Today’s a day the rain keeps going, light gray
and good to read an hour longer than I promised
who? Myself, or something. The manager in my mind
who wants me to stop any inefficiencies. I’ve gotten
better at throwing out pens run dry, and I don’t go
on second dates, and I fill my pink water bottle
again and again, float the liquid with lime. I’m tired
of hearing how hard rejection is when I’ve made it
a practice. If there’s no no, there’s no risk. If there’s
no risk, there’s no life. Okay, that’s the manger,
no philosophy on a Monday. Sit on your cushion.
Write. But remember when the self-employed
were covered that year? Remember the shape
of our lives. Imagine two bowls of food on the floor
a day, a bowl of water, yards to roam. Wouldn’t that be
enough of a good life? We could sit together and just be
out in the sun until there was no sun. The lives unequal
are also the lives that can’t conform. What did I say
about Mondays? Make work. Make good work.
Last week, I met my students at the Henry Street Settlement community garden where we tasted mint, lettuce, basil, and other plants just weeks away from full bloom.
We pressed flowers discarded from the Macy’s flower show between watercolor paper with hammers.
One of my students, through laughter, said, “I don’t feel like a college student!”
When our papers were ready, we wrote.
Then, shared our poems.
I watch the fish float my screen
pretend I am underwater
and then realize I am not
pretending I am underwater
I am watching their scales
with two fans going
I clean the air, I smell
as close to odorless as possible
The market today under Manhattan bridge
was filled with tubs of live crabs
I was less sad than I have been
passing their claws reaching
Sometimes I don’t notice my changes
when habit becomes who I am
lately all I am are habits carefully chosen
to be the version of giving I think is right
Fish are like this, I imagine
a large body in one direction
sometimes I forget the thousands
who live inside of me
Just this, from Berry’s Tbe Unsettling of America: “The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as ‘the environment’ — that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding—dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought—that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other. Because by definition they lack any such sense of mutuality or wholeness, our specializations subsist on conflict with one another. The rule is never to cooperate, but rather to follow one’s own interest as far as possible. Checks and balances are all applied externally, by opposition, never by self-restraint. Labor, management, the military, the government, etc., never forbear until their excesses arouse enough opposition to force them to do so. The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.”
I didn’t want to know
how they used their thick
gelled bodies, the meat a stale
marshmallow, which isn’t much
better with its ground hooves and—
what I want is the nibbling
of seaweed floating through a lake
to know their nest is built in earth’s belly
the dirt of a swamp, a sand soaked
home for the smallest winged
swimmer I’ve ever seen. To learn the
millionaires decide them cute enough
to order toys to be made in their image:
shells of blocks and musical eyes. How
I like to imagine even the toughest man,
suited up for the bottom dollar, thought
it necessary for a creature to be
commemorable
before sinking his
umbrella into a shore, watching
his belly-first child crawl for the sea.
Today I spent time creating using different dimensions, layers, and forms after making a gift using a recycled bottle and flower pot.
The smaller pot was home to a few plants that ultimately could not thrive in the container, and so I decided to take the hint and create from the material…something else. Maybe not what was expected for its original design. I was reminded of this lesson when I began creating an accordion book, and as the space I had to create changed the length of the canvas, I thought of water. This transformation to, from, and beyond container is something water demonstrates.
I was lucky to grow up on a river and to see a body of water in motion each day. We lived at the bottom of a hill and I didn’t always recognize at the time that I knew I was close to home when I could smell and hear the waves. As an adult, I notice this more and more.
I think this why I’ll walk miles wherever I am to find the water, to go there when I can’t hear my internal answers. In Michigan, I’d trudge to the Huron. Philly, the Delaware. The summer I spent in a landlocked part of LA, I took the train to get to the Pacific or swam at the outdoor pool available at the university gym. Whenever I visit a friend and they ask me what I’d like to do I say: Let’s go for a walk by the water, not always knowing for them what means, only trusting they have their own version to offer.
Now I live close to the East River, and I love to sit there a few times a week. As I approach, I pass underneath the two bridges, traffic drowning out whatever’s playing through my headphones; a reminder to listen. I take them off, and let them rest along my neck, a habit that recently had me referred to as “headphone lady” by someone seeking directions.
A year ago, I was talking to a playwright with whom I’d exchanged work. We were giving each other notes and she shared with me a theory she’d learned about structure, waves structure, as opposed to the traditional three act structure. “It’s mapped with the way the female body orgasms as opposed to a male’s,” and we laughed at the not so subtly hidden singular, spectacular “climax” that occurs near the end of the film (because it’s over, right?? get out of your chairs, throw away the unfinished popcorn, just a few moments left until we wrap up) and began to think about how other stories are structured, especially short stories and poems, and which ones find the most resistance to being “good” or “right,” how much the experience of pleasure dictates the taste over what is worthy. To an extent this is good: don’t let others tell you what you find pleasurable! But how much have we examined our possibilities for pleasure and the way that pleasure creates a hierarchy of correctness? I think the knowledge of connecting cycles of the body to cycles in story and creativity is important, that impulse to be so direct as to call a story piece a climax, but I wondered what it would look like for a form like waves structure to take over. Or to be considered with more rigor, more attention, as a formal choice rather than an accident to be cured.
chinatown, nyc, 2022
foley square, nyc, 2022
Today I am re-reading Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf. The past month I kept hearing his line: “just say yes and step into the consequence” as I went about my days. I knew I had to return to the collection, which I first discovered in graduate school and then re-read around this time last year. The collection contains themes of addiction, revelation, and identity, so the idea of desire becomes complicated in the text. Dangerous—life ending, but the idea of what life is ending, more so a metaphysical death, emerges between the speaker’s dance with darker impulses and narratives they’ve received about themselves. Re-reading the poem, I was reminded of the lines that come before the one I’d been whispering to myself: “it’s / lovely / because it’s simple.” I imagine this an instruction, a way to measure what that leap towards a consequence signals—the simpleness of desire, and the loveliness of that desire, and for desire to be enough of a reason to jump.
I’m reading Rachelle Toarmino’s “Flowers, Poems, Flower Poems” today. She writes:
“There are things / women know how to do. Clipped and caged and I think / that’s beautiful. What could be more feminine / than dying a slow death and another creature calling it / beautiful. A hymn for every howl. It's crazy / when you think about it. Whatever you call it / it’s the one thing that brings me back into myself, / dancing naked in the mirror and making faces in the glass. / I only ever wanted to make you feel my feeling.”
The lines dance perfectly between elegy and ode—and reflect so much of what it is to love, to want, to transform, and to hold mourning alongside beauty. The divine feminine is alive in her lines along with a critique in the ways we yield it, but also the possibilities for reawakening and harnessing the energy at a moment’s notice.
journal, ny, 2021
seaport, nyc, 2022
hudson river, ny, 2009