The Life You Could Have: a memoir

Category: prose poems

  • Refuse


    Out of the corner her attention through and beyond the mud room to the patio carrying a laundry basket filled of fluffy squares on her hip paused when spotted the pretty girl, who three years earlier had slipped her vaginal canal and was whisked away covered in feces, such a delicate beaming, “Look mom. We’re painting. Like you,” long wooden handled camel hair in a fist like an icepick, scrubbing the hundred- and twenty-dollar fan brush it took ten weeks to save for a decade before, completing the collection, then to her son, he four, with another, sweeping it back and forth in a quarter inch of silt washed underneath the retaining wall as wet in a thunderstorm dried over weeks as there was no time yet to sweep, and her eyes went high to a shelf where she had stashed the cylindric tin she propped her brushes in since she was a teenager given to her by her grandmother that she thought she might take down again someday put there on the day she found the boy in acrylics and after she threw squished tubes away and spent hours cleaning colors from carpeting, but the tin was on its side and every other kind of her brushes lay frayed out there too and she had had violent thoughts in the past but nothing like the electrical chemical hormonal flood that day and in her head who are these people and why are they in my life screamed along with flashes of ripping their flawless arms off pummeling their perfect faces into red pulp so she pulled deep and closed her eyes and silently chanted instead I am not an artist. I am a mother. I am not an artist. I am a mother over and over until another kind of biochemistry came and when all the squares of neatly folded tiny clothes were tucked orderly into drawers folded up her easel and leaned it out of the way and called the city to find out when was the next big-trash-day.


    Originally published by Pinyon , summer 2024.

    Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2025.

  • Plant the Habit of Loving


    During all the time we continue to exist in this particular universe we will bathe in the far too cold for our eyes to see glow leftover from the Big Bang that was accidentally discovered by radio astronomers in the dark spaces between stars and galaxies in 1965 that was perhaps the black I saw and cold I felt when I floated away off that gurney in a San Bernardino emergency room in 1983 after suffering a by all evidence of medical science fatal head injury as result of the missed hairpin turn somewhere above Crestline and all these years later when I put some plastic into my trash can I try to remember this happening even if the thought just hovers vaguely omnipresent like the microwave background remains of our primeval fireball with no point of origin occurring everywhere at once rather than project more invented stress into the universe with perturbed thoughts as I did for so long, because if I learned anything in those seventy-seven seconds it was that the words love and nonjudgement don’t quite cover it and since not enough of my fellows ever would follow advice to recycle nor would they change opinions when I told them if you separate according to color any eight-year-old could tell you it is called “division” and that healing blooms best in conditions of unity, I eventually was forced into the compassion that the only thing I have to contribute is what is created within me and it cannot be expressed most effectively through bodily experiences but in higher energies because the force of loving without self-seeking attachment creates irrepressible exchanges and is the only chance we have to disrupt the temporal order enough to set free whatever futures are possible including one wherein maybe we can find a way to send enough carbon dioxide to Mars to create an atmosphere there and in the doing save what we can of what is left of our so delicately interdependent biodiversity here.


    Originally published by Silver Birch Press.

    Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.

  • Just Leisure Enough


    Was reading another one of those poems that triggers this in me, this filthy resentment I want to rid myself of – – against those who have breakfast at a patio table near the beach, eating croissants and thinking about how deep a Pacific trench is or how the universe is infinite and expanding and the concept of what a trillion dollars might mean, because leisure equals enough space in the mind to ponder things other than how you will pay rent next month when the money runs out since you left the warehouse job at Amazon because of the injury you incurred at work that they say is not work related and how you can’t afford the cigarettes you use to try to soothe, but then feel guilty about, as if the guilt of poverty and all that it implies, or rather, is evidence of, about you is not enough, and I wish this indignation would fly away into the sky like Bezos, left over from when I discovered, or rather, was misinformed, that because my parents had nothing but a shack in a bad neighborhood and a couple of old cars that I never could go to college from my eighth grade guidance counselor who took twenty minutes before he could beat me down, telling me about how there were different types of people in the world, and who had how much and who didn’t have any, that I found to be irrelevant to what I was asking – – what are the best schools of journalism in the nation and do I have to take biology in high school to get into them – – my only two questions that I kept reasserting over and over after dutifully waiting for him to complete, like a good girl, which I was, since I had learned from birth my mother did not love me and I would do anything I could for almost the rest of my life to try to be enough that she would, when I wasn’t defiantly going in entirely the other direction, but he didn’t look up my grades to see all those As nor ask if I was breaking the high school track record for the high jump in my first year of middle school or the state record for the 50-yard dash the year after in gym classes to see how high I would jump or how fast I would run to get out of my neighborhood and the life that came with it since you couldn’t get in a rocket ship from there or sit at a patio table smelling salted air but maybe take orders from those who could, if you managed to fake middle-class enough to get hired since otherwise you might make the customers feel uncomfortable while they were trying to enjoy sumptuousness and discuss philosophical right-brained subjects, and count up the dollars they left on the table and tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have – – so I could manage stillness enough to gaze up and conjecture loftiness and deactivate the neural pathways cast deep and olden as the ocean that cause one’s mind to even come up with the thoughts to begrudge a poem of such loveliness.


    Originally published by Eastern Iowa Review.

    Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.

  • it was the McDonald’s on Dorsett


    in my dream, the one where you were drooling all over the 16-year-old girl behind the counter groaning that reverb into her then moved on to pawing at two skinny sick hustler boy addicts all itchy and scabby needled-tracked mouths all over one another your hands grabbing asses who backed and then flattened into the wall transforming into posters and looked at me with black eyes and I turned to Eric Bogosian waiting at the table for you and he said, “That’s who he is,” after you went to the head without even missing them and that is the same place two men pushed me onto my ass when I was 15 after I dragged a woman from her car across the passenger seat through flames once it was safe enough for them to take the credit for what I had done.

    Originally published by Misfit Magazine.

    Photo credit: Monica Escalera.