you think it's worthless
the colorful lights, the grins,
the money i spend
yet you know it's not
in your heart, your youth (our youth)
i know that you know
I Know
Author: lovizmytrio
Christmas Camry
we spoil our kids
maybe since we weren't spoiled
oh, how it sparkles
The Scrapping-Together-Book
so different from your sister's when i spent many joyful hours piecing together the photos of her youth your youth is marred, robbed, broken and i don't know why i don't know why and it might be the not knowing that will take us both
My Mythili
You are eighteen today, and the world has proclaimed you an adult. Yet, no matter your age, you will always be my child.
I don’t know how to write this to you. I don’t know how to tell you how much your life means to me without crying or wishing I could have done more or held you closer when you were young.
I don’t know when you’ll come home tonight (having asked you already to be quiet, to go through the back door).
I don’t know what to write, My Mythili, because I’ve already written too much.
I want you to be that little girl who played with pasta pieces, dolls, two toothpicks, a set of coasters… whatever you could lay your hands on… and make me an imaginary story filled with wild words and wild worlds.
I want you to be twelve, trekking across three peaks in as many days, backpack strapped to your back, aspens in their full autumnal glory, shining as bright as the sight of five moose in a weekend.
I want you to be two, trailing your older sister’s words and movements, adding to every sentence that you copy with perfect eloquence, “Yada yada yada… TOO!”
I want you to be eighteen. To have made it to your eighteenth birthday.
My little girl who hated this dress so much that she cried the whole walk down, the two-mile walk to the port in 40-degree, palm-tree-laden Spain, and yet still had enough beauty in her soul, her face, her whole being, to give us this photo.
This isn’t even the real photo. It’s the shit-copy, Walgreens-duplicate, blanket-for-Nanny photo.
Yet, look how beautiful you are, my eight-year-old, eighteen-year-old, crone of a girl.
My Mythili.
I don’t have the words or the pictures to post this moment in your life. This post-pandemic, post-death-of-a-friend, post-traumatic moment.
Post.
Is it after, or before, or right now?
This post.
I just want you to know that a million words wouldn’t be enough. That I have cried through every moment of writing this. Not because you have done anything wrong. Not because you have the audacity to become an adult. Not because I don’t love you to the tops of those peaks and back.
Because I do. My Mythili. And I don’t have the words or the pic or the ability to capture… to …
Post.
It.
Happy, happy birthday.
For You, For Me
hospitality:
the heart of an Afghan home
(how sweet the tea tastes)
Split by Trees
this pic of my girls
even with disappointment
immeasurable love
No reservations
made for a simple art day
with Van Gogh. of course.
yes, we won DC.
planes, trains, and automobiles.
only split by trees.
Girls’ Weekend
post-pandemic flight
the first for me; with my girls
to steal a weekend
beautiful DC:
the center of our country,
sordid past exposed
a bar mitzvah morn
in year five-seven-eight-three
from our first beliefs
a city forest
walking distance from temple
Shabbat salom. Peace.
my happy daughters
finding books, happiness, love
on our girls’ weekend
More than a Milestone
getting her to here
after COVID/grief trauma?
a grin worth winning
Not Here.
If you had another job, you would be so annoyed by the coworker who couldn’t piece together fiber or the project manager who doesn’t know how to manage, and your day might be temporarily ruined. You would miss your lunch hour redoing someone’s work or you wouldn’t be able to tell your boss your exact opinion of his golf vacation in the midst of your short-staffing issue.
If you had another job, you would spend your lunch hour cutting fibers or sending emails or catching up on a spreadsheet, hoping for a break or a promotion or … anything else.
Anything but this.
If you had another job, you wouldn’t stop in your tracks in the middle of a lesson to let a severe-needs child work his way to his seat, an admin begging you to give him a pencil and a blank piece of paper because maybe if he could draw a basketball, he would stop rocking on his heels and shouting the word across the room for all the world, all your classroom of recent immigrants, to witness.
If you had another job, when the siren makes your phone and the PA system and the whole world bleep and vibrate, you wouldn’t be thinking about the announcement (seeking the nurse) at lunch. You wouldn’t be sending your middle daughter to investigate the health of your colleague whose life was already threatened more times than the number of weeks in this school year, only to hear this report: “There were people everywhere and a kid on the floor. The security guards were surrounding the whole scene. We couldn’t see anything.”
If you had another job, you’d see everything. The botched fibers. The boss’s vacation. The spreadsheet that tells you exactly what you’ve done right and exactly why you don’t belong here.
But you don’t have that job.
You have this one. And despite the pull of this dog lying on your calves with the persistence of a love so divine you couldn’t measure it, this morning or in any other moment, you are here now.
And you look at your refugees and think about the Afghan girl and the Afghan para, who both stood on that tarmac eleven months back in a country that will no longer allow them to attend school, let alone show their faces, and are up in the tech office trying to get a new computer while you stand here, trying to explain without Dari or Pashto words,
“It’s a lock… out. There is a problem outside of the school. Not here. Do you understand me?”
And all the while you are thinking about your colleague whose student yesterday held a girl at her throat and sprayed her with dry erase cleaner, now imagining that at lunch that kid was under the security guards’ hands, and that he escaped, and that he “is a suspect in the perimeter.”
And that your colleague could be gone. And that your daughter was braver than you, walking down there to report on truths that can’t be reported.
And that you have to teach a lesson about the BE verb and all its uses and “Yes/No” questions such as,
“Are you happy?”
Yes, I am.
No, I’m not.
And the boy who can’t read or write or take total control of his body won’t stop talking about basketball, and then soccer, and then eating, and his paraprofessionals finally come, and the Afghan para and the Afghan girl return unscathed, and when you look into her young and beautiful eyes and ask her to say, in Dari and Pashto, “Please tell the students that the danger isn’t here. It’s a danger outside of the school,” they all shout, “We understand you, MISS!”, and even after her translation, her reassuring interpretation of your words,
You’re. Still. Not. Sure.
And let’s make contractions out of these “Be” verb conjugations, my students! (He + is = He’s. You + are = You’re.)
If you had another job, you wouldn’t have to wait until the passing period to see the text from your threatened colleague.
“I’m OK. A kid passed out in my room during lunch. I don’t know about the lockout.”
You wouldn’t have to wait. You’d be sending emails, repairing fibers, or working your way through a mountain of paperwork.
You wouldn’t be standing in front of these kids who are trying to piece together the parts of a sentence and the parts of their lives that were left in another country.
You wouldn’t be you.
If you had another job.
Lockout
if i’d stayed with you
instead of going to school
maybe i’d have peace
Step Write Up 