How holy
Is this little universe Of 5:17 in the morning? these salty dregs of nighttime That belong only to The peculiar few? This Fraying tapestry of Blue silk, sweet coffee, And salted almonds That rips open, stretches wide In our funhouse mirror Of midnight, leftover. A bubble of the galaxy You hubba bubba blew, Popping only with that Petulant prod of dawn. The open window Paints the floor an inky indigo, And we go swimming before breakfast, Take an extra hour to Dive for oysters. I fill my cheeks with pearls this morning. Spit them out, one by one, Into your open palms. You toss them into the sky, The stars eat them in big gulps. Before dawn, the darkness is sweet And sticky - It drips down the walls like molasses, Gets in between my toes, Lathers itself in your hair, Curls around the purring cat. I dip a brush in the ocean licking our feet And paint the windows dark. Then you, swirling the morning hour Onto you belly, up you neck, over you eyelids. Then, I cover myself in morning, too, And we are lost to the blue.
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I am not a difficult woman to haunt.
I relish the company. in the misty evenings, when the cool blue night curls around my ankles, and the strange new light flickers like ghosts across my empty floor, i’ll invite those old ghosts into my bed. i’m easy, maybe, starved for fodder for my famished imagination - I can turn the most rotten fruits into poems. I have always believed in ghosts more than I have believed in death. everything has a certain staying power, and i’m known to return clothing to the consignment store, because someone else was still wearing it. and how can I talk about ghosts without talking about my father’s mother tongue? that flickers in the back of my throat, slithers from my mouth in a bad accent, a hissing snake of a country my children may never know. and how can I talk about ghosts without talking about trees? the way they shudder and sigh the life out of themselves every september? the way death has hanged from their gnarled grasp, the way they cast shade over even the driest, most brittle bones. believing in ghosts is a special kind of labor. it’s a certain practice of seeing everything In the almost-past tense (and the almost-present). I read somewhere that every photograph is a little death. we snap the shutter, write the poem, blink our eyes - and we etch the tombstone. le petit mort. sorry for killing the moment. the fluttering, palpitating rhythm that is me,
that tugs and pulls catches on a tune or a kind word and goes running with the wind? how many ways can I describe the way I feel in my fingers and the tips of my ears when you happen around? the pounding, shaking the floor i’m standing on, or a lightly lightly tapping metronome to the beat of your words? you’d think I’d be used to it by now - the marching band of drums that comes stomping, banging, blaring, as you float noiselessly through the room. I cannot sleep, so I imagine my mattress is a raft.
My hot and stiff apartment floats away, And I begin to bob and heave with the breathing sighs of the sea. My things, strewn about on what was once a floor Are caught in the waves, Fading in and out of view as blue crests and falls over the horizon. I watch my guitar float past, A humpback whale its willing courier. Peering into the depths, I find myself in good company, As turtles balance my books on their shells, Seahorses tug my jewelry through the current, And an octopus grasps each of my favorite dresses In its slippery tentacles. I do not ask my companions where we are going, Knowing full well their inclination toward mystery and intrigue. My new apartment and I float through the blue depths, Charted on a route we do not yet know. I lean back, let the mist spray my forehead. My fingers hang off the edge of the bed, And I paint gentle strokes through the water. You can rest, dear, I hear the whale whisper to me, when no one’s paying attention. We know where you’re headed. In this corner, I will build a paper castle.
Cut knights and kings out of construction paper and cardboard, Build a moat of duct tape, And barricade myself from the rest of the world. In this corner, I’ll rebuild. Let me apologize for the wars I unfairly won, Let me give back stolen farmland, Repent for my sins in this stagnant, empty palace. Allow me my odes, epithets, pleas -- Let me shout into this wind, it’s all I have. The curtains are billowing, a seashell white, An embroidered love letter -- They are full of ghosts with whom I am yet to make peace. My ghosts, I love you, I miss you, I owe you —-- These barricades, dears - they’re yours, they’re ours. let this be the site of their ruin. the mountain goats are a late-90s, early-2000s indie rock band led by John Darnielle responsible for such hits as “Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod” and “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton”. The are also pretty common wildlife to encounter when one ventures above treeline in the Rocky Mountains. A mountain goat skull is also probably my next tattoo — for some reason, the image of death in the wild west has been resonating with me these days.
I don’t quite know what it is about mountain goats that I love — from the surface, they are wholly uninteresting (as are so many interesting things). they nibble, unworried, at short grasses and lichen in the high alpine plains. they leave tufts of their soft white wool peppering white the green path, a sign that a more-than-human visitor has already trekked this well-trodden trail. their eyes are, well, goat-like — analyzing, interrogating, yet blank and reflective. maybe you see in the mountain goat what you want to see - or maybe that’s just my anthropormorphizing gaze. but i’m not one to overly-romanticize things. (ok, I am, but I’m working on it.) A mountain goat is just an animal - one that is born, eats, and dies in the hills. and so am I - so I suppose I feel kindred to them. we ramble, knobby-kneed and eager, over alpine boulders and meadows. we stare, blankly, into the woods, and sometimes it stares back. we’re vegan. we wear wool sweaters. pretty much, I took a hike today and met some pretty phenomenal mountain goats. and the mountain goats are a pretty phenomenal band. and it’s pretty cool to share a planet with something you don’t understand at all, but are sure that you love. There is something about slowness,
That I lack. I move fast, mostly unnecessarily, Hovering, flitting, distracted by every moving thing. The light glances off a flickering leaf, and I’m off - Sure that I’ve missed something important already. But moss - moss takes its time. It is anchored to the earth, but rootless, Effortlessly chill in its slow crawl, Holding the soil and the rocks together. Moss is small, and easy to ignore, Secretly and silently sucking carbon from our sky Faster than all of our trees combined. it took me one day to write this poem, and I’ve been kicking myself for taking too much time. Poems don’t last - (at least not as long as lichen). The patient breathing of the green things, snuggled into the shoulder of our planet, Crawling slowly, imperceptibly, They are a celebration of smallness, And the permanence of slowness. Good morning, I love you.
Statue, fossil, relic Of yesterday’s breezy heat, You landed here some time ago and decided to stay. Friend, I’m lonely, And you’re dead, But you’re great company. You’re still, and quiet, and I am fast and loud, Fluttering around, eyelids flapping, Lens snapping, Trying to capture us both in a shadowbox. I want to be a writer.
What the fuck is a writer? Are they a Chewed ballpoint pen, furiously scratching Rage and reason into a notebook? Are they a houseplant, still, barely breathing, As the world spins on by? I want to be a writer the way I want to sleep -- It’s good for my health. I am shy, and don’t need many friends, But I need people to talk to. Bold of me, of course, to assume the ether I am talking to Is a “people”. Terrifying too, To dwell too much on the reader. So, to the writer, we return. Self-indulgent prick they are, Puffing cigarette smoke, Cold mug of coffee at hand, Listening to some crap like pink floyd. Or else tranquil, in a forest, Patient enough to watch the grass grow. Perhaps I want to be remembered -- To carve myself into the geological epoch (the technological epoch) And be pressed like dried sage between the pages of Right Now. The Anthropocene makes Lascaux painters of all of us , I whisper, as I spray red dye Around the outline of my open palm against the cave wall. I was here, I promise. Let’s talk about freedom. Let’s talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let’s talk about the right to breathe. The words I keep landing on are naive, ignorant - selfish, perhaps - self-indulgent, indeed, to tell oneself that July 4, 1776, was a day that signified freedom for all Americans.
I think of all the ways this does not apply, even to me. I am a woman, and white women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. Women of color, decades later. I am a mixed race woman, and the landmark Loving V. Virginia case that allowed couples of different races to marry in our country wasn’t passed until 1967. I am a bisexual woman, and the right to love who you choose without threat or hatred is still contested in this, our free nation. And that’s just me - a white-passing, cisgender American citizen. I have the right to vote - thousands of immigrants, felons, and the victims of voter suppression do not have that same right. What does it mean to celebrate the 4th of July when children are in cages, black men and women are murdered in the streets and in their own homes by the people who are supposed to protect us, and our president is attempting to launch a culture war in the midst of a pandemic? What does it mean to celebrate independence when gathering to celebrate would sacrifice thousands of Americans (most of them BIPOC) to a virus that we still do not know how to combat? What does it mean to call freedom the right not to wear a mask, not the right to not be shot in your own bed? I don’t hate America. I still believe that this is a county that could represent the best hope of what a nation could be. I watched Hamilton last night with my family, and the story still warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart. A nation founded by immigrants, against tyranny and oppression, in which we have the chance to build equal opportunity for all, take care of one another, and have a say in how we are governed. But I can’t help but think how much my understanding of America has changed since 2015, when I first listened to the soundtrack. I can’t help but think of the ways in which we still have not achieved those goals. We had a different president back then. I was complacent back then - I wasn’t paying attention to the atrocities committed by our governments and institutions of power against vulnerable Americans. And then, the atrocities seemed to get a lot worse (or I started to notice them more). I’m going to celebrate the 4th of July today by doing the long, arduous work of relearning the definitions of freedom and liberty that I have been taught. One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all - I don’t believe any part of that statement to be true anymore. We are many nations - Indigenous, immigrant, and interlocking, and to ignore the different ways we define this land is to be deliberately blind to any versions of America that are not born out of settler-imperialism. We are under many gods, and we are far from achieving liberty and justice for all. I’m not entirely sure I have a concrete idea of what justice should be. It is the 4th of July, and America is not yet free. |
journal entriessome poems, some prose, some in-between Archives
October 2020
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