I Wish I'd Written This

Crazy Beautiful

By Lori Williams

You remind me of an old time carnival –
with freak shows and elephants
wearing pink tiaras. The townsfolk waited all year
to laugh and take photos of things
they knew nothing about, things
that got them out of their life for a day or so.

They could forget their sadness for one evening;
get cotton candy, ride the ferris wheel, pet
a pig in a funny costume. It was all crazy
and beautiful for them. But Mondays happen
and carnivals are packed up like those

whose lives change,  yet become more
than they were before. You remind me of this
because you make me crazy beautiful.  You have things
packed up, after your sunshine show,
after everyone goes home and you are alone,
there. We can make our own carnival, you know.
We can be crazy beautiful.


You must have noticed that I give you a different poet each week. For once I'm doubling up. I featured New York poet Lori Williams on the 6th of April 2012. The reason I'm featuring her again now is because she has just died (some time between 1 and 6 September 2013) and I loved her and loved her work, and wish to honour both again.

It's not just me. As I write, several days ahead of posting, her facebook page is filling up fast with grieved, shocked, loving comments from friends far and wide. Some have known her since they were at school together; many are fellow poets like me, who encountered her online. (In my case, on MySpace in 2006.)

'To know her was to love her.'

She went to hospital for cancer treatment on August 24. She couldn't afford private insurance, so when she was first diagnosed a few days earlier, she expected to die. Then kind friends financed her hospital admission. She seemed to respond well to treatment, and from time to time posted cheerful, funny messages on facebook to reassure her many adoring friends that she was doing fine. And so it appeared. She was expecting to go home any minute. I don't know what happened. It must have been a very sudden relapse. It has shocked everyone. She leaves behind a dear sister and her beloved 28-year-old son, her only child, who inherits her poetic gifts.

You can read more about her, and find a link to her book, Woman on the Brink, at that earlier post.  If you're on facebook, you can find more of her poems on her 'writer' page.

Here I will add that she was funny, brave, and sometimes outrageous. She told it like it is, and she had a very big heart to match her enormous talent. It's hard to describe her, really. She was one of a kind, as they say. In her early fifties, she was young to die.

She was beautiful inside and out, and 'crazy' in the sense of being forthright, feisty, irrepressible, and often hilarious. She brought joy to many.

I can't believe she's gone.

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).

I Wish I'd Written This

Making Penne with Basil-Seafood Sauce
By Lori Williams

I gather shrimp, octopus, basil, clams, tomatoes,
garlic, cream. I clasp my knife, a bridge to life, slice cloves
slimmer than the hopes I hold on to with every morning sip
of coffee. I split the shrimps' spine, pick out the long black thread
of its existence. It feels nice to smoosh on a paper towel,
watch the darkness pile up, cram it into the trash. If only.

Calamari is interesting to cut - all those little legs with their stories,
those eyes begging a neat divorce, ashamed. Sweet squid,
I swear I didn't look at you as I severed your limbs. My four keep me
humble. I think my son is on drugs. Chopping tomatoes is numbing,
I could do it for hours. Plums, only plums, bright red eggs made for dicing.
The knife slides through the thin skin -- as I watch the juice spurt out,
the seeds, I remember his birth and I chop and chop and chop
until the cutting board is full of miniscule

pieces so I start again, because the recipe calls for thick chunks.
I think my son is on drugs you know, so I saute garlic in olive oil
until golden, that color of summers in the Adirondacks when little boys
with dark hair turned blond, and mother was someone who shined
like a new penny. And I cook and cook, stir it all with grandma's
wooden spoon while I state as a fact that I think my son is on drugs - say it
to the frying pan, the pasta pot, the cutting board. Yes, I think he is.

© Lori Williams 2007


Previously published in Avatar Review


I first encountered the work of New York poet Lori Williams on MySpace, back in its heyday. In those days it was full of poets and we soon found our way to each other, a community within a community. So exciting!

Most of us, after leaving when MySpace changed, have reconnected on facebook but it isn’t quite the same. MySpace was a networking-and-blogging space, closed enough not to count as ‘prior publication’, so we got to read and comment on each other’s writing (much like Poets United, in fact). I instantly fell in love with Lori’s poetry and have never fallen out again. We recognised each other, too, as kindred spirits — one of those true and lasting online friendships, for many of which I must thank the old MySpace.

As a poet, she has quite a range, but always her voice is clear, accessible, strong and honest. She has the capacity to look life in the face. Many of her poems are about motherhood, and other relationships including family. She writes very sexy love poems, too!

This particular poem that I’ve chosen, I loved so much when I first read it that I asked her permission to share it with my writing students, as something to learn from and aspire to. It’s outstanding, but there are many I could have chosen. I’d like to have written anything and everything Lori has done.

For her background, I can’t do better than quote her bio, which is both informative and succinct:

Lori is a born and bred New Yorker, who works as a Legal Assistant in the publishing field. She has been writing since childhood and still has her first published poem, which was in her elementary school newsletter. Since then she has been published in numerous journals and ezines, but that first 8 line poem remains her pride and joy. She is the mother of an adult son and three cats, is impatient, emotional and witty, loves cooking and is an animal advocate, who will start volunteering at the ASPCA next month.

Her first chapbook, Woman on the Brink, was published in December 2011. You can buy the book from the publisher, erbacci-press.

The blurbs say:


Lori Williams writes about ordinary, everyday living in a most extraordinary way. In her authentic, unique and richly flavored voice, she presents the world as she experiences it, holding nothing back. Her alluring style invites the reader inside the moments she so vividly captures. No smoke and mirrors for Williams. Her poetry is crystal clear, well-paced and pitch-perfect. She writes with empathy, tenderness and always with heart. - Barbara Moore, co-editor of Spiracle Journal.


With a unique softness that reminds one of a whisper, the poems of Lori Williams read as the painful, brilliant diary we all wish we could write. They speak of mistakes and tragedies with a voice that is strictly confessional, but never self-involved or introverted. Her poems explore the more painful aspects of life with a clear eye that any writer would envy. - Jonathan Penton, Editor of Unlikely Stories.org and Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind.

I’d have to agree with all of that. I always see Lori as the very urban poet she is, but in fact her work far transcends location.

She has had two poems on 9/11 published online here and here (you have to scroll to find them). A recent publication is in Spiracle Journal.

If you’re there (and who isn’t?) she now posts new work on a special facebook page.

Enjoy!

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).