MAUREEN SEATON and Denise Duhamel, with art by Chloe Koons, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic
How to Get Away
Last night there was so much rain and wind, I had trouble sleeping. Hurricane season officially begins two weeks from today, but weather patterns are changing. I kept waking up and checking where the floor meets my sliders. Sure enough, at 4 pm, a puddle the size of a saucer. I wiped up the water, too upset to go back to sleep. Then I watched the finale of How to Get Away With Murder, which I’d taped. I love Viola Davis, who is from RI like me. Her character Annalise had bigger problems than I do. I finally went to bed, thinking I should have taken a picture of the rainwater as evidence—but there would be no trial, only a wet towel. When I had the new windows installed last year, Scott said, “I guarantee they won’t break if they’re hit by a coconut. Hurricane class will crack, but never shatter.” When I asked about water intrusion, he said, “No one can promise you that. And if they do, they’re lying.”
Snakes of Floridada
It’s so weird to not be personally worrying about hurricane season. Colorado’s as far from the Atlantic as I’ve ever been. It’s not like we don’t flood here or burst into flames or get buried in snow, and there’s this strange pollution thing over the mountains—what is that?—and once in a while a little wind. Anyway, I’ve been unpacking boxes from Florida and here’s something I found in an old journal, c. 2005 (big hurricane season): I swear I love snakes, but my neighbor is afraid of the twenty foot pythons in the Everglades. He is a drunk but he is not a liar. He says they will soon rule the world.
Swimming Upward
This past fall a student told me about a python coming out of someone’s Florida toilet and biting him! I must have black-boxed it, shut the lid on it, so to speak. It sounds like a story from The National Enquirer, but also a story that feeds into my fears. When I Google it now, it is not only true, but it’s also happened more than once! In May of 2019, a Coral Springs man lifted the seat and a 4-foot snake bit him on the arm. In Australia, a woman was bitten on her behind in the middle of the night. Imagine? It’s happening all over the world—North Carolina, Thailand, India, England, and New York City (from a toilet in an apartment on the 19thfloor.) Tamar El-Ghobashy of The Wall Street Journal explains, “Snakes are good swimmers who can hold their breath for a long time, and are well capable of swimming upward and squeezing through tight spaces if needed.”
Radiowaves and Gamma Rays
The only four-syllable word I could find that rhymes with snake is radiopaque, the term for any material that inhibits the passage of X-rays and gamma rays. One example of a radiopaque substance would be human bone, which appears white or gray on an X-ray, although the last time I went for an X-ray, my bones were neither white nor gray but teal blue, the color that best matches my hair, which is a light copper chestnut. You might also come across the word radiopaque at your local airport security if, for example, you wrapped your egg salad sandwich in aluminum foil (radiopaque) instead of plastic wrap (radiolucent). Personally, I think the word radiopaque should be spelled radio-opaque, since its opposite is radiolucent. See what I mean? I’d like to know who makes up these words. The next time I go for X-rays I might be wearing my new wig, “Rubies At Night.” Then we’ll see what color my bones are.
Glowstyk
Radiopaque sounds like a rave band opening up for Praga Khan, Blümchen, or Glowstyk. I don’t know really what any of these bands sound like, but I remember when a student referenced Glowstyk in a poem and I was quite sure (though I was wrong!) that she was writing about those glow-in-the-dark necklaces people used to sell from kiosks on the broadwalk. I was sure her use of Glowstyk’s sound was an interesting example of synesthesia. The next year a student referenced the band Sublime and I asked—Why is this capitalized? Why isn’t this an imagine instead? I couldn’t use my senses to hear Sublime the way the rest of the class could. This morning I am reading that chameleon bones glow an eerie blue under ultraviolet light. Our human bones might glow too, but our skin and muscles cover them up. Chameleon bones don’t change color. It’s just that bony outgrowths along their skeletons sit just beneath the skin, which is thin enough for the glow to shine through. Under that same UV light, scorpions glow bright green.
A Gender Story
The only time I ever saw a scorpion I was walking down Surf Road not a mile from home. It was a major moment for me, as I’d been wondering my entire life what it would be like to come face to face with a real scorpion. I felt the same way about sharks, tidal waves, rabies, lockjaw, polio, rapists, volcanoes, and quicksand: things every American girl should be on the lookout for. I love that chameleon bones don’t change color under UV light and that scorpions glow green. I love the name Glowstyk for a band. This morning I sat up in bed and didn’t fear a goddam thing.
Martha Stewart
In Parasite, my favorite movie of 2019, several times the character Ki-woo says, “This is so metaphorical.” Today everything seems like a metaphor. The woman in Maryland who found a live scorpion in her bag of spinach from a Giant grocery store. Poop in the pork because the conveyor belt at the meat packing plant is going too fast. Is my love of bacon finally coming to an end? What about my spinach and bacon salads? Martha Stewart says to make a hot dressing with the bacon to delightfully wilt the spinach on contact.
Blah, blah, blah—metaphors
—Jack Nicholson (a Taurus), from The Bucket List
When I first started teaching poetry writing, it was to a handful of visual artists who were a lot like kids, kids on a brave mission, as none in the group had ever written a poem. So I found Kenneth Koch (a Pisces), used his book, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, Teaching Children to Write Poetry, and started their experience with metaphors, which Koch simply calls comparisons. Here is my (a Libra’s) current favorite metaphor: “He’s mean as a motherfucker. He’s Satan with a heart.” (Lori Anderson, a Leo). P.S. If anyone is wondering why the zodiac showed up in this short segment of “What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic,” I don’t blame you. I was wondering that myself.
Astrology for Beginners Beginning Again
I wish I knew a little more about the zodiac! I was talking to my niece Athena today. She is 27, living in Texas, and is unsure what to do next in her life—nurse, teacher, social worker, lawyer. I told her that her Saturn was returning and a big change was coming. When we hung up I googled around to send her some websites. And, low and behold, my second Saturn Return is happening right now—between March and December of 2020. How lucky am I to live to have a second chance at something transformative, although I know Saturn Returning can also mean loss and death. Do you know any good Zoom Astrologists?
Astrology for Zombies
How about Luke Dani Blue at Seagoat Astrology? They’re giving free pandemic readings and I bet they would love to take a look at the chart of someone in her second Saturn Return. Awesome and terrifying at the same time! My first Saturn returned to smash a marriage to bits then give me a really cool life without gin. My second Saturn Return began with Hurricane Wilma and progressed through a couple of years you may remember as deadly or death-defying, depending on poetic point of view. Now Sebby has burst into my room with his newly constructed Legos Minecraft Zombie Cave. He’s lego-shooting at a zombie and shouting Mwa ha ha—just like a real villain.
Game
When he was six, Ben used to love to take me to jail. I’d ask for my lawyer and he said, Wait in here, putting me in his bedroom and shutting the door. I’d hear him ask his brothers and cousins if they wanted to be my lawyer, but mostly they ignored him. Ben was the oldest of the bunch and didn’t know what a lawyer was. The other little kids didn’t either. Once in a while a toddler would take pity on me and say, I’ll be the lawyer, and take my big hand in his little hand and lead me out of the room. But she broke the law! Ben would say. She broke the law! Ben is nine now, still obsessed with fairness. I will be 59 next month. When my first Saturn returned, I sued my New York City slumlord and won. I used the money to pay off my student loans. I felt like the winner in a game show. Now I feel like it’s all a game. Now I have so much to lose.
Just a Few
Things I stand to lose: owls, real and fake; the color turquoise (is this a lesbian color? I heard it is!); an entire set of Le Pens; fish tacos with mango; mango mango mango; the drive down 25 to Albuquerque; crying when I cross the border into New Mexico; feeling enchanted; juniper, pricklypear, roadrunners, Sandias; the drive up 25 to Boulder; stopping at the park by the Safeway in Trinidad to walk my dog; my dog; the Sangre de Cristos, the Rockies, the Flatirons; snow (angels), heavy snow, light snow; lots of snow; aspens, catalpas, lilacs; MacIntosh Lake, eagles, Longs’ Peak, Twin Sisters; White Pelicans in Colorado (migrating); Brown Pelicans in Florida (enjoying the sea); Miami; mango; the sea. The sea.
A discussion on What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic:
Denise Duhamel: I know we wrote the poem “What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic” in May of 2020 because I booked an appointment with poet and astrologer Luke Dani Blue on May 18, 2020, the day after you suggested them in your entry. It seems quaint to me that I was already exasperated living through Covid and it was only the second month of it. We had already written a piece called “Ten Days in March (This Different Life)” and I had naively hoped that was that and we would soon move on. “What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic” was only two months in—and here we are two years later, still in it.
Maureen Seaton: I love that we put Luke Dani Blue in our poem, Denise. Right? Poems should contain more advertisements for poets. “Plugs for Poets!” I remember we were already worn out from the pandemic after collaborating about it every day for two solid months. We’d gone back and forth on emails daily almost from the beginning (in the US, at least). So we came up with the idea of a breather and “What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic” was conceived. And it was so much fun! I love following your train of thought, the way you surprise me—you always have, right from the beginning—when was that?—thirty years ago?
DD: Yes, at least 30 years! Remember when we wrote “Ecofeminism in the Year 2000”? We wrote it in 1990 when the year 2000 seemed so far away. I can’t believe we were so bold to embrace ecofeminism before we even read the theory. I loved following your train of thought too…and am bowing once again to your superb editing skills. I found the original version of “What We Write about When We Don’t Write about the Pandemic” which included six more entries which you wisely (and deftly) cut. We had gone on to write about the Raymond Carver story from which we lifted our title, physics, math, and identity theft. And while rereading those entries was a blast (from our past) they didn’t gel with the rest of the poem.
MS: I wonder that I got rid of any of it, considering the theme of the piece was no theme! Maybe I thought it was too long? Poets do have the annoying/amazing habit of compression. The best part of this prose poem, in addition to its NOT being about the pandemic, was that we sent it to Chloe Koons (a young visual artist and also my niece) to have fun with illustrations, and she did a great job. Don’t you wish all poems could be illustrated, Denise? Or accompanied by music? Or danced to? I was so happy when Ocean State Review took Chloe’s drawings too. Hooray!
DD: Yes! I’ve always wanted to write a poem you could dance to! Maybe that could be our next project? A very long time ago (1988 maybe?) a videographer made a “poetry video” for one of my poems. It looked like a music video—very popular back in the day when you had to watch MTV to wait to see a video for your favorite song. I have it on VHS tape somewhere….But I digress. You were right to streamline our poem, Maureen. When I re-read my section about Raymond Carver especially I may have gone off the rails.
MS: So we raced into collaboration in March, 2020. Just days into the pandemic we were sending lines back and forth and basically holding onto each other’s words for dear life. What a gift. And there are a lot more poets collaborating now than thirty years ago. Getting published too, although a poem by two still scares some readers or just kind of messes with the mind a little. I think that’s why I like this going back and forth with you, Denise, creating conversation, the way we pick up on each other’s words and mirror them back. So let’s write a poem to dance to! We can consult Terpsichore, the muse of both dancing and lyric poetry. A three-way collaboration! What could be better than that?
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four
collections, the most recent of which is Caprice (Collaborations:
Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015).
Chloe Koons is a young artist from Glen Carbon, Illinois, whose
passions include family, nature, tennis, creativity, and hands-on
stuff. This is her first publication. Find her @c.koons.
