September 7, 2008
The Old Appliance Club
Did she know when to quit? She called her stove a piano; she put frozen peas in the biscuit jar; she felt as frazzled as widow's net caught in an eggbeater. She looked up her name with Google, and omigod, there she was, the perfect definition of her unsaved self: The Old Appliance! And now there was a club about her! The club flew about her, whacking her ears, rounding off her shoulders, until she was just an old appliance, too wide for the back door, too warm for ice cream, too noisy for the keen of hearing.
August 21, 2008
MAPS & BIRDS: Getting Home
Like a throbbing bead waiting in a velvet box, or a tumor crowding honest flesh out of the way, or a perfect speckled egg in a tight moss nest, the magnet readied itself in her brain, just exactly where – through bone and forehead wrinkles – her third eye would be.
She knew already that she had the third eye, because something as slight as a stray hair from her bangs, pointed for a nanosecond at that part of her forehead, brought an intense feeling of centering. With her eyes closed, in the dark, someone could experimentally point a pencil closer and closer to that third eye spot, never touching the fine hairs, and she would know that it was there.
She amused herself sometimes, lying in bed – what else was there to do? – by bringing her forefinger slowly toward her forehead until she could feel the prickle, the feeling that the reptile in her head had woken up. Ah! there it was. This time, would the snake strike at her finger? Could she, that way, travel back 40,000 years to sing in a cave?
On Not To See a Bird. The noodles boil to paste, blacken, catch fire. She comes home and throws the pot into the snow, a hissing startled crow. Upstairs, she finds him asleep, eyes clenched to the plumes of acrid smoke. She slides beside him, has dreams—acres of corn-stalk, winter rag—pinioned by the wing of his arm.
Oh, no, she was on to something. She’d spent seven decades trying to find the direction, the point on the map where she should fly.
Like a bird with a magnet in its brain, like a homing pigeon, she had burst from her cage on a roof and flown in circles for years.
Home kept changing; where was home?
Is a roost always in the same place? Why did a male chicken get to be the roost-er? Why not the hen? Would she have to become a rooster, in order to find her real home, the home inside her brain?
Could she excite the reptilian magnet, the heavy like-a-ball-of-mercury orb of her third eye, so that it would point to due happiness?
Cartogram. The green cut to tan—textures of a grocery bag—the rivers bluer, counties wider. They opened out, out there, thoughts losing the yellow gridwork of cities, marked with the spare periods of desert towns. You are here? she wrote, across the legend, waiting 5, 10, 100 miles for an answer.
Again she thought about all she had learned about birds during her life. Forget the stuff that didn’t pertain, that didn’t really interest her. Here were the things that she found compelling:
1. The blue feathers of a bird, be it blue jay or kingfisher, get their color from the sky. No bird is really blue. Blue is the presence of scattered light and what? imagination? desire?
2. Pigeons, albatrosses, and hummingbirds have a small magnetic center in their brains which helps them keep track of magnetic north and its opposite, south, and its outstretched wings -- east and west. It is possible, speculated one scientist, that humans have this magnet too.
3. Chickadees can live 12 or more years. Each year, the part of their brain that records where they stored seeds and berries, in little pocks and crevices, dies and regrows, empty of information. How could a chickadee, without accounting practices or Microsoft, keep track of seeds buried in 2006 and since eaten or hidden in 2008 and still there to be eaten?
4. A crow can be quite shy, and will wait in a tree, politely, for the sparrow to leave the feeder. But rare is the sparrow who attends the feeder by himself.
5. If a bird flew overhead and shat its stream of liquid excrement on your head, this will be called good luck.
6. A tree full of turkey vultures is a tree streaked with white splatterings, gallons of it. It is also a noisy tree as they settle in at deep dusk – the sound of leathery wings beating like the wings of Da Vinci’s helicopter to lower their heavy bodies onto the roosting limbs. The slightest noise can make half of them fly up out of the tree, and it is like hearing a motorcycle gang strip off their leathers for a fight.
7. You can kill a baby bird by feeding it too many worms. Its belly will swell, and burst, and the baby will die a horrible death that you don’t know how to halt or hasten.
8. A trumpet vine thrilling with orange trumpets will not guarantee hummingbirds or angels.
What does this tell us about humans?
Whippoorwill. She stood in the wind at the edge of the lot, pigweed blooming and rattling cups. She angled her arms in semaphore, to spell out hello or love or cannot see. He let the afternoon open his face, red breath, wet tongue.
No, no, I may not be a bird, but I know where I’ll roost tonight, and I know over which trees the sun rises and beyond which highway the sun sets.
And that’s that.
---------------------------------------------------
This was a ‘blind’ collaboration between Linda Franklin and Joseph Young. We settled on two thematic words—birds, maps—and we wrote our pieces, understanding that Linda would read her title and first paragraph [roman typeface], be interrupted by Joe [italic] from the back of the room, then alternate between them until Joe was standing next to Linda at the podium. It was read at the 8/16/08 fiction 510readings at Minas Gallery, Baltimore, and worked better than either of us could have imagined. For more by Joseph Young, go to www.verysmalldogs.blogspot.com
For more on Minas and the 5ive Ten readings click on links in "site seeing" to the right of the page.
She knew already that she had the third eye, because something as slight as a stray hair from her bangs, pointed for a nanosecond at that part of her forehead, brought an intense feeling of centering. With her eyes closed, in the dark, someone could experimentally point a pencil closer and closer to that third eye spot, never touching the fine hairs, and she would know that it was there.
She amused herself sometimes, lying in bed – what else was there to do? – by bringing her forefinger slowly toward her forehead until she could feel the prickle, the feeling that the reptile in her head had woken up. Ah! there it was. This time, would the snake strike at her finger? Could she, that way, travel back 40,000 years to sing in a cave?
On Not To See a Bird. The noodles boil to paste, blacken, catch fire. She comes home and throws the pot into the snow, a hissing startled crow. Upstairs, she finds him asleep, eyes clenched to the plumes of acrid smoke. She slides beside him, has dreams—acres of corn-stalk, winter rag—pinioned by the wing of his arm.
Oh, no, she was on to something. She’d spent seven decades trying to find the direction, the point on the map where she should fly.
Like a bird with a magnet in its brain, like a homing pigeon, she had burst from her cage on a roof and flown in circles for years.
Home kept changing; where was home?
Is a roost always in the same place? Why did a male chicken get to be the roost-er? Why not the hen? Would she have to become a rooster, in order to find her real home, the home inside her brain?
Could she excite the reptilian magnet, the heavy like-a-ball-of-mercury orb of her third eye, so that it would point to due happiness?
Cartogram. The green cut to tan—textures of a grocery bag—the rivers bluer, counties wider. They opened out, out there, thoughts losing the yellow gridwork of cities, marked with the spare periods of desert towns. You are here? she wrote, across the legend, waiting 5, 10, 100 miles for an answer.
Again she thought about all she had learned about birds during her life. Forget the stuff that didn’t pertain, that didn’t really interest her. Here were the things that she found compelling:
1. The blue feathers of a bird, be it blue jay or kingfisher, get their color from the sky. No bird is really blue. Blue is the presence of scattered light and what? imagination? desire?
2. Pigeons, albatrosses, and hummingbirds have a small magnetic center in their brains which helps them keep track of magnetic north and its opposite, south, and its outstretched wings -- east and west. It is possible, speculated one scientist, that humans have this magnet too.
3. Chickadees can live 12 or more years. Each year, the part of their brain that records where they stored seeds and berries, in little pocks and crevices, dies and regrows, empty of information. How could a chickadee, without accounting practices or Microsoft, keep track of seeds buried in 2006 and since eaten or hidden in 2008 and still there to be eaten?
4. A crow can be quite shy, and will wait in a tree, politely, for the sparrow to leave the feeder. But rare is the sparrow who attends the feeder by himself.
5. If a bird flew overhead and shat its stream of liquid excrement on your head, this will be called good luck.
6. A tree full of turkey vultures is a tree streaked with white splatterings, gallons of it. It is also a noisy tree as they settle in at deep dusk – the sound of leathery wings beating like the wings of Da Vinci’s helicopter to lower their heavy bodies onto the roosting limbs. The slightest noise can make half of them fly up out of the tree, and it is like hearing a motorcycle gang strip off their leathers for a fight.
7. You can kill a baby bird by feeding it too many worms. Its belly will swell, and burst, and the baby will die a horrible death that you don’t know how to halt or hasten.
8. A trumpet vine thrilling with orange trumpets will not guarantee hummingbirds or angels.
What does this tell us about humans?
Whippoorwill. She stood in the wind at the edge of the lot, pigweed blooming and rattling cups. She angled her arms in semaphore, to spell out hello or love or cannot see. He let the afternoon open his face, red breath, wet tongue.
No, no, I may not be a bird, but I know where I’ll roost tonight, and I know over which trees the sun rises and beyond which highway the sun sets.
And that’s that.
---------------------------------------------------
This was a ‘blind’ collaboration between Linda Franklin and Joseph Young. We settled on two thematic words—birds, maps—and we wrote our pieces, understanding that Linda would read her title and first paragraph [roman typeface], be interrupted by Joe [italic] from the back of the room, then alternate between them until Joe was standing next to Linda at the podium. It was read at the 8/16/08 fiction 510readings at Minas Gallery, Baltimore, and worked better than either of us could have imagined. For more by Joseph Young, go to www.verysmalldogs.blogspot.com
For more on Minas and the 5ive Ten readings click on links in "site seeing" to the right of the page.
August 11, 2008
Acknowledgment that the Bug Exists.
I was walking and a bug landed near my elbow. I couldn’t ... I was walking and a bug landed near my elbow. to read the rest of this, go to my new blog that is solely for these Google-search generated writings.
To read the rest go to www.gobbledeGoogle.blogspot.com
To read the rest go to www.gobbledeGoogle.blogspot.com
July 22, 2008
"She Called It Freddy" News Stories the Way I Like 'em
Police said they found the remains ... stuffed in a jar earlier this week. Police said a worker at a pump station found the jar buried Monday. To read the rest go to www.gobbledeGoogle.blogspot.com
July 18, 2008
President McKinley Clutched His Chest
When the retiree got up to bowl in the fifth frame of his second game, he clutched his chest ... McKinley looked confused and rose up on his toes, clutched his chest. Took one look at the monitor, let out a terrible scream, clutched her chest and fell dead upon the floor. To read the rest of this appropriated-phrase story, please go to www.gobbledeGoogle.blogspot.com
Googling “clutched his chest” news garnered 709 hits in 0.12 seconds. Googling “clutched her chest” news garnered 4,090 hits in 0.14 seconds Googling “grabbed her chest” news garnered 11,800 hits in 0.46 seconds Googling “grabbed his chest” news garnered 16,900 hits in 0.34 seconds
July 9, 2008
Old Men and The Frail Operculum of Snails
Even in my youngest, ripest years, from twenty-four
to twenty-eight,
Young men did not, as the poet Yeats suggests,
“suddenly catch their breath”
When I was passing.
Even then, it was
Old men – old to me – men ten, twenty,
fifty years beyond me on the Path
Who smiled and wanted to stroke my arm where
fine golden hairs grew and looked like a
crop of wheat ready to be mowed,
It was old men who liked to put their arms
around my waist, and pretend to
Nuzzle in my ear,
Who invited me to dinner, so that
I could sit across from them and
Smile for French snails and wine.
Once, a fat old man who was my boss,
Invited me to dine, and I dressed carefully,
knowing what would come after,
But not knowing that I would have to suck
Cooked snails from their hidey holes in shells.
If I had not been young, perhaps I would have
Sucked a snail into my esophagus and
Died, asphyxiated on a harmless morsel that
Crawled once along its trail of lubricating slime,
And I'd never have ended up under the fat boss
Rolling around in his bed,
closeup seeing the sweat
pouring from his forehead, his ugly nose,
Seeing the hairs in his nostrils, seeing his
rubbery penis stalk my garden.
Now I attract only the oldest of old men;
now I am
Perhaps in sight of heaven itself--
and I have hidden the
Desire to have my body loved or caressed;
Except,
I do still like to have my shoulder touched,
my arm stroked.
I have never eaten another snail, but
love to see the glister of their garden trails,
leading
Without specific aim, but generally toward
Safe damp rocks and tender shoots.
New Drug May Save Aged Bra
Double click on the drawing and it'll be big 'n' boo'ful, and you'll be able to read the fine print. But, in case you still can't read the fine print, the news article reads:
Baltimore.--(A&P)
Special to the Sun
Tests of a new wonder drug, ichtyoelastinpu, seem to indicate that it works to restore all aged bras, and elderly underpants too. So far, garterbelts have failed to respond in a statistically significant way. Socks which underwent the same rigorous testing were found to suffer accelerated aging. Dr. L. Oldedrawer, 57, of Baltimore, says that the next item entering test trials are jockstraps.
Ichtyoelastinpu, which is made of a derivative of Queen Anne's Lace roots (daucus carrotus) seems to work by restoring the DNA of the decaying elastic strands to their youthful vigor.
This will be good news for all who are on a limited budget. The drug is going to be offered for sale to the public, under-the-counter, with the brand name UNDUE, as soon as October of this year.
UPDATE!! Furious industry leaders, including the CEOs of Matronform and Victoria's Gossip, claim that the government has not done enough testing of UNDUE, and that it is likely to wear off on the chests and underarms (and other parts) of wearers of treated unmentionables, and cause them to regress and become youngsters. Dr. L. Oldedrawer commented that surely Matronform, Victoria's Gossip, and others would appreciate a whole new, free, generation of "youngbodies" who will require training bras, etc., all over again. No-one from Elastopocket, which is the world leader in jockstrap manufacturing, would comment on the threat of "youngbodying."
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