Rather than transcribing lived experience directly, I choose to make strange the almost-familiar. Why? Because we also need the ineffable.
The colors on the walls are a soundtrack. I move into each room and I am in a different song and another scene is possible. In the apartment I am moving to, I will not play music loud and I will not paint the walls. I will live in a space unsuited to my vibrations.
The azaleas here are shriveled and scattered through the grass, the rhododendrons and peonies lording their pinks. I never knew flower names. The frilly words seemed pseudonyms--chosen for professions of which old-fashioned girls were ashamed: actor, stripper, novelist.
…color can exercise enormous influence over the body as a physical organism. -Kandinsky
Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory. -Josef Albers
No child can understand why dandelion is a weed.
In the rosebush beside the sidedoor, a robin is making a space for a family.
I need yoga, I need ballet, I need mindful walks, I need time each day to calibrate my somatic being with the part of me that feels it exists from head-up and wrist-down.
I am riveted by a book whose only plot so far as I can tell is apocalypse…
I want yesterday
to revisit itself
and ask the important questions.
…This is how your virginity
is taken from you. You get too hungry and then
you kill…
Does anyone wait well? Is this a skill one can learn… because with endless practice, I have not mastered it.
Marathon March Madness. Pisces Poems. Dreamy.
I do hope I become soon brave
enough to husband my twins, monstering
a poet-agonist such as the world
has never read…
It’s all you can do. The world is always
behind you, the catastrophe of time…
- Gregory Crosby
I wanted to get through to the bloody heart of the book, even if I had to dig with a chewed-up plastic spoon…
Why is it wrong to write from the head?
If my skull is sanctum—my skill to withdraw
when the world is too much without, is my flaw
that I’ve shied or my chosen part?
I have been swinging between poles of gratitude and forlorn-ness. What a strange word, old-fashioned, and yet forlorn with its rhyme with torn and lostness is the word that comes to mind. Little Bo Peep was forlorn. America is her.
I stay between get and grief. Radiance
is a dream I had of light. Even now
the days are shaving themselves down, thinner
and thinner, a prepubescent autumn…
I am hoping I can deliver this monster without killing the mother.
before today was yesterday and yesterday was good. tomorrow could be excellent. today there is cabbage soup and a box of holiday to toss around the house like eyelash thread instead of tinsel.
