March-ing Through Chaos

So this last week has been pretty chaotic – my mother-in-law got colon cancer surgery which includes a week-long hospitalization back in Ohio, my grandmother in the hospital for a broken back vertebrae, and of course, countless interactions with doctors on my whole “does your liver indicate you have metastatic cancer or not” thing.

At this point I have been granted a little bit of a reprieve, at least for a few weeks, in that I am going to be meeting with a hepatologist to discuss a possible new test called a FibroScan (low risk, but maybe only tells us if I have scarring instead of cancer in the liver, which would be a good alternative to cancer) and running allergy challenge tests with a few of the meds I’ll have to encounter with the liver biopsy.

Which means, hey, I can go to the AWP after all! Unless something else comes in and interferes, which hopefully it won’t. So I’m now trying to get back to doing taxes, making up a PowerPoint presentation for our AWP presentation on “Women in Spec” (April 1, 2 PM – put it on your schedules!) and other run-of-the-mill work.

The thing is, I’ve been distracted and it’s been hard to concentrate. Sending poetry work out has barely happened, and I haven’t been keeping track as well as usual of correspondences and commitments. Things keep slipping. I guess there’s a time frame, dealing with this kind of stuff, where you let the stuff that can slip, slip.

I am very much looking forward to seeing many of my writing friends who live across the country, who nonetheless mean a lot to me and bring a lot of joy just hanging out with them. Part of going through a crisis like this is being heart-warmed by the people who remember you, who write and send packages, flowers, and postcards. Not to be too Hallmark-y, but it’s meant a lot to me to know that people even care. AWP can be about a bunch of politics, but for me, it’s always been about being around these wonderful people – people whose work you’ve loved, and written reviews about, people you’ve corresponded with but never met, old professors and classmates – that remind you that being a writer doesn’t have to be so solitary, after all.

I’ve been trying to focus on as much of the “good stuff” of life as possible – I’ve been struggling to shake a bronchitis infection since the nuclear test, but have been reading a lovely and absorbing book – Julianna Baggott’s Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders: A Novel, which has a character with a bleeding disorder and a bunch of allergies (just like me!), noticing the signs of spring as they happen around me. Since part of my journey lately has been trying to write poems in the middle of stressful situations, here are a few of my recent haiku-ish things:

Cherry blossom petals
in the hospital parking lot
land in my hair.

Cut hyacinth
blown over by rain –
stay alive.

Daffodils spring up
wherever the shade’s fingers
cannot reach.