Emily Idzior - Letter to the Moon

Dear Moon,

I’m sitting in a coffee shop sipping iced pomegranate oolong tea, what are you up to? I see you are starting to rise in the reflection in the window next to me. How are you doing? You seem cold but I know you must have a warm core in there somewhere. No matter what science says.

I’m wondering, I’m wondering if you could tell me why I always say the wrong thing. You hang there listening and never say anything at all. You must have learned something about us after all these years looking. What am I saying, you’re not God. You’re not even a god. You’re the moon. The glorious bright beautiful big round moon. I’m over you. I’m over the moon for the moon.

Dear Moon. I write you letters and you never reply. Why couldn’t there be a real man sitting on your surface reading my words, writing a response? I’d climb a ladder to meet him. To meet you. You’re famous. You’re famous the way no one on Earth could be famous. Famous in a way even the Earth could not be famous.

I want to get drunk and drive to the middle of the desert and hug you. I want to get drunk and slink into an observatory and watch you sleep. Or wake. Watch you change your makeup, change your seasons. The moon is always female so I assume you wear makeup but forgive me if you do not.

What do you look at, perched like a bird, suspended in space? You must see me. Or someone who looks like me. Do I look pathetic, grasping at the air like a lunatic? I’m a lunatic. I’m obsessed with you. Why don’t you see me? I want love like any other human. You must want love. You must want warmth. Some blue. Some white. A little wind, a little water, a little bit of electricity under your surface.

Oh, Moon. I’ve done it again, haven’t I? All talk and no listen. Listen, Moon, whatever you need to say you say it. I’m here waiting. I’m waiting for the phone call. For you to tell me what’s going on in that big satellite above me. To tell me what you see. What you hear. What you wish you could unhear. I’ll say the wrong thing, I promise. I’ll say all the wrong things and you’ll wish you never called me. But that’s okay, just this one time I want to pretend to be good at this.

Listen, darling, I have to go but call me won’t you? Call me some night, tell the wolves to find me. Tell the prairie to call for me. Tell the ocean to call my name. Tell the whales to sing out to me. I’ll be there.

For now, loving you,

me.

Emily Idzior can be found on her tumblr (http://unravelher.tumblr.com), twitter (@ylimejane), and, rarely, Blogspot (http://ylimejane.blogspot.com). She and her husband reside in Michigan with 2 kitties.

Emily Idzior - Untitled

Dear ________, Is it too late?

Is it too late to tell you how much I loved holding your hand? Too late to say how courageous I felt, the two of us, getting coffee, eating food. Late like a period maybe in a sentence. Too late to say you were my favorite scar for-- how long -- still, to this day? I touched your hair. Too late though, you wanted someone else. Or, simply, didn’t want me. I wore your rejection around like hair dye. You were my cherry berry red highlight. I gave you so much that when you weren’t there anymore I had to choose a different way. A more lighted path.

Is it too late to say how much I miss you? Too late to read you that poem just one more time? Laying across your lap. Was it too late then? You kept the book which I think is weird. I would have done the same.

Is it too late to apologize for the manic phone calls? I called and called and hoped you’d call me back. Invite me up. I walked by your apartment insane. Tired. Listening to music you shared with me. Hoped you’d dedicate something to me. Little old me. Little old ugly me. Was it too much to ask that you follow through with your little, drunk, typed letters? I think it was.Is it too late to submit this poem? I wrote it just yesterday. Could it make it in? Can you validate my life’s work? Deadline seems more like a suggestion but it’s not. It’s a dead line that will not get a funeral. Only other dead words. Is it too late to even try? I wait and wait for every deadline to pass, hoping I won’t have to experience rejection ever ever ever again. But I do. I still do.

Is it too late to apologize for that fight?

Is it too late to apologize for every fight?

You’re not dead but some part of us is.

Is it too late to go back to the way things were? Hugging. Two bodies together, innocent. Easy. Admiration without feelings. Laughter but not flirting. You’re far away in that other city. I’m married now, which I like. I like that I’m the one who made a decision. I like that you make decisions, too. I still check in, when I can, but, isn’t too late, isn’t it too late, it is too late to go back to where we were. I’m glad. I think I like you better this way.

Emily Idzior is an aspiring poet and librarian who has to shush people poetically. She has a MA in salad making and wishes she loved tea without sugar but, alas, has a sweet tooth. She cannot quit waffles or coffee and writes in her personal blog once a year.
Also she has a cat.

Emily Idzior - These are a few of my favorite things

These are a few of my favorite things

1.

The way the air smells in the morning in fall. It smells like cleaning supplies and new books; dew and dying flowers. The way you look at me with your eyes that are greenbrownblue covered in glasses. The way it dies, all of it. Something tells me to look left, right, forward. We were all trembling during the final chapter and then wished we could read the book again, fresh, like we had never read it before. Every time we kiss I think of how much I love you. Every time we kissed I felt courageous. Every time we kiss I don’t taste anything, is that okay? When you hold me in your arms and I think we were made for each other and I get up and my neck hurts. You made me drink coffee and you don’t even make it anymore for me. The way you brush my hair with your fingers, like so many men are doing right now, like us, in a café somewhere.

2.

The words felt dead on the page until I read them out loud and fall into the o’s and I’s and land in the middle of the lyrical sentences. Every word Emily Dickinson wrote. Every poem Billy Collins writes sounds the same but God, I’m telling you, it’s kind of good sometimes to read them. The way poetry brings me back to life and then kills me again at the end of each poem. The way I admit I will never be famous. The way I never submit work to literary journals. My favorite excuse: I’m not good enough. My favorite thing is everything about the page and the way it is so easy to fill it with words twirling inside my brain making their way out through bitten fingernails and soft fingers.

3.

Memory. Picking raspberries in the backyard with my Grandmother. Camping in a pop up camper that made me think Camping was easy and cool like wind coming off the lake with the faint song of a loon miles away. Fireflies at night in a field look like little glowing periods at the end of lovely sentences. Sometimes the frogs sound like birds. A bird song scared me until I realized it was a bird song. I love the way the hair falls in my face, I might look pretty like that. The color pink makes me feel safe like it’s a big dose of Pepto-Bismol all around my consciousness. Soothing. I like the way organized books feel. Being in a library you know contains stolen kisses. Being in a nook looking out at the world unnoticed noticing the world walking back and forth.

4.

I had a stuffed animal when I was a child named Snuggy. He was a bunny. He had no gender. Sometimes he was a girl and sometimes she was a boy. I loved snuggy. I don’t have anything amazing left to say in this paragraph except that snuggy was there for me every step of the way through childhood.

5.

The snow falling in December, little embers put out falling to the ground. Frozen, dim fireflies fleeing the sky. A blanket of white word documents on the ground. Yellow splotches of highlighter in some places. Brown spots of color make me feel less excited to curl up in snow. Seeing my breath is never ordinary. I like looking at beautiful men and beautiful women. I like imagining them doing things like ironing or dancing ballet. Maybe they hate good literature but I imagine them reading it anyway. My birthday. My birthday and how I always manage to forget to ask for what I really want until after it’s over. The cat belly. The cat fur. The chin of a cat. Step of the cat.

Emily Idzior is an aspiring poet and librarian who has to shush people poetically. She has a MA in salad making and wishes she loved tea without sugar but, alas, has a sweet tooth. She cannot quit waffles or coffee and writes in her personal blog once a year.
Also she has a cat.

Emily Idzior - Hollyweird Boulevard

Crazy ass bathroom broke into the coffee

ate all the stars and went home

Where did all the people go?

I counted the stars four by four through my breath

Broke into your heart and took it for myself

I still talk about the past

Buy something here buy something now buy something whenever

$2.99 for a memory of you and me

I’ll never remember you better

Cold and windy sunny and windy my hair is full of sand

I want to color inside the words

I took a picture

I held your hand on the beach

I took a picture

and laughed

When I went to Hollywood, I felt weird

and stiff like someone might see me

you saw me standing there walking away

the stars were outshone by the city lights

but they’re closer so why wouldn’t they

I broke into the coffee I broke into the stars

you broke into my heart

Emily Idzior is an aspiring poet and librarian who has to shush people poetically. She has a MA in salad making and wishes she loved tea without sugar but, alas, has a sweet tooth. She cannot quit waffles or coffee and writes in her personal blog once a year.

Also, she has a cat.

Emily Idzior - In Love

When I was in Elementary school, I don’t know which grade and I don’t know what age, I read a poem by Emily Dickinson. I really liked the way she used language and I felt like I understood what she was saying without being able to really say out loud what she was really saying. I became a tried and true Emily Dickinson fan. I reached out to others, as well, trying Bronte and Shakespeare and eventually nabbing Poe into my circle of authors I loved to read.

By High School I was positively obsessed with poetry and novels and reading things that could captivate me. Words that could make me feel something that made me think “OMG. ME TOO!” Or, “That’s so true!” It was a love affair. I ate up everything. I read a lot of Science Fiction but mostly humorous things like Douglas Adams and Piers Anthony. I was delighted and happy with the way they effortlessly utilized puns to make me laugh. I read “Jane Eyre” but did not care much for “Pride and Prejudice” or “Emma” putting the final nail in the coffin of “Emily does not appreciate old books.” I yearned for a challenge. I probably could have read “Moby Dick” but instead I began writing poetry. I began searching for something that I could fall in love with.

There was this one evening I was particularly interested in something good to read. At this point there were two places I could depend on for a good recommendation: My High School Creative Writing teacher, Mrs. T, and Borders (the book store). I browsed one evening and came upon a book called “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” A book that had never been recommended to me and, since it was published in 1999 and this was about 2002, probably not read all that much by very many people who could recommend it. I loved it. It was eerily similar to one of my all ready favorites, “The Catcher in the Rye.” I was hooked.

This is around the time that I continued to encourage myself to be a writer one day. Specifically I had decided to be a poet. So I applied and was accepted into a Camp for the arts, in the Creative Writing program. It was here that I learned that you could actually BREAK THE RULES. You were allowed to write whatever you wanted and you didn’t have to rhyme and you know what? If you wanted to, you could forget about punctuation altogether.

We read Billy Collins and Naomi Shihab Nye and “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. We had to do assignments where we wrote a warped view of a popular superhero, we looked to the National Enquirer for writing prompts. We wrote the kinds of things I had been searching for.

So far I had evolved from child writer (obsessed with Shel Silverstein and short rhyming poems) to adolescent, full of angst and rules, and was now entering into a strange location in which I was looking for literature to show me some kind of way. Show me what to do, oh Literature gods. I read Oliver and more Collins and searched for writers who wrote things that spoke to me. I read “The Bell Jar” and felt crazy. I thought they were all speaking to me.

I entered the University’s Creative Writing with the most naïve outlooks of life. I thought that all writing had to enlighten and teach. All poetry somehow had to teach essential world truths. Had to teach me how to be a better person and writer. I read books my Dad read (“Listen as the day unfolds, challenge what the future holds” etc and etc.), falling for books like “Johnathan Livingston Seagull” and “Illusions.” I read “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran and was convinced it held all the truth I needed (outside the Bible of course) and read and re-read all of these books until I am sure quoting them became my friends least favorite thing about me.

Somehow I stumbled into a writing program though, that did not share my world view on poetry. I found myself one day, after numerous intro classes that gave me safe poems to read, poems that did not challenge much beyond asking me to describe a sunset in a different way that had not been done before, I found myself in a class reading a book called “Tender Buttons” by Gertrude Stein.

“A box is made sometimes and them to see to see to it neatly and to have the holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper.”

And I thought: WHAT THE…………

And then I fell in love.

I fell in love with the kinds of writing that could challenge me to think differently. It was refreshing to read something that did not tell me how to think but instead painted with words. It didn’t have to make immediate sense didn’t have to follow all the rules. It didn’t have to reveal anything extraordinary except that language itself is immense and infinite. It can be misunderstood and misheard and it can tell a story and it can teach you to just appreciate the word “bread.”

I discovered Anne Carson, who lives in Canada, and devoured all I could find by her. I relished my classes that taught me to think differently, to approach language and poetry in a different way. I loved my Professor who was constantly teasing out the parts of me that still wanted a poem to enlighten me. I read Alice Notley and cried when I heard the poem “Red Shift” by Ted Berrigan.

We read Beckett and Arianna Reines and Claudia Rankine. With these poems and “hybrid” works of writing I challenged thoughts and what “writing” had to be. I read Delillo and decided to never read a book that had a beginning, middle, and end again. We read a book that will forever stay with me, “The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics” by Gerald L. Bruns.

Two of my favorite quotes, from two different chapters of my life:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

--Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

And

I was tired of

ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had

first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt

just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning

unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to

sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The

piggy-back plant is o.k.

--Lyn Hejinian, from “My Life”

My “what the….” moment sparked in me an admiration for all writing that can challenge me to think differently but can still tap into something human inside me. Writing that can move me without telling me why I should be moved. When I think “What the…” I think of a poem that challenged me, that moved me, that made me sparkle instead and want to share with the world all of the words I had read. To make you feel what I feel when I read something that doesn’t make sense, at first, but soon, doesn’t have to make sense at all.

Emily Idzior is an aspiring poet and librarian who has to shush people poetically. She has a MA in salad making and wishes she loved tea without sugar but, alas, has a sweet tooth. She cannot quit waffles or coffee and writes in her personal blog once a year.

Also, she has a cat.

Emily Idzior - Silver Lining

I could be anything the text could be anything could be everything and here is the text as everything:

I listen for clarity. Like a violincellopianoconductorsheetmusicflutetrumpet

Like a place where I can fall into loss and hold still.

I listen for the clarity or the clarity of a sound. Of the sound I am looking for the moment of clarity or a moment of aha.

Except that there is sometimes the moment of crickets under a clear sky full of stars
or moon. Or stars and moon. Or clouds and stars and moon. And crickets. And you and me and the thought of “where is the clarity in this?”

Sunday morning I am thinking of rain or piano pancakes or food. Clarity of some sort.

Please stay for the anything of the text or the anything of the anything. The stars are everything and anything and nothing and somehow there but not there in a few years or a few years ago they weren’t there but we still see them somehow. A thousand sunrises. A red sky. I can only see one thing at a time.

Emily Idzior is an aspiring poet and librarian who has to shush people poetically. She has a MA in salad making and wishes she loved tea without sugar but, alas, has a sweet tooth. She cannot quit waffles or coffee and writes in her personal blog once a year, http://ylimejane.blogspot.com/
Also she has a cat.

Emily Idzior: Making the Bed

Everyone, you think, has trouble making the bed. It’s a dance that the actresses on TV commercials make look smooth and easy but it’s a fight. It’s Monday and in one corner is you, five foot tall, in the other corner is the mattress, so large and so tall. It’s almost comedic--like a skit on TV about over-sized chairs and toys with a normal sized person sitting among the giant things to look like a child. You’re the size of some children, except with hips and a fully developed love of naps. You will win this fight but you will walk away with sore arms, out of breath, in need of a glass of cold water. The cat makes it fun, she runs under the sheets and is cute, you think that will make it fun every time. Today, though, the cat is off watching the leaves fall of the trees and is more interested in a cat-bath than the human chore of making the bed. At moments you pretend you have it easy, some people do this for a living. And then the fitted sheet isn’t fitting anything today. So you’ll pull and pull and then gather and walk over to another corner and pull and tuck. Soon it will be done, one corner will be sticking up and the others will look taut and perfect like they should. One side will have less sheet than the other side but it’s done. And then the next sheet, which is admittedly easier but still a problem. The cat decides to come in and wants to sabotage your hard work. So you’ll play with the cat to humor her, let her run and jump and get cat hair all over even though you’re only slightly allergic. And then it’s time to finish the work. Smooth the sheet out, shoo the cat out. Maybe today you’ll do things differently and fold the top of the quilt over to make a cute “hotel” quality bed. Except not “hotel quality” because you’ll be able to move freely without fighting to undo the bed. So it’s done. The pillows are placed where they belong and the bed is made. Tonight it will become unmade. And next week the laundry will need to be done. But right now, in this moment: perfection. You own this moment. You deserve something. Go eat a slice of pie. Drink a hot cup of coffee with a lot of cream and sugar in it. Delight in the fact that it’s over and you don’t technically even have to do it next week if you don’t want to. But you will. The cat’s just too cute.

Emily Idzior: Back to School - A Brief History

“I still respond to the academic / year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn- / ing after Labor Day.” -- Lyn Hejinian, My Life

I was hooked on the first day of school, clinging to the day like a raincoat to a hook. The clean smell of Windex and hope; the thrill of new crayons, new books, and a new year. It was first grade that did me in with all of those lovely new words to spell, my obsession with ellipses, being allowed to use markers only when it rained and kept the class inside. It’s the Wednesday morning after Labor Day that’s kept me in school now for almost twenty years.

I’m twenty-four, (almost twenty-five thank you very much) and I’m still in school. I’m still chugging along, still trying to figure out how to turn my love of poetry and literature into some kind of viable career. Still buying books the first week and still looking forward to what my teachers or professors will be like. I’m twenty-four years old and I still love the first day of school with all of it’s promises of the future, the “we’ll get to that later in the semester” or the delightful projects and readings I can’t wait to delve into.

For so many years, though,  the first day of school was a little different. Blue pleated jumper, blue blouse, headband, socks folded down the right amount of folds. New shoes, of course, and new supplies, a new attitude.

Here’s the honest truth: I’ve always been shy. Being shy, of course, means that not a lot of people get to know you and a lot of people get to make assumptions based on your shyness. Either you’re a brat or you’re a snob; you’re an idiot or you’re really smart. I can be all of those things (and none) but most of the time I’m just me, Average Lady. The first day of school is the day you get to try and change all that. It’s the day when all the homework is going to get done perfectly the first time and it’s the day that every one's actually excited to see the Shy Girl. “How was your summer, Shy Girl?” “Do anything fun, Shy Girl?” “Can’t wait to play together, Shy Girl.” But of course, a couple of recesses and lunches later, after trying to find where to sit in the lunch room, everyone has divided themselves back into their groups from the previous year.

Fast forward through the complete awkwardness of elementary school and junior high, I remember the first day of high school. A real second chance. Most of the kids from my small Catholic grade school were going to other high schools and the ones that were going to be there, well, I wasn’t going to let them tell anyone what a loser I was for the past eight years.

The first day for eight long years had been a time of both anxiety and excitement hoping to somehow reinvent myself into someone else, trying to leap out of the skin I was in and become the girl everyone wanted to be around. Of course, in social circles it’s almost impossible to come back from the dead of being a wierdo. It really is impossible, it turns out, to pretend you love Nicholas Sparks when actually you just don’t.

Acne and  glasses were both against me on that first day of high school. My skirt was longer than most of the other skirts and I had stood five feet, zero inches for long enough that I knew I’d never get any taller. I like to think I was a little butterfly waiting to burst out of her chrysalis. But I think I was more like a rough draft, needing some editing and better worded sentences.

Sure, the first day of high school wasn’t so memorable that I actually remember everything that happened. I did the usual things like turning bright red when I found out I actually had to go to a gym class. I met a nice girl named Britney and then my best friends. But I think that most of my high school career and first days, were just a terrible replaying of Madonna’s career: trying to invent my image.
It’s more or less that I wished the first day of school would play out like a bad teen movie (for today’s generation something like Twilight, but I’m thinking more like Never Been Kissed). The first day of school I’d come in like that shy but gorgeous girl who just needs to be given a chance from the cheerleaders and really the most handsome guy at school would pick me (ME!) to be the girl he dated. And then I’d get asked to prom and I’d become Prom Queen and life would be kind of perfect but in a “look where I came from” kind of way.

That of course never happened. I remained the “girl no one wanted to date” for the next four years. I went to dances of course, but was never asked. I was set up on a blind date for homecoming. I glued together something that resembled “the high school experience” but the first day for me was always the same. Maybe this year I can show everyone else how smart I am! Maybe this year they will understand that really I am pretty funny. Maybe this year I’ll lose the acne and get perfect skin just like all the cheerleaders.

I survived the angst, the awkward first kiss(surprising, yes), the notion that it was OK to ask a boy out, the notion that being smart somehow would attract anyone under the age of 21. I survived countless conversations about being like a sister, or being the kind of girl you would marry and bring home to mom and dad not the kind of girl you’d date in high school. I survived and began college.

University was like the ultimate do over for me. No one knew me. I could drive to class unnoticed and I could make friends and reinvent my past. So the first day became nostalgic. The wounds of High School were healing, I made a name for myself and I realized that I’m stuck with the body that I have and I’m the only person who can change me. I looked back for awhile on those first days as a learning process, as a “what not to do” from now one.

Now, after earning a masters degree and working on a second one the first day of school has become a little less dramatic. Here I am, a newly married woman, and I am looking back to all those first days, all the days I wish I could be someone else, all the days I wanted to disappear or run away, all the days that I so badly wanted to go back and yell at all those people who rejected me, I look back and I wish I could time travel to one first day. The first day of first grade, I want to tell myself to remember the laughter, the smells, the important things like algebra. I want to tell myself to remember all the state capitals instead of worrying about whether or not Brian two seats over thinks I’m cute. I want to run over to myself back then and say hey, guess what, life is difficult but everyone else has the same fears and anxiety you do, so go ahead and raise your hand, you definitely know the answer.

I’m looking back, smelling my favorite smells of Fall, looking forward to the crunching leaves, the oranges, the red, the taste of powdered sugar doughnuts being washed down with apple cider, the pumpkins, the frost on the green grass as it slowly falls into Winter sleep. I’m remembering the smell of the clean classroom and the smell of bonfires and I’m remembering all those successful first days. Successful because they brought me here: me with not one but three best friends from high school; me with the husband, the house, the cat; me with the masters and the dreams; me with my own goofy sense of humor; me, here now, a woman with nothing but happiness in her life. I’m still awkward a lot of the time but somehow, I still love the smell of these first days of school. I want to send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils, like Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail. I want you to feel the excitement of what could happen. The smell of hope and renewal, a second chance to start fresh before New Year's.