Jessica
Jessica Fox-Wilson:
- wants a do-over.
- doesn’t want to tell her story again.
- feels tender.
- is collecting bruises and callouses, putting them on display.
- sees the world again in slants and slopes, distances and steps to climb.
- does the monster mash.
- cannot fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate.
- hates that everything takes longer and is harder than usual.
- loves her nest of hair, wants an animal to roost inside.
- wishes that she were a bird with brilliant feathers.
- feels victorious for small reasons.
- listened to an old woman threaten to break a young man’s knuckle. Did nothing.
- loves looking at people’s tattoos, peeking out from underneath their work clothes.
- is learning to bend and not break.
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This morning, when I woke up, I was in a snit. A sore, tired, leg-braced snit. While getting ready for work, all I could think of were the many grumpy, self-pitying status updates that I wanted to post on Facebook. I wanted to whine. So, instead, I wrote before leaving for work:
“Jessica Fox-Wilson can only think of grumpy status updates this morning, so thinks better of it.”
But as I continued to walk through my day, the FB status updates kept swimming in my head. They wouldn’t leave me only. In this scenario, the only thing to do is to collect them, so I wrote them down periodically. The nice thing about this practice is that they morphed from grumpy/whiny/self-pitying into something resembling poetry. From an artistic standpoint, I don’t know if I would call this a full fledged poem, but maybe a kernel (or kernels) of poems. From a personal standpoint, it sure helped me get through the day without crying or flipping out, which feels like a win to me.
And of course, my new status update says:
“Jessica Fox-Wilson feels better, now that she’s in pajamas.”
Which happens to be very true.
