Sydney Brown
Phone: 619•644•7523
E-mail: sydney.brown@gcccd.edu
Instructor Website: http://sydbrown.net/
Sydney Brown is Co-Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program and a member of the
World Arts and Cultures Committee at Grossmont College. An alumni of Granite Hills
High School, Sydney received both her B.A. in English, with an emphasis in American
Literature, and M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in British Literature, from
San Diego State University. While at SDSU, Sydney helped launch Poetry
International; she served as Business Manager and Assistant Editor of the journal's
inaugural issue. Later she worked as a reader and Assistant Editor for the edgy and
innovative, Fiction International. Before coming to Grossmont, she volunteered then
worked as Assistant Program Coordinator for The Writing Center, a nonprofit literary
arts organization founded by Judy Reeves. A Professor of English, Sydney teaches
creative writing, poetry, literature, and composition at Grossmont College. In 2008, she
received the college's Excellence in Teaching Award.
Sydney's poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including San Diego
Writer's Monthly; Iceberg; HOW2: Contemporary Innovative Writing Practices by
Women; Hawaii Pacific Review; Red; Zaum: The Literary Magazine of Sonoma State;
The Southern Review; two girls review; A Year in Ink; Red; Touching: Poems of Love,
Longing, and Desire; Inside English; Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego & Tijuana;
Hunger & Thirst: Food Literature; and Mamas & Papas: On the Sublime and
Heartbreaking Art of Parenting. Her first collection of poems, Broad Finds Love, was a
finalist for Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize in New York.
QUOTABLES
Forgive me if I say
there is something
flesh-like for the imagination
in the catastrophic, in the untimely
death of a stranger.
There are words for the people
we do not love;
there are words for the people
we hardly know,
room for similes
otherwise lost
in the heart's broken English."
(from "Makeshift Memorials")
ON WRITING: "One of the terrible divisions in the world is between those who are
drawn to the difficult things and those who give up. They are the ones who become the
censors."--Steve Wasserman
Link to Sydney Brown's website: http://sydbrown.net/
Poetry
Makeshift Memorials
Creative Nonfiction
Eggflower
CREATIVE NONFICTION
EGGFLOWER, LAND
originally published on-line by Rutgers University
How2: New Writing 1.4 (September 2000)
© Sydney Brown
Working Note
Why is the measure of love loss? This inquiry, which begins Jeanette Winterson's
Written on the Body, is perhaps what I had in mind when I began to miss the flesh that
became Eggflower. My longing, long under my skin, surfaced in words, a meditation on
love and loss, one that I locked myself in for days. I write like that a lot. Days where only
my body tells me it is time to eat/sleep/bathe. It is fortunate that my life allows me this, as
a line a day would be too painful, especially where Eggflower is concerned. What is
unique about my process for this poem is that I did not open up a Word program to
construct it, but instead, began a series of e-mails I knew would not be received. This
form became the emotional consent and space I needed to interpret my passion for this
person whose distance caused such raw introspection. As I struggled with a language
to transcribe my experience, I discovered the abstract relationship between the words
and what I was feeling. The frustration and pain was tremendously generative, and I
know this union is entirely nothing new; however, the sentences I managed to construct
were original and startling to me and the gendered, safe-history of the love I'd known.
The experience of writing "Eggflower, Land," or knowing what it was to write it, has
changed my writing immensely. This is a new language for me. The vital emotional and
formal deconstruction of an unanswered and perhaps impossible love, Eggflower was
written so that I can keep writing or feeling.
I.
•don't look-the blond shell is not dropping. Is not incoming. Downtown, everything
is more of the same. The jacarandas do not bloom in December. Fourth Street runs one
way. The stop signs do not know if the fast red cars will stop. Sirens no longer inspire
sentences ending in question marks. A man on the corner needs only socks. The cold
weather shelter is full. My house, like Eggflower's, is empty.
Eggflower, are you not coming home soon? The heart has yoked its hour. The
planes are waiting. They talk on radios and circle the moon, holiday blue and slightly
sour. And from my roof I can watch them fine. They line up and promise return. Could
one hold you? Perhaps. They remind me of your distance-like a photograph, radio
words are not better than breath. Heavy planes wait for a signal to land, are patient with
the sky & sand, unlike Eggflower who stays away from her little house by the sea. Wood
and paint, moonfull of flowers, red rocks & photographs wait to keep her from distance.
In proximity, I am a brown tree without green leaves. A blind street full of potholes
& fables somewhere between Eggflower's words, her sky and wood, paint and
photographs.
The holiday is almost over.
From the roof I know my window will frame many returns.
Still, like lights that line the dark runway, a little blue tree waits for you.
II.
Eggflower, I've come down from the roof and blue is still in fashion; the year is
new. I've lost my keys, calendar & compass-the photo of you by the pool. I've strung
your postcards across my living room. A biographer's clothesline. I stare at them and
turn your name over and over in my mouth.
A ferry crossing the Mekong River with no image to last the way across-I am
rereading Duras, again. One Sunday morning her language found your breath and
began my day. Now, it is difficult to get out of bed. My two feet on cold hardwood, walls
full of books, and I am lost.
III.
In search of. This coast cartographer left her cats alone with a screen projecting
mice, lizards and fish. People have narrated stories of my pacing the Pacific Coast
Highway. They say that I am talking to myself, but I am mapping places we found and
found again, recollecting and repeating our conversations aloud when I reach their
places of origin-bars, gas stations, motels and sea cliffs. Perhaps it is irrational to
reinvent the art of mapmaking for loss, but I yearn for the familiar.
Soon I will return, empty papyrus and head full of memory, to hold one of your
postcards. To touch black lines, ink raised on cardstock, a stamp you took from my desk
drawer. Your autograph-Eggflower, stranded. My only knowledge: you flew to the
Northwest and sent a postcard from the East. It reads:
these storms. inside and out. this ring of yours still on my finger. this heart beaten.
words between us float; open your mouth.
My mouth. I have spoken then written the word drought on a million different
bottles-blue, yellow, blue, green, blue, mostly blue. I sent them all to the North Atlantic
via the South Pacific-an impossible route. Still, I check my shore every day for simple
signs of your brands: scotch, cigarettes, magazines and bath products.
IV.
Yesterday I stuffed eight dollars into a metal box that let me sit in a designated
space for eight hours. The space was black outlined by white. The space is in a parking
lot next to my address and in your flight path. The money was too much for the narrow
slit. The instructions, words and illustrations, were not helpful-or, I had no patience for
them. It is getting difficult to discriminate. The crumpled bill took a long time to make fit.
Finally, my skin spread white on asphalt. I looked very small in the space, not a car at
all.
The day before yesterday I drove east till the moon lifted off my hood and the sun
sank in my rear view mirror simultaneously. My vehicle moved between the dark thighs
of mountains and all around me were sights that proved to me you were once here:
your songs in my system, maps on my dash, blonde hair on the passenger headrest. I
took your mug from the floor mat and traced your fossilized lips with my empty ring
finger then swerved to miss a falling star.
Two days before yesterday I parked my car at the airport and took a yellow cab
back to my apartment where I watched television, all day. On "Book TV" a male poet
spent an hour and four minutes introducing a haiku that lasted seconds. He spoke of
scientists who find metaphors like money in the street, the paradigm of webs, and men
who write poems about themselves after dreams of flying, rotten teeth, and foreign
places. I sat on the rug you brought me from Thailand and shook. It had been
thundering and I'd just finished soundproofing my heart. Body sweaty with an
interpretation of television and lightning, it was the beginning or end of a blue illness
diagnosed by pages of post holiday writing. Words reconstructing the places we'd
learned each other-a ghost haunting her own life.
V.
I have chewed off my leg and packed it in Styrofoam peanuts, Candy Corn and
confetti, in a brown box with only a return address.
It is just a metaphor, the result of too much red wine, word-processing and
alliteration. At the keys, I bite my truths to keep from typing in tongues. Horns tell me fog
is heavy on the bay; my hands ache and I have grown tired of figurative language. I
constructed you a text without using the letter E then walked to our breakfast place and
consumed two plates of vegetable scramble, rosemary potatoes, sausages and raisin
toast. The waitress we like, the one with the asymmetrical silver hair, asked where my
friend was and I said I didn't know. Eggflower, are you forgetting me?
VI.
I am back with language and planes arrive on the hour without you. For your
welcome, I've written you a fruit basket full of fresh pineapples, pears, mangos and
blood oranges. I will continue to rewrite the fruit as it rots. I replaced pineapple with kiwi,
pear with honeydew. I composed a sentence that said I was rotting when I meant to say
it. It is difficult to keep my pronouns straight. I placed ambiguity in the basket. I may very
well be rotting in the first person.
This is why I embrace blue. Blue is to be alive, to make sentences, to unaccept. In
blue, your return is not as essential as your departure and prolonged distance. I've
wrapped what's left of me in blue. My walls are blue and I've taken to wearing my eye
shadow blue. I've found a religion in the semiotics of color, like schools, hospitals,
churches, nurseries and mad houses-Sweetheart, come. Travel by air. From my
distance, I can still make out your brow when you're angry, distinguish your blue eyes,
sad. Eggflower, are you angry or sad? I am not forgetting you.
VII.
I ache for departure, and although they suggest I am unfit for travel, I have spent
the last few days flipping through catalogs of flight. Discount is everywhere. Tickets are
cheaper if you fly one way. If I pack my suitcase, will things make sense? Or, do I ache
for a new geography because your arrival requires wings and a flight number I do not
have. Most recent on the clothesline, I cannot decode your postcard. On the other side
of an unremarkable skyscraper, you write:
the sky opens me like the slit-wide marks of a sentence. rain changing meanings.
memory washed. i'm thinking your name in my mouth...
These letters form an abstraction-sky, slit, marks, sentence, rain, meanings,
memory and mouth. I've stenciled these words on a dirty canvas resurrected from deep
in my closet. It's hung on my blue wall where the calendar used to be. There is a noun
for each day of the week and one for the day you return.
VIII.
It's raining in Southern California. For three days: rain, mainly. Everyone says, "It's
about fucking time."
Because of the rain, flight paths have changed; the planes take off over my house.
I cannot count the incoming. My home is unbearable. I will get in my car and drive to the
incoming. I will wait for you in the tiny bar near United. I will order Bloody Marys in twos,
pay the extras dollars for the doubles, and tell the man or woman who brings them that
"I am waiting for Eggflower to land."
IX.
February. Hearts are everywhere and everyone is buying. It's expensive to be in
love.
I lose something each time I look at the sky, the ground, and the sea. For this
reason, I stay in my apartment with the shades closed to keep myself whole. I wear a
blue slip and your only pair of matching socks; they are red. Your angry brow and sad
eyes, I cannot picture. Your mouth is an anomaly. Listening to Holiday and Waits, I
reread your postcards, the latest from a city I can locate: Paris. They are in French. I
look up every word in my French-English dictionary. I am diligent; however, the words
narrate encyclopedic persons, places, and things. For this female, your distance is
becoming a desperation to construct meaning. What is the meaning of your distance? I
have filled the empty papyrus, meant for inventive mapmaking, with two words: your
and distance. I have eliminated the adjective your, the possessive form of you. In my
epistemology, I am left with only distance: the separation in space and time; the interval
separating any two specified instants in time, the degree of deviation or difference that
separates two things in a relationship; a point or area that is faraway.
Eggflower, you are becoming a beautiful word. Eggflower. Two words. Egg: a female
reproductive cell. Flower: A plant cultivated for its blossoms.
POETRY
facsimiled from
Inside English 32.2-3 (Winter/Spring 2005): 57-58.
© Sydney Brown
