On February 9, 2020, I curated and read aloud a selection of readings at Pindrop Session #21, “Nevertheless…” at Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville, MA.

These were the readings I chose:

Applesauce for Eve

Marge Piercy

Those old daddies cursed you and us in you,

damned for your curiosity: for your sin

was wanting knowledge. To try, to taste,

to take into the body, into the brain

and turn each thing, each sign, each factoid

round and round as new facets glint and white

fractures into colors and the image breaks

into crystal fragments that pierce the nerves

while the brain casts the chips into patterns.

Each experiment sticks a finger deep in the pie,

dares existence, blows a horn in the ear

of belief, lets the nasty and difficult brats

of real questions into the still air

of the desiccated parlor of stasis.

What we all know to be true, constant,

melts like frost landscapes on a window

in a jet of steam. How many last words

in how many dead languages would translate into,

But what happens if I, and Whoops!

We see Adam wagging his tail, good dog, good

dog, while you and the snake shimmy up the tree,

lab partners in a dance of will and hunger,

that thirst not of the flesh but of the brain.

Men always think women are wanting sex,

cock, snake, when it is the world she's after.

Then birth trauma for the first conceived kid

of the ego, I think therefore I am, I

kick the tree, who am I, why am I,

going, going to die, die, die.

You are indeed the mother of invention,

the first scientist. Your name means

life: finite, dynamic, swimming against

the current of time, tasting, testing,

eating knowledge like any other nutrient.

We are all the children of your bright hunger.

We are all products of that first experiment,

for if death was the worm in that apple,

the seeds were freedom 

and the flowering of choice.

“Apple Sauce for Eve,” poem from The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, by Marge Piercy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

Nikki Giovanni

There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.

From “Inventing Life Steals Time; Living Life Begs It Back,” 2000

Gish Jen

One must live in order to have something to write about. That's the commonplace wisdom, and to be engaged with the world is no bad thing; it is essential. Still the bulk of everyday life comes as an interruption. Some people maintain that everything becomes material, but in truth it does not. It is entirely possible, for starters, to have too much of one kind of material; ask anyone in a menial job. But this is the stuff of another essay.

Allow me to claim that at 45, a mother of young children, I have a life that is mostly not material, that I simply live. Writing competes with that life and shortens its run. I struggle not to hurry my time with my children; I endeavor to lose myself with them even as I squeeze every last minute out of the rest of the day. I calculate; I weigh; I optimize. That I may lose myself again in my work, I map out the day, the route, the menu. I duck, I duck. I hoard the hours and despair in traffic jams. Worse, I keep an eye on my involvements. I give myself freely enough to others, but only so freely. I wonder if writing is worth this last price in particular.

Mary Does Laugh, 1964

Sister Corita Kent

In 1936, just out of high school, Francis Elizabeth Kent entered the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, taking as her name Sister Mary Corita. 

Over the next few decades, she attended the order’s school, Immaculate Heart College, and developed as a significant and influential artist — we know her around here for her gas tank painting — eventually coming to teach at the college. 

In keeping with many debates within Catholicism, she became fascinated with the concept of Mary, mother of Jesus, as a flesh and blood woman who walked the earth. 

In 1961, she took over the Mary Day celebration at the college and transformed it into a celebration of the lives of everyday women with a focus on how they fed their families. For the symbolic, sacred imagery, she collected advertising posters from local supermarkets, converting them into signs on poles, and banners hanging around the campus, making the procession a ritual recognizing the often overlooked but vital stuff of in the lives of American women. 

One of the students, finding it to be a profound experience, wrote this reaction, which Sister Corita Kent incorporated into one of her most moving and well known paintings, Mary does laugh. 

Mary does laugh; and she sings and runs and wears bright orange…today she'd probably do her shopping at the Market Basket.