Poem of the Week, by Danusha Lameris
At a wedding last weekend I sat near a curvy, beautiful woman with a deep voice who radiated a wild and warm confidence. She was free with opinions and didn’t care what others thought; an artist expressed admiration for a specific modern museum and she laughed outright.
She moves through the world in a way I don’t. My voice doesn’t project; I need a mic when giving a talk. A friend once described my narrow body, turned sideways, as like a piece of paper he could slip into his bookshelf. The wedding woman claims space in the world with her solid belief in herself. I claim space in the world by distilling it into stories made of all the ways it overwhelms me. Nonetheless we are alike, both of us caught inside the cathedral, singing inside the song.
Bonfire Opera, by Danusha Lameris
In those days, there was a woman in our circle
who was known, not only for her beauty,
but for taking off all her clothes and singing opera.
And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars
emerged to stare at their reflections on the sea,
and everyone had drunk a little wine,
she began to disrobe, loose her great bosom,
and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight,
the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment
fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames.
And then a voice lifted into the dark, high and clear
as a flock of blackbirds. And everything was very still,
the way the congregation quiets when the priest
prays over the incense, and the smoke wafts
up into the rafters. I wanted to be that free
inside the body, the doors of pleasure
opening, one after the next, an arpeggio
climbing the ladder of sky. And all the while
she was singing and wading into the water
until it rose up to her waist and then lapped
at the underside of her breasts, and the aria
drifted over us, her soprano spare and sharp
in the night air. And even though I was young,
somehow, in that moment, I heard it,
the song inside the song, and I knew then
that this was not the hymn of promise
but the body’s bright wailing against its limits.
A bird caught in a cathedral—the way it tries
to escape by throwing itself, again and again,
against the stained glass.
For more information about Danusha Lameris, please check out her website
At a museum yesterday I sat and stared at this painting. It transported me to a world with a wooden school desk and a clock ticking on the wall. The hot waxy smell of melted crayons. Balloons in a summer rain sinking slowly to the ground. A miniature wooden circus in a clearing in the woods. Indistinct voices in the distance playing some kind of game.
Once, at a Twins play-off game, I sat next to an older couple. They opened a tote and pulled out sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, peeled carrots, small bags of grapes, and cookies. Dinner, packed at home and brought to the game. There was something about this couple I loved.
That woman sitting on the bar stool with a martini and a magazine, or alone on her couch spinning imaginary people into books, or flying solo around the world: she is me. But won’t you be lonely? is a question I’ve heard a lot in my life, and I don’t know how to answer it, because isn’t everyone, somewhere inside themselves, lonely? 
One of my best friends and I sat on my porch last night talking about how our lives might have been different. What if I’d made myself deal with that suicide instead of trying to escape the pain? What if she’d said yes to that job? What if I’d stayed in New England? What if we’d mothered our children differently?
Two lovely Japanese maple trees in a front yard one block south are symmetrically planted amid cement squares filled with small white stones. For eight years I walked past this house every day, so I could admire the way the owners, whom I always pictured as two calm men, swept the leaves and raked the stones into perfect, weed-free squares. Looking at this yard calmed my spirit. A few years ago the house was sold, and since then it has been reclaimed by wildness.
When I was nine my father brought me a huge, bright-green, horned bug from our garden: Look! You can bring it in to school for the bug project! When he turned away I placed some tomatoes on top of the bug, and later had to admit in shame that I had ‘accidentally’ crushed it. Alison! What the hell were you thinking? 
Old friend, it has been decades since that last summer before college, the last time I ever lived at home. But when I return to visit my parents and drive by the street where you once lived, I remember you. I remember rain on a canvas roof, darkness all around, the silent sleeping breath of other friends. I remember how surprised I was that someone wanted to kiss me –me?–and I remember your gentleness. Let me tell you now that you were the one who first showed me how touch could open up a new world. At seventeen I could not have known how the memory of that fleeting sweetness would sustain me in future dark times. This achingly beautiful poem brought back the memory of you. 
