Julie Karasik

Today's poem:

Great Things Have Happened

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

--Alden Nowlan

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Today's poem:

After After
by Kristi Maxwell

This was after we moved into pencil drawings of tree houses on stilts, but before the cows grazed in the diminishing field of the freckle signifying our face.

This was after a refusal of berries too close to rotting, but before self-consciousness about metaphor.

This was after the butter-soaked collard greens, but before we deflated the ache as if it were something reusable and easily stowed.

This was after the pimple you mistook for jam and, obviously, failed to wipe off, but before the last comma, which we obstinately misplaced.

This was after the bite mark, but before the tongue.

This was after the nosegay protecting the nose from the plague-stench, but before the video of the autopsy of the woman with a bra and panties matching your own.

This was after lushness, but before lushness.

This was after the ghosts caught fire and after their flimsy collage of light, but before the building conceived space and before the hard labor and before the dead men.

This was after the green shoe busted and the wool shoe, but before the description of a bus-struck owl.

This was after we knew, but long before saying.

*

So my big plan to make gyoza this weekend was almost derailed earlier when I received someone else's grocery order in total, and zero percent of my grocery order. My fridge is now filled with THREE DOZEN EXTRA EGGS I did not order, along with some ground beef, some ridiculously expensive stew beef (which I will have to figure out how to cook so it is not well done, because well-done beef gives me the yucks - marinating and roasting might be the way), an enormous container of Fair Life lactose-free milk, some lovely fruit I would not have ordered yet (not in season, but I will use it) and some KERRY GOLD BUTTER (another thing I would never order because I'm not MADE OF MONEY). But no scallions, cabbage, or ground pork.

So I got on the phone with Stop and Shop and the CSR was very good and got my order re-ordered, and it was just delivered, so it looks like meat gyoza are back on the menu, boys! Though I do not have room to make the chocolate frosted vanilla cupcakes I was planning to make since there's no room in the fridge for anything else right now. I just used up 8 eggs I already had to make a frittata since I need the space (so I have a total of FOUR DOZEN EGGS right now, which would be fantastic if I were boiling and coloring them for Easter, but I am not. or if I needed them to make Swiss meringue frosting, which I also do not).

I'm very glad i didn't do the extra Instacart order from Key Food I thought about last night, because Stop and Shop doesn't have gyoza wrappers and Key Food does, but they look pretty easy to make, so I will spend time tomorrow doing all that. And maybe I will make those egg rollups on Monday for the week so I can use up more eggs. I guess we'll see!

Today's poem is very far removed from *gestures* all of that!

Wilderness
by Lorine Niedecker

You are the man
You are my other country
and I find it hard going

You are the prickly pear
You are the sudden violent storm

the torrent to raise the river
to float the wounded doe

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April is National Poetry Month in the US, so as I have done for the last...TWENTY YEARS!!!! I will be posting a poem a day here (and a different poem on tumblr). They will be tagged as "poetry" and "national poetry month 2026," so if you know how to block tags on DW, have at it!

Let's start with old favorite Billy Collins:

Lines Lost Among Trees
by Billy Collins

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place---
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of the syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem---
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

***

Even Nyquil couldn't keep my cough at bay all night. At least it's a productive cough? Bah. I feel like I am made entirely of mucus. How is there so much of it??? Plus I woke up with a fever this morning and again when I woke up from my nap just now.

I'm going to eat a bagel, poke around the internet, and then go back to bed and hope I feel better tomorrow. See you on the flip side!

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I know I owe comment replies and I am going to get to them. The intermittent internet situation this week made me very reluctant as it would drop and I'd lose track of what I was planning to say by the time it came back etc. But! My new modem and router arrived yesterday and early this afternoon, I hooked them up. It worked, though at first I was like, what is happening? Because you do all this waiting for the modem to boot up and activate and then the first thing the router instructions say is "reboot your modem" and I'm like "are you for real? I literally just activated it!" but I did it and plugged everything in and it worked briefly! And then the router started blinking and my phone told me I had no internet and I was like WTF? Because it could 100% be an outside the apartment problem, or it could be a cabling problem because I did not swap out the coaxial cables - why would I do that? They are all nice and tight and the splitter is connected and I have had no issues with my cable box. So I unplugged everything and then plugged it back in and went to the Spectrum website to activate everything and it told me I had nothing ot activate, everything was working! And it has been so far! I will keep the old equipment for a couple of days, just in case, and bring it back to the Spectrum store midweek, probably.

After that adventure, I baked these whipped shortbread cookies (pic). I did not separate into lemon vanilla/orange chocolate. Instead, I used 1 tsp of almond extract in place of the citrus zest, and added chocolate sprinkles once they were piped but before they were refrigerated.

I've mentioned this before, but I am trying to replicate a childhood favorite cookie from an old Italian bakery that closed long before I even moved out of Ozone Park. They were not kept with the fancy butter cookies but with the S-cookies and the biscotti and the anginetti, and they had a much crumblier/drier texture than the typical Italian bakery butter cookies (you know the ones, either dipped in chocolate on one end or sandwiched with apricot or raspberry jam etc.). they were piped round and a slightly darker brown than the butter cookies too. And they were my absolute favorites. I've never found them at another bakery either.

I've tried a few Italian butter cookie recipes but none were quite right (though the one from Dolci was pretty close!), and then last week on thee second or third day of the pecan shortbread, I was like, this is the texture! And almost the taste, but the pecans obviously made the flavor different, though they do have almond extract in them (almond extract is the smell of Italian bakeries to me). So I googled to see if there was a chocolate sprinkle shortbread recipe out there, and found the one I linked above, and they also seemed like they'd be close. So after checking to make sure I wouldn't leave myself out of butter if I made them (I had another pound way in the back of the fridge), I got to baking. I think these also need a little longer in the oven, but we'll see how they taste tomorrow - I think that will be the test. but I think I'm getting close!

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We were all super anxious about today's board meeting, but despite all the agita, it went well. Whew. We will still need to do some tweaking in terms of the order stuff is presented in, but thankfully nobody got all up in arms about the changes.

My router keeps dropping my internet connection in short spurts every few hours, and I finally opened the chat with Spectrum about it. I was like, could it be that I need a new router? It's 6 years old. And the chatbot or whatever was like, it seems to be working right now! And I was like, yes, but it's been dropping the connection repeatedly for the last three days, several times a day, for 5-10 minutes at a time, both on wifi and with the computer that is plugged into the ethernet cable. And it was like, please hold. And then it came back and was like, ah yes, now I see there is some bad signal coming from your router! Perhaps we should replace it. It is 6 years old. And I was like, yes please! How do we do that? And it offered to ship it and a new modem, which is also 6 years old but has not (yet) been troublesome, so I said yes, let's do that. So now they are shipping me a new modem and a new router, which I will install and then return the old equipment to them. So we'll see how that goes.

I also signed and scanned back my tax returns to my accountant and I'm so glad they take payment by Zelle now so I don't have to mail a check. I'm getting money back from both Fed and State, which will have to go right to paying bills. At least I can't rack up more credit card charges atm because my niece has put a moratorium on any new clothes for Baby Miss L until they clear out out some space. It is very hard to restrain myself but I have done so womanfully. There are just so many cute toddler girl clothes out there though, and she enjoys playing with her clothes (she likes to do fashion shows by trying on various items, accessorizing with a hat and a purse, and then walking round the living room), so I enjoy giving them to her. Hopefully they'll get some old stuff that no longer fits put away and I will be given free rein again.

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