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when it snows in my heart

The sky today is milk-colored, snow is flurrying down and the naked trees shiver in the wind.
It′s a day when anything might happen, in a world where everything is shifting under my feet.
Things I thought solid suddenly slippery as black ice—

It′s a day to breathe in the chill air and watch your exhale make a tiny cloud. A day to remember what a mystery that was when you were a little girl bundled in your red parka, itchy wool mittens attached by clips.

It′s a day to remember America was not great back when you were a white child in the white suburbs outside Toledo, in a brand-new tract home in a place called Sylvania. No. It wasn′t great. “Great” was merely the undercurrent of every advertising slogan, “Great” was a story spun by ad men and sales men and con men. (They are still selling you fear and telling you it is happiness).

Men who sold your mother on the notion that the ache in her heart could be eased by a Midol or a Virginia Slim′s cigarette or a new Chevrolet or an A-Line dress. Men who told her that her uneasiness was her own fault, and that comfort would keep her safe. Men who peddled fear and separation and complacency. The TV glowed and mama stopped looking at the trees.

(Her eyes were sad but the jingles told her she was happy.)
You were a little girl, and you felt that ache. Feel it still, when big flat televisions trumpet
news news news.

And so you′ve learned to look outside.

It′s a day to look at the milky sky and the black arms of the trees shivering and remember the world is not black and white, not wrong and right. A day to remember that anyone who tells you the ache in your heart is nothing is a liar, or someone who wants to steal your life from you. Anyone who tells you to stop feeling what you are feeling may as well tell the trees to stop trembling in the March wind. Might as well tell these tardy snowflakes to stop falling.

The ache is there to help you. Listen to it.

Denial of what is will pull you under, into despair.
Acceptance may break your heart, but a broken heart is an open one.

Let the snow fall into your heart.
Feel what you feel. Cold, alive.
After all, anything might happen, if your heart and eyes are open.
A letter to my chiropractor

“Karma” by Korean artist Do Ho Suh | New Orleans Museum of Art

A letter to my chiropractor:

When I saw you last December,
your warm fingers on my neck felt reassuring —
it’s pure trust, letting someone adjust your spine.

“Relax,” you commanded, for I was tense.
The muscles surrounding my precious cervical vertebrae
relaxed into your palms.

I told you I was tense because I was worried,
really worried about the Trump administration…

Your healing hands moved to my shoulder, the tricky one.
You felt, you pulled, you pushed,

you said, with a chuckle: “Oh, come on, now.
You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

I said I worried about my friends and loved ones,
the non-Christian, the non-white, the LGBTQ, and immigrants, too.

And, that I was also very worried that my ACA insurance
would be taken away, that I’d not have any insurance
because hey I’m old enough now to have a track record
and anyone with a track record
involving two near-death medical experiences
looks like a big old pre-existing exclusion

Your right hand was on my thigh, left hand cradling my shoulder
You pulled me back against your body, almost lover-like,
to twist my spine

(real healing requires trust)

You laughed.

You said, “Oh nothing will change!
Relax! No one’s gonna take your insurance away.”

You were not the first white professional man
to hush me, tell me everything would be fine.

(I’m just sorry that you were wrong.)

Business may become very lean, doctor.
It seems strong spines have gone
out of fashion in many circles.
impermanence

Farewell, beautiful.

I’m going to say it straight out. Somebody’s going to die tomorrow.
Actually, I’m sure, lots of somebodies will die, but there’s one in particular
that I’m thinking of tonight.

Nothing lasts forever.
Joy comes, and goes.
Seasons come, and go.
Grief comes and goes, too.
Whole countries, entire species,
blazing stars in the sky—
come and go.
Tomorrow the elm tree outside
my west-facing windows will be taken down.

Chain saws will whir and bite.
It will be fast, the end.

Tonight I’m saying goodbye.

I get it.
It’s become dangerous, the elm.

Too big for its place. It has to go.
It could hurt someone.

(Hurt is part of life)

Joy comes, and goes.
I will miss her outstretched limbs
reflecting in my morning coffee in summer,
I will miss her golden leaves in the fall.

She healed me, that tree.

I spent hours looking up at her.
I owe her a lot, I think.
I wish I could tell her:

She gave me the gift of learning to just be.
To laugh and cry and and let go of what was and be myself alone.
(Though I suppose I wasn’t ever really alone; she was there?)
I’ll carry her gift with me, planted like a seed
rooting in my heart.

I’m getting more comfortable with impermanence.
Better at letting go.
Better at grief.
It’s just a tree, after all,
a little piece of heaven,
exhaling oxygen
patiently teaching me how to breathe in life.

The elm in my morning coffee.
Happy birthday, Mama

Barbara Stone, sometime in the late 1930s.

It’s your birthday, Mama. In the picture you’re about 12 or 13, but you did headstands for as long as I can remember. When I was a teenager, I lived in fear of your doing one when a friend was over. The other mothers didn’t do things like that.

I’m beginning at last to see you more fully, twenty-five years after your last earthly birthday. A truer picture emerges as I learn more about life, about myself—maybe it’s you coming clear or maybe it’s me? But the veils are falling away.

For a long time, I kept my memories of you behind those veils, blurring the edges and obscuring the painfully sharp details. The veils were garnet-colored, the blood-red of your birthstone. Looking at you through them softened the memories of you, made them pink and pretty as a sunset, and as distant.

The summer I was eighteen your anchoring roles were torn away. Your last baby (me) off to college. And then: Dad died. I still remember the grief, suffocating and thick as the August air. Suffocating because we were locked into pretending to be strong and calm, you and I.

At exactly the age I am today, you became a widow. And all these years later, I am a divorced woman. Funny how both of us emerged from long marriages, newly single at the same age. I feel a new kind of kinship with you. I guess our relationship isn’t over, is it? It’s true what they say: the people you love live on in your heart.

As I find myself, I unearth pieces of you, and you continually surprise me, Mama. You are not all fierce hugs and pots of vegetable soup, not just chewy raisin-oatmeal cookies and games of cribbage and piles of books and papers everywhere, though I see you in my mail stacks and my habit of saving the tiniest bits of leftovers.

I also find your “hot-spit” spirit in the shards of my anger, I find your ancient wounds, and mine, in my middle-of-the-night panics. I hear your voice sometimes in my dreams, and in shrill of my own voice, when I lose patience and boil over. Oh, I am fine, Mama. More than fine. Like you, I’m resilient and now: I don’t have to pretend to be ever-strong and ever-calm. I can just be me, roiling emotions and all.

The last gifts you gave me are the ones I’ve spent the last couple years opening. Remember that night in the kitchen after your chemotherapy, in the window of time before you grew queasy, how you and I sat and you told me some things that maybe you never told anyone else, because I needed to know them? Or maybe you told others, it doesn’t matter. You gave me what I needed to figure myself out. I didn’t quite know what to do with most of what you shared; I was embarrassed by your shame at your human failings. My own baby was stirring in my belly, and somehow I thought it best to push difficult things aside. Pretend it was all okay. I was afraid, you see.

I told you not to worry about the things you’d shared, things that were hard for you to say. Personal things, confessions of your weaknesses. I dismissed them all away with a rushed out thank- you-for-telling-me. I put those precious words, the evidence of your humanness, your stumbles and triumphs that were just you and not my mother, into the bottom of my very deepest brain-drawer when you died. And I pretended I was ever-strong, ever-calm. I was carefully incurious.

Silly, blind me. You meant to give me a shortcut, didn’t you? You were trying to let me know: it’s okay to be human, that falling apart—happens sometimes. That the key is trusting, and sharing, and connecting. Getting up, and forgiving yourself for falling.

And all of that starts with not pretending to be strong or calm when you are not. It means not pretending at all. It was like in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy realizes she’s had the power to go home all along. Pretending to be what we are not, to deny who we are, drives us into very lonely territory.

This year, I finally learned how to do a headstand. Like mother, like daughter.

I’m so glad, Mama, that you are still here, in my heart, while I figure things out.
Sharp, necessary things

Louise Erdrich says in her poem, “Thistles”:

“under loss and under hard words,
under steamrollers
under your heart,
it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.”

I think there are some feelings that are like thistles, that’s why Erdrich’s poem and the thistles along the sidewalk speak to me like an old friend as I ponder how some losses, some griefs, some pointy bits of the past never do entirely smooth over or disappear.

They simply die back for a while, and you think they are gone. Then you’re innocently snapping a photo, minding your own business, and they come back—sharp as ever.

But they are beautiful, thistles are. They endure for a reason.

You can read her whole gorgeous poem here:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007%2F06%2F22
NOLA dreams

Christmas Night | New Orleans | Gentilly | Lit by a streetlamp

Last year evaporated.
No.
Exploded,
boiled over,
filled to the brim and
poured over the edges
leaving December behind.

The beauty and the un-beautiful
combine
combust
time escapes like steam from a kettle
screaming with possibilities
I want to find more magic.
I am digging.
2017, a mini-novel

(I’m writing a mini-novel with flash-length chapters over on Medium.com. Following is the first chapter of my tale of a dystopian future. Check out the rest if you like—it’s a work-in-progress, which I’m hoping to finish before year end. It is a work of fiction. I hope. Access the chapters by clicking here.)

View at Medium.com

2017: Chapter One

The sirens blared. The President’s voice boomed, an audio clip in an endless loop. “…then I grab em by the pussy,” he crowed, again and again and again, the way he did every morning at wake-up. “She’s a pig, I mean, look at her! Miss Piggy. Call her Miss Housekeeping, why don’t you?” A laugh track — or possibly a recording of hyenas howling, it was hard to tell — ran between bursts of his “boy talk.”

She’d heard it so many times now. It was designed to make her go numb.
She let the guards believe it was working.
November Ginkgo

Gingko tree, Northern Kentucky, Novermber 26

Walking this weekend brought to mind a poem I remembered about Ginkgos. Their “yellow fluttering fans of light” never fail to inspire me. I attempt and fail to capture them in yellow/fossil/sucked-in-breath poems. They are the last of their division of tree (Ginkgophyta), all others being long extinct.

Ginkgo leaves are found in fossils dating back 270 million years, and though they are messy and somewhat smelly trees—they are my favorites at this time of year.I look up and get lost. Or look down and get lost, depending on which day I come upon them.

Here’s a stanza of the poem I had to come home and google around to find. It’s from “The Consent” by Howard Nemerov.

Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

Fallen ginkgo leaves.
The door is that way, Judge Ruehlman

Dear Judge Ruehlman,

I’m a registered voter and I’m not going to mince words here. I’m going to be straight with you. It’s time for you to go home, Judge.

You’re drunk— drunk with judicial power, that is.

Maybe it’s a side effect of how our justice system works, or doesn’t work? Maybe some counseling would help? It’s addictive stuff, power. The Ohio Supreme Court agrees you’ve gotten out of hand.

In June, the Ohio Supreme court said “[Judge Ruehlman] has repeatedly acted to shield Chesley and his assets from creditors, despite a patent lack of jurisdiction,” referring to your interference in a multi-million dollar settlement that (the now disbarred attorney) Stan Chesley was ordered to pay to his legal clients.

Kentucky courts ruled that Chesley owes his clients at least $25 million dollars, which he’s apparently holding in some kind of perma- limbo by filing twisty lawsuits that make it difficult for the case to be moved to Federal court. The Ohio Supreme court scowls at such shenanigans.

The court’s opinion said Chesley “has turned to the courts of Ohio to thwart collection of the judgment and re-litigate the case. Chesley has found a receptive audience in (Ruehlman).” The opinion also said you gave defendants in the case—Chesley’s clients, who were awaiting their funds and puzzled over why their lawyer was suing them—“patently false advice,” by telling them they did not need legal representation, advice that shows how tipsy you must be on that 100-proof power. You told a senior citizen from rural Ohio in danger of losing her home due to financial struggles that she did not need an attorney, when, according to the Ohio Supreme Court, “A judgement in favor of Chesley could have a dramatic effect on how much money Ms. Boggs and the other creditors are able to recover, and when.”

If the Ohio Supreme Court says you’re doing things you have no business doing, that’s enough to convince me as a voter, as a citizen, that it’s time for a new judge.

But there are more reasons to boot you out of court, reasons that resonate deeply with me.

You remind me of another judge recently in the news. Aaron Persky is his name. Everybody’s heard about him. I imagine you can’t see why people are so upset by his hand-slap sentence to Brock Turner.

After all, you did the same thing—worse, actually—delivering a not-guilty verdict while expressing your sympathetic concern for a young man “facing 20 years,” after repeatedly interrupting the prosecutor’s questioning of the victim to badger her by suggesting you thought she “kind of liked” her assailant, and suggesting that maybe she decided to cry rape out of disappointment that her assailant didn’t perform well. Suggesting that “sometimes girls like that when a guy pursues them a little bit.”

I wonder if you can even fathom why anyone’s so darned upset about Donald Trump’s pussy-grabbing talk. If you can victim-blame a woman in open court as she testifies, instead of listening respectfully and deeply to her after a grand jury and prosecutor have deemed her case worthy of being heard, it seems to indicate you might think women “kind of like” being demeaned and abused. Let me explain, Judge, why women do not speak up. Because when we do, we are blamed and shamed and re-victimized by men like you who demonize us as liars for daring to speak, even when we have rape-kit evidence, even when there are multiple victims coming forward.

Do you ever ask male victims who run from an assailant if they “liked being being pursued a little bit”? Or if they like being hit?

Back to Judge Persky. I hear he’s not going to be hearing criminal cases any longer. I don’t think you should either. I imagine along the way you served up some actual justice. Very little is black and white in this world. So for whatever clear-eyed service that I hope you rendered, thank you.

Still, in the end, there are some lines you don’t cross and you’ve crossed them every which way, zig-zagging all over the place. Maybe the power just got to you? Addictive stuff, that.

I’m going to play my woman card on election day, Judge.

Sources:

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2016/06/22/ohio-supreme-court-slams-hamilton-county-judge/86242854/

http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/08/the-stanford-rape-case-judge-steps-aside/497609/

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/10/26/judge-ruehlman-rebuke-rape-victims-shocking/92738786/
Dear Judge McKeon

Dear Judge McKeon,

A 40-year-old Montana father raped his 12-year-old daughter. Repeatedly.

You sentenced him to 60 days, of which he will serve 43. For good measure, he must pay $80 and “future medical care for his daughter.” You mean, I think, for his victim?

Forty-three days in jail for raping his 12-year-old daughter. Repeatedly.

Somewhere under the wide, wild Montana sky a little girl tries to sleep and never will sleep the same again.

There’s a call for your impeachment now, but you’ve made your decision and moved on. You mention it was a hard decision for you.

Forty-three days in jail for raping a 12-year-old. Repeatedly.

Yes, it would be hard for anyone with an ounce of humanity to come up with a sentence like that. But you know, girls and women—incest victims, domestic violence victims, women who have had a drink or worn a tight skirt or did something to anger a man—there’s always some kind of “exception” for that. Because deep down, Judge McKeon, you and a lot of others still believe women are the property of men. I’m sure you’d swear that wasn’t true. But your actions reveal your real feelings. That girls and women are not truly deserving of protection and equal rights when it comes to what happens to their own bodies.

Under Montana state law, your sentence to the rapist should have been steep:

“A person convicted of the offense of incest where the victim is 12 years of age or younger and the offender 18 years of age or older at the time of offense shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for a term of 100 years and fined an amount not to exceed $50,000. The court may not suspend execution or defer imposition of the first 25 years of the sentence.”

Somewhere under the wide, wild Montana sky a little girl tries to sleep and never will sleep the same again.

These things—things like incest, things like raping your own daughter—these things happen in the night, usually. Hand over mouth in the dark, whispered threats from a man who is supposed to love you and take care of you.

You’ve made your decision and moved on, Judge McKeon, but that little girl will never be the same.

The victim’s grandmother made a plea that shatters my heart, and apparently justified your joke of a sentence. She said: “What [the defendant] did to my granddaughter was horrible, and he should face consequences. But his children, especially his sons, will be devastated if their dad is no longer part of their lives.”

Somewhere under the wide, wild Montana sky a little girl tries to sleep and never will sleep the same again.

Maybe the little girl never really knew trust, even before the rape. I can’t decide if possessing pure, innocent trust and losing it is better or worse than never really having it at all. I fear for her. There seems no one she might trust, and you, too, failed her—utterly, miserably, unforgivably.

I bet you’d point out that her own mother asked for a reduced sentence, citing the rapist’s sons “need to know their father.” These are words, Judge that should have set off clanging alarm bells in your head.

Somewhere under the wide, wild Montana sky a little girl tries to sleep and never will sleep the same again.

She cannot sleep the way children should be able to sleep. She cannot relax. Her body, like that of all trauma victims, is now rewired, set to red-alert. To sleep well again will take years of love and therapy. To trust again may never happen. I hope she will find peace and healing. But it’s a hard road to go alone. And she is alone, it seems to me.

Perhaps her mother can sleep well? I wonder if her father can? Can you?

Somewhere under the wide, wild Montana sky, a little girl is all alone. Her father raped her, repeatedly, and no one testified on her behalf. No one.

No one testified on her behalf, Judge McKeon, which should have told you something. Your empathy, your humanity—should have roared to life when no one testified on her behalf.

Instead, you say you gave it consideration. The fact that no one testified on her behalf was “weighed in” to your decision.

Experts and friends of the rapist noted that the accused was employed and had a supportive community and thus was, in their opinions, apparently just the sort of pedophile that could be magically rehabilitated without a lengthy sentence.

I’d like to ask a question of the court. Why is there “leeway” in an incest case?

If he had raped his neighbor’s 12-year-old daughter, would you be so casually lenient? If he had raped a 12-year-old related to you, would you feel he could be rehabilitated, would you agree with his wife if she said he’d made a “mistake?” Would you think him being in the lives of his sons was a good idea, a good reason to suspend his sentence?

Somewhere under the wide, wild Montana sky a little girl is crying, and thinks no one hears her.

I wonder, Judge McKeon, how many other girls you have sentenced to life?

For make no mistake, she faces a life sentence. I hope that little Montana girl somehow feels the love of the millions of women and loving, kind men who are with her in spirit, and that it gives her some small amount of strength.

A million signatures on a petition to impeach you is not enough to help her heal. But I think impeaching you would be a start. It would be a start towards a world where a little girl has the right to sleep deeply, trusting those around her to love her, and keep her safe in the night.

Sign the petition here.

Sources:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/20/498676414/montana-judge-faces-call-for-impeachment-after-incest-sentencing?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2046

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/judge-john-mckeon-defends-sentence-for-fathers-rape.html

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2017: Chapter One