Don’t wither like a grape left unnoticed on the vine. 

Keep devouring this world, with all its madness and glory, 

till one day you are so full from sweetness 

that the skin which tethers divinity to humanity cannot bear the strain, 

but thins, 

s

  l

    i

     p

       s 

and finally bursts into flames and the real you, 

that dot of light,

 

that skim of wonder, 

sheds these bones and wings its way home.

Two Finches

Two finches lay still 

surprised into death

two squares of sidewalk separated them; the window behind promised sky

It was a lie

I went out into the sad autumn light, where

A girl sat on a gray wall, spilling plummy ancient words into a phone

Boxy English phrases peppered through, breaking her music

A story flowered in my mind as I passed; she spoke about 

gold in the Arabian desert

a drawing, a globe, a bottle of dark wine

More finches swung past, students laughed 

The air was unchanged

Surely someone would feel the altered weight; I paused,

But no one sang about the two left behind

No one prayed next to that false sky

Re: Muse I Knew (Apologies to Mr. Evans)

One of my favorite moments in my life took place when Ara was four and we lived in the Tech Center. Our tiny cookie cutter apartment boasted one bedroom with a sloped ceiling, which meant he got a door to close at bedtime, but I had to make my bed from scratch on the pull out couch. The high counter that separated the pocket kitchen from the dining nook held my music rig. The bar was too high for me to sit on a bar stool and still reach the pedals, so they lived on a jungly decrepit cardboard box within foot reach.

In those days leading up to making my first CD, I was dialed in. Nearly every day brought a grain of a song. Truck brakes, overheard conversations, pop music heard from open car windows; everything sounded like music to me. This resulted in truncating many an ‘expotition' to the kiddie park or the swimming pool—when the song came in, nothing but the song could exist. I had to stop everything and write it down. An additional hurdle was that I was not yet adept at sketching out the bones of a song for later fattening, which meant that there were no ten minute delays, only two to three hour ones.

How often have I thanked ___________ (insert name of your favorite deity here, I’m going choose The Flying Spaghetti Monster) for giving me the son I got. He was so patient, so forgiving, so mellow. He always made the best of it, entertaining himself quietly while I worked, and was always happy to go to the park a little later. Now I regret that. I wish I’d been a more typical mom. Did I rob him of some of his childhood joys? I tell myself that if I had a chance to do it over I’d choose differently, but would I? I truly felt as though my only mission in life was to obediently document each song that hailed me from down the river.

And they came all the time, as I said. I loved my muse, but she had a shitty sense of time. The worst (best?) part was the way they came in. A pattern would start thrumming in my brain, first in the background and then more insistently, moving its chant to the front of my awareness, until I suddenly became aware that a song was happening. I’d drop the dish I was washing and start writing. Because truthfully, there was no other option. The song would become so loud, if ignored, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything else until it was properly born and safely corralled. It began to feel like serfdom.

There was one moment: it was the middle of the night. I woke to the familiar feeling of my muse rapping on my forehead, trying to feed me a line. I flipped over and tried to summon sleep, but no luck. There was no escape. It was like trying to ignore the urge to pee. I grumpily crawled out of bed and switched on my gear.

Some sound must have woken Ara, because he came padding down the hall in his PJ’s, black hair clouding around his half mast eyes. He reached his arms up and I hoisted him onto my lap (my low back wouldn’t have even said a word back then). He immediately melted over my left arm, seemingly gaining pounds as he swam back into sleep. With my one free hand and drifty brain I continued to midwife the song.

I can still feel every detail of that scene. It was the perfect snapshot of that time period. And as gorgeous as it was, and as much as I fell in love with every inch of my life in that moment, the next morning I woke up and decided to let it all go in order to be a better mom. 

So after that, whenever a song came knocking, if I was free, I’d make space for it. If I was busy with Ara, I ignored the pounding at the door, and miraculously, after a time, it would go away. I didn’t know if it was the right thing, but I felt something had to be done, so I did it. I raised my son, and I tried to be present, and I attempted to stuff my creativity into the background. Eventually songs stopped clamoring at me at inopportune times. I could sleep better. Ara grew up, and a smaller crop of songs grew up around him. I tried to not let music crowd him away from his share of light. When he turned about ten or eleven and didn’t require so much of my bandwidth I thought my muse might come roaring back in full effect, but she didn’t. She never showed up like that again.

I still think about that time and wonder if I want it back. It’s hard to tell if that was my one true way of connecting with the muse, or if it’s just the way I slept with her during that time.

But here’s my slowly rising hope: that in fact I didn’t break that connection at all. That we might all be born with the greedy little fingers of our muses wound tightly into our DNA. Perhaps she comes in with us, sits down with us at our morning cornflakes every single day, and then flickers out when we turn the last page of our story. Maybe she’s part of our blueprint, and can’t ever really be lost.

Glamour Girl

For my son’s fifth birthday, my mom came all the way from Maryland to be part of the birthday festivities. Of course, in typical kindergarten fashion, Ara got sick and generously shared his cold germs with me. My mother, a newly converted herbalist, took charge of our healing program. She administered hot and cold compresses, echinachea, charcoal tablets and endless garlic cloves of garlic on buttered toast to head the bad guys off at the pass, or at least give them a dinner break. As a staunch granola head, I accepted all forms of natural healing and vigorously cleared my chi, neti potted my nasal cavities, and took hot and cold showers to help the healing cause.

The night before the big birthday party, Ara kept coughing himself awake, crying, drifting off, then coughing himself awake again. Of course that meant that the entire household followed suit. Finally, at about 3:00 am I broke down. I crept into the guest bedroom and whispered my mother awake, then grabbed a jacket and ran out for children's Tylenol. 

King Sooper’s was surprisingly busy for three in the morning, bustling with customers and stock boys alike. I kind of liked the weird middle of the night vibe. Cheerily I greeted everyone I encountered, and asked a cashier for assistance in finding the medicine aisle. For some reason though, not many people smiled back. I was puzzled to find many of them skitter off with sideways eyes. I breathed into my palm and sniffed. Well, it wasn’t a basket of roses but certainly not so horrible as to provoke that reaction. Subdued, I selected three bottles and paid for them.

When I got home, my mother had turned on the living room light and was walking my fretful child, who was draped pitifully over her shoulder like a boneless chicken. “Got them!” I stage whispered triumphantly, waving the bag open. My mother took one look at me and started laughing. 

“What?” I demanded, but she couldn’t speak. “Just go look in the mirror,” she finally managed, and I did.

So. This is why women check themselves in the mirror before leaving the house. My face was amply festooned with trails of charcoal. There was a ring around my mouth, a smudge on my nose, and my horrified shriek revealed that yes, even my teeth were completely black. 

But there was a silver lining, believe it or not. Ara’s cough almost completely went away and the birthday party was a big success. And I have stopped eating charcoal.

Except for every once in a while, on special occasions. Like the flu.

At the Dominion of Kings

When my brother Ras was just a little dumpling, around seven or eight, my parents bought into the American dream and took us all to King’s Dominion, the closest amusement park.

As we raced away with dollar bills stuffed into our pockets, my mother bleated after us: “Watch Ras!” Of course. Our job.

I thought it would be best if my brother stuck to rides like the Cups and Saucers and the Ferris Wheel, and due to his lack of life experience I figured he’d be an easy sell.

But no. I didn’t factor in my brother’s innate love for danger, which had up till then only surfaced once, when he accidentally walked all the way up Carroll avenue to Sligo Church hoping to catch up with my mom after she’d fetched us from school. When we spied him, sniveling under his pageboy cut at the intersection, we dragged him into the car and all three chastised him so thoroughly that I thought he’d wear a bike helmet and shin guards just to go to the bathroom forever more.

He observed the cotton candy smudged babies looping vacantly on the Ferris Wheel, with all the enthusiasm of someone waiting for an elevator, but just as I thought he was about to get in line he spied a group of bigger kids racing toward the Rebel Yell, and off he went. Reason, logic and mild threats were ineffective. He stubbornly ignored me and inched forward with the rest of the lemmings.  

Finally we reached the front of the line. My brother, scrawny and screaming, leaped in and excitedly yelled at me to join. I gingerly stepped in next to him, and the “safety” bar descended over our laps and hung there, a good six inches away. No seatbelts, no harness. Just one thin stainless steer bar keeping us from launching into orbit like two curry scented satellites. I ordered my brother to hang on, but at the first apex, the people in the car before us threw their hands up in the air and yelled. My foolish brother followed suit, and as we began the first drop, I saw his sixty pound body start to float off the seat.

“Grab the bar!” I screamed, illustrating by clutching the bar. He pretended not to hear me, waving his toothpick arms around and yelling with the big kids. He continued to rise. Terror pinned me to the seat but with a superhuman effort I managed to lift one leg and throw it over his lap, tethering him to the seat. He didn’t appear to notice and kept waving his arms above his head. 

As we sped up and down, I felt my leg starting to go numb, but I feared losing my leg less than I feared facing my parents if I lost my brother.

When we finally stopped, I grabbed my leg and hoisted it off of him. Without a backward glance he leaped off the train and ran to brag to my mother as I limped along behind him. “What’s wrong with your leg?” my mom asked. 

This is the part where you expect me to say, “nothing,” and be a silent and brave heroine, but nope! I told the whole story to my family, and everyone was duly impressed. I might have even gotten a cotton candy as a reward, or maybe a little toy. All I know is that my good deed was somehow rewarded, and so this story has a happy ending in more ways than one. 

Flatula

His super power was flatulence, and he wasn’t afraid to use it. On the nine thirty seven train, particularly, he used it to cut a wide swath of space round him, leaving him free to rest his dirty sneakers on the opposite seat, or to lie down with his long legs stretched across the aisle, hogging several benches. His record was seven rows cleared in three minutes and seventeen seconds, but he believed that with diligence and a good, fiber free diet rich in fried cheese and food truck curry he could bring that number down to under two. 

The trick to improving his number was that it had to be made clear, and fast, that this was not a one time thing. Most people sitting nasally adjacent would tolerate one blast, but would quickly relocate when it became apparent that he was some sort of human Glade mister who spritzed the air approximately every fifty one seconds or so. 

He loved the recognition in their eyes best. First the delicate sniff, and the surreptitious glance round the room, then the relief as the initial assault dissipated. He loved watching the glaze return to their eyes as their gazes fell back to their phones. How quickly they forgot. Well, they would not forget him. And he would fire again. 

Fate stepped in one fateful morning in July. He had mixed orange juice with his glass of milk that morning, a surefire cocktail that never failed to get the ball rolling. He was seated on his favorite bench when the woman who would change his life boarded the train. Her name was Eunice and she normally took the nine oh five, but had binge watched “Breaking Bad” the previous night, which had resulted in a poor night of sleep compounded by her chronic sinus condition. Now she nervously took the seat opposite him and checked her texts. Two messages already from her pimply faced boss, demanding to know why she was late for her shift at the toll booth. 

He was instantly enchanted. There was just something about the way her eyes squinched up as she searched the tiny keyboard, the way she bit her lip. The boxy cut of her uniform promised hidden delights (although Eunice was built like a tank and the polyester shirt accurately outlined her figure). He was just imagining unbuttoning that top button, the one that made her third chin dimple so fetchingly, when in his stomach the orange juice rolled over and start talking to the milk. Frantically he clenched his cheeks and managed to reabsorb the threat somehow. Whew. He took a deep breath of the clear, unsullied train air and at that moment Eunice glanced up. 

As their eyes met he felt a shiver of some ancient awakening. He was not a spiritual man, but Eunice, who had read every metaphysical book on soul mates available at her library, thought she recognized in him her mate of several lifetimes, including the Cleopatra one, the Spongebob one (he was Patrick) and a parallel lifetime, seventeen lightyears away, where they ate mostly beans and grubs. Not one to waste time, she delicately opened the lines of communication.

“Hey,” she said gruffly in her adenoidal tones, and her voice ran its fingers through every fiber of his fiber-depleted being. He shivered, and again, suddenly felt his colon preparing to unkink. By neglecting to answer her and squeezing every muscle south of Taos, again he managed to stave off disaster. He’d have to wait till he got off at his stop. He couldn’t burn the crops before this angel of mercy. When he opened his eyes and sighed with relief he noticed her looking at him weirdly and he realized he hadn't responded to her. 

“Uh, hi,” he said, and then it was as though a dam broke. Their small talk rivaled the great ramblings of a Will Shakespeare or a Ben Jonson, covering everything from current Facebook memes to the changing of the fish stick batter at the local pub.

As his stop grew near, so did his apprehension. How could he ensure that he see her again? For this was clearly The One. At the same time, the fart baby burgeoning in his lower colon was demanding birthing, and any second now. He was preparing to ask for her number when he realized she was gathering her belongings and was getting off at the same stop. If he could just hold it in for a few seconds more, they could exchange digits, she’d be on her way and he could unleash his farty fury in a safe, secluded area.

He clenched his bum and minced off the train as she lumbered off behind him. “Oh, crap,” she bellowed daintily, as, juggling her cigarette and lighter, she lost her grip on her phone. It skittered past him and came to a stop. 

“Allow me,” he said gallantly, and forgetting that the release valve was unfortunately positioned in direct nasal range, he bent to retrieve it. In that fateful moment he felt his muscles give way and a mighty stream rushed from his nether region, accompanied by a haunting butt trumpet solo. Several passersby, catching a surprised whiff, collapsed in heaps on the ground, thus ensuring their physical safety by falling below the line of fire, which erupted in a blinding flash as the simultaneous flare from her lighter ignited the jet stream, and that was the last thing either of them knew.

Epilogue

Seventeen light years away, in a parallel universe on the planet Girth, a square shaped woman with three chins is sitting down to supper with her man.

“Anyway, my horoscope said that I need to makes some serious changes, or face some extremely negative consequences,” she says, lighting up a Lucky.

“Uh huh,” he says, absentmindedly, eyes on the neckline of her muumuu where her third chin swung delicately over the lace. 

She leans over to uncover a dish when suddenly she feels a ripple in the force, as would be caused by a massive explosion far, far away. As the matrix realigns itself and her mind clears, she sees him reaching for the dish.

“NO!” she screams, and lunging forward, she knocks the plate of beans from his surprised hand. “I think we should switch to kale,” she explains apologetically, kicking the spilled beans under the table and handing him a plate of greens. 

Birthday Cakes and My Mistakes

Many years ago, for some childhood birthday, my mother threw me a little shindig. In those days the most intimate circle of friends for me was comprised of cousins, and they duly arrived, bearing gifts and big smiles. One of the families, however, had clearly forgotten the party and arrived a little out of breath. Their gift had been obviously purchased at a gas station on the way over. They assured me that it was only PART of my gift and that the second and BIGGER portion was yet to come.

It took me several months of springing at them hopefully whenever they swam into view (might I add, bearing NO gift) to realize that in fact, the promised second part of my present was not coming. In fact, the second part DID NOT EXIST. It was a white lie. A red herring. A carrot at the end of a stick wrapped up in twenty seven nesting boxes and tied all around with pink ribbons and caught in some inaccessible dimension.

I accidentally revisited this lesson at school just the other day. Last semester a wonderful writing professor who loved my work asked to keep my final paper, without his comments added, to read to future classes. He promised to send me an email with his thoughts separately.

Every day for the next month I hopefully checked my email, and even nebbishly sent him notes a couple of times, false cheer and exclamation marks spread thickly over my words. 

“Hi, Dr. Simpson! I hope you are having a WONDERFUL summer!! I’ve been enjoying it, especially with all the rain!! It’s like we’re Seattle, huh?! Haha!! So, I’m sure you’ve been enjoying your time off but I was wondering if you’d had a chance to …” 

Blah blah blah. You get my drift. I’m ashamed to admit that I crafted two or three of these odiously lighthearted missives before I gave up, at least for the summer. But about thirty seconds after the fall semester began I jumped right back on the cart and started smacking the horse. 

Still no response. I was positive something was wrong with the email system. Come on, it's  Microsoft Outlook. You'd be suspicious too.

A couple of days ago as I was sitting in the King Center courtyard morosely chewing a burrito flavored power bar and pretending it was good, I spied him rocketing past me. “Dr. Simpson!” I bellowed, leaping up and startling the guy who was enjoying his actual real life burrito across from me. (Oh, another thing I’ve learned at school: just because someone shares your table in the courtyard at school, it doesn’t mean they want to talk to you. It’s like sharing an elevator. Seriously. Behave like everyone else and act like your phone is the most interesting thing in the world.)

He turned with a hunted look. “Oh, hi,” he stammered. “Uh, I’m really really late for a class so I can’t talk but I got your emails and I am sending you my comments later tonight! I swear. Sorry it’s taken so long but your paper got buried in a big stack of other paperwork and I’ve just been … I swear … tonight … I haven’t forgotten … “ the last few words were lost as he barreled away from me.

Pleased, I threw the rest of my healthy snack away and celebrated with a Snickers bar. 

The next morning, I checked and re-checked. Still no email. At the end of the day, still nothing. A week later, still nothing. It was then that the memory popped into my head. This was my gas station gift! There is no part two. I shared this epiphany with a friend who listened kindly and then gave me his keen, insightful advice. “Just get over it.”

Okay, fine. Thanks, man. But I kind of can’t. 

So, what is the acceptable time to wait until you check something off your list as a bad debt? I still don’t know. But then I’m the kid still waiting for the second half of her birthday present over here.