Buzz!

Thanks to Mia Savant for hosting this online open mic! Here is my contribution for today, a poem called "The Art of Being."

The Word: Some Thoughts on What She Was Wearing by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

The first time I heard the word I was 9 years old, sitting with a group of girls around our Camp Fire Girl leader's kitchen table.

We'd just come back from a field trip -- a haunted train ride through Portland's zoo. The girl sitting beside me on the train's metal bench was so scared she gripped my hand, and when someone wearing a gorilla suit reached into the open car, my seatmate bit my finger. When we got to a tunnel, we were told to get off the train and walk through the darkness. By the tunnel's exit was a black-robed figure -- a mannequin, I thought. As I passed it, the figure sprang, its arms extended as if to grab me by the throat.

Later, as we sipped the cocoa our Camp Fire leader made for us, someone in our group said she'd heard a neighborhood woman had been raped.

"What does that mean?" another girl asked.

Our leader, the mom of one of the girls, said to ask our parents when we got home.

I don't think I ever did. Somehow I knew it was the word for an unspeakable act, and as soon as I heard it, my heart tightened like the iron vice my father kept clamped to the edge of his workbench. From that day on, the word has been a dark-robed figure at my heels. Sometimes the figure fades to a puff of dust or smoke floating in the attic of my subconscious, but it's always been, in some form, present.

A few years ago a woman in my writing group said, "I don't think I know any woman who hasn't been sexually abused."

Sitting in a theater or lecture hall, standing in line at the airport or grocery store, how can we know how many of our fellow humans -- women and men and children -- have suffered some form of sexual assault/abuse? How many have been able to say the words aloud?

For so many, silence feels like the only option, but on January 8, Annie Bloom's Books held a reading for Shawn Aveningo Sanders' book What She Was Wearing, a collection of poems about the author's nightmare of being raped at a fraternity party and her three-decade fight to heal from the trauma.

One of the first poems in the book, "What I Was Wearing," begins by describing in loving detail the outfit Aveningo Sanders put together for the party: "Pink sheet twisted into a toga/over a white one-piece swimsuit/pink chiffon bow in my hair/Nana's rhinestone dangle earrings."* Next, though, come the details of what she wore running home: a drop of blood and a swimsuit sliced with a knife. By including both "before" and "after" descriptions of what she wore that night, the author highlights the horror so many victims face: living in a society that too frequently casts an accusing eye on a woman's attire rather than condemning the perpetrator's crime.

Aveningo Sanders' story is hard to read, but this vivid account belongs to all of us. Whether we're mothers or fathers, whether we've been victimized or not, we, as a society, are the caretakers of our selves and friends and children and parents and neighbors and co-workers, and in order to protect one another from this crime, we can raise one voice that says rape is an act that devastates too many lives.

Last week Aveningo Sanders shared a work of art born out of pain. In return, the room was filled with support for her, and the word of the evening was respect. The word was healing. The word was power. The word was hope. And love and love and love.


What She Was Wearing can be purchased by clicking here or at Annie Bloom's Books. Fifty percent of all proceeds will go to PAVE: Partnering Awareness & Victim Empowerment.

*Aveningo Sanders, Shawn. What She Was Wearing, Beaverton, The Poetry Box, 2019.

The City Song of Lucy Brown

One afternoon in the early 1990s, my husband and young son and I pulled up in our driveway and found a man standing by our side door, his hand on the knob, trying to open it. When he saw us, he said it was his house, that Michael Jackson once lived there, that I could come inside and live with him, but my husband had to go. The moment set off red lights and alarm bells in my head.

Later, I wrote a story from the man's point of view, which was published in The Saranac Review in 2005. What triggered his alarms? I wondered as I wrote. I've learned a few things about writing and life since then and am grateful to the editors of Abstract Magazine TV for publishing my revised version of the story last month.

This exquisite journal features visual art and writing that "engages with both the crises and joys of our shared human existence." You can click here to read my short story, "The City Song of Lucy Brown," which is paired with a breathtaking photo by the Swiss artist Thomas Kräher.

The Real Prize

In November 2018, I was dressed in a blah-green gown, waiting for over an hour to have some diagnostic images. Knowing I'd be too nervous to sit and read, I'd brought a poem-in-progress to work on. Not just any poem, but — gasp! — a sonnet.

Writing a sonnet, or sticking to a prescribed pattern, is the opposite of my usual process, which is to let my subconscious tear across the page at a full gallop. But there I was in a cold medical facility, with my heart racing and my mind engaged by the intricate puzzle of my poem. Instead of solely thinking about the possible outcomes of the tests, I passed the time trying to find words that would rhyme with "wing" and "fist" and "peach" and also counting iambs on my fingers.

It was wonderful and rewarding in the way unpleasant experiences can sometimes be.

By the time I left the imaging center, I had good news from the doctor and a promising draft for a sonnet.

Fast forward to November 2019: Another green gown and more images and more good news from the doctor. Then, that evening, an email from Randal Burd, the editor/publisher of a literary journal called Sparks of Calliope: He had nominated the sonnet I'd written exactly one year before for a Pushcart Prize.

This is not an essay about prizes, though. About rankings or feeling like a winner.

This is a reflection on reminders: Sometimes good things, small comforts, a feeling that we are seen and even appreciated, come when we most need them. Of course there are many times when they don't come. But sometimes they do.

This post is also my bow to the power of writing — or painting or singing or any activity that's meaningful to you. This is to honor the things that bring us inspiration and delight. This is a small pebble of gratitude for those moments when our minds can emerge from the caves and tunnels and black holes of our fears to wander in open fields where the scent of the sunlit earth beats with a calm and steady heart that says, This joy, this peace, this comfort is real, and it is ours to find.

Poetry and Photography by Lindy Low Le Coq

My friend Lindy Low LeCoq is a magician who, with her art and writing, always transports me to a more hopeful place. May we all find pockets of peace and hope in this new year.

Photo courtesy of Lindy Low LeCoq

après le deluge


midnight rainstorm pelts
ocean roars above the din
chimney howls and moans

sunrise dunes sparkle
windless rain-washed beach welcomes
sanderlings kiss surf



About the Author: 
After 30 years of counseling young adults, Lindy Low LeCoq now focuses her energy on writing, photography and landscape gardening. Her work has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon: In the News, Postcards, Poems & Prose and Plum Tree Tavern. https://lindylecoq.com/author/lindyllll/

A Few Recent Publications

Thank you to the editors of the following publications that have recently published my fiction and poetry!

The Wild Word: The poems "Pluto Speaks," "These Summer Nights," and "From the Imaginary Journals of Venetia Burney" can all be found by clicking here.

Fewer Than 500: My flash story "Entertaining Elephants" is the post for November 24, 2019.

Sparks of Calliope - A Journal of Poetic Observations: My sonnet, "Disgruntled Thoughts After a Fruitless Summer of Job-Hunting," is the post for November 22, 2019. "I Want to Speak Norwegian" is the post for November 10, 2019. You can click here and scroll down to find these poems.

Parting Is Such...

We've lived on the same street for 29 years. Same sidewalks and oak trees. Magnolia, plum, maple.

This is nice.

The hard thing about staying in one place for so long, though, is that most of the people around us don't stay. They need a bigger house or their rent is too high or they decide to try cohousing or move to Bali.

Which means that we, who are rooted here, are always saying goodbye and goodbye and goodbye.

The little house next door to us was just sold, and we parted with another set of neighbors. They weren't family or close friends. We never sipped cocoa together after raking leaves or toasted the new year in together. And yet we lived in such close proximity that their faces and voices and the bark of their dog (Tony!) and the color of their winter coats remain firmly present in our consciousness.

Maybe we'd all be surprised if we knew the effect we made on those around us. Here's an excerpt from an essay I wrote about another couple who once lived next door to us.*

Arcadia

When we met our new neighbors we couldn’t believe our good fortune. Allie and Jay were young and attractive, with sparkling personalities that filled the air with a champagne fizz.

Our family had lived in their house for ten years before we moved to the Victorian next door. We’d sung our babies to sleep there, and in its yard there grew the columbine, coneflowers and chrysanthemums we’d started from seeds, as well as the apple tree my grandmother had given us.

The embodiment of joie de vivre, Allie and Jay seemed to love the house too. They made wine from the grapes that grew along the fence and filled the rooms with books and thrift-store furniture as well as the many friends they entertained. Whether the occasion was a birthday or an evening of reading Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia aloud, the sounds of their company – car doors opening and closing and hearty greetings and laughter – became as familiar as the horns of the trains that run just a few blocks away.

Although they both worked and went to school, they also made time for our children. Jay awed our son with stories about playing Bernardo in an amateur production of West Side Story, and our daughter, who rarely deigned to talk to adults, confided in Allie that her stern second grade teacher, Mrs. Young, pronounced her y’s as h’s.

“Mrs. Houng!” Allie laughed, and our daughter laughed with her.

The couple had a similar effect on my husband and me. We soon discovered they were also Jane Austen fans, and a neighborly “hello” in our driveways could turn into an energetic conversation about the likes of Mr. Darcy or Captain Wentworth.

At the peak of our friendship, Allie and Jay had us over for dinner. It was the beginning of autumn, but still warm enough to eat outside. They set a ping pong table decorated with white candles and grape vines on their brick patio, and as we ate herbed chicken and apple cake I knew we were in Arcadia.

Then one spring day our neighbors told us their news: Jay had been accepted by a medical school in another state. Even as they began packing, we already missed hearing Allie's stories about her beginning tap class and the sound of their party music dancing over the fence. We couldn't hold onto them, but we could hold onto the house. When we offered to buy it back to use as a rental, Allie and Jay gleefully started packing their books and booze and knickknacks.

They left on a July afternoon. Our stoic daughter insisted she wasn’t sad, while our son fought to keep his face composed as we watched the couple hop into their U-Haul, faces beaming with the thrill of a new adventure.

The next morning I opened the gate to their backyard. Since I hadn’t been there all spring, I was surprised by what I found. The grape vines grew unchecked, reaching for a telephone wire, while the asters I’d planted when our son was a baby were bursting like purple stars, and the branches of the apple tree were bowed with the weight of the most abundant crop of fruit I’d ever seen. Best of all, a large plot where we’d once grown tomatoes was now a sea of leafy vines, sprouting dozens of trumpet-shaped blossoms and green-striped pumpkins. Poking their heads up between the broad leaves were slender stalks of calendula topped with yellow-gold blooms, while tangled trails of orange and crimson nasturtiums wound around the edges of the garden and into the rosemary and lavender bushes my husband had put in years before.

I ached for Allie and Jay – because we’d longed to know them better and to be known by them. Still, I marveled at the riot of color we’d all created. Our neighbors' leaving had hurt more than our family wanted to admit, but how good it was to be alive and aware of the depths of our hearts.

*"Arcadia" first appeared in the 2010 TAWK Press anthology Seeds of....

The names "Allie" and "Jay" are pseudonyms.