The Girl Who Liked Hemingway

I didn't win the pageant
because those bitches wouldn't know beauty if it beat them over their 'do's with a porch plank.

My Mediterranean sultriness was not what they were looking for;
them with their politeness and their narrow-lipped smiles holding back the churning reflux that their hearts produce.

They are not human.

As a baby, I was different.
I spoke within minutes, asking for a mirror before milk,
and sharing Portuguese brandy with my father in the library before the month was out.

Let others become checkers at Target.
Let others slave in the shamba under a broiling sun.
They do not have my sculptured cheekbones,
and so must scramble and struggle while I laze under an awning in a cafe,
accepting the dazzled worship of waiters named Jean-Guy.

But look, it hasn't been all roses and honey, just the same.
I stayed barefoot until I was twelve, by choice.
I whipped all the local boys,
and was the terror of the American compound.

I first considered pageants when I was caught siphoning gas from a diplomat's car.
The diplomat took me inside and stood with his back to me,gazing through his wife's sheer curtains at the stucco buildings across the street, and said,

"There are other things
you could be doing."

Soon I was shivering,
my arm dangling boneless over the edge of the dining room table,
smiling at the patterned copper ceiling.
I had still been in command of myself when he lost all his polish and said things to me that were not diplomatic, but rather,
the shouts of a drowning man finding shore.

So anyway,
these bitches looked at me critically, as if I were a steer at auction,
each of them a little complacent fat cask of petty.
I knew I couldn't win,
and my mind turned, as it always has,
toward ways to rain down destruction upon my enemies' heads.

I have a little French cahier
that I write down my dreams and plans in.
If the gendarmes ever find it, I'm so fucked.

But never mind.
The world of pageants plateaus early--
you're done at twenty, turned loose in the streets to blink big-eyed
at the onrushing autobus that will flatten you dead.
Does this sound like me?
Does it?

I am a girl without an umbrella,
because it never dares to rain on my perfect creamy shoulders.
I own no pearls,
but I have six different divining decks,
one for each day of the week, and then I go to Mass on Sunday.

I didn't win the pageant,
but I escaped to Algiers and met a man.
In the morning, we start out together for Kilimanjaro--
I shall be barefoot, in my element once more,
and McComber will have some sort of accident and leave everything to me.

Heft those trunks, bush guides,
I forgot my mirror and am keen to retrieve it
so that I may kiss my image as one would Cerberus,
if he were female
and as pretty as me.
_________

for Flipside's word list 15: Mediterranean, siphon, brandy, destruction, cafe, cahier, raincoat, narrow-lipped, barefoot, pearls, sculptured, mirror, critically, casks, plateau, politeness, awning, curtains, shivering and shamba. (words taken from Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden Of Eden")

Also linked to real Toads open link Monday.

And shared on 10/27/22 to Dverse OLN. 

 

The Difference Between A Stampede And A Short Story Can Be Slight

I didn't come up here for any kind of nature shit.
I just wanted to be in a place where a girl can go about her business--
fluff her hair,
fix her face,
without half the magistrates in Canada wanting to know her particulars.

I thought that if I left Calgary and headed north,
that that dumb RCMP fuck would not follow me,
shoving his desk through the snow like a sled dog.

Why can't a girl listen to Tchaikovsky of an evening?
And if scarves get tied to the four poster,
is that anyone else's concern?
If money changed hands and then I had to change the locks,
does the world have to know?
May I no longer wear white? Will my nanny jobs dry up?

Listen--
a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do.
If a cabinet minister expires on the premises, 
and I don't wrap him neatly in a maple leaf flag,
tell me,
is it fair to drag me before the courts?
He couldn't handle some five star pussy, that's all.
It's not as if I assassinated Gretzky.

Anyway,
I thought that if I came up here, my pursuers might give up.
I hoped they might tire of pine boughs snapping back in their faces,
though some of them have paid me well enough for similar.
I thought they might get sick of stepping in moose shit,
and going without Timbits for days on end.

I am Bo Peep of the Far North.
I keep moving as best as I can, though my boots are not really made for this,
and I never got a chance to change.
Jack London, listen to me honey--
Save my happy ass, and I'll make it worth your while.
No Esquimo squaw can make it good for you like I can,
and very few of them possess
a whip,
and a pretty, painted
Japanese fan.
________

for Hannah's Transforming Friday at Real Toads

confused by Canadiana? Find the Calgary Stampede HERE and Timbits HERE.

RCMP = Royal Canadian Mounted Police



 

Book Review: "Back Roads"

Back Roads by Tawni O'Dell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I was bound to go there eventually, and I did. I read an Oprah's Book Club book.

Tawni O'Dell's "Back Roads" is a very difficult book for me to rate. It is absorbing from the very start, and O'Dell is a skillful writer with a keen eye for the telling detail. But the main character is sometimes hard to like, and the story is dark, dark, dark.

Nineteen year old Harley Altmyer's mother has gone to prison for shooting his abusive father to death, leaving Harley to work two jobs to support his three younger sisters. The book's blurbs say how funny this book is; while it made me laugh on a number of occasions, the humor is dark, and sporadic. This is not a funny novel. It is filled with flashbacks of Harley's father's physical abuse of his family, the narrator himself often has violent fantasies that seemed to me to be extreme and strange and at odds with his natural kindness, and the whole feel of the dying coal mining area of western Pennsylvania where the story takes place is oppressive and bleak. Add to all of this another murder and suggestions of incest, and one starts to wish for something to feel good about.

There *are* some nice touches. Harley's youngest sister, Jody, is the cutest little girl going. She likes to make to-do lists which include praying for people's "sowls", and carries a stuffed dinosaur called Sparkle Three Horn every place she goes.

The character I liked best (okay, I adored her), is a thirty-three year old woman named Callie Mercer, who is the married mother of one of Jody's friends. She likes art and is surprised when Harley turns out to know about a painter she likes. Here is a woman with a big itch that nobody is scratching. She's sexy, she's complicated, and her heart is in the right place, even if her ass isn't. She's Harley's first, and their lovemaking is hot, but I'm not so sure that's even the real reason why motherless Harley loves her. In one scene, she gives Harley a (sexual) birthday "gift", and he's thinking that he considers everything she's ever done for him a gift.

The writing is crisp and sharp, but in a couple of places, it shows that this is a woman writing in the first person as a teenage boy. For example, in one scene, he speculates what store and department a woman got her clothes from. I don't think he would know or care.

Anyway, even though I got wrapped up in the story, O'dell veers off into violence, cruelty and hopelessness too much for my taste. She doesn't leave any kind of light on for her reader in the end, and so I cannot recommend this book. 



View all my reviews

Gypsy

I'm a Gypsy--
kiss me hard, see if I'm not.

Ain't no peace in the graveyard, babe--
onliest choice is dance or rot.

My scent's like leaves, like rain near dusk--
chase that scent like the wolf pack does.

Squeeze my throat with a soft sure hand--
Gypsy heart at your command.
______

A Girl Always Knows

That bold hussy bitch.
Right up to my front door, every day,
with her notes for my man.

Today she pays!
Today she--

"Duchess! Down! It's only the mail."
________

for Mama Zen's Words Count feature at Real Toads. Today she wants conflict in 30 words or less.

The Crap Poet

The crap poet
writes a crap poem
about her weak love
for a weak man,

and it takes her
(yes)
a week to write.

"Perhaps some mythological references," she thinks, distractedly, choking on smuggled French cigarettes.
"Perhaps adherence to a form no one gives a framed, numbered, limited edition shit about," she muses, head lolling in the oven, dramatically.

My love, &etc, she begins.
The next line has to do with the ovaries of cetaceans,
and the next devolves into impenetrable multisyllabic gobbledy-goop.

It wins an award.

The crap poet goes on to write an entire volume in which 
all the line breaks follow prepositions,
and articles are entirely absent.

Passing by
Arc de Triomphe in
ambulance with
salmonella kisses for
donkey-faced driver named Despair.

This shit wins a Pulitzer.

All hail the crap poet!
She blogs a free verse broadside twenty-eight miles wide
and ten feet tall.
It takes her five hundred followers two and a half seconds
to skim carefully down it all.

"Brilliant! Brilliant!" they cry.
"Here's mine!"

Crap poet soar!
Crap poet shine!
Within the year she is declared
Divine.
______

for dverse open link #64, hosted by the preternaturally talented Hedgewitch, a.k.a. my BFF!  

 

 

My Life & The Study Of Birds

I have devoted my life to the study of birds,
though they study me but little--
they are not sentimental that way.

Heavy as a field stone, I have sat and watched them circle
until I feel lifted, myself.
I catalog, I question, I make sketches,
but just lately and often,
my pen drops from my dangling hand, and I wake up hours later with the sun going down
and my work never finished.

I concern myself with genus, markings, and range.
They concern themselves with the ripeness of plums barely hanging on to branches
or already on the ground.
They concern themselves with hollowed-out trees or woven nests;
I concern myself with questions I can never truly understand the answers to,
even should I blunder across them.

There is a whirling, in the lateness of my days--
an oversharpening of the air, particularly in the early morning.
It was this time of year when you last came to see me,
and removed the sterling silver cuff I had given you,
with its delicate black flock flying from wrist bone to pulse point,
and set it upon my bed.
You told me that I was your heart,
but that you could never come back to me again.

I have devoted my life to the study of birds,
but anymore, my mind wanders.
There is only one thing I notice now, and that is the way that the autumn birds have
of relinquishing a deficient, unsustainable world
without a thought.
Instinct drives them, they simply lift, as one, and wheel,
spinning for a moment above my foolish head,
and then departing,
growing smaller until they are indistinguishable
soundless
phantoms,
as ephemeral as my breath in the chilly air.

_______

for Flipside's word list # 14 and Real Toads open link Monday.