Applaud my mother
Thank you. I’d like to dedicate this award to my mother. Look up here. Here she is giggling pantyhosed at the stove boiling spaghetti in sweet butterdappled milk. And here she is in the bathroom mirror saying it doesn’t matter if it’s the weekday on my underwear and the moaning blow dryer. And here she is standing next to a large bicycle with her father who ran from a torture camp into friendly fire with his head. And here she is turning the lamp off to rest.
No awards for medical transcriptionists. Doctors slur whatever they tubed or removed that day into my mother’s headset. The work puts significant strain on the eyes. Her eyes, she tells me, are killing her. There were no doctors around when Richard and I nearly died together in green hills several transfers from here. I kept shouting, Slow down! I thought I was shouting but I wasn’t, like I thought I was on a train and I was in bed. Richard dragged himself to the monks for aspirin. I worried he’d faint on his way up the hill and die before I could remember I wasn’t on a train. It’s like that up here, Richard, but instead of a fever I have an award.
Applaud my students
Thank you. It’s no coincidence I’m so galvanizing up here, being a commander of attention by trade. This morning I watched a man fatally high draw his seizing hand to the subway pole. The hand wills its way to a grip! I shrieked, printed some pamphlets, stripped, chasséd right, chasséd left, ran up and down the aisle handing them out— my pamphlets. The train became very quiet. Everyone was reading. Finally someone said, Get this commuter an award.
I’d like to dedicate this award to my students. To their hands like sweet buns patting my hair into flaps and caressing my thighs during hard lockdowns behind the coat rack. They love to skin up next to each other in the safety triangle in the dark. They never believe me when I explain why we practice. Here we are at dawn entering 100% focus mode watching my favorite commercial starring Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens. Some charges against him were eventually dropped; he went on to write a memoir titled I Feel Like Going On. And here’s gigantic Shenora spread-eagle on the rainbow rug and her father wiping the sweat from his face, laughing, smelling of cologne, onions, the cold, and, very faintly but distinctly, shit, insisting that she’s six years old. Everybody spoils me, nobody loves me! she’s wailing. I tucked my hand into her paw and here we are discussing my hair until she can rejoin her class respectfully.
Applaud my father
Thank you. Have you ever heard of the depressed piano player? He eat so much bread, so much tortellini, so much— meatballs. But when he play the piano, he really bring reality to a point. Here’s my father patting his belly on his birthday telling me, I’ve got so much time in me.
And here he is in the garage in two bathrobes and a leather jacket feeding slabs of lapiz lazuli to a spinning blade for his pietra dura reproduction business. Here he is pointing his toes as I carry him in my arms around the hotel pool. Here he is fluffing my pillows and waving forks of marinated beef under my nose. Here he is squeezing my mother’s eyeballs out with his thumbs. This work is on loan from my mother’s private collection. And here’s the famous painting of the milkmaid pouring milk from a pitcher and me yearning. The milk pours into me through my eyes and overfills me with the perfection of the painting so I yearn for milk. But before I understood that, I left Richard, who my father, to whom this award is dedicated, never really liked, preferring for me a troubadour like himself.
Applaud my team
Thank you. None of this, of course, could have been possible without my team. I’d like to take a moment to thank the people on the subway this morning for always believing in me, especially Homeless Al whose ramshackling up and down the aisle repeating his name and Olive Garden order put us all in the mood for reading, the man with the pink backpack who chimed in on harmonica, the man fatally high drawing his seizing hand to the pole, the woman in the white skirt tattered on purpose, expensively, to suggest— winning a rape, and, of course, last but not least, to her IKEA bag, for the salvation of that vast, crinkled ocean when I needed it most.
I wanted this for Richard and I— a cliffside cottage in the simple replenishment of Scandinavian economy, a window facing the unthinkable and me in his lap unthinking it. What I miss most about Richard is the luxury SUV experience of his lap. Richard, I miss the luxury SUV experience of your lap, buddy. Call me.
Here we are never getting married though I believed I could coax him into a few dozen folding chairs tucked into some denuded coast. Here he is having no taste for publicity despite his ecstatic cheekbones. He’s an orderly person, like my mother, with a fine-tuned appreciation for the sweet ordinariness of our horrific ordinariness, like my mother, a person I like to make proclamations about, like Richard. The idiom of my mother’s suffering is only horrific and Richard abstains from complaint, seeing himself as ordinary. Here’s my mother telling me every day is a gift, when I ask, How are you, and here she is telling me we live on the blue waves when I ask, How’s the weather. And here’s Santa Claus zipping down our chimney with a velvet heap of days.
Applaud the revolutionaries
Thank you. It’s so cozy, me being up here like a Christmas tree, you being down there like shiny boxes, my boughs, your bows, delightful and delighted. See how the light catches the gold in my hair? They burned all the tapestries for gold threads during the French Revolution, you know that. What I like about revolutionaries is they’re so resourceful but it’s a shame about the tapestries; someone sat a long time pounding gold into floss.
And here’s my dad yelling in his deranged jovial way, It’s not for you, it’s for my grandchildren and their children, about the pietra duras he kept, You little bitch! He means— girl. Here he is making a mirror of his hands yelling, I’m an artist! Here I am agreeing again, gamely failing to imagine a room I’ll live in one day with my father’s tables, absorbing his jovial derangement with the side of my face, picking up whatever I was doing before he came over to love me, dreading his death in my spine. I’m retarded, he yells. I’m retarded gay, he yells, and goes up on his fungal toes to prance around his tables. I’m gay, respect my taste please, I’m retarded, my father, he yells dancing ballet, Look at me, I’m retarded. Sorry about, sorry about! he says, Sorry about! He never says what he’s sorry about. It’s smart to be dumb, he says, and I’m really dumb.
Applaud patyagoosinki
Thank you. It’s wonderful having you here with me. I can’t see you, but I feel you. You, of course, can see me. You’re probably wondering what my face smells like. I was sitting, once, in a field of wildflowers, believing the sun on my back, and a man sat down next to me and told me it smelled like honey, my face. Then the walls blanked and I named the holes in them Tidy and Pleading.
Here’s my Babushka teaching me the pleasure of honey and the pleasure of gratitude and the pleasure of pleasure which is the pleasure of honey which is the pleasure of gratitude in the free apartment next to the botanical gardens where she choked me to gratitude with hat strings in the winter! See her two gold teeth? She’d have to be careful laughing around revolutionaries! And here we are two Section 8 dilettantes dipping stale bread rinds into tea thick with honey, watercoloring trees on the laminate breakfast table.
I don’t blame her for pulling Pushkin from her ears and lobbing him idly at the buttercup curtains separating excavation sites at the strip mall hospice. Here she is taking her teeth out and not putting them back in, may her dirt be downy. Here I am disavowing the obscenity of her muteness and never visiting. Here’s my mother accusing Babushka of self-inducing her dementia, thrusting seasonal stemware at the nurses apologizing for her mother being a soft woman who never liked to work. And here’s Babushka in the mornings of my childhood, tugging my feet and arms singing a word I didn’t know, patyagoosinki, patyagoosinki, it felt so nice, it was to revive the blood, I’ll never forget patyagoosinki.