like the turtle laying her eggs on the beach
trance tears running
trance tears trance tears
your 10-year-old body cannot take it
Tag Archives: egg
Evoke, evoke, evoke, the egg.
Some common words: fragile, frail. Some common vulnerabilities: fainting. Some common objects: robin, squirrel. Some common remnants, fragments. And some uncommon chipped up blue of robin’s egg.
Fast talkers. At work, an impulse, so intense, to slow down all conversations. Slow slow slow slow down. Make you repeat each word in line so the thoughts can be absorbed. So what is this phenomenon, this riffing disrespect? Does it hide ignorance or escalate frustration? Where is the mountain, where are the waters?
Egg looking for the riverbank. Eggplant seeking streamside.
I used to write to You, but the You has dissolved out of my life. Rinsed of starch, I’m limp, limp as a cuttle-fish, scuttling, color-shifting, many predators. Laying eggs and going off to die.
That’s strange.
If I could find my way to a simpler conception. If I could find my way to the egg on the pedestal, if I could find my way to the walking rock. No table salt. No laughing pepper. No funny farm. No moldy vegetables. Rot in a garden. Where do we see that rot, the heavy mosses, the packed earth of the path? The beaten borders, crumbling boundaries? The edge trees fallen into the river, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, in a death flirtation with the current. Where do we see that? Where do we see the planes? How far away are they? The red light blinks far away at night and there you are, another person. We forget that all of these poets are also persons, one after the other, exhibiting bodily functions. Yes you are a wizard of language. Yes you may set a bonfire. Yes you can turn and turn and turn. No you are not a clergy person. No none of this should be bandied about. No you are not for sale. No you have no memory of the mountain of marzipan you saw in Italy.
Food is very important to me. I miss being able to cook, having a broken wrist makes it an ordeal. I like really tasty food. I like fruit smoothies. I love wine. I like vegetarian food—all the variety, none of the danger. I don’t think I could be vegan though. I like eggs and dairy too much.
My mother had very few stories. She repeated some familiar ones often. How great Christmases were. How she broke her leg riding a tricycle. Her problem students when she was a second grade teacher. How she developed a dread of throwing up from an incident in her own second grade classroom. How she ate the same thing every day for years. Now I can’t remember what that was—an egg sandwich? fried egg? maybe it was with tomato and mayonnaise, maybe not. The world of stories was very thin.
I wanted the juicier ones. The ones about menstruation. Her relationship with mother and sisters. Her thoughts about her father. I wanted the whole scoop. I was fed crackers. My next door neighbor said our house smelled like crackers. She found that comforting. Many people found my family comforting.