Posts

Showing posts with the label Zohar
Show all
Posted by

Writing Hand

This morning my hand went numb while I was writing.
My right hand.

The same hand I used yesterday
to painstakingly strip the last few ounces of milk
from Cori’s injured teat end.
A week ago it looked like someone had stepped on it-
-it being her rear left teat.
-Someone being a nine hundred pound jersey cow.
Bruised black and purple,
with a thick maroon scab covering the orifice.

I peel at her scab as gently as I am able, to expose the opening,
to extract the milk filling her swollen udder.

This will save her from developing mastitis.

But Cori doesn’t know the word “mastitis,”
so when I tell her I’m doing it for her own good she still kicks
and swats her tail at me.

I don’t blame her.

And this morning the muscles in my forearm are sore from wrestling.
From forcing the milk out of her teat past skin that is doing its best to heal.
And as I’m sitting in bed, writing in my journal, suddenly my hand starts to feel like
pins and needles.
I shake it and nothing changes.
I take a break and the feeling comes back, but when I start writing again,
again pins and needles.

So this time I force it, I struggle through to continue writing,
to extract the thoughts from my foggy morning brain,

until I slowly lose all feeling.
I’m forced to stop, unable to overcome the limitations
of my own body.
1 comment
Posted by

Studying for the GRE

This is all a neologism to me
A prescient paean
Oh dear god, or should I say
Oh dear magic
Is it perfidy on my part, to say "magic" in this way
An erudite choice, none the less.
I guess my vote is perfidy
always
of your he-god.
And yet I believe in something
with alacrity, even.
But I'm not sure what?


Post a Comment
Posted by

Spinach


I’m shoveling spinach into my mouth
delighting in its grassy sweetness.
And because the novel I just read 
is about the fallibility of memory,
and because I am stoned
I suddenly realize the reason I’ve left this delicious
source of summer chlorophyll and carbohydrate and whatever vitamins I’m craving the most right now,
slowly thawing for weeks in a vacuum-sealed bag 

is because of how we ate spinach last winter.

You had picked it all into big black garbage bags
in the early morning snow of the last day we would be able to harvest anything fresh and green.
And you wanted everyone to know you hadn’t picked the spinach just for yourself.  
But no one else was eating it.
So I ate it, we ate it, every time we ate together. 
Even though it had been frozen raw and unwashed,
so that we had to struggle to clean the dirt off before our hands began to freeze, 
and inevitably 
we would still feel the crunch of sand in our teeth.
And I ate it even though it had these horrible fat spongy stems, 
the result of constricting and thawing water cells 
in mature December veins.

I’ll concede, it was my fault that one time it was over salted.
And I guess it wasn’t your fault that you picked the spinach
and I didn’t like it.
It was just the way it was.

Now this spinach tastes like nutrient dense magic 
in the way that only a revelation can taste when 
you are high and rediscovering your own memories.

But even this magic spinach 
is leaking oxalic acid
an astringent film upon my teeth.

3 comments
Posted by

Glasses

I’m facing away from the window
I can feel the sun on my back
An invite I’m resisting
Instead sitting
In this small town coffee shop
Sipping water from my mug
Like when you start wearing glasses for the first time
And the floor feels further away that you’re used to
Not all the time
Just when you stand up
Drunk on the transition
The Newness
And you choose to stay seated where it is comfortable
Consider switching your orientation

Maybe, at least
1 comment