August 2012
12 posts
2 tags
Finishing Bluets in a Strip Mall Gym in Livonia,...
(for E.P.)
“All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.” — Maggie Nelson, Bluets
1. I had contacted them in advance - RTowne Fitness - to tell them I would be on vacation for a week and I would want very much to use their bicycle. I will come in, ride your bicycle for no more than one hour, and then I will leave. It is...
4 tags
eulogy for moth
I stepped on the moth.
It happened quickly, walking over to the rocking chair barefoot to pack a few things I had left there - a notepad, a pen, a hand towel - and I felt something small and soft beneath my heel. I leaped back and away as soon as I realized what I had done.
I want to think it was already dead. It must have been injured, of course, to have remained in that same spot on the...
rest
This morning, I watch the sun over the lake as it inches its way into the sky. The house is quiet. We all stayed up late.
Last night, in the early evening, I attend the dedication of a building for an organization my mother-in-law helped to establish decades ago. I stand there, beside Matt and his father as in the entryway, a curtain is drawn away from the wall to reveal an installation of blue...
chinese lantern
We are in a rented house on a lake for the week. Once a year, the extended family gathers in late August, and we shape our days by the needs of the very youngest and the very oldest among us. We take turns preparing the evening meal for the group. There are sixteen of us this year and whatever house we are in, we arrange it so that we can all sit around one long table. Before we begin, a simple...
august
I spent the summer mornings running along the access road in Bonnet Shores
sleepy beach town, smell of warm sand and eelgrass
a handful of stores along the road the donut shop the gas station
the Chinese restaurant its torn vinyl booths where we passed a rainy afternoon when my sister was in town and the only thing we could agree on was our hunger
past the broken umbrella stroller left on the...
standing at the sink, peeling beets
I have boiled a quantity of beets sufficient to feed a small Russian village through the winter
I stand at the sink now, peeling them, starting with the smallest, the size of a plum, it fits so easily
in my palm. Slippery and cool beneath the running water.
The larger ones are harder to peel and I run the edge of a spoon down trying hard not to gouge but occasionally, I do
and I wonder, can...
we have been here all along
So my husband, Matthew Derby (longtime readers might better recognize him as “M”) has been working on this collaborative writing project called The Silent History for the last year or so, and we are excited that it finally about to “launch.” It’s a little hard to describe succinctly, but there are attempts to at Wired and at Buzzfeed, and most recently in The Providence Phoenix.
Last night, he...
3 tags
line by line
How you made me want to be beautiful, to gather my hair up and stain my lips with beetroot
How you made me buoyant seaworthy like we could captain all the small ships in the harbor, the hard-drinking men would cheer us from the docks, raising their bottles as you unmoored my hair and let it spill all over us. Brown.
Brown. All skin + hair + eyes and the brown earth on which you took everything...
1 tag
A poem for Sunday
Good morning. It is Sunday again. It is not my favorite day, but there are parts of it that I like. Driving to the grocery store with my reusable bags. I feel useful when I pack up the lettuce and the blueberries and the bread and maybe this week, a small carton of ice cream or some chocolate- covered pretzels “for a treat,” my son will say and I will say yes even though we have lost the...
opportunity cost
If it’s Sunday then it must be rage that rises in you, puckering your lips like salt in your tea. All the weekend hours, she is immobile, lying in her bed breathing through her open mouth.
She has taken to sipping juice through a straw and you can hear the sucking sounds when you pass her bedroom. You close your eyes and bite down on your lip so hard it bleeds.
You leave, slamming doors.
You...
