recession

Anywhere but Here

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

with windows wide: write.
 because you’ve missed my poems, love.
 since yesterday’s dawn
 
 girls in sun’s shadow
 as she announces her move.
 life: cycle in, out.
 


you know you’ve missed me
 my “seven-likes” followers
 ’cause i didn’t write
 
 you count me daily
 amongst the regular loves
 that make us a life
 
 and i was just born.
 (it was like i was just born
 the day i met him)
 


’cause seventeen years
 can’t be measured in mountains
 or wildflowers
 


or whining children.
 but in the steps we oft take
 on our way back home
 
 and in sunsets. Sun!
 lighting my way across love
 across city, life.
 


cutting down this ‘hood
 into what it’s meant to be:
 scraped, demolished, lost.
 
 circular i am
 because that’s how tires spin:
 neverending globe
 


that brings us back home
 wherever that home may be.
 anywhere but here.
 

Sunny Skies Ahead

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

he comes home with clouds
 hovering over new joy
 (where we could be free)
 
 but then i must ask:
 is freedom found in money?
 so hard to answer
 
 those without know best:
 lack of money’s a prison
 choking month to month
 
 those with all know best:
 too much money is a trap
 biting claws of greed
 
 it was just enough
 for shoes, road trips, water parks
 just enough to breathe
 
 i want that freedom–
 monthly-cycle jail-cell break
 so far from the clouds
 
 

Dreams Await

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

one call changes all
 fifteen years of wait lifted
 our family’s lost weight
 
 
 

Swimming in It

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

bad college advice
 from those who are still in school
 and haven’t paid debt
 
 trapped in the banks’ lies
 for an unsure future life
 they might not afford
 
 tell them: study hard
 work your ass off, all four years
 with a paying job
 
 choose a cheaper school
 or a major that pays out
 once you graduate
 
 but would they listen?
 their biggest concern: when’s lunch?
 debt lost on all ears

The Same Zip Code

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

we make home visits to welcome freshmen
who haven’t set foot in our school.
on the drive we discuss gentrification,
how these kids are coming across town
to our school because they think it’s better
(but it’s so much better than the remnants
of gangs that linger in their northwest ‘hood,
in the high school that hasn’t caught up
with the white money-chasers)

inside the first house, a blond bombshell
(shy as a country field mouse) lets us into
her gutted bungalow, replete with
granite counters all around, tells us she chooses us
because the people at our school were nicer
than the pompous competitor next to City Park

we make our way back to the south side
and step into a mansion built
on top of one of Denver’s many scrapes,
with oriental rugs leading from
hallway to music room to never-ending kitchen,
with a nice mother and a moody teenage boy
who grunts responses to questions
(because manners can’t be bought)

and then, within the same zip code of
block after block of mansions that
have all but stomped out the middle class,
we pull up to our last stop:
The Red Pine Motel,
settled along Broadway
between a bar and a pot shop.

in a tiny apartment without a table,
a man stands eating a bowl of soup,
his hand half broken and bandaged,
his pony tail tied at the nape of his neck,
his high-heeled wife potty training
her three-year-old in the adjacent room.

“you can come and look, do your check,
do what you need to do.”
we exchange glances.
do they they think we’re the cops?
are they used to this?
my colleague reassures him that this is a friendly visit,
that we have papers and t-shirts
and hope for a better tomorrow
(God save us all)

we sit on the bench-like singular piece of furniture
in the kitchen/living/dining room,
(no more than 100 square feet)
with a miniature gas stove and not a single
speck of a counter, granite or otherwise

the boy is running late
and both parents engage in disgruntled talk
when he arrives,
and they plain as day tell us what he’s like
and he plain as day answers.
they use words like imaginative.
engaging.
photographic memory.
and the little girl sports her
oversized South Future Rebel t-shirt,
and the uncle waits outside and begs
to have a t-shirt too,
so proud are they of sending their boy
on the one mile
(the one million mile)
walk between their dwelling and
the grandiose Italian architecture
that will be his high school,
where he will walk past
block after block of mansions
in the same zip code
through the disappearing middle class
into the institution
that will grant him a future
or place him right back
into the thin line of poverty
that hovers over our city.

and this is what it’s like to be a teacher
in today’s world.

The Buck that Burns Across My Back

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

It is 14:52 on the eve of ESL summer school. We have spent an entire day, AN ENTIRE DAY, planning for a sixty-five-minute lesson from curriculum that we first laid our eyes on this morning after a completely different and unrelated ENTIRE DAY presentation of curriculum yesterday. And at this moment, he announces that tomorrow, for the first day, the schedule will be “different.” That all our lesson planning has just been flushed down the toilet that has become our society.

I cried on my two-mile walk this morning. Not because it was too hot, or the views of the Perfect Denver Neighborhood weren’t impeccable. Or because I had to teach summer school for four weeks to pay for summer camp for my girls for ONE. But because of an article I read about the University of Phoenix, of all things. About how, in five years, their enrollment has decreased by fifty percent. And starting July 1st, a new law will require that they prove that their graduates make enough money to pay back the loans that their for-profit greed has forced them to take.

I was thinking these things as I made my way across town to the locale of this year’s grant-funded summer school, the University of Denver, a NONprofit institution with gorgeous grounds and transgender bathrooms and air conditioning and classes that start at $1200 a CREDIT.

And how screwed I am. Not because I think that the University of Phoenix is so damn amazing that it could grind up the 100-year-old trees of Denver’s “Ivy League of the West.” But because I have to do this. I have to do this damn summer school and have a part time job as an adjunct-but-never-real professor, that I have to bend my will to the beck and call of disorganized, incapable-of-communicating administrators, all for the buck that burns across my back.

That the measly $600 that I sometimes earn in a month at the University of Phoenix is sometimes all that keeps us from bowing down to debt.

And when he comes in at 13:33 and tells me that they haven’t been able to contact more than 11 students for our summer school, I ask him if it will be cancelled, if I will be shit out of luck on all counts this Tuesday. “No worries… it’s already accounted for… a grant. No pasa nada.” And his blue eyes and Argentinian accent are slappable. “And who paid for it?” I demand, the third time in two months I’ve asked, a question he’s dodged until this moment. “Well… you have. The taxpayers. The READ Act.”

And it all circles back to me. The University of Denver grounds I stand on that have been manicured by professional gardeners. The school I could never afford to attend, nor will any of my children even think of applying to. The public education that is filled and funded with so many holes, twenty-seven gorgeous textbooks, full-color photos and activities galore, a slew of classroom supplies including an electric pencil sharpener, that 11 students will take advantage of … all the rest? To waste.

The “for-profit” evil University of Phoenix that has allowed my family to break free of the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle that is a teacher’s salary, that allowed us to live on a pittance in Spain, that has allowed me to… breathe.

What is an education worth? Why won’t parents commit to a forty-five minute bus ride for free materials, expert teachers, individualized classes, and free breakfast and lunch? Why won’t the University of Denver be asked to publish data on how many students graduate with a super-fancy psychology degree and start their salaries at $22,000? Why won’t our government ever just see that EDUCATION SHOULD BE FREE??

This is my Tuesday. Let the games begin. The Hunger Games, real world style.

Folktale

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

so the opposite 
 mud lightning storm Pilot stuck
 i’ll step in the mud 
 
 you will cry, complain
 say this trip is time’s vengeance 
 but i will find help 
 
 through lightning, thunder
 better than sickness and health
 i will walk through mud 
 
 and find solutions 
 to every last thing you hate
 yet me you soooo love
 
 and i will get help
 and tow you from hell. and back.
 my love is that. deep.
 
 misadventure? tale.
 that is my thought as i walk.
 you and i? tale told.
 
 
 
 

A Visit from Charles Schwab

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

a day off of work
 for three hours with students
 plus!–small donation
 
 refugees’ lives
 summarized in two chapters,
 questions that plague them
 
 if they saw their day,
 their actual student day,
 they might learn something
 
 instead, they murmur
 over plot complexities
 and students’ English
 
 they might realize,
 when to mansions they return,
 the true complex plot:
 
 they can’t give answers
 to high school reading questions
 nor inequity
 
 work, in equities:
 invest in students, not stocks.
 buy them a future.
 

Actual Advice Please

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

one more blog bragging
 about money saving tips
 i’m gonna lose it
 
 it’s easy to save
 when your salary’s double
 what a teacher earns
 
 i can just get by
 three kids, two jobs, zero debt
 yet no spare nickel
 
 a livable wage
 is all i am asking for
 not a useless post
 
 try living on this:
 string of broken promises
 thin enough to break
 
 
 

Free. Time.

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

In the outside pocket of my backpack, under my Subway-kids-meal-bag packed lunch, I cram my sneakers. The snow will be too deep this morning to wear them, but the thought of wearing my discount-store leather boots that pinch my toes all day burdens me more than switching out shoes once I get to work.

I could drive now, having two cars for the first time in three years. But then I would miss the beauty of freshly frosted branches, of silent flakes floating out of the Colorado sky, of the words tapping into me from my latest audiobook.

I am eating my amped-up breakfast, a bagel with cream cheese, spinach, and two eggs scrambled with red peppers, to sustain me for the late start day and the late lunch day, when my colleague texts me to announce the snow day.

I don’t believe her. Denver doesn’t cancel school, not unless there’s more than a foot and blizzard-like conditions. I check three web sites who haven’t caught up with the news as quickly as her, and then the email from the superintendent pops up and my entire family receives a rare and beautiful gift that cannot be wrapped and yet we open with such joy that it warms our entire house: Free. Time.

This could be so different. We could be part of different districts, just like before, Bruce could be at work, just like a few months ago, and we wouldn’t be all together. It would be my day, mine alone, and I would be crawling up the walls by the end of it, probably using the time to work and clean the house and dig out the driveway and be the person I am for 95% of my life.

But today? I fix French toast with sliced strawberries, powdered sugar, butter, honey, the works! We read Shel Silverstein under a blanket on the couch. Bruce visits a former colleague, helps him figure out a trouble ticket (unpaid, of course), and borrows his crockpot for our Sunday pot roast dinner. I listen, for once, to the girls practice their piano songs. Riona teaches me to play chess and Mythili beats me in a game in five minutes. The girls play Wii, Bruce shovels the walks and driveway, and I ski to, around, and back from the park, capturing the utter emptiness and silence in a way that couldn’t come to me on my frenzied walk to school, where I’d be thinking about my lesson plan, my seating chart, the upcoming testing nightmare… I come home sweating from head to toe, peel off my clothes for a shower, and he waits for me in the bedroom, ready to make me sweat from head to toe all over again… Isabella and I play Sorry, the younger set drives with Bruce and I to the local coffee shop where we have gluten-free pastries and mochas and hot chocolates and play Go Fish and compost our waste and pretend, if only for an hour, we are just like the yuppies who can actually afford this neighborhood. We have freestyle dinner–each person gets to choose what they want, Bruce fries up some ham and eggs to supplement the girls’ inadequate choices, I eat his delicious teriyaki chicken leftovers, and he whips up some instant pudding when the baby requests it because, well, she’s the baby, and, why not? I finalize the girls’ sleepover plans for Saturday and in the midst of texting with the mothers I don’t really know (nothing like the good old days when the girls were young and we actually took time to get to know their friends’ parents), we’re dropped with a mini bombshell.

How dare she ruin my snow day, my gift from God (or at least my gift from the god-of-the-school-district superintendent)? How dare she flaunt something in our faces and snatch it away? But worse, how dare she draw that rift up between he and I?

It is what we don’t talk about and what we always talk about. What he hates for me to bug him about and what I hate to be the one bugging about. How dare she flaunt an easy path for some extra money and take it all away before giving us one dime, all for us to be right back where we started, which is: Can we afford to live this way?

“I’ll look for a job…” He reassures me. “I mean, I’ll look harder. But you know, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have me work and expect all the things you have now. You know–” He sucks in his breath, flips the ham on his plate. “I’m not going to say anything else or I’ll get too upset.”

I know. If he works I wouldn’t be able to ski, or walk, or listen to audiobooks on the way to school. I won’t have neat piles of folded laundry stacked on the bed, ready for me to put away. I won’t have a chef fixing me his latest recipe, or a grocery list with everything checked off. The wood floor will be gritty when I move back the mat to do a yoga video, or I’ll be cleaning that floor instead of doing yoga. I’ll work two jobs and spend my free time transporting three kids to their schools and activities, and we’ll be able to eat out whenever we want and surely pay that hefty price for the piano lessons they so love and drive all the way to the east coast and back because we’ll have the money to pay for it… but at what cost?

The cost of silencing everyone who’s always asking me, “Why doesn’t he work? Where has he been looking? Why doesn’t he do this or try that? How do you do it? Why would you…” I won’t finish because I’ll get too upset.

The cost that would snatch the peace of a family snow day right out from under us. Of knowing that he’ll have a good job with decent hours and enough vacation time to actually enjoy our lives together, just like all those years before.

My day ends with a ping on my phone: a message from a former colleague who didn’t get a snow day, who is tired of everyone bitching about not getting a snow day, and announced it to them all today on the social media that consumes our lives and makes us not have a life. Why is he calling them out on their complaints? Because he remembers the 25 miles I used to ride my damn bicycle to and from work every day, all so we wouldn’t have to try to replace our broken-down van, so Bruce wouldn’t have to work, so we wouldn’t have the damn frenzy of a rat-race life that everyone around us has, all those parents out there who are stressing about delayed starts and snow days and having to fight the battle to bring home that extra buck.

How ironic, he points out in the end, that I was lucky enough to get a snow day today. That I wouldn’t have to ride my bike or walk or ski to work.

In the outside pocket of my backpack, leaving a space for my Subway-kids-meal-bagged lunch, my sneakers wait for tomorrow. I could drive, but why wouldn’t I walk? Why wouldn’t I enjoy the freshly fallen flakes, the peace that comes with early morning movement, where I can rethink my lesson plans, still have time to change them, and know that my husband will drive all the girls to school and fix their lunches and be there for them when the last bell rings and not have the money to take me out to dinner but will have a ten-million-times-better meal already planned?

Tomorrow, the snow will not be too deep. There will be no snow day. No Free. Time. And I will walk. And he will be home. And he will be the happiness that I am lucky enough to come home to.