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

19.10.09

What we are willing to give up.


Sleep is very important to me. VERY IMPORTANT. Already, I am dreading coming home tonight after this concert for fear that I won't get into bed at a reasonable hour. I sound like an eighty year old, I know. But without at least seven hours of sleep, I don't function.
So when I booked rooms this year for the Gulf Shores volleyball tournament, I immediately claimed that I would sleep in a bunk in the condo. I did not want to share a bed with anyone. I wanted my own bed to be able to stretch out in, in order to get a good night's sleep. Little did I know that taking a bunk was the wrong idea. Not only did the cover have sand all over it, it was impossible for me to lie flat with my legs stretched out because the bunk was so freaking short. Being a stomach sleeper, this was near criminal. I had to bend my legs at the knee while lying on my stomach. To top things off, the girls left on a TV and put the AC on 65. It was a frigid, uncomfortable night full of nightmares with game show voices.

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