“Mommy, tell me the closet lady story again,” the young, pleading voice pulled her attention away from her work.
“Are you sure Charlie? That’s a scary story and it’s almost bedtime.”
“It’s not a scary story, it's a sad one!” The boy huffed in annoyance at his mom’s worry; he would be nine years old next month and he refused to be afraid of the darkly paneled wood doors anymore. “The lady is lonely.”
His mother smiled, and in his confusion and irritation at being left out of whatever was funny, he flipped in the bed onto his stomach to face away from her.
“Are you sure you want to hear a sad story so close to bedtime?”
“I’m sure.” He wanted to hear of the closet woman’s sad ending because it made her late-night blank face seem less scary.
“Okay then, darling.” She paused to allow her son to settle before beginning. “A young woman sat alone late at night, nervous for the next day when she was to be married. The man was handsome and very thoughtful, and even though her family was very happy for the opportunity, for some reason the woman just felt sad. And lonely.”
***
The house sat quiet in of the early morning darkness, and yet young Ms. Kast still sat on her bed, kept awake by the swirling thoughts rampaging through her mind. It was a crisp autumn morning, the sun still rising over the top of Hillcrest Avenue, and a light breeze shook loose a swath of crunchy yellow and red leaves as the trees began to shed their summer foliage. The dishonestly white ceremony was a daunting inevitability, only a few hours away and drawing closer with each minute of new daylight sweeping over the Manor lawn. She felt hollow at the prospect of seeing the sun finally rise, but knew that there would be no rest if she attempted to sleep. The opportunities that she would have moving forward were undeniable — her family still so new to America — but as she stared out to the lightening world her mind was drawn backwards to happier times.
As a young girl, her father had spoiled her with time and affection, and she wanted for almost nothing. However, no matter how much she asked, she remained an only child. This required an adolescent Ms. Kast to develop a keen imagination which ultimately enhanced her easily frightened senses. Her fear of the dark and the possibilities that lie there came into sharp focus as she began aging, and were further stretched and warped by her overactive mind. In the liminal space of twilight her mind wandered erratically along the wide expanse of her childhood home, twisting familiar gardens and stepping stones into shadows and hiding places for the things she tried to ignore but which seemed to always be waiting.
Morning officially arrived, bringing with it ringing bells and gauzy linen. There were many hours of preparation ahead to become appropriately chaste for the waiting man. A beautiful dress hung from a nail which had been a permanent fixture on the left door to her oak-carved closet. She had tried to remove it and ended up with bloodied fingers and wasted time. Time was something too precious to waste with so little of it left to be allowed in her own home.
***
“Why is she so unhappy to be getting married to Holland?” The son didn’t understand why Ms. Kast was so sad. “He’s so nice.” He had heard the story many times before, and her fiance always seemed so kind.
“Oh he is a very good man, and she wasn’t sad that she had to marry him but sad because her life was over.”
The boy gasped and asked in a worried tone, “She dies?” That never happened in all the times his mom had told the story.
“No little one, of course not. Like I tell you every time, the two got married and lived a long life together.” The boy knew it should be a happy ending but the sad way his mother described Ms. Kast every time showed him it was not.
“Do you remember the spooky way she feels watched every night?” The boy nodded affirmatively. “Well, as scared as she was some nights, all alone in her small bedroom, she always faced that old closet with the hook in its left door. When she left to be with her new husband she never got to see that nail again, she never got to hang anything from it after that. She got married and gave up something she didn’t even know she would miss.”
Intro to Poetry Final Portfolio
“the sounds that never cease”
can you miss a bee sting if it’s never happened?
wanting painful things simply for the memories
yet the buzzing persists and somehow I am maddened
of all the dead-earth wantings open and blackened
it is a question wandering through the centuries
can you miss a bee sting if it’s never happened?
an interesting battle inside becomes imagined
the otherwise simple parts of the whole made enemies
yet the buzzing persists and somehow I am maddened
for every which way she is examined
to tell of the unsung asking melodies
can you miss a bee sting if it’s never happened?
in this life she found little that truly became impassioned
cracked apart and chipped away by someone else’s serentities
yet the buzzing persists and somehow I am maddened
the rock-crusted and deeply excavated caves are dampened
with all her wildly unanswered disparities --
can you miss a bee sting if it’s never happened?
yet the buzzing persists and somehow I am maddened
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“a (not) ode to a shitty childhood”
i want our early-two-thousands late night laughing back
catapulting on to your large blue bed
jabbing fingers and constant kicking
are the only way that i can force laughter
from you,
and i can tell
when i’ve gone to far
as silence has become my measure
it’s just us right now and i want it to stay that way
because it gets too complicated when Dad comes in --
i am just starting to realize that you can tell i like him more
grief and shame coexist in our little universe
and i try to enumerate all the wrongs
while you demand truth yet are retaliatory in the listening,
there’s not an open audience
but a critic hidden well under low-dim lighting
waiting for my interlude
that will provide a convenient cover
from which you can claim a suffocatation
of spoken pain i was not allowed
while i find myself still lacking comprehension
of the special, cracked-open-in-darkness place
which you turn inside out to teach me from,
distance has enabled a proper inspection of all remembrances
we were previously sealed with the air methodically rolled out
set aside like shitty christmas decorations
placed at the bottom of that peeling green storage bin
chipped and mothy after years of repeated improper packaging
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Weather Poem"
He fell in love for the first time at six years old,
squishy cheeks ruddy from a cold pressed in by harsh wind
and an overexertion of carelessly running too long.
It is the second day of first grade when an entire class of fifth graders walks in,
all bundled up to the point of bursting
in puffy winter jackets topped by too-warm scarves that itch and pull
and glove-stuffed hands,
conceptually gigantic to the six and seven years olds
who remain seated in their small plastic chairs
and gaze in awe at the older kids
before briefly and rather pointlessly wondering
if they should somehow be defending their warm and settled classroom
against the sea of comparably taller children.
The newly introduced teacher,
a young woman obviously fresh to the deep winters
dressed in only a light grey coat
and colorful black and yellow striped tights
(that he notices make her look like a oversized bumblebee when she walks),
introduces the group of elementary-school-seniors as ‘Reading Buddies’
who will ensure that the first graders are strong and well prepared readers
by the end of the year when they will celebrate with a guided read-along,
which is of course entirely silly because he knows for a fact
that he can read better than almost anyone in Mr. Hill’s first grade class.
Every first grader is made to stand and find their assigned partner,
their names conveniently marked on a post-it note in neat, red lettering
clearly written by the new teacher when compared with the haphazard
and messy blue handwriting scrawled across nametags stuck to puffy jackets
And it is while he is still standing at the back of the classroom,
his silent six year old protest almost completely unnoticed
accept for a girl with dark black hair walking straight towards him
so fast he doesn’t have time to sound out the shaky blue letters
before she stops right in front him and sticks out her hand
and introduces herself as Martha while waiting for him to respond just as formally,
sounding just like his dad when they go to the bank every other Saturday.
He is shocked to the realization that she is no longer wearing gloves
when she joins their hands and instantly freezes him like an otterpop,
shaking his entire body from their connected hands outward
as she declares that his name is Tommy (like he doesn’t already know)
and claims that he will be the best reader in his class because of her
and later he’ll think that if she wasn’t so loud
he would’ve told her that he was already the top reader in Mr. Hill’s class
because his mom reads with him every night
and at six years old he is proud to claim he can read all of Goodnight Moon
alone without any help,
and it didn’t matter that he had been listening to it for years
memorizing the curving white letters of
a red balloon followed by a picture of a cow jumping clear over the moon.
After she is done shaking his entire world
he can clearly make out three letters in bold blue ink
A-M-Y
which he reads aloud to her
then says nothing else
because he doesn’t feel like saying Hello or being ‘polite’ to this very strange stranger
despite what his older sister had taught him about returning someone’s kindness
because he didn’t think she had been very nice to him,
meeting for the first time and claiming that he wasn’t already
a fantastic reader all by himself
being too loud while continuing to talk to him about books and spelling
dragging him to a new table with more empty chairs
when he hadn’t even said Hello to her yet.
She sits the two of them at a table closer to the front of the classroom
almost right in front of Mr. Hill’s desk and empty white boards
so he stares at Amy and realizes that she is not wearing a coat
just like her bee-stripped teacher
and is for a moment impressed by her toughness
not getting cold outside in the regular snowfall
that he can tell the fifth grade class clearly walked in
because he also notices how bright the white snowflakes are in her dark hair
But when she starts to read him the book on the table
which he now recognizes as Green Eggs and Ham
he quickly becomes annoyed as she reads slowly
sounding out the trickier rhyming words
and looking down at him from her taller height
with the same smile his mom gives to his newly-born brother.
‘I am not stupid and I don’t like Doctor Suess’
he speaks to her for the first time
and stands up in his anger
happy when she stops reading to stare at him,
now clearly annoyed herself but finally prevented from reading.
He thinks he might have made a mistake
when she walks away wordless for the first time
to her own teacher
taking with her the first almost-conversation he’s ever really had
and is left wondering where he put his jacket
because suddenly it’s so cold despite the overcrowded classroom.
Nonfiction: Review of Bloodchild by Octavia Butler