Poet rag

In this ancient burial ground
I am a heap of compost, not

Sure of sorrow, not sure of earth
worms roiling through sad entrails.

Today will die tomorrow, as surely
as restless nights in cheap hotels

Cannot but end with eyelids burning,
brandy scented, coy as any drifter

Lost in a bus station, lost on that cold lake,
a dark spot on a lung. Is there no crime

Committed when words decompose
Where no radish is ever terrified

When reality’s dark dream digs wet
dirt on a shovel, into some poet’s grave?

 

(patchwork of writing prompts gleaned from half-dozen writing anthologies – make of it what you will)

The Chicharrones Diet

On America’s Got Talent, Brenda Lane presented her spectacular recipes for guaranteed weight loss. The voters hated her and she made it only through the first round. She went instead to the Biggest Loser and made it through rounds two, three, and four, with much hooting and ridicule for her recipes and her habit of wearing spandex too tight. She sweated on her meringues and divinity, she fried her pork rinds in lard and tears, the audience laughed and laughed but kept her in the race until round four, when with a flourish she threw off her towel at weighing in and ran off the set and onto the studio parking lot, where she hailed a cab in the altogether. The cabbie drove to a thrift store and brought her a shift of stretch terry cloth and handing it to her said for crying out loud lady, put something on. She wiped her eyes on the terry and thanked him, and he took her home. At the door, she said wait, just a minute, and came back a moment later with a bag of chicharrones and his cab fare, and thus a great love was born.

A hatred of fat is funny in a country of fat people, but less funny in a country of people who worship thinness for its own sake. Brenda and Guy went through every recipe of Brenda’s together and watched the weight come off.

“It’s a good joke, don’t you think,” said Guy, licking country gravy off of his bowl with a chunk of fried turkey. He handed Brenda a whole dill pickle to dunk in the batter.

“Sure do, honey,” said Brenda. “You want to hear another one?”

“Shoot, cupcake,” said Guy.

“How many fatties does it take to change a light bulb?”

“I don’t know, how many?”

“Only one, but it has to want to change.”

They laughed and went out for donuts, a couple of people who were just fat enough on love and chicharrones.

Bodily fluids

It was a hot day in the city. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck, and she thought to herself I really have had enough of bodily fluids for one day. She took a tissue out of her bag and wiped at the back of her neck. The tissue, sodden, shredded immediately, and she looked at it in disgust.

The man at the falafel cart made a sudden hooting sound at her, “Hey miss Lady,” he said, “here you go, here you go.” He held a handful of napkins out to her. Her first impulse was to throw her soggy, sweaty Kleenex in his face and curse his children, but she did realize it was just her bad day speaking. She calmed herself, set her face in a civilized gracious neutral, and accepted the handful of napkins, sopping at her neck, her forehead, even down the front of her shirt (turning slightly aside as she did this).

“Thank you,” she said, stiffly, but sincerely.

“No problem, Miss,” the falafel man said. “You want a drink, I got Orange Fanta and Root Beer, nice and cold?” She admitted that an Orange Fanta would be pleasant, and he fished one out of his cooler.

“I’d give it to you for nothing, you know, only I work hard for the money,” said the vendor, with a look that suggested he’d been watching her cross the plaza every day as she left the labs.

“That’s okay, but thank you so much,” she said. She paid for the Fanta and left a tip that was too large, just to put that distance between them. The falafel man’s face fell just a little, but he smiled and waved, bravely, as she left, crossing the plaza to the bus stop. The number 17, as always, he noted.

When she arrived on the scene this morning, the day was already hotter than anyone expected this early in the year. The university, with its hardwood floors and wide open windows, seemed foreign to her, accustomed as she was to grey walls, formaldehyde, fluorescent lights and the chilly certainty of dead flesh in drawers lining the walls on three sides.

There was a pool of blood still oozing from his head when she got there, reaching into the pile of student papers on his desk. If only the campus police had responded immediately to his call – his hand was still on the phone – they might have gotten there before this final student assessment. As it was, she put on gloves, gathered the papers, lined lightly in spilled blood, and put them in plastic bags for later examination.

(Writing activity: Group member Andy brought a handful of incomplete sentences with him to group. Everyone wrote the partials down, then we wrote for 20 minutes, using as many of the incomplete sentences as we wanted to create a fresh narrative. Here are the sentences Andy contributed – But I work hard for the money, said
- A pool of blood still oozing from his head reached into the pile of student papers on his desk. If only
- The ship had reached warp speed, and soon the distance between them would eliminate their love, unless
- Pat was in seventh grade with only a hint of facial hair beginning to appear, and dreams that were
- It was a hot day in the city, a bead of sweat trickled down her neck, and)

Interview

I was as good or better than I’ve ever been before. Even when, last August, I volunteered for Meals on Wheels and gave blood to the victims of that tsunami, that tsunami – I never can remember the names of tsunamis, seems like there’s one every month or so. It was in the newspaper, a feature piece by Jolene Kreuger Guttierez, that the tsunami victims that moved here – maybe it was the hurricane, that hurricane last year? Feature article by Jolene Kreuger Gutierrez, with a picture of me surrounded by – not refugees, you know, because refugees are like illegal aliens, but anyway, they were people displaced by disaster, with me in the middle of them, and we were all smiling. I had a French manicure and big chunky highlights done the day before the interview.

I have been taking care of people and disasters since I was a little girl. I remember saving a puppy who was running down the street, chasing after him in my big wheel. Mama says I was calling to him, Boo, come here puppy boy, come here and he kept running the other way ‘til I thought to go get an ice cream to share with him. I had to eat it fast; it was awfully hot that day, and then awhile later that puppy came up and licked the ice cream right off my face. I put the leash on him like Mama said and then we took him to the pound, where they take care of strays and keep them off the streets.

When I became a famous sexologist, it was something I was very good at, much better than I’d ever really expected or planned to be. Sometimes, expertise just falls into a person’s lap, so to speak, and I was thrilled to say that my interior life, my inner cupboard, you might say, is just full as can be of secret pleasures. Secret Pleasures is also the title of my first book, which might have won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, had it not been for the poorly timed release of Tim Cook’s Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917 – 1918. I was happy for him, obviously,and spent some time with him at the awards ceremony that year. He does drink a bit, of course, and I had quite a headache the next day, although I didn’t let it interfere with the research for my interview with Rielle Hunter. 

“How’d you decide on your subjects, Dr. Luce?” She asked me. I was in good form, sexology is my long suit, you might say, and so I told her about my first interview long ago, with a Playboy Bunny whose name I can’t really give here for legal reasons.  Well, you know Dick Cavett was before my time, but not before this Bunny’s time. She was a bit past her prime, of course, and looking for some copy; a few inches in a tabloid goes a long way. Her secrets were relatively obvious, and at that time, you see, scandal wasn’t really scandal the way it is now.

(writing retreat activity: Using a collectively generated set of prompts, create an “unreliable narrator”.)

Wuxi to Wuhan

The smashed banana plant in China made banana mash for smoothies manufactured and bottled in Cleveland, Illinois. The mash machine, a banana macerator, took in up to 1500 pounds of banana in a single open mouth gulp, emitting banana burps that hovered over the ancient city on the Yang-tse River. The banana peels were spit into a vat 20 feet high, which gradually came to a very high heat, releasing a continuous vapor. The banana peels eventually became a viscous substance that was compressed into long flat sheets, cooled and then cut into panels, which were sold to kitchen remodelers in Portland Oregon, who repurposed them into environmentally sound faux marble countertops with customizable colors.

The shaking of the banana macerator made an awesome sound, one that flavored the dreams of every small child and old man from Wuxi to Wuhan. The sound of squids walking, the sound of tree roots squelching through mud, the sound of moths wiggling out of their cocoons, amplified 100,000 times. The sleep of the people from Wuxi from Wuhan was both sweet and uneasy, and when they woke, they wiped banana vapor out of their eyes and had rice for breakfast, with dried fish and salty plum. The smashed banana plant on the Yang-tse River gave jobs to the people from Wuxi to Wuhan, but after the first generation, no citizen of either city ate bananas, and after two generations, many of them left, unable to stand the smell of bananas for even one more minute.

In the middle of everything

This is a common scene in my home, most or many of those autumn days: me, pushing the dog bed against the wall, in spite of her strong preference for keeping the bed in the middle of the room, where I had to step over her repeatedly while I bake.

This dog does not want a den, she wants a stage. She’s been through many remodelings in a relatively short period of time, for a number of reasons. Sitting quietly in a corner does not guarantee love, attention or food, in her experience. When we upgraded our windows, single to double pane, she tripped the Pella man, whose ankle was twisted, but he forgave her anyway because of her strawberry blonde hair and her wish to play tennis ball with him before he leaves. The plumber is less forgiving, and charges me for his x-rays.

At some point in the remodel I am finally able to remove the vintage 70s Elvis posters that have been tormenting me through ex-husbands, sentimental children and unsightly holes in the wall that I have not ever gotten around to patching or painting.

Really, don’t we all know that remodeling is most manageable following a huge natural disaster? A flood, an earthquake, even a fire? Although fire is so absolute that it has almost a religious significance. This fire would not have happened without your sin. Or mine.

So I found myself dragged through our history: the beaded shell door hangings, the various sound systems, lost technologies, the aging spices from vegan experiments, the nasty industrial air fresheners of the nineties, the assorted snugglies and noise cancelling devices of the early 2^nd millenium. We washed our feet like Jesus at one phase in our nesting. We lit sage to cleanse in another. We accumulated in the next decade, more and more and more and more and more and came suddenly to a painful and choking halt, with duct tape and orange alerts and one ounce bottles to carry on our big adventures somewhere else.

Now it is time to upgrade the house with security systems and timers, cameras and automated gates. My gardeners begin to worry, begin to believe there are terrorists everywhere and now my baking is for reassurance. No worries, I tell them, Randy and Julian and John and Jorge, take this apple spice cake and this bag of little things we did not use in the remodeling. They are looking for re-usable wiring so they can protect the perimeter of their empty lots, where they will someday build the house they’ve always wanted for their wives and children, who are for the time being living in little thin-walled apartments in Rio Rancho, which are incredibly expensive and yet close. Being close is important. Being close is more important than double pane windows, which is something even my red-haired dog, who is no rocket scientist, knows, and I have come to agree with her, and leave her bed in the middle of everything, because that is where we all belong.

The Complete Idiot

I had this system for getting exactly what I wanted out of people.

It was so perfect, this system, like a surgical knife, or maybe more like a perfectly blown piece of glass.

This system worked for everyone, and I was the author of it. Sweet!

It is pretty exciting to be the author of a system for getting exactly what you want out of people.

I wrote a book: Getting What You Want Out Of People For Dummies.

And another: The Complete Idiot’s Guide For Getting What You Want Out Of People.

These books were wildly successful. I had some LLCs. Bunches of them. And two accountants to manage my numbers.

Lost seven jobs in 6 years. Fired for being hard to get along with.

Next I’ll write a book about Getting Fired for Dummies.

Pays the bills.

The sighting

Bubba likes the pit stop at the Possum Kingdom best. Nice lake there, keep the skeeters down by using industrial strength bug spray, enough to kill the catfish when they eat ‘em. Catfish is good eating. Best fried, but then what isn’t? Think about it: donuts, turkeys, corn dogs, ice cream. There aren’t many things that aren’t best fried. Bubba says the exception is fried pickles, but I like those fine, as long as I got something big and sweet to wash it down with. Only thing about fried food is you gotta have extra napkins or else old jeans, either or.

What changed Possum Kingdom the most, for the best, some folks think, was when the miracle happened. Face of Jesus on a green John Deere tractor seat. Big as life: that seat was muddy from Bubba sitting on it after wrestling with a couple hogs out by Clearwater, and the imprint of his holy hiney was a dead ringer for the risen savior. Bubba’s wife LouNesta spotted it and showed it to me first, I gotta tell you that, but don’t think I’m bragging or nothing, only God can take credit for a miracle. But I took the pictures and uploaded them onto my church’s Face Book page and next thing you know the donations are flooding in, for forty days and forty nights that money was running fast and green as young wine. Bubba’s sister, MayLou, was Dairy Queen that year and handed out over 400 chocolate dipped cones at the state fair, proceeds of which were given to the church, but that was nothing compared to the donations flooding those Paypal gates of heaven. I took another look at the tractor seat after it all hit the fan, but I feel like I should say truthfully I never did actually see Jesus there, just old Bubba’s buttcheeks and a smudge that people told me was the crown of thorns.

The accountant

I like specialty bubblegum flavors. Peppermint, of course, and sage, the rain flavors, mud, ocean, tomato worm, potato chip, and my current best ever favorite is dead roadkill flavor. I save all of the wrappers and when I have enough I fold them together in a custom built bubblegum chain that should reach from my bedroom here in Seattle to the outer city limits of Little Rock, Arkansas, if my calculations are correct.

My calculations are usually correct, and I do all of my parent’s accounting for their firm because they are not very good at calculations, which they say is not a nice thing to say but is true anyway. They point out to me that they have many skills that allow them to get me the things I need to achieve my goals, and that is true right now because of the child labor laws. The child labor laws were first instituted in this country in 1916 because many children, even children with very good accounting skills, were working in places that were too hot or too cold or dangerous and they worked so hard that many of them died before they could grow up to be accountants, which is what I am going to do. The job of parents is to support their children and give them the things they will need to be productive adults some day, and my parents are clearly doing this job, since I don’t have to work in a sweatshop and live in a sub-standard situation that would be hard to imagine these days anyway.

The accountant is the person in the company who makes sure that all the information about the money in the company is reconciled, with no missing information or information that is not true. This is an important job because missing or wrong information causes people and companies to make mistakes and then companies can fail, which can sometimes lead to children losing their homes, their computers, and their parents, whose job it is to raise the children until they are mature enough to take care of themselves. The other job of the accountant is to tell people when they’ve made a mistake and to hold them accountable for their mistakes. This would be a very good thing to do, although I’m not allowed to do this with my mom and dad, just make notes of the mistakes they’ve made so they can look later to see that I was right.

The accountant looks for predictable numbers in columns and rows and becomes highly sensitized to variations in the predictable columns and rows that suggest that an error, either accidental or intentional, has been made. This is important information to share with people who have an interest in the company, and this information should be made known as soon as possible so that mistakes can be corrected. This is the basic job of the accountant, and that is what I will be doing professionally by the time I am 16, which is when I should be done with my accelerated math program and ready to go to college. My parents say they don’t want me to go any earlier than 16 because of my social skills, which I don’t think matters, but I am still under age and so that is the end of that debate.

Wedding in Cliché, Missouri

“Gracious and good heavens,” said the minister, who was smiling like the cat who swallowed the canary. “You all just sit right on down here and tell me how this came about.”  He gestured at the two straight-backed chairs across from the desk where he’d been sitting, surfing the web, thinking about his sermon for this weekend: Curiosity killed the cat, and other reasons not to question God.

Hannah and her beau, Cliff, sat down carefully, awkwardly, looking down at the seats before they sat, as if they were afraid of whoopie cushions or snakes hiding under the thin cushions. Once seated, Cliff began to sweat profusely, fresh acne rising to the surface in apparent reaction to sitting discussing the pending nuptials. Hannah, fresh, pink and bland as a commercially grown apple, sqeezed his hand and said, “We are considering a couple of different places?” with a rising inflection at the end that said maybe this was a question but maybe it wasn’t.

Cliff’s not sure, but he thinks he might be dumb as a stump, way his daddy always said he was. All he’d been trying to do, see, was turn over a new leaf, and when he met Hannah, he said to himself, well, boy, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and next thing you know he’s sitting across from the Reverend Richard “Bull” Bullock, resident minister of the Turncoat Baptist Church in the tiny town of Cliché, Missouri. Cliff’s not been entirely honest with Hannah, who in her turn has not been entirely honest with him, and in this respect they are well suited to one another.  Better take my medicine like a man, Cliff says to himself, and tell her about parole and all that later on, if it comes up.

Hannah’s attendance at Turncoat Baptist is perhaps not as regular as she’s led Cliff to believe, and in fact up until six months or so ago, she’d been working out of her home, sending out political spam several hours a day, and she’d saved up enough for a nice Baptist identity, although she hadn’t quite gotten around to changing her name. Debbie, she thought, or Anne, something plain and protestant and ordinary, something that would fit right in Cliché. She’d made friends with the Reverend Bull just as soon as she moved into her little house in Cliché, early bird gets the worm, that’s what she told herself.

She squeezed Cliff’s hand again and smiled. “I love you,” she said to him, and looked down modestly at the engagement ring, then back up again at the minister.

“Reverend Bull,” she began. “We’ve just been talking? And we can’t decide between a religious ceremony and maybe going to Vegas instead? I told Cliff we should come talk to you?”

The Reverend Bull rubbed his hands together and began, “The love that holds a marriage together for an entire lifetime should be as big as the whole outdoors. This is a step not to be taken lightly. Have you talked to each other about what marriage really means?”

Cliff opened his mouth to answer, not knowing exactly what he was about to say. Before he could say anything, though, in fact, quite suddenly and without warning, a shot rang out.

15 minute freewrite: word associations; cliches.