“…As has everyone on the whole planet, including those hunter-gatherers who live deep in the rain forest and were trying for no contact. Just once I wish someone would say that and the Good News would turn out to be something else.”
—Jenny Offill, Weather
Goodbye, height wall,
goodbye, Lazy Susan,
goodbye, apple spice–
scented little bathroom
with the good acoustics.
It’s been real, beige
carpeted stairs, trodden
38 years—that top step
where we waited as kids
on Christmas morning
for Mom and Dad,
down there finessing
details (pot of coffee,
Emile Pandolfi CD),
to call up “Ready!”
Thunderous descent,
blur of flannel pajamas.
Times we’d fly up the steps,
door slam, punctuating
an argument, and times
we’d race down, doorbell,
tumble of greeting: Hi,
Mom’s piano students.
Hi, Jimmer the Neighbor
Kid. It’s all been real.
So long, pizza slice–
shape picture window
high over the family room,
where oak branches bow
and sway. You gave passing
seasons a 1980s frame.
And you, lilac bush,
potpourri of youth. Birds
that fatally crashed into
that trapezoid of glass
are buried beneath
your boughs. I’ll miss you,
yard barn, towering tulip
tree I planted in third grade,
kitchen where we always
congregated, dress-up
box full of possibilities
(pirate, bridesmaid or both).
Dear childhood bedroom,
our parting was set
in motion long ago—
a tasteful quilt tapestry
where once hung a poster
of a mangy cat (“Bad Hair
Day”). I became an adult,
and you, a guest room.
Long live the last mile:
M-89 to 12th Street to 103rd
Avenue, sun-sieved canopy
of trees—autumn, indelible.
Healthy, I assume, to slacken
one’s grip on “home.” Change
as the only constant, et cetera.
Still, I’m sad and questioning
my sadness (22 years since
this was my return address),
reading about “pathological
nostalgia” and thinking
mostly of the height wall,
metric to measure gratitude.
"We were here!” it says, it said.
And how lucky to be for so long.
Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
—Toi Derricotte
When I tire of the screen’s glow,
the glazed scroll past serum-
smoothed faces, an #ad for
Metabolism Super Powder,
sAvAgE CLapBaCks, front-
facing videos from parked cars
(“Hi, everyone!”), the ramp-up
to the album release, “Suggested
for You” accounts like
living_with_many_chihuahuas,
a recipe for Green Shakshuka, ways
to forgive your past self, searches
for “best humidifier,” “13-month
sleep regression,” “what it means
when a friend won’t text back,”
and the reflexive return to my
own profile, the self-regarding
“hello” that Annie Dillard says
wastes most of our energy,
I close all the apps, let
my whirring brain whir down,
look up and out the window.
Today, there’s a dull grey cast
to the afternoon, and my neighbor
across the street is rolling
an old refrigerator to the curb.
It’s not trash pickup day but
it’s the dawn of a new year,
and why keep living with
what’s not working?
A year given to constant googling. A year of reading more posts on Baby Center, The Bump, What to Expect and some anxiety-inducing site called KellyMom.com, far more newsletters from Ovia and Babylist, than I did literary things for my own edification and pleasure. Somewhere in there, I started trusting myself more on the parenting front, started realizing my kid (whom What to Expect would call “my chubby cherub” 🤢) is adaptable, and managed to read some actual books.
Disappearing Earth by Julia Philliips
The Undying by Anne Boyer
The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke
We Do This ’Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo
Little Labors by Rivka Galchen
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy
Started in 2021, may finish in 2022? Time will tell…
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright
Coventry by Rachel Cusk
How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Singing along to “Thank You
for Being a Friend”
in the postpartum room,
as we wait to take home
two-day-old you.
“The Golden Girls is colostrum
to me,” Dad says.
You’re a bundled bread loaf
in a plastic bassinet
beneath the hospital TV.
We’re trying on “Mom,” “Dad”
like Blanche Devereaux
donning silk scarves,
shoulder-padded power
blazers. Maybe confidence
comes in assuming a role?
The grey December sky
is already darkening, but
night means nothing to you.
Earlier, in the wee hours
(somewhere in the waltz
of cry-swaddle-sleep,
feed-swaddle-sleep),
a nurse said you’re reckoning
with your new reality
and missing the warm
enclosure of the womb.
I cried at the thought
of your first disappointment.
Meanwhile, Dad found a playlist,
“Twelve Hours of Brown Noise
(with Womb Sounds),”
that soothed you with a steady
heartbeat reminiscent enough
of mine. Maybe parenting’s
finding a million small ways
to soften the blow? But the world
is also Sophia’s one-liners,
hills sequined with snow.
When we get out of here,
if we ever get out of here,
we will drive very slowly.
Remnant rain from Hurricane Delta,
another battering of bad news.
Meanwhile the trees go gold as usual,
disclose their true colors
on schedule, as “Dreams” goes viral
alongside disease and denial.
Today’s my last thirtysomething
birthday, and I’m clinging
to the decade like burnished
leaf to branch—a bit drained,
determined to shine, vulnerable
to the ravages of weather and time.
Always in their melancholy/
self-reflection/potential, birthdays
evoke the feeling of a personal
New Year’s Eve. And the “Cheers!”
of auld acquaintances means
more with each passing year,
much more this pandemic year.
(In the stillness of remembering
what you had, what you lost.)
Thirty-three weeks pregnant,
alchemically, amid everything.
Leaves turning, nature healing,
life growing, data tables of the dying.
A deciduous season
too teeming with metaphor
to think about much of anything
besides the baby’s health,
please let the baby be healthy,
before blowing out pink candles
on a Dairy Queen cake.
Batter my heart, motherhood.
Come quickly, death of ego.
In February of this year
Lawrence Ferlinghetti died.
Since 17, I haven’t stopped thinking
…the leaves were falling / and they
cried / Too soon! too soon!
—Written last year on my birthday, 10/10/20.
Abolition, parenthood, life under capitalism.
(Abysmal attention span in 2020 for anything longer than an article. Read some really great articles though!)
Small Animals by Kim Brooks
Severance by Ling Ma
How to Be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss
The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
Cribsheet by Emily Oster
A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk
Prison By Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar & Victoria Law
The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner
“It’s in the nature of years to feel exhausting in retrospect. The world is punishing; we have short collective memories and a cognitive bias that makes us recall bad events more vividly than good ones. The awful folkways of social media—which encourage us to call out bad things in dramatic fashion and then pretend that we’ve been helpful—have led to something of an annual conclusion.…
I’m worried that the ‘worst year ever’ feeling is half a condition of the Internet, of the way we experience the news as delivered through social media. Everything feels too intimate, too aggressive; the interfaces that were intended to cheerfully connect us to the world have instead spawned fear and alienation. I’m worried that this sense of relentless emotional bombardment will escalate no matter what’s in the news.…
There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet, and there’s no easy way to properly calibrate it—no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them.”
—Jia Tolentino, “The Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year”
I’ve seen several data visualizations of income inequality, but this one really brings it home.
Broken windows and empty hallways,
A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.
Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles,
The frozen smiles to chase love away.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.
Lonely, lonely.
Tin can at my feet,
I think I'll kick it down the street.
That's the way to treat a friend.
Bright before me the signs implore me:
Help the needy and show them the way.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.
Lonely, so…
—
Late capitalism, the attention economy, chipping away at hardened thinking patterns, America.
Read lots of great stuff in 2019. Aiming for more diversity and more fiction in 2020.
There There by Tommy Orange
Jillian by Halle Butler
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
The View From Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior
1919 by Eve Ewing
Educated by Tara Westover
Normal People by Sally Rooney
The New Me by Halle Butler
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Pure by Linda Kay Klein
White Negroes by Lauren M. Jackson
So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
The Government Lake by James Tate
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
On Immunity by Eula Biss
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Catch & Kill by Ronan Farrow
Certain American States by Catherine Lacey
“‘Hello...’ ‘Hello...’
Love and deeper understanding
I turn to my computer like a friend
’Hello…?’ ‘Hello...?’
I need deeper understanding
Give me deeper understanding”
—Kate Bush, The Sensual World (30 years old today!)
“What’s most compelling to me as a writer and a person is how we become who we are. How do we go from that kid on the playground who made that weird animal sound whenever he caught a ball to being a mixed-use real estate developer?”
—Chris Ware, Publishers Weekly
millennials love aura photography
evangelicals love the Enneagram
boomers love a garage fridge stocked with pallets of Ice Mountain
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
—Ada Limón
“When I rode up in my elevator alone at night after work, wearing the trenchcoat and carrying my book bag, I always became flooded by a melancholy vanity, as if I were being watched through a hidden camera. ‘Here is a young woman living in New York. It’s the end of the day, and she’s going home to her apartment.’ To me, my self-conscious weariness was cinematic and fascinating. It made me feel like an adult. Now I mostly get that feeling when I’m going home in a taxi late at night, but I don’t know whether the feeling is still really mine or whether I ripped it off from ‘My Dinner with André.’”
—Nancy Franklin, ”No Place Like Home,” The New Yorker
I’m starting a category called “Other People’s Writing” for the purposes of collecting great sentences & beautifully articulated ideas:
“Looking at these pictures, it is impossible not to feel the palpable tug of time’s undertow, the inexorable movement toward we-know-not-what…. Here is photography’s ultimate irony: it can freeze time, but never stop it.”
—Chris Wiley, “Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage,” The New Yorker