200. POET BEATINGS AND FIGHTING INJUSTICE

From the Archives

(March 2006) Consider for a moment the irony of the fact that Yahoo!’s lead headline today is The Trumps choose a name for their baby boy!

But only one major US paper has reported the news that Iranian security forces brutally attacked a group of women observing International Women’s Day.

These feminists organized under a platform of peace to support basic human rights, yet were ambushed by truckloads of state-authorized thugs who dumped garbage on them, kicked them and beat them with batons.

Victims include the famous (and elderly and nearly blind) poet Simin Behbehani, who says that the purpose of her poetry is to fight injustice.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali as-Sistani issued a death fatwa against queers and is calling for us to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”

This fatwa makes Medea want to grab her handy-dandy Sears and Roebuck vise grips and wrench the grand(iose) ayatollah’s scrotum about in the worst, most severe way.

SANG IN SHOWER: No, but I conditioned my frizzy hair

READING: Hiss and Tell’s latest entry (singing the praises of large breasts)

LISTENING TO: Kasey Chambers’ “Falling Into You”

BEST OF SPAM: Want your love back? (Well, I’m SURE I’d be asking a random e-mailer for it if I did)

93. ALL THAT FUCKING AND NO ART

From the Archives

(May 2005) Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember” concludes with these lines:

Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

I am trying to remember, but my life is filled with too goddamn many commitments right now, so I am instead slam dancing at a dizzying pace in a mosh pit of commitments—and the band is definitely NOT playing any Desiderata-like "Remember That You Are One With The Universe" medley.

I did take a break last night to to watch the season finale (sob) of The L Word though, which included this fabulous line:

All that fucking with no art is really rather boring, dear.

•

So sometimes clever little poems are too precious and just remind me of Mud’s fratboy dungeon-and-dragon pals and the tedious little verbal arm-wrestling matches they engaged in purely so they could sit around and be pleased with themselves for out-clevering another person. (The very definition of tedious to MEDEAgrrl.)

This clever little poem is kind of interesting though:

SF
by David Lehman

SF stood for Sigmund Freud, or serious folly,
for science fiction in San Francisco, or fear
in the south of France. The system failed.
The siblings fought. So far, such fury,
as if a funereal sequence of sharps and flats
set free a flamboyant signature, sinful, fanatic,
the fire sermon of a secular fundamentalist,
a singular fellow's Symphonie Fantastique.

Students forget the state's favorite son's face.
Sorry, friends, for the screws of fate.
Stage fright seduces the faithful for the subway fare
as slobs fake sobs, suckers flee, salesmen fade.
Sad the fops. Sudden the flip side of fame.
So find the segue. Finish the speculative frame.

SINGING IN SHOWER: Earl “Fatha” Hines’s rendition of "St. James Infirmary Blues"

LISTENING TO: Beethoven’s Theme and 32 Variations in C Minor (discovered after his death, hence no opus number)

READING: Carol Guess’s Switch and Rodale’s Successful Organic Gardening

BEST-OF SPAM: outperform any women’s expectations in bed! • Via-gra pro - will get you hard coppery

80. FIX

From the Archives

(April 2005) Posted on Sunday’s Writer’s Almanac

FIX
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling—
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex—cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They'd like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
—Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud—

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we're smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we've lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.

63. MEMORY CONDUIT OF SPRING

From the Archives

(March 2005) Here's a beautiful poem from today's Writer's Almanac.

THE MONTHS
by Linda Pastan, from The Last Uncle

March
When the Earl King came
to steal away the child
in Goethe's poem, the father said
don't be afraid,
it's just the wind...
As if it weren't the wind
that blows away the tender
fragments of this world—
leftover leaves in the corners
of the garden, a Lenten Rose
that thought it safe
to bloom so early.

April
In the pastel blur
of the garden,
the cherry
and redbud
shake rain
from their delicate
shoulders, as petals
of pink
dogwood
wash down the ditches
in dreamlike
rivers of color.

May
Mayapple, daffodil,
hyacinth, lily,
and by the front
porch steps
every billowing
shade of purple
and lavender lilac,
my mother's favorite flower,
sweet breath drifting through
the open windows:
perfume of memory-conduit
of spring.