Travelogue – Issue 8 | February 2010
Channeling Ferlinghetti’s ‘Autobiography’
by Natalie Parker-Lawrence
I have heard The Beatles’ songs coming out of Spanish mouths, oblide, oblida. I have ridden monorails and believed the predictions of Tomorrow Land, crossed the deserts in New and Old Mexico and seen the desolation of the plains and wallowed in the wilds of the backstreets of Memphis with its roaming street kids in their pimped-up rides. I have seen them roll a kid down three flights of school stairs, rupturing his spleen for gang initiation. I am the hippie woman. I was a little white woman in a big black school. I suffered not at all because I could get back in my convertible and go home. I am an American. I have a passport. I did suffer in public but only at piano recitals. And I’m not too young to die. I am a self-made woman after attending four years at an all-girl Catholic high school. And I have myriad plans for the future perfect. I am in line at Walgreens for medications that I do not know how to pronounce or spell. I may be moving on to Mexican places in my dreams, but my feet stay planted on the slanted and broken Memphis sidewalks. I am not only a playwright. I am not a plain Jane. I am an open book to my golden retrievers. I am leading a quiet life in Memphis during the school year, contemplating room 17 at the Hacienda de las Flores in San Miguel de Allende for four weeks in the summer. I am an intricate part of the 190-page body of work called the first draft of my thesis. I have wandered alone in various European and Canadian cities but not Mexican ones. I have leaned on drunken shoulders, mine as well as those of others. I have written wild prose without capital letters. I am the woman called Yoda, someone who is short and wise and dresses badly. I was there in my night-bramble dreams. I suffered getting through the corn labyrinth somewhat. I have sat in uncomfortable desks in the inner-city high schools of Memphis. I have sat in wobbly and splayed plastic chairs, like foals trying to stand, in the middle school in San Miguel. I am a streak of the moon. I am a Mexican hill from where poets run down and away. I invented a recipe for Brie with apricot preserves and horseradish after watching my friend make up a movable feast out of nothing in my refrigerator and pantry. I am a frozen lake in the mountains of Colorado, and I wonder too, like Holden, where their ducks go. I am a word in a chasm of illiteracy and complacency. I am caught between a mountain of plays and a molehill of prose. I am a raid on the quiet. I have dreamt that my both of my breasts went missing but my body and soul lived to tell the tale. For I am a Tennessee moonshine still of storytelling. I am a Mississippi riverbank of narrative threads. I am a question mark on fire on a Unitarian lawn still burning. I fear a similarity between the grandmothers begging in San Miguel and myself as a grandmother in Memphis. I have heard the sound of summer tourists not screaming namaste in the rain, slipping and crashing on the sharp cobblestones in many cities on two continents. I have seen the grandmothers at the Jardin offer complicated faces after being stepped over. I understand their hard questions. I am a gatherer of tomatoes and basil in every market that I have ever visited. I have seen how kisses cause lingering liquid pain. I have risked attachment. I have seen the Virgin weep with sadness in San Miguel and St. Theresa burn with ecstasy in Rome. I have seen zoo lions with acres of new quarters, their necks like fur collars wound around like burdensome chains, not seek anything further than the comfortable isolation in their habitual cagey corners. I have seen Degas’ La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans uncomfortable in her wrinkled bronze tights even in Paris. I have heard foreign prayers whispered and cried on the funiculars in Montreal and Guanajuato and Lucerne. I have heard a Nazi siren sing wah-wah wah-wah in Amsterdam in the middle of the Anne Frank tour. I have danced with the lopsided women in the parking lots of the Memphis suburbs in October, joining the breast cancer survivors. Some did not speak loudly. Some had no hair and still sang with their hoarse voices.
About the author
Natalie Parker-Lawrence’s is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. She lives in midtown Memphis in a 100-year-old house. Natalie’s new full-length play is a collection of non-fiction monologues about insomnia, Cover Me at Dawn. Her essays have been published in The Commercial Appeal, The Pinch ,Tata Nacho Press, and World History Bulletin.
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