The Embroidered Garden

New Publication

2011-09-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

My poem Landlubber is appearing in the September issue of Stirring: A Literary Collection. Enjoy!

http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/

Water

2011-06-23T23:14:00.001-07:00

When I came up for air, the others were already gone. Black, black water all around me, couldn’t tell which way was up or down for a minute, choking, retching, so much water in my eyes, my nose. I went under again but then a big wave bobbed me up. It felt like the ocean toyed with me like that forever, but it was probably just fifteen minutes – almost killing me, then spitting me back out for a huge, painful breath of air.

A piece of the ship found me just as I was beginning to slip into a quiet, deep blue state somewhere warm and just above the waves, somewhere very quiet and still. The pain woke me and I was angry when I realized I’d been hit in the jaw with this giant piece of wood. I tried to push it away actually, I was so tired, just wanted the sweet deep blue quiet, but then there were arms pulling roughly, I groaned water as they heaved me up onto some sort of makeshift raft. I heaved seawater from every small, dark, painful crevice of my body, retched and retched and then the world went black again, a vast field of cold stars above my head, winking out all at once.

There must have been drifting I guess, a long cold night of it, but all I remember is the brilliant morning and the hard white stones of a mysterious beach pressing into my cheeks. I started crying as soon as I tried to move, the pain of being alive was so excruciating. When I finally managed to pull myself onto hands and knees, I noticed that I was on a vast beach full of white pebbles that were dazzling in the sun, and that sitting next to me, calm as a statue, was a boy of about 17, wearing a red sarong and holding a huge pink conch shell, its curves and spines so exquisite it was hard to tell which I should pay more attention to – the boy or the shell.

More Information

2011-05-09T17:15:00.000-07:00

Wow, thank you so so SO much to everyone who has thus far contributed. You are all so incredible and I feel lucky to have each and every one of you in my life!

It's been suggested that I share a little more information about my vision for school, so that you can all know a little bit more about what you're helping to support!

After a three-year process of weighing the pros and cons of college, searching my life-long unschooler soul to make sure I really wanted to go, researching schools, taking the GED (no highschool diploma!) and navigating the maze-like application process, I was accepted to Mills College in Oakland, CA - a small, all-women liberal arts school that I feel completely thrilled about attending.

I will be studying my two lifelong passions: creative writing and psychology, with the intention of one day becoming a therapist focusing on mindfulness, somatic and creativity-based approaches, along with being a professional writer "on the side." That's how my path looks right now, but who knows how it will take shape as I go!

Again, my deepest thanks for contributing to this dream. I will take you all with me in spirit!

Love,

Rebecca

P.S. Here's the link to my ChipIn page if you haven't already donated and would like to: http://rebeccagoestocollege.chipin.com/help-me-go-to-college

Help Me Go to College!

2011-05-08T21:51:00.000-07:00

So one of my biggest dreams has come true: I've been accepted to Mills College to study creative writing! However, my financial aid is about $8,000 too short, I've already taken out quite a few loans, and I'm getting creative about raising money!

Please consider making a donation to send me to college, even $5 or $10 would be wonderful.

Thank you and much love to you all!

Rebecca

The Ancestors Are Not Sated

2011-04-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

Clinging to red-streaked rock, their numbers grow. They have survived in me and I am all too quick to reduce them, what cobwebs of memory I have evaporated under the chilly April sunshine, yesterday my birthday, the beginning of my 27th year, on a day when I am alive and they are not.

I celebrate that I am alive but I know I will be dead soon too. Soon even if it is another 60 years. I have already led dozens of lives as dozens of different people, all in this serviceable body that has born the same name (more or less) for 27 years. If I were a dog or cat, I would most likely be dead and reborn twice over in this time. What I am trying to say is that I don’t know what to make of life. I could be dead at any minute or slowly and what does that mean? I know things, I have inklings, I hear whispers and feel glowing warmth and the firm tugging of invisible strings all the time. I know the unseen world is teeming, know the unknown outnumbers the body of facts we’ve assimilated by a thousand-fold. But it’s the blackness that scares me, the thought of being two sightless, bodiless eyes in a vat of nothingness, unceasing nothingness. Where do we come from, really? Where do we go? When I set about the dirty and glorious work of saving myself, am I saving the ancestors too? Perhaps back through time… I feel them heave great breaths sometimes, loosening, untying their tight and ragged knots.

This morning standing in moccasins and a big gray sweater at the stove, stirring together broccoli and mushrooms, potatoes and eggs, boiling water in the tarnished kettle for coffee with fresh raw Jersey milk, I surfaced a memory, a tucked and guarded secret story, the one about my great-grandfather who was in the Klan. If I tell most people, they will unleash their horror, curl their lips, show the whites of their eyes. No one likes to be found guilty of carrying their country’s history. How easy it would be to travel light, pretend that your family tree began with just your grandparents, and maybe they didn’t really have much influence on you anyway.

But somehow my great-grandfather’s deep fear and neurosis spawned a child that deeply cared about his secret Cherokee roots, worked for fair housing in the 1950s, spawned a grandchild who walked side by side with Martin Luther King Jr., another who married a black man and then spent much of her life after 50 trying to heal her own internalized racism.

And the grandchild stirring broccoli. It would be easy to spit water and gaze innocent at myself in the mirror as I brush my teeth. But I have a survived knowledge of responsibility, backwards and forwards throughout the crook of time, a knowledge that will not let me evaporate before I bring healing.

What I Know How to Do Well

2011-04-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

First crawl out, bitter, warm, wrinkled. Survey the room weakly, move head from side to side slowly, muscles stiff, wondering if one will tweak and spasm - I didn't do my exercises last night.

Light from window diffuse, sound of rain soft, spitting. Can't be bothered to look, I can tell what kind of rain it is without looking, I have become an expert on rain here, we all have, constant, constant. Moments when the drops cease, evaporate back into the thick woolen gray sky, that's when you dive, go, grab bike, grab bright orange helmet, go, bike fast, downhill, gravel, wet ankles from the puddles, go.

The bed is crumpled, warm, inviting. Heave off blankets, reveal white flannel sheets, pale brown liquid stain. I've never peed in my bed but it sure looks like it, what is that stain? Where did it come from? Did someone else leave it? Even more disturbing.

Fluff pillows, down one flattened into a lumpy slab, synthetic one unmarred, uncomfortable. Fling white flannel sheet over impression of body on the right side. For some reason I can't sleep in the dead center and definitely not to the left. Sigh and pause to stretch back slowly, touch toes, ease up vertebrae by vertebrae.

Then onto the comforter, devilish thing, snakes out the bottom of the wildly polkadotted cover every single goddamn night, no matter how still and deep I sleep. Wrestle it back into a square, order, snap it back in, onto bed, fluff, smooth, even the edges.

Then the small quilt my mother, older sister and I made. Some days I linger here, run my finger over the purple and blue flower I embroidered in satin stitch when I was seven. Other days I get past it as quickly as possible. Hidden memories, sweet-bitter, raveled pieces of red and blue yarn holding the whole thing together precariously, coming undone bit by bit the older I get, the more I remember.

Next the quilt that is not mine, pilfered from my roommate who got it from a yard sale. I feel a guilty prickle every time I look at it, keep it face down so the patches won’t give me away. It should be on the bed of someone who knows its story, someone who feels the love of the maker sink down in their bones every night, someone who knows that what covers them is more than fabric cut and sewn. But maybe its story is pain and forgetting. Maybe the receiver no longer wanted the burden of meticulous hands, piecing hands, lingering hands over their body in the dark liquid hours when the mind is most vulnerable. It is a fugitive quilt and I hide it between the others.

Last is the innocuous comforter, the one with cheery red and blue geometric windmill shapes on a white background. This one is for the guests, this one is for people who just want to peep in and say oh what a pretty room. This is the one we touch with our hands as we gaze milky at each other, or as we peacefully examine the white ceiling, our bodies tucked neatly between the pocket of sheets.

This is the task I bend to every morning, in the dim hours, the labor that is necessary before I enter into the world.

Time Tunnels

2010-09-07T22:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is hard to remember what time it is – suddenly it could be any year, or no particular year at all. Your pen slips and a date comes out without thinking, one you blink at and hurriedly erase, before anyone around you realizes you have time traveled, snuck sideways without their permission into a pocket of time that fits you so well it is hard to tell you have been somewhere else at all. An accidental slip of the foot can take you there, as though some moments wear the precise shape of your body, need only for you to relax to absorb you like a well-worn mattress, the homey lump of elbows left in wool.

Some people say time is not linear as we would like to believe - a straight chute for us to glide down to our gleaming destiny - but circular, or even more perplexing, snarled like a ball of yarn, criss-crossing and curlicuing like the cobbled streets of a French town. I used to push these descriptions away, disliking the jumbled, chattering way they made me feel. But now, in my twenty-sixth year, I am having the slow and unnerving realization that I am living all moments of my life simultaneously, whether I agree to it or not: the trapped, leathery feeling of the family car trip when I was seven, Dad exploding at a rest stop, shoulders huge before me in their plaid shirt, the landscape shocked in snow outside. That flash of whiteness and my subsequent crumbling will leap at me sometimes, clutching my chest. When a man looks at me with a certain blank disdain, or when anger freezes his jawbone. When I am in the backseat of a car going much too fast.

I seem to be foraging in the dark soil of the future as well, running my fingers through its pebbles and leaves unwittingly, here and there making acquaintance with an astonished root or vine, following it up to the surface…

Just today, I wrote the date as 2011, a year ahead. Some part of me knows I will be writing then, worrying about the future, trying to wring sorrow from the past, too busy tunneling into time to notice for more than an astonishing instant that I have already arrived.

Pleasant Ridge

2010-08-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

You sent me pictures of the land
where I grew up. Yes –
it was just as I remembered
the tiny white-washed country store
at the corner of highways Z and ZZ
hills rolling wheaty and bountiful
blue-tipped in the distance where they met
the low, lazy puff of clouds rising perpetually
from the wide Wisconsin River.

“Amazing cheeseburger location”
said the website you’d found. And there
was a picture of the famous burger, shining
like an old friend’s face – golden hill of bun
embracing meat, swaddled in cheese
cozy nest of French fries
pickles humble as a dog.

We drove past that store, you and I
back when it felt right to call you
the love of my life, safe –
we’d already had our happy ending.
But I know what happens to all roads
ZZ turns to Rosy Lane, to triple H, to 18-151
but all end eventually, in dust or pasture
ocean or concrete.

And if you retrace your steps
along an ended road, it’s never the same
leading you into nightfall, a rocky cliff
of limestone and sand, an apple orchard
glimmering with the last rays of sun.

A place you think you were happy once, but
the road no longer leads there
or your own treacherous memory, faltering as dusk
has fed you a fiction once again
trying to nurse stability
out of the constantly waving fields of grass.

Arena Township, 1998

2010-07-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

When I was fourteen
I lived in honey, suspended
like a petrified bug.
The washed-out gold light
spilled down through the hills
by my piano teacher’s house
the sky dark and enormous
when I came outside later
stars itching like fireflies.

My fingers swarmed
over the clinking piano keys
learning to make them sing sweet
as a woman, tenderly
as a dancer pliés.

Nancy wore lipstick
that clung red to her teeth in places
threw her arms out wide
to measure of the feelings I struggled
to coax into awkward sound.
Her eyes pleaded, thinking
I might not get it.
We didn't talk about boys.

Sometimes, she took me up
the delicious, creaking staircase
to look from the huge windows
at the paint-spattered cows below.
Angels gilded the walls, their silent hands
cool and luminous.

A pot of soup always bubbled
seductively on the stove, a plate
of flower-shaped cookies on the table.
Nancy told me ladies never
licked their fingers or reached
for crumbs even a mouse
might miss.

But in that glowing
old barn of a house, I wanted
everything, my desire sharp as a needle
in the crazy quilt of hills
stitching my dreams
bold as silver.

Barcelona

2010-07-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

The men who run our hostel
have sleepy eyes and charge for everything:
blankets, laundry, internet.
They never take a day off
expect us to entertain them
like awkward party guests.

We hear them breathing
the movement of their thoughts
as they sit for hours in front of the small tv
flip-flops shuffling on tile floor
irritable sigh.

I lay in bed drinking
boxed sangria well past noon.
I am not Picasso
I can’t turn a woman
into a thousand inside-out birds.
I grew up on corn, hard work, regret.

We flew across the moody Atlantic
eager to tame our longing, blue and rose.
After three weeks we are sunburned
feet blistered from walking cobbled streets.
At night we watch hordes of English boys
get drunk in fake Irish pubs.

In the hazy afternoon
we spiral up to fairytale Park Güell
perched in purple hills, filled
with pushing teenagers
from every country in the world.
Climb 2,000 steps to see the city spread
beneath us, breathless, laced with fog
hurried catch of minds
falling away to the sea .

In that dreamy darkness
none can avoid
we find our humid longing
impossible to repair, a mosaic
tender beneath our flesh
a treasure we cannot lose.

So Easily

2010-05-20T00:51:00.000-07:00

I come upon a squirrel carcass

twisted in damp grass

beneath a sheltering oak, almost

no longer an animal, becoming

something else entirely:

birchbark, driftwood, honeycomb.

Its gnarled feet point up

the roots beneath point down.

My legs shine like ignorant beacons

pointed straight toward nightfall

so caught up in movement I forget

I could so easily not be here at all.

Left Hand Says

2010-05-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

I am destitute
coal mine.
Down in the earth
the rocks run black
with despair.

Right side is busy, cheerful
distracted, fast.

Left side is slow blond girl
locked in a room
alone with no allies.
Left side is mutiny.
Left side is left behind.

Left side is where
he left me at 5 and 25.
Different men, same
[ ____________ ]

Left side is the deep gray pull
of the ocean.

Left side is where you left me left me left me…

Crawl away
small child.

After the burning feast
of anger has been consumed
the sadness devours me.
No one to knock
on the locked door
for 20 years.

Now that I know you
what do I
do?

Hold the blond child close
kiss her soft hair
lay my cheek
against her pounding head.

Hold her, hold her
until a soft flower begins
to bloom, a sad
open-hearted flower.

So full of love
it is the deepest strength
shining blue-red.
It pours out of us, around
between us.

That love
loves
everything
and is
whole.

Away on the Wind

2010-03-23T00:46:00.000-07:00

We biked all day
escaping Portland.

The gurgling river
kept track of us past

Swan Island, Ross Island, Toe Island
the proud silky geese standing guard

with their black faces and prizefighter’s chests
the amusement park lonely

singing itself a tinny song
that blew away on the wind.

We traveled through small
Midwestern towns

bright banners flying
antique stores mumbling the past.

Here is that mainstreet
you walked down once

on a yellow day in your childhood.
And here is the tiny café

I once spent three days in
eating through chocolate éclairs

licking the glossy gold custard
from the cracks in my knuckles.

The towns that kept us safe once
dissolve as the sun sets

and we drop hands, uncertain
what to trust

as the wind from the river
erases the breath from our tongues.

White

2010-03-22T23:21:00.001-07:00

Ralph
my first
black
friend.

Milwaukee
I slept
on your floor
machines
turning gears
all night.

Rose
at 7
walked
into the
sun.

Realized
-flash-
I was
glowing:
only
one
in
sight.

Sheer
blink
of terror
shoulders
bundling
to neck.

Gasp
discomfort
not
belonging
then
fast on
its heels:
guilt.

Turn
to your
face
smiling
full of
morning.

Despair
knowing
in this
divided
city
you must
feel this
heaviness

Every
single
god
damned
day.

How to Avoid Change

2010-03-04T12:33:00.000-08:00

Stick things in your ears.
Close your eyes and refuse
to open them for anyone, even if they are trying
to show you something beautiful – a watercolor
pigment still wet and earthy,
a bird skimming the silver grass of a field.

Close your mouth.
Change hovers just behind the teeth
ready to leap out.

Hold onto things tightly.
Any large, immobile object will do –
washers or dryers, monkey bars, cars and trucks,
porch railings, large boulders.
Don’t hang onto people.
People are always disappearing
worse than ghosts.
They can’t even be counted on
to haunt you.

Don’t use electricity.
You might see the world for a minute.
This morning the sky was pure gold
with one orange streak. Tonight
it is deep blue with thin pink threads.

Don’t move across the country.
Stay in the same town you grew up in
or pick the town you lived in the longest
and move back there.
You don’t need to be happy,
you will be safe.
You will recognize everything
with a sharp, defeated familiarity.

Imagine you are a potted plant,
a geranium or pansy,
a wreath made of dry twigs.
Imagine you are an immaculate stainless steel surface
the smooth, satisfied face of the refrigerator,
the placid curve of a mixing bowl.

Imagine you are a fresh white envelope, never sent.

Magical Powers

2010-02-14T23:09:00.000-08:00

I used to pull numbers round
from my pale head.
I was the kid who always won the guessing
games at birthday parties, leaving
Moriah and Kelly freckled and blank,
fists soft and half-melted around
pink napkins, chocolate whispering
above lips that were about to give
the wrong answer.

Mothers stopped letting me play.
There was nothing they could pull
from a paper bag I hadn’t already seen,
no item small enough to hide
behind the dark corners of their ears
I couldn’t coax out.
I heard the numbers’ square feet
marching whole minutes off,
saw them in a holy flash,
spit them out before I had time
to question how I knew.

They burned on my tongue
sweet as lightning.

Rain Falls

2010-01-17T20:56:00.000-08:00

Rain falls and my pale suede boots get wet and water sneaks into my grubby white socks and my mind is racing and can't shut up - heartbreak, work, England - and I barely feel my toes flood cold as I stampede both the past and future at once.

Rain falls and suddenly I am aware of bird noise in the darkening afternoon, hundreds of little beaks and throats warbling in the same key and it's such an unusual sound for January that I crane my neck from underneath my green and white umbrella to see what all the commotion is about.

And there is a giant tree, barren but for hundreds of plump little birds camped among its branches, all moving and talking and singing at once, singing with gusto, not just the bare functionalities most birds could spare on a day deep in January, full of rain.

The birds are leaf-shaped, and as they twitter, the whole tree comes alive as if a summer wind blows through it. In all their tiny voices I hear one word repeated, one exuberant note, over and over again: spring.

And as I stand there stopped fully along the edge of this busy, homeless street, stopped mid-stride, mid-twenties, mid-heartbreak, they rise up all at once, twirling a few rounds of perfectly executed aerial acrobatics, before fluttering off to spread their news to another miserable, busy person, made fortunate for a moment by its hearing.

Ode to a Professor of Electrical Engineering

2009-11-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/html/ode.html

This video and poem are from about 3 1/2 years ago, and were just discovered in the bowels of the internet!

This is the infamous poetry booth that my dear friend Miriam Hall and I ran for three years at the Willy Street Fair in Madison Wisconsin (kudos to Natalie Goldberg for the idea), and that Miriam now continues with the help of her writing students.

The poetry booth operated in the following manner: folks would give us a topic (any topic, as this poem illustrates), pay us $1, we'd write a poem on the spot, as fast as we could, then read it aloud to them and give it away. It was a powerful practice in dealing with creative resistance, stage fright, and generosity.

I've been contacted by several people over the years who I'd written poems for, including a radio producer who invited Miriam and I to read on his show, a friend who paid me (a lot more than $1 this time) to write him another spontaneous poem, and others - but never anything like this! I have no idea who the man is that took this video and crowned me poet laureate of the Willy Street Fair, but thank you for making my day!

Buddha

2009-11-08T22:31:00.000-08:00

I.

White music before
I was born.

I never see the sun
go down.

Once it slips below
the thin line of horizon

it settles within my body -
glowing, empty.

II.

To know the moon
you must learn the taste
of your own tongue.

To know the ocean
you must give birth
a thousand times, and still
admit you know nothing.

To know the wind
you must embrace all
your cycles - going, going, going...

Karma

2009-11-08T22:24:00.000-08:00

I.

You're quick and barefoot
don't have the patience
for sunrise

haul yourself up
the steep legs of mountains

compete for the slender green
accomplishment of grass.

II.

In June, you are
a gravestone

the breeze goes
right through your heart.

For everyone
you hold the solemnity
of all things.

III.

Ripped sleeve on the tight
edge you walk
toes pointed to touch
air.

You taught yourself
how to dance despite
the hut you grew up in

taught yourself to sing
in a bowl that held tears.

IV.

I am running through
multitudes of goodness
grass higher than Tokyo
insects my playmates

giving me the music
that flashes green
after the sun has hidden itself
behind the hills.

Padma

2009-11-08T22:10:00.000-08:00

I.

Shh - the moth is kissing
the screen
with its whole body.

The candle touches the curves
of my bare shoulders
with its light.

I ease music from
the aching piano
the whole warm night
listening
to each breath.

II.

Your tongue
is the tongue of the irises -
licking, purple, shallow.

Your hands curve
to cup the places where
our stems grew once
out of the rich, salty earth

shaking with joy.

III.

Rumor has it you'll
burn me, you'll burn
bright as a pack of firecrackers

set off all at once
on the slick wetness of blacktop
after the rain has passed.

In the deafness of explosion
the space that lies between us
is too thick and red
to touch.

IV.

Rust came off in
my hands, the pushed gate
opening the valley.

The grass grew over
my sneakers, the truths
of childhood buried
in the low red heartbreak
of afternoon.

Ratna

2009-11-08T22:01:00.000-08:00

I.

Mother - your soup hands
all day making

your bread hands all
night undoing

Your morning hands
opening space I could
fly into -
a cloud or a kiss.

II.

Don't try to find me
in the field of childhood.
After dark, the butterfly
will come for me
gliding on the light
of its yellow wings,
gently touching the place
I am lost.

III.

In the dark of heaven
we lay together breathing
pine smells, grass smells.
The easy dark after sunset
like many hands
opening us
showing us where
we belonged.

IV.

Oh the village
where I was always busy
as an orange

beyond the sweetness
of bread and twilight

after forgetfulness,
before death.

Vajra

2009-11-08T21:52:00.000-08:00

I.

After you finish telling me
what I feel
my heart is locked.
My mouth tastes lemons.

Under the equanimity
of the moon's soft face
my garden continues
to grow.

II.

I must be clear as dawn
clear as throat
clear as ice
to be a mirror for you,
shadowing the lake.
I must be something dark enough
to keep unfolding.

III.

My fingers frost
at the cold's first
touching

your message lost
in the heat of my breath.

Earth is where I could
be sane
if I felt my heart.

IV.

No - the snowfall is black.
The park where I thought I was
is gone.
The blanket of defense
is smothering.

Short Poems from Shambhala Art Level III - June 2009

2009-10-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

Islands in asphalt, tall grass hairs reaching
No sun today to warn them
One black crow a meager guardian.

Gutter shoals, nuts and bolts
detritus in every color of gray.
No hope for a picnic.

Three green doors, none of them leading home.
Opaque window only reflects back my face.
Fear rises inexplicable in my belly.

One black brushstroke over chipping paint chrysanthemums
burning orange where death used to be.
Garbage and fresh air vie for each nostril.

The grass grows greener over dogshit, clover.
I put my worn feet where children's used to be.
The tires, full of graffiti, hold me like my lover couldn’t.

Purple flowers
too small to notice.
How best to describe the sky?

Landlubber

2009-10-07T21:50:00.000-07:00

The sea was talking to itself
all night, gray and full.
The dying bees swept out
by sunrise, all evidence
of the previous day erased.

Landlubber, auburn-haired wonder
bundled in wool, tide me over till
I can be here again. The sea, my friend
the sea, my death.

Fishermen wander, poles
outstretched, noses
to the wind. When will
I give up my wandering?
When my loneliness melts in the sea.

The sea is loneliness
the sea takes melancholy, gives back
driftwood, a tired bottle, worn
to a new thing, mute by its journey.
It no longer belongs to us, refuses
to tell us what it has seen.

I saw the sea first
when I was sixteen, fair-haired
barely out of depression, the doldrums
still clutching my painted boat. My toenails painted
the blue of mermaids. My heart already broken
by a hundred tiny things.

The sea does not touch Portland.
In the dark rain by our small, polluted
river, we stitch patches
over holes and grope the legs of our desolation.
But in the silver of moon, with grains of sand in my eyes
I tell myself I am independent, wise.

The sea is too big to be lost next to.
It will swallow me, keep me in its belly
of loneliness to polish till I’m dead
till its dreams become mine and my aloneness
is that of a sand dollar, a great white shark
a drowned man - so full he has nothing to say.

Horses

2009-09-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

"I feel like I'm here every day," says a girl at the next table at the coffeeshop. I look over, I can't help it, and her friend looks back. I don't know what they think. I am also here every day. The friend wears a gray and white striped t-shirt dress, almost too short to cover her underwear, and sunglasses to cover her eyes. The one who spoke doesn't look at me. She has brown hair and is dressed in black, with a tan and hunter green leather purse slung over her shoulder.

Her purse is something my grandmother would have given me when I was 13, along with musty, sun-faded horse books from the 70s, printed in Brittan. The books were filled with pictures of hard-jawed girls with thick, square haircuts, their flaxen bangs almost hiding eyes that peered out at me with glittering severity, gripping the reins of their polished bay and chestnut horses, their manes trimmed and perfectly braided, stitched into tight bundles marching in neat rows down their graceful necks.

I stared unhappily at these girls, and they stared unhappily back, as if they knew that twenty years after their pictures were taken, we would share that moment together, and see our discontent mirrored in the others' face.

It was always late afternoon in the photographs, even if it was probably morning or mid-day in actuality. But something in the muted golds and greens and harsh, sickly sky blues with which the books were always printed led to the impression that the girls and their horses existed in a perennial 4pm, the time of day that I invariably lost all hope for any meaning in life.

new short poem

2009-09-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

The crickets

have been outside

my bedroom window

since childhood,

since August.

As long as they follow

me, I know

I am always home.

The Embroidered Garden

2009-09-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

One thunder morning, Mildred's father disappeared into the sandy collapse of the well he'd been digging. She heard only the rain on the roof, no shouts, not the metal thud of shovels thrown aside, but she ran outside anyway and stood with her shoes sinking into the mud, her hands crumpled by her sides.

When her father emerged in the arms of his weeping friends, the water he’d tried to capture fell from his mouth, his head tipped gently on one shoulder, more peaceful than she had ever seen him.

Mildred’s hair grew auburn down her back and into her skirts, her shoes. The layers of prim undergarments only came off after the candle had been spit out in the room she shared with three sisters. The town outside made no noise, shimmering below the judgment of the moon. No drinking, no dancing, no card-playing, no makeup. Mildred sat before the window and combed her hair in front of her face, imagining what it would feel like to be seen.

In church they sat, four robins on a pew, each sister nested into the next, gradation of color and height, the trajectory of Mildred’s red ending in Helen’s black. The boys watched them through the sweating, stiff-ribbed hour of the pastor’s sermon, Iowa becoming slowly flatter out the window, washing itself away in the dusty light.

Mildred was confined to her room for a week once, after fixing her blue eyes squarely on Jesse Baker and winking, her mouth a saucy pucker. He must have been beautiful back then, with his golden hair in waves and secret Cherokee nose, his eyes bright in the midst of the tight-stitched Depression, thinness on everyone’s lips, fear in the tired swishing of the corn.

Jesse and Mildred bounced between each other like light from a prism, the colors of their merging so brilliant that the town covered its eyes, awed and wincing. She embroidered an English cottage garden for them to live in, towering pink hollyhocks and azure morning glories climbing the thatched roof to communicate with them as they slept.

They clung to the imaginary cottage even as her hands paled on the bedspread, her lungs weakening daily, until the flowers in thread became more real than the ones she could hear murmuring outside. The flowers whispered behind the urgent dialogue between her mother and the doctors who came one by one, then left bent and sad as scarecrows.

Maybe Mildred forgave Jesse, after she died.

In the stunning apocalypse of heartbreak, he only needed small details to re-create her. Maybe she knew that by marrying her sister Helen, he was only trying to feel her hands again, the wild morning-glory sweep of her hair.

Maybe she knew he made a bargain with God at her deathbed – to stop believing in Him if she died. And so he remained an atheist until his own death, though in later years, he began speaking of the Great Spirit his own ancestors had believed in – something buoyant and ancient enough to make sense of it all.

He wrote her poetry, the pages locked in the walnut bureau in the bedroom where my mother was conceived. The poems continued singing in their small, sweet voices, even after both their lives were only a flicker of remembered light.

A new day, a new blog!

2009-09-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I had a blog. I remember my first one, a livejournal I started when I was 15 and continued to write until about 18 or 19, when I moved from the wood and fields of Dodgeville to Madison Wisconsin, and realized that I could actually have friends that lived in the same city as me, who were not trees or flowers or raccoons.

I had a brief affair with a blog on MySpace, but it seemed so showy and superficial. I was always confused about what I wanted to post on it - creative writing? Snippets of my personal life just interesting enough to share, but not so interesting that they were too personal to post?

Older and wiser now, I've decided it's time for another blog - but this time, one created with the specific intention of sharing my creative writing with others. I have a tendency to closet my writing, and write copious amounts that I never seem to have time to type up (ie: do anything with).

I've also noticed that when I do share my writing with people, I am usually creatively nourished by the exchange. That seems to be key piece of the writing experience for me: it doesn't matter how much I write, something is not complete until I have shared it. But please be aware that the pieces I'm posting will be in all stages of growth, some just learning to walk, some going on their first dates, some well into their mature adult lives. So please handle with care, and enjoy this (hopefully) mutually beneficial exchange.

Now let's ride off together into the crisp morning of a brand new blog!

Becky

P.S. A word about the blog's name: The Embroidered Garden is a piece I wrote recently telling an old family story that has haunted me all my life. I'll post it soon.