An History Unearthed

My gentleman friend, Siyavash, recently transferred all of our grains and legumes into delicate ceramic urns decorated with Oriental miniatures. Beholding the resulting framework, I realized that the kitchen we share is enchanting. This morning we uncovered today's batch of yogurt and it was bubbling like a sourdough starter. It lives in its jar-home next to the kimchi, the sauerkraut from Frank and Paloma, the sauerreuben, the sour carrots, the kombucha, the kefir, the cheese or paneer in the tongue of his birth. All these things made by our two hands or hands of our beloved friends, and each with its own internal community of living beings making it every day more tasty and more dear to us. What contentment I felt with my own life at that moment!

Siyavash asked me, "What did you eat before you met me?"

"Collard greens, short grain organic brown rice prepard with a ratio of one and one-half cups of water to one cup of rice, dulse, celery, tomatoes, kimchi from Stoddard, a lot of raw garlic."

"And what did you eat when you lived with Abel Santamaria?"

When we share our lives and our home, eat the same thing as our companions every single day for nearly every meal so that even our digestive systems and sweat take on similar characteristics, this makes a great impression on us. There is no more thorough intimacy, because these acts penetrate the orifices beyond the point of any sexual act. They carry shared experience from the outside of the body to the very inside, and, as glucose and then ATP, to every last cell. They are transformed through muscle movement into each action we take as we live our lives. Sometimes it is a bond of romantic love that offers up this solidarity for us to masticate. On occasion, we may discover it as one part of a larger gathering of bodies toiling together, exhausting and rejuvenating themselves according to the same sunny cycle.

"Sriracha, Paul Brothers Roofing Beer, black sesame seeds, ginger chews, baguette and brie with red wine, Cabot cottage cheese, posole, gorditas...cheese sandwiches with tomato raw garlic mayonnaise and nutritional yeast. Anything from the garden. Ice cream."

"Fue de planeta en planeta buscando agua potable"

I feel very homesick when I look at this gorgeous foto of my friend Ralu. She is a top Moldovan fashion designer. Eat your heart out, Chloe Sevigny!!

Fingernails?!?

I would like to strike up a conversation about Juno. Of course Zoe saw it before me, and by the time I saw it she seemed to be having some doubts about why it was so overwhelmingly popular. With my rose-colored glasses on, I naively stated that it was due to the mature and portrayal of youth, motherhood, and marriage, although the portrayal of the abortion clinic annoyed me. However, as the weeks have passed, my feelings toward this film have soured. Some of this is due to its popularity, which is forcing me to face the real impact of its pathetic misinformation about and misrepresentation of abortion, pregnancy, and birth. As many things as there are about this movie that I am truly moved by, I am more deeply disappointed than anything else. After working at the Concord Feminist Health Center, I felt a sting in the theater watching the Juno scenes that took place in "Women Now," but I tried to laugh along...now my heart sinks when I think of all the countless people who have watched this film and dismissed our hard work as some sort of militant dogma, where grey area and compassion are left outside on the welcome mat.

There are important areas of this film's content, but it does not present a particularly insightful depiction of pregnancy or the issues it raises in our lives.

Apply It gently to the love you've lent me

All I have time to leave you with right now is this - a story by Joanna Newsome:

last week our picture window produced a half-word
heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird
we stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake
and pant and labour over every intake

I said a sort of prayer for some rare grace
then thought I ought to take her to a higher place
said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you
and though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"

then in my hot hand
she slumped her sick weight
we tramped through the poison oak
heartbroke and inchoate

the dogs were snapping
you cuffed their collars
while I climbed the tree-house
then how I hollered!
cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two

then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew away
(while, back in the world that moves, often
according to the hoarding of these clues
dogs still run roughly around
little tufts of finch-down)

The Un-ortolan

The other day I made a noise in the house - it was a high-pitched but gutteral cry of some kind. My gentleman friend, Siyavash, happened to be there. He told me I sounded like a baby crow, jujeh-kaelah in his language. "You sound like a jujeh-kaelah. Have you ever seen jujeh-kaelah?" He wrapped me in his arms and I closed my eyes. A sticky brown nest came to mind, held together with moss and saliva, in which several black heads with tiny, gaping-beaked mouths squeaking frantically. This memory was not one from the Uni, but from my childhood. I shivered. Can a child here ever see a nest of jujeh-kaelah? "They are ugly," he said with such tenderness, remembering his own other country. We are bits of floating sea-foam here, between masses of fertile ground.