Pig and farm report

 Advent poem December 6, 2020

Patty Hearst daughter of the bountiful deities of banks was taken to the underworld changed into her every her and so the earth burst with all the wrong assorted flowers the robbery of color poor Olympians Persephone of the yelling Persephone of the beret and of the rifle on the wordless television the pretty girl with a gun shouted pomegranate! pomegranate! motherfuckers!

*

I am here present as we said in elementary school I am here but I am reading reading returned to me like a lightning bolt to the brain the day the power went out all over the island and I was alone in the pitch black dark call me if the power goes out my son told me so I called him and said the power is out are you going to come here now with coffees and oats and ropes and batteries or what but nope so I crawled under my covers and started reading Atwood’s The Testaments with a flashlight I read straight through the night then I read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials all three books and was into the second book before I realized it was a YA novel and I don’t care it was magic then Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower but only halfway through because it was too grim and scary then I read Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore which stunned me now I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend I will never take reading for granted not ever again I know it can go out like a flame

I’m back where I was as a young woman when I left the commune inside of words and reluctant to turn on the television or look at a screen reluctant to surround myself in noise

I brought a tree into the house today from a Christmas tree farm ripe and green and pitchy I wrestled it into the stand and tightened the bolts with pliers I have done new things recently I replaced both the air filters on my car under the hood and on the passenger side so I had to figure out how to open the glove box by pressing in on the sides then sliding the connector tube up which involved me getting on my knees on wet leaves but I decided I didn’t want to pay $120 when I had YouTube to guide me like Jesus unfortunately there is no YouTube to tell you how to get a dead wood rat out from under your house but eventually the smell got to me and once again I knelt on the forest floor this time armed with my shop vac heavy gloves a long stick and a pair of barbecue tongs and managed to wrestle it out then fling the poor thing into its foresty grave

Ew

I read this tonight in My Brilliant Friend

“We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died.”

It reminded me of growing up in Spokane

I saw four tiny goats balancing on a round bale of hay I gave myself a YouTube haircut that is not even on both sides but it looks much better and I baked some Japanese milk bread and made old fashioned fudge and now the scent of the tree is waking up everything in my head and my stupid heart

 

Hello Darklings hello

December 1

Green lights zip the sky

I stitched her palm into the palm of my palm needle slung through ho ho I said fat tabby settled her bottom against the bathroom tiles my hands waved in the tub mirrored stitches pulled out a palm with asterisks along its bony spine ha ha I said listen! her heart warbled on a crane twenty and five stories above the city silver under rolling palms hee hee I said as the sky zipped open the greeny green of her reflection