--NO IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE

                                            Banana Raisin Cookies

Out of the blue, my grandfather wants a banana raisin cookie.  He lets me know by screaming, “I want a banana raisin cookie, goddamn it!”

He’s forgotten his teeth, left them somewhere.  Now he’s gummy, but he sounds like Elmo, his voice gravelly and strangely comical, but also a bit frightening.  He looks like Elmo as well, with his beet-red face and clam shell head wobbling without a neck.

He’s wearing a plaid hunter’s shirt over his desiccated frame.  I’ve only known him brittle, with hatpin bones.  I am eight now, or at least I am eight now looking back on being eight years old.

His wheelchair bounces when he wants something.  The roller wheels squeal in need of oil, but Dad’s not here to squirt WD-40 on them.  I wonder where Dad is, where Mom is, why they made me the sentry.  I am eight.

Then he needs a bath because his diaper is full.  “Change me!  It’s horrible.  I can feel shit leaking down my legs.”

His eyes are soupy brown sprockets, a pair of bees drowned in urine.  In his anger and frustration, he is shrinking, dissipating, taking baby steps backward toward some kind of awful youth he must have had.  He is bones and sags and leaking water.  He is my grandfather and I should love him more than I do.

I check to find his diaper dry, though it smells foul, like a tree with a family of rotting owls stuffed inside its hollow trunk.

“Change me!  Change me!  This is hideous!”

I inspect again but there is no shit.

“Poppy,” I say, “you’re clean for now.”

But he goes on being an angry talking parrot.  Change me!  Change me!

As a distraction, I turn my ears off and keep on examining him, making comparisons.  He has a puppet mouth, a side to side working jaw.  His nostrils are filled with hairy spiders trying to crawl out.  His face skin is a trampoline warped by too much sun and rain.   

Change me!  Change me!  This is horrible!

I have learned how to turn off my ears when necessary and I’ve learned how to make my brain a house with different rooms.  In the attic is where I store the things I never want to see again, but now the attic door opens and I remember the night of my fifth birthday.  Grandfather bought me a locket, gave it to me without anyone else knowing.  Came to my bedroom in utter darkness.  He wasn’t dementia-ed then, or maybe he was.  His breath sounded bear-husky and he smelled like the banana raisin cookies Mom had made.  His hands were rough and hot but after he clasped the locket around my neck, his fingers roamed and turned into ice bones on the rest of my skin, the first time something that cold had touched me there.  

Change me!  Change me!

Now he’s right.  I can smell it, the sharp, awful shit tang of shit.  I don’t want to change him.  I don’t know how.  I’m scared, but he’s bouncing in his chair while the wheels make terrified bird cheeping noises, and I’m imagining the seeping shit running a brown river down his thighs and calves and splatting on the floor tile and it makes me so sick I have to fight off gagging.

I can’t turn my ears off anymore.  I want to slap him even though I’ve never slapped anyone before, let alone an adult.  But he deserves a slap.  More than that.

My arms and legs twitch.  My skin has a forest fire on it, licking hot and fast and furious.  The attic door in my head is open, Grandfather is screaming and he smells like a full toilet that hasn’t ever been flushed.

I make my twitching fingers grab the wheelchair handlebars, intending to do good but ideas pop.  I could lead him out the door and push him down the porch steps and say it was an accident, Grandfather wheeled away by himself.  Better yet, I could shove him down the basement steps which has a lot more stairs.  I could watch him tumble and flail and then afterward, we might be partially even.

But I don’t.  Instead, I push the chair toward the bathroom.  I swing the door open and squeeze his chair in while not looking in the mirror.  I take a breath through my mouth to avoid the smell and say, “Please be quiet, and I will try to do this for you.”

Now Mom is the age Grandfather was when I was six.  We’re sitting on the sofa, just back from the cemetery where we visited graves and headstones, Dad’s and Grandfather’s.  It’s the first time I’ve been in decades.  Going has made me feel like I’m eight again, or like the eight-year-old me is trying to force herself inside the adult me.

Mom says, “I brought a surprise,” and fishes something out of a bag.  “I haven’t made them in so long,” she says.

She takes the cellophane off the plate of banana raisin cookies surgically, as if what’s under the thin clear plastic is made of fragile porcelain.

“These were your grandfather’s favorites.”

When she holds the plate out for me, the familiar sugary-banana smell gets sucked up into my nostrils, heading toward my brain and the door to the attic.  My fingers tremble jaggedly, like tarantula legs.  A sudden wave of nausea kicks in.  I swallow a bitter squirt of hot bile.

“Hey, honey, what’s wrong?”

I want to tell her that I am eight again, that I have lived twenty-five years without being kissed by a man who was not a family member.  There is so much I want to tell her, so I take a bite of cookie and swallow it down hard, choking a little even though the cookie is moist.  I finish the entire cookie and then another and after that it gets easier eating them.  Maybe it’s twenty minutes or less, but when I look down at my lap the plate is empty but for scattered crumbs.

Mother’s eyes slit flat as she grins wide, on the cusp of a laugh.  “Wow.  You’ve either been starving yourself, or you really missed my banana raisin cookies.”

I say, “It’s neither one of those things.”  I say, “It’s this,” and pull the locket out from my purse.  I say, “This is what I need to talk to you about.”

--IF THERE WAS A BETTER WORD THAN      AMAZING,
    I WOULD USE IT

Writers are people, too.  But then so are felons, you might say.

Writers are human and awkward and not at all transparent, though some are, of course.

Sometimes we (writers) like to think we have thick, alligator suitcase skin, a carapace of sorts, because, well, that’s quite necessary for survival in a “field” like ours where rejection is as common as Seattle rain.

But the truth is, our skin is, more often than not, thinner than the shrillest French crepe.  We are easily embarrassed.  We’re sensitive and moody and self-conscious, even when we shouldn’t be, even if, say, we find ourselves surrounded by a brood of 10,000 like-minded creatures. 

Encapsulated with so many other writers should make us feel emboldened, somewhat spiritual even.  Instead we roam the convention center and hotel lobbies like stilted zombies, eyes usually averted.  We check our phones in order to avoid conversation.  We hold our phone to our face and fake-laugh out loud so someone else passing by might think we have friends who are funny.

And yet, alone together, in a small cluster, maybe two steps from loopy, there’s a crack of lightning.  A seam opens up and we allow the unfiltered light to hit us.  We strip off our protective clothing and actually let our fucking hair down, meaning we allow ourselves to become vulnerable with each other.  And it’s okay.  It’s more than that.  It feels kind of nice, really nice actually, to be able to speak our individual truths about whatever comes to mind, without having to worry about recriminations.

In those moments of togetherness, we are no longer awkward aliens.  We sit across from each other anxious to hear what the other thinks and they readily tell us and it feels nice, wonderful actually.

We give our answers to questions not worrying if they are sharp and witty and fulfilling.  We talk about why we’re writers and what it is we write about.  Some of us have had bad childhoods or destructive marriages.  Some of us aren’t sure about very much and so our writing is a search, a wish to find out—to find ourselves or that deep blank space we carry around in the pit of our soul.

We do all this one short step at a time and as we do we realize how safe we feel, how accepted we are in the way twins or lovers might feel with one another.  We share our love of literature and it binds us in a way that would be challenging to describe to anyone who is not a writer.

And when all this happens, the skies do not part, no New York agent taps us on the shoulder saying, “Been meaning to tell you, you’ve got mad skills and I’d love to represent you if you have a manuscript sitting in a drawer somewhere.”

No, sometimes the breakthroughs take time and always trust, given and reciprocated.  And when that occurs, you kick back in a chair.  You no longer give a goddamn.  Not for a few minutes or few hours anyway, because this is AWP and in this moment, you are not the bizarre ugly duckling you often feel you are, but rather a writer with stories and dreams, the same as anyone else, though your stories and dreams are different.

And that’s okay.  In fact, it’s more than okay.  It’s close to perfect.

                                                 ************

This year’s AWP was my favorite ever and I had a few special moments like the ones mentioned above with several of the people listed below, or else some I was just meeting for the first time.  No matter what, they were all very lovely:

Robert Vaughan, Karen Stefano, Robert P. Kay, Christine Texitera, Gloria Mindock, Joani Reese, James Thomas, Laura McCullough, Shainel Beers, Kim Chinquee, Chris Allen, David O’Connor, Sarah Chavez, Lee Kreclow, Sara Fitzpatrick Comito, Wendy Ortiz, David Hornbuckle, Brian Alan Ellis, Tommy Dean, Michael, McInnis, Betsy Marks-Smith, Sean Foley, Tsipi Keller, Helen Rye, Helene Cordoba, Mary Miller, Pamela Clark, Tiff Holland, Ki Russell, Paul Lisicky, Andrea, Sydney…

—I’M NOT TOO GOOD AT GOOD-BYES

…Here’s a poem I had published a while back:

https://inbetweenhangovers.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/imagination-by-len-kuntz/

…Who’s that guy?  I think l he looks familiar and I think he has a book of poetry out.  He told me to tell you he misses you.

…The past isn’t as far away as we think.  Even vines cling for their lives.

…I might as well spend money on wine instead of new books.  Might as well pour wine all over these books.  I might as well stop dreaming of heaven and have another glass of wine.  Tell me why not.  Explain in great detail, and I will listen intensively.

…Otters have a lot to say, if you listen.  One keeps reminding me that I’m still young enough.

…Dawn is here again, and somehow that is significant.  Dawn is here again, and I still hear you.

…People pay attention when someone is really angry.  It’s a wonder, then, why people aren’t raging all the time.

…I’m in the pack, but I’m still all alone.

…Sometimes when my face is wet with tears, that’s my best feature because it’s who I really am.

…I knew it would be embarrassing to write all this on here for you to see me with all my rickety bones and hairy back.  But I thought you might be able to stand the sight of me, that, in some respect, you perhaps could relate, identify with a flawed being.  And by the way, I’m not really talking about hairy backs here.

…I said it before and I’ll say it again, it was all my fault.

…The heartbeat of this story lies in the next sentence.

…Sometimes I dream I’m happy, but that’s usually after having drunk a lot of wine.

…Or you could bring some wine over, and some fragrant flowers, because the bars are closed.  Even if you bang on the doors all day, the rain is still beautiful for about five minutes before it’s annoying.

…We can never be sure of enough.

…Love always wants to put a smile on the face of the other.

…When you see love on display it pretty much trumps everything.

…Really, we are all just God’s poetry going about our everyday lives.

…What you mean it ain’t working?  What you mean you ain’t finding yourself?

…Twistin’ me up like licorice isn’t the nicest way to handle things.

…Often, I say I’m off it, and I offer my crossed sympathy.

…Don’t call me stupid.  That ain’t no way my name pronounced.

…It’s funny how things can change, how the ebb and flow will take you under and that’s just what you want it to do.

…You are only young once, but you can remain immature indefinitely if you choose to.

…I pray for you that you never have to sit in a doctor’s waiting room, or that if, God forbid, you have to, that you have some great reading material at hand, as well as some kind of serious faith.

…If I don’t get what I want one day, I simply wait a day or two and ask again.  You never know.  Maybe today will be different.

…You don’t need to tell me.  Of course, I remember: I’m not supposed to take things so seriously.