Alison Barker is out buying a soda [] Yaya (the splitting continues)

Number one. The big jefe. Solo. Wolf Pack of One: That's me her. I'm segued, her-ed away from that shell on my hermit crab haunches. She, the my-self, is Alison Barker-ing away now, haha, away down by the soda machine by the bike rack at the far end of my apartment complex. She's so still, even when she moves. She thought so hard that she cried and then slipped in the bathtub while exfoliating with coconut scrub---And I popped out!

Afterbirth--not there! All messy is no-mess when it's an emergency birth.

And I am an alone emergency. Without artifice of otherself, or the self, I am just her now--emergencies can't shape shift! We stay urgent. Her. She went out to buy a soda and forgot to put me back inside her.


I don't have to interview anyone if I don't want to. Yaya.

I'm just a little one without her self, just her. While she-self is out there buying soda I will try to stretch out on the floor and take up as much space as possible. Yaya. Slinker in between the crumbs stuck underneath the rug and the dirty carpet. Protect myself from the Alison Barker, the shell, that Container Store raincoat that tries to shape me and hide my undersides.

Don't. Tell. A. Soul.

Emergency: What I'm Reading Now Yaya

I don't read. I don't. I skim I chew and I cry sweat on the lines in the pages that swim together. I don't read. I don't. Yaya. One book says 'remember this' and the other book says 'I see you.'

That's what the janitor with the heavy jaw line and the wooden hands said when I'd walk down the hallway way after the kids leave for home and their sweaty palm prints have dried on the desks, and I break my back on the industrial xerox machine when the jam happens; after quitting time.

"I see you," he'd say in a sing-song voice. Sun sets in the classroom where the windows won't let blinds cover them up.

"I see you." He leans back so the bend in the hallway can't keep us apart. I stand at my classroom door, wanting to escape back into that place but he has the key so why do I think scurrying from and to is any big thing? Again and again. He saw me again and again. The wheels on his trash can squeaked and his trousers were the same level of cleanliness every single day and he didn't let the booze get to him though Mr. Mallory, the Algebra teacher, told me he'd have every reason to let it get to him because he went to Vietnam and that's what we all know about being there; he's like your fatherunclebestfriendsgodfathercousinneighbor and "Why wouldn't you donate to his retirement party?" my mentor teacher colleague says, and shakes her head. Just sign the card. Why indeed? Her retirement followed close on his heels; it took the new teacher so many months to clean out the accumulated subtley. A love of other people like janitors who have been through so much.

"Happy 30th birthday, Miss Emergency!" He grabs my arm and I'm over the damned wheeled trashbin now and his jaw is the exact level of stubble it is every day and he is kissing me and there is no one here despite the reputation that everyone else here at this National Blue Ribbon school maintains; that we all work so hard and we are always here and there are always caring involved people to clean up after your stupid brats.

Not invisible. Not hacked on, in and beside. Seen. Touched. Not invisible. Read like words to slobber over, to grab and squeeze and this is why I don't read when I am so distracting.

The Interview Concludes

M.E.: I'm here. Keep going.

Mama Bear: I don't get the feeling everything here is on the square, if you know what I mean. I think I'd like to reschedule this when Alison is available.

M.E. No! That's impossible. I mean, that's not necessary! I have a confession. You're my first interview. You'll have to excuse my...I was using Alison's notes, and, well, maybe I should just use my own ideas.

Mama Bear: Well, ok. Maybe one more question.

M.E. Ok. Hm. (sound of tapping) Well, I know Alison had all of these questions about order, and female subjugation. But.

Mama Bear: All things I'd be happy to talk about! (pause) Yes?
M.E. Well, if it were me, and it is me conducting this interview, I'd like to ask, well, what is it like to be in love with the same person for so many years, living in the same tree house, wearing the same clothes?

Mama Bear: Are you asking about marriage to Papa Bear? Our negotiations and how we keep our household running like a humming, well-oiled machine?

M.E. I'm asking about love. What does it feel like?

Mama Bear: Hm. Love. (sound of her bear-snout sniffing heartily, following the scent of something wafting by her) Well. It feels like--sharp--no, hard edges. And sandpaper bits behind my knees. Oh, and molasses. Fingers pulling bits of glitter into the middle of my brain when the lights go out

and I was just about to be afraid I'd be sitting in the dark, alone, for a very long time.


It feels like overdrawing my checking account and having enough gas to drive to McDonald's drive thru and use the change I found under my seat for a dollar sundae, regardless of the impending financial doom I will face. It feels like fear and a seat belt that's been pulled too tight by one of my insane children from the backseat and one of them howls when I try to buy a little quiet time for myself just to stare at a wall--or a knotty side of an oak tree, whichever--and the way Papa never starts a sentence with What do you think but he always ends the day by pulling me roughly by my blue hat and squeezing my bear armpits until I laugh breathlessly

it feels like forever under a cellar door, which smells of cider and wobbles like big-bellied mice.

It is like trying to put all of the Lincoln logs back into their box before someone trots down the stairs on their way to Bear Cub dance rehearsal and trips and falls flat on their snout over one of them. But never being done with that putting back and waiting and falling.

(the sound of Mama bear's snout snarfling into her dress or a purse, looking for something) Darkness, cookie cutters...(her mumblings become unintelligible.)


---end of connection/interview----

Miss Emergency Interviews Mama Bear [] Yaya!!

Mama Bear Berenstain Miss Emergency

M.E.: Mama Bear, thank you for being here with us today. I'm glad Bear Country Library could loan you a skype-friendly laptop for our conversation today. I see you're sitting out front of the library, where that intrusive Librarian Bear can't listen in! Yaya!
Mama Bear: : Who's "us"?
M.E. It's a collective 'we'--the blog Craft Emergency, and me, Miss Emergency. Yaya!!
Mama Bear: Where's Alison? What's this Yaya?
M.E.: I'm her better half. I am trying on distinguishing remarks that show my unique personality. Yaya!!
Mama Bear: Well, I guess that'll be alright, though I don't usually answer these sorts of things unless I get to know the fan, and I had a pretty good idea of this Alison, but you-
M.E.: Yaya!!
Mama Bear: Well, I have no idea who you are. Are you in a basement?
M.E. That's a good place for us to start. Knowing things seems to be really important to you.
Mama Bear: True. I'm a pretty certain sort of bear. The only chaos in my life is Brother and Sister Bears messy room!! (a bear/guffaw/chuckle) Our Bear Country is full of certainty. Right angles, fluffy, curvy trees, and concluding sentences!
M.E. Right, right. (sound of crayons spilling onto a cement floor, cellophane rustling, whispers to self) In um, let's see, Alison's notes for this interview, she has extensive questions around the theme of, um, disorder in Mama Gets A New Job; both your children and your husband were pretty freaked out about your commitment to them vs. your interest in the outside world, ah, codependency, control over Papa, skip to a big word like imposed delineations on the body, wearing a mumu and control, so on and so forth.. (sound of pages flipping) And there's something here about Don't Talk to Strangers, how the purple is foreboding.. Um..
Mama Bear: Uh, Hello? (static and clicking on keyboard) I think our connection is fading.
M.E. No, no, Mama, I'm just sorting through these notes I found, er, Alison left me.
Mama Bear: Where is Alison? I'd recognize her anywhere-- She had all of my, ah, ha, ha, our books before she hit first grade. She also had the longest-running Berenstain Bear fantasy world in her backyard. She single-handedly kept our reality alive in the northern Maryland imagination in the mid-1980's.
M.E. Well, she wrote a big book that's rough around the edges and the in-betweens, and then realized halfway through it was a different book than she expected. She's in the bath. She's coloring things. It's ah, complicated.
M.B.B. Do you have any questions for me? I have to get home and prepare some honey bars for my husband.
M.E. Yes. um. How do you get your windows to stay in the fluffy branches of your treehouse?
Mama Bear: Ah, well. That's a certainty I can talk about! (giggles with glee) You see, everything in Bear Country relies on compact fitting, what your human thinker Roland Barthes might call the studium. What our readers don't know is that when you walk down the street in Bear Country, there's a constant clicking sound, sort of like that of lego's fitting together. We don't actually use wood for our structures--we use zwieback, or rusk bread. Oh, and there's the bolts. That's another oddity about our reality which you wouldn't know about--
(sound of banging and men yelling, 'hey! look at that!' on M.E.'s end. 'Is that a bear using a laptop in there?')

Mama Bear: Hello? Miss Emergency? Are you there?

M.E. (to the interruption) Mind your own business!

Miss Emergency's Prologue

First things first. I took a dump, which brings me to emergencies. Shitting is a ritual emergency so this is something very close to Miss Emergency's heart. I come from a family of colon interlocutors, and so this makes shitting even an inch closer to my heart.

I, Miss Emergency (I am so filled to the brim that it has taken so long to type unfettered!), I have pictures of my colon in the drawer where I keep my checkbook and my long and arduous pile of bills from the outside-of-network gynecologist who is no better than the in-network gynecologist I used to have, but my ex-best friend hypnotized me into joining her paranoia bubble about university health center gynecologists and so I said, "sure, I'll try your out-of-network gynecologist" and the friendship was a spectacular failure, but I kept going to the expensive gynecologist, because ....

... it turned out that this gynecologist (the expensive one) has candid, unposed photographs of women dancing, laughing, sitting, running--framed--all over her office walls. [These are the patients who got cancer.] So I kept this expensive gynecologist because I wanted to keep going back to the office to watch the framed spontaneity along her walls, dancing on pause over the shelves full of porcelain figurines of black women arranged in gossipy semi-circles. Some framed women are not white. Most are white, framed. Black women are the three-dimensional shapes on the ledge. This gynecologist has lovely legs. I told her so. But this is how I said it:

"Are you a dancer?"

Yes, of course she is. She wears two-inch pumps and panty hose and her white lab coat, trotting around the unposed figures of feminine joy all day. I figured that this was worth the long and arduous pile of out-of-network paperwork, if I could get this every six months to see if that possible std had finally worked its way out of my system.

I took a shit, and it makes all the sense in the world that I should feel that this act is very near and dear to my heart. I saved the picture of my colon, shiny and blasted away with Colon Cleanse.

I do not like my expensive, out-of-network's red headed (redheads=like palm readers) administrative assistant. I do not like the way she sneers and turns her volume up when she talks about the co-pay. I do not want to enter the bubble with her. I do not like the way I bubble myself off so that she will have a harder time reaching me when she wants to demand that I pay now, the higher co-pay amount, before being examined. I do not want to pay before or after. I want to send her a check later. I do not want her to call me and harass me every time I turn around, before I've had the time to make it over to the Drawer with all of my Records and Arduousness. The people who blasted and photographed my colon were much, much nicer about demanding payment.

These are things you need to know before I take full control here.

The Her and the She Split: Miss Emergency [] Alison Barker

Miss Emergency here, and the news on CraftEmergency (while soon-to-be MFA'ed Alison Barker seeks summer employment, while alternately color-coding and dragging her 300+ page manuscript around like an aborton, or a broken windchime) is now only good:

-->forthcoming interviews with Mammoth Pudenda, as well as Mama Bear Berenstain
-->a long joke, the one about the bisexual who walks into a bar
-->discussion (an old one; the old story) about whether or not it makes a difference if a man wrote that section where the writer calls vaginas meat pockets, or where the writer calls a vagina belonging to one particular girl a meat pocket.

This blog has been hacked.

(I have been hacked. My dual existence was written across the two selves of me by a hack.)

This Is Not Her Dog

News flash! My friend Kristin wrote a poem with many things inside it and now it's online at Octopus Magazine! Check it out by clicking.


Love it.