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

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...

There are people who draw light to themselves, and almost can't help it. They pull out a chair for you when you approach the table: "please,"  they say, gesturing you into it, earnest and unaware of their outsized generosity. They say "atta girl"  to strangers who have just ridden a big wave or run the bases. They fill the hungry heart with pride and do it with such ease, having learned some time ago that there is no economy of compliments. What made them this way? Not the absence of pain, no. More often than not, heartbreak is the holy ground that anoints them. The more of these light-gatherers I meet, the more I believe it's will, and will forged anew each day. They wake up and they call forth an adamantine determination to resist the ease of despair, and to believe that reality is mainly possibility, even when the wicked comes knocking.

Understand this: I lost myself for most of my life, altering and diluting my energy to fit in with those who eventually abandoned me. Do you think I'm going to continue to deny or tone down  my essence in the slightest? You're going to see all of me. Love me or hate me. But at least I won't hate me.

Yesterday, a star said to the little light in my heart, We are not just transients passing. Do not die. Beneath this glow some wanderers go on walking. You were first created out of love, so carry nothing but love to those who are trembling. One day, all gardens sprouted  from our names, from what remained of hearts yearning. And since it came of age, this ancient language has taught us how to heal others with our longing, how to be a heavenly scent to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh, a gasp of oxygen. Softly, we pass over wounds, like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief, an aspirin. O little light in me, don't die, even if all the galaxies of the world close in. O little light in me, say: Enter my heart in peace. All of you, come in!

My feelings regarding publication has changed through the years. Although I enjoy writing poetry and supporting other writers through reading their work, I feel I do not want to participate in the jungle of submission and eventual publication. Perhaps I have a fear of rejection—although I have a lengthy Submittable list and Excel Spreadsheet of rejected pieces, so I'm not sure that's the case. Although my time of involvement in the writing community was transformative, I'm not so sure it is where I belong. I met so many wonderful people and found several incredible opportunities. I remember a lot of friction in the community. A lot of competition, which was not always friendly. Like any other group of people, the writing community had cliques and groups that were not always kind and/or inclusive. Perhaps this has changed for the better since I were last involved. Perhaps this is not a writing community issue. Maybe it's me. I feel I have become more isolated since I ste...

I went for a walk in the rain today, a sort of intentional ritual of healing. I had to cut someone I loved out of my life in order to move forward. I guess I still had hope they would show up. Perhaps a letter or a visit. Some sort of gesture to show they had truly changed. I think it's possible for people to change—I did. But now I am this person; this stubborn, fearful, contemplative, despairing, yet hopeful person who wants someone to grab her by the shoulders and profess their love to her. I am still a romantic at heart. I want, for all the times I baked cakes, made dinner, bought gifts, wrote letters to men I loved, for this energy to come back to me. Is that selfish? I want to be treated the way I have treated men who treated me like shit. Someone who is patient and understanding. Someone who admits fault and shows up with honesty. Someone who isn't afraid to be vulnerable and human. Someone who is emotionally open and understanding. Someone who shows up and is present an...

A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow. A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all. A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly. An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations. Anything that is decent, anything that is present, a calm and a cook and more singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the centre. What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is when tears many tears are necessary. The tongue and the salmon, there is not salmon when brown is a color, there is salmon when there is no meaning to an early morning being pleasanter. There is no salmon, there are no tea-cups, there are the same kind of mushes as are used as stomachers by the eating hopes that makes eggs delicious. Drink is likely to stir a certain respect for an egg cup and more wat...

It has rained for five days running the world is a round puddle of sunless water where small islands are only beginning to cope a young boy in my garden is bailing out water from his flower patch when I ask him why he tells me young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.

A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn't catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.

 Nearly nine and still the sun's not slunk into its nightly digs. The burnt-meat smell of midweek cookouts and wet grass hangs in the air like loose familiar summer garb. Standing by the magnolia tree, I think if I were to live as long as she did, I'd have  eleven more years. And if I were to live as long as him, I'd have forty-nine. As long as him, I'd be dead already. As long as her, this  would be my final year. There's a strange contentment to this countdown, a nodding to this time, where I get to stand under the waxy leaves of the ancient genus, a tree that appeared before even the bees, and watch as fireflies land on the tough tepals until each broad flower glows like a torchlit mausoleum. They call the beetle's conspicuous bioluminescence "a cold light," but why then do I still feel so much fire?

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop. Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. Open the door, then close it behind you. Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean. Give it back with gratitude. If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars' ears  and back.