On Occasion, by Susan Currie

Inspired by the poem “On Occasion,” by Grace Paley

 
On occasion, I wake in the night and wonder if we are living in virtual reality. I read that Elon Musk thinks we are living in the “Matrix.” On occasion, I think I see something out of the corner of my eye — something just out of sight or something at the edge of my vision shifts. Is this a glitch in the software of my virtual reality?

On occasion, I wonder if those who are long gone come back to check on us, to see what we’ve been up to in their absence. Once on my mother’s birthday, a framed photo she gave me fell on the floor. It was on the fireplace mantel and seemed to leap off as if she were demanding I pay attention to the day. Was this a shift in virtual reality or just an old house shifting? I like the idea of her invisibly sweeping the frame off the mantel, stamping her foot and asking, “Where is my birthday cake?” I made a small lemon ricotta cake for her and ate the entire thing myself.

On occasion, I have had an out-of-body experience. So, maybe we are, each of us, living in a virtual reality game that intersects with others’ reality. There is an article in a recent New Yorker about out of body experiences and I am afraid to read it. I don’t want to have another one. Once when I was a teenager, I awoke to find I was floating on the ceiling looking down at myself. “Is that what my hair looks like?” I thought. The last time was a few years ago when I seemed to be floating down the stairs in our house. I kept trying to go down each step but my feet floated in front of me.

On occasion, I make the mistake of sharing these experiences with someone I hardly know — it often ensures that I won’t see them again.

On occasion, I think we are all living in a science fiction novel where the characters have come to life. After all, what do you think about a place called “The Preventorium” — a place I knew well when I was very young — where all the children have the same exact haircut, wear little white bloomers and shirts, march single file everywhere with hands on hips? I know what you’re thinking: “Children of the Corn,” right? Or some other sci-fi movie.

On occasion, I wonder if we humans are the least intelligent species and all the animals understand us and each other, while we can only understand other humans, and often not very well. Crows can recognize faces, chickens plot out their exact territory, dogs learn to guide us to what they need and want but we only guess at what they know. Maybe they are smart enough in science experiments to teach the researchers what they want them to know.

On occasion, I think about what it feels like to be a plant or a flower in the rain. Once I lay on our patio in a rainstorm to see if I could imagine being a plant.

On occasion, I think about the elaborate pastries and cakes made before baking powder and baking soda were discovered — were they discovered or created? Now that is something else to wonder about on some occasion.

On occasion, I like to say some of my favorite words aloud, even when there are other people present: “CAKE” “SATISFACTION” “CHANGE.” If I had done this at work, it would have been a problem, but at the grocery store, for example, people just move away carefully. I like the words with a “ch” sound like sandwich. When I was a teenager, two of my friends came for a visit and wanted to share all the new dirty words they had learned. I made the mistake of telling them some of my favorite words. They just looked at each other. One said to me, “You look normal, but you are weird.” I agreed happily, telling them I was complimented that they thought I looked normal. Then I told them it’s a good thing I do look normal because that way, they never knew what I was thinking. Later, one of these girls told me at school that her mother didn’t want her to come to my house anymore.

On occasion, I think about some of the games I invented as a child, like the time two little girls and I used a combination of airplane glue (my brother’s), a bucket of tar taken from a construction site across the street, and feathers I had collected from the ground outside my grandmother’s hen house, to create “symbols” on every air conditioning unit on the street. The symbols were for safe air to go into the house and it seemed logical that the air conditioning unit was the perfect vehicle.

On occasion at night, I go to a window and look for lighted windows as a sign I am not the only insomniac worrying about virtual reality — well perhaps others are not worrying about that but are simply awake in the night, looking at the moon and stars or clouds or silent snowfall or fireflies in the summer, or simply waiting for dawn to come and take away the unrealities of the dark. 

Simple, Perfect, Peaceful Harmony, by Marty Blue Waters

There are many jobs that have to be done even though they would never be something you would choose to do, if you had that choice. Life is full of them, especially after a major reality check -- like moving from a big house into a small apartment.

One of my favorite TV shows at the moment is "Hoarders: Buried Alive." I think that's the full name of it, although I may have made up the "buried alive" part just because that's how I feel right now. I turn the sound off of that creepy show and put Mozart or Bach or Puccini or Pink Floyd on my CD player and turn up the volume. Then I go to work in that slow pace that is the only pace that works for this kind of boring job.

Don't have anyone else try to help you sort through all your beautiful and/or strange collections. They will get impatient with your odd fascinations and try desperately to speed you up. They can help with other stuff, like carrying heavy bins down the stairs, packing them into the car, and driving them away to charity or re-use places that will find new people to appreciate your special things and give them a new home. But only you can decide what goes and what gets to hang around with you a while longer.

Glance at the TV and take in a house piled to the ceiling with stinking, broken garbage bags, random junk from yard sales, and rotten food feeding hordes of cockroaches and mice. Get a load of the thousands of squirming maggots some poor soul just uncovered and shudder. Then take a look at your stacks of music, art books, notebooks, toys, etc. and feel superior for a moment. Appreciate that at least you can identify everything in the piles of stuff before you and that you don't need a fly swatter to keep the bugs at bay.

Close your eyes, tune yourself to the music in the air, and re-enter that monochromatic zone where focusing on one tiny paperweight for 30 seconds is not a waste of time ... as long as it also goes through the final acid test of "present needs/keep" vs. "collective excess/let go." Give it a kiss and either put it on your desk or into a bye-bye bin. Then, immediately pick up another beautiful thing and make the same final decision, again and again and again. Eventually, everything will find its way to a new life. Either with you or someone else.

After you've cleared this overwhelming mess up a bit, you'll start rediscovering the magic of empty space here and there. Feng Shui will naturally carve its way into the room and show you how to arrange the survivors of your material past into simple, perfect, peaceful harmony. Then you can sleep deeply every night like a happy baby. And wake up each morning to a cozy room full of inspiration, potential, and joy. Life is good!

Letter in Pateawot, by Rob Sullivan

The writing suggestion was to write a letter in a language you make up. And then translate it.


Ublate Hindingus,

Hindingus, mot flam bittear, yap pergoin ut qua ti on. Ubbe tondral qui utino swarlb papayshewn.

Pakipan pai pakipan lashfotay bultmo ut farrah deutrino. Mashiman tie domtiti rentch ateasi sak jambote. Dway susay blay, sonne utangi blaypone.

Caipanni luipope kwai umma slyslyqui chanse goran.

Tweg pepe paka wot,

Shandwat




Dear Hindingus,

My dear friend, please know our hearts are one. Sad news traveled quickly of your recent loss.

Know and know well that your needs are our own. Your mom was like a mother to everyone who got to know her. We were family then, and you are family forever.

Please use the love of us all to fill the hole in your heart.

Until time is no more,

Shandwat

3 poems, by Heather Boob

1

Walk gratefully
away —
when you have finally
learned the lesson.
Even if it has exposed you.
For this naked Truth
is now free
to swim bare-skinned
in a silky sea,
and your heart —
now the mast —
bravely sets sail
on the winds of change.

2

Perhaps I love her deceptive softness —
The way she keeps changing her mind
untethered and unwilling
to surrender
her pushing and pulling
dragging me through the Mud

Perhaps I love the mud bath —
A chance to let the earth penetrate me
the closest I have come to the Creator
Earth-bound body
made up of water
Reaching for the root of my existence

Perhaps I love the reaching
For it is what I have always
known. And the quieted comfort I feel
from a lifetime of wanting is
the perfect preface to this
letting go

3

(I fill my glass again)
Although it is not my only option,
I choose
Happiness.
And the heartbreak and despair that has been lingering
in heavy air (which requires me to carry around
a paper lunch bag to aid in
breathing — in and out, uniformly
folded in my back pocket
in case of emergencies)
must also be welcomed here.
For it, too, reminds me to breathe
in and out. Repeat forever —
(I fill my glass again) in hopes
to become (more and more cockeyed with gratitude)



NOTE: inspiration came from a number of different poems, by a variety of poets. The very last phrase, about becoming cockeyed with gratitude, is borrowed from Billy Collins (“As If To Demonstrate An Eclipse”).

Things That Linger, by Nancy Osborn

Inspired by the poem “Adios,” by Naomi Shihab Nye, which contains the line:
"Think of things that linger: leaves, / cartons and napkins, the damp smell of mold."



the sound of the final chord of the piece by Chopin, filled with sharps that cause my fingers to stretch to reach the black keys

the smell of yeast as the bread dough breathes and expands in the mixing bowl

the slight tension in my back even as I hear my yoga teacher remind us to just be, just do nothing, just breathe

the brightness to the west after the sun has set behind the hills, letting us continue to sit on the porch even as the darkness creeps from the east

the scent of sunshine in clothes brought inside from the clothesline

the moist trails on the garden stepping stones showing us the paths the snails took before dawn

the echoes left behind by thunder as the next flash of lightning crosses the sky, followed by the after-image brightness of that flash

the pieces of thread that litter the floor after a sewing project is finished

the memory of the softness of my mother's cheek the last time I caressed it in a goodbye

the mysteriousness of ghost images in an inadvertent double-exposure, something that never happens with digital photos

the memory of myself jumping rope, joyfully, easily even as I sometimes now find my walking pace slow as knees speak up and ask me to pay attention to them

the way the fingers of the waves seem to grasp the sand as the tide goes out, keeping their hold on the land as long as possible

the shimmer of chalk dust in the air after cleaning the classroom erasers

the welcome coolness of shade even as I walk beyond it into the sunlight

the scent of basil on my fingertips long after I've picked and shredded the leaves for pesto

the fading pencilled notes in an old college textbook, carefully written to remind me of some valuable insight but making no sense to me now

the fragile paper-y wasp nest after the first frost

last week's collection of fruit and vegetable peelings, as they are slowly eaten by the worms in the compost heap

the desire to make sense of the world

my foot still feeling that pebble in my shoe even after I've shaken it out onto the sidewalk

the burning sweetness that continues to bite your tongue even after you spit out an Atomic fireball

the scent of pine when you walk on a soft, padded trail of needles

the warmth left in the cloth napkin after smoothing its sprinkled dampness with an iron

the film of molasses in the measuring cup when I am making brown bread

the French verb conjugations from 55 years ago, chanted out loud with my classmates, for which I now have no use

the taste of glue after I've sealed another letter to my sister

the glorious feeling of freedom I felt the first time I rode my bicycle out of our driveway, beyond our block, and into the unknown and unfamiliar streets of our neighborhood

the memories of all the libraries that have welcomed me in over the years: the creak of their wooden floors, the smell of their books, the smoothness of their wooden seats, the quietness that gave me shelter and peace of mind

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Jackdaw, by Saskya van Nouhuys

Inspired by the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens

I
Hopping along the centerline of the road
each step landing, a thunk, with
more weight than possible

II
It stands looking indignant
with dark gray shoulders and a hood
the color of rain-laden clouds

III
Monitoring the goings on
from a bare branch
through tiny tangerine eyes

IV
A single sharp “caw” lending perspective
to the urban drone
of cars and of heat exchangers

V
A single sharp “caw” that disrupts
the perfect melodies of songbirds,
absolutely

VI
Standing on one foot,
head tipped to peer through one eye,
at a flat dead viper

VII
Perched on a knee-high fence,
raising and lowering its wings, shifting
from one foot to the other, attentive to each bite
of scone I take, it waits

VIII
One on each side of the road, taking turns.
In the interval between cars each bird hops to the center to have
a few hurried bites
of freshly killed kin

IX
A disarray of feathers on the ground
and nothing else.  I am embarrassed
by the private light soft down
left exposed in death

X
A blustering flock of seagulls noisily harvest
the bugs brought forth by the tractor’s plow.
The jackdaw lands and they scatter.

XI
I lie in bed at dawn
in the hot heavy silence of a mounting summer rainstorm.
A lonely jackdaw calls. From far away
another calls

XII
A jackdaw moves across the sky carrying a slice of pizza, soundlessly

XIII
The jackdaw stands just at the edge of a rock pool.
I wonder,
is it looking at its own reflection, or
is it fishing for leaches?

As The Crow Flies, by Heather Boob

If I could draw a map of my heart
it would need to be topographical
so that you could lay your hands on it —
like braille —
to feel my existence,
to empathize with the contours of my  experience,
and the inclines and rolling valleys
(upon which I have ridden)
representing my relief.

One day when I’m wise and the lines on my face
reflect the journey of my heart,
I hope that the crow who has made his footprints
at the corners of my eyes,
will come to rest on my shoulder —
as he will learn, that even
the shortest distance to fly
would not be fast enough
to get from here to there —
from every joyful smile to the next.