Halloween circa 1990

I've been working on a documentary about the military and my family (see previous post entitled documentary abstracts for synopsis). Only recently did I start asking for pictures. I was nervous about asking for any kind fof compliance. I'm still scared of my mother.

There are so many stories I could tell (and have told) about my mother, but for a moment today, my mother sent me a picture of the two of us, and I could have sworn we were a family...

It was Halloween circa 1990 (as if you couldn't tell by the hair) and we were living on base in Sicily. Dressing up for Halloween is a quintessentially American thing to do of course, so it was only celebrated in the barracks with the handful of kids at the school on base. The correlary, of course, was that there was no place on the whole island where she could buy me a costume. Even the NAVY exchange (a government owned and operated department store) didn't have costumes in my size except princesses. I was pretty clear that I would rather not go than be a princess. My mother, wanting for her daughter to be able to celebrate with the other kids, decided to make my costume for me. It took months of gathering appropriate materials (they were exotic and therefore expensive. Also, she earned very little since she hadn't made rank yet). She would sew it together on weekends. But finally it was done. I sat through painstaking hours of make-up application. I was a clown for all three years we lived in Sicily. It's a great picture, no?

Work-in-progress

I was thinking today about the connection between domestic violence and state violence, about violence that comes from desperation and the enforced poverty of our economic system. I was thinking about what role choice plays in violence and whether coercion itself is a form of violence. I was thinking about my relationship with my mother and her relationship with the military, about dependency and abuse, about my past...

Here is a poem I started a while ago but that still isn't finished. I want it to be better- clearer, more direct, more personal. But details are hard these days. I'm working on it.


I tried to write you a letter today
The pen, tossing and turning,
Bold typeface grasping and yearning,
For words that might makes sense
Against the backdrop of our estrangement
Against the space and time we don’t know our way through
Against the walls laid over bricks and years
Mortar bound in custom granite, tears
Mortar rounds in children’s ears
Sound like each time the streets reverberate with
An invocation to bring wars home
landing too close to the home I never had
In the seventeen year old signature
that was desperate enough to exchange twenty years
for security, poor medical care and a pension.
In the throbbing veins of his neck synchronizing
With his grip pressing me firmly against the wall
As spit shrapnel bombarded my face.
In the smoke-glazed eyes that couldn’t find
the courage to soften for your daughter
once in twenty years and counting.
You’d think I would have learned how to write to you
During the absences that permeated my childhood
with the stale bitterness of sea salt and engine oil
Fermented over the six months you lived on
Meclazine* and the conviction that you were better
than those Dirty, poor people.
How much anger can I write away or leave behind
Like not-so hidden mines
Exposed partially but fully loaded?

*Naval generic of sea sickness medication

Short Hair

It’s been so long since I’ve had to be anywhere I didn’t want to be, that I forgot how public space feels against my skin.

“You in the service?” an older man with a worn expression inquires. I look him over, reading the loose threads of his cut-offs, the wrinkles in his over sized shell of an sweat suit draping down from his carefully trimmed neck line to mean he was.

I’d not been asked this question when I grew up in my navy town. In the moment of hesitation, an image of myself registered in my mind, short curly hair above a tall body clad in board shorts and a sports bra. I forgot how reference points shift with cultural territory, how a sense of place mediates the meaning that etches itself into our bodies. What, in Northampton, is decidedly dyke boarding on queer wedges itself into the military discount arena once I set foot within 10 miles of a base.

“Naw, but my mother was an aviation mechanic. She did twenty years on fighter jets at Oceana.”

He nods approvingly in an effort to mask his surprise, “I didn’t know women did that. Ya know…back then” I want to tell him that fuck yeah some women did that, and some still do. Instead, I shrug it off refusing to indulge the novelty of his statement. After all, it’s always been normal to me.