She falls, cuts her knee, and sits there crying.
BEAR growl hibernate prowl tumble forage
AUTO FACTORY produce stamp mechanize assemble
TEACHER lecture bend inspire pause puzzle
HOCKEY slide crash score crack check snowplow
COBBLER sew patch measure mend revive polish
BUS DRIVER veer steer advise ignore wait brake
SPACE TRAVEL orbit signal capture float eject
FARMS sow harvest broadcast irrigate fertilize feed
STREETLIGHTS click change sway warn urge
CHILDBIRTH grunt grit bear howl count sob
TREES seed flower leaf reach shade house drink
CELL divide mutate form die attack congregate
OCEAN swell crest drown recede cool bash
HAIR snarl slip tangle curl droop spring bristle
STREETFIGHT slam split bleed bruise sneer resist
PRINTER ink roll letter align center correct
COW low ruminate gaze chew calve kneel
BUTCHER rend slice weigh package rip cleave
She tumbles and rips her knee on the bristling sidewalk. The blood captures her, and she droops there, lowing at the sky.
Tag: writing
6. Things I Can Manage: This
Even if he nudges at every edge,
carrying his dinner to the counter to eat
alone, back turned,
before coming over to wreck the card game you’ve set up
then filling up a squirt gun you didn’t even know he owned
just so he can get you in the face
and grinning
as he says he’d like to kill you
for real
so he could get all your money
to buy himself an Xbox
Even it’s 9:54 pm and the bed contains
sketch paper, markers, silly putty, pokemon cards, library books,
and a kid not anywhere close to sleep
Even if you know the student
you dismissed from university today
and the other one with the conduct hearing tomorrow
are having much worse nights than you
Even if the dog keeps knocking her bone
under the couch and digging
at a bamboo floor
that might be the sole selling point
of this, the lone asset in an estate
from which he’d be lucky
to wring an Xbox
Even if you know the bone
is just a surrogate for the play
or walk she really needs
and your back creaks and your stomach churns
and you haven’t finished the letter to your grandmother
you started last week or called
to thank your girlfriend,
lover, or any of the circle
of angels who’ve kept you
off the cliff
for a decade
or two
Even if you don’t have one ounce
of energy left
You draw
a drop
from somewhere
Even if
thin air
and write
This:
Tonight, the sickle cuts a cool, slender tear
in the bruised night.
Later,
the boy in the back seat says
“I can see the full moon.”
This is the first time
in months
you know
what the sky holds.
The first time
you’ve remembered
to look.
“Isn’t it a crescent?” You ask.
His face fogs the glass.
“I can see the whole dark thing.”
You tell him the earth
casts shadows. “A little sun gets past,” you say.
It always does.
Even if we imagine ourselves so big.
Even if we forget to look up.
3. Things I Can Catch and Release: The Censor Speaks
The Rules:
- Avoid “I”
- Stick with a person
- Rephrase any instance of “no” or “not”
- When it doubt, verb
- Who inverts the passive
- Actions float; feelings sink
- Dice
- Describe in detail
- Enough description — get on with it
- Develop a character
- Develop a plot
- Make a point
- Points are red herrings
- Get over yourself
- Cliches are dead weight
- Is that sentimentality? Seriously?
- Carry a theme
- Release your grip
- Use all the senses
- Get back to the action
- Look up
- Exploit conflict
- Contrived conflict fails
- Contrived anything fails
- Just make it up
- But make meaning
- And make it seem accidental
- Smile. This is fun.
- Keep your hand moving
- Generate volume
- Polish gems
- Murder your darlings
- Perfection is death (also, the reverse)
- Express what moves you
- You don’t matter
- Learn something
- Teach something
- Get a grip
- Walk away
- Stay
- Wrap it up in a pretty ribbon
- Everyone can see coming
Work like Play
Write story code treaty bar
of song, draw a map
a portrait a bow
over string. Run marathon machine
mediation regression, build wells walls
a body of work
trust. Make art a living your own
bread
believe.
Change games,
Same rules: Work
like play.
Don’t stop
When it’s dark.
No Shortcuts
I write to discover what I know. – Flannery O’Connor
It took four weeks of reading, twelve pages of notes, and two hours of tinkering to compose this thesis for my next article:
“Although most doctoral students have written enough A+ papers to think they know (or believe they should know) how to do it, most are not equipped for the kind of writing required for dissertations and publications. The most significant obstacle to developing these skills is the misconception that writing is a utilitarian task separate from the essential work of research. As a process not of transmitting ideas but of making them, writing is research. Training to be a scholar means becoming a student of writing.”
Signs of Spring
He shoots hoops while I sit on a bench bent over my journal. Evening sun streaks across the blacktop. “Hey Mom, catch!” He fake pumps the ball at me and laughs before really tossing it up in a high arc. I pluck it from the sky and dribble it down the path towards the car.
“Can I write in your journal?” he asks.
“Sure.” I hand it over. He flips past page after page, not a stitch of notice snagging on the thickets and knots penned during a cramped daily metro commute. He finds a blank space, plops into his seat and starts writing. His grip on the pen is both loose and sure. We are only blocks from the house which is just far enough for my boy to fall into flight.
Riding some current that’s his alone, Bug ignores my bustle and opts to stay in the car long after we’ve parked. Continue reading “Signs of Spring”
Cut a Rug
The moment on the living room floor. Scratched record, skipping back again. Recollection as perseveration. The sweet cling of liquor breath. Neck. Night. The dim light, a carpet brown or beige or bare depending. Each time the thousandth time.
A cue I did not catch the first time around.
Cut.
I stand and walk from that place.
Over and over.
In lucid dreams, you cut.
Chop off the climax. Slice open an exit. Saw a hole through rooftop, treetop, pillowtop, sky. You reach up with your hands and trace the shape of yourself wherever they land. You open a manhole from the bottom up.
Out you go.
And this is where things get interesting.
Because that place where you step? Where you land up there? That has not been designed yet. The production crew hasn’t made it to the second story.
Cut.
You are writer, designer, main character, and director. You decide, crack boom, with a flick of your chin, the next act. To spin up through the rings of Saturn, to brush your belly over a tropical canopy, to alight on a garden pillar in Babylon. You can tumble-stomp your way up the marble stairs and swan-dive into a dragon’s lair. This is your place. Your riches. Your loving arms.
Your script.
One tilt of the glass. One stroke. One cut.
It took me 30 years to trip into it. Another 10 to realize I could use it for more than grasping at innocence.
You know.
The hush of the cradle before the first time your father failed to come home, your mother told you too much, your friend laughed and left you stuck in the gears of your bike, you laughed and left your friend crying for help. Before you knew how sharp the teeth of the moon. Before you knew that your name did not fill the sails or patch the leaks.
When you were held. When only falling and fire showed the dropped stitches in your untested faith.
That is the place I learned to revisit. The place before the living room floor.
Do you know this before?
When you finally find the capacity to color your own imagined set, this is what you do. You lean back. Back into a grownup simulacrum of infant security. Wealth and luxury. Feet up, rolling open, feathered cloud. Because the mind longs for rest. The body aches for comfort.
At last, to stop having to consider the threats? Someone else will assess the dangers. There are no predators. No failures. No lives at stake.
It feels like peace. The truest gift you can give yourself. Pure, full, trusting quiet. Not sleep. No. Rest. Within your skin, your here-and-now, your wakefulness. That wakefulness no longer vigilance. Whether the place is one of being embraced by complete and utter adoration, or one of total silent solitude, in any event, the desire is deep-down the same.
And maybe, like me, you stop there.
The outer limit of imagination is a few thousand iterations of rest?
Still. And always. The power courses down beneath. Untapped. Barely even poking one toe up through the soil (or down through the roof, as it happens) and roots that trail down from above may look like spiderwebs, veins, the simple ductwork of oxygen, the delineation of your quarters. Of your chosen universe. But they are only the finest tendriled extremities of something so much larger growing outside your line of sight.
This is what happens:
When you decide rest is not an objective or a measure of wealth, and you decide at last, Oh, I choreograph the dance unfolding now. I choose the color of everything around me, the everything of everything around me, then you really begin.
When you have the guts to admit that there is more than returning to before,
more than getting up again and again from the place where the world forced itself on you and broke open the egg in which you could never have stayed anyway
and with intention alone
squeeze onto the wall ceiling floor you face
the ambergris and ochre and butter and blood
then hone your blade with floss and schist
and begin to score the scene
of what is here
and how you might proceed.
Cut.
Called Into Friend
You’re getting stronger every day
I write to her
name on a faceless band
of light. We are far
from separate selves, warp and weft of crossing
need, proximity, and cut from the same
tongue. Language mediates thought
they say
(and also must think)
language makes real
whatever we choose together
is enough
for truth. We discern
and determine
in the very same breath. So thankful
for you
she writes back. It could have been
never this. I could have picked
another answer in the classroom
where she came with the cracked
arc of her story. I could have picked
up the phone tonight and heard her
make me real
which I am not
certain is the case. The haze
at the fringes of iced dark
cuts like blades. It is winter
but only if we choose to call
together these waves and absences,
the frayed seams of our orbit,
and bind them into a word
like season. She and I are one
and the same
in a single blink, single
mothers now
there’s a term that weaves truth
right into its opposite. She calls me
love. I say she is a gift. We spin
the woolen clouds
of our yearning into letters and tie
the ends into sailor’s knots, good
nights, we make good
on promises we’ve finally begun
to warm and turn
into us.
This Home Here
Story
In the back seat of the car, my son flips through the pages of Dolphin Tale. Bug fell in love with the story of Winter and her prosthetic tale when the movie premiered. His obsession has reached a fever pitch since I announced we’d be taking him to Clearwater, Florida the day after school ends.
“Do you know who lives there?” I asked.
He thought for a moment.
“Do you want a clue?”
A nod.
“It’s not a person but it is a living thing.”
His eyes widened, a light flashed inside his skin, and he fell over backward on the rug. Lying there with his arms spread wide and his whole face beaming, he cried, “The dolphin!”
Now, he follows the story. From the back, I hear him slowly piecing the words together. “Sawyer was worried that Winter might not make it back.” These are word bubbles popping along a graphic version of the story. And that is my son, reading to himself.
Did you catch that? My son. Reading. To himself.
When I ask what is happening in the book, he does not respond. In the rearview mirror, I watch his gaze dances over the page. He is bent to the work. His focus is absolute.
—
Sport
When I pick him up at Chicken School, Bug is playing Uno with his buddies. “Ready for basketball, kiddo? Or do you want to finish the game?”
He has two cards remaining in his hand and is inches away from victory. Nevertheless, he tosses them onto the discard pile and hops to his feet. “I’m done. Let’s go.” He gives his best friend a pat on the head and tells him he won by forfeit. Then he races out the door.
The red barn has two hoops bolted to the side at two heights. We slip-jog down the hill to the woods to schlep up a trio of lost balls. On the concrete, Bug squats and leaps, sinking one basket after another. Airborne and streaked with sweat, he stands as far back as he can and hurls the ball with all he’s got. Pow. It’s in. Again, again. He walks up close, darts to the side, heads to the edge. Every angle. Low basket, high basket, sometimes just bouncing the ball off the rust-red clapboards to see how close to the pitched roof he can get it.
He does not say “look at me.” He does not even ask me to play, though I do anyway, moving all around him. He barely registers my presence. He races after the ball, brings it back, mutters a sharp “Yes” to no one when he makes a perfect swish.
—
Journey
Once home, Bug says he want to walk the dog with me. I grab her leash and we run run run down the cul-de-sac to the green corridor between houses. Grandma is putting the finishing touches on dinner but we are sure to be late. We bound into the fern-shagged carpet of the woods. Dry leaves up to our shins, mud in the creek.
The dog takes off up the hill and Bug leaps down into the ravine. “Do what I do,” he says. And so I scoot under brambles almost my belly even though going over would be so much easier. One after the other, we scale the eroding creek-bed wall, slip on the exposed vine, cross the creek on the fallen tree, back again, then shimmy down the tumbling rocks. Bug ducks and darts and clambers ahead, whistling back the pooch and making sure I don’t cheat. “You can’t just go over, you have to step on it,” he tells me. I double back and do it right. He sees a frog and shrieks with delight.
Up ahead, the dog grabs a mouthful of something white. She skitters away but we chase her down back towards home. She eyes me warily as I pry the bone from her jaws.
“Can you see what it is?”
“A head,” Bug says.
“Huh. I can see why you think that. But look here. You see that hole going down through the middle? And the wings?” I turn and lift my shirt from behind, bending so he can see my spine.
“Oh! It’s a backbone!”
“A vertebra.” I touch one of mine. “They’d be in a string like this, all down the back. Probably a deer?” Below his blue t-shirt, I press my fingers into his ridged line. “It protects the spinal cord that carries all the messages from the brain to the rest of the body.”
The dog is panting and watching my every move. I return her prize and Bug picks up a walking staff twice his height. He uses it to fly between stumps. He calls it a broom. He chases down an invisible golden snitch.
—
Art
I finish the last verse of “Big Rock Candy Mountain” as Bug finally puts down his legos and crawls over me into the bed. He props himself up against the turquoise fleece cushion and picks up his pen and clipboard. I sing my way through “Baby Beluga.” He has a calculator now. He puts 10 tiny tick marks into 15 small triangles, does a quick calculation and announces, “A hundred fifty people.” He pulls the page off, lets it fall, and starts on the next.
I wend my way through the deep blue sea and Bug make an arc in fine blue ink. A box. Tiny wheels, a platform (which he spells out carefully) and trucks along the edges. His feet press into my side, squirrel under my back, find their cave. His eyes do not leave the page. With the morning sun, another day’s begun, you’ll soon be waking. . .
The song comes to its dozy close. Bug does not register anything different in the world outside of his design. He continues to add tidy, miniscule circles around the edges of the machine. “How does it work?” I ask.
Nothing.
“What are those boxes for?”
A pause. He rubs his nose. “People.” That’s all I get. Pen back on the page. His gaze is steady, tracing the leading edge of the ink.
Immersed, he has no need for conversation. He belongs exactly there inside his unfolding creation. Nested with his mama in a bed that works just fine, he is free to cross into the sanctuary of his imagination. His expression is both zeroed in and a million miles away. He’s found the sweet spot. He’s in the flow.
—
Dwelling
As I watch my little boy inhabit that generative wrinkle between ticks of the clock, I see how we live there together but in complete singularity. I cross that same threshold when dance fills me to soaring, when paper covers rock and its ink hushes the world. I know the place because it is where I walk under stars when my skin slips free and all I ever was and will be is night.
Story. Sport. Journey. Art.
Friend.
Song.
Clan.
We erect these places by the simple act of returning to them again, again, and shoring them up with whatever we dig from our pockets. When we come up empty-handed, we bend and scoop up fistfuls of breath. Of soil. Of our own flesh. Pack them into the cracks. Fortify our belonging.
We sing them open and fix our mezuzah on the door. We map their coordinates upon our names.
Here am I. Here are you.
We dwell in this Here we’ve chosen.
This here.
This, our home.
Love Lettering
Who will receive this next
ink ribbon folded back on itself, tucking
the pulp heart of the matter
into its own layered belly like an origami crane?
As if for peace
offerings and platonic love, I write to him
(or is it you?) yet contemporaries of Plato knew
that Mercury conceived the alphabet
from the sight of those wings V-cutting the sky
and words are nothing more than traces of hollow
bone and feathered vein, the page
a leaf stirred to flight.
Pen nib, beak, and paper’s razor edge.
Perhaps it takes on a power of its own, this letting
into letters a promise I fancy
a vial drawn from Delphi and ferried
in talon to brush his trembling lips
(or yours)
with prophecy,
with Us.
Alas.
When he (or you) unfurl the knot
of scratchings here, neither gods
nor philosophers tumble out,
no. Not even a waterbird
for all this trouble. Just abracadabra and alaka-zam,
a spatter of angles and curlicues casting
untested home-cooked spells.
This tattered plea calls not on him
but you,
(yes, you)
to fold back the edges, to smooth open
the wrinkled sheet. I beg
your mercy. Use your hands. Clear a place. Let divination
spread itself
across the waiting acre
of us.
Shannon E. Williams 