A few pleasures from this year

1) The poetry of Dean Young
 Here's an excerpt from a recent poem by Young. You can read the whole piece on the Poetry Foundation website.


Human Lot
by Dean Young

I’m amazed we haven’t crawled off by now.

Later we could go back and cross things out,

that way we wouldn’t know where we came from,

the shapes we asked to be bent into.

Sinatra’d be okay again,

mother the same distal approximation,

the sea still trying to spit it out.

Sometimes your sleep is different than mine.

I can’t catch up.

I don’t know—there are voices tangled outside.

Wind wants to make me correct something,

the refrigerator says something needs to be pushed

further from the sun.

 

2) The poetry of Bob Hicok

 Here are a few spots to check that out: Scythe and Diode 

 

3) The music of Brandi Carlile

She's not new but she's new to me. Her album "The Story," well let's just say I've looped that so 

much my hair should be able to play the guitar tracks on their own. 

 

4) The movie Zombieland because some days require nothing less than a fresh ankle

 

5) Friends and family who put up with my whimsy

 

 Happy Holidays and a Wonderful New Year to all!

Scolded by a Buddhist

Has it happened to you? I can assure you it is not pretty - especially when the Buddhist is your own fourteen year old son. This child who needed to lie on my body for the first three years of his life and lies on me still though he has passed me in height, is the most compassionate and patient and indiscriminately loving person I know. But he threw down the gauntlet this weekend (is that really only a glove? If I was going to throw down a gauntlet, I'd like it to be something that made noise when it hit the floor).

You are not home enough mom!, he insisted, tears in his eyes and everything.

Hey, no fair, is what I was thinking. Come to the coffee shop with me, is what I said.

So he and I and my nineteen year old daughter (who apparently also thought hanging out with Mom for a while might be a decent way to pass the time) headed out to the coffee shop and spent the middle of the day reading and typing (we took turns on my computer) and chatting about things like how anyone could possibly love a hairless cat.

At one point, a 30ish mother and her three young children sat near us. All four were clearly enjoying each other's company. Past days came rushing back, days when toddler hands searched for my legs and face, when eight and ten year olds ran up the stairs to tell me how their day was at school. And I thought how lucky I am that my children still want to sit at a table with me even if all we do is read our separate books and occasionally wonder how Victoria Beckham can walk in those shoes.

No writing got done, of course. There's always today for that.

There will be swearing (post formerly titled "Trying something new")

I might as well just dive right in to what I'm thinking about today. No Hellos. No lame justification for why you may or may not be interested in reading this blog.

I'm a writer of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and any other random crap I need to write at the moment. (There will be swearing in this blog - in fact maybe this blog should be titled: Mother of five, trying to carve out space for herself, there will be swearing. No, I'll just change the title of today's post). So that's the second thing - I'm a mother of five children who currently range in age from 14 to 23. (Who's idea was that anyway? - shit, that's right, I think it was my idea - there's that swearing again).

So I haven't figured out exactly what I'm going to do with this blog but I think it's going to be a random mixing of my thoughts on writing, publishing, motherhood, where to drop my teenagers off so they can't find their way home, and whatever else is caught up in my spin and burn.

Well, - I guess I provided a lame justification for reading this blog after all.

Enjoy or not as you will. I'll be back in the next day or two.

-KMA