I tried sleeping with my watch on my right wrist so that when it buzzed to wake me up (which I do to avoid louder alarms that’d wake B before she needs to be up) I’d have a harder time sleepily dismissing it, which I’ve gotten pretty good at doing with unconscious muscle memory. I still failed, and the 5:45 backup alarm on my phone made a big ruckus. Thankfully, I think B slept through it.

Dogs were amped when I came out of the bathroom, so I took em to the yard, came back up and got 10 minutes of stuff done before Javi started barking at something, so I went back down to get them to avoid pissing off the neighbors too much. (I think it’s safe to say we’re solidly second or third place as far as eyesore/annoyance on our block.)

Maybe another 20 minutes of work (I’m working on a scene that in my mind takes place in the middle of our street, but down a ways, and I’m totally biting Bud Smith and Sam Pink etc. etc.’s phonetic/vernacular speech bent for some of the dialog) before I walked the dogs properly through the woods, around the baseball field, past the trash can that is almost always overflowing with dogshitbags but occasionally gets emptied by I don’t know who, through the gate at the dead end of the street, back around the corner, and then made hot water for whoever wanted oatmeal.

I’ve been getting really hungry midmorning, so I had granola, yogurt, and frozen blueberries, which I realize is pretty sugary, but I’m convinced is a lifehack because it gives me energy, feels good, is affordable-ish and tasty enough to tolerate eating often. In the last couple of days I’ve had a tooth sensitivity, though. Cold and pressure. I just recently braved the dentist (paid dearly for a good stretch of years I didn’t go) and got the all-clear, but it felt rushed/half-assed/complicated by covid precautions, and maybe everything was fine then and isn’t fine anymore. Maybe it’ll go away!

Upstairs, A was up and wanted to read this book of stories for each letter of the alphabet. I like it (most of em, anyway), but it’s huge and way too long, so my trick is to flip to the back that shows all the letters and ask which one to start on, and A said “A, B, C, D, O,” so I jumped to O, and then skipped from S to V, then hopped over W (a “Whiraff” is a hybrid Whisk/Giraffe, I don’t like it), so it didn’t delay our getting ready routine too long.

We’ve (mostly B has) been packing lunches for what we’re calling “school” [insert ethical handwringing here], providing all the healthy stuff that we’re supposed to, but we got a report that A isn’t always eating the goods. “Struggles to engage with lunch,” was the phrase they used. So I made a batch of mac and broccoli, surefire safebets, but A still came home with the greens untouched. Dumped those (shoulda done cleanup last night but the kitchen’s a disaster and I can’t face it) and refilled the lunchbox. We’ll try again today.

The first time I read Stuart Dybek’s “Ant” from Ecstatic Cahoots, I failed to perceive its motion. Even primed for the fantastical (though not trained to expect it unfailingly by the collection it’s in), the story opened feeling static and flowery. Dybek’s never shy with allegorical language, but here, the adjectives piled up and he seemed to be paying an almost cloying amount of attention to light and shadows.

A couple lays outside; everything is languid. There’s the hint of intimacy with the narrator’s attentions on the woman’s blouse, “opened to where he’d unbuttoned it down to the sky blue of the bra she’d brought back as a souvenir from Italy,” and with the man’s own shirt off and beneath him, but it’s relegated to the past. There’s no suggestion of any specific discord, only that some quality of the day has arrested them. Heat and warmth and the absence of wind are mentioned, yet the sun evades direct accusation. There’s no acute gripe. It’s a muted scene, ripe for disturbance. 

Rob stifles a pun, anticipating the woman’s negative reaction to it. Being “in her company seemed to intensify the light,” but this heightened energy is not kinetic. The narrator attributes to her Rob’s trance-like feeling that he calls Limbo. It’s this not unpleasantly numbed clouding that foiled my readerly intuition causing me to initially skim sentences like “Only a single ant was working. It had him by the toe,” and “At first, Rob was simply amused by its efforts, but after a while he began to sense a nearly imperceptible movement across the grass.” On first pass, I did not notice what I thought to be impossible because I did not know to look for it, and Dybek, while being plain about it, doesn’t go out of his way to call attention to the oddity. These early causes for alarm are easily merged with the bad joke he declines to make, and the first indication of “movement” isn’t attributed to anything specific, so far removed from its grammatical subject it barely has one. He slips in reality’s rupture, deliberately understated to avoid detection. He’s lulled us into the protagonists’ very stupor.

So many things in the piece sneak up but never stand prouder than a suggestion: the oppressiveness of the heat, the weight of resigned dissatisfaction in their relationship, the way the narrator telegraphs persistent delight and wonder beneath what on the surface purports to be some sort of scarring from Rob’s childhood relationship with his shellshocked, storytelling uncle. I’m reluctant to assert that any of those things are even there, but wondering about them, parsing the layered ambivalences serves as adequate distraction. It’s masterful sleight of hand.

When, after the recollection of Rob’s uncle’s animated storytelling, Dybek writes, “Rob had forgotten the ant,” so had I, and thus was I carried away with him by the tiniest and mightiest of things visible to the human eye.

It’s hard to explain the exact sequence of movements that brought my back flat to the ties in the middle of the tracks, my right knee a throbbing gush of red. I was running, commuting home by foot as I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was suddenly colder and darker than before, winter intent on sticking around along with the body-baffling change of clocks. The Woodford’s Corner construction was done, meant to clarify which lanes led down four possible branches, excluding the fifth way from which one just came. It was supposed to make it safer for cars, cyclists, and pedestrians.

I finished climbing Vannah in time to catch a green. Crossing Forest Avenue is normally a pain. The steady and endless line of cars are often unwilling to break even from their dead slow crawl to let a person through. I let my pace, which had quickened to cross, decrease a bit.

Two cones of light came at me, vertically stacked, one waist-level, the other head-high. The bike steered right, away from the road, though there was nowhere for it to go other than what I’d call the shoulder or sidewalk area, though it was not elevated or separated by a curb, but rather an extension of the rubber grade used around the rails at a train’s level crossing. This is a maneuver I’ve used while riding: in order to avoid narrow bike wheels from falling into the groove, go at it as perpendicularly as possible.

He couldn’t see me, I knew, because I couldn’t see much myself, and I wasn’t wearing anything reflective, so I tried to get out of his way. Suddenly there was nothing beneath me. I was falling and tumbling exaggeratedly, it didn’t stop for a while, and then I was still and cursing. 

“Are you ok?” the cyclist asked. 

“FUCKGODDAMNIT,” I yell-said. It wasn’t his fault but he absorbed my outburst. 

“Look at your knee,” he said.

I couldn’t muster the explanation. If I look I’ll pass out. 

“I’M FINE,” I yell-said, which is how we both knew it wasn’t really true. My face and shoulder hurt, my palms were embedded with debris. I was squarely in the middle of the train tracks. I noticed my wrist was vibrating. My embarrassingly hi-tech running watch had detected an incident and was about to call my emergency contact, my wife. I frantically dismissed it, not wanting to alarm her, not sure how bad my injuries really were.

“I saw your legs go right up, right out from under you. These tracks’ve messed me up too,” he said.

“I’M FINE,” I yell-said again.

The cyclist waited another moment to see if I’d level with him, and when I didn’t, he left.

Free of his surveillance, I scuttled onto the littered berm and put my head between my knees, trying hard to remain conscious. When I realized I was losing that battle, I crept further up the hill into a parking lot and reclined on the asphalt, noticing only after I’d extended my legs straight and felt unable to bend them again that I was in a large puddle.

It felt pleasant, cool. The light cast by the Sinbad Market sign was blocked by a van. I was hidden, so much like ignored roadkill, an unfortunate casualty of the landscape. I worried a parking car might run me over again, though I had to remind myself I hadn’t really been run over a first time. I was being dramatic, feeling sorry for myself.

My determination to stay conscious waned. I needed to flip the switch in order to start back up. It’s hard to deny the element of machismo in my reluctance to admit weakness. I’ve got no conscious objection to receiving help, but now—enfeebled as I am—I wonder what, if anything, might’ve convinced me to seek it out.

Instead, I yell-said “I’M FINE” again, nobody left to argue with me, and yielded to sweet, sweet calm.

Zac wrote a book called 50 Barn Poems. At first, it seemed like a gimmick, but when Zac encouraged donations to bail and aid funds supporting BLM protests in June by offering to write personalized barn poems, I took him up on it and was pleasantly surprised. Like maybe poems having gimmicks isn’t bad, maybe gimmick in general is neutral or even good, maybe all poems have some degree of gimmick in them, maybe I need to keep scraping away at this stupid calcified snobbery I put so much effort into building up as a teenager and into my twenties.

I misinterpreted the offer as being one poem for any donation of at least $5, but he meant one poem per $5, so since I gave $10 to the actblue he linked to, he sent me two poems.

On Zac’s blog, he recently posted a few poems he wrote for others who donated to charity. They’re also good. I wonder if his decision not to include any he wrote for me means he’s less proud of them, or if he didn’t want to bother asking me permission to reappropriate them, or if it was an arbitrary selection. Maybe the recipients of the poems he did share bribed him. I would not bribe Zac to mention me on his blog. If Zac mentions me on his blog because of this post, I won’t object, but that’s not why I’m writing it.

Sitting on these has me feeling like Martin Shkreli with that one Wu-Tang record. It may not be the best Wu-Tang record, but it’s not right for only one despicable human to have it.

I like them. Here they are, Zac Smith’s barn poems for charity, liberated:

Barn Poem for Crow Jonah Norlander 1

 we used to paint barns bright green
 but then we invented traffic lights
 and green meant go
 red meant stop
 and barns
 well, they don’t mean go
 they mean stop
 take a look
 really drink in this barn
 check it out
 man, what a nice barn
 etc.

Barn Poem for Crow Jonah Norlander 2

 barn underneath the bed
 forgotten until it’s time to get a new mattress –
 one of those foam ones from the podcast ads
 it’s covered in dust and dog hair
 but it’s still a barn. it’s still good
 we should keep it, don’t you think?

Yesterday Zac asked people to share their own barn poems. This is what I came up with.

Even in his dashed off recommendation of my poem, it’s clear that he’s an astute and generous reader. This is evident in his “brief book reviews” too, though those are a bit more blunt, and refreshingly so (side note: don’t sleep on Imaginary Museums!) I don’t think Zac has recommended any barn poem responses with a word of criticism, but that would be funny if he suddenly turned and harangued people for botching his prompt.

I thought about that too with the minison project. Participatory poetry is fun, opportunities for collaboration are one of the more (only) joyful features of overimmersion in online lit, and the question of even passive “curation” and being selective about which submissions get a “signal-boost” is interesting. Zac seems to be retweeting all responses, just as the minison neutralspaces page seemed not to spare any inclusion.

I noted—not bitterly, but just in the way that happens when you can’t help your constant thirst for affirmation—that neither of the co-creators of the minison form featured my submissions in their tweets. I thought for sure I’d get some kind of extra credit for abbreviating my middle name so that even the attribution was a minison (crow j norlander). Consider, for a moment, the absurdity of feeling slighted—however momentarily—that nobody told you your 3-word phrase was somehow exceptional. Part of it is that I’m on a streak of rejection and discouragement. I’m trying to embrace that, though, let it build character or whatever. Of the minisons, I honestly feel that mine are middling. Of the barn poem replies, I feel that mine is also middling. No others immediately spring to mind as better or worse than mine, I’m just used to assuming I’m neither best nor worst.

Even if there are aspects of humor in my barn poem and minisons, I think I took them seriously. I don’t think everyone took theirs seriously. I don’t think Zac took his minisons very seriously. They’re silly. Many of the minisons rely on gimmick, deliberate misspellings, and a lot break the “rules” by not counting punctuation and emojis toward the 14 character limit. That’s fine, though; rules are meant to be broken? That I couldn’t help but notice speaks to another maybe not-so-flattering aspect of my personality. I’m not legalistic, but I do embrace constraint.

I sincerely like all the minisons and barn poem replies. It’s exciting to see people be inventive and playful and find loopholes and workarounds. I think it’s all good. I considered doing a silly barn poem instead, like “im a barn, she’s a barn, he’s a barn, we’re all barns hey,” but for whatever reason decided against it.

I confess that I have not read Zac Smith’s book of barn poems. His tweet soliciting barn poems suggested he might be sending some copies out, though I’m again unclear about his criteria. If he doesn’t send me a book for free, I’ll probably try to buy two so I can give one to my friend Kerrie (and her husband Brian) who was the first person to fav my barn poem tweet, likely because she recognized her own barn in it. I’m very fond of Kerrie and Brian and their barn, as well as the house attached to it, and Olee, the cat inside the house.

The kayak that sheltered the wolf spider that I found on my leg while paddling to an island to go camping was not my kayak, but it had been stored in their barn. I have used their barn for storage of other things, but I’m pretty sure (I hope) I don’t have any more junk over there. Kerrie and Brian do store firewood in their barn, but it has not caved in, and hopefully will never cave in, though it is apparently developing some rot and termite damage.

Breaking: Zac just offered to send me a copy via DM and I had the pang of regret you feel (at least I do) when successfully guilt-tripping someone into doing something, even though this post only exists in draft form so far and he has not seen it. I’m declining his offer and buying them not because I’m above freebies but because I’ve decided I need two, one to give, and I would never be so presumptuous as to demand an extension of his generosity. (Tangent: I saw some news alert yesterday that was like “Breaking: Report shows something condemning about I dunno probably Trump” and wondered when people would realize that we’re past the point where any report could break anything.)

Update: I noticed on my sixth-ish reread of my barn poem that I forgot to delete the word “wood” when I decided to change it to “firewood,” but its a screenshot so that’s canon now.

Another update: I’ve been busy with other stuff but am hoping to get some more minisons over to Tom and Jo in the next couple of days in time for round 2.