Writing – Kelly Yandell

Showmen’s Rest and Bull Riders Reprieve

Short Story: I belong to a writers group and we took a road trip to Hugo, Oklahoma to visit the Mount Olivet Cemetery where there is a special section dedicated to honoring the lives of circus owners, performers and workers. Hugo was the winter home of several circuses and there is still an elephant sanctuary nearby. I wrote the following poem for fun before we went, knowing nothing of the place. It is a fictional imagining. The actual plot was extremely touching to me. The sense of family and community was lovely and the personalized markers leave one feeling that they knew a bit about the subterranean tenant. So when you get to the bit where I imagine them in a better place than Hugo, Oklahoma, I now stand corrected. When I told my daughter about the visit, she remarked, “Just think, they all lived their lives just to make people happy.” So true. The markers tell the tale so well.

A Walk

This is about a walk. It is an aimless verbal wander about a semi-aimless hike along the Red River. I’m remembering it and I’m going through the trees again now. It is present and past. I am 53 now. I think. He is 55. For a moment in the year we are two years apart, in the way of bad mathematics. In another month, we’ll only be a year apart. Do you understand? People with siblings understand that math. We are 18 months apart, my brother and I. He lives on the other side of the river, north. Oklahoma to my Texas. We meet at the river sometimes.

In the time of our youth we’d have been drinking beer for this. I’d probably have started a beautiful ranch day like this with a breakfast beer. It sounds awful in retrospect but I remember them fondly and when you’ve got a day of no responsibility, and you are disappeared from the world, why not? Looking back, some of our most fun walks in the woods involved beer, or something or another. Yes guns. No cameras. No phones back then to tote about. Less sense to tote about then too. But it was a hell of a lot of fun. That was a different part of our life river. It almost seems imaginary on most days.

Would You Fly?

Would you trade wisdom to fly?
Would you put down reason
To soar to the heights?
Would you leave the words and ground behind
If you could take wing a leap for the sky?

Would you drop your moral compass
To take to the ocean?
With whales and sharks and learn the music of motion
Of tides and currents, instead of weary devotion
To things and manifestations of human emotion?

(Or not)

By Kelly Yandell

Homemade yogurt is the epitome of simplicity in the kitchen. All you need is milk, and a culture.

(This is certainly true compared to, say, performing a triple bypass surgery. After hours of research online and several failed attempts with different varieties of culture I settled on a “traditional” type of yogurt starter. Here you will also like to know the difference between thermophilic and mesophilic. You will also want to consider whether to purchase an heirloom culture which can allegedly be used forever, provided you keep making yogurt with regularity, or a non-heirloom which is a one or two use affair. I opted for the non-heirloom after several attempts with heirlooms which seemed to have a personal grudge against me, my family and my kitchen, and refused to become anything but grainy milk. I admit that this was a personal failing and had nothing to do with the product or the culture of culturing. Not every being will thrive in my home. Now that I’m an addict, I will be a customer of the freeze dried culture company forever. Regardless, at this point you will need one All-Clad saucepan, one Le Creuset small Dutch oven filled with ice for cooling the milk, a digital thermometer, a stainless steel All-Clad stirring spoon.)

Learning to.

Softer
More Vulnerable
No Armor
No Shell

May immense suffering
Rip your heart open
Not cause it to close

May it open you and soften you
To feel each moment of beauty in its moment
And love deeply and abundantly

May you see and work on your own path
And not mistake another’s path as your own
Though they run in the same direction

May you love and counsel
But not interfere

May you warmly offer wisdom
Without trying to control

May you offer knowledge
Without taking over the challenge
And depriving your friend of their opportunity to learn
Even if in doing so they may fail

May you receive counsel without
Feeling controlled or judged

May pain be your guide and teacher
May you see pain as such and not as your enemy

May you pass through suffering swiftly
But not so swiftly that you don’t see the lesson

May you recognize all of your teachers
And be compassionate to your students

May you feel deeply without being hurt
When you are hurt may you not heal completely
But increase your capacity for compassion

May your scars remind you of love

Kinder
More open
Still
Alive

This poem, prayer, meditation, or prose…whatever it is…was the result of a writing session when I was trying to make sense of the anxiety of being a mother of two college children on opposite coasts, to whom I am very attached and who were arguably over-parented. Also, I was cataloguing some of my hopes for myself and them, in no particular order. My contemplation is rather non-theistic these days as I try to take responsibility for that which I am able to control and let go of the things I cannot control, as well as the things I should not control. Being a parent is such a training ground. Being human is such a training ground. I hope that if you are reading this, that it finds you well and open to the challenges of the day.

Someone Has To

Someone has to love them.
Why must it always be me?
Why do I love the ones
With all the ticks and fleas?

I’ll take the ramblers and drunkards,
The tired, the sick, the lonely.
One like a malnourished street dog,
All surly and bony.

The broken, the beaten
The hated and cursed.
Downtrodden, dishonest,
The god awful worst.

Light Through A Lens

Hello all!

The opening of Light Through a Lens at the Davis & Blevins Gallery is March 2, 2024. It is a group show with my work as well as work by Dave Shafer, Emily McCartney Eiguren, Debra Fox, Tim Newton, Katie Sickles Rust, Craig Nadziejka and Willetta Crowe. This is the gallery and studio of Cowgirl Hall of Fame Inductee and noted western artist Donna Howell-Sickles. She has been a true patron of western photographers and has put on a yearly show for quite awhile now. I owe her a debt of gratitude for giving us such a fantastic opportunity to show our work.

Pretending At Death

Bette stood, balanced over the water, hanging forward precariously from the rail on the bridge. It was velvet black all around save for a shaft of moonlight that invited her and pulled her down. It seemed to say, “I guide the tides, I can show you where to enter.” The water rippled slightly below, and she imagined the tinkling sound of distant wind chimes coming from the tiny waves below. The moonlight decorating one side of each small undulation mesmerized her. She drew comfort from the friendship of the moon and its cool hand accompanying her to this place and adorning the water below.

She took a final moment to appreciate her strong body. She hadn’t realized that her body was strong and that it had will. She had only ever thought of herself as being blown about by circumstance. Her arms were taut, pulled behind her and holding her out at an angle over the water far below her. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right and she felt a power in the starless sky where the moon and the water were the only beings outside of herself, the only bodies that mattered other than her and they were calling her home.

She felt the grip of her hands one last time. She appreciated them for letting her have this moment, this pause, this last view from above. She relaxed her hands. She let go. She said, “I’m coming,” as though she was joining a lover for dinner but had been running a few, unavoidable, minutes late. The cool air rushed up against her face, or rather she thought, she was rushing through the cool air. And then she wasn’t any longer. Her shell was cracked and beaten on the rocks below, but it didn’t matter anymore.

Of This Place

I wasn’t made from the rib of a man
I was fashioned from a potent mixture
Of Gun Powder
And the Seeds of Bluebonnets
Bound together with the Sap of Mesquite Trees

I didn’t crack forth from the skull of a god
I was born in an Oyster Shell in Galveston Bay
And adorned with Pearls on my Birthday

I’m the Feral Daughter of the
First Twilight Star and the Bobcat.
The Child of a Blue Norther
That picked up the Red Dirt and carried
It to the rich
Soil south

An Imagined Conversation

Her

All those goddamned songs. All of them. Brandy was a fine girl. Do you remember that son of a bitch who went to Boston for the springtime and kept on going? Yeah, I was gentle on your mind. Sitting here watching the dust settle after you had imprinted me on your brain like a well worn postcard, something to look at now and again. To remind you of the kind of woman who made no demands on you, while you lay next to the ones who did. Do you think I’m supposed to feel bad for Bessie or Big Momma? I can’t decide which. Maybe neither of them wanted him around all that much.

Him

I was no good for you. I let you go. Set you free. Set us both free. Set us all free of who I would become if I stayed. You didn’t try to stop me. You just stood out on that porch and watched me drive off. I remember the dead expression, and the white dress with yellow flowers. Bare feet and wayward brown hair. But your eyes. Good Lord, you could put a chill on a hundred degree day.

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