linen
At one point it became very important for me to acquire towels and sheets and other linens. Important in a way which marked my comfort level as a person – enough fluffy towels in my closet would indicate I had some stability in my home. Many sets of sheets proved my bed a source of luxury. Unable to afford genuine quality items, I instead set a quantity goal – making frequent trips to Woolworth’s or Target to acquire additional bath towels, washcloths, pillowcases.
I know this desire’s moment of origin: my junior year roommate, who never had to want, showed up on move-in day with a laundry basket stuffed with whites. “I think I might have taken too many” she said. “My mom said – ‘you can have those over there’ and there was a small pile of towels and then this basket. So I took this basket. But, she can always buy more.”
Her towels, sheets, pillowcases, comforters, blankets, washcloths and hand towels filled our linen closet. I tucked my four towels (one from home, three from the drugstore) in to open corners. I wondered if I could possibly fold them differently to make them look like – more. Instead I added my one extra blanket to the pile. Now I had five items in the closet. I added my one spare set of sheets. At least it was something.
If I forgot to bring my pillows home with me on school breaks, I slept either with my head on the mattress, or on a folded pair of jeans. “Can you get me a pillow, please – that I can keep at home?” I asked my mom. I couldn’t afford one – my 20 hour-a-week job barely covered food and rent. If we had a cold month and the gas bill was high, then I had to sell back books in order to eat. Buying an extra pillow to keep at home was low on my priority list. “Maybe we can get you one for Christmas,” my mom replied. They didn’t. Later I discovered that shortly before we’d had this conversation my grandmother had sent me a $500 check. It was supposed to be a gift – my sister who was also in college had received the same amount. “It was lucky she sent it, because we had some unexpected bills I wasn’t sure how we were going to pay,” my mother said. “It was very lucky she sent that money. I was able to give your sister some of her check because I figured, since you have a job, you didn’t need it as much. But I promise I will make it up to you.” She sounded amazingly sincere when she promised, and her eyes filled with tears. I never saw any of the money, but at my dad’s insistence I wrote my grandmother a thank-you note anyway, so she wouldn’t think her generous gift had been lost in the mail.
After I discovered how comforting it was to buy towels and blankets – even tiny, rough, ten-dollar ones – I realized buying underwear was even less expensive and almost as reassuring. I filled my drawer with garish polyester panties. Most of it bunched and one pair strangely twisted, but the site of a full drawer of – well, drawers – made me happy. At least I had an abundance of something. I also collected dishtowels – terribly ugly ones sold at the grocery store. “Where did we get this thing?” one of my roommates asked – holding up a yellow and white towel depicting a chicken wearing an apron. “It’s mine,” I said, somewhat proudly. “You realize it’s to thin it doesn’t even dry” she responded. I didn’t care – quantity was more vital than usability. Besides, she didn’t own any dishtowels. Her life was obviously less comfortable than mine.
Over the years, I’ve amassed a contented collection of linens. In addition to several different sheet sets for my bed, our guest bed, our fold-out sofa and now our baby crib, I also sleep with 5 pillows on my bed (3 for me, 2 for the husband) and rest happily knowing our guest bed has an additional 4 plus there are 2 more oversized fluffy pillows tucked in our blanket chest. Our sole couch has 6 throw-pillows, and I have enough flannel throws to hand a few out as Christmas presents. Our bathrooms are filled with several small mountains of towels, including the oversized full-body sort and enough beach towels for at least three families. No member of my house shall ever have to do without a soft pillow, or a clean sheet, or even a comforter or two.
As I collect, I know I am still trying to fill that linen closet in my memory – to stuff in more of my own blankets around my roommate's; to erase the memories of sleeping on a pair of jeans in my parents’ house. It is my own private competition, to build my shelves of plenty.
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the above is almost completely unedited. I know there are flaws. If you read this, I would appreciate comments. Any of them - critical is great.
this entry goes hand-in-hand with 'write, dammit.'
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We volunteered
A promise - a unity
Merging means
My partner - my self
Purchasing our home
Growing - ivy into brick
Natural and structural
Moments and years
As words lose the
Timbre of feeling
What is love
And what inertia?
warning
Remove a tadpole’s nourishment
Chase her to a drain
Abandon precious favorites
Ferment her baby brain
Abuse her secret nightgown
Ridicule growth
Serve her legs for dinner
Slicing malformed toes
Box her spirit daily
Hide it in the shed
Salt her eyes on weekends
Eventually, it ends
Tadpole swims away
Slips to a different muddy pond
Slightly changes colors
Learns full-throated songs
Mimics natural pondlife
Water lilies bloom
Springs and summers pass away
But tadpole’s never gone
She’s sheltered by the scum
Not coming up for air
Almost sleeping underwater
But never disappeared
Betray a former victim
And you’ll never trick again
The residue from tadpole-hood
Inspires creativity: revenge
p*t*b
This isn't so bad
Nothing I'd sign up for tomorrow but
It certainly didn't kill me the first time.
I thought I'd have the house ready for you, but
I guess you didn't like what you saw.
I'm a whore
Everyone - come inside, come see.
Professionals, at the end of the day -
Welcome your next customer.
Your body rejected mine -
That's your right I guess.
It's amazing how quickly you forget -
How rudely, how often, you remember.
faeriebanner
hee hee. acr gets silly. loosely inspired by julia margaret cameron "rosebud garden of girls" and "may day."
young women
You expect too much, you set yourself up, if you’d just look at things the right way you’d be a lot happier. Don’t you understand how lucky you are, what do you expect, you’d think you didn’t realize the situation you’re in. Who do you think you are. Given your background, I’d say you’ve been pretty fortunate. Just shut up. If you knew as much as you think you do don’t you think YOU’D be in control. Stop it, no one forced you into this. Obviously, that’s the wrong thing to do. I have no sympathy. That’s a selfish thing to do. Selfish and immature and I have absolutely no sympathy and you can say I said that. You have no idea what real problems are.
Shut up – you don’t know what we know. You don’t have the experience and obviously have a lot to learn. How do you expect to make any money. We haven’t seen you around here before. Shut up and stop asking and stop your talking and don’t look for this again. You have no idea the things we do. You have no idea what is going on. No one is talking to you right now.
The world doesn’t revolve around you. We need help so do something goddamn it. You’re just faking it anyway, you are a fake who doesn’t belong and you should know better. understand. What the hell do you want. Who the hell did you think was listening anyway. We don’t care. If you would try to be a little more pleasant things would come a lot easier. You don’t exactly smile enough. You obviously don’t love me anymore. Stop pretending to be so grown up. Why are you always so mean. Everything you say is so mean, you talk like you Why are you acting like this. Many people would be grateful for what you have. You’d be a lot prettier if you smiled instead of looking like that. No one is going to like you. One day you are going to turn around and you will be alone.
You think you’re so smart. Stop nagging. I have more important things to do. Why did you think you could just say that? Leave it alone. Just shut up and leave it alone. |
Allergy Poem
At twenty-two I developed my first adult allergy. In a sound booth, during a dress rehearsal, a tiny reddish speck on my right hand asked me incessantly to scratch it. So I did, and did - a few weeks later my entire hand was blistered, burning reds and yellows. My left hand enflamed as well, angered by cold, dish soap, lotions, rings, and parched air. After I realized I could not cure myself I visited a doctor, was provided a salve. Today my hands are lovely provided I wear one, and only one, particular brand of crème.
My second allergy arrived between an illness and a wedding. An infection in my throat demanded amoxicillin – my body bore it strangely - a red rash crawling across my skin. It’s a popular drug, but I now belong to the anti-penicillin club.
My third allergy, in my mid twenties: hives, in place of my favorite extract -
lilac oil. I can apply this scent to my waist, or knees of elbows, but not my wrists or throat. (I think I have a feeble throat).
The following year my fair German-Irish skin decided to recoil from the sun.
Perhaps one of my relatives was indiscreet with a vampire back in the auld country.
During this latest chronicle of my body (now that I am ending twenties) the hollows where my arms join my torso have claimed a finicky preference for aloe. Otherwise, sores mark my choosy skin.
I surrender.
I have no options.
I am my skin's slave.
- I wondered what would happen if I took prose and carved it up into a vertical/poetic format. I might edit this one, since it really prefers not to be a poem. I like some of the lines, but really it is extremely difficult to make allergies interesting. Oh well, my experiment.
3/19/04 there, I made it a bit more prose-y. I couldn't live with the stanzas as they were.
The randomness of feeling/the calculated thought
Crumpled lovely on the floor,
Pretty eyelids caught
In a microburst of feeling,
A winded sigh of thought.
Dust and smoke airborne ballet
By a form that choice words brought
To the tachycardia of feeling,
The birds-wing beat of thought.
Another will fall victim,
While the rutted casts her lot
From the randomness of feeling,
To the calculated thought.
Betrayal
Three days after the
Kiss (ing)
We sat on the couch
I knew a less well-loved friend
Could have spotted the
Lip marks on my face.
But, because you trusted me
I realized you wouldn't see
The imprints he had left.
I was scarlet,
A traitor and later
Discovered everyone knew this
But you.
I thought my silence kindness.
My mouth sinned once -
Then again -
The second to
Expunge the first.
But my original sin
Did us all in
And we've boiled ourselves down to nothing.
I lied, you believed.
The weaker heart is mine.
- This poem tries to be a lament, an apology.
Packing
I had such plans for this place
Starting with the walls.
Boxes seem so cold
Like coffins being fed
With what I'd hoped.
[written sometime in late spring, 1997]
hold you close for safety
Torch songs all require an ember.
I want to keep you, to remember.
I hold your close for safety
I will not let you go.
Your fuel is my heartbeats,
Your servant is my throat.
Others glimpse you burning,
And remark upon your heat.
My eyes have changed their humor –
I see you in my dreams.
My hands, my mouth, my head,
My chest, my nerves, my breath
Given to the sweet and sour venom,
The anchor I have left.
- original 1995; updated 12/19/03; 1/12/04
Skeletons
I dreamt I died and all the skeletons came out to meet me. They were so beautiful. Their lovely, swan-like spines chattered like teeth in the breeze. They embraced me – and I too was finally beautiful.
The skeleton said to me tonight
Some words
None of which are very important
But the tone behind them
Hung behind its tonal curtain
Folded as if I’d hung it myself. . . .
She spoke so on my level
I felt as if we were girls together
Sitting side by side on the stair.
The skeleton pulled me open
And swam inside
And through the blackness I saw
Thousands of smiling skeletons
Some waiting to be repainted
Some chattering their bones were too big
Dancing in circles
Or swimming like my skeleton.
She is inside me now
The Skeleton is inside me
And I cannot dream,
And I cannot smile
But maybe –
I can be a size six.
*
Like a crush
I find the stupidest excuses
To call on you
Held hypnotized
Falling asleep with you in my mind
Waking up with you in my mouth
Like you never left at all.
I am struck dumb
By your strength.
Goodbye, I'll Miss You
Why not just
Reach inside me with
Your pretty hands and
Grab a good portion of
My innards and tug.
Please, be brutish and
Wrench them free -
I'm finding I don't need them.
Swear you'll extract them
Slowly, promise me you
Will not flinch; I hate to make
You suffer.
And be sure to wish me all the best -
Because it's gauche to forget the
Salt.