assignment ideas?

could I make a request for a weekly assignment?
I need to write again. Drawing's all nice and dandy...but my words are getting rusty.

thanks guys. x

empty verses.

I can still feel you alive inside of me.

Even at three a.m., as I stare blankly into the bathroom mirror, the weight of your presence still cripples me. I’ve let the insomnia take over my body, so here I am, battered and drowning, a shallow breathing tribute to His latest work.

The Bible taught me what was necessary in living a full and rewarding life. It had me believing that all I needed was to fill myself with His love and I would be complete, I would never need for anything or anyone else. I would be safe. I would be happy.

I would be whole.

As a child I would sing the hymns, rewrite the passages, listen closely for the word; each chapter and verse, a comforting sound. Thin delicate pages, turned so perfectly between my little fingers.

Communion. I ingested His body like a faithful cannibal but I was still too young to drink the blood he poured. It was a moment I had anticipated for many years; everyone always spoke so highly of this special occasion. But the wafer did not fill me with the things I had been promised, nor did it make me feel any closer to God. In fact, it all seemed to slip further away.

Confirmation. I was intended to surrender a promise to Him, to ensure that I would always love him. But where I thought love should come from, I felt nothing. I spoke the words of the prayers and held the candles to the flame but I did not feel you. I wanted you. I needed you to complete me.

“Fuck.”

The blade slipped. No, I am not trying to die. I am punishing myself for the mistakes that I have made. There are better ways, they say, to repent your sins without harming yourself or anyone around you, like prayer. They always told me to pray. I spent years praying for someone to find me and fill me with the love I had longed for. I thanked God when he touched me. I felt the light inside of me flicker. I felt the electricity charge through my veins, completing the circuit in a jumble of wires in my brain. Was this what it meant to feel complete? Like an intricate machine that had finally found its source…

“Christ!”

I slam it against the counter and draw away as quickly as I can. My back against the cold door, my bloody hands against my empty belly, I realize that I cannot even cry. I’ve spent an entire lifetime falling in love with a complete stranger, begging for his attention and adoration…I spent an entire lifetime wishing I would one day meet you. A pathetic fool, that's what I am.

But now it has all been ripped away, left in a pile of dead verse from a Book written by the hopeless.

I stand here before God as his enemy,

And we will never be made whole.  

A Little Bit Bitter, Part 1

That’s an understatement. I’ll be completely honest with you: I wrote that at the top of the page because it has a nice ring to it. The alliteration with the Ls and the Bs, and the two double Ts. I wrote that because it sounds nice. But the truth is Casey wasn’t just a little bit bitter. She was furious.

It was my fault. I’m the one who told her about Mark and Sam. Now that I think about it, it was probably a mistake to tell her. It depends on how you look at it, I guess— even from my point of view. I mean, I got what I wanted out of it initially, and at the time it seemed like a good idea, in a selfish way. Even now that all of that business has died down I can’t say I regret having told her because it helped me get to know Casey, find what kind of person she really is.

Everybody thinks they know Casey really well. Spot her, and immediately you know the type. She’s always been, and always will be, that kind of girl. Some like it, some don’t, but it’s all based on that initial judgment. You’ll see what I mean.

It all started long before that, but for me it began one night at the bar where I was working at the time. That’s when I came in, played my little part in the drama. It was a nice, quiet place, kind of shabby, corner Duluth and Saint-Denis. One of those places that’s been there for decades: once a working class taverne, now a favorite haunt for hipsters from the ghetto and the plateau looking for a gritty place to hang out and pose for faux-vintage pictures.

I’m at my best when I at work. And I say that in all humility, because most of the time I know I’m not much—or, at least, not enough to get the attention of someone like, say, Casey. But manning the bar, my crisp black shirt like a second skin, the rows of bottles behind me and the chrome taps at arm’s length, I’m an altogether different person. Cool, remarkable, I can make you whatever kind of drink you can think of, and others beside, with enough quiet authority to judge you on it, too. I know my stuff, and I know how to use it to my advantage.

I served Casey a Jack Daniel’s, straight, with a glass of ice on the side. Casey, you  should know, has an insatiable taste for hard liquor. It’s one of the things I like about her.

Another thing you should know about Casey is that she’s white trash. I mean that in the best way, but still, white trash is white trash. You hear it immediately—part of that initially judgment I mentioned. Accents don’t lie, and Casey is shameless about hers, which is Southern. Deep Southern. She says y’all, always, and pronounces her As as Es in an open-mouthed drawl. She hitchhiked her way up the US and across the border, ended up in Montreal like she could’ve ended up anywhere else: in the middle of the night, exhausted, confused, thirsty. She found a bed in a hostel, met some people, and eventually moved in with Sam and got a job as a waitress. She owns at least three different cowboy hats, and has a marked preference for short denim, and plaid on both men and women.

That evening, I told her about Mark and Sam pretty much immediately, no preamble or anything. Like, “here’s your drink Mark slept with Sam did you know?” Of course, she didn’t know. That was the point.

I was lucky to know about it myself. I’d seen Mark the day before and he dropped a hint that something had happened between Sam and him. He couldn’t hold it in, you know? Young love, that sort of thing. The truth is Mark had been in love with Sam as far as we could all remember; they used to date, when Casey lived with Sam, but then Sam went away to France for a year and that complicated things, until Mark started dating Casey.

I picked up Mark’s hint real fast and warned him: “If Casey knows she’ll murder someone.” (I was always thinking about Casey.) It turned out to be just the right thing to say to know more because it touched a nerve. “She can do whatever she wants,” he said. “I don’t care. I slept with Sam and I want to get together with her again. It’s the real deal. It’s my life and Casey has nothing to do with it.” I assumed that meant he wouldn’t mind if I told Casey.

For a second, just a second, when I did tell Casey, her face was the ugliest I’d ever seen it. “What?” she said. “What the fuck? Who tol’ ya that?”

For effect, I finished pouring a pint of Boréale Blonde and handed over to a customer before I answered. I made a show of taking the bill I was handed, getting the change at the till, counting the coins carefully before placing them on the counter.

“Mark told me,” I finally said.

“The dick.”

*

Five hours later she was sucking mine.

It was a long evening, heavy with alcohol, as you can imagine. Casey stayed at the bar until closing time, texting and fulminating. I went to chat with her between customers, feeding the fire of her anger, and made sure the glass in front of her was never empty.

What affected Casey so much is that she knew Mark and Sam made a great couple. They were from the same background, they had similar interests; if they got together again it would be for good. I didn’t even need to tell Casey what Mark had told me because she already knew that whatever there was between him and Sam was the real deal. It was nothing like what she’d had with Mark; she wasn’t deluding herself. She knew Mark had only gone out with her for the sex. Well, there was probably more to it, or else they wouldn’t have dated at all, I guess. She was a fun girl. She had a certain reputation. You were bound to impress, to get noticed, with a girl like that sitting in front of you at the restaurant and partying all over your Facebook wall. But mainly, it was obvious Mark had gone out with her mainly for the sex. Casey knew she didn’t have what Sam had. She was too authentic, too much herself. She couldn’t help it.

It was my chance, and I took it. I invited Casey over to my place for a nightcap. She accepted, of course. “I don’t wanna to be alone,” she told me sweetly. She was drunk. We cuddled on the sofa and I did nothing to hide my erection as it rose steadily between her butt cheeks.

“You wanna sleep with me, don’t cha?” She said matter-of-factly.

“Yes.”

She twisted her body around to face me and slipped her tongue, a little pasty from emotion and drink, into my mouth. We made out and she eventually emerged on top, straddling my hips, and let me watch as she undressed. Casey was famous for her tits, and they were something indeed. To finally see them uncovered was a kind of revelation, like at the synagogue when they pull aside the curtain of the ark to reveal the ornate torah inside. She unzipped my jeans and blew me half-heartedly for a while before I carried her to the bedroom—an armful of glowing flesh. We got into the cold sheets and finished there. It wasn’t much fun, to be honest. Even the slobbering fellatio had been better. She was too drunk and tired to move so she kind of lay there and moaned in…well, it was meant to sound like pleasure, but it sounded more like annoyance. As soon as it was over, she stuffed her face into the pillow and fell asleep.

What Could Have Been A Love Letter(You Haven't Entirely Driven Me to Full-Blown Misanthropy, But Know You've Pushed Me Quite a Ways in That Direction)

I will not dare to call you fair,
though I used to hold you dear.
Too much to bear, let's clear the air
of all these senseless cheers.
(Is it a routine?)
For my age to turn a page
in a book driven by disdain for humanity?
Or is this a hidden tourist attraction,
a guided tour to the brink of misanthropy?
Where boundaries are overstepped
and secrets we kept
(shhh)
become recorded and commonplace
through the ever-flawed system of
customer comment cards.
Is it too much to ask for
a better past for my future to
(fondly)
reminisce about,
for times of war to go ignored
to bask in the love
I've learned to live without?

After all these years,
I just want a day without
my hand curling into itself
becoming fist in a fit of rage.
If I stay here
without a doubt,
my neck wrapped in a belt,
I'll turn the page.

The Marriage Chain (Part 2)

My grandmother did some truly great detective work, especially when you consider the resources she had: Jonathan’s old papers and the city newspaper archives. At the university library I made quick work of confirming all her findings, and delving a bit deeper into the history of her husband’s previous marriages and of Mary Bradbury Stern Price’s first marriage to Mr. Stern, whose first name was Nicholas. I made other discoveries, as well: I found out that the marriage chain my grandmother had intimated was, in fact, even longer than she had thought.

From what I can tell, now, the first link in the chain was reverend Robert Hooker, from Bath, England, who was born in 1766. He married a woman called Louise Eldridge in 1815—I don’t know if either of them was married before, although I found no evidence to suggest this so it’s safe to say this is where it started. Louise was seventeen when she married Robert. They had three children, all daughters; Robert passed away when he was eighty; Louise married again, in 1840. She became the first wife of Nicholas Stern, a thirty-one year-old Bristol businessman. Louise gave birth to twins two years later and died at the age of thirty-three. Nicholas Stern’s transport business became very successful; when his daughters were older he moved to America to profit from the economic boom that followed the Civil War. In 1867 he married again, to Mary Bradbury, the daughter of a business associate and friend. Mary, who was twenty-three years old when she married, gave Nicholas a single child, a son. In 1883 Nicholas passed away; Mary married again three years later with Jonathan Price, a twenty-six year old lawyer. In the same year, Mary contracted tuberculosis; she passed away in the spring of 1888. Jonathan remarried twice: in 1891 with Angela Lawrence, who died in childbirth in the same year, and with Jane Sommers in 1903. When Jonathan died, just after the war, Jane, who was in her late thirties, was left in a difficult financial position with three sons to take care of. She married Raymond Stand, a butcher, in 1920. They had one son, my father, who was born a few years later.

Little did Robert Hooker know, when he married the young Louise Eldridge at the beginning of the 19^th century, that his union would start a familial anomaly that would join together eight people across a century and produce over 150 descendants in four different branches of surnames. I can’t help but wonder if, other than my grandmother, any later members of the marriage chain had figured out what they were part of.

*

These are the fruits of my research. I sent my sister an email with the completed family tree, but she replied only to tell me what a strange coincidence it was. “Strange,” she wrote, which implied that it was not really interesting, or life changing. I initially wanted to track down some of the other descendants of the marriage chain—our half-cousins several times removed—and get in touch with them, but I decided otherwise after reading my sister’s response. My discovery is only interesting from a historical point of view; it’s only fascinating on paper. It has nothing to do with our lives or identities.

Still.

I opened the door to my son’s room last night after he’d fallen asleep. He is my youngest child, my only son. An image struck me: I saw him as if he was the very tip of a mighty ship’s prow, propelled by the force and bulk of what came before him. He stands, supported by the past, cutting into the future.

The Marriage Chain (Part 1)

It all started for me when my father passed away. My grandfather had been dead for a long time. That’s how it all ended, of course, with my grandfather’ death. He was the last one.

My grandfather—his name was Raymond—died some years after my grandmother, Jane. I was too young when she died to remember anything of it—I don’t even remember anything of her as a person, although I came to know her quite well afterward—but I vividly recall the evening we learned the news of my grandfather’s death.

Every night my father read to me before I went to sleep, both of us cramped together side by side in my single bed, me tucked in the blankets and he lying on them. It was our ritual. He always read books of his own choosing, and they were never children’s books. He read me things like Great Expectations, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Selected Stories of Jack London. It could take us months to get through a single book, but we always finished them.

That night I had taken my bath and I was in my pajamas, ready for bed. I had the book we were currently reading open at the right page on my lap. As I waited for my father to come up I tried to remember what had happened in the book before we’d stopped the previous evening. Sometimes it was a bit blurry because if my father read for a long time I fell asleep and missed the last page or two.

I heard the phone ring. My father answered and I knew he would be a while yet. It was an unusual hour to get a phone call. I knew from the tone of his voice when he answered that something had happened, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He talked for a while and eventually I put the book down on my bedside table and I went downstairs to see what was going on.

My father had just hung up the phone when I walked into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with his back to me. He let out of sigh and his shoulders rolled up and down. I thought he was crying, but then I heard him chuckle so I wasn't sure if he was sad or not. He said, to no one in particular, “so that’s where it finally ends.”

He never did tell me what had ended that night—I only figured that out much later—but oddly, it struck me at the time, after I'd sat in front of him at the table and he told me that my grandfather was dead, as something odd to say in the circumstances.

Now, of course, I understand what he was talking about better than he every did. I think my father never meant for me to know about it, though. Or perhaps he did, or else he would’ve never left the clues behind. I'm not sure because he could’ve very well told me at any time—and he was usually quite honest about that sort of thing, he liked talking about the history of the family—but he didn’t. My guess is that he thought it didn’t concern me, and that therefore it wouldn’t interest me. There’s probably some truth in that; even today I’m sure most of my cousins would care. But I can’t explain why he didn’t say anything about it by the time I was older and my own interests in history and inheritance had become clear. Maybe he had forgotten about it by then, or maybe it had never really been that important to him.

The information had come to him from his own mother, my grandmother, and he must’ve seen himself as the story’s last inheritor. With my grandfather’s death, the story ended and there was no purpose to carry it on. Whatever he thought, and whatever my grandmother thought, I can’t ignore the knowledge that was eventually passed down to me. I think all the descendants of this strange anthropological anomaly are concerned, whether they know about it and are interested in it or not. Inevitably, it’s part of who they are. But at the same time, while I am fascinated by this thing, as my grandmother clearly was, I sometimes wonder if, in the larger context, it’s inconsequential. Is a quirky family anecdote worth calling up distant cousins for? Is it worth spending evenings at the library looking through page after page of newspaper microfilms? I’m not so sure.

*

The information came to me in the form of a 7 by 4 inch notebook with lined pages, bound in tan leather. My grandmother Jane had used it as her diary sometime at the end of the 1940s; she had covered nearly all of its hundred or so pages with her cramped, no-nonsense handwriting. I found this notebook three years ago, while emptying out my father’s house after his death. When I found it, at the bottom of an old box full of bills and files, I expected it to be an accounts book to be stuffed in a garbage bag with the rest of the junk my father had accumulated during his lifetime. When I cracked open the cover and saw the name and date on the top right corner of the first page I turned to my sister and told her I’d found something that had belonged to grandma. "Keep it," she said. “I’m sure you’ll find it a lot more interesting than I ever could,” she said.

I began reading the notebook a couple of weeks later, with a glass of scotch on a quiet Friday evening when the kids were over at their mother’s. My grandmother was in her seventies when she kept the diary. It begins with a kind of long digression in which she talks about the war: who in the family was affected and how, who had gone off to fight, who had come back. She mentions a lot of names I didn’t know, cousins twice removed and brothers-in-law and so on.

After about five pages of this my grandmother mentions that she received a letter from a man claiming to be a distant grandson, who seemed to have figured out that they have some ancestor’s in common. His name was Richard Stern, and he apparently asked my grandmother to confirm some information concerning relatives they may have had in common, as he was working on a comprehensive family tree. My grandmother writes in the diary:

I wrote back to this R. Stern in order to provide him with the names and dates I remember. What I can’t figure out is how any of the people he asked about can possibly be related to his family. We aren’t related to any Sterns. The connection must have to do with Jonathan, of course, but how can this be?

I looked through his old things this morning. Angela’s given name was Lawrence.

At this point in my reading I thumbed through the notebook to make sure my grandmother hadn’t tucked Richard Stern’s letter anywhere between its pages. I found no original letter. Instead, a folded square of yellowed paper fell out of the diary. I unfolded it and discovered a sort of family tree my grandmother had traced on it. On the top right corner was my grandfather, Raymond. He was connected by a line to the left with Jane, my grandmother. Another line connected her to the left with Jonathan Price, her first husband. It was common knowledge in the family that Jane had been married once before with this man, a lawyer, who had given her three sons. My father didn’t see much of them when he was older, but he often told me about them; they were in and out of the house while he was growing up. On the paper, however, Jonathan was connected to the left with two names: Angela L. and, underneath it, in a different-colored pen, Mary Stern. So that’s where the mysterious Sterns came in. I don’t know when my grandmother put that name into the diagram, but it must’ve been later, towards the end of her research. Finding out about Mary Stern, her husband’s first wife, was the end result of her years of enquiry. I’ve since completed the top section of this same family tree with many other missing names and dates, but at the time it was quite a shock for me to realize that even my grandmother’s first husband had been married before as well—twice. Jane’s note about Angela at the beginning of the notebook made it clear that she'd known about her husband's second marriage, but not about the first until long after his death.

I poured myself another scotch and picked up my reading where I had left it. My grandmother, after having received the letter from her long-lost relative Richard Stern, began researching into the family history herself by looking through her first husband’s papers. She noted and worked out all of her discoveries and questions in the diary. Meanwhile, she received another letter from Mr. Stern, in which he thanked her for the information and promised to send her the results of his research. But my grandmother never got anything from him. She sent him another letter a few months later, to ask him how it was coming along; all she received was an answer from this man’s daughter, informing her of his unfortunate passing—no mention of Richard Stern’s research into the family history.

By searching through her first husband’s documents, my grandmother eventually came across a legal letter, dating from before his wedding to Angela, concerning his deceased wife’s testament. From then on, it was only a matter of finding out who this mysterious first wife had been. Jane began searching newspaper archives at the city library, and finally unearthed a wedding notice for Jonathan Cooper and Mary Stern (born Bradbury). This would’ve been revelation enough, but my grandmother did not stop there. She had underlined the “born Bradbury” several times; evidently, Mary had been married before as well, to a man by the name of Stern. My grandmother had drawn an arrow issuing from the name, but it pointed only to a blank space in the page; she had never figured out who this mysterious Mr. Stern was.

The diary ends with a small note, in which my grandmother muses on the meaning of marriage. She was obviously shocked by the discovery of her first husband’s first marriage—she wondered if any children had been born from it—and equally struck by the coincidence that this first wife of his had been herself married before. Coupled, as it were, with the fact that she herself had remarried after Jonathan Copper had passed away, the oddity was complete. Her husband Raymond, my grandfather, was the last link in a chain of marriages that descended back into history, all the way to this Mr. Stern. In a way, my grandmother writes, it is as if I were myself married to Stern, Mary’s first husband. I am no different than Mary, who remarried my husband, for I have remarried after this same husband died. We are all part of the same union. We are all connected.

Drawing Period

Blue first. The wax is flattened down to the paper label so when he tries to draw, pressing the crayon obliquely, there is only the faintest bluish smudge on the creamy beige of the construction paper. He scratches at the label until it rips and manages to tear away a shred of it. He pushes the crayon against the paper again—nowhere specific because he doesn’t remember where he was and so he can’t know where anything else was either—and makes a little blue spiral. He pauses and stares at the blue shape. He draws again over the spiral, trying to fill in the beige space in between the lines with more blue. He finishes his first blue circle and then makes another one, further off, and the another one. He’s almost used up all the wax above the paper. He pauses again to look at the constellation of blue swirls. He tries to remember what the lakes looked like, what they must’ve looked like from above, in between the rows and rows of houses and the spaghetti streets. He’s only drawn blue circles, all the same, so when he starts drawing again he varies the shapes and the sizes. A blue oval. A blue peanut. A blue mickey mouse. A smaller oval. A bigger circle. He rips off another shred of paper on the crayon to keep going. He’s drawing faster now. The lakes aren’t lakes anymore so much as smudges of blue. He drops the blue crayon back into the box.

He looks up and glances at what the others at his table are drawing. Suns and houses and trees.

He picks up the red crayon. The tennis court where his parents were playing was red. The tennis court is a rectangle, he knows that. He draws a red rectangle, very carefully. He draws a line that cuts the rectangle in half. That’s the net. Then he draws a few crisscrossed lines in both halves. He knows he doesn’t quite get them right, but he isn’t sure where they’re supposed to go exactly. When his parents play tennis he likes to ride his tricycle around the court. He needs to be careful when he gets close to where his parents are jumping and running around, sending the ball on the other side or else waiting for it to come back to them. First he rides outside the lines, once. The second time he rides with his left wheel on the line. The third time he rides with the line right under his middle wheels. The fourth time—

“What are you doing, Adam! Get off the court!”

He cuts right through he court and peddles away. Goes through the gate of the tall fence that surrounds the court. It’s tall enough to catch the balls that go ballooning up towards the sky and fall back down again, almost in a straight line. He Peddles onto the sidewalk of the deserted street in front of the tennis courts. Takes a right. Follows the sidewalk of the curved street. Peddles on.

He draws the houses in green. The houses are all the same. There are so many of them, all packed along the streets, around the lakes. Rows and rows of little green squares between the blue lakes.

Then he draws himself. He draws himself as far away from the red rectangle of the tennis court as he can. He draws himself with a purple crayon because he remembers that he was wearing his purple shirt the day he got lost. He draws himself in the maze of houses and lakes.

Imagine the guilt his mother will feel when she comes to pick him up at the daycare and the counselor will show her the drawing.

Do You Ever Get Bored of Chicken and Wine?

[A response poem to Persimmons by Li-Young Lee from the North American perspective]


I’ve never met you, [grandfather], only
Your ashes in a marble urn.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky,
We find the time to visit you.
We drive along the windy mountain road,
To your plot just off the bicycle path.
They run over your grave like a bicycle path.
Do you miss the safety of the shrine?

Do you ever get bored of chicken and wine?

We place a slip under a stone
And lay a feast before you on the grass,
White Styrofoam nestled in white plastic bags:
A bald chicken roosting there. Its eyes are closed, its skin
Full of goosebumps, like a chilly ghost.

Next, we pour the wine (“to impress your future in-laws…”)
Into little plastic cups. [Uncle] fans
The smouldering dollar bills; their ashes fly
Between the branches, dancing
Up to Heaven.

They say Heaven is a banquet table,
Ancestors gathered all around.
They laugh, they muse, they wait year round
For their boiled chicken and wine.
Old bones buried in a far-away land
Want for visits and chicken and wine.
For centuries, boiled chicken and wine.

Aren’t they bored of chicken and wine?


Tell me, have you ever tasted pizza
Or crab apple pie?
Is this something you would like
To try, now, in the Afterworld, descendants
Like roving taste buds,
Bringing you glimpses of present life?

If I burn you a letter, will you find it?
Would you read it? (Could you read it?)

Shall I write:
“Hello, [Grandmother],
I met you in a dream last night.
You sat, cross-legged, on the counter,
A young girl in pants,
And said you were thirsty.”

Shall I burn you a photo?

No—
a poem.

I shall burn for you poem.

I Don't Want to Read Sir Gawain

I don't care for what you had to say
six thousand years ago or

when you wanted to be god's son so badly or

when you thought that the world was flat
or when you thought dragons were among us.

I want to know what you think now.

Of all the worlds we could've traveled to
you decided to ship me to the past.

I feel like you're trying to tell me something.

Holding Station

A Villanelle Written in Fishing Terms

Drifting lonely on the quiet seas,

I hope for your return to this loch,

but life is only catch-and-release.

Others, too, paddle to these

sighing waters. They cast their lot,

Drifting lonely on the quiet seas.

Some, mourning the long-deceased,

seek to bend the cosmic clocks,

but life is only catch-and-release.

I remember your white arm; we swam each

to our own green, mossy rock,

drifting lonely on the quiet seas.

And then, with sudden and with wordless ease,

you left me by my cheerless dock.

Life is only catch-and-release.

Still I circle without cease

these desolate, grey-naked rocks,

drifting lonely on the quiet seas,

but life is only catch-and-release.