Messages to my grandfather.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
I Suppose I Could Have Just Closed the Window
There’s this thing we say whenever my roommate is eating ramen out of an old shoe or someone’s joint has set the fire alarm to chirping ceaselessly for three days because no one knows how to make it stop. We say, “man, we are so in college right now.” And it’s more than just being enrolled in an institution of higher learning. I think there will be moments when I am 35 and trying (failing) to make my daughter dinner with too little water and too much pasta and all the forks are dirty and there’s nowhere on the table to put a plate and I am frustrated I still feel so in college. There will be nights when I’ll want to ride a bicycle away from the clean home I have made for myself, sprawl on top of abandoned trains and talk and talk with bead-haired, nomadic strangers. My neighbor is so in college. And I am in college but trying to go to sleep at 10 p.m. on a Friday, which is so not so in college. My neighbor with the paint-streaked forehead and too-big pants is playing college standards very loudly on his guitar while lots of girls sit cross-legged, leaning long hair against splintering wood, singing along very loudly. Huddled together under the porch light, voices rising carelessly from their beer bottles to the plants perched carefully on my windowsill. I am thinking my neighbor must, at some-point-hopefully-soon, come to the end of his repertoire. There’s got to be a limit to the songs he knows. But he is still strumming as I stare at the red glow of my alarm clock about to go off. I think that maybe he knows every song I know, and many I do not.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Newer Cut
Untitled from Annie Agnone on Vimeo.
Soul of Athens 2009 launches June 1! check it out at www.soulofathens.com
Rough Cut
a rough cut of a project on pentecostal women in athens, ohio:
Setting Themselves Apart: Women in The Pentecostal Church (Rough Cut) from Annie Agnone on Vimeo.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
On Becoming A Mother
ON BECOMING A MOTHER
Small things are cute. I’m pretty sure this phenomenon is an offshoot of an animal drive to mother anything that is ostensibly weak and motherable. Puppies, babies and old people who have begun to lose height are obvious. But the rule extends, deeply and somewhat bizarrely, into the realm of the inanimate. Like finger-sized plastic-peapod key rings: squeeze it and the smooth green peas bulge forward slightly (highly adorable, prime nurturing material). Also: colorful umbrellas to put in piña coladas, vegetable seeds and the clippings of the pinkie toenail.
But the 6-year-old slamming tiny fists into my abdomen with Pokémon-inspired fervor and screaming his favorite curse word—honestly, “sucka-ducka-fuckin-nigga”—was, at the moment, not cute and I definitely did not want to be his mother. I just wanted him to come in out of the rain and to stop having nightmares about being beaten by his stepfather.
I spent four hours my first day at the child center reading admission summaries. I sat on a low, scratchy, child-size sofa streaked with dried applesauce and snot. She killed three puppies. Threw them down on a hard kitchen floor. When she thinks about this incident she wants to touch herself. Can’t be left alone with younger children. He was prostituted to his mother’s friends so his parents could afford to buy drugs. He was 4. Problems with encopresis requiring supervised showers three times a day. Favorite foods: french fries with ketchup, ice cream cake, teriyaki chicken tenders, mashed potatoes. Triggers: “no,” excessive praise, room time, salad. Especially Caesar.
It crossed my mind to try to adopt one of them. 21 is old enough to foster and adopt and there are thousands of kids, living in transitional homes, whose parents' rights have been terminated. Now and then I still think about it—“just you and me, Joshlynn. We’ll be okay. We’ll get by.” But I can’t take care of a cactus.
When I was five my mother and I found a short, fuzzy orange caterpillar and put it in clear Tupperware with a generous offering of foliage collected from the yard. I cut holes in the top but they were too big and pretty soon the orange caterpillar wasn’t in its bed of leaves and sticks anymore. My mom found it under my bed a week later. A quarter of its original size, it hadn’t found the way back to the Tupperware where there was fresh water and it quickly dried up. We kept it on the windowsill, perched on a mossy rock, and sometimes late at night I would stare up at it and say I was sorry.
Most of the summer I worked at the child center never made it to memory because I tried not to pay attention to too much of it. I remember mostly that the air smelled like tea tree oil and that blackberries seemed to be slowly engulfing the city. Late one night I watched a raccoon get hit by a car ten feet away while his raccoon friend stood next to me at the bus stop. When I was stressed I ate peanut butter, jelly, margarine and banana sandwiches and cookie dough from a tub, letting crumbs fall under the oven for the sublessor to deal with when she got back from Vietnam.
The kids at work asked if I’d come back for a visit during the holidays (special dinner, state-subsidized presents under a plastic tree). I thought about the way my mother made our house smell like Christmas by dabbing oil she bought from a department store on the metal around the light bulbs and how when I found out I felt cheated somehow. I thought all that spiciness and warmth was really from baking cookies and felled conifers. “I’ll try to come,” I said. “I’ll try.” But I couldn’t.
My aunt came to visit with three of her children. We hiked to a field of bluebells and 11-year-old Isabella complained because she was afraid she’d be sore for her lacrosse game. My aunt promised her a Bob Evans cinnamon roll and pointed out the wild flowers she and her oldest used to pick to decorate their tiny house before they had money. My aunt has seven children. She had the first two before she was 20, one in medical school, two to celebrate earning her M.D. and two more after she opened her own practice. I think some people just know that they will be good mothers and others know they won’t be but have kids anyway.
Some large things are cute, too, and only narrowly escape my desire to swaddle and breastfeed. That summer working at the child center I took the bus home every day to a tiny studio where I watched my relationship heave and writhe like an upset child.
I tried everything and I probably tried to hard. I encouraged him to share his feelings and use his words and take time alone to process. I tried (usually failed) to maintain a flat affect when he was escalated and not to engage in power struggles. I employed the entire Therapeutic Crisis Intervention model: managing the environment (triggers include: bobby pins in the bathroom, bobby pins on the floor, bobby pins in the bed, bobby pins in anywhere in sight or not adequately hidden), prompting, caring gestures, proximity, time away, directive statements, planned ignoring and positive attention, redirection, hurdle help, physical restraint.
It didn’t work. I couldn’t really take care of either of us and I watched everything fall into a sobbing pile of scraped-up elbows, lonely shoes and fist-dented walls and I just didn’t know how to pick it up and wipe its nose and tell it to go outside and play for a while.
Small things are cute. I’m pretty sure this phenomenon is an offshoot of an animal drive to mother anything that is ostensibly weak and motherable. Puppies, babies and old people who have begun to lose height are obvious. But the rule extends, deeply and somewhat bizarrely, into the realm of the inanimate. Like finger-sized plastic-peapod key rings: squeeze it and the smooth green peas bulge forward slightly (highly adorable, prime nurturing material). Also: colorful umbrellas to put in piña coladas, vegetable seeds and the clippings of the pinkie toenail.
But the 6-year-old slamming tiny fists into my abdomen with Pokémon-inspired fervor and screaming his favorite curse word—honestly, “sucka-ducka-fuckin-nigga”—was, at the moment, not cute and I definitely did not want to be his mother. I just wanted him to come in out of the rain and to stop having nightmares about being beaten by his stepfather.
I spent four hours my first day at the child center reading admission summaries. I sat on a low, scratchy, child-size sofa streaked with dried applesauce and snot. She killed three puppies. Threw them down on a hard kitchen floor. When she thinks about this incident she wants to touch herself. Can’t be left alone with younger children. He was prostituted to his mother’s friends so his parents could afford to buy drugs. He was 4. Problems with encopresis requiring supervised showers three times a day. Favorite foods: french fries with ketchup, ice cream cake, teriyaki chicken tenders, mashed potatoes. Triggers: “no,” excessive praise, room time, salad. Especially Caesar.
It crossed my mind to try to adopt one of them. 21 is old enough to foster and adopt and there are thousands of kids, living in transitional homes, whose parents' rights have been terminated. Now and then I still think about it—“just you and me, Joshlynn. We’ll be okay. We’ll get by.” But I can’t take care of a cactus.
When I was five my mother and I found a short, fuzzy orange caterpillar and put it in clear Tupperware with a generous offering of foliage collected from the yard. I cut holes in the top but they were too big and pretty soon the orange caterpillar wasn’t in its bed of leaves and sticks anymore. My mom found it under my bed a week later. A quarter of its original size, it hadn’t found the way back to the Tupperware where there was fresh water and it quickly dried up. We kept it on the windowsill, perched on a mossy rock, and sometimes late at night I would stare up at it and say I was sorry.
Most of the summer I worked at the child center never made it to memory because I tried not to pay attention to too much of it. I remember mostly that the air smelled like tea tree oil and that blackberries seemed to be slowly engulfing the city. Late one night I watched a raccoon get hit by a car ten feet away while his raccoon friend stood next to me at the bus stop. When I was stressed I ate peanut butter, jelly, margarine and banana sandwiches and cookie dough from a tub, letting crumbs fall under the oven for the sublessor to deal with when she got back from Vietnam.
The kids at work asked if I’d come back for a visit during the holidays (special dinner, state-subsidized presents under a plastic tree). I thought about the way my mother made our house smell like Christmas by dabbing oil she bought from a department store on the metal around the light bulbs and how when I found out I felt cheated somehow. I thought all that spiciness and warmth was really from baking cookies and felled conifers. “I’ll try to come,” I said. “I’ll try.” But I couldn’t.
My aunt came to visit with three of her children. We hiked to a field of bluebells and 11-year-old Isabella complained because she was afraid she’d be sore for her lacrosse game. My aunt promised her a Bob Evans cinnamon roll and pointed out the wild flowers she and her oldest used to pick to decorate their tiny house before they had money. My aunt has seven children. She had the first two before she was 20, one in medical school, two to celebrate earning her M.D. and two more after she opened her own practice. I think some people just know that they will be good mothers and others know they won’t be but have kids anyway.
Some large things are cute, too, and only narrowly escape my desire to swaddle and breastfeed. That summer working at the child center I took the bus home every day to a tiny studio where I watched my relationship heave and writhe like an upset child.
I tried everything and I probably tried to hard. I encouraged him to share his feelings and use his words and take time alone to process. I tried (usually failed) to maintain a flat affect when he was escalated and not to engage in power struggles. I employed the entire Therapeutic Crisis Intervention model: managing the environment (triggers include: bobby pins in the bathroom, bobby pins on the floor, bobby pins in the bed, bobby pins in anywhere in sight or not adequately hidden), prompting, caring gestures, proximity, time away, directive statements, planned ignoring and positive attention, redirection, hurdle help, physical restraint.
It didn’t work. I couldn’t really take care of either of us and I watched everything fall into a sobbing pile of scraped-up elbows, lonely shoes and fist-dented walls and I just didn’t know how to pick it up and wipe its nose and tell it to go outside and play for a while.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
on the delicate art of swooning (a draft)
TO DO: SWOONING, NOT SYNCOPE
He says, “you are the light
that makes my camera lens flare
and I’m afraid to touch anything
because the pressure inside my index finger
after an hour with you is enough to make my chest explode,
so just think what I could do
to a little ballpoint pen.
And so I guess it’s goodbye
to photography and writing for a while.”
She says, “You make me want to sleep and sleep,”
meaning sleep forever in some old sweatshirt,
head against seersucker against chest,
ear sliced with spikes of 4 o’clock light.
But we’ve got to keep on
cooking the cow, match by match.
We’ve got to sweep out all the crumbs
before they harden under the lip of the cabinets.
We’ve got to make lists
so long we can use the stuff we’ve done
to wallpaper our living rooms.
We’ve got to swoon, real hard,
but keep that cerebral blood full of oxygen,
so we can stay standing, so we can believe
our love’s not useless.
He says, “you are the light
that makes my camera lens flare
and I’m afraid to touch anything
because the pressure inside my index finger
after an hour with you is enough to make my chest explode,
so just think what I could do
to a little ballpoint pen.
And so I guess it’s goodbye
to photography and writing for a while.”
She says, “You make me want to sleep and sleep,”
meaning sleep forever in some old sweatshirt,
head against seersucker against chest,
ear sliced with spikes of 4 o’clock light.
But we’ve got to keep on
cooking the cow, match by match.
We’ve got to sweep out all the crumbs
before they harden under the lip of the cabinets.
We’ve got to make lists
so long we can use the stuff we’ve done
to wallpaper our living rooms.
We’ve got to swoon, real hard,
but keep that cerebral blood full of oxygen,
so we can stay standing, so we can believe
our love’s not useless.
revisions
Hiya. I've been trying to revise things recently. The first one is super new, the second one is super old.
THIGMATROPIC
I read only the same peeling-paint bathroom wall
for two years and five months, going to visit
the same person every night, before gathering the skirts
tight around my knees and waddling the twenty feet
required to enter another world. The new walls say,
who bats their eyelashes anymore anyway?
ink reminiscent of birds and summer and Washington.
Black birds with oil-spill feathers,
laughing though Pacific woods.
You can’t forget, Dana said, they aren’t woods
until someone cuts them down. Reaching up,
his bony hands brushing hoary moss hanging thick as tinsel,
the same in Appalachian college towns
as in the wealthy suburbs that bracket
my lucky life. It’s hard to give things up.
I will not cut for stone, my aunt said,
and saying so was the right thing,
even though she sometimes believed
she could fix anything. She did
what she could and had her patients gargle
salt water for everything.
And Eritreans don’t have a word for it,
to tilt the head back and let cold,
dark liquids alternately rise
and fall, sliding past tonsils. Cauldron-like, mysterious
sounds breaking through bubbles. Just being
silly, Saba said, just being silly.
I used to be silly every day and between
serving cups of coffee I listened
to co-workers’ stories: beauty pageants, marinated
chunks of lamb, English classes, a husband stuck in Africa.
There are people I can’t see anymore
except when I notice pillows folded length-wise
behind my neck, cutlery arranged along the lines of the table,
my car gliding tangent to the curves of the road and never above 55.
Forgotten stories: a learned efficiency.
HURRICANE SEASON
You called to tell me you spent days tinkering
with thermometers and waving palm fronds
so the temperature and wind would be just right
and it would rain on me today.
I inform you that the drops fell into my tea
and cooled it down
and I love my rain boots anyway.
I tried to send you a happy anniversary! hurricane,
hoping it would fan up the shingles
on your roof, tear the pictures of us
off your doorframes and scare you
into coming home.
But instead it flooded your house.
and you had to stay at someone else’s,
you’ve always had the prettiest friends.
Let’s meet in Asheville. There are mountains there
with crags like embraces and if we hide on the leeward side
maybe we can forget for a minute
all the violent gales and thunder,
the wall-punching and teeth-baring,
the heat lightning nights
we watched the sky flash brown
then white and then brown.
Maybe you’ll begin to notice again
when I toss seismic waves to slam your body
into the rocks, or fix the sun on your face
for when you first open your eyes.
When I wake up extra early
just to run my nose across your eyebrow
or punch you in the stomach.
THIGMATROPIC
I read only the same peeling-paint bathroom wall
for two years and five months, going to visit
the same person every night, before gathering the skirts
tight around my knees and waddling the twenty feet
required to enter another world. The new walls say,
who bats their eyelashes anymore anyway?
ink reminiscent of birds and summer and Washington.
Black birds with oil-spill feathers,
laughing though Pacific woods.
You can’t forget, Dana said, they aren’t woods
until someone cuts them down. Reaching up,
his bony hands brushing hoary moss hanging thick as tinsel,
the same in Appalachian college towns
as in the wealthy suburbs that bracket
my lucky life. It’s hard to give things up.
I will not cut for stone, my aunt said,
and saying so was the right thing,
even though she sometimes believed
she could fix anything. She did
what she could and had her patients gargle
salt water for everything.
And Eritreans don’t have a word for it,
to tilt the head back and let cold,
dark liquids alternately rise
and fall, sliding past tonsils. Cauldron-like, mysterious
sounds breaking through bubbles. Just being
silly, Saba said, just being silly.
I used to be silly every day and between
serving cups of coffee I listened
to co-workers’ stories: beauty pageants, marinated
chunks of lamb, English classes, a husband stuck in Africa.
There are people I can’t see anymore
except when I notice pillows folded length-wise
behind my neck, cutlery arranged along the lines of the table,
my car gliding tangent to the curves of the road and never above 55.
Forgotten stories: a learned efficiency.
HURRICANE SEASON
You called to tell me you spent days tinkering
with thermometers and waving palm fronds
so the temperature and wind would be just right
and it would rain on me today.
I inform you that the drops fell into my tea
and cooled it down
and I love my rain boots anyway.
I tried to send you a happy anniversary! hurricane,
hoping it would fan up the shingles
on your roof, tear the pictures of us
off your doorframes and scare you
into coming home.
But instead it flooded your house.
and you had to stay at someone else’s,
you’ve always had the prettiest friends.
Let’s meet in Asheville. There are mountains there
with crags like embraces and if we hide on the leeward side
maybe we can forget for a minute
all the violent gales and thunder,
the wall-punching and teeth-baring,
the heat lightning nights
we watched the sky flash brown
then white and then brown.
Maybe you’ll begin to notice again
when I toss seismic waves to slam your body
into the rocks, or fix the sun on your face
for when you first open your eyes.
When I wake up extra early
just to run my nose across your eyebrow
or punch you in the stomach.
Friday, April 17, 2009
no-title, drafty mess.
I want feedback and lots of it, please. And I'm gonna post a revision on Thursday.
xox
I read only the same peeling-paint bathroom stall
for two years and five months
before gathering the skirts tight around my knees
and waddling, with near-thigmatropic elegance,
the twenty inches required to enter another world.
The new walls say, who bats their eyelashes anymore anyway?
ink reminiscent of birds and summer and Washington.
Black birds with oil-spill feathers,
laughing though the woods.
You can’t forget, Dana said, they aren’t woods
until someone cuts them down. Reaching up,
his bony hands brushing hoary moss hanging thick as tinsel,
the same in Appalachia as in wealthy suburbs.
It’s hard to give things up.
I will not cut for stone, my aunt said,
and saying so felt like the right thing.
She made her patients gargle
salt water for everything.
But Eritreans don’t have a word for it,
to tilt the head back and let cold,
dark liquids alternately rise
and fall, sliding past tonsils. Cauldron-like, mysterious
sounds breaking through bubbles. Just being
silly, Saba said, just being silly.
There are people I don’t see anymore
except when (late night, working)
I notice pillows folded length-wise behind my neck
or the car gliding tangent
to the curves of the road and never above 55,
forgotten stories:
a learned efficiency.
xox
I read only the same peeling-paint bathroom stall
for two years and five months
before gathering the skirts tight around my knees
and waddling, with near-thigmatropic elegance,
the twenty inches required to enter another world.
The new walls say, who bats their eyelashes anymore anyway?
ink reminiscent of birds and summer and Washington.
Black birds with oil-spill feathers,
laughing though the woods.
You can’t forget, Dana said, they aren’t woods
until someone cuts them down. Reaching up,
his bony hands brushing hoary moss hanging thick as tinsel,
the same in Appalachia as in wealthy suburbs.
It’s hard to give things up.
I will not cut for stone, my aunt said,
and saying so felt like the right thing.
She made her patients gargle
salt water for everything.
But Eritreans don’t have a word for it,
to tilt the head back and let cold,
dark liquids alternately rise
and fall, sliding past tonsils. Cauldron-like, mysterious
sounds breaking through bubbles. Just being
silly, Saba said, just being silly.
There are people I don’t see anymore
except when (late night, working)
I notice pillows folded length-wise behind my neck
or the car gliding tangent
to the curves of the road and never above 55,
forgotten stories:
a learned efficiency.
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