Time to Go

Tomorrow, Lizzie and I will hop on a plane and end up in Pittsburgh, PA, where Mom lives. We'll meet her and niece Abby, 4, who is staying with her for a few days while her mom, my sister, Erica, attends a veterinary conference in Washington, DC. Should be good times.

That is, as long as Lizzie and Abby manage to arrange a princess diva detante. Both of them are strong willed, imaginative only children who like to be the center of their own self created dramas. The rest of us are bit parts in the pagents of their lives. Last time we visited Erica and her family, last Christmas, Lizzie complained (after only an hour or two) that Abby was driving her crazy with her (then) 3-year-old demands. Suck it up, we told her. You don't remember how you were when you were that age, but we certainly do. And isn't payback a bitch?

This will be Abby's first time away from home without Mommy, too, so we need to be extra solicitous. "Let's go through all the books you have that you've outgrown and see if there are any princess numbers we can take with us to Grandma's," I suggested, casual, breezy, yesterday.

Lizzie shrugged. She hates to divest herself of anything. Even the wrappers from old suckers still litter her shelves--treasures, she proclaims. Once, when she was 5 or so, I found myself saying, "Lizzie, this scares me. This is not normal." But that's another story.

Today, I dredged up a Borders giftcard Erica gave me for that last Christmas in Boston and announced that we should go to the mall today and use it, get some books for the trip.

"Great," Lizzie said. "I'll get a Roald Dahl book and maybe we can get a few princess books as well."

Nice. Deft. That's a quality diva move there--spending MY giftcard on another princess because the original princess is too stingy or abnormal to get rid of her old books.

So tomorrow we fly off with our new books, whatever they happen to be, and two suitcases, and two carry ons, and the best of intentions. Wish us luck.

What I Want

I have a burning need to write something here, to be in the middle of an imaginary conversation--no, scratch that, an imaginary lecture, where I am holding forth and you are listening with baited breath (whatever that means), nodding in all the right places, giving me a 100 watt smile, and once in a while leaning forward to grab my hands and give them a squeeze.

I have a burning need to be in the middle of this imaginary holding forth, and for there to be a bottle of wine--no, make that two bottles of red wine--on the table between us. I want this conversation to take place in Arizona, at a kitchen table, at the battered, round kitchen table in my old 4 room rented house on Santa Barbara, next to the window that overlooks the raggedy ass shed in front of the abandoned dog run. I want the baked weeds cracking the red brown dirt to overhear our sudden laughter. I want it to be the summer, to know that outside it's 112 degrees and inside, where we are, it's about 90, but it feels cool compared to the sizzle of the sun on our skin where there's no shade. I want to say, "Shit, living here is like living in a nuclear blast," and I want you to laugh and agree.

I want to gossip about people we know, critique their conversations, their hair cuts, their clothing, their style of interaction, their inability to sustain human relationships past the superficial level, their sociopathic love of ideas and distrust of emotions. I want to see and name all the ways in which we are superior to them and their petty, intellectual concerns. I want us to gaze into each other's eyes with the puffed up sense that we are, indeed, the chosen. That we are special. We belong to the world in a crucial and identifiable way.

I want to be 20-something, and poor, and maybe just married. Not pregnant yet, certainly. Still in the prime of my physical life. Let me be flush with health and desire. Give me a poem or two in the mental hopper. A great idea for a short story and the time to write it. Throw in the two cats, but make them, again, spend most of their time outside, stalking the birds dumb enough to light on the starved ornamental orange trees in the broken tubs outside the front windows. I'll take the two boy cats instead of the two girl cats of those long ago years--the boy cats are just more grateful for me. They run at me with feline glee lighting their eyes, they rub their faces all over my legs, all over my cheeks, they bump me from all angles, trying to get their scent into me. They remind me that I'm special, that they belong to me in a crucial and identifiable way. The girl cats never did that; they reminded me that I was tangential, but necessary. That I was a loud, large feeding machine.

Let's sit at the kitchen table and let me talk your ear off. Let me work myself up into an inspired rant. Let me make new combinations of metaphor and insult sing through my catalogue of real and imagined abuses in our petty academic world, where we agonize over essays on William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop while small time mobsters turn on the ignition in their Caddies and blow themselves sky high, right outside the Ventana Canyon resort. Let me go on and on about this small life with the fervor of a true believer in my reality, in my fleshy pleasures, while you smile and nod and laugh in all the right places.

Let me think about how much I love you, sitting there, across from me, and how much I love this life, all its promises, all its small and sometimes delicious pleasures, and disappointments, and half-finished projects, as the afternoon falls down and the light across the table turns red, then purple, and the ceiling fan ticks the minutes away, pushing cooler night air across our faces.

New Purchases

Lizzie's new bed arrived today--a full size canopy bed. Only when we picked the bed in the store, it didn't have the canopy attached. It was just a handsome four poster dealie-o.

The WG&R men arrived at 8:45 in the 8-12 window and marched into Lizzie's cleared bedroom. We heard them muttering to each other while we played Othello in the dining room. Banging and a bit of clanging.

"Well," said the bearded one, a small man who reminded me of a bit part in a Shakespeare drama, all ferrety goodness, "it's going to be .... in there."

"Excuse me?"

"It's going to be a tight fit in there, a little snug," he said. "That dresser."

They were all done. Ferret-man whipped out a thick stack of papers. "You'll need to sign this."

I looked at the slot for my signature, next to the fine print: "I have examined my purchase and everything has been installed satisfactorily."

"I better go in there and make sure," I half-joked, "before I sign."

The bed sucks up all the available space in the small bedroom. The dresser, up against a corner, allows Lizzie only 3 inches between bed and drawers. "Ooo," I said. "We'll have to rearrange."

But what the ------? The bed looked just as it did in the showroom, with the addition of a fugly white metal arched canopy frame, one of the rods slightly bent. "It comes with a canopy?"

"Yep." The guy waved the stack of papers at me. "See? You paid for it."

Indeed. 60.00 for the fugly hardware. The four poster bed itself, even with the flower applique on headboard and footboard, could be considered tasteful. Topped with the empty metal canopy frame, however, it reminded me of the rickety daybed I put in my grad school apartment living room, pretending to have a couch. Whenever we sat on it, it jingled and clanked, saying "cheap," saying "low rent."

After the WG&R men left, Lizzie and I hopped into the car and tore over to Linens and More. Of course they'd have a canopy topper.

Nope--just mosquito netting on cheap plastic hula hoops.

Back home, I called WG&R to see about the situation. The man who sold us the furniture, JW, didn't pick up his extension. I dialed 0# to speak to a customer service operator. "Hm," he said, "I don't think we sell the beds with the tops themselves. Just the metal frames. Let me call the store."

I sat on hold for a while. "I can't get anyone to pick up at the store," he said, finally. "It must be busy today. We're having a sale. But my wife was looking for one of those and I think she found it at Shopko. Or Target."

"Thanks," I said, and called Target. They had one full sized canopy left for 24.95, a Hello Kitty number. Oooo, I said, please hold that for me.

Shopko didn't have anything but the mesh hula hoops, for 9.95, marked down from 34.95.

We drove to Target and visited Guest Services. No, the canopy wasn't there yet. We waited while someone ran it up from the back of the store.

Only to discover that it was a hula hoop mesh number with a gaudy circus tent action on top, festooned with Hello Kitty advertising. Bleah.

Thinking like Whiz Mom in a Pinch, I toured the curtain and sheet section with Lizzie. "Look," I said, "We could get some of these sheer curtains and drape them over the top of the frame. What do you think?"

Lizzie shook her head. No. Ugh. Not what she wanted.

"Okay. How about draping a sheet over it?"

That was more up her alley. We picked out a full sized white flat sheet, on sale for 7.99 (back to college sale).

Back home, we heated chicken nuggets in the toaster oven and enjoyed our brand new airconditioning unit, which for 3000.00 delivers an even 75 degree coolness. I had a quesadilla or two. Willow followed me from stove to table, nosing me in the rear hopefully. Perhaps she thought she'd joggle a piece of ham or cheese out of my loose grip. Ha!

The sheet looks okay on the frame. I pinned it to each of the four corners with invisible safety pins. "Hey," I said, "I could use ribbons or something to pull this up," I pinched the middle of the swag hanging down, "and make it look really cool."

Lizzie shook her head. "I think it looks good the way it is," she said.

Whatever. Turns out we can order an arched full size canopy top, custom measured to order, on the internet. It will only cost us another 79.00 plus shipping and handling.

Golden.

Now I'm heading over to the hairdresser's for a color job. Actually, I'm sick of my hair touching my face and fantasize about having him whack it off just under my ears. But that would negate the whole growing-the-hair-out-as-long-as-I-can-ge

t-it thing. Plus, just the color will be over 100.00.

In preparation for that, I have to coax Willow out of the living room (she's crashed out here on my feet) and into her crate. I've already crated her twice this morning--once for the delivery and then again for the shopping trips--and have used the doggie biscuits and the Kong loaded with soft cheese. What's left for her?

Wish me luck.

Diary of a Mod/Mad Housewife

6:45 AM

Woke from vaguely troubled dreams to Bowling for Soup singing "you could be my next ex-girlfriend."

7:00 AM

Walked Willow up the street. She sat on Brad and Diane's lawn and looked longing at their windows. She pooped on their neighbor's strip of lawny weeds, the strip near the street. I scooped it up into my blue plastic bag and dangled it, odiferous, like a testes sack all the way back.

7:30 AM

Finished a lemon poppy seed muffin and reheated coffee blasted with 2% milk. Read a New York Times Sunday Styles article, "The Shelf Life of Bliss," 3/4 of the way through, long enough to discover that the thrill in any relationship, whether legally married or simply cohabiting, drains out of the bottom by the 3rd year or so. And then it's just slogging thorugh the rest of the years as if through oatmeal, apparently.

Yesterday, Lizzie blithely announced that Brian, of the across the street neighbors, has moved to his brothers. "They hope it's temporary," she chirped.

Dave reached across the truck seat and patted me on the shoulder.

8:00 AM

Crated Willow, read a few pages of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games in the bathroom.

8:15 AM

Went into the basement and worked out. I'm doing interval training, which is supposed to burn more fat. Of course, I'm eating more fat, so it's not working out the way I'd perhaps anticipated. Whatever. (This is my new philosophy. It's like another and similar philosophy that I've been reading in other blogs: meh. As in, "Well, I just spent 6000.00 on a new furnace and airconditioner. Meh.")

While I worked out, I watched two episodes of Alias from season one: the one where Sydney saves her dad from a nefarous guy in Cuba and the one where she learns that her dead mother was a spy for the KGB and was responsible for killing a bunch of "innocent" CIA agents. I saw that latter plot twist coming for miles down the road and congratulated myself for it.

For the last 10 minutes of the second episode, I folded two baskets of clean laundry.

9:30 AM

Cleaned Lizzie's room. We've gotten rid of her bed because we bought her a new one, which is to arrive on Thursday. (Yesterday, when Lizzie announced that Hunter's and Ethan's dad had left his wife slash high school sweetheart just "temporarily," we were en route to deliver the futon couch to a student's house. This futon couch is the last vestige of our graduate school life. I can't say that I'm too sorry to see it go...)

Threw out a few things while Lizzie watched TV on the second floor, where she is sleeping until her new bed arrives: four deflated hot air balloons; a dessicated floral arrangement; various papers.

Pushed her dresser against a different wall. Removed the cork board from the wall where her new headboard will go. Rearranged the pictures and mirrors to accomodate the new location for the cork board. Took the raggedy area rug down to the basement.

Thoroughly vaccumed the hard wood.

10:30 AM

At Lizzie's request, put all the mirrors and wall hangings back in their original places. Determined that the corkboard would have to go to the basement, and that, after the bed arrives, the rug will be vaccumed and returned to its bedroom.

11:00

Vaccumed the dining room. Freaked out about the ugly brown spots on the carpet. Scheduled a cleaning for next week.

11:30 AM

De-crated Willow and asked Lizzie to take her outside to play.

11:35 AM

Took Willow from Lizzie, who announced that she intended to go across the street and play.

11:37 AM

Coaxed Willow down from the 2nd floor. Removed the stuffed rabbit from her mouth and threw it into the stairwell. Shut off the 2nd floor.

11:40 AM

Removed my shoe from Willow's mouth. Coaxed Willow into the kitchen with Gary, the stuffed elephant. Told her that Gary needed some chewing. Closed off the basement and its treasure trove of 1000 stuffed animals.

11:45 AM

Made Willow do a puppy push up (sit, down, sit, stand, down, stand) for part of the dog buscuit she'd been sniffing. She can reach the top of the mobile dishwasher now if she jumps up.

11:47 AM

Told Willow that Gary needed more chewing. On her bed.

11:48 AM

Attached Willow to the leash and took her outside. Told her to go crazy on the holes she's been digging. Our back yard is devastated--looks like a Faulknerian landscape, something the Snopes would be comfortable in. All we need is a big boiling pot and a few hefty women in gaudy ribbons to sit around fanning themselves in the folding chairs.

11:50 AM

Started responding to e-mails. Wrote to Mom. Looked out the window to see Willow pooping at the end of her rope, on the dividing line between our yard and the neighbor's.

Looked out the window to see Willow barking at the back neighbor, Ruby.

Looked out the window to see Willow hip deep in one of her holes, barking at ... me?

12:20 PM

Cleaned up the poop. Swept the dirt from Willow's newest hole back into it. She jumped and barked at the broom.

12:47 PM

I'm inside now, typing this. I've taken some testimonial pictures of some of these events and downloaded them from the camera to the laptop.

I look out the window and see Willow in the flower bed, digging behind the big hosta.

I contemplate killing her.

Instead, I go out and pull her out of the bed. Find a stick. Throw it to the other side of the yard for her to catch. She manages to get a smear of spit-dirt on my arm.

Now she's outside the door, yipping and crying. I look out the window in time to see her run back toward her hole. Along the way, her rope wraps around the bbq grill and, as she dashes away from it, pull it down and over with an impressive clang.

I guess that's my cue to end this and go out there. If I don't respond to your emails in a timely fashion, this is why.

In Memory of Cassandra Voss: A Collection of Her Writing

Cassandra J. Voss, cherished student, friend, and daughter, passed away in a car accident on May 21, 2007. On earth, Cassandra inspired us all with her loving compassion, her generous, vibrant spirit, and vigorous activism. Truly, Cassandra embodied loving kindness.

A talented dancer, writer, artist, singer, and healer, Cassandra leaves us here with vivid memories. These writings show the range of her intellect and vision.

*

On Poetry
Cassandra Voss

Mainly, my poetry tends to be confessional. I feel drawn to poets like Plath, who shares her battle between a feminist consciousness, and a desire to be accepted (by society, but also by herself). I write to “kill the angel in the house” so to speak, and yet, I want to preserve the angel. Identifying the line where human’s free will to choose becomes grey, is I believe my strength in creative writing. My goal as a writer is always to bring the reader (and even more so myself) to that edge, that place where you are forced to make a decision, and where you will sit there for hours analyzing the possible ways to jump off the cliff, because you definitely cannot go back now. Finally, a conclusion is made, and through some catharsis you are free to let go.

In the future, I would like to develop my skills in writing about things external to me. I am often times so consumed by self wonder that I forget there is a world worth writing about which exists outside. I would like to experiment with different styles, and push myself to not just write poetry as if I was simply journaling about my day. Becoming more conscious about what I want to share with the world, instead of counting on it coming out of me at random, would be much more reassuring in terms of my creative skill. Yes, creativity is intuitive, but it can also be learned.

*

Salt on a Wound
Cassandra Voss

I dream of a bird whose body is similar to a peacock,
although it has a slightly longer neck.
Its feathers are green,
like a granny smith apple,
like the kind my mother used to
shake
salt on
to make them sparkle,
and then eat in devouring and passionate bites.
Her tongue absorbing the sour flesh,
down to the heart of the fruit.

The bird is a normal bird, it has
two black eyes
from which to see its way,
and a beak which it uses to speak
out of, and take in
its nourishment.
It differs however in its ability to fly,
for the poor creature has but one wing.

So it drowns in the air,
shrieking and yelping and
shaking
Its head over its green body,
just like my mother’s salt shaker
shaking
salt over
her granny smith apples
to make them sparkle.

I gasp, that I might be able to save the heart creature.
But in its desperation it
loses
its sight,
and springs through the window of the house.
Its feathers and flesh
cut by the separation of
glass, and old wood.

Splintering sound echoes,
and the bird is shaking on the floor of the room.
I think it dead, yet the echo of the break is alive, and the
shaking
of the bird, is just like
my mother’s hand
shaking
salt
on her granny smith apples
to make them sparkle.

But then, miraculously, or perhaps, in masochism,
the bird gets up and flies back out the same window
just to fall again.
This time, on the cold snake scale pavement, still
shaking.

I realize now that the bird will not die,
That in fact it is salvageable.

The bird’s open wounds bleed onto its sparkling green feathers,
just like the open wound on the skin of my mother’s
granny smith apples sparkle from the salt
she herself has
shaken
on.

*

Don't Worry. I'm not Sleeping Here Tonight.

Cassandra Voss

I feel as though I may snap. Like Charlotte, I may begin creeping around on the ground. It gives a whole new meaning to the color yellow—which I’ve been wearing to help my will center. It’s not helping though. Sometimes I’m just lonely. Sometimes I just want to be alone. What does it mean if I tell her that she has the cutest face when I used to say that you had the cutest face? Fuck you. Have you had sex with her yet? You’re not in love with me anymore. I still love you. Where is Woolf when you need her? The closest I can get to you is the indigo girls—but I can’t even listen to them in a room of my own. I miss you too gramma, say hi to Virginia for me.

I miss my mother.

miss my mother when I was a child, and sick, and she mixed orange juice and Fresca together in a giant green cup just for me.

always told myself that I would become a lesbian if he ever cheated on me, but I’d rather be single. I’m so sick of women. Passive aggressiveness. That poem about condoms last week was so great—how wonderful to worry about if you’re putting your penis in her vagina the right way. I bet she’s worrying about if you will believe her when she fakes it. I’m so sick of men who don’t know where the clitoris is. Would it be ok if I said I just wanted a good fuck—a good fuck with a man? Is that Antithetical to feminism? Would it be ok if I went out and got drunk, and in my vulnerability I slept with a boy who didn’t know how to put a condom on. Look at him pretending like it gets easier every time. Is that what scares them? That I see through their masculinity? Don’t worry. I’m not sleeping here tonight.

I miss my mother.
I miss my mother when I got my period, and she gave me two aspirin and a wine cooler.

feel like I’m going to crack. Like Edna Pontellier, I’m going to forget how to swim. I’ve become aware of my dependency on men. There energy is soothing like my blanket, or my mother…or my father, when I was very young. What can soothe me now? Live women do not do it. But perhaps, dead women can. Perhaps Sylvia had it right. To die is an art. Oh if I died, I could be with her now, express my love for her, kiss her burned lips and taste the fire from the stove on her tongue. But even though I love you, I cannot follow in your footsteps. I am not a martyr. So, instead of suicide I will write poetry and miss my mother.

I think I may be having a funeral in my brain, like Emily, isolating myself to the point of invisibility. I do like her poetry by the way. But I agree, she was also a martyr, Daddy’s little girl. I wonder if she ever had an orgasm? I like to imagine her with someone, perhaps a woman, although a man would probably make her father angrier. There they are in the garden, in the early hours of the morning, reciting lines from Paradise Lost and fucking in the dirt—right on top of the tulips. And I bet she’s thinking she loves him, but he’s too busy worrying about her father who might wake up from her loud moaning. She looks up at the sky and knows her mother is watching over her.

I feel like I just got back from a dinner party. Like Judy, making myself so full of women’s stories that I become sick to my stomach. I cannot distinguish anymore—do I miss my mother or you? No, it is not you. It is me that I miss. Wasn’t I an artist once? A dancer? A witch? I used to paint for days at a time without eating or sleeping, and I would cry over my work. When I was finished I would lie in my bed and dream about planting roses. But this institution doesn’t allow for that kind of freedom. I stay up writing poetry until 3 in the morning—there is no time for dreaming. I wake up 4 hours later and have to argue my feminist dissertation…

Don’t worry. I’m not sleeping here tonight…I just need a catharsis.

*

On Poetry II
Cassandra Voss

I guess it is no surprise to you that everything in this collection is... confessional. I have learned that that is what I write best... myself. I write what I know—loss, anger, love, appreciation... I have learned that these emotions are not around all the time, so when you feel them, write them, because you don't know when or if you will ever have them again. Do not wait a day, or an hour, or even a minute. Grab a pen, tell the guy you're fucking to 'hold his horses ' and write down whatever you need to write down.

*

The Painting That Speaks to My Chakras
Cassandra Voss

It says that my heart is connected
to my will.
That they spin together to light
my being,
and move me.
They're working together now
to try and absorb you away,
but you do not back down.
I see in the corner,
my belly has also attempted to
weave a net for you;
with intent to devour your pricking horn,
and save my green and yellow
center from all this work.
But you do not fall.

*

Cento For Plath
Cassandra Voss

Send my muse Alice packing with gaudy scraps
You do not do, you do not do
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell
I sought my image
A witch’s face?

Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.
Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.
And the shadow stretched, the lights went out
They bow and stand: they suffer such attacks!
Herr God, Herr Lucifer

I am in control.
Some damned condition you are in:

A third person is watching

God’s Lioness
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
Do you do no harm?
Down here the sky is always falling.
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
She is used to this sort of thing.
She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints.

*

For Marion—
Cassandra Voss

You are my dark Goddess.
I hated You at first.
I hated You for taking him away from Me,
and tearing Me open.
I knew it was You, because he could have never done it himself—coward.
You are my Angelina Jolie.

Secretly,
I want to seduce You.
I want You to fall in love with me,
and leave him, tearing him open.
You know i have more passion then he does—You know because You crafted me—and him.
You are my black hole.

i love Your depth.
i love You for taking me deeper and wider,
so that I could remember how to be alone in the darkness.
I needed to remember the darkness,
alone.

I miss having a leech to lie with.
But now he’s stuck to You.
Although perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
Perhaps,
You love him too.
Of course You do.
In any case,

i understand.
I understand.

Tu l'as fait pour moi.*
Tu l'as fait entierement pour moi.*

So let’s celebrate.
Because it’s my cake,
Car c’est mon gateau,
and my knife,
et mon Couteau,
and my resurrected life.

Merci, Marion,
merci

*

The Scent of Dead Illusions
Cassandra Voss

Remember lake Michigan?
Do you remember how incredibly illusive we were?
Our brains were the mist that
rolled over the water and onto the sand,
and then back again.
Broken glass beer bottles cutting the fog
that was closest to the ground,
but we were walking on the air.
I remember it was cold.
I was glad it was cold, because it disguised the smell of
old
dead
fish.
Fish that lie carelessly buried in the sand,
some in clumps, all on top of each other,
as if they died while making love.
Our bodies were like those fish that night—
clumped together,
too hastily perhaps,
but we didn’t notice then.
I remember we were scared.
We even admitted it to each other.
What was lurking inside the giant black pine trees?
we asked.
We were waiting for some man or other creature
to jump out and attack us,
but we made it back to your car unassaulted.
I turned back and took in the lake one last time,
still illusioned, still
under its spell.
I wish I could go back to lake Michigan with you.
Lie on the sand like the dead fish, making love.
If I went back I could find it again,
us,
the two of us.
we are there, lying clumped together.
Dead, because the water has washed us ashore and then
left us,
eating the sand. We are not making love anymore.
The illusion is gone.
All that is left are fish skeletons.
but at least
when it is cold the
smell is bearable.

*

A Short Story
Cassandra Voss

Every detail of her character was blurry still. Just as her professor had said the grandmother stories were getting old, and she was sick of writing in first person. Her voice wasn’t as real as it had been before. Somehow through all the stress of her life she had forgotten who she was—I write for myself—but all she had been doing lately is writing to fill the gaping hole inside her, trying to fill up space with superficial energies. Not that her grandmother stories were completely void of depth, but never depth inside her, only external depth, only the depth of the situation—How interesting can my life be? —she thought, instead of asking the more important question— How important am I? — That’s what she really wanted to know anyway.

So, she continued to write in her hard cover notebook, the one that made her feel so unique, like such an individual, when all her classmates brought in their spiral bounds- What a joke—It was so cliché to be an individual, and now here she sat at 2 a.m. —just like a writer—doing it for it’s mere martyrdom effect, attempting to reach some edge, some breaking point, where, with a flick of ink something would strike her, something which she would collapse into, and where black runs would be all over the paper from her indulgent tears—How do I really feel about my gramma? …What is still inside me? Anything?

All she could think of was her vision of her grandmother as a high priestess, with long blond hair. She wondered why her grandmother didn’t give her luck when she played cards the night of her funeral.

Her writing was turning into a journal. She remembered her professor’s words— “No one wants to hear about your pathetic, boring life.” —The truth was, her life was boring. She was over being mad at her father, and sick of playing the victim with her stepmother. She had a best friend and a boyfriend—both of which she had stable, healthy relationships with. She got along with her mother. —I think writers purposely try to make themselves miserable in order to write good stories. What a bunch of fucking martyrs. There’s a topic I could write on ‘Women as Martyrs,’ how fucking original. —In any case, she kept writing in her hard cover notebook, fighting for some epiphany to leap up off the cream colored page destroying the gray lines that separated the words of her story.

This is so fucking abstract—Her character still lacked any real personality. In fact the only real character was a chair, or a ring, or some other object laid out in some extraordinary metaphor that was supposed to represent love, or death, or herself. God damn it, I’m supposed to be a fucking feminist, how hard can this be? —She thought she had already claimed her voice, but now she was unsure.

Finally, her soul lay open on the page. She was too exhausted to continue. —Maybe I’m not supposed to be a writer. —But this thought made her even more of a martyr then fucking Christ. —How do you not be a stereotypical writer? Where is my story, where is my fucking original story? Who the fuck am I? —That’s what she was really looking for; some sense of who she really was, some spiritual wholeness, some kind of original self. —It doesn’t exist. We’re always searching. We’re all always searching. That’s not original.

*

Reclaiming Slut

Cassandra Voss

I want to be a Slut—
overflowing and bubbling with passion.
I want to decorate my eyes
with black mystery,
and my hair with dark desire.

I want to call the shots.
I want all of them—
the cowboys, the pseudo intellectuals, the hippies, the biker dudes, all of them—
to want my body.
I used to wish that these men wanted to have my heart—but I don’t believe in that kind of ownership anymore—my heart is sick of being somebody else’s.

I used to want to be with these men because the accentuated my adventurousness, my intellectualism, my earthiness, my “bad ass” persona. —but it was all in vain.
Now I want to be my own cowboy, and I want to take a ride on my own motorcycle.

I want to buy my own drinks—
a very bloody Mary please.

I want to be a Slut—
I want to pretend to be men’s commodity, but then remind them that I am in control.
I don’t actually need them to salvage an identity—I don’t even need them for sex.

I want to be Mrs. Robinson.
I want to be Madonna.
I want to be the screamer that lives down the hall.

I want other girls to talk about me behind my back—just loud enough that I might hear.

I want to be educated in the art of desire,
and I want to teach men the tricks of the trade.
I want people to come up to me and ask me the questions they wish they could ask their mothers.
I want to wear black lingerie
as everyday clothes.
I want to go to the store and buy condoms—just condoms
and maybe a bottle of cheap wine.

I want to be a Slut—
don’t you love that word?
SLLUUUT—
Lemme break it down for you:
Sssssssssssss for Sassy,
Lllllll for lily’s like Georgia O’keefe draws them
U for Universal physical connection
ti-T for tentatively tasting tarnished men…
and women.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

I want to be a SLUT—
do I need to repeat myself:
SLUT—
you know you want it again:
SLUT—

Here we go now:
Calling all straight As, all goody two-shoes, all nice Christian girls, don’t you wish you were a---

SLUT.

*

The Awakening (Not for Chopin, but for Flora)
Cassandra Voss

In my dream, I got a message from my mom, who said that my gramma died.

Bile duct cancer.

My gramma used to cut my hair, and every time she would say,
"A woman's hair is like her heart."

For the past six months her hair had been falling out,

and mine had been growing.

The next thing I remember is a glass on my gramma's kitchen table,
next to a white bottle of pills.

The problem is life.

And a half empty glass is more like milk, than it is like water,

you can't see it all.

The I woke up.

And the sound of love rang like a wicked laugh.

I found my scissors, and made my hair like my heart.

*

Conforming to the Soul

Cassandra Voss

Stand in line--straight, still, and soulless.
Or perhaps,
all one single soul.
All legs
all toes
all arms and wrists
all shoulders
all faces
reflecting one movement.
Quiet
black torsos,
pink legs,
Move.
One single string tied between them.
One pulls on the others.
If one falls,
they all fall,
tumbling down into
the emptiness.
Their only identity
tied up with the string.

*

On Literary Criticism

Cassandra Voss

Since my introduction to feminism in my later High School years, to formal education in Women’s and Gender Studies, my definition of feminism has constantly been changing, reshaping, becoming abstract, and then concrete and then abstract again, becoming separatist and then inclusive, and so on. In turn my interpretations of literature have also been constantly changing.

Literature is important because it has power. Literature has the ability to affect the way people think about themselves, and the world. However, if feminism has taught me anything, it is that we need to learn to read literature critically. We need to be “resistant readers.” [“How Feminists Read Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’”] has come out of the castle of critical feminist thought, and works to address the rationalization of many of my peers that just because a text is not presented in light of feminist criticism, does not mean that we are not allowed to analyze a text through a feminist lens. Also, it is the first essay I have written which forced me to consider how I impose my own experiences onto a text. For in order to be truly critical of literature, I must first be critical of my subjectivity, and work to acknowledge my own cultural, racial, and class privilege, and also attempt to recognize my own internalized oppression.

*

How Feminists Read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”

Cassandra Voss

In her essay “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels,” Rosalind Coward asserts that “As feminists we have to be constantly alerted to what reality is being constructed, and how representations are achieving this construction. In this respect, reading a novel can be a political activity, similar to activities which have always been important to feminist politics in general. (227-8). Coward names what I have struggled with as a feminist reader since my “click moment” one year ago when being a feminist became an innate part of who I was and exerted itself into every aspect of my life, including the way I read literature. Second semester of my freshman year of college I began reading “feminist” novels, such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which overtly allowed me to analyze them in terms of gender. However, my gender radar did not turn off when reading texts that were not considered open for feminist analysis. Thus, I became frustrated with my fellow classmates when I wanted to analyze classic texts, like Huck Finn in terms of gender, and they cast this interpretation aside as having no precedence. As Louise Rosenblatt states, “The literary experience must be phrased as a transaction between the reader and the text. Moreover, as in the creative activity of the artist, there will be selective factors molding the readers response” (35). In other words, as my relationship with feminism grew, so did the opinions that I brought to a text.

After reading Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” for the third time, (now as a feminist) I realized how many male dominated texts lacked a feminist analysis. I concluded that this lack was because no one wanted to discredit the masculine actions of men (such as going to war). However, for a reader to deny that there are anti-feminist components to these types of stories, or even just to ignore them is problematic. As the authors claim in Gender Studies: Terms and Debates:

Given that the tactical reading is an articulation of the subject’s perception of their own positioning, an understanding of the tactical response can be an important tool for the analyst in understanding that subject’s self-perception, and in making a different perception available to the analyst which reveals the (mainstream) assumptions governing her/his own positioning…For gender theorists, an understanding of tactical reading can lead to valuable insights into the ways in which conservative gendering practices are resisted and transformed, which might in turn provide models for the receptualisation of gendered relationships and identities (Cranny-Francis et al. 135).

If we as readers fail to read texts that are not usually critiqued in terms of feminism and gender, then we will continue to reproduce texts that are sexist and that perpetuate sexist ideals in society. However, if readers take a tactical approach to literature, as previously mentioned, then our resistance to a sexist text is also a political resistance to a sexist society. We are then able to reconstruct what we think real relationships and identities ought to be like in society. Thus, I argue that a feminist reader cannot place a text outside of the sexist society, which it mirrors. Regardless of whether or not the text has been written overtly for feminist analysis or not, a feminist critic will always, and should always, work to deconstruct conservative notions of gender within it.

In the very first paragraph of O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” a feminist critic would immediately be set off by the sentence, “She was a virgin, he was almost sure” (90). This immediately sets up a sexual double standard between the male main character, and the female he is thinking about. A sexual double standard that feminist are uncomfortable with. As Rosenblatt explains,

A personal preoccupation or an automatic association with a minor phrase or an attitude toward the general theme will lead to a strong reaction that has very little to do with the work. A word such as home or mother or a phrase such as my country, with its many conventional, sentimental associations, may set off a reaction that tends to blind the reader to the context of these words (80).

Rosenblatt is correct that my reaction as a feminist to this phrase was strong. And although the main idea of the story is about men’s experience at war, and the literal and figurative “things that they carried” Rosenblatt is quick to assert that these “minor phrases” (like “she was a virgin”) have “very little to do with the work.” As a feminist it is impossible to read any text without reacting to anti-feminist phrases, or even words, and also analyzing in terms of gender. This reaction is further heightened by the recognition of a male author who clearly does not include women’s experience into the story, and equivocates misogyny as being merely a part of the natural male experience. As Terry Lovell explains in ‘Writing Like a Woman: A question of Politics,’

The development of the novel has been closely bound up with the social and political position of women…there is a fundamental continuity which firmly places them in a private domestic world where emotions and personal relationships are at once the focus of moral value and the core of women’s experience. In the novel women are ‘prisoners’ of feeling and of private life…Naturally, male writers have struggled against this taint of feminine identification (84).

Feminist readers recognize the complexities of gender oppression. In O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” a feminist analysis asserts that O’Brien’s masculine story lends itself also to misogyny. Although readers are taught to separate the author from the narrator of a story, a reader has a hard time distinguishing between the two, and often spends time discussing the life of an author and then applying it to the text. This is a valid response, sense the society in which one lives, and the experiences that person has had helps to shape that person and will, at least to some extent, affect that person’s writing. O’Brein, who served in war, was socialized in the army to be hyper-masculine, and a definition of hyper-masculinity assumes misogyny. Thus, in his story that comes out. The problem is not that his experience is wrong, or that he is wrong to feel the way that he does about women. The problem lies in the reason that he feels that way.

Readers who think that the main character in “The Things They Carried” is merely having “natural” feelings that a man has when at war, fail to take into account the crucial aspect of socialization that men at war go through. Or, if they do recognize this aspect, they fail to see it as problematic. A feminist reader recognizes the socialization, and then takes it one step further by asserting that that kind of socialization—of misogyny—is wrong, and O’Brien’s character’s failure to realize that reproduces hatred toward women. As Rosenblatt asserts,

Just as the personality and concerns of the reader are largely socially patterned, so the literary work, like language itself, is a social product. The genesis of literary techniques occurs in a social matrix. Both the creation and reception of literary works are influenced by literary tradition. Yet ultimately, any literary work gains its significance from the way in which the minds and emotions of particular readers respond to the verbal stimuli offered by the text (28).

Feminist readers, and other types of resistant readers, take into account the socialization of the author and the language itself. “Interestingly, resistant readings of this kind, which locate gendered identities which are very conventional and sometimes misogynistic in texts, have recently been attacked for their tendency to construct the (compliant) reader as victim” (Cranny-Francis et al. 121). However, as Rosenblatt states, a text only has power over us if we allow it to have power over us. A feminist reader does not claim that a compliant reader is “victim” to a text, but victim to the socializing of society. A reader who has been taught to experience things in a certain (gendered) way will be bringing that experience to the text. Thus, the “transaction,” as Rosenblatt defines it, is based on the reader’s prior knowledge of that experience, based on the general societal consensus. However, a feminist reader emphasizes that not everyone experiences the same thing the same way.

Often a text is considered great if it allows the reader to “relate” to a main character or main theme of the story. As Rosenblatt explains,

The ability to understand and sympathize with others reflects the multiple nature of the human being, his potentialities for many more selves and kinds of experience than any one being could express. This may be one of the things that enable us to seek through literature an enlargement of our experience. Although we may see some characters outside—that is, we may not identify with them as completely as we do with more congenial temperaments—we are nevertheless able to enter into their behavior and their emotions. Thus it is that the youth may identify with the aged, one sex with another, a reader of a particular limited social background with members of a different class or a different period (40).

Although many agree with Rosenblatt’s explanation of the sympathetic reader, feminists argue differently. The claim that human beings have “multiple natures” which allow them to sympathize with others of a different age, sex, class, ect. is not valid, because gender and class are social constructions, not innate to human beings. For example, consider why when discussing “The Things They Carried,” unless there is feminist in the room, readers are unlikely to talk about gender issues. However, when discussing an overtly feminist text such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” readers immediately jump to natural explanations for the narrator’s insanity such as post pardon depression. In Gender Studies: Terms and Debates,

Critic Elaine Showalter argued that women ‘are expected to identify with a masculine experience and perspective which is presented as the human one’ (1971, p. 856). The canon, feminists argued, was an engendering practice enacted through specific readings of a selection of texts characterized by the dominance of dead, white males.” As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose governing principle is misogyny. (Fetterley 1978, p. xx)” (Cranny-Francis 112).

Feminist readers break away from labeling men’s experiences as human experiences. In effect, when feminists question the so called “human experience” by asserting that—wait a minute, but that’s not my experience—the compliant readers become upset, because that questions everything that they have been taught about the way to read literature.

A feminist critic will always question conservative notions of gender within a text and within a society. To read from a feminist perspective is a political action that allows the individual and the collective community of readers to deconstruct society’s construction of gender. However, feminists must be careful to not reproduce binary notions of gender in their deconstruction. For example, to claim that a woman’s experience at war is innately different then a men’s experience at war perpetuates thinking about emotional differences between men and women as innate. In reality, the way in which someone emotionally deals with or expresses oneself is complexly constructed by society. And so, it is my own journey as a feminist reader to recognize where my own experiences impose themselves onto a text, and that they may not be the experience of everyone else, not even every woman.

Works Cited

Cranny-Francis, Anne, et al. Gender Studies: Terms andDebates. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2003.

Coward, Rosalind. “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels,” Eagleton 155-60.

Eagleton, Mary. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Cambridge & Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Lovell, Terry. “Writing Like a Woman: A question of Politics.” Eagleton 83-5.

Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature As Exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1983.

O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A guide to Narrative Craft. Longman: New York, 2003. 90-102.

*

Where Do You Go When You Die?

Cassie Voss, 1996

In memory of William Olson

Where do you go When you Die?

I believe you become nature. Sometimes you dance in the wind. You see the sky light and fluffy, and you become the clouds. Your bright puffy white looks down on the earth and you become the ground.

Your deep rich soil is strong and plentiful. You feel the warm bright light touch your surface, and you become the sun.

As you dim you see something out of the corner of your horizon. It’s a beautiful, blue crescent moon. You see it and you become it.

You see an old friend from the past, and she sees your face on the moon. You wink at her and then make her a shooting star to wish on. As you watch the star gliding through the night sky you wish you were it and you become it. As you settle your five points shimmer and you rest into a peaceful night.

Does Dying mean you’re gone forever?

I believe you’re never gone but just in a deep dream that gives you a better look at yourself. All the good things that you remember are held inside your heart like a picture in a locket. Your attitude when you were in the past is the same when you die. If you die happy that’s how you stay. If you die grumpy that’s how you stay. Therefore be careful, because Attitude is everything!

Why are you scared to Die?

Why are you scared to die? I think most people are scared to die because they think that they won’t see their old friends and you’ll just rot away. When really you remember everyone and love them forever! You see them off and on visiting in dreams and blowing their plants. You whisper to them of the deep dream you’re in. They seem scared because they’ve never heard an invisible person before but you know that in their heart they understand what you are saying. So why worry besides you’re just in a deep peaceful dream.

The End

---

* You did it for me.

* You did it all for me.

To simplify my life, I'll be posting primarily on drmacd_snc.livejournal.com. Visit me there!

Glazed with Poetry by the White Woman

After a penultimate Poetry Writing class meeting, I feel charged with poetic energy, like a backyard messiah fired up with the suburban word, ready to spread it around.

Yeah, we talked about sex. A lot about sex. After all, what discussion of poetry is complete without a knock-down-drag-out session of sexual metaphor building?

But, first, I talked. Lectured, rather. I used my power as a professor to talk at the (un)fortunate captive audience, reading poems that have spoken to me--just a smidgen from the pantheon--about the nature of, the purpose for, the audience of poetry.

Here's the list (I only read portions, and then babbled on about why I'd chosen them, including vast patches of shameless self-promotion which I will call Whitmanic Rhapsody):

• Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
• "Adam's Curse," W. B. Yeats
• Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot
• "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower," W. C. Williams
• "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," W. H. Auden
• "Diving into the Wreck," Adrienne Rich
• "The Bear," Galway Kinnell
• "The Poem You Asked For," Larry Levis
• "The Mountain," Louise Gluck
• "I Go Back to May 1937," Sharon Olds
• "The Words Continue Their Journey," Margaret Atwood

After my "lecture," interrupted only now and again by the running discourse of Asperger Boy, I asked the students to write for about 5 minutes about what they thought poetry is or should do. Their answers, shared after a small bathroom break, leaped from here to there, from the warm, loving, embracing mother/home/lover who then slaps you in the face and kicks you out of the nest, to the bottle for feelings, to the dominatrix/Old Testament god, to the conversation piece in the singles' bar.

Ever the Whitmanic wheelbarrow woman (so much depends upon/ the slickly fuckable wheelbarrow,/ glazed with hot poetry,/ next to the white woman), I wanted to pour every idea into a body and then to examine that body from every angle.

So my question now is not what poetry can or should do, or for whom, but this:

If poetry were a person, who would it be and how would you interact with him or her?