Feelings don’t last. That’s what a therapist once told me. They disappear he said. I agreed with him until yesterday when old feelings resurfaced for the first time in ten years. I was in the Cat and Cage drinking with Mark Dunne. We were catching up on old school days. Alison, his wife, came in about two hours after we arrived and she was excited. She had photographs of a friend’s hen night and was passing them to Mark and me.
I didn’t take much notice of the photographs until I took a second glance at one of them. There stood the girl who was to get married, whose name escapes me and Greta O‘Rourke. I finished my pint and asked Mark and Alison what they wanted to drink.…
Joy Ride by Ron Slate (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
A poet of ideas and emotions, Ron Slate comes as close as anyone to the phrase in Roethe’s villanelle, “The Waking,” “we think by feeling.” While his poems embody ideas and convey feelings, they evoke experiences, they are experiences. They are about boats, gulls, travels to Istanbul, to Brazil, to France. They are about family, friends, and acquaintances, doubt, certainty, grief, joy, imagination, baseball, jazz, and drums, also, airports, hospitals, a neighborhood bar, and a joy ride in a black and white (patrol car) with two women. There’s an investment of self and an absence of ego. They evoke solitude and life with others, experiences borne out of passed down stories, memories, and images embedded in thoughts. …
When you cook for me, it is a full-bodied affair. The clang of the wok on your stovetop, countertop, worktop. Always smashing, pounding, your forearms straining as you design a meal and display the side dishes on the table: blanched vegetables in an avalanche of fresh chilli oil, small bowls of jewelled pickles, meat braised soft and fragrant. The shallow bowls are like cupped hands, and you always treat them with dignity as you push them closer, place choice pieces on my bowl of rice like an offering and I feel obligated to do more than smile in return. I want to bend over your feet and show you devotion.
Yet, as I set the table for your arrival, part of me is convinced inviting you to my flat for dinner exceeds the dimensions of our relationship.…
It’s the third week of September 1992, and Lou doesn’t have to report for seven more days. But over the years managing a busy household and three children, I know to prepare ahead of time when something is important. Always leave time for the unexpected. A child with the croup. A flat tire. A meltdown with the kids. A husband going to prison.
Standing in our cozy kitchen, I stare at the papers Lou hands me. U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons typed at the top—a carbonless, triplicate form detailing the approved items for new inmates. The yellow copy for the inmate’s records. The pink copy for the guard at check in. The blue copy to be placed into the bag carrying the approved items.…
Everyone called Cynthia, our church camp counselor, Cinders even before she burned my pink bikini in a big trash barrel because I’d “left it lying on the bathroom floor.” Branding me a rule breaker, she slid her smoldering eyes my way during our moonlit devotionals by the lake. Those same eyes glowed with adoration and envy when the boys’ counselor, Donnie, led us all in my namesake song. She snuffed out any spark of joy lingering down in my heart.
I quit the church of my youth years ago— misogyny was my reason. I heard Cinders stayed, married a man like Donnie, a preacher who spews vitriol about women keeping quiet in church. Sometimes I imagine Cinders, listening in a pew up front, her gray eyes glistening with tears necessary to dampen any scintilla of her fiery self.…
What is the memory of some imagined loveliness? Flowers, certainly – and roses most assuredly – are lovely.
The chickadees are slowly walking, like tiny chicken hens, strutting, dancing through the blossoming dandelions … These calm chickadees are quite lovely. And, I would say, that my sister Evangeline, in her way, was lovely.
My sister Evangeline – that was her formal name – was a tall thin girl, all of 13 and a half years. No degree of happiness came to her face, because even at 13 Evangeline was a determined and accomplished girl. Rarely, when a smile would light her face, I knew what loveliness was; I could see that Mom was proud of Evy, not just because she was good at grooming the hogs for 4H, or her sewing, or her horse hiding abilities – no I think Mom loved her because she was a girl, soon to be a woman, and Mom, you could tell was proud of all 5 of her girls, and women in general; I think Mom felt that women got the short shrift of things, the short end of the stick. …
