if that is freedom, fuck it i don’t want it to walk bare as a genital wart in the mayo clinic swollen with liberty, flying the colors of the flag fuck it, fuck your freedoms give me plexiglass prisons, given me wardens in hazmat give me solitary confinement give me an oubliette so I can forget you and your fanfaronade freedoms
to hold my dying elder’s hand in hospice that is freedom you, your ilk, you kick it to dust you kick it to dust with your leather shoes to meet at feast together, eat together marry on the day we choose let our doctors see their children again such freedom you crush with as much disgust as the snake beneath your heel
my venom grows every night, every morning chokevine murderthoughts thorn and strangle me: the freedom to be kind, to forgive to live and let live all flayed away I am a criminal in my own mind I deserve my chains
I don’t know what you deserve (to do time for war crimes is what you deserve) I don’t know what you think you deserve but you take it anyway no matter what it takes away from all the rest of us
my friend, swaddled like a sarcophagus in the morgue for one last look at her sister’s face my friend, in her lonely hotel room, decontaminating her scrubs while she Skypes with her cat my friend, who stares out the window as Washington Heights bangs its pots and pans so tired, too tired to join the humble éclat, tired from doing nothing, from staying inside, keeping the city safe
you spit in the face of my friends you spit in the face of my friends you little shit you little shit
The release of a short novel, nested inside an anthology along with three very fine novellas (by Jessica P. Wick, Amanda J. McGee, and Mike Allen respectively), is a thing to be CELEBRATED WITH MUSIC!
Before I go further, allow me to link you to THE SINISTER QUARTET anthology! Click and see ALL the places you may purchase The Sinister Quartet from!
The author (moi!) hath made a playlist for THE TWICE-DROWNED SAINT, full of silent movie soundtracks, refugee songs, angel songs, glaciers melting (spoilers, darling), and kitchen heroes.
My view at 5:26 AM, right before I got down and dirty with my edits.
OW! MY FUNDAMENT!
Okay, I’ve been working pretty steadily on this writing bench o’ mine (borrowed) (in exile) since 6 AM-ish (well, I did break for breakfast), so I’m gonna stretch a bit. I may be done for the day.
All I have to do now is input the changes into the document my editor sent me, and I’ll be DONE!
It might take me a few more mornings, but then I shall be TOTALLY SHUCKED OF EDITING DUTIES and FREE AGAIN!
Free to… create RECIPES from our STORIES, and video-edit down my PAJAMA PARTY READING (or possibly re-shoot it now that I’ve re-charged the real camera), and BLOG about THINGS and WRITE POETRY, without feeling GUILTY!!!
AND RETURN TO MY WORK-IN-PROGRESS, Fiddle!!!
I know this work is also part of The Work. And I am SO GRATEFUL I was able to do this last round of edits.
BUT I WILL BE SO EXCITED NOT TO BE DOING THEM AGAIN!!!
Until June. When I get my edits back for Saint Death’s Daughter. Heh heh heh. Then, we start all over again.
Here we are, back in the house I grew up in. I’m even in the last bedroom I had (we tended to play musical chairs with bedrooms as we got older and needed or wanted different things from our living spaces). Currently, when it’s not sheltering guests from the east coast, it is a yoga/meditation room for the two (currently furloughed) massage therapists, one professional dancer, and my awesome mama who live in the house.
Carlos and I are camped out in here, quite cozily. Our bed is a snuggly heap of foam mats on the floor, which is not too different from our futon back home. Mama lent us her desk, and I bought a small, very portable folding desk from OfficeMax. Carlos and I have lined them up side by side right under the window. When Carlos is doing serious writing, he goes out to the front room and sits in the small easy chair by the fireplace, but I like my bench, which reminds me of my writing bench at home.
Right now, he’s sitting at his desk, with Roll20 and Zoom (audio only) open at the same time. Our friends Fran, Tom, DongWon, and Josh are playtesting our tabletop RPG-in-development “Negocios Infernales,” which Carlos has managed to input into Roll20. It’s his third virtual playtest, but the first one I’m here sitting in on. The fact that Carlos got this far in virtual game-building is, to me, terribly impressive. I’d’ve given up crying long ago.
It’s funny, the things each of can do more or less tirelessly that the other finds tedious or all but impossible.
Take game design for example. Carlos spent hours making this virtual play possible. Me, I took a nap. However, for the other game he’s developing–which is a card game called “Favors”–making prototypes requires a lot of cutting and stuffing into sleeves. I CAN DO THAT FOR HOURS. Just give me an audiobook and I’m happy occupied. Carlos hates doing things like that. I tell him it’s because I did office work for so many years. I’m like the resident envelope stuffer.
We both love being helpful to my mama, however. We have that in common. So today, we went out into the alley out back and attacked the chest-high alley plants growing out there. (“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” — Emerson.)
Here is another situation in which we are different:
Carlos in general dislikes gardening, but he loves the weedwhacker. He says it makes him feel like a god mowing down armies. It’s fast, it’s loud, it’s mechanized; it is the perfect tool for a job like this. But I? I like CHOPPING THINGS DOWN. And also LOPPING THINGS OFF.
So while he mowed down his grass armies, I went through a pile of tools until I found the LIMB LOPPER. Because there was a huge patch of greenery with stalks as thick as branches. And they needed lopping.
AND I AM YOUR GIRL FOR LOPPING AND CHOPPING. I may have mentioned.
All of which to say, we spent a good hour outside doing yard work. Which we never get to do in Queens (to Carlos’s great joy and contentment; he’d rather be writing) (so would I generally) (but after three years, I was super ready for some yard work).
I say this because this was after I went on a little neighborhood bike ride with my mama. And Carlos and my mama and I spent ten or fifteen minutes in the backyard shadowboxing, wielding bamboo sticks like tennis rackets and fencing foils and the batons from A Chorus Line’s “One.” That’s a lot of fun, physical movement for me. I revel in it. I glory in it. I don’t get this in apartment living.
I’m not sure if I’m losing weight, and I’m not sure I want to know. But I do know that I feel more deeply inside my body. My hands were trembling after all that lopping–I had to hold onto my drink with both hands!–and that tells me I was using and strengthening muscles that probably need it. My thighs are happy from three bike rides this week. Sore, yes, but happy. Also, I squatted down to get something the other day–and then I squatted again to fix it–and sprang back up, and realized my knees hadn’t creaked. I didn’t groan or huff. My legs didn’t complain. And it… it’d been a while.
Right now, Governor Cuomo has extended NY on Pause till May 15th. We’re therefore going to be extending our stay here yet again, for at least another fortnight past our already-extended return date. I’m in a city where most of my mother’s side of the family, and some of my father’s side, lives–and I can’t see them–except a few brothers who drop by and hang around outside in the yard to chat with us for a few minutes once every few weeks. Grocery shopping is stressful (we keep it at a minimum) and my ability to make money through narration is basically null, but…
But, in general, I’m happy. We’re safe. We’re comfortable. We’re among loving family. We take turns making family dinners, or sometimes just scrounging for ourselves. We watch things with my mama–Carlos and I watched the first two episodes of Los Espookys with her, and mama and I watched the new Emma, and alongside Caitlyn Paxson on Skype from Toronto. We kept waggling eyebrows at each other and making inappropriate comments in the chat. We play games at the table from time to time. We plant wildflowers.
And I get to go bike riding, which I’m afraid to do in New York. It’s a solitary activity–even if you’re biking with others–that harms none. I’m very grateful for that. I’m grateful to be here.
I’m worried about everybody. I have friends whose family and friends are dying. I miss being home. Plans for the rest of the summer and year are rippling and shedding. We must remain complex. We must remain flexible. We must remain ready to help.
And I must remember what Carlos says constantly: “Joy is local.” The world is monstrous, but joy is local. Both at once. And infinite else. We must remain complex.
I don’t seem to be any less busy. Not really spending a lot of time binging shows or books. Much is coming due. The trouble is juggling a schedule that seems to amorphous, or assigning priorities. Lists help. Waking up early helps–5:30-6:30. I don’t seem able to wake myself up with any number of alarms, but I’ll get up if Carlos wakes me. Even if the day gets slippery, at least I feel like there was enough of it, if I get up early.
I’m really enjoying writing the second draft of Fiddle, my new novel. It makes me laugh. It’s ridiculous and romantic and bizarre, and it suits my mood.
But I’m taking a break from Fiddle next week to finish copyedits on my ARC of The Sinister Quartet, which is coming out in June. My short novel–about 60,000 words–The Twice-Drowned Saint, will be found therein. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be creating recipes based on all four stories in the book, playlists for my novel, and videos of me reading excerpts.
This is in addition to game designing with Carlos (for his sabbatical, and also because we really want to get Negocios Infernales up and running), and helping him create videos/content for his upcoming book (vigorously virtual) book launch of Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe. He’s been hard (and happily) at work giving virtual presentations for schools and libraries, and that content is just going to accelerate and keeping on coming. I’m very excited for him.
And that’s the state of the Hernandooney Household In Exile.
Oh, and if you’ve read this far–his book launch is on May 5th. He and Rick Riordan will be live on Instagram at 8 PM Eastern, challenging each other to a MYTH WAR in which the loser cuts off all his hair. Carlos made this graphic for it:
no moon is rising in this house today no planet setting, nor sun is dancing–all is quiet, all is dark in this theatre of the heavens
the street of lights is quenched stars stuffed under bushels, seats are empty, the velvet cordons knotted no movement in the midnight curtains
yet there is a ghost lamp keeping company with the past campfire of our phantoms its own dance, its own dance
somewhere in the abyss restless colossi stir beneath cloud forms dream in crystal coffers of ammonia beneath adamantine oceans waiting to rise
waiting to rise, and dress in finest raiment, leathern slippers waiting to crawl through your casement, ring the bell at your door waiting to visit your very house
Nonestic Meets the Nothing by C. S. E. Cooney for Amelia L. Cooney
there, where the waters of oz run sun-rich with silt where those old waters run yellow-brick-yellow powdered by paths pummeled by tornados there, where gold-dust mingles with bitter tears of dispossessed gargoyles with silver sequins, and sad apples, and lonely-for-homeness there, where come the waters, the waters of the river mouth hard up against the nonestic sea there, oh! a terrible sea, that nothing sea like a storm swept in from the neverending story
“Sunset River,” by Joel Cooney, Acrylic Pour
Parochial Playground by C. S. E. Cooney for Joel Cooney
light as a feather, stiff as a board light as a feather, stiff as a board bright as a peacock, cold and hard bright as a peacock, cold and hard
shove a shiv in the river let its guts run down shove a shiv in the river let its guts run down
set a fire to the river let the wyrms crawl ’round set a fire to the river let the wyrms crawl ’round
you are a limnologist, standing at the edge of a river standing at that place where sunset meets water, where land meets lava, you are balancing barefoot in the riparian zone, between the green leaves of home and a channel of molten potential
eyes open, all-radiant you
JUMP!
The first poem comes out of that bright, bold yellow in Amelia’s painting. I immediately thought of it as “Oz Yellow”–like the yellow brick road. The similarities between her roiling blue ocean and “The Nothing” in the Neverending Story struck me, and for the first time, I thought of those two childhood books (and films) together. Today I learned that the ocean of Oz was called “the Nonestic Ocean” which means “the non-existing ocean.” And that made me think of “The Nothing” as well.
The second poem “Parochial Playground” came out of a memory of that old schoolyard game we used to play: “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” It begins by a circle of children lifting a single supine child in their midst all together, each child using only their index and middle fingers to raise her. It ends with that child–her eyes closed–being led to and placed upon a cement curb stop, told she is on the Empire State Building, and then… pushed off. The fall is not long. And it is forever.
Context: A conversation between two goblin sisters of Hatch Khelekeres— Loxósseliss “Fiddle” and Dida–about the half-selkie boy (elephant seal, from the Pinkbladder family) whom Dida wants to marry.
These goblin girls both have spider-like attributes. Dida shares a few things in common with the spitting spider. Lox (or “Fiddle”) is very much like a brown recluse. She likes computer games, staying in, and accidentally biting people who startle her.
“Wait,” I said, and Dida stopped rhapsodizing for a second. “Does your boy have immunity to . . . you know?” I gestured to her wet mouth.
Dida’s semi-translucent hair-legs writhed in ecstasy across her entire scalp. She smoothed the silken tatters of her mini-dress, then immediately rumpled them again as she began hopping up and down and hugging herself
“He’s fine.”
Her smirk indicated something more like “and by fine I mean HIS ASS” or perhaps “to people who are immune to its toxicity, this saliva is a feature not a bug.”
She went on to explain, “Gentry-babes from the Fathom Realms are particularly robust.”
“I see. More so than ungulates?”
The smirk deepened. “Brine is an excellent lubricant.”
I shuddered. “Saltwater? In all those crevices?”
She laughed. “Friction!”
“Chafing.”
“Excitement!”
“Rash. Rash on all your carapaces.”
“He’s worth it. I promise. Those thighs! That nose bladder! So. Will you go with me?”
And then she said the P word again. And again. And again.
“Please? Please, Fiddle? Pretty please? With sugar on top of dwayberry tarts and fruit flies and earwigs—please?”
From TweetSpeak’s Poetry Prompt Free Mini-Series. Sign up at their website to get prompts in mail.
This is the last of the prompts in this mini-series based on the book How to Read a Poem, based on Billy Collins’ poem “Introduction to Poetry“, but there are more free prompts here.
Prompt Based on Robert Haight’s “How Is It That The Snow“ Write a poem that begins with a question. Don’t try too hard to answer it.
Since When
by C. S. E. Cooney
for Kiri
since when did we take up our cameras, capture our faces– graceless, ageless, haggard and fey, shades of dwayberry and moth-wing-gray in the dusk? since when was that us?
since when did we use tablecloths for tables instead of affixing them to our persons with safety pins and fringed sashes– choose to do dishes, when we might be prancing off for sultry parklands, hand in hand, crushing dusty moonbeams with our combat boots?
since when did we reread Rilla, looking for escape in friendly old pages, hoping to shake off days of confinement, grinding duties fearful uncertainties, find not comfort but consanguinity with grief death tolls that defy belief, and hear again (as for the first time, again) that phantom piper, and wonder–if he plays, he plays for thee, for me– for our beloveds or beloved strangers on my side or on thy side of the sea?
I think they’d make an EXCELLENT book pairing. I’ve been sort of nesting them in my mind, imagining Sal Vidón spending a summer weekend reading all the Murderbot Diaries, then dressing up as Murderbot/SecUnit for Halloween/Rompenoche.
I mean, it makes SO MUCH sense! Sal goes to an arts school, loves cosplay, adores robots–has a few sentient robot friends, including a toilet–and would be on the lookout for fictional heroes as ace/aro as he!
Also, the Remembranation Machine in SAL AND GABI FIX THE UNIVERSE, a super-intelligent computer with cosmic processing power, would probably want to cosplay ART, the “Asshole Research Transport” in Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries.
…Except the Remembranation Machine is not NEARLY sarcastic enough to pull it off, so it’d have to collaborate on its cosplay with its pal, the Entropy Sweeper, who is sarcastic enough for the two of them.
Carlos asked me who Gabi would be cosplaying. (We figured out American Stepmom would be Dr. Mensah and Gustavo would be Thiago.) And something Sharon Shinn said on Facebook MADE ME REALIZE…
GABI wouldn’t settle for cosplaying a secondary character. Oh, no. She’d retaliate by reading Ann Leckie’s ENTIRE Imperial Radch series! And she’d cosplay Breq, the ancillary unit of the starship Justice of Toren’s AI!!!
Anyway, that’s my daydream. Love BOTH these books so much. Both of them out on 5/5. PRE–ORDER!
Recording from home, my mom’s home, with everyone else at home, during shelter-in-place, is a little like…
“OKAY EVERYONE IT’S QUARANTINE TIME. LET’S ALL LEARN NEW SKILLS. HOW ABOUT INTERPRETATIVE DANCE REPLACING ALL CONVERSATION?”
(Except, LOL, my own.)
(I tried getting up at 5 to record, and almost succeeded, but got snuggled back to oblivion. My bad.)
Ice machines, man. Everyone wants cold drinks. And they want them NOW. It’s like we’re living in a desert or something…
What’s that new noise? Ah. A juicer, I’d bet. Okay, well. I got 30% of my project done. Just need two more quiet mornings and I can probably finish. Probably time to call it a day, let people be people and not mimes.
No, autocorrect, I did not mean “mines.” Okay, maybe I did.
C.S.E. Cooney 