Poetry is a language. To speak it
you must be fluent in the languages
of those you love, be they Mary Oliver,
William Stafford, Seamus Heaney
Elizabeth Bishop. You must remember
how the scent of lilac tastes creamy
on your tongue, how words like
serendipity and archetype frizzle
through your brain. Keep
the conversation going, even when
you feel you can’t keep up, when
you’re afraid you’ll never have more
than a tourist’s dim understanding
of the dense richness of the text.
On our old road, for years, the ditches
cut their little pleasure paths,
and we built around them
as they followed the sweeps and pulls of land
into the bottoms and ravines
that fed the rain into limestone.
A conduit—a culvert—
a dark polypropylene creek
collects all it can carry unseen, between
the rows and roads we live on.
It leaves—
after it’s done its damage—doesn’t stagnate,
drops through rock to the Rockcastle,
into chambers never to be seen.
It cuts under everything
til the water resurfaces a county over–
renamed, gushes forth carrying minerals.
Lost ditch, leached from every secret thing
it has passed through.
The disembodied violin is a throat
scratching claws into the plush
hide of the chair the morning a purple
spot in the corner I turn my back
to the sun
Above where this necklace falls on my chest,
I say, because instead truthfully measuring here
where my third rib juts exposed from the body
of my visible sternum is where I want my hair
to hit when straightened and pulled forward
would be mood-killing, inappropriately morbid.
Artificial strawberry blonde falls, snipped to graze
the silver wings of my thunderbird pendant. Levity
lets my head become so light it almost untethers
from my spine, floats without the burden of those
four inches, the last two years when accounting
for quarterly trimming. Two years spent thinning.
Before it was called Lake Richardson,
it was Molechunkamunk.
A name that sounds
less like ownership
and more like weather.
It means “stream in a deep ravine”
in Abenaki.
I think about this
whenever a place
gets renamed
into something
recognizable to the people
who took it.
As though difference
is a problem to be solved
rather than a way
to love other people.
The Rangeley Lakes hold
a particular kind of quiet.
Not absence.
But density.
Water that has learned
how to be still
without forgetting
it is moving.
On the surface,
boats trace small corrections.
Fish revise their routes
underneath.
The lake continues
whatever it was doing
before language arrived.
It was once a river
at the bottom of a ravine.
A moving system
with its own grammar of direction.
Then it was dammed—
for fishing,
for logging,
for control of flow.
Each purpose
arriving like a new explanation
laid over the same body of water.
Now it generates electricity.
Converted motion.
Stored pressure
released as light elsewhere.
The land itself
partly owned by a hydropower company
that, ironically,
keeps it undeveloped.
Allows it to return
to its original wilderness.
As though the final form
of extraction
is silence.
Molechunkamunk
sounds like a system
older than exploitation.
Older than maps
that pretend to finish
the world.
I try to say it
the way it might have been said
before it was written down.
Molechunkamunk.
Like a body
remembering
a forgotten motion.
Recognition
is not the same
as possession.
Something can be known
without being marked.
I stand at the edge
of the water
and imagine
the older name
still existing
beneath the surface,
moving slowly
under the new one,
being whispered by
the birch trees and
driftwood
lining the shore.
The trees remember
the ravine below.
And if by staying I can
For Tonea Nicole Miller (1998 – 2026)
Hang, hung, hung
Unless found on a tree,
a black woman in Miami,
for Juneteenth hanged.
Lie, lay, lain
No foul play,
the suited substitute
brazenly rules.
Lie, lied, lied.
Apparent suicide,
recycled code for
know your place.
“But at least i got a soul still. Even if I’m in a bad place”- Noah Kahan
my soul will survive,
as the thick bladed grass of spring frosts over
the newly blossomed bluebells wilt beneath my feet.
my bones have weathered storms unrelenting,
my heart burdened grief
with each rib hugged around,
as sure a storm shutter.
even when i’m sure to break
and crack around around the edges
my soul will survive this dusk,
it must.
I’ve grown up knowing how to minimize
Time, energy, resources,
To look at a problem and spend a little extra time thinking it through,
Then enacting a plan meant to conserve,
From visualizing how to pack a car,
To calculating costs before the register,
Preparation braces my bones against what life throws my way.
Needing little kept us grounded,
I understood growing our own food
Was always worth the taste of fresh salsa and jam,
That buying from farmers paid back in community,
That a long walk outside was the perfect time to connect
With myself, my people, and my world.
Yet the new world seems to think something is wrong
If you don’t constantly need,
Like you’re alien for ignoring ads,
Or arrogant for avoiding luxury.
That new world doesn’t understand true need:
I can find anything I’m missing on those long walks,
And everything else grows in my bones.
