PSST! Rantings, Musings, & "Not Your Mama's" Platitudes

I shall go out again and find a tree, trees, pines, mountains of pine If my silence succeeds in song, you will hear of it from the winds.

For out of a house of matchboard and stone     Where men would argue till the stars be green,   It is good to step onto the earth, alone,           And be struck dumb, if only for a time.

We are all living in cages with the door wide open.

You are immortal; you've existed for billions of years in different manifestations, because you are life, and life cannot die. You are in the trees, the butterflies, the fish, the air, the moon, the sun. Wherever you go, you are there, waiting for yourself.

I lift my eyes To the blue Open-ended ocean. Why worry? Some things are always there.

Human beings  are made of water— we were not designed to hold ourselves together rather run freely like oceans like rivers

My daughter is bored so I tell her silverfish are neither silver nor a fish, but a spoon-dull insect that loves kitchens bathrooms the mouths of children. " Silverfish! Silverfish! " she squeals, the word peeling from her lips and crawling down her legs. She watches me knead the day's dough and asks if Kleenex are used to clean necks. The TV says a crane collapsed off 34th and she wants to know if it's because the crane was thirsty. Some afternoons we visit the neighborhood pool and even though she can barely swim my daughter isn't afraid. She's so unafraid it makes me afraid. She loves it when I pick her up and throw her as far away as possible. She loves to paddle back and scream Again! Again! But she loves it most when I swim away as fast as I can, when my back becomes a shore she's trying to reach. My daughter's named the pool Edna. Sometimes Edna helps her reach me. When it's time to go my daughter says, "See you soon, Edna." Every d...

Maybe it's a kind of freedom too. To stay home.

"And when I turned to face grief, I saw that it was just love in a heavy coat." Shannon Barry "My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless but it is right; for all is like the ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world." Fyodor Dostoyevsky "Maybe you've spent some time trying every day not to die, out on your own somewhere. Maybe that effort has become your work in life." Donald Antrim "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." Audre Lorde "And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing." Albert Camus "May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children." Rainer Maria Rilke "How wild it was, to let it be." Cheryl Strayed "The first rule is to keep an untroubled ...

Picking Cranberries The week after you arrived, I took you cranberry picking on the trails close to town.  You told me about your husband, your clenched jaw, the damage the pressure had done. I picked, fingers pulling, cooling against hard, dark berries. Buckets filled, sun slanted through the birch. That afternoon our words puffed visible from our mouths, and I knew what it had been for you, arriving more difficult than departing. I reached for your bucket and poured in my berries. I can see you in your kitchen in December, the short day peers in the window while your hands break open the bag. One square of pale sunlight on the sugar, measured, waiting.

Tupelo, MS Crop dusters have gone missing. Storm Clouds, missing. Every  owl has gone missing. Entire foothills. There are no dogwoods  or foxes to miss them. Radio towers are missing. An archive has  always been missing. Unmarked graves have not been missed; have been missed to death. Downtown is missing, the hardware store where Elvis bought his first guitar. The songs he robbed from juke joints. Original names for the dirt have been miss- ing a long time. The namers have not been missed; have been missed terribly. A gospel just went missing. A gospel took all the blood it needed for its metaphor to work. My lover went missing today. My lover went missing fifteen years ago. When neighbors spoke to him, they spoke to someone else. I found his old letters  missing from their hat box. Each penciled word called from my mother's chimney. The brick said nothing.

I grew up next to my stepbrothers, not with them. They were a dozen years older and already in their own apartments when our parents married. I was twelve. They were tall. They gestured with their arms when they talked, taking up space in the kitchen. They were biceps and shoulder blades, always talking above my head. They leaned in doorways. They leaned on the furniture, always coming from something or going somewhere. They were always touching things or pressing against them, deciding if they were solid or if they needed to be fixed. They were comfortable, powerful. They didn't worry about things. The world had made a place for them and they were intent on filling it. It made me petty and sore. They would drop by the house to borrow money or fix a cabinet door and they they would disappear. I was smarter but they had stamina. I was good with hypotheticals but they knew how to get things done, real things, with actual tools. They weren't going to take me to the movies or teach...