Oddity, Week 2

Curious Consumption

The cochineal, an insect native to South America and Mexico, turns up regularly on the ingredient lists of foods we eat all the time. When you see carmine, carminic acid, cochineal, or natural red #4 sandwiched between modified corn starch and kosher gelatin, that's foodspeak for dried female beetle, a phrase you'll never see on the label of your strawberry yogurt. The cochineal's red dye, known as carmine, also makes ice cream, fruit fillings, and juices look more authentic. The ingredient is natural, not artificial.

If you can afford it, you can get your morning java from coffee beans tagged by CBC News as “Cat Poop Coffee,” labeled tellingly as “Good to the Last Dropping.” Coffee starts out as coffee berries; the beans are really the seeds. When Sumatra-, Java-, or Bali-based civets consume coffee berries, enzymes permeate the seeds, which reappear a few days later with a higher than average protein value and in need of a good wash. These civets, or wild cats, make coffee beans a delicacy, upping the value to around $75 per half pound.

I remember saying once after watching a documentary about odd delicacies around that world that “I would not under any circumstances eat chocolate-covered grasshoppers.” But I've heard the rumor that insect legs are common incidental additions to chocolate in general. My husband Jeff tells me not to worry about that. “Just think of it as extra protein.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal

http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2002/09/13/catcoffee_020913.html

http://www.vrg.org/ingredients/index.php#rennet

http://www.sallybernstein.com/beverages/coffee/kopi_luwak.htm

Peer Response 2, Week 2

Response to Susana's Memory, Week 2

Your first sentence, I think, is a strong one, effective for peaking our interest. But the parenthetical aside seems unnecessary. You've really fleshed out some intereseting details in this draft--I'm especially fascinated by the "walking catfish" and the "walking-catfish-sucking-machine," but there are others. A thinning-out revision might serve you well in this piece. Expositions like, "The imagination is amazing at age 11" and "We were homebound," your readers get for free, so you don't have to say it outright.

Also, there seems to be an odd play here between fear and adventure. And I think you should take advantage of that juxtaposition. For example, were you just a little sad when the water receded and everything went back to normal?

Peer Response 1, Week 2

Response to Brett's "Oddity" Post:

You're right! Gatlinburg is the kitsch capital . . . and certainly the goody-two-shoes relative of Las Vegas. You made smart use of specifics in your post--The Donut Friar, The Happy Shack, and my personal favorite, Cupid's Chapel of Love. Even if I hadn't been there before, I could conjure up a telling image of what to expect should I make the drive. And without saying what a Gatlinburg vacation says about its patrons, you do a nice job of showing us. It's funny because when I think of going to the mountains, I think of spending time in nature. But Gatlinburg, seemingly uncomfortable with its association with nature, promises a kind of steroid-induced culture, a kind of hyperbole culture designed to claim the cash of the bored. Maybe when you swing to an uncanny connection, you could bring in the fake snow and transition to the downplayed beauty that the town attempts to distract from. What do the kitsch and bright lights keep us from seeing?

Memory 2, Week 2

Catching Pop Flies

My brother Dan and I still argue over which one of us got shot in the butt with a bb and which one did the shooting. I think I pulled the trigger and got in trouble afterwards. He says it was me who got shot. I was maybe ten, so Dan was either seven or eight. I remember a large woodpile next to the propane gas tank in our backyard, the firewood thrown in a disheveled heap like there might be a bonfire later. I want to say that the wood was stacked one log on top of the other like an unsafe stairway, lower at the ends and capping out in the middle. But that's not how I remember it. I think it took up a considerable chunk of our backyard.

I didn't take a direct shot at my brother. I was aiming for the woodpile. My mom had warned me not to shoot at the wood, saying the bb could ricochet and hit me, hurt my dog Knuckles, or crack a window on the back side of the house. I don't think I believed her. Plus, maybe I saw a snake or a rat and that's why I took the shot. The bb ricocheted, beaming my brother on his right cheek. At least according to me. I wasn't allowed to play with the gun after that when Dad was away. Dan says what happened is that he shot me on purpose, that we both lost shooting privileges. He says it was to get me back for pinning him down in a wrestling move when our cousins Chris and Mike were over.

My dad warned me all the time that Dan would get bigger than me one day, that I would pay for bullying him. Dad wouldn't let me forget my genetic weakness. He fought hard against it, arming me with bb guns, pellet guns, baseball bats, bows and arrows. And fishhooks. I remember baiting hooks with earthworms I had dug up by hand from the damp soil in the pasture next to the creek, the way those slimy brown bodies writhed as I hooked them in sections, making each one into an 's.' Dad said earthworms might still live even if you break them in half or in sections. He said they have seven hearts and don't need them all to survive. And I think I do remember watching halved earthworms wiggle along different paths after being split apart. Minnows were baited differently, the point of the hook entering through the eye and coming out the other side of their thin heads.

My dad and I played catch, too, and not just for fun either. Dad insisted I not flinch when he beamed the ball at my worn leather glove, suspended between my chin and sternum. "Don't close your eyes. Watch the ball and you won't get hit."

When I dodged the ball, shifting to the left or right, he yelled at me, "Don't be afraid of the ball!" So I learned precision, snagging balls on a path with my face, my shin, or the propane tank behind me. I thought he was training me for something. I thought I might get to play on a team. So I sucked it up when he made me pitch til dark, refusing to go inside until I landed a fast pitch straight into his stationary glove. If he had to, he'd make me angry on purpose. He said it made me throw faster. If I was mad enough, I'd go in for dinner certain that the dull thud of cork against leather had stung his palm. Happy it might have hurt a little.

I stopped playing catch with my dad when he forbade me to try out for the baseball team. It was an all boy's team, he said. Still, when I was older, I volunteered to catch pop-flies for my brother when he practiced at home between game days.

*couldn't verify whether pop flys, pop fly's or pop flies is correct -- none of them seem right. :)

Original Prompt, Week 2

Text: "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

This essay excerpt works to broaden the reader's perspective by comparing the experience of Antigua's tourists to the experience of the natives. Kincaid doesn't mind painting an ugly picture of tourists (who could of course be you or me, but at any rate are certainly European or American). She captures the escapist expectations of an island holiday, only to inform us that the natives "cannot go anywhere . . . are too poor to go anywhere . . . [are unable] to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure (264).

It's all about challenging perception: tourists come for the promise of sunny, dry days, for example, while natives suffer the realities of drought. Kincaid often introduces a loaded image or fact with, "You may say" or "You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder" or "You must not wonder," a writing strategy that suggests what you should say or should wonder when you come to the island. If you are thinking and observing, she suggests, you will wonder certain things. For example, "You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it" followed a few sentences later by "the contents of your lavatory might, just might, graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, for you see, in Antigua, there is no proper sewage-disposal system" (262).

Prompt: What do you have inside information about? I've heard horror stories about hotel sheets not being changed/washed for weeks, food dropped on the floor in restaurants served to the customer anyway, and the tip of a finger being found in a package of ground beef. Is there something you want your audience to seriously rethink? Something about which we "must not wonder?"

Memory 1, Week 2

Backwards to Thirteen

I once answered the phone "I love you" by accident. It was a multi-tasking snafu. I'm not an "I love you" whore. I might be a little loose with "I'm sorry," but confessions of affection aren't my vice. So when I turned from consoling my daughter Emily to profess love instead to Garan Mason, our youth pastor at the time, I followed with "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I meant hello."

I've briefly loved a few doctors. David Cummings, a balding dentist, saw me through a painful ordeal with a wisdom tooth. And Dr. David Kline, a barely thirty urologist who saved me from fourteen stones blocking the right side of my deformed horseshoe kidney, I loved best of all. The half drunken "I love yous" were helped along by narcotics and gratitude. Dr. Cummings, I still see twice a year.

Once, at the end of an exhausting telephone exchange with my ex, I unwittingly tapped the template "I love you," the one reserved for my mom, my husband, and my kids--my only regulars. And God I want to say I hate him. But I've been brought up to say instead that I hate how he makes me feel.

Hate was like a swear word at my house. Nowadays kids have the swear jar. Say a bad work, put in a quarter. Done. There was no magic glass into which I could deposit my sin. I kept my quarters and my guilt.

I once said "I hate you" to my mom. I didn't mean it. I hated what she was doing, insisting I stay home on a Saturday night where the only things to do were write love poetry in my room or watch reruns about a magical island where recurring nightmares finally get resolved. My mom eventually gave in, though, and let me spend the night at my friend Sandy's house, where Nora, Claire, and Tori practiced french kissing with mason jars. Later, Sandy's cousin Little Don, fifteen I think, would judge their progress. I didn't play. Little Don said I was acting like a girl priest. And he said I looked like one too, my white ruffled collar buttoned all the way to the top, my glittery socks reaching way past the hem of my gold knickers.

Junkward Quotes 1-4, Week 2

1) "The devil will drink your kool-aid, eat your cookies, and make you like it."

2) Mother: "Your shoes are on the wrong feet."  Daughter (6): "These are the only feet I've got."

3) "Loud children will be pressed between the pages of very large books." ~sign at Elder's Bookstore in Nashville

4) "She's an 'I love you' whore."

Oddity, Week One

Fear

My dog Sebastian has a phobia. Even though I'm afraid of heights and have an unnatural fear of spiders, it never occurred to me that animals have phobias, too. Sebastian, a 15-pound shih tzu, has a few quirks that I find amusing. For one, he spontaneously sprawls out like a bear rug on the floor while walking across a room. Suddenly, I'm assuming, he needs a rest.

At first I thought his refusal to climb up or down the stairs was cute. He just wants me to carry him, I thought. Eventually, though, I put the pieces together. He, too, is terrified of heights. The three sharp intakes of breath as we descend the fourteen steps to the main floor remind me of the time I hyperventilated on the stairs of the rock tower at Mt. Cheaha, my mom swearing that it would be less painful for her to jump than to endure the unbearable fear of falling. I wonder if fear is hereditary.

I can't say Sebastian's phobia isn't convenient sometimes. We can let him out on the porch without fear of him running off and getting lost. There are ten stairs between him and freedom.

If we're late coming downstairs in the mornings, Sebastian braves the climb up in an attempt to be closer to his family. At first, he only made it as far as the landing. Now, on a good day, he makes it as far as two steps from the top. Those last two 6-inch obstacles are more than he can bear.

Improv, Week One

"The Pain Scale" ~Eula Biss

Relevant passage:

"Hospice nurses are trained to identify five types of pain: physical, emotional, spiritual, social, and financial.
The pain of feeling, the pain of caring, the pain of doubting, the pain of parting, the pain of paying" (30).

An itch is a kind of pain, according to Eula Biss' father. Being uncomfortable also, according to me. The pair keeps me awake at night. If there are indeed five types of pain--and I think there are at least five--then I propose that the emotional, spiritual, social, and financial types manifest themselves in the physical.

My first encounter with the Wong-Baker pain scale was a comedic one, likely because I wasn't in pain. Michael, my oldest son, also not in pain, attributed the pain-free face to my husband Jeff's face when he takes the family to McDonald's. The contorted "worst pain imaginable face," Michael asserted, represents Jeff's pain level when we eat at Applebee's. Proof, I suggest, that the pain scale is relative. After paying at Sea Captain's House in Myrtle Beach or the quaint Cajun cafe on the corner of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Applebee's might register a '5' or a '6.' Financial pain--the pain of paying. I didn't feel it personally.

Sometimes, though, I do feel other people's pain. Emotional pain--the pain of caring. When my mom was suffering from emotional abuse and refused to be helped or help herself, my chest hurt all the time. Every night, I rolled up a pillow to press against my heart, trying to hold my body together. To stop the constant sensation of exploding. Helplessness. The worst pain imaginable?

Sometimes, doctors say, we live with pain so long that it seems normal. This kind of pain, we don't acknowledge. Tyler, my best friend Patricia's oldest child, was diagnosed with severe allergies at the age of 13. He also needed sinus surgery. Patricia questioned the diagnosis, noting that Tyler never complained of feeling badly. His doctor said he had probably adjusted to the pain. He'd felt that way so long that he didn't know he felt badly. This, for Patricia, induced guilt. Another kind of emotional pain.

Reportage, Week One

(Just a quick disclaimer: I found the "reportage" entry to be the most difficult post so far. What can be left out? What can't? I noticed lots of things, and I'm pretty sure this gets especially boring. I cut a couple hundred words. And still . . .)

Annual Appearance

Once a year, my family shovels out five dollars apiece to watch Woodland face off against Wedowee in basketball. The rivalry is decades old, my husband's alma mater the former, mine the latter. That's not why we go, though. We go to watch the sons and daughters of friends and family, just like they come to dance recitals and concerts to watch mine.

Friday night, we take our seats midway up the bleachers on the visitor's side, near the exit, in Wedowee's new gym. I had forgotten about the latest mud tossing—the insistence that Woodland's fans have no class. They don't. I'm no fan, so I can say that.

Jeff and I spread out on the bleacher, taking up more room than we need, expecting lots of visits from children from both sides. One of the benefits of my twelve years in the daycare business. We have a large extended family.

Across the gym on the home side, the JV girls' from both teams get their pre-game pep talks. Carley (a former daycare baby) plays JV. Her siblings—Callen age six and McKenzie age nine—are sitting between Jeff and me. She'll come speak to us after the game. Seventh grade changes things.

On both sides, fans wear election shirts, spatterings of the Woodland crew sporting “Re-elect Paul Gay, Superintendent of Education,” while about as many of Wedowee's fans don “Vote for Change, Elect Rance Kirby.” Campaign cards are dealt.

Levi, my best friend's middle child, comes to chat before his game. After punching Jeff on the shoulder, he talks to me about his mom. “She's not coming tonight. Caylin has a gymnastics meet. That stuff is all the time.”

Woodland's JV girls take a fairly easy win, holding Wedowee to 15 points to their own 38. At halftime, McKenzie had predicted 38 to 16. She grins as Jeff tells everybody. He's impressed. So am I.

Wedowee's JV boys answer back, beating their rivals by a cool 19. While the varsity-B boys play, the crowd thickens, boys without shirts making their way to Wedowee's top right bleacher. One passes by on our side sporting a large blue “G” on his pale, hairless chest, his belly a little like jello. Girls in halter tops join the bare-chested, and I note their painted bodies shifting around to send our fans a message. “RCHS IGERS!!!”

Jeff wonders out loud, “Where's the 'T?'”

There's a girl in a white shirt standing between the “S” and “I.” “Maybe she has a 'T' sign,” I offer. But then the “T” guy shows up, and I realize the white shirt girl is the space.

When the varsity girls come out to play, the crowd gets animated, empty coke bottles thumping against legs, feet tapping against metal bleachers, fans identifying the players they know. Grandmas, aunts, uncles, moms, dads giving in to habits, biting nails, chewing bottom lips, readjusting hats. Rap music booms from the loud speaker while fans and cheerleaders form a human tunnel, dramatizing the girls' entrance.

Wedowee won't put up double digits. Both teams know it. Leading Woodland's lineup are the Strain girls—Leah, Shanna, Shalyn, and Amy. Coach Strain had these girls playing together from the time they could dribble—his daughter Leah, her twin cousins, and a cousin from another brother. Leah, a sophomore, is already being courted by Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee, her older sister Courtney on full athletic scholarship at Auburn. Jade Walker is the fifth starter.

A thinned-down version of Wedowee's marching band plays, “All I do is win, win, win, no matter what. Got money on my mind and I can never get enough. Cuz every time I step up in the building, everybody's hands go up.” I know this because my daughter Emily, behind me, sings along.

After the whistle, the girls' shoes squeak incessantly, like baby birds in a nest, impatient for their food. Jade's dad yells, “You're out there by yourself baby. You gotta shoot!” A reference to the Strain team.

Wedowee's white-jerseyed girls can't take a shot, the girls in orange dispensing with the typical one on one blocks, all going after the ball. Frustrated, the girls in white look more like spectators as orange blur after orange blur demonstrate layups. They don't miss. Three's. Two's. Foul shots. Swoosh. At halftime, the score is 44 to 4. The final, 79 to 9. McKenzie had predicted 80 to 10.

The varsity boys enter through their respective human spirit lines. “All we do is win, win, win.” The painted bodies start their chanting, “We, Wedowee, we we Wedowee.” The final game.

Wedowee rallies, driving up a 10-point lead. The Woodland boys step up, closing the gap to one, just as the halftime buzzer sounds. After the whistle, Woodland's Ricky Stevens, still mobile from chasing the ball, slices through the sandwiched fans on the guest side bleachers, a slave to his unchecked momentum.

In the second half, Woodland stays slightly behind, keeping their own Coach Jones animated and on his feet. He's tall and thin with a slight stoop. His mouth stays open, but his words get absorbed before they get to me. Except for the oft repeated, “You hear me? You hear me?” That part I get. He never turns his back on the court, following the ball like an orangutan running sideways. “You hear me?”

During a timeout, a Wedowee player chats with a ref. Behind me, a disgruntled fan shouts, “Stop talking to the ref! Hey! Number 14! Stop talking to the ref!”

At the final buzzer, Wedowee gets the win, 59-52. Shots of the scoreboard get uploaded instantly to Facebook. Noone posts the girls' score.

Peer Response, Week One

Response to MacKenzie's "Reportage" Entry, Week One

I'm a rookie writer, so I find it difficult to offer helpful commentary. But I'll give it my best shot. Across the board, your bits of dialogue are timely, breaking up exposition and giving your subjects a realistic humanity. Sometimes, when you're giving us inner dialogue, I think it would give your prose more of a punch if you let the visual speak for you. For example, when you say that Daniel demolished the cheese dip, it distracts a little from the familiar image of "the last bits of it [congealed] in the bottom of the bowl." Maybe there's a way to show us who the culprit is without that front bit of introduction. I have a pretty cool visual of the guy with the "metabolism of a frightened antelope." I know the type. Nice image. To me, the last two paragraphs are your strongest. The only other observation I have is that your introductory sentence seems to get a little bogged down. Perhaps simply opening with "Apparently the new thing is just meat on a tortilla," might strengthen your hook.

Free Writing, Week One

*response to classroom prompt--moment when you felt awkward for your parent(s)

Errata

In fourth grade--a few months after donning a bright blue cast on my left leg that made me look cool, but before the chicken pox ordeal of spring--my dad walked into my math class to bring me roses on Valentine's Day. It was the handwritten card that made me blush for him. My dad signed his name to report cards--to everything--in print. EmmetT WhiTE--a cross between bell hooks' unconventional John Hancock and a first grader's. On notes to school, permission slips, and cards attached to Valentine vases, caps cropped up mid-word or at the fronts of words like At or LatE. Or LoVe.

Those rogue caps seemed magnified, making a spectacle, in my eyes, of my dad's unrecognized flaw, making him somehow vulnerable. There were things he should know, but didn't. That's what pricked me most. That's why I folded that card up like a paper fan and stuffed it in the back pocket of my Levi 505's.

People notice big things, making them spectacles because they're big. Think of Bigfoot, monster trucks, the fattest woman on earth, or General Sherman, the 3,000-year-old redwood in California's Sequoia National Forest thought to be the "largest--and oldest-- living thing on the face of the earth" (Burnam). But the large "V" squeezed between the "o" and "e" represents a different phenomenon altogether. Like my dad in a room filled with grammar school boys, the mid-sentence caps are out of place, mutinous, defiant, disturbing. Suggesting chinks in the painstaking onslaught of grammar drilled into our psyches from the time we can read "See Spot run."

The grade-school mantra "We have rules for a reason" brings to memory the perils of casually discarded gum, fights in the hall, or running with scissors. But the alphabet never hurt anybody. For the guardians of grammar, distinctions separate the dangerous from the rebellious, pitting the hard-nosed headmistress with a pointer, horn-rimmed glasses, and a scowl against the quaint protests of a young man, all grown up, finally beyond her reach. Playing with her rules.

Driving too fast, beaming baseballs at base runners, or choosing on a whim which side of the road to drive on can get you killed. An omitted comma might put you under suspicion. But THe rules goVerning caps only threaten to give or withhold reverence to nouns like the united states, Bumper Cars, or oliver twist. Maybe my dad didn't know better. Or maybe he didn't care.

No matter. I don't think my classmates were playing grammar police that day, anyway. As soon as my dad closed the door on my math class, Sherry Wier grabbed the sleeve of my Member's Only windbreaker to whisper breathlessly, "That's your dad? He so fine!"

Original Prompt, Week One

Source Essay: “Getting Along With Nature” by Wendell Berry

Strategy Notes:

Although Berry's writing is heavy on the exposition and relatively lean on imagery, he uses enough rich instances of the latter to balance the essay and avoid an overly sermonistic presentation. The essay makes a case for communion with nature without painting a nasty picture of culture, although it includes pros and cons of both in specific contexts.

One strategy I see using for myself is that of investing ample research time before attempting to narrate something I care deeply about. It's not enough to want to advocate something, to write about something important. Berry's essay highlights the necessity of intimately knowing multiple angles of an issue if you want to a) take a reasonable position, and b) potentially convince your audience that some change is desirable.

Berry writes, “I knew a barber once who refused to give a discount to a bald client, explaining that his artistry consisted not in the cutting off, but in the knowing when to stop” (24). He seems to be speaking here to the art of writing, as well as to the advantages of restraint in general. Along these lines, Berry uses his prose in this essay to contradict the idea that arguing for change from an absolutist position is effective or advantageous. In fact, he posits that for the arguments posed by the staunch defenders of nature and of culture, “It is a dangerous mistake . . . for either side to pursue [the] quarrel on the assumption that victory would be a desirable result” (20). (For example, saving all the sheep by eradicating all the coyotes vs. protecting sheep predators to the degree that farmers lose their rights to protect their livestock.)

Prompt:

Your first visit to a zoo or to a campus habitat for a live college mascot (eg Baylor's bears or UNA's lions).

Junkyard Quote Four, Week One

"Well, I'm half vegetarian." ~~Sara, age 6

Junkyard Quote Three, Week One

"Superheroes always call people citizens." From the mouths of babes . . . (after being asked to explain what "citizen" meant).

Junkyard Quote Two, Week One

"When I was maybe ten years old, my dad welded together something like a fireplace insert and installed it in the middle of our living room floor. The temperature hovered around the 80s in the common room after that, but the bedrooms were icy. Until, that is, a neighbor tore down chicken houses and gave my dad a few of those monster fans from the ends. He placed those fans in our bedrooms and used them to pull in heat from the insert. Our rooms were warm then. But I think I have some hearing loss from the noise." ~~Denise (sister-in-law) (I did paraphrase.)

Junkyard Quote One, Week One

AOL headline: "Braille Burgers From Fast Food Chain Wimpy Let Blind People 'See' Food"

To advertise that all its locations "feature menus in Braille for the benefit of the visually impaired," the South African fast food chain Wimpy "decided to launch a viral marketing campaign that would appeal to blind people." Apparently, the campaign consisted of distributing fifteen hamburgers in Braille-adorned buns (yes, the chefs manipulated the dough to inscribe the message) to fifteen blind people, filming their reactions, and making it into a commercial.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/12/braille-burgers-wimpy_n_1201622.html?ref=food

I chose this . . . a) because it is surprising and b) because it seems a bit exploitative.

Memory, Week One

My Last Steak

Dinner out meant steak or seafood. I chose steak. A ribeye, I'm fairly sure. I can't say that slab of well-done meat looked pretty on my plate. A charred measure of brown and black against the backdrop of overcooked broccoli and a microwaved potato. The smell, though, like fried butter, evoked backyard parties. Communion. Family night. Sometimes still, the scent wafts into memory, taking me back to a time when steak meant steak, not cow. I miss that.

And the taste? Something like sweet smoke, but with substance. A little chewy, but no blood. A tradeoff. Slicing away my third, maybe fourth bite, a thin string recoiled like a friendly snake caught by surprise. I put my fork and knife to work, attempting to bypass the offending reminder of life. A fruitless attempt.

Jeff, a little distracted by my shift from eating to disecting, offered comfort. “It's probably just a vein. You know, a blood vessel. Or a tendon. Just eat around it.”

A vein. A tendon. He said that out loud. I placed my fork, still warm from its foray into cow flesh, in a discarded napkin. I asked the waitress for a clean one and finished off my potato in silence.

Introductory Portfolio

Published by sixsentences, a not-the-least-bit-exclusive site where you tell a story in only six sentences, get published, and (sometimes) get feedback. Definitely not fitting the 80/20 ratio, but it's a sample, nonetheless.

Excuses

The urge to scribble overwhelms me once I hold the pen between my fingers. Before contact, an unnamed man—unsteady arms outstretched, unblinking eyes focused, approaches a red wooden door anticipating revelation but dreading the nothing he expects—distracts me from the faded oak floors in need of mopping so that I have no other choice but to sit down and write. My mind dumps its burden quickly into a tight-lipped vault, burying the man alive just as the threshold of breakthrough threatens to make public the private. So I write my name fourteen different ways, trying to perfect the signature that will claim my masterpiece. And I remember the four loads of laundry that need washing. As I separate the whites from the colors, I hear the knob of the red door turning.

Waking Up

In wonderment, I charged happily into my dream, humming as I went, my pink frill a safe distance from the ground. Without warning, I slammed into the clashing, self-preserving, silently-driven music of unfamiliar marches toward dreams I couldn't see or touch for the vividness of my own. How inexplicably my unacknowledged self-righteousness turned to self-loathing and doubt. I stopped moving, released the pink frill to fall where it may, and felt the awkwardness that only comes with epiphany. I am not alone. I am no longer the sun, and in dawning recognition I watch the mass of suns stalking the earth, unaware, and I feel the helplessness, the pompousness, of my shallow comprehension.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Poetry samples from ENGL 3200:

Broke

When you're living on french fries
in your grandmother's basement,
tired of homemade biscuits
and casseroles, you learn
to value things like junk
mail and sweepstakes. You do stuff
like cut your own hair or charge
expensive clothes. Then
it snows for the first time in ten
years and you light the gas heat-
er, heat up the grease for the fries,
and your mom calls. Standing
too close to the heat, the phone
cord melts and cuts you off
just in time to stop the grease
fire on the stove. So you walk
up the stairs in your designer
pjs and eat a buttered biscuit.


London at Twenty-Two

Leaving Les Mis
in my red interview suit,
I duck into a sidewalk cafe
to eat molded cheese
with dry wine. I was on my way
to Kingsbury on a street
too proper for double-deckers
and superman booths, where
men in suits and their starched
women walk hand in hand
or arm in arm, laughing, loaded
with money or ego, moving slowly,
to be seen. Cathedrals, Tower Bridge,
and Jack the Ripper tours await
them, otherness at their feet, sitting
quietly on sidewalks without
outstretched hands, watching
couples pass, sensing them grip
their twenties tighter, hearing
ladies' heels click faster.
The warm bodies march
past in their London Fogs in London's
fog while a grown man sleeps
in a purple coat and bare feet, his neighbor,
warmer, eating peanut butter
with two fingers.

---------------------------------------

Prologue to Unbecoming

Look at the clouds. I know sometimes they look like cotton batting or dinosaurs or trains or shapes that can only be called cloud shapes. But look at them now, a succession of spaceships, maybe not perfectly formed, but still a multitude of similar casts resembling capsules for alien visitors. Some white, some the color of smoke, not drifting in one easterly or westerly direction, but seeming to descend lower and lower, threatening invasion. Wait a few minutes and look again. Those clouds get no closer, but still they descend. How odd. Tomorrow, the clouds shall be only layers of airplane streams all come together in a large mass of evidence. But that’s tomorrow.

I wonder how you like your coffee. Sugar? Milk? Sugar-free, fat-free hazelnut? No matter. I have none to offer, anyway. I'm currently without shelter or coffee pot. I will explain soon enough. On your way in, you might have noticed the town sign. Population 286. That's a little dated. I'm pretty sure we broke 300 back in 2007. There are no subdivisions here. No Dollar General, Publix, Walmart. No McDonalds. You can get authentic Greek food, though, at the Grapevine. Or chicken fingers, steak, popcorn shrimp, grilled cheese. I recommend the ravioli. Anyway, I want you to meet someone. Shortly, I mean.

Hear that music? That’s Luke strumming on his guitar. No. You can’t see him. Not yet. You’re outside on the wrap around porch of a cedar cabin nestled on a creek. Only you can’t see the creek from here. You can hear it, though, if you focus. Water rushing too fast over rocks, faster than normal because of all the rain and, just yesterday, snow. It's true. Just now the ground is a blanket of blinding white crystals, but if you look behind you away from the sun, you can appreciate the oddity of four inches of snow this far south. Thick sheets of cold white balance on tree branches and barbed wire fences. The cows--yes cows fenced in just beyond the yard on three sides of the house--the cows stare back at you when you look at them. What else have they to do when they can’t find their grass and their sweet feed is covered with snow? Stare as long as you like. They won’t look away.

Oh, the guitar. You still hear it, right? You can stand here an hour, two hours, three, and it won’t stop. The same blues song. B.B. King. You know the one. “Everyday, everyday I have the blues.” But there are other things to hear. “Pride and Prejudice” on the television, for one. Jane’s characters compete with Luke’s strumming for your attention, but don’t you hear poor rich Mr. Darcy getting rejected by prideful Elizabeth Bennett?

Speaking of women, take notice of the one just feet from your presence on the porch. See her on the bench? No, she’s not looking at you. And she’s not dead. She’s asleep in her housecoat, pajama pants and fuzzy socks. At least her eyes are closed. No, she’s not cold. Not right here where the sun is focusing its hot heat and light. She’s sweating, truth be told, and not sleeping at all, but thinking, remembering, being pulled by memory and potential in two very different directions.

Jo hoped Luke would be the one to find her here, but either her intuition or her familiarity with Luke’s habits warned her differently. If she knew a stranger watched her instead, felt your curiosity hovering so near, Jo might feel compelled to make excuses for her odd behavior, such being so out of character for her.

I could tell you how she came to be. How she was created. Oh, don’t laugh. You only think you know. But you don’t. I’m not talking about that, anyway. It takes more than a sperm and an egg to make the likes of Jo. A conception story. Ha! Not a chance.

Anyway, Jo doesn’t see you. So relax. Take a closer look. She’s not one of those china-doll types, not one whose bones are so minuscule they seem capable of splitting at too hard a footfall. No, Jo has good bones, fretfully curly brown hair, high cheekbones, and skin that suggests four decades of hard living. And if you could see through the house coat, you would see good legs. If you could see those, you might guess her to be a runner. And you’d be right. But she hasn’t always been. It used to be that at the mall, the dentist office, the park, strangers took notice. “You must be a runner,” they'd say. One morning Jo woke up and concluded that if she looked like a runner, she might as well be one. That's her way of becoming. Of conforming. At least it used to be.

It seems you made it just in time to find out what I mean, dear reader. I can take you no farther myself. Jo's stirring, so I'll leave you with her. You're in good hands, I trust.