Open Letter #9, to my mother for the holidays

It is easy to believe you never loved me when I think of my childhood and all the moments someone else's hands held me--easier still during the holidays when memories pull me back through the folds of time.

* * *

It is Mother's Day, and I am sitting in a classroom full of small desks and cubbies where classmates cut construction paper, bend over bins of crayons, and write love poems to their mothers.  I stare hard at their cards as tears cook the backs of my eyes.  I have nothing to say that feels true.  Even the heart I've cut is a lie.  When I think of you, I smell the rush of your perfume, feel your lips brush my sleeping cheek on your way out the door or back through it.  How can I thank you for leaving me?  Or for coming home only when I'm asleep?  Is it enough for you to be close when I dream?  

My Dying Grandma's Gift

Twenty-eight hundred miles away, my grandma is dying.

My mother's mom grew up in Kentucky, a state all green with pasture grasses and leafy trees, all white with crosses and steeples.  I know nothing of her childhood but recall being told she'd never gone to school past the sixth grade.  Yet I also remember her telling me she'd attended high school.  I do not know how she felt about school, or what her favorite subject was, but I recall her careful cursive on the birthday cards she'd send with five dollar checks inside, and I imagine she earned high marks in handwriting.  I know when she was grown up she worked for J.C. Penney, I think doing something with sewing.  I know she birthed five children and lost her husband when a drunk boater slammed into his dinghy on a fishing trip, casting him overboard where his head struck a rock.  I do not know whether he died from blood loss or from drowning.  I was two or three years old and know him only through pictures of him holding my infant twin and me in his lap, his brown eyes--my mother's eyes--shining.

What is Mine: A Genitaliac Journey

The last time a woman, sitting between my legs, told me I had a pretty vagina, I replied, "I'm glad you think so," to which she quickly, and without any coyness, retorted, "Come on.  I'm not the first woman who's told you that."  Caught in this truth, I blushed a shade darker than most of what she could see.

* * *
As the gynecologist, seated on a swivel chair mere inches past my goose-bumped legs and thoughtfully shaved mound, leaned obligatorily towards the glossy pink sanctum of my cervix shining through the small yawn of my speculum-wrenched vagina, I closed my eyes the way people in pews do and waded into the rose-colored darkness for a brief breath.

When she picked up the thin plastic wand recognizable to every woman who's ever had a pap smear, I fastened my eyes to the ironic flower decal on the ceiling and tried not to imagine the rigid stick shooting through the short dark tunnel, like a snake lunging in the night.  It bit into me with a familiar twinge, its sharp pinch the kind my sister used to give me when we were kids.

A Disciplined Answer to the Question, "What is it that people give each other?"

Sociology: Consumerism and Advertising

Like the advent of a razor with five blades (or even the introduction of the single-blade razor for cosmetic hair-removal), we incite the other to question her wants and needs.  We aggravate and agitate.  We push, we pull.  We pitch contrast and cast lines of light into each other’s mysteries. We offer the sparkling promise of potential.  We are the one you didn’t know you wanted.  We are the thing you hardly dared dream.  We are the solution to a problem you didn’t know you had, but we are also problematic, and there will be a price.  You will be uncomfortable with the questions and doubts this union inspires.  But in the end, you will know the difference between a lemon and a real bargain, and you will know better where you begin and end.

Reading Students' Plea

My students inform me

they cannot read well when 

they are not interested, and I tell them, 

Of course.  Life is the same way.  

Why would this be any different?  

They clarify: when the stuff we read is boring, 

it is hard to concentrate.  

I say, If you judge a reading that way, 

you will certainly find it difficult to engage.  

They hesitate. It's just that 

some stuff is really dry, you know?  

It's all dry, I agree, unless 

you wet your fingertips 

before turning the page.

How You Clean a Razor Clam

The clams raise their necks weakly in the stainless steel sink, as if reaching for air or sun or the one who made them.  And when the water comes, the hottest rain, a teakettle's easy sacrifice, they stretch beyond themselves; one by one, like flowers thirsty after a long drought, they burst open, their shells no longer held tight against their breasts, their senseless shifting stilled.

You pick up a clam to clean it.

To clean: to remove impurities, to expunge, to liberate the imperfect, to decontaminate.  The act, in a familiar context: wet strings of cloth flopping across a floor in undulating spasms with the push-pull of a mop handle; the sturdy bristles of a broom whispering and shouting in turns across a wooden floor; a rag, heavy with the bitter scent of bleach, shining a porcelain commode; feathers flitting across the homes of dust bunnies and spiders, destroying gray constellations and webs, leaving nothing for fingerprints to stamp.

You pick up a pair of sharp scissors.

Scissors: tool for subtraction, division, revision.  Device for taking what was too much and cutting it down to size.

You snip the tip of the neck.  There is truth in the saying, if you stick your neck out.  It falls with a plop, like fagioloni loosed from a pot.

You clip along the frilly zipper, the simple seam so easily undone, the insides falling open like the pages of a book that was never meant to be read, or at least, that never hoped to be.  You poke the tip of your scissors into the tiny hole at the base of the neck and pump your thumb until the second chamber reveals its lot.  Turn on the tap, let the clear, cool water whisk away the gray rivulets of sand, think about shaving, how stubble mixes with the frothy cream and rushes down your skin into the drain.

Now, to remove the fine, olive-colored fringe circling the digging flap at the clam's center.  How light it is, like the hem of a woman's summer dress.  You slip the scissors along the gills, scrape away that delicate pleat and remind yourself that everything must eat.

Finally, you arrive at the large, dark marble on the other side.  It shimmers wildly, like an eye or the heart of a violet caught in a thunderstorm.  You don't want to--but you know that this black bulge, the  thing so important to the clam's existence that it lay shrouded behind calcified walls and clenched muscle--has to come out for all the other excisions to matter.  You plunge the scissors in and watch the world spill out.

One last rinse, and the clam is a shell of its former self.  You touch its white gleam, and all the places in you that once held shadow and doubt sparkle with the memory of mops pushed through them, scissors cutting through that which no longer became you.

Your Shape

Though I like being alone,
I am lonely at night.

When the rains come,
I fall asleep with wet cheeks
and touch myself
in the middle of a dream
about withering roses
and the kind of cold
only glaciers know.

Years pass.

In the morning
my hand is as much memory
as your shape,
the rose-tinged curves of your cheeks.

Conversation with the foolish, grieving girl inside me

It's too soon for me to tell you that you should have known better but here I am telling you that for all your pain and rage, you knew what you were getting into and have no one to blame but yourself.

But her eyes, you say.

Fuck her eyes, kid!  Every woman has eyes.

But, you go on, the way she told stories, the way she took a suggestion and gave it arms and legs, gave it lungs, a soul, a mouth.

Okay, so not everyone can tell a tale, but would you rather a story or the truth?

But the way she forgave, the way she heard through all the hard, sharp words to discern the trembling source. 

Yeah, but you couldn't forgive her.

I did! I did so many times! 

Not this time.  This time you drove out to the woods and waited for the sun to go down before you lit a match because it didn't feel right to burn your hope in a world filled with light. The stars poked through the sky like splinters, and you felt them needling your heart.  Isn't that right?

I held the rose I'd been holding onto for two years, the dried bloom I'd kept through all our separations, and I offered it to the cold sky and the owl screeching in the next campsite, and I took a match and pressed my thumb to it like lips to an ear and whispered, "Please, please let me be," and I struck it and watched the past writhe like a fly caught in a web and I shivered as the embers glowed red then orange then pink before fading to the grayish black that matched the space she left inside me when she broke my heart for the last time.

You are so young.  How many times have you looked at the stars and wondered if you weren't one of them?  Just another thimbleful of light tacked into the dark, a placeholder for future generations to ignore?  You could be part of the constellation Repeating Heartache or Broken Record or Girl Forever Crying In the Night.  You'd outshine the rest, your tears glinting in the light of your matches, all the fires you've burned, all the women you loved who failed you shimmering in the circle of your constellation, trapped.

I thought she'd trust me this time.  I thought if I trusted her, she'd show me who she was, she'd let me slip inside, she'd let me see her, and we'd understand each other better than we understood anyone else, and we'd cast off fear forever.  The dark would tremble around us, afraid of what we could reveal.  But she lied to me.  She was only honest when it was convenient, which is not like being honest at all.

Come on, Carol.  You're not an amateur; what did you expect?

She said she'd tell me.  She said she loved me.  She said I was her best friend.  She said she wanted to marry me.  She said she said she said.  She said, and I believed her.

You believed her, even though she'd lied before, even though she'd given you no reason to believe.

She said God was with her.  She said she'd never go back, never turn to the darkness for solace again.  She said it with those eyes, and I believed her because I wanted her to be my best friend, because I wanted to marry her, because I wanted to glow in the dark.

You're pathetic.  As gullible as a kid watching a magician pull a rabbit from a hat.  You can't chase away the dark with a few kisses and God's name.  The dark is eternal, and necessary.  Stop investing faith in flowers that die, in people who tremble beneath the stars and in the clear light of day.  This woman you're looking for does not exist.

But I've seen her screaming at the sky.  I've seen her rocking in the smoke of a thousand fires.  She has eyes that glitter with the assurance of the stars, and when she makes a promise, she does it without words because she knows words are nothing but the ash of intention; only action can set a rose ablaze.