I've Got an Asinine Affinity (Infinity?), a Clumsy Love Song, and: And We Arose, and Were Renewed, and: For What It's Worth, and: I Still Make Believe an Imperfect Sonnet Can Save the World or, How Many Bad Sonnets Does It Take to Fix the Future, and: Party Talk, with Sylvia

Abstract

I've Got an Asinine Affinity (Infinity?), a Clumsy Love Song, and: And We Arose, and Were Renewed, and: For What It's Worth, and: I Still Make Believe an Imperfect Sonnet Can Save the World or, How Many Bad Sonnets Does It Take to Fix the Future, and: Party Talk, with Sylvia Ronda Piszk Broatch (bio) I've Got an Asinine Affinity (Infinity?), a Clumsy Love Song The bees of the heart weave stillness into a conversation.String theory is smaller than the bees in the honey tin,larger than the bats hanging from the do not disturb sign. If I wasn't so tired, I'd rearrange my family's livesabove the upright piano, would spring a new theory in a blue-me world, where wandering beyond the yard sets my laughing gear in motion. If only my iPhone had a zapper appI'd deploy it at the movies, but for now I just use my keys.Tell me about your everyday love, and I'll tell you how the worm bin is haunted, and the fact that I hid the rulesin back of the cider house, in a can of Lyle's Golden Syrup. Stickysunrise, and UPS brings a broken administration all the way from America, the box intact. I miss my life, I really do.The bees of my heart sing the Mad Girl's Love Songso often my quarantine has an earworm, and the rat in my compost pile steals the worms. If I wasn't so tiredI'd be detachable, capable of reliability, but that's debatable.In an old insane world, the able are constantly bewitched, which is good, in my book. Close your eyes, pots and pans, runningwater. Can't you hear the phone ringing? The Mad Girl'sin the Bee Box, and I've got a sloe-gin theory about that. [End Page 87] And We Arose, and Were Renewed What should I believe in next, now we've deducedours is a passive God, who spit the seed and watched it explode like morning glory? I know we can't feel it,but we are coming apart, the universe of our bodies expanding like prizewinning pumpkinswe carve for months of soup, leaving the crows to fight for what's left. I believe in soup, and onions,poems, orcas, life on other planets. Let's put faith in emerging unscathed from a black hole, the ghostsof our mothers having gentled from their journey, their eyes cut out for science. I believe in eyes, too,wondering if a pair can be passed from mother to daughter ad infinitum, something like scalesfalling away, the dying stars closer than ever. [End Page 88] For What It's Worth I'm wild about fingers and forks and the mouths of moths, those bendy straw antennae that twitchand rotate like my cat's tail when she wants down. I want to buy up all the onions in all the fields where all the workers are home on COVID quarantine,and I'm sad for the pigs being slaughtered, and the farmers whose hearts and minds never knew so much death all at once. My favorite saint is Theodoraas is my grandmother Theodora whose name means gift of God. Keith Richards named his daughter Theodora, and maybe love walks through a pandemic in PPE, picks upall the babies, and wraps the elderly in all the care homes in caution tape. I take Mary Oliver with me to my yoga class, show her my seniors, who sometimes fallasleep when I read to them. For what it's worth, I like to bestow a blessing on all speckled trout, orcas, and the nurses who mask up [End Page 89] for us. In the last twenty-four hoursI received a stimulus check, a book, an offer for life insurance. I stalk comets with my longest lens, blotting out deniers, naysayers, and haters. I finally understand that hungeris a state of becoming, that fire starts the seed that might otherwise lie dormant, that without fingers nothing would burn as bright. [End Page 90] I...