Three Emotive Essays by Sandra Simonds

Scientists Recognize 27 Emotions and One of Them Is…

Confusion

No one knows the difference between prose and poetry and if someone says they do, send them to my living room. I sat in Mary Ruefle and Michael Burkard’s living room. Mary handed me a glass of green tea, told a strange history. Once, she said, they used to call the living room a parlor. The parlor is where people would lay out their dead relatives before burial. As people became more “modern,” no one wanted to display the dead in their homes. Hence, death was outsourced to the funeral “parlor,” and, simultaneously, we see the birth of the “living” room. Facing death directly became old-fashioned. If a piece of writing contains deliberate line breaks, we call it a poem. But what about this essay? I’m not thinking about where to break the lines. Instead, I simply write to the end of the page. I had the idea that I would make my students buy typewriters because I wanted them to know what it was like to rewrite something over and over until they felt that they got it right, but maybe it’s better to inhabit the peripheries of form. You could argue that only poetry uses rhyme and rhythm for musical effects, but this is also incorrect. I could rattle off ten poems typed out of a tin ear. I like sunny living rooms. One of my favorite childhood memories is watching the dust float in the Southern California air to the sound of the coffee grinder and my mother vacuuming our apartment on Sunday. I’ve spent my entire life on the outskirts of academia. Mary showed me upstairs and opened the album of her year in China. Exile, though, is an extraordinary gift. To conform is to take the same shape as everyone else, to mold your language into their vision of how a poem or essay is supposed to look. But what about your vision? This essay is the act of “mingling together two or more things that are properly separate” (and so is this poem). Would you rather sit with me in a parlor or living room? Would you rather see the dead body for the last time or would you rather we make the body someone else’s problem, someone else’s form?

Joy

“There’s an ominous raincloud hovering over my house,” my friend Claire says. Her son is failing Algebra. “Parenting,” she says, “used to be so easy.” My daughter asks me not to wear that “hippie dress” when I drop her off at dance class because it embarrasses her. “Mom, why do you dress so medieval?” The Rugalach are “just like my grandma made,” says Ina Garten on YouTube. My hands are sticky with dough. “Rewind 30 seconds,” I instruct my husband. He clicks a few times on the laptop. “Just like grandma made,” Ina says again. I try to roll out the dough into a circle, so it looks like a pizza. She says to do this, but the dough sticks to the rolling pin. I attempt to spread the raspberry jam on the dough and sprinkle the raisins and almonds over it. It looks as messy as my daughter’s room. With great effort, I cut up the pizza and roll up each slice. I don’t want to tell the story again that my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and occasionally I cook “Jewish things,” to honor them. The truth is that my grandparents were Sephardic Jews from Turkey and never made this. My mom made Halva and Baklava. Today the sky is blue but seems off like it has too much white in it. I’m very behind on my work. I keep checking my email like someone is going to give me a grant I didn’t even apply for. When they come out of the oven, the Rugalach look mushy, and the raspberry jam has flowed out of each cookie onto the baking sheet, each swimming in a puddle of bubbling red. My husband shrugs, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” “Just like grandma made,” I reply sarcastically. The kids emerge from their rooms. “I want one,” says my son. “I want one too,” says my daughter. They all sit at the table and eat the sticky cookies or whatever they are. “These are really good,” my son says. “I’m sorry I made fun of your dress,” says my daughter who gives me a big hug. “They’re ugly,” she says, plopping a cookie in her mouth, “but really good.” Today is Saturday, February 4, on Pimlico Dr. in Tallahassee, Florida. My son is getting a D- in Algebra and my daughter’s room looks like a war zone. The poodle has an ear infection, and my husband has a case of “rebound COVID.” In retrospect, I took shortcuts making the cookies. I added water to the dough which Ina never said to do, and I substituted crème fraiche for cream cheese, raspberry for apricot jam. Nothing was exact. I give the dog a cookie. Now, she’s taking a nap.

Adoration

To be adored, the mirror image of becoming adorable. The things I adored most as a tween were little erasures from Sanrio Surprises, a store in the Manhattan Beach mall that my sister and I simply referred to as the “Hello Kitty Store.” The experience of walking inside a cloud—surrounded by pink, peach, lavender, grape, lemon, sky blue, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. When you’re young, people come up to your parents and say, “Oh, what an adorable little girl!” but once you start growing breasts, armpit hair, once you’re pudgy, bespectacled, and dealing with cystic acne, you’re no longer so adorable. No, instead, you’re a monster. I’m still that monster and I’m sure, by now, so is my daughter. I’m old enough to realize that most poets have sad childhoods and mine was no different. I wasn’t bullied in school, just mostly ignored. “Are you mute?” my 6th grade pre-Algebra teacher asked when I couldn’t answer a question. I let him think I was stupid, a strategy I used often, so I could spend more of my time in class dreaming about Hello Kitty. The erasers were the ones that go on the top of pencils, and at eleven years old, I was writing my first novel. The characters came straight from the store: Hello Kitty herself, with her enormous face and red bow. Keroppi, a green frog, and a penguin with a mercurial temperament named Bad Badz-Maru. In my story, Keroppi is kidnapped to Iceland and Hello Kitty and Bad Badz-Maru must rescue her. When they are finally reunited, they make their way back to the Hello Kitty store and throw a party after the mall closes. A few months after my pre-Algebra teacher asked if I was mute, I fell in love with a boy named Nathan whose homework I often copied. He was very nerdy, and his clean fingernails and grown-up mannerisms intrigued me. One Monday, I built up the nerve to give him my story which was called “Goodbye Kitty.” He said he would read it if I went to the school dance with him. “Sandra, I read ‘Goodbye Kitty’ last night,” he said the next day, turning his desk toward mine. My heart was beating out of my chest. He placed the pages on my desk as if he was an editor at The New Yorker, “the characters in this story are adorable,” he said very seriously, then lowered his eyes, “but I prefer stories about monsters.”

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books of poetry (most recently Triptychs from Wave Books, 2022) and one novel (Assia from Noemi Press, 2023). She lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Essays from this manuscript are published or forthcoming in Seneca Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, and Boston Review.

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