But Call Me Betsy

Another poem I wrote, inspired by our teacher pleading for us not to turn in poems we wrote in high school. I tried to make the footnotes form another poem. Not sure if it works though. Here it is: What This is Not This is not a poem I wrote in high school with one syllable rhymes to words like heart/tart love/wove soul/pool references to brokeness teddy bears with flat glass eyes dusty teacups that will bide an eternity.* This is not a poem I wrote in college after discovering patchouli and tabouli. Responsible for a plant for the first time I killed it with neglect and wrote a poem comparing the dried, brittle spikes in such phallic terms my face turned red when we workshopped it, the "hard, fecund root withering to a tiny shell of itself..."** This is not a poem I wrote in my twenties for a spoken word contest. I wore a scarf on my head, read a poem about recovery. Later, someone approached me asked me how long I had been in remission. I stutt...

Went to a reading by Stephen Dunn   at the Kelly Writers House for class last night. He's written some amazing poems--one about a man seeing a clown waving to him from the distant treeline, and argument he had with his ex-wife about crows traveling in threes, another about being at a party and going upstairs to hang out with the dogs instead, how at a certain time of day, he's more likely to start misbehaving (4 PM), how it's just luck that he's not considered a criminal, just luck that the fire he started didn't spread or luck that a little girl didn't dart out in front of him in traffic when he was driving a little drunk, poems about desire and "this stupid body," and how on hot days in New York, everyone wants everyone, and then this line from one of the poems he read about a writing workshop where he thought he had a great idea and he read it and "the room got quiet with tolerance." That's what I feared might happen for my worksh...

This is what we talked about in our fiction writing class last night. I asked the participants to do a free write on two things--something that they were scared of and something that grossed them out. We were going to be discussing two pretty distressing stories ("The Shawl," by Cynthia Ozick and "First, Body," by Melanie Rae Thon) and I thought it would be good to have them start thinking about how to exorcise some of those fears/anxieties/grossness in their fiction. These are some of the things they mentioned on the gross scale: bodily fluids, snot (see "bodily fluids"),  milk (because she grew up in Poland and mile their came in these strange cartons, and was never refrigerated) and hair on plates (this from someone who waits tables and so really does have to face this ick on a regular basis). In the scared of part, people talked about:  rats (one guy has a rat problem in his kitchen. This brought on a whole slew of stories about rats. We suggested he r...

We're living it up at the I-HOP.

I have this new list on my refrigerator of the things I want to try to do more often--not every day, necessarily, but more than once a year. Take my vitamin, drink more water, walk to work, exercise, write every day, and then blog three times a week, that's another goal. It's hard though--especially when at least a portion of my day is taken up by work-related social media; I don't seem to have much energy for my own stuff. And I'm not taking enough pictures, that's another problem. Once the weather gets nice, I promise I'll get out more. Tonight, will go to Zumba again for the first time in 100 years. I told Dan I was dreading it and he said, But you're an excellent dancer. It's nice, how blind he is to my short-comings. I terms of writing stuff---have been doing my 750 words every morning for 37 days now, all because this blogging site offers me virtual badges for certain electronic badges of unicorns and flamingos and squirrels. That's what m...

To get in step with the next big holiday, my friend Padhraig's birthday on St. Patty's Day.

Bad dreams last night as several of the things I have anxiety about converged into one moment--lost a tooth, Tina discovered I have cats (in the dream, they were actually living in her house, but we hadn't told her yet), had to give a speech at a meeting and was unprepared, awkward distant acquaintance asked me to have coffee with him after work at his house and I couldn't think of an excuse on the spot. When I finally woke up, I felt a great sense of relief that none of those things (have yet) happened. Also woke up earlier in the night because a woman was screaming and yelling outside--far enough away that I couldn't tell what she was saying or if she was in any real danger and then I thought of the show What Would You Do ? which puts people in fake ethical dilemmas and then secretly videotapes to see if anyone does the right thing. I decided I would at least get up to look out the window in case I needed to identify a killer, but by then, her voice had gone down to a n...

Remember when I used to do that? Take pictures of things and put them up here? I haven't been doing the same kind of walking anymore and so am not out in the world except to go the two blocks to the subway and back, and on my lunch hour. Here are five pictures anyway of things in my office. P.S. I signed up for the 750words.com March challenge to write every day. In writing every morning last month, I got about 40 pages of fiction, single-spaced. Not bad. Not much of it was usable, but some of it was.

My working life is bookend-ed each morning and evening by riding SEPTA in some form; SEPTA, who has the saddest marketing tagline: "We're Getting There..." Like, we know we kind of suck, but at least we're trying! Most days, nothing of note happens, but yesterday, I heard a woman say, while holding twO children on her lap (ages between 2-4 years old): " And so I told her, don't you talk that way in front of my f**king kids." And then later, a kid on the Broad Street line announced, "I will recite Shakespeare for one dollar." The man next to me, this guy with a cane, took out a dollar bill and hobbled over to give it to the kid. They were too far away for me to hear what the kid said, but I thought it was totally awesome that the guy took him up on it.