Sunday, 01.08:
Worked 10-6 today. D is out because A may be having the baby this weekend (no news since Friday) and S called off, which made it a pretty rough day, but what’s new? Stopped at Kroger on the way home and bought eggs, tortillas, and fixings for a pot of chili. It’s on the stove now, and I have a couple hours to do some press work before T gets home. I’m going to try to print some page sets of JL’s chapbook, which he’ll need at AWP next month (next month!).
Monday, 01.09:
title in search of poem: Barlow Hollow
Monday, 01.21:
dread | resist
When I was a sullen teenager, maybe 13, my biological father dragged me along to a flea market in Kentucky. I have nothing against flea markets; in fact, I enjoy the odd variety of persons and goods. This trip was with a colleague of my father’s named, unbelievably, Junior Samples. It was a stormy weekend, but the rain had held off that morning. We were out before dawn at our table, wind flapping the oilcloth tablecloth and tarps held down by Depression glass, assorted metal tools, all the strange and sometimes wonderful items one can find at such venues. Junior looked up at the clouds shredding just enough for a bit of blue to shine beyond: My grammy always told me as long as there’s a patch of blue big enough to fix your Pappy’s britches, that means it ain’t gonna rain.
Today, at noon, alone, I walked out of the store where I work my day job and leaned against the rain-damp textured concrete wall about twenty feet from the store entrance. The parking lot is full, the traffic ceaseless at this hour. Heavy gray clouds, shredding and recollecting, massing and unmassing, roll ahead, soon indistinguishable. The bits of blue above so much darker than the flash of livid paler blue at the edge of the lot where the freeway crosses over. I don’t have names for these blues. This January day feels more like March. I am wasting my life in retail but too afraid to try something new. I’ve dreamed of nonprofit work, something that would feel essential and worthwhile, but I fear those jobs will now disappear. This expansion of clouds: just vapor and light, I know, and so I resist trying to call it anything more. But part of me would rather be there than here on this troubled earth.
Reads in the Trees 