Orson and Edna Holiday Poems: The Tree, The Eve

The Tree

A Stick of a thing,
they fought. Edna's fingers
drummed harsh on Orson's cheer.
She said, "Lover, let's be so Charlie Brown."
"I'm chilled. Let's eat." He said,
thinking how she'd forget and sleep.

Turkey hours later, he unboxes
ornaments to the hum and scrape
of her snores, weaves spare branches
to bloating with tinsel, bulbs. Hums Barry
Manilow so low he can barely hear.

Then a final injection-mold plastic Santa
in royal blue (makes Edna cross annually).
Orson decorates Edna last, he
lays a sprig of milstletoe near her chin.



The Eve

Edna slogs nog. Orson brushes
oil on something oven-ready.
He sips holiday microbrew.
Does not consider details.
Slurry, she asks, "What's your
resolution?"

Orson swells. Choked, he mimes
he cannot say. Edna serves
beers, studies hers without
noticing, waits. A timer breaks
her wait. Orson moves about
the stove.

He forks prok, a bit of kraut
points it in offer to Edna,
"For Health." While she chews,
she considers Orson's two full beers.

New Job for 2008

Despite my absurd ignorance about all things involving feminine-self-care that involves creams, make up, or other things commonly called "products," I have become a Body Shop At Home consultant. I have a website. Via The Body Shop At Home. You can go there and buy stuff that I'll get paid a commission on. It will be delivered directly to your house, just like any other online shopping.

http://www.thebodyshopathome.com/web/aline

That's the URL. Go there.

I guess since I'm not getting any younger, and as much as I wish it weren't so, people in the professional real world do often give a ?$*# what I look like, and since The Body Shop has really good company "core values" and are about the business of empowering people and women worldwide using fairly traded ingredients, recycled materials for their packaging wherever possible, etc. It's a good company. Nice to the world like Starbucks is. It is one of those companies I'm proud to be affiliated with, even though (like Starbucks) the potential to become an empire.

Stay Tuned for more stuff on the novel, and I think a poetry project I'm going to attempt to revitalize that I started a few years ago.

Yay!

Poem for 2008

Resolutionary

This is the year I'll divine with rods
get better at love, worse at eating
I'll make beelines for honeydew.
Won't touch Snickers. Won't snicker, either.
I promise I'll be good good good,
especially to my minister. If he again tells
Lorna Miller not to get divorced, I will
drive the highest road. We won't scoff over
bonbons.

Also, I will make a fish tank. The fish at
Walmart are sad. Their mouths say,
"home home home." I will spend
more time at home. No more two dollar
coffees, maybe once a moon. Cock Full o' Nuts
in the pot I own. For sure no four
dollar coffees, Vicki's Secret, Quizznos,
Gray Goose, Claiborne tops (even though she died)
or those Paige Jeans I've been dying
not to live without.

I will keep a journal: self-tabs. Next year,
I will know what I ate thought did on March 2.
Ride a unicycle. Make a marionette,
Volunteer, candy stripe, read to teh elderly.
Eat more elderly cheese,
Bleu. Try caviar, switch to skim When Maria
asks me to be her wing woman, I won't
say I know flying already.
Do what hurts. Use Fewer Band Aids.

I'll read The Unbearable Lightness of
Being and remember how daily how light
it is to be.

Draft Pages 1

This is the business of heart attacks. Heart attacks are a symbol of weakness, they yield jokes from our colleagues about what the doctor found when he opened up our chests for the bypass: bags of cheetos, Whopper Jrs--the high fat and sodium food gods that we whorshiped. The callousness evinced by this cavalier treatment of the manifestation of our colleagues' weaknesses of chest are what make me sure that, though this job is regarded as a profession, a career; I do not belong here.

Everybody who works here has had a heart attack. Most of them before the age of 50. It is an epidemic that crosses the departments. Sales, Service, Parts, Administration, all equal candidates for a defect of the most sanguine of organs. Our customers wince and groan. We joke. I am not concerned for my heart, though I smoke like a bandit and do not eat as much whole wheat or tofu as I should. I am not sure whether carelessness of this magnitude is the reason for the heart attacks, as though we are predisposed by our attraction to this industry to have heart attacks, of if we are genuinely under more heart-wrenching pressure than our fellows in other professions.

Of course, as with all epidemics of bodily weakness, there is likely more subtlety than I am allowing here. But this is an example of the ways in which I think too much—or maybe I do not think enough of myself , since I continue in this business despite the way I am illfit. I have always been vocationally masochistic. Perhaps I am so convinced that I will succeed here because I am so different. I think I fear failure in a way that, for my colleagues, success is given. I am a woman in a man's world.

Breaking it in

I've decided to start writing a novel.

I am a feminist single mother, and my job is to sell cars at a very male-dominated car dealership in a very conservative part of the country. I like my job, but it is teeming with material, and there are things about my ideals as they are in conflict with my position that make it somewhat difficult to face each day.

I'm about 75 ideas and 500 (rough) words on my way.

Also, there is freelance writing to be done as well as teaching. All the "hey! you can freelance, too!" advice I've received suggests starting a blog. I blogged on MySpace for about a year. You can look a those by going to www.myspace.com/georgette_magillacuddy.

I also blogged a bit at Live Journal and once and again at FaceBook. But those are slightly less-public venues.

So Welcome, I guess. And enjoy.