share.memebox.com/x/uKhKaZmemebox referal code for 20% off! DD1 "J" born 3/2003 DD2 "G" born 4/2011 DS is here! "H" born 2/2014 m/c#3 1-13-13 @ 9 weeks m/c#2 11-11-12 @ 5w2d I am an extended breastfeeding, cloth diapering, baby wearing, pro marriage equality, birth control lovin', Catholic mama.
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
Hmmmmm. You are hard because you know so many poems. Maybe this one is new to you.
Slant by Suji Kwock Kim
If the angle of an eye is all, the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life, what is the light of this city, light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world, light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love, light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven, light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace, light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas, light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens sizzling on a spit, light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops, the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons, the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne, strutting, trash-talking, glorious: the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors, stenographers and cooks, all of us making and unmaking ourselves, hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only: free in time but not from it, here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation, feeling that is fleeing, for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on? I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world, I can’t help thinking of thanks.
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’ red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps the truth is that every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?
My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears by Mohja Kahf
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer, wudu, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds, and given me her purse and her packages to hold so she can accomplish this august ritual and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares
Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown as they notice what my grandmother is doing, an affront to American porcelain, a contamination of American Standards by something foreign and unhygienic requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom
My grandmother, though she speaks no English, catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says, I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus over painted bowls imported from China among the best families of Aleppo And if you Americans knew anything about civilization and cleanliness, you'd make wider washbins, anyway My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,
as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them, my grandmother might as well have been squatting in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor, Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn't matter which, when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge. "You can't do that," one of the women protests, turning to me, "Tell her she can't do that." "We wash our feet five times a day," my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic. "My feet are cleaner than their sink. Worried about their sink, are they? I should worry about my feet!" My grandmother nudges me, "Go on, tell them."
Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers, all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed, is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps that match her purse, I think in case someone from one of the best families of Aleppo should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display
I smile at the midwestern women as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them and shrug at my grandmother as if they had just apologized through me No one is fooled, but I
hold the door open for everyone and we all emerge on the sales floor and lose ourselves in the great common ground of housewares on markdown.
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
My Family Never Finished Migrating They Just Stopped by Jose Olivarez
we invented cactus. to survive the winters we created steel. at my dad’s mill i saw a man dressed like a Martian walk straight into fire. the flames licked his skin, but like a pet it never bit him. in the desert, they find our baseball caps, our empty water bottles, but never our bodies. even the best ICE agents can’t track us through the storms, but i have a theory. some of our cousins don’t care about LA or Chicago; they build paradise under the sand, under the bones of our loved ones, worn thin as needles to threaten any blue agents, bones thin as guitar strings to welcome us home.
I have guarded my name as people in other times kept their own clipped hair, believing the soul could be scattered if they were careless.
I knew my first ancestor. His legend. I have touched his boots and moustache, the grandfather whose people owned slaves and cotton. He was restless in Virginia among the gentleman brothers, until one peppered, flaming autumn he stole a horse, rode over the mountains to marry a leaf-eyed Cherokee. The theft was forgiven but never the Indian blood. He lost his family’s name and invented mine, gave it fruit and seeds. I never knew the grandmother. Her photograph has ink-thin braids and buttoned clothes, and nothing that she was called.
I could shed my name in the middle of life, the ordinary thing, and it would flee along with childhood and dead grandmothers to that Limbo for discontinued maiden names.
But it would grow restless there. I know this. It would ride over leaf smoke mountains and steal horses.
My mother never taught me sweeping. . . . One afternoon she found me watching t.v. She eyed the dusty floor boldly, and put a broom before me, and said she'd like to be able to eat her dinner off that table, and nodded at my feet, then left. I knew right off what she expected and went at it. I stepped and swept; the t.v. blared the news; I kept my mind on what I had to do, until in minutes, I was through. Her floor was immaculate as a just-washed dinner plate. I waited for her to return and turned to watch the President, live from the White House, talk of war: in the Far East our soldiers were landing in their helicopters into jungles their propellers swept like weeds seen underwater while perplexing shots were fired from those beautiful green gardens into which these dragonflies filled with little men descended. I got up and swept again as they fell out of the sky. I swept all the harder when I watched a dozen of them die. . . as if their dust fell through the screen upon the floor I had just cleaned. She came back and turned the dial; the screen went dark. That's beautiful, she said, and ran her clean hand through my hair, and on, over the window- sill, coffee table, rocker, desk, and held it up--I held my breath-- That's beautiful, she said, impressed, she hadn't found a speck of death.
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.