Category Archives: Just for Fun

I don’t feel like writing today, because I was sick all weekend and am sort of recuperating still. I am still a bit achy and a little weak, but I feel better than I have since Wednesday. I tricked the sickness into hiding from Wednesday night until Saturday evening. Just as we were getting ready to go to Ed and Abbie’s for the Halloween Party, I started feeling run down, chilled, and throaty. Becs looked at my tonsils and they were swollen. Big. They were almost touching, which I am happy to say is over now. Anyway, since I don’t feel like writing, I am going to post a couple of poems I wrote a while ago.

This one is about the woman who feeds the ducks and my dogs everyday. I am annoyed with her but intrigued with her at the same time.

Running Along the River With My Dogs in the Dark: Early Autumn

The river is low and the rocks poke out above the moving surface.
Geese are sleeping on the bank. They are quiet, their heads tucked,
sly eyes watching us pass, their wings fluffed
around their well-fed bodies. They wait: she will come.

The geese stir now at every car that passes. The grey-brown Ford,
same color as their feathers, rounds the corner. She parks,
opens the trunk, retrieves the familiar green pickle buckets.
Geese flock her open palms filled with bread crumbs,
their wings spread proud. They rejoice: she has come.

This one is about a woman I saw walking around in San Francisco. I set it in a church, though, because I think the woman was delusional, and mistook the streets for a sanctuary.

Offering

A woman shrugging and slight of step hobbles up the scarlet
aisle between intricately carved, aged, cushioned wooden pews.

She, shrouded in a pungent smell: candle-wax and lilies,
clutches coins firm in her grip, knuckles white, head slanted down

on her thin wrinkled neck. Her eyes slits. Tears flow freely
from beneath clinched lids, lashes twinkling moist yellow flashes.

“A poor widows mite, a poor widow’s mite, a poor widow’s
mite,” she whispers advancing. Heads turn, our eyes stare. She trembling

continues her procession, as inch by inch the carpet woos her.
Chin now to chest, palms impressed by coins, cheeks chapped red by salt,

she kneels. Her body convulses, wracked with grief stricken sobs.
Hunched, she sways and intones her sins, naming each one clearly.

She rocks rhythmically; her fingers loosen, depositing
her offering: a cable car token and a poker chip.

Here is a random list poem. Poetry.com posted one poem for each day of the month last April and I used the poems as inspiration for my own writing.

List Poem

Old comic book, a Wonder Woman comic book, soiled pages.

Pink worm, a slippery earthworm cracked and dry, in a plastic sandwich bag.

A raccoon skin cap, a rabbit’s foot key chain, a piece of driftwood.

A crinkled dress pattern, several eight tracks labels faded, dusty.

Knotted prayer rope, song flute, marbles, music box.

An airplane gear and a silky cord. An infinity symbol and two pieces of velcro.

Soybean shell burst with beans missing and husk brown and dry.

Papier-mache volcano with soda-vinegar explosions. Sun dogs,
neighbor’s dogs, Red Dog Saloon.

This one is more creative nonfiction than poetry. I based it on this short CNF piece in the magazine Brevity. Wright asks the question why and then answers in “Becauses.” I ask for forgiveness and then say what that forgiveness is “For.” Most of what I ask forgiveness for has to do with relationships, both romantic ones and friendship.

Forgive Me

For letting me get carried away with myself. For staying with you while you used my body as a breathing punching bag. For defending your use of my body as love, when it was abuse. For staying even after you took me against my will. For not knowing so young that it was wrong.

For loving you so hard. For not understanding your mental illness. For trying to hard to understand it. For not knowing what to do when you came to my house, not yourself, looking for compassion. For wishing you ill when you left me to go off with the mother of your distant child. For not taking you back when you came home. For being afraid of you and your instability.

For having sex with you on the beach in front of my parents house under the full moon. For laughing at you when you cried because of the beauty of it. For stealing your virginity and then breaking your heart. For breaking your heart and never looking back. For making fun of your cooking: pot luck, hot dog gravy, and buche de noel. For never really loving you.

For stealing your girlfriend. For fucking your boyfriend. For flirting with your wife.

For loving you enough to let you love other people. For being too stupid to know you didn’t love me back. For wondering why you never came home. For doing the same thing to you that you did to me. For the Wise Owl hot air balloon guy. For holding on too tightly to something that could never have been healthy, good, or true. For not letting go sooner. For still wanting you back sometimes.

For slipping out while you were in the bathroom and never coming back. For changing the locks on the doors because you were a convicted felon. For not being smart enough to ask if you had a criminal past before I let you move in to my house and my life. For going home with someone wearing a Foreigner t-shirt and drinking Bud Light. For sleeping with you on the first date. For never asking about your past. For hating you for my free-clinic AIDS test. For hoping to never see you again.

For thinking I knew just what to say, when I didn’t have any idea. For pretending to know just what you were going through, when I had never experienced anything similar. For not staying with you when you needed me the most, and for leaving you with your cancer because I was afraid. For my inability to access my emotions and weep with your children when they lost you.

For forgetting your birthday, and not even telling you I was sorry. For forgetting it again the next year. For touching the deepest parts of you and then backing away. For leaving you and for letting you go. For never telling you I loved you.

For not listening to your deepest thoughts, and writing my homework list in my head while all the while nodding as if in agreement. For expecting you to listen to me and my tedious details. For getting angry when I think you aren’t. For giving you grief about your beer, when I have my vices, too. For taking for granted what we have. For not working as hard as I should. For letting you be the one thing that slides. For knowing you’ll still love me regardless. For using that as my excuse. For not telling you often enough: I love you.

For taking your body and your blood for granted. For accepting your grace without experiencing your shame. For questioning you. For always thinking I can do it on my own. For not following your calling. For getting myself so wrapped up in this world that I cannot see yours. Forgive me. For I know not what I am doing.

write two pages about the first food you remember preparing for yourself

“Hey, Titsy, I can’t reach the orange juice!” He sounded kind of frantic.
I went to the holey screen door and looked out into the garage to find my younger brother hanging upside down into the deep chest freezer. His back—showing skin as his favorite t-shirt, the one with the big twelve on the front, fell toward his head—was pressed thin against his stomach, which was in turn pressed against the front of his jean shorts. The waistband of the shorts was the only thing keeping him from sliding head-first into the big white abyss, and his feet were the balance to the top half of his body that was barely visible. He called me Titsy because when Adam was really little he couldn’t say Corby, and called me C-Torby or Torby. As he got older he couldn’t say sister, instead substituting titster, which morphed into Titsy. When he is annoyed or is trying to be funny, to this day he calls me Tits. It’s a great nickname, really. One I am proud to bear.
On this night, the one in which my brother was almost lost into the “outside freezer,” our parents were on a rare night out, and we had already cleaned the house, done the dishes, constructed an oddly shaped bookshelf out of scraps of lumber we had found in the garage, and watched several episodes of Belle and Sebastian. We were bored, so we decided to fix ourselves dinner. We weren’t allowed to use the oven when our parents weren’t home—and we didn’t yet own a microwave—so dinner required a little bit of an imagination.
We had a cookbook called The Young Children’s Mix and Fix Cookbook, which was big, with a red and white cover, and we hoped that hidden somewhere inside, behind the Humpty-Dumpty and friends on the cover and nestled among the “Over 55 Tasty, Nutritious Easy-to-Make Recipes,” there was one magical recipe that would tantalize our taste buds. Of course, we fancied ourselves gourmet. What we found was a recipe that combined equal parts orange concentrate and peanut butter. Specifically, I think it was two tablespoons of each—enough to make two sandwiches and to create a wasted can of OJ—mixed together and spread on bread. The recipe was detailed, right down to the way we were supposed cut the bread—in fancy triangles from corner to corner, not ordinary rectangles straight across the white bread the recipe recommended. While I was trying to find the peanut butter in our madhouse of a pantry, he was digging for a can of orange juice concentrate. That was how he ended up suspended, calling for me by his only term of endearment.

How do I look at To Sir With Love and Lonely Londoners as I try to sort out race issues?

construction of self between texts
1) assert a place for themselves
2) class background
3) education, Braithwaite; lack of education in Selvon (Moses)

strategies to negotiate London:
1) down the line rejection
2) new world verses previous experiences
a) being there
b) shock colonialism, race/class

identity as race two different approaches
1) Black folks are staying, what does that mean
2) what strategies are they using to survive/fit in (jazz, music, cultural misreading?)
3) patchwork v. misreadings ( do we patch it all together and how do we read it all together? (Transatlantic)

community:
1) 1900’s Black culture
2) what is just being created
3) what is emerging in U.S. New York, Chicago, Memphis, etc.
a) developed Af.Am. culture
b) colonial subjects?

“Dwelling Places” on housing
“Black British Writing: An Anthology” Proctor
“Black British Culture and Society” Owusu
“Pleasures of Exile” Lamming
Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall
“Black British” articles
“Braithwaite” Bruce King
CLR James, Trinidad, cricket, Black Jacobians, moves back and forth from colonial to US

Clothing/Uniforms and Race In Braithwaite
Braithwaite. E.R. To Sir, with Love. NewYork: Jove, 1977.
—–. A Kind of Homecoming. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
—–. Paid Servant. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
—–.Choice of Straws. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1966.
—–. Reluctant Neighbors. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
—–. “Honorary White”: A Visit to South Africa. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975.
Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. New York: Longman, 1989.

For this project I intend to discuss E.R. Braithwaite’s construction of racial identity. I would like to investigate the general feeling of race during the 1950 in London through other novels such as The Lonely Londoners. My point in doing this is two-fold: (1) I think Braithwaite is trying to say something different than Selvon, and (2) I think both writers effectively pull the American ideas of race into their discussions of British racial tension.

In To Sir with Love Braithwaite writes: “I had just been brought face to face with something I had either forgotten or completely ignored for more than six exciting years—my black skin” (37). Not only did Braithwaite skin color somehow get masked by his R.A.F. uniform, but this was an exciting time in his life. The six years in his life when he was able to forget that he was black are looked back upon as exciting, but when he realizes that he is really black he “hurrie[s] into the nearest public lavatory and [is] violently sick” (38). If Braithwaite does not portray himself as a self-loathing black man, I do not think was ever such a portrayal in literature. What confuses me about this portrayal is that less than 50 pages later, he begins instructing his class about the great diversities of the human race! In one instance his race is invisible via his R.A.F. uniform; in the next he recognizes his race, but it makes him violently ill; and in the next he is proud of his homeland and using it to teach his students global geography. In The Lonely Londoners, Selvon, while telling story of intense racial prejudices, manages to maintain a pride in his race, so I am interested in how the two writers conceive race constructs differently.

Selvon also mentions the American side of racial tension, which comes into play in Braithwaite’s text as well. Braithwaite writes: “I reflects on the U.S.A. There, when prejudice is felt, it is open, obvious, blatant” (41). He continues by showing how white Americans discriminate against Blacks, but that Black men have some sort of recourse: they fight back. I think the struggle between these two texts is that Selvon portrays a London that is very discriminatory, like Braithwaite describes the U.S. My problem with all of this is that Braithwaite, with all the evident prejudices of British society at this time, would not even be allowed to teach in a school with white children in the U.S. no matter how bad off the children were.

I think my questions are best framed as: what is Braithwaite’s real stance on racial issues? How does he support the idea that his race disappears? How is his evocation of U.S. race relations help or hinder his construction of race in England? I plan to use a combination of theoretical texts, Braithwaite’s works, and possibly Selvon or if I can find one, a U.S. example of race…This part is up in the air.