GRIZZLY PEAR
A United States Senator toured my building!
What an honor!
No.
The real:
They let me to deliver a daycare that serves forty eight children.
Every day, year over year, decade after decade.
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The purpose of a sentence is to say what it has to say
from Several short sentences about writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
but also to be itself,
Not merely a substrate for the extraction of meaning.
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I cut myself.
An experimental bread process left a hardened loaf.
The knife slipped and tapped my finger.
I had just sharpened the knife.
It landed true.
Should I rue the success or celebrate the failure?
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As Hoffmannsthal said: “Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface.”
“Exactitude”, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino
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The boy was wearing a sock on his right foot.
He started the morning with a pair but shed the left when it developed a hole.
I went upstairs and found a replacement.
Two hours later, he was wearing the new sock on his left foot.
The sock on the right had developed a hole.
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You give me money, I’ll give you creative.
I’ll start when the check clears.
Time is money. More time is more money.
I’ll listen to you. You listen to me.
You tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what you need.
You want me to be on time, I want you to be on time.
What you use is yours, what you don’t is mine.
I can’t give you stuff I don’t own.
I’ll try not to be an ass, you should do the same.
If you want something that’s been done before, use that.PRO BONO
If you want your way, you have to pay.
If you don’t pay, I have final say.Let’s create something great together.
Segura Contract, via Signal v. Noise
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I tuck the kids into bed.
At their feet, I swing the blanket up into the air and let it float onto them.
We call it a floooph.
Occasionally, I’ll whip the blanket down with a whoosh!
The kids clamor for this 快 (quick) floooph, but mommy frowns upon this ritual of generating dust clouds.
We laundered the sheets this afternoon.
Tonight’s dust is clean.
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We’re It!
“A Cosmic Belly-Laugh“, William Martin
We always have been, and always will be.
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The kids love making pancakes, but an eternity extends past pouring the batter.
They run off.
I glance up as they race out the kitchen.
Her arm stretches right out of the room. His leg kicks back to the left. He pushes his head towards his sister. She angles her torso above her brother.
They flash two grand smiles.
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An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem… The brain just edits it out.
Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams
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The girl scootched up the slide, but couldn’t quite make it.
The boy ran up the structure. He offered a little hand.
Ssssssstttrrretchh…
Clasp!
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Every door stands an open door:
our human settlements all temporary.We share together the incidental shore
and teach the young to tend the lamp’s wick,weary of anyone small enough to bar our entry.
“Visitors” by Joan Naviyuk Kane, via American Life in Poetry 887
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At the start of the pandemic, my son learned to count to twenty while washing his hands.
…十三、十四、十五、十六、十七、十八、十九、二十！
Least year, he learned the alphabet song at the lavatory.
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l-m-n-o-p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, and ….
Now, he wails for a few seconds.
“AAeeeeAAAEeeeeeeAAAEeeee”
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Yes, everybody has his own trademark – or someone else’s for that matter, since we seem to be plagiarizing all the time.
Borges on Writing, page 26
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The boy discovered a new helmet.
There’s a laundry basket on his head.
He spins it round and round.
A little man encompassed in a translucent white blur.
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Did you know that a group of pandas is called an embarrassment?
from the girl’s research paper on pandas.
People are trying to change that because it is embarrassing to the panda.
Most of the time they are solitary animals though.
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bl-uh-d or-an-j!
The thought grosses out my daughter.
So the boy repeats it with zest.
Not nice!
And we warn her about imbuing sounds with power.
How about the oranges?
meh.
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At times [the twilight cloud] will overspread the whole west as a sheet of brilliant magenta, but more frequently it blares with scarlet, carmine, crimson, flushing up and then fading out, shifting from one color to another; and finally dying out in a beautiful ashes of roses.
“Desert Sky and Clouds”, The Desert, John C. Van Dyke, 1901
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While folding laundry, he found his new boxer-briefs.
He was skeptical (they were one size larger than his current collection of underwear).
He ran downstairs to verify.
妈妈你有买短裤给我吗?
Mommy did you buy the underwear for me?
是的。“Yes.“
So he asked again.
and again. and
again. and
again
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Until she snapped and disavowwed doing any such thing.
He sauntered back upstairs.
I asked him to double check.
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That first cry opens the earth door.
“Memory Sack” by Joy Harjo, from American Life in Poetry #886
We join the ancestor road.
With our pack of memories
Slung slack on our backs
We venture into the circle
Of destruction,
Which is the circle
Of creation
And make more-
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