with just our four kids.
After going out for dinner
we played
Cards Against Humanity ‘til 2
in the morning.
That’s how to do
Christmas Eve.
Maybe I’ll tell her
if he can keep up with your kids
for hours of a raunchy card game
he’s a keeper.
After all,
it takes a card from the black stack
and a card from the white stack
to make anything meaningful.
He reaches out again
and touches my hand.
My skin is electrified.
I think that’s a better thing to tell her.
After all,
“’I drink to forget Stephen Hawking talking dirty’
won the first round
on the night of Jesus’ birth”
might not be the thing to tell someone
I’m meeting for the first time.
I think I’ll advise her,
“If you can’t live without his touch,
live with it,
where ever
you live.”
Photo
The bowling balls sound a lot like thunder
before they crash
into the pins.
I tap the air
motioning for the people
on the right
to crowd together
a bit.
I hold the camera up
to my eye.
I press
the button.
Everyone’s squeezed together
under the bar sign
glowing green
as the third oldest of the sisters
holds a score card
over the shoulder of a niece
whose brunette hair almost
covers it.
One of the brothers
with receding hair makes
bunny ears behind
another sister-in-law.
The father,
still wearing rented bowling shoes,
holds the neck of a Coors
with an eighty-year-old
hand.
I no longer
hear the balls
rolling down wooden lanes.
The ADHD kid fidgets
with a bowling score card.
The mom’s single black pearl necklace
is in perfect focus;
she’s flanked by sisters in turquoise
blouses.
They’re a team.
My stomach braids knots.
Another annual bowling party.
There was another S.O.
for a long time.
But this past year
the sister turned down his proposal
in Hawaii
so, it’s just me
on this side.
I’ve been on this side
of the camera
for going on nine years
watching them smile
at the girlfriend
who’s only allowed to look
in through this glass square.
Click.
My finger rises.
“Great one,”
I say.
The youngest sister asks,
“Did you get the ‘Jack’s’ sign in?”
She means the one
over the entrance to the bar.
Jack is their father’s
name.
The sheer mass of them
the worn carpeted entrance
to the bar.
“Yes,” I say,
“I got everything in.”
Cliffhanger
Cliffhangers are life and death
scenes in old movies.
A screaming woman lashed to train tracks
or pushing out a baby on a speeding subway
or the unknown outcome
of an adult child in recovery.
But it can also just be an outdoor sport defying gravity
clinging to a giant granite rock.
Today,
“cliffhanger” moved indoors
made of abstract plastic knobs and colorful
Carapace-like handholds
riveted to 50-foot walls.
A modern art museum
where I was allowed to touch.
Below the bolted Incredible Edibles,
I remembered like Gumby
how to tie a Pathfinder knot and thread the Belay.
“Do this right,” the instructor warned,
“or he will fall to his death.”
Giant fans whirled, blowing gusts
of air down the forged curving
canyons and crevices.
Human spiders hung from blue webs,
their ballet slippers curled around pink and green pebbles
protruding from the wall.
“Uh, I gave birth to him,”
I said.
“Think I’ll keep him safe.”
I hold up a perfect sailor knot
for inspection.
“Ahaar, a real pirate, ma’am.”
And he gave the blue cord
attached to my harness
a hard yank.
My body lurched forward,
the seatbelt-like Belay locked.
The instructor said through a mischievous grin,
“Yep, you’re set. Now one of you
head on up, head on up.”
I have to look up
at my son now.
He’s a grown man.
His cargo shorts bunched around his harness
He’s tied the long umbilical cord through it.
His life line threaded
up,
up,
up,
through a pulley attached
to the speckled roof,
and descended back down
to my own black harness and
seatbelt stopping gizmo.
“Belay on?” he asked.
“Belay on,” I said.
“Ready to climb?”
I parroted the words
I’d just learned.
Aerosmith blared
and the pink, green, yellow,
and purple holds lead the way
to the ceiling.
I pulled in the growing slack in the life line
between us.
“Ready,” he said.
I scrambled to reel in the excess
cord as he scampered
up the wall.
My heart pounded.
His life was once again
in my hands
with the pleated blue cord
attached to each of our
bellies.
I have to do this right,
I thought,
it’s important,
life or death
like a cliffhanger.
He looked over his shoulder
and called,
“Ready.”
“Lean back,”
I said.
Hand over hand I let out the uncut umbilical cord
while he repelled down.
Then it was my turn
to trust the miniscule toeholds
to hold my weight.
I pushed off,
hoping I could catch another
ridge by fingertip.
Then I was stuck.
There was nowhere else to go.
Even with a jump
I couldn’t reach a single
melted Lego.
I looked down over my shoulder,
“Okay,”
I said.
He could let me down
now.
“Nah,
you’re not going to give up now,
look how close you are.”
He stood way down there,
waiting like an echo
of my own words
when I taught him to walk
on a horizontal plane.
There was nothing else I could do.
I looked up
and around
for anything
I thought I could grab
if I pushed off with a toe.
I forced myself to clutch an impossible
tiny protrusion
of recycled material
stuck to the fake rock cliff.
In triumph I whooped
when I high-fived
the twinkling-starred ceiling.
“Okay, lean back,”
he said.
I knew he was smiling.
The rope tying us together glided
me back to the indoor/outdoor carpet.
I hugged him,
Now that I was a cliff hanger
maybe
I can be a mother.
Halloween
Halloween was the only holiday
I took off every year.
I was going to be a better mother.
Costumed as a belly dancer,
witch,
gypsy,
matching my daughter’s.
Sacred rituals
were supposed to give children
security.
I conceived her
with clean ovum.
Hers have endured
numerous toxic chemicals.
Nine months
not one drop of alcohol
no pain meds
for her delivery.
I’m going to have
Samhain grandchildren.
A warning label,
Australia belly birth mark.
A stamp from wherever she was sent.
Tin Heart
Wood squeaks on wood
when I pull the drawer out.
Under the strap-on, fist-sized dildo
and purple nipple clamps,
I find two more wads of Reynolds wrap.
Black creases in the foil balls,
like the tarnished silver in my china cabinet.
I’d told her,
stuck waiting for a train to pass,
that if she lived with me
she couldn’t work as a dominatrix.
She’d pouted,
like when she had to share a room
with three other girls
at a Rainbow Grand Assembly.
She’d worn a powder blue Jessica McClintock gown
with Sponge Bob bloomers underneath.
I thought she understood.
The drawer leaned down
on the sand-colored carpet.
At least there were condoms,
different sized squares
promising diverse pleasures.
I should be working on my parenting lecture
for the La Leche League conference
where I’m going to tell
all those parents
how the hell to raise
their little darlings.
Instead I crush
another charred chunk of foil
into the others.
There are enough whips, paddles,
and vibrators to stock a store.
Our housekeeper has folded
her bustier over the latex outfits.
A Dios, Maria’s praying
for her mortal soul.
There’s no more candles
to light in churches.
They’ve been burned empty
under the pipes.
My own mother told me yesterday
over the Cinco de mayo parrot
that kept falling into the garlic dip,
that it wasn’t my fault,
then gave me details
of the government’s imminent Sunday laws
that will send her
and other congregants
fleeing to the mountains
for their lives.
I bought a new valerian root tea today.
Maybe I’ll drink less wine tonight.
Jesus drank wine,
made more
when he ran out.
I hear
he hung out with addicts
and whores.
My son,
in this Overstock suit and tie,
volunteered at the felony expungement
clinic at the crackheads-for-Jesus
church in San Bernardino.
My mother went bonkers
when he taught
his standing-room only atheist class
at Berkeley.
He won’t talk to his sister,
she’s never been
arrested.
I wonder
if I had a cardiac arrest
if it would make a difference.
I should have accepted
the pain meds for labor.
My heroism
has bought me jack shit.
The torn open Reynolds Wrap box sits
kitty-corner to a pink butt plug
under a bondage bar.
My knuckles turn white.
I squeeze together
all the pieces
of tin foil,
and ask Grandma Barbara,
may she rest in peace,
to forgive me
for wasting rationed goods
and slam down
the lid of the trash can.
Preening
I brush cigarette ash from the shoulder of her heavy pea coat.
“You can’t preen me in this country!” My daughter snaps.
Tiny globs of blue gum across her bottom lip look like Smurf bites, residue from the stick of gum I gave her in lieu of a shower and real hygiene.
This meeting, if he’s still willing to see her, could set her future. She spends two hours showering, shaving, sliding into dresses, and applying perfect makeup before “scenes” at fetish parties. She’s so distant standing there three feet from me. This stranger, who grew inside me, came out and stared into my eyes as she nursed.
“Does she have a needle in her arm now?” My grandmother’s wise words of four years ago ring in my ears. My daughter had been accepted to all 5 London universities she applied to after rehab stints checked her out of UCI.
I take a quick swipe at ear wax clinging to an earlobe. She recoils.
“Your boot strings need tying.” I hop so I don’t step on the bouncing straps flying in every direction.
She looks like she might hiss.
“That’s not preening,” I protest.
We duck in the back seat of a cab.
I strain at the cab driver’s Caribbean/London rolled syllables. “Why’d you come to London for university?”
“It’s far from home.”
“Don’t they have good colleges in California?”
“It’s far from home,” she repeats.
“Didn’t they have the major you wanted in C
alifornia?”
“London’s far away from family.”
I stare over at her phone. She points to the adult-child sex offender’s paragraph. She’s brushing up on research abstracts of the professor she’s now 16 and a half minutes late for her interview with. I grip the sticky door handle as the cab clings to the left curb whizzing around stopped traffic. He slams on the brakes. Makes a 3, no 4-point turn, inches from the massive tires of a lorry.
Oh my god, not only is she late for her interview with the chair of the Criminal Psychology department at University College (redundant if you ask me) but we’re going to die before she gets her shit together!
The cabbie pulls up to a building older than anything but adobe in the U.S.
In front of the graduate department that’s been awarded a million and a half pounds for research. She glares at me over her shoulder.
“Don’t come in with me,” she snarls.
“Oh. I’ll just go for a walk.”
The daffodils are blooming in the park across the street. Moss carpets the trunks of the bare trees. The wooden benches are pierced with brass plaques memorializing dead people. All parents still hoping their children will make something of themselves.
Slab City
I drive the six hours for my week-late Mother’s Day gift. My son’s soundtrack for our road trip starts with a podcast on venomous reptiles. We drive into the desert. He’s brought K rations and bad-estrogen-producing water bottles, so I’m guessing a mimosa brunch isn’t on the docket.
“Turn right at the next road,” he says and looks back down and taps at his phone. Bombay Beach Club turns out to be a resort destination for the living dead. Even though the shoreline stretches as far as I can see and the water meets the sky like any other real sea, an unbroken line of dead bodies marks the high tide line, overlapping Tilapia fish in various stages of decay, their vacant eyes wishing me Happy Mother’s Day. Crushed bird and fish bones pretend to be a white sandy beach.
It’s silent. No bird sounds. No children splashing each other in the water. No motor boats racing. No wait staff to fetch me something stronger than a mimosa. Twisted salt-covered rebar are ghosts of a once star-studded resort, the sticky stench claims my clothing for Goodwill donations.
Nothing’s green. Not a blade of grass, washed up seaweed, a tree or shrub, only gray death that hints at what the salty water has reclaimed. The ooze allows a glimpse of a beam from a once bustling restaurant.
To break the oppressive silence, or to muffle the moan of a zombie, my son plays a selection of hits from the 40s. He’s brought me here for revenge for locking him out of his AOL account 15 years ago.
We drive past abandoned homes, all grey except for the graffiti. One says in big blue letters, “Bukowski Lives.” I hope he’s not reanimated.
The next podcast is on the history of the game of Monopoly, stolen from a nice Quaker lady, who knew? She didn’t have an attorney for a son.