Small

It's a small world town. Straight from work to the FedEx office to ship my green card renewal forms. The clerk glances at my address and says--Yellow Springs? She grew up in Yellow Springs. She graduated high school three years behind Big A, and yeah--she knows him. She was best friends with his baby sister.

We used to bug him a lot and make him mad, she said.

He's reformed now, I said.

Poor Li'l A, who bugged his dad by eating dinner for over an hour and heard his wrath for a solid ten minutes yesterday, would probably disagree.

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Stop me if you've seen this before: Microaggressions

The format is a speaker's somewhat blithe, privileged comment followed by a description of how the listener interpreted it.

I particularly like the way Microaggressions--a new-ish Tumblr--acknowledges that minorities may exercise small, even unintentional, aggressions upon each others' consciousnesses--as below:

Man, outscored by a black guy.”

• Quote - Permalink

Vietnamese American male upon finding out I got a higher score than him on the Chinese I midterm. 

Having the House to Myself

Is delicious. The silence is heavenly. The kids are at school. Big A is at work. The university is still on Easter break. I'm getting work done. I'm eating chocolate. I'm eating a lot of chocolate. I microwaved some Annie Chun's for lunch.

I miss the kids. And memories--of their tiny hands, their silly requests, their crazy antics--are debilitating. Their crazy requests. Their silly antics. Their tiny requests.

When I'm not with them I worry about them. I'm with them; I worry. Somedays they're crawling all over me and I feel like I'm sitting cross-legged on a train-track holding them tight, wondering if something horrible is careening around the corner towards us.

Other days, of course, feel like I should save the world from my kids.

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The Recent Fuse

Stories sink
numbers
are old

number
than millions
take their toll

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The Seige of Misrata (Take 2)

(So I went back and read the original post--which I'd made for a dear student from Libya who hasn't been able to speak to her family for over a month. The whole thing felt like the equivalent of a rant. Worse, all the pronouns made it sound like the conflict was all about me. I was trying to express solidarity, but it didn't convey well. So first I took out all the pronouns. But it was still too dense and heavy, so I pared it down further. Better now, but it doesn't say everything I mean it to say.)

The Seige of Misrata (Take 2)

(For Hala M.)

The run can start

the walk has not.

Run, run, and run 

skies never change

the sky is bloody fruit 

newsprint flattens cities

flight falls like attack,

sudden desert nights.

Loud around us 

art is bursting.

Reloading. Pulse. 

Repulse. of news.


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The Seige of Misrata

(For Hala M.)

For the run has started, the walk has not
run and run till skies never change
the small bloody fruit of the sky weighs
the city at once flatter than newsprint

count among the living
count among the alive

In fates warped and shocked by shells

racked and rocked and fucked by shells

carefully sisters endure, carry each other

one dies today, another in soon days.

flight falls like an attack

like sudden desert nights

so Hillary is a hero and so can spend lives
so destinies are lead, so her voice is silver
for reputations are assembled around our feet
for revolutions rattle in the circles at our feet

For around us art is bursting.
And pulse. repulse. of news.

_

The Day Homework Went Viral

Stuck in a dinky little library study room sans projector or internet with my ESL kids today, I proctored their exam and then wrote their home assignment up on the chalk board. That's as low-tech as teaching gets, right?

Then as they prepared to walk out of class, these awesome students proceeded to pull out their smart phones,  click pictures of the assignment on the chalk board, and forward it to their classmates.

:) !

They're going to inherit the world.

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