No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
I have a stack of unfinished poems in my drawer – many there for years, decades – some missing just a word, one perfect word. Nodding undergraduate heads.
“This is radio station WAST, the wackiest station in the nation blasting out at you with a zillion megawatts of pure rock right here in downtown Little Falls and I’m Don Zingo your favorite DJ here to zap you and zing you with the sounds of tomorrow today.
After a particularly bad week, I sat at my kitchen table and read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. It turned out, farting ghosts and a grieving president were just what I needed. The book’s elevated vocabulary and shifting POVs are demanding, but what I found the most challenging was that it asks the reader to just be. To watch. To listen.
Gong Fa hated Captain Flavel the way she hated most white men, especially rich ones. But over the last few months, Flavel had become something else: a dying man. A rich, stubborn, selfish one, but still a dying one.
I loved the alley bar noise in the Mission district. Sunday mornings our downstairs neighbor played gospel so loud all three roommates left the house. On my mirrored closet I wrote a two-line poem in eyeliner by Alicia Portnoy translated from the Spanish: I am talking to you about poetry / and you say / when do we eat. / The worst of it is / I’m hungry too.
“You’re an intellectual and a revisionist.”
“You take that back!”
“Lower your voices! The neighbors.”
“The neighbors? The neighbors are with us.”
“Not anymore.”