"In Praise of My Sister" by Wisława Szymborska

My sister doesn’t write poems.
and it’s unlikely that she’ll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn’t write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn’t write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister’s roof:
my sister’s husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as
Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.
My sister’s desk drawers don’t hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn’t hold new ones,
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn’t want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn’t spill on manuscripts.
There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it’s hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.
My sister has tackled oral prose with some success.
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from
vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she’ll have
so much
much
much to tell.

Baby love

This world is full of very young mamas. From the very beginning, since we are just a baby girl, we are trained to take care of babies, even when we are still one. We want them for Christmas, that’s what we tell Santa. And he brings us one, sometimes even two. We wash their plastic bodies, brush and comb, their blond artificial hair –if they happen to have some-, pretend to feed them and pretend they stained their diapers. We talk to them just like our parents and relatives and some random person in the street used to talk to us, with that patronizing tone reserved for puppies –animal or human. We love them because they never grow up and they never will. And once they do, we get bored and leave them hidden somewhere. They starve, they get dirty, and they die. Just at the same time we discover dolls. We go shopping, clean the house, bake cookies for the boys. And then someone buys us a husband for our doll. We make love with our absent genitals and meanwhile, our baby dies, the one in the deepest part of the wardrobe and the one inside us.

 Text by the author of the blog

 Photo by Stanley Kubrik

What I read in 2011

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Sorry for my abscense but I've been working hard (remember, I'm a teacher) and writing my short stories and things for Norma Jean Magazine. Not an excuse, I KNOW. Anyway, this year I've discover I love making lists and I applied my new skills to record what I've read and the movies I've watched (next post). So here you have the books I've read:

-The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
-Beloved by Toni Morrison
-Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems ed. by Wendy Cope
-The Machine Stops and the Celestial Omnibus by E.M. Forster
-Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
-The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
-Que caiga el favorito by Ramiro Gairín Muñoz
-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-The Help by Kathryn Stockett
-Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
-The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

-Undeletable Scenes by Jeffrey Brown

-Maus by Art Spiegelman

-Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

-The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

-Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier

-Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada by Pablo Neruda
-Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue
-Manderley en venta by Patricia Esteban Erlés
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
-The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy by Tim Burton
-Casa de Muñecas (Doll's House) by Henrik Ibsen
-Summer and the City by Candace Bushnell
-La tienda de los suicidas by Jean Teulé
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
-Ten: New Poets ed. by Evaristo & Nagra

-I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason

-Everything We Miss by Luke Pearson

-Holocaust Poetry ed. by Hilda Schiff

-Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

-Guía de hoteles inventados by Oscar Sipán

And the best one is...written in bold. I strongly recommend Safran Foer. In 2012 I want to read "Everything is Illuminated" by this same author.
And the great discovery this year has been graphic novels. Just take a look at the green titles.

I wish you all a great 2012 full of good stories!

Very Short Story: The Nail

Just like he did when he was a kid, when the screaming escaped through the open doors, he passed the fingernail across the softest part of his arm, back and forth, once and again, turning it from pale to light pink until a subtle line of blood drew his distress. Now the source of his anguish wasn’t his parents but life, or rather the lack of it, so he thought. Is it life a life without love, a job, nothing to believe in? While he was struggling between yes and no, his nail, his body, had already decided.

"Mort Dieu" by Karen McCarthy Woolf

Our son

dear God

is dead

and gone.

His tomb

was red

with blood

and warm

as tears.

He was

born still.

Was this

dear God

your will?

(Photo by Mary Lou, photoshopped by me)

So Far this Week #18

I found THE TREE OF LIFE a fanstastic and beautiful movie, that's all I have to say. THE GUARDIAN and WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS were two terrible mistakes and curiously enough, Ashton Kutcher is in both of them... THE WOMEN and FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS were a surprising amount of fun. THE MACKINTOSH MAN was really entertaining considering I hate spy movies. HARRY POTTER is always a good way of spending time, even more if you remember Voldemort as a child and teen. And it is always a big pleasure watching LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE.

Coloured Seaside

My first, my last, my everything...

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY