it's been a long time

since much of this was written. Perhaps long enough to find its way into a public sphere. Not that anyone reads this little old blog, anyways. :)

I've been sorting for the past month. Sorting and throwing things out is very cathartic for me, and always has been since that year I almost ran to South Carolina. There's just a very lot of freedom in knowing you could stuff everything you own into the backseat of your car and fly anywhere. We are strangers, after all, pilgrims who "desire a better, heavenly country," and it does my heart good to shed a few more suitcases every once in a while. (It does my heart better to read the rest of the verse, which you should go and find yourself in Hebrews 11.)

In this particular rummage, I've been finding old journals and notebooks, scraps of ages past buried beneath the health notes, birthday cards, and innumerable love letters from Caroline and Seth. (Sidey-side note - I ought to be more like them. [later - ironic in light of poems...bahaha.]) I also found a handful of old poems, all written for a fiction class in the fall of 2009 or spring of 2010. I am posting them here for posterity, just in case my computer dies, but - they all need sequels. Which I can write, now, in this age of grace. :)

Written September 2009, edited again in November, strongly resisting a desire to edit once more! I have gone back and redeemed this place already; will have to write that up. All things new. :)

St. John's Cemetery, October

I found the place myself, and it was lonely -

The hills stand back, just beyond reach;

The wind rattled by, leaving me tall, strikable,

In a field of dead sunflowers.

I had stopped to walk in the graveyard

With its marble angels and acolyte pines,

But they were not taking visitors

And the fence hustled me on,

Past a ravine where ghosts sunbathed as dusty birches,

Up the hill beyond the cemetery.

Geometry fell before me - the chain-link

Square, fuzzy bushes perching on banks,

A precise highway bisecting the west.

Windshields glinted with the mass concentration of salmon,

Muffled out by the shimmering atmosphere

Between. I sat down among the sunflower

Skeletons and watched the silence float in the air.

Also from the fall of 2009. Good in concept, but very badly done; I apologize.

Inheritance

You have succeeded,

Jessie Miller, great-great grandmother,

Deceived me into carrying

Your heritage. The family story went

That we were Amish, until you ran to California

And those you left were shunned.

When people asked about my name, it was

A melodrama to tell, like a novel,

Like fiction.

Last week, at a funeral, I acquired

A scrapbook of photos, old photos. I flipped

Through the pages, found you seated there,

Squinting at me, head turned

With the predatory precision of a praying mantis.

Your clothes were elaborate, frothy, machine-sewn.

Your husband wore glasses and smooth-greased hair.

There were no severe collars, no monotone hats,

No draft horses or cattle. Three children.

The other half of the family never heard

That they were Amish, and gaped at me.

Only I am assigned to propagate stories

Of yours; I would have told my children.

You have left me as you left your husband,

Homeless, explaining away the lies you scattered.

...this poem is going on two years old. It contains little identifying detail. And these things always have so much less power when thrown to the sunlight. So I am putting it here, where no one will ever notice, (and if you are long gone, please don't notice; it isn't my intention to beat you with this again) in the cyber equivalent of throwing it to the winds. All things new. :)

Note Paper

November has come early. The sky

Is deep and intricate, a dry rotting plush.

My car swings up next to yours,

And I set my boot heels emphatically

Onto the wasting black asphalt

Of the Eastland Mall parking lot.

I squint through the glass doors to where you are

Selling sugar-drowned pretzels inside.

Against the wind, I clutch

A torn scrap of paper, written

Earlier in the day so its intent cannot change.

As I walk around your car, I run

My fingers over the bleaching bumper stickers,

The rusty gravel nicks above the tire well.

One quick glance - I always expect

Mall Security to come whining up

When I clack open the wrinkled Toyota door.

I lean in, half-kneeling, to place the note

On the console, and I am crushed

In the smell of you.

It is like cider, onions, autumn;

A root cellar, smoky-dark and devastatingly sweet,

With splintered Mason jars in the corners.

You smell like three nights ago,

The long drive home where you sat here

And I sat there. The sky was full

In the darkness, and I carved

My nails into the door handle.

You told me many ugly things,

Growled imploding confessions of treason,

Beat the steering wheel, yourself.

I twisted my ring and took it like a priest

For a long time. Chewed forgiveness, and

Spat it out the window. I cannot believe

Myself - to think you were in there

With her, while I left you these

Stupid little 1950s housewife notes.

I slam the door, wrap my arms

Around my shoulders, shake my hair.

The glass of the mall only glints

My own face back, heavy as the sky.

The slam sends my note paper scrap

Skittering down onto the floorboards, and I see

A nest of paper tucked into a pocket,

A smiling Post-It note gummed

By two summers onto the visor,

A faded pentagon slipped into the dash,

Covering the gas gauge. I love you.

Your stupid little notes

Make my week!

You hammered every syllable into the wheel,

Rasped and chewed your lip. You turned to me;

Your eyes were green, as they always are

Before they cry. Deep and full and heavy.

I am green; I sink into the driver's seat

And press my face against the steering wheel.

I cannot create enough barbed wire

To keep you out, it molders in my hands.

Trust died in that sky, and I will exhume it again, find enough

Machismo to be the 1950s housewife.

Also fall 2009. A bit more fictional than the rest. :) This one has actually already been released on the world, through last year's Fish Hook (the USI liberal arts journal).

Ice Princess

Two winters ago, the city rang

With ice. I remember mincing home, cringing

At the trees. The day before, they were

Neat-cut bones against the sky; tonight the ice,

Relentless, adamantine, drug them to the earth.

They shimmered in the cold, gorgeous pain, fragile

And lovely as captured princesses.

Later that week, I stumbled across

My old sign language teacher. After the first

Hello squeal and hug, she stepped back, cupped

Her florid hands around my shoulders. Baby, there's

Nothing to you. I can feel your ribs.

I laughed. I've been sick. But I could feel the warmth

Puffing out: I would take care of you.

To be doomed, one must be beautiful,

Or the tragedy is only a comedy.

I found that in a book and kept it:

Only the lovely are loved, the pathetic pitied.

I strait-jacketed myself in pain,

Skipped meals and slept on Sundays. Aches were precious,

The concave hips only a side bonus.

My essence was the blue Diana skin, ribbed

Wrists, opaque eyes. I was a ghost baby,

Goblin princess, glass tree, before the world glanced

Up. My soldier came home and cried over

My cell phone fine; I melted.

Also published in the Fish Hook, from spring 2010. In the fiction workshop, we peer reviewed each others' work, and I got an amazing response from this one - all sorts of touching, empathetic notes from guys and girls alike.

Looking-Glass

It makes me wince, some mornings, watching

My frail-boned body come from the shower

Towards the full-length mirror. My ribs

Fall meekly as drapes over a window,

Keeping the chill out. I draw

The towel around my shoulders, wrap

Its hunter's orange across my chest.

With it sanitarily under my chin, I can see

My face, the steamed flush pulsing between

Full, peppered cheekbones. I did not realize

Their shape until someone mapped them carefully,

Ordered me to smile and traced the topography with a blunt finger.

I hang up the towel and dress myself as distantly

And carefully as one dresses a paper doll. Just before jeans, I flip

One thigh toward the mirror, crunching the muscle, willing it

Taut and shining as the neck of a horse.

I contract my eyebrows, assessing muscle tone

With the ruddy alien squint of an overseer

Below the auctioneer's platform. I am cold,

I could not care twice, but neither has anyone else.

The hands that held my face always dropped it.

When I am through watching the opacity

Of my invalid ghost-baby body flicker in the light,

I turn from the mirror and close the bathroom door.

Finally, a pantoum, also spring 2010.

Apprentice

for Beth

You are the birdcage waif, my friend;

I whispered rumors of keys to you in the dark.

Recite the lesson for me again.

I taught you what I did not know.

I whispered rumors of keys to you in the dark:

When you are lost, sing here, and so loudly.

I taught you what I did not know,

Yet it looked right, hung in the sky.

When you are lost, sing here, and so loudly.

You took my wispy words and hammered them true

And they looked right, hung in the sky

Now, beneath you and your dance.

You took my wispy words and hammered them true -

Remind me how you twisted from the cage

Now beneath you and your dance,

How you have learned what I never said.

Remind me how you twisted from the cage:

You were the birdcage waif, my friend.

How have you learned what I never said?

Recite the lesson for me again.

almost thanksgiving

I have just finished the dishes and the rotini, and I should probably turn down Frank Sinatra a little. In an oddly riotous mood. Thanksgiving is nearly twenty-four hours away, and home almost as close - perhaps that has something to do with it. :) Or maybe I'm just starting to un-knit my eyebrows after an overwhelming, frightening, beautiful weekend. Oh, and the responsibility still turns heavy between my hands, but I'm regarding it objectively now. Maybe.

(This is the point where I insert a disclaimer - I'm assuming that anyone who still reads this blog kind of cares about me, and half-expected that I'd talk about myself. :D If you really just want to be entertained, try engrishfunny.com. The word nerd in me never fails to be amused.)

I have an opportunity to participate just a little in a crazy work God's doing in North Africa next May. I've known about it since October, and been completely gung-ho if a little intimidated by the preparation. Part of that preparation entailed attending the National Missionary Convention in Lexington last weekend. I expected the workshops; I'd heard of the keynote speakers. The exhibit hall was full of Bible colleges and campus ministries, including my own. It was good, and I learned and had thought-provoking conversations.

But...oh, how do I say this? I had never before sat in a stadium with four thousand people and listened to them sing Revelation Song, sing it as it will be sung around the throne, in a hundred different shades and accents from hearts that have been both emptied and filled. And I cannot comprehend the amount of other voices around the throne who will have been brought there by that four thousand. I was surrounded by people who were giving their lives for the words of that song. And was I?

A few hours later I found myself in a private debrief-and-praise meeting for everyone who had birthed or somehow touched the North African ministry. I felt like I'd been invited into a family reunion - no one actually recognized me, they just assumed I was a second cousin they'd never met. A few key people shared the events of the past year (and God really is doing some crazy things, things that haven't happened in other countries) along with prayer requests for the next. They thanked us all for our fervent prayers over the past eight years, blessed our faithfulness, fed our visionary dreams that have propelled all the impossibilities.

I did not stand up. I did not shout across the room that I struggle with focus, love, nerve, and a very lot of apathy. They do not know that I usually pray for about twenty minutes a day, most of which is in the shower. Or that I know all the correct phrases because I was raised in a good family, not because I have dogged them from the page on my own. I would sooner be comfortable than meet someone else's needs. And I love Jesus because He takes care of me, not for His incredible goodness and glory.

I did not leave, and I will stick with this and work for it, but...I am very much humbled by this weekend. Still thinking.

G'night, all...I'll be back on Thanksgiving.

Vitriolic U

The Shield is significantly worse this week...for your consideration --

(Disclaimer: all below is transcribed sic.)

The defense of 'True' Science

By Ian Burleson, Staff writer

Part One

Imagine if someone today were to deny the existence of germs, the roundness of the earth, or the heliocentricity of our solar system. Suppose this person denied the credibility of science, which purports these theories, and that "true" science proves the opposite.

Would you be skeptical of this person?

Would it be consoling to know that she has a single book to back up her claims that germs do not exist, that the earth is flat, and that the sun revolves around us? Her book has not been, nor will it ever be, updated to fit our current scientific conception of how the universe works.

Does the fact that the book's teachings are eternally unchangeable ease your skepticism?

Most people these days will answer no it does not. In fact, most would--or at least should--consider the mentioned claims to be outlandish, beyond incredulous.

Interestingly, some of this debate still continues to this day among the fringe of the fringe: The Flat Earth Society and the first annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism entitled "Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right" in South Bend, Indiana near Notre Dame University which took place last Saturday.

What have we learned from instances in history when the obviously false was Biblical doctrine. If not that we must update our model of reality in light of scientific evidence on a constant basis if we are to ever understand it?

Now fast forward a few hundred years, and the new "debate" in the forefront is between the same historical opposition: scientific evidence vs. a literal interpretation of Biblical scripture.

In our case, the theory of evolution is the subject.

The theory, as science understands it today, maintains that evolution is a natural occurrence whereby all species of life developed their vast diversity and complexity from a common single-celled ancestor through an ongoing process of genetic natural selection. Creationism asserts that an intelligent, supernatural being had to have made all things in the universe because evolutionary theory cannot account for the diversity and complexity we observe--it must have been intelligently designed.

USI has been graced by the presence of one such fellow, Marlin Goebel, who argues for the latter, claiming that true science defends the Bible--that's his slogan anyway.

Let us put aside the fact that he has no training in biology, no experience in a laboratory or in the field, and further he has no official theological tutelage. He owns his own real estate company called Goebel Commercial Reality, Inc., and so he is, in a word, a businessman.

He is here--by invitation and sponsorship from Chi Alpha--for a series of lectures to inform us that mainstream scientists have got it all wrong: the answers are in the Bible.

Does this kind of rhetoric not sound hauntingly familiar? The examples presented earlier were based on the same mode of logic.

The Bible never once mentions the existence of germs, rather it explains in Luke 13:11-13, among a long list of verses, that disease is caused by evil spirits. The Bible never once mentions the roundness of the earth, rather it explains in Daniel 4:10-11 that a sufficiently tall tree can be seen from "the earth's farthest bounds," clearly implying that the surface of the earth is flat. The Bible never once mentions that the earth orbits the sun, rather it explains in Psalm 104:5 and I Chronicles 16:30 that the earth is permanently immovable and stable in its position.

Of course these are factually incorrect statements, so it's reasonable to say that if we based our scientific knowledge on them, then we couldn't have vaccines, antibiotics, satellites or an understanding of why something as fundamental as changing seasons, or retrograde motion of other planets in the night sky, occurs.

In short, if we take the Bible at its word on issues like physics, chemistry and biology, we'd be vastly ignorant to how reality operates, and we would not have the technology and medical advances that have made our lives as relatively safe and simple as they are today.

The same applies to the theory of evolution.

As the Russian Orthodox Christian evolutionary biologist once quipped, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution."

If we blind ourselves to the reality of evolution, then explaining the foundations of biology go out the window in favor of a book which teaches us that disease is a spiritual matter, the earth is flat, and the sun revolves around us.

Part Two

We enjoy the life that scientific progress has afforded us. Taking away the fundamental pillars that allowed the progress to flourish as it did is to return us to a primitive state of ignorance.

Perhaps it's just me, but Mr. Goebel's series seems like a sully insult to the biologists and scientists on this campus who spend an enormous amount of their professional life studying all the research, theories and debate that go in their scientific domains.

In none of these domains is anything like creation even a legitimate option, not because of some gung-ho crusade against theological explanations that scientists have (indeed many of them are Christians themselves), but because none of the evidence actually points to such explanations as being the right ones.

Despite the fact that the germ theory is "just a theory," no one seems to be stripping it down, tarring and feathering it in favor of the evil spirit theory as described in the Bible. Despite the fact that even before we went to space, we verily knew that the earth must be round because of incredibly compelling experimental evidence from what was then "just a theory." We often scoff today at those who believed something so simplistic as a flat earth. Despite the fact that some were tortured and even executed for dissenting against the Church's geocentric doctrine for "just a theory" of heliocentrism--a theory first formulated in 260 BCE by Aristarchus, but was truly solidified by Copernicus in 1551 CE--we again wonder how anyone could have been so malevolently fatuous to have taken the Bible so literally in spite of the clearly presented scientific evidence.

And yet, a few hundred years later, we have a man on our campus promoting the same kind of message: couching literal Bible interpretation as "true" science, and lambasting the scientific theories which contradict the Bible as essentially works of the devil, and scientists as heretics.

I for one find it truly amazing how far we've come in terms of scientific knowledge, yet how short we've come in terms of educating our nation about how science actually works and the indispensability of the theories it often produces--such as the theory of evolution--to our everyday lives.

The consolation I find in this situation is the fact that no matter how hard the church has tried to suppress scientific knowledge in favor of literal Biblical interpretation, science has won out in the end.

I suspect Mr. Goebel's presentations are the contemporary countenance of history's long-fought battle between science and Biblical-literalism. His stance is one that our descendants will look back on with the same shameful guffaw we have when discussing the literalists of our scientifically ignorant past.

Can't we just evolve already?

insomniacal chatter

...I've been meaning to write lately - really, I have. I've started a post two nights out of the past six, only to end in a fatalistic growl. I can't write presentably when I'm tired. But I'm somehow wide awake tonight, and feeling chatty. Consider yourself warned.

Alright, I'm actually up because my stomach hurts, and I couldn't sleep anyways. It hasn't done this in a year and I've lost all my coping strategies...yes, a year! Isn't it crazy? November is my ebenezer month, in more ways than one...but that is a different conversation. Which will happen before or around Thanksgiving, I promise.

-- God is just so sweet, though! I have to say something...He's given me so much good this year. I've met many, many good people, iron-on-iron people, and then a couple of crazy people of the sort you have to keep -- you know what I mean. They are the ones who you find on a bus you walked onto by accident, the ones who you meet for coffee the next day for largely indefinable reasons. And in the middle of the second or third hour of conversation, they say something that makes you glance over quickly, skeptically, because you've been waiting forever for someone else to say that. Those people. Reasonably, we only come across a handful of those people our entire lives, and I've met a few this year, and always when I needed them. God most definitely loves us through people.

But that's another post! I'll stop now... :)

And I'm starting to tire out. So by way of summary --

Lately I've been pondering just how vocal I should be -- perhaps the lack of belligerent professors this semester has given me a little bit more distance to think. But when is it necessary to put a word in for truth, and where would I do no good and only come across as another pugnacious Christian? (I'm always surprised at their numbers and tenacity, actually...and their acute lack of love. A rant for another night.) More specifically...

I have been a faithful reader of the USI Shield since last January. It makes me feel more connected to the culture of the campus, yes, but I think I've started this new habit chiefly as a twisted, autophobic way of motivating myself in my English studies. By the time I've sloughed through the whole thing and shaken the remains of the grammatical bloodbath from my feet, I feel that it is practically my moral duty to become an English teacher, or at least circulate more coherent prose. (I don't mean to sound condescending -- the Shield has made great improvements over the past semester, expanding their content and columnists, and they do offer an accurate cross-section of USI -- they just have no grammar Nazis on staff.) I've debated writing to the editor before over some very silly opinion pieces, but an article of an entirely different nature popped up yesterday and I don't know what to do with it.

Essentially, it's a critique of a lecture series on creationism that a campus ministry, Chi Alpha, hosted over the past two months. The article is from a staff writer, highly factually inaccurate, and poorly and nastily written. (I can tack up the text if anyone wants to read it.) Part two of the article will be published next Thursday, and it may moderate this week's installment, but still -- should I write in anything? Since this is the Midwest, I imagine the Shield will receive multiple letters about these articles -- the argument itself is inevitable. But should I say something, and argue well in the firestorm, or stay out of it entirely? When am I talking for the sake of doing some good, and when am I just snapping back in offense?

Motives are so hard to decipher. (Does anyone else struggle with that?) I've been poking at mine concerning a few big decisions over the past month, and I finally came to a truce -- if I'm bathing it in prayer and constantly dialogging with the Spirit, it's alright to move ahead and do things that I know are inherently good, even if I might have selfish reasons tacked onto them. I will never know exactly what my heart wants; it's a petulant, mad mess, prone to change its mind the minute I have pinned it down. And it's hard to fix, or reason into behaving. But it is possible to just tie it to the Word and make it follow along, and then life becomes much simpler.

...it's now 3:30. I do have to work tomorrow, so I think I've written enough for tonight. It's nice to be scribbling again. :) I'll be back soon...I need to explain a few things, a few of the crazy things I love that I've been scaring everyone with lately. 'Til then.

I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging for bread.

Psalm 37:25

Life is good, but God is better. :)

Benevolence

Sorry about the lack of new material lately -- class assignments have become slower, and the last few poems have been icky, personal things I don't want to subject you to. But I do have something new today -- I wrote this two weeks ago, in a twenty-minute exercise. It's the Lloyd Expressway. ;)

(By the way, this should be on USI's creative writing department website by the end of the week, under Best of the Workshops for April. http://www.usi.edu/libarts/english/creative.asp Exciting!)



Benevolence



You have seen them, in their old white
Neons and bulging Caravans, throttling past you
And throwing Cheerios or Ke$ha on your windshield.

You have fought them where the highway squeezes
Itself around men in orange with Plexiglas heads, where the fast
Lane is elbowed into yours twenty yards after the stoplight.

You have waited nicely
While they pitch forward, wiggling past and then rolling
Back into your bumper, tapping the brake righteously:

Their child is on the honor roll. They must obey the speed limit.
And you have thought, haven’t you,
Of tooling beside them cheerfully instead,

Window to window, and waving
Them into the fluorescent barrels, listening
For the crunch of axle on humpbacked median.

Perhaps you would stop and hold their hands afterwards,
Let them use your phone, and you should –
They are the golden retrievers of the world,

So firmly assured in the inherent goodness of man
That they don’t check the mirrors before sliding in front of you;
They leave the windows down and sing loudly like children.

So you sit at the stoplight, singsonging I can’t see you
Because they’ve plastered two hands over their eyes,
Or throwing the tennis ball again and again, and smiling.

Baggage

There was a free duffel bag

With a bank logo on the side under her bed;

Every few weeks she would pull it out

And threaten my mother with it:

Take me to the station in Fulda! I'm going

Home to Chicago on the next train!

She filled the bag with newspapers

And soft, fibrous photographs from the thirties; later that night,

When she unpacked, she was twenty years younger, visiting friends,

And greeted us graciously.

My great-grandmother would talk

To my brothers and I if we brought her pictures

Or found the concertina case in the closet. She had run

To Chicago when the Midwestern farms dried up;

She worked in a factory and spun

Wheels of meter with tap shoes each night.

Once she and her twin sister rolled out of a car

And into a ditch after they were picked up

By the mafia. We only heard stories

About the pretty lady in the sparkly dress;

I knew nothing of the man on the badge

In her drawer, Anthony Chmela, Supervisor,

The charming man who she married

After he gave her a baby, a baby who withered

Between them a few months later.

I was allowed to play her piano, stumbling after

LEDs above the forty-something plastic keys

That taught chords and melody to eight

Pre-programmed songs. She knew the words

And sang them on clear days, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles

Or When the Saints Go Marching In. She sang another,

About a dear Augustine, in German, and I asked her

To teach me the words in English for a long time.

But she always finished the chorus back in her own language;

She would not remember anything else.

It frightened me then, the loss of control;

I never could tell her the train station was gone.

But she had the gift to sort through all the pieces

Of memory and choose which she wanted

And which to leave in the shoe box. I wish I had

That mercy time gives, wish I could only sing about

Her voice, reaching into the well-grooved German.

I cannot repack my bags to my liking yet.

Earthworks

I'm definitely unsure on the title...I hate titles!
Turned this in today -- I'll probably know what everyone thinks by next Tuesday. Good reviews on Antecedent!


Earthworks


I was seven when my cat died.
He was a werewolf, hunting
In his lunacy for a chunk of days,
Then returning to sleep on my lap
For a week. I read him Where the Wild Things Are.
One October he came from the woods
Dragging his dead hind legs, meowling.
I touched his head, terrified; he growled.
We bolstered him in rugs on the garage floor, left
Tins of vinegar-sweet canned meat
Beside his thrashing slow-mo head.
I stood on a bucket outside the window to watch
So I could not smell him rotting from the spine out.
We buried him in a paper grocery sack
That proclaimed its own virtue – No need
For double bagging! But we did
Anyways, wrapped his coffin a second time,
And my dad took it out to the woods with a shovel.
I followed warily from my room with binoculars, a blanket
Buffering my face.

Two months ago, in the rain, I saw
The face of a girl on a billboard, a girl
Someone had missed. She was beautiful.
I sat in my car at the stoplight and stared
At her set dimples and washed-out blond eyebrows.
She perched outside my windshield, smiling
As she did for all the Dateline specials, in the perpetually knelling
Too-personal slideshows – senior portrait, with infant daughter, last Thanksgiving.
She left in a provocative neon fade
Like a pomegranate thrown against the wall,
Sliding down smooth and terrible color, its own
Purple blood dropping slowly, delectable, on its head.

My wipers started, a horn barked, and I touched
The gas pedal. As the glass was mopped clear, I rolled
Under her face and glanced up again. I only smelled
Formaldehyde, and clicked the wipers off
To let the rain ebb between us.