#currently in bed with my childhood Good Texture Blanket against my face

[mightbeautistic]

Me: I must be faking my autism

Also me: wow what a long day of socialising, I feel like I'm going to die if I don't crawl into bed with my Good Texture blanket and rhythmically rub my feet together while I read about this topic I'm "abnormally" interested in

[musemash]

TUCKER TRANSMUTES LOSS INTO GRATITUDE – by David D. Fowler / updated July 18, 2021

NOSTALGIA FOR MOVING PARTS is the fourth book by gifted British Columbia poet DIANE TUCKER. The embedded videos present a visualization of the title poem; her recitations of selections from the book; her tribute to George Herbert; and her book launch readings, with guests Sheri-D Wilson and Kevin Spenst. Multi Facet Fables offers several of her poems below.

Turnstone Press describes her work as follows: "Poised between thoughts of mortality, and an exquisite taste for the most tender, small details of life, the poems in Nostalgia For Moving Parts are whimsical, quirky, and resonant with memory. Deeply grounded in the rainy mists and green reeds of the Canadian west coast, solitude becomes a spiritual practice – transmuting loneliness and loss into grand appreciations, for the gift of childhood and the untravelled road ahead."

Fellow poet Rob Taylor writes: When Diane Tucker hangs up a payphone in Nostalgia For Moving Parts' title poem, she observes that 'there is (oh unexpected pleasure) a real click.' When she lays down to sleep: 'the prayers / that fight up through me make a sort of hum.' Click and hum. Nostalgia and prayer. What's been and what will always be. Nostalgia For Moving Parts reminds us how to hear and see the ephemeral in the eternal and the eternal in the ephemeral: the moving parts of all our lives."

Finally, playwright Ron Reed enthuses: "Three poems about childhood... made me cry... So particular, so much compassion. Get yourself a copy. I'm not kidding." You can find the book at this link: https://www.turnstonepress.com/books/poetry/nostalgia-for-moving-parts.html

CHILD'S POSE Both hands spread to feel the floor, the child I am is still kin to carpet, tile, dust-drift beneath cupboards. The child I am spreads forearms along this coolness, taking in how much the floor gives and resists. She curls into her kneecaps, warm familiars, pressing into the small dark made by her greying head. The tops of her feet flat against the ground, the child I remain makes herself hummock, hill, barrow full of the self's jewels, small spine a path from darkness to darkness, arms twin tree roots cradled in earth.

DANNY Skipping ropes at school, their woven heft. Steel poles around the roofed playground, the rain running down them luminous, metal-melting. I’d press my tongue against a pole and drink. School was a world of delicious new textures: fat crayons, creamy manila colouring paper, notebooks, worksheets stacked fat as animal bodies. Tables and chairs with shiny metal tubes for legs. Even light at school felt stronger than at home. They showed us filmstrips of marmalade leaves against a blue blue sky, all technicolour-crisp. How I loved those glowing celluloid leaves! Then the cloakroom hooks’ imploring curves, parallel silences in calm, rectangular shadows, the pavement tap-dance beat of skipping ropes. How I loved school, the sweet order of desks in grids. So I wasn’t totally upset when, in grade two, Danny with the French last name tied me to a pole with a skipping rope so he could kiss me, Danny with the round eyes, a cherub’s mouth, curly hair. He was small even among the small, as I was. No doubt I’d flirted with him, grade-two style, cute and clueless. I thought myself a lady. Were kisses procured? I bet there were a few. Soon the rope loosened and I made a dash. But Danny pushed me back. A metal pole I loved, from which I’d drunk the rain, rushed up and struck me in the bone below one eye. A shiner it was called. I had a shiner. I’d seen them on TV, cartoon-red beefsteaks on faces. Danny got the strap then, or another time, or both. He came back to class subdued, his crying eyes swollen. As if a hiding could patch up his love-starved soul. He chased girls, he lifted skirts, he stole kisses, and the grown-ups just spanked his ass? Poor Danny, tiny paramour, tiny batterer! As long as I knew him, Danny chased the girls, staring expectantly through big brown eyes. Whatever makes boys seize girls roiled in him. That yearning he had, no strap could smack it out. And no black eye stopped me flirting. I was seven and had imprinted on romance like a baby bird. I followed its Hollywood promises everywhere, persistent and imploring as a cloakroom hook.

IF I CAN BE BRAVE I love to lie on the rust-orange carpet by the shiny floor that stops at the heat vents, black slats like little venetian blinds. I peer between them. Can I see the basement? Can I hear Grandma and Grandpa talking? I slide along the varnished floor in sock feet, turn and creep down the basement stairs. If I face it, the darkness, if I can be brave, Grandma will give me a glass of 7UP and scratch my back on the green and white brocade couch and let me watch every last minute of The Lawrence Welk Show. Let me make it through the black basement kitchen, then run into the living room. Lamps will be on. Grandpa will smoke a pipe in his brown leather chair. Grandma's hair will shine in its perfect silver waves. Everything will be safe, blanket-cozy, almost-bedtime good.

BEAUTIFUL GRADE FOUR TEACHER always wore his shirt half open, had dry-look hair and eyes bigger than Donny Osmond’s. Sometimes he used swear words in class. I fell hard in grade four love. I remember the day I had to wear the hand-me-down dress to school. Polka dots, pleats, Peter Pan collar. 1974 was bell-bottoms, feathered hair, Three Dog Night and Doodle Art. It was neither pleats nor polka dots. It was in no way a Peter Pan collar. But crushy teacher, lounging atop a desk, fixed me, with round, pale eyes, in his stare. He grafted two trees to a single rootstock, kindness twinned forever with desire. You look smashing, he said, in that dress. The world lit up. I clutch that moment, talisman still, the heat that flowered when he noticed my smallness, my sadness, and spoke.

LOVE THE SAD MEN The small, huge things that sad men do, sad men who build with everything but words. Build dollhouses, train sets, HO mountains from cereal boxes and plaster of Paris, building the mountains they can for their sons. For daughters they build scroll-sawed shelves to hold phalanxes of dolls, blown-glass animals, Barbie barns above the bed’s blue lace. Sad fathers who’ve eluded words carve magic circles in their back lawns for swimming pools. They sieve stones out of the soil circles so nothing will nick the pools’ thin blue skin. This is the testament of sad men who live starved of words: drywall, carport, pickle jars of nails, lawnmower, farmer’s tan, house paint, apple tree, soldering gun, handsaw, wood plane. Wood shavings falling from the vise, wooden curls on the cold garage floor, wooden curls warm on little girls’ ears.

VANDUSEN GARDEN IN OCTOBER Imagine being planted long enough that your roots grow up through the earth, breaking the mossy surface the way a fish’s spine rises from the bronze lake. Imagine walking in a chilled silence until you hear three black squirrels chewing and hear their tiny hearts beat when the raven screams. Imagine white-gowned women in a fern dell. Imagine they’ve swallowed all of the October light and shine with it like walking birches. Imagine small bridges over a dry stream. Imagine every leaf assembling, red-gold current of autumn wind running under ice-hearted stones. Imagine pausing there, letting the chill slip itself down your back, into your lungs. Imagine your coat, your scarf, your boots loosen, open, and let slip in November’s sleek and blandishing hands.

UN-SISTER The un-sister who barely came to be in this world stayed in God's mind with the un-roses: red almond-shaped shadows. I dream her idling about the un-garden with all the un-born, bodiless smiles painted on the airless atmosphere of the vast un-place of the un-made, faux perfection of the un-tried and un-spoken. I hold up my hand of flesh, bathed in particle waves of material light. It cannot close around nothing. We're always bearing handfuls of atoms. Even when very still and thinking of my un-living sister among the haze of un-created flowers, matter sparks. Light dances across synapses in the mind's dark, where everything imagined has its name, its own small electric body.