When I first saw Finding Nemo it was so much about you.
And after all these years, Finding Dory is much the same.
I may have been your brief and most arbitrary mama, but I will love you forever.
And your foster dad and I will never stop laying down the shells…not just for your way back to us, but as a mosaic for how you changed us forever.
You, beautiful girl.
I love them when they snake totemistically through the clouds, smoke before the storm
And when they are filigree-perfect by the pool, along the slender branches of new trees
Skin the same green as the leaves
But when it is the serpent
Climbing vertically toward the sparrowlets,
I cannot either
Turn, ignore
Or observe with the objective skill of a naturalist
intervene
Knowing grace is more than words before a meal
Or a sticker you wear to church on your lapel
Grace is the Hand that
saves the sparrow
Even at the mortal expense
Of the dragon.
we watched the old man
Build his doohiggy in the yard
For a hundred years
We mocked
his talk of “rain”
Unaltering our behavior
To the very end
Through the procession of paired creatures
Too quiet, too orderly, in hindsight
No longer
surprised when he shuts up his wooden spaceship
Seven day still
Then
Come rain
Rise relentless river
Through the rooms of our careless together
Drips, drops, seep, torrent, flood
words we coin
In the last moments of our lives
As the world entire
Recedes
they said they lost them
Tossed in the trash?
Recycled?
Whatever
I see them clearly
The shape of ordinary Syro-Phoenician
Cursed on lined paper
Wtf.
How do you lose
The story of the rape of children
In parking lots
Playgrounds
Public spaces as well as cannibalizing
The geography of “playing house” and “family?”
You should know that the state of f#cking Texas
Can “lose” the words we wrote
All they want
But the story belongs forever
To the indelible
Victims’ statements.
Her grandmother holds several objects close to her bosom as they make their way to the front of the store.
Serenity asks for a balloon.
Grandmother asks, do you want the balloon or the play-doh?
Play-doh, Serenity replies.
Behind them in line, I ask if I can buy her the balloon? (In honor of some young women I love who used to be the Serenities of the world, all grownup now.)
Serenity’s grandmother agrees.
Yet after briefly snagging a balloon, Serenity puts it back.
You don’t want it?
No, she replies, we are going to the park and it will fly away.
We inventory other possibilities–a two-headed dragon?
Nope. One too many heads.
A bag of plastic dinos? Yes but only this one, and this one, and this one.
So efficient, young Serenity. I give her 30 cents worth of plastic.
She gives me joy.
Grandma picks out several pieces of fruit from the wire basket. We sit and eat our respective breakfasts in silence as the pert weather girl plots the course of the storm into which we intend to drive.
I do not intend to drive, I intend to passenge, pulled along by my grandmother’s gravity.
Slow rain begins to fall as she indicates with her hands my need to wrap it up, Girl.
I ask with my empty cup if I may get some more orange juice?
She says, you drink as much as you want now, but understand this: down the road I am not stopping so you can pee!
I attempt my most impassive gaze, like the people on the poker channel on the tv…no tells.
Will she or won’t she? I am betting she will. I stake my money (and my bladder) on the belief that down the road she will stop somewhere…
So I can pee.
in my head
I sing off-key
Pick through the rocks
On the steep uphill
Dark of course
Avoid the fruit
They say
I long to look
Behind me
Willing you be there still
As though a woman of no particular gifts
Could summon the missing
With scraps of broken notes
Strung together
You want less?
Probably not
Save the sagging bits of self left
Clinging to your soft middle
You want more
More sunshine and more rain
More fame, more privacy
More love, more oxygen in the lungs
Once filled with more
Sing loud, sing more
Full-throated
This four letter word for greatness
Expanding out into
Infinite light
It has troubled me for some time that in Texas people are legally allowed to kill human beings and use their tiny, defenseless body parts for “science.”
But the two people with the courage to infiltrate and expose this science-fiction level atrocity were indicted by a Harris County grand jury for using fake IDs.
So to recap–fetus harvesting: legal
Fake IDs: a big deal
Or are they?
I spend way too much time listening to Texas teens brag about their fake driver’s licenses to believe that we in Texas are suddenly cracking down on forged driver’s licenses.
In fact, I wish we were.
But in the case against the brave people from The Center for Medical Progress the prosecution is selective, punitive, and political.
In fact, one has to wonder how many of the grand jurors in this case have ever owned or used a fake ID? How many of their children are using them now?
These are far simpler, easier questions to ask than how many Texas mothers have allowed their own children to be carved up, evacuated from their wombs, then bought for “science” while the rest of us hide behind the now meaningless phrase “everything they did was legal.”
In Texas.
On June 1st, 2016, People magazine reported on the arrest of a single suspect in the murder of 15 year old Katen Perez, whose brutalized remains were found, not by the Houston police or the Harris County Sheriff but by Texas EquuSearch.
According to the People article the rape and murder of Karen Perez was caught on the suspect’s cellphone.
Harris Co. is not releasing the suspect’s name…wait for it…because he is a juvenile.
He should be charged as an adult, prosecuted as an adult, and his identity exposed as an adult.
For that matter, all the involved possible accomplices should also be formally charged.
For the following reasons:
If you commit a capital felony offense (a fully grown-up crime) you should have to deal with the law as an adult.
Should be enough. But there is a chilling “because”/second reason–
For years now Texas has been quietly compensating for aggregious juvenile offenders in order to save money on their incarceration and probation.
The laws of privacy protect the juvenile offenders, allowing them to get juvenile-only plea deals for monstrous felonies then quietly exit the system as adults with no records.
These laws do so at the expense of their former and future victims.
I watched all of this play out in real time.
My adopted son plead no contest to a minor charge. He was never tried for hundreds of felony offenses. He was promised no criminal record.
His story and the stories of several other youthful felony offenders I spoke to during his year in juvenile detention align with the identity protection given to the teen who raped and murdered Karen Perez.
For years now in Texas many juvenile offenders get far better deals than their victims.
And regrettably, more protection.
