The hardest day of the year
begins with lifting the receiver
and saying her name on my
amateur ham radio. CQ…CQ…
CQ…Calling all stars. Make
way for my weak frequency.
I don’t speak the language
of my dead as fluently.
File under: ephemeral work,
photograph&release program,
hold your breath, the observant
nature of evidence, after the poem,
not art/not a poem, not imagination
but the constant flitting memory
and anchorism through writing,
drawing, touching, and other
significant dark&beautiful
matter-ing of foundlings who
to this day still sleep under
kitchen tables to remember
faces, hands, and other shapes
memory&breath have made
and are naturally forgetting.
Yes.
File under: hand pressed lives,
itinerary notes while in Asia,
train stubs to keep, rooms
better off unlit, rooms where
a white dress circled a room,
where I said, “Right here,
she died right here.”
Leave me for a few hours
so I may resuscitate the ground
and stories about the aching 3rd,
4th, and 5th resonants
of curse&poetry.
Yes.
File this under:
a drawer made of stone
and other thousand pound
epilogues where you must
(you must) carry with me
because you know my name
and heard my intonations
of loss, liberation, and essential
catastrophe of hanging on
as if I am the last leaf
to surrender whatever light
I’ve taken from the sun.
As if I am the last fruit to fall
and forget that soil carries
traces of salt from our first
mothers.
Yes.
File me under:
morning, salve,
skin&bone,
boat, and home.
,
______
//am journal
//dec28th is around the corner
//listening to Goodnight
WHAT THIS BOY LISTENS TO for Betty • I stitched up some songs together to help me remember what my mother’s hands looked like. I miss the music she made. I miss the music of her. I miss her fingers inside tin bowls as she mixed ingredients together. I miss that. I miss together. I miss the sound of what she put together. I miss dancing inside the kitchen. I miss the clanging sounds of her winter, her pots and pans. I miss the after-gifts, the red bean soup, her hands over my eyes as she would say, “Open them ………..now!” I miss that. I miss now. I miss dancing.
[ Reshaped poem & image ]
CONSTITUTIONAL
The heart—she works inside
the ambulance of the body,
she’s good at what she does
without the Imaginary or holy
lights to guide her. Give her
a crown and she will refuse it,
swallow a thorn and she will nurse it.
She holds no prayer, holds
no faith, she is the first evidence,
the first apple, the first cartographer
of this flushed coastline—
this beautiful dark park.
______
Listening to Mr. Somewhere
by This Mortal Coil – https://youtu.be/hQ4rDlX0Zpg
Sometimes difficult mornings end up smoothing itself out into tender afternoons. Through music, tea, and a genuine embrace, things do iron out for the day. As an adopted person, feelings of loss about “what could’ve been” with biologicals is a real thing, a constant thing for me. The body remembers so much about what the mind can’t carry. Sometimes the crucial work is to know how to self-parent not the Hallmark versions of self-care and “H”ealing. To me, healing is not a goal but a mark to which where one begins. I prefer to shift, move, and work with whatever it is that is too bright or hovering. It is there I find a valley of clarity between the inhale and the out. I prefer to be sheltered not saved. I prefer tenderness over kindness. I choose to tell people they matter before I say I love them. It’s good to remember the bones behind the skin. It’s good to locate the stars scattered inside each and every one of us. Sometimes, it’s good to kiss our own palms to see we are a cut from a giant human jewel.
______
Listening to A Single Wish – https://youtu.be/2ej9wFitkCw
