Out of Step



I just figured out that FP is one of my friends on Face Book. I don't really get how Face Book works entirely, because I am old and foggy. FP, forgive my idiocy. I love you very much!

Odd happenings, spent some time yesterday at work trying to figure out how to best describe a client's illness in a case summary, an eye disease called nystagmus that I never heard of. Then last night I was reading a novel called Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, and a character in the book had nystagmus. Weird coincidence. Then last night I dreamt that the kids and I drove to my brother's house, twice to squirt scented powder all over the front of the house to make it smell nice. I don't talk to my brother really, so what the hell did that mean?

The boy is driving me bonkers, but my friend Lia suggested a book called Yes, Your Teen is Crazy. Thank god for Lia and that book! It is already helping me deal with my teen whose brain seems to have been replaced with a swirl of hormonal mush. Lesson one, do not engage in arguments with a crazy person! I have some work to do.

Mothers, Daughters

Through every night we hate,
preparing the next day's war.
She bangs the door.
Her face laps up my own
despair, the sour brown eyes,
the heavy hair she won't
tie back. She's cruel,
as if my private meanness
found a way to punish us.
We gnaw at each other's
skulls. Give me what's mine.
I'd haul her back, choking
myself in her, herself
in me. There is a book
called poisons on her shelf.
Her room stinks with incense,
animal turds, hamsters
she strokes like silk. They
exercise on the bathroom
floor, and two drop through
the furnace vent. The whole
house smells of the accident,
the hot skins, the small
flesh rotting. Six days
we turn the gas up then
to fry the dead I'd fry
her head if I could until
she cried love, love me!
All she won't let me do.
Her stringy figure in
the windowed room shares
its thin bones with no one.
Only her shadow on the glass
waits like an older sister.
Now she stalks, leans forward,
concentrates merely on getting
from here to there. Her feet
are bare. I hear her breathe
where I can't get in. If I
break through to her, she will
drive nails into my tongue.

Shirley Kaufman