As a registered caffeine addict, I’m more than a little bewildered by anyone over the age of twelve who doesn’t drink coffee. I’m with Michael Pollan, whose recent audiobook, Caffeine, explores not only how the world’s most widely used psychoactive drug has taken over our lives but also tells how he tested his own reliance on caffeine by giving it up for three months. Pollan slept better, he says, but his brain power flagged and his productivity declined, so he went back to the stuff.
As for myself, well, I’m glad that somewhere around the year 850, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi noticed that when his charges nibbled the berries of a certain plant, they gave up the foxtrot, waltz, and mambo forever and began to do the twist, frug, swim, hitchhike, monkey, slop, Watusi, pony, shake, jerk, stomp, shag, and mashed potatoes.…
Annabelle Lee had a room of her own, wallpaper from the movies, and an iPhone. She had a closet full of clothes, many with price stickers still on them; she had one favorite sweatshirt, hidden in the corner so that Mariana, the cleaning lady, would not put it in the wash. Annabelle Lee swore that the sweatshirt would never be washed because she wore it the day the seventh-grade boy with the thick silver chain asked her for a cigarette by the fountain; she did not have one, but the moment lasted anyway. On top of it all, Annabelle Lee had a porcelain doll; she had other dolls, too, but the porcelain doll was her favorite, though she never gave it a name, but just called it “my doll.”…
“You ruined everything! We had it all and you destroyed it!”
“Sure, says the man with a wife and mistress. You certainly had it all.”
“You and your fucked up morality. I told you why I moved back home. There’s nothing between her and me.”
Michael argued his position and opinions between middle of the night and crack of dawn. Plagued with insomnia, he did his best agonizing in the wee hours. Alcohol, once a sedative, stimulated overwrought concerns into sleepless obsessions. The medication to ward off nightmares, to dull terrors, was now a sabotage. He was forced to stand naked before his sorrow. Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to stand alone.
“You women are all the same,” he continued to bluster.
Beate Sigriddaughter, author of hundreds of poems, is the winner of the 2014 Jack Grapes Prize and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. She has promoted women’s writing at her blog, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, for many years, an activity which grew out of her earlier Glass Woman Prize. Siggriddaughter is the author of Emily(review below) and Dancing in Santa Fe and Other Poems. Her forthcoming Dona Nobis Pacem will be issued in December 2021 by Unsolicited Press.
Emily, in your latest collection, you assume a unique voice, so different from the personas you presented in Dancing in Santa Fe. Can you tell us a little about how Emily originated? Did the collection fall together, for example, over a period of months, or years?…
If they could speak what stories would they tell? How you crawled through fire to save Fred Noonan? How you were cast away like Robinson Crusoe? Was Fred your man Friday?
About the sun, sharp and relentless, how it burned your skin, already charred? About the rain that drenched your shelter, hastily built in the shade of a ren tree?
They say you lived for sixty-one days. Did you live or just survive? Were you sad or secretly relieved to be free of photographers’ flashing bulbs and Lucky Strike?…
It rained all day and then the next day and then it rained for the next one hundred years. Sometimes it came down hard and other times, just a light mist. People got used to it. It was expected and normal, like the fact that, in the morning, there’d be air to breathe.
People sunned in the rain. They swam and had parties, played ball, rode bikes, cooked out, drank wine and beer. People made love in the rain, divorced in a downpour, washed their cars in a drizzle.
In dreams, people often imagined clear, sunny days. They imagined dry fields and lawns, trees swaying in warm sunshine, lakes and ponds as smooth as a sheet of glass.
There were always a few in each town who couldn’t take it, who let the constant tapping on the roof and windows drive them nearly insane. …
