My body has been

Against me all of my life

Ugliness, fear, pain 

 Little worlds in cracks

Sun stretched clung root persistence

I take your advice 

Number Five

When I moved to New Hampshire, I picked up the trash scattered throughout the forest all the way up my street. I dragged it home, carefully rinsed out the tobacco pouches and mud, and then, with my flashlight and magnifying glass in hand, I began the process of separation. There were a few glass bottles and aluminum cans. There were the typical number ones and number two plastics. The nip  bottles were mostly number one. The Dunkin’ cups? Number five.

Without the option of curbside pick-up that I had grown accustomed to, I hauled the booty to the recycling center. Soon after I arrived, my exuberance turned to dismay when I found that the plastic disposal area only provided receptacles for my ones and twos. A stern attendant stood watchfully nearby.  

“Remove your caps,” He said, “They pop off and take out the workers’ eyes.”

I immediately complied, tortured by the thought that up until this moment, my negligence in this area had resulted in serious eye injuries for millions.

“And rinse them out better next time,” He added, clearly unsettled by the number and variety of dirty nip bottles I was dumping into his barrel.

“Where do I put my fives?” I asked in a disheartened tone.

“We don’t take them,” he replied without sentiment. 

I was incredulous. I had always been able to recycle my number fives.

“China stopped taking our waste in 2018. It’s just going to a landfill.” He stated matter-of-factly as he strolled away, leaving me aghast, alone with my limp bag of Dunkin’ cups.

“What an absurd system,” I grumbled on the way back home, the irrepressible cups bouncing on the seat beside me. “Don’t worry,” I consoled them, “I’ll find a way to keep you out of the waste stream.” 

A year later, I still have that bag of cups, straws and lids sitting on my screen porch. I thought about displaying them out on the side of the road with a hand-painted sign: “This Forest is not your Dumpster”. I then considered filling them with sand and building a garden wall. An art piece? The orange straws would make a nice Christmas star. Yesterday, I vowed to ship the whole lot off to Dunkin’ with a note: “I found some of your stuff lying around and thought you might want it back”.\

“Once you buy something,” my boyfriend said as I attempted to find the CEO’s address online, “It’s yours.”

“Yeah, well, it has their name on it!  Why do you write your name on your underwear? Because it belongs to you,” I protested on my way down the basement stairs in search of a shipping container. 

“It’s not their fault that people are slobs,” he shouted after me.

I emerged from the basement, cobwebs sticking to my face and hair. “Even if you can change human behavior, it takes hundreds of years. Dunkin’ could change this problem in a day.”

“Really?” He looked up skeptically from his morning tea.

“Or maybe a week,” I muttered, cramming the cups in the box. 

The timeline aside, the real question, it seems to me, is why is this my problem? Why am I racked with guilt over somebody else’s transgressions? I am not referring to the litterbugs, although a new round of public service announcements might be helpful. Change, in this case, is not going to happen from the ground up. Yes, I know, there are many innovative alternatives to single-use non-degradable plastic out there, but they are practical only for diehard deep ecologists and people of means.  The average American will buy what is affordable and accessible. Relying on public education and individual responsibility is not the answer; people like the convenience of single use and besides, with a pandemic ranging, it is almost a mandate.

I am pointing my wagging finger in one direction only: at you, manufacturers. I am stunned by the effort you put forth on a beautiful package without any regard for its not-so-beautiful future: lying around on the floor of a forest, floating down a  stream, stuck on the writhing head of a furry animal, choking the majestic whale and the innocuous sea turtle, filling the guts of the mighty albatross, piling up on our screen porches… it has your name on it, guys.

The solution is clear. Manufacturers, it is time for you to take responsibility for your packaging from cradle to grave. The technologies already exist, you just have to care enough to implement them. Right now, you reap the profits but absolve yourself of the consequences as soon as the product hits the shopping cart. We, the people, have grown accustomed to this unfair arrangement, but this is not the way it has to be. 

We are drowning out here in plastic

Journalists: Where are your binders?

Absurd: a tab in Kaleigh McEnany’s famous “binder” of talking points that, I must admit, was very satisfying to see. From the beginning of her ascension to the position of White House Press Secretary, I have followed all her theatrical performances, paying close attention to her scripted body language of which her incessant “binder flipping” is a part. Like some Tantalian folk tale, the binder teases me from behind the podium.  I am dying to see how it is laid out and what is inside. I imagine her lovingly piecing it together on the carpet of her living room, barefoot, in her fuzzy pajamas with a glass of merlot in her hand. Seeing even a bit of it was a total rush.

I started obsessively watching these conferences hoping they would set the world right. I had followed McEnany’s career enough to expect a phony charade and was certain she would not survive in a room full of seasoned journalists armed with the truth. Clearly, the briefings would be a validation of my need to have authenticity annihilate superficiality:  food for my soul.

If you have not had the pleasure of viewing one, McEnany’s press conferences are, quite obviously, formulaic. They are carefully designed to promote the actions of the president.  She shamelessly spins every question and rarely provides a direct answer. She uses her binder to present “facts” supporting her whataboutism, and her journalistic plant, Chanel Rion, to hand feed her questions. She begins and ends with an advertisement sometimes complete with propagandist videos.  Her tactics include scapegoating, lies of omission, serial positioning, cherry picking, and simply ignoring questions she cannot answer. She does all of this and more, but even from the perspective of this inveterate progressive, she wins every time. Though McEnany should be scrambling out of these briefings defeated and exhausted, she instead glides out like a self-satisfied movie star.

I have two potential reasons. First, what McEnany says is the unassailable truth or second, the press corps sucks. Though in my more Twilight Zone moments I have entertained the former explanation, to preserve my grip on reality, I usually side with the latter.

The press is playing bit parts in a show in which McEnany is the star. They arrive with pre-determined questions. Most of the time, the answers are hijacked, often just serving as a springboard to promote the President’s agenda. These sacred questions are posed regardless of what McEnany says, or if the question has already been asked and the answer already given. Rarely interrupted, her spin hangs there fully preserved and unchallenged. Maybe I am ignorant, but questions cannot be adjusted to respond to a real time situation?  Journalists: where are your binders?   

For a recent example, McEnany opened her 7/16 briefing with the following statement: “The president reversed the disastrous overregulation of the Obama-Biden administration…The cost of these burdensome regulations falls disproportionately and benefits disproportionately lower income Americans.”
Even my own half informed brain could identify issues:  omitting the benefits of regulation and the costs of not regulating, associating a long history with Obama exclusively, leaving out the fact that many regulations protect the public from the indiscriminate actions of the moneyed elite, the insinuation that Donald Trump is the champion of the poor… Surely somebody would oppose it. Surely somebody could flip to her tab labeled “regulation” or “the poor” and beat this one down. I understand we are in the middle of a pandemic, but we already know Trump’s position on masks.  

At the very least, I wanted one person to fact check this opening statement in real time, and at best, I wanted them all to toss their prepackaged questions out the window and corner the assertion like a pack of hungry wolves. Instead, it was allowed to stand, and, later, the main takeaway from this briefing? According to the press,  McEnany claimed that, “The science will not get in the way of us opening schools”, which she did, but then clarified it afterwards with comments that clearly exonerated her from the statement’s worst possible interpretation.

My conclusion? I am beginning to believe that the press is, as the Trump administration claims, after the president and not, as I rely on them for, after the truth.

Absurd, indeed.

Time Theft: A Story from the Pandemic

It is six AM in the middle of April and Anissa is watching through a large bay window. She is watching the marshmallow snow plop down from the canopy, melting into the thick white merengue slung between the tree trunks. She is watching a bewildered possum sinking its naked feet into the fluff, apprehensively crossing the brook and then disappearing behind her neighbor’s wood pile.  The jubilant birds are singing and preening around the feeder, unperturbed by the chilly surprise.  Delivering long firm strokes to her ecstatic, vibrating cat; she watches until her coffee turns cold.     

Setting her cat gently aside, she pads barefoot to the kitchen. She swallows what is left, and then runs the empty mug under cold water for a few seconds.  The action triggers a memory.

 “The most mundane tasks,” she remembered an old boyfriend scolding as he eyed his scorched, greasy pan that she had placed in the dish drainer, “should be done with patience and contemplation.”

In a nod to his philosophy, she deigns to give the cup a proper bath.  She squirts a bead of soap into its mouth and, working the edge of the scrubber around the lip, she gazes out the window above the kitchen sink, searching unsuccessfully for the possum. The counterfeit snow is still falling but will disappear within the hour.

Under normal circumstances, this idleness would not be the pace of a typical Thursday morning. Instead, Anissa would be racing to get ready for work: yanking a wrinkled shirt from her overstuffed dresser drawer, plowing it with the iron, and darting off for a quick shower. She would eat breakfast in the truck, leaving behind a deluge of crumbs and small drips of coffee wherever she went.  At work, she would proceed at the same accelerated pace, powered by the persistent stress churning in her chest.

For as long as she could remember, Anissa had approached the necessary tasks of life expeditiously. She did this even though the result was often calamitous: errors, spills, stubbed toes, broken objects; It was worth the risk, she thought, because of a certain calculation: the less time spent doing work, the more time she’d have to create

“Work is for survival, art is for existence, and if you need them both you are usually screwed,” was her challenge to her old boyfriend’s lesson on mundane tasks.

“You must slow down and appreciate being,” he maintained. It was the last significant thing he said before leaving her.

Throughout her life Anissa had worked many different places. No matter the nature of the work, it was always accompanied by a seething resentment and a tenacious yearning for long stretches of uninterrupted time.  Time to compose any number of poems, stories or songs that drifted through her imagination, to make sculptures from pieces of nature or junk, to play music, to draw.

Creativity was so valuable to her, in fact, that she deliberately set up her life to have few obligations. Never-the -less, she remained consumed by the expectations of work. She would save money with the hope of taking time off. Then, some major expense would claim it.  As the decades went by, she gained little in the form of economic advancement, and her art went unassembled, her stories unwritten, her instruments un-played.   

Recently, she decided to act. She trimmed her expenses to the bone. She drastically cut her hours. She had accumulated some savings that would serve as a cushion. She would only work enough to survive.

And, then, came the pandemic.

Anissa now sits at her desk. Today she is writing. Tomorrow she may be drawing. The next, playing music.  From her radio she hears the stories from hibernating voices across the country, across the world: accommodating the change as their circumstances allow. She is moved by the layers of physical, psychological and economic devastation. She watches developments closely. She watches as her own savings dwindles.

 She does not want to go back.

Christmas 2019

The Christmas branch hung from the rafters
In the years after my mother left;
She was the one who did Christmas best:
With the crescents and the bittersweet
and the orange clove scents and the wildflower wreaths.
He could never fill her shoes;
The Christmas branch, not our only clue.

"It's got two bottoms, " I complained.
"Or two tops," my dad's refrain.
My friends were confused by the Christmas branch,
"Is he just too cheap to buy a tree?"
"No," I said, "He's just artsy."
"It's a protest against the slaughter
 of Christmas trees," said his other daughter.
"More room for presents," said my Uncle Ed,
"And easy disposal once it's dead."

We never solved the mystery
Of the Christmas Branch that hung from the rafters
In the years after my mother left;
She was the one who did Christmas best:
With the star fashioned from milkweed pods
And the batter spoon and the potato stamp cards,
The string of lights, monochrome blue
He could never fill her shoes.
The Christmas branch, not our only clue.

It had one bulb, as I recall
And after that broke, none at all.
He took the explanation to his grave
And the credit that I never gave
Just for carrying on,
In the years after my mother'd gone.
And I never had the chance
To tell him I liked
That Christmas branch.