seen this commercial. Maybe there is a piano in it! But I took it metaphorically, and also Emily Dickinson-ly, feeling the lines take the top of my head off, as in all real poetry! Like this:

     The day we looked for my mother
     was the day she refused to be found. 

Oh, how grief begins! But let me end with this excerpt from “Arguments with Destiny,” since it is another terribly hot day in terribly hard times: 

     The fig and the plum burst

     out of their skins because heat
     has unstitched them, not

     because their hearts constrict
     from a sadness they cannot bear.

Falling Off the Empire State Building

Today's #SealeyChallenge book is Falling Off the Empire State Building, by Jimmy Pappas, the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner. Pappas's book grabbed me today for its somehow darkly comic yet patriotic title, the day Biden has announced his running mate, Kamala Harris. The title captures how I've been feeling lately, with America having reached great heights only to fall off its own pedestal. Yet here I can celebrate something.

And I am certainly enjoying reading a poetry book or chapbook a day on the advice of poet Nicole Sealey, a good literary citizen. I wanted to tell you yesterday about that moment in the "Document/ed" chapter of Brian Sonia-Wallace's book, The Poetry of Strangers, but I am telling you today: "A mentor had been talking to me about 'literary citizenship' as the obligation that writers have to support each other's work and work to elevate each other's voices." Brian was thinking about it in the context of citizenship itself, "in an age of immigration terror and child detention." Paying attention to poetry was something he could do. And it's something I can do, as a poet and a reader of poetry.

So let's visit the Empire State Building together! Pappas's book starts with an "Invitation" to homemade organic pancakes sprinkled with blackberries picked in the rain. I'm in! The second poem, "Creation," creates the [poet's] world and the theme of falling via "the man across the street / who fell off a ladder / to the cement sidewalk." (This reminded me of the guy who fell off our roof and broke both wrists, repairing our home after a house fire, a fact we learned much later from the neighbors, as we were living elsewhere during the repair. I hope compassion after the fact still counts!) 

Here are Jimmy Pappas's "four Noble Truths:"

     Life is suffering. People fall
     off ladders. Love ends.
     Nothing has any meaning.

The title poem is a father poem, and also repeats an urban legend. There are unsentimental and deeply human tributes to stepmother and mother, noting "the massive indifference of the universe" and a plethora of shoes. A father poem of love and guilt, deathbed poems of pure love for various people, a lovely poem where his sister, ready to die, signs, "Sleep."

     She took the open palm of her right hand
     and dragged it down her face. Sleep. Sleep. 

I, too, would have let her sleep. And then, in "Mourning," taking the poet Sappho's advice, Jimmy Pappas keeps

     jotting down
     notes

     for my next
     poem.

A poet's gotta do what a poet's gotta do. And that takes me back to The Poetry of Strangers again, something Brian Sonia-Wallace says in one of his own unsentimental poems, how he's

     always rooting for the monsters
       who are at least honest
         to themselves, at least
     not pretending altruism.

Jimmy Pappas, who has a poem about putting his screaming father in a nursing home against his will, might agree. And "rooting for the monsters" takes me all the way back to My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, and now you've come along with me on a Random Coinciday in the blog.

A Slow Bottle of Wine

Today I read the poetry chapbook A Slow Bottle of Wine, by Katharyn Howd Machan, winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Award 2019. A fine book with a gorgeous cover that involves a self-portrait by the author's daughter, CoraRose Howd Machan, also an important figure in the poems. This is a book of 40 poems about a sad love affair that produced a beautiful daughter--see her here!--troubled by heroin addiction. Her mother is tortured by this, too, as you can imagine. The poem "How To Lose Your Perfect Child" is devastating. It's a set of instructions for how to live in denial while neglecting your child on a beach. It contains the guilt and the grief of a loving mother who knows and doesn't know what she did wrong, and almost accepts that there's nothing she can do it about it. Day Four of the Sealey Challenge breaks my heart on another beautiful day in paradise.

Random coincidii:

1) Today I drank a slow (half) bottle of wine, temporarily masked, and appropriately socially distanced, on my patio with my friend, Kim. This was a bottle of Firefly red wine, not the Pomelo announced/updated yesterday/this morning.

2) I was struck by these lines in A Slow Bottle of Wine in the poem "Tonight":

     I was sixteen when a man first trod
     that impossible place of sky and stars...

so soon after reading, in Bruise Songs, by Steve Davenport, in the poem "Dear Happy Ending":

     When I was fifteen,
     astronauts stepped
     down onto the moon,
     dividing it forever
     with a flag
     and some God.

I was a little younger when this happened but remember the moment, going outside, away from the TV, to stare up at the moon while a man was standing on it.

3) Halloween poems. Who gnu that two days in a row I'd read poetry chapbooks with Halloween poems in them? American Zero yesterday, and A Slow Bottle of Wine today. With a moment of inescapable Covid reading when I encountered the line "we search for weeks for just the right mask." Sigh...

Best We Could Do

After Chances Are... by Richard Russo, on Martha's Vineyard, I did not make it to Cape Cod for That Old Cape Magic, which was not at hand in the stacks at the library, so I opted for Bridge of Sighs, instead, set in the small town of Thomaston, New York, and sometimes Venice, Italy, with some graphic novels in between, and right after. Indeed, a certain phrase in Bridge of Sighs, about families doing "the best we can do," was the bridge to The Best We Could Do, an illustrated memoir by Thi Bui.

Thi Bui tells and draws the story of her family coming to America from Vietnam, after the war, via boat and refugee camp, as well as the story of coming to understand her parents better after becoming a parent herself. It's lovely and honest, and made me think. I realize it's part of my ongoing education this summer in equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

As always I was aware of the random coincidences. In Bridge of Sighs, the town is poisoned by chemicals and dyes from the local tannery, that get poured into Cayoga Stream. In The Best We Could Do, the author's father helps create a small town, building roads and houses, creating a pleasant, self-sufficient environment with a well-stocked pond, until a fabric dyer moves to town, pours her dyes into the pond, and kills all life in it.

Both books tell a family saga and explore the love and a reticence born of trauma that can affect relationships for a long time. Both move toward even deeper love and understanding, and leave some things unsaid, uncertain. Both made me think about, miss, and connect with my own family.

My Dry July

I had my last beer on June 30, visiting a friend in his back yard. Now I'm having a gin & tonic, minus the gin. Plenty of lime. As July came near, sans rain, I recalled that last July I went dry for the month. I had read something about intermittent fasting in general and not drinking alcohol on an alternating month basis, and how some bars and cafes were catering to this trend, creating delicious cocktails without liquor but fancy enough to be pricey enough for the establishments to survive, etc. We were coming up on our annual extended family vacation, where there is a lot of wine drinking, and I thought, "Why not?" Somebody needs to stay...I was going to say "sober" but what I really meant was "awake."

I haven't exactly gone dry when it comes to poetry, but I did stop posting a poem a day on a little chalkboard in June. As the poem states, I was "out of chalk" from the start, writing with little stubs I found in the kids' art supply boxes and kept in the lid of a jar.

Just the other day, my husband found in the garage a bucket full of colored sidewalk chalk that I'd been looking for in the basement. So there's that for the next public art project that might arise from the ongoing circumstances. And I ordered and received a little box of slim white chalkboard chalk for the next round of daily poems, possibly in September. For now, I'm writing in my various journals, intermittently.

As I've been writing here, I've been hearing thunder! And, look, it's raining out my window! ...And now I've come back from stepping outside to smell the rain, the needed rain, the gentle rain. It's falling on my prairie flowers, my single tomato plant, my little pots of hibiscus tea, my gradual attempts at a very local permaculture. I forgot to plant a little packet of California poppy seeds, but I have plans for it. I have more to tell you, but not right now.

Paczki

I can neither spell it nor pronounce it without help, but I can eat it! With help. I got a box of 4 paczki in time for the real Fat Tuesday, yesterday, to comfort my sick husband, whose appetite was returning (!), and today I learned about Fat Thursday (last week), a Polish/Polish Chicago tradition. Sadly, I missed timing this post to either of the correct days, even though "Fat Tuesday" is one of the "Eight Days a Week" of this actual blog! We got Bavarian cream paczki, but now I want to try all the flavors mentioned in the WTTW article. Recently, I learned of the many flavors of Kit Kat bars & confections in Japan in an essay in this book, so I want to try those, too. I also heard a nice NPR story on paczki yesterday, and read all the pronunciations on our box from the local grocery-store bakery. Attempting to spell paczki just now, I got Ed Paschke, the Chicago artist of Polish descent, who may well be named, somehow, for the sweet, yes? As Paschke seems like one of the pronunciations on the box, along with Pooch-key. Sigh... It's Wednesday, the Hump of the Week.