don't forget the flowers, someday

[i know you will].

Our memories are such selective mischief-makers, aren't they?

here's to:

1. big-bully/silly-momma/the vampire-in-the-chair game
2. fox and the chicken
3. ghost-folks on first and second
4. sun salutations in the wee hours
5. rock hounds
6. and historic mounds
7. and hand-me-down ice-skates
8. newspaper routes
9. homemade playdough
10. looms
11. and yarn
12. and rock tumblers
13. red wagon race
14. bags on my feet
15. letters from TF
16. meteor-watchin' past bed-time
17. bonzettes
18. Daley-Poe, and L-Poe and Little-Poe, too
19. craft sales and
20. library summer reading programs
21. butterfly netting
22. firefly catching
23. wrestling matching
24. living-room performances
25. and spies out the way-back
26. mmmm i wanna linger
27. ya skunk
28. wanna Scrambled Dog?
29. beat ya in the clean-plate-club

after a long cry/I feel.

Winter in Gold River
by Catie Rosemurgy

Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again

and given her to the lake to wear as a skin.

Why am I always being the weather?
There were days in the winter

when her smile was so lovely I felt

the breathing of my own goodness,

though it remained fetal and separate.

I was a scavenger who survives

with a sling and stones, but whose god

nonetheless invents the first small bright bird.

And it was like flight to bring food to her lips

with a skeletal hand. But now she will always

be naked and sad. She will be what happens

to lake water that is loved and is also

shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing,

the black blood of it, the check opened

to reveal the inevitable heart attack.

God, the silence of the chamber

we watch from. What happens to water

that isn't loved? It undergoes processes.

It freezes beside traffic.

But the reaching out to all sides at once,

the wet closing of what was open?
That is a beautiful woman.

So of course I stand and stare, never able

to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.

30-loves list. (for Dale). (and also for myself).

1. Love of family.
2. Love of friendship, that becomes a kind-of family.
3. Love of the way we can be many different things to each other.
4. Love of farm stillness.
5. And farm movement.
6. And love of knowing that I might plant the garlic, but I do not make the garlic grow.
7. Love of service.
8. Love of the humility that allows oneself to be served by another.
   
9. Love of the capacity for reinventions.
   
10. Love of second chances, with things right in front of you.
11. Love of saying sorry.
    
12. Love of music, and the way it shares things between people (the way it shares things between the multiple people in one person).
    
13. Love of moments when I recognize I'm human.
14. Love of my cat Comet.
15. And my old cat Chewy (rest in peace).
16. Love of the people who have passed--physically, or emotionally--from my life, for they are and always will be a present part of who I am.
17. That is, Love of the way Love lingers, even when bodies and hearts do not.
    
18. Love of functioning in a Communion of Saints.
    
19. And of the Joy and value in little pleasures and safeties.
20. Love of my body (on a good day).
21. And my spirit (on a good day).
    
22. Love in strength and flexibility (but not malleability).
23. Love of the way I am big and small in a world that is big and small.
24. Love of warm things.
25. Love of the intimacy allowing one to speak a coded language, that only one more understands.
26. Love of spending a lifetime, almost knowing one another.
    
27. And the way that people return to each other after miscommunications to try to communicate again; their persistence shows a caring language cannot capture.
    
28. Love of deep peace.
29. Love of not taking oneself too seriously.
    
30. Serious Love.

6 years

today.
breathing.

departure/suspension/missing.

Sometimes i look at old photographs, and swear I don't recognize my own face.
and I know my weight fluctuates and my hair is always different and lately I've been make-up free, but that's not it really--
it's the eyes.
the eyes are different.

and maybe all I've got is change and maybe we're all scattering and--
oh, safe travels.

oh!

Congrats to Dale and FiFi on their recent engagement!
Do we look Brady Bunch or what?


Photo of Leslie Albanese & co. was acquired from Nick Bowsher's wedding photo booth. Please contact the post-author, prior to use.

diving for lobsters

relentlessly.
every time.

(Will I ever stop taking myself so seriously?)

photo by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Holiday

"For my sister who sometimes needs to take time to grieve with the world. Don't forget what a beautiful place it is. With love from Frances, Christmas 2010."

[photo: cousins Maize (head-bopping), Zoe (leap-frogging), and Oliver (mohawk-rocking);
they are part of my beautiful place]

Wait- Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: the enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asked to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

--

Maybe faith is just an active--it cannot be passive--acceptance of others' love, and the hope that, despite all the darkness, we share enough goodness between each other to keep on//fight for.

Merry Christmas.

[[a little red box]]

(click to enlarge photos)

"One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make--to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion."
-- Anais Nin

"he was a good guy, but he had the laugh of a bad guy"

Cheese Manicotti, Stuffed Roasted Artichokes, and Fried Breaded Eggplant will be the most decadent, most artery-clogging Christmas Eve Feast. Ever. (Albanese style).

These past 3 days, I've enjoyed the likes of Ms. Molly Shea, Ms. Ericka Mobley, Mr. Gary Alan Bearden (+ Marina!!!), Mr. Alex Williams-Witzky, Mr. Shaun Thomas, and my newly engaged Canine Best Friends who are coming over tomorrow, too, for some Torres-inspired Pizza. Word on the street is: it's the kind of pizza that gets you free cab rides for life. Oh yes, and family. One could say I've been enjoying my family.

Here are some truisms:
1. my gas tank is low
2. my wallet is thin
3. my future is vague
4. but I'm surrounded by folks with captivating laughs.
5. and in a non-fatalist sort of way: I feel (more than a little) fortunate

Sometimes, I swear, it all comes down to mirrors and lenses.

"sleeping with the enemy"

I couldn't sleep last night (a combination of the coffee-milkshake I drank with my Panera dinner--a bad idea that left me jived--, the looming "wherethehelldoIgofromhere" anxiety that I've been effectively--or maybe last night proved not-so-effectively--avoiding, and, at the risk of hyperbole, some "emotional turmoil" from supposedly caring too damn much). Is that even possible? To care too damn much, I mean? It's like being in some lonely camp all by myself: the caring corner. And it just feels like no one else gives a damn and they all just look at me and say, "give it up, Les," but how can I? Why are there not more people caring? And why are the apathetic always making me feel like an isolationist?

[I'm not usually this sinister, but being stuck in Central Ohio is making me go loony (no pun intended this time)]. And I don't want to live a mental separatism. So what do I do? I write about it. But inevitably my writing becomes all cryptic and abstract until it, too, becomes its own separatism--my own linguistic world that no one else can fully reside in, that no one can truly enter. A defense mechanism, maybe. And a subconscious one, at that. I'm not one for dishonesty. I couldn't live a double life if I tried (though I'd never try). And yet I feel torn between two wholly contrasting feelings separating my being. I love people. I do. I love them. And I love being with people. And I love serving people. And am shocked and shocked again by the number of people who have reciprocally blessed my life. It's humbling, really-- the number of people who care. (look how contradictory I'm being). But there's this side of me that feels totally alone, even when I'm in a room full of people who love me. Because my mind is somewhere else--some unreachable place--and because, despite my rationality, I'm ultimately moved by feeling over logic every time--and I cannot fully understand or articulate these feelings or the flashes in my mind (usually not even complete sentences) and consequently lose my ability to share (despite my hopeless earnestness) the fundamental-most part of me.

"I am the cat who walks by [her]self..."

My mind's been flashing with: gender binaries, and parasites, and lions, and "Eating from the Outside" vs "Eating from the Inside," and the social construction of "enemy camps", and how complicated they are, and Eichmann, and institutional compliance, which quickly becomes complacency, and the conjunctive relationship between interior and exterior threats-to-being, and rats, and bodies, and violence against said bodies--sometimes using rats, and bullying, and the way the new Sufjan song made me feel all angsty like the sleigh-bells were saying "consumerismconsumerismconsumerism," and my own inability to let go...

All-the-while flashing with: my parents' good natures, and The Christopher Spirit, and milk-crates, and this Pitchfork interview with Jeff Mangum, and the farm, and community, and collective identity, and the way it can be a positive thing with conscious participation, and Cornel West, and language, and what that really means, and whether or not art really can be the ultimate revolution, and knowing that love really does exist, and...

And this is all occurring while my white middle class privilege comfortably manifests: in my friend's apartment, eating chocolate chip cookies, drinking orange juice, and watching The Office (season 3). If this were satire, I could appreciate the irony like a good ugly sweater party. And maybe this is satire after all. Maybe I've got you (and myself) fooled, and I'm living "Behind Enemy Lines." Maybe I'm taking myself too seriously. And maybe I'm becoming an ego-maniac. Maybe I'm not.

"sleeping with the enemy" by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

my heart and Ohio

[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: Ohio is such an important place
[12/07/10] Eddie Barnes: it's everything
[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: a lot of ppl who live here do not value it the way they should, I think
[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: also- unrelated- but aesthetically i think it has the coolest outline
[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: of all the states
[12/07/10] Eddie Barnes: yes! haha
[12/07/10] Eddie Barnes: i think we may be a little biased
[12/07/10] Eddie Barnes: but it is a nice shape.
[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: haha
[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: ok maybe a little
[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: but we are not a box
[12/07/10] Leslie Albanese: so many states are shaped like boxes
[12/07/10] Eddie Barnes: indeed
[12/07/10] Eddie Barnes: that's true. This is my heart and Ohio.

I've been wearing an old (basement-retired/retrieved) hat of my mother's for the past week. It's wool and has loons on it. I like it because it's warm and makes me feel safe. And maybe also because it allows me to make bad puns about being loony.

But it's not just the silly hat. It's everything. Oh, Ohio! [My friends, my habits, my family, they mean so much to me/ but I'm (not) just a box just a box in a cage (no I'm not) just a box just a box in a cage].

It's not that I don't love you, all musty.

my heart and Ohio by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.