By Kathleen Ossip
To my left,
you, in the driver’s seat.
Chlorophyll, to my right,
through the windowglass, green tipping
to black, tipping to gold, shivering.
Green hills, further on, shading
to blue. Fuzzed slopes, lovable, rolling down down.
Awkward weeds, sprigged, not wheat and won’t feed anyone.
All is Dutch, set out for display and gain.
I’ve come to a conclusion about happiness: I want it.
You say “Sometimes you’ve got
to bust a move.” How would I do that?
Through the windowglass I can get a fearsome burn.
Thus I’m spf’d. I must earn.
On my lap, folderful of papers to which I should turn
but the sun does her thing: down down.
We don’t see her cooling, but we gain
from her careful campaign.
Goodbye glimpse, speed past,
the green consummation tracks
everwards, lost—
Lost me, lost you,
lost green hills shading to blue
and lost the valley view...
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This is the first year in ages when I forgot to look up the Oscar nominations as soon as they were announced, which is weird because I've seen more of the frontrunners this year than I have in the past several. It's a fairly good year for movies and a great year for movies that don't fit typical molds, with a whole bunch of new artists doing great stuff, though I have to admit that if I were picking a female first-time writer-director to champion, it would be someone who'd filmed something other than a coming-of-age story that colors much more within the lines than something like Get Out which is genre-breaking in so many ways (as coming-of-age stories about women go, I, Tonya is a lot more creative). I am not at all sorry that two Dunkirk movies are up for Best Picture although I fully acknowledge that they are fairly typical historical war films, even their flaws. I'm delighted for Janney, Blige, Robbie, Oldman, Chalamet, Kaluuya, Peele, Del Toro, and the entire Academy still owes Denzel for last year so if he beats Gary I will not complain. And Logan snuck into the Adapted Screenplay category! My only real point of rage is that Boss Baby got a nomination but Lego Batman did not.
I took Maddy to the mall so she could pick up something at Forever 21 and I could do a Kyogre raid, so I was there when the next batch of third generation Pokemon were released and caught a whole bunch of Whismurs. I also made headway in a writing project, finished two laundries, and made a pair of earrings out of broken bracelet with big sparkly beads, but the big project of my evening, getting my brand new Roku to talk to my Windows laptop so I can mirror the screen and send slide shows and home movies to the TV, has thus far been a total failure (I should have read internet reviews in advance to find out how many hundreds of people had the same problem with Windows 10). Here are some photos from the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery of two sculpture projects I loved: Kristen Morgin's Monopoly, which from across the room looks like found thrift store junk but is actually made from clay, I suppose to represent the crumbling American dream, and Steven Young Lee's Vase with Landscape and Dinosaurs, which looks like melted porcelain with glaze and illustrates the artist's interest in how cultural appropriation, failure, and altered expectations shape identity:
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