When a Bell Rings

Dad was drunk- we all had ways of dealing with that kind of car wreck. Tommy lit bottle rockets in the backyard. They whisteled up the mountainside, leaving tracks and little pink sticks in the crabgrass.
Sally braided. Her hair. Mine. Mom's, while she re-read last Sunday's post.
She braided the carpet tassles, the pull cords on the dusty blinds, even her ragdoll's yellow yarn hair (some of the plaits pulled away from the head entirely, surrounding her in a little nest).
I carved the words "not" and "working" on eigther side of dad's srying soap bar with the end of my toothbrush. Then I filled his briefcase with the cat's pancake-like litterings, scooped dog shit up in a brown lunch bag and smeared it all over his sock drawer. These were the best Christmas gifts I could give him- ones that I really meant.
Mom started sniffling between the screeing sounds of Tommy's barade. Sally strung the doll's hair on the tree and tried and failed to throw her bald little body on the top point like some sad angel. She lay there, somewhere near the middle, on her side. The shiny tree looked like it was swallowing her, the lights made her look like she was on fire.

Dad was drooling on the kitchen table. I pulled the warming bottle from his outstretched hand, thenpadded back to my parents bathroom in my new slippers and refilled his Old Spice bottle with whiskey.

The whole town thought he was a drunk. Now they'd know he was one. He'd loose his job, and then maybe Mom would brave the stick shift of the station wagon, pack us kids up, and go. A three inch metal lever was all we needed to get us out and away. I wondered if he's miss us. "The whore" and his "nasty little fuckers". I wondered, if we left in the night if he'd sit alone in the pile of ribbons and wrapping paper and regret.

The senior year of College smells like a CD warpper (that clingy kind that sticks to your hand).

That is to say, it smells like anticipation (the overpriced kind).

Three days after her husband left

The wind shook down what she had,
left it all at her feet.
No one wants to be 32 and swimming in pictures taken by
instamatics and poloroids that their aunts and uncles (long since divorced).
This is what happens on a Saturday when the sky is indifferent and, when
trying to escape the hum of a turned on television
a woman plans to surprise her mother with coffee and
store bought cake
but the door is locked and it seems she went away for the weekend
apple picking, with your older and much more lucrative sister
and her lite cigarettes.

So, you go down to the basement with the washing machine that gapes
and dig through boxes-
Half flattened, holiday patterned, cardboard and plastic.
Digging through a life of barbeques, communions, girl scout patches
and the horn-rimmed faces of all your
older brother's old sweethearts.

Where did these girls go? Wasn't this one's name Jane?
Or Sue?
Ghost women, always floating next to a vague uncle, a snack table,
a tinseled tree...where have all those women gone?

The pictures took up the day that
the wind had shaken down from the branches
and she had eaten all the cake herself, leaving crumbs
and crumbs and crumbs

Jane always was so thin.

Humlos

Moon- just wanted someone to trace its craters.
Sun- hadno hands, ran away.
Moon- lost weight. Lost light.
Sun- tore holes in everything, despite lack of hands.

Moon- waiting behind clouds and clouds and clouds.

I am burning the truth out of myself on a daily basis. 

The universe summed up in a sentence:

"And then something happened."

A Man's Man.

While telling me about how terrible the new summer job is that his father set him up with, my best friend admitted to being upset and berated by his new boss who told him he was cleaning toilets wrong. This idea of his body that I know so well and have seen so well and come to love so much for, dressed in a muted green cleaning suit, crouched over a piss stained toilet in an office building somewhere in the city disgusted me in a way...the budding poet of our time. Knee deep in urine and shit and fluorescent lighting.

I told him he should quit. he said he had cried and already decided to never go back.

He said " God, I just hope my father understands."

I said, history would not have happened without that sentence, without that sentiment.

He said, "I just hope my father isn't angry."

I said, now there is a sentiment I know nothing about.

But I do know what an office building bathroom looks like and my best friend Matthew, has no place there.

Confirmation Names

We studied the saints, slipped boys in through a break in the hockey field's fence, and led them to the woods the nuns had deemed "off limits".
Vicky let a boy read her palm there. he told her her lifeline was short, that she'd better learn reverence for the moment. She cried for weeks before choosing the name Barbara, patron saint of those in danger of sudden death.
Susan said she would only go "so far," but no one knew what that meant. Boys went nuts trying to find out. They loved to untie her waist-long hair, to see it fan underneath her. She loved their love letters, the way they'd straighten up whenever she walked by. She chose Thecla, who'd caused the lions to "forget themselves"; instead of tearing her to shreds, they licker her feet.
Jackie couldn't wait for anything. the nuns told her impatience was her cross. Even the lunches her mother packed would be gone before ten, and she'd be left sorry, wanting more. She'd chosen Anthony, "the Finder", in a last-ditch effort to recover what she'd lost. But the nuns gave her Euphrasia, the virgin, who'd hauled huge rocks from place to place to rid her soul of temptation.
Before mass, we'd check her back for leaves.
None of us, of course, chose Magdalen, the whore. She was the secret patron whose spirit, we believed, watched over us from the trees. She was the woman who'd managed to turn passion sacred. She was the saint who turned the flesh Divine.

Hostess

She swallowed Gore Vidal. Then she swallowed Donald Trump. She took a blue capsule- a B-complex and an E- and put them on the tablecloth a few inches apart. She pointed the one at the other.
"Martha Stewart," she said, "meet Oprah Winfrey."

She swallowed them both without water.

Waiting

Five days a week the lowest paid substitute teacher in the district drives his father's used Mercury to the Hough and 79th, where he eases it, mud flaps and all, down the ramp into the garage of Patrick Henry Junior High, a school where he'll teach back-to-back classes withour so much as a coffee or cigarette break and all of this depressing him until he remembers his date last night, and hopes it might lead to bigger things, maybe love, so he quickens his pace towards the main office to pick up his class list with the names of students he'll never know as well as he has come to know the specials in the cafeteria, where he hopes the coffee will be perking and someone will have brought in those doughnuts he's come to love so much, loves more than the idea of teaching seveneth graders the meaning of a poem, because after all he's a sub who will finish his day, head south to his father's house, and at dinner, he'll ask how his job is going, and he'll say okay, and he'll remind her that it might lead to a full-time position with benefits but he knows what teaching in that school is like and his date from last night call to ask is he's busy and he says yes because he promised to wash his father car and promises to his father are sacred since his mother died.
Besides, it's the least he can do now that he lets him drive the car five days a week towards the big lake, to the NE corner of Hough and 79th and you know the rest.

You may as well call me Michael Jackson's nose...because you knew I'd cave eventually

I always said writing students with blogs are the worst kinds of writers. 

It is summer and senior year and my senior project are just around the corner. 

At this point, I'm willing to be that worst kind of writer if it will help me graduate and become the best kind of writer that I can be after spending so much money, effort and time thus far.