Greener

Jeffery tells me that poetry acceptance letters come when you can’t recall submitting poems.  In February, I entered a chapbook competition run by Finishing Line Press. A couple of months ago, I received a form letter: there were 538 manuscript submissions and unfortunately, mine wasn’t selected for their $1000 prize. Even though I paper my walls in rejection slips, I didn’t bother saving this one.

Then last Friday night, I got an email from the editor at Finishing Line Press announcing that she wants to publish my chapbook. You never really expect such an email. And if you do, you don’t envision yourself reading it while tipsily gnawing on a block of cheese. You expect the moment to have some dignity. But no. After we came home from George’s, I beelined it to the fridge to unwrap a hunk of parmesan I couldn’t be bothered to cut but could be bothered to stuff in my face.

But who cares! I get to publish these poems, at no cost to me, in high-quality saddle-stapled books, with cover art, and author blurbs, and, best of all, a jacket photo. I’ll ask for reader help in picking the appropriate shot (whimsical but sober, earnest but not too severe, no hands-in-pockets, no leather jacket, no Italy, etc.).

Pressrun is typically 500-1000. I’ll need to sell 55 prepublication copies to warrant the full run, so I’ve gone ahead and set up a gmail account for the book:

Greenerchapbook@gmail.com

Cost will be $14 for a chapbook of 25 poems. Greener won’t be released until early next year, but if you’d like to reserve a copy, please email me at the above address. Once I’ve decided on cover art, Finishing Line Press will send out announcement postcards for prepublication sales. Include your mailing address and I’ll make sure you get one! And thanks, in advance, for your support.

Also, just because I have a book doesn’t mean I’ll stop posting from the point of view of a solipsistic stuffed penguin.

Girl, who are you calling solipsistic? Now come here and help me dispose of this creature!

Me at the ear doctor last Tuesday: potential author photo.

Two Turtle Doves

What with Dan in Tanzania, and my impending departure from New York City, I’ve been contemplating absence: a state or period of being away. My friend Brandon sent me a link to Garfield Minus Garfield , a site that reconfigures the original comic strip with the cat erased. What you’re left with is eerily existential. According to its creator, Garfield’s absence shifts the focus from funny to “schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life.”

Yes, life is strange and mysterious. I feel like I’m standing with a rumpled, raised pant leg and a pseudo-silence, a shimmer in the air where just this weekend Dan was but now isn’t. Soon New York will be an invisible paw, too.

I’ve never lived with a boyfriend before, nor have I ever had to fit everything I own into a Honda Civic. I’ve decided to ship books Media Mail, cram essential furniture and clothes into Dan’s car, and toss out the rest. This means I’m not only thinking about the absence of my Safari-Lover (a nickname that might stick) and my dear dear city, but my possessions. The wake of things. Maybe absence implies a hope of return while getting rid of stuff is just loss, plain and simple. It’s absence stripped down to the bare bones of gone.

Because it’s different, really, tossing the tangible. Dan will return in ten days. I’ll visit Brooklyn come Fall. When again will I ever see my desk? Or Bo’s bookcase from Georgia? Do I need a 1995 address book? An unopened jar of honey from my cousin’s wedding four years ago (Our Love is Sweet)? A half-assed seashell collection that somehow includes a puppy’s tooth? Old birthday cards? The movie stub to Maid in Manhattan? What about stuffed animals? Or a leaky hookah? These take up space. So does my bike. Should I sell my pink bike and get a new one? And then there’s the question of my Beta fish, Okiedokey, who’s long been circling his own life like a spent vulture. He can hardly rise to the surface for food anymore. I bought sinking wafers so he wouldn’t have to work so hard at eating. Do I transport Okiedokey 900 miles?

Today is day two of Danzania (hence the turtle doves) and while cleaning out the cabinet under the bathroom sink, I came across a half-used Dove 2-in-1 Moisture Therapy, picked it up, and hovered it over the garbage, not quite able to throw it out, not quite able to box it, either. The second verse to “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was running through my head, and then 2-in-1 became both a metaphor for moving in with someone and a lesson in reducing your shower crap (instead of deliberating over a shampoo and a condition you can just deliberate over one bottle, see!) Dove is still in the bathroom, confusing me.

I feel like a turtle, asked to carry my house on my back, simultaneously liberated and scared. I want to take nothing. Then I really really really want my cumbersome dusty statuette of James Joyce. Right now I’ll settle for this poem.