Just a few minutes

I had time to write, oh lord, I had time to write. I'm not even going to tell you about, because I still have more time to write, but I did want to share this snippet and also open it up to criticism. At first glance I don't like the movement of it and there is a slight awkwardness and I'm not in love with all words choice.

Oh, but also - I made it through my first section of dialogue (not shown here,) and it wasn't absolutely terrible. It's not great, and it's a close cousin to bad, but it's not terrible. I feel like I've ripped the band-aid off, at least.

Mrs. Perry holds the bundle out to Helen and for one dreadful moment Helen thinks Mrs. Perry is going to unravel the blanket she will have to look at what is inside. Helen squeezes her eyes shut and when she reopens them, Mrs. Perry is holding a loaf of bread in a dish towel. She doesn’t seem to notice Helen’s brush with panic and places the loaf on the counter near where Helen’s hands are still resting. She twitches them away and stuffs them into her apron pockets.

See, quite rough. But I got it out of me, at least. It had just been sitting there, spoiling in my brain, for weeks. Fuck. That felt good.

Little surprises

I have a tendency to write thoughts down in random places and thus forget these scraps of paper in random places. I picked up Theodore Roethke's On Poetry & Craft tonight and found a little poem I wrote for my husband when I was clearly very drunk (he asked me how I knew I was drunk when I wrote it, and my answer was simply, "penmanship.")

I came by this book in early 2012, and would have had to have written this before I became pregnant with my daughter, so I can feel safe in narrowing when I wrote it.

I truly have no memory of it, but I found it to be a sweet little surprise and I'm happy to have decided that it was a Roethke kind of night.

Unnamed Poem #1

I've always had a 
single heartbeat.

I'll tap to the tune of your feet
and your heart'll tap
to mine.

Together we tap tap
and we're just fine.

Hold my hand-holding hand,
off we go to meet the band.

Summer, 2012