Quick Update
FIve Things and a Blank Verse
1) Walking up to the restaurant Friday, we passed a man who hollered, "I can see you don't mean that smile," to D, who called back, "Yes, I do-- have a good one," but the man responded with a magazine round of slurs stemming from his sniper training overseas. We kept walking, thinking about how great it was that we could walk to meet up with our friends, each great Italian food. We periodically returned to the man, though, asking as we walked home afterward, "I wonder what he's up to now." I picture him still wearing a coat, sitting on a living room floor, listening to Al Green records by himself, lonesome for company.
2) Sloth is the name of my sin incarnate this week, though I feel as if I've been anything but lazy. A week after AWP rendered me too tired to exercise this week. The combination of writing, catch-up, and teaching left me with little desire, in my spare moments, to bounce around my hamster cage of a gym (the living room) to sound waves of the latest fitness diva demanding the surrender of my free will to her latest workout. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed my time off, renewed by soundproof ear drums, and am ready to watch the dvds again-- on mute.
3) In DC, I attended the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference where I spied several famous writers who look much taller than their back-cover head shots, and made new friends in the world of writing and publishing. I attended a couple of poetry readings that I enjoyed, and found scribbled in a notebook, "Every story begins in a posture of weakness," but in no way do I wholeheartedly agree with it.
4) In addition to walking all around the town, I even saw the monuments cast in a fog, in the company of my dear friend M, who took a train up from Baltimore to hang out. He noticed I didn't have any gloves and gave me a mismatched pair he had in his bag-- black, all-purpose gardening gloves. I took them off to eat pho in Columbia Heights, but kept them on as much as possible. Even when my hand gestures failed for all the flapping fabric, my warm, inarticulate hands stymied by common sense.
5) In addition to the amazing food, intense amounts of literacy, and sights of gorgeous people I consumed on my trip, I also did a fair amount of false-start-poem-writing. Here's a taste:
"Making Timo and ice cream float. Hermosa for the first time. Picking them up in Georgia. The gay husky you knew named Amadeus. The van we called the Castro Astro. The time we drove around with someone pet boa constrictor in the car with us, and I held him the whole time between trips to the grocery store. The time I put tiny fliers in the pockets of jeans and sweat pants in Wal-Mart, reporting on unfair labor practices."
---
Menka Lines
Your Walkman and mix tapes of Sai Baba
bhajans and Nirvana. Your thin bedroll
in the spare room. Fresh carpet. Melted cheese
hard on paper plates. Remember when you
stopped me before the flight to say, "Don't let
them change you?" As if somehow the hoards
of adults, their talons and barbs, gnashing
sober praise of the academe, boasted
the bile to dissolve any film star gall
stones. As if our faces would melt off
the billboards, slide down a sewer back home,
to a textbook, or a radio played low
to not disturb our sleeping brothers-- though
we'd be singing shy and high for Kurt and Sai--
A temple in my heart/ all in all is all we are.
1) Walking up to the restaurant Friday, we passed a man who hollered, "I can see you don't mean that smile," to D, who called back, "Yes, I do-- have a good one," but the man responded with a magazine round of slurs stemming from his sniper training overseas. We kept walking, thinking about how great it was that we could walk to meet up with our friends, each great Italian food. We periodically returned to the man, though, asking as we walked home afterward, "I wonder what he's up to now." I picture him still wearing a coat, sitting on a living room floor, listening to Al Green records by himself, lonesome for company.
2) Sloth is the name of my sin incarnate this week, though I feel as if I've been anything but lazy. A week after AWP rendered me too tired to exercise this week. The combination of writing, catch-up, and teaching left me with little desire, in my spare moments, to bounce around my hamster cage of a gym (the living room) to sound waves of the latest fitness diva demanding the surrender of my free will to her latest workout. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed my time off, renewed by soundproof ear drums, and am ready to watch the dvds again-- on mute.
3) In DC, I attended the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference where I spied several famous writers who look much taller than their back-cover head shots, and made new friends in the world of writing and publishing. I attended a couple of poetry readings that I enjoyed, and found scribbled in a notebook, "Every story begins in a posture of weakness," but in no way do I wholeheartedly agree with it.
4) In addition to walking all around the town, I even saw the monuments cast in a fog, in the company of my dear friend M, who took a train up from Baltimore to hang out. He noticed I didn't have any gloves and gave me a mismatched pair he had in his bag-- black, all-purpose gardening gloves. I took them off to eat pho in Columbia Heights, but kept them on as much as possible. Even when my hand gestures failed for all the flapping fabric, my warm, inarticulate hands stymied by common sense.
5) In addition to the amazing food, intense amounts of literacy, and sights of gorgeous people I consumed on my trip, I also did a fair amount of false-start-poem-writing. Here's a taste:
"Making Timo and ice cream float. Hermosa for the first time. Picking them up in Georgia. The gay husky you knew named Amadeus. The van we called the Castro Astro. The time we drove around with someone pet boa constrictor in the car with us, and I held him the whole time between trips to the grocery store. The time I put tiny fliers in the pockets of jeans and sweat pants in Wal-Mart, reporting on unfair labor practices."
---
Menka Lines
Your Walkman and mix tapes of Sai Baba
bhajans and Nirvana. Your thin bedroll
in the spare room. Fresh carpet. Melted cheese
hard on paper plates. Remember when you
stopped me before the flight to say, "Don't let
them change you?" As if somehow the hoards
of adults, their talons and barbs, gnashing
sober praise of the academe, boasted
the bile to dissolve any film star gall
stones. As if our faces would melt off
the billboards, slide down a sewer back home,
to a textbook, or a radio played low
to not disturb our sleeping brothers-- though
we'd be singing shy and high for Kurt and Sai--
A temple in my heart/ all in all is all we are.