Flower girl in white cotton and white petals, look at them rot in the aisle, like bruises on ballerina heels, she’s all cracked callouses and pink skirts, a porcelain doll, she is skinny but her tears are fat as cherubs.
They let the doves out of the box and put the pictures in, the dust will fall like feathers, make a veil.
And your old clothes stretch and your new clothes shrink and you go back to the beginning.
The world outside of California hardly
noticed the blaze destroying Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. Although it
was the worst library fire in American history, it was largely ignored for it coincided
with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Library fires, often started deliberately,
are not rare events in the USA and elsewhere. There have been many such fires
throughout history. Caesar set alight the library at Alexandria. The Nazis were
infamous book burners. Often what is gone is irreplaceable. Manuscripts and
early editions vanish, taking part of human memory and identity with them.
Something more than paper burns. Something of life itself is lost.
There are also heroic tales of rescue.
Susan Orlean in The Library Book,
recounts the fire in a Russian library in 1988 when a crowd of onlookers defied
the police, firefighters and bulldozers by rescuing as many books as possible,
taking them home and drying them out.…
When you feel one coming, it’s called an aura. That’s not a word heard often, is it? Once, as I stood on the corner of Broadway and something, a woman with sapphire eyes and tarnished silver rings on every finger stopped beside me. She told me I had a powerful aura. For just $49 (there was a special) she would tell me my future. “I already know,” I said and crossed the street staring down the glowing red hand. My grandmother had another kind of aura, although we never called it that. We never knew there was a name for it. I have the image of her sitting on the back porch after supper in the dusty pink evenings. She wore strands of long turquoise beads around her neck, her skin wrinkled like crepe paper in the amber porch light. …
On table tops, in the deep recesses of my mind, written in
foggy breath on winter windows, behind the curtain, on scraps of paper, taped
to the washing machine, magnetically clinging to the refrigerator, etched in
black ball point inside matchbooks.
I gather them, carefully considering each one. They beg so. Distractingly. Pick me. Pick me, one squeals. I say, “You are a noun.” And it screams, “I could be an adjective if you work hard enough. If you are creative enough you will weave me into the flow, feed me to the hungry bowl of story, gulping back millions of us everyday.”
And I say, “Whew. Hold on. Let me get another cup of coffee first.” They do not wait.…
Pacifica is the fourth album by Washington, DC singer/songwriter Peter Maybarduk. Peter’s introspective songs include post-punk and symphonettes, sometimes bridging classical and rock music. He writes about transience, justice, dignity and meaning, and he arranges field recordings into his music. The Mid-Atlantic Song Contest (1300 entries) has just recognized Pacifica‘s third track, “Discontents” (Honorable Mention in the “Open” category). Pacifica features stellar musicians of the Washington, DC scene (Shawna Potter of War On Women, Kate Rears of Ladygod, Sriram Gopal of The Fourth Stream), with J. Robbins producing. You can find lyrics to the songs below here.
Peter Maybarduk – “Where is Your Heart?” Peter Maybarduk – “Failed States” Peter Maybarduk – “All of Whom I Love”
She faced
him as she spoke of how her stay was at her mother’s. She sat on a low wooden
stool on the floor, peeling the radishes and slicing them in coin shape.
Already, her nose had scrunched up. She found the smell of radish overpowering:
why even eat this thing? It’s known to cause gas in the stomach and then loud
farts. Her husband was not immune to them. But the radishes were his favorite.
Saute them in oil, turmeric, salt, and he would cram down two bowls of them in
one meal. And then he would belch and fart in his sleep all night long,
punching the fresh air out of the room. But, she didn’t want to say no to
radishes today. Not today.…
