We believe in magic

I'm in the second week (out of four) of observing Gideon's swim lessons. I watch from the other side the pool because on the first day the instructor warned the parents that if we meddled she'd banish us straight to the picnic area behind the fence. I keep a far distance so there's no misunderstanding. I'm no meddler!

During my observations of swim classes I came to a realization. Kids are big babies and whiners. Everyday some kid is having a breakdown. Thursday was Gideon's turn for one. I'm not sure exactly what he said, because I was across the pool definitely not meddling, but I think he screamed "I want to go home!" after his teacher poured some water on his head.

Of course, no matter where I sit not meddling, I always end up next to the kid who's lecturing his mom on how she needs to fill his summer with lots of activities and plan their days a lot better. Apparently when something isn't being organized for him all he can do is lay on a chair in a daze. He has the imagination of a gnat.

Anyhow, enough about him, more about my kid. After his Thursday meltdown I purchased some magic goggles and a new magic swimsuit. I explained that to activate the magic in these items he had to both activate the magic inside of himself and get these items wet. I explained that he's a very powerful magician, possibly even more powerful than me, but he has to practice his magic and get his freakin' face wet.

He's doing a lot better after our talk. I plan on using this line of inspiration until he's at least 16.

And speaking of inspiration, our upcoming trip to Stockholm has been a great incentive for him to try new foods (new foods= anything that isn't bread, cheese, noodles or some combination of such). I explained that on adventures we're going to have to eat a lot of crazy food, cause that's what adventurers do. On our last adventure (recent beach trip) he tried fish, shrimp, steak, pancakes, hushpuppies and strawberries. He already likes meatballs, so we should be good to go for Sweden.

We've been going through the guidebook discussing what we want to see and do. It turns out that we both want to do a lot of the same things, which was a relief because I really didn't want to spend a week at the Swedish Chuck E Cheese.

flies

This evening I answered interview questions on poetry editing for Nic Sebastian's Very Like a Whale. My interview will be posted on July 7.

As I typed out my answers I wondered aloud to Chris if I should be concerned that yet again I'm coming off as a bitch in an interview. He said something about catching more flies with honey than vinegar.

Why the hell would I want to catch flies? I responded, They're disease carriers and totally nasty.

"Well then, you have you answer now, don't you?" he replied.

It's useful having a practical engineer around the house.

Maria Padhila writes about the Friday night reading. What she fails to mention are the fabulous baked goods she prepares! Oh my goodness. I think I'm going diva and will start requiring cookies and brownies at all future readings. And long-stemmed white roses and no brown M&Ms.

I'm pretty burnt out right now, so to prevent any trashed hotel rooms or other benders, I'm not doing anymore readings until the fall.

My friend David was in town this weekend and gave me a really cool book, To Sleep, Perchance to Dream: A Commonplace Book from the Folger Shakespeare Library. I'm learning a lot.

A dreame is nothing els but a bubling scum or froath of the fancie, which the day hath left undigested: or an after feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations.

Thomas Nash, The Terrors of the Night

Sounds like somebody doesn't like what his psyche is trying to tell him.

This weekend I dreamed of an archeological dig (and deciding to homeschool Gideon so I could bring him along), speaking on who gets away with making butt thumbing threats, having to answer questions on religion when buying plane tickets, not being able to speak because my mouth is full of hard & sticky gum, separate tables, a Turkish beach vacation, pictures in my bikini from that vacation being posted on the Harriet blog, a man's sex reassignment surgery, knitting and iguanas.

Where I'll be tonight

FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2009: 9:00pm - 10:30pm, Artomatic, Washington DC
READERS: Reb Livingston, Reuben Jackson, David Beaudouin and Pamela Murray Winters

I was played

Remember Gideon's sweet moon dream that I was so proud of last week?

Well, while I was making breakfast this morning I overheard Quack on Peep tell the same exact dream!

Men, they just tell you what they think you want to hear.

Now I'm going to have to do a google search on Gideon's earlier dream report, the one where he goes through a blue door and ends up in a large blue store with a stomping giant dressed in all blue.

In my book, there's nothing worse than dream plagiarism.

When I find out who started that rumor

boy oh man.

Gideon: I have to charge my battery.

Gideon: Your battery is 100, you should unplug your laptop now.

Gideon: Why did the number on your battery change?

Me: You're kind of obsessed with power, don't you think?

Gideon: I have really big muscles.

Gideon: I can't believe it.

Me: What can't you believe?

Gideon: The pipes in the basement.

Me: What about the pipes in the basement?

Gideon: I can't believe it!

The Warm-up Acts:


Lorna Dee Cervantes, Reb Livingston, Alice B. Fogel

The Star:

Where I'll Be Tomorrow

Busboys & Poets, Langston Room, 2021 14th Street NW (14th and V), Washington, DC

Sunday, June 21, 2009
4:00pm - 6:00pm

Return to Sunday Kind of Love on the first day of summer, featuring Lorna Dee Cervantes, Alice B. Fogel, and Reb Livingston.

Lorna Dee Cervantes is the author of DRIVE: The First Quartet (Wing Press, 2006) and From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press, 1991) and Emplumada (1981), which won an American Book Award. Her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1994), No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (ed. Florence Howe, 1993), and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (ed. Ray González, 1992). In 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

Alice B. Fogel is the author of Be That Empty (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007), I Love This Dark World (Zoland, 1996) and Elemental, Zoland Books (Cambridge, 1993). Her poems have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, Poets Choice, and many other anthologies. She teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

Reb Livingston is the author of God Damsel (forthcoming No Tell Books, 2010) Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books, 2007), Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, 2006) among other titles and co-editor of The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel anthology series. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other publications. She's also the editor of No Tell Motel and publisher of No Tell Books.

Flight Home

Gideon's Beach Dream

There were five moons. One full moon, one half moon, one orange moon and one bouncing moon.

The fifth moon? He doesn't remember. So we're calling that the mystery moon or the moon yet to come.

Things are going to be dark here this coming week. I'm going away sans laptop.

I have not yet dreamed of a donkey, but now I want to

Sometimes the ass is representative of sacred, lowly energy necessary to carry the god. In the Christian myth, Jesus appears on Palm Sunday riding a donkey, and Mary rides on a donkey to the stable where she gives birth to Jesus among the animals. The donkey, one of the lowliest of animals, is also, paradoxically, the perfect carrier for birth of the divine. The sensual, lowly instincts in the soul are necessary for birth amid the truly human domains of life, as lowly as the manger scene itself.

Genuine spirit of the ordinary is seen in the ass. The ass brings alive the mediating between human and divine precisely because it brings the ordinary or modest into view. When the modest or ordinary is present, then by contrast the opposite, the divine, constellates. You cannot have one without the other, and if the ordinary is abandoned, then inflation results, and no true union between human and divine can occur. In fact, the presence of the ass also plays with the manifestations of the ordinary and of the divine not as opposites. This leads us to the flame of the Greek goddess of modest, Hestia, whose sacred animal was the ass.

[. . .]

Psychologically Hestia represents the value of the inner flame of awareness, the warmth of inner being, and the virginal qualities required individuation--remaining true to oneself. She also lights the hearth flame in home life, and is the warmth that gathers people together, an eros flame of community life. Her presence in relationships helps bring humanity alive, and stands in great contrast to the false self constellations which can keep people from experiencing their humanity and true exchanges in a spirit of love.

[ . . .]

When the ass appears in dreams, looking into the particular essence of the appearance of the ass helps reveal the message and meaning. Is the lowly ass drawing you toward genuine modest ground of being where the divine is born, through its Byzantine eyes? Is the bawdy jackass revealing the backside of things by ushering in contact with shadow and a freeing of energy? Is the god Mercurius revealing his royal tricky presence? The nature of the ass is complex, and so the specific details and felt experience of the manifestation is of utmost importance to understand what side of the ass is communicating to you.

from Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness by Monika Wikman

Over the past few days I dreamed that I met with a dreamy new doctor (who kept a scrapbook of his favorite poems), attended a gun training seminar, my house was burning down, entering a regrettable contract and living in house with others that was somehow all connected to the Devil, a dog working for the Devil, cannibalism, being one day away from giving birth and lastly, accepting an "ultraviolet cancer" that would give me special abilities. About that ultraviolet cancer, they gave it to me once before, but I rejected it so they took it away. But after lying in bed with a lizard man who had the ultraviolet cancer (via a small robot he showed me on his tongue), I decided to give it another try. Once the process began I was warned to be careful and secretive about my new special powers. So sadly I will not be blogging/blabbing about them. In this day and age, and as a busy mom, I simply can't risk the chance of the government or a nefarious corporation finding out and turning me into a weapon.

I think you understand. Yes, I think you do.

DC Readings in June

I have two readings in DC this month:

SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 2009: 4:00pm - 6:00pm, Bus Boys & Poets (14th & V), Washington DC
READERS: Lorna Dee Cervantes, Alice B. Fogel and Reb Livingston

FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2009: 9:00pm - 10:30pm, Artomatic, Washington DC
READERS: Reb Livingston, Reuben Jackson, David Beaudouin and Pamela Murray Winters

Me: Hey, how on Earth did you get to MySpace?

Gideon: Actually Mommy, it's my space.

Who can blog with all this rain? My house is dark. It's unreasonably cold for June. I fell asleep this afternoon while reading No Tell submissions (oops) and dreamed that I called myself "Luke" after receiving a distress message from the princess on Obi Wan's TV. There was no time to waste. They were going to use the drug on her in the morning. Obi Wan agreed to help. First we stopped at a pharmacy to speak to a Hippowoman who knew of the place where the princess was being held. The Hippowoman delivered drugs to this zoo/military space facility. We had to be careful, her bosses were watching. Then Obi Wan and I spoke with the family of someone I went to high school with. I introduced myself as Luke but later in the conversation after they told me about the dead baby I admitted that I was known to them as Rebecca. But I didn't feel comfortable telling them about why I was now "Luke" or my mission. It seemed too weird to share, just like earlier in that dream when I crossed the street wearing a bikini and high boots. So goofy and exposed, no good explanation. I had trouble keeping it together after I learned of the baby. "They'll just have to try again" the mother said. It didn't seem that easy to me.

It's been a week of intense gender dreams. Maybe because I'm reading Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology by Marie-Louise Von Franz. I just finished the part about conjunctio and the love letters between the Sun and the Moon in Arabic alchemy texts. Basically it's about how they agree not to destroy one another.

I still have 2 1/2 lectures to read, but I think this is going to be a five-starer.

Preschool has been out for the past two weeks, so wow, I have very little time to "myself" these days. Not that the time isn't being put to good use.

Today Gideon and I spent an hour perusing the craft store. Somehow I always walk out of there spending twice what I do on a normal grocery store run. We buy all this stuff to create our incredibly hideous art that we give to our most beloved family and friends. This afternoon we made some stank ass potpourri from my mother's day roses. I screwed up and bought spanish moss instead of oak moss, so in a pinch I used some cinnamon sticks and nutmeg as the fixative. The "light rose" essential oil wasn't so light and I have no idea which part of a rose this smell comes from, but I'm pretty sure my hands reek of rose ass. Or rose fart. Or rose after two hours at the gym. Or perhaps rotting dumpster rose corpse. All I can say is that our beloved family and friends need to start practicing their "what a lovely gift!" faces cause in two weeks this newest sense offense is going to be ready to gift!

As I type this Gideon is next to me with his laptop, looking at the "French Revolution" Wikipedia page. It's been up for five minutes and he's intently looking at it. I never met a kid who couldn't read who preferred looking at text instead of pictures. Last week he somehow brought up the Facebook login page. I don't know how he got to that. Chris and I are discussing which domains we should block access. Gideon is not allowed on Facebook. Facebook is for stalkers, creeps and his mother.

Now he's taking Chris' copy of The Battle of Kursk to read on the deck

and

yesterday he performed a song on his guitar called "I don't need you" (that's my boy!)

and that has been our summer vacation so far.