Erin Passons's Blog, page 2

104 Degrees

My moth child lost a coin tossAte dirt almost
Almost almost

I wheel my larva down the hill
Down the hill down the hill
on wheels one hundred and four degrees pressure past the point of flight

Goodnight untilthe morning exams
She wears her Saturday on Sunday still
Coffin brown packaged socks
Plastic bagged my shoes she wore
A Berlin ring for Chinese tubes
An A-line valve, a loosened gown, a needle pricking at the skin on roads where blood forgets to thin and dagger teeththe angels grin

The alarms don’t care when they go off
And off they go and off and off

Kai Sri Krishna the C word grins
Then pops a pill and rides a wave, a train, the last ship out of here
Radhe radhe, the 19th strain

The moth child’s wings have been clipped
And filmed and framed
And framed and filmed
The swallow paints along her nails,twists her hair in long dark waves
Pretty girl you’re outta here
Outta here,
until until.
- E.P.May 17, 2021

The Devil Has Texas: Days One and Two

I have been to Abilene
The spirit world rising
I have seen in Abilene
The Devil has Texas
--Daniel Johnson, "Spirit World Rising"


I. Tenderfoot

I call my boyfriend, Doug, a tenderfoot because he’s all white-collar, despite being a Mississippian born and bred. Years spent roaming concrete jungles first as a journalist and then as a lawyer had chipped away at his country upbringing. By the time I got him, he had forgotten how to labor manually with the world—forgotten or just plain didn’t have the stomach for it. He claims that growing up, he was the family yard guy, but all those sweaty, scorching afternoons mowing grass and weeding flowerbeds must have soured him to soil.

I don’t know if it was moving to Texas or becoming a homeowner that eventually reignited Doug’s blue collar/laborer spirit. Probably a little both. In Texas, you must be prepared for every malevolence Mother Nature throws at you. Wildfires, cedar trees with misery-inducing pollen, all the venomous snakes that you can shake a stick at. Even our pretty flowers—like bull nettles—can kill you or maim you for life.

Then there’s the thunderstorms and hurricanes. Sure, this large, semi-desert patch of dirt stuffed inside America like a twisted womb is dry most of the year. But when it’s not, it’s not.

Two years ago, when Hurricane Harvey came, our backyard flooded and drowned a pregnant cat queening under our porch. With a neighbor’s help, Doug dug a hole beneath the wooden planks to retrieve the body. “Don’t come outside,” he warned me, knowing my love for cats.

Doug gradually came around to playing farmer. Growing peppers, specifically. I will never understand what makes men want to eat something that burns their mouths on the way in and lights up their rear ends on the way out, but Doug loves those twisted scepter-shaped fruits of Satan. He grew quite a selection in the old bookshelves that we had laid flat and repurposed as vegetable gardens: Anaheim, bell, Jalapeno, Serrano, Poblano. As late as early February, we still had some blooming at the stem, eager for longer daylight hours and a chance to be reborn.

Then, a week before President’s Day, winter storm warnings began flooding the airwaves. We didn’t really pay attention. Doug’s snarky comment, “There’s an eighty-percent chance of snow Sunday night and a seventy-percent chance on Monday, which means we will get nothing,” was met with my laughter. We took great joy reveling in the Weather Channel’s often inaccurate predictions.

Oh, hindsight.









II. Proof

“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.”

I think of this quote from Watership Down as I corral the feral cats that live in my backyard into my house for the night. Because I apparently live in a damn zoo, raccoons followed closely behind them. I slid the door closed before they had a chance to step inside. Dejected, they paw at the door, their fluffy, banded faces pressed into the glass. Light from the kitchen reflects the desperation in their eyes—they know what was coming. My heart cracks. “What if..?” I begin.

“No,” Doug says curtly behind me. He may have embraced his inner pioneer, but he still had the good sense not to invite a trio of potentially rabid, wild animals into our home.

III. Sickness & Darkness


I wake up on the morning of President’s Day with the first signs of COVID. Achy throat, swollen limbs, my nose clogged as if an invisible Kleenex has been stuffed into its cavities.

I know it’s COVID and nothing else. My son had brought it back from Colorado (an ill-planned ski trip courtesy of his wealthy father). He had tested positive the day before. Almost a week earlier, during his first night at my house after the trip, I had reached for my bottle of Sprite only to discover it was half empty. My son chuckled from the other couch. “I may have had more than a sip,” he said.

“Kaya! What if you have COVID?” I cried, half-jokingly.

Oh, hindsight.

Now my throat is sandpaper; my sense of smell, kaput. I turn on my lamp. Only, nothing happens. I make a mental note to replace the bulb, then stand up, walk to my bathroom, and flick on another light. Still, nothing.

Then it hits me, and I groan.

“What is it?” Doug asks groggily from the bed.

“The electricity is out.” I pause, and add, “Also, I think I have COVID.”


IV. Tenderfoot No More

For the last two years, Doug and I have gone out of our way to visit popular destinations during off-season, even if it meant foregoing the chance to indulge in activities only offered in peak-season. In our over-40, not-much-fun-to-begin-with, crowd-adverse minds, not doing those activities was far more agreeable than doing them with other people.

And if you, dear reader, are like-minded, may I recommend the American Northwest in November? Doug and I found it ideal. Two years ago, we went to South Dakota. It was a ghost town. We loved it. Last November, amid a pandemic that required social distancing for more than just hating-most-other-people purposes, we went to Wyoming. Also lovely and devoid of life.

Both places, Doug drove. I have a history of wrapping cars around trees in bad weather, so it was for the best.

In South Dakota, Doug played safe. Wyoming was different. Doug had made a pact with himself that he was going to push his winter-driving skills to the limits. He rented a four-wheel drive—a big bulky number that only Bubba-types drove back home—and headed off to elevated grounds. It was dodgy at first, but he got the hang of it. By the second day, he was driving around edges of snow-capped mountains. At one point, a local hunter stopped us and asked, “Where do you think you’re going, fella? You don’t have the right tires.”

“Oh well,” Doug had said and waited until he rolled up the window before muttering, “Screw that guy. I know what I’m doing.”

I was in awe of him. With a little determination and chutzpa, Doug had taken a step farther than his kin, had dove deeper and trekked higher into the wild, untamed Americana than his ancestors had ever dared.

And I know driving in dangerous, icy terrains may seem like nothing to a Northerner, but to a Mississippi-turned-city-turned-Texas boy, it was everything. Doug was a tenderfoot no more.

On President’s Day, my former tenderfoot’s new winter driving skills becomes a life saver when we realize our electricity isn’t going to be turned on anytime soon. Earlier, Austin Energy had tweeted, “Per ERCOT, controlled outages will likely last through tonight + into Tuesday as ERCOT works to restore the electric system to normal operations.” Translation: “Y’all are shit out of luck.”

So, Doug and I decide to head out into the wild, blue yonder and bag some supplies for the rough days ahead—even if scoring said goods is going to be a crap shoot. We have no way of knowing if anything was open. By this point, our cell service is shoddy, the network overloaded because everyone else’s internet is down; half of Austin is using cell data too. The only option is to drive around and see.

V. The Unfamiliar Familiar

My first impression of our winter-stormed city: it’s still Austin and yet it isn’t.

Gone is the clear, blue sky and yellow sun; gone are the sun-soaked buildings framed by dried landscapes and backdropped in pigments of a perpetual summer.

Instead, muddy, gray clouds smear the sky. Snow and ice pack the sidewalks. Snow caps the tops of cactuses and twentieth-century plants, ice coat their prickled skins, and long, sharp icicles line the trim of snow-coated rooftops and edges of street signs.

The roads are mostly empty, chafed in places by the odd tire tracks stenciling mud into the snow, and Doug finds it easy to drive. “Everything is easy, after Wyoming,” he says, which I decide should be his new motto. I stay huddled in the passenger seat, however, and shudder every time it feels like we’re slipping.

We drive past pedestrians in wool caps and heavy coats pacing along the gutters and lingering at street corners below downed traffic lights, and parking lots dotted with parents helping their children ball up snow or carry garbage lids for sledding, our eyes searching for lit Open signs that didn’t exist. Everywhere is closed. The gas stations, the dollar stores, the grocery stores.

We are about to give up when I remember the Target on Frontage Road, north of Brodie Lane. One of my favorite Sunday Funday hangouts on normal occasions. I have no idea if it’s open, but my primal, white woman instinct told me that it is.

As it turns out, I’m right. As my dad would say, even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in awhile.

VI. A Map of the World

Honestly, I don’t know what is scarier—living without heat in freezing temperatures, or sending a man into Target by himself. In ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t have to choose either. But today is not ideal, and I have no choice. I have COVID. I can’t go inside. Doug will have to shop solo.

Doug isn’t thrilled about being the designated shopper either. I mean, we’re talking about a man who hasn’t been inside a brick and mortar store in seven years, thanks to a girlfriend who loves him and the miracle of Instacart. But now, he finds himself at an existential quagmire, with the chances of survival for himself and the woman he loves completely at the mercy of the very skillset he has strenuously for years attempted to not acquire.

I help out by drawing a map on a napkin, showing Doug what we need and where he can find it. Batteries on Aisle Nine, flashlights on Aisle Thirty-Two, candles and lighters on Aisle Twenty-Three, cat food on Aisle Twenty-Seven, and so on (I never thought my detailed knowledge of Target’s store layout would become a life-saving skill, but here we are.)

Doug stumbles out of the car and into the Target parking lot like an unseasoned soldier storming the beaches of Normandy. But to his credit, he comes back an hour later with everything but the milk. “They aren’t selling produce,” he says. “They’ve taped the freezer doors shut.” He says inside was spooky, Armageddon-like. He describes the eerily half-stocked aisles with dimmed lighting (electricity had gone out there too, they were using generators). Only self-checkout counters were open, and the line to check out went down the shampoo aisle. In the bottled water aisle, which had been picked over by early shoppers, a woman had been crying.

A car squeals by us in the parking lot and rams into a curb. Another car cannonballs into its side, ice flying, smoke puffing miserably from the exhaust pipes. The two drivers hop out unharmed, and Doug and I wait until we knew they have it worked out before pulling out into Frontage Road. Doug turns the steering wheel with a steel grip. “Thank you, Wyoming, thank you,” he keeps repeating, over and over until we were almost home.

On the corner of our street, we notice our neighbor standing in her front yard beside a tent where she sells plants for reasonable prices. In her hands sits a small, dead houseplant, its brown, wilted vines dancing in the wind. “Triple mask yourself,” Doug say. “I’m gonna stop and see if she is okay.”

It turns out, our neighbor had lost $30,000 worth of plants. She had a greenhouse in the backyard, but when the energy went out, the greenhouse went too, and the plants with it. Her boyfriend comes outside and hands a Terra Cota pot to Doug that we can turn into small heater, like we had seen on social media. He tells us to keep it as long as we want. He looks down at the dead plant in his girlfriend’s hands and adds, “We can do without it for a while.”

Their plight sobers our mood, and we stay silent rolling into our driveway. We park, grab our spoils and carefully head inside, sidestepping chunks of ice. Although it’s only six o'clock, it’s already dark. The darkness, made thicker by the cold, blurs every detail with its ragged veils.

Once inside, a kind of manic urgency takes over. The Weather Channel said it would be ten degrees tonight, and this time, Doug and I believe them.

VII. The Long Night Has Begun

Pick your favorite vampire movie. How about The Lost Boys, when the two Cories are filling up the bathtub with holy water, anticipating the arrival of vampire Keifer Sutherland? Or how about I Am Legend, when Will Smith sees the sun going down and immediately shuts the blinds and locks the windows and doors, fearful of some unseen threat?

This is how it feels getting ready for a night without heat. I work at creating a tiny heater out of the Terra Cota pots and twelve tea candles. Doug collects blankets around the house and lays them on the couches in the living room, the most central room in the house and our designated bedroom until the heat came back on. We push the couches close together. Doug cooks soup using a hand lighter to light our gas stove while I read my slow-loading Twitter feed on my phone: rolling blackouts that weren’t rolling, seconds and minutes away from a months-long blackouts, ERCOT not unable to turn on electricity at this time. Republicans predictably blaming green energy. Liberals predictably blaming Republicans. Outrage over affluent neighborhoods bearing the smallest burden of the outage. Austin Energy asking its residents with electricity to use it sparingly (Echoing my thoughts, one person responded, “People with electricity aren’t reading this shit. They’re sitting in a warm house watching Bridgerton on Netflix, you dumb ass mfs.”)

After dinner, we snuggle into our ten layers of blankets and twenty layers of cats. I’m daydreaming about microwaved popcorn when Doug brings up an excellent point, “At least London and Kaya aren’t with us.”

Usually not having my kids was a bad thing, but this time, I couldn’t agree more. The kids are spending the week at their dad’s house in West Lake—a rich, mostly white suburb in northwest Austin. Their electricity is on, as was the case with most affluent areas in Texas, per Twitter. Social justice warriors are having a field day over it on social media—as was I—but the mom in me couldn’t help but feel grateful my kids were safe and warm.

Exhausted from the war going on with my white blood cells, I go to sleep immediately, and stay sleeping until early dawn. By the time I wake, the cold had seeped inside me, crawling into my bones. A wet cold that burns. I try to move, but everything hurts.

VIII. Other States

My dad calls after I’ve taken an ibuprofen and feel well enough to clean the first of many cat pee puddles from the kitchen floor. “I can’t believe what is happening over there,” he says. “Texas is a mess. You wouldn’t be without electricity if you were back in Mississippi.”

My dad is always trying sell Mississippi to me, even though I hadn’t lived there in twenty-five years and have no plans to return. If a Metro bus ran over me on Congress Avenue and crushed my guts and I died, my dad would probably say at my funeral, “She wouldn’t have gotten run over by a bus and had her guts crushed on Congress Avenue had she lived in Mississippi.”

Overnight, my employer, a state agency, sends an email, “Due to the continuing severe weather event, if you are not directly involved in responding to COVID-19 or the winter weather event, please do not report to your work site and limit telework activity in order to conserve electricity.”

What if you were involved in directly responding to COVID-19, but also, you have COVID-19, I thought.

Of course, my COVID-19 responsibilities had mostly subsided after the initial outbreak. I had been center stage on the onslaught, charged with communications in our effort to send 1,400 employees home. That was almost a year ago. Since then, I had been sidelined to the remedial—keeping spirits up and engagement high in our new remote workforce still plagued with the plague. Not really mission-critical stuff. I figured: that fact, along with being Typhoid Mary, along with having the same access to modern resources as Little House On the Prairie, put me in the exempt-from-work category.

But that, of course, did not stop the work emails from coming. Most were meetings cancelations. At least one major player in every project had drawn the losing hand in the Austin Energy lotto. Our CIO was the worst off. No electricity or water, and two trees had kamikazed into his roof in the middle of the night.

I hear from Dina, our office manager, as I’m cleaning the second pool of cat pee. She had flown to Florida to visit family before the storm. Now she was stuck there and happy about it. “I’m actually glad to be in Florida, ain’t that some shit? How are you, Erin?”

I tell her everything, including the COVID part, and immediately wish I hadn’t. I hate being fawned over, unless it’s by Doug after he’s done something wrong.

I am again reminded of my distaste for feeling like a weak and helpless sad sack’o’crap later in the morning, after stupidly posting a miserable and (admittedly) self-pity-party on Facebook.

Kind, well-meaning friends across the country begin to private message me.

“This is horrible! How can I help?”

“I read your post. Can I send you something? What do you need?”

“Erin, you sound like a poor, weak, and helpless sack’o’crap. What can I do for you?”

I think about my neighbor cradling the dead plant like a baby. I think of the car wreck at Target, and the woman crying in Aisle Seven amid rows and rows of empty shelves.

Nothing, I think. There’s nothing anyone can do but wait.

teenage years

When I think about my daughter I think about her at three wading in a kiddie pool a safe distance from me with blue green pouring out of her eyes from the sun

I don’t think about her snarl, her black liner and punked out hair The Clash mini skirt or the memories I shared she holds against me or buying fishnets off Amazon, telling me to go fuck myself

She, she.

Help I think daily some dark spirit coiled inside her when she was asleep and spawned a beast I have to feed with self-help book hymns and advice from her therapist

Whatever I say, it is the wrong thing.

I did not birth a monster because I remember how her eyes glowed when Waltzing Matilda played and how the car filled up with her laughter

I did not, I did not.

I demand an exorcism sometime before graduation, please.

In five years we will share tea and I will tell her stories she won’t store for blackmail later but today I will live with this snarl beside her pool of disdain drained of any sun or possibility.
- ep 10-4-2020

Quarantine Haikus

The CatDoug, the cat wants out
Yes I know he just came in
But now he wants out
MorningDoug, you woke up late
I drank three cups of green tea
Let the cat out, thanks.
AfternoonThe meeting drags on
The cat howls by the door
Stop talking, everyone
EveningWhere is the remote?
Can’t you keep it in one place?
Look under the cat
We’ve Run Out of Toilet PaperThe roll is empty
How much do you people shit?
Replace it next time.
TexasDelayed reaction
Cost your peoples’ live thousands
But you repeat it

Election

Home of the disease
Land of the sick and dying
Small hands man will win
The Cat Part IICharlotte sleeps in chair
Another borrowed day borrowed
I love you, don’t go

Armadillos

Ripping up my yard
Stop digging holes you fuckers
Prehistoric dicks

Raccoons

Big weary mother
Leads greedy fur balls to feed
I know that look well

Possums

Stripes around his eyes
Looks like eyeliner, we call
Him Ziggy Stardust
Blue JaysGet out of my yard
Crackling and shitting in trees
Feathered gremlin dicks
Stereo SystemI am sorry babe
I am such a selfish jerk
Keep your stereo

Teens

They sleep until noon
Wake up hungry for Starbucks
We have food at home


- EP, 8-9-2020

Fourteen on Wednesday

For Kaya
what is it like to come of age in a plague?
you’ve grown another inch no one can see,dug in as you are in your corner of the apocalypse,your skateboard propped against your bedcollecting cobwebs since June, a bed unmade, sporadic murals bulge from the walls coded with colors you can barely comprehend.
what is it like to form into your adult mold while the world pauses with a gasping breath?
July trickles into August it’s all the same100 degrees bleeds into sleep and another disease eats through our dreams and takes hold.paralyzed thoughts cough in rooms desperate to break freebut the airlines are on life support and the parks are empty.another store collapses and announces We’re Closing while under the 290 bridge the homeless camp fills to capacity.
you fold your knees into your chest and say, “momI am so anxious, and I don’t know why”
lately you hug me more, reach out to me more, curl fetal-shaped beside me, your head against my shoulder, as if instinctively knowing the days are getting shorter anda train is coming to take you to destinations unknown.
not long now you will turn off your phone when it rings my toneand press your face against the skin of a girl not your kin, andonly then will those bold colors devouring your space have meaning.
But not now, not in this plague Not when every day hundreds enter the grave and call it home and the politicians shake their headsand the nurses break down exhausted in supply closets and theexperts warn us this is not the end, this is only the first wave.
You say you want to believe in God againI ask if you want to go to churchI begin, “I know a place…”you shake your head and say“I would rather believe in him in my own way”as you look ahead at the dark stain of your sister walking toward us in the afternoon.pretty soon you will match her shadowpretty soon now, but not today.
what is it like to come of age in a plague?
you pack up your bags and go.in the distance the blue jaysare dive bombing butterflies and your sister puts her ear buds in but you don’t notice.august trickles into another august and the day is over but it is just beginning as the sun envelops you with open arms.
-- 8/3/2020

Demeter's Prayer

When Persephone began skipping meals
And decorating her stretch marks with blood flowers,
Demeter took her to a home for girls with eating disorders.

When Lil P was forced to surrender her flaming torch at the door,
Mama D was forced to write letters.

This morning, she writes, I followed the fog down a trail
of acacia trees and winded up at the Cliffs of Moher.
I met a giddy Saint Patrick where the sea met the cliff who offered me a guitar riff
and a round of ice-cold Guinness.
“’Scuse me but I’m ‘igh coming off from
the campfire hour.” He laughs into the sea.
He heard the Queen’s speech from her perch
at Windsor Castle. It changed him, it converted him, and now
somehow he’s a believer. “She’s always been a monarch
but today she’s a leader.
God save the Queen!”

He reminds me of a war I’ve never been in.

God save the health care workers,
God save the recovering and the newly infected
God save the black communities unfairly affected
God save the April rain and the May flowers,
God save the face masks and the ventilators and the frozen food trucks repurposed into morgues for storing the bodies of the departed,
God save the economy and the airlines spending time
praying to the almighty dollar,
God save the furloughed workers counting every dime and the unemployed
standing in line to fill out forms for the workforce commission.

God save your cat from attacking my cat.
God save your brother in the garage painting cartoons from a childhood you can never return to, even when you get well again.

God save your therapist who writes a lot. (When I reply, she never answers.)
God save your dietician who never writes at all.

God save your grandmother who still shops at Kroger
But only during the high-risk hour
God save this woman who raises her fist to the tangerine man
Behind the curtain of lies who disguises his greed as concern
For Americans to get back on their feet and live the American dream again,
But this time at a 6-foot distance and without any resistance to the
Inevitability of his November recrowning.
God save your grandmother as she tweets and screams and prays to the son,
the father, and the unholy spirit
Just this once, for a suicide bomber.

God save your grandfather who brings flowers to the grave of his son
Before the storms turn the earth to mud and the weeds
Cradle the skeletal remains of an uncle you will never meet.

God save the 30 million people sick like you
But removed from the news because
your disease is not in fashion,
and God save the path I take each day through fog
To find a way to bring you home
To a place where sickness, death, and even the voices inside your head
Telling you to hurt yourself
Can’t touch you.

--Erin Passons

4/20/2020

My Corona

My depressed daughter amped up her eating disorder the Monday before Mayor Adler shut down the city.

I checked her into Dell Children’s Hospital fifteen miles from our home, on a day when traffic was traffic because Austin was Austin and a cough meant simply catching a cold.

The first night I was lost in her nightmare.

Seattle was on the moon.

The stock market crashed in a forest with no trees and Italy was a scream muffled by an ocean.

I slept in a rollout bed beside a window looking out at a courtyard of mistflowers and wandering jews. Vines of purple, clusters of white petals. No children swung from the branches or played in the flower beds. The birds chirped but no one answered them.

Light filtering through the green, blue, red, and yellow stained glass of odd-shaped windows cast rainbows on my toes on the way from my daughter’s room to the cafeteria on the first floor. Stale bagels, chipped ice, the screech of chairs pulling out from tables. Men and women talked hunched over in muted conversations. A woman in scrubs pressed her palm against a pane of glass, reaching out to her own reflection. The granola tasted like sand in my mouth.

It didn’t smell like a hospital there, but I saw dead children everywhere, so when they said, “wash your hands thoroughly,” I thoroughly complied, and I won’t deny it took some work not crying every time I passed a wall of art signed with loopy handwriting.

Depressed kids can turn a remote control into a suicide plan so we listen to the Food Network on mute, my daughter spread out in her bed with half-open eyes and eyebrows shaped like waning crescent moons knitted low on a face I have loved since the moment it breathed life into this world.

These days, I have to beg my world to eat a cracker.

The next day they admitted her into the psyche ward secluded on the second floor while that bug brought to Virginia Mason from across the sea spread its hands over the map of the USA and our mockery of a president finally had to confess that we’re fighting more than flu.

I drove home alone with a stack of paperwork.

The following week I ride to the hospital on empty roads built from DUIs and long goodbyes and calamities no one saw coming. An eerie silence silenced the live capital music of the world. My son and I scattered from the car in a dance of sleeved hands. I signed the release form and my daughter walked out into a world different than any world before or at least since she was born, fifteen years ago.

She didn’t seem to notice. Her face was glowing. She met a boy in there named Shiloh. He drew a ring around her finger with a red magic marker. They made paper mache pets and gave them names like “Schizophrenic Spot” and “Bipolar Buddy.” They met in the hallway at night when everyone else was sleeping and held hands and exchanged numbers, although they’re not supposed to.

And now it’s Sunday 10:50 am, the air conditioning is roaring and I’m working because back in January, I warned my employer, “We needed a teleworking plan” and they ignored me. Now I attend Saturday, Sunday conference calls with my ear to the walls and the shouting for laptops to appear. No one acknowledges my prevision except for Christie in Network Access who Skypes, “Sorry we didn’t listen to you sooner.”

My daughter folds into my view. Hair messy, yawning. She’s spent all morning sleeping off last night’s conversations. I heard her giggling from the other room.

(I found a plate in the kitchen sink this morning, and two slices of bread were missing.)

She approaches me, smiling. Reaches out to braid my hair. Love has filled the vessel of her grief. Shiloh, the hero. I am okay with this impermanent menu; I only wish I was the one who could feed her.

Our cure is our ruin is our cure. This conference call could last for hours.

My daughter asks if I want my plaits fat or thin like spaghetti. There’s a ski resort in Ischgl with three floors of coughing patrons. Trafalgar Square is empty. In Madrid the Spanish army has turned a skating rink into a mortuary for victims of the first attack. This was only the beginning. Overnight the Giants stole the crown from the Seahawks. Now the Alphabet City is counting numbers. Trains move without passengers. Carnegie Hall sleeps without singers. In Central Park, pigeons make their own dinner.

Every man for himself. Every saint to their sinner. Every sin to its saving grace—the great black eye shining light into our existence, speaking truth: “It is time. Choose wisely.”

Our ruin is our only salvation.

Australia

I. I don’t talk about Australia much because it hurts. Some periods in a person’s life are too painful to recall, and some are so joyful that they, too, become a type of burden. Australia is the latter.From an early age, I only had two goals: to escape Mississippi and become a successful writer. Everything else—marriage, kids, friends—took a backseat. So it’s become a continual source of amusement to me that everything I put on the backburner would find me in my years Down Under. It was in Melbourne where I met my best friend, Mercedes. Drunk on youth and beauty, wired by caffeine and nicotine, we’d skip our college classes to hunt for men and drink for twenty. We’d teach the guys from Supergrass how to shoot pool, dance until the floor melted, laugh until our sides hurt, and stir a boy’s entire paycheck into our drinks before wobbling back to her flat on Orrong Road just as the sun was coming up over Port Phillip Bay. We’d wake up under a large red gum tree, hungover with smoker’s coughs and creased clothes, laughing and hungry to start over again. We’ve maintained our friendship over two decades and three continents. I also met the man who would later be the father of my children. He was beautiful, brilliant, with ambition larger than life. We barely speak now, but for years, we were inseparable, and the residual energy of what we had still clings to me, revealing itself when I find the odd picture or letter tucked in the back of a book with pages browning at the corners.  I found my fairy godmother too. Her name was Amanda. A “true blue Aussie,” she and her English husband Mark hosted me at their home in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne. The town of Melton was far enough from the city and so sparsely populated that it could practically be considered the outback. Warning signs of kangaroo crossings dotted the road every kilometer or so, tucked beside acacia and hakea bushes and occasionally accompanied by wedge-tailed eagles and skuas scavenging for roadkill. The city center was often vacant save for the burly, sunbaked men coming in from the bush, making their way to Mac’s Hotel on High Street for a round of Carlton Colds and to watch a game of footy on the telly (Melbournians, above all other Australians, love their footy. There are about 3,000 footy teams in Melbourne alone. The year I arrived, the Sydney Swans had won the whatever the Aussie Football equivalent of the Super Bowl was, and I thought there was going to be a civil war.) Amanda lived in a Victorian home off a dirt street, just down the road from a famous retired Australian boxer. Her expansive house hosted a hodgepodge of everything—Amanda was a self-admitted shopaholic—and was rarely ever clean (“Houses should be lived in,” was her reasoning). My favorite room was the only room where I was not allowed entry—an elaborately furnished parlor just off the kitchen, hidden by a sliding stain glass door. It had an air of Miss Havisham about it, the way the dust and cobwebs coated the pink and cream Queen Ann chairs, the velvet Victorian settee and mahogany demilune tables, the clawfoot ottomans and Tiffany lamps. Each morning Amanda’s four cats—Spit, Terror, Friendly Shorty, and Unfriendly Shorty—left trophies of their hunts from the night before at my bedroom door—usually rabbit guts (“shit bags” Amanda called them), but sometimes bird feathers and possum fur, and occasionally a snake, venomous and non-venomous. I was accompanied to the bus stop each morning by flies as large as magpies and magpies as large as horses. The only time I saw koalas was at the zoo; they tended to make themselves scarce, especially in Victoria, where the bush was being depleted at a rapid rate. For much of the year, Melbourne weather felt like Seattle, drizzly and perpetually overcast, sometimes four seasons in one day. But for a few weeks each summer, the wind from the Great Victorian desert would breathe through the city, coating the pavement and buildings with a layer of dust. Under a cloudless sky, the sun intensified, its dilated orange pupil deadlocked on the lone country continent, weltering green to brown, boiling the streets, eating the air alive. I think about those summers now the way I remember childbirth. I knew it was painful, I knew I didn’t want to experience it again, but to actually relive it is impossible.And to think how it has only gotten worse…II. My adopted country.                                       I can’t imagine what you are going through. All your Odd. All your Unique. All your Indigenous. All your trees without shade, your flowers without scent, your birds with flightless wings, your beasts barely able to walk or walk not at all but hop on hooved feet. Your sleepy-eyed creatures in the trees who refuse to eat save for the food that slowly kills them. Your slithering ropes with enough venom to eradicate an empire with one extended fang. You are the holy vessel for the children of an adolescent god. He drew you on a napkin and molded you with paper and paste—his first attempt at scribbling life into existence. 
III. I wish I had gone to Australia when I was older, when I wasn’t so ripe with selfish ambition, when I was mature enough to know that journeys were arrivals in their own right, and that the one-and-a-half hour train ride from Amanda’s house to the city was just as important as the hours I would spend in my urban destination, strapped to my narrow dreams.Australia is the last unopened chamber of my heart. I never share her with people, not even Doug. I don’t even like sharing her with my present self. The Erin who writes this now is very much embedded in today—her work and kids, her home and cats and the scourge of current events that blaze through her timeline like a hot Australia sun.But today, Australia is current events, and so I allow myself this moment— I find Crowded House on Spotify. They are my favorite band, but I never listen to them because they remind me too much of the best years of my life. But they soundtrack my memories whenever I want to go back there, and today, I do. I want to go back to Australia…which is why I skip to “Now We’re Getting Somewhere” and forward to the 3-minute mark, just to hear Australia’s adopted son Neil Finn sing, “When you took me to your room, I swear I said surrenderWhen you opened up your mouthI saw the words fall out…”And I’m there again, in my foster country. I’m on a Footscray train, squeezed between uniformed schoolchildren and working men in ratty Billabong sweatpants and gum boots, the kurrajong and waratah trees making way for great giants of concrete. “…though nothing much has changed…”I’m creeping into Amanda’s parlor, into the beautiful decay of a paradise abandoned. The cats scratch at the sliding door, but I refuse to admire their prey.  “…I swear I will surrender…”I’m at Lorne Beach with Mercedes. The salt stings my nostrils as we wade through tides, the Southern Cross watching from the distance of a million years ahead. “…there is pain in my heart…”It is a Southern Hemisphere spring and I am engulfed in my new love. He is picking me up at Flinders Street station in five minutes. I’m carrying a Les Murray book and I got a pen behind my ear because I’m going somewhere. My daughter and son are secrets in my knapsack, and I unknowingly carry them with me down the steps where Flinders Street and Swanston street meet, where throngs of tourists have lined up, their heads bent over maps. Some of them speak with American accents, but I don’t stop to help. I am not one of them now.“…we can choose what we choose to believe…”In a second I’ll stop remembering and I’ll finish this story. I’ll go online and donate to the young families of Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O'Dwyer, and I’ll spread awareness on social media, But for this moment, this brief moment,Australia is alive within me and nothing is burning.

For Eli

Eli you would have been proud of me
Today I slayed a dragon
She lied to me so I swallowed her whole.

I probably won’t have a job come Friday,
but boy it felt good to sink the beast
before it fired and released on the people I love the most

Essentially, I saved my team

You were on my team once

I wish I could have saved you too

I wish my Spider-Man sense
Had sensed you hovering over the chair
wrapping a noose around your neck
before you jumped,
before the art stopped
and the music dried up,
and the strokes of color you brushed across the sky
were erased from the world forever

My mysterious friend,
Before you hated me
Before you betrayed me
We played a trick upon the stars
We spoke in code and god only knows
What signals were crossed
And before I knew it you were gone

Jen B. told me through a screenshot
Jen N. and I thought it was a hoax
That’s just Eli being Eli
Digging her own escape through the barricade
of holiday facades and family gatherings,
hibernating until the bells ceased ringing
and the cash registers stopped dinging
and the carolers had run out of songs.




I must have called every YMCA
in Seattle. Me with the office door closed
the Ravenettes muted, nibbling on a Kit Kat
a co-worker had left on my desk with a card
merry christmas and voices of Northwestern women
interrogating my reasons and me saying, it's fine,
you have the right to be suspicious,
but I promise you,
I'm her friend.

Some friend I am.

now forever your death will taste like stale chocolate wafers
and the aftertaste of devouring a monster. 

Cheers Eli I gotta go
Gotta clean up my resume
By the way they’re protesting in Delhi
And the big bad orange has become a peach
In the house at least
But we all know how it will go
In the senate.

it's okay it's progress and you're a thousand lives ahead
I'm applying to a job in Budapest
and you're delivering your nightmares a bowl of ice cream
finally, some peace for the peaceless weary-eyed princess

see Eli monsters aren't as scary as they seem.

Badlands

 


for Doug

We got lost in the Badlands,

the November wind stabbing at our backs,
the sky bleeding topaz while ash-colored clouds lowered
over the land like a holy simlāh hellbent to disguise
any path back to civilization.

"just drink it all in and pretend we know exactly
where we're going," you say,

"focus on the mule deer hopping away from us in
pairs scared thinking these pale faces are hunters
who like their meat complete with hooves for feet
and minced and gamey,

or focus on the chipmunk puffing out its cheek and
bushing out its tail while it scrambles from
rock to rock sequestering seeds for meals

Or just be glad we're not back at home on MOPAC stuck
in four lanes of non-moving traffic under the rage of a Texas
sun with one desire -- to eat us alive.

Or just be glad the mountain lions have learned
to hide from other predators."

I listen to you and I do--I drink it in. I drink it in for miles,

I drink in the mounds of oyster scoria that protrude from the earth
like oven-baked caves gutted from the inside out,
which you say reminds you of your humble beginnings,

born to this world with a curve at your back
and a set of grasping pedipalps which you wear these days
more like a badge and less like a weapon,
ever an ambassador for peace while your partner (who is me)
stays unreleased in perpetual combat--a trait
that you both love and fear about me,

"Just be careful when you enter the circle of serpents
that you don't come back wearing their shape," you say,

to which I reply, "Even when I slither, remember:
I'm the good kind of snake."

-- not like the kind we're likely to
encounter here, the kind with rattles and
infamously notorious tempers and reputations for
laying men to waste in a split second
for disturbing their season of slumber.

I think: the Badlands could kill us a number of ways,

but we walk on...

down the Medicine Root Loop on the way to the castle,
where you reminisce on the time when I was still a ghost
in your rearview mirror, a shadow in the hallway at our high school,
a time of your life when you had quit your job after four years of law
and set off to see America, driving the
coastal highway from California up to
Oregon and through Montana, searching for yourself in
changing landscapes and well-planned playlists and roadside
gas stations with busted payphones and broken
people, the dream for yourself hiding in the palm
of America's hand like a talisman with powers unrendered.

We stay lost in the Badlands.

We wander and stomp through mud, and I tell you that I miss my kids,
and although I know what it would be like if they were here (miserable)
I couldn't help but wonder if the kaleidoscope art of sedimentary rocks would
open my son's eyes to the beating heart of the world, or if the
western meadowlark's call would pull my daughter from the wreckage
of her teenage years long enough to
remember her song and how to sing it.
 
We got lost in the Badlands,

We got lost in the tall, dry grass,
and slipped on patches of ice,

We got lost in the layers of sediments
and roaring Dakota winds and the cold getting colder
and the mud getting slicker,

We got lost and risked trampling through rattlesnake dens
just to escape before the sun dimmed and darkness took over,
but I grinned and beared it, as I knew you did--

because we knew as long as we were together,
we would always find our way home. 

-Erin Passons
11-24-2019