A Literary Feast

Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

Spilled Milk

Posted on January 1st, 2017

Twice this week I have cleaned large amounts of milk off the floor of my classroom. Once, white milk after a student accidentally dropped it; the second time chocolate milk, after a student had thrown it to the floor in anger. This is not typically in the brochures or posters that advertise teaching programs, but it is, after all, part of my job. Over the last several years I have learned to see tasks like this as less degrading and more meaningful. There is the academic side of my job, but on some level I also care for children and this involves both physical and emotional labor. As I cleaned the milk I imagine I felt something like an office worker feels when they…

Move Forward, Look Within

Posted on January 1st, 2017

The other night I lay in my son’s room as he fell asleep. His love of cuddling surpasses still our need for him to fall asleep on his own, and for now that’s okay. On this evening, a day or two before Christmas, the light in his room radiated in a low glow from the Christmas lights on the tiny tree we set up on a side table by his window. His breath had slowed and deepened and I watched his chest rise and fall, his mouth slightly open, his eyes gently shut, one arm up towards my head with his fingers tangled in my hair, the other on his chest. My heart constricted, my breath caught for a moment. I love watching him…

The Conscience of the King

Posted on January 1st, 2017

It was never plausible and it was never smart. We did it anyway. We had to, I guess—we had run out of choices. It’s hard to remember how life felt before. I can only recall a sort of seething numbness. When everything goes that grey, you need to light something on fire. When it had finally begun and we couldn’t turn back, when the first real shots started flying and the air turned yellow with gas that stank like a mockery of the grave, all I could feel was an angry heaving that stretched from the pit of my stomach to the roof of my brain. I wanted to throw my head back and laugh, ecstatic, perverse. I wanted to yelp to all the…

Kyoto Protocol

Posted on January 1st, 2017

“…and now your insides are raising  an ineffable racket…”   –Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Elizabeth Bishop trans.)   I finally turned to you and said, I’m scared of what is happening to my body. Oh, person! The week before,   I’d held you inside that fear. It was a kind of heat, a realness. The wish to transmit   kindness without pain is a form of pain. We had just started to be good   at teaching each other words for things: persimmon, catkin, mosaicism, friend.   I’d already decided I didn’t want you living in me like that: all that longing, unthrottled cry   in the dark. But then, walking back in the pre-dusk, I watched you tremble once with a smallness,  …

Dancing on a Hot Skillet

Posted on October 14th, 2016

Rain patters on fallen leaves and the maple trees across the street blaze red. The companion oak trees next to them more modestly shift to gold while the conifers and evergreen shrubs hold fast to their northwest green. It’s grey this morning and cars hum by below, spraying water in their wake. The window is open, I sit on the bed, the door is shut. My husband is in the kitchen cooking Sunday breakfast while my nearly 3 year-old sits at the table contemplating the oatmeal I made for him 20 minutes ago. Once in awhile I hear him pick up the whistle his grandma sent him last week, giving an enthusiastic toot every few minutes.   This morning I both asked and took…

My Kitchen

Posted on October 14th, 2016

My kitchen needs an upgrade. It is furnished with old painted cabinets…hollandaise yellow on the outside and rust red on the inside. Why anyone painted the interior of kitchen cabinets I will never know. The range is a mid-century electric with two large and two small coil burners. The kind that don’t sit level anymore and laugh at the idea of ‘even heat’. The ‘hood’ is just a GE fan cut into the wall through to the exterior of the house, with a pull string to open. It might be the propeller from a very tiny plane – I can’t say. It starts a few minutes after you open it – perfect for when you have a forgotten pan of oil on the coil…

Going To Ground

Posted on October 14th, 2016

The mud under her boot soles rasped and rattled as though it had something to say but couldn’t remember how. It hadn’t rained since the last week in October, and the small river that ran through the cellar was little more than a trickle; along its banks lay little hillocks of earth neither wet nor damp. Dry mud, she thought as she dragged her feet through it, wishing she could kick off her boots and drag her toes through it. She imagined it would feel cool and crisp between her toes, like the scales of a fish that hasn’t been dead for long. She didn’t smile. The ceiling above her bounced like the underside of a drumhead, or at least she felt it did,…

Eating Lunch Alone

Posted on October 14th, 2016

“Work is always a little sordid.” –Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer’s Gun The shock of a new job came like fall this year, an icy unexpected blast at the end of a lazy hot summer. After three years at my previous teaching job, my only actual “professional” experience, I had moved on. Nothing had been typical about the position that I left. I founded the school in the South Bronx straight out of Columbia with nine other educators, over half of them under thirty, with all the bright eyed wonder of someone who had moved to New York from suburban Texas only eleven months before. Needless to say I had my teeth metaphorically kicked in, repeatedly, in a variety of different ways. That is…

Quack Low, Sweet Chariot

Posted on October 14th, 2016

The cooler weather, that search for thick socks, the first tentative roasting of root vegetables before the sun has set—the day still, somewhat, long. This is how I settle in. I laze and lank on the kitchen floor, pausing to stir sauce, pour wine, sneak rosemary into a roasting chicken, wedge chunks of butter beneath its translucent skin.   None of this can happen without some suspension of disbelief, some willful entry into a land where my eight by six foot kitchen expands palatially, where the hot water pipe that runs up the side of the stove converts to a gracious source of sustaining heat and I am cozy, swaddled, and all the tools of winter—crock pot, wooden spoon, herbs—are within easy reach. This…

The Weather Underground

Posted on August 22nd, 2016

1.   How To Have A Body   Here are your limbs and where Oh here is your Head it has these many Places for looking and this line Jaw to hair that a hand Could go, hesitantly   It’s not clear? A finger passage Spells out the unspoken Is an alphabet of unconscious– You mean you just Want the manual, the sockets the Sight and its correction, the bone That follows the other bone, down To where the ground Begins, to where all Sentences end   The allen wrench Of your arteries, the pill That puts you out   Tab A Slot B Requires some Assembly.   2.   How To Be In Motion   It’s been some time, and maybe this is…