Literary as hell.
catching dusk clouds
side-swiping indiscriminate thru
a line of others more distinct in their
trajectory—
then the obstructed lengths
unpossessing downhill too, or the
bristly blind of snow up to Here
that’ll curb your cigarette break bound
by slush overlooked too, and the dirty
distillation of static that’ll obscure all
the breakup songs to come
straining from car’s radio
for you to love thru
It was an old three-story brick house
in one of America’s dying towns,
but we could afford the apartment
on the second floor.
And though it was a disaster:
the plastic Woolworth’s dish drain
melted onto one of the electric stove’s
burners, the bed’s one foot propped up
on the Bible, the fish tank with its three
inches of green water and window drapery
lying inside, drowned in algae and neglect,
and though we had to scrape and toss the
water-stained wallpaper, refresh and repaint
the entire place, to me it was the best—
with the stained-glass window that turned the
living room gold in the afternoon with its sliding
wooden doors that divided the living space into
two separate rooms.
And though the roaches finally forced us to move,
I still remember those nights, in the living room,
sitting together
on the sofa of the first living room set
we bought as young bride and groom,
so happy to be together, on our own,
living proof that dreams really do come true.
_________
P.C. Scheponik is a lifelong poet who lives by the sea with his wife, Shirley, and their shizon, Bella. His writing celebrates nature, the human condition, and the metaphysical mysteries of life. He has published six collections of poems: Psalms to Padre Pio (National Centre for Padre Pio, INC), A Storm by Any Other Name and Songs the Sea has Sung in Me (PS Books, a division of Philadelphia Stories), and And the Sun Still Dared to Shine (Mazo Publishers), Stained-Glass Faith (Alien Buddha Press) and Seeing, Believing, and Other Things (Adelaide Books). His work has also appeared in numerous literary journals. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee.
The paths wove through the vignettes like veins, around the koi pond, the stone retaining walls, the avenue of white pebbled and sandstone pavers, and down to the creek, where an arched bridge linked to a small island with a treehouse encircled by hundreds of daisies. Rebecca and Stephen had no ambitious landscaping plans when she’d inherited the estate. But after close inspection, they’d discovered the bones of the existing garden, uncovered its harsh lines and soft curves, and, after three long years, had opened their botanical paradise to the public.
Rebecca believed gardens created themselves. Where trees had grown over time and brought more shade, the plants struggling to prosper beneath were moved. Where seeds were dropped, self-sown, and thrived, they were left. Advertisement brochures referred to their garden as ‘a living work of art’. To her, the garden was a structure to sustain life and was in some ways more important than her own. And while she and Stephen won awards for their landscape designs, and were featured on gardening shows and in magazines, there was one vignette of their garden that visitors were forbidden to enter.
Oh please. Not that question.
No, I am not fine, I twisted my ankle leaving the bus, I have two dentist appointments this week, the ATM swallowed my card and I have a headache. I am not fine at all but I have to put on a brave smile and say that I totally am.
Or: Yes, I feel great today, I got brand new teeth, a promotion, and I won 10 euros in the lottery. Again, I have to clench those brand new teeth and rave that I am fine and parrot the question back. It reminds me of the ritual dance of the red-crowned cranes.
You may say that people are asking because they are polite and they care. Not at all! I mean, yes, they are polite but they obviously want to hear only “I am fine”, so no, they don’t care.
Actually, they don’t want to hear any details, good or bad. Well, I don’t expect them to care, everyone has problems of their own. But then why ask and spend time on this dance?
You may also say that to argue with the language itself is silly. “How are you” is used as a friendly greeting. But still, I cannot understand why usual greetings like “hello” or “good morning” are not good enough. If we want to add something else, why not make it more personal or more specific, for example: “Today is very hot, are you feeling well?” Just to show that we care about each other.
I don’t know why it bothers me now more than before. Probably, because of the pandemic. People revalued a lot of things, including communication. All those formulas, rituals, and clichés bubbled to the surface and became more visible.
In my opinion, asking a question without any interest in the answer is hypocrisy, plain and simple. Tell me, why it is such an essential criterion for good manners? I help people in need, collect and separate my recycling, and donate to charities. Am I good enough? Or without the proper “I am fine, thank you, and you?” I am not part of this great civilization and should be sent to a remote village where I belong?
I see it as a game. Or a kind of password that helps polite people to recognize each other in a crowd, like spies. For me, the world is already weird enough, sorry.
Mondays are even worse, like it being Monday is not enough. On Mondays, another question is added to “How are you?” – “How was your weekend?”Come on, do you really want to hear about my weekend, or you are trying to distract and soften me before asking me to do something for you?
After this ritual of exchange of pleasantries, it is not so easy to say no, is it? Without realizing it, you feel obliged, even before the real conversation starts. Very clever. Now it is not only insincere- but also- manipulation.
This is why I developed my personal answer to “How are you?”
“I am fine so far, but it will depend on what you say next“.
You will not believe how fast the boundary is set.
Well, I need some kind of shield in this brutal world.
_________
Maria Tolosa lives in Luxembourg and sometimes thinks she can write something better than a grocery list. English is not her mother tongue, so she is still fascinated with it, poor thing.
I can’t recall why. Or when I bought
Hippocrates’ Epidemics. I was on
a tangent that should have taken me east
of Athens to Perinthos on the Sea of Marmara.
To get there, I would have to stop over
in Crannon. About Crannon, I know
nothing, which is basically how I’ve
always traveled. Floundering from
country to country. Blind to where I was going.
After Italy, why not Hungary?
I passed the time surrounded by
Soviet architecture. Buildings
stripped of ornament uniformly at war
with old world charm. My host, a woman
and her boy. He didn’t walk, couldn’t feed
himself. His silence. Her patience.
I felt oddly blessed and cursed. Lightning.
I’ve been struck more than once. Spinoza’s
famous question: What can a body do?
Bite my tongue. The toll it takes
to come back from the dead.
On the phone, I hear my partner offer
his sympathies. There’s been a significant
uptick in requests for advance directives.
The neighbors left for Charlotte a week
after the schools closed. To read the mail,
we put on gloves. The house reeks of chlorine.
We’re still under orders to hunker down.
For how long, no one knows.
When this is over, I hope to visit Perinthos,
a hanging cliff-town in Turkey, overlooking
a luminous sea, harboring every
ounce of light the heavens will spare.
There’s no surprise
attack—it has a bird’s-eye
view. It will be all fight—dodge
and parry, dodge, and parry.
Rain is multitudinous and fast, unafraid
to fall. It can shift
the ground out from under you,
raise a breathless wave above
your head, pin your shoulders
down, crawl inside your body. Wait
for it to spend itself—drive it into
ground, use its body to raise
an army of grasses, glinting
their wet swords to sky.
This happened back when I was living in Cleveland working at a big theatre there. There’spretty much only one big theatre in Cleveland. Anyway, I was working under the theatre’s artistic director who I would travel with to theatre festivals all around the country, and this particular time we were at the First Look festival at Steppenwolf in Chicago. This was like the first year they did the festival, which was 2011. At any rate, it’s the opening night and there’s two plays back to back playing in their garage space, which as you can maybe guess, was a one-time parking garage converted to a theatre space. It was pretty rugged as far as top-tier regional theatre goes, but I think that was also the appeal. So the artistic director, let’s call him Dan, and I are sitting in our seats, which happen to be in the first row of this semi in the round configuration, which means the audience sits on three sides of the stage, and we’re sitting on one side of the stage so there’s people sitting on the other side facing us, and Dan nudges me and I look at him and he nods to this Asian woman on the other side of the stage facing us.
I was supposed to be the subject
Of a painting. Something with a bit
Of haze, maybe a light red tint,
A background of reeds leading
To open water. Birds – but way off,
And painted more precisely than
Anything in the foreground. Perhaps I
Would be in a dress, or draped
Like the goddess Diana, or possibly
Delicately naked, twisted
At the hip, seen from the back.
There could be a tree, perhaps Spanish
Moss. The painter is yet to decide.
But I have been cut out of the production.
The figure now is to be nondescript,
The light all second hand. There will be
Something ominous closing in. Had I been
The subject, the painting’s elements
Would have conspired against me. My own
Children, regarding the painting in place of
Lunch, would not have recognized me.
But for me to have known that the effort
Was mine, who the misty unrecognizable
Woman was, and the effort to gather it all
Together, would have been comforting.
Nothing To See Here
In June 2015, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Surgery, Chemo, Radiation, Reconstruction, and More Surgery followed. Between then and now, I wrote Cancer, I’ll Give You One Year: A Non-Informative Guide to Breast Cancer, A Writer’s Memoir In Almost Real Time.
Unraveling
People ask how cancer has changed my life. Am I more religious? Have I forsaken sugar? Given up red meat? What’s with sex?
It’s in the book, but:
The road trip part first: I’ve always loved travel. But now, I crave the jammed-in-the-car/free-hotel-breakfast/seven-hour-stretches–of-highway. I want to craft memories for my children. I want to unravel maps with them, holding hands in White Sands or before Renoir. I know life is a privilege.
But Introversion is new to me. I’ve always been extroverted, social.
Cancer has rendered me insular. There are medical reasons, like exhaustion, like incessant hot flashes. However, there are others: I just want to be with Tim, my husband. I’m a little nervous to be out there alone. I do it sometimes, venture into the world. I do writer things. I flew to Portland for a conference, went to Kentucky for a teaching gig even. But it wasn’t easy, and I missed my small world: family, pets.
(Do you know how many times Tim has attended my readings? Like, a gazillion. Because he’s had to go to every single one of them.)
So, I rarely go out past dark alone. Cancer has left me stumbling at dusk, longing for middle-aged marriage, a cup of tea, Tim, and his nightly bowl of cereal.
Unintentionally or maybe intentionally, I have made it a hard thing to maintain a friendship with me. With some trepidation, I admit that Tim is my world. Saying that—admitting that—frightens me. I love my steadfast friends, the persevering ones, the other introverts. And I’m wary of the vulnerability of my position, my reliance on some guy. Really?
Just the same: I’m an introvert now.
Cancer demanded of me that I get my house in order—because I was going to spend a lot of time in it.
Is this an essay on marriage?
No.
It’s an essay on writing under the cancer rubric.
It’s an essay on road trips.
It’s an essay on writing about road trips under the cancer rubric.
You try to steer Cyndi in her Hulk costume away from the house three doors down where the pediatrician lives. He opens the door and pulls an avocado and a toothbrush out of a basket and tosses them into her pillowcase. He says, “Happy Halloween.”
Cyndi thanks him, but you can’t help yourself. You say, “You know it takes a special kind of asshole to give a child a lecture instead of a piece of candy.” You point into his basket overflowing with the Earth’s bounty. “Is that a beet?”
He cocks his head. “What? Did you have a couple before you took your kid out trick or treating?”
Of course, you did, but only because you forgot it was Halloween, and anyway, you thought you’d mouthwashed the smell away. Apparently not. “Yes, madam,” you say, “but tomorrow, I’ll wake up sober, and you’ll still be a shithead.” The quotation is right on the top of your head because you’ve been teaching Churchill in your graduate seminar for the last two weeks. You know you got it wrong and the “madam” probably confused the guy a little, but it feels like a good retort, so you spin on the back heel and catch up with Cyndi who’s sitting on the front lawn.
By now, the guy’s slammed his door, so you say to her, “If you want, we can throw the produce through that fucker’s front window.”
“No, Dad, no. I’m the peaceful Hulk.” This is probably why she drew a Mercedes Benz symbol on the chest of her costume. She brings the avocado up to her nose and inhales and smiles and then lifts it up to you.
You take it and breathe it in, and it fills you up. “You make a good point, Gumdrop, and besides there’s more loot to be taken on this street.”
She takes it back and smells it once more. “It’s so good,” she says. “It’s just so fucking good.”
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