Wait--what?

The latest easily-foreseeable gun death in the United States took place in Arizona at a family-targeted (pun intended) facility called “Burgers and Bullets.” The idea, I suppose, is that families, adults and their children, would spend the day out in the open eating kid-friendly food and having a wonderful time learning to shoot guns. I read about this in the Los Angeles Times, saw references to it also in the New York Times and the Guardian.

Apparently the fond parents shot a video of their 9-year-old daughter having her first encounter with an Uzi. An Uzi. An instructor had set her up with protective ear mufflers, and can be heard encouraging her enthusiastically after her first single shot. He warns her about the recoil from a repeated-shot firing of the Uzi. Some people, like me, might say that he can warn her all he likes, because 1) she’s only 9, so probably won’t quite understand what ‘recoil’ is, and 2) she’s only 9, and won’t be strong enough to manage the recoil.

My husband was drafted into the Army and sent over to Korea. He tells me that he and the other soldiers (young men in their late teens and early twenties) were all astounded by the power of the recoil from their repeat-fire automatic weapons, and needed to practice bracing against it when shooting. (FYI, he could read and write, and volunteered for company clerk, thus getting pulled from the front lines, protecting his life and taking him out of the position of trying to kill others.)

So, the instructor warns the 9-year-old girl, hands her the Uzi, shows her how to fire. Predictably and horribly, the barrel of the gun arcs up as the recoil pushes the girl back, and the instructor is shot in the head. Mercifully, the video stops before that point. I am utterly at a loss for an adequate comment on this event, except to say that my friends in Europe will no doubt learn of this incident and think, once and yet again, “Are they nuts?”

 



It's a real poem

This poem received an Honorable Mention in the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest (pant pant), and was published in Comstock Poetry Review earlier this year. And, since you can't find it on-line...

Real Poem

 

Open mike, she comes up to ask me, were those real poems, or did I just make them up. I confess:  I just make them up. Her look says I thought as much. So many years I have faked it, getting credit for stuff I just made up. What you are reading here, for instance. It's not a real poem, just one I made up. This poem did not come from a certified breeder, someone who could vouch for the pedigree of the parents. Nah, it's a mutt, a Heinz 57, a tabby-tortie-tiger-cat, maybe even missing a tail. At the computer it will not leave me alone. Make a real poem out of me, it hisses, prowling across the keyboard, make me a real poem. At my desk, I made a nest for it from my grandmother's shawl, the one she crocheted even before she married my grandfather the head baker of Lodz. The poem deliberately lies sprawled across the paper I'm trying to write on, or it swarms up my shoulder, then lodges under my chin. I can't even see what my hand is doing. Sometimes I try to write without looking, but my hands crawl a row up or a key over, and the whole thing transposes into code, spilling out and leaking onto the table, disappearing into the carpet. Sometimes I lose track of the lines and go right off the rails, maybe even over the edge. But when the poem is satisfied I am not ignoring it, it lets me write. It curls up in the shawl-nest and sleeps, breathing in quick little bursts, snoring tiny snores, feet twitching as it dreams.

The Four Questions (nothing to do with Passover)--or--the nature of work

Women making dumplings to order
--right there, on the spot, before your eyes, not until you have placed your order--
at FFY Noodle House in Rowland Heights, California

A long-time poetry friend tagged me to post on this my blog my answers to four questions about my writing. As soon as I figure out how to access her blog I'll read her answers too. Here are mine:

1. What Are You Working On?

 

A book-length collection, The Book of Knots and Their Untying; three different sestinas that resist closure; poems about death; poems that are not about death.

 

2. How Does Your Work Differ From Others In Its Genre?

 

I keep bringing in the psychological angle. Actually, I don’t have to bring it in; it shows up as soon as I start thinking. Also, when I seem to be most ironic, then I am being most accurate and direct. Also also, I write a lot of sardonic sonnets and literary limericks.

 

3. Why Do You Write What You Write About?

 

I write about what I notice. I write about why I notice what I notice. I try to explain to myself why something is remarkable, or weird. I write to give voice to what we are not supposed to notice.

 

4. How Does Your Writing Process Work?

 

Sneakily, mostly. Kicks in at the last minute. Maybe I’ll circle around and around, returning to some draft for three years. Or write a sonnet in an hour. Or free-write, and return to it months later. Or play Minesweeper for an hour and then write what I was trying not to think about. Or I’ll achieve that semi-trance state in which I am following an imaginal thread, swinging and grabbing the next metaphorical vine, almost taking dictation, ignoring what seems to be a disjunctive image or thought and then swerving back to it and hearing it out. All the while ducking the voice that says, That’s not a real poem. Or telling it to shut up.