On the branch, the sparrows dogfight with their beaks and onto
the out of place pine. Before, beneath the birdhouse, wrestling breast to
breast in the weeds. I have waited nine hours (two of them asleep to the pages
of a chapter book) for the first sip of aluminum tea. In the nine hours I
certainly sat on the bedroom floor eating cereal from my lap. I certainly
considered the retributive violence scenarios played out in American major
league baseball (to take the bat, with one, out to the pitcher’s mound for the
war?) I annoyed myself awake with the same meditation that usually brings the
sand. Lamps were on the way the sun is through the left-middle tree. My stomach
ate away at itself and bran. It was a way to live.
The time that is not spent waiting for the tea is the
ceiling fan and DMX’s “Ruff Ryder’s Anthem” connection to “All I know is pain /
All I feel is rain / How can I maintain / with mad shit on my brain?” Guilt (?!)
over wanting to recognize that same rain while admitting that, No, I was not in
the airport parking lot on that fateful day. But wondering if I had to be to
growl out the incurable ache. Because I was, after all, in the airport diner
watching her gag an omelet into a red cloth napkin because her throat had
forgotten how to swallow. I was there for those airplanes taking off enough to
rattle the silver skillets and the scale models and the rental cars. I could
not stomach the breakfast with a hacking music teacher at the bar behind me,
and that should say something about appetites and taste. It should say
something about what we are allowed to say about what we know of pain.
But there were also the mornings before little league games
with holy grail Power Ranger figurines dug up from garage sales with the
newspaper classified map. The ever-youth they promised more seductive than a
line drive stuck in the web of a mitt. And I did make that catch at second base
with the Black Ranger in the back of my mind. And I did not consider the workers
at the factory that fabricated his mastodon tusks and chop-action arm (his
fingers balled into a fist at the hinge if you wanted them to. You could make
him a warrior with a hinge.) No one told me about those workers working for me
to play. I did not talk to them on the telephone during those mornings because
the Power Rangers were not telephones to be talked into. I used to pretend and
play. I am told not everyone is allowed these luxuries and this is meant as a
commentary on birth(un)luckiness.
…
Arielle Greenberg wants a Gurlesque space where women can
write about dolphin stickers and postpartum
depression and tongue-kissing boys and tongue-kissing girls and rape and baking sugar cookies with rainbow sprinkles. She wants a space
where the painful and pleasurable/girlish mingle over strong cocktails and
slinky dresses, maybe upping the ante of the mingle to a make-out session in
the faux fur coat closet. I want this space, too, where trauma and nostalgia
cross-dress for each other and it’s more than a dress rehearsal for a
performance no one will buy tickets for (because the box office refused to
print adequate seating information for fear that people might actually come.) I
want a space where things can be cute and
going very very badly. It is a necessary space. It is a necessary, potentially
healing, space.
I also hope there is a space where men can write about Jean
Claude Van Damme martial arts flicks and feminist
politics and protein supplements and tongue-kissing girls and tongue-kissing boys and being over-privileged WASP’s and being emotionally insecure and the overt homophobia of their
upbringing and falsetto singing. I
hope there is a space where the boyish and the hypermasculine arm-wrestle over
beers only to realize they have been holding hands the whole time. I hope there
is a space where desiring to dominate and dominating and feeling dominated and
desiring to be dominated are the web of a baseball mitt while daydreaming of
the Black Ranger. Because there are patriarchal fathers who forget their sons’
fifteenth birthdays and the things of these sons can be cute and going very
very badly. I hope for this space. It is a necessary, potentially healing,
space.
I want/hope these spaces over DMX and rosebushes and breast
augmentation optical illusions on television and sparrows dogfighting while they sing to each other. The
want/hope is a potentially healing space. I want/hope more.
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