Among other things: A Bird

I have fallen in love with this book

which Anna gave Eva for her birthday last year.

And lately, I am also in love

with poems and my girls and just being here.

All morning I have been watching the saddest news.

I stare at my computer and cry:

14 small coats hanging on hooks.

I keep waiting for Ella to wake so I can go to her and nurse her

but the house stays quiet.

I wonder when the snow will come again.

A Snippet

From a new essay I've been working on about sororities, cigarettes & Elle Woods:

There was one girl in my sorority, Jennifer, actually there were many, many Jennifers, but this one Jennifer, one who I sometimes ran prayer group with, even though out in the quad I questioned not only the existence of sororities but also of God, and on really, really cold days, the existence even of a self, but this Jennifer had worked at Disney World as a Princess, and even though, she looked EXACTLY like Cinderella, and had the most beautiful Cinderella-like hair I had ever seen, they made her wear a wig. That’s just the way it is, she told me.

For Drowning

Dreams. I recommend them.  

The easy way to go. Tipped siren,

sip of Benadryl.

There are days I want nothing more than to

step onto the seabed. There, I lived

in the hollow of your throat.

Do you remember? (It was only

a day; it's okay if you forget. Really.) Then nothing,

just the creekbed,

crawdaddy graves, Poprock husks.

Last week, I went to my sleeping baby

and reached for her. An empty crib. I knew

that they had taken her to Mexico, and I

would have to kill myself (gas)

or move to Paris. But I was still dreaming.

She was actually in my bed, had never been

in the crib. I sang and sang to her.

Louder. Still she slept.

A mistake, but I kept dreaming anyway.

In the dream: a strand of seaglass and you. I

was there too. It seemed like a punchline,

the slippery side of a gesture, end

of a joke: us, there, on the seabed,

too deep for the sun to reach.

Are we shells? you said. 

I tried to answer, open my little shell mouth,

but nothing. Only bubbles.

A river is a river is a river. Yes?

My student wants to write a story

about a man who thinks he is in love

with a woman but is really

just in love with the air around her.

My student is still young enough

to believe these are different.

And so I write on the board:

pools are pools,

oceans, oceans.

  

Thanksgiving: A Poem

In honor of all I'm thankful for this year: a poem I wrote fifteen Thanksgivings ago when I had just moved to New York City and was still in the habit of chasing love by taking buses down south. Incidentally, it's also the poem where I first wrote of my tenderness towards Hostess cakes. It was published in Washington Square in the Winter of 1997.

Thanksgiving

3 bags of pork rinds,

6 cans of warm Pepsi,

18 mentholated cough drops,

a couple of HoHo’s, a DingDong,

2 and a half packs of Marlboros,

and Dee from Louisville

pressing her elbow into my ribs,

talking her hysterectomy,

her 13 year old gone on birth control,

her 16 year old thrown in a Boy’s Home

south of Memphis for stripping butt naked

and flipping off God on top of the county library,

the 3 men who’ve beat her,

her 1 cup coffee maker,

and the turkey dinner

she’s packed in her suitcase, all boxed up,

so the jackasses won’t crush it.

We talk about the stars

‘cause I don’t get many where I come from,

and she teaches me a song about bumblebees.

Waking up alone’s the hard part,

we agree till Nashville rises too soon,

sticking up sore-thumb style on the horizon,

and a man without flowers awaits my arrival.

Yesterday I could almost love him,

could almost hear him breathing,

but today, I’m afraid,

my ass isn’t the only thing gone numb

above the roar of white walled, greyhound tires.

So we sit at the Waffle House,

careful not to touch for fear of nothing special—

coffee weak as rainwater,

jukebox blaring Blue Christmas.

The Cupcake Story

[poem was here.]

Tunneling

I am forever riding shotgun in a little brown Honda under a faded blue sky. My mother is driving. Sometimes she closes her eyes and tells me she is taking a nap, says to wake her if I see any big trucks coming, and I yell, tell her it's dangerous, until she gives in and laughs, shows me she had kept her left eye open. A truck screams past, and I am tunneling.

I am fancy dancing on the moon, that's what they called it, fancy dancing. I learned it on the reservation, but my dad lives inside the moon, and he can't sleep with all the dancing. Horses, he says, and bangs the inner mooncrust with the long handle of a broom. His ceiling is crumbling; his wife is having trouble hearing.

But the stars still sing. Slews of them. In the third of the four decades I've lived, my brother, Joe, and I sat in a kitchen drinking beer and telling jokes. For ten years straight we did nothing but laugh about passing the butter and the cat on the roof. Every two or so months one of us would go out to buy smokes but we'd come back fast, and we'd miss the other the whole time we were gone.

Decade one was for Heather and me to run around in dirty bathing suits sipping Cheerwine and eating French Onion Dip; decade two, they tried to clean me up; decade four is mostly dreamy houses and milky bliss. Oh, and hunger. Sometimes I am hungry.

And I am tunneling. We are waiting for an exit. Mom says there has to be something eventually but we have been driving for years, and there is nothing. So we keep driving, and I remember how there are afternoons when I am playing my daughters and burying my head into the beautiful sweet smell of them that I think, I was pregnant with a boy once. I think, This might have felt so different.

But that was forever ago: it was the summer when it rained so hard the walls were soaked, the summer when Eva fell into the pool; dad came back from the moon; my brother, done, pushed his chair away from the kitchen table, stretched his arms into the air, said, I gotta go to bed; and mom and I, finally out of gas, sat in a field of upended Cadillacs waiting to be saved.

Dear Blue--

Dear Blue--

Would you have any advice or ideas on how to calmly deal with a child diagnosed with ADHD?

Signed,

Troubled Gemini

Dear Gem--

When I put out a blanket Facebook request for "questions" I imagined a thousand different answers I might give. Wear a yellow scarf, I'd say, or, Just go back home and love on her, or, The ability to operate a cordless power drill goes a long way in making you feel powerful. But then your question came.

I love, by the way, how you use the word "calmly," as if to say that we all know how to deal un-calmly; we all know that spine-surge to pinch, to yell, to maybe even throw just one thing because for-Chrissakes-I-need-you-to-listen-to-me!

But calmly. Calmly.

There's breathing, of course. For you. For her. Lots of breathing. Lots of audible inhales, reminders that there's plenty of oxygen, plenty of space in the world, plenty of time, some day even if it feels forever away, that you two won't be together, that you'll be separated.

Last week at the tail end of summer, one of my dear friends came up to our country house. She doesn't suffer from ADHD but, having just turned forty, she's going through this unsettledness, this quickness of mind and body, this distracted texting, and she's wearing cut-off's and rolling her own cigarettes, and for the past six months or so, I've felt very far away from her.

I think that's what we're talking about: distance. How can I deal with someone, calmly deal with someone, who appears to be right in front of me but is not seeing me? And how can I do this without totally checking out?

Let's see, Gem, for me, it's poems and walking right beside the person, maybe even letting our shoulders touch, and being near the water, even if it's just the sound of a fountain.

A couple of weeks ago I was having issues with my daughter, Eva, who's almost four. She kept saying no to me, and I felt like I was going to lose it. I called the Nursery School director and asked her what I should do. She told me to hug her. She told me to remember that Eva is three, that her job in life is to tell me no and to define herself, and that my job is to make sure she's defining herself in a way that's appropriate to the world. Hug her, she said, and I did.

Have you ever heard of Temple Grandin's "Hug Machine"? I don't think it's the answer. But it might be. I guess anything could be. I want to tell you to get a fish tank and start every morning with a poem. Examine your reactions; try not to take anything personally, and for goodness sake, make sure you're taking care of yourself. Floss. Up your Omega-3's. But all of that amounts to nothing if the distance is still there.

Maybe it does go back to breath, that reminder of being alive, being together. Savor it, even if, at the moment, it seems unsavory. Let it be, and be with it. I think that will make it easier. If it doesn't, try the fishtank, and if that fails you too, there are always yellow scarves.

Still breathing,

Blue

First Tooth

For weeks, Ella, I have been absently fingering your gums, feeling for the inevitable, and so it shouldn't have surprised me this morning when I reached my thumb in and felt the sharp of your first tooth. On Sunday, after playing outside, your sister came in and handed me an acorn so flawless it seemed more like a piece of art called "acorn" than a real acorn. It is tooth-hard and perfect brown, and I can't for the life of me imagine how an animal might squirrel itself in to get at its meat. Now, it rains, and you sleep, and I think of all the foods you'll touch with that one perfect tooth: of the avocado I gave you around lunchtime and the bananas I'll feed you in the morning, of the Cheerios that will come and the peas and the candy. In graduate school, I had a friend who seemed always to dream of losing her teeth, and she recounted those dreams as we walked the city streets: she had coughed, she said, and when she looked into her palm, it was filled with teeth. In Chinese culture it is sometimes said that you lose a tooth for every lie you tell. Maybe now, sweet girl, with the thunder, I am wondering if you have given me some truth with this one new tooth. In just a few days, I return to work; already I ache for you.

Remembering Why I Teach

Today I drove in the rain to the Bronx where I taught poetry to children at the School for the Visually Impaired and Blind, and a boy named Infinite wrote of his love for music, of how the beat keeps him alive; and another boy wrote of the sound of thunder, how it reminds him of the warmth of his grandmother's house in Guyana; and then there was a girl named Armani who wrote an ode to her closet; and another kid who wrote of how his mean, toothy dog was as silent as a ghost and as prideful as his father.

Towards the end of the morning, when  the rain seemed to be slowing, there was another boy who wanted, he wrote, nothing more than to sleep on a poem, to bury his head inside of it and enter the endless dreamworld. Now back in Brooklyn, I still hold José in my mind, see his fingers running across his braille page, hear the lilt of his voice while he reads about words: so soft, he says, and safe.

Summer Dream

All spring I was awash in the milky bliss of new motherhood, and now July is here, and I wake up rubbing my eyes, confused by how time is seemingly linear again. In those blooming months, I was twelve and a hundred, and my daughters had never been born and were already old. Red bandannas were tied to fig trees; rooms opened to other rooms; tender buttons slipped into even tenderer buttonholes.

This is to say: this morning I'm not quite sure how to be in this world.

A few years back, I opened a magazine and saw that there was a story called "How to be a Person." I was giddy with the thought of it. I flipped to the page and started poring over it until realizing, with great disappointment, that it was not, in fact, a pamphlet for being; it was fiction.

Last Thursday, after K missed her train because she couldn't find the stairs to get her to the other side of the track, we drove towards the ocean because the girls had fallen asleep in the backseat. On the way to the ocean, driving around the bend, we hit a deer. She was fine, I think, jumped the fence and ran off, but in the heart-tripping seconds after hitting her, I remembered what I first thought was a dream and then thought was a story but finally remembered was neither. It was something that had really happened. In high school, riding in Brooke's car, there was a dog in the road. It was getting dark. We didn't stop. Do you remember that short story about dogs? I asked K. About having to incinerate them? She remembered, of course, but it was a novel, she said,  a novel about more than just dogs. I need to start writing again, I told her, and she nodded and looked into the rear view mirror.

Before the air even started smelling like the sea, Ella woke, and I knew she was hungry, so I turned the car around, away from the ocean, and we drove back to the yellow house where I nursed E until she fell asleep again, her eyes fluttering with her very own dreams.

From Jeanette Winterson

When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language--and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers--a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Shiny Silver Love

When Eva was a baby I couldn't stop talking. Look, baby. This is a window and that is the sun and that is the sun through the window. No, that's not right: that is the light of the sun coming through the window. The sun, baby, is hot and yellow, (very hot. can you say hot?) all plasma and magnetic fields, and it is very far away but not so very far away. There are things further than the sun. Many things, some things. And this is your nose, and these are your eyes, and the window is a rectangle, and if you put your hand here where the sun was pressing, you'll feel the heat. Touch, baby. With Ella, things are much quieter. I can stare at her all day. I can let the sun be, let it come up and go down and come up again. I decided early on that the only thing I really need to teach her is love. On the days I feel like talking it gets messy: "Now, love, I love you, and now, love, I'm making sissy-love a peanut butter and love sandwich, and I'm slicing a love-apple with this shiny silver love and pouring a big ole glass of love and drinking down all that love, and yum yum, I'm going to get me some more love, love." But on the days I'm not afraid of the quiet, it feels just right. Love.

Spring

Eva stood in the doorway holding petals in her palm. Cherry blossoms, mamma, she said though they weren’t, but they were pink, and the sun was coming in, which it has been doing this spring, all spring, coming in rich and full. But that can’t be true; maybe it’s just this moment that it’s so rich and full. Of course there’s been rain: it is, after all, April, and the other day at the discount store, the one on the corner that Cody threatened to burn down the summer he quit smoking, when I was buying things I didn’t want to buy, things you have to buy right after you have a baby, and the baby was starting to fuss, Eva suddenly looked up at me with her teary blue eyes, and I knew it was coming, as if she had been holding it in forever, and she just peed and peed while I watched the darkness spread across her pink leggings and run down into her Hello Kitty rain-boots, and since I don’t remember arguing about how there was no need for rain-boots on a perfectly sunny day, and since I do remember, once we got outside, taking off each of her boots and pouring them into the gutter where a tiny stream already ran, there must have been rain. It must have been slicking these dusty Brooklyn streets. It must be responsible for all this mad blooming.

Ella Cole Callihan

born April 4, 2012

8 lbs, 11 ozs

Mamma is swooning...

Telling the Story

40 weeks, 3 days

You don't have to begin by telling the reader that the apples are gone. With all the stickiness of the p's in papaya, she'll know that you've moved on, that clementines and pears now hang precariously near the edge of your wooden bowl, that you were wrong--at least that day--about how the spring would come or when the baby might arrive. Mention your mother: talk about her hands, or her laugh, or the way the tent preacher healed her lazy eye when she was a little girl; you might even want to tell about the dream she had for years, the one about burying the man in the basement, about worrying she'd be "found out." Use nouns: evening primrose oil, pad thai, blisters from walking so long. Try to remember what it is that you are trying to say. If, because you are too distracted by, perhaps a toothache, or a baby that was due three days ago, to even remember what it is you were trying to say, distract your reader instead: confess something. Friday, March 30: Besides the obvious, I can think of nothing but jellybeans.

Apples

Quiet here today, nothing but the inner-churning and a wooden bowl filled with red apples. It seems it would be almost impossible to eat all these apples before the baby arrives. Still, I try, cleaning them on my thigh, throwing them in my bag before I leave. All morning, I have been thinking about getting lost--not the kind of lost I was in my 20's where I'd find myself crying on subway platforms or kneeling in bookstores trying to find a place to pray, but physically lost--the kind of lost where you really don't know where you are, the kind of lost where perhaps only an apple could save you. When we were little, my brother always seemed to know shortcuts, through Startown or through the woods or just across this little stream. I would have followed him anywhere. And I did. Even then, he carried a pocketknife. Now I like to remember him using that knife to peel and split sweet apples for us, but really I think we just carved words into trees and sliced at things that we no longer wanted whole.

Winter, Interior

1.

I like to imagine that when the days shorten I am filled so full of snowflakes that they lace my lashes and are on my tongue--already--when I open my mouth to catch them, when I have just pulled myself from the ground where I had lain flapping my arms and legs and yelling "Angel," when I have not at all minded the gunmetal sky, but have, instead, found peace while walking under it for miles and miles, feeling little more than the hot breath returned to me from the thick wool of my scarf, but really, I prefer spring.

2.

In New York City, when it is too hot or too cold, the delis pull the flowers inside and place them in large green buckets along the floor and in the way of the cinnamon raisin bread and the sticky buns. When I first moved to town, I was intoxicated by the sheer number of flowers; now, I feel overwhelmed. I know tulips, of course, and roses, but my daughter, Eva, asks me what the others are, and I find myself calling anything purple a "lilac." I have tried to google "identifying nyc deli flowers" in hopes that I can print out a fold-able sort of bird-watching sheet but have had no luck.

3.

The winter I was nine, my mother and I lived on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Nights, we fell asleep on the couch during the 6 o'clock Wheel of Fortune. It was just so cold and dark. My mother told me later that she must have been depressed, sleeping, as we did, for twelve hours straight. Once, driving through the badlands on our two-hour stretch home from getting groceries that had to be packed on dry-ice so as not to spoil, our car spun off into a ditch, and we thought we were going to die. When we managed to live, I reached into the paper sack in the back, and we opened up two Diet Cokes to celebrate.

4.

Sometimes I think that this baby that I have been carrying around in my uterus for the past 38 weeks (I am as BIG as the sky!) will come on the first day of spring and I'll call her Daisy. Or that she'll be born on the last day of winter, and I'll call her something like Katherine, which seems a bit remote and cold but also very beautiful. This year the weather has been so mild that I often forget socks; it's as if I'm unprepared for such a reprieve. I also seem to forget to brush Eva's hair before school.

5.

Sweet pea, million bell, dahlia, lavender, tangled wisteria.

6.

In health class, they showed us a film called "The Little Girl who Died of Loneliness." She was on the bus; no one talked to her; she fell, finally, face-first into the snow. To me, it was an admonition of winter. Had she held out until spring, she would have fallen into the flowers instead. I imagine lying in the flowers and breathing in the sweet verbena before rolling over and staring up at the thinning sky. Strange how seasons used to seem so immutable, as if calling something gray might turn it into rain.

Radio Star

Finally, my childhood fantasies of becoming WKRP's Loni Anderson are coming to fruition!

Tune in tomorrow,

Thursday, March 8 at 3:00pm,

as I host a show I've produced called

New York Women Writers Now.

Find the live feed: here.

Put your Monkey where your Mother Is

In all my life, I have only known two people who owned monkeys. One lived in Battery Park City in the shadow of the World Trade Center and named his monkey Marilyn after the starlet. He said the monkey was dirty and crazy, that he'd come home from work, and the monkey would have drank all the strawberry milk and smeared her feces all over the walls.

The other was my mother. I sometimes wonder how my mother, in the foothills of North Carolina, was able to get her hands on a monkey. I can only guess it got left behind by a carnival or a traveling preacher's show. She also claims to have had "a pet chicken that died" but I think she's just being funny, just making excuses for why she wants to order a burger instead.

Besides the monkey, I know little of her early life: fried bologna, a broken wrist that she hid under covers, a big doll that she left in the bathroom in the mountains (Ricky, she called him), her love of watermelon, her marriage--at 16--to my father, the same doll--Ricky--left by my father--jealousy?--in an apartment they moved out of in a late night flash. And this: at six-months old she was left by a redheaded woman to be raised by my grandmother.

I don't think she was left on the porch. But that's what I always imagine. Or under the pecan tree. Or, bleary mornings, I half-dream stories of her and Moses, and somehow that little dusty town where we were both born turns into a fertile place with a big wide stream. My mother is tiny, violet-eyed, floating in a basket, her little fists opening and closing.

Yesterday, a thousand miles upstream and fifty-some years later, I went to see a family therapist to help me to prepare Eva for the new baby. I sat in a windowless office staring at a poster about saving a choking child. I took off my boots and sucked on a huge cup of honeyed Lemon Zinger, listening as the therapist, who I liked, went into these long scripts of roll play, so long, in fact, that I sometimes got confused as to whether she was talking to me or "talking to Eva" as if she were me. The baby will be fragile, she said. Like glass.

Like your pretty tea set, I added. Very, very fragile.

Good, she said. Very good. 

I stared at the choking child in the picture. She wore a red plaid jumper. There were lots of yellow squares, and someone pointing to a phone, and I was wondering how I would ever remember any of this, thinking about how, if I happened to ever be near a choking child, I would need to get back to this tiny room so I would know just what to do. And what about your mother? the therapist said. I pointed at myself because I am Eva's mother. I thought we were still pretending. The therapist laughed. No, she said, your mother.

My mother? I repeated. Because I am--presumably--not my mother, I joked. She didn't laugh again.

Well, I said, let's see. She had a monkey.

A monkey? the therapist asked. I nodded; she made a note in her book.

I thought about how years from now--sitting on a train or in a very different office from this one--she will find that note (MOTHER HAD MONKEY) and that she will have probably drawn a little tail--after all, how can you write the word monkey without drawing a little tail?--and she will highlight those three words even though she will have likely forgotten all about me, and I will likely have forgotten all about her. 

How easily we forget, how much there is to not remember.