#153: Pillow Poems + The Alipore Post Merch Store + A Recipe Postcard Exchange

Hello!

How are you? Have you started visiting your neighborhood parks? Are you eating enough mangoes while they’re in season? Summer seems to be slipping by and my light sweaters are already out. I've been spending my days watching squirrels play in the park, discovering rusty old globes, writing postcards and journaling. 

I recently came across the concept of pandemic post-mortems on Katie Hawkins-Gaar's newsletter My Sweet Dumb Brain. Essentially, the post-mortem is a team gathering held at the end of a project that gives everyone an opportunity to discuss wins, losses, and lessons by answering three questions:

-What worked well?
-What could have been better?
-What would we do differently next time?

As someone who largely works alone apart from the occasional collaboration, I miss having like minded people to brainstorm or conduct 'post-mortems' with. So I decided to try out this evaluation exercise in my journal for my personal and professional life. It’s already been leading me to some fascinating discoveries about myself and my approach to people and problems. I highly recommend you try it.

The re-evaluation of my life’s priorities pushed me to finally pursue a lifelong dream: to start my own merchandise store!  *happy dance*

Cloud Doodle postcards in my new merch store

I’ve made postcards, stickers, badges and calendars so far and will keep adding more designs soon. I can’t wait for you all to see it here.

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Poetry Corner

Art by Eric Zener

I've been spending a lot of time in bed recently, and felt an urge to look up poems on pillows and sleep. Here are a few that I enjoyed reading:

1. Recalibrating by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
   
   I would like to go inside your pillow, hear
   your breath and know you are okay, catch
   the tears you cry when no one else is looking.
   Today, you told me you don’t want to be held,
   but I still want to hold you—want to meet you
   with gentleness, support. How many years
   have I been the one to comfort you, the one
   you would run to, the one who could make
   things feel better with a kiss and a shhh
   and slow rocking of our bodies.
   A pillow wouldn’t take it personally
   if you didn’t use it. A pillow wouldn’t wonder
   what it did wrong or wrestle with letting you go.
   I try to invite that softness into myself,
   try to transform my woundedness into feathery
   acceptance. There is some unlikely magic in this—
   a downy inner quiet that doesn’t try to fix anything,
   that is content with being soft. And nothing changes,
   and everything changes, oh terrible surrender,
   oh beautiful tenderness that appears inside this loss.
   

2. I Was Mean to You Today by Pat Schneider

   Things were difficult
   and I was impatient.
   You were trying to explain
   why I must reorganize the files
   on my computer, why
   they all have to have project numbers,
   why I can't put them
   where they've always been,
   what the tax consultant said,
   what you need for your report
   to the Board of Directors,
   and it boiled down to my files
   have to be re-filed, and they
   have to have titles with no more
   than twelve letters to leave room
   for project numbers,
   and I said, Well, dammit.
   And you said, Don't talk like that.
   
   You sounded pained
   and I was mean to you.
   I was bored and tired
   and mad, and you were
   trying hard. Later,
   I went out in the rain.
   I went to the mall
   and bought us both really
   expensive pillows. Down
   pillows with 100 per cent
   cotton covers, 400 thread count.
   I have lusted after them for years,
   ever since Mama told me
   that she asked Grandma,
   who was 86 and dying,
   "If you could have anything
   in the world, what would it be?"
   and Grandma answered,
   "A down pillow" and Mama
   didn't have enough money.
   I bought two down pillows for us all,
   to say I'm sorry.

3. Mourning by Margarita Cruz

   5 AM—the world is silent save for the heater
   in the hallway, the cars wooshing
   down the main road, the vibrato of
   every single driver. Every creak of a settling
   house. Lay my head down, press it into pillow.
   On the window sill a jar of coins,
   sunlight crawling through the
   water in an empty spaghetti jar.
   A spider settles itself into the warmth
   of my house. Inside the body: ghosts
   of IVs, needles, feeling
   breathless in a hospital bed.
   Somewhere inside my brain aware
   of the machine pumping oxygen,
   beeping, attached by wires to the chest.
   In the chest, an animal. The animal
   forgetting how: to howl, to crawl,
   to find the words.

4. Adhesives, for Earlene by Robert Hass (excerpt)

   "How often we overslept
   those grey enormous mornings
   in the first year of marriage
   and found that wind and rain
   had scattered palm nuts,
   palm leaves, and sweet rotting crabapples
   across our wildered lawn."
   
   (I found this poem in an extensive interview with Hass in the Paris Review archives. The poet captures the sentiment of growing with poetry and the 'vocabulary of sounds' so well: "In some way, your whole imaginative vocabulary of sounds is already buried in you by the time you’re nineteen or twenty years old and you’re just following these little paths through the summer grasses that other people have walked." -Robert Hass)

5. Breakfast With Bonnie by Jennifer Matthews

   Wake to small footed pyjamas,
   small footed minutes and the thick
   second hand tock insists, insists
   I wait on my pile of pillows.
   
   The burbley percolator pre-set to hiss,
   fat seizing on bacon. For now,
   the kitchen is ticking over without you.
   
   In some other room, your spiky rollers,
   your economical lips. I know you
   by your starched robe, its bleached
   blue. I know the scuff of your thin
   white house shoes. Every fixture
   
   in this place either clicks or spits,
   not at me, but for me. Soon
   my breakfast. Soon your cigarettes. 

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Recommended Listening:

• Cornelia and Jane -Yo La Tengo

• Homesick Sounds

• Jerome Robbins' The Mistake Waltz Concert

• Violin Tsunami - Kishi Bashi

• Love Will Tear Us Apart - Sanoli Chowdhury (Joy Division cover)

• Recovering from People Pleasing + Tiny Meditations by Johannah Bogart

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Links of the Week:

• Animation Obsessive, a weekly newsletter devoted to animation from around the world. Loved their latest edition on the Very First 'Madeline' Cartoon.
  

• Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times
  

• Can't wait to watch this: Who Are You, Charlie Brown?
  

• Lose The Very (Love this!)
  

• Plant Guides (The plant mother in me is delighted with this find)
  

• Rediscovering the Joy of Drawing During the Pandemic
  

• When I Confronted My Molester (Trigger warning)
  

• Esther Perel on The Value of Letter Writing (In case you'd like a penpal, do sign up for our side-project Chitthi Exchange here.)
  

• Gentle Monsters, a digital exhibition by Nisshtha Khattar and Angad Berar that enables the viewer to relate to the artists' own journey of discovering and confronting their monsters and in transforming them into something gentle.
  

• We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks, a poem told with paper-cut puppetry

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Recipe Postcard Exchange: Nivaala x The Alipore Post

Nivaala and The Alipore Post have been cooking up something good. We bring you the ultimate recipe exchange! 💌

What?
Personalised handwritten recipe postcards, mailed for you

Why?
There is something magical about a handwritten letter. Nothing beats the thrill of opening the mailbox and finding a letter, written and addressed just for you. This is why we have launched this highly personalised campaign to inspire people to share their family recipes. After all, sharing food is a form of love in itself. And since we can’t share food, we might as well share our favourite family recipe.

via

Steps:
1. Share your recipe
Order your postcard here and tell us your favorite family recipe.

2. Tell us the recipient
Send us the name and address of the lucky person you’re sending the recipe to.

3. Wait for the magic
We’ll handwrite your recipe on the postcard, affix the stamps and drop it off at the post office.

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This is my newsletter: Michelle D'costa

Today’s guest for This is my newsletter is Michelle D'costa, Managing Editor at Bound. In her takeover, Michelle talks about beating writer’s block + how writing contests, movement and listening to 90s Bollywood songs help her get out of rut + some great resources for writers looking to publish their work.

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I’ll keep this newsletter shorter than usual and go make myself this roasted tomato arugula mozzarella salad.

In the meantime, here’s some parting wisdom from Courtney Martin:

The ground will keep shifting, even if you build a monument to your own safety atop it. The chest will keep rising and falling, until it doesn’t, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. The only thing to do is keep welcoming the beautiful unknown, however terrifying. Burn the old plans. Keep loving and questioning. As Parker Palmer wrote: “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

Here’s to making sense of this mysterious journey called life,
Rohini

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