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

27.12.09

Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas

For years, this has been a family tradition at Christmas; the Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas movie must be watched. For the past few years I think I’ve been able to evade this tradition. I was informed Christmas Eve that I am usually asleep or reading at the point that everyone watches it. Well, this year I succumbed and watched with my family.

It really is a cute muppet movie that bases it’s story line on the O’Henry’s short story, “The Gift of the Magi.”  The best part was at the end when my brother suggested we watch the Bloopers. Who would guess that a muppet movie would have Bloopers. It had us all crying from laughing so hard.

Emmett

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