New Publication

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

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

Water

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

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!

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

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

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

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.