For Jan

Originally published on April 6, 2014 in The Michigan Daily

Modeled off of the essay “Interstellar” by Rebecca McClanahan.

To be the daughter of a beautiful, older woman is to sit down in the memory of your childhood attic, your fingers running question marks around the edges of an old photograph. The lady in the picture stretches her arms into third position, neck arched with a grace you’ve never experienced (you with your stout soccer thighs and penchant for the hunch).

Not that you’ve ever tried to stand any differently. When she signs you up for ballet class you beg to be relieved of the aching pain of toe touches and pas de bourrées. You hate her for forcing you to leave the quiet wonder of the backyard, where you have been painstakingly constructing homes for ice fairies out of icicles and thumbprints in the snow.

You’ll call her fat and ugly when you fight, tell her that you don’t love her, but let her fold you into her arms when you cry. Her softness, the very thing that makes you embarrassed when she picks you up from school, is what comforts you, what lulls your shaking body into a slumber, head like a warm stone against the skin-smooth cradle of her breasts.

Your mom struggles to draw an audience to her shows. This isn’t a town for modern dance. You are dragged to all her rehearsals like a suitcase full of books, never paying much attention to the worry and the pride in her face when she sees her work fall into the bodies of the young — recent college graduates and talented immigrants from Taiwan, the Philippines and Cuba. You never imagine that she once was the one on the stage; spinning, rising and collapsing like a dandelion floret released on a breath of Chicago wind.

The pictures in the attic hint at that story, though it will take you a decade to believe it. In them she’s as young and beautiful as a babysitter, a news anchor, an old-timey movie star. Sometimes she wears strange and wonderful costumes: long nails and a flowered headdress or a blue veil and jeweled leotard. You find one picture of her smoking on a train, lips half-parted and eyes unsmiling, fixed on a phantom photographer (another man? It couldn’t be your father).

She never smokes now, just half a Corona or ice-spiked glass of wine with dinner. When did she become so boring? you wonder. You never pause to consider that you might have been the reason, that it was you who tore the hole in your mother’s beauty and let the small dignities escape, the wrinkles spread, the air deflate. You tell her you think her dancing is weird. You don’t bring many friends to her shows, don’t hand out the flyers she gives you at school. They settle at the bottom of trashcans heavier than the guilt you brush off when she asks you about them later. Yeah, a couple people said they might go.

Her talent survives your betrayal. More than 15 years later, you watch her smile and wave to the audience from under the blinding lights of the stage, thanking you and your father for always being there, always supporting her. She has taken her company across the country and beyond its borders: Mexico, Cuba and maybe Germany in the next couple years. Her body of work is larger and older than you, her achievements greater and begotten with more sacrifice than you can ever imagine, more than you yourself may ever accomplish. At the age of 62 she still radiates an almost elvish beauty — eyes the blue of Superior and cheekbones high and cut from the ore of Iron River. She is bottle blonde, but it could be natural, she could be much younger, how did you not see it until now?

The woman in the pictures still dances in time with an unheard music, still one-two-three’s and plucks the hearts out of the chests of anyone who dares to watch. You want to drag the whole world to her shows, want to sit the President down and pop in a VHS tape of her spinning, spinning, spinning — all the while holding you, protecting you from yourself.

America

Originally published on April 20, 2014 in The Michigan Daily.

Based off the song “America” by Simon and Garfunkel.

The beautiful, the free. Closeted in cornfields, hidden by highways and shards of billboards, our nation glows, blinding planes and passing stars. We sleep in its beds of down and dirt while quiet monstrosities protect us from the elements; air conditioners drip cool on the basement floor, the baby sings in strange treble tones. Acid rain on our tongues, explosions under our eyelids, sutures in our logic. Nobody can touch us, nobody can teach us, our feelers are everywhere: creeping, knowing.

Everybody in America loves Raymond, soft rock, Chinese take-out. No one likes cheap talk. Nobody likes waiting. Silence is rust-colored plastic wrap. We talk until our voices sputter and die on the two-lane blacktop, we rest all other thoughts out to dry in the cyber breeze. Senile old women complain about Applebee’s entrees but we know better, there are bigger problems to face, what’s the Dollar Menu looking like nowadays?

It took me four days to hitchhike to Saginaw, but I was determined to get there because I had to get to my friend's drag show. I’ve got some real estate here in my bag: some Monopoly pieces, some memories to forget. Riding off into the horizon, John Wayne realizes he left his charger at home. Who knew it was this easy to fall so far so fast?

Violence in video games makes our children want to hit each other with Glock nines, hentai in adolescence makes nerds out of our future leaders, Ciroc makes beasts out of scared boys. Poetry is found in dark corners beside the highway, those forgotten places known only as tin hammocks for gas station clerks.

From sea to shining indoor swimming pool, the Dream is everywhere, the Waffle Taco has arrived. Paul Blart Mall Cop wins the electoral college. In his inaugural speech he brings the audience to its knees: four score and seven years ago our WiFi connection was bad, our corn syrup grew wild, our native population threw up smoke signals not even Watson’s logarithms could make sense of. Electronic Dance Music didn’t exist, there were not yet any sick womps or faces rolling with furry inertia across the lonesome prairie. We used candles to make our light shows. There were no music videos, no spring breaks, no parachute pants. Democracy was vibrant and men tickled one another with bayonets and knew no Queen Bey.

The embers of the last dying American Spirits illuminate our path, forlorn wanderers counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike. In the kitchens of local haunts, accents fly with broken wings over surfaces of plates dirty with Cholula hot sauce. Tie-dye t-shirts with the spit of different berries and bleaches clothe our greatest cities: De Moines, Paris, Texas, Palo Alto. What is a gabardine suit? Do they sell them at Marshalls? Hot Topic haunts twenty-somethings’ closets, providing tube tops that leave sagging midriffs open to the setting sun, their wearers are “Daddy’s Little Nightmare.”

Michigan seems like a dream to me now. Out the rear window of a dirty house filled with the sweat of men, I see its trees, nature’s dinosaurs. When rain soaks through the soil it is surprised to find that roots and branches are mirror images of one another; reflections on blurry puddles. Looking out through the glass behind the back seat I see fields fly by and turn into blurry moonscapes of soy and crushed cans. I love this place, I never want to leave. I want it to keep turning me on myself, selling me a troubling mystery I can never crack, not even with the help of Detective Stabler or the Hardy Boys. I like it better this way, I like the assuredness of the daily news that features failing celebrity skin and the clash of civilizations in the same breath. I like not knowing who I am or where I need to be.

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together. Our ecstasy will become numbing. We’ll think they’ve turned the camera off. Our smiles will fade. We’ll stare out in different directions.

I’ll say, “I’m lost,” though I know you can’t hear me.