Mission Hill Morning

Five AM, I wake to screams—

the neighbor's house bursting from within.

The fire reaching upwards and out,

as orange flames do at such an hour

against fresh eyes.

The sky, billowing black above,

that darkness of smoke rushing towards

the morning light.

Meanwhile, my eyes meet down left of the scene.

Downtown, a gold building that the sun can't resist,

is ablaze too,

the top half of the high rise flaring yellow.

The two structures conversing in light,

one true in its burning.

The city, begging to meet the day.

Written by Alexandra Ustach

The Very Old by Ted Kooser

The very old are forever
hurting themselves,

burning their fingers
on skillets, falling

loosely as trees
and breaking their hips

with muffled explosions of bone.
Down the block

they are wheeled in
out of our sight

for years at a time.
To make conversation,

the neighbors ask
if they are still alive.

Then, early one morning,
through our kitchen windows

we see them again,
first one and then another,

out in their gardens
on crutches and canes,

perennial,
checking their gauges for rain.

Madea's Wisdom

"Some people come into your life for a lifetime, some come for a season; you got to know which is which. And you're gonna always mess up when you mix those seasonal people up with lifetime expectations."

an excerpt from Pat Conroy's Beach Music

"But it was her figure that drew men to her, those surprising curves that make words like 'voluptuous' explode on the tongue with the sweetness of tropical fruit. I have always suspected that my father married the shape of a woman and had not a clue about the nature of that woman herself."

Ted Kooser's "A Room in the Past"

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill
with a morning light so bright
you can’t see beyond its windows
into the afternoon. A kitchen
falling through time with its things
in their places, the dishes jingling
up in the cupboard, the bucket
of drinking water rippled as if
a truck had just gone past, but that truck
was thirty years. No one’s at home
in this room. Its counter is wiped,
and the dishrag hangs from its nail,
a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,
blue aprons of rain, my grandmother
moved through this life like a ghost,
and when she had finished her years,
she put them all back in their places,
and wiped out the sink, turning her back
on the rest of us, forever.

end of the essay "Homeless" by Anna Quindlen

"This is a difficult problem, and some wise and compassionate people are working hard at it. But in the main I think we work around it, just as we walk around it when it is lying on the sidewalk or sitting in the bus terminal- the problem, that is. It has been customary to take people’s pain and lessen our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human beings. We turn an adjective into a noun; the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box or the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.

Sometimes I think we would be better off if we forgot about the broad strokes and concentrated on the details. Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang it on. They are not homeless. They are people who have no homes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything. "

the opening to Scott Sanders' essay "Under the Influence"

My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food- compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and will continue so long as memory holds.

found in The Art of the Personal Essay p734

part of Emily Prager's "Our Barbies, Ourselves"

“On the other hand, you could say that Barbie, in feminist terms, is definitely her own person. With her condos and fashion plazas and pools and beauty salons, she is definitely a liberated woman, a gal on the move. And she has always been sexual, even totemic. Before Barbie, American dolls were flat-footed and breastless, and ineffably dignified. They were created in the image of little girls or babies. Madame Alexander was the queen of doll makers in the ‘50s, and her dollies looked like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. They represented the kind of girls who looked perfect in jodhpurs, whose hair was never out of place, who grew up to be Jackie Kennedy- before she married Onassis. Her dolls’ boyfriends were figments of the imagination, figments with large portfolios and three-piece suits and presidential aspirations, figments who could keep dolly in the style to which little girls of the ‘50s were programmed to become accustomed, a style that spasmed with the ‘60s, and the appearance of Barbie. And perhaps what accounts for Barbie’s vast popularity is that she was also a ‘60s woman: into free love and fun colors, anti-class, and possessed of a real, molded boyfriend. Ken, with whom she could chant a mantra.

But there were problems with Ken. I always felt weird about him. He had no genitals, and even at age ten, I found that ominous. I mean, here was Barbie with these humongous breasts, and that was O.K. with the toy company. And then, there was Ken with that truncated, unidentifiable lump at his groin. I sensed injustice at work. Why, I wondered, was Barbie designed with such obvious sexual equipment and Ken not? Why was his treated as if it were more mysterious than hers? Did the fact that it was treated as such indicate that somehow his equipment, his essential maleness, was considered more powerful than hers, more worthy of concealment? And if the issue in the mind of the toy company was obscenity and its possible damage to children, I still object. How do they think I felt, knowing that no matter how many water beds they slept in, or hot tubs they romped in, or swimming pools they lounged by under the stars, Barbie and Ken could never make love? No matter how much sexuality Barbie possessed, she would never turn Ken on. He would be forever withholding, forever detached. There was a loneliness about Barbie’s situation that was always disturbing. And twenty-five years later, movies and videos are still filled with topless women and covered men. As if we’re all trapped in Barbie’s world and can never escape.”

found in 40 Model Essays: A Portable Anthology p128-130

Making Things Right

For My Father

By, Barbara Bloom

Driving through the apple orchards
heavy with fruit,

I realize I have let the anniversary of your death
slip by-ten years already, or is it eleven?
It's a gray morning, and the clouds press down,
obscuring the sun.


I wonder if you knew

when you had to be helped on with your shoes

for the ride to the hospital

that you would never again
stroke your cat
or walk into your lab room
with its walls lined with antique instruments and books.



What I remember most from that time

is standing by your bed

as you grew smaller and smaller,
less and less of you

who had so frightened me as a child,
and looking down at you

lying there quietly

when it was too late to talk.

I just held your hand 

and told you I loved you.

I don't know what you heard 

or what you knew,
but those words were all that was left
that could matter
before you leapt off
from your bed

in that tiny white room
into something huge.

Practicing, by Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off- maybe six or eight girls- and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair…and we grew up and hardly mentioned who
the first kiss really was- a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we made ourselves stop.