--DON'T LOOK AT ME THAT WAY


...The other day I had a creative burst and wrote five poems, three of them while in the bathtub.
This is one:


Things I Know About The Things I Don’t Know

The way people save broken umbrellas. The way dried-up pens
love trickery. The way photographs retain their gloss years later.
The way black takes
what it wants and can never be extinguished.
The way oppression overeats at buffets.
The way certain words razor-rip the throat.
The way night sneaks up on day, but never the other way around.
The way babies jump at loud bomb sounds.
The way the sun writes what it wants and shadows really don’t.
The way you say his name after parties, in the shower,
while dreaming.
The cuckolded way I watch you apply eyeliner.
The way lovemaking can sound symphonic,
like a deluge of hailstones
or like nothing at all.

--SO, WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW AND WHEN DO YOU NEED TO KNOW IT?


...New music arrived the other day. Few things can compete with that.
In the mail there was new Dawes, Elbow, The Local Natives and Delta Spirit. New Bruce Springsteen came later. It's really good.

…I am reading Emily Petit's collection, "Goat in the Snow."
Her poems are spectacular. She's so clever. Sample:
"I look you in the face. Up on a wire it's hard to be anything other than awkward."
Just one more sample:
"It's not your birthday but I am giving you this candy bar and science. A flashlight in your mouth. You build a map in layers. Tiger stripes on your brain…"

…I'm trying Twitter. Did I tell you that?
For a while, I thought it was really silly. Some of it is, of course.
For a while, I think I was just afraid of it, not having any fun,pithy things to say.
I still don't have any of those things, but I'm sort of getting the hang of it, little by little, trying to find my Twitter voice (I think there is such a thing, just as I think there's a blogging voice.)
When I first signed up I had seven Followers and four of those were porn stars or someone posting a pretty, safe photo with a raunchy porn name and a link.
The porn industry is ubiquitious and insidious. I'm not a prude. Not hardly. But it's awfully snaky.

…Evidentially the Disney movie "John Carter" is going to lose $250 million, the worst performance in film history. "John Carter" received favorable ratings from just 51% of all critics.

On the other side, "The Hunger Games" had the third biggest opening ever--$155 M.

…I don't hate many things but I do detest the word "seemingly." It's a concotion for lazy writers. Do use that word. Together, let's abolish it.

…The new "Angry Birds Space" game was downloaded 10,000,000 times in just three days.
I was not one of those 10M.

…Yesterday a new poll was released showing a sharp rise from four months ago--53 to 68% in the percentage of people who believe we should no longer be in Afghanistan.
I am one of those 68%ers.

…I like these things today:

"You've got a special way of rising above the bullshit."

"It you don't have a dark side, it's not to late to make one."

--I WILL POSSESS YOUR HEART


...I like statistics, or finding out about "us," the things we prefer, fear, how we're alike and different.

In no particular order then...

Households with cash income of no more than $2 a day per person:
1996: 636,000
2011: 1,500,000

Where adults purchase the most/least lottery tickets:
Most:
57% --Buffalo, NY
56% --Providence, RI
51% --Albany, NY
Least:
13% --Las Vegas, NV
8% --Salt Lake City, UT
5% --Honolulu, HI

There are 39,000 standard-screen movie theaters in the U.S. and 425 IMAX

Nearly 40% of women have never been married, up from 33% in 1995, and fewer are in a first marriage.
55% of all black women have never been married.
49% of Hispanic women
39% of Asian
34% White

Music:
98 -- Percentage of people who say listening to music helps keep them sane
72 -- Percentage of people who still listen to the same music they did when they were teenagers
94 -- Percentage who listen to music while exercising
17 -- Percentage whose workout soundtrack includes Madonna songs
94 -- Percentage who listen to music to psych themselves up for any kind of challenge
31 -- Percentage who think the lyrics are more important than the music
22 -- Percentage who'd rather forget the first album they ever bought
3 in 5 -- Number of people who listen to music every day
61 -- Percentage of men who've used a favorite playlist to set the mood with a woman
22 -- Percentage of men who wouldn't date someone with different musical tastes (wow)
4 in 10 -- Number of men who keep the music playing during sex
5 -- Percentage who have music-related tattoos
8 -- Percentage who cry when they hear "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M.

Six fittest cities, according to Men's Fitness:
1. Portland
2. San Francisco
3. Albuquerque
4. Oakland
5. Boston
6. Seattle

Six fattest cities:
1. Houston
2. Detroit
3. Cleveland
4. Memphis
5. Tampa
6. Las Vegas

Top Six Cities With the Most Eligible Women (According to Mens Health)
1. Washington, DC
2. Portland, ME
3. Boston, MA
4. Seattle, WA
5. New York, NY
6. San Francisco, CA

Fewest Eligible Women
95. Reno, NV
96. Wichita, KS
97. Fresno, CA
98. Toledo, OH
99. Bakersfield, CA
100. Las Vegas, NV

Pieces of mail sent, in billions:
2005 -- 211.7
2007 -- 212.2
2009 -- 177
2011 -- 168

To have a secure retirement, I'll need:
-$100,000 to 1,000,000 -- 48% said this
-Over $1,000,000 -- 42% said this
-Less than $100,000 -- 10% said this

Runners favorite "Running Movies":
31% -- Forrest Gump
10% -- Chariots of Fire
9% -- Spirit of the Marathon
8% -- Prefontaine

How often are you late for work?
61% -- Never
16% -- At least once a week
12% -- Once a year
11% -- Once a month

For unknown reasons, New York’s approval showed one of the greatest gender imbalances of any state in the country. Women favored New York 43% to 19% while men actually disfavored the state 36% to 39%.
New Jersey is the most overall disfavored state at 32%.

--After elections, we end up feeling better.
How the S & P 500 fared in year four of a first-term President:
-14.9% -- Herbert Hoover 1932
27.9% -- Franklin Roosevelt 1936
13% -- John Kennedy, 1964
15.8% -- Richard Nixon, 1972
25.8% -- Jimmy Carter, 1980
20.3% -- Bill Clinton, 1996
9% -- George W. Bush

Percentage of workers who expect to retire after age 65:
11% -- 1958
16% -- 2001
25% -- 2006
36% -- 2011

Are you confident you'll retire with a comfortable lifestyle?
51% --Yes
49% --No

Do you expect to get a raise or promotion this year?
Men -- 52% Yes
Women -- 63% No

$14, 218 -- The poverty threshold for a household of two people
Percentage below the poverty rate:
15.1% --Men
12.5% --Women
19.2% --Children under the age of 18
12.6% --18 to 64 years of age
11.1% --White
11.3% --Asian
25.3% --Black
26.4% --Hispanic

--YOU SHOULD COME INSIDE


…I’m writing this late at night.
I could tell you a lot of things right now, but it’d be like drunk dialing.
Some might shock you.
Some could even offend.
Alas, I think I’ll demure.

…I once saw a photo of a Facebook “friend” (I honestly don’t really know her, although she seems very nice) who’d gotten some terrific tattoos, and of course, that just happened triggered me writing, and I happened to see a new online lit magazine that wanted writing having to do with Alamaba, or birthed in that Southern spirit, and so I wrote a few pieces about these pictures, several of which were published in Steel Toe Review and one which was anthologized.

This was it:


Ways to Remember Birmingham

She gives her pets
street names—
Hunter and Red Mountain,
Oak, Valley, Tuscaloosa.
The gold fish are 1st through 9th Avenue.

She has the city tattooed across her chest so she can see
the campus in the mirror when she’s on top,
but the truth is
it’s been a long time,
and the fish are floating belly up
and the dog has diarrhea
and the embryo inside her has grown bad boy hair by now,
his hands and feet itching
to make their way into the world
with or without you,
you bastard.

--I THINK YOU'RE REALLY WONDERFUL


…In yesterday's issue of The USA Today they had this statistic:
How many books do you typically read in a year?
0 -- 14%
1-2 -- 15%
3-5 -- 19%
6-10 -- 19%
11 or more -- 33%
That was surprisingly better than I would have expected.
What do you think?

…An internet friend is putting out an anthology called "I Am Not Pizza."
The idea is we are all different. Some people are pizza, some aren't.
Each piece in the anthology has to include the line "I am pizza" in the poem and as the title. Same for "I am not pizza."
In the bathtub yesterday, I wrote these for her:


I am Not a Pizza

All of our clothes are on the floor
while we sit in bed
picking apart the pieces of Us
that have made you heavy
forlorn
lonely
and as pale as the belly of a moth.
You say you were wrong
to love me,
that there are reasons for leaving
and there aren’t.

Behind us is the moon,
the month of June
staring at us as if we’re orphaned children.
We were so young then,
you a clown cashier saying,
“I have acne, but
I am not a pizza,”
my heart bulging like my eyes.

I watch you put your panties on
with your back to me.
I watch you put everything on,
then close the door
putting me away for good.



I’m Pizza

You told old stories about me,
admit it,
how I am thin-crusted, fragile and flakey,
tied together taut
with string cheese instead of cheddar,
waxy, gleaming grease,
my pepperoni pungent
but the red pepper flakes the only part of me left
that really packs a punch.

You withered while we waited for Us to arrive at a place
where it wouldn’t matter that
I am pizza
and you are not.
I’ve tried to insist that
opposites attract,
but you just sit there,
legs crossed like bread sticks,
you a bag of bones and skin,
starving yourself so there’s nothing
you’ll need from me.

Flash Fiction Fridays

Books have always been a best friend to me. In dark days and bright. I could even tell you that stories have saved my life more than once, and although you’d likely think me melodramatic, we’d both be right.
No one has been able to articulate my feelings about this subject quite like Anne Lamott does in her landmark book, “Bird By Bird” saying: “My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”
For me, great stories thump your heart like someone sneaking up on you from behind. Or they twist your heart or prod it. You put the pages down and half expect the parchment to ignite.
The best authors motivate me to write. I’ll have to stop reading—sometimes in mid-sentence—grab a pen and jot down an idea or image.
Great writing pulls up a sofa inside your skull and parks itself there, like magazines on a coffee table, always available to be picked up and re-visited.
That’s what we have in the volume, “Flash Fiction Fridays,” featuring thirty-one of today’s strongest literary voices. Each piece (including one of mine) in the collection has been read by the book’s editor, Robert Vaughan, live on WUWM’s radio program, “Lake Effect.” How Robert cajoled such talent is a mystery we need not solve, but rather just delight in.
What we have in “FFF” is a chest full of weaponry—some of it shiny and slick and modern, others more medieval and therefore wickedly destruction.
We encounter the damaged characters that make up our own inner selves—estranged offspring, abandoned lovers, parents bearing life-threatening disease, alcoholics, voyeurs—a cacophony of characters, a circus of lives tested by the current of living.
Here is a smorgasbord of riches:
--Sara Lippmann uses a blowtorch: “I picture his hardened half-moons floating on the toilet bowl’s surface like pin bones of small helpless fish, sucked in the flush, replaced by the hum of his razor.”
--Julie Innis takes a boulder and smashes your aorta: “Later she will try to explain her sadness at it all—that nothing remained—why, even snakes give back the bones.”
--Meg Tuite, like Cormac McCarthy, makes up her own words: “So I stood alone, rerunning the minutes I had dumb-lusted you, as the widening hold you left behind in your wake cracked me in half of what had barely been a half.”
--David Tomaloff lobs grenades: “Leslie Ann liked knives. So much so that she ate a whole one by herself while engaging in phone sex with the neighbor, Roy.”
Bl Pawelek keeps you on your toes with smart quirks like: “My son has 89,812 hairs on his angel head. This is the lowest count this month.”
Sam Rasnake bends fable: “There were no pigs’ huts of straw or stick or stone. No chimney or door. Nothing worth his time to enter, nothing to tear down for another meal…”
--Susan Tepper throws darts: “A man without instincts is lost around tools.”
-- J.P. Reese finds a hand mirror and holds it to timely atrocity when she writes: “One day, Muslim soldiers from the north came to my village and began shooting.”
--Susan Gibb paints Polaroids: “The spring thaws have made pie crust of pavement, throwing up stones that might’ve taken centuries to work their way up to the surface from the hellfire of earth’s core.”
--And Vaughan himself, master of both humor and dark, has several zingers, but none as razor-sharp as this opening: “Today my mother broke every dish in the house. The Lladro Three Wisemen were the first to go.”
“Flash Fiction Fridays” is filled with some of the most vivid and memorable flash ever assembled. Treat yourself. It’ll take you places you’ve never been.
Available at Lulu.com

--THIS IS THE SOUND OF SETTLING


…This is a quirky story I forgot I wrote that appeared in Stone Highway Review…

Strangers

A stranger is kissing me.
His lips are warm and pasty, but it’s a nice pasty, like lilac-scented lotion that’s seen just a tad of sunshine. And the stranger wants things from me, yes, he does, that’s what his urgent maneuvers are suggesting, yet he’s not rough or demanding, it’s just yearning and urges. He says, “I know you’ve had other lovers, but none have been as good as I will be.” He tells me his is the panacea.
I have never kissed a stranger before. His lips now feel like gummy worms. I am sucking the green-lime flavor from them and he goes, “Hmmm. Hmmm.”
If I’d known strangers could be so sweet I would have tried this sooner. I might have made a cardboard sign to hang off my neck with invitations for strangers to come up and lay some sugar on me.
This man tells me I taste of chlorine. He claims I am a clean girl. She says all my sins have been ransomed, don’t I already know that?
We are kissing on a commuter train and I’ve just realized people surround us and there are gawkers in the crowd. That one by the holding pole is sort of biting her lip. She’s a jealous calico and that makes me kiss the stranger deeper until I’m rooting around inside the well of his throat and then I must bite him because his mouth is slurpy and iron-tasting. When he says, “Whoa!” it echoes.
I come up for air. The Asian man in charcoal pinstripes wants a piece of this action but it’s too late for him. I am in love with a stranger, this one, and I blurt it out. “If you leave me now, I will throw myself under these train tracks.”
He laughs. My father had laughter, too. He laughed at strange things, horrible incidents and mistakes he should never have made.
“Who are you anyway?” I ask.
“I’m just a stranger on a train.”
“That’s so unfair.”
“Well, you would hate me if you knew the truth.”
We kiss some more, our tongues blue boats and flexible acrobats. I know I shouldn’t sell myself short like this, but I’m a believer in love songs. Yes, yes, that’s it: I am not myself and I am not that damaged little girl any longer. I am beautiful because the stranger tells me so.