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.

Scott Joel Gizicki - What's Next

His laughter. It's so incredibly adorable. Unlike any I've heard. It was very charming to me then and still makes me smile today. When I mock it he laughs and tells me to shut up. It's OK because I guffaw like a drunken banshee. We both get embarrassed. It's fun. It sometimes sounds like a child being tickled. It might annoy others but it brings me joy. Even his snoring. God, how many times did I wrap pillows around my head with others? No, his snore is comforting. It's quiet enough and steady enough and predictable. Who needs the sounds of the ocean to fall asleep when you have that? He is so talented. His artwork is astonishing. It absolutely amazes me. He has a great lust for life and although he sometimes frolics instead of walks I'm there to play Devil's Advocate. I just don't want to see such a lively spirit torn but at the same time I'd like to think I help ground him just enough so he's protected. He believes in gnomes and fairies and mermaids. I laugh, but I know a part of me believes too, and he brings it out in me. But not mermaids. I won't believe in mermaids because as legend tells, the old sailors thought manatees were mermaids. Manatees = Mermaids. Despite my adamant disbelief on that mythical creature I still love the way he views life. His sensitivity and honesty blows me away. I've never had it this good. I never once found him unattractive despite his constant (my own exaggeration) preoccupied focus on his body. He is insecure and so am I. So sexy and fragile. So human. So real. He makes me feel so alive. Like no other. Now...Wow...Now is soon going to become a next. What are we going to do? Even while we are both aware of the inevitable I'm discovering more of my love for him. It's so difficult. But it's smart because of the different futures we see. The one subject that was essentially the tipping point in our relationship. So, we take it a day at a time. We've been able to tackle and do everything perfectly and honestly in our relationship. I find it incredible that we can even break up so well. We are almost perfect and I'm not ready for what's next.

Scott Joel Gizicki is just another one of those new Los Angeles residents that acts and enjoys writing as well. After being born and raised in Detroit, he finally made it 3,000 miles to the city he's always wanted to live in this past August. He hopes he can stand out from the crowd; at least a little bit. :)

Barbi Beckett - Dark Rooms

I was fifteen when Amadeus came out. It was a long-ass movie, with an intermission, but I couldn’t get enough of it - the music, F. Murray Abraham, the story and Tom Hulce…Oh, Wolfie. If I were to see it now I’d probably think, that’s a gay man, but at fifteen I just thought, dreamy.

By Oscar time I was 16 and the film was having a long run at a dollar theatre thirty minutes from my house. My dad would let me go by myself, with my brand new driver’s license, on SCHOOL nights to watch it – again and again. He must’ve figured there were worse things I could be hooked on.

When F. Murray won the Academy Award I learned that he was raised in El Paso and his parents were still there. I started plotting how I would get into their house.

I decided a fake interview for my school newspaper was the way to go. I was not affiliated with the class I would later learn was called “journalism”. I had never written anything. I actually struggled for passing grades (sometimes forging my report card) so I could participate in theatre and dance. To boot, I looked ridiculous. I had sort of a Brian Setzer/Cyndi Lauper thing going. Think pompadoured mullet. Still, I got the phone book out and rang up the Abrahams who, just, said I could come over.

I took a clipboard with a piece of paper on it, for my ‘interview’. I did not take questions. The Abraham’s home was bright and open with congratulatory balloons and flowers everywhere. On a sliding glass door was an Amadeus poster and, on the wall, a Fruit of the Loom poster. F was grapes before he was Salieri. I didn’t write a single thing on my clipboard in the 3 hours I spent in his parent’s home.

With great pride, Mr. Abraham showed me his reel to reel player and his extensive bathroom remodel. But, of course, the Abrahams were most proud of their boy. Mrs. Abraham told me that she’d been watching the movie in a local theatre when, at intermission, she overheard two women talking about how incredible that Salieri was. She said, “I leaned in and whispered, ‘That’s my son’.”

I did not want to leave and I had no excuse to come back. “I forgot to take notes” was too weak, even for me to try. And, I finally admitted to myself that there was no casual way to ask people to be your grandparents.

After I moved to Seattle, I was leaving a coffee shop when I saw Tom Hulce walk out of a Blockbuster video. As we passed each other on the crosswalk, I averted my eyes and thought, I wish you could know how you touched my little life.

Soon after that, my brother died. That was bad enough but the circumstances around his death were dark and horrendous. I wasn’t afraid to close my eyes at night because, graciously, the only thing my brain made me see when I did was a soothing, swirling fuschia. Open eyes were problematic. If you’re me, you can still see where his name once scarred my leg. If you’re my therapist at the time, I probably wasn’t the first person you warned against trying to drink bleach. “You won’t die; You’ll just end up in the hospital getting surgery after surgery to repair the damage.”

hmm.

But then Forrest showed up. I’m not embarrassed to say that Forrest Gump may have saved my life. Another long movie; I sat for hours in packed, vacant, giant and intimate theatres relieved of reality. I came to know when a crowd was about to laugh and curiously observed how different moments landed on different audiences. After the 10^th or 12^th viewing, I was driving home and thought, I should really commit to acting. Maybe I can make something that relieves someone someday. If it doesn’t work out, I can kill myself. Later. With that, I’d taken the tiniest step back toward the living.

Just two years before all those hours and days grieving with Forrest Gump, I’d been doing Extra work on Sleepless in Seattle. At 4AM, between takes in a restaurant, I was standing near a booth where a shot was being lit. Tom Hanks sat in the booth and yawned, then I did and he said, “Made you yawn.”

I smiled at him – unaware of how he would touch my little life.