When I overhear my parents talk about the death of Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy playmate first discovered in a Vancouver Dairy Queen, I somehow confuse her with the woman who sold my family our tent trailer.
Mary Meigs wrote this piece in spring 2001 while she was recovering from a stroke, and which is reproduced here exactly as she typed it, Meigs writes: “In occupational therapy, it was a great joy to use the old Underwood electric typewriter to strengthen the fingers of my left hand.”
I saw my mother under sedation in the Psych Ward, after she collapsed at the funeral. She foresaw the bridge disaster, but no one believed her, not even father. Her “visions” made him uneasy.
I’m not just another American gringo, chasing old lady luck South. Staring wide-eyed at their beautiful skin, at the bones of the burros, the dogs and the rats. It’s not why I’ve come,
to stare, to open my eyes this wide, sucking the lemon before I drink.
You are clearly preoccupied with love. See the way you sift through the lint from your purse, searching for the backing of an earring. See the runway of broken leaves and bread crumbs collecting under the emergency brake in your car. Messy, messy.
Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.
