radiantfracture | today's writing

I was actually reasonably well-rested for 6:30 poetry writing this morning.

I struggle when the timed writings are very short. I am trying to use that constraint to go right to the immediate. This has some not wholly reliable success.

I am learning from the others how to write from life. For a long time, I thought I would never do it. But sometimes there isn't time to do anything else. You have to draw on memory or there would be no words at all.

From today's writing:

When they called without warning to let me say goodbye to my grandmother, who would not die for some months or maybe a year, a child’s voice rushed out of my chapped mouth like a cartoon snowstorm: you were such a good grandmother.

We were both very put off by this. She was not a good grandmother. I was not a good grandchild. But even this late something in me would have liked to be caught and held in its clumsiness, its shapelessness, to be hugged into a human form.

I think I’d better go dear she said. Who wouldn’t.

{rf}