An Occasional Poem
Connecticut, 2007
Seeing Betty’s canapés, my mom says, we ate canapés
Just like those, off plates just like that
New York, 2008
They tell me while I'm sitting in the back of the car.
“This
never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened"
Not
this, which is still happening
New Jersey, 2009
It's 1963 on TV.
Back in Connecticut, a scrapbook in the attic,
Record of a teenage girl’s JFK fan club
New Jersey, 2010
Of course Don marries Megan, says my mom, she is so good
with the children
2011
Things go dark
New York, New Jersey 2012
My mom would have loved the first Jewish employee
New Jersey, 2013
My mom always said cruise ships were the perfect place for
murder
England, 2014
The first time I watch alone
Knees up in a narrow room
Still daylight
The sea just at the end of the street
Taking the TV cure in Brighton
<3 <3 Mad Men/all tv shows /seriality as time travel to/with the people you experienced them with! But Mad Men specifically as travel to our parents' secrets. xoxoxoxox
ReplyDeleteLove this so much. <3
ReplyDelete(Also, can I see that scrapbook?)
I love this, too!
ReplyDeleteYay! And yes-- scrapbook visit next beach day, if not before. I need to figure out how to preserve it...
ReplyDeleteI just got that it's a _JFK_ fan club (somehow glossed over that before, as just scrapbook/fanclub/60s.) WOW.
ReplyDeleteEnd of an Era, New York, May 17, 2015
ReplyDeleteThis one I watched live,
The first time in years,
And, like most of this final season, alone.
At the end of the week,
We’ll watch as a trio (musketeers!),
With cocktails and canapés and the dongle, this time.
But tonight, it’s just me.
Knees up, but with plenty of room.
I didn’t watch for Don. I watched for Peggy, Sally, Joan. Me. My mom.
Why was Betty ever doing this?
Taking classes at Fairfield University
Just like my mom.
Sally at the sink. She will watch her mother die.
Smoking through her cancer: Go, Betty.
Mine would have laughed.
Peggy and Stan: a dream-sequence, of course.
Holloway Harris though: that’s the way to
Take two names, and make it real.