There’s a woman who came to my homeless writing workshop last week who talked me five minutes’ late for class. She talked about how she wrote this poem some time ago and since then she hasn’t been able to write it better. It always comes out choppy. She has tried so many times, and each time it doesn’t “flow” — she kept using that word. Around and Around the Leaves / chase in the wind is how it begins. She spent the twenty-minute writing time transcribing the “choppy” version that was still in her mind. When she went to share, she explained that she’s been writing this poem since second grade. Second grade. She got it right the first time, but not again since. What an effort, somehow honorable, to keep trying to perfect the same 14 lines for forty years.

April 27th, 2009 | Category: happening, written | Leave a comment

Our arugula a leaf pile on my plate. Or placed here and here to mark this:

Lapping sounds. The girl-dog pivots her ears, wags her tail backwards.
The ice cube hits the floor.

I could swim out to my mailbox and then swim back. Stay.

From here I can’t see the cats’ hearts. I used to, when they were small.

The dog sleeps, unwanting sleep, her eyes yolks, lids, yolks, lids.
Look at me slightly mapping. To get here and here to circumvent this. Sex on my plate.

The dog collapses. My heart kicks.

But it was not a cry it was the garbage truck, wet brakes, crying again at the stop sign.

(The cats with the invisible hearts are fine.)

Light makes the corner a light. The cuckoo clock births a turquoise bird.

The ridges of a dog spine kiss the circular rug, her heart blinking: Open. Open.
The cat rigorously loves her shoulder with her cheekbone. Look: love.

I don’t want to hear again about the dead horses. My dogs, what if. Quiet. Radio off.

April 27th, 2009 | Category: house, written | Leave a comment

Walking downtown, all kinds of people. That one could be like my child, or that one. My child could turn out like this or this person. I had to (have to) train myself to see all of them as beautiful, as someone’s child.

April 27th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

ways I knew that I was pregnant/crazy/on a lot of progesterone

Pelvis ached. (It ached just after surgery, but in a different way than now. One ache disappeared to make way for this one. More like cramping.)

Stomach became bloated. (It swelled up during surgery, then settled, then swelled up again)

Pee smells like I’m a fat male coffee-drinker.

Moby growls a lot these days.

There was a day when I couldn’t see anything about myself that I didn’t like. A sense of peace.

There was a half-day when nothing could console me. Every crevice in my brain reflected anger.

I was wheezing trying to get up a hill, gasping for breath I just had the week before.

Craving arugula and grapefruit (this started much after I began the progesterone). Most foods don’t so much turn my stomach as just cause me to feel ambivalent about eating.

Sensitive. (What did you mean by that?)

April 27th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

Three days before my scheduled blood test, I took a home test and it was negative. I spent the whole day grieving, trying to understand what it was like to have that news once again. Two days before the blood test, it was negative again. I didn’t believe it, I didn’t feel it in my body, but it’s hard to tell what are drug reactions and what is life. Then that afternoon on a whim I bought an early-detection pregnancy test and tried again. It was this digital kind, so I couldn’t even watch any line appear. I had to wait three minutes for it to say anything. I was sure it would say NO-. I cried at that YES+. I love the word yes. Six tests later, they all say yes. The blood test at the doctor’s determined that it was a strong yes: not a chemical pregnancy or an unviable embryo. At this point, there’s an 82% chance that it will be healthy enough to stick it out for the duration.

April 25th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)

In ohio i can feel my shoulders widen. You can just breathe there with all that straight land, fields and then fields. The midwest sea. Steve says I’m prettier in the summer, and maybe it’s the freckles he likes, but he says it’s that I seem more open. Not shut down, burrowing in sweaters, head down for winter. 81 degrees today.

April 24th, 2009 | Category: inward, written | Leave a comment

Steve and I drove to Columbus, Ohio yesterday and then drove back today. We went there to see Neko Case sing. I’m not sure why she didn’t come to Detroit or Ann Arbor. She’s shy and awkward and her lyrics are perfectly strange. That shyness, and her lyrics that feel like they’re written in a very quiet, personal space, it contrasts profoundly with her voice — so strong and externally emotional. She had drawings and moving photographs of tigers and cardboard things projected behind her as she sang. I found on YouTube the first song I knew of hers. Blast it.

Deep Red Bells

He led you to this hiding place
His lightening threats spun silver tongues
The red bells beckon you to ride
A handprint on the driver’s side
It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small
And Popsicles in the summer

Deep red bells, deep as I’ve been done
Deep red bells, deep as I’ve been done

April 24th, 2009 | Category: happening, written | Leave a comment

I am both one who mumbles and one who hates to repeat herself. It is unpoetic to have to repeat myself, and the sentence loses its timing and natural rhythm on the second round. I know this is snobby. Steve often asks me to repeat myself, especially when he’s on the computer and I speak up. This is understandable, especially because usually when he’s on the computer he’s actually working. Still I feel it in my gut, a small tug of frustration.

But I don’t speak clearly. I am shy, and words sound dangerous when they’re pointy. I slur them together like safe water.

This morning:

me: Guess-what-temperature-it-is-outside?

steve: what?

me: 28!

steve: 48?

How could he hear forty instead of twenty? They sound so different.

And another time, the other day at the bank.

lady: What’s your name

me: Courtney. C-o-u-r-t-n-e-y.

lady: C-o-u-r-t-s-e-y?

How could that lady have heard an S and not an N? They sound so different. What planet am I on.

Granted, when I was twenty years old, I sneezed too much with bad fall allergies, and then suddenly my right ear started ringing and hasn’t stopped, the tea is always ready. With the ringing, I also lost high-frequency hearing on the right side. It makes organs in churches sound like marching bands in bathrooms.

April 23rd, 2009 | Category: house, written | Leave a comment

I read yesterday from several sources that after a baby is born, the father’s testosterone levels descend and his estrogen levels rise. Supposedly it’s to make the man more sympathetic, compassionate, squishy — to make him find the baby cuter. It must work, because while I’ve heard many stories of men walking out on their pregnant wives, not many men see the baby and then run away.

I wonder how far away the men have to be to have this hormonal transformation. Can they be at war overseas while their wife is in labor and then suddenly they don’t want to fight anymore?

With the hormones I’m on artificially, Steve is already sympathetic. I can’t tell what cravings are mine and which are his. You probably want cheese fries right about now, don’t you? he’s asked more than once near midnight. He makes delicious cheese fries; I eat very few of them. Instead I am obsessed with arugula and grapefruit. For breakfast all week I’ve had a salad. I swig grapefruit juice out of its big container. Yesterday I tried to make myself have take-out thai for lunch, but I turned the car around just after I backed out of the driveway. I came right home to make an arugula sandwich.

I don’t know if it’s the extra estrogen and progesterone, but yesterday I saw a puppy and cried. Steve did not. The dog peed on the owner as he held it in his arms, and I sang to him puppy-dog songs and rubbed his beautiful nose and let my hands travel along his puppy-soft fur. I’m pretty sure it’s an outcome of all these shots: being cranky to my husband, but crying for puppies.

April 23rd, 2009 | Category: the baby thing, written | Leave a comment