S A DAVIDSON

sunday writing club

sunday Writing club

These are bits of writing generated from prompts and shared with my Sunday writing group, organized by Jessica Letteney.


20240908

This is how I will remember you:

Driving the van on a dusty road with heavy animals panting and peeing in the back and slick dogs with tongues somewhere between us, always listening. I marvel at the time travel we’ve discovered together - folding and stretching time. The humming disorientation of an adventure to do something out of the ordinary but also totally ordinary. Something very old and very new at once - like what it feels like to come home. 

Three summers we’ve spent here now, learning the filling up of water and then emptying again. We met the bats and owls and swallows and other flying things that knew all of this before us. The creatures that have words for all the subtle shades of mist and rain. Ombre is maybe the word for the whole idea, though. One thing becomes another thing because it has sat in liquid just a little longer; the expressions of accumulation describing the lines in our faces and the stories we tell. If the house is a metaphor for the self in dreams, then this house is a metaphor for the sadness that is possible when you stay in one place without love in your heart and eyes, the dangers of not dying and also not living. The way that a person could lose track of time (that folds and stretches) and find the whole house has been swallowed up by blackberry canes with their unsettling speed and reach. 

Every now and then I hear a lamb or a horse make a noise, and then it’s the wind slapping in the fig tree. This is a different place now because of what has happened since.

This summer I was compelled to finally settle in and know more, in this summer that only got hot twice but was sticky anyway. Now, I’ve moved on to letting things rot in jars, gently nudging one thing to become something else, something wonderful and mysterious and a little dangerous. I know a little more about transformation and waiting. I know a little more about discernment and the finality of a thing gone bad. I can now be more comfortable with a change of plan, because neither of us has one simple color to our eyes. 



20240915

When I was smaller and younger, my greatest wish was to fly the fastest airplane. It was a blade and a forest fire at once. It was the way to get to the edge of space, but not beyond it. It multiplied gravity and tore apart sounds. It was unseeable and the most powerful thing I could think of at the time. Some old man who had learned to fly ninety kinds of airplanes bought me books with pictures of this invisible airplane. In them, I read luscious descriptions, charts and statistics. Many details marked CLASSIFIED. Designed to disappear from enemies, the matte black paint, exotic curves and the physics of vanishing were irresistible to my still growing heart. 

That same old flyboy that sent me those books revealed to me that a girl was not allowed to fly that airplane (or woman or whatever). Not for trying or training or anything. After that nothing in the world reflected any light at all. I found other shapes to admire and other facts to memorize. I found new and exciting ways to escape. 40 years later I took the next old man to look at airplanes. We stood inside the wide open mouth and throat of the air museum. Inside a hangar built for the unlovely craft called a blimp. In this desperate cavern sections of airplanes were propped up like slabs in a butchershop case. I realized that none of these airplanes or pieces of airplanes or films of airplanes or models of airplanes would ever be anything more than old men telling tales to each other. 

On the way out, I squeezed past a man in a narrow hallway and pushed the swinging door into the bathroom. After a pee, I stood at the sink washing my hands and in the mirror, saw a kid come out of a stall alone. She looked at me blankly and then pleadingly as she recognized her predicament. She couldn’t reach the faucet handle so I turned it on for her. She couldn’t reach the soap dispenser, so I squished some soap into my big wet hand and she scooped it out with her tiny wet hand. She swirled her hands around each other in a way that had been taught to her and she dutifully performed the act of handwashing. I waved my hand under the paper towel machine and turned off the water for her. I took a towel and waved again. She took a towel and we both dried our hands slowly, delaying the inevitable return to the places where men drive us around and explain things.



20241013

(NOTE: THIS IS PROBABLY OUT OF ORDER AND INCOMPLETE.)

This is a sink full of dishes containing a cracked glass, about to slice me. So here’s what it is like to be cut up.
This is a photograph of me, near a Canadian river, expressing the gender of wilderness.
(Here is where I forgot completely)
This is the room in a basement apartment where I was sure the whole building would fall upon me. 
Here is another photograph, this time, it’s you, sitting on a closed toilet seat while someone shaved your mohawk with clippers
(You are snarling, did you know that?)
This is a list of every apartment I’ve ever known with an alley beside. 
And here is the gender of architecture, of doors closing and opening and closing again.
Here is what it is like to be unexpectedly middle-aged and fine.
(PAUSE)
Let me tell you a little about subtraction. For many days he measured the blood and other fluids collecting in the bags at the end of tubes sticking out from holes in my lumpy sides. He noted in a neat hand the color and quantity changing day by day. And now there is a scar stitched the full width of my chest. Basically, describing how it was, what happened, and what it is like now. This is still not enough to know which door is safe to open. And now I don’t always remember how to say my own name. 
Then. 
We’re both watching the boys at the gym, thinking about the gender of heroism. 
(If my voice cracks, I need you to pretend not to notice.)
I’m tenderly remembering the punks I knew before, in San Francisco, the young things that possessed the audacity of genderlessness, but were not yet able to articulate a strategy for survival. 


20241017

1.
darling friends, gather
outside where someone
has placed a circle 
of river stones
someone else has 
brought a bag of 
marshmallows, jumbo
and then someone else 
tells a story about witches
that can walk between
raindrops and stay dry

2. 
the charismatic horse is brown and dappled as a forest
his real feet, the size of dinner plates, are blind and careless
he coos for a scratch and leans against any vertical thing
to test the fearlessness of friendship

3. 
a fisherman’s clubhouse
one room only
too loud and too hot
shudders
threatens to blow over 
when shoved by the 
shoulder of wet wind
that comes as the river 
and the ocean 
holler at each other 
all afternoon
each bracing breath is a gasp
all the boats are already in

4.
a secret in this innermost pocket
is the dried root of a wild iris
a ropey and wise time traveler
ceaselessly whispering about true love
carried until forgotten it is revealed again 
and placed in another’s hand

20241124

What I know about a body 
Might fit inside a shoe
I think bones grow cold and break
Some blood curdles and boils 
A stomach will flip-flop and drop and go sour
Eyes grow wide and glassy
In the grim twilight of the bathroom mirror
I will whisper to nobody else

To say:

  • You are safe

  • You have done nothing wrong

And then I’ll look down and imagine every single muscle around every single one of my ribs and every nerve that ever had any bad thing to say to anyone. 

With a deep, slow inhale… the full sloshing barrel of my chest can now hold:

  • A vision

  • A knitted mitten

  • A garden

  • A novel

  • A medical diagram

  • A universe

Good Night.

20250119

You could pick a better place to cry than this. 
You could also pick a worse place to cry. 
Let’s rank places to cry in order from best to worst.

  • Gently weeping on a European train platform: Good one, very romantic, like a movie.

  • A surprise cry in the garden: Pleasant, amongst pollinators, loamy.

  • Big, fat tears of frustration in front of the one you love, standing at the sink in the kitchen you share: Vulnerable, but normal.

  • A painful sob on a sidewalk outside a bar, or a restaurant - slash - bar: hot shame on your cheeks. Oh no, you did it again - you said you wouldn’t - but you did. 

  • Ugly crying in the car in a dark parking lot:
    No, while driving:
    No, after an accident: FUCK.

You could pick a better place to cry than this. 

  • On an airplane, say, on your way home - your eyes well up with thick tears that wait a while to fall. You’re in no rush to be anywhere too quickly as the airplane moves through the sky faster than 500 miles/hr. You can’t feel the speed until something changes, altitude, weather, a cart of refreshments, until it is time to come in for a landing and that is when you know, for sure, that even air must weigh something.