There’s so much to catch you up on, so many adventures, books, cities. Joy and grief. But we don’t have time for all that now. Right now, we are going to talk about National Poetry Month. It’s here! And I’ll be involved in readings, performances, (more about those later) and, of course, I will be attempting 30/30. For those of you not in the know, 30/30 is when poets attempt to write a poem a day for thirty days. Mind you, I had no intention to begin such a task. But here I am, the day before Spring quarter starts, staring down my (recently) cleared desk, and contemplating the work that I still need to do for my English 101 class. Naturally, I’ve decided to write poems instead. I will be posting them here. While I have every intention of finishing thirty poems, I am but a human. Worse, I’m a human in grad school, which means I’m not much of a human at all, but a sort of zombie writer/teacher who finds herself enthusiastically defending Nathaniel Hawthorne while at a bar in lower Manhattan, ahem. Speaking of that wonderful city, New York, I just came home from a mini tour/vacation there. If you’re in the area, make sure you check out the louderArts reading at Bar 13. It meets every Monday, and check it out: they have both a writing workshop and a reading! The workshop is from 6-7 and the reading/slam/feature goes from 7:30 to 10ish. I highly recommend it. Their words are still going off like firecrackers in my head, which sounds painful, but is actually delightful like Pop Rocks under your tongue. Which is what New York felt like in general, in the best way. How about a poem about it?

30/30
Day 1

Four Ways to Blend into a City

1.

You’ve got a sailor’s mouth. A sailor who’s read a bit too much early American literature but who gets lazy with their adjectives. At home, you might be scolded in the checkout line, slipping up when you ask for some fucking gum. The mother of the five year old behind you is not impressed. You correct yourself. Shit, you say, I’m really sorry. I mean, goddamn it. 

2.

You walk twelve blocks out of your way just to eat at a restaurant called Pies and Thighs. When you ask for a box for your fried chicken and some dessert to go, your server doesn’t blink. Asks how many pieces of pie you want.
You say one. Liar.

3.

Every morning you wake up alone. Try to re-imagine your life on an opposite coast; you’re writing a children’s book, Jessica in the City. City Jessica exercises in the morning, City Jessica practices her Spanish. You have countless conversations with the men who’ve left you, now banging on your door in Brooklyn, begging for you to return. You can’t be bothered; City Jessica is about to make her debut on Broadway, after she runs her fifth full marathon and finishes teaching a yoga class.

4.

Trying to catch the J train from Williamsburg, your Metro card won’t work. Frantic, you swipe it again, again, moving aside so the twelve year old boy behind you can get through. The train pulls up, and he calls to you from the other side, you want in? and punches the emergency exit open. You don’t know what you’re doing but now you’re on the train, probably about to be arrested, stealing glances with your accomplice and mouthing thank you. You have a secret. An understanding. The city keeps her head down, pretends not to notice.

In the beginning, there was bad poetry.
Nearly unjustifiable. Spiral notebooks full of it. At sixteen years old, I was a master of emotional regurgitation; I saw something, felt something, wrote something. I existed pretty happily within this loop until I turned seventeen and discovered the open mic. My paper thin, ticking, antique, once forgotten, beautiful and strange, heart, burst, into a thousand song lyrics. There was a room of people who wanted to hear my work. Never having been to an open mic before, I imagined it was a lot like VH1′s Behind the Music. The performance wasn’t just about the piece I would read; it was also imperative that I share my creative process. I would lock myself in my room and practice what I would say to my adoring fans. “This poem (brushes bangs across face) is about that moment when you realize that everything you’ve once loved is a lie. You know, (looks up wistfully) that moment.” My imaginary listeners attended to every word, eager to hear what sage advice I could offer them about love, the girl who had never successfully procured a date, much less told any boys that her lighthouse, refuge, rusted trumpet of a heart, had been interested in them in the first place.

When I finally attended the reading, I quickly realized this would not be my opportunity to reminisce in the tragedy of my adolescence, but an opportunity to read one poem, maybe two. I also needed to read in the first set, since I still had curfew and needed to be home by ten.

2.) Turn off your cell phones; that shit is obnoxious.

I don’t know when I first met my friend Jack, but I do remember the first time we competed against each other in a poetry slam. Somehow, I had made it to the final round. This might have been in part due to the fact that my youth group leader was one of the judges, but she promised she was judging fairly. If memory serves, by the third round, I had used up all of my “good” material. I think I had to dig into the Taylor arsenal, the purple notebook containing every distressing detail of our non-love affair, he being yet another young man I had accidentally not professed my love to, but who had gone on to destroy the summer of 2004, all the same. The poem wasn’t even a page long, too short, really, for a poetry slam, and it didn’t score very highly.

Now, Jack might not have looked like a credible threat. He was in his sixties and had a gray ponytail. I was too amped up on my grande hot chocolate and clear shot at fame, to notice who I was really up against. I vaguely remember knowing that he was important, one of those poets who only read in the second round. He approached the mic and began a simple story about being beat up by a girl when he was a child. The audience loved it. He described crying to his father, ashamed to be crying about a girl, and asking his dad what he should do. Jack killed the punchline with his father’s response, “Hit her back.”

The audience was really going now, getting hysterical at the trials of little “Jackie, the first born”. I knew then I had lost. But I kept listening, as eager as anyone else. And when Jack’s poem became about always wanting a son, I should have known to keep my guard up. I had a teacher once describe Mark Twain’s humor almost ominously, saying, “Any time Twain has you laughing, check for your wallet.” I should have checked for my wallet. Because when Jack rounded the corner of that last stanza, bringing us into the delivery room of his infant son who would die shortly after being born, I was demolished. We were demolished. The last lines of the poem were, “when Joan went into labor they said/the baby would be born dead./But he wasn’t: very briefly,/before he died, I heard him cry.”

3.) Keep your poems to three minutes.

If memory serves, up against each other again, Jack once said to me, “Someday, Jessica, you will beat me in a poetry slam, but that day is not today.” It wasn’t arrogance, it was accuracy. I never could beat Jack, and I don’t know that I should have been able to. We weren’t really competitive with each other. If anything, he began to be a mentor to me. He, a retired Irish Catholic, and me, a retired Irish Lutheran, we seemed to understand each other. I wanted to be half the writer he was, and so I would email him. Sometimes about writing and more often about life. My spiral notebooks of heartbreak became our correspondence; after my three and a half year “sure thing” ended, I wrote him, pleading for advice on how to move forward. He responded gently, reassured me of my life’s potential, saying, “Willie Nelson said, ‘Ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.’ This feels shattering right now because you thought you were in the other 1% and you’re not. Welcome to the human race, Jessica. Come on down.”

He was a writer. A real life, honest to god, writer. The kind that has a schedule and sticks to it. Even after moving out of my terrible poetry phase, I still seemed to focus on the attention, the validation that came from reading to an audience. Jack was different. He was writing for his audience, but not like I was. He seemed to truly care for them. Sometimes, if I was lucky, he would share his writing tricks with me. Once he told me, “If you want your audience to cry, you have to make them laugh first. That way, they won’t be expecting it. You’ll be able to get through to them.” Also, “Take notes. Come to the open mic to hear everyone else, don’t just sit there waiting to read your own work.”

4.) You will get from this reading, what you put into this reading.

Jack said to start with the jokes first, so here goes.
Two poets walk into a bar, and my friend Jack died last week.
I have never been good at punchlines.

Visiting him a couple of days before he passed, my friend Ryler gave him a stack of poems he’d just written. Jack, confined to his bed and frequently out of breath, looked at Ryler’s work and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get you some notes on these.” It’s okay, that was a joke. He would want you to laugh at that. Smirking, I added, “Yeah, Jack. I don’t think you’ve done enough work. If you could just do a little more before you go, that would be best.”

Before we all left, Jack told us to take any books from his personal library that we might want. Robert got a copy of Ryler’s first chapbook. Flipping through it, we discovered that Jack had rated the poems, using a star system, two stars for this poem, four for this one. This was funny enough on its own. But returning home with my copy of New and Selected Poems by Thomas Lux, I discovered that Jack had rated his poems, too. Two stars for “I Love You Sweetheart” and only one star for “Wife Hits Moose.” To Jack, all poets were created equal. We all deserved feedback. He was listening. He was taking notes.

5.) Clap every poet to the stage.

When I was twenty four, I understood loss. It was the home I had made with a man, now not my home, and still only ten blocks away. It was the fifth job I had applied for after my bachelor’s degree, that I wouldn’t get. The Lutheran faith I could not find my way back to. This hollowing out, this strain. The difference, though, was in that these were places I could get to again. Eventually, I would make amends with my ex, my career path, my upbringing. I would fill four more journals with the never ending saga of my post-modern, third wave, lamppost lifeboat of a heart. The poetry would get only moderately better.
But to lose Jack, is to know loss. A man who would teach me how to write, and accidentally, by extension, how to love, and eventually how to die. He really did it well, so let’s give him five stars for ability to leave this life with grace, and one star for timing. If you knew him, you know that he left instructions for all of this. I am reading his work. I am taking notes. I am listening.

*
If you would like to read Jack’s work, please become acquainted with him here.

http://standupoet.net/

*For Darci Duncan

When you are always renting,
you become familiar with never
owning a thing. You can relax
into your temporary state,
not knowing when
your landlord might kick you out.

The house is riddled with other
people’s clothes, furniture,
boyfriends. You might not be
the first person to hang that painting
but it looks better here, anyway

Down the street, your roommate
is rummaging through a free pile.
Yesterday, she was at the bins
Every time you see her,
she’s wearing something new
Hasn’t paid full price in years

You wonder if you can learn
how to wear a stranger’s clothes
with grace. Worry that the previous
owner will laugh at your attempts
with their leather jacket.

Until you see your roommate,
grinning, again, at her latest find.
Peacock feathers pinned in her hair,
you would never doubt
that they belonged together.

When I was young, I wanted love like a vaccine. A preacher told me to find a husband, said I had to learn the ways of the Lord. Keep my sex in a canning jar, doused in boiling water, shelved and numbered. In the country of my desire, our God the Father was the north pole and Husband was the south. If you teach someone what to want, before they know want, they’ll match you fever for fever, covet the step of your stride.

I kept my mouth shut. Come down, they’d petition us, turn away from your life of sin. Even your thoughts have betrayed you, your body has made you weak and you are not your body. You are not your body, and so join this body, this foundation, this fellowship of believers, forfeit your body to the Lord.

I wonder about marking my flesh. Consider the tattoos of my friends and yearn for permanence. These seven years have passed and still I shy away from the needle, saying, it will hurt too much, but meaning, if I alter myself, it could make someone love me less.

To the privileged, to those born in the right neighborhood, to the rich or the rich enough, whose bodies and loves aren’t questioned: I have let the clock wind down. I have negated the abuses of your fathers, offered grace where there was none. As I grow larger, you cry discomfort, as if comfort came guaranteed. Did you know, even your Jesus was a liberator, a champion of the weak? When he called on his people to turn the other cheek, he recognized that the abusive party would be made to hit the oppressed with the palm of their hand. This is not a coincidence. Culture taught only those equal in stature were to be struck this way. By hitting them with an open right hand, they were saying you are the same as me.

One day, you’ll open your mouth. Like every other day in your life, you will expect to be heard.
This is not a threat.

Then the breakfast it’s made, spilt open on the pavement, examining it for the best parts. He takes his pick and leaves you there, wondering whether life tastes metallic in his mouth. It is already 12:30, and you wonder if this is a bad sign. You would run but for the soreness in your legs, each hour on your shift last night, etched into your joints. You are going to lose your knees this way, perpetually taking orders, another ticket in the window, another pint to serve.

Across the state, a man is mourning his wife. Across town, a woman is making love to a man in your old bed. Putting dishes into your old cupboards. Save face. Good etiquette says it is not right to cry over what you do not own. This good man, asleep in his living room for fear of their marriage bed. On a drive to Chelan, you asked him how they met. At a bar. He says the second time he saw her, he sat down at her table. Talked to her till the man she was with came back. Informed the gentlemen that this was his seat now. He didn’t protest. This man never looked back. And if he did, it must have been to admire his sure footing, the terrific set of stairs he climbed to get to her.

You’re selfish, telling their story. For saying success but praying failure for the men you’ve loved.

You close the bar. Marry all the bottles of booze. Take the trash out to the alley, the city block sharp and quiet in its 3 am. You catch a ride with a co-worker; she puts whiskey and ginger ale in her coffee cup and sips it while she drives. You haven’t been a child for thirteen years. Still, you trust the car that takes you home, the catch of the clutch. Your keys are never where they started, tossed loosely in your bag. Find the one that fits. She’ll wait to make sure you get inside.

I’m angry. I’m angry and it isn’t cute. It isn’t attractive. It doesn’t come with a hilarious anecdote or a filthy story. I’m angry for myself and I’m angry for all other female artists. I’m angry because my body, my physical appearance, seems to be tightly bound to the general reception of my art. I’m angry because I’ve been told to be docile, receptive, passive. I’m angry because I’m too often described as “beautiful and talented”, as if the “talent” aspect of that is shocking, unexpected.

Last night, a man approached me after my show. He told me he really enjoyed my set; he said many kind things about my work. I accepted his praise with gratitude. I turned to leave. He grabbed my hand and kept going. I became really uncomfortable. I did not move. I tried to excuse myself from the situation, and he ignored all of my efforts. He began to describe what I was wearing. He was leering. I took my hand back. I cut the conversation short. I left.

I feel embarrassed because I didn’t do more. This man crossed clear boundaries. At the very least, he ignored basic social cues, out of ignorance. At the very worst, he was totally aware of his actions and decided to disregard what I might have been feeling and trying to communicate. I’m angry that I didn’t stand up for myself. I’m angry that I feel shame about this at all, when shame doesn’t belong here. I’m angry that I stood there. Why did I stay there?

I stayed there because this is what I’ve been taught. Female artists are raised to be humble, to lay themselves down at the feet of their following. A woman who makes demands is seen as a diva, an individual who asks for too much, due to their inflated sense of self. I have been taught that this man was being nothing but kind, that I should wear something less attractive if I don’t want that kind of attention. In short, I’ve been taught that it’s my fault. It is not my fault. It is not the fault of any female artist. How long will it take our society to place blame where blame is due?

I have chosen to take action. To stand against situations like these, to be emphatically clear about my own personal boundaries after a show. However, those individuals that cross the line are responsible for their own actions. Old man, you knew better. I tried to be gracious and you took advantage of it. No more. Do better. There is no room for your brand of misogyny here.

Sincerely,

Jessica

A writer whose vagina should have little to nothing to do with how her work is received, in the same way that one wouldn’t expect special treatment for being a writer who happens to have an elbow.

Yes, it is June. But here in Bellingham, this month is nothing more than the cruel tease of summer. The sun is out long enough to convince you it’s swimming weather, but is gone before you’ve so much as put one vitamin D deprived limb in the water. The women in my town remain both hopeful and obstinate, banishing leggings and tights from their wardrobes and bringing out short shorts far too early. The theory is that you can convince the season to change, if you are perpetually ready for the next season.

Here’s the other problem with spring fever: I have a crush on every boy. Of course, by I, I really mean we, and by boy, I mean whomever you might have a crush on. Clearly, this is not a time for red flag dating. The guidelines are simple; if you see any red flags, you leave. For example, you’re having dinner with someone and they casually mention that they voted for Bush both times. Red flag. Get up and go. Of course, everyone’s red flags are different. Theoretically, when you meet someone with these tendencies, you would call it quits right there, without getting involved. Doesn’t that sound mature? Sensible, even? Be warned, spring fever has a complete disregard for your responsible inclinations. There are sunsets to reckon with. Sangria comes back into play. Sure, this guy is super homophobic, but he has a boat! And you can reach him, change his mind, probably, by making out with him! Right?

Best to take up a lot of hobbies. And since you’ll need something to distract you from poor decision making, how about coming to my show this Thursday? I promise, I did write something on my residency, though I might not be able to write again until September. The show is at the Honey Moon and it’s called Thirty Days in the Wilderness. Troi Gale will be opening it up and I will be accompanied by the incredible Sarah Goodin. It starts at 8:30. There’s a patio, and mead, and maybe there will even be a spell of warm weather. Come and make some good decisions. Or bad ones. Either way, you know I won’t be the one to judge you.

I know, I know, if “I have access to internet” than apparently “I don’t want it!” Such impassioned terms! So many promises! Well, I have been writing like crazy, and I couldn’t keep it in anymore. Also, if I make the promise, I can change the promise. So here we are. In the wilderness! And connected to the internet.

Holden Village is exactly as fantastic as I had hoped it would be. It’s also very different then I had expected. I’m writing some weird material….and it makes me a little nervous. But I press on, and hope for the best. I have many stories for you, but those aren’t for right now. The internet that I do have, I only have a short amount of time. Time is of the essence!

The poem I have today isn’t about this place, exactly. But its subject matter has been on my mind and I had to write about it. That’s all. I come home in about two and a half weeks, and I couldn’t be more excited. If you’re in Bellingham, you can come see me June 7th (TONIGHT!). I will hosting the inaugural Grown Ass Poets’ Society show (special thanks to Robert Lashley for coming up with the name). It is going to be at the Green Frog and it will be featuring…..drum roll……Buddy Wakefield! And Jack McCarthy! This is going to be a show to end all shows, you don’t want to miss it. So, to review:

Grown Ass Poets’ Society!
Featuring Buddy Wakefield and Jack McCarthy
June 7th, at 7 pm at the Green Frog on State Street
$10!

I will be hosting! Get there! I will hold you, and tell you about my adventures. Hell, I might even buy you a drink.
Home can’t come soon enough. Now, to lead us into the poem, here’s one of my new favorite quotes.

“God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions.”
-De Caussade

When you Decide to tell your Church Group about Domestic Violence

you’ll stumble, at best
at worst, you’ll cry
Not in the classy way -
how they show it in movies -
A stern professor approaches the microphone
delivers an impassioned plea for justice,
a message that demands the best of his colleagues
He’s almost made it through the entire thing
when suddenly the music swells
and he’s caught,
our stone man now transparent
One tear running from retina to jaw line
a more honest hero than we’ve ever known.

No,
when you do it,
you won’t make it through the first stanza.
The poem you picked
because of its subtleties,
turns out to reveal your weakness
more quickly than a politician’s intern
You are crying in earnest now
soggy and pathetic
Your voice, a pitiful sliver of what it once was
Worse yet, they’ll listen to you
Cock their heads to the side
and start nodding
bring you tissues
and say,
keep going.

Once, in this very sanctuary,
you watched a man
trying to light the candles for the service
The altar was a dreadful thing,
too small for his thick frame to maneuver around
He lumbered back and forth,
smiling,
the flames paper thin
his body, his weight,
so earnest to do the Lord’s work

You felt embarrassed for him
Couldn’t believe he would
put himself on display like that
And look at where you are today,
wailing, publicly,
with no dramatic music
to soften the blow

Best to go as quickly as you can
No use pretending
to gather yourself
Sob through the whole
goddamn thing -
you have to get
the candles lit,
somehow.