Daily Archives: September 19, 2007

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I know I have been absent

I thank everyone who wrote to ask about my grandmother’s health. I thank everyone who commented on my blog, even though I did not respond. I am thankful that my grandma was on the rehab hall of the nursing facility, and not the feces hall, where old men groaned in wheelchairs and ran into my shins from time to time when they wanted me to take them back to their rooms. I was looking at the phone book and the old man crashed into me with his desperate request. “You can’t take him,” said the nurse. “If he’s in his room, he will try to get into his bed and hurt himself.” I asked him where he lived and he emphatically spelled out his last name, like I had a Rolodex that would tell me everything. I wish I did. I knew nothing about the Alzheimer’s, the senility. I knew nothing about my grandmother’s roommate, who had to be fed by a nurse and who frequently sent her oatmeal back for being too cold. I am excited because my friends Jason and Jessie are getting married this weekend. Life seems to be picking up again. I started a class tonight with a young teacher who has funny stories to tell. She also inspires me because she is a writer and a waitress. I am less than a waitress. I aspire to be a waitress. If only someone would support me in this dream. I like to bring people food. I am planning my trip back to Williamsburg for my five-year Homecoming. I hope to run into people, and to show them that I am no longer a wreck. I hope to watch some bad football while drunk. Maybe football will be my new sport, after doing laundry. I hope that ex-boyfriends will be amazed by me. I am putting sea algae on my nails to grow them. I am thinking of condensing my entire novel to 50 pages so I can figure out what’s important in it. I wonder if I am getting too wide for striped shirts. I will not put any more poetry on my blog for a while. I didn’t really mean it as poetry; I meant it as the transcription of a dream. It’s scary putting yourself out there. I am starting a bridge club for my grandmother, to replace her weekly group of card-playing widows in Georgia. Darren and I watched some soccer tonight at Zinc – Barcelona versus Lyon. There were some loud French persons sitting across from us at the bar but I didn’t get up the courage to ask them my carefully rehearsed questions in French. I told myself I didn’t want to distract them from the athletics, but in actuality I was afraid because I didn’t know how to apologize for speaking terrible French in French. I ate some of Darren’s mashed potatoes though. Good night.

Poem written in bathroom in the middle of the night

My feet churned the dust like a tornado.

I approached Edinburgh

and then the continent went dark.

The wedding photographer was drunk.

He took pictures of ruins, of history.

An esplanade of smoking sphinxes

and grey coliseums

where we had lived once.

My body was all that was left,

whisking the ashes,

a relic of weather and population.