July 31 2026: “The Girl,” Struggles, “Rafter”

Yes, I am still alive.  I have received some messages from friends and acquaintances who were worried about me because I have been a non-presence for most of this month.  My only answer to the question “Where have you been?” is simply that I needed a break.  So perhaps I should have titled this post “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.”

When I was a kid, the months of June, July, and August were my favorite.  No homework or studying.  A relaxation of strict bedtimes and curfews.  Just endless days and nights moving at the pace of a glacier.  As you get older, I think time has a way of speeding up.  When you’re born, you’re a ball balanced at the top of a hill.  With your first breath, you start rolling, slowly at first, imperceptibly.  As hours, days, weeks, months, and years go by, you pick up speed as the hill becomes steeper and steeper.  I’m so far away from the top of that hill now that it’s barely visible.  Like the top of Mount Everest seen from India.

Marie Howe writes about her childhood . . . 

The Girl

by: Marie Howe

So close to the end of my childbearing life

without children

—if I could remember a day when I was utterly a girl

and not yet a woman—

but I don’t think there was a day like that for me.

When I look at the girl I was, dripping in her bathing suit,

or riding her bike, pumping hard down the newly paved street,

she wears a furtive look—

and even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now

she would never come into my arms

without believing that I wanted something.

Adulting kind of sucks at times.  When you’re childing, you don’t (or shouldn’t) have things like car payments or mortgages or addictions or grief weighing you down.  Perhaps that’s why summer vacations seemed to last for eons when I was a boy—time just stops when your only worry is whether the ice cream truck will come by.  Like Howe, I don’t think my younger self would want anything to do with my older self.  I’ve become the grumpy guy who doesn’t want people walking on his lawn.

The biggish adult thing I’ve been struggling with in the last month or so is sadness.  My sister Sally’s birthday was July 17.  She died on August 19.  Since her passing, during this timeframe every year, I always feel heavy.  Some years, the heaviness descends, and I don’t even realize why I’m feeling low.  Like my body and unconscious mind are aware of it before the rest of me catches up.

I finally realized about four or five days ago that I’m in the midst of this heaviness.  Then everything made sense to me.  As a kid, I didn’t experience a whole lot of real loss.  Some older relatives, sure, but grief stayed away from my immediate family until around 2014, when my brother died.  For a clan as big as mine (nine siblings in total, including myself), we were lucky, I think.  Statistically, we should have experienced  death a lot sooner than that.

But death has been with me for a long time.  I was a strange kid.  From a very young age (like 12 or 13), I’ve had my funeral planned out, from the songs to the eulogies.  I’ve kept that practice up, updating the plans over time.  Maybe that’s why I became a poet?  Just sayin’.

This morning, I’ve been dealing with another adulting thing—a plugged sewer.  I have a couple guys here who are currently cabling the sewer line.  I think they’ve got it unplugged, but now I’m waiting to see how much it’s going to cost me.  That’s the kind of shit (literally) old people deal with all the time, and that’s why I’m going to reiterate:  adulting kind of sucks.  

As a kid, I never had to worry about plugged drains or busted toilets or brake jobs on cars.  In summer, I just threw on shorts, wolfed down breakfast, and headed out the door until sunset.  So much simpler and easier.  I let my mom and dad take care of business while I got into stupid, adolescent mischief.  I never realized how good I had it.

Nowadays, when I open my phone, I run across obituaries of high school classmates on my Facebook feed.  This happened one morning a few days ago.  I found out that a really good guy with whom I graduated passed away after a short cancer battle.  I just sat there, looking at his picture on my phone screen.  It was a moment of adulting colliding with childing.  Remembering us as teenagers, only worried about how to score some beer or weed, versus us as adults, constantly worried about discolored moles and weird abdominal pains.  

That’s what I’ve been dealing with this last month.  Lots existential angst.

Earlier this week, dropping my wife off at work, I encountered a brood of wild turkeys on the side of the road.  I pulled over and watched them for a little while.  A friend once told me that turkeys represent coming abundance and wealth.

Saint Marty would settle for peace of mind and an ice cream sandwich.

Rafter

by: Martin Achatz

What does a flock of turkeys in the wood

portend?  Some say the toms and hens foretell—

all plump and regal, each a plumed god—

a coming fortune, gold and pearls to quell

the hungry tongues of want and jealousy.

You press your starved lips to maple trunk

to slurp its sugared blood so greedily

your belly swells with sweet thanksgiving, drunk

enough to swing a psalm or write a poem

to waddles, claws, and snoods, to oracles

of seed and grub and acorn.  Ancient Rome

had Juno’s peacocks, Neptune’s salt-soaked gulls.

I have a gobbler host in this wild space,

to peck and scratch and preen in feathered grace.

July 21, 2026: “The Game,” Easily Distracted, “Someplace Happy”

Yes, it has been a hot minute since my last post.  I could flood you with excuses, talk about how busy life has been, list everything’s that’s happened.  Independence Day.  Heat waves.  Toxic wildfire smoke.  Performing in Calumet.  Two Republican senators meeting their ends.  (Sorry, Mitch isn’t sucking down margaritas at a cushy rehab facility.)  War crimes against Iran.  Billionaires getting richer.  Teaching my summer class for the university.  The pigeon lady from Home Alone 2 dying.  

I’m easily distracted these days.  I have good intentions to write blog posts, new poems, a novella.  Make a dent in the stack of books I want to read.  Finish art projects.  Grade student papers.  Edit my new poetry manuscript.  So many plans, so little time.  

Marie Howe writes about childhood games . . .

The Game

by: Marie Howe

And on certain nights,

maybe once or twice a year,

I’d carry the baby down

and all the kids would come

all nine of us together,

and we’d build a town in the basement

from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.

And some lived under the pool table

or in the bathroom or the boiler room

or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,

and you could be a man or a woman 

a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around

like a day in the village until

one of us turned off the lights, switch

by switch, and slowly it became night

and the people slept.

Our parents were upstairs with company or

not fighting, and one of us—it was usually

a boy—became the Town Crier,

and he walked around our little sleeping

population and tolled the hours with his voice,

and this was the game.

Nine o’clock and all is well, he’d say,

walking like a constable we must have seen

in a movie.  And what we called an hour passed.

Ten o’clock and all is well.

And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep

or a grown up baby cried and was comforted.

Eleven o’clock and all is well.

Twelve o’clock.  One o’clock.  Two o’clock . . . 

and it went on like that through the night we made up

until we could pretend it was morning.

This poem has so much truth in it.  As kids, we dream of growing up—all those freedoms of adulthood.  As adults, we dream of times gone by—childhoods filled with water balloon fights and school crushes and eternal summer vacations.  The grass is always greener in someone else’s backyard.  Younger people don’t get this until they become older people.  (How many times have I heard young people in my life, after working their first full-time job, saying to me after a couple of weeks, “Man, being an adult sucks!”?)

Yes, human beings rarely enjoy the present.  We look ahead all the time.  Oh, if I can just finish this poem, I’ll be happy!  Oh, I can’t wait for my vacation in six months!  Oh, I live for weekends!  Oh, I’m going to start enjoying life once I retire!  It seems like the future is always better and brighter.  

On the flip side, adults always look back wistfully on their childhoods.  There’s a reason why books like Little House on the Prairie and movies like The Breakfast Club and A Christmas Story are so popular.  They tap into that current of nostalgia that runs through all our veins.  True or not, we believe things were simpler and easier in the past.

My mother, in the last years of her life, lived in the past.  Her eyesight was bad.  Her hearing wasn’t much better.  She couldn’t remember who I was sometimes, and other times she would tell me stories about her girlhood in Detroit.  After my father died, she frequently asked about his whereabouts.  If we reminded her that Dad had died, her face crumpled with confusion and sadness as she experienced his loss anew.  The past became Mom’s happy place, where grief didn’t exist and joy was just a trip to Dairy Queen away.

Of course, that’s all bullshit.  There was still racism and misogyny and homophobia and Ronald Reagan in the past.  And I think we (current residents of the United States) can vouch for that fact that the future holds no promises of sunshine or low gas prices or peace. All we really have is the present, in all its current fucked-upness.  Worrying about tomorrow is about as useful as a wildfire smoke tariff on Canada..  

Here are things I celebrate about today:  blue sky, dinner and drinks with friends, chocolate, a puppy kiss, and warm pajamas.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about his mother for tonight , , ,

Someplace Happy

by: Martin Achatz

after she lost    her         husband          she didn’t

     remember         kept asking

when he was coming    home    accused him

of staying out         late        drinking with his pals

     from the Elks club    or    even worse

holing up at hunting camp         while she

slaved at home         took care of their nine kids

     they are    all grown     now        two dead

one with Down’s syndrome & Alzheimer’s

why would         you draw someone         back from

     someplace happy        with all her loves

still around        and she can still         remember

how to make          the good         tapioca from the pearls

     without having to           con         sult         the box

why    why    why    why    would you           want

to lure Dorothy back         from Oz         or

     Max back         from           the wild rum         pus

with all         the wild things         isn’t it bet    ter

if she just         keeps         wearing         those ruby      shoes

    eating emer    ald macarons         know         ing

Auntie Em is          still         there         wait         ing for           her