This Semblance of Movement
Afraid because my walking hurts the ground. Hesitate. That there would be nothing left to write. There are cracks in everything we've made. That does not mean futility. Father's faith in truth and then this stubborn repetition but what if. The moon looked paper-thin tonight. So I thought if I could slide more softly from now on.
Sifting Liquid
I am peeling off the liquid skin of a memory. Pulling crooked strings out of a silent field of dreams, sister keeps asking what she's missing in me. The sky was three shades of blue tonight, glass stars and frozen landscapes, caught in the pantomime of living. Time unfolds its battered wings and in that space I smile.
Stealing blankets and the young girl fell. My first day home from the hospital, she only wanted to play, but reaching to tug, share a piece of my soft security, she tripped, cut her chin. The first blood of our tenuous intimacy. There was a safety scissors haircut (Mr. Rogers would have done it that way) and hours under chairs looking everywhere and up. Entranced by mobiles moving across distance, light, and eyes. In my crib, I would stand, arms reaching out for her, babbling. She, translating thoughts before lips knew how to form. My mother recalls a time early on when she woke in the middle of the night to noises down the hall. A four-year old and a three-year old at two in the morning, laughing. We had been building a bridge of cards from her bed to mine, so that we wouldn't fall in the water between us if we wanted to hold hands.
The most unlikely of stories I never thought to question. Sister, less than a year old, lying on her mother's stomach. Head down, moving with the rhythm of familiar breath. One word. Baby. To discover, shortly after, for two months their silence had been shared.
I remember the ways we used to pretend. In the water, we could have been dolphins, at home different versions of Barbie and Ken. Our Barbies lost countless heads perfecting dives off sofa's end and to think that's how I spent my years. Do I laugh or merely cry. When we played I think I was always the boy but I don't know if that changed the way I feel.
Susie’s mother opened the door to let Molly, Susie’s babysitter, inside. Ten-month old Susie seemed happy to see Molly. Susie then observed her mother put her jacket on and Susie’s face turned from smiling to sad as she realized that her mother was going out. Molly had sat for Susie many times in the past month, and Susie had never reacted like this before. When Susie’s mother returned home, the sitter told her that Susie had cried until she knew that her mother had left and then they had a nice time playing with toys until she heard her mother’s key in the door. Then Susie began crying once again.
Baby narrates her story through her naïve, innocent child voice. She serves as a filter for all the events happening in her life, what the narrator does not know or does not comprehend cannot be explained to the readers. However, readers have reason not to trust what she is telling them because of her unreliability. Throughout the beginning of the novel we see Baby’s harsh exposure to drugs and hurt. Jules raised her in an unstable environment because of his constant drug abuse. However, the narrator uses flowery language to downplay the cruel reality of her Montreal street life. “… for a kid, I knew a lot of things about what it felt like to use heroin” (10). We immediately see as we continue reading that Baby thinks the way she has been living her life is completely normal, however, we as readers understand that her life is in fact worse then she narrates. Baby knows about the impermanent nature of her domestic security, however, she repeatedly attempts to create a sense of home each time her and Jules move to another apartm...
My mind started to wonder though each room of the house, the kitchen where mom used to spend every waking hour in. The music room where dad maintained the instrument so carefully like one day people would come and play them, but that day never came, the house was always painfully empty. The house never quite lived to be the house my parents wanted, dust bunnies always danced across the floor, shelves were always slightly crooked even when you fixed them. My parents were from high class families that always had some party to host. Their children were disappointments, for we
Her eyes were heavy, her body weak. As she crawled into the bathroom two feet away, Abby felt her body slowly succumbing to the numbness. All of her pain would be gone in less than 10 minutes, so why would she want to turn back? What about the senior trip Abby had planned with her best friend? What about the chair at the dinner table that would now be vacant? A couple of hours later Abby’s family came home from her little sister’s soccer game. Little did they know what they would find as they approached the top of the stairs. Her little sister, Ali, stood still as she looked down at her feet. There on the cold floor lay her big sister, her role model, and her super hero. Ali was crushed when she saw the pill bottle in her hand and the pale color of her skin. Her mom fell to her knees screaming and crying, wondering where she
My patience was running extremely thin, and it felt as if I myself might start to cry. I looked down at my tiny 6lb son, eyes wet with tears, cheeks and chin shaking. My heart throbbed
As I walked through the door of the funeral home, the floral arrangements blurred into a sea of vivid colors. Wiping away my tears, I headed over to the collage of photographs of my grandfather. His smile seemed to transcend the image on the pictures, and for a moment, I could almost hear his laughter and see his eyes dancing as they tended to do when he told one of his famous jokes. My eyes scanned the old photographs, searching for myself amidst the images. They came to rest on a photo of Grandpa holding me in his lap when I was probably no more than four years old. The flowers surrounding me once again blended into an array of hues as I let my mind wander……
A single slip in action may cause lasting sorrow. A slight mistake in operation at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal of India causes a lot of deaths and injuries. What a tragedy it is. Undoubtedly, there must be something wrong with the management of the plant.
When I was a teen, my mother gave birth to two children, a female (Tamber) and a male (Avery), nineteen months apart. As the two became more mature, my parent’s desire to place each child in the
Hubka, David, Wendy Hovdestad, and Lil Tonmyr. "Child Maltreatment In Disney Animated Feature Films: 1937-2006." The Social Science Journal 46.3 (2009): 427-441. Print.
I cried as we locked up the house for the last time. I felt like we had just spackled, primed, and painted over my childhood. I felt as if my identity had been erased, and like the character in the song, I had lost myself. There was no longer any physical evidence that I had ever lived in, much less grew up in, the house.
Andragogy, the art and science of teaching adult learners is a theory most closely associated with Malcolm Knowles. Andragogy unites the student and teacher, allowing a partnership to blossom in the classroom. The teacher has a role that is more of a tour guide and less of the authoritarian. The teacher allows adult students to experience the education as opposed to observe one. Andragogy instruction is not fully content based, but focuses on the process of education, it is not just what you learn, but also how you learn. According to Mr. Malcolm Knowles (1984), five main aspects of Andragogy are:
I was born on a very stormy wintery night, my mom and dad left to go to the hospital at about midnight and I was born about an hour later. I was naturally birthed without any drugs, inducement or epidural. The overall birthing experience went very well and there were no complications at all. My father’s role in the delivery room was to “get his hand squeezed off.”
Tuesday, June 30,1987, It was a high of 91° in Philadelphia, PA. The sun was high in the sky the day when I decided to wake up and live on the other side. My tiny feet I would kick the wall, the barrier to the outside. I was gently pulled from my mother’s tummy. Whaaaa!!! As I grasped for air! I cried as the doctor gently pulled me from my mother’s tummy, as the lights-gleamed on my body. It was
I stood there in amazement. A tingle surged throughout my whole body. It was a rush of excitement I had never felt before in my life. When my eyes hit her angelic little body, they froze and I couldn't think or acknowledge anything else around me. The world seemed to stop, hold its place in time, just for that perfect moment. While she slept I stared at this precious little angel. My hands quivered as I slowly reached down to touch her little fingers and feel the softness of her skin. I ran the tips of my fingers very gently across her smooth face, and right away, I fell in love. Then my brother said, "I can wake her up so you can hold her." I was ecstatic, I was finally going to meet her! As I held her, I stared into her gorgeous blue eyes and knew instantly that I would love and cherish her forever with all my heart.
Nearly three decades ago, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal India had a devastated tragedy. The toxic chemical and methyl isocyanate gas leak from the plant killed thousands of civilians who were sleeping and injured hundreds of thousands of people in the nearby neighborhood. For those who survived from this catastrophic incident had injuries ranging from blindness to suffering burns of the skins. The cause of this accident was due to the lack of safety standards and the decision making of Management of Union Carbide in the U.S and management in India in which it played a huge role on how this incident unfold and the many lives that were affected by this horrific accident. The Union Carbide manager in India’s overlooked at safety issues that could have clued them to the problem that needed to be resolved. And if management had a high priority for the safety of their employee’s well-being instead of profit, this situation could have been avoided. After the incident, it was a matter of who was responsible and who will compensate for the injured victims.