life rx 8 mar 24

I can hear you talk without a telephone

Mar 09, 2024

the empress, and a stanza from Sandra Cisneros’ “The Poet Reflects on Her Solitary State”:

The stray lovers have gone home.
The house is cold.
There is nothing on TV.
She must write poems.

the aleatory

In some sense, I had a very lonely childhood. In the classical sense of “who is around? nobody.” If you’re an only child, and you live on 250 acres, and your parents are working. I hope it doesn’t sound like blame—it’s not. This is just a fact. I grew up accustomed to a kind of silence that makes people anxious, or so I’ve gathered. There are bad things about this; it makes you weird. But there are good things, too. You can find a kind voice in silence. Something about that—the inanimate world being a friend—is central to writing poems. For me, anyway.

In 2020, I got a fellowship to live on the Dobie Paisano Ranch outside of Austin for four months, behind not one but two padlocked gates. (A weird rhyme: the Dobie Ranch is also 250 acres.) It being 2020, even if I did drive into town, the social opportunities were essentially nothing. For most of the time, it was just me, my cat Nellie Belle, and the snakes and the lizards and the coyotes. The junipers. The live oaks. (I love live oaks.) The fellowship advisor, Michael Adams, confessed toward the end of my time that he had been worried about me. All alone in all that space, and no ready way to shake the aloneness on the other side of the impenetrable junipers. Not everybody could do it, he said.

I don’t know that I deserve this praise (was it praise?), because as far as I was concerned, I was never alone.

the assignment

Find an instagram infographic about how many friends you’re supposed to have and throw it in the garbaggio.

writing prompt

Write down what everybody is saying. By “everybody,” I mean trees.

a chune

“Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains),” Connie Converse