Plan E
Write to lull the listeners (homework)
Sleep dissolves anxieties (awake at 3)
Good blood, good cells (well, maybe)
have a job to do (retired!)
Anticipate harmony, anticipate (why wait?)
matrimony, anticipate (beware!)
walking away from bad (ummm “bad”?)
Find a lake of teal-colored water (CO, AZ)
Use it, own it, float, splash (campers)
lounge, recline, star gaze (oh cool nights)
Every day the path not taken
emanates a radius unknown.
I awake drenched with blossoms,
the gnarly elbows of the crabapple
above; my man in my arms again.
You remember that poet with arms
like branches, one-leggedly
dancing his lessons?
His poem gave us his feet
swinging in the sunshine
from a Santa Fe garden wall.
He gave us spurs and boots on
the cowboy slouching to the chemo room.
A poet can love that cache of words
like some lust for gold, property, cars.
Kaleidoscopic shuffles of syllables win
me like a jackpot, tied up in a kerchief
on the mesa, the prairie under the stars.
Oh poet, my heart is yours.
1.
Birds sing the sun up
Purple majesties and all,
a finely drawn brow
What a surprise in my email! “You won!” Georgia and I decided to send the book out during the first of the year flurry of deadlines, and I found this local contest. Now every poet and their grandma will be sending work to Communications categories seemingly set up as sister contests (for journalists) to the well-know Zia Awards by the NMPW. Well! So be it. Our little after-travel book re Berlin, Germany, now has us dreaming of other after-travel books of photos and poems–so let the contests roll. At this point, I have so many irons in the fire, the flame barely gets enough oxygen. Add a possible trip to Greece in April 2019.
Notes on Serenity, my forthcoming book about loving an addicted child, written as a source of solace, survival, and introspection, is also meant to inspire others to speak up and out in whatever way they can. Silence won’t make the epidemic go away. Sharing of experience for me is practicing the art of making poems, making our story accessible to those who speak poetry, and maybe even for some who don’t. So that’s keeping me busy–getting to the finishing touches.
I recently gave a fun workshop at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse and another is in the works for two or maybe three Saturday sessions in the fall. The focus will be to Read, Discuss, and Write like Poets Laureate–specifically, the women who held that title. The idea is to get inspired by some of the reviewed work, and write our own. Should be fun. Stay tuned on Jules’ newsletter for Playhouse
Earth Day April 22 Jennifer (Dime Stories) and I will have a table for showing and selling local authors’ books. Send Jennifer or me a note if you want to sell for an hour or two. She’s trying to distribute the hours. I’ll be at the table from opening at 10am til noon. It’s a fun party; highly recommend.
http://media.newmexicoculture.org/release/685/a-counterculture-enc
If you have seen Ben’s book of his uncle Irwin’s photos, or if you were around the area (El Rito, Vallecitos, Dixon . . .) in THE days circa 1970, this might be fun. The book of photos is gorgeous. Maybe I’ll see you there Feb 23, 2018 4pm.
The following day in Santa Fe
NYTimes Jan. 7, 2018
I had a lengthy conversation and a good cup of coffee with my neighbor Richard Ward, an author recently published in the local journal, Bosque 7, and Richard, having recently spent two years in South America, was fairly hot under the collar about the tsunamis of “he said, she saids” ruining men’s careers and lives. He was outraged about the overkill implicit in women coming out in groups to take an offender down. hmmmmm.
Well, it was fun to step in and try to represent a woman’s take on the whole shebang. And we kept backing into the walls of the obvious, bouncing off and coming back into the meat of the matter with some passion. Of course Al Franken ought not to have stepped down–but then again, it was his choice. One can only speculate as to why he made such a wimpy move. Perhaps there was more to his story than he wanted to admit–who knows.
Or maybe Al is the proverbial baby who got thrown out with the bath. And if it’s a battle or a war of the sexes, then some collateral is to be expected. Women have forever been shorted and silenced (secretly, randomly), and if this is a group scream where numbers matter, then so be it. Let every woman who has been wronged have her say in the court of public opinion. I don’t think flirting and dating and procreating are going to end over this ruckus, but I do think men will watch their behavior (become as a group more introspective) and tend to their own mouths and other body parts.
The outcry won’t set right the inequity or iniquity of the 97% of rapists who have been found quilty but never incarcerated; the loud noise across the nation won’t stop sexual innuendo but it might slow down the bosses who serially and incessantly harass employees. This noise from previously silent women might cause some soul searching that results in improved behavior and less violence against women, maybe. The sheer volume may be the awkward and enthusiastic sum of all the silence which has struggled to out itself over the millennia. What’s intended is neither a witch hunt nor an unmanning of men, but the right to mend the torn fabric of society that has been inadequate in protecting women’s basic rights. Let the voices even out. Let the courts, classrooms, and media publish the rules. “The truth has a voice.” Is that Justicia speaking? Lady Liberty? Yes!!! Continue reading
A recording of our launch at Jules Poetry Playhouse right here in our home town, Albuquerque, in the beautiful forever New Mexico.
You can find my Paypal version of buying a signed copy on the last pages of this site! And I have one free copy of Free Love, Free Fall to the first person who actually can contact me with snail mail to send it to. See it also on my book page.
If you brought nothing home . . .
my new squash soup recipe
I’m grateful I drove to Farmington from Burque on Wednesday
for family day at the recovery center; left my house at 4:40 AM
enjoyed the cold empty roads, the high mesa hills
pink striations topped with blue as if a striped bowl in Cuba, NM
Misty cold, a few truckers and travelers
and our destination, his GF’s and mine, was to sign in by 9 (mandatory)
for family time, dying to see him detoxed and two months sober.
My jaw dropped as we greeted in the greeting room.
He looked like my young father back when I was a teen and
Daddy didn’t know how to raise me but he tried. I trusted my father’s affection.
Took lightly his misplaced critiques of chubby me and not holding liquor well.
(The family disease being alcohol/addiction.) Most of them gone now,
drinking and smoking into some fertile hell, a verdant underground
from which will spring fruit trees and hyacinths—that pretty stuff.
And so I dined with friends, exhausted from the trip all in one day.
****
For a good Thanksgiving, see your loved ones and friends. If all you brought was one dessert or side dish, and all you’ve got at home is squash and apples, try this:
Put 8 cups or so of diced or chopped up raw winter squash (pumpkin, butternut, acorn, etc.)into an enameled pot or pan with about 8 cups of water and two veggie boullion cubes.
Bring to a slow simmer.
Add a couple few diced apples. I used old yellow ones to keep the autumn color going.
Add half-cup to whole cup of orange juice.
Drop in a tablespoon of butter or olive oil.
Add cinnamon ½ tsp., cumin ½ tsp., ginger 1 tsp., and a sprinkle of turmeric.
Bring to a simmer.
Simmer until squash is very very soft.
Mash the squash in the pot or ladle out the majority into a blender to puree, then return to pot.
Optional: Add a can of coconut milk. It’s delicious without also. If you add the milk, choose the smaller portion of orange juice.
Optional: Serve with a tablespoon of yogurt and good toast.
Enjoy!
from Abercrombie’s stockroom–1950s or so
Abercrombie’s (built circa 1860) in Anton Chico, NM
by Merimée Moffitt Spring 2011
Wow— an arrow-slotted fortress for Comanche attacks
We walk through plumbing parts
unearth your father’s and grandfathers’ old porch lantern
stacked doors lean, the floor a domestic dump.
Grandmothers stood on stools to level muskets
at natives shooting arrows right there–
massacre, slaughter, death: the entire
town of Anton Chico twice leveled by
Comanche serious about staying.
Can’t say I blame them
The invaders’ history lightly dusted
with cocoa powder earth in almost ruins,
this garage holds old glass like green petrified popsicles
walls 3 feet deep a pastiche of fissures
reminders everywhere of shared blood
and food, lace curtains, oak tables, plums
The village howls witch winds through crazy teeth
spiraling to an eye looking;
we kick around the warehouse,
our mother bones, our womanly feet pulled by
the scent of age and paternal stars.
In the smaller, melting house you say
“Know why the pink walls?
My room as a kid,” and smile to your roots.
Mother and father dancing figurines in fancy clothes
bought you the pretty wrought iron bed with hearts,
divorced and danced the door open for you.
Peaches, pears, and apples, a wedding cake of
rolling land speckled with ochre-dotted
agave blues in mica-glitter slabs;
we scramble all day over black rock tables.
Your silver Nissan our bare-back pony.
The land grant rich with flagstone and free-roaming cattle
red heads also, curious about why we visit their Pecos,
meandering under curved-rock shelves layered like tortillas
deep pools of shade and water good as gold.
We wander the gulch where your great great grandfather
hid a herd of stolen cattle from Texas.
On the porch, old stoves await re-installation.
High ceilings impatient for Bob Wills in the living room.
Stars drip down to cover this million-acre bowl.
We play Scrabble, grill steaks in the kitchen
on the wood stove firebox. Child-like ghosts
serve as gatekeepers to this hard-won land like
little dervishes of wind, playing, just messing around
outside time, teasing us with tiny gusts
as we set the latch to head back to the city.
Honor’s 17th birthday cake by me, Grandma
Well, it’s Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve, and the trick or treaters have slowed down, a mom or dad with every single kid or group.
In the fifties no parent ever went out t or t’ing with their kids. If you were too stupid not to get run over there were plenty of other kids in the house to eat your dinner. I’m pretty sure the Irish or Italians in the town I lived in invented trick or treating just to get all the kids outta the house for some peace, time to put another starter in the pot. Can you imagine eleven kids, twelve? My parents were weirdos with only five. No one took babies out to beg for candy or to appear adorable in those days. You could go trick or treating if you were old enough to demand it, at least in my family. My mother put costumes together last minute and gave us each pillow cases. I only remember being made up to look like Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottle which involved making me very fat with a pillow on my belly. It wasn’t fun, with black shoe polish on my face and a pillow under an old raggedy dress my mom dug out of her rag bag. I wasn’t pretty or cute, but I was crazy for the candy.
We might have had six kids instead of five, but my mother had a secret after-lunch abortion which I may have been, at age ten or so, the only one privy to. We’d gone shopping and the two little brothers and one baby sister were in the backseat, one of them asleep. I was honored to be riding shotgun as my sister must’ve been at a friend’s. My mom parked on the street and said, “Now this may take a few minutes, but just make everyone stay in the car.” Nothing new—I was often a car babysitter. When my mom came back, she said something like, “Well, that’s settled. I’m not having that baby,” apparently talking to the steering wheel, “that wasn’t so bad,” she added, giving the wheel a good pat. At that point I was staring at her for some kind of information I could relate to, and she told me the story in brief. “The doctor said ‘Mary, do you want this baby?’ she told me looking at my face very briefly, ‘and I (my mom) answered ‘No’. So he said ‘Hold on; this is going to hurt a little’ and it was all over.” That was that. I didn’t say anything. I’d been slapped too many times for saying a wrong thing, so I often opted for silence.
That doctor’s visit discussion was the entire extent of my sex education. She never mentioned anything having to do with my vagina or hers again. Oops, I amend that. When I was 29 years old, she mentioned some very inappropriate dating she was doing—but we won’t dwell on that. That was the 70s and sex was an open question and all answers were fair. And that same year she had been adamant about me using my rights to have an abortion; that was a tough one, but her counseling encouraged me. If my own mother was going to be so negative about me having a second child, when she judged me an inadequate parent already, I didn’t feel very hopeful. I was barely able to raise my one child on my own. I would wait eleven years before having my second, and insisted that the second child’s father would be a husband. I don’t think either of us regretted our abortions.
Nobody had parents go most anywhere with them that I knew of, to trick or treating or to movies or roller skating or abortions. We didn’t know which women were chosing abortions at the same time we were, legal or otherwise. I didn’t know anyone who died from one, but we knew that women did. My mother’s doctor did a good job—simple and quick. I cried during my third abortion knowing that I’d give up sex rather than have another. And then, the world changed, and there I was riding along in my station wagon while my kids ran up to houses to beg for the oft forbidden candy. My husband did the duty at home.
This year, the trick or treaters are very young, not too many hordes of tweens or teens or old grandmas desperate to get more sweets for their grand-kids. It impresses me every year that the kids are polite. They thank me for giving them candy and wish me a good night. I especially loved the home made Frieda Kahlo. The eyebrows were perfect; she even had the attitude. I loved the halo of roses fanned out high on her head band and her jacket barely revealing her tiny waist. Lovely, as her mama stood proudly in my driveway.
