Tick tock

I will probably always wonder about you a little - what was going on in your mind beneath the surface, what's really driving you, both towards me and away. If it's fear or love or panic or loneliness. If it's that I was too intense and not attractive enough, like the voice in my head repeats. If it's something you'll regret forever. If we would have been as good together as I suspect. Too late now to know, so I shush the voice and keep moving towards tomorrow, trying not to close down, to stay open to the chance of something better.

Burying Hope

The day after the funeral

My swollen eyes see only

Steep cliffs of red dirt teeming with roots

Waiting to wrap your little box

To dust we shall return.

Only your sister’s weight

Curled on my lap

Kept me pinned to the earth

Studying the face you’ll now

Never grow into

Your mama passed out in front of the coffin

Well – the closest you had

It was her finger

Your little fist curled around

For the last time

Your mother lies next to you

The stones outlining your grave

In perfect miniature

And, underneath

Only the cool earth

Poems for Saimoni and Zi VI

I crave you, like water. 

When I'm so far away

from your touch and your laugh,

your full, serious cheeks,

the taut curve of your belly. 

I sit and replay your videos,

catch my breath at each smile,

marvel at the miracle of your fingers. 

On my worst days

they feel like cruel mirages,

pale shadows of your intensity,

mocking me with distance. 

I count the days

till I can curl you in my lap,

inhale the intoxicating scent of your scalp,

slake my thirst.

Breathe again. 

Poems for Z - V

That day, I paused, rested,

curled up with you on the concrete floor.

I tried to memorize your every feature

the music as you dissolved into giggles.

I held the terrible weight

of knowing I, too, would leave -

as you, blissfully ignorant, diaper clad

nestled your tiny body up to mine

cradled between my knees and heart.

Your mother would have been so proud

Delighted in your chubby thighs,

your curiosity, your smile,

even your reticence,

your armor.

I do.

Poems for Saimoni and Zi - III and IV

III

A gasp -

the perfect O of your lips

your chubby fingers outstretched

seeking my hands to hold you up

and grasping only air

a moment of shock

replaced by delight

as your troublesome feet,

to your surprise, catch you,

your eyes wide

with shock and delight.

You didn't know, did you?

That you could be so strong

that below the hump of your belly -

once taut only with worms

now layered with muscle and fat

your little legs

bowed but not broken

could catch you, bear your giggling mass

forward, out of danger

and into my outstretched arms.

IV

I tell myself

that someday you'll read

these scraps salvaged

from tear soaked pillows,

wondering how my blood pumps

while my heart wanders outside my chest,

oceans away.

Easier, not better.

In response to Jenny:

I’ve told you before, years ago, on several occasions, how much reading what you’ve written has helped clarify my feelings towards my own depression, to remind me that if someone as incredible as you can be fooled by it sometimes, it doesn’t mean I’m a failure for not always being able to fight it as well as I wish I could.

Things are… interesting right now. All up in the air, soon to be literally – as-of-yet-unexplained illness, imminent continent move, imminent start to a program I’m terrified I won’t be smart enough for, and being on the other side of the world from the little girl I fell hopelessly in love with and plan to do whatever it takes to adopt. And when things are hard, I feel the ache of missing her that much more acutely, knowing that she’s in an orphanage wondering where I went, falling asleep alone in her crib and waking up alone. For now, though, there is nothing I can do to make her mine, and the only thing that will make her more likely to be mine later is to go to school, to do the work, to get established in a life so that if (when, please make it when) the law changes and/or I get married, I can give her the life she deserves.

And in the meantime I run my nonprofit, and we try to do the little things for all of the orphanage kids – first a well (wouldn’t have happened without your help, Jenny), now clean water (just completed the fundraiser, will install in December), next raising school fees for little Ericki, Dainess and Stevie to get them started out in the world. And I do it for them, partly, but I know I do it for me too, because the despair of being so far away from my Z is eating me up every day, and this way I feel a tiny, tiny, tiny bit closer to her.

Sometimes… often… I have moments where I wish I didn’t care. I think about what it would be like if I’d gone, and done the work, and come home, and not left a huge chunk of my heart behind in her tiny, sticky little hands, grown chubby from the spindly stubs they were when I arrived. I’d be free, now – planning my life in a new country, excited to move forward with my career, eyes on the horizon instead of looking back anxiously behind me.

It would be easier.

When I got there, she was so tiny and sick, too riddled with worms to gain weight or strength, unable at a year old even to crawl, her belly was so swollen and her arms and legs so thin. Then she got pneumonia. And her little system couldn’t fight it off, after her first round of antibiotics she still lay in the bed all day, little chest barely rising and falling, rattling like a stick was running up and down her protruding ribs. We went down to the hospital, the two of us together, and they confirmed that the drugs weren’t working. I held her while she bawled, as the technicians fumbled to try to find a vein in her immature, underformed arm. I rocked her and my tears mixed with hers and my sobs shook with hers and my heart beat with hers as they gave up and injected the first of many drugs, painfully, into her leg. I held her and stroked her and sang to her, both our tears all over my face, until she finally settled down to sleep on my chest, and I knew I would never be the same.

It would be easier if it had never happened. If I hadn’t pushed to go to the hospital, if she had gotten better or died, whichever it would have been, and neither would have been my story.

Instead, I throb with missing her every day, every time I see a child, every time a kitten stretches their neck out for a scratch under the chin, just like she did – does. I scribble poems into unpublished blogs to keep for her, one day, holding out hope that I will have the chance to make her mine, to tell her how much I've loved her, I love her.

It would have been easier. It wouldn’t have been better. Thanks for reminding me.

Poems for Z - II

I can feel them
your soft chubby hands
drifting across my face
always searching
your squeal of glee
when I turn my head to nibble
on your delicious digits

That belly
round and tight as a drum
with a thin coating of fat
to reassure me
of how far you've come
from the gaunt infant
whose every breath made me tremble

You concentrate -
no time for games, this,
and bowed but never broken
you walk.

And is there any greater miracle?
The blessing of seeing you walk?

Your lips purse -
obstinate – you hoard
your giggles and smiles
for those who have braved the prickles.

And when they flash
those eyes, those teeth
joy radiating from my serious girl
my breath catches in my chest
as yours once did.

You've caught me.
Your soft, sticky, warm, chubby fingers
tangled my heartstrings
so that here, so far away
they pulse only for you.
Zawadi.

Poems for Z

I arrive
pregnant with expectation
thrilled to start a new day
up the winding cliff face.
She lies still
on her cot, tiny chest
shuddering with the effort of each breath.

I lay
hand after hand
on her shrunken back
waiting for reassurance
as they feel the juddering
shaking
catching as she breathes.

They send us
as we are never sent
clutching red file under one arm
listless child in the other
dressed in her best
as if to show
our weakest at their greatest strength.

The doctor reads off her history
no birth date
and that hits me hard in the chest
zero October two thousand and nine
our tiny soul
pneumonia, malaria, suspected meningitis
and if they had been right!
no sweet babe in my arms.
Hold for observation.

She tests negative for malaria, no fever
and not a cringe when the needle
plunges through her paper thin
first percentile skin.

Blood filled with questions
painful suspicions squeezed ruthlessly
and without dissent
from her tiny fingertip

She is too small for chest scans
too young for an HIV test
so she is offhandedly handed
a prescription for antibiotics

Treat for pneumonia
Nothing else we can do.
For once first and third world agree
today we helped
but her prospects are not good.
Nothing else I can do.

Once a mother
in who knows what state
of agony or ecstasy
looked down and named her Zawadi. Gift.

Dusk

To hear it told, and I have, endlessly, I was born the serious, unsmiling, difficult child. I'll never match my brother's lightness, and every moment I spend next to him makes my feet heavier, roots unfurling into the ground. Even when left to myself, I ended up like a moth, drawn to your sunny smile, your carefree embrace of pleasure and life, the way you made me laugh. Reveling in the moments you made me feel weightless. But at some point something shifts, the drink that feels pressured, packing a bowl as soon as we get home, or before we can go out: the moments of passionate ambition that crumble to dust in the light of day, the moments of vulnerability that give a glimpse of the depth and rawness of your wounds, still, and the feeling of air on them makes you jerk away, shield them farther from me. I stand here, all my flaws in full view, painfully open for you, and it's too threatening to your cloak of sunshine to really see me. You flaunt your light as if to prove it to yourself, casting me into shadow by default. You ask me if I mind you having another drink, that if it bothers me you'll stop for the night, and I hate having to ask you, knowing that if left to your own devices, you'd keep going until you'd driven away all of the depth and intelligence that keeps me in love with you. And so go ahead babe, and I drove us home, and I laid next to you as you laughed, vodka soaked whispering in my ear, and I was alone.

So now I'm back home, without you, and my brother blows through the house, a whirlwind of blond hair and snatches of unexpected accents, picking up and shrugging off personalities like so many baubles, and my smiles tug at my inadequacy. But he hides no cavernous hollows, he's never had to darken me to lighten himself, and I'd love him with or without ambition, intensity, depth. We're yin and yang, but he never asks my permission, so I don't have to give it, and there's no pretense that we're balanced, and I don't know if it's better or worse, but at least here I know when I'm alone.

Jewelry

I sometimes feel like I put on jewelry like armor, when I'm nervous, when I'm scared of how I'm going to be perceived. Before a date that has me filled with butterflies. I slip on my bracelet gauntlets, my rings like brass knuckles, my necklaces like shields. They impose a distance, no one can stroke my wrists, nuzzle my neck, kiss my fingers. I am buffered by my work, and by the excuse to speak, to defend myself: Yes, I made it out of blowtorches and steel and metal dredged from the ground, adorned it with sharp stones, it is mine. A demonstration of my control over extreme elements (over myself, over you).

Part III

The orderlies make the days pass, differentiate morning from evening from night. Eric, a hugely muscled ex-gang member with olive skin and light eyes treats us like people, listens to us. He hears me go on about this and that, school and work and art and he asks me why I'm here, and I lose it completely. He sees my rage, takes me into another room, holds pillows against his body and tells me to let go. I punch him, over and over again, speaking aloud all of the things I'm afraid to say, afraid to fail, afraid to lose. Things I may never have said aloud. And I cry, and with each punch feel both lighter, in terms of heaviness, and darker, in terms of light. And like my feet might be touching the ground, one toe at a time.

Dreams

For as long as I can remember, significantly before I actually started driving, I've had these endlessly repeated dreams where I'm trying to drive and I end up in the backseat, or in the passenger seat, or the brakes simply will. not. work. And I swerve, and I can't reach, and I do everything right and the car absolutely will not do what I want. Last night I had the second version of those dreams - where I try to punch or hit someone and I can't. My arm feels like it starts out in air, by mid-swing through water, and ends up as though I'm trying to punch through sand. I don't remember whether I'm attacking or defending - I think I've had dreams with both - but I'm just unable to make my way through it. I'm ineffectual. I'm fundamentally unable to function the way normal people do. I had these dreams for YEARS before even beginning to think about them, that feeling of trying to do something but everything turning out wrong, uneven, I'm in the wrong place and the wrong time... nothing about that surprised me.

I realize that other people don't automatically feel like that. That just maybe, the fact that I'm a capable and successful human being should, could, translate into FEELING like a successful and human being, even subconsciously, even in my dreams. That's a completely alien idea to me.

So maybe it's a good first step that I'm recognizing this is odd? That I know consciously it doesn't necessarily have to be like this forever? But how do I defend against my brain and it's dreams?

Part II

By fourth grade I was so angry and so sad that I was sent to my first psychiatrist. At least, that's what I'm told. I remember puzzles, a high filing closet, a cats cradle. It felt useless but I walked away with string in my hands and an art box, learned to busy my hands when my brain started to bubble. Later I'd busy my hands with razors, thumbtacks, bad poetry, sticking my fingers down my throat, overloading myself with schoolwork until I collapsed or someone noticed. And with art.

My mother brought my spool of silver wire to the hospital, my skewers for weaving it. They let me take it out when it's quiet, which is most of the time, and sit in the common spaces twirling hair-thin wires into a hollow woven tube. It needs to be four feet long to tie the way I want it to. I'd planned it out months ago, plated gold, stuffed with pearls, my crocheted noose. An art piece for my collection. I weave it here, tell the orderlies it's just a necklace, which it is, also. Impress them with my calm, with my ability, she seems so together. And I quietly work away, laughing a little at the irony, but only on the inside.

Art/Craft

So I'm a jeweler and a metalworker, and a women's studies major, and a religion minor, and I read almost exclusively nonfiction, primarily science. And I fuck with people's ideas about left and right brain, and artists and intellectuals - there is a perception that one invalidates the other, that thinking and feeling are mutually exclusive. It drives me crazy. I think the problem is that people have internalized that attitude, that art is fundamentally different from academics and requires no knowledge of the world outside of personal experience. And certainly some good art comes out of a very limited worldview, some art wouldn't be as good if it weren't from such a specific place. But the upper middle class slackers are often just too lazy to learn, and chose art because they wouldn't be forced to learn there. Like Andy Warhol's quote, "Art is anything you can get away with." You know what? Fuck you, Andy. Look, if you've had no new experiences in your life, if you come from a place that's "been done" and have no new insights on it, there's no way to make good art out of that, by my definition. I feel like real art requires either a fresh insight on something personal, or a connection or reference to something in the world, some new piece of knowledge about how the world connects, some commentary. And for that you need to know things. Read books. Go to other countries. Take classes. Try to understand how and why things are the way they are. Sexism, racism, classism, poverty, hunger, war, mythology, xenophobia, these are the experiences humanity has been defined by. I feel like good art, maybe any art, requires of the artist knowledge, connection, empathy.

And what about things that are just pretty? I'm torn. At the end of the day art needs to talk about something, speak with its own voice. Sometimes that can be about innovative form, or space, or expressive color, but then it has to be that much more impressive, that much stronger, and frankly there's not much that hasn't been done before, and better. Pretty doesn't cut it at the end of the day. Does that make me a traitor to metalwork and jewelry, especially? Maybe. I would restrict the category of art to pieces that talk about something outside themselves. Either narrative work, or pieces that go really above and beyond in how they interact with the body, what they say about space and form. By my own definition, perhaps the majority of my work wouldn't fall into that category. That's OK. I don't feel like a piece has to be "art" to be valuable, either. Craft is impressive, craft is valuable, craft is a language unto itself. And into the category of craft, I would add most representational painting and drawing and representational sculpture. Just because these are older mediums doesn't mean they are inherently more valid.

And why does it matter? The art/craft distinction? I think the dividing line comes back to where I started from - intelligence as it is measured in the outside world. Knowledge, connection, allusion, insights about the stuff of life. Perhaps even in my perfect world, where art and craft are acknowledged and valued separately, artists would still be looked down on by those in academia. But at least then it would be easier to see it for what it often truly is - a yearning for a life they didn't have the courage to grasp. Luann points out in her blog, "As Bruce Baker says so enchantingly, “To ‘normal’ folks, artists are people that ran away to join the circus!” Fair enough. But is it too much to ask that intelligence and insight and real content not be dismissed just because they're found under the Big Top?

Part I

It's tempting to go back, sometimes. When I feel weak. When I want to feel like the most normal person in the room, when I want it to not matter if I'm not. Where figures drift in and out of the common spaces, in and out of touch with reality. Some fight to take their meds and more, some fight not to. I line up like a good girl. Cigarettes like freedom anticipated, counted down, bargained for just one more minute, we step outside. For once the swirls of smoke don't choke me, for once the birds don't sound so bad, but I'm relieved to go back inside. I'm not ready for all that space.

I fold myself up in bed and cry like the origami flower my roommate, a lifer, placed on my pillow my first night. She's sweet, and won't tell me what she did, only that she's being transferred to a state hospital and she's afraid she won't get out, and then she gets quiet. Her family wants her to stay behind walls, thinks she belongs. The staff watch her when she eats - they're meant to watch me too. They don't. It doesn't matter, the food is bland and I don't eat enough to make it worth my while to purge. Besides, she might hear. And that's not what I'm here for anyway, really.

My mother and brother come from a college visit straight to the hospital when they hear. My funny, airy brother, deflated, stands as tall as he can, tries to grow up enough to take care of me, separates himself from the shoulders around the room hunched in defeat. My mother tells me she's proud I asked for help, asks with their eyes why she isn't enough, what they did wrong. We play Scrabble to convince ourselves we're still who we were, awkwardly, in the common room, while a woman yells at the TV. They leave. My parents come back the next day with clothes from my apartment, toiletries, luxuries. They get permission to take me out to dinner, and I eat and eat and purge in the bathroom at the restaurant, and on the way home we pick up socks and a blanket from the dollar store, and a panicked rodent somewhere in my chest wants to bolt from the store, and it echoes the itch in my feet that wanted to bolt into traffic, days ago. And I didn't do it but it was only this time, I couldn't be sure I wouldn't and now I'm here and I quiet the rodent the best I can and walk to the car.

Thanks to BHJ for sparking the strength to begin this particular series of posts.

Wisdom teeth

He picked me up at the train station, after a month of talking, waiting, testing the waters. I sang under my breath, thrilled to be back in the city, feeling beautiful despite the swelling and pale green bruises under makeup on my jaw. I felt ebullient, wittier than ever, reveling in my strength, my lack of shame, my form fitting clothes and hair uncovered, afloat in the wind. This is what you want. Intelligence, strength, toughness. You came for me. We eat ice cream, he'll have what I have, the cold soothing on the stitches in the back of my mouth. Then it comes, a confession to make. It's just a family thing. It's culture. I don't love her. The wind knocked out of me, I pause. Should I go? Is this the life you want? You don't understand. I'm Saudi. I have to. What did you expect me to say? I hail a cab, stitch myself up, drag my bags upstairs to the new apartment one step at a time.

Not my country

The words “Do Not Push” have no meaning here. The little babushkas in the marketplace grab by the shoulders and move anyone in their way. Bus stops degenerate into mob scenes when the doors open, a soldier knocking a woman with the M16 on his shoulder, an elderly man using his cane to slash a path to the door. Nobody blinks at the thousands of women with strollers, most half hidden by wigs or headscarves. They are a part of the tableau, the six year olds carrying the newborns, the teenagers carrying the toddlers, obstructing the narrow alleys that wind between ancient stone buildings. They are blunt, and straightforward, and bracing, prickly as their cactus namesake. An entire people revels in the heady freedom of taking up space, speaking loudly, pushing and being pushed back without fear. And yet. The solidarity that carried them through a thousand years, the imposed and internalized otherness, the angry fire that survived concentration camps has no one to fight now. It swings wildly, the defensive spines grown poisonous, self defense morphed into blinkered xenophobia. The troublemakers are “put on a diet,” walled in, denied permits to build or schools to learn or space to grow. For those who have awakened in their beds to the sounds of bombs for centuries, for whom everything they can do has often not been enough, it seems alien not to fight with everything they have. Sixty years has yet to erase the scars on the collective psyche, like an abused child who grows up to be an abusive parent. So others grow up ghettoized, made other, poor and angry. Those who have learned too well from history are sometimes doomed to repeat it.

Echoes

I am tattooed with snapshots of who I have been: A naïve Zionist teenager with her Hebrew name on her back; a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors with a memorial etched indelibly on her arm; a girl with the ourobouros, the snake eating its tail, ancient symbol of fertility, tradition, growth, change, twisted into an infinity symbol on her shoulder; a woman growing into her skin with a declaration of self on her wrist. It shows vines twisting down my forearm and culminating at my wrist in the hebrew word “Hineini,” here I am. It is the response of powerful Biblical characters when God calls their name; not cowering, not fear. It represents the most important kind of strength, the strength to retain a sense of self in the midst of things much bigger than you. The strength not to be afraid of failing, to know that even if you can’t do everything, you can do something. Facing sexism, facing racism, facing poverty and greed and inequality, I can do something. Every time I shake someone’s hand, the word Hineini faces up from my wrist, a joyful reminder of my heritage, the tattoo and the history reclaimed intact. It is a reminder to be mindful, to not take time for granted, that wherever I am in life, to enjoy being there, in that moment. Hineini, here I am.