Posts for June 4, 2023 (page 3)

I try not to let

the lens of

depression

darken

all my past

good days.

Still,

last summer

feels like

some impossible dream

now.

A week in LA

as myself,

shopping,

having my make-up done,

attending the world premiere

of a trans musical

I helped fund.

A week in Detroit

as myself

with my partner,

being female

24/7,

meeting other trans girls,

making friends,

dancing,

living my joy.

Transitioning felt

inevitable

then.

Now it feels

dangerous

and forever away,

the first steps still

years and years

into the future,

more a question mark

than a certainty.

They say no one can take from you

the dances you’ve already danced.

I just wish I could remember the music.

impatient drivers light cigarettes
and try to find the words for a prayer
the limestone cliffs look on
with the morning sun creeping
up over their grey shoulders

Round and round 
a question of morality, 
or mortality.
Never ending rhyme,
with too many faces,
facets to articulate.
You spin
get sick, feverish, 
but feel without blood.
Face pale, 
skin red and scarred.
You don’t know
what you feel anymore.
Or if you were ever supposed to. 

Memories can become immortalized in words – 
Or forgotten altogether.
People and their marks can become ink etched onto paper – 
Or they’ll only ever be a ripple, soon quelled by the water’s stillness.

draw one in the dirt, and dare
follow others on your way home
stencil with charcoal, to
craft delicate portraits 
check them out in the mirror
demarcate colors of glass, the
outlines of our outlooks
lay them cross country for cargo
string in pairs to pluck, set
upright for binding attackers 
offer verbally on stage, to
remind us of pasts repeated
draw once more in the sand, we
cry for peace
to lay down arms, and
yearn for the day we
won’t have to
draw again

Today, I caught competing
levels of the food chain sharing quiet communion
just beyond my church’s peeling walls.
A hawk, a crow, and a robin
perched atop burgeoning branches of the same budding
tree, their reflection no less pensive 
for lack of wafer and wine.
They bathed in the sweet hymn of rumbling engines and rustling
leaves, serene, 
unbothered by irrelevant labels like predator and prey.

I watched as the hawk swooped
from the branch, bespeckled feathers brilliant
in fledgling afternoon light, its flight gentle as a whispered prayer
that we could spurn our prejudices as easily as birds on a bough.

I want to be remembered as kind.
The girl that picked up pens.

Prideful, yes
self-centered, at times

but a compliment
a few words

a dandelion pressed to lips
wishing you peace.

Perhaps it isn’t nice
to eulogize yourself,

but will I find favor
in the eyes of the mourning?

Beautiful, if you say so.
Funny, she hopes you liked her jokes.

But when you don’t remember the way my hair curled
or how my voice got higher when I didn’t want to admit I’d done wrong

I hope you remember
the jacket, the birthday presents, the books, the hugs, the notes, the apologies.

I hope you remember
what was important to me.

It’s almost time for the screaming

They lie dormant in the ground
Sleeping
When the time comes
They emerge
In triumph

To wail in the trees

And fuck

How sweet and simple the delicious life of a cicada must be
Bursting through all at once into the sticky heat of high summer

Home of sun tea
Shucked beans
And ripening green tomatoes on a chipped window sill
Flung open to catch the dampened breeze

Can you hear the screaming?
It’s almost time. 

It’s like lightning
A hot tingle on my fingertips
The sweet cut of ozone in my nose
The creeping tension of hairs raising 
A blaze of molten white on the horizon
And the rumble in the dark
The earth vibrating to meet it

(Note: I know this is too prosaic, but I’m too upset to make this into a decent poem so soon)

They’re gone. Just the other day, we saw 
the workers clustered around the mouth
of the hive, noted the industrious zip

in and out that heralds spring foraging. 
I’d come to assume the hum from this one hive
would continue on, as it has stayed alive

over five years. All sprung from the wild 
swarm my husband strong-armed from a friend’s tree.
Before. Before. The sweetness these bees bestowed 

as they reemerged each spring, surviving five fingers 
worth of winter, ushering us through the deaths 
of my father and nephew, returning even as our sons

left home. Winged metaphors for caretakers
and family, inspiring peace as I witnessed how 
these creatures let go of their dead, undertaker

bees placing the lifeless outside of their home.
That we all might see what was once a body
in vibration lacks its essence at the end. Still.

Still. I miss these bees as if they are the sum
of all who have gone before them. I fill. Here. 
Here’s the water you drink in the nearby birdbath.
                                        Come back.