Shaky & a still life

On election day, I taught a Zoom workshop to a small creative writing workshop at Western Washington State, with a focus on spell- and prayer-poems. The teacher and I thought hard about the timing and decided it would be a good distraction for us and them–and it sure was. I read some poems and answered questions then led them in a prompt about change, as sunset darkened my desk window. It felt like safety.

Then the results, predictable and terrible. Then a break-in to our campus LGBTQ+ resource center, vile graffiti sprayed on the walls. Racist texts sent to Black people nationwide, welcoming them back to the “plantation.” Worse coming.

Mostly I haven’t had energy for talking about any of it. I don’t want to rant or hear someone else rant; god knows I am completely uninterested in the pundits and their asinine explanations. I’ve been paying attention instead to my bodily reactions and trying to figure out how to find a little physical peace, especially since I noticed Monday morning at work that I was shaking. My brain, floating above me, said, oh, this a trauma reaction very similar to the one I experienced in 2016, when the dam of my repression burst and I called out the behavior of a colleague. He was a nasty piece of work who had bullied me and others for years, with some inappropriate touching and physical intimidation in the mix. As it would for anyone, my response reflected prior life experience. I froze when he poked me under a table, as I had when sexually assaulted; fled in silence, as I had fled men on the street calling out threats and obscenities for so very many years; burned with humiliation as I did when my parents were cruel. That’s a difficult personal history but also a very common one. We all bring some version of this stuff to the office.

It wasn’t wrong to speak up, but the results were awful in a dragged-out and alienating way, including a major HR investigation, a formal complaint, his counter-complaint against me, a verdict in my favor that was flipped to one in his favor, and a black mark placed in my personnel file. When I found myself trembling and feeling almost unbearably agitated this week, I thought, hmm, let’s not do that again.

In 2016 and now, a certain person’s election, for me, will always be a referendum on whether men are welcome to assault and bully women without ever being held accountable. There’s so much more at stake, but that one piece of it is seriously personal.

What makes me feel a tiny bit better? Talking about poetry. Reading. Writing just a little (I’m in a crunch work-wise, bad timing). Sally Wen Mao gave a reading here and talked to my class, and it was all very sane and grounding. I’m also Zooming into a Mt. Holyoke class tomorrow, and I’m giving a reading with Gary Dop in Lynchburg VA on 11/17–a lot but maybe good for me, too.

Below is a free-write I did with my own class this week after reading Mao’s “Nature Morte.” Later she talked about writing information-heavy poems, how you need to keep juxtaposing the facts with your response to them, leaping from one kind of sentence to the other and back again. Often the labor of direct explanation is more than the poem can bear. Ahem.

Still Life with Wallet and EpiPen

Because this week withered the apple in my rib cage, I place a spiral basket on the table and ask everyone to fill its emptiness. People dead-fish through their backpacks and pockets: no jug of mums or crusty loaves, no newsprint or candles. Instead a leather bifold and Do-Not-Disturb sign in French. Outside a high window, trees shake their brilliant heads; in here we can only harvest a plastic snake plant. Some slap their stillness into the basket or lob it from two yards down. A notebook silenced by an elastic band. Blunt pencil whose dinosaur eraser bares its teeth. Medication for an emergency that has loomed for years. That most beloved, a glitter-cased cellphone. Why do they trust each other, trust me? I don’t trust them with my trembling hands. For me, it’s the same old skull with shadow eyeholes. Men boast about assaulting women as other men assaulted me, again and again. Beyond the glass, leaves brown as I watch them. Now write, I say, and the poets lean in.