Why I am Who I am

Why I am Who I am

1. Ramen Noodles, Woody, grandma's nursing home, Papa's handkerchief, fat lip, ants, oldsmobile, Blue Moon, dolphin necklace, Deja Vu, Shooters, flat tire, hot dogs, dad's baseball cap, clarinet, porcelain dolls, whistle pops.

2. My husband's hands, rough and calloused from work- so hard they sting sometimes when running across my skin. they have permanent dirt caked into the deep crevices and are covered in smooth patches from scars and pink burns.

3. The smell of my great grandmother. It's soft and flowery, something like a white oleander. Sometimes I can smell it in a candle, softly sweet and somewhat dull in the way it tugs at my memory.

4. "Someone's at the door." "It's Ian."

Cellar (What is A Word Worth)

I can still remember the way it smells. That dingy old cellar full of watermarks that track the floor and dust that sparkles like glitter when the wooden doors are swung open on their hinges. The smell of my grandma’s laundry. And freshly sawed wood from my grandpa’s workshop, a tiny and narrow room shoved into the backmost of the cellar. The larger, sprawling and open room covered carefully with a rug and decorated with toys for my brother and me. Who wants to play in a musty old cellar? Well, we had fun anyways.

Root cellars are used to store vegetables. Potatoes, beets, onions. You know, before we had modern things like refrigerators and freezers and heating and cooling systems in our homes. Probably used more now to store wine. Ours wasn’t like that though, not for jams and cream or old bottles of merlot. It was a little hole dug into the ground, sure, and maybe it was used for those practical things once upon a time- before the town was settled and no one had indoor plumbing. But ours was a homey hole in the ground, and it felt unique if only to us.

I’m pretty sure a good number of houses in my old hometown had cellars. I mean, it’s an old Iowa town and some of the cracks on Main Street are older than me. An old, historical, settled-in-pioneer-days town like that is full of houses centuries old. I never saw any other homes with a cellar, though. And it was a small town, so rest assured that I’ve seen at least one quarter of the houses there. All lacking a cellar.

The phrase cellar door is supposedly one of the most beautiful phrases in the English language. There’s a certain beauty in it; in the way it rolls off your tongue. I wonder if all of those people, those poets and authors and journalists, who find beauty in such a common word have ever seen a cellar door? If they’ve ever played in a cellar while their grandma hummed in the next room, folding laundry. If they ever snuck around in the dark down there and watched the way tiny cracks of light would crawl through the old door barring it shut.

When I was younger we didn’t often use the cellar door as entry, but I remember that they were old and rotted and sitting on a slab of dirty grey concrete. There was something beautiful in that yet, too, and when my grandpa replaced the squeaking and filthy doors with bright new pine it was ugly. There’s no need to replace things that are already beautiful in the way that they’ve seen the world. Maybe not so aesthetically pleasing, but who needs that? Something that has seen things, and speaks about them in that inanimate way that objects do- in how their paint is chipped and flaking and there’s an initial carved into the underside that no one could decipher. That’s what beauty is.

Dock, Revised (Chapter 6)

He called me, fire dancing just behind his words.

A tangled-up love pulling his strings

And a brimming desperation to him

That echoed through me.

How could I say no?

We met at the muddy side of a dock,

The waters beneath it shimmering quietly.

Night filled it with muted colors,

But was unable to quell the noise of creaking boards under our feet.

Wild gestures painted smoke,

Slowly spiraling from the tip of a grape flavored cigar.

My eyes transfixed at the gap of rough, thick fingers.

Wide and strong and kind.

And then my world tilted,

Focused solely on his earthy smile

On his open, earnest face

On his hands, shoulders, jaw-line.

And then it straightened again-

Pulled forward, stuttering, and crashing to a halt

In his eyes filled up with pain

For someone else.

Chapter 21

I remember memories of my past in brief seconds-

Fleeting like the grand flash of a firework

And I watch them trickle away just the same.

I remember my papa asking me to help him plant his garden

He made a perfect little hole in the ground

And I filled it up with seeds, covered it with dirt.

It stops.

I remember Elaine and me; barefoot in my grandmas kitchen

Flipping pancakes with a metal spatula

And halfway through belting out Sweet Caroline

It stops.

I remember watching documentaries with my dad at night

Stupid things about snakes and Noah’s ark

And when they’re explaining about poisonus fangs

It stops.

I remember my roommates yelling at me for something

Their faces stern and accusing

And just when I open my mouth to respond

It stops.

I remember getting drunk with Gunnar in our apartment

His friend with a fake ID providing

And when I go to give him a liquor-laced kiss

It stops.

I remember Water St., Egret Ct., Pine St., Sunset Tr., Tripp St.

My grandparents, parents, friends and husband

Each place filled with those brief, flashing moments.

Playground (Poetry Patrol)

The sound of muck

Sticking to my boots as I back-track my way through a wood-covered path.

Decaying trees breaking at the trunk block my way

I clamber over delicately; land in the clearing of a park.

It’s still and unconscious and caged between an-

Out of practice-

Baseball diamond, and a frozen lake.

Ice is caked up the sides of it’s fragile dock and

Cracking electricity through the quiet chill.

A decade since I’ve stood here,

Cold sinking sharply into my skin-

Like the edge of a chilled metal can,

The monkey bars don’t like it either;

I can hear their sticky plastic casing squeak in protest

As I reach out to them.

Papa(Chapter 11)

Papa

My smile is wide and innocent,

Focused on my nana behind the camera,

And covered in sticky red sugar.

A popsicle is situated in my left hand

My right resting on my papa’s knee

As he smiles at the top of my head.

His grey sweatshirt is covered in dark paint stains

And so are my hands,

But not my bright pink watermelon jacket.

Together we painted the deck we were now relaxing on,

Red juices running down my chin

And plopping softly on the pavement.

My nana fussed around afterward,

Making sure to wipe my face,

To keep me as clean as possible-

An odd reflex I had learned to accept-

And when she walked away

To grab a new washcloth

Papa leaned down to me and

Grabbed one of my tiny hands

In his large, work-hardened ones.

“You done good.”

I smiled a red-stained smile

That dissolved quickly

When I saw my mom’s car.

I always spent Friday nights away from home.

“Not tonight.”

Was all she said, her words cropped and short,

And dragged me away

As papa called good-bye,

Trying not to expose his sadness.

I don’t know when I finally realized

Or maybe I always knew, inherently,

That my grandparents were always better parents.

Shore Cove (Chapter 14:A Short Magic-Landscape Poem)

When the sun awakens-

Like breaking an egg over a dark skillet-

The thick taste of yellow,

In the back of my throat.

Living on the edge of nirvana-

That resonates with the clarity

Of glass waters,

That break with their waves,

Over vacant shores-

There is a cave carved consciously

Into the jagged cliffs

That sings our memories to the sea.

Velma (Chapter ten: Apocryphilia)

“Jenkies!”

Someone cackled from the other end of the seedy bar.

She huffed, ran her fingers through her thick auburn hair,

Not moving her eyes from the man two seats down.

His face pale and eyes shifty

As he sipped on water with a lemon perched on the rim.

An odd thing to drink at a bar, she couldn’t help but notice-

Her days of solving mysteries had at least left her with a sharp intuition

And a burning desire for chaos

She only found at the tip of a cigarette these days.

He stood up and she slammed back her Crown,

Followed him with practiced ease,

Her eyes trained on his glowing skin sliding through the front door.

Through thick, wired rims she watched him

As he pulled out a strange device-

Probably calling his home planet-

He spoke with someone briefly, in a tongue she couldn’t place,

Then stepped into a cab.

She sighed with her whole body

And trudged home to feed the big, brown dog.

No one would believe her neighbor was a Martian,

They never believed her in the day,
And really, what had changed?

Patchwork Man (Chapter nine: The Dream Metaphor)

My mother would pull up my covers,

Kiss my cheek, and flip the tape

In my cassette player,

Turn off the light.

The soft music would play next to my head-

Ariel and Belle- singing me to sleep.

In my dreams

I would wake

In my bed.

A figure with dark eyes

And red hair

Made of twine thread-

Like a fearsome Raggedy Andy-

Perched on the edge.

Sitting on the blanket

My mother made me.

His body of patches

Stitched crudely,

Little red hearts

On white cloth

And yellow stars

Sown into blue.

His mouth would open,

A garish rip,

And he’d whisper

The sweet

Childish lyrics.

I would clench my blanket

My mother made me

Around my neck

And the patchwork man

Kept singing.

I would close my eyes

Will him away.

Patch by patch

He would disappear.

My mother

Would run to my room

And I would

Close

My

Eyes
And she would disappear.