Sand Mandalas

I’m curled into my new lady-friend on the couch. After two months of the exhaustive weekend shuffle between sleeplessness at her apartment and mine--a shuffle from which I still occasionally wake up unsure of where I am, disoriented and reaching for phantom light switches from the other apartment--amid this chaos girlfriend still seems premature. We exist in that space between intimacy and strangeness. I know the pitch of her voice when she’s trying hide her rising anxiety, but I only learned two weeks ago her legal first name. It still feels weird on my tongue. 

There's This Girl Though

I was crushing on a girl to the annoyance of my friends. I tried to find a historical justification for it. Like I'm sure this is the feeling behind the gay rights movement. It all starts with this crazy pit-of-your-stomach feeling.

"New Shit Slam" Poem 2 of 3

Second of three poems in three weeks for the "New Shit" Slam. Today I met slam poet El Jones and she says she never spends more than 2-6 hours on a poem. I tried to go with less control in these three pieces. Although to be far this poem was seeded over the summer after a Netflix documentary binge. This one could be expanded.

"New Shit" Slam Poem 1 of 3

We're having a "New Shit"slam on campus the third Friday. We need three new poems. This one is based on a prompt "what is poetry to you?" It's rough and I think it owes too much of a debt rhythmically to Andrea Gibson. I need three poems in three weeks, so I submit "Poetry."

Poetry is the rhythm of the ocean,
The pitch of bird song,
The warmth of yellow,
The coldness of blue;
That which cannot be qualified. 

It is the transparency of your tears, 
The way the light strikes through
These channels of rain on the
Banks of your cheeks
And makes the water and salt
Shine.

They say you cry too freely
But your teardrop rivers always reach the sea.
They swell with rain; sometimes from joyful summer storms sometimes hurricanes. 
Poetry is the sound of the current in that emo/ocean
In the shell on top of your dresser drawer
From that day at the shore. 

Yes, I know you kept it the way you know I keep ever receipt from our dates, every shred of paper from our gifts because I am an accountant. I want an account of our shared life together told in split orders of pasta and the newsprint wrapping that held our humble gifts. 

The first anniversary is paper and I'm saving all of this to make you paper lanterns. Because you illuminate the dark. 
And in the light reflected off your skin
 

Is poetry.

Through My Grandmother’s Eyes

I’ve been writing a lot about The Land. This is by no means my definitive Blog About The Land. I’m still processing my experience. Some of it I’m going to keep for myself. I learned that, to keep things secret, sacred, and safe.

This was my first lesson from Michfest.

But I wanted to put something out there from my trip to my grandmother’s home.

Contraband

In trembling hands I hold the electric hair clippers. My mother never allowed me short hair because said she didn’t want me to “look like a lesbian.” From the freedom of my own apartment two states away I watch the pieces of hair rain down into the sink. I cut some places too thin and other too long but the point isn’t the style. The point of this exercise is revolt or perhaps mild revolt.  I Googled hair growth to make sure I’ll have at least a feminine half-bob for graduation next spring before attempting this exercise in freedom. I do not want my four years of college to culminate in a battle over gender roles.

List of Publication Credits

I haven't had much to say because I'm shocked I'm still in Iowa.

Truly shocked.

 
It is nearly impossible to work through college without loans and working through college with loans is still a hardscrabble existence.

I shouldn't be possible that I'm still here right now,

but I am, just putting myself though college and working full time.

I also have to catch up on a million unwriterly tasks I let accumulate such as laundry, cleaning out the fridge, and meal planning.  

And a million pre-writing activities such as making a calendar of next years contest deadlines, finding new journals to submit to, finding prompts.

In the meantime here are links to this years publications:

"Physics" printed in the Cornell chapbook Poetry for Science

"City on a Hill" printed in the Cedar Valley Divide

"Panic" printed in the Open Field (an earlier draft appears here)

"For the Neighbor at Christmas" printed in the Open Field winner of an American Academy of Poets Prize

"Wilderness"* printed in the Open Field, winner of the Reader's Choice Award for Prose and the Clyde D. Tull Prize for Excellence in Prose.

and my new bio:

Maria is a non-traditional student at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. She is the winner of a 2014 Ned Foskey Prize for Poetry, a 2015 Academy of American Poets Award, a 2015 Clyde D. Tull Award for Prose, and a 2015 Reader's Choice Award. Her work appears in the Cedar Valley Divide and the Open Field.

*Sorry folks, this one is not going up online. If you would like to seek out a print copy let me know. 

Panic 2015

The day after it tried to kill me, the doctor says “your heart sounds fine.” Apparently this has only been a test of my emergency broadcast system. In the event of an actual emergency my heart will let me know in a more dramatic fashion. My heart isn't shy; it doesn't just murmur like other hearts, instead it shouts from my own throat just to make itself heard. I should be used to hearing my heart speak, in high school the nurse said I need reinforce the bars in my chest with iron supplements because anything that sounded that wild should not be let out. In the corners of my notebooks I doodled hearts like mine clenched by thorns and spouting flames: sacred hearts. The divine mystery of the sacred heart always held for me a fearful plausibility. I understood the feeling of a heart so full of love and sorrow that it could no longer be contained that it must be allowed to combust in a brilliant display of color before it could be placed safely back. They say the meek have more panic attacks because passivity in life may lead to the sudden combustion of feeling.

Once in a box of baby things, the relics of our past, my brother and I found a shiny red plastic heart with a switch on it. When we turned it on it beat like a metronome. It was thought, my mother explained, to prevent SIDS by reminding a baby’s heart to keep rhythm; a night time conductor for the newborn percussionist. My heart remains tone-deaf.

My loss of rhythm is often the first sign of an impending assault from panic. I know what it feels like to be in the ER in Cedar Rapids attached to wires, not having a heart attack. No one is sure what causes panic attacks but only a little over 2% of the population suffers them. We may be mis-wired, our bodies triggering the alarm bells for a personal apocalypse prematurely. Chest pain, palpitations, tingling, depersonalization, headache and trouble breathing are written in the body’s book of revelations, they are almost always signs of the end times in the rest of the population. For me it means about twenty minutes of terror in which my body acts as if it is in mortal peril. My rational brain knows I am fine but when has the rational brain ever won an argument against the body?

I know fear is a spark. Fear will cause my sacred heart to burst again. And Christ, am I fearful about leaving everything I know to start over in Iowa. Kalamazoo’s late summer evenings felt like home; fireflies igniting in impassioned bursts along the bike trail lighting my way home, sitting on my balcony in a secondhand plastic outdoor chair ponderously sipping cheap wine; and spending time with my working class room mates, my family of choice.

Now, after four years I am gripping tight with both hands and yanking out all of my roots. It is not that I’m impulsive. I would love to put down roots as deep as the trees in old neighborhoods, ones that grow gnarled and tangled up in everything they touch and are so strong they rip up the concrete on the encroaching sidewalks. But trees and people don’t pick where they grow.

I've stopped thinking of home as a place or even a state of being. In its new incarnation home is a person. Home is the person whose eyes I will look at and say “It’s a good offer but we have to move.” She'll say “We should take it.” Home is the firmness behind ‘we’. Home isn't waking up to the same bedroom year after year but waking up on the same side of the bed; that little amount of space that does not need to be renegotiated. Home doesn't need to know where the grocery store is but it gets lost together and laughs as they pass the same gas station the third time. Love fills the empty chamber but does not ignite.

Physics: a Pantoum

Physics is the art of motion.

He said “sometimes you get so close to something and just lose it.”

Something well-built stands, others collapse.

Eventually, everything pulls apart.


I said “sometimes you get close to someone and just lose it.”

You put in things you can quantify and never get them back.

Eventually everything falls apart,

like eggs that can never be unscrambled.


You put in things you can quantify and never get them back.

Not just time changes but the space itself,

like eggs that can never be unscrambled

eventually everything pulls apart.


Not just time but space changes

great cities, rocket ships, cosmos

everything falls apart.

Physics is the art of that motion.

The Last Peaceful Place

In 1968 The New Yorker dubbed Cornell College “the last peaceful place,” the only college campus the Vietnam protests hadn’t touched. It takes a while for events to penetrate the Hilltop. It's isolated here, peaceful. A retreat apart from the world. In Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael Roth explains that college was originally meant to be harder than life in the outside world as a way to make the everyday challenges seem less. He notes a shift recently where students now attend schools to be sheltered from the outside world for four years. Liberal Arts schools cater to this, often tucked away on hill tops or in rural areas. They send students into the world but they safely harbor them first.

I resisted leaving the world and coming here. How could I prepare for real life when I wasn’t in it? When I moved to Kalamazoo from Marquette Michigan a friend warned, “time moves faster here, but it’s okay, like, you’re actually getting things done in real time.” The twenty-four hour neon glow of the city replaced the endless Sunday afternoon of my small town. How novel a run across the street for milk at 2am seemed. How irritating a long wait for coffee in the morning. Time is money. We’ve got places to be and appointments to keep. When I moved from Kalamazoo to Mt. Vernon time changed again in three and a half week regimens of hyperactivity followed by four days of complete calm. I often forget what day it is, favoring a numbering system “Monday of first week” in place of the date. It’s quiet here, so quiet I lose track of time in the rest of the world. It give new meaning to the Catholic concept of Ordinary Time, the days devoted to regular ritual.

I forgot my natural city rhythms and adjusted to the Block. It’s a breaking process.  I am amazed at the things I can accomplish in 18 days, it is enough time to write a 20 page paper (or as we told, think of them as 20 one-page papers) put in 15-41 hours of work, read a 1000 pages, and learn a new subject. Time moves differently here. Our days are regimented by the bells at King Chapel and the shifting of the sun across the snow. It’s archaic, we share common life and common rule. We go to class together, eat together, study together, and meet for clubs at prescribed times every day. I am no longer compartmentalized as a Tuesday/Thursday commuter student. More than just here I'm mentally present in this quiet place to reflect and meet the self.

We’re losing our quiet places.

I’m deeply saddened to hear about the closing of Sweet Briar and Tennessee Temple University. What place will the liberal arts have in a world where degrees are offered cheaper and faster at for-profits? Where work comes first and school is delegated to two days a week. School becomes about results, about finishing the cheapest, fastest way. We are hyper-competitive for grades, scholarships, and leadership positions that look good on resume. In a culture of competition that goes well beyond the bounds of healthy what value does communal life have?

My final college decision wasn’t based on pedagogy about common life or quiet places, in the end practicality won out, Cornell offered me a tuition rate that could be completely covered by my Pell grant and federal student loans. I would not have to take out private loans and would still receive an overage payment for living costs. They also offered a generous work-study award. This is the best college I got into that I could afford.

It can be argued affordability is part of community. I’m here because of alumni who give to our endowment. I worry though, in a hyper competitive individualistic society how many generations of students will continue to give back to the school? How many will be able to afford to when they are still paying off undergraduate loans a decade from now?

Even with abundant aid the liberal arts are a tough sell. What student, who wants to remain competitive for graduate programs, won’t flinch in the face of papers marked with B’s and C’s when the for-profits offer an easy A? A good education does not guarantee success. Is a liberal education an expensive hobby?  a four year retreat before entering the 24/7 service economy? It’s lovely to loafe on the ped mall and contemplate ourselves as Walt Whitman instructed but $37k is a lot to pay for a good loafe. There's a price for cultivating a rich inner life.   

A few months ago I spoke to my ten-year-old sister on the phone.

“Is college hard?” she asked.

“Yes.” I said.

“I don’t know if I want to go. It’s too hard and too expensive and you can get a good job without it.”

My heart broke audibly over the phone.

“It’s not ‘too hard’, you build up to it. You still have a lot of school left by the time you get to college, you’ll be ready for it.” I said.

I explained some jobs a woman needs a degree for even a two-year degree. I told her we’d work out the cost when the time came and reminded her I won scholarships.

Children don’t come up with these ideas entirely on their own. I’m deeply concerned someone is telling my sister she isn’t college material or that college is priced out for her.  I’m worried she is internalizing the message college isn’t worth it. My sisters are the reason I’m working my way through college. I want them to see what they can accomplish even when every door seems shut, when every path seems hopeless. I want them to go to college to get an education not a degree, to learn to love the solitude scholarship provides, and apply theories that help them connections in the world they never noticed before. I want them to meet their true selves in a quiet place.

But, I worry that when they get here there won’t be any quiet places left, at least not any they can afford. I worry liberal arts education is becoming lost to our nation’s history, an interesting footnote about the world before all schools because for-profit.