what are you looking for
you can see love
you can see hate
if you look for them
you can see beauty
you can see pain
if you look for them
you can see them all
if you aren’t looking
you can see love
you can see hate
if you look for them
you can see beauty
you can see pain
if you look for them
you can see them all
if you aren’t looking
“It keeps the past as richness.” -Wendell Berry on soil
Understanding the privilege of
land access is crucial.
For children to play and build a
connection with nature,
farmers and gardeners to grow food,
people all over to have wild spaces
where they can just be.
Land is expensive,
affected by extraction,
even public lands cost money to visit
be it parking passes, admittance fees, or
the gas to get there, and
we live on stolen land in the first place.
So many layers to so many issues
we don’t even acknowledge
all carved into the crust.
But we can write our own
love letter to the earth in the soil with
tillers and trees, restoring native species,
violets instead of violence,
cutting, cultivating, caring,
putting back as we take, planning with
consideration for each piece of the system
consideration for every impacted person,
each endangered animal and plant.
We can build the richness in this land
with our labor and our love while we also
tell the stories of its loss.
and they tasted like the day you could’ve died,
the smell of mulled alcohol and bile, the flood
spilling wine onto your favorite dog park zip-up
ripped at the hem from puppy teeth. They cut
it off of you in the ambulance. It swallowed you
whole, the sirens shrilly painting the neighborhood
a blue and red hellscape, echo-chambering inside
a suburban idyll. The EMTS said they had to
pin you down how they once pinned me down.
That you screamed how I once screamed.
In the waiting room I replayed the image of myself
dying, my face morphing into yours, older, sagging
when you blacked out on the bed. I wove in and out
of sleep while you laid in the small white room, IVs
laced to your inner arms like clear power cables.
You were just a little drunk. I was just your baby girl
and your mother and your best friend and your nurse
and the wine and the room and the saline in your arms,
and the reason you drank. You remembered me trying
to die my own small death, the bottle of pills you left out,
the locked door, weeping, my hand to your face, my face
paling haloed by fake brown hair, an ode to your own.
And when you had the first sip did it taste like my smile?
And was it the real smile when you and I snuck flowers
into the backyard, or watched bad horror, or got a dog?
Or was it my smile in the ER thinking I had finally done it?
I hoped you couldn’t save me. But then you saved me.
So I got to save you.
You can spend your days living in fear
Of the quiet commercials that air at 3 a.m.
Asking if you or a loved one
Have fallen victim to negligence
And let that resentment sit in your chest
Where you’re left with less love and more regrets
Or, you can choose the latter
Live fast and die young
Before anybody even noticed you were here
Until you weren’t
As if you never mattered
Because maybe you never really did
In a short period of time
You didn’t make an impact
Or imprint
And it seems beyond your wildest dreams
That you’d be asked to pick and choose
From two extremes
So I’ve determined that life has to be an intersection
Where these two paths meet
So the next time you’re alone
With your thoughts on the street
Just remind yourself
The next time you are held back
Or restrained by fear
Remember what it was
And who you are
That brought you
Here
Big floofy black spider
coat like a puli dog
lives in the hole of my door
the one that was left when the antique one was replaced
and the modern one didn’t quite fit the old moorings
left a dowel shape through which you could have peered
had I not pushed a rolled up tissue plug
into it from the inside
I’ve seen you and your friends
hanging around the little walled stoop
where I take my coffee and nicotine
in the blaring of sun or rain
You remind me of my mother
I wonder if it’s she, returned
when I was about 3
I think it was while I was in the bath,
her tickle hand became
a spider named Cris,
who I talked to
and played with
and comforted
(he was quite a fearful spider)
and who I obsessively drew pictures of
all over my door and dressers and notebooks
I drew him as a circle
with straight lines fanning outwards
a primitive sun
his shoes all faced the same direction
and caused him to resemble a spinning wheel
It is still a symbol
I tend to draw on things
even in my mind
A spider is a good symbol of a writer
and the web of all things is decorated
with the many works you caught
and fed to me
it is all connected
precious spider.
If I was small enough
I’d ride you.
we lay in the bed of bub’s old El Camino
watching the sun go down all orange, paint
random lines across the sky, no prism in sight
this ain’t no Pink Floyd poster
The house came with river rock
around widely-spaced hostas,
a bonafide playground for
a little kid and me.
At two, my grandson
likes to carry a few rocks in each hand
or put them in & dump them out
of his little red plastic watering can
which is what we were doing
this afternoon
when I found a keeper:
half-inch crinoid
hollow core
a definite keeper
or
a gift
for his mom
to put on her kitchen windowsill–
a little marvel to see each day.
The hose intrigued the toddler
too much to revel
with me in my find,
but when she came home,
I nearly whooped,
Hey, look what I found in your flowerbed!
She glanced at my palm–
her attention on her son who had
replaced rocks with a stick in each hand–
and said, Yeah.
300 million years old
washed and found
on my windowsill now
Yeah
Burrow your fingernail beneath browned,
crusty skin, unsuture
new tissue that hides old pain.
Dig, tear, rip, peel.
Reopen
the wound just to see your tender, pink
flesh underneath. Remember
what you’re capable
of withstanding.
