Friday Poem: the elephant

Friday #Poem: the elephant

This is another poem I performed at the Toscanini Slam Poetry event last week. This one is much older — I wrote it back in high school for a poetry class, about the playground outside the apartment building where we lived back in Kharkov, Ukraine.

the elephant

There was an elephant, once
in my hometown
small, and silent, but big enough
for me to ride on.

I’d get up on his back,
clunk clunk of…

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Friday Poem: the elephant

This is another poem I performed at the Toscanini Slam Poetry event last week. This one is much older — I wrote it back in high school for a poetry class, about the playground outside the apartment building where we lived back in Kharkov, Ukraine.

the elephant

There was an elephant, once,
       in my hometown
       small, and silent, but big enough
       for me to ride on.

I’d get up on his back,
       clunk clunk of metal,
And with a woosh, cold metal
       on my back, warm sun beats down,
Slide down his trunk
Into my mother’s arms.

The Importance of a Really Good Wallow

One of the first things I do when I want to do something is research it. This usually starts with a simple online search and then moves on to polling friends and social media and reading scholarly articles on the matter. Wallowing in self-pity is no exception

Upon arriving home yesterday evening, I set out to find justification that wallowing was going to be good for me. The Internet did not disappoint. This article, The Importance of a Really Good Wallow by Larisa Noonan, even includes etymological information. Wallowing, it turns out, is something buffalo did to cover themselves with dust so as to prevent insect bites. We humans wallow metaphorically, but Noonan contends that wallowing can serve a similar metaphorical purpose–taking the space to feel things acutely so that the rest of the time we don’t get overwhelmed by the emotions we’re feeling.

Well, if it’s good enough for the buffalo, it’s good enough for me. If you catch me looking morose in the next few weeks, it’s ’cause I’m taking the advice in the linked post to heart. I am going to carve out some time each week to wallow, and I intend not to feel guilty about it. I have permission from the Internet, after all.

Friday Poem: Girl

I performed this poem at Toscanini Slam Poetry 5 at Stony Brook last week.

This is being posted today and not Friday because of a number of things: lack of computer, busyness, and the subject of my next personal blog post: wallowing.
And now, without further ado…

Girl

I know you girl!
Beautiful hair down to your
neck
Beaded and braided as if you’ve got
magic tied up there
biting as wool, shorn
fr…

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Friday Poem: Girl

I performed this poem at Toscanini Slam Poetry 5 at Stony Brook last week.

This is being posted today and not Friday because of a number of things: lack of computer, busyness, and the subject of my next personal blog post: wallowing.
And now, without further ado…

Girl

I know you girl!
Beautiful hair down to your
neck
Beaded and braided as if you’ve got
magic tied up there
biting as wool, shorn
from a black sheep,
you never did go with the flock.
I know you, girl!
long legs bone-thin, ankles sleek,
skin smooth as wood floors,
we know wood floors, girl.

I know you.
I know the way you cock your head, impish
the way you scratch your nose with one finger
when you’re thinking;
I know every freckle you were brazen enough 
to claim meant something.
Girl, I know the music you dance to when no one’s watching
I’ve seen your rhythm change from room to room
as you shed skins
until you whirled about the room 
in just your underwear
and you have bruises everywhere
You wound yourself, you’re so reckless,
I know you, girl.
your narrow eyes, like pinpricks
in a waking limb,
your eyelashes have a sting to them, 
each tear you cry falls double,
double-pronged;
Girl, I seen your fingers dragging,
fluttering,
like doves on wing.
I know each photograph you never took,
the landscapes you never painted,
every fugue you never wrote,
You could have done them all.
Girl, you
your lips shaped bloody around 
teeth, sharp;
I know the shape of every spell you ever whispered, “life”
whispered “life” under blankets,
flashlights shining, like fireflies.
I know you, girl.

Your tongue bells soundless in the silence
you toll nothing
your words fall into wells 
like pebbles, wishes, 
Girl, if you scream, 
it’s world’s end,
it’s bird-flight,
it’s buildings crashing down in fire and smoke.

I know each room that you left empty when you left.
You made my world expand, my walls recede,
Left my halls cavernous, my mansions 
caving in in dust and tears,
my landscape desolate and yet, through all these years,
I have held firm, I’ve learned my strength from you 
We knew each other once, and I think
we still do. 

How To Regain My Awesome

CN: mention of death, feeling like crap, grief, tension

Last week I had the distinct feeling that I had misplaced my awesome. This wasn’t just a case of feeling like dirt–I knew that I had had awesome, but that I’d lost the sense of it. Somehow, all that hope I’d had (even in the midst of my grandmother’s illness and subsequent death) at the start of the year had faded away into a grey blah.

There’s a bunch of things I know can help me; for instance, I’ve got an intake coming up at a local health center, after which I’ll have access to both physical and mental healthcare. But what do I do to stay afloat until that day?

I got a massage the other day and spent nearly the whole time thinking, “I haven’t allowed myself to relax like this since my grandfather died” (a year ago, for those keeping track), but even then I wasn’t truly relaxed, because I could tell that there was all sorts of grief and fear that needed releasing, preferably in a proper weeping session. Then, talking it out with a friend, I realized that the reason I couldn’t allow myself to relax and release was that I was afraid that if I let go, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself back together in time to get done all that needs doing.

And there is so much that needs doing.

But, see, that’s the trap. I think, Oh, I’ll take the time to release all my pain and grief once I’ve finished [clearing out my parents’ living room, stopped job hunting, etc.], not realizing that there will always be more to do. I need to create the time and space for myself to feel everything so I can suck the power out of it. Nobody will make that space for me–I’ve got to do it myself.

So here’s the reminder, how to regain my awesome:

I will be kind to myself, give myself the time to feel what I need to feel, and take my time doing the things I need to do. Trying to force any of this will just break more things and require more time. The awesome is in there somewhere under all the clutter and sad; all I need to do is give it space to grow.

Friday Poem: to the Friends of Captain Awkward forum

The white hot dance of electricity — an infinity of
                    stories we take turns narrating.
We are all experts of our own experience.

                   Now, how can I be lonely
when the oceans are bridged
                   as if by magic,
and I, in New York, can lean on you, in Bath.

This poem is a tribute to the truly wonderful community that is the Friends of Captain Awkward forum

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Friday Poem: to the Friends of Captain Awkward forum

The white hot dance of electricity — an infinity of
                    stories we take turns narrating.
We are all experts of our own experience.

                   Now, how can I be lonely
when the oceans are bridged
                   as if by magic,
and I, in New York, can lean on you, in Bath.

This poem is a tribute to the truly wonderful community that is the Friends of Captain Awkward forum, which I highly recommend visiting. The Captain Awkward in question is a phenomenal advice blogger. The blog and the community are two of the three things I credit with making me a better person today than I otherwise would have been. The third, by the way, is my beloved frubble Mischa.

Grief

CN: death, grief, mental illness, aging

In my last post, I mentioned that my grandmother was ill. I came home at the end of December, in part because I wanted to be closer to her and to be able to help her and my parents out.

Well, as you can guess by the title of this post, the illness ended with the inevitable. On January 19th, 2015 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) at 10:10 AM, my grandmother passed away. It was hard losing her. I was on my way to a volunteer opportunity with Repair The World and had to turn around when my mom called me. And as we sat shiva in the day since the funeral, I kept thinking that I was never as close to my grandma as my sisters were, didn’t have deep heart-to-heart conversations with her like they did. I regret that missed opportunity; I long for it.

And I’m angry, too. I’m angry that in her last weeks, my grandma wasn’t entirely present; that whatever mental illness had her in its grip led her to lose touch with reality and with us.

Here’s what I said at the funeral:

Mental illness is a liar and a thief. It stole Babushka Zoya from us in drips and drabs, led her to doubt her worth and even her own humanity — she, one of the brightest and most vibrant women I’ve ever known.Zoya was brilliant—well-versed in all the arts and a polyglot. Even toward the end when her mind was going, her ramblings took the form of poetry recitations and metaphysical discourse. As impressive as that was, I’d rather remember her well and happy and interested in life and all it has to offer. I don’t want to remember those last few weeks when she was struggling, I want to remember the woman who took me to kindergarten and school and Western Canada and Alaska, who pointed out goats on the mountainside as we soaked in the hot springs near the Banff Glacier, who wrote perfect poems for every occasion, a skill which I, sadly, lack, although I too am a poet.

I want to share with you something I read in Greta Christina’s book of essays Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God:

“Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole — history, the present, the future — the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you’ve passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive — that doesn’t make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn’t make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn’t make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn’t entirely inaccurate. It’s true: the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it’s no less important, either.”

If our life is measured by those we affect, then though Babushka shrunk well below five feet as she aged, she was a giant. And the Babushka-sized hole in our lives now is a giant one as well

As I write this, we are working to empty her apartment—we have to have it vacated within 14 days after the day of death. By the time you read this, we will have completed the task and her things will have been dispersed among family, neighbours, strangers, and friends. My parents and I are keeping the photos and knick-knacks, the fold-out couch on which I’ve spent many a night, and many of the books.

As time passes, as I go to therapy to process my grief, I’m sure I’ll get a better handle on things, but right now, all I’ve got is that it’s dreadfully unfair. I’ve lost three grandparents in the past thirteen months. There’s only so much death anyone can handle.

This blog post won’t have a pat ending. I don’t think there’s anything pat about times like this.

Friday Poem: “I can wish it otherwise, but I am learning.”

Friday #Poem: “I can wish it otherwise, but I am learning.”

poem from NaPoWriMo2014 that remains appropriate to this day

There is a limit to how much I’m able
               and willing to handle
I am not the immortal bamboo
               or the cockroach
My body is not tireless
               my feet can grow heavy
My brain can ache with the weight
               of a thousand decisions.
I can wish it otherwise but I am learning

To stride, bold, until I…

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