she is the devil

Remember the Cuban man from a past entry? The other night he walked me to the car and gave me a talking-to. He pointed at the salsa club and said, “You don’t believe me, but there is the devil in there.” He predicted the ruin of me and my marriage by salsa. “Salsa, it is an addiction, and you are already addicted.”

I laughed, and then thought about it in silence all the way home. This is a man who blames his divorce on dancing. It’s not that I believed what he predicted for me, but that out of respect I thought I should seriously consider what he’d said. So I did.

I stopped and got a couple of tacos, and came home to find my husband and ER playing video games. I sat down to eat and told them the story. They loved it. My husband shook his fist and exclaimed, “Damn you salsa! Damn you to HELL!” While I was laughing I tipped a cup of salsa all over the front of my skirt.

Without missing a beat, ER repeated the curse, this time directed toward my taco, “Damn you, salsa!”

I have such high hopes

for this meeting we’re having tonight. I see it as a refuge for people who love Jesus, or are at least interested in Jesus, but hate going to church, or are afraid to, or just can’t seem to wake up on time. So far, most of us fit that bill.

I also see this as a place to invite people that is less intimidating and more friendly than church, somewhere they don’t have to think about what they’re going to wear. Or bite their tongues. (Consider that your invitation, friends. I promise you we won’t baptise you in the bathtub or assume anything.)

I mean, I go to church. I shuffle in the door every month or so, although I always intend to make it more often. I’ve been out of town on weekends a lot (here come the excuses) and it’s just so BIG and ORGANIZED. It’s a great place, though. I actually really love it. The man who’s likely to be the new pastor is brilliant, absolutely a gift. His teaching cuts right to my heart. But there’s all this other stuff involved.

The other day, there was a Congregational Meeting to start deciding on a PROCESS to decide who the new head pastor would be, because the old head pastor is stepping down. I was standing outside with a group of AWESOME girls from this church, who are all painters and, oddly enough, about exactly my age, all of them. I said, “Aren’t you all going to the meeting?” They said, “Oh, no, we’re not members.” I laughed and said, “Me, neither! But I thought for sure you all were.” There’s a process for that too.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing ridiculous. You either go to a couple classes, or you attend the church for a while, and when you feel like being a member, you meet with a pastor. There’s some stuff you agree to; I can’t remember what it is.

This is boring me already.

—

The other night, I apologized to ER for calling him out about waffling about going to church the next day. I was actually mad at BJ, and it kinda spilled on ER a bit, so I called to apologize. He said, no need. He said he looks for that in a friend; someone who’s willing to call him out when needed.

—

My mom told me breathlessly on the phone, “Oh, I wish I could just be a fly on the wall at that meeting!” She thinks my friends are really cool, and she knows my difficulties with this kind of thing.

I see this meeting as a lot of things, when in reality, it’s nothing yet. It’s just an appointment. I-am-trying-not-to-get-my-hopes-up. Because I tried to do this in San Diego and it flopped. Like a big dead smelly fish. We had one meeting that was magical, where we prayed together and it was like music, and it was like Romans 8:26 happening in front of us (here are two different translations):

“And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don’t even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words.”
-New Living translation

“…we do not know how to pray worthily as sons of God, but his Spirit within us is actually praying for us in those agonising longings which never find words. And God who knows the heart’s secrets understands, of course, the Spirit’s intention as he prays for those who love God.”
-JB Philips translation

But then it just fizzled. I don’t think that’s going to happen this time, I really don’t, based on the people involved, and the ways that I’ve grown since then, and the rightness of this moment.

I used to have a really traditional, transactional way of looking at reading the Bible with a group of people. I used to think that there had to be a teacher, a wise man, a scholar. And how could I ever be that? I couldn’t, but I tried, and so I reckon I undermined the group in some ways. Now, my profession is to get groups of difficult people to talk about what they’ve read and relate it to their lives, and to sidestep the traditional relationship between adult:group of teenagers. It applies. Surprise, surprise.

some more retreat

Have you ever read “Adam and Eve” by Tony Hoagland? Some of you have. It’s from his book “Donkey Gospel.” He might be the most honest poet I’ve ever read. This particular poem talks about an episode with a woman. I’d tell you the main line, but you should open the book and look at it yourself, get the impact. Suffice it to say, he confronts his own ugliness, male ugliness, the bliss of power over weakness.

It’s hard shit. He “interrogates” this confession, as Di put it. She had us write five things we’ve thought or wanted to say over the last year that are totally inappropriate, that might have no place in the real world. She said that sometimes there are things that are true, or that were true for a moment, that you can never say to a person, because “they’d tear too big a hole.” However, they’re true, and as Hoagland said in this poem, “Until we can say the truth, there can be no tenderness.” I think that’s what he said.

My first five were about work. We’ve had a lot of people quit in the last year, and a lot of stress in general. The first three are about co-workers who quit. KT is my boss.

I was glad that EO left.
I was glad that EG left.
I was glad that CS left.
I am so sick of KT’s worried face.
I wanted to disappear and abandon everyone.

I didn’t like ‘em, so I wrote these:

I loved it when the Cuban man told me,
When I dance with you,
I suffer! He’s about my mom’s age.

I dance because you don’t have to talk
to anyone when you’re dancing. You don’t
even have to have a name.

Every time I got out of the car during
an argument, every time I cried
with frustration, I did it to hurt him.

I want him to fix my life.

When I’m dancing, I miss him,
and I enjoy missing him.

Now that I look at it, I’m not sure of the truth of this, now that I realize I’m putting my supposedly completely inappropriate feelings on the internet. Maybe I get some kinda thrill out of it. I think my greatest fears are either that I’m completely nuts or completely normal, but that sounds like something I’d say in high school. It’s not even really a poem. She told us we could choose our favorite one and “interrogate it” in a poem, like Hoagland did. I’d like to do that, I think. I wonder if I have the guts.

A couple years ago, Lucille Clifton read one of my poems and said, “You need to be a little bit braver.” She’d prefaced this comment by saying, “You know I love you, right?” “Ye-s,” I lied.

Retreat

I just got back from a staff retreat in Lawrence, Michigan. We have a board member who has a home there, and it’s marvelous, not because it’s a mansion, but because it has love in it. Di Suess came up and did a poetry workshop for us, then coached us on our poetry prompts and methods.

As a starter, to “blow the crap out of the carburetor,” as she put it, she had us choose five nouns that sounded good to us just then, and three each of juicy/intense adjectives and verbs. Here are mine:

silk
apple
seed
cornflower
callus

bloated
slippery
clogged

tongue
wipe
open

(I noticed that I chose a lot of words that were interchangeable as nouns/verbs/adjectives)

Then she handed out “I the Woman” by Sandra Cisneros. Do you want me to post it? Oh, what the hell, here it is:

I the Woman

I
am she
of your stories
the notorious
one
leg wrapped
around
the door
bare heart
sticking
like a burr
the fault
the back street
the weakness
that’s me

I’m
the Thursday
night
the poor
excuse
I am she
I’m dark
in the veins
I’m
intoxicant
I’m hip
and good skin
brass
and sharp tooth
hard lip pushed
against
the air
I’m lightbeam
no stopping me

I am
your temporary
thing
your own
mad
dancing
I am
a live
wildness
left
behind
one earring
in the car
a finger-
print
on skin
the black smoke
in your
clothes
and in
your
mouth

from “My Wicked Wicked Ways” by Sandra Cisneros

Then she gave us five or ten minutes to write our own. Here’s mine.

I
am silk
the best part
of the apple
the rest tossed
away
the seed
sprouting
in your
gutter
my body is
a cornflower
I spring up
overnight
I am the red spot
after you shave
away the callus
my belly
is full
bloated with food
I slide over all
your slippery
floors
I clogged
the
toilet
and tongued
the dark spaces
the crack
of your door
I wipe your body down
and open you
again

She had us notice how slim and sinuous Cisneros’s poem is. Now that I look at it, I notice that mine’s not quite so. Mine has tits, you might say.

oh, man.

Who would’ve thought that the best Polish sausage in Chicago would be in Skokie? I just ate and it warrants a journal entry. It was a “Char Cheddar Polish” from Poochie’s on Dempster. It had cheddar cheese sauce and grilled onions and mustard on it, too. It was like, love. They also have fries made from real potatoes, and lots of old bachelors eating their lunches. “A little more ice,” one of them said as the girl was getting his soda. One ordered “just” mozzarella sticks “with barbecue sauce instead of marinara.” One man looked at me as I hurried out. He had a mustache like a push broom. Even his eyebrows were waiting for his food.

I wrote this shortly after we were married

The Cost

It’s so easy now.
Like a baby:
whenever he’s out of my sightlines
I imagine him gone

or going. I conjure a hospital
bed, I conjure years, smells and wasting,
long sickness, his life clinging
and letting go,

drunk drivers, battalions
of drunk drivers,
his body tumbling like a dummy
at sickening angles
on the freeway shoulder
where his car had broken down,

or crushed against the overpass
like a sandwich in foil,
or burned
down to the crowns on his teeth
and the pins in his knee.

Some stray bullet.
Some old story, his face pasted.
Some scrap of video.

From the window where I sit,
I roll my already grieving body
through the sweetness
drunk on the almost-certainty
that I will see him soon.
I will probably see him soon.

I see myself getting up from the couch
on repeat,
rewound and replayed,
picking up the various calls:
“Mrs. Javellana?…
It’s about your husband.”

i’m the lucky one

We were waiting to board our flight back to Chicago. All the chairs were full and I was sitting on the floor with a carne asada burrito and the queasy weakness I get from taking my migraine pills, which was so strong that morning that Ben insisted on carrying all the heavy stuff and I didn’t have the energy to protest. It was then that I remembered that my manual camera was packed with my clothes, full of possibly gorgeous pictures that got more gorgeous as I realized that my luggage would be scanned and my photos probably wiped out.

Can I tell you something? I cried. Right there in front of everybody. It was quiet with my hands over my face. I think people probably thought that somebody died. I also pretty much blamed B, which was an awful thing to do; I didn’t say it, but I looked it, and even if I hadn’t he still would’ve been sitting there not being able to stand seeing me sad, and wishing to God he would’ve just remembered to grab my camera with his big strong hands.