Oddness

Young Seema with original eyebrows

In case you missed the announcements here and on various social media, opportunities to hang out with me and so many poems this week:

1. Thursday at 7:30 pm at The Potter’s House DC
2. Friday at 7:00 pm at Washington ArtWorks (Combat Paper/Warrior Writers Exhibition and reading)

I think I was nine or ten in the picture above–we lived in New Delhi for a year, and I was all kinds of out of place everywhere I went–at the American Embassy School, on the streets in our little neighborhood where I rode my bike around and around–wasn’t quite the same as anyone, but just drinking the difference gleefully. I’ve talked to you guys at some point somewhere about my theory that from the time we’re nine until twenty-five we are trying to be something else, something different than we are; and then from twenty-five we turn and begin trying to get back to who we were when we were nine.

I think nine is when we begin to be aware of the ways we were different from others, but before we see those differences as unforgivable flaws. The young lady pictured above did not care that her teeth were weird–she knew they were, but didn’t obsess over it, it just was. My younger son is like this. He doesn’t feel like he’s the same as everyone else, but he also doesn’t feel like that’s some big tragedy. There’s something so lovely and righteous about this kid. One day, someone will say something that will strike him at a certain angle and he’ll start thinking about how odd he is and how he wishes he weren’t. I am dreading that day. But hopefully, some time after that day will come another day where he will again decide that he doesn’t give a fuck, that he is odd, and that it is his very oddness that is his gift to himself and the world. People say mean and sometimes terrible things to us, and it feels awful. But the real trouble comes when we start to say these things to ourselves. When we join them and turn on ourselves.

My dear friend Jennifer Patterson, a writer and the editor of the incredibly important anthology, Queering Sexual Violence, sent me this week’s prompt. She’s pretty much like a holographic superhero who projects from my phone into whatever space I’m in, with sound advice and good things to read. I just registered for an on-line writing workshop she’s doing in the Fall, check it out and consider registering. She’s a really gifted writer and a supremely wide reader–her class will open your eyes and your writing in all kinds of ways, if you’re into that sort of thing. Here’s a link to that.

It’s better to click the link so you can see how the lines were intended to be formatted, but I know sometimes you don’t feel like clicking a link, and since I want you to read this, here it is:

Fiddleheads
by Maureen Seaton

The first time I saw hundreds of fiddlehead ferns boiling in an enormous pot I realized
what an odd person I must be to hear tiny cries from the mouths of cooking vegetables.

Similiarly, when you hurt me, I curled like a mouse behind my third eye. I realize what an
odd thing it is to believe as I do in my third eye and the mouse behind it that furls like a fern

and whimpers like a fern being boiled on a monster stove beside its brothers and sisters.
Poor mouse. The things that make a person odd are odd themselves. Think of DNA,

the way it resembles the rope Jack climbed to secure his future and that of his aging Mom.
Or the way a sudden wave can drag a child under, that addiction to adrenalin, her

siblings farther away and more powerless than she ever imagined, the pure and ecstatic
irreversibility of undertow. It’s odd to come back to life, as they say, she came back to life.

I think I’ll come back to life now. It’s odd to think of something so big we could miss
the elephant we’re living on, like this planet Earth, is she alive and and we’re her brain cells,

each one of us flickering, going out, coming back to life? Even Chicago looks poignant
from the top of the Hancock, organized and sincere. Think if we were photographing

Earth, how dear she would be, how we’d watch her shimmer in the shimmering black soup
of the firmament, how alone she’d look and how we’d long to protect her, the way it feels

to protect a woman at the height of orgasm, the liquid giving, the sea water slide of
coming back to life. When you hurt me, I evolved like a backboned sea creature, translucent

nervous system sparking along in the meanest deep where I was small enough not to care
my passions ran to swimming, gulping, spitting bubbles back into new oceans.

Once when you hurt me I slept at a Red Roof Inn. I double-locked the door and tried to
watch talk shows to keep my mind off sounds like someone suffocating someone

in the next room. I thought I saw blood on the box spring and imagined needles and bulgy
veins, there’s something odd, I thought, about someone whose imagination runs this wild.

So often I dream you’re here and I wake in the middle of a prayer from my muzzled
childhood. Jesus Mary and Joseph, I say, appalled that I’m stuck in 1955 when I need

something profane to see me through. Serrano’s submerged cross. Ginger tea.
The idea that we’re moving between horizons and the Earth is so wise she sends us

Winter and red-tailed hawks when we least expect them. I can do this, I say,
and the planet shifts imperceptibly. From a great distance she appears to be at peace.

Your prompt is to just write. “Once when you hurt me…” oof, I know. It won’t be easy. None of the best things ever are. But the first step to moving past hurt is admitting it. Write for 20 minutes. Send me a poem.

And the dance party song of the past few weeks. When you’re done writing, watch this. I’ve literally listened to this at least once every single morning for weeks now, even the most grumpy morning bears have been heard humming it unconsciously. Sunday Candy. It’s so much fun.  And the video! Seriously, you’ll thank me.