Prayer by Marie Howe

Someone or something is leaning close to me now
trying to tell me the one true story of my life:

one note,
low as a bass drum, beaten over and over:

It’s beginning summer,
and the man I love has forgotten my smell

the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter
when he picked me up

and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down,
among the scattered daffodils on the dining room table.

And Jane is dead,
and I want to go where she went,
where my brother went,

and whoever it is that whispered to me

when I was a child in my father’s bed is come back now:
and I can’t stop hearing
This is the way it is,
the way it always was and will be

—beaten over and over—panicking in street comers,
or crouched in the back of taxicabs,

afraid I’ll cry out in jammed traffic, and no one will know me
or know where to bring me

There it is, I almost remember,
another story:

It runs along this one like a brook beside a train.
The sparrow knows it, the grass rises with it.

The wind moves through the highest tree branches without
seeming to hurt them.

Tell me.
Who was I when I used to call your name?

[Reprinted from What the Living Do (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999)]

the magic erasers; party of (?)

Jenny is here. I am so happy.
I cannot even express my excitement.
I will be posting pictures of everything soon enough.
The only bad part, the city we are in has these terrible pro-life billboards everywhere and they make the people cringe when we see them.
Adam and Eve surprised me when I arrived with a bicycle that they picked up from the thrift store before I got here and it is beautiful. Jenny brought goodies one of which is an amazing quilt for my room at school with sheep all over it. I slept on the top bunk last night snuggled underneath it. She also brought other wonderful treasures like a Lloyd suitcase, I mean it is so beautiful, the magical hunk of kitty cat goodness painted on to a suitcase. What more could a girl ask for?
I am really glad I am here and my brain is having a hard time sorting things out so that I can somehow write about what good times I am having but this is so difficult because in my brain there is so much happening and we are overwhelmed with all things oriented from "home" and at the same time there is so much happening here that is good like Jenny and I painting a mural for the coffee house which is really difficult because a.) when you stick two dissociative people in a room with a big white wall and say "draw", you should already know it is going to be messy but when b.) the owners of the wall happen to be two people who are incredibly beautiful people with an idea about what the wall should end up being, it makes things messier.
So after much distress and pencil scribbling Jenny and I came up with a plan, stick to all things garden-related (because a French Impressionist painting of two girls in a garden is what Adam and Eve had in mind for the inspiration) and section off a piece of the wall using garden lights and only allow ourselves to draw inside of the section. This is an incredibly brilliant but awareness-provoking experience.
First, there is a bunny on the wall, in the garden next to flowers and while Jenny is resisting her urge to go and draw the intestines on the bunny; I am arguing with her about my need to keep the garden lights a stop sign and traffic light even though I know Adam and Eve will hate my traffic light because it won't make any sense to them and would just look funny and strange and off-key. They came in though, a little after 10pm last night and they seem pleased. I hope they are. Jenny made me erase the stop sign and traffic light and after about an hour of discouragement we found these wonderful devices called Mr.Clean's Magic Erasers.
Please allow us to add that it was when we found the Magic Erasers that everything became all better. On the way home Jenny and I came to a conclusion about these and realized that we really want a huge Magic Eraser for our lives and that is why it was such a mood-lifter when we found them for the dissociative mess we had on the wall. I know that I am not making very much sense because I am simply not thinking clearly about most anything these past few days. I have so much to figure out about my family life (both internal and external), about my education plans, about the play that we've been writing, about how in the world Jenny's going-to-Italy-to-be-with-the-love-of-her-life is going to mess with the systems of thinking, about finding monologues and trying to plan for the Humanities Project and all this jazz and the fourth of the July was yesterday and I was completely reminded of my last fourth of July experience and I was with Jenny then as well and it was beautiful because maybe a day later we were sitting underneath a huge war-monument that read, "FREEDOM IS NOT FREE." We all still feel this way. We hid from fireworks last night and tried not to let them bother us, because we don't want to be horribly emotional or weird or dissociative or PTSD-ed or any of that other stuff that usually accompanies this childhood sexual abuse and rape- aftermath, thing. What a messy messy place. Boy, Oh boy, Mary Poppins, What would we do without faith?

we will write more soon.
love, we the people

PS: The real solution to the painting problem came when someone here said, "I cannot apologize for having all these people living inside of me with different artistic styles, not of which happens to be French Impressionist. I think that will be fine with Adam and Eve."

Before 2AM. No memory.

and we almost ran that red light back there. She tapped her fingers to the music and without pause, slammed her hand, flat, into the power button of the radio, 'ya know," she laughed, "The doctor made a great point, this isn't going to be hard, well not as hard as we think.' I laugh, and know at the same time that it is not funny. "Oh, really?" I ask.

"We have so much rage. Rage is energy.Can you imagine what I could do with this rage? With this rage I could build buildings by myself, I could stay up for months. With this rage, I could burn a whole country."

love, jessieh

{PS: After she saw it she said, "I like the doggy." and I laughed, still not funny.}