Everything Needs Fixing
a writing prompt for you
Welcome to Writing in Company. A special welcome to new members from my new town/church community just finding me here, and wondering: what is this?
This is a writing community where you are welcome whatever your experience (or not) with writing. It’s my own writing outlet where I play with words and ideas and hope you’ll do the same. It’s a grand experiment in following a new call to ministry, inviting you to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points to write about what matters to you. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.
Wondering why writing matters to me, and why I hope you’ll write, too? You can learn some of the background in this post from 2021.
Week two in our new place. Some of the boxes are unpacked. Books are lining up on shelves. Dishes are stacked in the kitchen. The internet guy is outside right now burying some kind of cable. I found the salad bowl, fixed my closet door, and added another bruise to my leg from pushing things around.
I always forget how much work goes into a move. You need patience with yourself, your partner, and your anxious dog. You also need tools, tape, trashcans, a plan for recycling, and painkillers. Things won’t fit like they did in the last place you lived. You won’t fit like you did in your last community, at least not at first. You have to balance the outlay of physical labor needed with whatever it takes to buoy your emotional reserves so you can meet new people with the kind of grace you try to carry, and would express, if only you weren’t so worn out.
Still, I keep unpacking and sorting and jiggling and moving lamps around while my spouse goes to work and I kick my writing contracts further down the to-do list. The promise of a home, a routine, a linen closet, a life put to rights—a new space of possibility—is both energizing and elusive.
This wellspring of labor, physical and emotional, is a reliable distraction from the news, where it also seems like we’ve all drifted into a new space where nothing lines up, stuff that matters to us has gone missing, and everything needs fixing all at once.
That impulse to want to fix what is broken and turn chaos into order, even as it seems impossible, reminds me of a poem by Karla Cordero. She said this about it:
“At the beginning of the pandemic, the concept of aging and death became a haunting obsession. With an attempt to regain control during a world crisis, I began fixing every crack and bruise around the house with a hope to expand the longevity of these items. This poem gave me the opportunity to reflect on the kinds of living material within my life and how there is a limitation to my fixing, realizing how we must marvel at the magic and evolving beauty of aging. This poem led me to think about the kinds of repairs I made in my life as a child and a father still finding purpose in the fractured and imperfect. I began to think about the biblical story of Noah, sent by God to repair a fractured world and how there is still beauty to be found in the outcome of chaos.”1
—Karla Cordero
a writing prompt
Use the poem as your writing prompt. Find a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, and start there. Then let yourself keep writing, and see what happens on the page.
Everything Needs Fixing
—by Karla Cordera
in your thirties everything needs fixing. i bought a toolbox for this. filled it with equipment my father once owned to keep our home from crumbling. i purchased tools with names & functions unknown to me. how they sat there on their shelf in plastic packaging with price tags screaming: hey lady, you need this! like one day i could give my home & everything living inside it the gift of immortality, to be a historical monument the neighbors would line up to visit even after i’m gone & shout: damn that’s a nice house! i own a drill now, with hundreds & hundreds of metal pieces i probably won’t use or use in the wrong ways but what i’m certain of, is still, the uncertainty of which tools repair the aging dog, the wilting snake plant, the crow’s feet under my eyes, the stiff knee or bad back. & maybe this is how it is—how parts of our small universe dissolve like sugar cubes in water—a calling to ask us to slow our busy breathing so we can marvel at its magic. because even the best box of nails are capable of rust. because when i was a child i dropped a cookie jar in the shape of noah’s ark, a family heirloom that shattered to pieces. the animals broke free, zebras ran under the kitchen table, the fractured lion roared by the front door & out of the tool cabinet i snagged duck tape & ceramic glue. pieced each beast back to their intended journey. because that afternoon when my father returned from work i confessed & he sat the jar on the counter only to fill it with pastries. how the cracks of imperfection mended by my hands laid jagged. chipped paint sliced across a rhino’s neck. every wild animal lined up against the boat— & a flood of sweet confections waiting inside.
Copyright © 2021 by Karla Cordero. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 6, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
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What an evocative poem...eager to see where the writing takes me. May the bruises be small and few in number as the settling-in continues, Julie, and may you find "home" in yourself amidst the boxes and drawers and details.