POINT OF ENTRY    /    Katherine DiBella Seluja

  

 

This is the kind of night where one must pay one’s debts

 

The secret: never ask the body to give up its truths alone.

 

I see dancing skeletons, I mark the desert with crosses.

 

Won’t you say to me the word that conquers death?

Silence: speak.

 

Sometimes she whispers to the bones 

rarely, they whisper back

 

At the edge of sleep, some slim truth or partial answer 

to her list of many questions

 

This isn’t what she had trained for, 

not what she had imagined.

 

 

(I have learned the ways 

of dirt and stone 

 

how best to backfill 

the hole 

 

how gently 

to settle the box.)

 

 

The wind is a thin child’s call

 

My shadow is a cat arching and whining.

 

Each small heaven is full of risk.

 

I live curled in the mouth of the fox

 

His flesh was breathing slower than a wall

 

Who do you think was speaking 

when you heard, Beware the ditch?

 

There are miles enough for everyone, down to the smallest child walking shoeless in the desert, trying so hard to avoid the thorns.

 

We dead have so much more than worry.

 

The dead do not rest.

They wait.

 

By the time he reached the gangplank, his stomach was an old woman jumping in her shoes.

 

They knew it was useless and 

that seemed to make it more compelling.

 

What soup can resist the flavor of weary?

 

 

(WHERE TO BUY THIS BOOK: https://www.unmpress.com/9780826365309/point-of-entry/)

—SOME DAYS I’M WALKING BACKWARDS

 

 

“In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart.”

Colum McCann

 

“Hey, if tacos can totally fall apart and still be amazing, so can you.” Jonathan Edward Durham

 

“Distance is not a problem, the problem is humans, because we don't know to love without touching, seeing or listening. And love is felt with the heart, not the body.” Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

  

“And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.” Kurt Vonnegut

 

“I wonder if the things that remind me of you, remind you of me.”  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

 

"𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘨, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩. 𝘉𝘶𝘵, 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘢 𝘧𝘦𝘸 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴."  Before Sunrise/Before Sunset

 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. ~Louise Erdrich

 

"You cannot save people,

you can only love them."

~Anaïs Nin

 

Dear Human:

You've got it allllll wrong. You didn't come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you'll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of messing up. Often. You didn't come here to ...be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering. But unconditional love? Stop telling that story. Love, in truth, doesn't need ANY other adjectives. It doesn't require modifiers. It doesn't require the condition of perfection. It only asks that you show up. And do your best. That you stay present and feel fully. That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU. It's enough. It's Plenty.

~Courtney A. Walsh

  

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." Joan Didion

 

Give me back my broken night

my mirrored room, my secret life

it's lonely here,

there's no one left to torture

Give me absolute control

over every living soul

And lie beside me, baby,

that's an order!

--Leonard Cohen

 

 “There’s something terrible about reality and I don’t know what it is. No one will tell me.”- Red Desert / Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. 1964

 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett

 

 The moon comes up.

The moon goes down.

This is to inform you

that I didn't die young.

Age swept past me

but I caught up.

Spring has begun here and each day

brings new birds up from Mexico.

Yesterday I got a call from the outside

world but I said no in thunder.

I was a dog on a short chain

and now there's no chain.

-- Jim Harrison

  

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.” Chuck Palahniuk

  

“Writing teachers ‘have so much power.’ They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But out teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost hold, which we never forget; they take us seriously.” George Saunders

 

Evidence

 

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads. ~Mary Oliver

 

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” Allen Ginsberg

 

“When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage! An invisible and all-powerful enemy—some call him God, others the Devil, seems to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.” ~Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

 

 Loose Woman / Sandra Cisneros

 

That was enough

for me to forgive you.

To spirit a tiger

from its cell.

Called me corazón

in that instant before

I let go the phone

back to its cradle.

Your voice small.

  

“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing to wait for.” Marcel Proust

 

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” Charles Bukowski

—JUST HOLD ON LOOSELY, AND DON’T LET GO

 

 

 

Stories

 

Tell me a story, kid, 

my dad used to say, 

as if I had dozens

stashed in my socks,

as if I possessed an ounce 

of moxie or nerve.

If he knew how 

he scared me, 

he wasn’t telling,

and that frightened me more, 

his bones made of ancient stone, 

his jaw pure Rushmore.

Mother was her own cyclone, 

Tasmanian devil, witch, and jackal, 

all stitched into one, 

but Dad did her bidding—   

robotic, fake-eyed blind,

the lashes always with the buckle end— 

which weaponized and 

made him fiercely unpredictable.

During one installment—  

while my youngest brother 

screamed and bled—  

I thought I saw a teardrop

slip down Dad’s face, 

only to realize a second later 

the difference between 

mercy and muscle strain.

Tell me a story, kid, 

he said again when I didn’t answer, 

so this time I shooed the cigarette smoke away,

sat down, and never stopped telling.

 —AND WE’VE GOT NOTHING TO BE GUILTY OF

 

 

Better Questions

 

Next door, Stevie Nicks spins irate 

while Moses fishes solo on the lake. 

True story. Pinkie swear.

All this, as summer molts into autumn,

performing the slowest costume change ever, 

another sheaf disappearing into the ether. 

And I know, I know, I know that

somewhere someone’s toasting a velvet ceiling,

someone else has just made love 

with the person they love most,

body-sweat sticky yet half-dry, 

promises damper than that.

But here a hard rain’s having 

it out around a card table, 

each cloud ready to throw down, 

thunder itching for its first shot in the majors,

while really, Stevie just wants someone to pet her,

the ducks only clamor for bread,

no fish hopes to be hooked or butchered,

the cedars absolutely love being bored,

every lake wave adores their own wrinkles,

as Moses busies himself reciting Buddha.

The inescapable truth is

there’s no reason to go outside, 

there’s no reason to do anything but 

watch the world slide 

a little farther through the sky, 

and perhaps take a few notes 

or learn to ask better questions.

 

—I WON’T ASK FOR PROMISES, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIE

 

 

THE BEAN TREES    /    Barbara Kingsolver

 

 

“You’re holding a lot of tension here.”

 

It’s terrible to lose somebody. But it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.

 

I’m just totally screwed up, that’s all there is to it.

 

Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

 

It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw up.

 

--“Taylor, honey, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re asking the wrong question.”

--“How do you mean?”

--“You’re asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm’s way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can’t. But nobody can either.”

--“So, what’s the right thing to ask?”

--“Do I want to try?”

 

You were just looking for a disaster, that’s all. If you look hard enough you can always come up with what you want.

 

If the truth was a snake it would have bitten me a long time ago. It would have had me for dinner.

 

You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.

 

It’s a sad day for all of us if I’m the hero here.

 

It’s interesting how hard it is to be depressed around a three-year-old. If you’re paying attention.

 

There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting out, right where you thought you could see it all.

 

Only two things are worth making so much noise about, death and sex. 

 

I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?

 

I decided he was dumber than he was mean.  

 

“You must come from Hog-Norton, where pigs go to church and play the organ.”

 

I’d forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently; that life didn’t just stop at eye level.

 

It seems like, if you get to know them well enough, everybody has had something awful happen to them.

 

Even a spotted pig looks black at night. It means that things always look different, and usually better, in the morning.

 

There was a type of woodpecker that said, “Ha, ha, ha, to hell with you!”

 

“Will you look at that,” I said. It was another miracle. That flower trees were turning into bean trees.

 

In Spanish, the way you say you have a baby is to say that you give it to the light. Isn’t that nice? 

 

Everything you get is really just on loan.

 

There are times when it’s just impossible to say good-bye.

 

—THIS IS WHAT 8^TH GRADE (AND COMPLETELY LOST) LOOKS LIKE

 

 

…I wonder what it means when you edit yourself after you’ve already journaled your thoughts.

 

…I’ve learned a long time ago that being a great friend means being there when it’s not easy, comfortable, convenient or pretty.

 

…There are far too many books to read, and isn’t that one of the biggest blessings ever?

 

…I’m fairly superstitious, even though I’ve had that notion backfire on me plenty of times.

 

…Eight days until the draft. Pray for me, please.

 

…It seems like years since you held a baby.

 

…After the basement flood, I found a yearbook photo of myself from the 8^th grade. I totally looked like a hoodlum, like some kid ready to hijack your Tesla. What’s funny is I remember being too shy to even speak to the photographer who snapped that pic. He kept telling to me move this way and that, so I did so soundlessly.

 

…In my 10^th grade yearbook, also barely salvaged, I had about seven or eight (“friend”) inscriptions in the whole thing. They were all from guys, except for one random girl who wrote, “You don’t know me, but I think you’re really cute. I’m Tina, pg. 112.” And then her phone number. 

So, did I just read that back, then keep on flipping pages?

 

…I also found dance pics from early college days with girls/young women I can’t name or remember now. How does that happen? Is that just Feeble-me, or is it normal to spend an evening with someone, at a semi-important event, and then not even remember anything about it, or them? 

 

…These nights, the lake doesn’t even look real. 

 

…Who knew a silly pastime like baseball could nearly send a guy into cardiac arrest?

 

…There’s no getting around it any more—the skin on my hands looks like the webbing on a turtle’s neck.

 

…Good Lord, there are 329 pages on this particular, rambling document. Pinkie Swear.

 

…Not everyone’s going to understand, or relate, but should you deem to keep coming here, it’ll have to be enough.

 

…The taste of a strawberry always has a lot to say to me.

 

…Wednesday is my favorite day. This week, Wednesday was beautiful, close to 92 degrees. I saw Bud the beaver doing his laps at 6 am and I watched all kinds of people frolicking on the lake. Yet it was still a blue, blue day.

 

…I wonder if I’m as opinionated as my friends. I hope not, but I have an inkling that I am, and that maybe I am even more so.

 

…I do think opinions are important. It matters to stand up for something, even if you’re in the minority. Especially if you’re in the minority.

 

…It’s taken me three-quarters of my life, but I’m finally, slowly, learning to let go.

 

…Pinkie Swear, a deer walked straight up to the house last week, pushed her nose against the window next to me, then trundled a few steps and nosed the front door. I would have thought it was a man in a deer suit, sort of like the people who thought that was a man in a bear suit at the Chinese zoo instead of it being a sun bear. But the deer kicked away in a hurry once the door opened. 

 

…I never in my life would have taken myself for a sickly person, but, in the words of Justin Bieber, “Never say never.”

 

…First 45: “Two Divided by Love.” 

 

…First Album: “The Partridge Family,” (after wrangling over an hour between that and Bobby Sherman.)

 

…First time I can remember crying: Age 5, in a trailer in Bismarck, ND, listening to my parents shout at each other the entire night, a few days before my mom would drive with us, and my soon-to-be-stepdad, a thousand miles to Spokane, WA.

 

…First time I had sex/lost my virginity: I honestly don’t remember, or know what the correct answer is.

 

…First time I almost died: We used to take one vacation a year to Ellensburg, WA. Mom and (step)Dad would get a room at the Holiday Inn and we’d (the kids) stay in a camper in the parking lot, but use the hotel pool plenty. I was about 9 and my brothers were teaching me how to swim, the same way they’d learned, by chucking me in the water and waiting for me to dog-paddle my way out. I was doing fine for a few minutes but had nothing left when I got a few feet from the poolside. I just kept sucking down chlorinated water. Four of my brothers thought I was faking drowning, laughing at me, but luckily Ron jumped in last minute.

 

…First (real) regret: Not becoming a writer right away.

 

…First drink: Age 9, Jack Daniel’s, straight out of the bottle. 

 

…First theft: Two pieces of penny, sugar bubble gum that looked like mini suns, stuffed into my sock.

 

…First time speaking in tongues: My parents, for a while, rotated churches like people do their underwear. We went from being Baptist to Lutheran to Catholic to Assemblies of God. At the latter, I was to have memorized a certain part in a play and during practice I hadn’t done it, so, sitting in the balcony of the church after being called on, I started spewing what sounded like sacred gospel gibberish. To this day, I don’t know if that was me covering up for my neglect, or the grace of God.

 

…First obsession: Vampires. I wanted to become one so bad. I thought it would solve everything, plus Barnabas seemed scary and bad-ass, yet in charge of his own destiny to a degree.

 

…First crush: Monica-somebody. She was a lifeguard when I was five. In my memory, she’s the actress in “Summer of ’42,” but who knows?

 

…First experience with racism: It was at that same pool where Monica was lifeguard, in Mandan, N. Dakota. Until that time, I’d never seen a person of color because the entire state was white. Then one day a black kid jumped in the pool. He was my age, smiling and skinny, just really happy. But immediately, without a word, everyone in the pool leapt out. (It sickens me to recall that.)

 

…First Joy Ride: Over the cliff and into a corn field outside of Moscow, ID, with Clinic, Ling, Lersie, Zinga and others in tow. (Where in the hell Oz was, I still don’t know.)

 

…First drug: Pot in the Mandan High School parking lot. I inhaled wrong, so nothing happened. But I sure reeked the whole day in class.

 

...First (real) suicidal thought: A few weeks later, in a trailer in Bismarck, ND, sleeping on a vinyl sofa with a butcher knife tucked under the pillow, sleeping with one hand on the handle.

 

…First job (paid by an outside source): Milky’s strawberry fields, age 9. I would go on to set the record for most flats picked by anyone ever—21—in a single day.

 

…First pet(s): “GoGo” and “Thunder,” twin Guernsey calves.

 

…First prom: 9^th grade, Linda LaFountain and The DeFranco Family, “Save the Last Dance for Me.” I can’t even imagine what I would have said to her.

 

…First movie in a theater: “Beauty and the Beast,” and not the animated one. I was 5 and was so scared, and cried so much, that my brothers had to take me outside, then promptly home. 

 

…First drive-in film: “The Born Losers” (aka the first “Billy Jack” movie.) Holy hell was that terrifying back then.

 

…First concert: Bachman Turner Overdrive, although I really just hung outside the ballpark, listening in the parking lot the whole time. (Actual tickets were $12.00, a fucking fortune at the time.)

 

…First idol: David Cassidy (he maybe still is.)

 

…First non-celebrity idol: LeRoy Ashby, History Professor at WSU, who once introduced class by unrolling Playboy magazine and holding out the centerfold to us all (300 plus on a hot Friday afternoon) with taped pieces over certain body parts, saying, with aplomb and not a trace of sarcasm or mirth, “This is Candy Loving.” 

 

…First person(s) I knew and loved who died: Hala and John.

 

…First poem I wrote: “The Pill”—Take a pill/swallow it first/then some water/to quench your thirst/hop in bed/your pleasure be/no need to worry/she’s pregnant free” (as an angry reaction to learning a girlfriend was on birth control before even meeting me, which just goes further in explaining how stupid AF and naïve I was then.)

 

…First book read: Gulliver’s Travels. (It changed my life.) 

 

…First memory of parenthood: Watching Madison being born, then two minutes later hearing her stop crying as soon as I said, “Hi, Madison. It’s so good to meet you.”

 

…My first and best miracle: Somehow finding Mike.