Author Archives: Elea Lee

Unknown's avatar

About Elea Lee

Foster parent, adopting parent, family advocate, educator, homeschool parent

Parable of the jack pot

Posted on by
Reply

Nose running, he rifles through piles of unfolded clothes looking not for the library books which are due today but for everyday handkerchiefs you say you are lonely and wish you had someone to talk to the trick is to stay amicable strangers he finds nasal-remedy-counter-wiping-dish-cleaning-spill-absorbing bits of cut-up-cotton beneath the burnished sink exclaiming I hit the jackpot! As if he had–the neon casino, the human animals trained on slot machine monotonies and the tall handsome kid who just needs a piece of something to blow his nose hitting jackpot with a cascade of washcloths emerging from whatever machine or game or apparatus you might win them from

You might win them and not know you had won because you don’t expect things you win to be old, worn, ordinary

Hoping instead for quarters, bright metonymical poker chips things of value in the gambling sense of course bright bits of new, new noses, running, treasury things, hit-or-miss, a gamble,

Stranger.

He speaks to us in parables

Posted on by
2

I leave the shower curtain on the living room floor and the little boy who does and does not resemble us takes it up, exclaiming, the periodic table! with the remains of his little boy voice.

Later, after forgetting and days of heavy gravity, I lift the curtain and pierce each hole again, arms growing heavy-diagonally, the way trees grow.

Admire the way they have been ordered each in their brightly colored boxes. Iron, gold, carbon, oxygen, and the exotic ones we seem to have conjured to fill up the empty places.

  • There whether we see or not.
  • Unchanged by our indifference.
  • Three or more dimensional even if we only see them flat.
  • Elements and symbols for when full words seem to be not enough

He speaks to us in parables.

Our Savage Selves

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t own a gun but I am grateful the barefoot neighbor in Sutherland Springs did.

Every time we face the devastation of a mass shooting in this country I want to say things like:

We cannot monetize an entertainment culture of violence and not expect it to sway the unhinged.

If we want “better” gun laws we have to enforce the ones we already have.

Andhow many of us know there will be a fatal gap between when 911 is dialed and when help arises?

Without civil accountability in public safety

There is no safety at all.

How to clean a toilet

Posted on by
Reply

When I tell you I found the old mushroom-colored sweatshirt which saw us through thick and thin you will know I am talking about the way the Romans used to have it done, long pole, wad of cloth, vinegar soaked as we raise it to the real hero, his naked pain, the way he eschews ordinary safety for a stretched-to-the-limits agony

I take the brush, add the cleanser, wipe it all down with an uneasy litany

Drab for color

Old for young

Plain for beautiful

Forgotten for remembered

He says

Me for you

Death for life

Life, everlasting.

Baby Jane Doe

Posted on by
Reply

I had not expected you to be

Consumed in a blast of politicized mambo-jumbo

Then just as suddenly

Reduced to silence

when the wolves got what they came for

You–downy layer of protective hair

Beating heart, the ability to grasp and suck and distinguish

Light and the way things taste

Orange-sized child

If I could have pressed my face close

To your mother’s belly

You could have picked out my voice

Telling you how much I wanted you

To live.

Me n’ Hillary down by the schoolyard

Posted on by
Reply

I have been pro-life, pro-woman, pro-child my whole life. So to be accosted by strangers and friends as somehow anti-woman and anti-feminist for not voting for Hillary Clinton for anything is astounding to me.

Why would I vote for militant anti-child women?

If I am a feminist it is my job to speak out about the brutal forced abortions reflected in worldwide abortion statistics as well as the now incontrovertibly evidence of anti-female fetal termination.

Which in lay-woman’s terms is killing baby girls.

No. Hillary Rodham Clinton was never the feminist choice. This is us, gone missing.

Any Boat in a Storm

Posted on by
3

It has been 30 years since I made the (not very complicated) decision not to vote for political candidates who support abortion.

Abortion on-demand–at-all-is and will be our generation’s genocide stain. The comparison to other genocidal impulses* is not that difficult to make–

  • Genocide systematically dehumanizes the victims
  • Genocide creates words and epithets to divide victims and devalue them from the rest of us
  • Genocide targets people who are legally exposed, minorities, female, from disenfranchised classes (often created through the repeated use of dehumanizing terms), the medically fragile, people whose basic human rights have been suspended or exempted
  • Genocide finds ways to stigmatize and blame the victims
  • Genocide labels victims as “unwanted”
  • Genocide institutionalizes, regularizes, industrializes, and monetizes mass murder
  • And many times genocide co-ops scientists and medical professionals by couching the process of mass killing as medically necessary or scientifically interesting
  • Genocide kills people.

Do you know the statistics for aborted people in your state, country or region? Do you know when it was legalized and who it targets?

You should.

We all should.

We will have to make an account for every one.

*for the purpose of cohesion I have not separated out gendercide, femicide, or the systemic killing of disabled people, all of which characterize abortion and have been components of genocide as well.

Tara Lynn Badamo

Posted on by
Reply

Whether you cast back all the way to their respective birth announcements or race forward to their untimely deaths, my two friends share bits of biography, outsiders in a world full of the ambivalent. So it surprises me that it took so long to realize the next step in my own apparitional grief was to see them together at the table I told you about before…

In the unassuming kitchen of God

Singing-

someone is in the kitchen with Dinah, someone is in thekitchen I kno-ooow!

“Tara” for “Dinah” and capitalize the “Someone” and you get the picture-

He talks beauty and parable

All tears wiped away.