Slip into place,
don't breathe.
Slam the screen,
quietly.
Fry the linens,
fold the chops.
Underestimate
the chickens next door.
Back in September
The sky may
be falling
but we've got
parasols.
Go ahead,
rain nonsense
and
accordions.
The 2nd Half of December - Reverie 2011
Swallowed alive by the holidays, and so in a nutshell, here are the rest of my Reverie 2011 musings. For each day’s topic, a few words of response or less.
Choice – writing
Protest – against SB5 - Ohio Workers' Rights - & for environmental awareness along the Gulf Coast
Solstice – so dark, so bright
Technology – iEverything!
Service – the Gulf Coast: wetland restoration awareness
Bizarro – miscommunications
History I – Japan and the tsunami, Gulf Coast restoration, the deaths of Liz Taylor and Amy Winehouse and Steve Jobs, violence in Arizona, revolution in Egypt, tragedy in Norway, the Brits and their Royal wedding, the end of bin Laden, U.S. troops returning home
History II – reading, writing, places to workshop and write from San Francisco to Acadia
History III – short story publications, editing work, blog posts, nearly finishing the novel, traveling on West and East coasts, children's milestone birthdays and daughter's college graduation
Dreams – teaching, traveling, finally going back home to New Orleans, writing words that others want to read and that will hopefully make a difference
Table of Contents – Chapter title for 2011 – “The Year of Seven Stories”
A Day to Delete – the day the bizarro miscommunications began
New Year’s Eve 2010 – I could’ve been home – in New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl and bringing in 2011 – but I stayed alone at my desk in Columbus, writing and writing. It took an entire year for me to regret this. Serious delayed reaction. Sometimes getting-things-done at the expense of not-visiting-your-mama is just-not-worth-it. So 2012’s theme might just be, Make-Sure-There-Ain’t-No-Room-for-Regrets!
Lost Friends – Reverie 2011 – Day 18
I think, not of those I've met and lost contact with.
I think instead of the soldiers who have lost parts of their bodies to mortar rounds, shrapnel, IEDs, things that come out of nowhere and everywhere. Out of the sky, the sand, until the sky rains down and day becomes night and night is lit up like day.
Lost friends. Arms from the elbow down, the shoulder down. Legs, feet, hands. Bare roots of what once was. Lives. Lost. Undone, unimagined, done. Fellow soldiers. The Captain whose wife was due with their fourth child, sure to be a Christmas baby. That young private just in from L.A. The 2nd Lt. on his third tour. The last troops have pulled out of Iraq. So we are told. Think, though, of the friends they’ve left behind.
But this is better expressed by one who has served.
A poem by Brian Turner – from his collection PHANTOM NOISE:
JUNDEE AMERIKI
Many the healers of the body.
Where the healers of the soul?
- AHMAD SHAUQI
At the VA hospital in Long Beach, California,
Dr. Sushruta scores open a thin layer of skin
to reveal an object traveling up through muscle.
It is a kind of weeping the body does, expelling
foreign material, sometimes years after injury.
Dr. Sushruta lifts slivers of shrapnel, bits
of coarse gravel, road debris, diamond
points of glass—the minutiae of the story
reconstructing a cold afternoon in Baghdad,
November of 2005. The body offers aged cloth
from an abaya dyed in blood, shards of bone.
And if he were to listen intently, he might hear
the roughened larynx of this woman calling up
through the long corridors of flesh, saying
Allah al Akbar, before releasing
her body’s weapon, her dark and lasting gift
for this jundee Ameriki, who carries fragments
of the war inscribed in scar tissue,
a deep, intractable pain, the dull grief of it
the body must learn to absorb.
2011 Reading List – Reverie 2011 – Day 17
Readings
Head Off and Split – Nikky Finney
The Chameleon Couch – Yusef Komunyakaa
Here, Bullet & Phantom Noise – Brian Turner
You Know When the Men Are Gone – Siobhan Fallon
Back in the World & The Barracks Thief – Tobias Wolff
The Mrs. Dalloway Reader – Virginia Woolf/Francine Prose
The Half-Known World of Fiction – Robert Boswell
A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
Going Away Shoes – Jill McCorkle
All the Living – C.E. Morgan
The Vietnam Reader – Stewart O’Nan
The Book of Salt – Monique Truong
Inside Out and Back Again – Thannha Lai
The Buddha in the Attic – Julie Otsuka
Long, Last, Happy – Barry Hannah
Blue Nights – Joan Didion
The Empty Family – Colm Tobin
The Family Fang – Kevin Wilson
Dirty One – Michael Graves
Bossypants – Tina Fey
Just Kids – Patti Smith
and more...
Re-readings
On Becoming a Novelist – John Gardner
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf’s
Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich
Dien Cai Dau and Warhorses – Yusef Komunyakaa
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Monkeys – Susan Minot
and more...
And hundreds of short stories
in literary reviews, anthologies, contest queues, writing workshops, and story collections