Joanna Penn Cooper


Birthday Poem


(1)
Forty-six and so far from the ratty-haired child in a tube top and hot pants climbing a fence, climbing down to the basement apartment of an older kid with a drum set, his mom and her boyfriend passed out on the couch, all those creepy plants covering their front window. Well, don’t worry—I climbed back out again unscathed and went home to read a book and drink chocolate milk by the spoonful, pretending to take my medicine. “Tell me to take my medicine,” I told my mom. “Take your medicine,” she said.

(2)
Sitting down to poem, I find that I can’t poem. I pick up a book of prose poems and there is New York School poet Ron Padgett telling me, “In times of trouble and despondency, I turn to sportswear.” Ron Padgett in his yellow pullover and new white shoes. I wish I could get a fellowship to meet him in upstate New York and lie in a hammock while he answers my questions. “Tell me, Ron Padgett,” I’d say, “how much poetry knowledge do you suppose I need before I can put Poet under my name on a name tag?” And he’d answer in a kind and thoughtful way, voice like an Andy Warhol who cares, “Why would you want to do that?”

(3)
Actually, I saw Ron Padgett say some things at the Poetry Project once when I lived in New York. I don’t remember what his voice sounds like. A cross between New York and Tulsa, I imagine.

(4)
In a time of trouble, I write my friends the badass Catholic women writers, to tell them I’ve been thinking about the Virgin Mary. I like how she’s central to it all, but maybe she needs a sassy non-mom friend, another woman next to her to balance out the mom vibes? “Mary Magdalene,” they say. “Oh, yeah. Mary Magdalene.”

(5)
Do you suppose MM was Emilie Flöge to Jesus’ Klimt? Pioneering Viennese designer to his fin-de-siecle painter? I am thinking here of the creative partnership, but also of the vibes. Also of the fire that burned up her collection of clothing and art. Burned it all up.

(6)
If it is true that a midlife crisis is just a summoning of powers
If it is true that a midlife crisis is just crawling into a hole from which to get a better vantage point of the stars
If it is true that one emerges grounded (muddy) and victorious (resigned)
If it is true that with age comes, “Listen, it’s better than the alternative...”
Still, I’d rather have a drink with one of me now than two of me at 23.

(7)
I was a girl for a long time, but also a person. Here’s the picture of me in green short shorts in 1977 looking like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. But, no. I looked like me, a girl with so many thoughts they spilled out into my hair. A kid in a halter top she liked. Joanna Penn Cooper.


Threshold


The strangeness of always having been the same person with the same gaze.
The Lord called, Samuel! And Samuel said, Here I am!
A lover from my 20s told me that. He loved it. Here I am!
He (the lover) once accused me of narcissistically staring at myself in his toaster while I ate spaghetti. Really, I was just looking for myself. Here I am.

*

There was the year, one of the years, when I read books about Buddhism. I would pause in doorways and think threshold.

Well, I’d think, standing in the hallway after brushing my teeth, Here I am. About to go from this to that.


Before the Invention of Regret


Before the invention of regret, we had to make our own fun. We wore keys around our necks on strings and let ourselves in after school to set up for the party. We had streamers from the dime store and construction paper hearts, Kool-Aid and cheap Kroger cookies. Angela showed up with feathered hair, makeup, and a ribbon through the collar of her yellow oxford cloth shirt. Douglas H. and Alan C. went out into the hallway of the apartment building to have a fist fight about something, cheeks flushed and lips Kool-Aid red. Angela stood in the doorway with amused eyes saying, “Guys, c’mon. It’s a party. You’re ruining everything.” I stood behind her with my camera and said, “Hey, look over here!” and took a Polaroid when everybody turned around. 


A Set of Preferences


My grandmother’s preferences often charmed me, the ones she would report. She was a woman who knew her own mind. (Even now, the past tense is strange, her voice having been so immanent in my psychic universe.) I’ve always enjoyed sleeping upstairs in a house, lifted off the ground like that, she once reported on the telephone. I feel myself lifted and nappish just thinking about it. I don’t know the name for such a speech act. It’s a type of firmness of conviction interacting with a receptive will. Her declarations and my willingness to be charmed.

I’ve always liked the sound of rain on my roof as I’m drifting off to sleep warm in my bed, is another thing she said to me as child, tucked in next to her when I was scared. And now, these decades after, the sound of rain as I’m drifting off to sleep, and her sensibility comes drifting in as well. A weaving of company and weather.

When she was dying—after a stroke that paralyzed her left side and caused her toward evening to lose track of years and people’s relation to each other—she had a moment of twilight lucidity when I was sitting by her bed. When the body begins to break down and you can’t do for yourself, it’s time to leave. I started to tell her that she would leave the hospital and go to rehab and have more good years, but she repeated more insistently that it was good and right to leave when the body wears out. I knew then that I was being called to listen in my particular way, that I was the one in the family who could hear it. I let myself understand it, then said, I understand. The next day she wouldn’t eat and a few days after that she was dead.

 

Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press), What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press), and Crown (Ravenna Press, winner of the Cathlamet Prize), in addition to several chapbooks. Her most recent chapbooks are Wild Apples, a collection of flash memoir and writing prompts, and Comfort Event, collaborative poems with Todd J. Colby, both through Ethel Zine & Micro-Press. Her current project is When We Were Fearsome, a book of flash memoir about motherhood, origins, and power. Joanna lives in Durham, North Carolina and teaches online writing classes and coaches writers through her business Muse Writing & Creative Support (musewriting.com).

ISSN 2472-338X
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