Pomegranate juice thief walks home

http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/title

The Gift, short story

That's it. The rest is history. And history is never as interesting as what your imagination can give you. History is what you get when the projector gets stuck.

It turns out that art, like everything else, is what some people do for a living. Art, what passes for it, is a commodity. It is just one more thing to pay for, lug home with you, borrow, or steal—hurtar para dar por Dios, as it says in the dictionary.

If I could rouse any interest, I would start a support group for people committed to art. I would circulate a petition, start an internal movement to bust people out of the art hospital. I would get a witness to say that I were healthy enough to live on my own, to make a decent living. What is stopping me is thinking that I am bound to the commitment I made to art as a child.

One way to make something real is in solitary confinement. Some people walk with God and honor their commitments. Those people may live anywhere on Earth except in the limelight.

Lock-up, I queried. Where is lock-up?

I would not have asked where lock-up is had I known it would seem forensic. The first thing you find out in lock-up is that God exists. In other situations you could just dismiss this information. In lock-up that is impossible. The second thing you find out is that God is everywhere, even in you. Your job as an artist is to come up with a reasonable gift to present to God.

Most people who go into the art hospital never get out. They just get moved to more comfortable quarters. Some of them, the invalids and life-long convalescents, live on the deluxe wing. The worst thing is knowing that deep down I want to stay. I would show no sign of resistance if they offered me a room with a view. "Put the trophies over there," I would tell my students from my comfortable bed.

For about one month out of solitary I would have appreciators. There would be no question about it—I had served both God and man. After that, if I managed to do anything more, they would give me students. It is very strange, these students. They come from miles around to be put in the hospital with you. Most of them are starving and craven. Usually it is because they had a parent or step-parent who belonged in one hospital or another themselves but who managed to hold on by sheer will power to the world outside. Then values changed, and these offspring lost the wherewithal to define their own existence. There are millions and millions of them, and their numbers are growing. There will never be enough beds.

The easiest wholesale solution is for everyone to drink their gift to death. That way is the most popular, but it is not the only possibility.

If people were willing to open their minds a bit, they could find constructive uses for creative energy. They could leave the hospital, even for day trips, and no one would blame them for changing their minds. They could write to their congressmen. They could volunteer at shelters for the homeless; better yet, they could go on the road with Jimmy Carter and build habitats for humanity. They could sing in the church choir. They could grow a garden. They could raise their own children. We do not need as much art as we are making. There are many other things we need more.

Some people, women especially, go the sex route. They devote their ingenuity to making themselves as sexy as movie stars. Artists can never be worshipped as mindlessly as movie stars, but some of them come pretty close. Other artists, the men especially, sleep around or mulch up their brains on fame.

The very lucky few get shipped back to solitary confinement. Most of these do not know they are lucky, chosen. They think they are being punished for bad reviews. They think bad reviews cheat. They think good reviews tell the truth.

There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Of the inmates with windows, every year, one or two of them, the purest at heart, beg to be let back into the cell. They are afraid they might jump. That would be going beyond the call of duty, something no one might say. They say that they have learned their lesson, and they promise all the real powers-that-be that they will work harder this time. They sign statements to that effect and they apologize to their loved ones for the emotional and financial turmoil they have caused and will continue to cause until death. (In some of them, the very exemplary, this bad behavior will be held up as customary, even as tax-exempt.) They say goodbye to them and vow never to look outside themselves for companionship or diversion again. Of course, it does not last. Pretty soon someone or something better comes along.

They all have one thing in common. They discovered their gift in the first place because they needed a friend, so they made one up. They kept on making things up until they had a world. Now that they have real friends, and sex, you would think they could just let it rest, but they can’t. They still have something to prove, so they put their name on the waiting list to perform their very own, original talent shows in the seasick cafeteria.

Most of the shows are the same, except in detail. It is rare indeed when someone gets the wind whipping through your grapevine. These days most anything is acceptable as an offering—a stick of wood, a drum roll, a shitty conversation ya had with a friend. The ones who feel ashamed of their limitations almost quit.

It was better in the days before promotion, when having a gift meant something in Latin. In God, a token to His allness in your smallness. A simple nest egg.

(1991)

Published in Mad Hatters' Review, issue 10, 2008.

Triptych

These stories can be found at Fictionaut: http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/hobos-pastor; http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/story-for-neds-edit; and http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/purple-iv

Irish Salad

Scandinavians settled in Minnesota because it resembles Scandinavia. This morning I vomited salad I ate last night at an Irish pub. The salad was called "chop chop." I paid $19 for the food and two beers. I met the owner, whom we help to become rich by our simple appetites. We were rich farmers from Scotland and Sweden. He is Irish but unlike other Irish people I know, Irish-American people, he is from Ireland and is red-headed and swarthy and muscular. He imported the mahogany bar from Ireland. I wish my simple appetites might feed two in our decision, instead of helping him if he's a tax-evader, like so many of the restaurateurs. Asian restaurants serve vegetables with love. Overnight, I felt drunk, as if headed for hangover, but I hadn't drunk enough alcohol to cause it. What caused it? Superstitions dialed in sleep. Today I was thick with religious devotion. I had thought about delicious corned beef and cabbage, not to be served at that public house on St. Patrick's Day. I wanted the Irish of Binghamton, the fire department, and the Irish of literature to comfort me. To avoid this unwanted drunkenness not caused by drinking. I was so balanced before it was revealed. Ladylike reserves be restored to me.

March 16, 2007

She lets her intentions guide her

Evelyn is 42. I listen as she explains that her “heart goes out to her”—to the woman whose husband she's stealing; there's no credit in that, I say, maybe in heaven. I listen as if to a speech by Obama. She could get a job that way, but I know she's afraid to be hired. She relies on our mother and calls her arts and crafts minor.

 

A friend of Evelyn's has canceled plans for the evening, and I am her fall back. We sip the beer I brought. I look at the flowering pots she's seeded on the balcony. She says she's glad she grew up in a liberal faith.

 

The handsome French husband's slender American wife lives with the two boys in a Victorian house across town. He calls it a marriage for Immigration. He takes Evelyn rock climbing. I take up his side when I hear he's romantic.

 

The American wife and Evelyn know people in common who send Evelyn angry messages. They're angry because they thought they knew her. They are New Age. Hell is unsketched in the notebook of New Age people. “There's a balance in heaven for mistresses,” I say, thinking “mistress” could be a pride word, but Evelyn admits to no name, only to love for the neighbors. “Is he your neighbor's husband?” I ask, inviting her to explain whether neighbor applies to women who covet—“deliriously desire”—husbands from Angers.

Tilly Artaud

NOTES: I spent one summer at my mother's house with a toad, an American toad, a female American toad, who visited each night at ten and left in the morning at six for twelve weeks; then she did not appear at her perch by the glass door for two weeks, a summer vacation.

 

"If you continue to come here," I said to the toad, "I'll have to buy a terrarium." At the word "terrarium" she crawled off into the night.

 

My life was quiet then, and that was my entertainment. I studied toads on the internet. The male toads have distinct voices. They call in mating. The females have little red gullets. Toads hibernate under the permafrost. No source seemed to know how long they live.

 

I reluctantly named her Tilly Artaud. She was free, not a pet. I could only train my cat, Francis, not to eat her if he knew she were a pet. Before the summer was over, I saw him pat her gently on the head.

After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcyclist who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

 

Tilly appears in my short story "Dumb Luck" in a paragraph. I used it already, but it's a longer story than that. Do I write it long form, as a creative nonfic? As a children's story?

 

I started on a children's story that turned lewd about frogs and turtles. The turtles were the landlords. The wife turtle drove a red Corvair. Her husband fetched six-packs of pop and beer from the country store for the frogs who were guests. He strapped them to his shell with a bungy cord. He went on foot, crossing the highway at a walking bridge. One day a car hit him, and the frogs didn't care that he was limping. The frogs were a very famous rock band staying at the lodge. Continue?

Écriture de la chatte

The story has had four titles: "Écriture de la chatte," "How to Be Another Writer," "YKK," and "Feuilleton".

...

YKK is a zipper manufacturer whose initials stand for Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha. A boy told me (and I believed as a child) that YKK was my name in code.

...

Another writer was not always another writer; before she was another writer she was a young woman writer and before that a girl who wrote; before that a child and before that an infant; before that an egg in the scenic camaraderie of heaven, in a film about two pants, parents enjoining her to take up.

 

She has lived with her and inside her. Has she seen it? She has not seen it, but she has roamed its hall until airborne, a cord dripping. Who cut it? Saw. He saw it, the boy, from the foot of his mother's deathbed, her covers flung off--dark furry snail suddenly visible--signal of what's next, his dying at the beginning or her end.

 

Another writer writes a serious paw, a mistake of cat, a dripping maw, a dune of replacement. "Sex is a renewable resource," she says. "If I have slept with all of North America, then you have slept with all of North America and Iceland besides. Wake up, lizard!" but he has slid off the bed.

She'd rather write his penis than her pussy. She's seen that.

 

Her clit is off limits to all except a stranger. He sends her a chestnut-sized, handpainted black and pink-petaled vibrator with 12 speeds and two gyrations. When it runs out of energy, she plugs in the long one, long like a rolling pin.

 

“It was the size of my forearm,” she said when he asked about the largest man. “I squatted over it. The head was inside me, and I covered only the top of it like a helmet. He didn't thrust. ”

 

She is long and curved up near a bell; only the carillonneur has knocked it.

 

She goes to the garden in August with her camera. She pictures it for the wild rhinoceros, a serious writer, living in Reading. She has never met him. He sends her fifty photos of his pumped up self, even one of his erection during a handstand; she says, “I'm not big enough for you, not wide.” He texts her from a restaurant in Philly where he is eating mussels: when r u cum-ing?

 

In the photo an elegant nail partitions the leaves: a flower, she's heard that, or an ear of prime rib. She posts the photo to her weblog under the heading "Sex and Taxes” and leaves it for fowl to peck at for a week.

 

“I don't want you to get a Brazilian,” he tells her, only he calls it a Bolivian. She has to get a Brazilian, every few weeks for a year. “I like you with hair there,” he says, “I like women with hair there,” but his position is a losing climb. “Suit yourself,” he says, “but it's for men who fantasize girls.” “It's cleaner,” she says, thinking of the artist in St. Paul who wouldn't let hair near his mouth. She has told him about the camera but not about the rhinoceros who texts her in Reading: gitting any? like a common pornographer or a crowd.

 

Blood everywhere, and this time she hasn't prepared for him or shaved. Fifteen pillow shams at the Palmer House devastated, a serious poet from Philadelphia, not the writer from Reading after all.

 

The third first he: Had he seen it? The ring. He couldn't move forward to be inside it with her: it was a deadlock in several positions. He went down to look at her, to shell gaze. There was a wedding band. “You said you weren't a virgin when I met you,” he said. “I'm not,” she said. And he returned it.

Inaccrochable

Unapproachable. I imagine an L. Frank Baum novel with a hairy lesbian marching band in parade. The womyn visit the barbershop and keep their hair short like men's then let the hair on their legs and armpits grow like European women's.


The womyn are hippies in their way.

I have to look back at it: men in Madison guaranteeing the free speech of a preacher on the library mall. The preacher stands during lunch hour on a concrete platform and shouts at the group, perhaps hoping to save them, "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" The beards face him braced at attention, forking the word in the cold.

I walk by watching them, not stopping, thinking, "What fornication?"

Later, ten years later, in Texas, I visit G.'s apartment. She orders the men to piss off the balcony but lets the women through the bedroom to the bathroom to pee. Pages of my thesis are strewn throughout the rooms and cover the floor. We sit on them and on old CDs. The visitors grow upset, to the point of hysteria, if one of their lovers sleeps with another of their lovers or husband or wife. "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" I shout from the bathroom. The men hear it and send in J., the little drug dealer girl, to see.

. . .

When the man comes in the house with his girlfriend, he is hoisting a 12-pack of Bud, and she is holding her eye where he has flicked it with his baseball cap while driving. M. and I have been arguing about the future. At first we are glad to be interrupted. I immediately think of the two of them driving 25 miles out of Houston to get to us in Sugarland, but when I see that the girlfriend is injured, I get on my horse.

The man is wiry and jumpy. There is a tattoo on his upper arm of Charles Manson. He jumps and jumps. He looks like a man on a pogo stick. He will not stop jumping. "I'm going to smash all the windows of her car," he claims. "Stop him," I say to M., but M. does nothing except try to make peace with concentration. "You're not allowed to hurt her or her car," I say to the man, whose name I have heard once and forgotten. The man veers close to my face and says, "Who are you? Bella Abzug! Gloria Steinem!"

The girlfriend smiles then goes to lie down on the daybed in the dining room. The man runs through the kitchen and out the back door. When he comes back, he says, "I smashed the windows of her car." M. goes out to the driveway and returns. "He did it," he says. "Call the police," I say, and M. says, "We can't have the police here. The neighbors will complain about rehearsals."

Then the man jumps near my face. "I'm going to tell you a story, Bella, Gloria. When I was 13 my father beat my mother every day, and I threw myself into the fight and tried to stop him. I couldn't stop him. He was bigger than I was. You have TLE. I have TLE. You have bipolar. I have bipolar. But mainly I shoot heroin. Would you like to shoot heroin?"

"No," I say and look at M. "She doesn't do that," M. explains. Then M. leaves the house by the front door, and I pretend he will be right back, that he will not abandon me to a fiend. The girlfriend has not gotten up from the daybed to look at her car. She lies turned to one side holding her eye and shyly laughing.

I go to the master bedroom. I close the door. I leave it unlocked for M. The man comes running through the door, jumping and making noise. "I'm going to eat you," he says. Then he leaves and I lock it. I get in bed. I can hear him fucking her in the dining room. I hear her songbird sigh. I can try to get under my head. I pull the pillows over my ears and the covers under my chin. I pray, What solidifies them. What unites them: Blessed are these the workers of the world.

[Published in Wigleaf, 2010.]

Po-cash

My savings account had $16,000 in it. There were $16,000 in my savings account. I was on this side of the economy. I sided with the economy: get on up, banks, get on up!

Barbara hadn’t called for a year before her position at the biotech company had been eliminated: Six years after her chapter seven, she owed $16,000 in credit card debt, and her wisdom teeth teemed with cavities. She was unemployed, and her wisdom teeth hurt.

Aaron called to say his wife’s sister had been killed. She’d been beaten for an hour then shot between the eyes by someone she knew, someone backing a jealous girlfriend. I didn’t believe that, but I believed someone had killed her -- until they knew more -- slain. He asked me to pay for the funeral. After his divorce from his rich second wife, he had filed chapter seven. He said, “You have money,” and, “My wife’s family are white trash.” At one time he had wanted to marry me. He could have said “my third wife’s family,” but he said “my wife.” He had a job. I said, “Aaron, you earn $90,000 a year,” and he said, “Shut up” and “fucking bitch” as I might have said “goddamn.”

Nancy called to say the housing market had slowed to a creep, and she was running out of cash. Her mother had died leaving her several million in real estate and locked assets. She was tired of it! she said.

My sister called to ask for $200 for a dress form for her clothing design business. She pitched it like a saleswoman. I had spent $400 on her birthday the week before that, thinking it was extravagant and due to having something.

My mother called to invite me to a play. I felt like I owed her, and I did. I bought the tickets.

At 60, Brian, a music prodigy, who had rent control and a house he inherited in New Jersey, never called. I called him. He and his wife, a publishing executive, couldn’t buy groceries except rice and beans. Chop-chop salad, I said.

Jason called before his chapter seven to ask me how to file. He worked nine-hour days trying to sell Chevrolets and had borrowed $60,000 to pay bills: daycare, mortgage, food. “Black is up, red is down,” I said, knowing he turned to pleasant memories of lawbreaking when he felt discouraged. I asked him to meet me for coffee. He said he hadn’t bought a coffee in a year.

When I was poor, too poor for lunch out or coffee, cash poor but rich in time, the word broke had too catastrophic a meaning, so I said poor to give it balance, to live inside it. I was eating, practicing at gentility and at saying “fixed income.” My friends lived flamboyantly with millionaires they ended up not marrying. The therapist for the county suggested I move out of my mother’s house and into government housing.

Who remembers? What do any of us remember of those times?

I am a would-be philanthropist with my nest egg, but I would go down. The egg came from winning a poetry contest: $20,000. The text of my poem is as follows and appeared in a hard cover volume called Touch of Tomorrow, $80 a copy:

Florence’s Weekend

Grace brought Ryan
with his saw
to grind the trunk
and make the logs
build the stack
and clear the leaves
the tree left
when it died

I had told three people who later called broke of my success. I said they can write a poem, too: anyone can! They said they didn’t want to write a poem. They said they were too busy working to write poems. When they realized all I intended to give them was a story about a poem, they said: Why didn’t I get a job (if I couldn’t be useful)?

Anger management, the therapist said, so I went. The therapist there scowled at me for coming in late. I realized I was angry because I knew no one who could meet for lunch. Why did poor people go to therapy? They borrowed money for housing; why not borrow money for business school? What had I learned at leisure school: the days went by slowly, the weeks went by fast. I didn’t know how to pass time; it passed me, and it couldn’t be saved. Time kept running at me, flapping its salty deck in my face like A/C.

Curfew

Composing in my head this afternoon, I wrote a fast masterpiece. I had not had a glass of wine nor eaten a fruit; I had climbed a hill in high gear. Pushing against the pedals in sport sandals and pedal pushers, a “crossbody mini” (as such purses are called in the industry) holding my nature-man cigarettes, phone, keys, and no notepad, bobbing against my backside, my organic cotton royal blue t-shirt, I saw phrases, a seven-pack of lines, every line its reasons: nothing reasonable on the page's blank and nothing out of order. Every minute its thing. Every thing its minute memory. Every memory its own account threading rivulets to sea, spilling water to wall flowers.

What would be perfect.

Here, indoors, sitting merely where the equipment is, after a drink with the meal, nothing comes but the memory of heightened tactics.

I sing better in my mind than I sing aloud. Mentally, I sing soprano.

The story was about the adulterous man who shaved his head in spring. The story was about the Houston police devising a punishment for the adulterous man -- shaving heads of adulterers would be an excellent idea to them except the adulterer had beat them to it -- never letting him cut his hair would be another. Not that the courts would cite it. Not that the adulterous man was balding or a skinhead and so had shaved it; he was a thespian. The Houston police devised a punishment for the adulterous thespian that would not hurt the nights or household income of his French young wife. The Houston police caught him drinking. The parking lot behind the tavern emptied of its hundred cars. The police wanted that one bald thespian's car: The car was a Houston police car bought at auction and stripped of its decals. The police in their turquoise squad cars followed the thespian in his plain turquoise car as it followed a slate blue car Mondays and Wednesdays to a street far from where the thespian lived with his wife. The thespian smoked a roach on the way, proudly unaware that the police were following him, preferring to think that they were riding beside him.

That time the judge sentenced him to five AA meetings per week, a work permit (he kept the car), plates in the driveway weeknights by nine.

Eloise's porter

Eloise went into her closet to pick a pair among her hundred pairs of shoes. 100 x 2 = 200 shoes. A pair of shoes equals a pound. Her shoes weighed 100 pounds. She admired them in their mound on the floor of the walk-in: Glossy red, tawny orange, forest green, metallic gray, black, brown, ivory, pointed toes, square heeled, tall boots, ankle boots, patent leather, suede. Eloise wore a 7AA.

Eloise picked her favorite pair of blue jeans; a long-torsoed embroidered white blouse with satin blue ribbon; a delicate pale pink and white underwire bra and panty set; and matte royal blue low-heeled pumps. She assembled herself without difficulty and threaded the jeans with a narrow alligator belt. Voila!

Her clear, smooth skin was too pure to need make-up, yet everyday she hesitated near the mirror: There were people who rejected a woman’s face unless it was camouflaged. She wore mascara and as with her fetish for shoes and boots, she fetishized mascara colors, what few there were. Navy blue Chanel, she selected. Sheer plum lipgloss to vaunt her pearly whites.

Eloise’s hair was in arrears. It was brave straw sprouting from a vase. Her forebears had owned slaves.

In the suburbios

As far as I was concerned, she had done it. Her foot had done it. Her right foot, to be exact, had not coordinated with her eye movements in time to avoid hitting the lady. A sin of omission, an error in haste.

All this talk of “woman” “man” “man” “woman” “lady” “girl.” At death crossing an intersection, do you want to go out as a lady, spread flat against the curb, hit by a lady driver in her 40s -- not a very young lady -- or do you want to die a woman? “Hey, lady, you just hit a woman, killed her.”

The lady who died was old. Relatives on both sides of the story say it was no one’s fault. The lady driving didn't care deep down: Her kids had not been in the car, but her mother had been there, her mother before suddenly developing Alzheimer’s and moving to a home. Poof! Esther’s crossing-the-street dead! No blame nor cause for a civil suit: an innocent taking of burdens off the street one burden at a time.

Belinda’s darned for money, strapped, house full of renovations, nannies to pay and kids in private school.

I bring up the death because though Belinda did it, she is not quick to forgive. I haven’t hit so much as a squirrel.

There were breaches of etiquette in her first marriage; her first husband took a piss on a bush outside a museum. The children were watching, the boy and the baby. Her second husband is “ordinary” but decent, lets Harry pay.

No need to pay for the accident because it didn’t happen “that way.” The cel phone didn’t do it. Her foot didn’t do it. Her foot didn’t fall.

"Bless everyone mentioned in every news story, no matter where they stand or what they do. For what we bless is delivered to divine right order. Bless those who do harm as well as those who do good, for any judgment blocks the light and keeps miracles at bay. Becoming emotionally reactive when we are confronted with darkness only serves to keep the darkness alive. Reacting with fear merely feeds the fear."

-- Marianne Williamson

Vertigo

In the um. In the, um, beginning. The, uh, founder of wide-margined porous-prose steel prospective mother. Counsel. In the beginning, before the beginning, until the end, she, headstrong, rose clairvoyant into the next. Stomach. Surprise. Etwas auf Deutsch gesagt würde. Strumming heels. Fixed Parkinson’s. Herr Drueder saw her at Caribou. Saw her at Starbuck’s because there were no Caribou's in Texas that I saw. He saw her at Starbuck’s, but I would rather that he’d seen her at Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t remember whether there were Dunkin’ Donuts in Texas. There is one in New York, across First Avenue from Beth Israel Hospital. I fell for the advertising. I did not buy a donut, but I bought the famous coffee after learning it was famous. There are cups more famous than that at Dunkin’ Donuts. I bought two cups and had no way to carry them with my umbrella extended, so it rained. I had vertigo. Crossing the Avenue with vertigo was as anxiety-provoking as if I had been crossing against the light without vertigo. I feared collapse midway. I feared that my legs would give out under me, and I’d fall to the pavement and that help would not arrive before the light changed and the cars moved. I stop typing to put a latex glove on the right hand with which to eat cheese curls. I lick the glove clean, remember chewing popped balloons like bubblegum, and resume typing the story. Tell it in nine words. Lazy.

Wall Street

Try to write a short story. The first line of the short story is about trying to write a short story. Trying to write a short story is like trying to type a letter for a secretary who could type her own letters, but since she is an administrative assistant, the agency pays me to do her clerical work. She will not file. They trust me to file for her. She consults files when she has a question, a question that derives from her own intelligence. Probably she has a bachelor’s degree. I have a master’s degree. She wears a navy skirted suit. I wear a navy skirt and white floral blouse. I am not to use my intelligence, my autonomy, my independent sense of what has value and meaning or my sense of license in writing. The agency does not pay for my health insurance. The law firm pays for hers. The old barrister (her boss) comes in at eleven or one. He smiles at me knowing all too well. The summer intern, who sits on my desk (once), sniffs me out as a lay then is told that I finished graduate school and am technically, get off the desk. I am peripherally his senior, except that law (his field) has more clout, more entity, more finality than mine, though mine was a terminal degree. I type for her. He barely notices her. He notices her. He is to treat her equally, as with respect, but he is to treat me for one hopeful morning as a prospective lay. I tell him that I’m engaged to take the pressure off these other hierarchies, to relate. I would only type for him if they asked. I aspire to work as an old school secretary directly for the barrister, but no such luck.

Citizens: a fragment

B: Write an essay about war for the checklist.
A: Did it, only it was a short story.
B: Write a poem with synecdoche.
A: I confuse it with metonymy.
B: Write a poem about the economy.
A: I did that, but it's a cut-up.
B: Write a short story about men for the gym teacher. Write a candle for the century.
A: How do I end it?
B: Write a synopsis.
A: I wrote a synopsis for the regional agent. They were unimpressed.
B: Write about sex. Write a negligee.
A: I wrote about sex. My friend wrote a negligee. Agents were unimpressed.
B: Write for your friends.
A: I lost my friends.
B: What if men are your friends?
A: Start over.
B: Forget the past.
A: Cry.
B: Die.
A: Sing.
B: A useful talent.
A: I need the past for writing purposes.
B: The moment is all.
A: For artists, not for writers.
B: Write a long joke.
A: Various items -- puddles, frogs, fog, flag stripes.
B: Term litmus.
A: Self-leadership.
B: Encourage, enlighten, and entertain.
A: Be loyal, frank, and merry.
B: Marry for love.
A: Substitute Swiss for German.
B: Buy now.
A: Do nothing.

Credenza

Now the house is empty of romance except a potted flowering plant from my mother for Valentine’s Day. No man has set foot in my museum since I moved here. One man has set foot. The owner’s brother to see about the gasket under the toilet. The Comcast installers, twice. The man and his son who sold me the corner desk and cupboards. The cupboards have a name that I’ll think of before I’m done. I’m showing you that I’m not always right.

It was Abe Lincoln’s 200th birthday, so that is how I‘ll remember it -- the day, the time. The years I lived in Binghamton I visited Irish bars in the evening, and I had many Irish friends, not from Ireland, but Americans whose ancestors were from Ireland. And one of them told me he could move to Ireland merely by proving his heritage, but he stayed in Binghamton afterall; he bought a house with a turret where his son plays drums. Later I wrote five short stories about him and about our plan to move to Canada, something we never did nor visited, even though we threatened it when Irish bars were closing, and we pretended to be bored by cloudy Binghamton. He had his birthday Feb. 12, and I’d talked to him earlier that day. He was worried about the bathroom renovation, and he asked me to give him some paint -- cobalt blue with copper in it -- but I laughed it off, as if: fat chance I’d send him paint. He was not enjoying his birthday in the least, which distressed me. Perhaps I’ll send him a gift certificate for paint.

He and our Greek-American friend, Tomas, sat in the first row and smoked in the original Jerry Rothenberg course. I sat in the back row with Deb; she and I smoked when Tomas and Michael were done smoking and before Jerry smoked again. Other people smoked besides. We retained everything we learned. We learned more than usual for a seminar. My presentation was on Dada in Zurich, and while I talked, Michael drew my lips in his sketchpad, and this drawing became a monument to friendship that started then.

When I met the other Michael in Texas, I dubbed him Michael to remind me of my friend, but other people called him Mikey, and I might have realized early but didn’t or wouldn’t that I was not replicating my happy days but was creating a bomb that would last a lifetime and that would turn out to be no one’s fault, just something -- a timeframe -- that happened and that contained its own happinesses.

I wanted to say a few times that you are Irish, but you had said that already, so I thought it might not add much to the conversation to repeat it. It might add too much. I might put myself in the position of iterating stories of Irish men. My friend, Maureen, writes about Irish women writers and other Irish people. I went to one of her talks in NYC about the son of a businessman from Brooklyn named James Johnson Sweeney who became curator of MoMA.

The rest I told you, that I began to write male characters in fiction for the first time -- I began to impersonate men movie stars in the mirror -- I crossed over. I thought I would refuse to finish my novel about Texas and leave it as a short story, really leave it that way, without writing it in the first person, male point of view, but in the third person semi-omniscient point of view. A novel that spans 30 pages after all the cuts have been made, story with a complex chronological design that introduces a novel that doesn’t exist. The woman in the short story is less interesting than the man. The reader might care very little about her, because she is emotionally frozen, immobilized in her apartment by her inability to make a decision about wrongdoing about which she knows almost nothing. The other people in her world are much more active and engaged. She is a poet who writes three poems and contracts to write little or nothing. Someone being funny might think it’s a novella about writer’s block rather than about a rock band named ISM-GISM.

Marie Ponsot told us in her talk about the writer’s duty that “sex” had been referred to in her mother’s past as “rendering the debt.” What we call love or banging. I like your Pendleton sweater. I enjoyed your stories. There was such an opportunity to see each other in the evenings. If only I hadn’t sworn off shaving -- it was awkward sticking to it all weekend -- I saw myself as beyond shaving when I swore it off. Let’s cut this up and send it. You might think that’s the end, but no.

There was a man, a Harley Davidson salesman I met in AA, with whom I ate at Perkins many, many nights. I told him he seemed Irish to me, though his last name was German. The next time I saw him, he told me he’d asked his mother who said he was three-quarters Irish and one-quarter German. Why wouldn’t his mother or his father have mentioned Irish blood until then? My aesthetician, Kathy, went on a disappointing date with him -- the motorcycle salesman we’d picked out for her. He sells cars now that the bottom has fallen out. It was the car salesman she found so one-note; then he got pissed off that she’d told him that on the phone. That is how I came to avoid going in for salon treatments -- waxes, haircuts, color touch-ups, facials, manicures, pedicures -- something I was given to before that.

Dreams-in-progress

I noticed that on nicotine patch I dreamt of celebrities and sex. These were men who knew me in the dreams but not in life. All of them were extremely famous, except Dan Fogerty, who used to be more famous and who kissed me like a teenager. Redford came in a limo. With Dylan the embrace was of friendship for my real friend, Jack. A team of reggae journalists played and an unknown man came after work for me in a kilt.

Perhaps it's due to Wellbutrin -– who knows? -- that I dream now of celebrities I have met and who might argue against it, their fame, as a false claim, one that means (no one besides poets and students, colleagues and friends knows them) a familiarity related to but unlike widespread fame.

I walked into a party. Men I'd heard of were there and more than "heard of," whose intimate veiled thoughts revealed in pages of risky avant garde literature I had read. I was wearing new shoes that were a half size too small. My feet had grown from pounding the pavement looking for someone. The homelessness had broken open in me without interrupting shelteredness.

I had slept with a dry head in a soft bed, alone. It was as if I had always slept that way. I might have resorted to holding a stuffed animal. There was a reason for this celibacy but it was not religion or disease. It was society. I had exceeded a limit placed on all of us -- how many hands we are to hold before picking the hand we most wish to hold for life. I had thought it was a numeral but it was a resonance, one that happens early then recurs.

I hit upon it with a musician, a famous man married for decades, a soul already spoken for, enough. I was poor (despite my shelter) and I had learned that "poor" is different from "broke" which didn't apply to all poor people. "Broke” described the nouveau poor. And "clarity" I suggested we use when "enough" had been reached.

I dreamt in three dreams that we were at a poetry reading and at two AA meetings. In the second dream of the meetings the married musician suggested that I read seafaring novels to help the alcoholic I had next met. The alcoholic had rejected AA as brainwashing. Enough, enough, enough, but it wasn’t yet enough: clarity in action.

In the earlier dream about the meetings –- the rooms change –- I am bottomless under the table and must cross the room to find pants. My fat shows, fat that wasn’t there when he met me, vantage he would not have seen.

In the dream of the poet there is a wide sweeping lawn, and we flirt, but it is or is not the same thing, and we have no words for it: “legislation,” “negotiation,” “foundation.” I collide with him on a hill and knock him over. I recircle the hill to see him but by then he is busy.

Earlier, not ten years of it, I had walked into Keillor's bookstore, and the word "clarity" was written across a banner under the ceiling. Enough, I was thinking, but the furtive position of one seeking clarity or enough, quietly or alone, was barely enough when I couldn't see those brown eyes or pass a guess.

Dream in Snow Circle

I dreamt that we were in the snow. The snow looked like the tundra. My sister was there and was looking at me from inside the snow circle near the house. She was knitting or mending. Pierre Joris was standing in open snow, wearing a parka, and the fur ruff on his hood made him look sincere. I told my sister, “That's Pierre Joris. He's a poet.” “Oh,” she said. Then Pierre came to talk to me. He had a collection of record albums indoors; we went inside to search the records and see the equipment. The phone rang. A freelance client named Martin, who had unwillingly given up a chance to work with me to a man named Clay, was calling to warn me that Clay had ripped up a plastic milk jug in the house they rented, while claiming the jug was me. When I got off the phone, I wanted to play my “Sound Experiment” for Pierre, knowing he might like it if it were played properly with the right equipment, but it didn't seem possible: a French feminist in a caftan had come into the room and was applying cream to her elbows. She ordered the equipment. Pierre said to me, “I'm horny.” “I can read French," I told him. "If you heard my French, you would laugh.” My sister stayed outside near the snow circle mending.

Posted at Annandale Dream Gazette. Read Robert Kelly's description of poets' dreams at Ready Steady Book.

Dear Physical Man:

The realtor I befriended in the cult once admitted that she had cellulite and then she apologized for her dark thoughts, and I didn’t know what was dark in it. It was a cloaked confession, since we were both in longer shorts, waiting for a picnic to start by Unison Lake. She said, we aren't even allowed to have cellulite, and I knew she didn't mean by the cult because neither of us perceived we were in a cult; she meant by her man. I thought my thoughts were darker. The headlines harm my gentle soul. If you were to read my thoughts, the day’s news might flash before you -- news I reject at the barrier between me & it -- and you might think I were news too. You cast me to your left, then your right, in your seeking a better woman, but you do not know me. I am so afoul of my genuine likes & dislikes that I write you, and you ignore me. I think of you before sleep. I protest to my non-cat, my bunched pillow, that people need to engulf someone at night. You're a sign in glorious physical gear.

Distressedly,

Donna

Dear Eunice:

That you wrote to me regarding our writing "experiment," our little coalition to create a new form of writing -- our fantasy to be in Playboy released -- isn't that how it came out? -- is a tremendous honor. I wanted to be in Playboy; you wanted to be in Playboy. Instead, you live in South Carolina with a husband who used to look at Playboy until he met you at 18 -- isn't that what you wrote? And I never even think about my Playboy goal, anymore, ever since I grew up & left high school & started to vote & came back home to Grange. Unbeknownst to me, under my surface, there was this aged, mouldy-bread, rock-hard former wish to be featured nude, and you had the same one, and we wrote, using a new form of writing (people in Grange are not my audience; people in South Carolina not yours). Probably, our audience is in England. Didn't the provost at the writing conference talk a lot about England? (I thought it was weird that a provost was leading a writing session, but maybe it's just me.) I've thought about your offer to move in with you and Lawrence while I recover from a.) my cult exposures (thank you for the offer, to be sure) and b.) from the rumor that I had probably had a baby & left it at a train station in Wyo. The cultists were making up stories like that about people, and we were required to attend the groups, anyway, even though they were basically ruining every day we ever had lived with their lies & invented religiosity. After going through that horrible set of years, I could not have believed that I harbored that old fantasy to be in Playboy. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be ironic in it or not. If I take you up on your offer, and at least visit you in S.C., we could try to write a collaborative story about the cult years -- I'll give it to you. The provost & his team would not like it, do not like collaborative or new writing, and would much rather read something conventional -- wouldn't they? We could knit a sign that reads, "Experimental Short Story," to hold up at the next conference. I'm just glad I met you & that we are friends.

Love,

Donna