Mewling

 (c) 2/25/2025

Most nights I stuff myself, ravenous

for fat, for alcohol, anything

to push my skin outward—

to increase the plane—

the surface--

so that it might be brushed

absentmindedly on the sidewalk,

in doorways.

 

I take opportunities to see the doctor

and though it pains me to be seen

I drop my drawers in a second. 

 

All those mammograms.

The pokes and prods.

Drawn blood. The speculum.

 

As intimate as a pedicure,

a manicure, a massage.

 

In grade school I was the target,

pummeled on the playground

every few days.

 

Maybe that had nothing to do

with their demons.

 

Maybe I was genius—

making myself mewling—

pathetic, a kicked dog.

Maybe I knew

 

it was guaranteed touch.

And Still.

 (c) 2/25/2025

No trip to the Louvre. No fumbling je veux

as we ordered croissants. The plan for Paris never happened.

The week in Tobago, the delicious honeymoon he promised.

All the sea turtles nesting on Irvine Back Bay. No. 

No cross-country trip. And no new couch

even after he ripped the back off my old sofa

 to free his pet corn snake.

 The newest model mustang was repossessed. 

The fake job he listed on the sale document,

that job he so bragged about, no income.

His whole resume a fraud.  Degrees unattained. Positions

never held.  The zirconium wedding ring

to symbolize his love. So much like my father. 

Every year with him was diminishment. And still,

I stayed.

Flash Memoir: Self Portrait in Drab

 (c) 11/2024 

 

“Come here.” Sofia instructed us to lay hands across the stack of fabric bolts held in the turn of her elbow.

The fabric bolts were similar: a faded buff, like overcrowded sunflowers that should be relocated, and in turn, over-patterned with beige, ivory and pale-yellow flowers. The size and pattern of the florals differed, though those differences were slight.

I almost instinctively hated all four of the prints. Neutrals, off-neutrals, they made me feel mute. I also hated the Simplicity Jiffy dress pattern we’d prayed over. Its movement-enhancing elastic waist, the puffy sleeves, like a plea for romance and marriage. And then that wide ruffle around the hem was one to many nods to femininity. At least our deadline prohibited lace trim and rosettes.

Lois, Cindy and I dutifully walked over to lay our hands across the fabric. How much paler we all looked than when we arrived at the Mission Base seven months earlier.

Sofia began to pray, “Dear Heavenly Father,” followed that with a litany of things we were thankful for, such as the apples a neighboring rancher donated for our breakfast, my minimum wage, part time job that provided the bus fare to the mall, and now, this wonderful opportunity to connect with God.

She prayed, “and God, we ask that you guide us to the right fabric, for your glory.”

I opened an eye to look at Sofia and wondered if this really was important enough to bring to God.

The four of us were interested in dance. Despite my aunt’s reprimands about dancing magically leading to fornication, every Saturday night you couldn’t get me out of the all-of-three under-age discotheques in the Seattle area. All that glamour and glitter. The shimmer and shine. The jewel brights. It was difficult to remove those colors and cuts from my wardrobe. It was easier to remember to slap on a bra every morning, overtly modest, since I was called in to the base leader’s wife’s office every couple of weeks. It was about my presentation every time. It seemed to bother so many different people for different reasons.

The night before our shopping excursion Sofia had showed us a photograph she still clung too of herself two-years earlier. A photo predating becoming saved. In it her hair was spiked, and while she didn’t have a tattoo, her nose was pierced. Now that was exotic, the piercing. She let it grow back. In the photo Sofia wore a basic black-tee, a leather biker jacket and combat boots. Scowling, Sofia looked so edgy, confidant even. I think Sofia meant to show us the photo as an indicator of just how far Jesus had to reach for her to bring her over to this maudlin femininity of ruffles, bows, and demure knee-skimming skirt lengths.

“I feel guided to this one.” Cindy touched a medium-sized floral bolt with a nail she no longer lacquered. Clearly our Heavenly Father had guided her.

Lois felt guided to suggest a different medium-sized floral bolt. Which of us had the shortest path to God’s heart?

“God’s not speaking to me,” I said, letting Sofia be the tiebreaker.

We scheduled a performance at a neighboring church’s Tuesday night service. I’d written a short story about a young boy being saved while walking along a beach. Battering Waves. A wise old man. In hindsight, nothing remarkable. We didn’t have musicians and even though we had a cassette player we couldn’t find a single song any of us wanted to move to. Lois was in the process of finding suitable bible passages to accompany a dance.

None of us were trained in dance. Not even childhood ballet lessons. We couldn’t articulate whether what we were doing was considered free-form, modern, jazz or whether we were just four 20-somethings swirling haphazardly across the shag. Creating choreography and trying to remember it when we performed was a complexity at least two of us couldn’t handle. Every movement slowed and repeated ad nauseum. A lot of lifted arms and gazing upwards.  And performing in prairie-girl dresses? I hadn’t seen that before. And yet, all four of us felt called to use what we were calling worship dance and testimony.

Eventually, our dresses were sewn. They were too formless to need fitting. Cindy and I slathered on some eye color, but Lois and Sofia had already given up on cosmetics. According to the script my role was that of a hapless, hopeless young boy and I suggested that I wear dress slacks and a button down.

“I’m sure that will be convincing” I said, “all also honor God, since he directed my writing in the story.”

After much prayer and listening to God thankfully that the others agreed I did not need to wear that hideous dress.

During a swirl with an upward gaze and arms opening to God, I heard a man gasp, and another say, “Oh, so beautiful.” Suddenly I felt certain our message of redemption was getting through to the audience. I was hopeful that should the minister end the service with a call to the alter at least one person would have been moved by our dance to walk to the alter.

After service I was approached by two men who wanted to let me know how beautiful the dance had been. How beautiful I had moved. How beautiful I was. They didn’t mention the story line, nor whether the movements put them into a worshipful space. I have been one to hang on to any small bit of praise or validation as though it were the last meal of my life, already snuffling for more. Clearly, I’d been living on the base long enough, because I was more concerned for once in giving the glory to God. I had no sense that they were going to find a quiet spot and pray. I interpreted the look in their eyes as being as desiring as the looks in the discotheques. 

The next day I was called again to the Base Leader’s Wife’s office.

“I’d like to steer you to join the Children’s puppetry team.” 

Okay. Puppets are fun. “I want to dance though,” I answered.

The minister had complained to our base leader. I was too seductive. I portrayed a seven-year-old boy wearing a baggy button-down shirt too seductively.

“I didn’t even make eye-contact.” I paused. “I had my hair pulled back into a bun!” I was mentally thinking of all the ways in which I had definitely not been seductive. Maybe it was the blue slathered around my eyes. It wasn’t my smile; I hadn’t smiled. And yet, I had broken one of our strict for-females-only rules: Do not entice men.

“I didn’t entice anyone,” I said. “It’s their responsibility to control their own reactions. It’s their responsibility to deal with their own lust.”

But apparently, it wasn’t.

The next week I was on puppet making duty, safe in the craft room. Even if I did perform, I’d be hidden inside a large cardboard house. Foam, paint, and bright colors manipulated by my hands. My body, completely invisible until the final curtain call when I could reveal myself, draped in beige.

The Authorized Tongue

 (c) 1/12/2023

I didn’t sign any papers; it was mutual—

a handshake.  Culturally driven. 

Just the way things are.

 

The team of umbrageous doctors included

Capitalist bourgeoisie, the Entitled—

A Priest or two.  

Through their surgical intervention

my tongue would become my husband’s tongue.

Sutured. The only domestic stitch he would undergo.

 

 I saw him unconscious on his own metal table—

Delicate. Almost pretty.

Breathing through a sheer shroud of gauze and anesthesia.

Not even his vulnerability bothering him.

 

I’d been told that his having only bravado

and masculine posturing,

he would recover when he started to speak my words,

when he would summarize books I’d read as if he’d read them.

My meticulously formed opinions

would be his conclusions.

 

If my words came from a male mouth

then they might be listened to—

he would say meaningful things.

 

Almost too late I realized the lie—

I was the only one able to speak my truths.

 

I struggled through the drugged stupor, brandishing a scalpel

I killed him.

Many say I over-reacted. That I crossed a line.

That I should have aimed instead for the Doctors.

Flash Memoir: Feeding Sean

 (c) 3/21/2022

“Well, Sean,” I said, “You look good! Your wound has healed up nicely.”

Sean had shaved off the scrub of beard and mustache. His makeshift cast, which was built up from strips of t-shirt and plaid shirts wrapped nearly two inches thick and that had been hiding a purplish, swollen hand, was now gone. The gash had healed to a four-inch-long welt along his wrist. His hand looked normal.

Sean showed me how his wrist was stiff and that he could barely bend it. If he’d had any type of manual labor job before that opportunity was now past.

“I sure wish you could have gone to the ER with that!” The mother in me popped out. I hoped Sean wouldn’t take it poorly. I had already learned that he wouldn’t check in to any medical facility. Money and lack of insurance aside, he was convinced Doctors would lock him up and force feed him hallucinogens and poison.

I noticed that while I couldn’t say Sean’s clothes looked freshly laundered at least they weren’t rank and grubby from months of daily wear.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got the chance to clean myself up.” He beamed and his blue eyes shone with a calm I hadn’t seen when running into him during the past year.

I thought against asking him where the opportunity came from. It had taken me several months, a few dips into my grocery bag or wallet, and a couple of meals at Ozzie’s Pub before he offered his name.

The first time I saw Sean panhandling outside of Starbucks three different people, including me, ran up with cups of coffee and bagged pastries. I nudged my companion. “Look how he shines!” His smile was infectious. I instantly wanted to give him the world.  If only I’d owned the world.

When I talked him into a meal, I learned to not ask many questions. His meal choices had started as burgers and fries, an occasional steak. Eventually all he ate was pulled Pork and a Pale Ale. No sides. No buns. “This is what the German’s eat,” he’d said. He’d never go back to California to see his mother. The German’s were teaching him how to be a man. I didn’t ask about the Germans. I supposed they were white supremacists, and if Sean bought into that belief, I didn’t want to sit here feeding him. I hadn’t asked about the wound on his wrist either. I couldn’t tell if it was an accident or self-inflicted. I had offered to pay for urgent care. That is how small my world is. He needed much more than one doctor visit.

Sometimes Sean would shut down, turn slightly, and stare to the right of my face. Then he grinned as though there was a frenetic comedy on a big screen beside my head. A couple of times I turned to look. “There’s nothing there,” Sean said somewhat dispassionately. After a long pause, he would re-start the conversation.

The last time I ran into Sean he showed how he got around the security fence and slept in the crawl space of the now defunct Kasper’s French restaurant. The restaurant was festooned with notice of what new Apartment Complex was coming. Now four years later, I think of Sean on occasion and with worry. It never changes anything.

Flash Memoir: Confession Night

 (c) 3/20/2022)

One confession night in October, Jimmy confessed to masturbating.

Gathered from across the states we were a community of forty young Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and some like me, non-denominational. Our community leaders were married and the rest of us had taken vows of poverty and celibacy. Of course, Jimmy masturbated.

Jimmy felt the need to confess details. He did it whenever his roommate left for the quad bathroom. Instead of eating dinner. Or breakfast. During solitude hour, usually reserved for prayer and meditation. He described his grip,  moving his hands like God moving heavenly hands over the water in the silent dark, bringing forth teeming creatures from the depths.

 As an activity that amounts to self and group denigration, confession provides criticism to promote mortification, to forge new identity and new norms based on the power of the group, to reduce individual separateness. Instead, Jimmy’s confession disrupted everything.

Fifteen minutes into a confession that would seemingly never end Jimmy started to cry. “I can’t stop. I know Satan controls  my penis. Everywhere I turn is temptation.”

“Stop already!” I thought, utterly transfixed. All the girls continued to look on  wide-eyed.

Sure, sure there’s the sin of Onanism. By Jewish law, Onan had to marry his brother Er’s widow Tamar and help her bear a son that would carry forward Er’s line. Instead of impregnating her Onan spilt his seeds on the ground and so God smite Onan. It wasn’t spilling seeds that was the sin but Onan’s refusal to invest in raising up his brother’s son.

How cruel that his parents, and his church taught him this shame. Masturbating was probably the only activity most of us could take to remain born-again virgins.

Jimmy wasn’t one of the boys any of us speculated about marrying. He didn’t play guitar. He’d never lead a Youth Group. He hadn’t spoken much before tonight and wasn’t a powerful orator. The chances of his becoming a pastor were slim. Even in the secular world he would likely have problems finding a Friday night date. Without Satan, where would Jimmy shift blame for his transgressions? Shame radiates outward. How would Jimmy relieve that pain? Upon whom?

Finally, Bill broke in. “I see you girls looking with disgust at Jimmy. But masturbating is a totally normal thing for guys to do.”

“Yeah, sure thing Bill,” I thought. It is normal. We women though, held captive to a near-pornographic call for our comfort and understanding was not.

Capable Hands

 (c) 3/19/2022

My Great-Aunt Winnie loved the garden.

She labored beside the work crew

that planted crocuses each spring—

in the concrete bowls straddling

the entrance, meant to welcome visitors.

 

Winnie had no visitors. Not her mother.

Not any of her five brothers. But then,

taking time for family can be such an inconvenience.

 

More than anything, Winifred loved music.

Whatever musical journey Winnie began back home

her mother shattered

when she had Winnie institutionalized here

among catatonics and their colonic irrigations,

among palliatives, shocks, and needles.

 

Young and modest, Winnie may not have realized

she had been sterilized.  

 

Access to a turntable took finagling

the one attendant who wasn’t easily agitated.

Even Glen Miller and Gene Autry

become irritating when overplayed.

 

Winnie was, my father said, a talented pianist.

“She spent her time playing for the inmates

and probably felt fulfilled.”

 

Sundays after lunch, plunking out 

As Time Goes By or Blue Moon 

on the auditorium piano.

 

Capable hands

her mother saw no use for at home.