And the Grandmother Ate the Baby
There are no good things about my grandmother anymore,
or at least that I hear in conversations about her
at family suppers, weddings, and that time at Easter
when she was tired and wanted to nap,
as anyone would after nine people
pushed their way into your handicapable apartment
equipped with alarm buttons by the bed.
Today, the conversation is happening
in a minivan on a windy highway, and
grandma is old,
grandma has been to the hospital again,
grandma is depressed and wants to run away,
grandma never wants to die.
This makes me wonder what use she finds for her God
when He makes her journey to the grave
no more graceful or enlightened
than any other animal.
I rarely talk to my grandmother,
but I am told her woes in great detail.
Her life, I am given to believe, is no celebration of itself.
I told her that if she ran away, she'd have to take her body, someone said,
and she said “I know”. She just wants to start over again.
I resent the storyteller and my grandmother for this.
I don't want to know these things.
I don't want to accidentally absorb this kind of end for myself.
By blood, it feels as though this could be me.
They are giving me bad mojo.
I look out the window at a copse of trees,
the ones over there passing us by on the highway,
and I imagine myself there with a cigarette;
I am smoking it under that branch
which brushes my hair into my eyebrows.
I would smoke, cancer be damned,
because better that than be spoken of like this,
as though I were my mind, and I were being erased,
or was erasing myself, with each false memory and chronological snafu.
Someone says, She is getting so tiny. There's nothing to her.
I think, 88-year-olds are tiny, because they are.
When I volunteered in a nursing home,
all of the women had skinny little legs
with fine, long hairs camouflaged between liver spots.
Inside my head I become sarcastic.
I am my fifteen of twenty years ago;
I roll my inside eyes at obvious things said with too much feeling.
She's old, she's frail, she's going to die soon, I think.
There is little else more obvious than that.
Part of me likes to hear this, though,
that she suffers dissatisfaction and a sense of entropy.
I do not; I will be better than this at the end.
I am full of myself.
It divorces me from my blood, these pesky ties,
the wiry twists that keep showing up in my knife drawer.
I feel as though I could just float out through the window
and the 110-kilometer-an-hour wind
wouldn't batter me into the asphalt along with the gophers and porcupines.
I could just float out this window,
squeeze through the tempered glass by some magic osmosis,
and sit on a rock under those trees, smoking.
It could be like I've always been there – tree, rock, me –
the still spot played over with shadows,
breathing in the peanutbuttery aftertaste of old tobacco against my tongue.
No one can lament your sitting on a rock.
There is nothing to remember.
The line of time contracts to a point beneath a bough,
and you can be anyone.
posted by Schmutzie on July 4, 2008
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A List of Complaints, Oh Sigh
I am always hungry,
but when I eat, even if it is just a little bit,
I feel uncomfortably full,
and my belly distends.
There is this headache, too,
and sometimes it is so shrill
that I become dizzy and exhausted,
but most of the time it is dull and distant,
somewhere indistinct.
The wart on my foot defies all treatment,
and so does this seemingly permanent zit on my chin.
I am so thirsty,
and chilly water is nearly like dessert,
except then I have to pee,
which I find to be an annoyingly endless game of action and consequence.
I have popcorn husks stuck in my teeth
from a bowl of popcorn,
which was unsatisfying to eat
due to its healthful lack of enough butter.
The alarm clock's not gentle,
but then neither are dreams of loss, losing, and departure.
The warm weather is late, summer is short,
and winter is a bitter exercise in remembering to breathe.
The cirrus clouds were ugly today,
like old Halloween cobwebs with no will.
Not even the birds would go near them,
or maybe it was the unpredictable gusts of wind
which blew dust into my eyes that kept them out of the sky.
If only I could love my whining cat more
and afford a maid
and enjoy food and drink without fullness or evacuation
and never have winter or blistering August
and forget dentists
and ban household detritus
and get rid of cheap perfumes that make my eyes swell
and cure cancer
and wander around wherever I like
and get to ride trains for free
and institute three-day weekends
and lie around in a park in the shade of a tree
with a book and a pink lemonade
and watch the baby geese roll like dumplings
as their parents scuttle them away across the lawn,
then it would be that Tomorrow I keep hearing so much about.
posted by Schmutzie on May 5, 2008
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In The Field, 1987
You stand in that field
with the spring crop just reaching your knees
where your shorts end.
You have that skin,
the kind we have before we've been in car accidents
and stretched our mouths around other people
and smoked drugs in the outfield,
that kind that plumps over your bones
and takes the sun into itself.
The scrape from the rock you fell against
will taste oily and metallic when you stop to notice it,
and you will hope it will scar before fall.
I can taste it from here.
It was soundless;
at least, that is how I remember it
as I stare at this three-hole punch.
I think the grass scraped edge on edge,
and there must have been that sound of the breeze
running over the well of my ear,
but I do not remember it.
I do remember how far along the field you were
picking at seedheads.
You had forgotten about my following
and fingered yourself absently through your pocket.
I stood there once
with a toy car in my hand,
keeping my distance from the men who rolled wheat heads
and squinted against the dry air blowing off the highway.
One day I would be them, I thought,
and I plotted the cap I would wear
and whether I would chew grain
or let a thin stalk twizzle from my mouth.
That was then.
We are all three deep:
inside, outside, make-believe.
I watch your eyes go inward
while your lips move words to something there
away from the Doppler sounds of moving cars
where your shoulders are not burning
in the high sun.
posted by Schmutzie on January 11, 2008
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The Dear Johns
When I was a little kid
I thought Dear John letters were just that:
letters addressed to an imaginary person named John
that would never be sent
about things you wanted gone from your life.
I wrote a lot of them.
They said things like:
Dear John, I don't want celery in my soup anymore;
Dear John, I think the organ is tacky and want to take guitar lessons;
Dear John, I wish Leslie went to a different school;
Dear John, they call me Chiclets because of my front teeth.
When I was twelve,
I found out that Dear John letters were for leaving those once loved,
and I realized that I had forgotten love in my Dear Johns,
so I wrote my last letter:
Dear John, I love you;
and I folded the letter into a little box I buried in the yard
and then hid out at the ball diamond
to avoid my organ lessons.
posted by Schmutzie on November 30, 2007
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With You, It's Always The Poor New-Yorkers
You say, but there's death.
There is hunger and dehydration
and murder and torture.
There are carnivores and weapons.
There is fire and disease.
Cars drive over people,
and the living eat dead food.
Some kids in New York have never
seen a live cow
or walked on soil barefoot
without fear of dirty needles and broken glass.
I want to say that these are only bodies, only bodies,
that we carry them around,
that all of these will go.
In one hundred and fifty years
not one of us will be here
to recognize the face or hair or gait of another.
These bodies are the meat we antagonize,
not the things that flesh them out.
You are confused.
If anything at all,
we are not to be here.
The world despises us
as much as we do any weed,
and we should accept that fact
as much as we accept
that we will kill the mushrooms
that pop up in brief rings before we uproot them
to make way for grass
that we won't allow to grow.
posted by Schmutzie on October 26, 2007
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The Traveller
She should have sat elsewhere.
I did not like her,
that girl who squeezed herself in
between me and the bench's wooden arm,
with her faux-suede skirt gripping my thigh.
She smelled like the contents of my grandmother's purse -
crushed sucking candies and tissues and discount hand lotion -
and I thought she must be very lonely or European
to press herself so selflessly against a stranger.
Canadians do not touch each other.
She picked at something gummy stuck to her sweater
while I jiggled my leg in time to the clicks of the clerk's tapping pen.
posted by Schmutzie on October 2, 2007
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The Terrible Twist
Just now, in that mirror,
there were only her own eyes,
all of a sudden,
and she saw it, that absence,
that place where she would not be looking back at herself
through the science of procreation and DNA,
and that most of the people she knew
would do that,
and they would look at bits of themselves in another
and know the physical extent of their existence
by the colour of eyes or the peak of an upper lip;
she would not;
she could only see strangers.
There should be funerals for the deaths of possibilities,
she thought, there should be services
with slide shows to tell the possibilities
of could-have-beens to the could-nots,
and candles would be lit by everyone
to acknowledge all their futures that had just unhappened,
except that was not feasible, because things were unpossibling all the time,
and no one could ever go to work for all the funerals,
although, without them,
everyone just kept walking around and talking and going to work
and eating and putting gas in their cars and sighing
with no one so resigned to the unhappening
as her face looking back upon itself.
She closed her eyes,
and a short and desperate gesture it was,
to find the mirror that would show her
a living thing of her own making,
but she could see only strangers with wisps of curly hair,
or, in a terrible sarcastic twist,
she was an ape cradling a dead monkey daughter
that only she could see.
posted by Schmutzie on September 11, 2007
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No Longer Other
When I was little,
death did not happen to me.
It was on the list of things
that happened to other people I did not know well:
divorce, cancer, fire, torture, and virgin births.
Death happened to distant great uncles
and someone else's fish.
Death was like the Morgans' backyard pool:
they had one, and we did not.
Now death lives in that space
where they removed my uterus and sewed me shut,
forever cutting off the path
from inside me to outside me.
It presses itself over the scar I will never see,
a cat that lies on the newspaper,
drawn to it by attention.
posted by Schmutzie on August 30, 2007
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From This End
I sleep six days for every one I open my eyes.
I take pictures and then run three days from the source.
Fiction fixes place in time when fact is fleeting,
and all reality's a vanishing point
at the end of a long line of roadside poles.
At least that's how it appears
on the other end of a pen, a lens,
from behind a particular pair of binoculars,
in the news and financial reports,
on the calendar three Sundays from now
where the crow goes long.
posted by Schmutzie on August 2, 2007
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Red Jacket
At four or five or six years old,
my mother outfitted me with a red jacket
that had a hood and a double pocket on the belly
and a metal zipper that went tick-tick-tick in soft clicks
that could only be heard when you were inside it.
The fleece was on the inside where it counted,
and it had broad, soft elastic cuffs at the wrists
where my mother would stuff tissues
that I used to squash bugs
so that I could see the colour of their insides.
I knew that my insides were red,
but theirs were brown or yellow or green,
unless sometimes if they ate people, like mosquitoes.
I would find that jacket hanging in the closet in the winter,
and I would smell it and push its smooth insides into my face.
It meant things, that coat. Even then I knew.
It was the smell of rain-damp dirt with mashed in pine needles
from the trees way up north,
and my cold, chubby fingers in wet sand on grey days
when my uncle's curse kept the rain close;
it was the musky-sweet smell of rotten foliage
limping into the humic soil
and translucent snail shells snapping easy against
water-worn pebbles no bigger than my smallest fingernail.
That coat is a place.
That coat is a place even at the bottom
of the landfill it was thrown into
after my mother secreted it from the house.
Long from then, now, when I lie in bed,
older and sore and worried,
I am in that coat with fat cheeks
counting the beetle shells
that I have stashed in my sleeves.
posted by Schmutzie on July 23, 2007
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