Bingo Every Tuesday (Part I)

Bingo Every Tuesday (Part I)

I am a forager for stories. In the moments when I’m not mulling over the past and future, I look for the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. For example, my grandmother’s shoes inspired one of what I consider the best poems I’ve written. And a favorite poem of mine is the one Charles Simic wrote about a fork. It’s called “The Fork.” Read it. You will never look at a fork in the same way again.

Since 2007, I’ve kept a very small journal named “Bingo Every Tuesday.” I didn’t name it this. I just plucked the thing off a shelf at a general store up in Bangor, Maine. “Bingo Every Tuesday:” the grand title of no story but the one I’m telling now about the title’s lack of history, and it’s a story that’s about to end.  Anyways, because it felt right, and because it was a Tuesday, I bought the journal. Bingo.

(For the record, after doing a reading at my college, Billy Collins winked at me and signed the inside cover of “Bingo Every Tuesday.” He’s the poet whose wine glass I drank from when he went to the bathroom during that pretentious dinner a few English majors and I shared with him. Maybe bustling our little exchange into this introduction is pretentious in itself, but whatever).

The journal has served its purpose as the quirky title of a quirky literary nest made of impressions, thought prints, quick exchanges, and drafts of poems and love letters. I drew upon this forage for inspiration in writing my manuscript of narrative poetry “Good enough.” Below is a compilation of some of the rough material I didn’t integrate into the manuscript. I transcribe it exactly as I now find it in “Bingo Every Tuesday.” 

           

  1.

At night, you can hurdle north on NH–49 on the wrong side of the road for hours and not die. I want to give this a try once, but my mom’s the driver. “Just do it, “ I say. She won’t. I open the glove compartment looking for a mint. My mom’s the type who keeps quarters in what used to be mint tins, and I forget this. I slam the glove compartment shut with my foot. I want to cry, but I remember that I’m twenty. My mom asks if I’ve been writing any poems. “I’m sick of poems,” I say.  She asks if I’ve read any of Mary Oliver’s new poems, and, again, I say, “I’m sick of poems.”

  2.

We all know the urgency that comes with padding barefoot across a wooden floor between the bedroom and the bathroom at 6 AM in winter.

  3.

I asked my mother how to stop loving someone. It’s February, and we’re standing in front of the window at the kitchen sink watching a red cardinal in the branches.  Later, I’ll meet someone who loves falling asleep on the floor as much as I do.

  4.

I’ve kissed twenty boys. That’s roughly 6.5 per year, since I started at seventeen. In a different journal, I keep an inventory of the boys I’ve kissed. Is this normal? 

  5.

Visiting a famous church in Galicia, I stick my head into a confessional booth to check it out. I’ve never seen a confessional booth before. Coming face to face with a priest, I say, “Jesus Christ, you scared me!”

  6.

When the nurse takes my blood, she says, “Pretend like you’re giving me a present.” In the waiting room, an old Russian woman fixes her husband’s collar.

   7.

In a taxi in Quito, I don’t get the sense of relief I always did in the girl’s bathroom in high school. The driver flicks his eyes at my necklace in the rear–view mirror –– quick like tapping ashes from a cigarette. Eres linda, he says. No llores, linda.

   8.

I don’t put my napkin in my lap, and I don’t use a coaster when I have a cup of tea. Are things like this really important?

   9.

In a parked car outside the supermarket, a father and son wait for their favorite song to finish on the radio before heading inside for ice cream.

  10.

I dislike when people say things like “what did you expect?”  

   11.

What I’ve learned so far working on a sheep farm:

1. How to touch a sheep and how not to touch a sheep

2. Unlike goats, sheep are skittish

3. You have to dust the mites off aging cheese rinds

4. How to use plastic wrap 

5. How to herd sheep back into their pastures when they escape and the sheep dogs are being stupid

6. Sheep’s milk is 5–10 % fat

7. A few sheep in a herd wear bells so if a coyote chases the herd, the shepherds are able to track the sheep down

8. Bleating lambs sound like crying babies

9. You can get away with selling cheese for $23/ pound if the cheese has a good story, and you’re a good storyteller.

10. Sheep have more respect for you if you hold your arms out sideways while approaching them

11. Sheep are not stupid. They form their own hierarchy for milking –– appearing each time in the same order in batches of twelve.

12. I don’t like sheep

   12.

Dear Dave,

Do you remember the time we kissed in the pantry? 

   13.

My parents are fixing the toilet together and talking about gas prices. Is this what marriage is like after thirty years? I’m excited.

   14.

I read in the newspaper about a man in Siberia who swallowed a seed from a fir tree without knowing it. When he started coughing up blood, a doctor took a biopsy and discovered he had a fir tree growing in his lungs. The tree’s needles were poking at his capillaries. 

  15.

Johnny Cash’s voice

Sloshes in the troughs.

A runaway chicken

Ditters without plans.

   16.

In a mining town leftover from the Gold Rush, the man who sells me my Durango boots half price is charred, durable, decent, and wide-stanced.

   17.

To Cypress,

It makes no difference

That her calf isn’t female.

Without hesitation, she pushes,

Then stands to lick her bewildered

Boy clean for this world

In which he’ll have no place.

I cannot not turn away

From such somber devotion.

   18.

A small, cooperative woman

In a wool cap in the Ecuadorian

Cloud forest squats on the earth.

From a distance,

She’s a child playing on the ground.

But she’s washing her husband’s boots,

And the sun saddles her shoulders.

From her kitchen nearby,

Sad Latin music waltzes

With the pots and pans.

  19.

A kooky woman on the bus announces the deal she got on bananas at the supermarket. “And you don’t want to see me without my clothes on,” she says. “It’s not pretty.”