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The String Between

Somewhere in between the drone of the hard shelled wings outside

Their slow siren of instinct and wanting

And this plastic covered cork desk

I hear music

In the rustling of the leaves like sandpaper palms

The raspy breath of wind

The texture of distant clashing metal and shouts of a nine to five burden

I can see the back of their working minds

They are stained glass portraits of

The pairs of eyes that watch their front stoops for muddy footprints

Waiting for their hero to come home

I hear harmonies in lawn mower motions

The overtones that sound like young whistlers

When they first learn to hold their pursed lips taught

Just long enough to hold a note

Wobbling

Teetering toward a smile

I hear children’s voices instead of machines

Not that this should be a comfort

In fact it would worry most anyone

But I

Learned how to feel

Legato

So I can’t help but live in long tones

These beige walls are canvas to my ears

Bouncing the patter of conversation from beneath my cold tiled floors

To one another

And then to me

Today the world is in G minor

I only know because the ciccadas are chirping a little slower than usual

Which gives me a b flat harmonic

I could play the blues on this creaking bed frame

Listen

Music is the closest thing I have left to imagination

It is the only thing I know that comes close to that day in 2nd grade

When I was convinced the power of my mind

Made my glass at the dinner table

Shake

And move just a little to my right

I could’ve sworn it did

I don’t know when I stopped believing in love songs

Or the last time I had so much faith in my own abilities

That I thought I could reshape the world

But I can close my eyes and see silver silk strings attaching

The way my best friend laughs when she realizes she’s in love

And the back up beeps of a mac truck

Their both in D major

The way I see it we’re all connected

In the pitch of our gasp before a first kiss

The lowest sob of despair that resonates in our sternum

And the last refrain of Bach’s cello Suite number one

In the moment that we feel most alone

There is a note

Somewhere

That starts our favorite song

Somewhere

Always

There is a tone like ours

A long tone

And all we need to do

To understand each other

Is take a deep breath

And Listen.

The List

The List

I keep a list of every set of lips

Mine have kissed

I star the ones that happened

On more than one occasion

Circle the three I fell in love with

Once

I was kissed by a boy who believed in vampires

In the catskills, at night, on a stone patio

Under the stars and a flickering lamp-post

He put his hands around my waist

And was the first

The girl who followed was older

Told me she could teach me how to be curious

And I liked to watch our hair twist into

Melted candy canes of blonde and brown

Then there was spin the bottle

In my garage

At my elementary school graduation

A boy licked my cheek

From the inside

And ran away

My best friend’s crush

Spun on me

And I bit his tongue instead

I was dared to kiss the boy

Who filled my chest

With caffeinated fireflies and honey

He put both my lips inside his mouth

And I wiped away the thoughts I had

Of holding hands at the museum.

At summer camp

I met a boy who made me glow

His kisses tapped on my chest

Like a pointer finger and hopeful expectations

And for six years

Saying his name

Turned my sternum into a nightlight.

My first love

Kissed me behind closed curtains

Tucked us away on a well worn stage

And brought me into the light

It’s because of him that I learned

How to bow

And exit

2 Dans

2 Jesses

A Jimmy and a James

3 Zacks and a Jack

One John

One Jason

And four Mikes

A TJ and a PJ

And now you

You

The reason I need to write it down

The reason I want to

Show you all the ways

I know your mouth the best

I could paint our lips in watercolor

Sooner than I could rightly explain

Our lips,

Book-pressed flowers

With all the right colors leaking through

You make me feel like forgetting

So before I do

I’ll sew my history into my gums

My midnight mistakes that taste

Like vodka and soap

Every woman who was just

A little softer

Every morning that I felt

Hollow

A stitch

And when I’m done

When you wipe my bloody mouth

With your ink-stained hands

I will write your name down slow

You

Will have the only punctuation mark.

Confession #37

I really like mens’ shoes.  Not to wear.  More to admire.. but when they’re really nice I’m always tempted to buy them.  Now you know.

Any Suggestions?

Does anyone want a poem on a specific topic?  Think I should write about something in pop culture or politics?  I’m open!  Let me know!

Short Story: For My Daughter

For My Daughter

      In first grade everyone wanted to be the line leader.  Mrs. Zwick would swing her blonde curls over her shoulder and smile to her favorite student that day.  Everyone wanted to be her favorite.  We were still young enough to see every woman as a mom;  we were just aware enough to know she wasn’t.

     The day Jimmy called her “mom” his face flushed redder than his hair.  He had apple cheeks, and he buried his face in his favorite Toy Story t-shirt until snack time.  We had apples.

     The day I called Mrs .Zwick “mom”, I meant it.  I wanted it.  I wanted her to scoop me up into her arms and let me bury my face in her curls.  My mom had curls.  They were thick and brown.

“Mom?”

     Mrs. Zwick smiled and ran her hand down the back of my head and gave me grape juice instead of apple.  I didn’t even have to ask.  Amanda looked at me, peeking from under her bangs, expectant.  She was waiting for my face to change.  She was waiting for me to realize what I had done.  We didn’t know how to say what we felt.  Amanda just wanted to see my face flush because it would be the third time she had ever seen someone embarrassed, but I didn’t do it.  I picked up my juice with both hands and drank enough to be sure it wouldn’t spill when I put it back down.  I put it back down and she filled it up again.  

     Amanda’s eyes got big and her mouth opened all at once.  I thought for a second she was going to say something.  It took both closed hands to hold her bangs out of her face, even though they fell right back down.  No one gets two cups of juice.

     Amanda was my best friend.  Amanda’s house was the first house I ever went to without my parents.  I slept there once, the night mom went away.  It was nothing like mine.  Her kitchen smelled like stale cinnamon and Tropicana fruit punch.  The tiles were old and patterned with flowers in pink vases that hid all the spills.  The cabinets, dishwasher and refrigerator were all white; they matched the chairs and dining room table.  I had more sugar in that house than I did for the rest of my childhood.  Amanda had a TV in her kitchen so we could watch Rugrats and eat Pull and Peel Twizzlers while the water was boiling.  We had macaroni and cheese from a box.  I had never had it like that before, but I liked the big blue bowl and it smelled good.  I didn’t eat much, I didn’t feel much like eating.  We watched “Grease” and talked about who was on our soccer team and who was the nicest boy in our class.  I stayed up all night on her floor too scared to move because her shadows looked different than mine.

     The next night I slept in my little sister’s room.  When the cars made the monsters against my wall move, I forgot the word for mom.  I yelled teaspoon.  Dad came in.  I couldn’t fall asleep in his arms.

     I looked back to Amanda, her eyes now focused on her drawing, red crayon inside the lines.  She was good at coloring inside the lines, but it was a duck.  I bet her mom was good at it too.  Amanda was the only one who knew my mom went away.

     Mrs. Zwick took us all outside for recess everyday.  She surveyed the room with a quiet approval of all of us, even if we had been on the time-out stool that day.  She loved us.  Tommy’s swishy pants were swishing.  We all started to fidget when Mrs. Zwick stood up and started to call our names.  The line leader was always first.  As she opened her mouth the room became a vacuum.  Everyone held their breath until…

“Amelia, come to the doorway.  Don’t forget to push your chair in and throw out your cup.”

     Me.  It was me.  Today.  Today it was me.  She called my name.  Today she called my name, it was me today, I was her favorite.  Me.  The line leader.

     I glided across the room, beaming, with my cup in hand.  I tossed my trash into the bin across the room and then turned to walk to the door.  Mrs. Zwick was waiting, already beginning to bend at her knees.  I had never seen her eyes so close to mine.  She hadn’t called any more names.  She gestured for me to come and then stepped to the side of the doorway, so all I could see were yellow-tiled walls.  Suddenly my heart sank and I pulled my arms into my sweatshirt to hold myself, or hug myself, or so I wouldn’t fall apart right there next to our watercolor paintings of endangered animals.

     At the doorway I breathed in hard, hoping that I could float away.  Mrs. Zwick’s eyes were level with mine when I turned.  Green and brown, like a whole forest in a look.

“How’re you doin’, Amelia?”

     I felt like I was choking, like there was no more room for me and her in this moment.  Suddenly I hated her teeth, they looked sharp and dangerous.  I wanted to leave.  I shrugged my shoulders and turned to get back to Amanda and her crayons, she should probably know that ducks are yellow not red anyway, and I’m her best friend so I can tell her.

“Amelia, your dad called the school.  Is there anything you need?”

“No, I’m okay.”  She isn’t asking for me.  Dad told her to.  I’m not her favorite.

“Would you like to stay outside and start the line?”

“Okay,” I said.

     I don’t know what this feeling is but I don’t like it.  I don’t like being the favorite because I’m not the favorite.  I feel like I’m cheating.  I don’t belong at the front of the line ‘cause Dad told her to.

     The class pushed their chairs in and dropped off their cups, I stood against the wall and stared at my shoes as the rest of the class filed out.  I tried to remember where I got them, or why I picked purple instead of red sneakers, but all I could remember was Mom.  Her hands running across the laces, and slipping them over my heels.  Her smile and gentle encouragement as I learned to make bunny ears and cross them under and over and pull it was suddenly the only thing I could see.

“Ready, class?”

      My mom’s favorite shirt was purple.  If I squinted real hard, my shoes looked like the same velvet.  Her hugs were like velvet-covered clouds, or marshmallows, or marshmallow clouds.  I used to fall asleep there.  I wonder if I’ll ever sleep like that again.

      When I looked up the whole class was looking at me.  They were ready to go play kickball and tag and sit in the grass talking about what club they could and couldn’t be in because of the secret password.  They could run as fast as they could because if they fell, their scraped knee would get a kiss and an appropriately themed bandaid.

“Amelia are you ready?”

      I kept my head down.  I didn’t want to lead the line anymore.  I didn’t want Mrs. Zwick to see my features curling down around my eyes and corners of my lips.  She would see the cry rising in my throat.  If I said yes, I couldn’t hold it in.  So instead I just kept looking down.

“Amelia?”

      Mom used to say that instead of yelling she would count to ten, and then keep her voice real low and say everything she wanted to say. One. Two. Three. Four.

“Amelia, let’s go.”

Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

     Mrs. Zwick knelt down beside me again. I felt my chest weighted down to my ankles.  She spoke softly.

“Amelia, what’s wrong?”

“I..” The words came to my throat like tiny pineapples, prickly and indescribable.  “I don’t want to be the line leader anymore.”

     For a minute I thought she was going to be angry.  Her eyebrows came together slowly and pulled themselves up towards her curls.  Dad does that when I can’t finish the food I order at diners.  Then she stood up.  She took my hand and walked me to the back and tapped Amanda on the shoulder.  Amanda’s eyes got wide again when she whispered into her ear, I thought maybe Mrs. Zwick told her that ducks are yellow or brown, not red.  But then Amanda walked up to the front of the line and looked back at me, smiling like she was the one who got two cups of juice.  She started walking down the hallway and the class followed.

     Mrs. Zwick’s hand was soft and warm on mine.  She held my hand like she told us to hold the class hamster.  She told us to cradle him, make him warm and welcome.  She still hadn’t let go even when we got to the back of the line.  We walked the whole way to the back door like that, right until we got outside.

     I was never a kid who played with bugs and magnifying glasses.  I cried whenever an earthworm stopped moving.  The first time I saw one laying in a puddle, I carried it in my hands back to my mother’s lap and asked her to fix it.  Instead, she told me we should let it go home.  She put my hand in the dirt and asked me to let go.  I did, because she told me to.

     That day outside was one of those spring days after the rain, when the concrete smells like flowers and flowers smell a little bit like pennies in a jar.  On days like that, it’s hard not to find an earthworm in a puddle.  

     I spent my recess picking up flowers and worms to bury in the grass, the way Mom taught me to.  I was proud to bring them home that way.  Amanda walked over once I had a pile of flowers that you could see from across the baseball field.  She didn’t ask me what I was doing, she just started picking flowers like mine.  Jimmy came over next, he brought two dandelions.  Mary was after that, she picked the white ones from the fence that almost always had bees around them.  I walked away to the puddle next to second base, crouching in the mud to see if there were any more worms to be brought home.  By the time I turned around Julie, Andrew, Scott, Tess, Dylan and Matt were all bringing worms too.  I don’t remember much else.

     It’s been about twenty-five years now since first grade.  I don’t remember my classmate’s last names, or faces, or who was the line leader when we went back inside.  All I remember is that pile of flowers and all the empty puddles that suddenly didn’t look so sad.  It’s strange to think that at six years old my classmates never asked a question, like what were doing or why.  That impromptu funeral is still the closest I’ve come to making sense of my mother’s surrender to cancer.  I started writing this story the day my daughter was born, suddenly dreading the explanation that no one ever gave me, of where my mother had gone and why.  I figure that maybe if she ever is to be without me, maybe she’ll leave earthworms in the grass, and know that I’ve gone home.

Because People Keep Breaking Up Lately

This is for you.  If you, like me, have ever believed something falsely.

I’ve written a million words

Trying to crush them down

To love songs

Trying to take the blackened soot

That rolls off my chin

Stone on top of boulders

Tripping over where it belongs

Like if I put enough pressure

Onto falsely lullabied lovers

I could make my stone cold coal

Into diamonds

I once lifted my tongue

To lesser lips

That ate of me

Drank of me

In gulps and engulfments

Never sips

Til I was less than I was

Without them

Til I disappeared

Amongst the clouds of smoke

That now fade the memory of me

I look sickly in your greys

I thought I was being generous

Not dangerous

I thought I was walking on the safe side

I thought the grass was green

I thought you wanted me to stay

Even when you

Wanted to leave

Everyone has had a mother.
The picture you see here is of Emily Metcalf at Hartford University.  She was the same age there as I am now.  That woman is my mother, and today (Mother’s Day) I’m asking friends and strangers to help me remember her for the wonderful mother, role model, and musician she was.
My mother was a cellist. She fought breast, bone, lung, and brain cancer for almost 12 years until 4 years ago when the illnesses overcame her.  Her memory lives on in the Emily Metcalf Scholarship Fund. This fund and program lets musicians of all ages and experience levels participate in the program she helped build, the program she raised me in and the one she died loving… Music For People. 
This isn’t a guilt trip, it’s just a chance for me to get the word out- help remember her with me and donate if you can.
Click this image to visit the Music For People website, to donate, and read more about my mom.

Everyone has had a mother.

The picture you see here is of Emily Metcalf at Hartford University.  She was the same age there as I am now.  That woman is my mother, and today (Mother’s Day) I’m asking friends and strangers to help me remember her for the wonderful mother, role model, and musician she was.

My mother was a cellist. She fought breast, bone, lung, and brain cancer for almost 12 years until 4 years ago when the illnesses overcame her.  Her memory lives on in the Emily Metcalf Scholarship Fund. This fund and program lets musicians of all ages and experience levels participate in the program she helped build, the program she raised me in and the one she died loving… Music For People.

This isn’t a guilt trip, it’s just a chance for me to get the word out- help remember her with me and donate if you can.

Click this image to visit the Music For People website, to donate, and read more about my mom.

Music Box Woman (back by popular demand)

I was born to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1

Eyes open and listening

My mother said I didn’t cry

Just shook my face into thousands of shapes

Like I programmed all of my emotions there on her stomach

I’ve always been set to music

Wound tightly and spinning in time

Like my life was a journey of ballerinas and music boxes

So before I learned how to walk

I learned how to open latches

Wind up

And press piano keys

Like some children learn to hold spoons

I ate with my hands

My hands were used for learning

For singing before I knew the word song

My parents don’t remember my first word

Said I babbled in six-eight

And laughed in g-major scales

Spoke melody before english

Tried to prove there is a universal language

Began to speak

By memorizing the lyrics of lullabies

My father sang me to sleep

I would lay on my back

Grasping at the notes with my toes

Dad said I never smiled so wide

I could hear in four part harmony 

Before I knew what snow tasted like

He said I rocked myself into fits of infant giggles

Tickled

Touched by song

I wrote my first song when I was nine

The blues

I mourned for the struggles of a modern woman

Wrote lyrics on the backs of my double digit multiplication

Tried so hard to conjure emotion

I made strange and contorted faces

Found the kind of truths that we train our children out of repeating

Found what I thought I had left on my mother’s bloody hospital sheets

My mother played the cello

Four hours a day

“The Swan” is written in the hairs on my scalp

I grew into it

A part of me

When a song gives me the chills

My goosebumps are written in G

Tchaikovsky and the Beatles are filed next one one another in my childhood

Share the same dust

They have a common denominator of dancing barefoot on hardwood

The day my mom rolled up the living room carpet

For just such an occasion

At her funeral I took my shoes off

So I could feel the floorboards under the pedals of the piano

I tried to play a song that sounded like Lennon doing a concerto for Violins

I couldn’t find one

So I wrote it

Sang harder than I’ve ever cried

I Sang

Because there is no past tense for “mother”

Because trying to find God is easier when you can’t spell it

Because “I love you” never resinated long enough

Never seemed to carry as far

And I thought maybe

If I did it right

She would hear it.

I plan to sing at my sister’s wedding

Have sonatas playing down the isle for my own

Bury my father with an extra set of guitar strings

And give birth into a room echoing with Bach

So she can hear us coming

One day I’ll carve boxes out of floorboards

Give them to my children

Paint the ballerinas with glasses and brown hair to remember me by

I’ll try to give them my life in music

And hope that I’ll be given from this world

Dancing on their voices and beachwood

Our first conversation

Was arm in arm about another woman

On our way to friends

With a strange hop-step rhythm

Kicking loose concrete with our heels

And letting a ukulele hang limp

Amongst some of our shoulders

When I met you

You were already dressed as one of my heroes

Sunglasses and curls

Harmonica and melodic drone

My first impression of you

Was an uninvited journey

To the bedside folksongs

My father used to turn into lullabies

I should have known you would soothe me

I should have known you’d be

The kind of man

I’ve always wanted to be proud of

My father used to yell like thunder

So I hid from rain

I’m still afraid of fireworks

My brother

He’s a great guy

But we run like parallel lines

13 years apart

As close as we’re ever going to get

You taught me how to find the sun with angles

You hang tightropes from shadows

And attach them to the moon

You bend my Insight

You see dimensions in atmosphere

Lines

Connections

The primary

How we all come back

To one

Our silence is beautiful

Our music is therapy

Our words are communal

And our worries

Are gently tended

We touch like stitching wounds

I’m healing

My mother

Didn’t let anyone else hold me

For a long time

After I was born

For me

In the ways I am like her

It’s hard to imagine

Another hand that could be a cradle

One day

I want you to hold my son

Carry my daughter

I want them to know the man

I first called a hero