Prompt # 56

I keep almost setting my hand on fire. I am still smoking- oh yes- no wine for me but nicotine and I are still very tight friends- and I forget and hold my cigarette in my gauze wrapped hand till it starts to smoke. I am ambidextrous in some things and then there are times you'd think I'd never used my left hand for anything more complicated than waving goodbye. 

Last night I used my left hand to hold the cat in various strange positions while R helped me soak his kitty litter encrusted paws. He was so confused and sad and also half the time was purring. This is a cat who has been left too long. We were sure we'd be bleeding by the time we were done but he was very kind about it, with just the occasional confused questioning yowls, softer than his angry mournful ones. The ones that just said what are you doing to me and why? 

R set the bathroom right and got the paw prints off the floor for me. N got me microwaveable foods and they both got me more medical supplies to keep tending this burn. So far no infection. So far so good. It makes typing very strange. How grateful I am that my finger tips weren't burnt. What would I do if I couldn't write? I'd dictate words into a voice recorder but it's not the same. I've done that from time to time when I'm out and the words are writing and I have no free hands to capture them but it's not the same as the physical act of connection, finger tips to keyboard or gripping pen and pushing the words out onto the paper. 

I'm home in my tiny one bedroom, overcrowded and blatantly dusty apartment. We are wedged in here tight and as difficult as it is for three of us to share this small space, moving sideways to get to the kitchen (which is a tiny kitchen) and moving in and out because it won't hold all three of us at once, I am comforted by this space. By the home here even though I am often running to escape the walls that threaten to crush me as they move closer and closer. I am new from the land of wide open house and too big and too empty and too spooky. I like knowing what each noise I hear is, I like being able to see the whole of the apartment from any spot in it. I never have to fear there is an intruder walking around- I only have to look to know I'm safe. 

I like hearing my kids laugh again and I love N saying, I hate you guys when R and I are laughing over something grossly inappropriate. Or sometimes it's the other way around and they are laughing at the look on my face as I shake my head at what they've just said that is so wrong and yet funny. The important thing is that this tiny place holds a lot of laughter. So much, my crazy mean neighbor used to come and yell in our kitchen window to stop laughing. Because we are loud when we laugh. These are full belly laughs, unconstrained, unabashed laughter and that's how it should be even if it gets us stares in public. We are not shy in our joy and we are quiet in our sorrow. This is my small family, my children who are so delightful I'd like them if I hadn't given birth to them- I swear I would. They are my Home. 

And the sidewalk is always my home. It's loud and busy, too busy for my fresh from the quiet of Eureka mind but it is as much my home as the apartment is. As I walked down to Telegraph this morning I saw the thin, fast talking woman with her baby strapped to her, his arms and legs a little red from the cold and her new dog, a black lab, who lives in a van in the neighborhood. I saw the man with the wild curly black hair who shouts at his dog, who got another while I was gone and now has two pits to yell at instead of one. I passed the very shy Sonia who so loves to read she once stopped R to read all the buttons on her bag, sitting cross legged in perfect meditation pose, with a shirt over her head making herself a private place on the sidewalk, doing her mediation and the air felt quiet around her despite all the activity around people's park. 

We make our privacy here as we can in this neighborhood. We are all so close inside or out we can see into each other's apartments, hear each other having sex, or belching or laughing or making music. I can't tell you how many early morning orgasms appear in my morning writes because I can't ignore the auditory journey I am hearing as I write. It becomes woven into the writing. 

I have a love hate relationship with this neighborhood. There are too many people. Too many tourists, both the college shopping kind and the out of town thugs just here to do some crime that will later be attributed to the homeless. Too much not safe everywhere. Too many sexual predators, drawn to the neighborhood because of the college. Too much pain and at the same time there is this wild beauty kindness I see too. It's all here. Every part of life condensed into extra strength, tightly viewed like a living organism trapped under a glass slide, under the microscope, or too many frogs stuffed into a teeming terrarium.

 Shit on the all the sidewalks because we want to pretend there aren't people who need bathrooms and don't have homes. Too many people walking around, confused with plastic hospital bands on their wrists because they are fresh from breaking down at John George, or set back on the street with their pneumonia or their broken bones set and their faces stitched up after a fight they lost hard. 

I often want to move some place less densely populated. Some place I don't have to be afraid of walking home at night. And then today when I see Sonia making her peace in her tidy spot with her books stacked up and her polite sign asking for food money (she never asks anyone with spoken words) I am glad to be home again. I'm wanting to have my morning coffee time with my homeless neighbors and listen to all the stories that are told, that kind of writing, the spoken words that are alive poems, that happen every morning in my neighborhood. Today I am glad to be here, even while missing the quiet in Eureka, and the wide open ocean there and the dog I have fallen in love with, and  A who I fell in love with years ago and once again when I watched her hold her mother as she died.

 It's good to be here today. 

What about you? What are the things that are home to you that are in the place that you live or outside of it? Do you have a favorite writing spot that is outside your home? A cafe, or coffee shop or park? Are there touch points for you that are home outside of where you live? 

 I have so many places that are home to me. Ass on the floor of Jen's writing workshops is home. Any place that A is, is home. The dogs I love that are not mine, Ellie and Sophie and Shadoe- they who love me without question- are always home for me. When I hear my sisters voice on the phone or my old lifetime friends I've known since High School- home. 

Even traveling, riding a bus or in a truck on a long highway, that sense of going someplace else is familiar and always delightful to me because I grew up a runner who never got to run. Those spaces of going to someplace else always feel like long lost hard won freedom and I always grin when I know I'm leaving and going somewhere. That's home too. 

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First Poem for You

BY KIM ADDONIZIO

I like to touch your tattoos in complete

darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of

where they are, know by heart the neat

lines of lightning pulsing just above

your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue

swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent

twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent

and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss

the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until

you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists

or turns to pain between us, they will still

be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

Kim Addonizio, 

“First Poem For You” from The Philosopher’s Club. Copyright © 1994 by Kim Addonizio.

Source: Poetry Foundation 

And skin and tattoos touched in the dark, that's home too. 

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Here is a prompt I am taking from my writing time with Jen because I love the prompts when we get to make lists- 

On the left side of  your paper or computer screen make a list of ordinary things, like household items or rocks or? - anything at all that comes to mind- ten is enough unless it isn't  then you can keep going. Do it before you read the next part if you can. 

Now on the right side of your paper or computer screen write in whatever way that you want- is what home is, or is like home to me or was home to her....

So mine might be 

Sidewalk

Shell

frying pan 

eel 

cat shit 

Then I'd fill in each line... Cat shit is home to me. Make each object into a sentence till they are all filled in. 

See if one pulls at you to write from and just go. Or use more than one. You can build an interesting poem this way. Sometimes the list itself is a poem when you are done. Play. 

If that doesn't work for you write about a time, real or imagined when you had no home. Perhaps home was not a safe place. Perhaps you were homeless. Or what would it look like if your home disappeared along with your money tomorrow. What would home be or not be then? 

I hope this day is good to you and your creative.