On Not Flying to Hawaii

I could be the waitress
in the airport restaurant
full of tired cigarette smoke and unseeing tourists.
I could turn into the never-noticed landscape
hanging identically in all the booths
or the customer behind the Chronicle
who has been giving advice
about stock portfolios for forty years. I could be his mortal weariness,
his discarded sports section, his smoldering ashtray.

I could be the 70-year-old woman who has never seen Hawaii,
touching her red lipstick and sprayed hair.
I could enter the linen dress
that poofs around her body like a bridesmaid,
or become her gay son
sitting opposite her, stirring another sugar
into his coffee for lack of something true to say.
I could be the reincarnated soul of the composer
of the Muzak that plays relentlessly overhead,
or the factory worker who wove this fake Oriental carpet,
or the hushed shoes of the busboy.

But I don't want to be the life of anything in this pitstop.
I want to go to Hawaii, the wet, hot
impossible place in my heart that knows just what it desires.
I want money, I want candy.
I want sweet ukelele music and birds who drop from the sky.
I want to be the volcano who lavishes
her boiling rock soup love on everyone,
and I want to be the lover
of volcanos, who loves best what burns her as it flows.

Alison Luterman

21.10.09

UAH Interview


I received a call today from the lady in charge of the scholarship that I received this past spring: http://oip.uah.edu/star.php. Apparently my name was chosen out of the group and someone wants to interview me about my project and my trip. I'm pretty flattered about the whole thing and very curious to see how this all turns out. I just pray that I get some positive feedback from my students and this whole project isn't a wash.

If this all turns out like I've planned, I think that I am really going to take all of this to another level. Now that I've found a novel and really connected with the material, the characters, the time period, the author, the movement, etc, I think that I could take all of my research so much further. I'm considering taking a group of students to Spain this next year. From the response I've received from a few students, I think that there would be a large number of kids interested in going. Then I could continue my research and documenting in Spain.


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