Written a year ago and read at my mother-in-law's memorial service by the author. My Grandmother's Garden by M. Bessac I am bunches of wildflowers with their roots ripped up I am the weeds your mother cannot get rid of And the stained red poppies, held in place with a cup I am the big willow tree, who watched you learn to love I am the California sweet peas, so stubborn as to only grow in the summer The orange tinted daffodils your father bought ...so long ago The mistletoe your little sister always takes down for Mummer I am the thorn-prone ivy that only grows in the snow I am everywhere, it is time you know For when it is my time to go I will be anywhere, everywhere in that lush green paseo
Written a year ago and read at my mother-in-law's memorial service by the author.
My Grandmother's Garden by M. Bessac
I am bunches of wildflowers with their roots ripped up
I am the weeds your mother cannot get rid of
And the stained red poppies, held in place with a cup
I am the big willow tree, who watched you learn to love
I am the California sweet peas, so stubborn as to only grow in the summer
The orange tinted daffodils your father bought ...so long ago
The mistletoe your little sister always takes down for Mummer
I am the thorn-prone ivy that only grows in the snow
I am everywhere, it is time you know
For when it is my time to go
I will be anywhere, everywhere in that lush green paseo
Written a year ago and read at my mother-in-law's memorial service by the author.
My Grandmother's Garden by M. Bessac
I am bunches of wildflowers with their roots ripped up
I am the weeds your mother cannot get rid of
And the stained red poppies, held in place with a cup
I am the big willow tree, who watched you learn to love
I am the California sweet peas, so stubborn as to only grow in the summer
The orange tinted daffodils your father bought ...so long ago
The mistletoe your little sister always takes down for Mummer
I am the thorn-prone ivy that only grows in the snow
I am everywhere, it is time you know
For when it is my time to go
I will be anywhere, everywhere in that lush green paseo
As soon as I sat down the seven year old girl offered me gum and showed me a postcard of the airplane we were in. She was writing her mother whom she had just left at the gate, smearing her love in blue magic marker. Then she pulled out a drawing she had made of the wind and one of a cloud and a man who had ladders for legs and eight arms extending eight hands. After the heavy body of the plane lifted off the ground, she held my hand and talked about her flute teacher's birds and the eels she had bought in a bait store and let loose on the beach, each one slithering into the dark of the green waves, returning to what she said she could not imagine.
The turkey vulture,
a shy bird ungainly on the ground
but massively graceful in flight,
responds to attack
uniquely.
Men have contempt for this scavenger
because he eats without killing.
When an enemy attacks,
the turkey vulture vomits:
the shock and disgust of the predator
are usually sufficient
to effect his escape.
He loses only his dinner,
easily replaces.
All day I have been thinking
how to adapt
this method of resistance.
Sometimes only the stark
will to disgust
prevents our being consumed:
there are clearly times
when we must make a stink
to survive.
Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Jun 28, 2022 - 11:35am
Antigone wrote:
Marge Piercy: Right To Life
A woman is not a basket you place your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood hen you can slip duck eggs under. Not the purse holding the coins of your descendants till you spend them in wars. Not a bank where your genes gather interest and interesting mutations in the tainted rain, any more than you are.
You plant corn and you harvest it to eat or sell. You put the lamb in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to butcher for chops. You slice the mountain in two for a road and gouge the high plains for coal and the waters run muddy for miles and years. Fish die but you do not call them yours unless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman. You lay claim to her pastures for grazing, fields for growing babies like iceberg lettuce. You value children so dearly that none ever go hungry, none weep with no one to tend them when mothers work, none lack fresh fruit, none chew lead or cough to death and your orphanages are empty. Every noon the best restaurants serve poor children steaks. At this moment at nine o’clock a partera is performing a table top abortion on an unwed mother in Texas who can’t get Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die of tetanus and her little daughter will cry and be taken away. Next door a husband and wife are sticking pins in the son they did not want. They will explain for hours how wicked he is, how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the rose of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood and every baby born has a right to love like a seedling to sun. Every baby born unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will beget pain. A decade downstream a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched, a firing squad is summoned, a button is pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.
A woman is not a basket you place your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood hen you can slip duck eggs under. Not the purse holding the coins of your descendants till you spend them in wars. Not a bank where your genes gather interest and interesting mutations in the tainted rain, any more than you are.
You plant corn and you harvest it to eat or sell. You put the lamb in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to butcher for chops. You slice the mountain in two for a road and gouge the high plains for coal and the waters run muddy for miles and years. Fish die but you do not call them yours unless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman. You lay claim to her pastures for grazing, fields for growing babies like iceberg lettuce. You value children so dearly that none ever go hungry, none weep with no one to tend them when mothers work, none lack fresh fruit, none chew lead or cough to death and your orphanages are empty. Every noon the best restaurants serve poor children steaks. At this moment at nine o’clock a partera is performing a table top abortion on an unwed mother in Texas who can’t get Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die of tetanus and her little daughter will cry and be taken away. Next door a husband and wife are sticking pins in the son they did not want. They will explain for hours how wicked he is, how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the rose of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood and every baby born has a right to love like a seedling to sun. Every baby born unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will beget pain. A decade downstream a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched, a firing squad is summoned, a button is pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.
There is a country to cross you will find in the corner of your eye, in the quick slip of your foot—air far down, a snap that might have caught. And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing voice that finds its way by being afraid. That country is there, for us, carried as it is crossed. What you fear will not go away: it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That’s the world, and we all live there.
Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Mar 16, 2022 - 5:26am
Elegy Patrick Cabello Hansel
On your face, your beloved face, your sweat skinned face, the remnant grace of mother, father hidden there, the wind of years, the triumphs and the savagery, on your springtime harvest nightfall sunlit face, let me linger there. Let me touch it as a baby, my fingers unfolded gently, my voice harboring no words, let me touch my face to your face, Father, let us be here, face to face, in this land we have sown and reaped, in that time that has no wind, no words to worry, let us touch, Father, let us linger, let us be.
Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Mar 8, 2022 - 4:49am
Dark Charms
by Dorianne Laux
Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep lines and dark splotches, thinning skin. Here's the corner store grown to a condo, the bike reduced to one spinning wheel, the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds. The clear water we drank as thirsty children still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often. The old tunes play and continue to move us in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance, lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets. We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named. We name it the past and drag it behind us, bag like a lung filled with shadow and song, dreams of running, the keys to lost names.
Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Mar 7, 2022 - 5:14am
NEXT YEAR
by Gary Johnson
When we win the lottery next year,
Let’s buy a flat in Paris, France, And I will worship you, my dear, In lovely rooms with flowering plants. Me, a somewhat endearing old relic, A jowly but still charming man, And you my darling, rather angelic
Reclining prettily on a silk divan.
When I’m tired and don’t feel well,
Pack me off to a nice hotel With Egyptian sheets and fresh-cut flowers And room service is 24 hours. When I die, which I will do, Wear black for a month or two, Then look around, find someone new.
Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Feb 25, 2022 - 4:37am
Everything but God
by Anne Pierson Wiese
In Europe you can see cathedrals
from far away. As you drive toward them across the country they are visible—stony and roosted on the land—even before the towns that surround them. In New York you come upon them with no warning, turn a corner and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick's, spiny and white as a shell in a gift shop; dark St. Agnes lost near a canal and some housing projects in Brooklyn; or St. John the Divine, listed in every guidebook yet seeming always like a momentary vision on Amsterdam Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
steps ascending directly out of traffic.
Lately I have found myself unable
to pass by. The candles' anonymous wishes waver and flame near the entrance, bright numerous, transitory and eternal as a migration: the birds that fly away are never exactly the same as those that return. The gray, flowering arches' ribs rise until they fade, the bones so large and old they belong to an undetected time on earth. Here and there people's small backs in prayer, the windowed saints' robes' orchid glow, the shadows—ghosts of a long nocturnal snow from a sky below when we did not yet exist, with our questions tender as burns.
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and Iâve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways Iâll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and thatâs a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
