Author: jelizabeth

– Anger, on ice

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Ice

by Jane Kokernak

In this house
I make the ice. I
fill the tray. Full
rows shimmer and
tremble. Across
to freezer, drops tip
out. All day against
heat a compressor
hums and once snaps
at air. Within, molecules
slower and slower align
until crystal.

Sweating, in one arc
you swing into kitchen,
hands into freezer.
Out comes a matrix
rigid with ice. You
twist. With the crack
of a stick cracking,
matter resists — then
splinters. Your face
relaxes. Your chest
rises and falls with
breath. Water snakes
into cubes:
sighs.

The ice the glass
the water glitter. You
drink. Inside me
solids collide
drift and float.

*

—–

Author’s note: At one time, I was writing poetry like crazy. It seemed to be the way to capture and compress feeling. (The compression was really important to me, as an activity and effect.) Although I don’t think in poems so much anymore, I do believe that the sound of words and prose is important, and when I revise my work, I read it out loud, or read it deliberately in my head. I want to hear the words do something, and I want it to sound like something you could feel. Meaning alone is not enough. Back to this poem: it’s about anger — in particular, how I experience it. A deep freeze. No outbursts or sudden conflagrations for me, just a gathering into this cold black center. An outburst — “the crack of a stick cracking” —  might be more satisfying and productive, if I could pull it off. Can’t. Eventually, it lets go.

Thanks to Kevin Saff on Flickr for his image “Ice Cubes.”

– Your attention, please

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Thank you for your attention to my work.

That’s the line that ended the cover letter I sent with an essay to an editor who had read “Tethered” online, dropped me an e-mail, and encouraged me to send her something else. (I finally did.)

I stared at that sentence for a long time. Yes, it is gracious — anyone who went to public school in an era when students learned to compose and format a letter (do you know what the five parts are called?) — and concludes the body of the letter appropriately.

I wondered, though, as I stared and stared at the line, if that’s what I really want: attention.

A writer cannot actually be a writer without an audience. While I and others might write to organize our thoughts (see Seth Godin), I could also do that in a private journal. But that for me would not be enough. An idea written down is not somehow alive unless someone reads it.

Is that the secret function of an audience? Attention? I think of that as something children want. And yet there I was, grateful for it. Continue reading →

– Trouble with avatars

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After Christmas, I made myself a Wii Mii on the kids’ new console and thought, “There’s something not quite ‘Jane’ with this avatar.” No medical device, and no way to make or add one.

On New Year’s Day, we went to see Avatar: 3D as a family. I enjoyed the movie, yet it bugged me. And while I’ve been reading lots of smart commentary on the web about the film and its racism, sexism, and colonialism, I’ve come across nothing on the disability of protagonist Jake Sully, an ex-Marine in a wheelchair, and its relationship to the plot.

So I wrote about all this trouble with avatars, here.

—-

Note: If you don’t have Nintendo Wii and still want to see what your Mii might look like, try My Avatar Editor, which Rosemary pointed me to.

– Rear windows

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On this night, from our second-floor rear window and into their rear window I look and see not the lit tv screen or the polished floors or a body on a couch but female legs in red stockings and dancing shoes and his legs, in blue jeans, stepping in time with hers.

On other nights, from the same rear window I look out over neighbors’ rooftops and see tiny squares of light, in this house or that, signaling who’s awake. Sometimes I see a head bent over a desk: Is that the peaceful pose of work done in solitude or the defeated one of work done under the midnight gun? Most of the time the lit windows are empty, and I must guess at who is up in that household and why. Insomnia. Sickness. New baby. A fight. Love. Continue reading →

– Girls around Jamaica Pond

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Grace and I dropped Lydia off downtown at her rehearsal and then drove back through Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, the sun in my eyes the whole time.

On Perkins Street, as we approached Jamaica Pond, Grace said, “Let’s stop here and walk around.”

I, thinking selfishly of afternoon coffee, tried to reason her out of this impulse: “We don’t have hats. Our heads will get cold.”

Grace was undeterred. “Look at all this hair. Our heads will be warm enough.”

Try again. “I have gloves, but you don’t.”

“Mom, look at all the gloves on the floor back here. And a scarf.”

I parked the car; we tiptoed down the snowy slope to the path. It was 4:30 in the afternoon and already the snow was taking on the blue of the air, and the trees were as dark as espresso against the sky and frozen pond. I persuaded Grace to stand near the shore and get her picture taken. As I posed her this way and that way, I spotted in my peripheral vision some walkers coming down the path to my left, and I heard a woman’s voice chirp, “Taking a picture!”

There must have been something in her voice that invited me, because, without stopping to think or ask permission, I turned and said, “And now I’m taking a picture of you!” I snapped the woman and her companions.

Linked up, Jamaica Pond, 1.7.2010

The three of them looked over my shoulder as Miranda, the woman with the scarf and sunglasses, dictated her e-mail address to me. Whoosh, I sent the photo to this stranger. Continue reading →

– Open job ticket

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Shawn, the electrician, comes in the front door lugging his toolbox and three light bars. “Are you excited?”

“This is the hard part,” I say. “We’re in the middle. So, er, no.”

Our kitchen has been undone since late December: food and dishes put away in boxes, tile ripped off the floor and walls, vintage appliances carted away, and cabinet doors unhinged and discarded.

We’re undertaking what I’m calling a recession renovation. (My phrasing is inspired by Marcia telling me she’s “recession reading”: getting to books she owns already and no bookstore splurges.) This project is not a total re-do; instead, it’s piecemeal. New this and new that, but some old remains.

Threshold (Jan. 2010)

New doors have already been hung on the old cabinets. New floor tile has been ordered. New countertop: Formica™ will have to do.

The project started. It’s underway. The last lick of paint is a long way off.

We’re in the middle.

I find the middle, of any creative project, to be a wide, rough patch (even this one, in which other laborers, and not me, are doing the lion’s share of the physical work).

Beginnings burst with energy. There is a decisive break with the old. The outcome shimmers ahead on a horizon only imagined.

Endings, too, gather energy to them. The finish line is in sight. Adrenalin surges.

The middle slumps. Continue reading →

– Pucker up, baby

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Grace and I are sitting at my parents’ dining room table, eating cheese and crackers. Grace is also, as usual, writing on a notepad.

“Mom, I have a question,” she says.

“What?” I reply hesitantly, expecting the unanswerable.

“What do you do when life gives you lemons?”

Oh, that old one? I think. I say, instead, “Make lemonade.”

“Nope.” Grace rolls her eyes at my obvious answer. “You pucker.”

And, indeed, you do.