Mellie used to say don’t put all your eggs in baskets,
which made no sense ‘cause her baskets were always
full of needles and yarn and blackberries, that one time
out on the Cape. Mellie didn’t have a mother, just a
daughter in Boise and a sister in Indiana who I spoke to
on the phone once, her tinny voice whirring through the
wires like something distant, imaginary. She might as
well have been living on a cloud, maybe under the sea,
even, for all we saw of her. Mellie didn’t like men or tight
spaces, cliffside roadstops or fences or blood. She hid in
the kitchen the one time my father picked me up – I could
see her through the window, her face shaded, turned down.
She always let me lick the spoon. Mellie slept on the porch
one winter. She said it was because she needed the air.
Month: February 2014
On the Art of Returning
Hark! What monstrous beast, what wailing newborn,
What fresh new hell approaches in my line?
Is there something there, curtains lightly worn,
Perhaps an old coffeepot wrapped in twine?
Have you your card, good ma’am, or your receipt?
Anything I could use to lend you aid?
There’s no need to shout, ma’am, nor use deceit,
It is not for this shit that I get paid.
Do you not realize I am human, too,
Not some peon meant to simper and bag?
Is that too difficult for you –
Beyond your limited nature, you hag?
Quitting this job will be scratching an itch:
I’ll tell you how I feel, you giant bitch.
long roll downwards
“We should spend more of our lives on staircases.”
– Georges Perec
Hannah is already a little drunk by the time she gets to the Eagle’s Nest, navigating carefully along the sparsely-lit streets as she stumbles from Nina’s parents’ house to the bar. It’s a local dive, neighborhood-friendly, tucked away on the inside of a plaza dominated by a grocery store, a florist, and a terrible Chinese restaurant; Nina likes to go there on hockey nights. Hannah is mostly indifferent to it, tagging along with friends who want to stop in on the weekends, but this is the first time she has ever gone by herself; a fact made worse by the unfortunate truth that it’s the closest – the only – place she can think of going without putting herself behind the wheel of a car. It’s almost three in the morning by the time Hannah reaches it, having tripped somehow on a cracked patch of sidewalk and lost her boot halfway, but there’s still a few people lingering outside: an older couple arguing quietly in the shadow of the plaza awning, a handful of college kids smoking and talking around the wire table in front of the big picture window. She doesn’t recognize any of them.
Rach (Out Loud) 