The little one counts skipping over ten which creates a gap that hangs heavy in the air: seven, eight, nine, eleven, she recites Before circling back to six For reasons unknown. Her counting song dances along as I get stuck on the nine and the eleven shorthand for the way my stomach dropped when I saw all those United flight names and raced to my dorm room to call home to be sure dad wasn't traveling and the way my heart pounded at the busy signal (remember busy signals? nobody is busy anymore, I guess) The call didn't go through on my cell phone Or on the dorm phone with my calling card or on the dorm phone with the calling card my Venezuelan roommate handed to me her mahogany eyes distilling earnest concern in the only language we shared. I don't think on that day as much as I once did But considered today, as the little one counted, the neat way my brain boxed it up and stored it only to be retrieved by keywords in a boolean search of my history nine-eleven, September Eleventh, World Trade Center, Pentagon, What was the name of that Pennsylvania Town? Shanksville. Never forget. My lifetime has so much shorthand for tragedy. Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde All evoke troubled young men hoisting weapons designed to make short work of short lives. Katrina, Indonesian tsunami, Haiti, now Turkey New synonyms for natural disaster for the distant, lingering fear that it won't be long now until Earth comes for us. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Darfur, Ukraine, refugees, migrant trains, invaders The dead baby on the beach Those foil-wrapped children behind chain link fences, Those Ukrainian women mixing Molotov cocktails. The way we confuse our words depending on the darkness of a person's skin The state of their bank account. Each word meant to encapsulate all the images, words fury, sorrow the severing of ourselves from our souls and the way they sew us back together like Frankenstein's monster and the quilts my mother makes for all the new babies always with flannel for warmth and a print the mother likes. (that's her shorthand for love. Except, I can see the stitches, where her hands worked the fabric, so maybe there's a longer story there.) What I mean to say is, maybe we're too reliant on a language based on shared assumptions. See, my dad wasn't on any planes. I came home to hug him that Friday passing roadside vigils and under flag-draped overpasses. And we only practice lockdowns at my school The kids know the drill and only giggle a little bit. Only because they are nervous. And the only flood I've known to damage my home was the one under the kitchen sink after Thanksgiving. Replacing the floor was a headache Not a catastrophe Our furniture stayed dry And no mold. No bodies in attics. And my brother spent nine months in Herat And we worried every day But then he came home The relief I felt hearing his plane landed Is in each deep breath I take today. I wonder if my co-worker whose twelve-year-old daughter is stuck in Afghanistan, is no longer school aged, is no longer a child, the way my twelve-year-old daughter is a child. I wonder if she will ever feel the same relief. Hearing that the plane has landed. These words we use universally seem to promise some shared understanding. But it's a curated knowing. Maybe it allows us to avoid really knowing. IDK. Shorthand makes it all digestible. Something of another time something that's already been codified into a singularity. A universal understanding that isn't actually universal. The narrative that we can only consume what's bitesized For our health. We're starved for communal knowing. When my daughter skips the number ten I see the students gathered around the giant TVs in the student center On it, the towers are burning I am me They are they And we are all witnessing this confusion in our own context. I don't have the words For what I'm getting at. I only know, it was more than smoke, and running people it was more than flags, more than firefighters, more than vigils, more than fighter jets, and the tip of the spear and WMDs and God Bless America. Why don't we talk about THAT? Can we talk about sitting on my living room couch (Before the other side of the cushion was stained) in mid December 2012 (just after Poppy died- I just thought of how he always called me Sue-Sue. When was the last time I felt sweet like that?) My babies napped in their rooms While I watched the news That twenty children were murdered at school? My babies safely wrapped In the bubble of stay-at-home tedium. But not for long. Can we talk about how ten years later Nineteen more children were murdered at school? And these weren't even the bookends the deadliest the first the last They're just the ones that made me cry the longest My babies keep growing their blood warm, their hot breath in my ear. Sandy Hook, Uvalde These names Shorthand for school shooting shorthand for gun control shorthand for out of my cold, dead hands. Make short shrift of the violence we accept now. This was all supposed to be in verse But it's not that simple. Let me start again. Short means to cut, to maim, to be stunted, to be of insufficient quantity. Hand means the end of a person's arm beyond the wrist but also, to seize, to take, to possess. Together, shorthand is rapid writing An efficiency. Taken apart, it is about seizing the meaning (of what we know is true) and maiming it. What I know is the last time I cried was three days ago when I asked my student who refuses to speak what she would do to improve her community And she drew a picture of a flower, and a pond, and a bench. The moon and the stars, a waterfall, her family and music notes. And the last time I cried myself to sleep was May 26, 2022 while trying to make sense of what happened May 24, 2022 At Robb Elementary School. (There was no sense to make.) My student who refuses to speak at school Told her mother it's because of what happened in Uvalde. This is all a long way of saying the details matter. What is specific is also universal And when we shout it into the void What reverberates back is each other all echolocating for a way out of our loneliness. I always feel like a bad poet my words awkward, inelegant. The meaning is fast and slippery and just out of reach But I keep chasing it nonetheless. And I don't care to dress it all up into something more presentable. Like yesterday on a walk I realized the other poem I was going to write, the one about Alysia- One of the shortest on the basketball team, but with the longest hair. She stows it in a wispy braid under her jersey both fierce and feminine (Why don't I ever assume the word feminine is enough)- Belonged in this poem. Or rather, the way Alysia glances back at her dad before she takes a foul shot. After she makes a play. Her focus on him before the ball before the net And the glance back again after all of it knowing he's always watching always the steadying hand how it catches my throat How much they believe in each other. I don't have the words for that look And the joy and envy it kindles in me What is most beautiful stirs up the sediment of what we long for. That's part of it too. And I didn't include the long terror of lockdown In that first listing of horrors because the day-to-day unknowing of that spring how the news said one thing as the earth broke into flowers and birdsong the sitting on my stoop watching each petal wake up calling out to whoever passed by (I knew all the dogs in the end) That period of creeping dread Paired with the way it shook us back into longing for each other That was the closest I ever felt to living the thing I'm getting at How we were alone together How those aren't two separate states of being. We had to communicate with our eyes All the things we were afraid to whisper with our breath And it was like for a second We all heard each other. Remember? This all started because two days ago the space between nine and eleven felt like more then ten. So I wrote about it. In longhand.
