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.

May 12, 2025: “The Girl,” Authoritarianism, “Joseph McCarthy Remembers Blueberry Muffins”

CONTENT WARNING:  The Sharon Olds poem in this post contains images of sexual violence, rape, and murder.

Sometimes, writers write about things that are difficult.  There are some poems in my journal that will probably never see the light of day until after I’m gone from this realm.  Either their subject matters are too personal, or they contain information about loved ones that I simply can’t share.  

Sharon Olds is pretty fearless in her writing . . . 

The Girl

by: Sharon Olds

They chased her and her friend through the woods

and caught them in a waste clearing, broken

random bracken, a couple of old mattresses,

as if the place had been prepared.

The thin one with straight hair

started raping her best friend,

and the curly one stood above her,

thrust his thumbs back inside her jaws, she was twelve,

stuck his penis in her mouth and throat

faster and faster and faster.

Then the straight-haired one stood up—

they lay like pulled-up roots at his feet,

naked twelve-year-old girls—he said

Now you’re going to know what it’s like

to be shot five times and slaughtered like a pig,

and they switched mattresses,

the blond was raping and stabbing her friend,

the straight-haired one sticking inside her

in one place and then another,

the point of his gun pressed deep into her waist,

she felt a little click in her spine and a 

sting like 7-Up in her head, and then he

pulled the tree-branch across her throat

and everything went dark,

the gym went dark, and her mother’s kitchen,

even the globes of light on the rounded

lips of her mother’s nesting bowls went dark.

When she woke up, she was lying on the cold

copper-smelling earth, the mattress was pulled up

over her like a blanket, she saw

the dead body of her best friend

and she began to run,

she came to the edge of the woods and she stepped

out from the trees, like a wound debriding,

she walked across the field to the tracks

and said to the railway brakeman Please, sir.  Please, sir.

At the trial she had to say everything—

her elder sister helped her with the words—

she had to sit in the room with them

and point to them.  Now she goes to parties

but does not smoke, she is a cheerleader,

she throws her body up in the air

and kicks her legs and comes home and does the dishes

and her homework, she has to work hard in math,

the sky over the roof of her bed

filled with white planets.  Every night

she prays for the soul of her best friend and

then thanks God for life.  She knows

what all of us want never to know

and she does a cartwheel, the splits, she shakes the

shredded pom-poms in her fists.

It’s a traumatic poem, full of ugliness and cruelty.  Yet, there’s also something hopeful in it—the girl survives, brings justice against the attackers.  She doesn’t forget her dead friend, but she’s also full of gratitude for the fact that she survived.  She is alive despite the violence committed against her.

Thank God, most people never have to experience that kind of violence.  However, each day the United States seems to be creeping closer and closer to authoritarianism.  Judges and mayors are being hauled off to jail simply for criticizing President 47’s policies.  (Last time I checked, it’s still legal not to agree with an elected official thanks to this little document called the Constitution.)

Now I’m seeing rumors of President 47 suspending habeas corpus, which guarantees that anyone detained by the government has the right to challenge their confinement in a court of law.  If habeas corpus goes the way of the passenger pigeon, then you/me/anyone can get thrown into prison and left to rot simply for saying something negative about Agent Orange.  For all I know, the FBI already has a file started on me.

Yet, I’m not going to shy away from being critical of a federal government hell-bent on destroying democracy.  Truth is truth, and I will speak it regardless of what kind of MAGA Kool-Aid you may have swallowed.  The truth came out during Watergate, and President Nixon had to resign.  The truth came out during the Army-McCarthy hearings, and Joseph McCarthy ended up being censured by the Senate (and losing most of his political clout).  

Truth is power, and that’s why schools and universities and libraries and museums and journalists are currently under attack in the United States.  An uneducated public is easier to control and manipulate.  Think about it.  Joseph McCarthy had the country believing the Lucille Ball was a communist.  President 47 calls the January 6 insurrectionists “heroes,” and suddenly we’re giving taxpayer money to the family of an insurrectionist who was killed by Capitol Police during the attempted coup.  

The only people who should be afraid of the truth are those who are propagating the lies.  That’s it.  I’m pretty safe, I think, because there’s no way President 47 reads or understands poetry.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight about a not-very-nice guy, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem where a famous person from the past visits you in the present.  What message does s/he bring to you?  What does s/he want to tell you?  Write a series of questions for this person and imagine the person answering them.  Write down everything s/he says.  Use the best answers and lines from this exercise to write a poem about a topic this person brings to mind.  After you complete your draft, research this person and find an actual quote to use as an epigraph or weave into the poem.

Joseph McCarthy Remembers Blueberry Muffins

by: Martin Achatz

“I will not get into a pissing contest with that skunk.”

          — Dwight D. Eisenhower, talking about Joseph McCarthy

You have to love your enemies,

he says, just like Jesus.  He sits

on his front porch, remembers how

skunks jumped in fields when

he pumped bullets into their asses,

how satisfying the smell was

as it settled on him like Hail Marys

after a great confession.  They were

everywhere, in basements, under

porches, behind outhouses, inside

corn cribs.  Sneaky bastards.  His eyes

get all misty as he recalls Old Lady

Schmidt bringing him warm blueberry

muffins one afternoon after he wiped

out a stench of seven from her farm.

She shook my hand, thanked me.

He wags his head, spits.

Christ, the blueberries were big

as horseflies that summer.

November 1: More Time, The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything

Giving another midterm this afternoon, this time to my mythology class.  Frankly, I don’t understand why any of my students stress over my tests.  They seem fairly simple to me.  If a student reads what I assign and listens in class, maybe takes a few notes, he shouldn’t have a problem.  I Love these kind of teaching days.  I don’t have to perform too much, and I can get a lot of other busy work done, as well.

Today, for example, I will administer my midterm.  While my students are taking the midterm, I will be correcting their response papers and journals.  Once the last student finishes the midterm, I will have them write a journal entry about heroes, and then I will start discussing the story of Gilgamesh.  Simple as pecan pie.  For those of you who have never made a pecan pie, it’s pretty doggone simple, like pulling up a zipper.

I’m sort of glad that I scheduled a week like this for myself in the middle of the semester (I gave a midterm yesterday in Good Books, as well).  This time of year, I start to fall behind in almost all my activities—grading, reading, exercising, sleeping, everything but eating.  It makes me think of a TV movie from 1980 titled The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything.  It’s about a guy who inherits from his rich uncle a pocket watch that can stop time.  That’s what I need.  Something that just gives me about twenty more hours in the day to get everything done.

I haven’t thought about that movie for years.  It was one of my favorites when I was a teenager, and even spawned a sequel, I believe.  I wanted to be Robert Hays in that movie.  Now, screw Robert Hays.  I’d be happy for just a couple more hours of sleep, or a day to get some teaching prep done.  I’ve really lowered my standards.

I’ve had more than one person tell me that God never gives you anything that He doesn’t think you can handle.

God must have a pretty high opinion of Saint Marty.

Whatever happened to Robert Hays?