The Crave Distraction

First Belief

2010-07-20T21:40:00.003-05:00

The act of love
Is your belief.
I want our legs.
We will grow into earth.
We can become one garden
With a million blooms of impulse.
When our lips wear thin
We will give up the things
We do not need
To find the thing we want.
May we never miss the other's first smile.

Leaves Behind All Her Leaves

2010-07-20T21:34:00.002-05:00

It is her hair,
Wild as branches,
As it whips in the breeze
Calling the spring storm
As it passes,
Leaves behind all her leaves.

Down they come
From the barn beams,
Where they watched
Through the night.

On the bold wind
To her muddy bed,
To hunt in the tall grass,
To sing in her arms.

A Call to Integration in Advocacy Efforts

2010-04-27T22:32:00.005-05:00

Dynamic collaboration and strategic approaches are vital in prevention and intervention advocacy in the areas of domestic and sexual violence.

Volunteer work and activism with the Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Center in my city has given me perspective that values the unity of community advocates in fighting to protect the rights of every person.

Advocacy cannot be submerged or made secondary to the goals of careerism, territoriality, or to the effort of maintaining status quo. We define our commitment as advocates as being a part of a movement to end oppression. This definition constitutes solidarity with other movements to end oppression, such as oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation/preference, social class, economic status or minority.

Advocates at the SA/DVC collaborate directly with a wide range of representatives from agencies and institutions at city, county, state and national levels to support victims of domestic and sexual violence. We provide accessible resources and information to our community and educate the public regarding the consequences of violence and the prevention of violence. The effects of domestic and sexual violence on children or minors, which can be at the hand of someone on whom they are dependent, legally or literally, is a major concern to advocates.

We must support social change that challenges the surrounding culture of domination which reinforces the violence of domestic and sexual perpetrators. This includes support of other movements which aim to end the many forms of oppression in our society.

The primary thrust of our efforts must be to support victims as we aim to eradicate oppression and be in solidarity with those for whom we advocate.

We must approach our work critically through diverse strategies, focusing clearly on ourselves and our environment, toward an integration of each individual's subjective needs. Collaboratively, we can confront the realities of how we are different from each other, what divides us and what can reconcile us, so that we can participate in a radical, ongoing transformation of our advocacy for each person -- each child, teenager, woman, man, partner, parent and guardian.

Let Me Tell You How

2010-01-04T18:08:00.000-06:00

Something is happening
That I do not understand.
I am here next to you
Because you are my family now.
You are for me,
that is what you have said.

“He offered me wine,” I begin.
I want to tell you how it happened,
But you pound the walls
With your fists
And you stare at your knuckles
How your hands are bleeding now.
I try to begin again.
This time without words,
I reach for you.
You are rigid in my arms,

“I will not touch you again.”
You tell me to call him.
Ask him if he is healthy.
Ask the man who raped me
If he is healthy.

I want to tell you how I feel.
But my feeling is in my body,
My body.
My body
You will not touch.
The woman at the clinic
Who answers my questions
Tells me we cannot know for months.
I am awake for four weeks.
No blood, no rest, no sex,
No kisses, no touch.

Something is happening that we can understand.
Let me tell you how.
This is how to touch my body:
Let me tell you how.
This is how to touch my body:
Let me tell you how.

Growing Up Without Women

2009-12-06T13:06:00.005-06:00

Always an imbalance
of mortification and bliss,
perfect by standards of ignorance.
I remember
wearing no underwear.
I remember
liking to be naked with others.
Of course it was childish.

My parents had no other daughters,
And my mother no sisters,
My father no brothers in a family of seven.
Women, outsiders.

I liked kissing.
I kissed boys and girls.
I touched them too.
I never touched myself.
I became invisible and untouchable
inside myself.
My period started in the summer.
A missionary wife bought me ice cream.
I was ten?
I was eleven?
I was shown pornography, too,
Asked for sex when I was ten,
offered money,
Fingered when I was sixteen.
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen:
Love stories of sad, lost women,
and strong, resilient Christian men.
No sexuality, just gender.
No reality and no education.

Jezebel Day

2009-12-06T12:52:00.003-06:00

Purple
is the color I choose to wear.
This day: a birdhouse day.
This day
my brother gives me away.

The last thing you gave me;
the only strand
of things you have given me--
since i became a woman--
a perfect line
of pretty round soft things...

But my pearl is purple
since I became a woman.

It is gorgeous,
a whole world of round and deep,
hard and soft.
My pearl loves touch,
belongs to me,
belongs to my body,
bouyant and lusterous,
fleshy and pounding purple.

When it was white or pink
it was hidden.
It was secret and misrepresented.
Then it was black and blue.
And blue, and blue and blue.

Then I discovered:
my pearl is purple.
It belongs to me,
to my body,
this day and every birdhouse day.

Keeping the Fields

2009-11-07T07:28:00.006-06:00

This moment steps into the next and reconciles the tension, instantly transforming this moment to the last and the next to the present, a dizzying dissolution of slides on a reel experienced as one continuous flood of colored light. Consciousness is a cycle; like our planet's orbit that takes a year, our minds process each stimulus as intimately as each inch of earth conceives the seasons.

There is no veil. The world's dreams assault our own, weaving a gothic tapestry of conscious life. Exponential numbers of tiny electric shocks shoot across the superhighways of the mind. Our brains sling web and information crawls and darts madly, urgently and grotesquely as though there are spiders in our cortex. Neurons and synapses wait with anticipation for each rendezvous.

I meet myself again; each day between sleeps a fresh self-portrait emerges in a new medium. Each fellowship is like the lord's supper with mixed elements of fidelity and betrayal on each companion's breath.

We take each symbol into our minds like spring, experience it like summer, and render it, like fall, to understanding like winter's death and renewal with the promise of the cycle we will commit again with each word. There is life in the mind we have not explored, a life vast with possibility breathing in the spaces. There may be an underdeveloped sense of self or sense of community, for development is cumbersome and serves as the ultimate distraction.

Incarnation is the soul's excuse to revel in the beauty of itself. Give me four seasons of your soul; it is all I ask. I might want more but four is all I need to love you best. I am a perpetuated glimpse of divine energy, and so are you. I meet you and meet myself. We are the same story with one variant angle.

To live is to be the good I know and to have faith is to make myself accessible to the good I have to learn. To love is to practice the good: that which I know and that which I am learning. I make myself my home and my home is my self-diagnosis. Maybe I do not so much work, play, feed and sleep as much as I self-medicate.

Glory is waiting at the height of wisdom, still glorious in her exile, hand outstretched and ready to take me up into the tree of life. I am on a journey to a well where the water will take me back like a raindrop. My essence will disintegrate and reintegrate, destroyed and recreated a million times over, river to the sea. My mind is alchemy, turning thought into pure energy while history writes like a seismograph. I will make the needle pulse just once for my initiation, one moment and an eternity, and it will be enough.

This pen is to draw out the poison and scatter the devils to the wind, writing like a sneezing fit. For all the people I have met who have loved some part of me, these lines are my prescription. For each community that declares "This is the Kingdom!" these lines are my purging.

I knead the dough. I have purchased the fields for their treasures and I am keeping the fields. In doing so I may lose my life or your esteem, but such is my singular preference: to keep the fields.

Redemption seems to be already and not yet--the gospel still being written--full of the philosophy, poetry and prophecy of sacred texts. Our pens can be the spirit we incite for the writing of our own canon. We will illuminate the shadows of the garden again and leave our father's houses for a land we promise to ourselves. Keeping the fields where I have found my treasure, I am evolving to one simple, universal amen. I claim the soil of freedom, spontaneity and love for the cultivation of winged seeds like fallen angels.

Taking It Personally (The Nobel Peace Prize)

2009-10-21T18:27:00.003-05:00

Plodding,
Epochs plodding.
It is the nasty, sticky, thumping,
Hollow, resounding, slow-motion plodding
Of blasted epochs.
No one can accept it,
But this mucky plodding progress
Is much more mine than theirs.
Footfalls, fallen empires,
Brain waves thick as mud.
Plodding through hate,
Fattened through the years of feast and pride;
And plodding through hardy prejudice,
Pacing with the drums of greed and fear;
And ignoble ignorance plods with us,
Plodding.
Hollow epoch hearts roll bubbling and molten
Through dull seasons and predictable pitfalls.
We are always disappointed but never dismayed.
It's better this way,
Better this plodding blasted shit
Than knowing we are getting nowhere
Because we do not understand where we are.

The Angel Of Death In Kansas

2009-09-15T09:32:00.005-05:00

My thoughts scuttle across the sidewalk around the blessed feet of Benton, a young man who walks with dark blue polyester strides. His hairless chest peers out through the unbuttoned lapel of his light blue shirt. His long pale blond hair bounces in a ponytail between his small shoulder-span. My thoughts scuttle like early-summer fallen leaves around these feet that stepped into the air one summer day, never to touch the earth with weight again.

I think of his finger tracing with mine whenever I write in Japanese, the way he told me he practiced on misted shower doors, a grey ghost finger of a small hand gently touching my curled fingers. He was in my room and in the backseats of cars in front of me all winter. For months I tried to give him peace.

My thoughts scatter in the wind with the last breath of Aunt Helen, a lady with invisible skin. Her smile is etched with wrinkles from soft “I love you’s” whispered from underneath her last, long sleep. I hold out my hand to a softer side of my grandfather, one touched by the most gentle spirit for 67 years, now to be alone until he lies with her again. My thoughts scatter like the harvest dust to have touched skin that knew such devotion.

My thoughts gather in thunderhead fashion above a wavering summer road where a van speeds to a mistaken burial. There was no warning for this loss, no foretelling of Jeff’s quick passing. He stands thoughtfully in the plaza outside Zendoji Temple in Nagano, Japan. He laughs over a shared meal, witness to one of my high school Novembers. He takes his family to church to be lost in a crowd of people who live comfortably at home while his family longs for home. My thoughts gather in thunderhead fashion for his funeral I missed, for his bereaved son and daughters and for his long-haired widow.

The spirits of the dead are moving in and out of my head, oiling the gears of my mind with emotion. My grief is a dream of transcendence, kindred and compelling, as it is for any old soul. The blossoms smell the same every spring even though nothing else remains. I cannot commune with the spirits of the dead and hardly any longer with the spirits of the living; the blossoms and my grief alone are truly kindred.

One month after I walked back into the world from a week on the fourth floor psychiatric ward at the local hospital I was hired at a nursing home in a nearby Mennonite town. I spent ten months slicing vegetables and preparing gelatin desserts, ten months baking casseroles and serving homemade chicken noodle soup, ten months meeting the elders of Kansas, where I am now a resident.

A few weeks after I started in my new position I received news via email that my fifteen-year-old Japanese student Benton, whom I left behind in Nebraska the previous spring, had hung himself in June. That next month my dear friend Jeff, who had been like an uncle to me growing up, had passed away suddenly, and I had not been able to attend his funeral. While it seemed I had been missing out on the presence of the angel of death, now I had elected to work alongside him in the stark halls of the Midwest retirement communities.

LeRoy and Marilyn, my grandparents in Kansas who did not get to watch me grow up as I was in Japan through those years, have big families and many of my relatives reside in the nursing homes of Central Kansas. My grandpa’s brother and sister-in-law Gib and Helen lived together at the home where I was hired. It was strange to me that I made their dinner every night but saw them very rarely.

Aunt Helen also passed away in July and I attended her funeral. During the ceremony the pastor of my grandparents’ church and the chaplain from the nursing home asked the staff from the nursing home who had cared for her in her last months to stand and be recognized by the community who knew her during her life. The chaplain called each by name as they stood, but I was not recognized. I sat next to my great uncle Del who had graciously offered me his arm when I arrived at the church.

Uncle Del had found me standing alone at the casket of Aunt Helen, who was dressed in the soft blush of cherry blossom pink. The Bible was open on the platform, and streams of her peers and our relatives flowed by, stopping briefly before being ushered into the sanctuary. I was given an idea for a painting then that I would finish a few weeks later, and I was inspired to eulogize Benton, Jeff and Aunt Helen.

It has been two months since I last set foot in the nursing home where I worked, where over the months I had received the news Rubina had died, and Rueben, Richard, Pauline, and others. Expired, sometimes it was written. My thoughts get muddled as I wonder about Hazel, Leona, Everett and Gene. Missionary Ralph Cox passed away that year, whose influence was integral to my parents’ decision to move to Japan, where I was raised. I have met friends recently whose lives have been completely changed by losing someone to leukemia.

I have been learning that residence is transitive for everyone, not just for an expatriate like me. The diagnosis is that we are all dying. In Japanese the kanji character for “house” also reads as “family.” It is becoming my practice to expand my boundaries for each of those meanings and cling less to the compartments of my mind where I sometimes find them tied up and gagged. This demonstrates my desire to honor the urge to grieve and celebrate the spirit of memory, though it is often incited by intense loss.

Ambiguity

2009-09-11T15:50:00.004-05:00

This is a dream. Finally after a month of nightly, vivid dreams, one comes that startles me to realization. I haven’t addressed it yet; I was raped. It was four years ago this Halloween.

I am in the living room of the house where I live. In my dream my husband David is away to drill in Salina for the weekend. His friend is visiting, sitting on our futon facing me as I stand in the doorway to our storage room. He gets up to get a drink from the kitchen. As he walks past me I feel his hand grab and tug on my ass, rounding out the back of my stretchy blue jeans. He keeps walking but he calls over his shoulder,

“I like that ass.”

I stand where I am, feeling awkward but oblivious as to a way to communicate some boundaries. I easily decide to let it go. As he returns to the room he half-turns me around to face him with a hand on my shoulder and half-steps around me and then wraps me into a desperate, throbbing embrace. His hands press into my clothes and traverse across the back of my body and he grinds against me. When his fingers rise to touch my neck I speak,

“You should talk to me about this, ask if you can kiss me. I am able to make a decision about doing this with you.” He has paused for a moment and I think he might listen, but he does not. He continues to grab at me.

He is pushing me toward the bedroom but I am fighting against his direction. We come to struggling in the open front doorway of my house. With both my hands I break some of his fingers that are on my leg. He doesn’t wince, doesn’t whine. I think of the crowbar just by the coat rack but then I remember this is David’s friend. What can I do to him? I feel my lighter in my pocket and say,

“Listen, it didn’t have to be this way!” I hold the lighter in my grasp, “I have been raped before and I will destroy you!”

With that my left hand grabs his face, my thumb in his mouth and hand wrapped around his jaw. I start the flame against his lips. Now he is fighting to get away from me, but I will not let go of his face. I hold the lighter tightly and although my fingers hurt I take it across his eyes.

I do not remember that he ever made a single sound during the assault.

My phone beeps and vibrates with a message from my friend during the next scene, waking me up. In my dream he had been cleaning out his locker at school where the hallway is completely deserted but for us. I find myself apologizing to him as he walks out and then I feel incredibly alone.

Then, as I stutter awake, silently thanking my friend for texting me, I feel devastated that David might already be in formation at drill before realizing he won’t leave town for two more hours. He will be home from class in fifteen minutes. I sift through my disorientation and walk into the living room, then into the dining room to sit at the desk.

Ten minutes pass before I jump and shriek as David’s keys rattle against the door. My whole body tenses as I fear it could be someone other than him. But David walks in and walks to me, holding out a postcard. It is a postcard from a friend whom I had lunch with two weeks ago after five years of separation. When he places his hand on my shoulder, I tell him I had a dream about rape. As he makes a sound of empathy I finally let my body relax.

“I burned his face off and then I apologized.” Now these are emotions I haven’t been able to identify yet. In this realm my self becomes indistinct. I sense a hint of revulsion at myself for not taking a stand at the very beginning, but then I am willing to apologize at the end for my fight to survive? What the hell?!

I am coming to the conclusion that there is no blame for me, as much as I am still trying to find it. Me, I am the sort who asks for forgiveness in the end after I have destroyed you for threatening to destroy me. And me, I am the sort who will always blame myself for the handful of ass you grabbed. And me, I will stop in the middle of it and think of who you are, even though you never listened to me. Someone will say you deserve to die. Someone will say you deserve to live. Well me, I don’t decide things like that. I don’t get to have a decision. Remember? You didn’t give me one.

Hypotheses

2009-09-07T17:10:00.001-05:00

Knew you once,
Saw you,
Heard you,
Touched you,
Loved you… once.
You who held my stack of paper,
pages covered with my iconic scrawl.
It read like a message orated by an angel,
weighed like a bag of cocaine.
I let it burn in your mind,
I let it burn as kindling for your fire;

It did not matter.

You, who lets genius coagulate in the lungs,
lets it run through crooked teeth,
plays with it like a jewel in the tongue
when pontificating of love.
That’s funny…
Knew you once,
Saw you,
Heard you,
Touched you,
Loved you…

The Lost Dispensation

2009-08-27T18:37:00.003-05:00

dis-pən-'sā-shən
1 a : a general state or ordering of things; specifically : a system of revealed commands and promises regulating human affairs b : a particular arrangement or provision especially of providence or nature (from Merriam-Webster)

I was a freshman and in Bible college and something happened that we didn’t have a name for, but it was there nonetheless. It was glorious. Everything collapsed. Just that, like a mountain avalanche. Better, like the woodblock game people play where the whole stack crashes across the table and the floor when an important piece is removed and everyone gasps! But it doesn’t so much matter because then it starts again. Like that.

We had classes and schedules and lived in the dorms on our downtown Chicago campus. Christian doctrine went out the door when we walked in because we did not need doctrine. We saw God. We weren’t the same as we used to be, certainly not like the way we were in vacation Bible school. Not like Sunday morning service or even Wednesday night youth group. We had new leaders: student group presidents and resident assistants, peers who were regarded as saints. We couldn’t talk to them, at least not in the same way as we may have before. We couldn’t even talk to the seniors, or date them. We were to be devoted and we were to study and worship God. They read their Bibles and prayed all the time. There were conferences and chapel sessions and there were worship hours. Oh, there was worship in Bible school!

We wanted to know how it worked. We wanted to know it was real, and we thought that was the purpose of school. Only at Bible college, school wasn’t school; everything was backward. If you had a question, there was evidence of doubt. The economy of this Christianity was to capitalize on faith, not doubt. There wasn’t really a place for it at all. We didn’t ask and we figured most things would be that way, unquestionable, swallow it down. We never said anything about anything. We weren’t unbelievers.

Joey and I solved Bible college in a year. We’d leave campus, hop a train or bus, head to smoke-filled coffee shops in disreputable parts of town, the places no first year Bible student should go. So we went. It was our hermitage where we acted freely of the restrictions of others’ perceptions. The people around us could be anyone. So could we. We became saturated with the cigarette smoke of sinners, were glutted with the foul language of carnal men, and filled our heads with an abundance of thoughts expressed in brazen conversation. We carved our initials in the bathroom walls.

We used dirty words and spoke forthright about Christian taboos. We stirred every doubt, laughed at blasphemous jokes, ragged on our professors and plotted to infuriate the Dean. It felt good and we couldn’t explain why. It just felt good and for the first time in our lives there was no one to tell us we couldn’t. So we did.

When I had been a child we moved away, my family and I. We moved away a lot after the first time, too. We went to the mission field, see. It was disjointed and foreign then at first, especially for my parents, because everything new is like that until you get used to it. My brothers and I got used to it pretty fast. I was three when we moved out there. We lived everywhere else, too, until I left for Bible college. But Christianity was in every place. It was everywhere I grew up: in my living room, in my bed, in my home school textbooks. And the world was never mine, for it was blemished with iniquity, stretching across the ever-shrinking globe from my family’s perch on the Pacific Rim in Japan.

Joey had moved around quite a bit, too. He had found that Christianity was useful for an unpopular kid. At church he could acquire social status and friends. His mom was a children’s pastor, devoted to Christian missions. Though his dad was a tough case, and had left the family for several years before Joey came to Bible college, Christian heritage was deeply rooted in him. Joey and I each had so many models for a good, Christian life. But we got the talk instead. Oh, Christians can talk!

One Thursday after chapel Joey and I skipped class as we often did to smoke cloves and complain about roommates and the chapel speaker’s failure to provide scriptural support for his exposition. That day we found, in our usual spot in the alleyway between the high-rises, a quarter of marijuana. We knew about it. When knew it could be dangerous. Possession of it was illegal. We got really excited. We knew it was just great.

We knew we had to decide what to do with it. And we knew, because of a lot of things, that we couldn’t just share our little happiness with just anybody. This discovery, this best thing, would probably incite a witch trial. That’s how it works with Bible students, like with any questionable thing we had ever said or done. They would tell us, “Get a Biblical life!” Simple.

So we came up with an answer. We dug a hole in the soft, grey soil next to our slab of alley cement and buried it. We marked it by carving a cross with Joey’s car key on the wall by where we hid it. But when we went back a few days later and looked to see if we could find it again, we couldn’t. We pillaged the soil along the whole alleyway, scavenged for the cross, but we couldn’t find it. We tried.

Joey and I talked about the pot or whatever it was when we couldn’t find it. We used good, clean words. What we were saying was how much the bag was like our coffee shop revelries and our smoke breaks between classes. We didn’t tell anybody about those things, and we didn’t understand what that might mean about us. We had never given a thought to what we could call how we felt about it. We didn’t give it a name or label it in any way. It just felt good. It was perfect in the way it was our coffee shop or our alleyway. It was our quarter of marijuana. But once we buried it, it was gone forever.

The bag was gone, like our feelings that caused us to flee campus to hide, like the first time we bought cloves in Belmont; it was gone like everything else that had been taken away even though we tried to salvage this one thing. It was not the first time we had learned this. Christianity seemed to keep pushing us around one way or the other, teaching us the same thing wherever we ended up. It’s tough that way, always teaching us stuff.

Then every other week or so Joey and I would find ourselves sickened with secrets. We never could predict when the feeling would come. So sometimes we had fun and sometimes we didn’t. We found a thousand ways to explain our depression. Homework was difficult, roommates didn’t understand us, no one prayed for us, ministry was lonely, worship was empty. We came back to the dorms smelling like smoke. We lied.

We stopped going to the alley after the bag. I smoked at the bus stop a block from school. I smoked on the rooftop of the dorm with Val in the middle of the night. We watched Donnie Darko in her dorm room. I went to the movie theater and I made out with a senior. I had sex. We all started having sex that summer. We decided to leave Bible college. It was an adventure to find an apartment near Belmont. We could take the bus to Milwaukee Avenue. We still had our friends. We had studied about ministry and we had grown up in the church. We weren’t dumb. The Dean or some senior may have argued with us, insisting that we stay or change or not leave. We rolled our eyes at each other about that.

We had no more patience for that stuff. We took our Bibles with us and moved all of our things. We said our brief goodbye and left.

We got to live it up. We worked jobs and made new friends. We still went to church sometimes. We tried to tell our story, but we still weren’t sure what to say about it. People said they understood or that they cared. Who knows what they meant. Our life became what we thought it would be. Perfect. It was freedom. Freedom was full, unlike anything else in the world. It wasn’t heavy or anything like that because we had known heaviness and this wasn’t it. This was perfect, lots of things to experience. We went to everything laughing, laughing, laughing together.

We learned about art. We made art. Life was beautiful. We were throwing a party, celebrating something we called freedom in Christ and forgiveness. We raised our bottles and cheered. Aha! We had found them out! This was right. At last it was right.

There was a scream and some commotion sounded from the master bathroom. I went running. I had heard about this but I’d never seen anything like it. One of the girls was on the floor passed out, bleeding from her wrists. Joey sat between her and the tub mumbling. Was it being taken away from us again? Freedom. Gone. Happiness. We grew up a little bit and couldn’t go back. We learned. No one had ever told us about responsibility like this. They had told us about freedom, about happiness. And it went away. We got smacked with growing up instead.

Then we smoked pot in the apartment, counseled each other and our friends when we were depressed. We learned about great music and supported local artists. We worked at coffee shops, rode bicycles, told our therapists about our vivid dreams. We had known something of freedom, but when we buried that first bag we knew what would really happen. The truth is, we didn’t look so hard for it. We didn’t look so hard for that cross. We were Bible students and we weren’t stupid. Things get taken away.

Joey and I parted ways after the lease was up. We kept in touch. We have tried to have fun as best we can.

We buried faith because it was hard, sure as any foundation, but same as the stones thrown to bruise us. We buried hope because it was whole, because it didn’t belong to us and so that it wouldn’t get taken away. Like children we buried it, marked it with a cross. We buried love because it was perfect. We didn’t tell anyone, but together it was all we talked about, until we forgot. It was the dispensation.

How Sharon Got Her Shuffle

2009-08-21T17:00:00.008-05:00

Sharon shuffles and Sharon can shake it.

When I first met Colorado native, Kansas resident Sharon Rose Gray in October 2007, Sharon needed knee replacements. She worked 4 days a week as the evening cook for Pleasant View Home in Inman, KS where I had just been employed to be the evening cook’s souse chef of sorts. After years as a farmer’s wife in Colorado and Kansas and some time working as a teacher’s aide in Hutchinson, KS and at the egg factory in Buhler, KS. Sharon had come to the nursing home where her husband, Al Gray, was receiving care. Even after Al was moved to a smaller facility in McPherson, KS, Sharon continued to work as a member of the Dietary staff at PVH. Sharon was recovering from surgery during the winter months of 2007 and 2008 that I passed working overtime hours.

There is a long-standing joke with the evening kitchen crew at PVH that one of the young men who works as an evening dishwasher is Sharon’s boyfriend. Like many young dishwashers who occasionally forget important tasks, Justin might have missed filling some water glasses before supper or he may have poked holes in the cookies so they would fit in the smaller tulip bowls, but Sharon could not be bothered by these few mistakes. Instead, Justin was given the role of the firstborn son, admired and appreciated, and not without due cause.

Sharon, Justin and I all have late winter birthdays, and so it was that in March 2008 as we were celebrating that Sharon returned to PVH after her recovery. There were many evenings that month where the three of us worked together, finishing early most days, and passed the last fifteen minutes of our shift talking. This was when I got to hear some of the stories that revealed how Sharon got her shuffle.

Al Gray was not only a farmer, but also a commercial interior decorator. Sharon’s bathroom at their home in Colorado Springs where all five of their children were born was drab until Al knocked out some ceiling for a sky-light and hung a fern to catch the sun’s rays. The border he used was velvet, cut-outs of carriages, gentlemen and ladies with parasols. Sharon’s fireplace was set in a wall of moss-covered volcanic rock, which she watered to keep green, that stood between the living and dining rooms. The other walls were painted green and her curtains were banana yellow. They moved when Al was commissioned to redecorate the dining area of the hospital in Garden City, KS.

After a few moves in Kansas for Al’s work, the Gray family settled on a farm six miles east of Buhler. They came with two U-Hauls, one packed with their belongings and the other set up like Noah’s Ark: goats, cows, chickens and cats carefully transported across state to their new home.

All five kids grew up and moved out; grandchildren popped into the family; precious farm animals and pets came and went with the years. Sharon and Al grew older together, knees and joints weakening, smiles wrinkling the corners of their eyes deeper, their work on the farm more limited.

Organ failure is a daunting medical concern. When Al experienced trouble with his liver and pancreas after he and Sharon had moved into town, giving up the farm, the cause remained hidden for quite some time. Al began to have mysterious attacks. While under observation at the Kansas University Medical Center, doctors labored to discover the underlying threat. Finally a rare condition, perhaps caused by the initial failure of Al’s pancreas, was revealed as the source of Al’s attacks.

Sharon continued to work and was quickly transformed into Al’s full-time caretaker. The Grays moved into a more accessible home, a duplex on the west side of Buhler, where Al could function in a wheelchair. Eventually Sharon decided to seek care for Al outside of her home so that she could work.

After Sharon recovered from her knee-replacement surgeries and returned to the kitchen in Inman, there were plenty of difficult afternoons. The aches and pains do not fade out completely. Rehabilitation is a time-consuming process, time that is not usually able to be spared. But that did not stop Sharon from shaking it.

Sharon and I would get a tune in our brains and go with it, releasing all of our pent-up energy in nonsensical lyrics and silly, offbeat grooves. The chicken pot pie always came out better on the nights we let loose. Some evenings Sharon would go to visit Al in McPherson after finishing work. Nearly every day she had off she was there, too.

Sharon told me Al was having eye surgery one Monday in August to see about removing some cataracts. Most of Al’s motor-functioning had shut down, and he had been without vision for two years. When the surgery was successful and Al was able to see Sharon for the first time in two years, one of his first requests was for a dance.

That week Al was able to see his grandchildren he had never seen because he had lost his sight before they had been born. One of the greatest delights was to see his only son with his new wife, whom he had married the year before when he had no vision.

Sharon shuffles, but Sharon can really shake it. I am sure Al would agree.

Sharon continues to live in Buhler, next door to one of her daughters and three of her grandchildren, and work in Inman, preparing the evening meal for 125 rest home residents at least four nights a week. Her beloved Al passed away in the fall of 2008. Sharon now travels to Hutchinson to line dance on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Elmdale Recreation Center.

Dust

2009-08-14T17:04:00.006-05:00

For me,
It happened after the soft bud dried and cracked.
There was disorientation first
And an aching for real hunger.
All I knew was spring
With its promise, fame and renown.
All I knew was a taste.

Disoriented, I saw a face.
Its eyes were rapt and a mirror,
Its lips wet and thin.
There were thoughts of bread so I ate them.
There were pictures of wholeness, too.
I copied them, wrote on them and painted them over with hopes.

It was my father's voice in the thoughts,
My mother's image in the pictures.
I had never seen nor ever heard
Before the roaming face came.

For me,
It was like a dry flower that breaks.
The face was a lie for the sake of truth,
The lie you have to thank
When you learn it saves you,
When you learn it makes you.
It is the lie that you are beautiful when you are not,
Which is forgiveness.

It makes the liar into a god
And it starts to show:
The flower is dead.
It was always dead. (This is important to remember)

You forget and it takes everything from you.
We desire to celebrate what we know,
But what we know is slavery.

For me,
It had to be told again and again.
I might say I am not,
But I am beautiful.
The bud is crushed
And cannot be restored by slavery.

In freedom you begin to hear the lies,
Which are everywhere,
And you start to pull your brain out your ears.
There is usually bleeding.
There is usually agony.

If this dry, perfect dust can be valued,
Then existence has done it
With flowers,
With skin.

For me,
There is one day that matters,
One face and one voice.
I am the mirror here to tell you the lie
That can save you.

Reset

2009-08-14T16:49:00.004-05:00

Then I am up from the pillow,
Draping the bed with the steam off my skin.
It irrigates the dust circling above the sheets
I threw from my nakedness;
My smooth, taut whiteness,
Now smeared with black sweat,
Is emaciated by tiny blades
And rough breath.

Here comes the burrowing mole,
Sinking his wet nose
Through my memory of secret slavery.

My right hand with purpose again,
I am always dreaming of your violence.
I am always wanting
Your fulcrum
For the breaking of my legs.

This is how ankles cry.
This is how a chest floods.

Enchiladas & Inclinations

2009-08-13T09:57:00.011-05:00

Slivered onions cook in smoking olive oil just before I shake in some minced garlic, just enough for a pleasing aroma. I have chosen to use the 10-inch skillet, but I am just realizing it may be too small once I add my other ingredients. Still, it pleases me to use my cherry red cookware, a wedding gift from my new mother-in-law.

The recipe for "Quick Turkey Enchiladas" was hand-picked by my husband David to be the first meal I cook as a newlywed. It will be the first of 15 that I will cook before the end of summer, September 22, at 16:18 CDT. We were married on June 18, the final Thursday of Spring 2009, but I haven't started cooking meals in the kitchen until tonight, July 30.

Already I am substituting, a trademark I have been destined to establish since childhood. I cook intuitively and without urgency, despite my Type A personality. For these enchiladas, I use diced chicken instead of ground turkey and green chilies instead of jalapenos. I add fresh diced tomatoes.

From my experience in the food service industry, I am acquainted with food-handling procedure. I clean my raw chicken in the sink before dicing it on my cutting board for raw meat only. Immediately I wash the cutting board and knife after transferring the chicken to the skillet.

My chef's knife is my favored asset, an extension of my self. I delight in mincing, chopping and the like. I take the handle in my right hand, my index finger pointed, resting against the blunt edge. The tips of the fingers of my left hand press against that same edge, close to the tip of the knife. With a rocking motion I move the knife across a pile of fresh cilantro, releasing the pristine scent to mix with the aroma of onion and garlic, soon to complement the redolence of enchilada sauce and grilled chicken.

The filling for the tortillas I have warmed in the microwave is complete once I have stirred in shredded Monterey Jack cheese. I wrap 1/2 cup of filling in each of ten 8-inch tortillas and place them seam-side down in my greased 9- by 13-inch glass dish. Once they are topped with enchilada sauce and more cheese, I cover the dish with foil and place them in our gas oven, heated to 400 degrees. Only fifteen minutes later we are ready to eat.

David has set the table and it is near 6 o’clock. The enchiladas are unveiled and we struggle to get them out of the cooking dish with a spoon. I am not sure why we chose the spoon. A piece of diced chicken falls from one of the enchiladas, a dollop of steaming tomato and gooey cheese on the brown table cloth. David picks it up and pops it in his mouth, and his eyes turn thoughtful and contemplative as he chews slowly with his mouth open, letting the food cool off.

We cut into our meal with our forks. We manage several big bites before we look at each other. The enchilada sauce, medium, is a tad spicy for both of us.

“We’ll get the mild sauce next time,” David suggests. This is good news for me. He wants there to be a next time.

“Maybe the chicken should be shredded instead of diced,” he continues.

“Oh yes. I think so, too,” I reply as I start thinking of how to cook the chicken so I can shred it. I have never eaten enchiladas before, or maybe I have. I cannot remember. I realize I should ask my friend Amy about the quality of what I have made. Amy introduced me to carnitas at a local Mexican restaurant. She had spoken fluent Spanish with the waiters. I considered her fluency in the language and her dating history with Latino men to indicate a palate tuned to the excellences of their cuisine as well. Excited, I call her,

“Amy! I made enchiladas! Have you eaten? I should have thought to invite you sooner, with your expertise.”

“Well, no, I haven’t eaten. I was just thinking about stopping somewhere and getting something. I’ll just come over there, then.” Amy is coming. I set out a plate for her and grab her a cold one when she arrives not 10 minutes later. After grinning wildly and announcing she is about to buy a house, she helps herself and begins to eat. I pepper her for a reaction.

“What do you think? It might be too spicy. Should the chicken be shredded instead of diced? I have never made anything like this before. I don’t even remember ever eating enchiladas before.”

“Well,” Amy is chewing smaller morsels while she speaks. I notice with pride that David has taken seconds. “The truth is I don’t really eat enchiladas. This is pretty spicy, but it’s not too much.”

We finish eating and David helps me carry the dishes into the kitchen, rinsing everything well at my insistence. Of the 10 enchiladas only 2 are left and David claims them for tomorrow’s lunch. After we talk with Amy about her dream house for a while she goes home and I press David,

“So, grade me. What do you think? Did I make an A? A-?”

“Well,” he emphasizes the end of the word. “You can have a B+. I want to give you room to grow.” I am a little disappointed by this. Yet I had asked, had I not? “You know,” he continues, “I don’t like grading you for it. Why can’t we just enjoy it?”

“You’re right,” I smile. My heart exalts in this accomplishment. This is my first kitchen as David‘s wife. It’s on the northwest corner of a rickety two bedroom house on 2nd Avenue, across from the train tracks. The world shakes when trains go by and the kitchen hums and whirs when we run the washer and dryer in the backroom. The kitchen appliances are propped level with folded cardboard pieces because the linoleum floor is at an incline. My cupboards do not stay closed and there is limited counter space. Cooking is certainly a task in which I find I am in my element. Eating, even more so, though our dining room is at a slight incline, too.

I Flew In With The Boxcars

2009-08-12T20:07:00.002-05:00

I come on like a train chasing the sunset’s pink and orange scream, shadows dancing behind me. I come on across the prairies to Kansas, past the sick and fat cows and the flooded plains. I come on to where the trees have been broken by straight jackets of ice.

I left the fear behind me, where my female body struggled to breathe. I flew in with the boxcars, a trail of ash and smoke across the middle states. America like a funeral pyre, I am reborn with the wind through the wheat and from the land.

Where first there were only trails and tracks, there are highways that crack through the seasons and roads of gravel that are washed away and renewed. There is a place north of this town where the earth’s arch can break your mind; you have never beheld so much sky up to your chin in dirt. I am gravity, you might think.

Mother knows this is one such place where nature earned its karma. Cyclones ravage the counties; wind and warmth with savage, electric nails rend trees, homes and graveyards. I scrub crayon markings off the walls and tend to ten months of dirty dishes, my babies torn from me. The storm is never ending in this state, and I learn to love its every face because it hurts me more to hate.

This primal country where my eyes melt down my face affords me no shelter. My love is always an arrow: shaped, strung and shot with its point already embedded in its target. I struggle in linear time because my heart has no faith in it. Time seems a vengeful god who demands constant sacrifice of my consciousness. I refuse to prostrate myself and have no solace in its realm, but this is the only love I have. I try to explain it.

Never mind how it sounds; I am free. My mother knows it but she disagrees with my personality. My sisters, too, are free, but they carry on with masters for their own reasons.

I spent much of my life under the tutelage of fear, a teacher whose lessons apply perfectly to one who is content to remain its student. I have been ready now for quite some time to be mastered by love instead, but they tell me it was murdered long ago when a strong man took a weaker man’s life with a stone.

We keep flying into love because it illuminates you and consumes me. We take lives with our love like this--with stones, with photographs we have misplaced, with electronic messages that have now been deleted. Fear makes love like this possible, and with rare exception the brave have no one to love but those who are afraid.