bigger than a blog post, smaller than a breadbox

I haven’t been doing much creative writing lately,

because this:

 

is coming out in the fall and contrary to what I’d somehow fooled myself into thinking,

my work is only just begun.

More to come lovelies, I promise. all sorts of things are moving and shaking.. a website, a video, events, travel. opportunities for folks to support getting the stories in my book out into the world. For now… disjointed waitress poetry will make an attempt to return, because learning how to market a book gives me a headache, and I need to write creatively again.

 

Fishing Family

My friend Heather’s husband Ross is headed to sea today,
or maybe yesterday or tomorrow.
They never know the exact date when he’ll ship out,
and they don’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring.
They chop firewood
plant gardens
rebuild portions of their house
hang nets for the summer salmon season
teach their sons to climb ladders,
use tools
prepare food,
practice kindness.
They go on dates in canoes,
birth babies at home,
and snowshoe a few miles into the wilderness
to have family time
in a primitive cabin.
They volunteer in their community,
preserve hundreds of pounds of food from their garden,
and eat well.
I’m fairly certain that between the two of them,
there is nothing they could not do.
While Ross pits himself against the elements
to make their living
in the wintry Pacific a few thousand miles to the north,
Heather will keep everything going
with grace
and humor
while training to be a doula,
caring for ailing elders,
building furniture,
traveling cross country to see the grandparents,
and growing more gorgeous all the time.
Sometimes she takes the kids camping as a solo mama,
and laughs that its easier than being at home sometimes.
Depending on which fishing season it is,
she can talk to her husband daily,
or only once a week, for ten minutes,
or not even then,
but after a while,
the call inevitably comes
that he’s headed home.
Until then,
they labor through the seasons,
adding weft
and strength
to the warp of a marriage
seasoned by saltwater
struggle
and joy

my fishing family. Ross, Haven, Heather, and Liam.

(To read more about their family and their work, check out some of the words and pictures here).

just an ordinary thursday, really

morning.
wrangle kid into clothes
potty training
vacuum
sweep
clean up kidspill
make pancake batter
make coffee
feed dogs
flip banana pancakes
make beds
open curtains
talk kid into eating
unload bookshelf
move bookshelf
reassemble
move chair
sweep
pacify meltdown over end of tv time
transition toddler into creative play
research the gyan mudra for monday’s tattoo design
make more coffee
coax kid to eat more breakfast
find missing ball kid desperately needs
rewash husband’s pen-stained work clothes for 4th time
move file cabinet
organize an entire family worth of paperwork.
answer several important emails which require Thought
chat with my momma friends
make lunch
deal with 4 spates of whiny crying intermixed with throwing and hitting
shower
clean up spilled juice
kid hucks the potty
offer him the choice of peeing outside
we stand on the porch together
his tiny bare feet on mine
it is raining softly
and he gets sad
at naptime he holds my hand in the dark
and we listen to Gillian Welch sing “the way it will be”
he falls asleep in a blessedly short ten minutes
and I emerge to sit
alone
in this room
try to figure out what to do with the beautiful solitude
launch myself into action
and try to build up enough inertia to carry me through
tackle the mess on the desk
recycle, put away, categorize, rediscover, trash, sort
dice an onion and sautee it in olive oil with thyme and smoked salt
put on Macklemore’s Can’t Hold Us
and dance
answer more emails
file more papers
stir the soup
and
try to scrape together enough of myself
to remember that once I wanted to be a writer when I grew up
and drag myself to the keyboard

So we put our hands up
like the ceiling can’t hold us

kid wakes up with a 102 degree fever
and i spend the subsequent 5 hours with his tiny frame pressed against mine
hot forehead searing against my skin in the carrier
coaxing him to drink
persuading him to take a thermometer
coercing him to swallow tylenol
and soup
and finally,
soothing him to sleep,
lay there staring at the ceiling
drained

just an ordinary thursday, really

newyorkminute

It wasn’t until the last day that I sat on a corner bench and raised my collar against the cold and cracked my journal: for four days I followed his tall and purposeful stride through the subways and the sidewalks and the elegant lobbies, beneath the sky-filling spans of bridges and down the hallowed and corrupted aisles of urban cathedrals, through the temporary winter foyers of artful restaurants and past the legions of doormen, (some of whom i am convinced we have interrupted in the midst of composing poems), along the curving sidewalks of frozen Central Park and over the very ground where John Lennon breathed his last on the day my mother heard my heartbeat for the first time, in and out of taxi cabs and up the stairs of the Jane hotel for a cocktail but not a 99$ room, into the darkened bustle of gay bars without women’s restrooms which makes me laugh, buzzed on gin and freedom while musicals are projected onto the walls and the scarcely clad bartenders ply their trade, past graves marked and over graves unseen and through gusts of paper confetti drifting onto sidestreets after a Lunar New Year parade, taking refuge from the biting wind over yet another cocktail and elegant scallion pancakes, seitan marsala with figs unrolling on my tongue and fennel soup eddying across my notion of what is possible, exorbitant shop windows and resilient beggars, and meanwhile there are ghosts, millions of them, Ginsberg ogling muscled Puerto Rican delivery boys in the East Village and Dorothy Parker tapping her pen on the tabletop next to her drink at the Algonquin, the woman who shares my name who was murdered in Central Park a few years back and whose face I know from the pictures, precious babies who died from adulterated milk in the tenements by the thousands because their malnourished immigrant mothers couldn’t produce breastmilk what with all the stress and work outside the home, each of us here chasing our own particular version of the American dream in this island city built on ancient bedrock and washed over by the storms of the Atlantic and I’ll just stop there for now because the laundry won’t do itself.

KP and RR… crazylove and wildgratitude.

chopping garlic with Patsy Cline after the two year old spends an hour unsupervised.

Fighting off a winter cold,
I laid down on the couch
after putting my son down for a nap.

woke up an hour later to discover
he’d gotten out of bed
emptied the dental floss container
built a train
liberated some tortillas from the fridge
and finally
come over to pat me on the shoulder
and deliver a bottle of homeopathic throat spray.
We snuggled.
Not bad for at least an hour of unsupervised two year old time,
I reason.
And later, when he reveals to me that he successfully
unwound an entire roll of toilet paper,
its hard to be appropriately stern,

as he’s beaming and proud
and I’m listening to Patsy Cline
and chopping a mountain of garlic.

sweetness in the doldrum days

on making soup from what you have.

Cooking for a family isn’t quite the thrilling experiment that cooking for a partner or a group of friends used to be. You have less money, less time, and a more critical audience than you ever did before.  I find its hard to try new recipes when they invariably necessitate a trip to the store, and I’m bound and determined to cook with whole foods and the ingredients I already have laying around.  A few months ago a friend asked me for a soup recipe, and I had to admit I didn’t have a recipe…

just a method.
here it is.

1. Begin, always, with onions.

2. Be fearless with your spices, and buy them in bulk so they are fresh and cheap.

3. Grow at least one of your ingredients yourself. it feels good to harvest into your cookpot.
If you can’t, make it a point to buy direct from a farmer every now and then. Look for a local farmer @ your farmers market who doesn’t advertise as organic, & ask them if they use pesticides. Many, like Whistling Train Farm who sell @ almost every Seattle Farmers Market, grow without chemicals but cannot afford the organic certification— their veggies are more affordable than the ones labelled “organic.”

4. Cook with your nose and your sense of color. Both should delight you. If they don’t, add more of something that does.
Use things from your fridge that are wilting or nearing expiration. Waste not want not.

5. you will almost never go wrong by adding more garlic or more greens.

6. Chickpeas or red lentils will give a protein boost, add heartiness, and scarcely impact the flavor.

7. At least 2 of these items go into almost everything I make. (apple cider vinegar, braggs liquid aminos, tahini, miso paste, lemon juice, toasted sesame oil, nutritional yeast)

8. Make your kitchen (or at least a corner of it) into a place you find lovely.

9. A library of inspiring cookbooks just in case.

10. take notes on your successes

11. Figure out what your cooking music is (mine is Gillian Welch) and keep in mind that a good apron never hurts.

latkes

Last night, a homeless man politely propositioned me for cash at a gas station.
I held up a fistful of ones and told him we’d dragged the seat cushions for these,
and I couldn’t spare any
and he politely said
no worries sweetheart,
happy holidays.

Inside I handed over eleven dollars to the Sikh cashier,
and watched the homeless man standing against the cold.
while my husband pumped gas I rummaged through a canvas bag full of Hanukkah leftovers.
Returned to the homeless man with a glass container
and asked him if he was hungry
yes, he said
and I apologized that the latkes were greasy
he tugged his glove off and accepted the leftovers into his palms
and said thank you
and I replaced the lid and said you’re welcome.

As we drove away into the dark I rubbed my oil slick fingers together
and caught myself feeling relieved for having allayed my guilt
over having more
rather than less
and thus descended into a hyper-intellectual narrative
about privilege and inequity
and altruism and leftovers

Then it occurred to me
that the homeless man’s fingers were slick with the same cooking oil
as mine
and our bellies now held the same food
and that maybe it was enough to leave it at that

Offerings to the Utter Brilliance of the Present Moment

As we were leaving, the sweet Vietnamese woman at Chu Minh Veggie Deli on Jackson and 12th bent down to stand face to face with our son in his rubber boots and his raincoat, and handed him a crispy vegan springroll wrapped in a napkin. “Because you are special,” she said,

and I felt my heart in my chest, standing by the window in the cramped deli as the birds took off in a mass from the telephone line outside and swirled into the grey sky, feathered bodies reflected in the puddles of rainwater laying on the pavement.  There was a sign on the wall behind a potted plant that said “We care more about compassion and protecting your physical and spiritual health than we do about making a profit” and it was as if they didn’t need to advertise it, they just needed to affirm it, somewhere, commit it to the visual world in case someone bothers to look closely,

which is how i feel about the tattoo on the back of my neck, which says

basic goodness

and is usually covered by my collar and my hair.

:like a declaration of compassion tucked behind the leaves of a potted plant,  like the reflection of birds swirling into a grey sky in a puddle of rainwater on the pavement, like the momentary connection between that woman and our small son

Offerings

to the utter brilliance of the present moment

 

 

 

Harvest Moon

for Brandy

Redgold sunflowers line the west border of the garden bed,
dozens of crimson crowns hanging heavy with seeds
every one a volunteer from last year
glowing in the slanting light
of early autumn afternoon

the firemen across the street are singing crude songs
while they wash their trucks for the umpteenth time this week
and the white sheet of the teepee in the garden
is flapping idly in the breeze

harvest a giant pan of tomatoes while the kid naps
tugging gently at their rounded bodies
to see if they are ready to give leave of the vine
cherokee purples, brandywines, sungolds and mortgage lifters
shape them into a heart for Brandy
and spend thirty minutes dicing them.
every time i lean on the knife
i mutter
screw cancer
and make myself smile
and each time the blade cleaves the flesh
it is a prayer
augmented by ten cloves of garlic
and a pile of basil.

freeze the bruschetta in bags
for some dark night in winter
when the sharpness of the garlic
and the ripeness of the tomatoes
and the spice of the basil
will, swirled together over bread,
remind us of what vitality is possible

in the meantime,
harvest moon tonight,
2nd night of luminescent fullness
make potato leek soup,
close times with the ones we love

on a sunny saturday morning at the end of september

i wake up ready to write
after a rare Friday night off work
dinner out with my loving husband
and a reading by Cheryl Strayed,
a writer I respect and admire
the words are at my fingertips
and i know if i sit down, i will create

but everything seems to conspire to keep me from my writing desk
kiddo needing breakfast
the broken seal on the toilet
the mouse that refuses to leave or be killed
the overripe plums that are attracting fruit flies
the kale and chard that need planting
the laundry that needs doing after the boy peed on the bathroom floor
the chickpeas that are done soaking, and need cooking
the garden tools that are overdue @ the tool library
the diaper explosion that presents itself at the hardware store
the little old Korean man who did not show up to work today
and thus, could not fill my empty print cartridge
and these are only some of the things
I lose my patience
gather it
and lose it again

Callum is sitting in one of his emptied out toybins,
eating peanut butter pretzels
i kneel down to apologize for yelling
and kiss his forehead
when i walk away
i taste salt

it may have come from the pretzels,
onto his sweet, two year old hands,
which he then brushed across his forehead
or it may have come from the tears of rage
i shed earlier
reading a friend’s news about breast cancer.

but then i think about the way she told us,
fearless and funny as hell, like she always is
promising plenty of profanity and the kind of fierceness
that only a mother can bring to a fight

and i gather
laugh
cry
meditate
and put my hands to work again.
harvest acorn squash
write about the 1992 World Uranium Hearings
move the laundry to the dryer

wash
spin
dry
put away
clothe
pick up
repeat
Amy said the other night
and its true.

i take comfort, always
in the solidarity of mothers

acorn squash harvest and a lone Blue Hubbard