Newborn

It’s haphazard and I don’t like it, this way I have, when I’m living alone, of collapsing into self-neglect when it comes to how and what I eat. I know better. Rice cakes broken in half like sacramental wafers and nibbled as I sweep or read. Peanut butter slathered loosely on heels of whole wheat loaf bread. I’m not down to Sunbeam yet but maybe getting there. Lots of coffee. The French press is working overtime. I unwittingly bought a pound of decaf Sumatra the other day and buzzed around organizing my shelves and folding clothes until I happened to notice there was nothing behind the imagined push I felt from the beans. Diet soda, once my sworn enemy, crowds my refrigerator shelves in half-full bottles that I’ll empty and recycle soon. Some days I don’t eat till evening, eschewing the corn dogs and cardboard pizza triangles the school cafeteria offers. Other days I go ahead and dance with the devil and I always regret it: flavorless chicken sandwiches that would make Thich Naht Hanh shudder and throw up his patient hands, wilted huddles of what passes for salad, and the inevitable applesauce. Nowadays I don’t even boil water for oatmeal, much less sit down at my dining room table to eat it slow with raisins and honey like I used to. I deserve some homemade guacamole, an organic spinach salad nurtured with the sweetest flakes of carrot you can think of, and fresh crusty French bread dipped in EVOO. I need some green tea, the kind flavored with rose petals, or maybe some pomegranate juice, pure and expensive. Bring me something clean and wild, something delicate, something strong. Hurry it onto the plate, into my glass, and sit me down in front of it. light me a candle and tell me something about the sky. Hold my hand and break bread with me, and slow me down when I chew too fast. Remind me to hear the way I taste my food and to smell the colors as if they were newborn: fragile, wet, and hooked by the miracle of how to swallow.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

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Tentbuilding

 

This is from 2007. I plan to write something new very soon.

Last night I read something about impermanence and I remembered the time when my mother gave me the kaleidoscope. I was about twenty-two and living temporarily in the downstairs bedroom of my mother’s house. It was a surprise when she handed me a brass cylinder in a soft cobalt blue velvet cloth with a drawstring on one end that tied with a white ribbon. I don’t know where Mom got the scope, and it was apparent to me that she had just acquired it, but I never asked her where it came from. It was midsummer and I was drinking too much. I remember one night I lay awake and watched the foxfire-green pulse of a firefly that had gotten into the house. It was flying intermittently around the room the next morning, and when I went off to work I left my mother a note to warn her that it was there, dormant and flareless against the windowpane. For some reason I was afraid she’d think it was a wasp or a bee and kill it. It seemed so fragile to me, so vulnerable, and its tiny folded wings, black with red stripes at the edges, tightened my throat with their smallness.The kaleidoscope held colors darker and less bright than you might expect: slate, oxblood, cleargold, winesong, deep purple, palest winterblue, hard rust. No cerulean, scarlet, or fuchsia, or kellygreen. Reflective tones. Strong, subtle. I can still see them when I hold the kaleidoscope up to lamplight now and they’re as pure as they were then. The blue cloth encasing the scope is musty and the circle at the end that I hold up to my eye has come loose. All it needs is some super glue but I hesitate to fix it. The circle is spotted with rust and I rather like how its tones of sienna and gray fit into the colorscape of the glass at the other end of the tube. When my mother gave me this kaleidoscope, she told me that change was the only constant and to celebrate that. I like having to hold the loose metal ring against my eye when I hold the kaleidoscope up to the light, a scrap of fallenness gently acknowledged but not negated or rejected. A tag of flow and scatter, of attachment come loose and propped lightly against the grooves of its house of glass and metal. 

©Laura Sorrells 2007

all rights reserved