Jennifer Parkhill

Jennifer Parkhill Instagram – On a Wednesday morning, I’m cleaning an Airbnb for cash.
Texas is hot. Severe heat warnings hot. Film work is slow. The thought of a 12 hour day in 110 degree heat is unthinkable.
I’m cleaning for cash.
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In this lull, I find myself with coveted time to write. Yet here I am. With time. And mostly I sweat and stare at walls.
Too much to say. Nothing to say. I sit at my desk.
Nothing.
Except now. Except here where I am supposed to be cleaning.
I stop the vacuum to write this down.
Perhaps my art is derived from having to squeeze it in on the sidelines. The only flow I’ve ever known. I’ve been writing into my phone in bathroom stalls while on the job for as long as I’ve been grown.
Maybe I don’t know what to do with time except rest. Maybe that’s what’s needed.
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I’m looking at my phone, at a picture taken from space. Bolts of light across my screen, all containing different galaxies. I am struck by how delightfully tiny we are.
Our world is burning. Flames of grief and rage. Our sweet dying planet. It’s bickering people.
We haven’t slept right since Roe v. Wade.
I can’t bring myself to put on clothes, tape an audition for “officer number four” or a character only referred to as “mom”.
I’ll be paying off the school loans that bought my BFA until I’m dead. Smiling and holding my hands up to the camera to make sure they are fit to hold a can of hard kombucha in a close up is not the acting career I’d imagined when I was studying Shakespeare. No hard feelings. I’d rather clean a house than be a prop that sells one more thing we don’t need.
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I pray I am finished allowing the industry to determine my personal and artistic worth.
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$100. I take the dog with me to condo to the start the laundry, change the sheets. I sing a song about how it’s “take your pup to work day”. I’m stripping a bed. She’s bored. She’d rather I was throwing a ball. I tell her, “I gotta pay the bills — you’re a dog so you don’t know about that.” A sigh. She lays down.
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(Cont —>)
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📷@adamcolemandp
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Filmmaker mentioned: @dayday.studio
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#wordporn #poetry #poet #poetsofinstagram #poems #poemsofig #writtenword #written #writing #writingcommunity #queer  #queerwriters | Posted on 16/Jul/2022 05:12:17