Today there were crow calls from the really tall pine tree on my street that manages to live in a three by four square of dirt soirounded my concrete sidewalk on all sides. I'm amazed when trees can do that: pull what they need from the soil, their roots hidden underground sometimes forcing themselves up to split the sidewalk with their roots.
The crow stayed up too high to see.
Sonya is meditating again eyes closed and sitting quiet, straight spine, slow breaths in and out. Yesterday was a hard day for her. Talk radio in her ear and a scowl and she was yelling a lot. I left her money but not the poem. Did my best not to interrupt her time with the radio.
****
The crow stayed up too high to see.
Sonya is meditating again eyes closed and sitting quiet, straight spine, slow breaths in and out. Yesterday was a hard day for her. Talk radio in her ear and a scowl and she was yelling a lot. I left her money but not the poem. Did my best not to interrupt her time with the radio.
The poem will go in her basket when she's asleep.
This morning her sign was decorated in crayon pink and red. It says:
I have $4.50 I need five to have a humane...
Meal? Life? I don't know what the last word was I couldn't see it. She's a poet so it might have been anything.
There is a lot that is inhumane in this neighborhood. The homeless have to clear People's Park by 10:00 each night and if you walk by you'll see sleeping bags stuffed full of people on the sidewalk lining the park. Bundles of possessions in neat stacks. Sometimes a cart or crate on wheels is locked up. The homeless get robbed too.
I can't count the number of times that I've heard a neighbor who has never been hungry or desperate refer to the homeless as analogous to the rat problem here. They want the city to clean both up. The police ticket and fine street people, almost to the exclusion of everything else- part of the city's aggressive plan to make this area more attractive to business owners.
Nobody likes to think about street people as people or remember that they contribute to the local economy.
I'm thinking of homeless people surviving on nothing I'm thinking of humane and inhumane I'm thinking of how humans and pine trees survive without compassion or enough food soil water and light.The pine tree keeps growing and scattering the ground with pine neddle stories and people write and make art on canvas or on cardboard signs.
My own story today is made up of yesterday's pictures that needed to be pried out of old yellowing sticky photo albums and put in photo boxes. Humane and inhumane, light and darkness. I thought I could move the photos without looking at them. I looked at them all, one by one. Searched the family pictures looking for proof. Searching for tangible clues to the truth.
I saw my father as a boy with ears too big for his face. I looked close to try and understand the man he became. He was just a little kid with a shy forced smile. I saw a candid photograph of my mother laughing into the camera already married at eighteen and wondered if their lives would have been saner without that first baby. Was my very existence a trigger for them that changed everything?
I found family pictures where I was older than ten and I can't remember the house or the day. My smile looks forced and I have serious eyes. I found graduation pictures where I am wearing a white robe in the tradition set down by nuns twenty years before. I am wearing hideous white cork platform shoes and there is no smile. My eyes are older than my face. My eyes are determined. I am almost free and nothing will stop my exit into the world which turned out, no matter how harsh, to be much more humane than my family. I found pictures of my children which was the prize for all the other pictures. A reward.
Photographs are powerful prompts and one of my least favorite to write to. That writing is too close to the bone. I don't know where I'll land.
But this is a good prompt even though I don't like it.
Remember or imagine an old photograph. Write to this: In this one you are...
Or in this one she is or in this one I am.
This morning her sign was decorated in crayon pink and red. It says:
I have $4.50 I need five to have a humane...
Meal? Life? I don't know what the last word was I couldn't see it. She's a poet so it might have been anything.
There is a lot that is inhumane in this neighborhood. The homeless have to clear People's Park by 10:00 each night and if you walk by you'll see sleeping bags stuffed full of people on the sidewalk lining the park. Bundles of possessions in neat stacks. Sometimes a cart or crate on wheels is locked up. The homeless get robbed too.
I can't count the number of times that I've heard a neighbor who has never been hungry or desperate refer to the homeless as analogous to the rat problem here. They want the city to clean both up. The police ticket and fine street people, almost to the exclusion of everything else- part of the city's aggressive plan to make this area more attractive to business owners.
Nobody likes to think about street people as people or remember that they contribute to the local economy.
I'm thinking of homeless people surviving on nothing I'm thinking of humane and inhumane I'm thinking of how humans and pine trees survive without compassion or enough food soil water and light.The pine tree keeps growing and scattering the ground with pine neddle stories and people write and make art on canvas or on cardboard signs.
My own story today is made up of yesterday's pictures that needed to be pried out of old yellowing sticky photo albums and put in photo boxes. Humane and inhumane, light and darkness. I thought I could move the photos without looking at them. I looked at them all, one by one. Searched the family pictures looking for proof. Searching for tangible clues to the truth.
I saw my father as a boy with ears too big for his face. I looked close to try and understand the man he became. He was just a little kid with a shy forced smile. I saw a candid photograph of my mother laughing into the camera already married at eighteen and wondered if their lives would have been saner without that first baby. Was my very existence a trigger for them that changed everything?
I found family pictures where I was older than ten and I can't remember the house or the day. My smile looks forced and I have serious eyes. I found graduation pictures where I am wearing a white robe in the tradition set down by nuns twenty years before. I am wearing hideous white cork platform shoes and there is no smile. My eyes are older than my face. My eyes are determined. I am almost free and nothing will stop my exit into the world which turned out, no matter how harsh, to be much more humane than my family. I found pictures of my children which was the prize for all the other pictures. A reward.
Photographs are powerful prompts and one of my least favorite to write to. That writing is too close to the bone. I don't know where I'll land.
But this is a good prompt even though I don't like it.
Remember or imagine an old photograph. Write to this: In this one you are...
Or in this one she is or in this one I am.
****
If you hate this prompt like me, you can write to it anyway. Sometimes the prompts we hate give us the strongest writing. Or you can write to another, an image you find beautiful that you remember, or a painting. You can let your eyes roam the room and pretend they can take a snapshot. See where they land. What is the story there?
***
The Skin's Broken Aria | ||
| by Jennifer Chang | ||
I cross the street and my skin falls off. Who walks to an abandoned lake? Who abandons lakes? I ask questions to evade personal statements. When you are skinless, you cannot bear to be more vulnerable. With skin, I would say I am in love with Love as in that old-time song crooners like to croon. With skin, I would wear elbow-length opera gloves of pearly satin. Protect my skin. Hide it. There is no skin like my skin. How I miss it — I miss it as I would a knitted bonnet, a pewter teaspoon to stir sugar into hot water. My great passion was my skin. The lover I loved. They don’t sell skin at Wal-Mart. And really, how could I, humanely, buy it? Would you ever give me your skin? This is a terrible world we live in. There are mistakes and batteries littering a junk drawer, where Mother would hide my house keys and Father would store his eyeballs. Do you know Puccini? Do you spill silk at the gorgeous onslaught of love, of Pinkerton’s lurking return? Butterfly had no skin either but you could not tell from the outer left balcony. As I lay in a bed of my dead skin, I dream of Butterfly and what she could have done instead: run away to this little room to lose her aching voice, to listen to the hourly ringing of bells that is really the souring birdsong of a child, skinned and laughing, a child that will never be hers. source: Poets.org *** When you are skinless.... or when you are skinless you cannot bear... *** There are mistakes and batteries littering the junk drawer *** This is what I found in the junk drawer... *** Today's prompt was written on the sidewalk, punched into my phone and now I've cleaned up all the wrong words (I hope) and copied it into a new email. Everything feels strange today, the sidewalk, the hidden crows, the photos stuffed into boxes sitting on a shelf, my own words. But the overcast to the day feels hopeful to me. I will hit send and call my sister, who I miss especially today, after looking at the family pictures. I hope this day is good to your creative. | ||
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