What We Make

Kalashnikov In The Sun, my two-years-in-the-works project on Sierra Leonean poets, is sent to the publisher, one week following the death of Tom, one of the voices included in the anthology, a friend. I dedicate the book to him, I hear the cadence of his voice, still.

That evening, last week, the day I heard the news, I teach voice lessons. After, I have tea with a friend. When that’s over, I am standing at my car. It is late, dark. I look up to check on the stars, and they’re there. It is dawn in Sierra Leone. The night suddenly feels bigger than me, vast. I don’t want to go home, I start to cry a little, standing there on the curb. I walk down the block, knock on the door of a friend, who stops what he’s doing, and sits down and talks, simply talks. And the night becomes more like dawn.

There is a jar of homemade plum jelly on my kitchen counter. It was left on my porch last week by another friend, along with someone else who left homemade tomato sauce, along with someone else who brought over homemade split pea soup and a bag of farm produce.

Minh and his wife come to my house today, to practice speaking English. As a thank you, they bring me Vietnamese food, salad rolls with fresh basil and spiced tofu, spring rolls, beef filled something, chunky sweet and sour peanut sauce….it reminds me of when I used to go to the home of a refugee from Ukraine and help her with her English. Her family had raised honey bees back home. On one visit she gave me her last jar of honey, it had journeyed from one continent and one life, to another.

Minh and his wife and I talk about our kids, they go out back to look at my tomato plants. We have tea, and talk about how both their fathers spent years—one for 13, the other for 8—in a post-war Communist prison camp. They tell me about not enough food for anyone, in or out of the prison walls. Minh’s wife would boil peanuts, and then carry them to the stadium in Saigon on sporting event days, scale the wall, the top of which was lined with coils of barbed wire, and sell the peanuts for money to buy food so she and her family could live.

They tell me that their fathers were allowed visitors once every two months, and they would try to bring food, as their fathers were starving. I say I am sorry for what they have all been through. She looks at me, “But they survived.”

It is time for me to pick up my kids at school. I open my freezer and hand them a jar of tomato sauce I made a week ago. I reach for the plum jelly my friend made, and I think he’d like me to give it to them, his hand extended through mine, to this family who lost their daughter to brain cancer, who lost their country, and so much more, and who continue surviving.

And we continue surviving because we feed each other, through words and food and by looking at each other while we tell our stories. My son wrote a report about himself for school, it’s here on my desk in front of me. “My eyes change colors and I have jet black hair,” he writes. My eyes change color, too, all this past week, they must have. Sitting in the kitchen at my table this afternoon, it is difficult to hear these stories. At times I have to fight back the tears, I do not want them to think they’ve made me cry. It is difficult to sit at my desk and work on this anthology and read so many poems about lost limbs and lost dreams and lost lives. Wars don’t ever end. They just don’t.

And in the past 24 hours, in addition to the above: took a walk with a friend whose 87 year old father in law just moved in; found out a friend’s marriage is ending; learned another friend’s 7 year old son may be facing open heart surgery; my mother surfaced and called me from a pay phone, having trouble putting words together, methadoned out, but in her way, a piece of her still trying to connect; my great aunt Charlotte died today and my 95 year old grandmother is sad…and the house is a mess and the laundry needs to be done and I still haven’t finished my syllabus for the class I’m teaching starting Monday, and things are tanking sideways with this huge freelance project… The wars don’t ever end, they just don’t.

But yesterday morning a friend sat in my yellow kitchen while I chopped onions and tomatoes for this roasted vegetable recipe she told me about, “You don’t have enough basil,” she says. “Add more olive oil,” she says. “Go to the store and get garlic.” And last night I sat on the floor at my friend’s place, and we listened to Soundgarden and talked about music until midnight, and I don’t know, it was fun. And tonight for dinner I ate my thank you gift Vietnamese food. And this morning the sky was grey, like my son’s eyes, when they’re not blue, when they’re filled with the reflection of all that’s right in front of him, the glint of the world, if held up to the light, to be seen.