A List Will Help

1. What does it say about me that I'm less reluctant to write about these long lonely bus rides than I am what happened before and after? 
2. These people advertised themselves so recklessly it's justifiable to repost their personal ads. Whoever you are, Maika, someone loves you enough to carry a permanent marker on their person. I wonder what someone has to think, what someone has to feel, to write these names out. What does "qwatro" mean?  I wonder if these numbers still work.
3. I was on my way to visit my grandmother. It was in the early afternoon, a little after an extended and unplanned conversation with Gail meant I missed three of my father's calls to tell me my grandmother had begun vomiting black blood then red blood then just water and that she had seen her eldest, deceased, sister pulling her leg. She was religious, my grandmother. Maybe even the ghosts were prayers. More like they were the products of her imagination, something the body does to ease itself into decay. How past and present bleed within memory and your entire life floats up as the dams burst. The more she toed the line between death and survival, the less it mattered how time insisted on its steady march forward into futurity. Something in the chemical composition in her brain, in her mind, must have given up so that time collapsed, first, within her and that stasis echoed outward into our lives. I've never known such an extended Present. The bus ride took me from one era into the next in the space of an hour, maybe an hour and a half.  
4. On her deathbed, Lola became uncharacteristically democratic. Ryan, my 19 year-old cousin, recited our names by order of birth and after every female name, Lola jabs a finger into the air, exclaiming: maganda! And after every male name, the same: guwapo! As if congratulating herself. 
5. In retrospect, the thought that she was alone--with her memories--comes as a relief. Because there was no act of abandonment from our end. She simply left, stopped walking with us. 
6. That won't erase years of not being there. Here is what I cannot articulate: we stopped visiting a long time ago and for no good reason. We left you alone with people who made you feel hideously and unnecessarily grateful and then debased and then, even, unappreciated.
7. Aside: the culture of gratitude we abide by shouldn't exist on a fragile tipping scale. Gratitude shouldn't make you feel less valuable, yourself. It makes people mean when they equate tulong with lost pride. Real help should take nothing away. You can be grateful and be proud. Do I need to learn this, too?

Short life update

I'm in the middle of a few long-term projects directly related to fandoms and I'm glad to be back (sort of).

Asylum

My life becomes too hard, so I go away.
A couple near Turlock takes me in,
not because they like me,

but they like the good my rent will do.
It's just the two and the woman's mother,
frail and shawled in black.

As spring heats into summer,
the old woman comes to call me "son,"
for we have both lost sense of home.

At meals they barely feed her,
give her the smallest cuts of meat,
mostly fat, and a few red drops of wine.

They do not speak.
She convinces me they want to kill her--
"Neglect is only the beginning."

One afternoon, outside their farmhouse,
we sit on crates and smell yams
swelling in the warm earth.

I ask her why she lives like this,
but she says nothing, only smiles,
grabs a chicken, and wrings its neck,

then pulls out its innards,
showing me the freshly eaten grain
inside the dark gizzard.

She frowns at my silence, as if to say,
"There is a lesson here,
but you do not understand it yet."

Later, as the moon begins its nightly rounds,
she leads me a little ways from town,
to a tree clutching a fallen ax's running blade.

She says it was the tree that bit,
catching the axehead
and snapping the handle in two.

Come autumn,
she offers me the axe that lost its head,
and I go south to face my life.


Herman Fong 

After Fighting for Hours

When all else fails
we fall to making love,
our bodies like the pioneers
in rough covered wagons
whose oxen trained to cross the Rockies
until their hearts gave out trying,
those pioneers who had out-survived
fever, hunger, a run of broken luck,
those able-bodied men and women
who simply unlocked the animals
from their yokes, and taking
the hitches in their own hands, pulled
by the sheer desire of their bodies
their earthly goods over the divide.

Kate Gleason

A List Will Help

1. Smoked my first cigarette in months, Kevin looking on. I felt faint and nauseated and high and reckless.
2. That list of conversation topics to avoid voided during the first conversation after I wrote it. 
3. I have to cultivate my silence; that is the only thing standing between the world and the word vomit I so regularly inflict upon my (unsuspecting) friends. 
4. Hey, you look great. 
5. This is how I feel after long conversations:  

Andy Goldsworthy at Tewet Tarn, Cumbria 1988