Erin Passons's Blog, page 12

Two Days Before D-Day 71 Years Later

One day I will actually sit down and scribe this poem into a legible document. Oh who am I kidding? I probably won’t. But I sort of like it the way it is, raw and messy and deeply flawed. I wrote this on the way home from Vegas last June.

Praise You

I heard from a mutual friend that you had a kid and I thought, great, another Republican

Born into the world locked and loaded.

Down here in blueberry land we gang up on the crossing guards. Two feet flat I never doubt I am the majority. My stiff upper lip can get pretty limp from its idleness but when I go back to Mississippi, oh boy, watch out.

I’m surprised you visit Austin. I bet your Bible boils in your back pocket along with your 420 cigarettes.

You hypocrite.

I never liked the way you pouted your lips at men you swore you’d never sleep with. I never liked how ashamed I felt at asking you for favors, even though we split the Claire’s Boutique best friend necklace straight down the middle in middle school and for a while there never looked back.

You want religion? Try this: one day thou beautiful face will no longer erase thy ugly brain underneath. Your racist thoughts and slutty parts and the murky past you tiptoe around like a polluted lake will coming rushing out like fits of rain in Noah’s chapter of the book written by the God you try to steal from people far more deserving.

Stand

The bright-walled amphitheater of the luxury cruise liner school makes my marriage prison break feel like a hall pass handed out with a menacing threat. 
It tickles the brain. I want to laugh at the elbow pain. I blink a tired eye and marvel at how hard I fought to fall flat on my face at rock bottom.

She zooms past, holding the limp hand of her daughter scrambling behind her. The daughter holds a silver plated water bottle bearing her name, “ANGELIQUE.”

Her mother glances over her shoulder and her face lights up with the kind of wide-eyed wonder reserved only for mothers realizing they are in the company of other mothers with children similar in age.

We scramble down the hallway exchanging the stats of our children. Fourth grade, third grade. New to the school district, three years in. We were at basketball camp last year. This is our first time.

Do you live nearby, she asks. We live in River Oaks.

I picture her house: a white-stoned fortress with a circular driveway. Deer grazing in the yard. An easy breezy morning enjoying the dimmed October sunshine on the back patio.

I live in the part of town one moves to when they can't afford a good divorce lawyer, I tell her, putting a positive spin on the midnight cries of car alarms and the sidewalk art of vagrant amputees and the stripper dope femme across the hall who throws empty liquor bottles at her boyfriend when he tries to leave.

We’ve all been there, she laughs, but I doubt that.

I notice this about myself—I look down a lot when I am with these women. I probably know the tile pattern of every floor in Westlake.

I am suddenly self-conscious that my hair hasn’t properly been colored and cut in years. That my face is blotchy red and dead without exfoliation facial care of any kind.

She’s chatting and walking fast and thankfully doesn’t seem to notice me tuck my ratty purse under a cardigan whose strings are coming loose at the pits. And my pits aren’t shaved, I think. I’m a bottom dwelling, stinky, hairy mess.

But I decide sitting down next to the woman and her immaculate purse I’ll still wave at my son from the stands, even if he doesn’t score a single point, even if he’s benched from start to go and he only uses his hands to peel off the paper of his hastily bought plastic water bottle, just so he’ll know I’m here and I’m not going anywhere and just because I decided to fall doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how to stand.

Yellow

I removed the yellow nail polish my blunt friend said looked like toe fungus this morning in a dimly lit room (my preteen daughter hovering nearby on her phone) not knowing the sick butter shade had stained the flesh above and below until some hours later when my daughter and I went shopping for a book for her language arts class at an outside galleria where I had taken her as a baby to play in the sprinklers surrounding the marble gazebo - her laugh, her brazen, carefree laugh- I'll never forget it - but today she's a leggy box of subdued dynamite, a reflection of my lessons and failures, and I walked ahead knowing the dread she must feel at being seen with her mother, and the September sun (stubbornly hanging on for football season) spotlighted the rotten lemon tone of skin I thought I had wiped away and I wondered if I had removed it too late or if I should even have bothered.

They Grow Up So Fast

A piece of my son's toenail stuck up like a sword (his words) I successfully pass the mom test of eradicating a pesky part of him he wants no more
And tomorrow when the sun rises over gold strands of his hair (darkening every year) I'll rustle the feather whisps of his remaining childhood between my fingers and wish I could clip off his ninth year and make it last forever

Sleep-Deprived Dribble Mind

I haven't posted in over a month now and there's a reason - I have nothing interesting to say. I know what you're thinking, "But Erin, that's never stopped you before." True. But I seem to have recently lost the conceit to even think that I do.

Here are some things going on, in a nutshell:

I haven't slept for more than four hours in three nights.I have a headache. I am dreading Doug waking up because I'll have to interact with him, and all I want to do is bury my head in the sand until my head stops hurting or I fall asleep.I am not a nice person when I am sleep-deprived.I am currently working on my Photoshop skillz, which isn't so hard, and my After Effects skillz, which is really fucking hard.The company that I am working for extended my contract for another year. I am really happy about this because I like working there a lot- however, I can't tell anyone what the company is because it is located right next to my stalker's house. Thankfully, I haven't heard from her in awhile, but I don't want to stir the embers. Doug has managed to wiggle his way out of body painting for the last couple of weekends. I bought this flavored body paint on Groupon with the soul purpose of going Picasso on his ass, and he somehow finds a way to deter my efforts. Sketch is still really fat.My kids come home from Turkey tomorrow. It's been a long month. I've missed them terribly. We're leaving for Jackson tomorrow, and I will be staying at my Dad's the whole time because my mother is in England. I will probably be asked to fix something on my Dad's laptop.Doug has had more success with job interviews. Fingers crossed. Oh, I am officially divorced. I can't seem to finish a book. I mean, reading a book. Don't even ask about writing. But I have been going to the movies more often. Maybe I have been around Doug too long, but everything is awful.Doug and I are using Green Apron and every day it's a heated debate over whose turn it is to cook. Only half of the recipes are even enjoyable. I have actually started paying for software. I wear make-up more.Ugh, my head. See? Most boring post ever, right? This is why I haven't been posting. Somebody ship me some Ambien. 

New Flyer for "You'll Never Interview in This Town Again"

Memorial Day

Charlotte shit in the bathtub again.

You probably didn't see it
Before you went out for coffee,

But in case you did -

I just wanted you to know
That I saw it and picked it up
And flushed it down the toilet
And everything's okay.

It's safe to return home.

-Erin Passons, 5-25-2015

Storm Chaser (for Doug)

For Doug


Tell me a secret. Tell me something you've never told anyone.

You lie and say you've told me everything.

Abridged thirty-seven years inside two bookends holding twenty-four months together.

Do you expect me to believe this?  You, great lover, expert back scratcher, intense warrior,
Receiver of the universe's kindness and the internal dweller of monsters so violent at night they steal your very breath?

You of physical weariness both phantom and real and tears big and wet and spilling oceans at a time?

(In the shadow of your neck, I think, I've never seen a man cry like that)

You ask your god for a distraction and he listens.
The earth growls, flashes a signal.

You turn away from me and stand, walk to the window, pull back the blinds, and reveal vast miles of shattered, broken sky.

We love these storms, you and I.
Its rage immobilizes our stillness.
We make love to them, fly high with them,
Wrangle their fury inside our fingertips,
Press flesh against heated flesh, turn water into fire,
Treat the earth's self-infliction like a balm to our unhealing.

Then we hang over the balcony and cross our fingers, asking for more.

There's a storm brewing inside the closed circle you keep closed and circled and you place your hands together and ask for it to end but sometimes I wonder.

When the phone rings you view its screen wearily.
The news is always different but the same,
And you choose to believe one day it will be different in a different way but it never is.  

I don't understand and you know it.

You harden at the tongue of my logic and leave for another room to the outstretched arms of a distraction that is slowly killing you from within.

It's bad when I ask for your secrets. It's even worse when you confide in me and I dismiss you at the first signs the levee is failing because the bad news from other people who aren't you isn't what I want to hear.

I want to hear more about you, not about the squeaky wheels in your life that you refuse changing.

I wonder aloud (my words slapping cuffs on the silence you prescribe yourself for carefully constructed avoidance),
 
Hey baby,

Why are you relying on the wind from another sea to direct your sail?
What happened to your November suspicion?
Why don't you demand more answers?
What jealous angel clipped your wings, told you eagles were meant to climb trees?
Who advised you that sacrifice was the only way to live?

You tell me it's nothing, shut up about it,
But in a nice way, in a way I can forgive later.

This is its own storm too.

(In the valley of your chest I think two things:
It's hard to love a man who loves the unlovable,
It's hard to love a man who is loved by everyone but himself.)

You've said I have a callous heart but that's not true.
We simply love in different ways.

I learned love from my mother.
Nurturing others means teaching them to nurture themselves.

You were not broken when I found you. Merely chipped.
Trust me, you are salvageable. I could never love what I couldn't fix. I'm not a humanitarian. I'm into cats.

I am the sky that rips its skin, punctures its own membrane to drip the poison out from within.
I self-preservationalize. I rationalize: there's more room outside than in.

You are the ground, you are the soil collecting the toxic cries for help and absorbing them like its your place to hold the world together, and in holding the damage so long it becomes part of your landscape.

You are smarter, wiser, stronger than the rest of us. Perhaps you think it's up to you to carry the weak.

I wouldn't know. You never tell me the things that matter.

But, Love -

I have ten fingers and two hands and they are stretched out in your direction. I am not as strong as you and the universe has long dropped me from its gift list and maybe my heart could use a gym membership but if I can and if you'll let me, I'll soften the blows you're so hellbent on taking for others.

Turn my direction. The storm is ending.

Or is it too late? Have you internalized that collapsing circle?
Does it wear the shape of your heart?
Is it corroding and do you believe that's the price you pay for chasing storms, for standing by the window safe inside your secrets, nurturing the war with wet eyes and fresh scars until love drowns you in its cannibal clouds?  

- Erin Passons, 5-25-2015

Orange Juice

There goes a man carrying a two-gallon bottle of bright orange non-orange-juice orange juice, the kind that imitates two-gallon milk bottles but with no name, trademark, or commercial to say it’s there, it’s available, it’s a dollar fifteen.

No. It’s just there and you see it and you expect it but you never buy it unless you’re poor.

And there he goes past my car carrying this thing which must be heavy in his chapped painter hands and weary eyes with claw marks and yellow sand looking up at the rare rain of an Austin May day afternoon almost evening and its greyness, and a lynch mob of a cloud delivering on its promise.

And later he’ll say what a mess in Spanish to his wife, and the kids will drink their sugar sacrament and sleep off their malnourishment and later Daddy will stay up counting his change and counting the days until better days.

And later I’ll creep up beside the cardboard cutouts I delivered through a tunnel mass of love and tissue and the desire to save the unsalvageable and they’ll say (not looking up) they’re not hungry or they’re not hungry for anything I have or anything I’ve given.

And isn’t that always the case? Isn’t hunger a perpetual state? We’re all just immigrants in this place living from reality check to reality check, waiting for the rainmaker and the rain and the love we lost and the love we made and the better days when less was more than plenty and plenty was never far away.