domestic sentences 9/10/11/12/13
by Bill Neumire
Domestic sentences 9
I like how chipped and scratched my dining room table is. I like putting on my softest pants when I get home from work. I know there will come a time when my children will not live here. I think it makes my wife sad already, but it mostly makes me curious. I like when I get surprised. I think I'm most afraid of not-surprise. I used to teach high school students Slaughterhouse-Five, but I ached too much when Celine says, "Make them stop... don't let them move anymore at all... There, make them freeze... once and for all! ... So that they won't disappear anymore!". On the table there’s a canvas with a painted heart made of my daughter’s handprints.
Domestic sentences 10
Yesterday I talked to a class of 6th grade chorus kids about a poem they were going to sing by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It was called ‘Afternoon on a Hill’ and we talked about how wonderful it is that we can be in the sun and know it won’t last but also know that it’s even better that way. They loved the lines, “I will touch a hundred flowers / and not pick one.” I like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s name, the august saintliness, the poetic line of it. I read that she was in a car accident and had to keep taking morphine for pain after that. I like to think that we’re always experiencing each moment we’ve liked, even the ones that haven’t happened yet. I like to think of her on that hill and those little kids singing, “I will be the gladdest thing!”
Domestic sentences 11
I like my friends and I think most of them are smarter than me, like Jesse who has a PhD in psychology and a sweatshirt for our annual football game that says “Dr. Feelgood.” He just got a senior lecturer position at Cornell and he gets to teach a class on happiness, which is a secular replacement for god. I’m happy that he’s happy. I like when the people around me are happy or at least seem like they have the strength to keep going. I read a book by a poet named Christian Wiman, and he had bone cancer and a painful life story, but he believed so much in such a particular vision of god as what is. I like that for him. One night in high school I cut my own wrists and didn’t mean to die but I cried out and my parents found me and now I’m a parent and I have a hard time with how much pain I caused them. I like my parents. They live in the small village where they went to high school surrounded by hills and waterfalls and vineyards and wineries. Sometimes they get to see old friends and tell stories about what’s happening. I like remembering my dad lying on the living room floor after work at the salt plant listening to his Bruce Springsteen ‘Down to the River’ record, the slow circle of it, and realizing that I’m that age now. Sometimes my mother brings me a local bottle of wine as old as I am.
Domestic sentences 12
It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m thinking about time, which is also a feeling. The heating vent is dusty. I used to like lying on the heating vent at my grandparents’ house when the ABC Disney family movie would come on. Memory is a secular replacement for god. I’m going to visit my grandparents on wednesday with my dad. They have dementia now and laugh but can’t remember why. Their children have been cleaning their house and finding unopened gifts in the attic from decades ago. Sometimes my grandparents sleep all day or talk about close friends that don’t exist. My grandmother eats one ice cream sandwich a day.
Domestic sentences 13
I like when the dog circles a spot at the foot of the bed then nestles in the green throw blanket and rests her chin on my foot before one long huff. I like looking at our wedding picture on the wall with the good words of all our friends around it like a debris field keeping us safe. I keep a small pile of books, some pens, and a knife on my nightstand. But the knife can become a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, nailclippers. There’s a deep mirror on the opposite wall, half covered with folded clothes. There’s a tv on the dresser we never turn on.
Photo of Bill Neumire
BIO: Bill Neumire’s first poetry collection, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award, and his second book, #TheNewCrusades, was a finalist for the Barrow Street Prize. His poems have appeared in Harvard Review Online, Beloit Poetry Journal, and West Branch. In addition to writing, he also served as an assistant editor for the literary magazine Verdad and as a reviewer for Vallum.