lycanthropia

And not a moment too soon says I, huddled safely on the sofa beneath the yellow wedding-ring quilt, with mineral water within arm’s reach.

Not that it’s particularly wintry here, or even cold; last night was down to freezing but then today I sat in the sun in the backyard and ate strawberries. So I can’t really complain. It’s just that I have a particular history with February, with its being a terrible month in which terrible things happen to me and/or I do them to myself. Climbing up mountains and falling down them and so forth. So I am grateful to watch another February sliding into the past and leaving me well and sound and mostly totally unscathed.

Pyewacket is blissed out passed out on my lap making typing nearly impossible, or I would say more. And maybe I will say more tomorrow once it is safely March, which is always a good month because my birthday is in it. And the equinox. And the start of spring.

I’ve been watching inane Youtube clips for hours, I won’t even link them because they have made me feel really dumb. But I can’t read for anything, can’t concentrate, I don’t know why. It is maddening. Out of I suppose boredom (which I have always thought was a mild form of anger or irritation) I finally unblocked my ex on Facebook and it was completely uneventful. I don’t feel anything, only a slight but sincere pity, which is condescending of me but that was what I felt tonight. Maybe another time I will feel another kind of something.

And I am waiting, waiting, waiting for the five PhD programs and the one fellowship to contact me. March is also the month of notifications so that is always kind of interesting, after a long winter of waiting, to see where you will be in a few months’ time, what address you will be writing on the boxes and the forms, or if you will be going anywhere at all. I am not even sure I want to go anywhere, but I know I probably should. Otherwise I will stay in this town and always have this physical pull of knowing roughly where he is and what he is doing. When I was in DC for AWP it was wonderful, I felt free and young and like a person again, this was maybe partly because we were walking everywhere and taking the Metro and it feels wonderful to get around on my own physical power, not eternally slumped behind a steering wheel like a drone, and also partly because I had a crush, and yet I think mostly because I was in a city without him in it. I felt so good. I want to feel that free again, in my city. Whichever city it will turn out to be.

My friend Laura sent me a very nice horoscope which promises I will have all kinds of revelations and insights; it says in part,

Your craving to be free is real. The restlessness you’re feeling is not something you want to medicate away, talk yourself out of, or pretend does not exist. It’s not merely spring fever, though that’s a good way to describe your whole life. Rather, what you’re feeling is your soul calling you to wake up to your beauty and the beauty of life….

On the other hand, in slightly dampening news my friend who is exactly one day younger than I am and who is a midwife tells me we will probably start being menopausal at around 45. I thought I had until 50, but clearly I really will be childless now, unless I adopt, which I might do some day if I have any money which I never will. I have hated having periods all my life but now I feel each one is actually, and I know this is so obnoxious you will want to slap me, but I feel each one is singular and precious. I don’t mind them anymore. Sure they hurt but then at least there’s something going on down there (which reminds me of late Texas governor Ann Richards joking about getting frisked by airport security because she was wearing one of those leotards with metal snaps at the crotch).

I drive around with the air conditioner on low, because I am always wearing a sweater and it’s hot in the car, and I listen over and over to Patty Griffin’s album Impossible Dream. I’ve had it for years but it’s like I’ve never heard it before. Songs like “Florida” and “Mother of God” and “Rowing Song” and “Icicles,” songs for which I didn’t much care six years ago, are now so desolate and redolent for me that I get gooseflesh when I hear them, driving along and singing, singing. They are natural songs for me to sing, falling easily in my range, with my sharp rural soprano that matches hers, the voice of those “hill women” with whom CD Wright identifies:

I have no trouble spotting myself: bony but strong as a weed, an abiding refusal to smile or sing; a relentless if not brutal honesty; streaks of the mean, the grotesque in humor. Thomas Hardy’s descriptions of the peasant yeomanry of England…are likewise faithful to my relations: “blond, grey-eyed, slim, with straight mouths, determined chins, independent and hidebound, adaptable to circumstances, free of outside influences, not complacent and don’t fight well unless cornered. Then to the death.”

(That little autobiographical essay of hers was gospel to me at twenty-five.)

Nothing I have to say tonight is as galvanizing as those songs.

I am craving fettuccini alla carbonara pancetta from Giuseppi’s, an unexpectedly amazing ristorante cleverly concealed in yet another mud-colored Arizona strip mall. I would have ordered the pasta with a side dish of deep green grilled rapini and a glass of buttery oaky Chardonnay which is not a wine I usually care for but I liked the taste Beth let me have out of her glass when we went there. I may go tomorrow night, if anyone wants to go with me. To celebrate surviving until another March.

(The cat has moved to my feet and it’s possible to type now.)

(But now I can’t think of anything to say.)

(Which pretty much sums up February.)

isn’t it hard sometimes
isn’t it lonely
how I still hang around here
with nothing to hold me

I have decided the secret to blogging is not to plan and edit every single word I type.

I am in bed clutching a hot water bottle between my thighs, the pain was so bad as I drove to class today that I had to call a friend’s voicemail just to tell another person, someone, anyone: oh, ow, ouch. Then I hung up and hummed and moaned along the highway, wondering if I would pass out. I remembered a little song I used to sing when I was a menarchal girl, dazzled by the output of uterine pain my small body could produce:

pain is but a sensory input
pain merely comes from your nerves
yet when you feel pain
you loudly exclaim
because when you feel pain, it hurts

I like how this patently ridiculous ditty nonetheless tries to contain the dialectic, even though I was thirteen: pain is both a mere excitation of neurons and, also, it hurts like a motherfucker.

Now the pain is back and I laboriously pull off jeans (so much harder to do now that we all wear the skinny kind) and pull on sweatpants and clamber into bed and put the hot water bottle, well, let’s be honest, it’s kind of draped over my crotch at the moment, which is throbbing but not in a good way. It’s hard to breathe when it hurts like this.

But the cat is happy I’m in bed, sitting here purring and washing herself serenely, and I can finally blog about what’s been on my mind for the last twenty-four hours.

(Which is mostly, honestly, my ex-boyfriend with whom I’m still in love.)

But it’s also VIDA. And this whole issue of women’s underrepresentation in literary publishing. Poetry Magazine was plucky enough for a quick head count, and so was The Southern Review, and both journals found that men submit to them more than women. Why, they wondered artlessly, would this be so?

I have a folder full of addressed stamped envelopes and carefully folded poems in my desk, the existence of which offers me several clues as to why this might be so.

First of all, women don’t have as much time and money to submit. And it does take time and money. You need a familiarity with the magazine/book publisher to whom you’re submitting (and that means either access to a good library, or enough income to subscribe to the journal or buy the books). You need postage and you need a computer and a printer. And you need the education, the MFA or PhD or however you acquire it, the familiarity with tradition and conventions and the breaking of them, in order to make your writing any good at all in the first place.

But that’s the cherry on the cupcake, really. Because what you really need, in order to send out stories and poems into the world? is self-confidence. The bomb-proof, Kevlar-coated, unassailable kind, because it will be immediately assailed. You need the confidence to turn around a polite rejection and send new poems to the same magazine immediately, without blanching, without quivering, with a big brassy grin on your face.

Maggie Gyllenhaal encloses her SASE.

And that, I would humbly submit, is what many women understandably don’t have.

A few months ago, I pulled out an old manila folder marked “SUBMISSION” (which always cracks me up, privately, because where is my folder marked “DOMINANCE”?). I had resolved that if my romantic life lay in tattered ruins, I could at least work on improving my shabby professional reputation. Inside this folder I found things which horrified me—kind letters from publishers, handwritten letters with specific suggestions, letters entreating me for more poems at a later date, letters to which I HAD NEVER RESPONSED.

The worst of these, the one that made me feel positively ill, was a handwritten note from Jorie Graham, on Ploughshares stationery, advising me that she had solicited too much work for her guest-edited issue and therefore could not take my poems, but that they were “lovely” and that I should send them “and more like them” to Ploughshares in the spring. The letter is undated, so I don’t know when she sent me this. I don’t even know what poems they were, because I didn’t take note of which ones I’d sent. I hadn’t done as she advised. I don’t even remember receiving the letter. I somehow blocked the whole thing completely from my mind.

Why would someone get a letter like this and never respond? Why would someone hear only the rejection part, and tune out all the acceptance?

(Those questions are rhetorical.)

Next month, at the Exurbia Community College, I will be on a panel for women’s history month. A panel called something like Why I Call Myself a Feminist. We have six minutes apiece to explain why we are feminists. Really I find the whole thing kind of bizarre—the fear of the word, the justifying of it. When, as Ani DiFranco asks, why can’t all decent men and women call themselves feminists?

My ex-boyfriend calls himself a feminist and one of the reasons we got together is that his politics seemed unimpeachable to me. But it turns out that anyone can be impeached. It turns out there are feminists who don’t believe that sex trafficking is the clear result of the market’s insistent demand for something of which there is an unendingly inadequate supply, never enough female flesh for male desire, but merely an area of the economy desperate for legalizing and trade regulations. Like Amsterdam. If I ever hear about Amsterdam again I may throw up in my mouth. (Like these hilarious ladies from Dodie Bellamy‘s blog.)

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll talk about that on the panel, because of the whole involuntary-barfing thing. Instead I’ll probably drone on and on about wage and income disparity and violence against women in their intimate relationships and, yes, professional glass ceilings, like the one in literary publishing. But the truth is that I privately keep thinking that my poems don’t get published because they are, because I am, not good enough. And more truth is, I sometimes think I should have been okay with a more permissive stance on sex work, because sex should be open and free and liberated, and porn and sex work can be/are also beautiful sacred things, and why couldn’t I be down with that, like Annie Sprinkle and Violet Blue and Betty Dodson, etc. etc. (Which is really another blogpost, which I have already written but haven’t had the courage to publish yet. Because it’s half-theoretical and half-personal.)

Anyway you can’t tell the truth to college kids, because it’s too real-time and life-sized and chaotic. You have to tell them something graspable, something to give them hope. You have to be a little bit funny but not too scary. They already think I’m freakish enough for asking them to write “humanity” instead of “mankind” in their papers, and for insisting on calling them “first-years” instead of “freshmen.” We’re in the backwater, here in Arizona. Shocking enough for them that I teach in jeans and sneakers and often go braless.

(Though actually ever since I got a comment on a student evaluation, “Instructor needs to wear a bra!” I always try to remember to put one on before I go teach.)

In other, not unrelated news, I have found the best cosmetics blog in the entire world, Foxy Voxy’s Academic Beauty Collective. My heart fairly swells with admiration for Ms. Voxy and her courage in trying out expensive blushes and eyeshadows, and teaching us how to use all those mysterious cosmetics brushes that come in all those bewildering sizes and shapes. And we can be safely nerdy on her website, and freely admit that we don’t have the foggiest clue as to how to get the eyeliner from its pencil or pan onto one’s lashline. I have read the plays of Shakespeare, but I don’t know how to put on eyeliner! In this as in most things, I blame my mother.

(I’m kidding. My mother tried to teach me, but I paid no attention.)

So, thanks to Ms. Voxy, I have already acquired a fabulous lipstick (Shiseido Natural Red) and an extremely important hair serum called argan oil, which is the only thing ever to smoothe my sun-damaged frizzies. And, in keeping with the rest of this post, we can feel reasonably good (or, well, okay, less awful) about consuming argan oil, because it is purportedly grown and harvested and crushed and extruded and so forth by a collective of Moroccan women!

There’s a moral in all this somewhere but I’m in too much pain to extract it for you.

she wore shiseido red & we drank tea by her side