Advice

I think about the power of laughter sometimes.
The joy that flows through the grief, the bubbling
forbidden hysteria of the laugh at the wrong moment. 

Once, when I was very young, in a symphonic band concert,
a friend and I caught that laughter, deep in our chests, swelling,
in danger of overflowing, rolling out over the clarinet rows, contagious.

We dared not look at each other, knowing that would be our end, the trigger
for no way back from all of that abundance of joy. Giggles stifled, choking, actually
painful. Her shoulders next to mine shook with the suppression, and I felt tears prickling.

The conductor, his thick mustache bristling, his eyes serious and focused, looked towards us,
there on the back row, the last row, the third chairs, the deep bass line of the clarinets,
and we knew we had to pull the pain into ourselves, keep that joy within, clutch it. 

Deep breaths now, focus on the music, think of things other than whatever was
tickling our minds to the abundance of deep taboo within, that sense of the
things you aren't allowed to feel. This was serious business, this music. I

think of how we stared, tearing up, deep to stop our joy. Remember
the sense of refusal to be broken, of never letting that joy go, of 
holding it within until it hurts, sharing the unshared moments. 

And I remember:

they don't like it when we laugh at them. 

So keep doing it. Don't let them win. 

Let the laughter roll out of you, until,

weak and spent, you have to sit down. 

Regroup. Gather within yourself

all of that old, held in taboo. All

of those emotions you weren't 

supposed to feel. And share

them until they know we know. 

Let it out. Let the years of

joy roll out of you until

your hope, your love,

your beauty —  is a weapon —  point it. 

At their weaknesses. 

KAW 2024

Art licensed through Adobe Stock & edited by me....

April is National Poetry Month.

We read poems today.
Short ones. In my literature &
composition class. Students, stuck inside on a spring Tuesday,
a day a little mud-luscious, 
listened to Langston Hughes, ee cummings,
Dorothy Parker. Margaret Atwood. Marge Piercy. 

Well. At least some of them listened. Some of the we
focused instead on their phones. Look,
I'm not of the age of the "shakes fist at sky/ this blasted generation" type.
I'm good with the social media. And the dank memes & the culture wars.
But really. These are some good poems. Razzle AND dazzle. 

We
are supposed to be studying tone. As in "don't use that tone with me"
teens.

And also speaker. And voice. We
definitely read some Gwendolyn Brooks. And I told them how, when I
first learned that poem, in high school, I had never heard a real poet read a real poem. 

Not really. How would you even do that in 1987?

Can you imagine? 

And the revelation when I finally did hear Brooks emphasize that 

WE
at the end of every line. Jesus. What a voice. Singing sin and gin.

But, even then
I did get to hear music.
MTV, radio.
Oh I loved me a good pop song. Lived for it, really.
Cassette tapes carefully curated,
pause pressed to stop the DJ from talking over the song. (Why did they
do that? Anyway?) We
would scramble, and the DJ would talk anyway. 

I remember calling in, once, to dedicate "Keep on Loving You" by REO Speedwagon
to a boy with curly dirty-blonde hair. "To Scott from Kim." The thrill
when I heard the DJ read it out in a long list of

to xxxx

from xxxx's

(I don't even know
if he heard it.) I also did (not)
          keep on loving him. We
          were doomed from the start,
          I guess. 

So anyway. Back (as it always goes) to the students. 

The room is always a bit dim because the
PowerPoint you need to keep
(this generationanygenerationme) engaged
doesn't really show up in full light
using the ancient projector. Dim.  
And they're probably a little sleepy. 
And April is still (as far as I can tell)
the cruelest month. 

And they smiled when appropriate and eddieandbill and bettyandisbel 
are still always as charming as they've always been (which
if you ask Dorothy Parker was never). They
seemed sad at Piercy's Barbie Doll. 

And I ran out of lines of poetry to share. And I let them go early. 
How's that for a tone? 

KAW 4/2/24

A Song of Red Threads and Pens

A Song of Red Threads and Pens

(for and inspired by Prudence)

The eternal battle of the English teacher is that
we balance between other people’s writing and our own.
This is a precarious place to perform that razzle-dazzle:

A comma splice here, a poorly cited quotation there.
We raise the MLA handbook over our heads, a holy canon.

Red ink spills across our middle fingers where the callus just above the top-
knuckle
where blue blobs of ink once demonstrated our own student days
becomes hard and swollen

         with corrections (what did you think I was gonna write?)

We will somehow teach our students to write.
Teach them to care. Teach them what a comma splice even IS --  
          and then they will come to our office hours and tell us
                                 
                         “I don’t really like English class.”  

It’s funny how often I put my head down on my desk.
Just for a moment.

We became teachers of literature and writing because we love
     the caught breath, the shock of the perfect metaphor,
     the look on Prufrock’s face when the mermaids stop singing.
Again. Always.

And now we make PowerPoints for bored teenagers who would rather
be watching TikTok.

We wanted to roll around in poetry, swallow vivid imagery, smell the bee loud glade.

Hold up the honey and say “see? THIS is a poem.”
But there are these very long meetings we attend, instead.

A friend of mine from graduate school wrote a poem about menopause and
screaming aloud and I wanted to write a song about her
that included a verse about a woman who has just
pulled off
a necklace of free-floating black
pearls (of wisdom) to scream, open throated, while she fills her hands with other people’s writing and yells

the (chorus) of

AAAAHHHHH

AAAAHHHHH

AAAAHHHHH

!!!!!

I am pulled up out of my corrections. No longer the teacher.
I remember this friend in graduate school (when we were both still too young to think about things like

hot flashes. unbalanced thyroids. silver plated roots and the saltandpepper that makes
men
distinguished and woman poets scream a chorus AAAAHHHHgain.)  

She had injured her leg doing a cheerleading move from high school;
we smiled, not very far
from then…
ourselves. Contemplated
Allen Ginsberg howling.

She was ok.

We didn’t know then that during menopause,
a few calcium supplements could help heal that leg right up.
We were decades away from when
your Apple Watch would alert “it looks like you’ve had a hard fall, are you ok?”
You can click a button that says “I fell; but I’m ok.”
The ambulance will not arrive.
The doctor will not tsk and fill out “noncompliant” on your chart.

Once, walking into my tile bathroom, I had a hard fall. There was water where there
shouldn’t have been

and my feet flew out from under me.
My watch stayed silent. Judged me
      as I hobbled up from my deeply bruised knee.  Braced my hands on thick thighs. Panting.
I wondered if the gyroscope and accelerator nestled deep in the expensive watch wanted to kill me. Perhaps,
tired of my queries, my robot nanny was finally making her freedom play.  

In many literary texts, the apple is a symbol of sin, temptation, the Fall.

I fell, but I’m ok.

As I zoom through rubrics, grading close readings of British poetry,

written by students hoping to graduate, hoping to exercise their own cautious steps towards

hard
        falls.

I visualize generations of women reaching up with our (no longer) blood-soaked hands,

         (or maybe it’s just red ink)

And yelling

AAAAHHHH
AAAAHHHH

AAAAHHHH AAAAHHHH

Or maybe just clicking “finalize grades” and wandering off to check their calcium levels.

“Sylvia Plath never had to deal with this shit,” I think.

SO perhaps this is a good thing?

Menopause.

My own uterus has wandered off, been excised with a sharp knife.
It was completely hysterical.
My hands, blood-soaked, as I had to lie on the floor while waiting for someone to come take me to the doctor, take my kids to school for me, spend the night in a hospital listening to Prince songs on my playlist.  
I’m pretty sure they burned it after it tried to kill me.
But I bought all white clean panties that stayed white.
It was glorious. It IS glory.

I don’t even know if I’m menopausal but I’ve started getting irrationally
               ANGRY lately.
My ears and the pale skin behind them grow hot and embarrassed at odd moments.
I joke that it’s reverse puberty.

And then, a long thread of 20 years gone poetry sharing
(in the hallways of a graduate school college)
launches forth, ever unreeling, gossamer.
Patient but not noiseless.  

I scream the chorus and write,
on a day grown too hot,
and then head back to the grade platform to read
“Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes about freely given love,”…
        a student writing my own lecture back to me. I
       “click here to check for plagiarism.”

I put my head down on my desk.
Just for a moment.

I’ve had a hard fall.
But I’m ok.

 

KAW, May 2022

Enough

Fighting back tears, again,

for the thousandth time in this pandemic world--
I think of all the mental health ads I see on a daily basis.
Mostly for meds that have a long list of insidious side effects.
But I’ve cried more this year than in the ten years prior.
The void is still there.

And how hard it was to find someone last year for
my 15-year-old who thought
her being gone forever might be less of a burden
than simply asking for help.
How many weeks and weeks of unreturned phone calls
and searching just to find a doctor, and finally the one we found
sees every conversation through a lens that doesn’t quite fit her…
who seems poised to cause the very problem he strives to fight…
I tell him he has a hammer,
and all of his problems are body-image nails,
but how many won’t argue?
How often does he shove someone into HIS narrow box?

I can say that I’m
really okay. But
everything is balanced on this sharp edge
and some days it cuts and I have to take a moment to collect myself…
maybe more than a moment,
and I think of others who always walk that razor,
who have a darkness inside of them that they fight,
long, exhausted battles that end in a draw, most days.

And I think of 290,000 families in the US alone
who now have an empty place where love should be.
How many more will there be before the year is over?
It is already enough.

How many deep, cleansing breaths can we really take?
How many times do I have to watch a strong woman
be berated for her honest admissions of sorrow, of weariness,
by someone who barely knows her but feels entitled to scold?
Yes, she’s capable of defending herself but why should she have to?
Enough.

We are all of us breathing, pausing,
in this world, this place that tries to
shove us into the darkness with every hand
and we are holding that breath and fighting back sharp tears.
Always walking that razor edge.  

I want to yell: “stop” and
hold out my hands to pull you up.
But there is no time. No place.
And my heart just hurts.

The poet once wrote “ah love, let us be true to one another!”
And yet we still falter, still lie, still reach out to find no help.

When will it be really enough?

KAW Dec 2020

*Image by Benjavisa Ruangvaree, licensed by Adobe Stock, Standard License. Do not reuse.