Surfacing

9/11

Of course I remember that day.
I could tell you, as everyone else does,
about how I found out, where I was
when I got the news.
I could make it all about me.
I could indulge in the
media's grief porn.

No.

All the news stories,
all the flags at half-staff,
all the masturbatory Facebook posts
won't bring back
a single person who died that day,
or who died in our
national orgasm of revenge.

No.

I don't think we will ever learn.
We are a country founded on
spilled blood, on violence,
on conquest. It's in us,
as a nation, as a people,
and it's rooted in our religion.
Do we have any right to complain
about radical Islam or any other
affront to human dignity when
we have committed centuries
of Christian terrorism ourselves?

No.

I wrote this haiku when my stepmother died, but it seems very fitting today.

Milky Way

Sea of stars the dead
Must navigate, slipping
Beyond earthly forms.

Do they dissipate,
Blend into all, into one?
Or change entirely

Through some alchemy,
Sleight of hand and cosmic joke
Awaiting us there?

Loose

Clothes unbound
long hair flowing
like wine I am
easy with my favors
and this offends you
but your abstinence
helps no one
least of all you
you are an angry
ejaculation
waiting to happen
just let go



Lent/Given

Penance is also excess.
Purging is the mirror
of indulgence. Flesh
defines us, defines her,
sinner pouring freely
from her alabaster jar.
Mary so often painted
in a whore's carnival mask
next to virgin's mourning veil,
but she was there willing
to anoint alive or dead.

As a girl in Alabama in the 70’s and 80’s, I learned that the kitchen belonged to women, and vice versa. My mother and most women in my family were homemakers when I was very young (before divorces and the 80’s economy). Some of my earliest memories are of my mother, my aunts, and my grandmothers stirring on the stove or chopping on the counter.

Food preparation was strictly segregated. Women ruled the kitchen, men controlled the outdoor grill. This was unquestioned. Women brought out the prepared meat to be grilled and then retreated to make everything else in the meal. Men feigned ignorance at any indoor food prep more complicated than a sandwich. This was the division of labor, and it was set in stone.

Now of course as a child I was sometimes handed a spoon covered with cake batter, and I was sent out into the back yard every fall with paper grocery bags to gather the pecans that fell from our two trees so my mother could make cookies and pies. I was occasionally allowed to stir a pot or sprinkle a seasoning, but for the most part I wasn’t required to take part in cooking until I reached puberty. Then the training began for what was apparently my predestined role in life.

Mom tried to teach me to cook. She really did. But I had no interest, possibly because she always made it clear she didn't enjoy it much herself though it was expected of her, and possibly because I was a sulky teenager in the first throes of feminist rebellion against gender roles. It didn’t help that her cooking was incredibly bland like my Midwest Grandma's (unlike my paternal grandmother who specialized in deep-fried, deeply unhealthy but very tasty Southern food). I decided as a teenager that I was not put on this earth to cook for anybody, period, thank you very much. Of course, in a few years life threw some truth at me. Somebody’s got to make the food, or you don’t eat.

In my 20's, I was blessed to have a relationship with a man who enthusiastically made hand-tossed pizzas for a living, and then another with a woman who was a camping and fishing outdoor type who taught me to cook over a barbecue pit in our back yard. I learned that making food didn’t have to be gendered drudgery. Now that I live alone, I’m getting more adventurous about experimenting in the kitchen, because I don’t have to please anyone but myself. At the same time, as I get older, I’m getting more nostalgic for those old family recipes. I recently made salmon croquettes from my grandmother’s recipe, and it brought back powerful memories, as well as making me appreciate the time- and labor-intensive work she and all the women in my family did every day without praise or acknowledgement, because it was expected of them.

(posted on DailyKos)

I haven't seen American Sniper, but on The Nightly Show tonight (so glad this show is a worthy successor to Colbert!), Larry Wilmore discussed the movie with his guests, one of whom was Nick Irving.

I had not heard of him before this show, but Nick Irving is a military sniper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the show he said he doesn't look at "the aspect behind it as far as, you know, I'm gonna kill this guy. He's nothing but a target at that point."

I'm not trying to dehumanize him and his war experiences, because he went on to talk about PTSD and how he coped with it, but I don't understand how someone gets into that mindset in the first place. His answer for why he joined the military: "I saw the Twin Towers fall". Well, I saw that too, and it made me sad, horrified, and pissed off like everyone else, but it didn't make me want to sign up to kill people.

I don't understand war at all. I kind of understand violence on personal level. I don’t condone it, but I understand it. I understand being angry at another person and wanting to hurt them. Honestly, if you’re human, you’ve felt that at some point. Hopefully you didn’t give in to it, but we all know that feeling. And I understand violence in self-defense. What I don’t understand is the impersonality of war. The leaders of one nation or faction decide they want something another nation or faction has, or they want to prevent them from taking theirs, and they send their young people of fighting age out to kill the others of young fighting age, and whoever defends the territory or has the most people left alive wins. This is madness. This is calculating, machine-like insanity. And I think the root of it is to learn to see the “others”, however that is defined, as not human. This is the cause of most of the world’s evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, etc. How does a person get there? How does a society get there? How do we not recognize when the people in power are encouraging us to get there for their own purposes?

I understand people in the military have a job to do, and they have to defend themselves (and many join the military from lack of other economic options), but in the world that I want to live in, the world we should live in, a sniper’s job wouldn't be necessary.

(posted on DailyKos)

Spectral

January trees
rise like dark skeletons
from the fog, shrouded
as half-remembered dreams.
The mist is alive
with ghosts and bones
in this dead season.



(In the last two days I've watched Black Swan, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. This haiku is the result.)

Spectacle

A geisha, painted.
A queen in her finery.
A ballet dancer.

Each acting a role,
precisely costumed, movements
all choreographed.

Each in control yet
rigidly restrained by the
part that must be played.

Just a thought: Think long and hard before you get married, because after your divorce (and eventual remarriage), your kids (and their kids) will deal with multiple families at every holiday afterward for THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.

It's a REAL pain in the ass. Forever. Just something to think about.

Happy Holidays!

I posted this on Facebook in response to a friend's post about gentrification in Nashville:
"I've been listening to NPR's series on gentrification this week, and thinking about how it's happening in Birmingham now, and how the reverse was happening when I was a teenager and my childhood home got robbed. And I am utterly flummoxed and pissed off that race seems to ALWAYS play a part in Southern politics."

I feel I should expand on this, and I don't know where to begin, so I'm just going to jump in. I grew up at 5220 Terrace Q, Birmingham, Alabama 35208. Two miles from the state fairgrounds. A "nice" neighborhood, where my friends and I could ride our bikes around without fear of being bothered. And we did ride far and wide, much farther than our parents gave us permission to, and we remained perfectly safe, because we could do that then.

Around the mid-80's, the neighborhood changed. A black family moved onto our block. That shouldn't have been a big deal, but it was, for some. That family didn't make any changes aside from repainting their house and putting white-painted rocks along the front walk. I remember riding my bike down the street and waving at them as they sat on the front porch. They waved back. No big deal. To me.

But even though that first black family was middle-class enough to afford that house on our block, white people panicked. People started moving, selling their houses for less than they were worth. This is how neighborhoods go downhill: people act stupid and sell for nothing because they are afraid of living near THE OTHERS.

Eventually, the house I grew up in was robbed. The robbers had apparently been watching the house and knew when no one would be home. It's an eerie feeling to walk into your bedroom and see your clothes dumped out of drawers into the floor. But it wouldn't have happened if the neighborhood hadn't descended economically because of the racist few. It was stupid to me then and it is still stupid now. I could probably buy the house I grew up in now for less than my car cost, because of racism/classism and people just being STUPID.

Defensive

Battle-scarred and perfumed,
blood and tears flowing
beneath my fair skin,
a lioness under
a soft pelt.
Beware.