NaPoWriMo 2018:
33 Women
March 31, 2018
I did the prompts last year. It was a bit unsatisfying due to the fact that multiple groups are now creating their own prompts. So this year I decided to return to a project, one based on a poem I did years ago for my friend Michelle Sawdey after hearing she passed away and while on a writing retreat finding a notebook she had given me and being moved by her inscription.
At that time I thought I would like to someday do 30 poems for women in my life for NaPoWriMo. The title now says 33 women because (31) the Michelle poem had already been done and (32) I had also completed this first poem “America,” (drafted and finished auspiciously on February 14) and (33) the poem directly below which was created for a 2013 NaPoWriMo year, all poems outside the range of official NaPoWriMo dates of 2018, but fitting the project. Another thing I pre-did was to compile and chronologically order the list of names of the women I would do. The rest is all challenge work.
Some of their pictures are posted here: http://www.marymccray.com/33-women.html.
When I Was a Bird (Laura)
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 15, 2013)
What I know
about the tops of swing sets,
paint peeling over rust spots,
the arc of the swoop,
all the land falling silent,
the curve of the earth.
It was a moment
before gravity coaxed us back
down and physics hurled us up again,
chest out and flying,
having joy, having fun,
singing “Seasons in the Sun”
over and over and over.
We surveyed the concrete tunnels,
the sun-bleached dirt expanse
of second grade off Juan Tabo.
Within the year
we’d moved to cities of grass
and we flew
under the shade of trees,
over two levels of soccer fields
and a forest beyond that,
tetherballs obsessively circling
over spots of asphalt.
The third-grade boys
were already chasing birds
but we chose to fly, fly, fly.
Everyday our feathers rent flying,
wind-riding, sailing off the seat
and landing in the soft dirt spot
worn into the Missouri grass.
One day
my bird friend Laura landed on the root
of a big oak tree, hands first.
She stood up, dusted off,
and walked with southern poise
to the nurse.
When she came back that afternoon
she was grounded
in a white wrist cast.
And the boys caught her after that.
(Prologue) America
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: March 31, 2018)
I know you love her by the way you speak of her
as she walks the carpet in sea-green, sunlit gowns.
Who would ask you to break with her or her literature,
abandon her A-list avenues or prickly crowns?
I suggest only one alteration—uncover the veil
and see the violence they’ve done to her face,
but-her-face with sunken eyes of rust and wail,
foundations of varnish you could still embrace.
No time or reason to turn or leave despite
the yellow brick ways of which you’ve dreamed.
Cast and gloved, she’s not looking for an acolyte,
but someone to love her becoming un-seamed.
So solidly was she the vision of your inspiring
and knowing her fully, imperfectly worth desiring.
Rebecca
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 1, 2018)
“Who for Truth could die
When all about the owned the hideous lie!
The world redeemed from Superstition’s sway
is breathing free for thee sake today.”
John Greenleaf Whittier
On the family memorial of Rebecca Towne Nurse
Salem, Massachusetts
In the vault of personal history lessons
I bank this one from the Bay Colony.
History is family and how far we go back
is though the repetitions of American centuries
like seasons, back to the boat
where persecutions landed
and seeded in Salem farmsteads
with their mysterious pilgrim conceits.
Goodwife Nurse from Great Yarmouth
was 33 years in the new world
eight children and a mediator’s wife.
They said she was as good as good is,
an unlikely accused witch,
not allowed a lawyer
in a trial full of spectral evidence.
Rebecca was the martyr
who turned the tide of religious hysteria.
Thirty-nine signed the petition
that still survives in a museum
proving the pitifulness of petitions.
Innocence overturned,
reprieves reversed:
the trials of the women
who are hung in public.
Rebecca Nurse was frail and deaf
and the questions of her court floated away
unto justice and the silence
was taken as proof of her guilt.
They also said she could fly.
Years after the recants and vindications
and her house made historic
and her name found in a play
persecuting new persecutors
and new verdicts blaming Satan
or bad wheat
or boundary disputes among neighbors
or outspoken critics
who make themselves a target
of those they stand up against,
her family forgave everybody
but the village minister.
They hung a 71 year old woman
in 1692. And I tell myself,
they can hang you, too.
In the play, Rebecca stands at the gallows
and her children ask her why
she hasn’t said more in her defense.
Rebecca says she has lived long enough.
And she is credible and brave
before the judgements of God.
And if blood counts
and if I have one-eighth of her
in me, one-eighth of the defiance
against the loving dead,
that is something, as they say,
to take to the bank.
Not a story, not a claim, not a word
not a pulpit, not a altar, but a seed
in a hallowed bank of seeds.
Wilma
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 2, 2018)
It was a wheat farm in Iowa in the 1920s,
all brothers and two girls,
and a father who doesn’t believe
girls should go to school.
This was not unusual for the times
I imagine the day you left that farm
with your sister
going all the way to Washington state
as if only an ocean would stop you.
She worked to put you through college
and you worked to put her through college
back when a job could still purchase such a thing.
And I wonder about the energy that took
to be stubborn, to believe otherwise—
in a new city demanding new pathways
and the tall shadows of a multitude
of doorways.
I think about how wonderfully before you were,
before Mrs. degrees and empowerment seminars
and leaning in,
what Leroy was thinking while he was waiting downstairs
at the boarding house. Did he tell you over diner
about having the courage of your convictions?
Did you talk about your courage and your convictions,
and how beautiful were your convictions?
Reinvention is something we do on a Monday
nowadays.
What was it to be a girl in the 1920s
breaking out, leaving behind?
Was it ever about vocations and motherhood,
or just the hubris of a father farmer?
What was the fuel for the engine
of your determination?
Far from the jazz and the liquor
and the short fringed skirts,
two rebellious teachers
were smoking their own inevitabilities.
And how I never saw this in you
even when I was in your arms.
Katharine
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 3, 2018)
I’m five and we’re all in a town called Roy,
a ghostly epicenter of the West.
I’m circling a grand old Spanish Revival table
and have wedged two plastic dolls, cattywampus,
into the frames of a green and red leather chair.
My grandmother Katharine sits there,
the matriarch, her legs crossed, smoking, smiling
and playing Gin.
She’s telling stories about Indian country and towheaded boys
shooting out street lamps with guns.
A decade later we’re in her city apartment
hovering over my education
in English Toffee, needlepoint and love letters.
I fail them all just like like Gigi with grand Aunt Alicia
although my lessons were Wild West instead of Paris.
Soon, it’s her funeral with the long dust train across the prairie.
She’s lying in the small Methodist church her grandfather built,
long fingered hands folded over her prestigious blue suit
with its large eagle pin.
Here presence is large. We are sprinkled with namesakes
like enduring salutes.
And whenever I’m asked if I was born to wealth
or have the inheritance of prospectors,
silver glamour borne straight from the well,
the magic charm of gold…
Estelene
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 4, 2018)
In the brown 1970s, laying my head on the blue
polyester pants of your lap,
the smell of earth in a dusty Plymouth,
traveling through the pitch black
winding roads of rural New Mexico,
on dirt roads that make cracked dashboards rattle,
stars glittering the sky like sequins in the silver
gown of heavenly cat walks,
the boys in the back,
your hand running through my brown
hair, saying my name
on the verge of my dreams.
Marla
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 5, 2018)
We are seven, Marla and me,
standing on a corner street in the labyrinth
of neighborhoods off Juan Tabo.
We are the edge of town
and Marla is crying, in trouble maybe
because we scratch salty words on sidewalks
with chalky New Mexico rocks
or maybe because we’re negotiating
all the rights and privileges of the tag BFF,
only forever will only last a few more months
before my family moves to Missouri
and nevermore stretches out
like diverging roads on a map,
or maybe because we will subsequently grow up
and find ourselves in the middle of it.
In any case, Marla is spilling tears
and I am fervently trying to make the case,
the very hairbrained case,
that tears are a limited resource
and one wouldn’t want them to “run out.”
Today, forty years later, I would like to circle back
to that corner in the crook of Juan Tabo and Highway 40
where we were standing at the edge of it.
I have an amendment to make;
and if I had a dime for every bad idea I’ve ever had,
this one would be framed because it was the first.
I would say, “Marla, tears are bountiful.
You can have as much as you want,
as much as you can stand.
They’re just about the only precious thing
you will never run out of, be at a loss for, find yourself bereft of.
They are endless.
They are bottomless.
And they will make you who you are.”
Krissy
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 6, 2018)
When I moved to the Interior,
the wonderland of wet greens,
I met an explorer years deep
in her expeditions
of sunken ships and newsrooms,
lunch counters and single, spy moms.
A researcher combing through libraries,
she was writing codices to the future
hunters of relics.
I became a tagalong junior
and spent friends for it,
friends I liked.
That was the cost of the bounty
as was a dollface or two.
We were constantly and violently
shipwrecked and our soap operas
were salacious. The blonde one
could never be a lady killer.
The mustached one
we turned into a villain.
We were powerful overlords.
We were the deciders.
We swooned over brunettes
but they were hard to come by
in our villages and townhomes.
We scared ourselves in the mystery
but we were brave. We survived
on desert islands. We starved
and swam the channels
and went to college periodically.
We covered a million miles,
and vanquished.
We were celebrated
in a thousand books.
Erin
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 7, 2018)
Pretty girl of the 70s, fully inhabited
in bell bottoms and t-shirts,
eyes like grandmas.
I was always trying to be where you were.
But I was the smallest of the cousins,
four years younger, awkward in the face
of country glamour; and the click-clack
social order left me on my own
sometimes in the weeds
walking circles in the hard yellow
grass around the Roy house.
Those summers were pretty borrowed dresses
for the anniversaries of aunts,
the Ladd girls walking dirt patches
between the houses to the church,
riding the yellow truck into the prairie,
the sound of wind through our hair like a song.
It was a beautiful piece of time
as they go.
At the end of the decade
you were on the cusp of boys
and we sat on my brother’s trundle bed
waiting for your favorite songs on the radio,
which were Rupert Holmes and Cliff Richard.
We were trying to bounce to the disco beats
of Richard, who wasn’t counting sheep
or losing sleep. This was the last time
I followed you around like a puppy,
before I became reserved and self-conscious
about too much love in myself.
And the next time I saw you
it wasn’t so funny,
but we didn’t talk anymore.
Jayne
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 8, 2018)
Our time together was brief and occasional
but illuminating in how closed I had become
to myself. Horseplay dusting up
only inhibitions: Billy Joel throwing a rock
in your basement, the unmoved dollhouse
in the sunroom, breakfast in the green,
carpeted kitchen: you asking, “Cocoa Pebbles
or Lucky Charms?” Me answering, “Whatever,
you decide…” because my choices might betray
some unlikability. And so I was paralyzed,
some Joelean Stranger meeting myself
in a mask for the very first time,
afraid of the risk of choice, the self
dissipated like a mist over a boat
on a lake. Which is all to say
this lead to my first self help initiative,
age nine: to start having opinions,
so as not to become the worst sort of friend
I would ever have.
Diana
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 9, 2018)
Two blocks over and up the hill, the summer walk of forever
through the thick, humid exhaust of Missouri,
you were my only two-story house friend;
and I was always very curious
about how the two-story people lived.
We would use the landing of the stairs to play board games
about imaginary adulthoods, the negotiations of paydays
and inserting stick children and husbands into plastic cars.
I used to hide my money under the board like a hustler.
In you I could see what beautiful and smart looked like
together in one girl, the weld of quiet but not shy,
the deliberate ballet of your fingers,
maybe from hours of masterclass piano.
You were like the figurines on your dresser,
solid but also fragile. You could be sensibly stern
as you flipped your long, shiny black hair.
Lillian
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 10, 2018)
We roller skated right to the edge of 1978
and when the sidewalk was too close to home
we skated up the hill to the edge of the trees
where we walk-skated through the woods
toward the lake. We found abandoned places,
an old chewed-up couch and rusted, white appliances.
And when we heard the voices of bigger boys,
we hid behind big trees and waited
until the back-way path to the pool was clear.
We spent the afternoon jumping into the pool
yelling silly things before cannonballs.
We skated the sidewalks two blocks home.
One day two Missouri rednecks in a car,
probably imagining themselves some dukes of hazard,
threw beer on us from their window and yelled “chink.”
I remember our shocked faces and sticky legs.
We were a block from my house.
I remember realizing
how close we were
to men who would throw beer
at eight-year old girls.
That’s not quite true though.
I took artistic license there
to give the poem a loop.
On pool days we didn’t skate
and on skate days we didn’t swim.
“Well, if that part’s not true, maybe none of it’s true.
Maybe no one threw beer at you.”
See that?
I can still hear them to this day.
Nathleen
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 11, 2018)
The playground is full of scene stealers,
dodgeball psychopaths and line cutters.
Maybe everyone remembers
their first safe harbor in a face,
their first port of trust.
Maybe it was to the left of the slide
or in the shade of the swinging monkeys,
maybe it was a new kid as yet unappreciated
by her colleagues, the outsider
you can tell anything to,
any nonsense at all
that comes into your head.
She rolls her eyes maybe,
tsk-tsks a tall tale or two,
but then she goes home
to her grandmother’s house
and combs through the hours
of tabloids and comic strips
and finally digs up evidence
to prove all of your theories.
Christy
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 12, 2018)
Friendships of fragments,
the fragmented we,
St. Louis, the suburbs,
arriving to the neighborhood
like a meteor and punching Billy O’Brien,
the racial drama of sixth grade camp,
popularity and potential,
talent, a sketch on paper,
the face for it, the voice for it,
Donna Summer ballads,
matching Humpty Dumpty t-shirts
skipping through amusement parks,
arguing with your father
about Tina Turner’s hair,
the Wiz of Oz, Dorothy’s apron
your mother made me,
the opera house in summer,
Prince on a motorcycle,
pastoral summer picnics
and the man with the gun
chasing a deadman
who is running straight for us,
diving over the green hill
for dear life,
the pressures of place,
the buses of desegregation,
the slur of Oreo,
budding rebellions of youth,
the ambiguities of Nick Rhodes,
the radio on all night
bleeding into our hearts,
birth control, dangerous driving,
basement parties with shadowy couches,
boys too soon, promises to the self,
betrayals of self, everything
too much ahead of me,
what little I had to offer,
the feeling of heartsick
as we slowly drift apart.
Maureen
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 13, 2018)
“Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do,
to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else,
you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Lewis Carroll
Looking back you can easily see
Alice in Wonderland
as a metaphor for being
an adolescent girl.
At first you’re very thin
and then you’re very fat
and then you’re very weary
of the landscape’s melodramas
and mysterious, mouthy animals.
You had been through it already,
had a sense you had conquered it even,
although it’s hard to put order
to a cruel world.
But I always thought
the campaign was a valiant one
and you gifted me the instructions you had.
Indeed, you were of the Alice kind,
blonde warrior searching for the balance
on the jerking cavalcade of days.
We practiced aerobic drills
in the empty, front room of your house
and from that emptiness you gained a keen sense
of what a house says about you.
But inner rooms always resist order;
the fringe troops slipping into AWOL.
It’s ultimately a funhouse, a fantasia,
the cause is real but more
about battling fairy tales than trolls.
Tireless gladiators at the threshold
holding our flurry of blueprints,
ready to face the mad, mad deck of hearts.
LeAnne
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 14, 2018)
Historian of our 80s, you knew all the folktales
about rock bands and the anecdotes of art parties,
DJ booths and offbeat pubs along the trendy
St. Louis blocks. The midwestern bands in the basements
of Ciceros, the more notorious at Mississippi Nights,
where we walked the cobblestone streets
in our black boots and short, spandex skirts.
All the times I tried to go with you and blend into it,
belong to it like a thrilling glitter. But the gloss
was like a glaze that would stick. Legitimacy
remote and dim in the bellies of windowless places.
Everyone had visions of moving to London
or even Chicago; and I felt wide-eyed at the dream,
how impossible it sounded. How angular and edgy
and abrasive and brave. I felt tedious and leaden
and lackluster at the likelihood of running away,
such a thing more riveting people did.
Toward the end of my midwestern life
I followed you deep into the city streets
to Bernards where grunge bands screamed
at their boredoms and broke jaws outside
the threshold. The hazy bathrooms,
the awkward hallways, the alleyways of misfit,
I remember the places
I could only be adjacent to,
at the border of,
on the melancholy curb outside,
in the halo
of all the notes.
Mandy
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 15, 2018)
I.
It was Junior High, I remember. You had the house
at the corner down the street from the high school,
(our family drove by it a thousand times before I knew you),
the house with the little brown playhouse in the backyard.
What a lucky girl must live there, I thought, every time.
II.
I remember you were the first to have a car.
(I remember it like it was a long, red two-door.)
We used it to drive to the north county mall
to learn what curising was about.
Turns out it was about cars, not boys.
III.
I remember you introduced me to Donna
who introduced me to Nellie who introduced me to Lisa.
I remember we ate salads and worried about our painted nails.
IV.
I remember you standing in the hallway of the purple lockers
as our friendship wobbled those years I struggled
to find my footing. I remember feeling guilty.
V.
I have no memory of the day we met.
I just remember you girls were from another grade school
and coming into your circle entailed surprise
slumber parties in your carpeted basement,
the kind of basements midwesterners called “finished.”
I do remember distinctly this, deep in my chest,
the first time I walked down those stairs
knowing the surprise was for me
and feeling very special for the very first time.
Donna
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 16, 2018)
My friend Michelle once told me about the many spheres of friendships:
she said there were friends you kept in your troposphere all your life;
drifted friends whom you would re-meet with intense bouts of chemistry
(this was Michelle and me); and friends who hovered around
only long enough to help you through a finite port of trouble.
I would add to this those friends who help you fill the days,
friends you don’t have anything more in common with
than the proximity of togetherness in time. Although, something
keeps you there beyond convenience—for here you learn
about the dramas of prom dresses and invitation lists.
You learn how to navigate boundaries around the obligations
of brotherhood and goodwill, how to reconfigure
after meltdowns in high school cafeterias.
Maybe you seem so similar for a time, your plans converging
around an idea of the future like a virgin biosphere
that is fragile and assailable to any other idea.
You could talk it through, diagnose your ailments,
map the trajectories of your cold wars.
But some friends are just like this, part of their molecular structure.
They step out of the biosphere and the element of time is suddenly gone.
The bell rings and they quake and split like two sides of a great divide.
Jenny
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 17, 2018)
We sat next to each other in history class
talking music. You were struggling toward
authenticity and I was so ill-equipped to help,
not having any of my own.
It’s a plundered word, lionized
and spent. But it helps
when you’re defending what you like.
And we will spend a lifetime
defending what we like.
Especially against the boys
who like to bequeath taste
and charts of song.
To this day, you are a haven
of conversation and we are still
combing through the bins
with the discernment of pirates.
You are staunch in the search
of the old and the new,
inspiringly unswerving.
You are an anthem
to the exploration.
You are the hymn.
Loren
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 18, 2018)
“…that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
Definition of Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG)
Film critic Nathan Rabin
This is the friendship I didn’t quite make
but looking back, often think maybe I should have.
This girl was resolutely quirky, the kind who would become
a type of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Like elves
lately they have a bad reputation because in movies
they only transform their dreary male leads.
But they exist and are beautifully transforming
to the struggling leads they daily inhabit.
In Ms. Taussig’s class in Junior High,
where I had a breakdown in the midst of anorexia
and where we learned platonic rhetoric
as applied in modern television commercials,
you tried to warn me about bad outcomes of friendship
with J——-. And yes, I was hypnotized by her cattiness
and the new phenomenon of her fluorescence gummy bears.
But I visited your room once and I remember
it’s wraithlike ambiance. You had a copy of Cher’s
“Dark Lady” on 45. The only girl I knew who did.
You were over it though. And full of smart,
strange ideas, like only painting the middles
of your long fingernails to make them look even longer.
You thought bravely, my number one criteria
of fascination. But I wasn’t there yet, I was a tightly
boxed-up version of magic, starving to burst.
For that reason alone.
And because we could have stirred up some shit.
Ms. Eichorn
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 19, 2018)
Her American Lit class was a disarray of desks,
as if to say
rows don’t matter in the chaos of literature.
She sat in the middle of seventeen
like the center of a cyclone,
and it was the way she held the book—
in the midst of honors kids
where I had slowly crept
from years of remedial; former friends
ignoring my sudden presence in the discussion.
It was lonely
and I felt so remote to the scene I wrote one thing
she found worth reading
and she read it
to the class while my face went hot,
all my divergent endings
to Huckleberry Finn.
And if the words of Gatsby
were still floating, etherized above my head,
I would be the bashful sycophant
loitering in their swagger.
It was the way she held the book.
It was her bearing.
She was pregnant and fierce
in her defense of our pregnant student,
as if to say we could,
sure as hell, read Hemingway and propagate.
It was her bearing. So muscular and precise,
like a Book General,
shoulders back, head high and bemused
at the brink of an idea.
I can’t explain it
but I’ve been trying to replicate it
all my life. It was the way
she held the book, dominating, contending
the flapping wings of pages,
chapters flipped open wide
by a single hand,
waving it around us like a gun.
Nellie
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 20, 2018)
Some friends are warm,
electric energy that magically buoys yours,
especially when it sputters or burns,
an orange and yellow embrace,
a feeling everybody wants in a friend
and these chums are always split in time
half in all fronts. You only get the moments,
like prom nights, or quiet downtimes
stage left of our Senior plays.
I tried to play the witch like Meryl Streep
and you played Gretel like Paula Abdul.
That was the year I learned how to cackle
and you learned how missing rehearsals
for family vacations turns you into a cookie,
in a backup duet of cookies.
But you were a trooper.
You wanted to be a song and dance man
and you studied the moves of MTV’s dancers
and you cookied it up
and never let that sort of thing
ever happen again.
You dutifully played the part:
straight-A girl dumbing down for the boys,
straight-laced girl next door
becoming Vegas showgirl,
a real, good friend who disappears
into the neo-vaudeville.
But if we couldn’t corrupt you
with our spiked coca-colas
and lunchtime AWOLs,
Vegas wouldn’t. And when the drama
of the dramas wore me down,
you became permanently
on the road, foregoing milestones
and collapses. To us you were a paradox
and those who loved you
could either live with it or not.
I find you every few years
and see how time works
like an accordion, collapsing,
wheezing time.
We’re old broads now
full of stories.
We’ve been all over,
crisscrossing the landscape
in our separate odysseys.
Your glitter still tumbles out
of all the neutral, slimming black.
And of all the legends you imitate,
it’s your Lauper I love the best
because she’s just the explosion
of halcyon light and spirit
that most imitates you.
Lisa
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 21, 2018)
Someone I liked was throwing a party that year
and we didn’t go.
We went to the Central West End instead,
to an all-night diner.
It felt fateful and good
and we were inseparable after that
all through college,
watching horror movies on VHS,
adopting our dogs, Ariel and Helga.
We dreamed of being cultured
and nesting. We made shrinky dinks
and Easy Bake Oven cakes
long after it was age appropriate.
We watched MTV all night long,
waiting for our favorite songs,
you waiting for mine,
me waiting for yours.
We walked through a Chicago snowstorm,
survived a tornado in Forest Park.
I thought we would be friends forever,
through all the rites of passage.
We were like some combination
of Annie and Lillian
except we never reconciled.
And now when I hear the radio
play Howard Jones
or someone mentions Hellraiser
or I run into a memory
with someone we knew,
in all the backwards glances
I can’t decide if it was the moving away
or something felt long before I left.
Where do these gaps come from,
the black holes in the fabric of us?
You gave me your Renoir print,
“Dance in the Country,
and I’ve kept it in my bedroom
for over twenty years.
The New Mexico sun has turned
it’s consoling reds and blues
to desolated, faded greens.
It’s my heart’s quiet hoarding
and even now
I don’t want to let it go.
The Girls of UMSL
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 22, 2018)
College English class with Ms. Cook
We’re reading Pynchon and Faulkner and Silko.
The class is full of women and I would sit in the back,
only read chapters the day after discussions
so I wouldn’t miss anything
and never once stepped into the ring.
Those women, they were like surveyors
of what was coming ahead.
I remember the one who said
read Gertrude Stein like listening to rain.
These were no dorm girls
lounging in common rooms
waiting for boys.
Three black women sat up near the front.
They talked about jobs and sometimes even kids.
One white pregnant woman sat ahead of me
to the left, looking very suburban.
All of them took inordinate interest
in the meanings
of Chopin and Anderson.
And that amazed me.
Their lives amazed me.
No end scene with a day job.
No utterly domestic montage.
They wanted to be there and so they were
in a class that would never lead
to a job or a baby.
They were entirely enthused about V
and The Awakening and Ceremony.
This wasn’t transitions and dues;
it was investments and returns.
This was the year of the big predicted
earthquake along the New Madrid.
My class would not be cancelled
over news hysteria, so I sat at my desk
slightly unnerved and mused
about my exit strategy through the window.
The women kept talking their animated talk
about Light in August or Winesburg, Ohio
and the earthquake never came.
And yet it kinda did.
The earthquake that never was story: https://www.buzzfeed.com/tgounley/the-day-the-earth-stood-still
Susan
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 23, 2018)
This is all with the caveat
that a lot of things you see from the outside
looking in, like a great cathedral of mystery
where we go for lessons in humor
and joining in, our laughs floating through
the catholic hall of anything goes.
Your laugh is rigorously good
and profoundly believable
amid all the adjectives of good:
full-throated, full-bodied,
fold-in-half and falling over,
and clarifying
in how to laugh with boys,
how to join in or stake a boundary
or stake a boundary concurrent to joining in,
stay true to yourself
like an oversight committee
in the midst of a joke;
it’s just a joke,
as harmless as sepsis.
Let it rip the seams,
peal out like an eagle,
giggle up to a boiling,
or spurt out
a glamorous guffaw.
You can be playfully vigilant in the mayhem
like those jazz age girls with their liberating,
back-bending laughs behind cigarette holders,
or the sarcastic factory girls, like Ginger Rogers,
who during the war laid down a joke
wielding a hammer drill.
Julie
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 24, 2018)
My first day at Sarah Lawrence when a mutual friend
introduced us as being both from the same Midwestern city
and we discovered we were, but from different parts and times,
laughing at a workshop comment that we would ever know
“something about cows,” (and people fly over those edge states too),
and this leading to all the things I did
that I never would have thought to do
on my own: surfing the Internet that day in the computer lab
of Sarah Lawrence, climbing a ladder in a Manhattan bookstore
to grab that book on HTML, getting from Yonkers to SoHo
in a car without paying a toll, a plethora of my moves,
and a plethora of your moves from Hastings on Hudson
to The Jefferson to Australia to Mar Vista to that Tarzan set
of the old MGM lot, the TVless Sarah Lawrence way
and pop-loving writers on the downlow throwing
theme parties for Jack and Cher, finding useful threads
in the banality of Sunset Strip, a real hullabaloo
in our living room with the kitschy shag carpet
of the 70s we loved, the Edgar Winter Dog on the beach,
the Edgar Winter Dog dining alfresco,
setting up a tent, setting up a website,
setting up a yard party around the treehouse,
crying in green cocktails over the cheating Irish,
lecturing in a Buena Park pool with illicit bottles
of glass hearts, lessons in online profiles, all the concerts,
(the Tom Jones ones being my favorite),
and the courage to say *something different about me,*
the edible, the artifacts, the scenes and stories,
obscure songs and experience through the new,
even if it’s really old, the trip through
a friendship and the courage to take it
when you have a sister to share it with.
Ann
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 25, 2018)
Like a treasure found in a wayside book
or a cheeky verse of serendipity,
this one I came near close to missing
before we all dispersed into the winds
like dandelions spreading our poems.
It was the fluke of a suggestion at the end of a class,
apropos of nothing we were doing there,
a crash course in the attic of something more useful.
Decades later, we’re parsing
and consuming snaps of the cerebral,
emotional practicalities over pizza in Scarsdale.
We gush over words and their wordsmiths
like two docents explicating from room to room
at a Williamsburg of Writers that exists only in our heads,
but should exist, we know, on some New England gristmill
with a rock wall and people reading Frost on each side of it,
Mark Twain under the gazebo and Hemingway
typing and howling at Fitzgerald upstairs.
We could pull it off, we could,
like two verbose entrepreneurs
with the giddiness of girlfriends
who write their own epitaphs in lipstick.
Murph
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 26, 2018)
I see you as an archaeologist of the arts,
at the crux of things and looking for the heart,
a safarist with a holster of nets
versed in cryptology and novelettes,
searching for the beautiful mind
in the overlooked and wunderkind.
We hear your thoughts in conference calls,
on motor tours, in lecture halls;
and I’m always curious what you think
of curios and pieces on the brink.
You are as interesting as antiquities,
a modern woman with sensibilities.
Natalie
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 27, 2018)
I would call what we do a trek
but it’s not really a trek
or an odyssey or adventure;
although it’s surely a hike,
sometimes a trudge or a slog—
moving the emotional self up a hill
with books and plans and gurus
indulging as we do, gleefully,
in the spa of self-explication
mapping patterns of the head
and heart through phone lines
and meetups, knowingly
like Sisyphus with his boulder
of hubris and comforting purpose,
he’s a proto-plucky yank, willful
but never crafty enough
to outsmart his own charming,
deceitful, underworldly self.
Mean Girls
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 28, 2018)
What they have to teach us,
I do not know. Something
about spoiled milk
or how bees become bullies,
the frayed benefits
of reservation.
Backed into corners,
most often by themselves,
they portray sinister
with moll faces, half-shadowed
in office hallways.
But they are no caricatures
of femme fatales;
they are their own systems
of blood and belief
and all the synonyms
of vindictive.
There was the prim boss
in the office downtown
overlooking the library.
She told me men
aren’t worth crying over.
They are like trains:
another one comes along
every fifteen minutes.
I was good cop to her bad cop
until she turned on me.
Then there was
the aristocrat of orchards
dismissing the riff-raff
with her friendly fire.
And the Shakespearean villain
of Amish country.
That was my first time in the tank
with a real shark. And then
the one who literally
put curses on people,
a real nails-in-the-parking-lot girl.
I think about her
every time I feel
bad mojo.
And does it all go back to the girl
who lived behind us
on Claudine.
Our fight in the street:
I was punching and she was slapping.
She called me Indian Giver
after she grifted all my toys.
They’re full of slurs, these broads,
and you feel it the first moment
they try and push you over,
the haze of smoke
floating over their kettles.
They suck out the trust.
Maybe they’re born with it;
maybe it’s in the makeup
or that their tantrums are like seizures
they can never come out of.
Screen Star Girls
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 29, 2018)
What you didn’t know was a lot.
They were essentially pixelated
and mostly human offstage.
What you saw were fictions
of the staged and costumed,
all the misleading mise en scene.
But there were clues,
the power of a photograph
and a deadpan stare.
The New Englander in slacks
no matter how goodly-wife she tried to be,
Hepburn always came out.
And the shaky-voiced cattail of Mary Richards
who once haunted my ideas of Marys.
But I came to accept her capable
punctualities and small courage.
So different from the vamp trails
of Cher and her roster of femme fatales
who never once succumbed
to a story. Or Bette Davis on a staircase
a tank of eye-rolling.
They were no sleuthing Nancy Drews,
none of them, no high-voiced cream puffs,
their sighs were full of gravel,
their silhouettes a poignant defiance
of No, I don’t think sos.
and So what if I dos
They were living shedoneits,
the new swashbucklers,
arch, caped rapscallions
who could part the Red Sea
in a dress, sequins flaring
bullets at the lenses.
Years later, Ru Paul explicates this
on a show he calls Drag U,
how dress-up can make you feel brave,
how you could fight fires and dragons
with a dose of spunk and, in a pickle,
Walter Mitty-it and presume.
The Girl on the Train
(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 30, 2018)
It was my early twenties and she was in our poetry class,
a girl taking the same train as I was
one late night from Manhattan
to the town of our school.
She wrote beautiful poems,
long lines without punctuation;
but mostly she missed class
because she was an actress
and the rumor was
she was working on a Spike Lee movie.
The train car was mostly empty and lit with a bad yellow light.
Train people would read or eat
or I remember liking to look out the windows
into the apartments of Harlem
because I longed to know how other people lived.
Soon enough, the lights would dim with the darkness
of the boroughs and then the suburbs.
She was sitting up to the left and she recognized me,
smiled and said hello. I was startled a bit
out of my reclusion and we had a small,
friendly conversation about our class
with Tom Lux and what a character he was.
We were like strangers or almost-strangers on a train,
connecting with the warm light of fireflies.
She would go on to star as one of a gang of girls
in a long-running TV series, but I can see her
just as she was that night, a girl traveling
into a future so amazingly ahead of her.
We turned back to our own private rides
and the cars returned to the quiet,
except for the shuffling sounds of all the tracks
we crossed. I sat in the melancholy yellow light
and caught a reflection of my own face
in the mirror of an evening window—
I, too, a girl on a train.
Chica Micha, you are here in the White Place. Today, your own ink is here. Your fingertips have reached the White Place. Your small printed letters, your porous hardship, your palm is in the White Place touching hardened sand. Your soles are sinking in the river bed. Your breath is trailing me here, telling me, “Some friends stay forever; some friends come and go; and some friends are there only when you most need them.”
The vulnerable brain’s
Oceanic erosions—
Your majestic early precipice
Chica Micha, you are floating above the white space. Today, slowly sliding over me in a mass of shape-shifting. You are buzzing today, urgent. And then your quiet is here. You are monumental. Your wrinkles in the stone, your shards of stone, your cup of sand in the limestone. Your towering portrait of ornamental caprock. This of you is here.
The lawn of the river bed
A slow race of tumblers
Hard souls swimming to the next
Chica Micha, your ocean is here. Many shadows of the wave and white caps holding their foam-rock faces to the sun. The party is here, standing in a half-moon circle, grass in our toes, hard smooth backs. Weathered, we are here. Enveloped in your seldom shadows. You are in the White Place. You have traveled to the White Place. Your print is now here in the Place.
Our red hot faces
Finding the small cactus—finally
Foot after rock foot
The story: http://www.bigbangpoetry.com/2014/08/walking-with-poetry.html
Thank you Michele. This year’s NaPoWriMo journey was an extraordinary one for me and you inspired it many years ago with the inscription you left in your gift to me the day I left that company with the shark tank. I will never forget you.