Blog : Beautiful-Things
On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
| June 27, 2022 I think of John Ogonowski, leaving his farm at dawn in his green Chevy pickup . John flew cargo planes in Vietnam, knew the Boeing 767 like creases in his palm. He held the yoke, ran checklists, calmly captained the takeoff of the first plane that would crash into the World Trade Center.
Here I Am
| June 20, 2022 Two-year-old Ella takes a stick and draws zigzags in the sand. She asks me to write her name; I say each letter aloud and she knows that these are the marks that make words that make the stories we read to her, which she inhabits and commits to memory.
Gotcha Day
| June 13, 2022 We adopted Nala the day my mother fell down the stairs. That wasn't her name, but she didn't look like a Mindy.
Thingness
| June 6, 2022 My husband raps on the kitchen window from the deck outside where the cat sews in and around his legs. "Can you hand me that thing?" he says, pointing unsteadily. The scar from his brain surgery curves over his left ear. An upside-down horseshoe.
Pedestrian Acts
| May 30, 2022 We were late for an appointment. I wove through the afternoon crowd at a quick clip with my son and daughter, nine and six, following behind me like ducklings. Head down and shoulders bent, I had the posture of someone punched in the gut.
Into the Answer
| May 23, 2022 Your high school teacher mother taught you a trick for taking comprehension tests: always skip ahead to read the questions before the passage.
Things to do in the Belly of Despair
| May 16, 2022 Blow out the candle that burned for his last days. Dump the OxyContin and morphine in the cat litter like the hospice nurse told you to do. Touch his cheekbones that emerged like knives these last few weeks.
Everything You Hold Onto in Your Body Lets Go
| May 9, 2022 In autumn, my massage therapist comes to the barn, plugs in her electric pot to warm the large black stones she regularly returns to the river, whose current removes things bodies hold onto: the ache of arthritic knees, tight pelvises, a woman’s chorus of sharp edges, shrill songs of sore muscles and little heartaches.
On Turning Forty-Four
| May 2, 2022 This was a particularly hard number for me, and in the back of my mind, I knew it was because the late Nora Ephron, in her book about aging as a woman, wrote about how much she regretted not wearing a bikini the entire year she was twenty-six and suggested to anyone reading that they “go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're forty-four.”??
Tea
| April 25, 2022 At every lesson, she serves me tea. She steeps it with cardamom and swirls of evaporated milk then pours it steaming into “my” cup—a white ceramic blue-flowered mug—and adds a heaping spoonful of sugar.
Walk
| April 18, 2022 I’m at my desk, playing with the idea of taking the day off, when the phone rings, and shit, it’s the landline, the number I dread, the one on too many contact lists and credit card applications to ditch, and unfortunately it’s in the bedroom, across my office and one hallway away, and even worse, I have to answer it...
The Fawn
| April 11, 2022 Hunting was a source of food, the main recreation, and a rite of passage. Everyone hunted. Still, I had a choice. It was dusk, and my father and I sat beside a crop field, plowed over in the fall. We watched from woods that earlier were full of birdsong, canopied by oak, cottonwood, and pecan, when two deer appeared—a doe and its fawn.
Delicate as a Hummingbird's Heart
| April 4, 2022 This past Saturday, the fire burning on the north side of the river jumped a ridge and lit another hillside of drought-stricken timber, sending a plume so high that the air turned red with the seared skin of Douglas fir and larch.
The Last Pie
| March 28, 2022 I take my grandma to the grocery store. While perusing the produce, I mention that it is my father-in-law's birthday. She takes that to mean we are making a pie, and who am I to remind her that she doesn't make pies anymore?
Uprooted
| March 21, 2022 The day Papaw Laster kicked out Mamaw, just before their divorce, our pickup pulled up to their porch. Daddy worked in the bed, stacking and arranging furniture handed to him by Papaw. Mamaw stood silent, looking through boxes as they passed her, thirty-five years of accumulated belongings.
Dandelion Fritters
| March 14, 2022 Fingers flower-yellow. I want to make a poem from those words, but as always, line breaks trip me up like wires at ankle-height. Still, yes, my fingertips are tinged yellow, blessed by the blossoms of dandelion suns.
Istalif, Afghanistan, 2004
| March 7, 2022 We picnic by firelight in the bombed-out carapace of a hotel, where a guard in tattered shawls sips tea, cradling his gun. Beyond the balcony, mud homes jut out from the snowy hills.
Reason Enough
| February 28, 2022 A friend and I are at happy hour. Icy doubles swim in glasses before us. Recently discovered: We are both adopted. Blooming: An intimacy unwarranted by the length of time we've known each other. I describe growing up with an identical twin, wondering about our birthmother. Ask if she has done a search.
Gratitude
| February 21, 2022 Spring in a cold place. Which means everything is so heartbreakingly tender—tulips lifting their dusky prom skirts, dandelions twinkling in their green sky.
Eyelashes
| February 14, 2022 The AC rattles above me, but all else is silent, so silent, so blissfully silent. My baby is asleep at grandma's tonight, across town and across space so wide and deep and needed that I now almost don't quite know what to do with all this time.
Confession
| February 7, 2022 It happens six, maybe seven times a day. I'm crouched. He looks at me with those liquid eyes, his face in front of mine, his wet nose quivering, exploring my breath.
Zero at the Bone
| January 31, 2022 Emily Dickinson knew something about—holding space—the power—dashes have— The white spaces hold so much—the ghost of her white dress—posing in the corner. They may be silent—but are not empty.
Flower Salute
| January 24, 2022 The flowers bob on the brown swirls of the river bloated with spring rain. As they float downstream, I serenade them with poetry - “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief“ - words from a Wendell Berry poem, that you, a poet, once told me “was damn-near perfect.”
Reenactor
| January 17, 2022 My father was orphaned at eighteen, and though he'd made his own family, we weren't enough to satisfy his craving for deep roots. For that, he had his sixth great-grandfather and the American Revolution.
Hard Frost
| January 10, 2022 On the morning of the day the jury would return, snow swirled with fallen white blossoms in the gutters of the streets. April can be cruel like that. The next day, as I drove, all over town I saw plants that had been protected from the hard frost with sheeting and tarps, and the covered shapes seemed to shift before my eyes...
Amelioration
| January 3, 2022 I want waking up to feel like shuffling a new deck of cards: smooth and full of intention. The citrus sun rises early now. I remember that my body is also a tender peach, wrinkling as I stretch to the horizon line.
Echo
| December 27, 2021 On nights I was restless as a child, my grandmother, Ama, would put her gentle hand under my shirt and rub my back. That time when my family lived in the small house and there weren't enough bedrooms or beds for everyone, she and I shared a twin bed.
Bird Families
| December 20, 2021 My mother taught me to look at birds by pointing out their details, like bill shape and breast color. She taught me the names for American Robin and House Sparrow—city birds, the kind we could see in our Chicago backyard.
Dam
| December 13, 2021 We share the rowboat. I'm nearly nine; he could be 100, my uncle, sole survivor of his platoon. “Losing it,” neighbors say, and “Claims he hears Voices.” I say a person can hold back some things, by naming others.
Developmental English
| December 6, 2021 Julie's name is Adriana or Alessandra. I can't remember, because she insists on Julie. More American. It's not that she doesn't love Brazil, but she worries that her real name will be too big for American mouths.
