Amethyst Review published my poem, “Praying in the Doorway.” This is my second publication out of the US (they are based in the UK).
Rest, but pay attention. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is stealing your freedom, you personal and civil liberties, and then smirking about it. I’m not going to name names.
Anne Lamott – “Plan B”
Writers sometimes appear prescient (seeing the future). It’s not because they seeing The Future, but because they are speaking a truth that is not just about a specific event (i.e. facts). Anne Lamott wrote quote above about George Bush. Trump fits the smirking bit even better than Bush. That smirk irked me. The knowledge that he deliberately did things that irked people who did not vote for him kept it from infuriating me.
Poetry Pacific published my poem, “Chemo Mindfulness”, written a year after I finished chemo. They are based in Vancouver, Canada. This is my first publication outside the United States.
The May 25 issue of Amethyst Review, based in the UK will publish “Praying in the Doorway”.
Boundless, the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival anthology, containing my poem, “The Cat Has Passed On,” is also published this month.
Voices de la Luna has published “Sundown” in the February 2021 issue. It’s not accessible through their Website. I’ve included the text below.
Sundown
for Javier ZamoraI read where you received
a soccer scholarship
to Katherine Branson.
It was a girls’ school
in my day. My father
liked their thrift shop.
Now I live in another state.
I know people who attend a school
they cannot afford on scholarship.
They are welcome
until the game ends,
until the sun goes down.
I want so much to believe
my home state
has no sundown towns.
A theme that runs through this interview with Joyce Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate, is home. We moved to Austin, TX because my wife wanted to go home. California was losing its appeal (cost of living, forest fires, and our direction diverging from the communities we were in). Sitting on the porch of the B&B we were staying in, drinking hard cider and chocolate cookies, Austin felt good.
It has been twenty one years and it is not feeling so much like home any more. Summers have always been rough. This past winter was not easy, though we did better than most. A fire station and two nursing homes are on our electrical circuit and so we had no rolling blackouts. The contaminated water for a few days was a problem.
The political climate has worsened. The Texas Legislature seems determined to prove how small minded and mean spirited they can be to people who aren’t rich, white, and powerful. They are also trying to ram through permit-less gun carry in spite of the opposition of the police. It is unlikely they will do anything to improve the reliability of the electric grid (or the water and sewer lines). It doesn’t feel much like home any more. Hearing some one else struggling with home, is heartening and inspiring.
The “You can’t get enough of what you don’t want/need” principle bit me again last night. My wife and I frequently share a Perfect Manhattan when we go out. Usually we sip it all through appetizers and dinner, occasionally leaving a bit. Last night, the bartender was busy and rushed it. I drank it too fast, mostly on an empty stomach and was a less than excellent driver going home. Sharing a great Perfect Manhattan is enough. A mediocre one is not enough until it is too much.
Interestingly for both of us, most margaritas are this way, even very good frozen ones. I’ve had two truly great margaritas, both on the rocks. Maybe they were enough, I didn’t get a second and don’t recall wanting one.
Inspired by Gary Nabhan’s “Why Some Like It Hot”, I’m embarking on a search for what genetic factors are affecting my health, what my ancestors ate, and how I might change my diet to improve my health. From my reading and my experience, two principals have emerged so far:
“Why Some Like It Hot” by Gary Nabhan, subtitle – “Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity.” The author is described as an ethnobotanist -someone who studies “a region’s plants and their practical uses through the traditional knowledge of a local culture and people. … investigating plants used by societies in various parts of the world.” For this book, throw in people’s genes. This is a fascinating travelogue of sorts as the author travels the world looking at ethnic cultures, their diets and genes, and how they reduce the survival threats of their homelands and how migration and/or changes in diet expose them to different threats they are not adapted to.
The first chapter, “Searching for the Ancestral Diet,” illustrates his central thesis. It is subtitled, “Did Mitochondrial Eve and Java Man Feast on the Same Foods?” It debunks the idea that one diet fits all, e.g. that all early homo genus ancestors ate the same things. Mitochondrial Eve lived in Rift Valley of Africa about 150,000 years ago and is the mother of 99.9% of modern homo sapiens. Java Man (homo erectus) arose in Asia, 700,000 to 1 million years ago. The earliest fossils were found in Java. Peking Man is now considered to be the same species. Both Mitochondrial Eve and Java/Peking Man are considered ancestors of modern humans. The idea that both of these ancestors were eating the same diet is absurd.
Nabhan journeys to Sardinia, Crete, Arizona and nearby Northern Mexico, and Hawai’i to work with the local people and study how their traditional diet, genes, local weather, diseases, and recent changes to their diet interact. In the Mediterranean and North Africa, malaria is historically the number one killer. One estimate is that half of homo sapiens has died of malaria. The G6PD allele (mutation) protects against malaria, but makes fava beans unhealthy for its carriers. Carriers get lethargic when the fava beans are blooming (“Baghdad fever”). There are cautions in the culture around consuming fava beans and spices or preparation procedure to lessen the effect.
People in desert climates are frequently more susceptible to diabetes, especially when they shift to a Western diet of heavily processed food. Nabhan’s wife conjectured that there was something intrinsic to desert plants worldwide to explain this. He identifies a possible substance (extracellular mucilage that buffers moisture) in Arizona and Northern Mexico cacti, but doesn’t followup with other desert climates.
He worked with native Hawaiian communities in their restoring their ancestral diets and community health, both diet and community.
I found his stories and discoveries intriguing. The communities he describes in the books are largely intact gene pools or with one additional gene pool/ethnicity.
Now I’m left to figure what can I do with this information? I had hoped that “Genes, Food and Culture – Eating Right for Your Origins” would help. It appears to be the same content with a different cover and title. The copyright dates are 7 years apart. If there are any changes, a quick read of the intro and first chapter didn’t reveal it.
I intend to pursue this idea. My wife and I carry the MTHFR mutation that he also discusses. Without methylated folate supplementation, our risk of cardio-vascular disease (strokes and heart attacks) is elevated. I’m 70 and my health is going down slow. What can I change in my diet to improve my health? My ancestors are scattered around the periphery of Europe: the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal or northwest Spain), England, Scotland, northwestern Germany (Lower Saxony), Finland, and Eastern Europe. Going back a thousand years or more, my ancestors ate barley, rye, leafy greens, lamb, chicken, and pork. Going back 500 years, the more adventurous may have started eating potatoes, tomatoes, chilis (nightshade family from the New World), and rice, buckwheat, and soybeans from Asia.
Updates as I figure them out.
My poem, “Why Poetry,” is the first of the Ars Poetica series on Texas Poetry Assignment. Several poems on the Website have audio of the author reading it. This is the first with audio and video.
Sunday, a week ago, I’d never heard of Ars Poetica. On Monday I wrote a poem arguing against Dunya Mikhail’s statement, “poetry is not medicine—it’s an X-ray.” It explained why I wrote and read poetry, sometimes as medicine, sometimes as X-ray. Later that day I encountered the term. The next day, Texas Poetry Assignment issued a Call for Submissions of Ars Poetica (Assignment #8). With some more polishing, I’ll be submitting it.