Poetry Corner Monday

This is a day late. I'd apologize, but no one gives a crap.

I just discovered this poet, whose collection, A Love Story Beginning in Spanish, was hiding bashfully on the top shelf of my local library's meager poetry section. I'm in love with this poem, which I think sounds so wonderful when read aloud.

To Understand El Azul

-Judith Ortiz Cofer-

We dream in the language we all understand,
in the tongue that preceded alphabet and word.
Each time we claim beauty from the world,
we approximate its secret grammar, its silent
syntax; draw near to the Rosetta stone
for dismantling Babel.

If I say el azul, you may not see the color
of mi cielo, mi mar. Look once upon my sky,
my sea, and you will know precisely
what el azul means to me.

Begin with this: the cool kiss
of a September morning in Georgia, the bell-shaped
currents of air changing in the sky, the sad ghosts
of smoke clinging to a cleared field, and the way
days will taste different in your mouth each week
of the season. Sabado: Saturday
is strawberry. Martes: Tuesday
is bitter chocolate to me.

Do you know what I mean?

Still, everything we dream circles back.
Imagine the bird that returns home every night
with news of a miraculous world just beyond
your private horizon. To understand its message,
first you must decipher its dialect of distance,
its idiom of dance. Look for clues
in its arching descent, in the way it resists
gravity. Above all, you have to learn why
it aims each day

toward the boundless azul.

Poetry Corner Monday

I know, I know. You were hoping I'd forgotten about Poetry Corner Monday. Well, in fact, I did. But I just remembered and guess what: it's baaaack! You're welcome.

I read this poem tonight and, as my ninth grade English teacher would say, it spoke to my truth. Not historically a hater of mornings, I have grown to resent daybreak with a passion that surprises me. This poem is a reminder that there's always something worthwhile to get out of bed for. Granted, I'm still going to be pissed when my alarm goes off tomorrow, and I'm still going to spend 20 minutes denying that any good will come of me throwing back my covers, but for now I like to think that these lines will change something in me.

Up
Margaret Atwood

You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
there is birdsong,
you can't get out of bed.

It's something about the crumpled sheets
hanging over the edge like jungle
foliage, the terry slippers gaping
their dark pink mouths for your feet,
the unseen breakfast--some of it
in the refrigerator you do not dare
to open--you will not dare to eat.

What prevents you? The future. The future tense,
immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. Nothing is so simple. The past, its density
and drowned events pressing you down,
like sea water, like gelatin
filling your lungs instead of air.

Forget all that and let's get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house is on fire
and you must run or burn.
No, that one's useless.
It's never worked before.

Where is it coming from, this echo,
this huge No that surrounds you,
silent as the folds of the yellow
curtains, mute as the cheerful

Mexican bowl with its cargo
of mummified flowers?
(You chose the colours of the sun,
not the dried neutrals of shadow.
God knows you've tried.)

Now here's a good one:
you're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?

Some Things Everything I Forgot to Post Earlier

I volunteer with a tiny poetry publisher in Seattle. One of my current tasks is to compile a list of bookstores in the state so the press can send copies of their poetry reviews and anthologies to them. Not only am I learning how to use an Excel spreadsheet (which is always a good time), but I'm learning towns in Washington that I had no idea existed (Camas, Chattaroy, Normandy Park, Newman Lake). My greatest find by far, though, is a bookstore in Davenport called Hart n Home 4U that specializes in books on Christianity and brain disease. I find this combination utterly delightful.

According to Biblio.com, the store Taradise Books in Kirkland is "currently on vacation and their inventory is not available at this time." Where, pray tell, does a bookstore go on vacation?

Here are my two most recent musical obsessions. (Pay attention, because it's not often that I get a new one): 1) Scars on 45. This band has recently joined my growing list of concert openers who I might possibly like more than the bands they opened for. 2) Rodrigo y Gabriela. I first heard this Mexican musical duo where I hear most things: NPR (or as I like to call it, Why I Have No Friends). Of this video's  nearly 304,000 views, I think I account for about 300,000. It's absolutely mesmerizing. I can't stop watching.

I wore my Sounders scarf to work the other day and this happened:

E (a kindergartner): Did you make this?

Me: The scarf? No.

E: What is it?

Me: It's a scarf.

E: What's it for?

Me: To wear.

E: Are you part of this?

Me: Part of what?

E (pointing to the Sounders crest): This thing.

Me: The Sounders?

E: Yes.

Me: Am I on the Sounders?

E: Yes.

Me: Sweetie, it's a professional men's soccer team.

E: It is?

Me: Yes.

E: Oh. *Thinks for a minute* So you don't play on it?

When my cousin was here visiting last month we ordered takeout Thai food from a place near my house and put the order under Naomi's name. When we showed up to get it, the lady at the register was profoundly confused by Naomi's name and couldn't find our order on the shelf. "Could it be under any other name?" she asked, and Naomi shook her head. "What did you order?" the lady asked. Naomi told her and she finally found our bag and rang it up. No wonder she couldn't find our food: the name on the receipt was Mel.
     So a few days ago I had the following conversation with my mom:

Me: I told Michael about the Mel thing.

Mom: Mel?

Me: You know. Naomi.

Mom: Oh. Haha!

-approximately three minutes later-

Mom: Wait, I don't remember the Mel thing.

Me: Then why did you laugh?

Mom: Because I remember that it was funny.

I'm probably the only 24-year-old in the country who groans when the Oscars are on because it means no ABC World News. (Speaking of the Oscars, my mom and I spent the entire three-hour broadcast trying to pinpoint what exactly about Tom Cruise's current appearance makes him look so ancient. My mom said his cheeks. I said his nose, then my mom decided that maybe I thought it was his nose because his hairline is receding. No, you didn't miss anything - that logic really does make no sense.)

Jackets: the End of the Universe

I work at an after-school program for kids. Every day before we take them out for recess we have to judge the weather and decide whether we'll let them outside in long sleeves or if we want to torture them by making them wear their jackets. We woke up this morning to an inch of unexpected snow on the ground, and even though the snow had mostly melted and the sun was out, it was still downright frigid. We informed the kids that they had to wear their coats and they groaned as they always do. Actually, to say that they groaned would be a massive understatement. Their hatred of winter clothing goes so deep, boils so hot, that I frequently fear a full-on military coup staged by 18 seven-year-olds who are still 45 minutes away from snacktime.

Today the mandatory jacket policy enraged one girl in particular - a normally cheerful 2nd grader who I will call G. After I dismissed her to go line up at the door for recess, she approached me with the despondent face of a child whose puppy has just been slaughtered in front of her. "Do I have to wear my jacket?" she asked. "I hate it! It's too heavy!" I calmly explained to her that considering that we had been caught in a flash blizzard a mere two hours earlier, yes, she was to wear her jacket. Upon hearing this news G yanked her jacket down from its hook and stomped to the end of the line, dragging the coat on the floor behind her. She made a final last-ditch effort on her way out the door. She had the hood on her head but her arms weren't in the sleeves and the jacket flapped behind her like a cape. "Arms in, G," I told her, and she crossed them in front of her chest and muttered the requisite "HUMPH!" before brushing past me and heading toward the playground.

Not five minutes into recess I noticed that G, who was already depressed because her best friend E wasn't there today, wasn't playing on the playground like she usually did. I found her, moments later, lying on her back in a patch of sunlight on the bark. Her arms were still crossed, still not in their sleeves. "G," I said, "you need to put your jacket all the way on, please." "But I haaaaate it," she said. "It's too thick and heavy and it's so hot out!" "G, it's 38 degrees. There's a pile of snow two feet away from you. Jacket on."

"Is G staging a sit-in?" my supervisor asked several minutes later, nodding to the gravel next to the portable where G was now sitting. Her arms were finally in her sleeves but her scowl seemed to have replenished itself. I was about to answer when an army of kids trotted up to me ("trotted" is actually quite an accurate verb as they were pretending to be horses), their jackets shoved all the way down to their hooves hands. "Can we take our coats off now?" they asked. "We're boiling!"

Poor things. The shaking of my head must have looked a lot to them like the cracking of a bullwhip.

Scary Aminals

On the wall at the bottom of the stairs hangs three photographs of my brother and my dad when my brother was about five. The trio is called "Scary Aminals" and a different "terrifying" face is featured in each picture.

For our second annual birthday visit, my cousin Naomi and I decided to recreate "Scary Aminals" with some goosebump-inducing expressions of our very own. Good luck falling asleep tonight after you see these.

So That Happened

Here's a STH all the way from the crypt of my unfinished posts that I half-wrote and then forgot about. This gem is from about a month and a half ago. Because that's how I like to bring you the news of my life: 45 days late and no longer relevant.

1. The other day, when I was trying to buckle my seatbelt in a crowded three-person backseat, my mom accused me of "getting fresh" with her. In case none of you have ever had your mothers accuse you of getting fresh with them, it is not exactly a joyous occasion.

2. I was watching the semifinals of the FIFA Club World Cup tonight. Kashiwa (Japan) against Santos (Brazil). The match took place in Japan. Now, I'm all for learning other languages. I'm even all for creating enormous banners in other languages to hang at sporting events (as I may or may not have done this - thank you, Casey and Edwin!). But if you're going to make a banner in your second language, please have it checked first, preferably by a native speaker of that language. Failing to do so results in such sayings as "We're Kashiwa Stupid!" Doesn't your heart just want to curl into a ball and dissolve? Kashiwa went on to lose the championship. I bet Santos went stupid when they won.

3. We're doing Holiday Week with the kids at work. Today I was explaining the story of Hanukkah, and the further I got into the tale the more impressed I became with myself and that fact that I, the world's crappiest fake half-Jew, could give such a thorough description of this particular religious holiday. It wasn't until I was home, hours later, that I realized I had accidentally told them the story of Passover.

4. Speaking of work, a parent told me last week that I have the patience of a saint. Pretty sure he just caught me during a good hour.

Did You Miss Me?

Why yes, I have been taking a little break from publicly abasing myself. Thanks for noticing. Fear not, though: I'm back. Not making fun of myself is so boring.

1. I was updating my to-read list on Goodreads.com this morning and I typed Remarkable Creatures (by Tracy Chevalier) into the search bar. I was immediately redirected to a page with a list of books I did not ask for, at the top of which it said "Did you mean: 'hello''?"

2. Yesterday at work a fifth-grade girl asked me for help with her homework. She pulled out a sheet with three math problems and I noticed they were algebra. While I always have been and always will be horrendous at math, I actually quite enjoy solving algebraic equations. They're like little puzzles, and I am a big fan of puzzles. So the girl read the first problem aloud and I helped her figure out what n should represent. (By this I mean that the problem told you what n represented and I simply underlined it.) That was about as far as my usefulness went. We eventually arrived at the correct answer to each problem, but only because this brilliant little girl, bless her heart, second-guessed my stuttered instructions. I can't help it if it makes no sense to convert a problem into an algebraic equation when all you have to do is subtract one number from the other! (Addendum: I just wrote out the problem, going on and on about how easy it was to solve without algebra, when I suddenly realized that I had indeed "helped" the girl to the wrong answer. I feel so awful. Addendum to the addendum: The girl came up to me at work today to thank me for helping her. "I'm so sorry all your answers were wrong!" I told her. "They weren't," she said. Um...pretty sure they were.)

3. I was in my room this morning and out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving out my window. It was my dad, broom in hand, wildly beating at something in the grass. For some reason that struck me as something my two readers would be interested to know.

4. Three. That's the number of times I cried in the span of thirty minutes one evening last week. So much emotion, and I'm not even pregnant! What had my tear ducts in a tizzy, you may ask? The following three things:

• The ABC World News story about an American family who flew to Ukraine to rescue a little girl with Down's syndrome from spending the rest of her life in an adult mental institution. This story had me crying so hard I could barely see the TV screen. How could you condemn three- and four- and five-year-olds to a life like this just because they have an extra chromosome? It makes me sick.
• The clip of Charlie Davies, a professional soccer player with D.C. United, scoring his first goal in his first game after recovering from a horrific car accident in 2009. And just as a heads-up, I will also be crying when my beloved Steve Zakuani steps back onto the pitch in March. (A dangerous tackle by Colorado Rapids' Brian Mullan left him with a broken leg in April, ending his season barely two months into it.) Here's the video in case you're interested, which you're probably not. The helpful man who posted this recorded it straight from his television so you can actually see, in slow motion, Zakuani's right leg bend backwards where no leg should ever bend backwards.
• I have just decided that Reason #3 is too embarrassing to share. Instead I will leave you with this impossibly adorable picture of a baby bunny, which I found by typing "cute things" into Google images.