boom.

I'm Alive

Indigo

by Ellen Bass

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers
with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,
which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse
of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,
a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed
from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,
saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce
his lobes and his sunglasses testify
to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.
As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.
I want him to have been my child’s father.
I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.
I imagine when this galloping man gets home
he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,
who slept in late, and then he’ll eat
barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone
while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop
wishing my daughter had had a father like that.
I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know
it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.
First there was the war and then just waiting.
And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit
and I airlifted. That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totalled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing—my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.
So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her
onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.
I’ve cried most of my life over that.
And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.
Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me
if I no longer had my mind—
we were on our way into Ross,
shopping for dresses. That’s something
she likes and they all look adorable on her—
she’s the only one
who didn’t hesitate or refuse
or waver or flinch.
As we strode across the parking lot
she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?
That’s what I need to know.

• Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University. Her most recent book is “Like a Beggar.”

Will Have Sex for Chipotle

To the woman who ran her car into my daughter's bicycle in a crosswalk, I say, accidents happen and its okay. I say this to her on my blog because what she did after my daughter was knocked to the ground was not okay. She got out and yelled at my daughter. “She said it was my fault. She yelled that I damaged her car.” Then she got in her car. And left. My daughter is 10 years old. She was alone, bleeding, and her bicycle handlebars were bent so that she couldn’t bike. Accidents happen. Being cold-hearted to child is a choice.

When I arrived by bike a few minutes later, two men from a nearby building were there. One had already brought tools to fix her bike. They were kind and helpful. One of them was wearing a white t-shirt with black letters that said, “Will have sex for Chipotle.”

I decided to get back on the bike and take Iza to computer programming day camp, as planned. Then I returned to the accident scene to thank the men. Those men did a good thing today. To the woman who had an accident and then behaved badly, here I am. If you find me, I am willing to forgive you.

Found List

I found this on Bartok Bela street. A street filled with galleries, coffee shops, and gallery-coffee shops. This is a list of highly ordinary things. Still, its good to make a list. #fundamentals #budapest

Date Night

  

The Babysitter

by Sharon Olds

The baby was about six months old,
a girl. The length of her life, I had not
touched anyone. That night, when they went out
I held the baby along my arm and
put her mouth to my cotton shirt.
I didn’t really know what a person was, I
wanted someone to suck my breast,
I ended up in the locked bathroom,
naked to the waist, holding the baby,
and all she wanted was my glasses, I held her
gently, waiting for her to turn,
like a cherub, and nurse. And she wouldn’t, what she wanted
was my glasses. Suck me, goddamnit, I thought,
I wanted to feel the tug of another
life, I wanted to feel needed, she grabbed for my
glasses and smiled. I put on my bra
and shirt, and tucked her in, and sang to her
for the last time — clearly it
was the week for another line of work —
and turned out the light. Back in the bathroom
I lay on the floor in the dark, bared
my chest against the icy tile,
slipped my hand between my legs and
rode, hard, against the hard floor, my nipples holding me up off the glazed
blue, as if I were flying upside
down under the ceiling of the world.

Delicate

A Blessing

By James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, 

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies 

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows 

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture 

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness  

That we have come. 

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. 

There is no loneliness like theirs.  

At home once more, 

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.  

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, 

For she has walked over to me  

And nuzzled my left hand.  

She is black and white, 

Her mane falls wild on her forehead, 

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear 

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. 

Suddenly I realize 

That if I stepped out of my body I would break 

Into blossom.

Cool Disgust

This paragraph from Matthew Desmond's "Evicted" lingers in my mind:

One day, a friend gave Arleen a cat: a half-black, half-white thing. After Sherrena said they could keep it, Jori named him Little and began feeding him table scraps. Jori laughed when Little would spring at a loose shoelace or gulp down a ramen noodle. Jafaris would pick him up and press his nose against his ear. Both boys especially loved it when Little caught a mouse. He would drag the thing to the middle of the room and smack it around. The mouse would take different routes, trying to figure out what Little wanted. Bat! Bat! The mouse would tumble and roll with every swat. At some point, the pathetic creature would burrow under Little's arm, hiding. Little would let the mouse rest and warm itself. Then he might reach down and grab the creature with his mouth and throw it into the air and, enjoying the effect, do it again and again. Eventually the mouse would just lie there motionless, and Little would look at with with cool disgust, wondering why the creature didn't get back up.

This passage captures the story of eviction in modern America. 

A free cat, neither fully white or black. 

He is little, thus his name. 

The children's delight in his antics. 

The fact that they feed him ramen noodles. 

The fact that the entire scene--the killing of the mouse--was witnessed more than once. 

The cool disgust of the cat. 

Don't we all have an attitude of cool disgust when we go about our business and fail to see or understand the damage we inflict on others?

Situation: ________

I looked down and stepped over this folded up notecard (the kind you use to make notes for a research paper, old school style). When I turned back to investigate, I opened up the folds and found this life-hack map. So useful. Found on Park Street, Brookline. I return it to the universe here.

Small Answers

Under One Small Star

By Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Repeat

May Day

Phillis Levin

I've decided to waste my life again,

Like I used to: get drunk on

The light in the leaves, find a wall 

Against which something can happen, 

Whatever may have happened 

Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing 

The will of an executioner, a crevice 

In which a love note was hidden, 

Be a cell where a struggling tendril 

Utters a few spare syllables at dawn. 

I’ve decided to waste my life 

In a new way, to forget whoever 

Touched a hair on my head, because 

It doesn’t matter what came to pass, 

Only that it passed, because we repeat 

Ourselves, we repeat ourselves. 

I’ve decided to walk a long way 

Out of the way, to allow something 

Dreaded to waken for no good reason, 

Let it go without saying, 

Let it go as it will to the place 

It will go without saying: a wall 

Against which a body was pressed 

For no good reason, other than this.

From May Day by Phillis Levin. Copyright © 2008 by Phillis Levin.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/may-day