I am finally reading Fanny Howe. Selected Poems. And she's kicking my ass, in a good way. After a particularly restless wrestle, I awoke with this in my head.


Think
I'm in love
with the poems
or is it lust?
certainly
we'll meet
and secret talk
of god
afterwhich
I'll pick words
from my teeth
like lettuce
apostrophes
a lumpy mess
of my throat.

Later, they'll turn
on me
the poems
I mean
grown tired of
my careful attention
to their every
word.

I'll pray
for a return
to before
alone
and preying
always praying
any way
but
any
way
that I can love
them
loving me.

The Long Way Home

I'm a Buffy fan. Not a rabid Buffy fan, ya know, eat, drink, watch, read, post, make out with photo of Joss Whedon, rinse, repeat. But the kind who has watched every, single bloody episode at least once. The kind who searches out other Buffy fans, if not lazily, and talks about hot vampires and cool chicks over a cup of coffee, high school cafeteria lunch, or a piece of Thanksgiving pie expertly crafted by none other than Donnie who taught a college course devoted to the genre, clips from Buffy gracing, gracefully, the screens of his classroom.

I don't own the music, but I'd enjoy a copy of 'Once More, with Feeling' if someone burned it for me.

Having set forth that I'm not a rabid fan, it is with rabid-fan-like enthusiasm that I tell the internet how happy I am that season eight, as envisioned by JW, is here in comic book form. Buffy lives on. And on and on and on. There are slayers. And clones of slayers. Evil comic book universe characters that I think I'll love to hate. And there's something so seductive about it all. It's an escape that seems to exist even after I've shut the book, somehow unlike pushing the switch on a television. I find myself thinking about little details like hovering feet and a woman's face. I can go back to the book, with ease, flip to a page, call a friend. Wonder aloud, wonder to myself, this universe a salve, if briefly, for cold March winds and desires to drive, fly, run to warmer weathers.

Family Portrait

If I Should Fall From Grace with God

It seems lucky that on my walk to the bar last night I encountered two darkly clad men, Mormon missionaries doing what Mormon missionaries do at nearly 9 o'clock in a bar-filled town such as Gloucester. It seems, also, that they recognized me from a previous encounter, the one a few weeks ago during which they came to my house and after trying to save me asked if there was anything that they could do. "Like, you know, some manual labor." "I'll show you womanual labor," I said as I pulled them, neckties wrapped round my breasts, into my devilish lair. Well maybe it didn't go exactly like this, but I'm not a tell all kind of girl, so use imagination accordingly, or sparingly, or however.

It's not that I wished to fall from grace with God. People often ask me when and how and why it happened. And though I've looked for a defining moment, there isn't one. Instead, a thousand little moments of question and doubt and wondering add up to choosing not to belong to this religion, its lifestyle, its language, the near equivalent of severing a limb, phantom pains lasting a lifetime as the brain reminds the body of what used to be. As I grow less and less fluent in their language, I hear my voice trying to say it how they want to hear it. But the words don't come this way anymore. And there is awkward silence or nervousness at the other end.

Recently and a little ironically my brother tried to convince me to repair the rift that may or may not exist between my parents, my siblings, and me. "They're trying," he said. And I don't doubt that they are. They're always trying. In ways that I can no longer pretend to understand. I don't understand because I'm not trying not to fall. I am at the bottom looking up. It has taken years, the falling. And for me, this falling, the only way out. I want them to understand that it is my fall that has saved me.

from If I Should Fall From Grace with God
Shane MacGowan/Stiff Music Ltd

If I should fall from grace with god
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me

Let me go boys
Let me go boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

More than a Feeling

I have some fond memories of the band called Boston. For one, smooching (yes smooching) this kid Alan in the back of his parents' station wagon while "More than a Feeling" rumbled through the tape deck and out of the speakers and onto my mohair sweater. Then later, slow, but not dirty, dancing to "Amanda" in the stinky, sweaty high school gym after a few too many clandestinely consumed wine coolers of the citrus variety.

I also have a few recent memories of this band, replace tape deck with CD player, replace Alan's back seat with KT's back seat, sandwiched between two child restraint devices while the real life Amanda listened from the front seat and KT played DJ, loud the only way to listen to Boston. There may not have been kissing involved, but that night, sitting in my driveway, speakers rumbling, doors locked to prevent the escape of the passengers, I could feel the love. Love for a band. Love for a time gone by. Love for a feeling. And I get it. I get why the band's official website was taken down and replaced with the statement: "We just lost the nicest guy in rock 'n' roll." I get why fans everywhere are sad. It's a loss. And it's sad.

A's photos of our housebound afternoon

In

Temperature reads cold and windy and I'm wearing orange to make things warm. Seems there isn't an alternative. Two sick kids, one sleeping and not sick. Been in the house for two days without leaving. Think that's called housebound in some parts. Aidan and I entertain ourselves with mirrors and sunflowers and crayons and light. Lucky for the light, if you can call it luck. Lucky for love, if you can call it love. March brings emptiness, usually, and sickness. When the lion creeps in, quick and quiet like, I try to fill up. With baking and telephone, with Margaret Atwood in interview form, the way I like her, a baby to breast, loud words through the walls. Chocolate. I fill and fill. I feel until I'm full, emptiness growing smaller, a receding eye, a waning moon, a single pin prick.