What Else

Sandra Martz
The walls are thin and you can see sunlight around the windows. When the wind gets up, the howling keeps you awake and creates small dunes of red sand along the west walls. The mother takes cotton and wedges it into the cracks around the windows with a case knife. It helps, a little, but they still have to sleep with a wet wash cloth over their faces in order to breathe.

She didn’t ask for this life, had once imagined joining her sister on the assembly lines at the plant in Dallas. But that dream was overcome by a handsome airman who undid her bra with one hand on their first date. She made him fasten it back and take her home straightaway but his big gold-toothed smile and an embarrassed apology made her to give him a second chance.

A month later he asked her to marry and she said yes. She knew he had a child and wasn’t quite divorced yet, but he promised to fix that soon. They rented a house in River Oaks near her sister so she could babysit her niece and nephew.
After he was discharged from the service, he took a job driving long haul trucks. He was gone a lot but home enough for her to get pregnant. When he did come home, he brought ears of fresh corn and tomatoes and green beans from the roadsides where he stopped to sleep.

And then one night he came home with a scrawny little girl carrying a grocery sack of ragged dresses and underwear. “What else could I do?” his eyes begged.

BEHOLD BARACK!

Bold
Beautiful
Black
Bewitching
Breathtaking
Beloved
Bountiful
Bodacious
Bi-Racial
Bitterless
Badass
Beguiling
Buoyant
Best
Brilliant
Big
Biblical
Busy
Blameless
Bedecked
Booted-and-Suited
Budding
Blessed
Buttressed
Bullish
Behemoth
Beneficent
&
BEYOND BELIEF!

Early morning memories of Mark

"I don't want to go," he said. They were sudden, unexpected words. Mark had been submerged by depression and drugs for weeks and verbalized very little, aside from responding to questions with a curt yes or no. He sat in a wheelchair across from me in the hospital garden. It was early June, the sun burning hot, and we were enveloped by azaleas and roses in full bright bloom. He still shivered; nothing could keep him warm. He would be dead in three weeks, destroyed by AIDS at 32.

The day before, Dr. Scott confirmed one of Mark's worst fears -- that he probably had Kaposi's Sarcoma and nothing could be done except chemotherapy -- which ultimately killed him. I had followed up later that day with my own cruel blow of truth. Our younger brother Tim had been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. He would follow Mark in three years. Mark howled a primal, psychic scream and hadn't spoken since.

For the six months of his illness, I longed for Mark to tell me what it all meant to him -- the plague that was decimating his friends, and the advancing loss of his own health and life. Now that he uttered that sentence, "I don't want to go," I was speechless, with no comfort to give him, no light to offer. His words hung in the air as they needed to. It was his only expression of lament and sorrow and it needed to be unanswered.

Lying in my bed in the dark of an early morning, 23 years later, I hear his words and can see him, small, frail and ill, in that garden. I treasure this hard memory and preserve those few words as his gift to me and the other people in his life. Inside all of that pain, anger, outrage and grief, he didn't want to go -- he still loved.
Martha

Advice to New Writers (smartz)

Read, read more

read again, read aloud

Chew words

spit them out on the page

dribble them down the front of your shirt

caress them

let them slip out

soft, moonlight, a bud opening

If they don’t please, toss them

If they come tumbling back

give them a second chance

Gather words in a basket

set them on a shelf to ripen

put a few good ones under your pillow each night

and let them seep into your dreams

Lost

to whom?
from where?

how do i know, when i’ve never been found
how do i know, when i’ve never been bound

could i be lost to me if i never knew me?
could i be lost to you if you never knew me too?

lost is such a big scary place
the craters and caves in the place called lost are treacherous indeed
how can i be found in such a place?
my smoke signals are feeble at best
what do i do next?
i crawl, i walk, i cry, i talk
how can i be found?
i don’t know the language
i improvise but there’s no sound
is it not loud enough, not strong enough, who has the keys?
i can’t see found in the craters and caves of the place called lost
can you find me? PLEASE

It's Our Time Now

Seize the moment, come out of the rain.
Seize the moment, release the pain.
Seize the moment, build your home in this Universe we share.
Seize the moment, because you care.
Seize the moment, it's our time now.
Seize the moment, you know how.
It's our time now.

A Small Piece of Driftwood

Rough and wrinkled
but smooth and strong.
Cracked and brittle
but still holding on.
Broken and jagged
but in one piece so long.
Aged and weathered
but no where near gone.
Accentuated lines and rugged edges
but no worse for the wear
loving all of life's pleasures.