Venus Moon Rising

I heard the ER doc say Venus anomaly and I thought how pretty the words sounded and how accurate as we were in a Venus moon that would soon give rise to my own Cancer water season. What he actually said was venous anomaly, a raised cluster of veins in my brain that were not there since my last MRI, which was most likely causing tonic clonic seizures. As a current student of neurocounseling, an emerging field that connects the brain to behavior, the biological to the social, I was amazed to see cross-sections of my own brain on the lighted x-ray, a beautiful back-lit peep-show horror.

Gabor Mate, the world renowned Hungarian physician, talks about the biopsychosocial inverse effects of trauma and grief on the body, how unprocessed anger or loss can manifest as illness and I wondered which horror rested in the right hemisphere of my lower occipital lobe: child loss, family loss, the unspeakable agony of ache, the rage of injustice, the fire hot tongs of betrayal? I fingered my long hair and wondered, as all people learning about the nested cocoon of their own bodies must, if I had caused this. There is not a question in my mind as to if I fought hard enough in custody court and invariably against my own family as they sided with my cruel, jealous, mean-spirited ex-husband, but did I fight too hard against forces over which I had very little control?

Did I set myself on fire?

In her text Bearing the Unbearable, Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, a Zen priest and PhD lecturer on traumatic loss notes, “Grief occupies the space between people”. I looked at the bright mass on my brain scan and wondered what occupied that particular inflamed space. Was it the crocodiles of my nightmares? The Jungian archetype of the ancient monster that represents the deepest, darkest subconscious? I am constantly caught in a river running through the middle of a washed out town in my dreams and crocodiles rise and disappear as I struggle to keep my head above water.

No dream analyst is required for that interpretation, it is what it is: I drown.

Over and over again, every night when I slip beneath consciousness into the dark waters of my own monstrous grief.

I have not held my child in five years, why do I wake and pace with aching breasts? She has not breastfed in nine years. This mother ache is monstrous. I miscarried a baby several years ago and some nights I tremble for him as well, though I never speak of it. I keep him buried within me, my tiny secret Sky baby.

Sometimes I am the monster.

My rage goes out before me like a search-light. I am the townspeople at the door.

I have a right to be angry, I know, anyone would be. But the rage will overtake you.

It’s Mary Shelley’s monster of her own creation, men having the audacity to meddle in the affairs of women. Men profiting off of women’s labor in every way. My daughter not in my arms. My monster of an ex-husband, my monster of a mother, my monster of an ex-lover, the monster that is myself. I tinker with it, I electrify it in the night, in a castle on a hill backlit by lightning and from the fog, that same crocodilian death roll rockets and I’m under.

Judith Herman writes, “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations….are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”

And so I thrash in my sleep, I pace back and forth to escape the monsters or to become one, I don’t know. My breasts ache, my arms ache, my belly feels so empty. Why should it feel full? My living child is ten years old, my ex-husband took her from me six years ago when she was four in the most outlandish of custody cases in one of the most backwoods courthouses in the deepest of the Deep South where they hate women and minorities and where white men prosper by default.

The cruelty of mother ache knows not time, though.

My breasts apparently don’t know it is 2023, not 2012. My fury disintegrates into soft sobs. My partner, sleepy and shirtless, finds me, holds my head above the waves as I gasp for breath. Sometimes I shove him away, sometimes I fall into him. It depends on how rough the undertow is.

I won’t hold his hand as the neurologist talks to me about brain surgery, how they don’t cut, they go in through an artery now in the groin.

The groin, so near the birth canal.

I’m not listening.

I don’t hold his hand because I am not Shelley’s monster right now; right now I am her castle on the gothic hill within which both the creator and the horror reside.

I am alone, pulled into myself, the only way I am ever able to withstand the winds.

I’m thankful he is listening to the doctor because I’m still staring at the light and dark of my sagittal axial brain slice. And what is that bright thing rising from the dark of my brain scan? The monster, the physical manifestation of my grief terror horror sadness desperation.

When I fell out at work (yay for the loss of dignity there, it’s hard to ask for a raise once you’ve drooled, snotted, and pissed yourself in a horrifying scene you have no memory of), I can see a soft yellow haze around things.

I wrote a poem with fridge letter magnets awhile back that said, “Still streams the sun atop the horizon like honey….” and I thought of that while sliding from my desk chair seizing. While coming back to with the sound of a train in my ears, vision blurred, I see what my little girl had spelled out with her own fridge magnet letters below mine, “On you there are daughters.”

I’m wet and cold, my hands are numb, I’m covered in daughters, my own, myself, my mother. I want to go home, but I don’t know where that is anymore.

Instead I go to the emergency room for nine hours. My partner pushes through the employee only entrance, sees me slumped over in a wheelchair, just fucking tired, and is blocked by hospital staff. Hey babe lol. I have not always chosen the best men in the past, see above ex-husband for reference, but he’s a good one. He doesn’t give a single shit about employees only and that makes me laugh, if silently, within myself, a ripple in a river running.

The rest will unfold slowly, in a haze, a dream, a tight-burning fire until I seize under the pressure, a house of cards imploding in slow motion. In the center is my daughter in a white dress, the sacredness we shared when she lived within me, the horror of being cut open and giving her over to a man unworthy of trust or honor, the horror of giving her over to the world.

In the meantime, I study. Another master’s degree, a doctoral dissertation on the biopsychosocial model and how it relates to the physical manifestation of trauma in the body, a book publication and then another, some meaningless letters behind a name that will fade like all do into the etched stones of time. Grief is the space between people is the space between fire and fog, loss and life that is relentless, that comes like waves.

There are no answers, just a chapel on a hill and moat of crocodiles, ever circling.

Cowards, Thugs, and Code: Police Rhetoric

https://msrising.medium.com/thugs-cowards-and-codes-police-rhetoric-21850bb54bf8

An Open Letter to Women

https://msrising.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-women-8209454f532a

Surviving Mississippi, an Elegy

https://msrising.medium.com/surviving-mississippi-an-elegy-ba3ea019520

Hope, Rising link to YouTube channel

Hope, Rising

Sky Fall, copyrighted chapter for upcoming memoir

—————-
Windows down, black painted fingernails and chunky gemstone rings on an arm outstretched, reaching, pressing into a violet soaked sky, last rays of the day all in my hurricane hair. We got Pat and Stevie on the radio, all rooftop-goodbye-cigarettes and silver springs, some country song about a wide open road and chasin you like a shot of whiskey. “All your life you’ve never seen”…. I don’t want to feel your eyes on me, shove those aviators closer to my face….”a woman”….. further into the fierceness, leaning into the final light of day….”taken by the wind….”, sunset catches in my throat, I feel it burn and I smile, meet your eyes, sideways glance, swallow it down.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a bird. That was before I realized how my knees trembled and my heart sank in high places—terror.

A lover dreamt of me once with black wings, and I held that image in a robbed space within me, welcomed it like home, something sacred on the edge of everything profane, watching life quietly, carefully, from a distance, even as a child, preferring not to participate in games, ancient soul in thin bones, filtering, deciding how to see the world, how to perceive people.

I’m most disappointed in myself. When someone close to you betrays you, it sets fire to carefully delineated maps and graphs—how did I not see it? How did I miss such a glaring inconsistency, that dark thing that unfurls its wiry limbs within someone you love, blinding them, deceiving?

Of course they like my ex-husband more than their own daughter, he’s the same as them. He plays the game, looks the right way, says the right things even if they’re fake. I have tattooed arms and messy hair and say fuck a lot. I’m not a doctor, but an artist of all things. My thrift store decorated house is full of cast off, no-breed dogs. I date who I want, regardless of race or status. Basically, I crumpled up all their carefully parsed chapters of rules, set fire to the whole damn book, and danced laughing in the ashes.

They think I’m bat shit crazy.

I never wanted to look at the veneer of things, childlike instead, clinging desperately to some semblance of naivety, though I knew better. I knew. Rose-colored glasses, an enormous rose bush with skin-catching thorns, a tiny snake that inspected my furious digging and then moved on, a Rose of a girl child, stolen, the raw animal sound that emanated from the guts of me, desperate, panicked howling, hopelessness, utter powerlessness.

Smiling, political, kiss-ass, deacon in the church snakes are still snakes. I knew I couldn’t fight it, so I ran with my baby, hid out in my childhood home and goddamn if a fucked up court system and my own fucked up family with their own influence did not turn around and hand her right back to everything I fought so hard to get away from, the meanness, holes in the sheet-rock, pummeled air thick, a thoroughly spoiled, out of control man-baby with smarmy rhetoric and convincing diatribe. And daddy’s fat bank account.

Justice / System

I don’t know their ironed-button down, how’s the weather Jesus. I never have.

I know a filthy Christ who loves even as he is spear-sliced through the side, a Christ bloody with betrayal, bile and sweat and shit and shaking bones toward cloud-covered heavens.

Here’s all my money, take it, if this is their game, I’ll play it, I’ll do anything.

Anything?

$5,000 serendipitously ran dry the night before the custody trial. I remember hearing laughter when I realized what he wanted, did not even realize that it was coming from the marrow of me—this was not just any run of the mill extortion, this was suck my dick if you want your baby back blackmail hahahahahahaha this was a disgusting desecration of the most sacred, most powerful bond in existence off of which he profited–mama and baby, Madonna and child.

Immediate nausea. I should not have swallowed it back, I should have vomited it all over his blindingly tacky Western-style suit. Fury Adrenaline Indignation– I instead spat a gofuckyourself and flew out the door into the night air, sat in my car and sobbed, black wings wrapped tight against the hopelessness, rocking back and forth, terribly alone.

Without exaggeration or emotion, I can say that every single person I have ever trusted has betrayed me to the point of ruin.

My parents because of small-mindedness and racism, fear and selfishness. I sliced off chunks of myself to fit into their cramped box of should-be’s, and still did not fit, I cannot curl my feathers tight enough. Dearly loved brothers who never once asked for the truth, falling easily into a pre-fab form of marriage and babies and professionalism. Blind doctors, the choking irony.

I mean I did it for awhile. My husband was chasing after a manufactured Christ, though, traveling all the way around the world to jungles and rural villages to talk about a love that surpasses understanding hahahahahahaha and then could not, still cannot, respect the mother of his child even the smallest bit. Choking. Irony.

I guess most fittingly, the man who fell into books and philosophy with me, who was lit inside out from my words and ideas, who gave me hope that there could be another kind of life, fuller, with yellow kitchens no eggshells and afternoon shadows and slow-burning cigarettes with raspberry tea and Turkish rugs and babies with antique names that made me laugh hahahahahahaha, that man sat across from me not as my one time best friend in the world but as my department chair, trying not to meet my eyes—me, me alone in a student desk, wrong side of my usual lecture podium of twelve years, before people I had considered family, desperately propped hypocrites, and said not one word while they read from an official document, all bullshit jargon and hollow words that faded into the distance like cinema sounds from decades past. The loss of a practical tenureship didn’t even sting like it should have. I just stared at my former lover, twenty years my senior when I was 23 and searching, blinking, alternating between wanting to say
”hey love, remember D’Lilo and Anne Carson, that crazy poetry, the hotel room afternoons, remember?” and wanting to fling myself across the table like a wild thing and rip his throat out with my teeth. Stand up for me, please, please….but there was only silence.

Yellow was all I saw. Yellow like a coward, spineless.

I heard only the quick inhaleexhale of my own breath, rushing wind, flashes of bright red blood on a tiled floor, the trauma of alone contractions and confusion and shock and panic.

It’s no wonder my own heart attacked itself.

The sickening irony. There was nothing “mini” about it. My heart literally could not take anymore.

The wracking relief of numbness in my upper body, a kind of quiet peace.

Fingers of the sky in my hair again, hand out the window, black painted fingernails and gem-stoned hands reaching, straining into a losing sun: “She rules her life like a bird in flight and/ who will be her lover?”

You reach for my hand and I let you take it, I smile at you, stereo bass slamming in my chest, my eyes fixed on that damned sun that never, ever stops sinking.

From Madgirl Elegy, upcoming publication

My spine arches, skin absorbing each salty spear, bracing myself for impact, the dark thing no one can bear to look at stretching toward me, mouth open–NO. NO! I know the Truth! Everyone that I have loved in the court are dropping bait about my body like wave caught chum, I muscle hard against the steel of water, pushing away from the monster beneath. Don’t they know it will swallow us all? No one is safe. They don’t know, cannot see. I push surface-ward with all that I have, my daughter clutched hard to my breast–NO. I will not go down like this. I look to the Baptist-burgandy carpet of a blood-stained courtroom and see sitting quietly a hooded figure in the space where my family should be. I do not know him, his shoulders are shaking, he is sobbing. All at once he tilts his head back, and the roar of the oceans screams forth, a Red Sea of deep tear-rage. The dark thing vanishes, monster retreating to its blue-black depths, but I can’t stop swimming for the surface, my baby in my arms, heart in my throat, air dissipating. This is mother-rage, seeking always for breath.

What do I do when my struggle is beneath the wavering water sky, where no one can see? There are feet in the liquid subspace above me. My fingers break the surface, clutch a soaked hem, all of time swirling Asah and I into the arms of the sobbing, cloaked figure in the courtroom—Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani! It is not my voice I hear but the guttural incantations of Aramaic centuries past, water streaming to sand, and I am alone again, my girl-baby and I, in a great desert. The sky is clear, horizon unbroken. I put one bare foot in front of the other, sun-scorched sand beneath me, white, wet bit of cloth clutched like kleenex in my trembling hands in a courtroom in Mississippi in 2019. Head down, hair wind-blown, baby to my breast, “so we beat on against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past….” 

 

Levi, Sky-Baby

They come to us in the strangest of ways, on the streets, from breeders and mills, tied to stakes and boats, and they forgive infinitely.

My Levi was going to be the last living soul on earth when the apocalypse hit, that’s how timid he was and wary of life and people who had only been cruel to him in his short life.

Dogs offer only the purest form of love, selfless and sure of you no matter how many times you let them down.

I found him in a drainage ditch where dogs were tied to trees and trailers. “Hi baby,” I creened and watched him squirm his way out of the drain to hide under my long skirt, huddled on my sandaled feet. “Well, this one’s mine,” I told my then fiancee, waiting in the truck. I washed weeks of mud and dirt from his tiny, fat, worm-ridden body, and he inhaled his food and slept like the little baby he was, ate and slept for days.

Once he was healthy, I tossed  him into the pack of rescued pups at the stable I worked for through college, but he would get tired so I’d snuggle him into my saddle where he’d fall asleep with my horse’s rocking gait. He had no horse sense whatsoever, but the horses were careful with him, letting him wobble beneath them with his fat paws and clumsy puppy balance.

When I got married, Levi was there. When I was up early in the morning, working horses, he was by my side in the chill of the morning, and then pond-wading in the heaviness of summer bareback sprints through tall, yellow-flowered pastures. When I separated from my then husband, I packed him up with a suitcase and took him to my mama’s. When I went back, pregnant and broken, he guarded me day and night, always close, always watching. When my baby was born, he sniffed and sniffed and looked on warily, herding her around the living room when she began to toddle around, gentle mouth and kind eyes, tail and ears on happy high alert.

When we took in a little black dog who had been shot, Levi put up with him, teaching him how to Indoor Dog, growling when Goose overstepped boundaries, which he did often, lying by his kennel when he went through heart-worm treatment.

When it was time to run again, I packed up both pups, my three month old, diapers, and dog food, and we disappeared to the only safe place I knew.

When I bought my first home on my own, he let me hold onto his coat and cry on him on the floor. He ingested my loneliness, my fear, my doubt that I would be able to make it on my own. When I added Luna to the pack, he didn’t question me. She was a student’s dog, left at MARL after the student was hospitalized for PTSD, and he took her in with me.

When friends came over, he would disappear until the initial excitement had settled, and then come out quietly, greeting them with a “Levi hug”, pressing his face into their knee until petted. When Asah put crowns and necklaces on him, he lay patiently. He was a friend to my 20 lb rabbit that teased him mercilessly in the back yard, hopping up on his side while he sunned. He has been a friend to many prey animals over the years, his calm dubiousness about the world emanating from his 75 lb. body.

Indio was the last to be added to the pack, a 120 lb German Shepherd who was abused by a former owner, only one ear standing up, bustling through the house knocking things over with his enormous tail, totally oblivious. Levi never growled at him, maybe sensing the deep sadness Indio’s burly body has already endured in his short life.

Levi is the first pup I’ve ever owned on my own. I was nineteen when I picked him up out of that drainage ditch, and we grew up together. My life fell apart, he was the constant. Life changes, dogs do not.

Tonight my remaining pack is hanging closer, sensing my sadness, possibly sensing the emptiness of the collar and leash on the counter that I haven’t the heart to put up yet.

Today, for the first time in fifteen years, I came home to a house without Levi in it. I lay with him on the concrete floor of the vet while the injection was administered and he fell asleep in my arms. When you spend so many years of your life and so much money and time caring for an animal, it goes against everything natural to have them put down. I lay with him all last night while he sneezed and coughed up blood though. I could not be selfish after the years of selflessness Levi had taught me.

Dogs teach us how to be better humans and I am infinitely better for having loved my Levi. I don’t know where dog souls go, or if there is a heaven; I do believe in the regeneration of energy though, so Asah and I will plant a tree in his honor and wherever his soul is, I hope he knows how incredibly loved and appreciated he will always be. Hopefully I loved him enough in life for him to know that.

I will continue to care for those cast aside souls, those scared babies in drainage ditches and tied to trees who just want a soul to love, and I will never stop.

Thank you for teaching me how to love, and for the magic that came with your small spark of life. Take flight, my Levi baby, and I will see you in the stars, angel boy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mississippi Summer

Rods of sunlight slant through bent-vined trees in the hungry heat of a Mississippi summer, on a creek bank where sunfish dart through cool water relief. I stop and watch the broad shouldered man wading through shadows ahead of me. In another few weeks, he will disappear around a bend in the earth, and I will not run splashing to catch up with him, the freedom of my solitude, like those red-budded vine flowers, too delicious to share. My heart swells in that second of watching him, though, and a glimmer of a fish of contentedness swims into my throat and I push back tears at the beauty around me.

I slip on a rock and fall in, soaking my summer dress, laughing at my clumsiness, and the unforgiveness of hard surfaces I have come to know well over the years. No one helps me up in life, they watch me flounder from the bank, basking in my gracelessness, hoping I drown. I never do though, I have too much fury in my veins. This day, in the creek, he reaches out his hand, helps me up as water streams from my body like oceans, like that girl who fell from the sky and lapped up salt water until she became the Earth in Native American folklore. Woman as Creator, her body birthing land and water, something only a Mother-woman can do, tiny offspring island dancing at her muddy feet. I run my fingers through the sand and the familiar ache rolls across the landscape of my soul for the tiny mouth that calls me mama.

Afterward, we drink beer in a bar in the middle of nowhere, my Luna dog splayed across the tiled floor, and we play pool badly with locals who tell crude jokes and comment on my wet dress and love the music we play on the jukebox, all Night Moves and Crimson and Clover. My hand dances on the edge of the car window on the way back, radio blaring, wind drying my long hair. All of the sunfish settle in my memory and in my heart and I want to go back already to the infinite wildness, the rawness of a creek cut through a wood.

What a beautiful summer it has been. I want to white knuckle it, but I will let it go with grace and treasure the memory, and if there is a heaven, I pray there are sunfish there and a bar at the end of the world, and a creek cut through forests of mercy, a shadowed lover just ahead, and a “Mama” echo on the wind. I’ll stay there forever with my sun-soaked skin and long wet hair over a summer dress on a creek bank in Mississippi.

I Am the Husband

(for my Rosie, that she will be bold enough to take her own path and stubborn enough to dig her own ditches)

I fight with the lawnmower–hold the clutch, rip the string, am growled at as the starter clicks and slips back into silence, godDAMMIT! The prim woman across the street glares at me. Her yard is perfection. I despise her. Sweat seeps down my face, between my breasts. Sometimes I cut the grass in shorts and a sports bra, sometimes I sit in the driveway and drink beer when I’m finished. The ugly looks make me laugh.

I taught myself how to change the oil in the lawnmower as well, dumped the velvet black in a bubbling puddle in my side yard because I didn’t know what to do with it, created a one-woman biohazard.

I am five years divorced from a man who cut the grass and fixed the sink and was not an artist.

When the bathroom sink breaks, I fight with it as well, while my then partner lay on the couch,  working on his music, artist stuff I need to be doing. When he comes to check on me, I am soaking wet, the cabinet beneath the sink flooded, some guy named Home Repair Jim droning away on YouTube. Fuck you, Jim. My lover grins, he doesn’t know how to fix a sink either–which is what happens when you love an artist rather than a farmer. He and I did manage to wrestle a new oven into a built in space under a counter, with much effort and laughter some years ago, but that’s about as far as our accomplishments run.

I am doing Husband things.

My backyard fence is falling to pieces. I patch it, hammer one board up while another comes loose, but I am not strong enough to dig up the rotted posts cemented in sun-baked Yazoo clay. My dogs press against the crumbling boards and go renegade, racing joyously through leash-lawed streets. I am behind them, cursing and then begging, enticing, Treats! Kibbles! Please to GOD come back before the police come after us again. Sometimes the police pull up beside me while I’m chasing a dog, lower their window, “Hey Meg….” “I’ve GOT them, can’t you see I’ve freaking got them??” The police waited with me when I fell and broke my foot chasing a dog in the early morning darkness while I was half-dressed for work until my lover could get there and take me to the hospital, though. They either feel sorry for me, or think it’s all amusing, maybe both.

I am doing Husband things badly.

In a Virginia Woolf graduate seminar at a chokingly conservative Baptist college, a pretty girl with short blonde hair explained the difference between men and women to the rest of the class, specifically how men were more adept at digging ditches and shingling roofs because they are naturally, biologically stronger.

I have never wanted to hit someone in the face so much in my life.

“I’ll dig the damn ditch,” I said in response to her ridiculousness, “it may take me twice as long as a man, but I’ll dig the same damn ditch, I swear to god.”

That phrase has come back to me again and again when I’ve had momentary lapses into self-doubt since I’ve been on my own, no husband, no family. When a tree fell in my front yard, and all I had was a hand saw and anger and cut it into pieces for four hours, until my hands were blistered, and I drug each piece to the street, I was reminded of pretty Jenny and her fainting couch, Victorian diatribe. “I’ll dig the damn ditch…..”

I get taken advantage of at the car dealership, the mechanic’s, by air conditioning repair men and the like because I am youngish and blonde and clearly know nothing of tires or gauges or filters.

My six year old: “Mama, why are you not married like daddy?”

“Because I don’t want to be.”

“Well, you didn’t fix the disposer (disposal) good, but ok…..”

No, I don’t fix much of anything good, but I can breathe. And if all the husband is good for is sink-mending, I’ll stick to my lovers and duct tape.

In the Deep South, something is wrong with you if you are not married; people get married young, right out of high school or college. I did too because I was supposed to, and I had always been a rule follower. Until I fell in love with someone not my husband, got pregnant and divorced, moved out, and took a brilliant African American lover for four years. My yard was rolled in toilet paper the first months after I moved into my little house in the suburbs as a single mother with a black boyfriend. Bags of trash have been thrown in my yard. Because it’s Mississippi and I set fire to the rules, because I am a seductress of anarchy.

I am doing Man things as Woman in a place wholly uncomfortable with anything even borderline liberal, to the point of violence.

Man voices from my past still wake me some nights: “I know where he works, I will find him. I’ll kill you both. Do you know what I could do to somebody?”

                                                                                “I’ll kill you and bury you where no one will ever find you. Alternate layers of dirt and lime, dirt and lime. They’ll never find you.”

I have never threatened harm to anyone in my life–I just had the audacity to live by my own agency. As I write, the sun streams through holes in a rotted fence and catches at yellow weeds shin-high in my back yard. The “disposer” works for now, the front yard is neat, the sink is duct-taped, and I can finally, finally breathe clean air untainted by violence.

An older Trisha Yearwood song reads, “Got a picture of her mama in heels and curls/She’s tryin to make it in her daddy’s world…..Fix the sink, mow the yard really isn’t all that hard/ when you get paid.”

This is not the life I had ever imagined. It is infinitely better, and I am beyond grateful for the everyday insanity that means I am making it. I’m making it not in my daddy’s world, but in my own, broken fences, relentless weeds and all.

The damn ditch may not be pretty, but it’s mine, and I’ll get it dug.