Work: A Haiku

All work is work.

All days the same.

Time is a joke God makes about my life.

Vignettes III

I knew I didn't have any dollar bills, the lunch line wasn't an option today. I turned the puddle of nickels over in my palm. The California sun or the light of childhood memories made or makes the crumbs of my lesson money reverberate with liquid silver. Everything in the vending machine was more than 65 cents. I'd have to try to sneak off campus to get to the Albertsons on Longhorn Drive.

I sat with uncharacteristically bad posture, breathing in my classmates' lunches. Peanut butter. Pizza. Chicken strips. Lunch period talk in the band office was of the new Maslanka symphony, the wailing mother trombones in movement one, and the new piece whose title was an incomplete line of the Lord's Prayer. Bread. Banana. $1.00. A flute player unwrapped her muffin. Blueberry. Muffins, $1.50. “Where's your lunch, Brittany?” My teacher's question shot through the chatter. “Oh. Oh, it's okay.” Green paper fluttered into my field of vision. “Go get lunch.” Bread. “Oh, no, no, it's okay, it's, I'm okay.” Bread. “Take it.”

“Take it.” I shouldn't have told him. I didn't even particularly want to see her again. “No, I can't, professor. It's okay, I'll call my mom and see, or I can work out a payment plan. Or I'll... I can't take this.” Thirty dollars was a lot more than five. Therapy was a lot more than bread, although it was bread I had faith in. “Call Betsy and make an appointment for next week.” I didn't need therapy twice a week. Once a month at the most. She'd already cut my bill to the lowest possible she was allowed to accept. Desperate to make rent (which I didn't end up making anyway), I'd cut back on the none-essentials. I cut a lot more. And this man, who'd already given me thousands of dollars of the university's money, gambled on me (and lost, as it turned out, four years and zero Bachelor's degrees later), and put up with so much of me, had noticed, and was making an offer on his peace of mind. And I sold it to him. “Okay. Thank you. Thanks. I'll call her in the morning.” “Promise? You will call her tomorrow?” “Yeah, I will. Thanks. I definitely will. Thank you.” I tucked the crisp, square money in the securely-hole free front left pocket of my jeans, walked home in the perpetually noontime Tucson sun, and tried to fall asleep before I felt hungry again.

Vignettes II

"I feel guilty, terrible, so guilty it lingers for days, spending money on groceries." The look she gave me across the table, kept at the ready with kleenex, disoriented me like an outsider's astonishment always had. "You feel guilty," she leaned a long time on the mouthy vowels of the word, "guilty about buying food?" She paused. "You don't have to feel guilty about buying food." Other people don't feel bad about buying groceries? You mean people just go to the grocery store and put things in their cart-- I guess I never use a cart, I guess those are there for those people who would just put things in a cart-- and it's okay? They don't feel guilty about it? "Oh, um--" I looked at my knees for thirty more minutes until she gently suggested I come in the same time next week.

Vignettes: American University

His name was Chris and I waited forty minutes to be shown to his cubicle and answer embarrassing questions about myself between long silences where he would pencil my answers into his paper work and I would look at the pictures of his family thumb tacked to the walls and wonder about his daughter and wonder if he ever wondered that I'm a daughter, too; but I didn't go back after that, and the agency sent me three of the same letter over a few weeks before we forgot about each other until tonight when I can't sleep and the stories eddy through my narrator making desperate the fact that at 4am there isn't anyone to hear.

And I remember they all thought it was funny, the nurses, that I would sit and read the whole packet front to back, but what did they expect me to do, color another mandala, how many mandalas can one color between 5am vitals and 10pm lights out? I chose COPE out of the three agencies because it had the most hopeful sounding name, it had something to offer, the ability to, acquire the skill to, learn how to, and yet, just as taking the pills I had turned into a daily ritual of self punishment, in the back of my mind coping always felt like a cop out, like not really solving the problem, like giving up and resigning oneself to living with it, so that reaching out for the hope COPE had to offer was perverted into telling myself I'd really given up.

And at the end of my last semester of college we did a big concert in Centennial hall where admission was one can of food for the food bank, and I myself had been too embarrassed to go to my interview for food stamps earlier that month, so I didn't bring anything to donate, I needed all the food in my house, which was about one can of black beans and one watermelon, but then backstage they said we were to line up and drop out cans into a box in front of the stage one by one, making a big show of the school's generosity, before we took our seats in the orchestra. Panicked and embarrassed I had to ask my section mate for a can to donate, and he gave it without questions, without funny looks, and to this day when I think about gratitude that instance replays itself in my mind. And I remember being on stage, being applauded before the concert began, and I stood there, being looked at by a crowd of hundred for whom I was to perform, but not being seen by them, I stood there, in the midst of a great public show of all that the university did for the community, of all that the kindness of these people did for those less fortunate people, I stood there, hungry, broke, with a concert to play, for all these generous, generous, generous people.

Cake. (This Post Not Related to Poetry [subtitle: the post with "sarcastic quotations" {followed by parenthetical statements}])

So when I'm not raking poetry from the bottom of heaps of notes and sketches, I like to bake. I started getting really into cooking one summer between semesters in college when, unable to find work and unable to sleep, I'd hide inside my air conditioned Tucson apartment (which was ironically situated on Water St. Seriously, who decided a street in Tucson, AZ should be called Water?) with my Kroger "Peanut Butter" and Kroger 88c/loaf "White Bread"sandwich for that day and marathons of Food Network programming. This is the only time that I, as a vegetarian, have ever craved a steak (I'm talking to you, Grill It! with Bobby Flay).

When I moved to Portland, and finally found a job, I, for the first time, had enough money to buy ingredients, and that's when I really got going.

Here's a bit of my latest fooling around between shifts at work and panic attacks about how to afford to go back to school.

I baked this cake "for my room mates birthday" (because I like to make cakes). It's chocolate devil's food with a cooked meringue "marshmallow" frosting. And I did it without a single appropriate spatula, and with only one whisk for my hand mixer! I'm kind of grateful I've never had endless money to have all the supplies I need to cook, because now I can basically make anything work (I baked my first loaf of bread in a toaster oven in my kitchenless studio apartment in Tucson).

Spiiiiiin! Thanks to my roomie for finding a nice, cheap, cake table at Rose's in Portland. Also, pardon the Jolie Holland in the background. I forgot to turn down my music.

Maybes

Maybe I will wander off and get eaten by a bear.
Maybe I will find my way between the slick hot rails and the train.
Maybe I will be stabbed walking home at night.

Maybe a rich old man will bestow his money on me.
Maybe I will win some piece of the economy on which I'll float.
Maybe money will burn in the revolution.

Maybe the water is cold, so cold, but clear, too cold.
Maybe the water sustains all life.
Maybe the water is cold, so cold.

Maybe the cold rids me of my body.
Maybe the cold expands my mind into the infinity which is pleasures.
Maybe pleasures are outside of life.

Maybe God awaits me in the snow.
Maybe peace is, after all, white.
Maybe all silence is undrinkable.

untitled

Oh.

           This!

      What is this?

Oh, this!

                                 Oh–


Him.

         Him, –
   
                                      I–

                         I.

Him., machine.

Body, machine.
                          Indistinguishable.
Oh, this!

                          Oh–

                                           

                                                                    Oh–