Here’s my ShuffleWords poem for this week’s Read Write Prompt. I’d say more, but what is there to say? I got to write a poem that has goats and cows in it. How could I not be pleased?

But seriously, this was a fun exercise. I’m so glad Dave turned me on to ShuffleWords, which in turn made this week’s Read Write Prompt possible. (OK, Dave didn’t exactly turn me on to ShuffleWords, but he did inspire me on his site when I saw what he’d done using the ShuffleWords “method.”)

So anyway, yeah. Here it is:
* * *

Now that I look at it, I feel like the last stanza should read: “furious water / is only fun for cows,” but I am not going through all the rigamarole necessary to change it. (Fine. I redid it all so the last stanza would read the way I want it to read.)

Seems I can’t stop Twittering. At first it felt lonely, kind of one sided. But now I like it. And I’ve “met” some interesting folks, namely TinyDoctor, recommended by Dave Bonta.

If you subscribe to Twitter, I recommend you follow TinyDoctor. He’s tiny, after all. What’s not to love about that? I bet he could very effectively perform surgery on my hamster, being about her size and whatnot.

Anyways, here are some of my latest tweet ramblings. I’ve done everyone a favor and put them in the right order, not bass ackwards, as my parents used to say.

::

“I’m safe with scissors. I’m safe with scissors.” Words spoken by a nutty lady I once worked for who was *anything but* safe with scissors.

She’s forever marred my experience with scissors. Every time I pick up a pair, I hear her shrill voice. And I didn’t even mention the dance.

There was a dance, alright. And what a dance it was — her with the scissors above her head, turning in circles. Around and around.

Like a music box doll, only scary. Like a carousel horse, only without a saddle. Yes, like a carousel horse wielding scissors. And drunk.

And wearing a circa-1984 red leather Michael Jackson jacket, with big shoulder pads and all.

Aaah, the good old days, when we could love us some Michael Jackson openly and without shame.

Of course Michael Jackson has forever marred my experience with the moon walk.

I can’t attempt to do it across my dining room floor without feeling dirty.

Which makes my floors very, very sad. They want someone to moon walk across them. This they do. ’Tis a fact.

::

Whoever said I can’t excite you in 140 characters is dumb.

::

A gang of crows just flew by my window. Cackling, they have no respect for the sleepy. And I do mean gang, as in street gang. As in, deadly.

::

Husband’s left his man hair in the bathtub again, and I’ve put the toilet paper roll on backwards.

::

A word to the wise (five words, actually): Do not lick toilet paper.

::

What *not* to name a carbonated beverage brand: Acid Rain.

I initially mistyped that tweet as “carbonate beverage band.” Which is funnier than what I *actually* was trying to say.

Acid Rain would be the *perfect* name for a carbonated beverage band.

::

I just choked on my LifeSavers Fruit Splosion. For some, they are life savers; for others, they be killers.

Describes expectations, goals, requests and future states in a way that provides clarity and excites interest.

How do you describe future states? Do they want a fortune teller? I might apply, though. I like to think I provide clarity and excite interest. In fact, I know I foot the bill, at least on the providing interest part.

Today is not the day to put my makeup on while driving.

This morning’s commute is like a video game whose object is to knock all the other cars off the road.

I like it when a lane lets you go forward or turn: It gives me the false notion that I have choices in life.

Left: brake. Right: gas. Left: brake. Right: gas.

I really should be eligible for a handicapped permit. My handicap is not knowing how to drive.

Changing lanes is the hardest part.

Everything I think is 140 characters or less: Twitter is rewiring my brain.

I like it when the shadows are next to the cars because it makes them look like broad-shouldered aliens.

To clarify: by them, I mean the shadows.

I wish dreams could come true. Then I’d really have a dwarf giraffe.

I’ve unlocked the key to creative writing: Benadryl.

MFAs should give Benadryl to all their students, but then the world would be flooded with too much good writing. Who could be expected to read all that?

Look: Someone just threw a white trash bag from a balcony. Judging from the looks of it, I’d say it’s a Glad.

The scary thing is, I don’t listen to half of what I think.

Imagine if you stood up from your writing desk and left the room in hopes the letters would arrange themselves into words and that the words, in turn, would organize themselves into sentences. You might suppose everything would be fine as long as your departure was a short one. If, say, you were only going downstairs to have a cold glass of purified ice water.

But as you suspend your glass in the refrigerator’s built-in water dispenser, you might hear something that’s barely audible, given all the ice-clanking and water-sloshing and whatnot.

And as you step across the kitchen floor, do not allow yourself to believe what you’re hearing is nothing more than the sound of your poorly installed laminate flooring creaking under your weight, when in fact what you hear is the sound letters and words make when they kill one another (and, in some especially tragic cases, themselves).

Oh, the small plaintive cries of the wounded and dying. Their inky bodies smeared upon the page.

When you open the door to the room where you left the letters, you will drop your water glass as soon as you realize what’s occurred.

The nouns and verbs have of course attacked the adjectives and adverbs. The former are jealous, you know. Believe they are strong enough to stand on their own. Ironically, it is only after all the adjectives and adverbs are dead that the nouns and verbs realize they cannot stand on their own. They collapse, like so many dominos, but without the clinking sounds and the children’s laughter.

As bad as that is, the compound modifiers actually got off even worse, having pulled themselves apart at the hyphen hoping that, as separate words, they’d have a better chance of scurrying up to the closest bookshelf, where they planned to hide inside the pages of a book, namely The Bible. So many words there, not even God would notice a few more, they reasoned. Unfortunately, pulled apart, none was tall enough to reach that shelf. So they lie in a pile at the edge of the desk, their dislodged hyphens next to them like tiny bullet casings.

So close to safety; so far away.

The remaining parts of speech have had their throats slit by the “i”s and “t”s. I can’t exactly explain why. All I know is that government-sponsored studies have proved that, without a doubt, the “i”s and “t”s are less intelligent and more aggressive than all the other letters combined.

Um-hmm. That’s right.

Why, they will even kill their own kind, that is if they are wielding themselves, sword-like, against a word containing the letter “i” or “t” and that letter chooses to stand by its word instead of joining the “i”s and “t”s in their nefarious activities.

There’s a reason there’s an “i” and a “t” in the word “fight.” Ever think about that, water-drinking writer who supposed it was A-OK to leave the letters and words alone for just a teensy-eensy-weensy-widdle while, as if letters and words are as helpless and innocent as newborn babies? You can’t simply stick a pacifier in their mouths, after all. Letters and words demand more from us as caretakers.

But the most tragic loss of all is that of the “h”s. They always got along so well with the other letters, partnering up with “s” to bring us the soothing shuffle of footsteps, the shucks of frustrated suburban housewives who are too polite to actually swear, and the shazam! we all know and love. Where would the world be without shazam! Where, I ask.

But “h” got on especially well with the letters toward the end of the alphabet. “H” never said no to an “x” who wanted to go for a ride on its smooth and waxed hump. Or to the “y,” who also enjoyed a good ride (if one of its key uses, the phrase “Yes! Yes! Yes!,” is any indication). As I am sure you are aware, the “y” liked doing it side-saddle, lest its descender get in the way and give the “h” a thrill it didn’t bargain for.

A handful of times, the good-natured but not overly bright “h” tried giving pony rides to the “v”s who, sadly and without exception, lost their balance and fell over. On a positive note, those topsy-turvy “v”s managed to find one another and, with enough patience, teamwork and wet ink, were able to transform themselves into unattractive but perfectly functional “m”s who found gainful employment across the country as McDonald’s golden arches. They did picket one year for higher wages, but the “w”s threatened to literally act as stand-ins by doing handstands, and so the malformed “m”s begrudgingly went back to work.

Which brings me to the “m”s. When you open the door to the room where you’ve left all the letters and words alone, it’s the “m”s you will see first. I can hardly bring myself to share exactly what you will lay eyes on. But it is for your own good: The valiant “i”s and “t”s will have strapped the surviving “m”s to their backs in order to have the fabulous badonkadonks they’d always dreamed of but that their rail-thin figures would not afford them.

And that is why you cannot leave the letters and words alone.

Please. I implore you.

Half of what we accomplish is what we manage to not screw up.

My prompt is up over at Read Write Poem. Do go check it out, and check out the new Read Write Poem Twitter page (which is still a little rough around the edges, but whatever).

Merry Merry quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

My mother used to say this nursery rhyme all the time, with a little lilt, as if everything in her world was just right.

I’ve changed the spelling from “Mary” to “Merry,” since that is how my mother spelled her name. Ironic to have a name like that when she was anything but merry, plagued all her life by depression, and most of it by drinking. And deep, unrelenting loneliness.

She sang this song about herself, as if the words were a spell she could cast to fix everything that had gone wrong, as if she could do take-backs on all the injustices committed against her and those she herself had committed.

au jus: Served with the natural juices or gravy: roast beef au jus

auk: Any of several diving sea birds (family Alcidae) of northern regions, such as the razor-billed auk, having a chunky body, short wings and webbed feet.

auld lang syne: The good old days.

au naturel: 1a. Nude. b. In a natural state. 2. Cooked simply.

aunt: The sister of one’s father or mother.

::

She wasn’t my aunt. I don’t even think she was my mother’s aunt. If I have sketched out my family tree correctly, I believe Aunt Grace was my mother’s mother’s sister’s daughter, which would have made her my mother’s cousin and my first cousin.

That’s the relationship structure we’ll go with for the purposes of this entry. But I will continue to call her Aunt Grace, since that’s how my mother referred to her. Alternatively, various family members called her Little Grace, since her mother was also named Grace, and you can see what kind of confusion would ensue with two Graces running around in one very small Oklahoma town.

My Aunt Grace collected demitasse tea cups, according to my mother. Apparently Aunt Grace’s immediate family had more money than my mother’s family, so things like demitasse teas cups made a big impression. “Well, Aunt Grace had everything,” my mother would tell me, raising her eyebrows on the word’s first syllable and sliding down into the rest of the word like a swimmer slipping slowly under the water’s surface.

Her intonation and delivery at once betrayed my mother’s jealousy and judgment. My mother was always concerned about people who had too much, since that was a sure sign they were spoiled and didn’t have to work for what they acquired. When you grow up poor in Oklahoma, you can develop the attitude that those with money are “soft” or, as my father used to say about wealthy freshmen who joined fraternities, “a bunch of pansies.”

My mother told me about more than just Aunt Grace’s tea cups. I also heard about the lovely dresses and hats, the beautiful and well-appointed home, and the display cabinets that kept Aunt Grace’s tea cup collection safe.

“Aunt Grace’s mother doted on her,” my mother said, spooling out the word “doted” so it sounded as if a ‘w’ was wedged between the ‘o’ and the ‘t.’ “Her mother spoiled her.” My mother always maintained that Aunt Grace’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother was the reason Aunt Grace killed herself.

::

First, she paddled out into the lake, even though she couldn’t swim. She meant to go under, and did. But someone noticed. She was pulled back to shore.

Though I have no details about this day, I imagine it was sunny. Hot like Oklahoma gets hot in the summer months, where the whole sky seems to be made of sun and everything but the wheat and corn have gone limp, their cells unable to stand erect against certain searing.

One might almost surmise that this response, this limpness, is a defense mechanism in plants: to faint on the soil they know so well and that they hope holds the one thing which will steel them in their attempts to stay alive: water.

Aunt Grace went limp that day, until there was water, water, too much over the skin, in the mouth, the lungs. Her body’s heaviness shuttling her to the bottom like a sinking vessel, her troubled mind the only passenger.

I’ve often wondered how it happened. Did she walk into the water from a rocky shore? Step off a pier? I don’t wonder about the details because I am morbid; I do so because as a writer I need to “see” everything. Someone describes a room to me, and I ask what kind of drapes they have, where the side chairs are placed, what fabric is on the sofa and if it’s strong or delicate to the touch, what kind of light comes in and at what times of day. It’s not enough to know that the room has drapes, chairs, a sofa and windows. I need details or else the room is nothing to me; there is only a blank space in my head where a room should be.

I need these same details where my family stories are concerned. Putting their lives back together, and seeing them move through those lives, is part of putting my own life together and seeing myself move through it.

So yes. I want to know if it was a windy day. What lake she was at. If there were cows nearby penned in with barbed-wire fencing and a cattle guard. I want to know if there was also a bull in the pen. If the bull scared Aunt Grace as she walked past the pen on the trail leading to the lake.

Was she in a bathing suit? Did she even think, or care, to change into one? What time of day was it? How many people pulled her out? Who were they? Did she require resuscitation?

But mostly, I want to know what it felt like to be that close to death. I can only imagine how her heart was beating, in what must have felt like a percussion section’s accelerando, blood being thrust into limbs for which Aunt Grace already had no use. That heartbeat which once signaled so many things — fear, excitement, arousal — now mocking her with its last battle cry for life. “Do not forsake this body,” her heart must have said. “Do not give the order to take it down.”

::

Sometimes the body clamors for our attention to remind us we are still alive and our lives are both valuable and viable, but the mind closes itself off to all that gibberish.

Sometimes the body can hurt so badly that it seems there’s nothing to be done other than to be forcibly separated from it.

I’ve known both kinds of pain. I suspect Aunt Grace did, too.

::

Her second attempt was a success, if you can use the word success in cases of suicide. In the medical literature, successful suicide attempts are called “completed suicides.” That phrase doesn’t sound any better. I sometimes think of my entire life as an “incomplete suicide,” the completion being only a matter of time and the function of a greater derailing of my mind.

Aunt Grace locked herself in a bathroom, swallowed a bunch of pills and at some point tried to call her mother for help. (She had taken the phone into the bathroom with her.) Her mother was not there to pick up the phone. When they came to her home and realized something was wrong, her brothers shoved and kicked their way into the bathroom, where Aunt Grace lay dead, her throat and neck scratched by her nails in an apparent attempt to purge the toxins she had ingested.

At least that is how I remember the story, as told by my mother. I might have some of the details wrong. Aunt Grace might not have taken the phone into the bathroom right away. Perhaps she took the pills, became scared, then pulled the phone into the bathroom with her before locking the door.

The locked door doesn’t make much sense, either. If she wanted to be helped, wouldn’t she have left the door unlocked? Maybe she only wanted to say goodbye to her mother and didn’t want any help at all. I don’t even know if it was her two brothers who came to save her, or if she even had two brothers. I think that’s what my mother said, but here’s another detail I did not commit, or can’t say with certainty that I committed, to memory.

It could also be that I’ve filled in the blanks, the way I do when something is described to me in broad strokes but, when I see the thing for myself, it is nothing like I imagined. As I go over and over Aunt Grace’s suicide attempt and her “completed suicide,” trying to get all the details right, I often feel as if I am writing a scene from a play in which all the characters, their actions and the objects on the set must be just right.

In trying to have some kind of intimacy with Aunt Grace, I fail her, treating her like an object instead of the person she was. In my defense, I don’t have enough detail to make her real, so I must work with three things: what my mother told me, my faulty memory of the telling, and my tendency to fill in the blanks so I can create the image I need.

I suspect my real intimacy with Aunt Grace lies not in stories about her but rather in my genetic makeup: in my body, in my brain and in the interplay between the two. Sometimes when I touch my arms softly, I imagine they are my mother’s arms or Aunt Grace’s arms. I can see the two women warm and pale and young and covered in moles. How am I so different from them, when so much of them is in me?

::

Sometimes Aunt Grace’s story ends on the shore. Sometimes there is no other story. There is no bathroom. No locked door. No funeral. No mourning. No tragedy.

::

Dramatis Personae
Aunt Grace

Act I
Scene I

We’re on a rocky beach. Water comes to the shore in small, rhythmic waves. A slight breeze carries oppressively hot air through trees and over the water’s surface.

Aunt Grace, mid-30s, wears a black, one-piece bathing suit and has styled her hair in finger waves. Barefoot, she steps onto a long pier and walks slowly to the end before stopping. She leans forward, looks down into the water, watches small fish swim in an uncoordinated manner. She almost smiles. The fish continue to dart and jag, some swimming backward without seeming to realize it.

She leans farther, nearly losing her balance, and can now make out larger fish, the ones she thinks are ugly. Sometimes these fish look to her like rocks, but then they move and she sees them for what they are. She thinks of how she once held one of these ugly fish in her hands, shocked at how quickly fear changed its color. And eyes like buttons you might use to embellish a fancy evening dress. But cloudy. How quickly they clouded over. She has never since held a dying fish.

Where is the bottom, she wonders. How far would it take to get to the depth needed? Could she dogpaddle out that far? Was today the day?

The breeze comes up, moving the hairs on Aunt Grace’s arms and legs, even the fine hairs on her face. It doesn’t make her much cooler, but a warm breeze is better than no breeze, she thinks. The hair on her body reminds her that she’s still alive.

The End