Shirley

About the Note on My Fridge   Week and a half ago, almost my birthday, an Amazon package came. I tore open the bag, big, brown, smashy, no sender address, and pulled out two smashy cartons of Boom Chicka Pop, 12 packets total. My sister. Of course! We had a history. Gleefully I called her. “Did you see my message?” she asked. Message? No. I looked again. Down inside the bag was a note. Hahaha. We laughed and laughed.     Boom Chicka Pop used to arrive routinely, big cardboard boxes of it, each holding maybe eight cartons labeled like in a grocery store and containing a bunch of individual packets, microwaveable. My sis—she jokingly calls me Sisty Ugler—had bought us a subscription. She’d said she’d keep it coming for as long as I didn’t say anything mean to her. We swam in that popcorn. We sometimes gave some away. So easy to bump open the microwave, lay down a packet, wait rocking on our feet while it bloated up, and pour out the nubbles, exploded and salty, into...

Just Telling You Recently, winter bearing down upon the land, I happened on a few photos from back when the yard was still green. Maybe May? June? My sis-in-law and I had been talking on the phone about this thing of bunching the front of your shirt inside your pants or skirt and letting the back hang out sloppily. Which I guess I’d not known was a style. I went out on the porch and took some pictures of me trying it and sent her one. Probably this one, as the others I have here don’t delude the eye enough. In those, my belly puffs out. The pudginess i s normal, I know, and nobody ever scolds me for it. Still, it’s one more cringey thing. I always mean to suck it up—in—but the effort is too wearing. I forget and end up going around jiggling. I suppose not eating would also work, but I want too much to live. As photos don’t tell you everything, e specially when they’re curated, l et’s move on to the skirt itself. It’s long and languid, with pockets, and draggy on behind, so...

When the Song, Not Just the Groundhog, Got Cooked   Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.” So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. (Stock photo. For illustration purposes only.)      On a tangible hillside in honest-to-goodness hilly Pittsburgh, actual man is robbed of his bush berries in broad unfiltered daylight. Culprit is furry, breathing. Actual man clobbers culprit and cooks culprit’s wet pink meat. Actual man makes quiche, perceptible steam puffing out. Man carries dish to party, yum yum. True story gets around. Man’s breathing sister in fields-and-cows Virginia tells some other breathing people. One says, her thoughts coming hot on the air, “That sounds like a country song: Kill a groundhog and put it in a quiche. Tell him to write a song.” Breathing sister does. Actual man does. Man jiggers words around in his pulpy brain and sends them to his machine, making it blink but no...

Even If   Mind roils and boils, world’s ending. If can get some nerve, leave bed. Cold trip to night kitchen. Glug of milk, dose of choco powder, push nuker button. Pad cup to grizzly frizzly chair, frowzy lamp. Scrabble for pages. Gaze and sip, gaze and sip, till— Till nod nod Till heavy heavy Till drag down, drag down, drag down. Stay put, not wake up enough of bones to soft leg back to bed. Just feeble reach and switch off light. Sag low, lower, lower, whole way to knocked out. Usually works. And even if. Once, toddy overbubbles overfloods. Still’s some left. Fuzzy lamp and fuzzy head. Dims dims dims. Stills enough to sinker, low down to nothing.    

Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 15   You almost can’t see the cat puddled along the windowsill. And to get a grander picture, you must bend your nose to each piece of the story. For example, this one, and this one.   But even then, that won’t do. So here’s the book (it’s also here—the whole thing ). After chopping up my thrift-s hop copy for its illustrations, I had t o go find a nother .   The cat is a nuisance and a pest, in the eyes of Mr. Foster, the hotel manager. He uses Mr. Foster’s toothbrush—the cat hairs are evidence. “ Cat whiskers!” cried Mr. Foster. The cat rides the elevator when he wants, eats the night clerk’s tuna sandwiches, thinks the lobby is his own living room. Mr. Foster intends to shoo the animal for good, once the rain stops. Maybe it sounds terrible—my cutting up a book. But isn’t this vandalizing what a junk store is all about, really—its mission? Its used and useful ethos? And e ven if m y objets d’art lack the gravitas of somebody’s act...