"What's it called?"
"Minnow Peck."
"Um, why??"
Here's why. Because a long time ago, I wrote a poem that ended up being the last poem in a small collection of poetry. One of the lines is about being in the Currituck Sound and feeling minnows taking little bites of my back. The poem is about change and the line itself is, "The minnows peck—maybe they are eating the skin,/making everything worse. " About a year later, my brother Paul and I were swimming in the sound off my mother's dock, and at some point he felt a minnow peck. Then, in the manner of a Shakespearean actor, he stood up with his full 6-foot-2, 240-pound frame, stretched his arms out and proclaimed, "They are minnows!! Eating skin, CHANGING WORLDS!!" And then he laughed like a crazy person.
There's no one in the world who will bust your balls more than a sibling. No one. And there are few more vulnerable to this kind of ball-busting than a poet, who, perhaps rightfully so, is reminded regularly that for most people, poetry is about as reflective of real life as my brother's parody is to the banal biological fact that minnows will eat your skin if you get into the sound and let them.
I haven't written very much in a long time for a few reasons. One, I got the unbelievable privilege of being published at 27, a tiny run of a tinier book, and I wasn't ready for the understandable little invasions of privacy that come with waiving my right to privacy through publishing. Tricky little thing, writing about real life. Two, I fell in love with teaching and thought it a better use of my time and energy than writing poems. And three, I had a kid, which under many other circumstances would have been awesome fodder for writing, but my girl came here on her own terms and on her own time, so a lot of that experience felt completely out of my control, and since I was gun-shy about sharing anything anymore, I didn't exactly take a lot of notes.
I'm writing this blog to see if I've healed from all that, to see if I can write and not get nervous. To see if I can be a writer again because it has become a lie to say that that's one of the things I am. It'll be lighter stuff this time, not so much war and sadness. Maybe I will write about making curtains, and about taking pictures with my new camera, and about my love of quality thick-cut bacon, but also now and then about having Ellie, and a marriage, and a total lack of employment thanks to this excellent, never-ending recession!
So, "Minnow Peck" is my concession that maybe this will be as silly as writing a dramatic, melancholy poem about little sea creatures who eat your buttcheeks. It's also an admission that the blogosphere is huge, and I'm just one little thing in it. Writing publicly stems, in part, from a potentially delusional belief that people give a crap about what you have to say. You have to believe that even to do it. Otherwise, we'd all be keeping locked-up Hello Kitty diaries.
"Minnow Peck" is the apology. I've said it. And I mean it.
