Why Can’t You Just Be Nice

We all need the sun today,
yesterday, tomorrow —
all summer in the now,
and I resent being told
to provide it.

Put on your makeup,
you’ll feel better.

Wear a bra.

Be creative.

Move.

Be nice,
can’t you just
be nice for once?

For my birthday
this year, I woke
up in tears, fired
up the percolator,
and wrote some
obscure metaphor
that only (maybe)
archers understand.
I’m not sure
I even get it.

Target missed.

The cupcakes
I baked for myself
and my husband
were rocks.

Jack called and we sang
Happy Birthday
to each other
in the key of hysteria.

Outside in the rain,
worms celebrated.

I read something tidy
about how what you write
can never be finished until
you’re embarrassed by it.

What a relief.

Everything I’ve written
can be put to bed,
tucked under the covers,
each word nodding off
on greasy pillows of shame.

Nitey-nite.

My mother
wanted to see
what I’d be like
as an old woman,
and well,
this is it:

I am not nice.

The other night
when I let my hair down,
a stink bug droned out,
pinged its body against
the mirror where I caught
my folded face.

My middle finger
is swollen.

This poem is
finished.

Bathos

You’ll forgive the expression, I hope
for my various nostalgias of early March:
Children on swing sets and slides,
two people sitting on a park bench
sharing a lunch, park lovers
held together by an invisible parenthesis.
I considered attending church
when I saw the first crocus,
then didn’t, and a great song
rose without me anyway,
like wind on waves,
one voice from many.

Breathing the same air,
you took a sip to taste
my coffee, that sweet
ignorance of living
which now leads to
doubt, and deadly,
and doom, your lips
two surfaced sharks.

Here we are today,
souvenirs stapled to a wall,
benign but mad pennants
facing the mirror of history.

Yes my heart slaps,
urges, flashes, spreads,
plies a blistered speech
without anyone else
listening or hearing.

I am held together by a parenthesis,
that absurd embrace of whispered words.

Here is where I drop in
the anticlimactic lapse
of a question mark.

?

You’ll forgive the expression:
I hope.

Happy Mirthday from Lady Paramount

You’re trying too hard
to laugh, so you can’t.
Target panic.

You must cry first
in order to laugh.
Quiver.
So let us, as a group,
in our separate
but safe spaces,
lay down and laugh
together.

Turn up your volume.
We want it to be contagious.
This is the kind of virus
we need right now,
to hear the primitive,
unconscious mechanism
at play. Uncontrollable.

I’ll guide you through
your epiphanies of shame,
your wah-wah moments
of defeat and lacking,
the failure of being you
in front of an audience
until you’re disoriented
and stumbling, and then
and only then will you
receive my invisible seal
of approval, the holy
gold star for rising
to the paradox,
releasing to minnow
the hollow air.

If I Polyester: A Birthday Anagram

This day is cracked
open like the eggs
I cannot buy or borrow.

I am sorry to report
that your cake
will be a bird fighting
the wind,
crossed scissors,
or a joker.

So instead you get
an anagram.
A star, or rats?
Live or evil?
Mood or doom?

Sovereign of grump
coiled in my brain,
take a nap.

Whorl, whirl
for better words.

Life is poetry
gives us gazelles
of possibility.

Your birth 
life is poetry
charcoal eyes 
feister ploy
all past, present,
and future verse 
eerily if stop

Today you are 28,
a hawthorn wreath.
Plant each black pansy
seed we sent
free soil pity
and imagine us
laughing together
at yeti profiles,
I frostily pee,
riot if sleepy,
refile it posy,
feel spirit, yo.

Journal of American Poetry

For beautiful pressed flowers
gather those free of spots or blemishes.
Sunny days are best for gathering.
Pluck off damaged petals,
Cull wilted leaves,
pull seeds that look as if
they might damage the pages.

You’ll need a telephone book
or some weighty tome —
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,
the Dictionary of Symbolism,
the Oxford English Dictionary volume A-O,
The Holy Bible.

Some prefer the Dictionary of Miracles:
Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic.

Whatever you have
that is heavy will do.

Pull a length of parchment paper
and lay down your
Enchanter’s nightshade,
fern,
daisy,
bilberry,
apple blossom
marigold,
flax,
spiderwort —

Fold the paper over it,
and squash
somewhere in the middle
of your book.

Forget every detail
of its life
and let it wilt
between the pages.

It will eventually dry,
crumble.

In a few decades
someone looking up
the origin of the word
nonsense
will find your poem,
now a brown stain
across the word
normalize.

Silent

I think it’s the silent e
in the word humane
that gets under the skin
of my eyelid the most.

Sometime during the 17th century
we decided that human
was different from humane.

You can be “of or related to
the family of human beings,”
or you can be “compassionate,
civil, gentle, inflicting
the minimum of pain.”

Shake any hand now
and receive a dollop
of hand sanitizer
and a lecture
from a total stranger.

Get within six feet of me
and you can hear the muscles
in my neck and shoulders stiffen.

Right now, being human is an error.
There’s a bad bit of code
in the loop, a glitch.

Humane. We don’t know
what that is, other than
the silent e as a wall,
a border that helps us
console ourselves.

It’s a foil blanket
covering the words
that always follow:
“treatment,”
“slaughter,”
“killing.”

Say it. Humane.
Feel how the silent e contorts
your face into a terrible grin
with the elongated a.

Say human and you feel
the tip of your tongue
touch the roof of your mouth
and your lips close
to a place of being
silent.

Distance Greetings

Sunday, and I overturn dirt,
disrupt the wormy darkness
of this spring isolation,
when a stranger bicycles past
carrying a candelabra
of hello, how are you,
I’m just fine,
thank you.

Broadcasting

Here’s the news for today:
Some seeds stick to your gloves.

The clouds, clods of dirt, that stream
that cuts through the woods —
they are not just within our grasp,
they are our hands, eyes,
and mouths.

Clouds as hands, you say?
Tut tut.
Eyes of dirt?
Snort.
Mouth of stream water?
Must be fake news.

We think of that as “someday,”
you know, six feet under.
A few hundred worms, some time,
grab of roots at the ribcage.

The Big Takeover.

It took falling in love,
having a child,
and almost losing my life
to know my heart as
a mountain, feet as the tides,
my hair, each strand
connected to a river birch
that is rotted on the inside.

I still forget what I am made of
if I spend too much time
in the car, or find myself
inside a grocery store,
or staring at the screen
of my screw-this-thing phone
looking for anything
more interesting than
my own mind, which,
I realize I am reporting,
is mostly moss on a rock.

Right now I look out this window
(sand and fire)
with my glasses on
(sand and fire)
my eyes
(sand and fire)
at the field
where we broadcast
wildflower seeds yesterday,
the littlest ones
holding onto my hands
like kindergarteners.
They wouldn’t let go.

They whispered this news:
Sand and fire,
water and wind.

What I Miss About Being Near You

Sight

We are near each other, sitting side by side on the somewhat punishing cushion of our kitchen banquette. You notice the little hair coming out of my chin that catches the sunlight. I see the fleck of amber in your left iris. You notice how the skin around my eyes fans out when I smile.

Taste

Here, have you tried this cinnamon turmeric tea? It's supposed to cure being human. I think it makes you immortal or something. Let me pour you a cup. Bitter? A little. We can cut it with these oatmeal cookies I just made, and the cranberries, sour. Bitter, sour, and lumpy. Welcome to teatime at Jenny's!

Touch

When I spill the tea all over the table, we both reach for the nearest napkins, and press them into the spreading pool. What a klutz I have always been. Forgive me. Our hands touch, and we play that pile up game where the hand on the bottom slides out and goes to the top, until we're a mess of hands and napkins. We laugh.

Sound

Oh, your laugh! God, I love laughing. It's all I want to do. When I am near you, I hear your breath. That's the poetry of the body, the inhale, exhale, langorous sigh, bubbling laughter. Your voice is a syncopation that reminds me of watching the insides of a piano when it is being played.

Smell

When you stand up to get another splash of milk for the tea, I smell the laundry detergent you used this week coming off your clothing from the heat of your body. You detect the hint of my unwashed hair, and we both catch, through the open window, the scent of spring air. You say, "It's a long time coming." I agree. That lift of life scent is a long time coming, every single year we get to experience it.

Movement

Hip hitch when you stand (aging), the slightest lean forward from the chest (your heart leads you), and then a glide that is somewhere between sailboat and assuring door latch. Your hands puppet the words you speak, bring them to life. And when something strikes you as really funny, you put your hand over your heart and your head tilts back so I can see right up your nostrils, almost right into your brain. An invitation into what you're thinking.

Intuition

Our bodies are not a boundary between us and the rest of the world.

Your Friday Briefing

During this time of constant change
we understand that this is a difficult
and complex time.

Surreal time.
Crazy time.

Through this time of great challenge,
in these unprecedented times,
with this uncertain time.

During this challenging
and unpredictable time,
this critical time,
we are taking some time
with this bizarre
and ever-changing time.

These are serious times
in this time of crisis.
What an atypical time,
a supremely challenging time.

In these strange times
for certain
we are aware
of time.

In times like these
for the time being —
what a time
to be alive.

Face Times

Everything is closed now.
We can’t touch each other.

Yesterday I saw my daughter’s face
in the rectangular room of my phone.
She told me how she spent
the morning at work making meals
for a woman and her daughter
who are living out of a car
in a local park.

I wanted to hug
everyone in the story.
My daughter, her boss,
the woman, her daughter,
whoever delivered the meals.

Everything is closed now.
We can’t touch each other.

This is as close as we can get.
You are reading  these words
made up of letters
I just typed, each letter
a pattern of pixels.

Everything is pixels now.
Keep your molecules to yourself.

A Brooklyn friend, using
Facebook Live, gives daily tours
of Greenwood Cemetery.
He showed us the statue of Minerva,
a Roman goddess with her upraised hand
forever waving at the Statue of Liberty
a few miles to the west.

What a strange friendship
between the goddess of wisdom
and the symbol of freedom,
they never really touch,
just wave politely,
with too much distance
between them
for any real conversation.

Everything is closed now.
But waving is acceptable.

I’ll bet both of them
are hungry, poor, and tired
of the living talking of freedom
on one side of the river
and all the dead
on the other, so silent.

Didn’t Achilles’ mother
dip him in the river Styx
while holding him by the ankle
and so his heel became
his most assailable place?

We try so hard to protect.
Everything is closed.

Oh, we are all so vulnerable,
and we don’t like to be reminded.

I owe a huge debt in this world,
and this is some of what I have now
to pay anything back before I go:
these words
in this space
between us.
Take them
as you would
my hand.

Strong Measures

It’s five in the morning
and the moon is public property,
so enjoy its impression
of a child’s construction paper cutout.
Subscribe to its channel.

We are all relieved the sun
hasn’t been cancelled today.
We need the light to fill
our stunned-to-darkness places.

Please remember the sun
is for others, too. Pick up
after yourself when you’ve
spent time in the clouds.
There are no restrictions
on contemplation,
no shuttering
of deep thought.

The daisies in the park
will not be punished
for raising their faces
to yours. Planting seeds
is permitted, encouraged.

We realize these are
strong measures to take,
so, please, please, obey
the flourish of dandelions
and grow where you can.

Isolation

How is this even a thing,
quiet?

Up to our twilight knees.
Up to the loaf of our bellies.
Up to our solar plexuses.

Green, how I love you.
Nature.

Birds, how you sing anyway,
not knowing our shadow headlines.

Daffodils send their blades
up through the earth.

It’s quiet inside
ourselves.

The hellebore
bows, facing a sunset
filled with shade.

We have a hard time
living here, in this
empty speech bubble.

Up to our armpits.
Up to the penumbra of our hearts.
Up to our necks.

The south wind
(pay attention to direction)
is swelling.

I dreamed the song
I’ll never lift,
a cloud lullaby,
lyrical haunt.

Up to our twitching noses.
Up to our half-closed eyes.
Up to the disorganized rain in our minds.

Stash of silence.
Hoard of solitude.
Quiet.
Listen.

Panic Corner in the Language Center

There’s a part of the language center in my brain that I imagine as a large filing cabinet — one of the metal ones with drawers that stick. Tucked inside dog-eared folders are the words I never use, but which pop up like song lyrics. I spent an entire day wondering where spanghew came from and why I was thinking of it, and it never got used in anything I wrote or said. It was just my mantra for the day. Ah, but here it is now, sparkling in its obscurity, begging for you to look up its definition.

My sister and I share a general abhorrence for any food that is slimy in texture. At a restaurant together, with a set meal, we were served a dish that is similar to potato, which gets blended into a viscous soup. It is served over rice. The entire time I was in Japan I was careful not to offend anyone, but I was pretty sure I was not going to like this dish, and didn’t want to leave any untouched. As Naomi served it up for everyone, I said, “sukoshi,” and made a little gesture with my thumb and index finger to indicate “small.” She understood and spooned out a tiny bit.

Sukoshi is the word for “a little bit” in Japanese that I learned 20 years ago when I studied some “get around words” for my first trip to Japan.  Like most of what I used that trip, which included "Otearai wa doko desu ka?”, the word was relegated to that filing cabinet. When I needed it most, in that critical moment of being served a food I might not finish, there it was, like a superhero in a bright red cape.

I probably could have finished the dish. The entire meal was delicious. Oishii. That’s a word I’ll use often.

Yesterday I decided I’d like to have prints made of the photos I took on our trip. I uploaded them all to Google Drive, thinking that would connect to the drugstore’s photo center kiosk. It did not. Google Photos was available, that celestial super-cloud of data I never think about, or I could use Facebook, Instagram, or connect my phone directly to the kiosk with my power cord. Who takes their power cord with them everywhere? I went to another drug store, which had no photo center. Then I ended up at the store of the Living Dead: Wal-Mart.

I thought I’d just breeze through the aisles of zoned-out shoppers by taking the superhighway lane in the middle of the store, straight to the back. My goal was electronics, where the photo kiosks were. A young man at a booth chirped, “Ma’am, may I ask you a quick question?” and I replied, “Nope, I’m on the run.”

“On the run?” From what, exactly? I have never used that phrase before, but the panic center, the part that hates dealing with nonsense, called it up and without thinking, spanghewed it out of my mouth. It worked. The guy backed off whatever his sales pitch was. I didn’t have to talk with anyone who called me “Ma’am.” I wouldn’t feel obligated to buy The Thing I Didn’t Need or Want.

When you’re in a pinch, facing an awkward social situation, the words may just come to you,  unbidden. These are the words you didn’t know you knew, the ones waiting inside untouched folders, the ones whose definitions might need to be researched, but oh, they’ll do the trick as you make your great escape.

Watching Me Watch Myself: A Meditation on Meditation

A quiet mind has never been my hallmark. It reels with proclamations, self-judgements, to-do list items, conversation reviews, philosophical meanderings about time, diatribes on appliance repair, scraps of poetry and song, floating dream images, and survival thoughts — like what might be for dinner. I should go to the grocery store.

When my sister suggested a “Movement Meditation” class at the Satoyama Design Factory during our visit in Kamogawa, I said “Yes! I can do that if there’s movement!” She said she thought it might be about a half hour of dance followed by a half hour of quiet. I wasn’t sure about the quiet, but thought I’d try.

I’ve never done any kind of long meditation before, but I once attended a yoga class that had a guided visualization the end. “Imagine a boat at the shoreline,” the soft-voiced instructor intoned. Lavender misted out of a diffuser in the corner of the room. The set-up was lovely. Instead of relaxing into the image, I argued with myself over which color the boat should be. Blue? No, too on the nose. Red? Too alarming, this is supposed to de-stress. Wait, what is that over there by the cattails? A dead fish? I never got out on the boat. I ended up poking at all the fish that were belly up in my mind.

The idea of combining movement and meditation, where flinching might be allowed, perhaps even flailing, appealed to me.

Our instructor explained in Japanese that there were five stages to this type of meditation, all of which were to be performed with our eyes closed. Kristen translated for those of us who didn’t understand. This class was actually Dynamic Meditation, a registered trademark meditation in a series of offerings from Osho, who was an Indian godman and founder of the Rajneesh movement. During his lifetime he was viewed as a controversial new religious movement leader and mystic. There was a little color photo of him in a frame on the shelf facing the open space where we’d practice.

The first stage of the meditation consisted of ten minutes of breathing through the nose while keeping your knees slightly bent and movement natural. I made short, staccato like breaths, with a focus on the exhalation. Osho’s website describes it as “chaotic.” We were instructed to blow our noses beforehand, but my experience with this stage got messy anyway. I had to wipe my nose on my sleeve a couple of times.

Stage two was “blasting off like a rocket” or “exploding like a volcano.” Ten minutes of vocalizing from the depths, holding nothing back. Wail, scream, cry, sing ... anything goes. Your mind isn’t supposed to get in the way, but I found myself on the floor at one point, recalling a movement theatre class where we were all monsters.

Stage three was jumping with arms up in the air for ten minutes with a mantra of ”hoo” on each landing. You are supposed to let your flat-footed landing “Hammer deep into your sex center.” I think that was lost in translation for me, or I was zoned out when it was mentioned. I just got exhausted here. You’re supposed to “be total.” I felt about half, maybe two thirds, worrying about the blood flow to my arms, and wondering if my ankles would swell up from all the jumping.

Stage four was standing still for 15 minutes in whatever posture you found yourself in when the bell rang at the end of stage three. My arms were up in the air. You are not supposed to move. No coughing, fidgeting, anything. My arms began to sag at about the five minute mark, and were left halfway up my torso, palms facing out, like I was being held up in a robbery. However, this is the stage where I saw color, and felt a really strong energy flow, and my brain finally shut off for a moment. I cried. Then my brain was back on.

The fifth stage was 15 minutes of dance. A celebration. An ecstatic end to exit with.

It turned out flailing was encouraged in this meditation. The stage where I saw color left an impression on me, although I’m not sure what to do with it. Let it flow through me. Observe.

Osho said of this meditation, “… bring your total energy to it, but still remain a witness. Observe what is happening as if you are just a spectator, as if the whole thing is happening to somebody else, as if the whole thing is happening in the body and the consciousness is just centered and looking. This witnessing has to be carried in all the three steps. And when everything stops, and in the fourth step you have become completely inactive, frozen, then this alertness will come to its peak.”

Tod and Dan arrived at the door at the end of our meditation, dressed and ready to go to the onsen. I was glad the next thing on our agenda was a trip to the public bath, where the water would be steamy and melt my muscles. I was ready to relax after all that meditation. Maybe I’d even imagine an invisible boat on some unnamed shoreline.

Oh Noh

There is no cure for a case of the giggles. You try to stifle, and the “funny thing” just becomes funnier. Your sides hurt from the quaking. Your eyes water. Maybe they’ll think you’re crying, maybe no one will notice, maybe they won’t send the usher over to politely whisk you out of the theatre.

Browsing shop stalls at the Temple of Asakusa, I saw some Kyōgen masks, the characters for the comedic interludes during Noh theatrical pieces. The two that caught my eye were Oji, the old man, and Usobuki, a face with surprised eyes and a pinched mouth, a character who can only whistle. I was reminded of my wish to see some theatre while we were in Japan, and turned to my sister. “Do you think there are any Noh productions happening while we’re in Tokyo?” She did some research. The National Noh Theatre had a Fukyu-Koen (Dissemination Performance (Introduction to Noh) on the 11th. Perfect. She got us tickets.

The National Noh Theatre entrance is an open space, with sculpted trees in front of a low building that has a center courtyard. While we waited for the doors to open to the performance, we explored an exhibit of scrolls that depicted scenes from Noh plays from the Edo period, on loan from the Kobe Women’s University Library. There was also a small series of chant books that the actors used for rehearsing.

The theatre seats 200 people, and each seat back is outfitted with a screen for translation. A relief. I’d need that. The National Noh stage looks like a small temple, with some trees painted against the upstage wall, and a long stage right entrance that leads onto the main stage. Actors glided in from behind a curtain and made their way to the mainstage like they were floating on clouds.

Before the production began a professor from Kobe University stood in the center of the stage in his white socks and dark suit and discussed the historical context of the plays. This wasn’t translated. Kristen leaned in occasionally to whisper — “He’s talking about the sea, and the geography of a battle. Now he’s explaining some kind of helmet collar that gets pulled.”

The first play, a Kyōgen titled, “Suhajikami,” was about two farmers going to market. One is a seller of ginger, and the other a seller of vinegar. The entire play is a series of puns, various plays on the words “su” for vinegar, and “hajikami,” which means ginger, as the two sellers vie for space at the market. The twenty minutes of wordplay ends on a boisterous laugh between the two. There were chuckles from audience members throughout, but if you are not a proficient in Japanese, some of the puns are lost, even with translations. My sister seemed to understand most of it. I enjoyed the slow movements of the actors, and the spirited tonality of their voices, which was song-like and made the chant books in the exhibit make more sense to me.

The actors didn’t wear masks. Their action was a slow float, glide, and turn. In many ways, it resembled martial arts, loaded with intention and meaning. The costumes were elaborate, and I felt I was missing something here as well, not understanding what the patterns and textile choices might mean. It felt a bit like reading Chekov — I got the gist, but I wasn’t experiencing the richness for an ignorance of cultural and historical background.

The main Noh play, which came after the Kyōgen, was “Akogi,” a story in which a monk encounters an old fisherman on the beach and discusses an old poem describing Akogi-ga-ura beach. The monk asks why the beach is called Akogi-ga-ura,and the old man tells the story of a fisherman named Akogi who was discovered poaching fish in the sanctuary, and was executed by drowning off the shore of the beach. He encourages the monk to console the spirit of Akogi, who is still suffering in hell.

In the first half, we hear the old fisherman tell the story of Akogi to the monk. It is nearly sung, with little movement, with the addition of some drumming and chanting. Reciters add to the text in a way that felt echoic. After intermission, when the fisherman (who we now suspect is the spirit of Akogi) disappears, we are introduced to a traveler returning home who sees the monk resting in his hut. The monk explains that he was just regaled with a story by an old fisherman, and he thought the hut belonged to him.

This is getting long, isn’t it?

I peeped down the row of audience to my left.  All asleep. The man who was seated late in the middle aisle was sleeping. Four people in our row were nodding off.

The owner of the hut begins to tell the tale of the fisherman … again. Another long, poetic retelling of poaching on the high seas, with drums, echoing words, and slow movement. I wasn’t prepared for the retelling. Kristen leaned in as we read the translation of the traveler’s monologue together. “Maybe he doesn’t know the whole story.” And then he began, “In the year …” and she whispered, “Nope, looks like he knows it.”

That set me off in giggles. It was a release from intense storytelling, but I was in the National Noh Theatre. I should have reverence for a craft that has been around since the 14th century. My laughter felt worse than poaching fish. I was in a state of helplessness, like Akogi, unable to find my way back to the shores of propriety. When I couldn’t stop, Kristen and I slipped out of our seats (luckily they were in the back on the aisle) like two schoolgirls skipping class.

The drama ends with us disappearing into the ocean of Tokyo’s winding streets to meet everyone at the Akita Festival —a festival devoted to dogs so devoted they wait for their masters who have been dead for years to return from work. I wonder if Akogi had an Akita still waiting for him to return from his damnation. I wonder if there will be one waiting for me — hee hee hee.

Loud and Wrong

Sometimes you have to wait in line — a long line, without really knowing what is going to be said to you at the end of it when you finally get to talk with the person in charge at the counter.  It’s part of life, and at the airport, it is a chance to observe human behavior.

Our flight out of Japan was delayed by a day. We were deplaned after two attempts by the mechanics to fix a “part that is needed to fly over water,” according to the pilot. Since this was an 11 hour flight, most of which is over the Pacific Ocean, I was really fine with the decision to not fly. Some passengers grumbled. As we left the plane, there was already trash everywhere. Discarded candy bar wrappers, plastic wrap from the  complimentary headphones, and on each screen, a still of whatever movie was being watched. It was like walking through the last vestiges of a preteen sleepover.

We returned to our original gate seating, and waited for word on the delay. When the announcement was made that the flight was canceled, and wouldn’t be rescheduled until the following morning, we were told to “follow the woman with the yellow vest” through the airport. All 300 or so of us followed one tiny woman. We lost her at a couple of points, and had to rely on the herd of faces we’d already memorized as our fellow plane mates — the young Texan with the loose blonde ponytail, a Japanese man with his grandmother, a guy wearing white-rimmed glasses. A few airport employees held up handwritten signs with arrows along the way. What our pilgrimage amounted to was a very long line at the airline check-in desk, where we’d all started our day.

We stood with a young woman from Laos who asked us if we’d been through anything like this in our travels. Dan explained that we’d either be offered a hotel and meal voucher, or we’d get rescheduled flights. She seemed relieved. The line snailed along. Dan noticed that attendants at the counter had to share a stapler. Then we realized they had no printers, and had to walk away from their posts to print out hotel vouchers and boarding passes. Some of them rode the luggage belt to get to their desks faster.

I watched a woman at the desk pull out her hair from the same spot just in front of her ear, strand by strand. Another woman, at the counter the entire time we waited in line (about two hours), must have had a complex travel itinerary which was disrupted by the flight change. She took out her laptop to consult a world map. Her flights were rescheduled.

Americans are not good at waiting. It’s like they’d never spent time in a line before. There was a group of impatient, entitled ticket holders who decided to start their own line by complaining. One man oozed his way to the front of another counter and demanded to know why he and his wife had to wait. He was given a hotel voucher. I overheard him tell his wife, “It’s ok, we got meal vouchers too, and I have plenty of snacks.” No one was going to starve (I sat near this man on the plane the following day, and he ate during the entire flight). Then he felt empowered to let others know his success, and made an official announcement that “this line is the line to get into if you want a hotel voucher.” Some went into that line, which took away one or more attendants who could manage all the people in the first line.

The rube and his wife, the guy in the white rimmed glasses, and several others who befriended them, were the boisterous Americans who had all the answers before anyone else did. At the bus queue, one of them decided that one bus was designated for each hotel, and actually moved someone’s luggage. Each bus dropped people off at either hotel since the hotels were near each other. They were wrong. So they had the wrong answers first.

I have never liked the adage “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Sometimes the squeaky wheel is just a total embarrassment to the rest of the vehicle, and needs to be removed and replaced.

You know, like Trump.

When our plane took off, people applauded. My takeoff anxiety was in full-swing. We had 11 hours to go. Let’s make it over the ocean first. The pilots have a job to do.

Style

Everyone in Tokyo today has a coat that is nicer than yours. Herringbone, grey, beige, long, short, collared or not, adorned with a small faux-fur scarf. I saw very few black coats. Nails on women were manicured. Hair was conservatively cut and styled.

In the year 2000, the fashion in Tokyo was intergalactic. Fifth Element short skirts, white eyeshadow, the highest of platform shoes (women died from falling on subway stairwells), bleached hair, bright colors. The white eyeshadow was a startling Liquid Paper for the eyelid. I forget what I wore. Probably stretchy pants and wordless tops. Everywhere we went I felt like a big loaf of bread.

In 2020, calm is the new wild. Everyone is wearing earth tones. The highlight color is mustard, if you are brave enough to wear a highlight color. Dan saw a guy dressed all in green, but I missed him. It’s easy to miss people in Tokyo, which is a mill and seethe of humans.

I packed layers, planning on cold days and evenings in the countryside with my sister and her husband, and didn’t pack anything I’d call fashionable. In Tokyo, I felt like a rock with legs. A monolith in my oversized grey sweater coat, like an avatar in a video game whose goal is to not bump into anyone or anything. I failed at that, I’m sorry to say.

I thought about the coats I could have brought with me and if they’d stand up to what I was seeing on people. Nope. The 10 year old black coat I bought in Germany? The other black dress coat I got at Target 12 years ago?

By our second day, I felt offensive. My hair, in piles on top of my head, got snickers from shoppers while we were in a paper store. I love the red, cashmere hand warmers my daughter got me for Christmas, up-cycled from someone’s sweater, and wore them everywhere, with the big grey monolith sweater. They stood out. The boots I purchased to be comfortable (which bore a tag on them that said “fashion” — knockoffs of some brand I don’t know), made my size 10 feet look like concrete blocks. They were comfortable for all the walking we did though.

I wondered out loud with my sister if I should style my hair differently for the next day. Was I offending people? “Wear it how you want,” she said, and she shared that in her early days of living in Tokyo she gave up on trying to blend in. You never will. Just be you.

What a relief.

In the countryside of Kamogawa, I felt more at home. Everyone wore relaxed, comfortable clothing. Layers. They smiled more, and even if I was ridiculous and loafy, they didn’t make me feel so. There were goats, dogs, chickens, and cats. None of them wore fancy coats.

But I still feel the pull of desire for a nicer coat, which is impractical for where I live. When I’m around people who have manicured nails, I want manicured nails, which is not wise for a woman who tends to goats on a daily basis and has to sweep out a barn. Yesterday I found myself on my knees in the mud, in my thrift store “goat coat,” holding onto the collars of Littleface and Brick, who decided that a visit with the neighbors down the road was a good idea.

My biggest concern these days is how to trim goat hooves. Goat manicures are on my mind. I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube tutorials. My days of fashion, if I ever had them, are over. If you see me wearing a nice coat, it’s a loaner.

Page Match

Last Friday (right before I lost my voice), I participated in Page Match as Volta, my alter ego. She's all about delivering turns, gut punches of meaning ... you know, you think you might laugh, but then you cry, that sort of thing. She has to wear many sweatbands and a fanny pack full of melting chocolates to do this important work.

Everyone who took the stage that night and rose to the challenge of writing on-the-spot in ten minutes was fierce fire, and I was humbled and energized by sharing the writing table and stage with each one of them, and then relieved to take my wig off at the end of the night and eat a pancake at a local diner.

What can you write under pressure in ten minutes with a random prompt? I urge you to give it a try. It generates some wonderfully wild writing if you are willing to let go.

Congratulations to Monica Prince who took first place, to Carla Christopher for her second place win, and to all for their character, charisma, and diamonds-from-pressure writing.
Photography by the poetic lens of Michelle Johnsen. Modern Art space for creative encouragement provided by Libby Modern (Go! Go and find your creative self there!). Event from the fearless literary minds of Tyler Gof Barton and Erin Dorney of Fear No Lit. 

For the full album of Michelle's photos, go here.

And here are the two pieces I wrote that night. The prompt we were given for the first round was "Astroturf," and the second round prompt was "About a mountain." After my Prepositional Yawp, I was out of the game, left to enjoy the rest of the match with my husband and daughter.

Astroturf

The summer there was too much Astroturf, was the summer of tube socks. Tennis, lobbing balls over fences past the pool -- chasing the damned tiny moons everywhere. Ten, Love, whatever.  I couldn’t feel my hands. I was beyond frayed to falling until I leaned against the fence of my own body, my boundary, myself. Nothing but sky around me, I fell into it, forgot all I was but my outline, a cutout of summer at ten years old, in tube socks and shorts. I waited for anything other than the false ground, fakery, forgery of grass beneath my feet. Green, green youth, not mine, but a volley in a valley of forever. We all go through this madness of finding ourselves in the grass, looking up after a fall. The body suddenly awake, aware, a starfish.

Prepositional Yawp

About a mountain, above a garage, across the year, after the drink, against my life, below, below, below the ground, between the months when we were apart by, bye, goodbye, for all of the incantatory bell ringing of my body against the world, from the other side of the night, from the other side of your spleen, in the distant between of cemetery headstone where you left a tiny rock pressed into the dirt, into the ever after god-awful belief of the everafter, of, of, of, what is all fo this for, from one body to another, stuff and nonsense -- to you this is all to you, I miss you, you up there where no one can say or see or reach -- with that look in your face, with the way that you laughed, oh, oh, oh there are no more ways to say how or what direction other than GONE.

Since Your Death

A found poem from signage read on the PA Turnpike between the Quakertown and Wilkes-Barre exits

Fallen rocks
Falling rocks
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen rocks
Fallen
Fallen
Falling rocks
Fallen
Falling
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen
Fallen