Grapes of Wrath
There's a popular tweet, made more popular by my inability to shut up about it: A grocer is asked, "Can I try a grape?" by a customer was browsing the produce section.
The grocer says: "I wouldn't care if you lit this place on fire with me in it."
This is everything - I can see the grocer pressing "pause" on his music, slipping his iPhone into his pocket, waiting to hear what fresh nonsense a customer is presenting to him on this particular day in hell.
The grocer's student loans have been piling up. He needs to pay rent. His mom called, she's in the hospital. The trifecta of American bullshit bills has piled up, and he is on call to pay them.
He makes $16.70 an hour. This is above average. He wanted a new Xbox. A new TV. This is now a wet dream.
While the customer asks him about the grapes, he is somewhere else. He is in Tahiti, or Puerto Rico, or at the bar down the street. He is singing karaoke at said bar, drinking his problems into oblivion. A beer in this city costs $8 before tip. That's what he makes in half and hour of work.
While he is thinking this, and saying: "I wouldn't care if you lit this place on fire with me in it," he is imagining the fire from within, the one that keeps him coming in for his paycheck.
No: he is actually thinking about flames, about annihilation, about burning.
For this is corporate America, and he is just a player in a bigger game of grapes.
Seasons of Motherhood
I can't title this as a letter, as a "Dear ____", as a painful series of sentences designed to make me reflect and feel pain. My children are cells that have not yet divided into fetuses, into little versions of myself, into generational trauma and sticky fingers that reach for an absentee mother.
I suppose this not-letter has to be abstract, because that's what my children are to me, what my relationships with my mother is - a once and future cloud that erupts into thunder when I'm asked, "Do you want children?"
There is nothing quite like dreams to keep me going, nothing quite like hope to inspire a future with a son or daughter.
Life is hard. It's a series of rejections, sickness, and bills to pay. It is a series of rock-bottoms, or maybe that's just what I've experienced.
Can I let my failures as a human being already cloud my perception of motherhood? Will my children suffer for having me as a mother, for watching me reach for something other than their love when I'm down and out, aching for a substance to heal me when family is right in front of me?
I would want more for my children. I want them to be happy, to experience life to the fullest. To hit rock bottom, and instead of bottoming out, to see it like the seasons. A spring of blossoms, rain that creates new life but does not wash away our lessons learned. A summer that does not scorch old terrain and make us want to obliterate pain, but makes generational trauma come out behind shadows; the sepia light reflecting off only what is there to be physically seen, and not just psychically felt.
I want more. I know there is life beyond pain, and I would want that for anyone, whether or not they share my DNA.
I am going to end this not-letter by saying that I am in love with life, but not in the same way a mother loves her child - in a fragmented way, in an autumn of sorrow, in a winter that lightly coats everything in snow and melts away to uncover the peace I so desperately crave for myself.
DSM-5
you ever open the DSM-5
and think,
I'm not the most interesting person
I thought myself to be?
I'm not someone who hears voices,
or is narcissistic,
or has an addiction to eating mattresses
or even likes to feel pain,
like some of these freaks*
seem to find appealing
but I do count to the same numbers
over and over
trying to find sanity
in where there is none to be found
in any capacity -
which is the definition,
even by these psychiatrists,
of insanity,
of someone
with issues and a diagnosis
a label, if you will,
to cure my malady
I am page number 43
or 52
or 89 -
the list goes on
I am somewhere sandwiched
between the many injustices
that were done to me
*of which I am wholly
willing to claim some responsibility
White Hydrangea
Dripping, a slow heat that suffocated as it lifted you into summer. I was twenty-four and had nothing to prove. I walked through the Yale University art museum while my best friend sat in front of a likeness to Michelangelo, tracing the every curve of people from history. What we didn't know was: we were creating our very own.
There was a white hydrangea plant outside of a church on the Yale campus. It created words inside my brain that hung like the branches themselves: sentences turned to paragraphs while my twenty-four year old self beamed and touched each flower. It was the happiest time of my life.
I was free. I went to bars and ordered margaritas with the abandon of the bees that sucked on the hydrangea's blossoms. I remember that plant, not only because I took copious pictures of it (although that, too), but because it was there only to be loved.
It was ninety degrees and the humidity lurked, turning into ghosts that I can only reminisce about in the present day. The heat seemed to evaporate as soon as it appeared. The hydrangea remained strong, tethered to the earth. It didn't seem bothered by anything, only happy to further illuminate the already piercingly bright day.
Sound Tracks
I used to burst at the seams. My tears ran hot, like blood dripping down an open cut. I sang a song that made me feel at home, and foreign in my own skin, all at once.
I am strong, I repeated to myself. I have values I'd like to uphold. Covid hit, I was yelled at inside a Whole Foods for not following security guidelines. I touched a "dirty basket" and was ostracized. I felt unsafe. I wore an N-95, was made fun of by a conservative guy. Such was life.
The song I sang isn't important. It isn't important for a lot of reasons. The first being: isn't music just an extension of our psyches? Shouldn't it all be celebrated, and not told to follow the rules like a society in ruins?
You touched a dirty basket, said security. Judgement day looks a lot like 2020.
The song made me smile. I am strong, I repeated to myself. I have values I'd like to uphold. I made it through, to the modern day. And I have only luck - and maybe a vaccine - to thank.
The song made me resilient. It reminded me of Taylor Swift - please don't stop reading this. I wanted to feel whole, to be well, to have a mind that didn't rattle like loose glass in a window.
The song made me notice life, in its entirety. It was like a grammatically correct essay, a gun with all its bullets, a lake with swans and full of secret meaning, ecstasy.
It was a way out in a broken environment, a healing touch, a prophecy. Should I keep going? Or is music heard only when it's listened to, and not merely described by a poor writer?
I still feel warm and fuzzy when listening to it. I press my fingers to my temples, bless the feeling, put the "dirty" behind me.
Lit
temptation
noun
the desire to do something, especially something wrong or unwise -
oxygen escapes
the lit candle
by some mechanism
or maybe that’s
carbon dioxide
I failed chemistry
with a 59.9%
grade point average
my professor said
if you pass the next test
I could bump you
to a D minus
the candle flickers
indifferent
temptation
noun
the desire to extinguish
what wasn’t there
to begin with
I started taking Prozac and now I can’t write
In the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes," there's a comic where Calvin is prescribed medication and it erases his imaginary friend, Hobbes, and just shows Hobbes as a regular stuffed animal - no longer his best friend, just stuffing held together by thread.
I started taking Prozac a month ago and it has made me not want to write - my imaginary world, kind of - gone.
Here's something: I was at the mall the other day and walked into a shoe store selling Doc Martens. I did it on a whim. The sales lady was really working me, telling me certain styles of Doc Martens would go well with the dress I was wearing. But I only had eyes for the classic fit. I wanted them, and I bought them. A simple transaction.
But it's how the Doc Martens made me feel. It's how they gave me a new persona, like I could be someone cool, worth knowing.
And I guess that's what writing was for me (is for me?). The act of creating a persona that people might want to know, an act of image, of creative outlet.
And as I sit here, full of Prozac, I have to wonder how I can recreate myself in this image. One of health, one of wholeness, one of newness.
My whims turned into prose, and not erased by pills.
Blow
I used to blow
out my birthday candles
like I played my flute -
blowing
down, not out
never getting them
to all go out at once
the flames flickering
teasing out a tempo
until one day
my grandmother
said:
Alice, BLOW
and I did
I turned those candles
into musical instruments
I made their silent song
my own
International Women’s Day
how does it feel to be a woman
in this body?
oh, you must mean
the one that's forced
to carry a pregnancy
women
who have to shave
their legs
for fear
of being ostracized
in public settings?
women
who are expected to
reproduce, only to have
their baby daddys
get called "heroes"
for the work they do daily
women, who if they have
twenty sexual partners
are sluts
and men of the same category
are legendary
women, who if they
go outside without
a shirt, are unacceptable
but men can wear
nothing on top and be normal
I'm not happy with
where we are
in this dichotomy
it's unfair
and women deserve
better, completely