I bought some authentic real grits (not that mealy west coast crap) from the company Southern Queen whose incredible logo is right up there a Black owned business with an amazing product which I will be having this weekend along with honest to bog collards curtesy of my CSA box
tonight the Mets and the Marlins met on the ball field facing each other in two lines removed their caps bowed their heads in silence for 42 seconds then waved to each other with their ball caps and walked off the field leaving nothing but a Black Lives Matter tee shirt on home plate having canceled the game and this finally is the thing that triggered my tears that now fall freely under my fingers as I type after days of stuffing those tears back into my head as I’ve watched the news in horror holding my head up in the air so the tears would not fall out but baseball is my game and this is the image that broke me
we witnessed yet another young Black man gunned down in front of his own children by police in Kenosha
a 17 year old maga proudboy shooter killed two people and wounded a third during a protest in the same city then walked away past several police officers saying what he had done admitting what he had done bragging about what he had done and the police told him to go home which he did before turning himself in later
murders ordered by king donald
Riot Kitchen an organization that offers hot vegetarian meals to protestors across the US an organization I have been supporting had their crew members grabbed from the street and thrown in black unmarked cars in Kenosha last night and now they are disappeared
all they were doing was feeding people
Feed my sheep
those are their blond blue eyed baby boy Jesus’s supposed last words on earth
Feed my sheep
no one can find them who took them police? FBI? NSA? all the american president’s gestapo
Jacob Blake the man who was shot repeatedly in the back by police remains handcuffed to his hospital bed paralyzed from the waist down
why is he shackled?
I have a feeling of dread about the republican convention tonight in what used to be the rose garden a garden I stood in as a girl with my uncle
something wicked this way comes
this week I successfully took myself to the clinic for necessary blood tests to keep my psych meds alive in my brain then fell up my porch step onto my stomach bruising my entire left side after I had successfully driven myself home the top of my left foot absorbed most of the damage and is now black and blue and swollen like a weird squash and it hurts like a motherfucker but I’ve mostly been keeping it up and iced
my left foot has absorbed most of the damage of my entire life now that I think on it and when you damage your foot you pretty much think on it
a lot
my favorite word for 2020 so far is problematic
my left foot has been problematic since I was a girl
I’m still going to the beach every day I saw a hawk knock a raven out of the air I saw a great blue heron standing in a culvert just inches from where I stood I watched a two year old girl walk with her mother on the lee side of the island this morning the child was wearing a bright pink gauzy shawl that was at least five feet long and it furled out behind her in an amazing wave I finally moved my tiny belongings out of my gray winter purse into my spring purse which is pink and has a sixties boxy look I was saving it until after covid but here we are I began a skin care routine with a fancy cleanser then masque then cream then lip exfoliant but I gave it up in one day the gladiolus are finished drooping their long stalks with one determined flower hanging onto the ends of each one with ridiculous hope the dahlias are up the bullfrogs sing in the marshlands behind my house my son is still here but he is leaving Saturday going to the city then to his orchard we talk about politics and art and memory and music my son is brilliant and his thoughts constantly keep me thinking we talked this morning about how our brains grow rigid if they are not used we think this is what happened to Terrible America its denizens grown rigid and stupid
I can’t practice Bach because when I play my violin I keep my right foot in front of me and my left foot behind me then I move my body using my left rear foot as a propeller launching me almost out of my chair at times something that used to disturb The Jackal my prize student’s mother all that moving around she’d say the queen of judgment and I’d beg her to go see the symphony for herself so she could see that I was not broken
ps. I teach my students to sit with both feet in front of them planted firmly on the floor
I wanted to write about woodpeckers how their tongues practically curl around their brains and about penguins’s terrifying sort of teeth these creatures are not at all disneyfied but instead I’ll confess that my terraria my science projects are all over the place now at different stages of growth and decay fecundity and death and according to my son are problematic but I think I’m done with nature at least for tonight