Blog : Beautiful-Things
Reading
| May 10, 2021 I am reading. I have spun into the writer's words, how his grandmother curled and uncurled the telephone cord around her fingers. I remember those curly cords, how the coils unspooled when you walked around, and then jumped back, spiraling in on themselves, hanging like a wonky rubber ringlet.
On the Afternoon I Write My Husband Another Note
| May 3, 2021 I sit in my gray office and scribble words onto a piece of stationary I wish I could remember picking out, yellow flowers wrapping around the edges. Believe me when I say I do not have a choice. And I am so sorry. And I tried to fix myself.
Not That Kind of Royalty
| April 26, 2021 “So, you lost your crown,” the dentist says. “Yes,” I reply. “Down the hatch.” I’ve learned that jokes are the best and maybe only antidote to terror. My daughter often reminds me, “Don’t relive past traumas,” so I won’t describe the horror show of dental malfeasance that got me here. Not to the dentist’s chair—that’s simple: I swallowed a crown while eating a bowl of leftover rice. Here being: imploding dread, the body’s memory of pain.
Resonance
| April 19, 2021 A fifty-something woman, wearing a faded floral dress, showed me the antique pump organ. “No one plays anymore,” she said, her wooden cooking spoon in hand. “And I could use the $150.” She went back to her farmhouse stove to stir a pot that smelled of onion and sage while my new husband and I—some said too young for marriage at only 22—whispered about the price.
Urn
| April 12, 2021 “What kind of urn do you have in mind?” “No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.” In the brownstone where I grew up, mother stashed a potter’s wheel behind a Japanese screen built by my father. When she wasn’t throwing pots, I rode that wheel like a merry-go-round.
Seasonal
| April 5, 2021 In the fall, we rake pecans into piles as most people do with leaves. The tree’s branches extend in every direction over our backyard. Summer thunderstorms shake them loose unripened and encased in a rubbery green skin. They hit the roof with a sharp block, a Louisiana hail.
Mist
| March 29, 2021 A wisp of perfume accompanied my mother. Like her, it was elegant and subtle. The fragrance softly followed her up the hall, her heels clicking, her skirt rustling. Late to somewhere.
The Bends of the Kickapoo
| March 22, 2021 The Kickapoo doubles back on itself. Cutting its way through the billion-year old hummocks of the Driftless Region, the river winds in tight knots and bends. In the high blue Wisconsin summers, ferns and orchids grow on the banded cliffs above the water.
This is Orange
| March 15, 2021 Around 10:30 this morning the world is orange. The sky, the houses, the air. Inside, my new baby is trying to roll over. She wants to do it so badly she tries to do it in her crib instead of sleeping. She is hopeful. She is determined.
Red Talisman
| March 8, 2021 In sepia photos of the flower market, I picture my father with bundles of pearl chrysanthemums or peach carnations in his brown boy arms. A child with the lodgepole-spine of knowing pride can mean the difference between survival or not under the street-corner eyes of the City of Angels.
Talk to Her
| March 1, 2021 I once took a job with a major online retailer, listening to the words that people spoke in their own homes to a voiced virtual assistant I'll call Amaya. Our ragtag team of English and Linguistics majors tapped away on laptops, categorizing the words for the developers so she’d respond better over time, listening to the private words of a faceless people.
On Sam Mountain
| February 22, 2021 At the peak—932 feet above the Mekong floodplain—beyond the holy caves and the Cham, Buddhist, Hindu, and Mother-Goddess temples that litter the twisting pilgrim road, a mother and father are teaching their young son how to pray.
Purse Candy
| February 15, 2021 There's a single, beat-up black jack bobbing around my purse, its wrapper feathered from accidental collisions with lipstick tubes and wallet, the once-bright stripes gone gray. The taffy inside is stone hard but still offers up a spicy licorice warmth.
The Perfect Day
| February 8, 2021 The images are still with me thirty-five years later. The weather in the Northeast Michigan woods on Grand Lake is warm, heavy with fragrance of late summer, cedar pines, sandy soil, the water clapping the edge of the land. The turquoise sky turns to twilight with a soft glow of lavender rising.
Wildflowers
| February 1, 2021 Another set of packed bags. After another get out now. This time my mother, sister, and I landed in a trailer across the abandoned tracks. Fake wood paneling on the walls repelled all light, and years of cigarette smoke made every surface feel singed.
Le Sacrifice
| January 25, 2021 Mom, sitting on the floor among a group of cross-legged Girl Scouts, teaches us a song in a language none of us know.
Leeches
| January 18, 2021 When we get home from the hospital, I realize the electrodes are still stuck to my father's chest and back. He says that it hurt too much when the nurse tried to remove them, so he told her to forget it. The confusion makes him this way, irritable and impatient.
Drawn In
| January 11, 2021 I got better at drawing when I began to think of petting an animal. I sent my eye running along the spine of a thing, felt it warm and alive, arching its back into my palm. I moved my eye like I'd move my hand, stroking an edge, pressing against the body of a mass.
Rubber Tourniquets
| January 4, 2021 My four-year-old son plays with the blue rubber tourniquet from his latest hospitalization. A nurse tied it around his arm to insert an IV into the tender part of his forearm near the crook of his elbow.
You Should Ask for More
| December 28, 2020 "Am I sad?" I ask my dog, because it's not something I recognize anymore. Sadness had come so thick and urgent for a while that the quieter emotions don't register like they used to.
Car Keys
| December 21, 2020 “I can drive today,” my partner said, and I tossed him the keys over the hood of my 1999 Jeep Cherokee. Up went the key to my mom’s house, which opened a small home of wall-papered, floral prints and a retired woman shuffling in a bathrobe, slowing sipping coffee . . .
The Ledge
| December 14, 2020 We've come to Switzerland and we're in love. It's the crisp air, the towering waterfalls and majestic peaks – a guise to hide the death that lurks behind the exquisite landscape where we've flocked to feel alive.
Real Mom
| December 7, 2020 Until I decided to come to Korea, I hadn't realized how special my mother was – how selfless, how enlightened. Most adoptive parents of her generation can't understand that searching for our origins isn't a direct affront to them. In truth, it has nothing to do with them at all.
Jars of Daybreak
| November 30, 2020 Roused before dawn, my siblings and I stood at the edge of the kitchen and marveled at gleaming red jars that filled the room. Our parents shuffled wordlessly from stove to kitchen table and back again, their bright faces like blacksmiths' flushed by forge light . . .
After Hours
| November 23, 2020 My grandfather wakes, confused and flooded with his body's toxins. "Sit down," he tells my grandmother. "We're going around a bend." He thinks they're on the train forty years ago. He reaches for invisible handholds . . .
The China Tea Set
| November 16, 2020 The china tea set, wrapped in tissue paper, nestles in its warped cardboard box on the shelf inside my mother's wardrobe. She draws it down gently, as though not to wake it, places it on the bed, slides the lid off.
Photograph
| November 9, 2020 I push through the brambles and climb over the rotting, peeling fence that inevitably grabs at the cuff of my pants. Getting snagged, I always seem to fall cursing onto the beach, an unfitting way to enter the quiet beauty.
A Good Day to Die
| November 2, 2020 What I remember is the salt that formed in his pores like crystalline grains of sand. A million tiny specks covering his skin. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. The hospice nurse said that this meant his sweat glands were shutting down, squeezing out the last drops of his life.
The door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges
| October 26, 2020 I open the door to see if you're there, the door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges. There is a noise, a constant; it could be the rain or the thick of my heart in my eardrums. I've never heard this sound before . . .
The Hart
| October 19, 2020 He steps out of the grass like a god. Thick necked to hold up east-to-west spanning antlers which in turn hold up the entire sky, three clouds and a Northern Harrier. I am caught off guard by his emergence, how he comes from nothing into everything.
