Let’s Call this Monday
A 24-Hour Collaborative writing project, with contributions by Rachael Carnes, Andy Evan Cohen, Greg Romero, Alyssa Cokinis, Holly Richards, Marjorie Bicknell, Amelia Reising, John McDonald, Erin Gustafson and Susanna Bard.
Hi
Um
Here’s a picture of a Jackdaw. They like buttons.
It’s not clear what this is or what it needs to be but.
I like buttons.
Do you?
Buttons always get lost. Does Jack Daw take them?
If it helps to know,
I’m a Western Jackdaw.
A corvid. Not Covid (which I’m
Sure you’ve heard a lot about),
A crow (corvidae).
What does it mean
To crow?
To be a crow?
To be Western?
What buttons
Do I collect?
Why do I do it?
Is why not good enough?
Sometimes, I wonder why
I am not as acclaimed
As my more famous Corvidae brethren:
Straight as the crow flies.
The crow cried thrice.
Why can’t I call
The raven black?
Why can’t you eat me?
(I guess you can,
But I suspect the buttons I have
Collected would be hard to digest.)
I’d like to ask Jack Daw
A question,
But he (they?) haven’t been
As forthcoming with any answers.
So I crow to myself,
Buttons in beak,
Thinking about other birds
(Not those damn Ravens – nevermore those damn Ravens!)
And stare out into the void,
Looking for an ending,
Or a continuation,
Or another button.
I guess finding that button
Would be the Hardest Button to Button.
Wherever we are, the space changes. We are outside. We are in a tree. In a nest.
The nest sways gently, pushed around a little by a wind that also passes through our feathers. We can see so much from where we are perched. We hear the other crows calling out to us, their voices carried by the wind.
The crow next to us, also nested, holds a button in her beak. We wonder – where did she get it? Is someone’s pants falling down? And that makes us think of all the things that are falling down. Is everything falling down?
We want to ask her, but instead, we spread our wings, testing the breeze, preparing for flight. A burst of movement and we are in the air, soaring higher, wings set, looking down at everything. We are flying.
Wish we could cinch this like a button, like a supposedly quick-not-so-quick Happy Birthday song. The Jackdaw’s button eye is on us. What will we have done: maintain disgusting dissonance in grabbing whatever is within reach, or will we hand over that essential to someone in need, to someone not unlike us? I’m waiting, America. I don’t trust you to do this the way a world should. We’re waiting for our test.
My mother had buckets of them
Blue
Milky white
Gold
Putting my hand through them was like
Diving into uncooked beans
A pile of grandma
A serving of her stash
My eyes never tired of the spectacle
The kaleidoscope generations in the making
A colored display of saving
The bits that connect us
Connect our clothing
Connect our souls
- Because when someone passes
- Flies like the crow
- Gathers in a murder of spirits around us
We cannot see them
Feel them
But the threads they’ve left
The zippers
And plastic bins full of ric rac
Say they were real
More real than the mother who never really knew us
The mother we never really knew
We never really knew her because …
She was never really there.
Her affect was there in the clean sheets on the beds
The dust-free tables,
The freshly plumped chairs.
Dinner on the table, breakfast, too.
But mother was a spectre never heard
Rarely seen leaving us alone with
A clean house.
Which is why while I am on lockdown
I clean, I cook, I make the beds and keep silent hoping
The virus will pass me by.
I have marked my sill
With the blood
I have prepped the cupboard stash
I sang “Hallelujah” while my boy
Played his guitar in the little room.
We keep a six-foot distance from strangers and friends
So the crows who gather won’t call US
A murder.
A plague in every restaurant
A plague in every school
It came in the spring
When the clock changed and everything
Was eerie bright
Like this all was being made for t.v.
The reality-show runs on rolls of paper
Bottles of gel
Runs on beans and bags of rice.
Later Monday the photos pop up
On the screen
We are little girls, the same age my boy is now
We are posing with our dolls in the tent
On the porch
By the door with the sill. I remember that age,
Learning about the plagues of Egypt
My adolescent brain wondering if I still should worry
About God’s wrath,
Mark the sill
Protect my yarn and plastic child.
We loved nothing like now,
We feared nothing like now.
Will it pass him by?
Will it pass me by?
Will it pass?
Will it?
My twentieth birthday party was Rent themed. We watched the movie and made burgers. Later, I tried out for a production of Rent thinking I was a Mark (though Roger was more compelling). But when I went to actually read the book of the show, I ended up falling in love with this side character from the aids support group. Gordon only had one or two lines and he talked about how he was a survivor and it was New York and it was expected you’d survived. Will I Lose My Dignity was one of my favorite rounds to listen to for a long time. I never did get cast in Rent but I’m not bitter about it. Apparently their version of casting involved two twin brothers to play Mark and Roger. What I am more bitter about is that I never got cast in Godspell and I really wanted to learn to play the shofar. Ironically, all this fuels my playwriting. Because obviously if you’re writing the play, you can’t not be in the program. At the very least.
Although, I’d love someday to do a cd of myself doing all my favorite songs from various shows. Especially a male/male duet version of Suddenly Seymour and “Little Bitty Pissant Country Place” as sung by Dolly Parton.
My little bitty pissant country place would be near the coast. Or by the sea. Somewhere where the air is blatantly filled with salt and plenty of screetchy sea birds. Here, I will share bits of my days old crusty bread as they swoop in, each one posturing and preening and yelling MINE. But mine, they’ll be.
I’d wander along the sand collecting and curating from flotsam and jetsam. Flung here by the ocean from far away shores. How did you get here? I’d wonder aloud to twists of orange twine. From what ship were you lost and how long must it have taken before you were tossed to my beach.
My little bitty pissant country place would be chock full of these finds. Window sills littered with the treasures I’ll glean. A mussel shell worn from the tumbling waves exposes the prettiest pattern of blacks, whites and purple. Maybe the perfect rock that feels sublime in my hand. Possibly a glass float from a foreign fishing net. I’ll remember the day I discovered each piece.
My little bitty pissant country place will be simple, but certainly not stark. It will be my respite when the world just doesn’t feel right. Here there will be books. About things. And spices to cook. I’ll clean when I feel like it and mostly just be. You’ll be welcome. To join. It won’t be easy to find, but worth it when you do. The woods here you pass through will be mossy and green. And when the sun shines, this place is supreme.
The air is blatantly filled with salt and plenty of screetchy sea birds.
As I breathe it in it occurs to me no matter how macho I pretend to be,
Cold air cuts deeply into human lungs.
Now they are saying that we have enough to survive down here for years.
You know–if the supply lines are cut and no one can bring us food or gas.
Or maybe there will be no one left out there to bring us anything.
No, don’t be so dramatic, that’s ridiculous.
It reminds me of what I imagined hardtack tasted like when I was a kid
Reading novels in my four poster bed, dreaming of a bigger world.
Nothing but moss grows on this godforsaken ground.
This is what I always said I wanted:
Everyone will be so impressed by the girl mechanic,
Overwintering at the ends of the earth.
But the truth is, now that I’m here, deep down I admit to myself
What I was running from.
How easy it would have been to phrase things a little more kindly to Martin.
Instead of my knee-jerk, congenital, self-absorbed passive aggression.
Could I have chosen to turn back in February, before we left Christchurch?
Back to my mother–with her angry grey hairs, and her asthma that I cannot fix, and her demands.
Or perhaps first to a lonely fortnight in an empty house.
I was proud.
And now, I watch, as the world closes up around us,
A frozen barrier
An impossible impasse…
Between this giant island of salt and sea birds and the nearest thing resembling a hospital.