D is back and carrying a head cold from Ohio with her. She's keen to sell Frankie Say w00t t-shirts. She also brought back dozens of pictures and short videos from visits with family. Nothing like almost-toddling nieces for photo ops.
In the business of photo ops, you might have missed these people. Not household names--with the possible exceptions of McKinney and Nader--but an interesting group. So what do they need, a celebrity VP to get attention? Can they get the attention of organized labor? Dare I add that the Greens need green? Not that money wins elections, but it sure damn helps.
And now I'll had a little prose poem. See how it works for you.
Loaf, loaves. My nephew leaps into the room, his body soft and wigglesome with childhood. He transports his stomach carefully, points to it, holds it, says, “I want some bread.” Like blond children several hours earlier, a thousand in each time zone, each one said, “Please.” And pointed to their stomachs, also carried carefully, also surrounded by soft bones and pulsing tissue. And what I assume, he has not assumed.
A vague teacher forms above his head, struggling. “We should make squaw bread,” my nephew says. As if. Above the pale pergo floor, between taupe walls, under a plaster ceiling, in the middle of a cold snap near Lake Michigan, as if. Just a word. Not by bread alone, but joined. A loaf. Soft and shaped like that soft shape. Which one? A woman shape? Pick.
Over the couch. The same nephew, thick through the hips, clutches his arms to his breast, folds at the waist over the back of the dark upholstery. Folds. What else to say? He’s a kid. It’s from school. The teacher appears above his head, and the boy unfolds. Another time zone, another thousand hungry blond boys. “Just pick something!” the mothers yell, hoarse with rich food and children in socks, “Entertain yourselves!” Snow snakes. Stick games. We can make squaw bread. As if. A redheaded woodpecker hammers outside, and outside it’s headache weather. Inside it’s headache weather. Coffee in shallow cups. Screaming toddlers. A circus.
Soft in the hips. Heavy, but he wants to fry bread. “You shape it like this,” he says, hands forming a shape in space. An assignment takes shape above his head. A teacher’s voice falls silent, snakes along the floor, goes. “Squaw,” he says again. “Ojibwe,” his mother says, tired, “Ojibwe. Ojibwe bread.” The afternoon vanishes into dinner time. More hungry children in this zone, in the one before and the one that follows us into our small future. On the table, venison, squash, wild rice.
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