Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
...
I could be the waitress
in the airport restaurant
full of tired cigarette smoke and unseeing tourists.
I could turn into the never-noticed landscape
...
So many so small go on day and night
under your feet you barely notice.
A big bang sounds like someone in the upstairs apartment
knocking over their refrigerator, and you ask,
...
Try to love everything that gets in your way:
the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane
...
My love plays piano and his foot hovers above the pedal.
Sustain, they call it when the note floats
like a basketball player suspended in air,
or a question whose purpose is to remain unanswered.
...
Consider the pigeons of the city,
how in their filthy swoop and dive they fatten
on dusty Dorito crumbs;
consider their evolution
...
The afternoon had a flu-like quality, gray and threatening to burst into tears at any moment, but I held it together like a grown-up, taught my classes, smiled at the children. I was in love with one little boy who couldn't write, not one idea in his
...
Alison Luterman was raised in New England, but moved to Oakland, California in 1990. Since that time she has worked as an HIV counselor, a drug and alcohol counselor, a drama teacher and a freelance reporter and has taught a number of poetry workshops in schools. As a writer she is known as a poet, essayist, short story writer and playwright. Her pieces have appeared in the publications Poetry East, Poet Lore, Whetstone, Kalliope, Oberon, The Sun, Kshanti, The Brooklyn Review, Poet Lore and Kalliope. She describes her poetry as "accessible... with a spiritual focus, grounded in the real world of my daily life". Her first book, The Largest Possible Life won the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize 2000 and was published in 2001. She also says that: "My strength as a writer comes from my willingness to be naked and vulnerable, and to connect my own small set of concerns to the larger questions and concerns of humanity.")
Invisible Work
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces fro dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.
I have been reading Alison Luterman's poem " Some Girls" in the New York Times this week. The powerful adjectives describing girls inspires me as I create images of modern women from the female gaze. Thank you Alison.
Some Girls in honor of Kamala Harris..... That poem has been on my desk for weeks as she winds her way to a place in history