31 Notes from August

I use Freddy’s jump rope rhyme as my handwashing song. After every door handle, after every package, after every shopping trip. One, two….

I make a point of smiling and saying hi to everyone I pass

You’re holding your breath and thinking at the characters, no, no, no, don’t do that, don’t go in there…

And if all you did was stand outside and listen, you could almost convince yourself that nothing at all had changed

I fell asleep./ I ate it with succotash. /I jumped in the water

I can see the whole world from ten inches away

A man lies on his left side in a thin patch of riparian woods on an asphalt path, which presses against his ankle, knee, hip, shoulder

Covid-19 quarantine killed my dyed black hair

I had been living in Seattle at the time, so all of these transitions - including my father’s stroke and his initial descent into dementia - occurred and were retold like fairy tales or travelogues

His funeral felt segmented, disjointed, impersonal, rushed. Not like him at all

If I could have just one more conversation with my grandparents

What is promised/ in ceremony

For five hours/ I huddled/ in my car, tethered to the phone

Unnerved by the discomfort and the sight of the sky

And as a mother, I feel so responsible for my family‘s happiness

My most immediate memory of her is of those small, soft hands sprinkling flour

She does not/ hold one thing more/ precious 

But when I arrived at the Ledges, a little boy in a yellow shirt was perched quietly at the top

His black jacket/sparks with tiny flickers of starlight

Some of us love being masked

Standing on edge for months at a time can make you really, really tired

I experience it mostly like a Mack truck in a narrow hallway made of concrete

I packed my lover’s belongings for intergalactic travel . . .I teletransported the bedroom 

The old lady next door chattered nonstop over the fence

The hibiscus and I stay home. /Neither of us wear masks

An orphaned duck paces the block

Everyone else was a black box with white writing on it like intertitles in a silent film

I grab as much of the sun as I can and keep it in my pocket

Everyone is always becoming someone else

There are no sufficient emoji.

We’ve taken a sentence or two or some lines from each blog post in August to create a quilt, a cento, a mini-collage, a fringe of whose story is this? We hope it’s ours, in the same way that holding hands can help (although we can’t do that now).