let me be open
let me tear
a wet, brown paper bag hearing the lunch bell
spilling forth chicken salad sandwich cheese nips and juice box
barely holding it all
in, clutched by a warm hand
bathed in the light of the cafeteria.
let my ribcage irrupt
on the airplane
let oxygen masks drop down from my sternum
so that others can calm
themselves down first, and then their children
during a pressure change in the cabin.
let my dead branches bear fruit
buds and flowers and green in the spring
the smell of new roses and soap
astonishing the neighbors.
let me be the blackstrap molasses in your peanut sauce
stir me in,
let me bear weight
let me have a metallic aftertaste.
make room for me on the ground,
let there be two spaces for my feet.
let my hands fade in the evening
without trepidation.
let me be dizzy and limpid.
and let the grass tickle my arches
when i move.
dear liz,
i think you’re in thailand. maybe you’re in indonesia? i forget. in any case, why are you on facebook? and googlechat? i don’t understand. i wonder what it will be like to travel to a far away place and be reminded of home when i look at my gmail inbox. is that why you are in an internet cafe? i am so confused.
last week i finished working at the coffee shop and began working at farmers markets full time. in the span of a week, my life no longer involves waking up at 5 o clock, having three bosses all of whom are the kind of bumbling folk i always seemed to get paired up with during junior high school math class, or making lattes with coffee that reeks of oppression and colonialism with lopsided rosettes on top for anyone. my hands smell like broccoli instead of coffee. you would think broccoli doesn’t have a smell, but everything in the brassica family smells a little bit like hearty, older gentleman farts. it is like recognizing the scent of an old lover years later in a weird place, except it happens to me every year, and they’re vegetables. not lovers.
which reminds me, i am very much without love. of the four people living in my house, three of us are single, and we talk too much about wanting. we want to have terrible relationship drama, like our fourth housemate. we want to get bad love poetry sent to us by post, we want to fall asleep during morning sex, we want someone to put sunblock on our backs at the beach without making any jokes. i guess you would tell me to shut up and go on a date, because i’m in a country full of queers, and next weekend is pride and i’m going and i’ve never been to pride and if i threw a rock into the crowd and said ‘kiss me i’m lonely!’ someone would probably oblige me (if i remembered to brush my teeth, which, truthfully, i work on). really, i am not without love at all. for the first time in my life, i feel like i am constantly surrounded by people who want to love me. if i was really lonely, i wouldn’t complain about it on the internet.
i can’t believe you’re wherever you are. that is so far away (wherever it is)! do you think about that? do you think ‘right now i am x thousand miles from where i had my ninth birthday party’? i feel like i think about that sometimes and i am only in seattle. for example, it is three thousand and twenty six miles to my parents’ house. actually, they moved last week to a house four miles down the road in the general direction of i-90, so it is three thousand twenty two now, but i think about numbers and facts like that and i get mired in all of the statistics. my head might explode when i am in new zealand. i know you saw it on facebook, and i swore i’d never update my friends via facebook, but it is so easy, and i am officially one way ticketed to new zealand! i am leaving four months from tomorrow, i have saved enough money to actually pay off most of my student loans in one lump sum (again with the boggling) except i am going to spend it slloooowly on things like transportation and hostels and trinkets for all of those people who love me (you’re all getting postcards). things i feel a lot of: pride, initiative, lucky, crazy, afraid, and like i’m indiana jones, without all of the training and special skills. for two years i think the people in my life thought i would never get the cojones or the dollars to do what i’m about to do, and now that i have a little from column a and a little from column b i feel like i’m saying ‘i told you so’ to folks who would respond ‘well you’re still an idiot’.
on saturday i wound up with 20 pounds of strawberries (things like this happen to farmers market workers more often than you would think) and with the help of two friends, made a dozen large jars of no sugar (as per the marne friendly diet) honey maple strawberry spread. this references both my new job schedule and my wanting love (ergo wanting someone to spread strawberry spread upon) so i put it in its own paragraph.
and that is where i think i will end.
come home safe, liz. and tell me everything.
marne j
a one way plane ticket to new zealand costs 638 dollars and 16 cents, if you leave from seattle on october 24th. i know this because i just typed all of the numbers on my american express gold card in the right order in the right place on the cheap tickets dot com website and now i have a spot for myself on a big plane, a boeing 777, to auckland, on october 24th. i will be away indefinitely, or until they start denying my credit card.
this italicized paragraph is about my life: i applied for my visa on tuesday. it was approved on friday. and a merry christmas to your family. it is a visa that will let me go to new zealand for a year and work while i travel. i can earn money (though i intend to be paid in the blood of firstborn children, something about the exchange rate being more stable?) i am eligible for a three month extension on my working holiday visa when i am done because i am an agricultural worker. i am going to buy a plane ticket for november 2. this means i could stay until february of 2011, though i will probably have moved on by then. what an odd looking series of numbers. i am going to buy a plane ticket when i get the juevos together to sit down and hit send on the computer. i wish the process was more corporeal than the internet. i could really use some customer service. sometimes i like to think about the goodbyes i will have, and then i get shakey and cry in my head a little. especially when i think about my last iced latte in cal anderson park. it gets me every time.
everyone wants to know what i’m going to do when i get back, but i’m not coming back, i can’t even say twentyeleven out loud, so i am sticking to dreaming about other countries i’d like to visit when i am done. i think i might like to fly from new zealand to greece and farm and backpack in eastern europe. i envision sitting on some beach when i turn 24, huddled over a well used notebook overlooking impossibly blue water while wearing white. maybe i’ll eat fish tacos, and then i’ll head north. estonia sounds nice. also i already bought the lonely planet guide.
june is a good month
june is a good month.
june, here i am in yellow
bedecked in daisies
i am naked from the waist up
silver spoon implanted in an immovable pint of ice cream
in ice cream held steadfast under my salty chin in june.
licked with sweat and dust from dried up mud puddles
no rain in june, we are covered in strawberries and i am
staring at dripping, sweet calves
straining up hills instead of hibernating
asses bouncing step step step in peacoats and gortex
mittened and goosefleshed navigating iced over sidewalks
falling down the steps outside the grocery store.
june means my red bikini purchased
during some other june, delirious and tempestuous
strapped to my tits like tits in slings for fractured elbows or
pouches for baby kangaroos
two traffic stopping red lights
only in june would i put aside my endless
endless, gender trouble dialogue monologue
for two scraps of lycra in a hibiscus motif
a red bikini denouement
in june,
june, here i am
feverish, heading downhill
hands filled with stone fruit and towels
june, i have my spoon,
let us eat.
exercise from Ordinary Genius.
name some of the objects around you: a bamboo plant, bag of corn chips, futon, wind chimes, sofa, kitchen table, wicker basket full of shoes, water glass.
pick two of those objects: bamboo houseplant, wind chimes.
the first object is in love with the second object. write about that love.
the view from the windowsill
i think about going outside and
rooting myself in a pond
submerging and holding fast
to the sand, gently
bobbing,
spray salting my new leaves
until I have grown so green
and tall that my new leaves
are too high
for all but the highest tides.
or
walking out this door and
growing, deep down on a rocky hill my
roots searching, wiggling
to get established in some sunny spot hugged
by shade giving stones.
every day
i would bend with the arc of the sun
listen to birds
watch the other plants flower
and every day think
about physics and befriend crickets
to keep the nights
from becoming as endless as my memories of you
languid in the breeze
would be if i walked
out this door
and went outside.
I am reading Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio. I am going to try as many prompts as I can before the book is due back to the library. The first prompt was to write American Sentences, that is, haiku length sentences, that is, poems that are sentences that are 17 syllables. For more information, go to americansentences.com
I think if you are reading this, then you should not leave this page without leaving a sentence of your own.
anxiety dreams of cop cars pulling me over; woke up sweaty.
June makes me think of college and ex-girlfriends; maybe its all the roses.
Three concussions later I appreciate not having a headache.
Steaming whole milk for the first latte of the day, right shoulder still sore.
Home too late from work to make the pizza I had been craving all day.
Two boys playing Left For Dead instead of studying for their finals.
Giggling on the couch, reading the postcard you sent me from Chicago.
First heat of summer left me with a migraine and four pints of ice cream.
Yogurt, granola, and strawberries: breakfast in the car this morning.
Started to write a story at the register– blue pen on receipts.
First heat of summer left me with a migraine and four pints of ice cream.
prompt: write a primer for dealing with your family. i like this prompt and have been using it a lot, but i am also alone without homework assignments from my writing class for the first time in a few months; i had to drop it for work, but will hopefully pick it up again soon. i miss the homework already.
Don’t look at the birth certificates
or the credit cards or the ophthalmologist’s records
Don’t trust any other permutation of four consonants and two i’s
Think before you spell.
Have nothing in common with Smiths and Laurens.
Bear the weight of spelling your surname each letter cast to an object
i as in igloo n as in nancy
of hearing it run over
mangled like a penny imperfectly positioned on steel traintracks.
Bear the compounding frustration of being interrupted at the dinner table
with a phone call
from someone who can’t say your name
selling insurance
or paper
on Yom Kippur.
Hold your torturers accountable; air the trials on cable tv, and
introduce yourself
smile twice and paint a picture when you ask someone if you have got theirs right.
my first and last names can be difficult to hear, say, and spell. i am trying to write about that.
i’m not going to put any longer stories on the internet anymore. the internet is a weird, scary place. if you know me and you want a copy of the quail story, (or you just want to send me e-cards), e-mail me at marneasada@gmail.com.
watching the sun move from under a cedar
a happy satisfaction when,
surprised, opening the blue lid of the tupperware
to find
on top of the salad
the yellow
and green avocado not brown
like the book said it would not be
if she sprinkled lemon juice on it.
I’ve been counting candy for the past half hour.
A lie: I’ve been counting packages of bubblegum, pharmaceuticals, and potato chips all afternoon, but probably only moved onto the candy ten minutes before my break, which is now.
Inventory is always a hard day. I wake up cringing and falling asleep and eventually make it over here and unlock the doors just as one could start to see in the sky that its going to be another cloudless day. I do all of the same opening procedures, sometimes rigidly moving my arms while i complete my work, as if i needed to pretend that i’m a robot.
Today we have to count everything in the store. We do it once a month. Walk around with clipboards and lists upon lists of each product, each flavor of bubblegum listed, every kind of batter separated by letter and number in the package, and then we count. Once a month I find myself squatting between the rows of condoms, marking down magnums and ribbed for her pleasures.
At lunch I read a story by Sherman Alexie, a writer I pretend to have opinions about and don’t, because I’m not from Seattle, and if you’re not from Seattle, the only thing you know about Sherman Alexie is that he wrote Reservation Blues, which I did not read, because my introduction to women’s studies professor dropped it from the syllabus midsemester.
In his story he talked about working at a 7-11 here in Seattle, and really his story was about bigger things and other places and other narratives and identities, just like my life now is about pretty much everything except working as a university barista. It felt good to think about Sherman Alexie as a cashier. He got to write Sonics Death Watch. All Is Not Lost, you know? But then I realized I might have been reading fiction. And the narrator might have nothing to do with Sherman Alexie, and I won’t know until I read the whole book, or look him up, or write him an email.
So now I feel robotic and dumb, instead of just robotic. Which is hard, because robots, by nature, aren’t dumb.
