Michelle O’Kane

AKA Feisty

Recent Posts

  • Typewriters & Trees

    December 12, 1974
    Trinidad, Calif.

    Dear Mother,

    Bob is using the typewriter to type up his first report to the tribal council. They meet on Saturday & he has to tell them what he has been doing since he started. He also has to submit reports when he inspects an area for being a possible Indian burial ground. I had planned on typing this, which is why I mention it; as a matter of fact, I started a letter on the typewriter-but if I wait for Bob to finish… Don’t know what our plans are for Christmas. Bob really doesn’t want to drive down & back. He would like to fly, but that would mean we would have to build a fence for the dogs by Christmas & I don’t know if we can do it. So, everything is sort of up in the air (we will probably drive down). Our new house is really nice — very bright and cheery. Not really much news- just trying to put everything away — not many cupboards or closets. I’m planning on enjoying a long winter, making things for Bob & Michelle & going for walks to the beach when it’s not raining. Hope you can come & visit soon. Will write as soon as we know what we’re doing.

    Love, Kathi, Bob, & Michelle

    P.S. Michelle is really enjoying the house- lots of room to run around & play & she likes to go for walks & see the houses     & going for walks to the beach when it’s not raining.

  • Pebbles and Dirt and Birdsongs

    Pebbles and Dirt and Birdsongs

    I keep eating things—handfuls of pebbles and dirt and birdsongs. I’m walking over gravel and rocks and sticks. Leaves. I keep eating and walkingwalkingwalking upupup—until it all comes back. It all comes out. I think so anyway. It doesn’t matter. I turn around and start beatbeatbeating to wherever I came from.

    Along the way I eat a rotten apple. Soon my body feels like an overstuffed bag of dirt.  I go behind a tree and push 2 fingers into my mouth, and slide them into the constricted part of my throat. I shove and shove and and poke and slide. I keep raping my face with my fingers and I feel  wildflowers, pebbles, leaves —slime up my fingers. 

    I look at the pile of dirty puke. I stare at the Mc Donalds french fries and Big Macs and chocolate shakes. I’m outside of my body. I am tiny, swimming in the mucus, in my mess.  

    It’s just there. It’s all there in the ocean-sized puddle with my life drowning in the gross fucking mess. This is my ocean at the end of my slimy lane.

  • The Ocean at the End of My Lane

    I keep eating things—handfuls of pebbles and dirt and birdsongs. I’m walking over gravel and rocks and sticks. Leaves. I keep eating and walkingwalkingwalking upupup—until it all comes back. It all comes out. I think so anyway. It doesn’t matter. I turn around and start beatbeatbeating to wherever I came from.

    Along the way I eat a rotten apple. Soon my body feels like an overstuffed bag of dirt. I go behind a tree and push 2 fingers into my mouth, and slide them into the constricted part of my throat. I shove and shove and and poke and slide. I keep raping my face with my fingers and I feel wildflowers, pebbles, leaves —slime up my fingers.

    I look at the pile of dirty puke. I stare at the Mc Donalds french fries and Big Macs and chocolate shakes. I’m outside of my body. I am tiny, swimming in the mucus, in my mess.

    It’s just there. It’s all there in the ocean-sized puddle with my life drowning in the gross fucking mess. This is my ocean at the end of my lane.

  • Best of Days

    Best of Days

    Here is what is this about. I don’t know what I’m about. Most people ignore me now and I’m not sure why, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know why, and even if I knew why, I wouldn’t remember anyway. I’m a handful on my best of days. My best of days happened decades ago. I can hardly live with myself. And I’m not. Nobody is. Time is something that speeds by on a billion schedules, pattering its way around the world in an infinitely interactive lacy web. Life billows. I get tired easily and right now I’m imagining the reality of slitting my wrists.  I’m scared. I’m tired. I show don’t tell. My brain has stopped functioning, which is exhausting. For once, this isn’t on purpose. I haven’t killed the soldiers in my mind, I haven’t shot them with bullets of xanax and bombs of vodka. My heart-my heart my heart my h-heart hear-t beats to its own fucking drum. I haven’t made it to the store yet, Jerry. I haven’t made it anywhere at all. I have a past. I have a history. I have a story. Stories. I have things. Somewhere. I have a son. I have a heart. I had brain—a brain, which wasn’t a tangled collage of decades of images.

    But hey. At least my life gave me some really EXPLOSIVE memories.

     

  • Safety is an Observation

    Safety is an Observation

    I want to see flowers. I want to feel warm water. I want to feel waves melting around around my body. I feel stupid. I feel smart. Do I feel smart because I’m so fucking stupid? Feelings are supposed to be shown, not told, when writing. Show don’t tell. I want to feel happy. I want to eat. I want to know. I want my hair to not fall out. I need a break. I need a brain. I want a break that lasts me the rest of my life and beyond.

    I don’t want to be standing on the gymnastics floor, eight years old, with my gymnastics teacher, Wayne, behind me. Gently reaching around to push his hands down the front of my shorts. I told my mom. She was so upset I needed to comfort her.

    I want my hair back. I want my life back. I want a sandwich. I want ice-cream. I want to eat with love. With people I love. And who love me. I want to sleep. Forever. I want to live happily. Indefinitely. I want to hold my newborn son, every one of these days. I want to be in love and mean it. I want to hide in a lake. I want to hide with fish. I want to write about people who exist, and who are good. Instead I’m swimming fiercely in rocky, murky water. My legs are drumsticks. My legs beat beat beat. The wood, shattering on the wet, sharp rocks. I taste blood. I remember the metallic, plastic, blasting—the sound of my typewriter smashing cement after I threw it over my second-floor balcony. Little brown buttons with letters in a dark courier font splattered the ground. H and I, two stated.

    Whenever I find myself in the hospital room, standing next to the bed on which is resting my dead mother, in indecipherable spans of time, I am looking out the window. It is Summer Solstice, which means I am nearly exactly 17.5 years old. I am staring at the white blinds, which are slanted open, and I look through countless strips of plastic, I am looking at the sky. The sky is blue. Above the top of the concrete roof of the fifth floor of the other wing of The Hospital, the sky is blue. It’s that clear, clear, clear, clean, windex blue. The kind of blue that only happens for a little bit of time, on days with a slight breeze, and little pollution. Danny and I–Danny Lee Clark Junior (he’s dead now, too) and I–had left the trailer in San Jose, after the call came, around 7:30 a.m. Now, it was around 9:30. It wasn’t yet 10:00. The light would be less clear at 10:00. It would start to look hot. And it was, after all, June. June 14th. 1990. I look at my mother. I look at her. She looks peaceful. I’d never seen her look so peaceful. Ever. The bandage wrapped around the top of her head was neat, and clean, and white. It only covered the top of her eyebrows.  I would not–did not–think about the bloody wound hiding beneath the clean, white dressing. It was all dead. She was dead.  Standing on my balcony, in Reno, I watched the explosion.

    When the typewriter hit the concrete, the black ribbon spool still pressed against paper. After the ancient typing machine crashed onto the ground, I remember brown leaves drifting around my brown typewriter, like ballerinas, floating in the blasted air. Today, now, I want to see the brown leaves drifting across the scuffled concr ete of my patio. I want to look between the brown patio steps and see the ground. I want to hear the shuffling sound of shoes as people walk on the other side of the fence, unaware of what they’re missing over here.

    What I want to be is home. I want to be cooking paella on my stove, in our house, that I toured with Jay with a real estate agent. I want to be standing in our kitchen, in front of the counter, chopping vegetables on the countertop that I designed. I want to boil water on the stove that I, after much research, had installed. Our 5-year-old son watches something silly on the tv with J, who is sitting on the long sofa, a shot-glass of to-be-sipped-slowly tequila in his hand. They watch the green Bang & Olufsen television. I want to be there, at home, where I was–where I thought I was–safe. Safety is an observation.

  • The Past is such a Curious Creature

    The Past is such a Curious Creature

    The last of days are hard because they fuck with your head. The last minutes of the last hours of the last days of the last–months, minutes, seconds, sounds.

    You know it’s the last days because you’ve been taken over by cliches instead of your thoughts. You never used to think in cliches. Unless you were in love, but even then. You thought you were too special and that because you were so special your love must be special, with a special person, and it was so unique it didn’t matter if you lazily said your heart skipped or that I love you. You had his son. Now he has his son. You now have a pile of random, old, photos.

    This one time I wrote a story, but it wasn’t a real story because it actually happened and it happened to a girl who wasn’t/isn’t me. I just share her birth certificate and a deep longing to see more worlds. Very poorly, I played the flute. So did she.

    She and I heard people crunching very loudly—pieces of toasted bread because that’s what they did in Spain and France and other places.
    —In my head— in what used to be my brain—I look into a bowl  of soup—egg drop soup—I stare into the steamingsteamingsteaming—

    —and then I walked through a door that could of led anywhere; glass that wasn’t a door, nor was it any where. It was a window with panes and surrounding the panes was crispy brown wood with crinkling white paint—beyond the door was a cement sidewalk because we only have cement in the capitals of small states.

    Everywhere else they have concrete, with yellow, faded stripes— and iridescent lights, lights that are meant to look old, but they’re not as old as 1895.

    I hid in my coffee shop—I hid in my studio above Comma Coffee, on the highway that goes through Carson City.

    And then he held the door open, for me to leave the coffee shop with him—and I did. And, on my drumsticks, I looked for my beat. Which I found and then forgot. 

    The past is such a curious creature
Emily Dickinson

The past is such a curious creature,
To look her in the face
A transport may reward us,
Or a disgrace.

Unarmed if any meet her,
I charge him, fly!
Her rusty ammunition
Might yet reply!
  • Life, the universe, and everything.

    Life, the universe, and everything.

    I am 42. My mother died when she was 42. She died right after surgery to remove her brain tumor. The last time I saw her, alive, she was on a gurney. Not yet sedated. Still with me. Still here. Her long, curly brown hair looked like it was being mulled into a surgical skull cap. I was 17. I watched her being pushed, under a blanket, on the gurney, through blue hospital doors, that closed. Quietly. The doors swooshed. That was the last time I saw my mother breathing. The next morning. I saw my mother again. I was still 17. Not my mother. My mother’s body was in a hospital room. Lying on her back, on a hospital bed. Her bed against a brown wall, rolled to the side of the room. There was only one bed in the room. I learned that there are always only one bed in those rooms. The dead people rooms.

    I am reliving my life as my memories return. Having grown up homeless, in a commune, in the forest, in my father’s dark-room, my memories-my life-are weird. I keep track of my memories by writing them down. My memories are an ongoing collection of pretty stories. Some are even true. I think.

    Born and raised in Northern California, I moved to the Sierra Nevada high desert just before I turned thirty. Now I’m in Dallas with a friend who helps me deal with life.

    Dead people who should be breathing and moving, and dead machines that should be beeping and moving. I felt so shaken, like when I had stood behind the shuddering glass at the one-hour-photo, where I’d worked, last year. That year, I was 16. That was the ‘89 earthquake. Everything shook, rolled, dropped, shattered. Seventeen seconds of rolling destruction. Everything seemed to be wanting to be pulled under the surface of the earth. An invisible force. It was such a quiet, deafening shaking. Like now. Like inside of me now. Looking at my dead mother. Like now. Me. Standing there in a ray of sunlight, on the weirdly soft hospital floor. Always, hospital floors are absorbently quiet. Never walked upon, just padded upon. Except for wheels. Wheels rolled. 

    The wheels of wheelchairs and gurneys are loud. In hospitals, things, people, are always being pushed. Rolled. I felt more shaken by how little I felt as I looked at her, sleeping without breathing. I wondered if her wheeled bed had squeaked as it rolled her to this room. She still had that skullcap on her head. It was the only time I ever saw my mother’s hair look so lifeless. Or my mother

    Today, I am alive, technically. My mother and I had brains that weren’t built to work for more than forty-two years.

    Less than 2 years after I watched my mother wave to me from the rolling bed, waving to me as those big, blue doors drifted shut after she’d been pushed through them—two years later I met J.

  • Memory Posters

    Memory Posters

    July, 5, 1994. 
London. 
My first night outside of the states. 
I am 21. 
Home—
Mountain View
Flew out of SFO.

2021
a color of a memory
a photo of our son
she needed you to show her 
remember just a bit
riving on those roads
landing on that lake
that water plane
Alaska
tapas
Cha cha cha’s
sangria in spain San Francisco 
crisp, warm, lemony—
calamari fritto

scatter, float, fall 
I wanted to remember
wavy golden seas of leave
no memory too small

2021
no calls, 
photos, zoom
but i can see you
your glowing screens

1992
NASA editing room
memories are colors 
scents—
shades of light
songs, words in songs — 

1994
Us
We loved to write

  • Memories Are Colors

    July, 5, 1994. 
London. 
My first night outside of the states. 
I am 21. 
Home—Mountain View
Flew out of SFO.

2021
a color of a memory
a photo of our son
she needed you to show her 
remember just a bit
riving on those roads
landing on that lake
that water plane
Alaska
tapas
Cha cha cha’s
sangria in spain San Francisco 
crisp, warm, lemony—
calamari fritto

scatter, float, fall 
I wanted to remember
wavy golden seas of leave
no memory too small

2021
no calls, 
photos, zoom
but i can see you
your glowing screens
1992
NASA editing room
memories are colors 
scents—
shades of light
songs, words in songs — 

1994
it was us who needed to write
  • Forever – is composed of Nows

    Forever – is composed of Nows

    Trinidad, Ca
    1978
    Dear Mother,

    Thanks for your nice long letter. Michelle wanted to send you the deer she colored & cut out, so I’m writing you a note to go with it. She doesn’t like to color between lines & needs to practice that & cutting with scissors to prepare for printing letters on the lines. The teacher says she goes too fast. I’m so glad I go once a week so I can see what she’s doing & where she needs help. She is what letter a word starts with, by sound.

    Here is what is this about. I don’t know what I’m about. Most people ignore me now and I’m not sure why, but I don’t want to know why, and even if I knew why, I wouldn’t remember anyway. I’m a handful on my best of days. My best of days happened decades ago. I can hardly live with myself. And I’m not. Nobody is. Time is something that speeds by on a billion schedules, gently waving soft branches. Like a willow tree’s swaying leaves. Around and around and around: north, south, east, west—, transparent lacy webs. Life billows. I get tired easily and right now I’m busy imagining the reality of slitting my wrists. Three hospital stays have informed me that pills don’t work. I’m scared. I’m this tired because I hardly eat. Also, my brain has stopped functioning, which is exhausting. For once, this isn’t on purpose. I haven’t made it to the store yet—I haven’t yet—I haven’t yet—I haven’t yet. I haven’t.

    Forever – is composed of Nows – (690)
BY EMILY DICKINSON

Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

From this – experienced Here –
Remove the Dates – to These –
Let Months dissolve in further Months –
And Years – exhale in Years –

Without Debate – or Pause –
Or Celebrated Days –
No different Our Years would be
From Anno Dominies –