Tag: thoughts

The Fragility of a Tornado: a Free Write

by Isabelle Palerma, posted in Uncategorized

Pierce a vein and watch calligraphy spill on the page. India ink replaces deoxygenated blood. My heart starves for the passion the stars contain. My heart is empty except for the galaxies that glimmer inside of aortas and dwell in ventricles.

I have spent lifetimes hiding behind the gauzy veil of metaphors and similes. I still manage to somehow sever through memories, fantasy, and autobiography. When you are handed a time bomb, you don’t have time to pause and rehearse the perfect line.

My thoughts are not always beautiful, but like my penmanship, they showcase the chaos and tumult within. I have been compared to a tornado before, but I always try to clean up the messes I leave behind. I would much rather be a natural disaster than an unyielding and unforgiving ghost.

I have told stories for as long as I can remember. As a toddler, I babbled to my mother about memories of previous lives. I told her about East Hollywood like it was a place I had been when all I had known was the gateway to the west.

I will keep imagining until the disease that stripped my grandmother of her memories and left her vulnerable steals my words and empties them of all meaning like the thief who robs a safe or picks a pocket. I sometimes worry I will grow stale, a piece of bread left out for too many days, or that I will wilt, a flower not watered and left to perish, but until that day comes, I will keep leaving out these dictionary pages rearranged in hopes that they will create a sparkle in someone’s eyes.

Home

by Isabelle Palerma, posted in Uncategorized

When I was young, perhaps eleven or twelve, I read the poem “Silence” by Marianne Moore. It was right around the time that I had started to explore my own poetry and craft my own metaphors. I remember the phrase “the glass flowers at Harvard” sticking out to me in a beautiful way.

At the time, it was a lovely phrase in the midst of a mixture of words that didn’t make sense to me. Now, on rereading it as an adult, I see how beautiful and eloquent Moore’s entire poem was. It speaks to me on a level that it did not when I was a child.

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat-
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth-
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech,
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn."
Inns are not residences.

Given my childhood, it’s funny what pierces my heart and stabs my soul. It’s not the beauty of the phrase “the glass flowers at Harvard” (though, to Moore’s credit, that is a wonderful turn of phrase). It’s the last two lines of the poem.

Without getting too autobiographical, my childhood home felt as though it was curated for an interior design magazine. It did not feel like a home. I felt like I was walking into a stranger’s house every time I came home.

Home is such an interesting concept to me. I would love to explore the idea of it more in my writing.

PS: Anyone interested in reading an excerpt of a short story I’m working on?

Morning Meditation

by Isabelle Palerma, posted in Author Updates
Art therapy homework (original)

Today, I made an interesting observation while working on my self-assigned art therapy homework. I am doing a design of what it looks like when my Inner Healer and my Inner Artist emerge, hence, the words Healer and Artist in the bubble. This work is not finished by any means, but I paused because I had a moment of self-reflection that I’d like to share with y’all.

When I was making my dancer’s skirt, I was using an outdated thesaurus page as the base, and though it’s just an old book, I still find myself looking through it. When I glued down a specific piece, I saw it said “powerless, weak” as two of the synonyms for the particular word. I paused, thinking to myself how in the past, I could have seen myself as powerless and weak. Having a controlling mother and being in relationships with possessive and abusive exes took away a lot of my power. Recently, though, I have added a mantra to my morning one. The new mantra is, “I am in control of my life.” Pretty powerful stuff coming from someone who felt as though she was victimized for years.

So, this is where it gets interesting, in my opinion. Out of curiosity, I flipped the scrap of paper over to see what words were on the other side.

Lively.

Vivacious.

Frisky.

Showy.

Dapper.

Those are words I would rather associate myself with. So, those were the words I chose to face out to the world. But funny, if I had not chosen to look at things from a different perspective, I would have still been facing down “weak” or “powerless”.

My mother often comments on certain events would make good things to reflect on and meditate on, and as I was doing my homework, I was thinking about how powerful it is to change the script of what we believe about ourselves. Sure, I could continue to think of myself as “powerless” or “weak”, but instead, I chose “lively”, “vivacious”, “frisky”, and more.

Just something I was thinking about this morning.

Have a beautiful day, y’all.

Killing your Darlings

by Isabelle Palerma, posted in Uncategorized

In the world of writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch advised students to “murder their darlings” in a lecture, and as I revise, I find I am reluctant to murder my darlings, but I’m doing my best to be brutal.

Some lines, no matter how beautifully they’re phrased, must simply be abandoned.

I keep a small notebook with phrases I adore from my murdering stage of my writing. I call it my Homeless File. It’s where lines that are homeless lay their heads to rest, a small trashcan fire burning to keep them warm.

Today, as I revised my novel, I came across one:

Ghosts of an unremarkable past haunted her.

Those words are beautiful to me and conjure up images of a mundane life now gone, but alas, the sentence was unnecessary, so it goes into the Homeless File.

The beauty of the Homeless File is that I can discover other beautiful fragmentary thoughts that add to my appreciation of language and maybe some day, can incorporate into a story or poem.

Ribbon my soul/and graft/the missing pieces onto your heart.

These words, alone, might not sound like much, but they all hold a place in my heart because though I might have given up their ghosts in their earlier works, this does not mean they will not find a home elsewhere.

I have lived so many lives/you might as well call me/a matryoshka doll/(Stacked inside of each other/to keep warm & cozy/we can be our own best friends./Whoever needed anybody else?)

I feel every author should have a Homeless File.

What do you think? Do any of my fellow authors keep the darlings that they kill?

I’m starting to wonder if it’s more of a morgue than a Homeless File.