Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Hollyhocks
Penny Perry
- Three days after my mother died,
- her hollyhocks tumbled down
- under their own weight. My father disappeared.
- I had eaten the last
- of her meatloaf wrapped in wax paper.
- She had waved me out of her kitchen.
- “No need to learn to cook. You’ll be
- a professor.” She ground her own meat,
- the red strings wriggling like worms.
- Though I only had my learner’s permit,
- I drove her old Plymouth to the store.
- There were whole aisles in Safeway
- she never went down. That first day I bought
- Bird’s Eye frozen broccoli,
- macaroni and cheese. The mothers
- of my friends told their daughters,
- “Stay away from her. Who knows
- what’s going on in that house?
- Parties. Boys.” There were no parties.
- No boys. Nights, I was so lonesome I would call Time
- to hear a lady say it is three-oh-three.
- I made Jello and Swanson’s turkey dinners.
- I asked the gym teacher, perky Miss Butler,
- a woman whom a month before I would never
- have talked to, about salads. Miss Butler
- coached the girls’ marching drill team.
- She told me she had polio as a child.
- People could survive all sorts of things.
- She said, “Wash the lettuce first.”
- I fried hamburger meat, flames jumping
- wildly under the iron skillet. A month later,
- my father reappeared, moved us to a dingy
- apartment across town. Nights, I would sit
- in my mother’s car in front of our old house.
- The new owner, a gardener, staked
- my mother’s hollyhocks.
- I couldn’t see the pale pink, ruby, and yellow
- flowers in the dark. But I knew they were there.
Penny Perry has been widely published as a poet, most recently in Lilith and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her fiction has appeared in Redbook and California Quarterly. She was the first woman admitted to the American Film Institute screenwriting program, and a film based on her script, A Berkeley Christmas, aired on PBS. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee in both fiction and poetry, she was born and raised in Santa Monica, the setting for her first collection of poetry, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012). “Hollyhocks,” which appears in that collection, is reprinted by permission.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Hollyhocks
Hollyhocks
Penny Perry
- Three days after my mother died,
- her hollyhocks tumbled down
- under their own weight. My father disappeared.
- I had eaten the last
- of her meatloaf wrapped in wax paper.
- She had waved me out of her kitchen.
- “No need to learn to cook. You’ll be
- a professor.” She ground her own meat,
- the red strings wriggling like worms.
- Though I only had my learner’s permit,
- I drove her old Plymouth to the store.
- There were whole aisles in Safeway
- she never went down. That first day I bought
- Bird’s Eye frozen broccoli,
- macaroni and cheese. The mothers
- of my friends told their daughters,
- “Stay away from her. Who knows
- what’s going on in that house?
- Parties. Boys.” There were no parties.
- No boys. Nights, I was so lonesome I would call Time
- to hear a lady say it is three-oh-three.
- I made Jello and Swanson’s turkey dinners.
- I asked the gym teacher, perky Miss Butler,
- a woman whom a month before I would never
- have talked to, about salads. Miss Butler
- coached the girls’ marching drill team.
- She told me she had polio as a child.
- People could survive all sorts of things.
- She said, “Wash the lettuce first.”
- I fried hamburger meat, flames jumping
- wildly under the iron skillet. A month later,
- my father reappeared, moved us to a dingy
- apartment across town. Nights, I would sit
- in my mother’s car in front of our old house.
- The new owner, a gardener, staked
- my mother’s hollyhocks.
- I couldn’t see the pale pink, ruby, and yellow
- flowers in the dark. But I knew they were there.
Penny Perry has been widely published as a poet, most recently in Lilith and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her fiction has appeared in Redbook and California Quarterly. She was the first woman admitted to the American Film Institute screenwriting program, and a film based on her script, A Berkeley Christmas, aired on PBS. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee in both fiction and poetry, she was born and raised in Santa Monica, the setting for her first collection of poetry, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012). “Hollyhocks,” which appears in that collection, is reprinted by permission.
Comments