Eloise Schultz
Nanci Griffith
By thirty, she says, you should have ended
your life and begun a new one in the service
of a lowercase god. Indulge your baser nature.
That’s another way of saying the world needs people
who have come alive, a phrase my ex-girlfriend often
wrote on the little notes she left in my banjo case
and which she attributed to Howard Thurman:
civil rights leader, theologian, and Christian mystic.
Now she’s married to a rifle salesman in Iowa.
It seems some people come alive when they can make
other people dead, I tell Nanci, but she just says that
Americans don’t know what to do with our inheritance.
What our people lack in sensitivity, we make up for
in sentimentality. Like this email I received at work:
I left out my three husbands from my bio but the book
clarifies them. My friend once bought a vacuum
that came with a free gun: that’s, like, so American.
At my brother’s wedding last summer, I danced
with our dad while the DJ played Dancing Queen.
Pretty soon I realized he was doing the polka.
I’m from Texas, he said, polka is what I do.
your life and begun a new one in the service
of a lowercase god. Indulge your baser nature.
That’s another way of saying the world needs people
who have come alive, a phrase my ex-girlfriend often
wrote on the little notes she left in my banjo case
and which she attributed to Howard Thurman:
civil rights leader, theologian, and Christian mystic.
Now she’s married to a rifle salesman in Iowa.
It seems some people come alive when they can make
other people dead, I tell Nanci, but she just says that
Americans don’t know what to do with our inheritance.
What our people lack in sensitivity, we make up for
in sentimentality. Like this email I received at work:
I left out my three husbands from my bio but the book
clarifies them. My friend once bought a vacuum
that came with a free gun: that’s, like, so American.
At my brother’s wedding last summer, I danced
with our dad while the DJ played Dancing Queen.
Pretty soon I realized he was doing the polka.
I’m from Texas, he said, polka is what I do.
--
Eloise Schultz lives in downeast Maine. She is the author of [DUG OUT], a hybrid collection forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. She enjoys playing the flugelhorn.
Eloise Schultz lives in downeast Maine. She is the author of [DUG OUT], a hybrid collection forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. She enjoys playing the flugelhorn.