Soap and Hot Water

Soap and Hot Water

Behold: the bitterness of the left-in-the-glass lemon.
Behold it.
Do not drink, beloved.

Why would I want such bitterness
along your tongue.

Tell me.

Today I sliced a jalapeno.
Hours later, rubbing my closed eye,
a gritty sting.

I had used soap and hot water.

Why does the body insist
on hanging on.
Why is contact
a door.

Bookmarks List/Bedside Table

This week, reading and enjoying:

This essay at Salon, “What a Tragic Death Taught Me About Organized Religion,” by Deborah Jackson Taffa. Extremely powerful and beautiful.

Another stunner of an essay, “Boy Next Door,” by Stacey May Fowles, in The Walrus. Intense and complex and emotional.

Jody Bates’s Tomorrowland (more on this later).

This post  on The Reel Foto about sports photographer Neil Leifer’s incredible photo of a Muhammed Ali Victory. It’s an amazing image. Leifer says, “Ali, Williams, the referee, the reporters, the symmetry, the drama--it’s the one photograph I’ve taken where, looking back, I’d change nothing.” Fascinating.

Photo by Neil Leifer, via The Reel Foto

Vignette

Vignette

Electricity in the veins of the cornfield
Kernels lighting up within their cocooned ears

The world’s power lives in its vignettes
and how quickly a thing is over

Just plain dirt
Plain cornfield
Plain breeze carried here
and passing through

Surf and Turf

Surf and Turf

The moss is out of control.
The rocks under the moss are out of control.
The ocean is also out of control.

Come to think of it
there is not one thing
growing based on your preferences.

Lob a rock at the water.
It plops in somewhere,
you assume.

You weren’t trying to skip it.
It can be calming to picture
the stone falling

down through the water, eventually
stopping on a surface
no one will ever touch.

It can also be calming
just to hold a rock
at the edge of some big-bodied water.

On Creativity: Tessa Mellas

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tessa Mellas for the Columbus Alive (the local arts paper). We talked about her new book, Lungs Full of Noise, which is a gorgeous and grotesque collection of magical realist short stories. While we were chatting, I was struck by her insightful comments on process, the female characters who dominate her stories, and her thoughts on silence, snow, skating, and surprises in writing.

The profile is a short one (you can read it here), but there were so many great thoughts she shared during our conversation. Here are some that didn’t make it in the piece!

NOTE: Read Tessa’s stories, “So Much Rain,” (click here) and “Mariposa Girls” (click here) online.

****

[The title of the book] is from a line in the story “Beanstalk,” where the main character is remembering how a beanstalk grew outside her window....she imagines birds circling her, their “lungs full of noise.” I’ve got a lot of imagery of birds and winged things throughout the collection, which, for me, is a metaphor for women who are fragile, but also strong. They can support themselves. But like birds with their hollow bones, they can be knocked around.

“Quiet Camp” is about a group of noisy girls who are sent to a camp to be silenced. And this represents a huge struggle of women....the girls in school who are obedient and quiet get rewarded, and are seen as good and feminine. And the girls who are noisy, and speak without thinking and are opinionated get criticized and attacked. I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on girls to be quiet and silent, and yet there’s all this noise going on inside of them.