Keep reminding me of Anne Lamott’s philosophy!!–Day 1 of StoryADayMay

The Year of Fire and—

A man was frozen in a block of ice for a year and a half.

That was his perception upon hearing the news. The doctor stood before him in an oversized, white lab coat and matching white clipboard. He tried to imagine the doctor with a tube running from his nose to match his own. Together, they would look like a pair of aliens.

He cleared his throat gruffly. “So what’s the story, doc?” His voice was lower than he remembered.

“Well…” the doctor hesitated. The man watched him flip through a few pages, knowing his eyes saw nothing. “Well, Robert, there was an accident…”

He seemed to come to terms with this. “You were in an accident.”

The man had never been one to need much bedside manner. Information was what he needed. “How long have I been here?” Cleared his throat.

The doctor shuffled, looked down at his feet. “Look, Robert—“

“How long have I been here, doc?”

Pursed his lips. Looked older. “A year and a half.”

A pause. It was as if the room were filled with pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds and flowers. And snow. Rain on the windows.

The room was filled with silence.

He hardly dared to break it. “Did anyone come to see me?”

The doctor hesitated again, blue eyes to brown eyes. The man realized how young the doctor was.

The answer was evident. They wouldn’t have found any family to send for. Not a wife or girlfriend. He vaguely remembered a woman from a side street bar, the stroller stored in the back room away from the noise. A blanket the color of desert sand.

Without another word, he sent the doctor away. The white coat swept from the room like a flag.

The man cycled through the room like a broken circuit. She wouldn’t have come. He remembered the way the music had throbbed through the bottles of beer, clusters of shot glasses. The main bar needed to be cleaned. Strands of deep brown hair slipped and curled from her ponytail.

The room was too white, walls and bed sheets. He finally met the silence with the creak of the window on its hinges. He watched the room change. The bed sheets became pregnant with wind. Old diagnoses drifted to the floor in soft tongues. There were dried flies in the window sill.

The first time he met her, he noticed the baby had blue eyes like his own. The night at the bar, he was asleep under the blanket in the back room, the door ajar. The rush of sounds lulled him to sleep.

The room was dark with leftover sunlight. As the sky disappeared, he counted the stars. Said prayers on each one. Like a pulse. The wind became ice.

With each star, he let go. The strands of hair tucked behind her ear. The blue eyes. Desert sand. He remembered how delicate her wrists looked in quarter-length sleeves. The small strands of blond hair, darkening around the roots on the child’s head. The transition of songs.

He stopped moving. Focused on the chill in the breeze. The bed sheets had fallen back into place. The old papers had shifted into the doorway, under the bed.

By morning the man had turned to stone.

May is Story-A-Day Month!!

So, this morning I was disappointed that I had missed so much of National Poetry Month and decided to turn every month into a writing month! BUT I just found out that May is already Story-A-Day Month!

If you want to do this with me—and you should—we are not very far behind. Here’s a quick recap:

April 30th: Prove you’re a writer—to yourself.

May 1: Keep It Short (no more than 1,200 words).

And now: May 2!

Let’s get going! We’ve got some catching up to do!

P.S. Ernest Hemingway once said that he had created the shortest story ever written:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This is the time, and this is the record of the time.

“This is your captain: We are going down. We are all going down…together.”
from Laurie Anderson’s “From the Air”

LAST WINTER

In the last few waking hours,
you watch the world through

unblinking eyes.

People become impenetrable
shadows, dark birds,

until everything turns black
on the outside.

There are no tears.

Instead, you remember
a building—draw back the curtain,

and there is a nest
of winter goslings.

You leave the barn door open
until it’s all a hurricane

of feathers and winter snow
inside. Underneath, it is yellow

and maroon and salt.
You wrap the young

in another winter blanket and
put the curtain back in place,

forgetting the old barn light—
flickering, threatening them

with impending
darkness.

*

inspired by Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, on the conditions of Marburg and Ebola on the human immune system.

Find Laurie Anderson’s “From the Air” here.

Also an Influence of Stephen King’s “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”

(a very unfinished story)

A FUNERAL OF INSECTS

Renee found the clearing in the woods hours before the moon arrived. She watched it rise, thinking of how it looked shallow, lacking marrow, in the fog. She listened for a while to the way leaves brushed together, observed how darkness equalizes the appearance of trees.

She was lost. It was dark, and somewhere in the darkness, there was a looming storm. A cloud of breath escaped her lips.

Renee tried to remember exactly how the day had started, repeatedly, to travel back the way she had come. That morning, she left the campsite in search of dry branches. Listened to her shoes crunch the fall leaves against an uneven public path. Then, like a fairy tale, she was picking flowers, moving further and further from the path.

What happened after that was less than explainable. In the trees, a mass had developed that made Renee think of a man. A man made of particles that could manipulate into a cloud.

*

The possibility of retracing her steps had been lost hours ago. There was a time of following a stream, running through the trees, watching the sun drift west but forgetting the cardinal direction of the camp.

Hello, my name is Renee Childs, and I am lost in the woods, she thought. A fractured smile.

Lost somehow was not true in this situation. There was an emptiness to the word, as if it addressed something less. She moved forward to a darker area. Denser trees, fewer animals.

But what worried her most were the bugs.

Under the Influence of John Saul

I don’t know if you all have read anything by John Saul, let alone my favorite Saul novel, The Homing, but I have been thinking of that novel all day. When you haven’t read a book for years and continue thinking of it… there’s obviously something to say about the quality of the writing.

There is this concept I’m struggling with for writing a short story, the use of insects as a larger entity, a driving force, which is largely addressed in this novel. I’m beginning to write the story, with no idea of how it will end or really how my idea functions as the beginning (only that it will be placed…at the beginning), so we will see how this goes. I’ll be posting the story as-is once I finish it tonight, under its title (yet undecided).

Rewrite

I’m reworking “The Nightsky Often Looks Like a Mound of Feathers” and retitled the poem (I may re-use this title in a future poem). Here’s the result:

A LETTER TO CALICO SKIN

1.

Early on, you appeared
like a curled robe

on the side of a highway, like
a young woman dying in the corner

of a room. For years, you appeared,
followed me to states I could not travel to

in real life. I remember the way
you seemed to make others ill,

as they disappeared
from my dreams

entirely.

2.

After years of silence, I found you
in a poem, in the form of a man,

with a name for the illness
that I could not name as a child: leprosy.

And again you returned—I was lost in the woods
and you gained ground, bending with

the shadows, offering me flowers
with poisonous thorns.

3.

Soon I realized you might follow
others: the way he described a woman

with calico hair, and I tried
to not believe him.

I collected flowers, like you in the woods.
It was when I began to search

for sunlight when I wondered
if I had ever told him about you.

Stared at the roses. In this moment,
you became an impenetrable mass

of searching.

*

The poem referred to in Section 2 is David Dodd Lee’s “The Calico Man,” from Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010).

Speech Impediment

You often says things in which
I can say little in return—my growing

deficiency—and the sky turns yellow.
We lay a blanket in a field in the middle

of nowhere and return to find it
covered in earth that cannot grow.

We lie in this space and stare
into a sky filled with clouds that are

lined with mildew. It begins to rain, and
we take in the moisture

and softly blossom with pastel-
colored flowers. We lose the ability

to speak, to use our peripheries,
only knowing that the other lies

under the same sky, forming a hill
in the same space. Like-minded flowers.

Writing Process

This is one of those poems that is not very good, needs a ton of editing but will not get out of my head. I imagine part of it will be useful, but for now, this is it, in its roughest form.

THE NIGHTSKY OFTEN LOOKS LIKE A MOUND OF FEATHERS.

1.

Ever since you were young, you tried
to stay awake through the night, observing

only the odd shapes made through the room
as the moon shifted in your open window.

When I was young, there was a woman
of calico skin, eyes and tongue, curled up

on the side of a highway. I yelled to my mother
to stop the car, and when we backed up,

she had disappeared. She followed me
for years, through airports and gas stations,

always sickly, perfumed with what could only
be death and wind chimes.

2.

Sometimes in the middle of the night
when we cannot sleep, we lie

in the middle of the backyard. We do not fear
this darkness or the strange shapes

of the Arizona shrubs and flowers
that seem to wilt with darkness.

We listen to the wind, in silence—and I wonder
if perhaps this isn’t part of a dream, too,

since sometimes we remember we really live
in Midwestern snow.

3.

During one of these nights, you
make the mistake of telling me

of a woman who followed you
through your dreams

when you were young, one with calico
hair only, and I try not to believe you.

I pluck one of the flowers, wilted black
with nightfall, and smell the rank fumes

of its funeral, trying to decide
whether or not I ever

told you about her.

No Skin Included.

Break open the branch. Inside–
there is lime and tree foam. Like marrow.

The white liquid that illuminates
the skin, full of leaves and freshly-plucked

strawberries. Like dawn, opening:
he captures this about her

in a painting, surrounds her
with blood oranges, places roses

around her face. The girl becomes something
like a funeral, the white-marrow quality

of her skin, the hair curled across
a pillow, the hands poised

for picking daisies.

Analecta Publication

Saturday evening, in conjunction with Jim Daniels’ reading, was the IU South Bend student writing awards and the first reveal of the 2012 Analecta.

Since I was unable to attend, I just picked up my copy, and I’ve spent the past hour or so flipping through it, reading it, admiring it. This very well might be my favorite Analecta yet!

It’s also exciting, because I was a part, however small, in this year’s publication, since I was one of the Assistant Editors, along with a few other very awesome people, and I was also published (I included the poem below)! It’s a great feeling to have multiple roles in such an admirable annual project…

Thank you to Jeff Tatay for your awesome work and dedication to this year’s Analecta. I’m sure there are many others out there who are as excited about this year’s edition as I am.

*

Poisonous Snakes

1.

You, you remember
those earlier days

when you walked along
a more putrid river

surrounded
by chamomile and violets

where the moon

hung itself

in the trees.

The new moon became
the funeral

you walked into.
You dreamt many times.

2.

You remember how, once,

your legs somersaulted

without you,

as though filled with wind,
as if they
were predetermined
amputees.

You wandered into someone else’s backyard
without them,

as if it would help stop the bleeding,
as if it would somehow tell you

you have somewhere else to be.

And when you awoke,

you walked into a woman’s yard,
hanging laundry.

Admired
the childlike size of the clothes,

the smell after washing
still suggesting illness.

3.

The rain had pelted through
the scarecrow’s body,

limp on his pole.

She placed his clothes on the line,
she said, to keep them from molding –

(while the scarecrow lay limp
on the desert rock,

he with a torn mouth,
his body –

the tan-to-brown S shape
that then suggested

poisonous snakes.)