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Love, Dare, Grow: El Cerrito Families Part 3
For part three of my series of interviews with El Cerrito families, I interviewed my daughter Magdalene Gabriel. Her ideas about family ended up very much fitting with my own, but it was also beautiful to read the way her ideas and feelings are different. Magdalene is a 14 year old freshman at El Cerrito High School. Who is family? My family is my mom, dad, brother and my dog. My family is my uncle james and my aunt amy and Erik and Terry. How do you know? I know because they’re the people that I love and the people that have raised me. What is unique about your family? When a lot of people think of family, they think of people related to them by blood, their ancestors. When I think of family, I think of people like my aunt amy and uncle james, and those people aren’t actually related to me by blood, but regardless they are still my family and I love them. Why is family important to you? Family is the people that have raised me. Family is the people that have helped me with my homework and influenced my interests. Family is the people that have and will support me unconditionally. Family is the people I will always go to, no matter what. That’s why they’re important to me. What does home mean to you? Home to me is the place I go back to after school and the place I wake up at, but home can also be the place that I feel most comfortable and most myself, just like family is the people I feel the most comfortable and myself with. What does home look like to you? Home looks like a house with a red door. Home looks like a backyard with a laundry shed and a bedroom with blue floors. What are your dreams for your family? For us to go to Iceland together. For my mom to win every poetry contest and award you can think of. For my brother to graduate from OSA and then whatever art college he decides to go to.
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almost summer shelter in place love poem
i have spent almost twenty five years trying to write you the perfect love poem. this will not be it. this poem will sigh the way you sigh, deep, at 4:30 am not ready to exit the bed but called out into the world of heat and wire. summer is folded up on top of the blankets, waiting, just a few more weeks. i want to tell you that when your truck pulls out of the driveway my heart sinks, and in the afternoon i wait for the sound of your engine. when i say i love you i mean here, in this moment, in the almost of it: the repeated sighs, the early rising, the hot coffee in the kitchen, the wilted spring and the joy that’s not quite here yet. i love you even if may never ends, an eternity of the light on in the bathroom, you brushing your teeth and zipping your work shirt, everything about to happen. teenage zine
my daughter orders a zine in the mail, smoky teenage art featuring liquor bottles. i was excellent at that genre: collages and stories that featured absolut, and razor blades, and witch lesbians. i was epic in high school, so much so i only finished sophomore year. this girl i love starts 10th grade in a couple months, and i am the parent now, paging through this photocopied offering, reminding her she can come talk to me about anything. i hand her back this testament letters swimming in high proof alcohol, practically ripping the paper: 14 is a lot of truth. my girl i welcome you into the world a second time, with equal struggle, this universe of words that cut and defy and end. you are the child of language that panicked all the grown ups: grown now yourself curled in your tiny back bedroom with pencils and notebooks and plenty to say. i’m listening. the favorite child
my daughter is obsessed with being The Favorite Child. she brought it up in my Mother’s Day card, then again at the dinner table. this has gone on for years. my son has gotten touchy about it, fights back, no I’M the favorite child. their papa tells whichever one he’s with they’re the best, then, shhhhh don’t tell the other. i’ll tell you the truth, which i don’t dare tell them: i could not possibly pick one, but i do love that they both fight for it. each one knows that they’re worthy of being the favorite. both day dreamers imagining a better world in the leaf shadows outside their windows, both certain of their own genius, confident in their ingenuity, both not too shy to declare themselves the center of my spinning universe. freeways: pandemic poem #10
for amy i made it through oakland in minutes racing the freeway arcing the lake looping back past the bay pulling the reins in hard to halt at my corner. traffic is a thing of the past back when i wore slacks and went to lunch and had more to do than just pick up my medicine and hurry home. i don’t see anyone on my street either: usually the high school kids would be tossing wrappers in my bushes jaywalking extravagantly away from my disapproval. it’s quiet here in the after. but then unexpectedly you call, and even more unexpectedly i call back. there might be space here in this great sudden emptiness for conversations about losing and what comes after: wouldn’t we all like to know what comes after? i think it might be the truest thing i ever said: which was i love you. that’s what’s left here at the end of all the empty roads, the coiling freeways that sped us back home. four more weeks sheltering: pandemic poem #7
the strings of emails the tasks accomplished the drafts the submissions the hours billed: none of it adds up to one room full of laughter, one walk grazing shoulders, one knee to knee strategy session. can i talk to you through the fence i asked thinking it might keep me from breaking. i now have weeks of lists and jokes, terrors and dreams and things i had wanted to ask backed up behind a polite fine: this dam threatening cracks. i can’t wait til it breaks: beware the obsessive love notes and messages marked question a giant earnest wave wrestling the mud and rocks all the way to the ocean. pandemic poem #5
for the Molotov Mouths this molotov cocktail is loaded with a love poem: hot sharp devastating. it’s sailing over their chain link their barbed wire over their massive concrete: it’s leaping every barrier. it’s exploding windows splintering doors warping steel this burning love. i am standing in the middle of this smoking apocalypse launching the one thing i have left to say: i love you like a riot like an avalanche like a hand that just won’t let go. pandemic poem #4
for jonah i can’t think of anything better this morning than telling you the way you glance at the floor and half smile when i say i love you is devastating, the way you carry the weight of waking: make your lunch, zip your bag, grab your keys, convinces me to start with coffee, the way you place your hand on my shoulder blade is just enough to make me believe i might make it through the day. turns out when we get to the end of the world all i have left is love poems and the memory of your 5 am kiss as you headed out into the tangle of danger and fog. love poem on a monday morning: pandemic poem #3
Praise be to the leftover night and to the sun itching to rise. Praise be to the ones who woke up tired sitting here with coffee about to rise. Praise be to the babies and youth coiled in their blankets dreaming with their fists raised. Praise be to the ones zipped in tents layers upon layers upon layers to raise the heat. Praise be to the gloved hands that heal at all hours and praise be to the thermometer that’s numbers do not rise. Praise be to all those who didn’t sleep terrified of the mistakes they made worried the cost may rise. Praise be to genius tapped out on keyboards sung out in songs written out in documents praise be to the people organizing the people who will rise. staying dry
the tents on the side of the road sag under the rain. my friend says we’re staying dry. i say that’s good to hear. meanwhile i’m reading a lot about the markets and banks and businesses. bailouts. priorities. i’d like to see a trillion dollars or even just a billion (hell a million) distributed down here by the tracks. loosen those hundred dollar bills like butterfly wings, land them in every palm. |
Authordani gabriel Archives
August 2020
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