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Tag Archives: Cleveland

In Cleveland: Memories

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Kristi Yorks in I am Writing a Novel

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Cleveland, literature, Memory, Narrative, poetry, Writing

I am writing a novel, but I still persist – I am a poet at heart.

I am writing a novel about my grandfather and mother. The narrator is like a ghost, an empty vessel through which her grandfather’s stories find presence, worth.

These stories are not truth – fractured memories. I wonder how many of my memories, all those moments stitched into the very fabric of me, are real, true. I wonder how many I adopted, stole from strangers. How many dreams sabotaged my reality; how many nights I’ve spent, subconsciously weaving fictions, half-truths.

This is a story about reality and its fictions. It’s all a lie – the only way to live in a city like Cleveland. I remember it’s brick and steel, the cracked concrete facades that followed me, spinning out into basement bars and apartment rooms without doors or furniture. I remember men and women, all children, casting out into the night. The streets were wide, the lake was shallow, and the world began and ended at the scars on my grandfather’s hands.

I loved people in Cleveland. I despised sleep.

I lived fast in Cleveland and fell hard into any number of waiting arms and bodies.

There was always a man with a guitar on a mattress, drunk-strumming the night, resisting sleep until the bitter end.

Cleveland is a story of leaving and near regrets disguised as pride; poverty worn like a badge, a reason to exist and persist against the dimming horizon, to distrust anything beyond the struggle, to depend upon backyard BBQ’a, 64 packs of bud light, wings, pig roasts, and the stream of teenagers in June who climb into their parent’s cars and never come back.

Because this is our city. The mills and the factories all boarded up in red paint, standing relics of our past wrapped up in the present.

We don’t belong; we don’t belong.

Inside, against the impossibility of existing here – on a lake in a city, all that fire inside burning.

I love Cleveland. All the roads I chased, aimlessly, in heels and glitter.

I loved the smell of it, the sweat of it, the heat or at least, the memory of fire wrapped up in humidity, rain.

Softball games and endless highways, yellow lines tangled in maple leaves and a strange, pale haze just over the West.

There are stories, but they are not a fiction.

I remember laying on the beach in the late fall, the snow catching the rocks and gravel with Leo and James and Ian, shirtless and thin the way that all high school boys are. Open bottles of wine, two towels and the gulls outline the shore. The cove and the lighthouse, the street mimics the sand, lines its borders in large brick houses and grass-less yards.  Glass and shells, driftwood, plumes of smoke and an orange haze to the west over the city. Music blares from the dockside bar. There are lights in the water, slipping in and out of the ice fields that encase the island.

I think about writing when I think about them

in Cleveland

the electric paper cut into strips

the ways I choose to fill space

 

I imagine the stories I’ll tell our could have been children

I imagine how they’ll write us

one of them must be a poet

I’ve decided

our involved language

we stitched

in Cleveland

 

its  refrain

repetition

the phone calls

the lost emails

in Cleveland

I’ve never loved a city

I still can’t

I’ve tried

The crossed lines of the apartment and the textured walls we walked all morning with the windows and blinds open.

I imagined them and remembered dancing in the water in a blue dress lined by lace. The folds caught on the rocks and filled with water.

The turns were slow but my toes were sharp and arched, my arms were straight.

My mother swam alongside my grandfather across the lake. In the shallows, their hands clawed the sand. They ate on the beach. Their legs never left the water.

I never wanted anything but lights

the glass in the waves

I never wanted the waves just the light they kept

there is no ocean but there is light

just the ice and the black I caught between the bricks that lined the road and buildings around us.

 

 

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A Birthday Wish: Memories and Lines

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by Kristi Yorks in Cixous - Poetic Ramblings

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Art, Bhanu Kapil, birthday, city, Cleveland, Father, fiction, in the desert, island, Kelley's Island, Lake, Lake Erie, literature, Memory, monkey puzzle press, mother, Naropa University, poetry, Water, Waves, Writing

“I write because I cannot paint” – Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of StrangersImage

I think and try to remember. I write and remember. Writing is an act of memory, the art of living a moment again and again from impossible angles and imagined perspectives. It is the art of believing in the possibility of what has already passed, has already lapsed into history. 

It is my mother’s birthday today. I tell myself to write it. Not it, but an image that I know of my mother and for my mother. 

There is a list of what I need to write. It begins with the house my father built for us. It ends with her back turned to me. Her body submerged from her waist down beneath the waves. Her hair is swept over her right shoulder. Her  neck is arched as is her spine. The sun sets and casts a black shadow. The waves are purple, growing darker, like oil against her skin. The world is black and white, golden at its edges. And the weight of it centers upon her, expanding out in a series of desperate ripples towards the artificial lights of the city and the cracked hull of my great grandfather’s fishing boat.

This is how I know my mother, how I remember her. This is how I will remember her, regardless of the new memories that we create. This is the story that I try and am trying to remember and that in remembering, am writing over and over again. 201 pages. And a prologue.

I hope that it is worthy of her.

I tell myself to write it. Where I sat. Reading words as though they were lines, sketching the light out.

 

Write the cracked counters and the stained and gnawed cushions my mother covered with sheets and blankets.

Write the stripped floors, the broken cabinets and the mismatched plates my mother purchased, one at a time, one a week from the department store down the road.

Write the impassable oak table surrounded by folding chairs.

Write the dampness of the basement, the constant swelling of the air at morning when night sank into the earth, staining the concrete purple and blue.

Write the smell of the dying magnolia masked by the sound of wilting paper and the steady pacing of my mother, still walking from side to side, her finger prints left on the wall.   

Write the photographs and the desk.

Write the light and the stairs.

Write the oak clusters, the gravel, the dust and wind.

Write your father, bent towards the paper screen, ink stains etched into his hands and face.

Write your mother, her hair draped over her chest, her bare back pale and open to the sun, her jaw and neck outlined in the water, streaming against the shore of her uncle’s cabin on an island somewhere I can’t remember.

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  • Conceal Carry on Campus: An Open Letter to My Colleagues
  • Thoughts on Time Management: Write or Die
  • Passion, Possibility, and Ingenuity
  • Writing Back: A Way of Moving Forward
  • Writing Back
  • I have a story I cannot tell…
  • Thoughts about Poetry
  • Marriage and Motherhood: Eight Stages
  • Into the Desert: Lessons in Education
  • Memory – Selections from “Marriage” (a work in progress)

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