For Keyra's Birthday

 To build a life with you

To take all your bowls 

And all my bowls 

And figure out how they nest inside each other

Inside the kitchen cabinet that's a little too small

And if (when) a bowl breaks

dropped by a careless hand (probably mine) 

Onto a distant floor

We will patch it together with band aids and kisses and say

"This is something we have built"

Flirtationship of the poodles

 My neighbors have two black poodles 

Hopping about in their high fenced yard

Is this what it means to love?

Love poem for the non-monogamous

My love is not a bird trapped in the cage of your fingers

My love is not a patient record of each of the starts in the night sky

My love is a wilder thing then this

My love is a lion's hunger as it devours another living thing

My love is the sound of music over a car engine loud and late

My love is the pancakes I made and then compost last Sunday

Because I love to dream and I can let a bad thing go when I must

My friend Robin told me they want to build the wood and hope foundation of love 

From the ground up, add walls and a roof

But I tire of square shapes

My love is a language, taken, not forgotten

My love is the language of smells, I know it as I breathe but I don't have the words

My love is the language of a baby: new, full of potential, and utterly meaningless

My love speaks and I take pause and then 

I shout what I hear to anyone who will listen because to be known, 

For just a moment, is beautiful

My love is the wind and it is infinitive and powerful and chaotic and with time 

It moves mountains

found poem

As found in the "Armenian kids get secret Santa" of the Local First: Your Weekly Guide to Shopping

Send children on her ancestral quest.

Is there matter?

Recieve gifts amid winter.

Drive to children and recieve hundreds.

Leave everything behind at second snow.

Its cold after decades.

Over to home.

For my thesis

 

When each word is an old friend

And the weight of you lies heavy in my hands

When each page is dark with edits

And stained with a catalogue of food

I ate while pouring over you

When your page numbers count heartbeats in time with my own

When I close my eyes and see lines of you printed across my eyelids

When I look down at you and say

Now you are complete.

Now you are whole

For Aunt Fanny

 My roommate Leah's parents have a cat

Named Aunt Fanny.

Actually her full names is Frances Abbigail Billingsworth

But that seems like a large name for such a small and anxious cat

And Aunt Fanny is anxious

Like scared of people, furniture, and the wind.

Like scared of things that move and things that are still.

Like resting heart rate of 200. 

Is that fast for a cat? Whatever cat's heart rates are, hers is faster.

Aunt Fanny is a rescue and they don't know exactly where she came from, 

Or the sights her tired eyes have seen,

But they know how to love her now

She has three soft beds

And eats gourmet organic cat foods

That need to be refrigerated

She has more toys then I had as a kid and

She never gets kicked out of the house for vomiting

(Not that I was ever kicked out of the house for vomiting)

She has humans who keep her warm

And keep the coyotes out

Even if those humans

Did name her

Aunt Fanny

For Beatrice

This morning I burnt my toast

And the world kept turning

If only I had thought to set a timer on my phone

Or pay more attention to the careful tics of the toaster

The toaster isn't loud but maybe if I had listened harder

This morning I made tea and everything went right

And the world kept turning

I boiled the water and I steeped the tea and it tasted of earl gray and a hint of honey

And it reminded me of my best friend in my freshman year of college

When we would sit on the fire escape and drink tea and pretend the city lights were stars

Tonight the moon came out and she smiled at me

She said I love the way you sway your hips when you dance

And I said I love you too

For Howie

 Counting Poem:

1. Sun sets at night amidst scarlet bright hues

2. Planets wink on, shining bright into view

3. Next come the stars, as they twinkle with light

4. Light years to the nearest star, as it shines bright

5. Each finger lit by the shape of the moon

6. Globular clusters light up like balloons

7. Stars in the hunter hung from velvet sky

8. Stars outline the bear who learned how to fly

9.  Planets (well eight now) stretch out from the sun 

10. Millions of stars but we're the only ones 

For me

 A list of things I didn't say during zoom thanksgiving:

1. This year I'm grateful for a global pandemic

2. This year I’m grateful for the fall of capitalism and increasing and before this unparalleled wealth gap

3. This year I’m grateful for the black people being murdered en mass by the police

4. This year I’m grateful for the history of indigenous genocide

5. Let's not forget this is a holiday founded on the genocide and erasure of native peoples

6. Please stop asking Adam and Hannah when they're having children

7. Fuck you for getting married and having children

8. Fuck you for thinking I should get married and have children

9. Grief and anger weigh on my chest like a heavy blanket

10. Like snow and cold rain it drips down the inside of my rib cage

11. My belly is frozen earth and I wish you could see this and still be proud of me

12. I stack accomplishments like a jenga tower, shaping them around the empty places I don't want to be, hoping for your approval

13. I don't need your approval, but yes I have a fucking job after graduation and yes I fucking like it

14. I do not dream of labor, I dream of liberation

15. I do not dream of "going back to normal"

16. I dream of creating new stories, I dream of growing tomatoes out of frozen earth to feed my family and friends, I dream of pressing snowflakes in between my eyelashes and showing them to everyone I loved

17. At least at my job we talk about native people

18, And we don’t talk about if we're having children

19. Please. Help me imagine a better world then this.

20. We will do better

For Samy

 Today I baked a pumpkin cheesecake 

With the round, orange fruit

Grown on the farm at my college 

(Or, in a complication, the college from which I just graduated)

(This poem is full of complications)

And I helped grow the pumpkin

I moved fertilizer and pulled weeds and I helped bring in the harvest

But so many other people helped grow the pumpkin

Planted it in soft dark earth

And weeded it

My friend Kate sings to the plants as she works and they always grow better

(From her I learned to sing to the fires I light

They burn better when I sing to them too)

And of course I didn't make the cream cheese

Or the butter

Or the gram crackers

The eggs were from my friend Rebekah 

Who knows the names of each of her sixty hens

So I mixed all the delicious things together in a bowl someone bought

And baked them in an oven that my dad's friend Tom installed in our house

And sang it the songs I learned from Kate as it baked

And in the end 

I had cheesecake.

For Ashawna

Love Poem for a Fish 

More tree then fish

The Atlantic sturgeon are huge, slow growing, and old

Their scales remember the years in rings of growth

Their eyes remember truths about the bottom of the ocean

When I first drove cross country 

From the east coast to the West

The sky was terrifyingly huge

And I couldn't fathom how small and 

Not blue I was 

The Atlantic sturgeon is born in the freshwater Hudson river,

Swims out to sea as an adult

And then returns to the freshwater where it was born to mate

Where they go to sea, no one can follow 

But they return each year

A magnet inside of them unwavering 

Insisting:

This way towards home

This way towards home

For Erryn

 Pablo Neruda famously wrote about the ocean and love

The ocean and love in two languages

But I could never wrap my mind around Spanish

The way it twisted unfamiliarly around my tongue

The syllables spilling sideways over my lips

The grammar slipping from my mind

The sunshine in the winter

It slips away too quickly for me to chase. 

Touching the street, 

Touching the treetops,

Glinting off the hilltops 

And then gone into the dark.

When I was a child,

My dad told me a story about a little girl's shadow 

And how it grew across the earth until

Night time hugged half the globe like a blanket

I always fell asleep before the story ended

Cerrwida

 I love to hold M & Ms on my tongue

To see how long I can remember 

To savor the sweetness

Without taking a bite

Sometimes I open the fridge door

And forget what I meant to get

But I leave my face open to the cold

And think about the beets

I don't dance anymore but

I remember all the steps.

For Hawkins

 Lipstick

Stolen from the make up aisle across target

A banner across my lips 

Says, 

"Kiss me

I dare you." 

For Jen Jack

 My friend Reba said to me yesterday morning,

Puppetry is breathing life and animation into a puppet

To control a puppet is to tell a story of oppression

I don't know much about puppetry but I can make sense of this and you

And the way you listen to the cute queer boy at the deli

And the way you picked up the habit of picking up shiny things

And the way you hear music on the breeze and can 

Translate it to the beautiful guitar you've found. 

I think it (you) are a sort of magic

And I fear a breeze too strong will sweep you away

But I know you could sing down a hurricane and breathe life into stone

For Mariyama

The ocean is bigger than I understand but

I know you speak its language,

Wave by wave, it contains so many little living things

Taking the light and making it to air

Maybe you are contained by the ocean

Maybe I am shifting with the moon

Maybe you turn light into air with little thanks

Thank you for the air

Thank you for a moment of joy 

I wonder what the salty taste of the water would say if it could speak

Congratulations on marriage, even if it is a twisted and fucked up concept. You deserve so much love. 

For Darrow

 In my childhood bedroom lives a desk made by my great grandfather

A big, heavy creature smelling of wood colored dark

When I was a child I would sit under the desk where a chair was supposed to go

And trace the parallel lines of the grain

The life blood of the dark wood--cherry? chestnut? hickory?

Unlike my great grandfather I do not speak a language of saw blades and belt sanders

So I was left to guess at the flavor of this sheltered place

Some afternoons I would try to count the lines like rings but always

I would lose track

For Rivkie

Memories of the flesh

I buy myself silk robes because I like how soft they feel against my skin and then I refuse to apologize

I use words too big for people to understand because I like how they feel playing along my tongue

My body is a home for soft feelings and sugary delights

I bake bread and eat it fresh dipped in butter

I say that I prefer this to love but of course I miss her fingers on my skin

Some nights I still can't fall asleep because the world is too quiet without her heartbeat

And some nights I sleep warm from fresh bread and soft in silk robes and I think that everything might

be alright again some day

For Zoe F

Leaving and Returning

When I was sixteen, I hung up a tapestry on my wall

It would be more precise to say that when I was sixteen I tie-dyed a sheet, renamed it tapestry

And hung it up on my wall

It was rainbow 

And the patterns were a little messy and blended together

It hung and billowed when I made my bed below it

And I looked at it every night before bed

It remind me of stars. 

I left it behind but I remember its constellations. 

For Joe

 The land remembers

Look under the city street

Down under the cracked pavement sprouting the most resilient weeds

Down under the water pumping life through the city

Look down into the darkness, home to rats, raccoons, and

Other things that do not have names, just secrets

Down, down to the rushing, roaring trains

The screaming brakes and squealing rails

Their mighty engines are the gods of the city

My first love once told me the dirt remembers

Each foot that ever tread on it

And I wonder if it remembers car tires and bike wheels too

Roots that grow through it and shovels and machines that rend it

Beneath the city there is earth and the earth remembers.

For Astrid

 I would braid you a thousand daisy chains

Into a dress of petals and sunlight

I would place a thousand more in your hair

So that they would be starlight in its soft night

Can I show you the stars for the first time?

We will name each constellation and consider their nature

Can you teach me the true names of each animal and plant?

Starting with Bailey, of course

And when we build the universe new again, 

Just for our eyes

And wrap our hands in the pieces of the universe

That are silent, and we tell them our stories

The fairies stole my colors

 A treasure hunt

1. The pavilion

The fairies stole the rainbow bright

They have left hints for you because

They know you'll find it before night

Head towards where we last ate pawpaws

2. The Forest Garden

On other days you'd wish to climb

You'd climb up high and touch the leaves

But we must find the rainbow in time

So go and find the old oak tree

3. The oak tree

We're nearly there, more then half way

You could smell it, if you were a dog

For this next clue, I will now say:

Go to where we played camouflage

4. Where we played camouflage

The way from here is not so clear

But some of you may know it fine

The rainbow's close, so have no fear

From here we go at last to pines

5. Pines 

I knew you would find the rainbow

I hope you thought this trip was fun

Now lets head back so you can go

Home before the setting sun

For Emma G

 

7:00am I wake up

7:10am I go back to sleep

8:30am I go for a run 

4:00pm I finish my class

4:15 pm The final rays of the sun disappear below the horizon

7:00 pm I hear the rain start

7:01 pm I open the window to hear the rain and feel the warm air on my skin

7:05 pm The rain reminds me of the last time I cried

7:08 pm The rain reminds me of a song my first love played into my spine

7:11 pm I can't be inside for an instant longer

7:11:05 pm I grab my phone

7:12 pm I step onto my roof and the rain hits my upturned face for the first time that day and the air feels clean and soft and maybe like remembering

7:13 pm I push play on my "young and in love" playlist and "I feel like I'm drowning" comes on

7:14 pm I dance under the falling raindrops

7:15 pm My chest opens and shines bright enough to light up the rainy night

For Liz

 When I was eight, my family and I 

Drove West to Yellow Stone State Park and saw

Old faithful springing forth from the earth

Something where there had been nothing.

I think you're like that

With you pizza made from scratch

I think your like that 

With your immaculately planned house parties

And the way your voice fills a dance hall

Who was it who said energy can't be created or destroyed, only changed in form?

Well, he was a liar. 

For Gabe

Winter in Boston

The geese are leaving me again

Every year when leaves give in to gravity 

They tell the same rambunctious tale

I know the geese will come back

And I can't be bothered by their complaints

The sun troubles me more

When it leaves each afternoon

I wonder each night why it loves me a little less

Why it makes its excuses sooner

I like how Orion returns each year

And how he stays with me through the cold, long night.

For Ekvi

 Each morning I wake up 

The first thing I do is pull on the sunrise

I wrap the warm golden light around me

And try to secure it around myself with hair ties and bobby pins

I try to paint my lips with gratitude 

And line my eyes with compassion

But I make sure to put my rage on my desk where I can see it clearly

Some days the gratitude goes on crooked

And there's nothing I can do to make the compassion look less femme

And I face my day half-dressed and half-put together

Some days the sunlight fades before noon

Every morning I wake up and I think about which socks I should wear

Will it be cold?

Will my feet be comfortable?

Will I be able to tread on the ground?

Some days I wake up and it's too much work to put on pants

To make myself a breakfast of joy and protein

To bite off my bitterness and sand my sharp edges into a smile

But every day I wake up

Because I deserve the sunrise

For George

Empty dance halls

Breathe in mountains, breathe out the sky

The river never looked so blue

Remember the rain, remember the sun

The way it danced in time for you

Hear the click of heels on wood

Smell the scent of sweet fresh pine

Sunshine slants through windows sideways

Swinging her way down the line

Remember the trees, the way the leaves

Shook with autumn joy and light

The light faded but music rose 

Into the air, remember the nights

The deer remember each quick step

The shaken aspen stills its leaves

The winds wish they could allemande

The music waits in shadowed eves

The clouds knew how to play along

The blades of grass, they knew the tune

The birds were great with harmonies

I hope we'll dance again and soon

For Anna

 I learned to ride a bike when I was five and invincible

I could not scrape my knees

For all I knew if I launched my bike off a cliff I would fly off into the middle distance

The summer I learned to ride a bike, my dad tried to teach me physics

Or maybe he was just messing with his five-year-old child because he had nothing else to do that particular Saturday morning. 

(Hindsight's murkier with time)

He told me that the outside of the wheel had to move much further each time the wheel spun than the inside of the wheel

How come the outside wasn’t moving faster than the inside?

How did they stay together? 

Five-year-olds who think they can fly aren’t always experts

But I still wonder

What is the miracle that keeps up together?

For AZ

45 N Cascabel Rd

I think home is accordion music

Wafting (if such a verb can be applied)

Through stray open windows here, around this

Door, barely cracked open. Home is the scent

Of fresh made sourdough and the sound of

Your keyboard tick-tick-ticking along in

Time with your heartbeat. Home is for us queers:

Not four walls and a roof but a picture 

That your best friend painted of you as a 

Wizard before she dropped out of art school. 

Home is welcoming to your table all 

The tired, poor, and huddled masses.

You may not have much but what you have you

Share because that's how its been ever since

Your many-greats grandmother built her own

 One-room shack and fed each of the thin-faced 

Children who showed up on her humble stoop.

Home is walking inside, taking off your 

Hat and boots and gloves and feeling warm, for

The first time all day. 

For Keyra

 Moving and Sex

Those are probably my two best skills if I had to rank them

I have become expert at peeling posters off the wall

Tetris-ing boxes into my car

My great-grandma's collapsable table

That only fits in one of the back seat doors

This is a puzzle to which I have memorized the curves

Sex is more like a cypher

Sliding and changing

But I can find a clitoris blindfolded 

Which you know because you've seen me do it twice

As long as we're ranking things

You are the first great love of my life

I have shared food, porn, a home, a few lovers, and so much lipstick with you. 

I can hear the sound of your laugh when I close my eyes

Our relationship is the tides and the ebb and flow can occasionally drive one or both of us into the sands

But like the water to the beach, we will never be apart

You have been a part of each home I have made

A pice of your art, a card from you, a picture of you always on thumb-tacked to the wall

You have known every heart-break and good lay I've wrecked from here to California

You know the lines of me like a poem you've had memorized since you were twelve

You will always be my first great love. 

For Griffin

Tree song

Roots grow down 

Branches reach up

We're not going anywhere

Slowly sway into each other

The trees in the forest won't fall

So we learn their names

The trees in the forest won't leave 

So we trace each crevasse

In the ash bark

We memoize the dimples in the maple

The curls of the birch

The chipping cherry

And as we learn we spread our branches

Out to catch the sunlight

We're not going anywhere. 

For Danielle

Like the waves on the shore

I'm scared of the blue water

The ocean, unfrozen

I say I like the cold because

It helps me feel more real

Or just more, I'm unsure

What the difference is anymore

I'm scared of the salt in my eyes

Making tears, unclear

If I remember the last time 

I cried, won't lie

I'm not over you yet, you bet

I remember the taste of your lips, fingertips

I miss your kiss

The moon pulls me back

Back to your tides, confide

In me each of your secrets, your regrets

The corners of your soul that 

Even you avoid,  I remember

The words you sing, they ring

Through clear salty air, the care

You take when you shape

You songs all night long

For Amelia

Heart in a Tin Can 

Imagine a chrome future

Metal creatures walking the crusted earth

Imagine sunlight gleaming off the above

Mix-matched arms 

I thought I might teach a robot to love

And we would walk together across the cracked earth and then 

I realized the my own chest was the metal one

My own joints creaked and moaned

I can feel myself beginning to rust. 

For Amanda (it's a surprise)

 How do I write write a love poem for a poet?

How do I describe a sunset when you

Invented red? Before I ever knew it,

'Twas on your lips I first saw crimson hue. 

I swear the stars shine dimmer then your eyes

I swear the birds song strives to match your voice

So sweet, I swear I'll think up some new lines

Less tired, some new metaphors, more choice.

If I said I were speechless would that be

Too trite? Even though I can't, (this is true)

Think of any more ways to say: "you see:

I'd write a hundred thousand poems for you."

For all my borrowed words and turns of phrase

I love you so much, have a great birthday(s)!

Hornets

Hornets

 I will love you fiercely, 

I promise this with my yellow and black body, jagged and whole

My eyes will break the world apart

And put it back together again

I will make us a home with dust and spit and hope

And we will love it

All our friends and sweethearts will share in this vision,

And when they finally come to take us out,

Call us pests and spray their poison down the hallways of our home:

We will aim for their heads.

Climate Change Climate Summit

 The maples don't come to visit

In the fall

They shed their vermillion leaves 

And took of for Maine or Canada

They missed the cold like a lost brother

The maple trees have made it clear:

"Listen!" They shout, "We are telling you what you need to know!"

"Live simply. Live in good relation to each other. 

Work together to break the storm. When one of us falls

It makes us all weaker." 

The Nipmuc and Pocumtuc

The people who listened to this land for generations

They remember these lessons

They know the maples teach us, they remember how to listen

But we've done all we can to silence them

We've done all we can to wipe them out

The trees,

They leave their leaves in bold letters

Spelled out on the ground

They do not give us the sweetness of their lifeblood in the spring any longer

But they would help us any way they can.

They shout from their stretching branches and tired roots

"THIS IS FUCKING POLITICAL. CHANGE YOUR STORIES NOW"

The trees challenge me to imagine a future 

A future without greed 

A future with out trillions of dollars in annual fossil fuel subsidies

A future where we all know the land and can hear the trees

A future when the maple trees feed us their sweet sap again.

To love a fairy queen

To love a fairy queen 

I'll make you a crown of golden maple leaves stitched with stories of falling in love

And you can wear it to command toy soldiers to die for you

I'll weave you a net of metaphors to catch the winter

And you can tangle yourself in it and watch as men who would help you drown

I'll hand you matches crafted from my own wooden heart 

And watch you set the forest on fire

Heron

 I love to see you swoop

I hate to hear you squawk

I love to see you fly

I hate to watch you walk

Today I told her that life is just the same battle over and over again until you die

And to find comfort in that because perhaps each time is a little better

And there is a synchronicity of the world reminding me it happens in cycles

And because I am being reminded now I am being reminded always

Cyclical, cyclical 

round and round

Remember the highs

When your feet drag the ground

Yesterday she told me each of Scheherazade's one thousand and one stories and

After every single one, we hoped the king might spare her life

And each story sounded the same

If only she could crack my heart like a nut and get to the fruit of the stories inside

Imagine a duck who is god

Feet move so fast they do blur 

His flippers do flail under water

Above not a feather does stir 

Tomorrow I will ask you who you want to be when you grew up 

And how you dream of futures in relation to community

And how you dream of loving the land and letting the land love you back

And maybe we will dare to imagine a new story. 

Poem for you

I can't remember the way your hair is sunlight 

But I wish it was night so I could see it shining for the south

I can't remember the way your laugh is the green grass bursting from frozen ground

But I wish it was spring so I could smell it living and growing

Here I am sitting in class and all I want is 

To throw myself into the lake of your blue jean jacket with the lady painted on the back 

And be shocked by the cold of the water on my skin

To feel every nerve of my skin wake

After this sleepy apathy of this seemingly unending lecture

Imagine a future where you have eternal sunny days

Imagine a space in between the day and night where it's still warm but the sun is still below the horizon 

Imagine a warm dark space where you know the names of every living thing around you and imagine you hold a paintbrush and lights and colors pour fourth from your hand

How do you hold the days in your hand and how do you imagine the night?

Body series 26

 I am entrenched in the metaphor of fall

I cannot escape the synchronicity of pumpkin spice body lotion and apple picking themed phone backgrounds and skeletons on windows

I am an anthropologist, deconstructing the empty symbols of my own home

Drawn to conclude the inhabitant must worship some eldritch god of cinnamon and bones who breathes fire each year in honor of the maple leaves

I am entrenched in this metaphor of fall

And when I fall to sleep at night my blankets only seem to contain the slowly-creeping cold so determined to leach into my bones

And I refuse to turn on the heat until October 

And I pretend the weakening sunlight will still be bright enough to light my heart and ribs from the inside out

I watch the birds flee with the rest of the common sense

And all that's left to me is story telling and fire sides and pumpkin spice and the knowledge of winter sitting cold in the bottom of my heart.

Conceiving the unspoken

 Here's love letter

Composed of the words I want to say to you every time I see you:

I love you

I'm in love with you

I have been in love with you since April

I'd like to push you against a wall and do some nasty things involving your neck and my tongue that would literally take the air from your lungs

When you wear your hair half up and half down I feel like the earth has been swept out from under me

I love when you show me your art; it's like seeing your insides and I'd like to eat you out until your calves cramp and I want to trace the lines of your body and I want you to look at me with your blue artist's eyes and see my soul and find it wanting and decide to love me anyway. 

I'm collecting little pieces of you: you love chocolate ice cream, you've been doing yoga for six years, your family pet is a pitt-bull named Sparkle, you and your roommates went apple picking last weekend, your favorite thing to cook is sesame noodles 

At the end of the day I sweep all the course books off of my desk and marvel at the empty expanse

I take this collection of favors and small loves and I lay it out on my desk like I would lay you down

And I run my hands over the familiar figures and pretend it brings my closer to your lips

I sound 50% creepier in this poem then I do in my head and the problem is I'm so overflowing with love and without a place to put it

And last week when maintenance came to unclog my shower drain they brought not one but two plungers in spite of not even working on a single toilet and 

I do not want my feelings to make a mess on the floor and I can't imagine where I left the metaphorical plunger

Red Convertible

 Have you ever driven a stick shift car?

Do you remember the sound it makes when you accelerate, the way it moans underneath you

More speed, it demands, more fuel. The car is hungry, wanting

And you give and it takes

Pushing you back into the seat, and adrenaline accelerates through the roads of your veins. 

Remember learning to drive?

And felling the power of the rocking, the shaking

The car bucking beneath you, eager to please

And you were at once sure that you held the power of this great beast, 

Ready to unleash at the very twitch of your foot

The car told you what it craved and you listened.

Do you remember when it became a well learnt route

When the gear shift fit into your hand

The lines in your palm mapped the desire to go faster

Faster and you knew exactly how to swing around the curves

Cut through the mountains and 

The car was an extension of your body

Gripping the pavement, rushing for the next horizon. 

A poem for Persephone

 Dandelion woman

Drift in and out on strong breezes 

Dandelion woman I knew you in pieces: 

Your hair in whips on your neck

Your breathy laugh 

When I asked you a question you would not answer

(could not answer?)

Dandelion woman why were you all questions and no answers?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

And what happens now? The play is over and the villains 

Have won?

Lin Manuel Miranda understands how

Storytelling is the most important part of history.

Which begs the question, if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 

are the oafs Tom Stoppard would lead us to 

Believe, how come these two gentlemen

Seized the imagination of so many generations? 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

So who's left standing on this stage? On this

Rock as we fly through the void? 

The ushers understand that once the play is over they must

Sweep the theatre and throw out all the popcorn that has

Fallen from hands and mouths agape to the floor.

Shakespeare demands us to ask, can we ever do anything but 

Destroy? But the ushers would like us to

Just clean up after ourselves please.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

The Dog won't have to sleep on the potatoes anymore

--William Carlos Williams

You can't spell lonely without one

Here I am, sitting in my window seat, 

Trying to finishing my indigenous feminisms reading and thinking about how I am single. 

This is not a metaphor.

Here I am sitting in my window seat

Reading papers about how in order to deconstruct the white colonialist patriarchy we (I) must acknowledge the radical idea that feminism is not just an intersectional thing but multiple knowledges in multiple contexts

And that in order to even strive for liberation we must first eschew the idea that liberation is rooted in the colonialist idea that it exists to serve the individual

And now I'm looking on facebook and Jocelyn Reyes has just moved into a house in the suburbs with her fiancé

He looks like a straight white cis-man

Here I am wondering what's wrong with me and why don't I have a fiancé who looks light a straight white cis-man and a house in the suburbs?

This is not a metaphor.

Here I am sitting at my window seat in the home I have carved out for myself

Trying not to text any of my lovers (none of whom are straight, white cis-men and none of whom I will ever live with in a house in the suburbs).

And trying to focus on this reading talking about the legal rights of Muscogee nation women to identify not as citizens of the United States but rather as sovereign members of the Muscogee tribe with the right to self-govern and wondering how I could possibly be making this about myself

This is not a metaphor. 

Here I am sitting in my window seat

Looking at the art of a yonic wasps nest water color (that may be a metaphor) I have pasted on my wall 

And trying to find the validation and strength inside me

In the twisted up pit of my stomach and tell myself that I am enough and 

I do not need a house in the suburbs and a straight, white cis-man fiancé (that I do not want a straight, white cis-man fiancé or a house in the suburbs)

And periodically glancing back at the reading that hangs open on the screen, sitting ambivalent and unchanging for when I work through this momentary crisis of faith and return to the homework that is due tomorrow.

This is not a metaphor.

Here I am searching for the keys to my own liberation like 

I left them in the back of a desk drawer or in a cluttered corner and it's 

Just a matter of finding the right words to string together or the right angle to look and 

There it is! My liberation. My contentment. My confidence. My sense of self and community. 

Me and the reading on indigenous feminisms both know that this is a lie.

But it has the good nature not to laugh at me.

This is not a metaphor. 

A love poem to Blue

Yesterday I
Fell in love with the sky
I didn't intend to
But it was so blue

The sky drew me in with her musical call
The problem with flying is fear of the fall
But with you it's a joy to fell gravity pull
I gladly relinquish my hold on control

I'm in love with the way your hair's always a mess
And how you always manage to spill on your dress
I always want more, always more, never less
How euphoric to dive into the sky helpless

Today I
Fell into the sky
I don't know how to land
And I don't think I can

When you work on a flower farm . . .

Fuck your roses, give me snapdragons
Sunshine petals glow from graceful bends
Remember the rain, remember every
Time you said "I love you" and it was true.

I have always loved the summertime
Though I will never underestimate
The stark beauty of winter, the painful
Reminder of the rose's thorns, I see
No reason why my joy should come tempered
By winter's stings. I want only sunshine
Only honey sweetness and velvet
Softness. I want only bright yellows
Without any browns to muddy this
Glorious water color that we call truth.

Fuck roses, I'll give you snapdragons.
And when I say "I love you", know it's true.

--for Kim

sense of place

In my childhood neighborhood there was leg of sidewalk under which tree roots grew, tearing the sidewalk apart through years of hard work.

In that tree was a limb that if you squinted, looked like the approximation of a woman. We named her Persephone and in the spring her strange long brach of a nose burst into glorious blossom.

We said to each other that Persephone had trapped herself in a tree after Hades, lord of the dead refused to marry her.

They fell deeply in love back when the Haudanausaunee people walked the land. They promised to marry each other in a year from the day they fell in love, after Persephone dug a channel for the Hudson river through the Hudson Highlands and Hades went to Lake Tear of the Cloud and pulled the water from the most intimate part of the earth.

After a year apart, Persephone returned to where they had fallen in love to be married but Hades did not. He had fallen into the deepest part of the lake and met the most intimate face of the earth. He had completely forgotten Persephone in his infatuation with this tender and fertile place.

Persephone, in her grief reached down to the earth and up to the sky in a plea for relief. And the earth and heavens herd her and in a show of mercy turned her into an oak tree. There she stands at the corner of my neighborhood to protect other lovers and skin the knees of children who ride their bikes too recklessly. 

Independence day

Snapdragon, fire cracker, lights in the sky
Fractured patterns flicker, shimmer, thunder and cry
Fire ruins, embers smolder,  smoke in your eye
Think of water, think of winter, try not to die.

Childhood past

Asphalt: there's no way around the word:
It's flat, black and hot
No ulterior motives, no hidden meaning

Synonyms for asphalt (as per dictionary.com) run as follows:
pavement, road, concrete
sidewalk, path, blacktop

Asphalt is black and hot
It drives the temperature of manhattan two dreadful degrees hotter in the summer
Asphalt is human made
Crushed, heated, and spread across the earth by huge gas-burning machines
Asphalt is ubiquitous
Think about the last road trip, the last time you went to the grocery store, the last time you walked to   the corner store

Do you remember the road you grew up on?
Did you walk barefoot in the summer? Remember the feeling of the heat on the tender skin on the bottom of your feet.
You played games on the asphalt: hopscotch and four square
And when you couldn't find chalk you used sticks and shoes to mark boundaries.

The asphalt would shimmer in the summer heat
You later learned mirage to mean an illusion looking like a sheet of water
But you were never fooled by the asphalt
There was no way to dress it up as anything other than the black road it was.

Lunes about home

Tell me of your home
What smells live
There? Who welcomes you back?

I love the wild children
Who run underfoot
Knowing they are welcome here.

Come in and be fed.
Bring what you
Have, take what you need.

queer love stories

i fucked them with a strap-on for an hour and we spent the next three days processing our gender dysphoria (and other queer love stories)

there was no label for the relationship between us so we carved a new space and named new constellations for our pet names

they asked me to move in with them, to have a threesome with them, and to love them in that order. i said yes

i wrote them epics of poetry and changed all the pronouns so no one would know

they never bought me a single gift, but made them all by hand with a tight budget and a limitless imagination

every time i saw a sunset i thought of them. sunsets also don't believe in the gender binary.

we traded podcasts about queer theory, books about anti-racism, low-budget antifascism documentaries, and once a kiss

Mosquito Heartbeat

They say if you squeeze your arm while a mosquito is drinking your blood it will explode.
Because its tiny body can't handle the influx of such great quantities of life
These tiny things
That cause such great suffering.

(not) Clumsy (not) Girl

To hold something in my hands is to break it
I have watched brick walls crumble under my touch
So I don't touch brick walls any more.

heartbeat

The more I touch the more my greedy fingers ache

-a love story

For Andre

You didn't ask for a poem but you inspired this whole project. It gives me a pleasant sense of symmetry that I might end on you.

On keeping promises

I thought love meant standing on a subway platform waiting for the train that will never come
Except maybe, because love beats all odds, it would
I thought love meant defying the train schedule
I thought love meant being the rushing train
Called to the subway platform where it has never gone before,
Off course, off script, in love
I thought love meant keeping promises
But I am a poet and a liar.
My tag-line on tinder is "I'll break your laptop, your heart, or both"
People still swipe right.

Andre, I'll don't know what it means to contain the universe
So instead I count constellations when I can't sleep
Thinking about which stars look most like her eyes
Which, of course, is the kind of thing a liar would say: Stars are nothing like eyes
Except, perhaps, in terms of gravity.

I thought love was remembering how to dream
When I couldn't sleep.
Lying awake, eyes open, flying full-speed ahead into the depths of my own mind
Where her eyes are stars
But somewhere between the subway stop of poet park and liar plaza
I broke something
I thought this might also be love.
I don't dream anymore. I kind of like the quiet.

Andre, remember when you, me, and six other people piled into my tiny red car
And drove down to the lake together?
That night the moon was so bright on the water it seemed like we could dive into her
And splash around in her light
But every time we got closer she pulled away
Remember: The night was warm and the stars were bright and we didn't crash the car and I didn't break any hearts at all.

Andre, please teach me how to contain the universe.
This time, I promise, I won't mess it up.

For Josh

**I don't often write rhyming poems or songs so feedback is welcome. This is a work in progress**

You hear her say

You tell her that you love her
In every marching step
You tell her that you love her
Singing songs with all your breath

You loved her as a child
When you climbed her vivid trees
You love her even more now
You know she lets you breathe

(chorus)
You love her so you spend your days
Chanting till your lips turn blue
Take a minute in the silence
And you hear her say "I love you too"

You tell her that you loved her
Writing postcards shouting "VOTE"
You tell her that you love her
When it seems most people don't

You tell her that you love her
In the weeks you spend in study
You love her in the guidebooks
And the boots you get so muddy

(chorus)
You love her so you spend your days
Chanting till your lips turn blue
Take a minute in the silence
And you hear her say "I love you too"

She's a quiet teacher
You must listen, hear her say
She tells you in the food you eat
And the way she brings the day

She tells you in a birdsong
Or the sunrise, or the city park
She tells you in the stars
And the way they guide you in the dark

(chorus)
You love her so you spend your days
Chanting till your lips turn blue
Take a minute in the silence
And you hear her say "I love you too"

For Aunt Gail

An ode to the women of my family

"There's a reason they only name hurricanes after women"
(I hope you take this observation as a compliment)

The women in my family will not let other people into the kitchen when they cook
They say anyone else will get in their way
They cook with the same ruthless efficiency
That they run schools, or health centers, or political campaigns.

I'm afraid I have inherited this unwillingness to let others run my kitchen
In my kitchen the dishes are always done
In my kitchen the counters are always wiped down
It drove my roommates crazy but how could I explain to them
That this desire, this compulsion was my birthright
Ingrained in my DNA like my height (or lack theirof).
Same as the half-learned Jewish shabbas prayer I kind of know

"There's a reason they name hurricanes after women"
(I hope you take this observation as a compliment)

For Mira

Home

Imagine a technicolor dream

Imagine hues slung in yellows, blues, and red

Imagine sparkles

Imagine sunshine

Yes, like that, but more so

The smell of evergreen forest and 

Sweet tea and citrus

Warm light and candles and the gentle smell of smoke

The space we shared

Imagine home

For Will A

Constellation Rolecall

Last night all the constellations were in the sky
I stayed up late counting to make sure
Ursa major, ursa minor, casiopia
Even Orion, sitting on the horizon, unsure if the spring weather is a dismissal
Unsure where to go from here

They all sat in the sky and reminded me of her eyes
They all waited patiently for me to finish counting before dimming in the dawn light.

For Rainbow

A Love Poem

I'm writing this to candle light
Sitting in the silky bathrobe I bought from goodwill
And smelling the incense that always makes me feel like I'm in a pine forest
Because that's the closest thing I can feel to flirty in this lonely place

I wouldn't say I'm in love with you
In the same way I can't be in love with the moon
But I always take a moment to just breath her in whenever she graces my sky

Pine forests make me think of you
Or maybe the other way around.
I don't remember how pine forests smelled before I met you

In a way, this is Shakespeare's fault.
Because if he hadn't already wrote that Juliet's eyes were more beautiful then stars
And that stars would be dim compared to her eyes
And her eyes, in the sky, would outside anything the heavens had to offer
Then I would be able to offer you an original metaphor.

The world shatters

Mirror Poem

After I have dropped it on the desk

And cursed myself to seven years of bad luck

I do not know how to pick it up

Without cutting myself on the jagged shards

In this one the left corner of my mouth, 

In this on my right eye, red and puffy

In this one my right palm gently leaking blood

From my first attempt to pick up the pieces

Didn't do me any good. 

There is no word left in my vocabulary for

"The opposite of broken"

There's no word for

"What happens after I shatter" anymore

For (Great!) Aunt Susan

**I'm a little daunted in the task of writing a poem to one of the greatest artists I know. But I've done my best**

To My Greatest Aunt

Imagine a place where the mountains are new and raw
And the earth is wrought with drought and fire

Imagine a place adorned with strawberries and
Vineyards and oranges and all kinds of ripeness
Born from the earth.

Imagine a place where the winters are sunshine
And the summers are dappled with rain
And there is always dancing and drum circles in the park
And the lemons drip off the tree.

No wonder this place calls so loudly to all the people I love
No wonder she sings nigunim to the foggy sunrise.

I think, when the red bridge arches over the water
It looks like she's trying to say "I love you"

For Brynn

**today is earth day. Remember: capitalism causes climate change

Those Gender Feels (tm)
Or: a hot take on the Shakespearean Sonnet 

Picture, if you will, a big grey trunk full
Of dance clothes in my closet in disuse:
Velvet crop tops patterned with hot pink skulls
Skirts and dresses, shiny leather shoes.

Imagine glitter stored away in boxes,
Imagine baggy pants with elephants,
Ripped up fishnet tights and knee high polkadots,
And all the things I love to wear to dance.

This clothing is a costume I remember:
Something I can easily 'don and 'doff.
Would that it were so easy with my gender,
That "woman" were I switch I could turn off.

If I could I would fold up and put away
My label "woman" for another day.

For Anonymous

**today is holocaust remembrance day. If this post moves you, donate some money to No Mas Muertes or the ACLU #never again is now**

The Atheist

When I'm with you I often think of god
Which as a Jewish Quaker atheist
Is more challenging and circuitous
A journey then you might think. I imagine
God like the violets on my walk around
The neighborhood: delicate, beautiful,
Ephemeral. God is the morning doves
That fly away when I walk near them:
Coo-ing and flutt'ring, silly things really.
Perhaps god is a bad habit: checking
My phone mid-conversation with a friend.
Or the opposite of that: staring deep
Into a lover's eyes until I can't
Remember what she's saying. That she was
ever speaking. That there is a world out
Of her eyes. God is the strength in my legs
Simultaneously impossibly strong
And constantly failing. Ursula Le Guin
Wrote something about this idea. Something
About how atheists must acknowledge
And define god in order to deny
Its (her? their?) existence and in doing so,
Prove that god exists at least somewhere.

For Becca T

An ode to the 5th season of Doctor Who

When I sould have been studying I was

Watching Matt Smith a la bowtie and fez whisk Rory and Amy away to other words

Instead of re-reading my AP American history textbook 

I watched the 11th hour and then texted you for about 11 hours about it.

I did poorly on that exam but I made it through half a season of Doctor Who that night.

Up until the part where the heroes are separated on a strange alien planet and the villian attempts to pitt them against each other but in the end

Friendship prevails.

Of course, these days TV shows with canonical queer content and more than one person of color with agency.

The stories I prefer, like me, have come down somewhat to earth in their process of political awakening. 

But for that strange, missfit 16 year old

The stars were a beautiful place to find friendship.

"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth"-- Albert Camus

For Daniel

An ode to the smell of an old book

Dancing is the sun setting
My feet are the sun and they know how to sink
Below the horizon and rise
The next morning as if transported
They remember the East
They remember the West
They remember the orange dusk and the light pink dawn

Dancing is the smell of an old book
And the way the pages know me so well they open
To my favorite passage, the scene where the hero
Realizes that he has the strength in himself to save the world
Except he's known all along

Dancing is fresh cookies
Still warm from the oven that I just finished
Cooking because I can't sleep under
The shouting stars so I might as well stay awake
And make something beautiful

Dancing a warm cup of tea
And my hands wrapped around
The warm mug as the morning chill
Whispers around me and the sun
Remembers to come up again.

For Erryn (one poem among many)

Sweet nothings

I have to believe it's all downhill from here, honey
A maple-syrup smooth ride into town
It gets easier my sweet,

And the sweetness eases our way

Honey this ride is a long one
Months and moons and mountains
Tides rise and retreat until I see you and
If I can make the waiting sweeter I will

Sweetheart I'm stuck on you
Stuck apart, solitude without solace
And I hope the sweetness of this verse
Staves off some of the sadness

Sadness gets slippery and easy to
Slide into these lines in time
These lines that lack a single rhyme
But I'd rather scribe sweetness.

So roll downhill with me, love
And we'll make it down to town
Down and through and smoothly onward
Let's murmur sweet nothings until we get down. 

For Léah

An American History of Tattoo Art

The Rose:
Symbolizes the way my chest puzzle pieced perfectly into the chest of my first love. Skin pressed to skin, the rose remembers the smell of the soft skin at the base of their neck. The sneaking suspicion that, however much time passes, years and new lovers, I'll never stop aching for the feel of their skin curled into mine.

Snake:
Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you. Beautiful, graceful and venomous. Without legs but so much strength in the way I move across the earth, pressed close to its secrets. Turned on its side and twisted it might look like infinity.

Eye:
Maybe nothing will ever be enough to help me take in the world. Maybe I can stretch my hands open wide and hold my skirt out to catch the pieces that slip through my fingers. Maybe I smell the air, hear the birds, stretch my eyes wide and never miss a sunset.

Skull:
I never meant for immortality to be a theme in this poem but here we are, at death. Or at endings. The irony of a tattoo, lasting forever on your skin when someday your skin will return to the brown earth, skull or no. And then I will finally stop aching for the skin of my first love.

Wings:
There is immortality in stories more than in anything else. The stories I tell myself, my friends, the stories I tell to strangers. The stories I see (hear? know?) with paintings, with sculptures, with written texts, with the pictures I ink onto my body, across my skin. Here is how I will be remembered.

For Catherine

Mom, what's for dinner?

Tonight is your favorite
Mashed Potatoes, summer squash, and one of Van Gough's sunflowers
Because we, like him, are eating in color tonight.
Autumn leaf scarlet, deep sea blue, and spring dandelion gold

Tonight we will eat
Spaghetti, spring asparagus and Aesop's fables
The words will keep us spin us rich tapestries
Of animals and courage and love and kindness

Tonight I served
Cheesy broccoli and the way the hills lie against the sunset
With a dessert of morning dove's coo-ing the setting sun to bed

Tonight is
Tacos with fresh cilantro and sea shanties
About ships and wind and wave
And a single human against the might of the storm

Tonight I have no more paintings to love
No more stories to tell
Nor sunsets to watch
Nor songs to sing
I guess we'll have to order pizza.

For Taz

Paint-your-own Constellations

I remember that night we started up at the sky
And you tried to teach me the constellations
You named them, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Orion

But I only had eyes for the moon
Her spotted face outshining everyone

When I was a child I always knew when the moon was up--
Day or night I would spot it and point

Even before I could speak in sentences
I could find the moon and point to it
Drawn as though with the tide.

Now, in these dark nights I squint up at the sky and remember your soft voice
I redraw the stars for you
That one's the first time we held hands
That one's the shape of your eye when you smile
That one's your laugh

The evening air chills my spine but I press on
Intent on making the stars in your own image
Although your eyes would doubtless outshine them if given the chance
That one's the ache in my chest
The ache of missing you.

For Alex Pt 2

Water Poem

When I was three, my parents took me to 

Saranac Lake of the Adirondack Mountains.

Just as they were sitting down to dinner

They looked around to realize I was gone. They found me

toddled, on short legs down to the shore, Playing in the gentle

lap of rocking waves. They tell me it was downhill from there.

I prefer to think of it as downstream.

My first kiss happened in the rain

Under a streetlight, light playing in the raindrops

More beautiful crossing her face than any rain I'd ever seen before. 

What's the word for rain falling across the face of your beloved? 

The first boy who ever broke my heart left me by the ocean

We had gone on a vacation to the beach in the wintertime with

The hope that it would be quiet and uncrowded. We wanted to get away

From it all. Turns out he wanted to get away from me and the ocean

Too much undertow all ‘round

I met the fifth great love of my life

Skinny dipping in a river

Or rather, they were clothed and I was

Vulnerable. I felt the pull and I knew the current was coming

Before it swept me away

Into their arms.

For Alex B

Inspired by the song "Crayola Doesn't Make a Color For Your Eyes"

Painting you:

Painting you in reds and blues
With texture in crocheted, bright hues

Painting you in waterfalls
Waves of ocean, water's call

Painting you in graceful steps
Round the dance floor, take my breath

Paining you in lightning smile
Sit right down and stay a while

Painting you in strong warm arms
Your dancing simply oozing charm

Painting you from wall to wall
'Cause love, you deserve it all

for Sasha

A Feminist Love Poem

Someone once told me falling in love was like

Falling asleep. But with respect,

That's bullshit. Falling in love is

What I felt the first time I danced

And the hundredth time. Falling in love is

Red nails and pink lips and lacing 

Up my shoes.

Someone once told me falling in love was like

Jumping off a cliff and that's also bullshit.

Again, with respect.

Falling in love is finding the perfect skirt in a thrift shop

And wearing it to a contra dance, wearing it to brunch, 

Wearing it to dinner, wearing it to watch RBG on TV.

Love is watching RBG on TV in a nice skirt. 

Someone once told me falling in love is like a hunch

And then a series of promises

And then a lot of work. 

Or a rose, or a smoking gun or a ballet slipper

Or a shooting star. 

Love is the sun shining on daffodils and daffodils

Pushing their roots into the soft earth.  

For Mimi

Classic

Langston Hughes once asked something about dreams
And their fate after people lose interest
Something like the fate of the dodge meme
And how if you asked a teenager
What their wolf name was they would look at you as if possessed
But even these young upstarts know the meaning of the word "yeet"
(William Shakespeare basically wrote sonnet 55 about this).

The thing about timelessness,
As the band MTKO sings,
Is that the phrase "Mona Lisa smile"
Now refers to the painting, three pop songs, and a movie from 2003 staring Julia Roberts
And "The Crossing of the Brooklyn Ferry"
by Walt Whitman refers to a part of New York City that is now a TJ Max
Probably.

So, what's left, when everything else is dust?
Or, as Emily Dickinson asks in her poem "I heard a fly buzz-when I died"
If animal crossing is better then real life (and it is)
Why bother ever putting on pants?

Perhaps the answer is something about love
Or the essential human-ness of our desire
To be understood. What else are writers but very good liars?
Something about stories
I think.

For Hannah

I think I owe you a poem in some sort
Of flow'ry shakespearean language where
I proclaim I would bring you the moon for
Nothing but to breathe your same sweet air.

And though if you asked I, in an instant
Would take up this craft, to tell you I'd dive
Into the ocean for your iridescent
Eyes. You deserve more than these delicate lies.

For you, I want to break a poem open
And feed you the juice inside, I want to
Plant some poems and sees what grows from them
And I hope it's dandelions for you.

And then I'd plant fields of weeds to assert
Our springtime love, and in this way I'd say
With something more eloquent then this verse:
I'd bring you flowers every single day.

For Danielle

It's been such a long time since we've seen each other
That memory has scrubbed away the finer details leaving only
Broad strokes and general impressions.

I remember that your voice was birdsong in the morning, I remember that your voice paired with a ukulele was fine wine and cheese
I remember you were graceful as a cat and joyful as a hawk when you danced

I remember you had a penchant for falling in love and listening to Taylor Swift, a combination that seemed fated to end in heartbreak
I remember you loved like a stolen car:
Hard, fast, and heedless of consequence.

For Anna T

**this poem was inspired by Anna T and also the poem "Astrophil and Stella 31"**

Sweet Steps

With what sweet steps, my dear, do you turn around the floor
You move like the waves on the ocean
Your feet are a poem in slow-motion
And I see your eyes in starlight, who could ask for any more

Your roots stretch softly down, your branches soar
You bend, a willow in wind
And I know I would do it again
All from the start, what else are wishes for?

Oh tell me, moon, what was it like before
You'd memorized ev'ry lash on her skin?
You'd studies her ev'ry movement and whim
But somewhere you always knew that she was not forever more

God, to go back to that haven in your arms
But time, like me, is ever marching on.

For Oliver

**Author's note: This is my 300th post on this blog so that's exciting!**

Seder Plate (or to my younger cousin)

Charoset:
Reminds us that life is bitter and sweet.
Hard work and joyful reward
We find this duality in family, in friends
In books, movies, video games
There are many days of hard work yet but many joys too
How can any of us be free if some are still in slavery?

Parsley:
Reminds us of springtime
Of being the youngest
Of being the fullest of love
Reminds us of things that grow
Shooting up from the earth
Soaking in knowledge like rain
Reminds us of the sunshine a smile can spread across a day

Bitter Herbs:
And what joy is there to be found in spicy things?
Horseradish and weird pickle flavors
Fermented radish to season the gefilte fish
And raw onions for the chopped liver
How would you like to find a food that no one but your pop could love
And give it a seat at the table?
In these foods we truly find the meaning of passover welcome.

Egg:
What a small thing to contain so much potential!
What could it have hatched to be?
Who knows the kind of bird that might have lived inside?
What will you learn?
Who will you become?

Shank Bone or Roasted Beet:
We took something bloody and grim (the shank bone)
And we made it delicious (the beet)
We can grow up, change, learn new jokes, love new cats
And still honor our tragic past

Matzo:
You are the rock the table is built around
Without you we would be so angry, so hungry, so bored
You are the joy at our seder
The levity in our story about suffering
The crunch in our bland-ness
The passover meal depends on you.

Orange:
Maybe there is not a place for you yet
Maybe you still are trying to fit yourself into this big plate of tradition
The shoes of thousands of years of ritual are big shoes to fill
Don't worry, someone will fit a space for you
Squeezed between the herbs and the greens
And you will someday feel like you've always belonged.

For Keyra

To Keyra, the first great love of my life, my best friend:

I wanted to write you a poem that was just the word "peepiss" repeated an undefined number of times
And then I was talking it over with Denali and I said
"She's the first great love of my life. I am who I am today because of her."
And I realized I probably owe you a proper poem.

Because we grew up and into each other like two trees planted next to each other
Like lichen and algae, feeding each other, shaping each other loving each other

I have books of poems for incidental lovers,
Lovers for a night, lovers who shouldn't have been, lovers who never were
And here you are
The first great love of my life
The friend who shaped me, who loved me, who taught me how to love
Who taught me how to love myself
Poem-less. Not a single poem
For you.

Surely there must be something about the phones calls we shared when I was alone on the road
Something about the way you know every single one of the people I've every kissed
The night we went skinny dipping in the bioluminescent ocean
The years of manicures we painted in your back yard
Sunning our shoulders and legs in the warm yard,
The way I was afraid of your guinea hens
 The way you're the only one in my life (myself included) who can keep track of my partners

My love for you is an ocean
All my lovers combined were a puddle I splashed in
I would drown in the depths of my love for you
I would not think of fighting the undertow

But I did still manage to put the word "peepiss" into a poem for you.

For Julia

How do I write poems for a poet?
I would sooner give one of my paintings
To the lady herself, Frieda Kahlo

I feel the futility of it, me
Writing you a poem. It's like if I tried
To teach you how to love. How to star gaze
In summer nights and name each path of stars
"your eye" "your forearm" "your pinkie toe"

Like I would teach you how to turn on the
Radio and hear your name in each chord.
Like I could teach you how lips, that holy
Palmer's kiss, does touch, how to memorize
Each second of the singular epic
That is love. You could write the book on love
And here I am strug'ling through the cliff notes.

For Katie

When was the last time you got hurt?
Scraped your shin against a coffee table at the right angle
And bled a little on your neighbor's nice white carpet?
Perhaps caught your shoulder against a thorn bush sticking too far onto the trail
And cursed at the bush as though it might feel remorse?

Was she there to hold your hand the last time you feel?
Did she help dig the thorn out of your shoulder?
Put a bandaid on and kiss it better?
Did she just hold you as she cried?

You know the joke, "Two men walk out of the bar
And one man said, "Is that the sun or the moon?"
And the other says, "I don't know, I don't live around here."

Well, what's the difference between a healer and a lover?

"Is that joy or grief?"
"I don't know, I don't live around here."
Whatever it is, it's too big to hold and shining through your sky
And you don't remember when you last saw something so bright
So beautiful.

For Rivkie

What does a promise taste like?
It tastes like fresh challah bread and three day stale sandwich bread
It tastes like ice cream snuck from the fridge after midnight straight out of the carton
It tastes like the air before a warm rain

What does a promise feel like?
It feels like the air of a secret escaping your lips
It feels a cold stream on your bare feet on the hottest day in summer
It feels like the knot at the base of your neck you can never quite work out

What does a promise smell like?
It smells like the musty couches of the staff lounge where we spend hours together
It smells like wool soaked in campfire smoke
It smells like burnt popcorn and fresh earth and lake muck and dish soap

What does a promise sound like?
The noise of a city
The quiet of a farm
The song of something in between

What does a promise look like?
You darling, it looks just like you

For Daniel

A list of things I know to be true

1. That the world will continue to spin
2. Zoom is glitchy
3. If I plant a seed in the earth it will grow
4. The world will continue to spin
5. The sun shines and every day she does she says "I love you"
6. Teaching is a labor, like Sisyphus I will not drop this boulder
7. Love is the last of the gifts from the garden and the hardest of Hercules' 12 labors
8. To nurture an acorn into a tree takes sunlight, rain, and a great deal of patience
9. The sun will not stop shining and the world will continue to spin

For Marni

Mood-board for a Ghost

Think raven feathers
Think picnics
Think partly eaten waffles and dark colored posters and stories about dead English kings

Think the feeling in the pit of your stomach before you go over the peak of a roller coaster
You name it anxiety and keep it in a padded bed and feed it three times a day

Think cutting your hair, dyeing your hair, shaving your hair
Think cycling through hair like water: evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation
You name this cycle queer and and plant it in the yard and the rain waters it and it grows up the walls

Think high places and dramatic lighting and black and white words
On the page and they sound like music
You name it beauty and you feed it hope and sing and maybe it looks like home

For Andy

Lovesick

I see your eyes through screen-dimmed light
I yearn to touch you through the screen
My skin on fire, fever bright
Your words broke up in skype-skipp'd dream

I miss your lips, that gentle kiss
My heart it pounds, so loud it seems
Like cracking thunder, storming still
I cannot stand this quarantine

***Note: I will be writing 30 poems in 30 days for National Poetry writing month. Each poem is for a friend, requested by them over facebook. I will put just their first name (unless they tell me otherwise) in the title. Stay tuned for more poetry.**

The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons:

The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons: 

A critique of resource sharing, western colonialism and the way human beings understand climate science

In high school you might have been familiarized with “The Tragedy of the Commons”, a thought piece by American biologist Garrett Hardin. In this thought piece he imagines a “commons” or communal land accessible to a village. Each person, Hardin supposes, will raise cattle on the commons. The commons can only support a certain number of cattle without being entirely depleted and no longer able to support any cattle. Eventually, Hardin imagines, the greed of each person will lead to a depleted commons unable to support any cattle. The moral of Hardin’s story is that population growth leads inevitably to exploitation unless regulated by the state and that humans are fundamentally greedy, terrible people with no regards for the shared resources of the air, oceans, and forests of the world.

Here’s the problem: 50% of greenhouse gasses are released into the air by the richest 10% of the population and the poorest 50% of the population releases less than 10% of all the world’s greenhouse gasses (Study here). The commons aren’t being exploited by the whole village, the commons are being grossly exploited by the richest person in the village. Whenever anyone blames climate change on population growth that person is reading some unfortunately common racist piss. It’s plenty possible to feed the entire population of the earth with green farming practices (and we literally can’t afford not to, as Bill McKibben discusses at length in his book Eaarth and article here), but it’s not possible for the earth’s resources to support people who own personal jets. 

Here’s another problem with the tragedy of the commons: people aren’t fundamentally greedy. Western colonialism is and “post”-colonialist globalism is. In Robin Kimerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass she points out that the way humans interact with the environment is a direct result of money based economies. We exchange money for goods and the transaction is over. So what happens when we come upon a non-monetized resource like the commons? We exploit it, taking and accepting that if we owed something we would pay money for it. But Kimerer comes from the Potawatomi tribe of North America where they use gift economies. Instead of money being exchanged for goods and services the people of the Potawatomi nation take (are given) gifts from the Earth in return for a relationship. If the Potawatomi tribe were given a commons, instead of taking from it indefinitely, Kimerer might argue, they would give to it in return. They would honor the commons by taking care of it, not overgrazing and replanting every spring. This view of natural resources as expendable (and with those resources, the poor black and brown people who often live on or around those resources) is one firmly rooted in white colonialist bullshit.

In Naomi Klien’s This Changes Everything she introduces the idea of “blockadia”-- a new frontline of people fighting for the climate. The people of blockadia are most often indigenous poor people of color. They fought against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Keystone XL Pipeline, and pipelines and other extreme methods of fossil fuel extraction in Greece, India, Canada and China. These indigenous-based movements often started as a tribe of people protecting their home and their rights to clean water or air or the land they depend on for food. In these blockadias, like the one that became the abomination that is the Alberta Tar Sands the native people (the Beaver Lake Cree tribe) are fighting for their basic human right for drinkable water against an outside force (in the tar sands it’s Shell Oil). If I was to carry this metaphor over to the commons it would be like a village that had sustainably used and coexisted with its commons for literally thousands of years before an enormous multi-million dollar company came in, poured fossil fuel all over the commons and then gleefully set in on fire.

But maybe I’m being too literal. Maybe I’m focusing on a silly, outdated metaphor. Maybe you’re convinced the idea of the tragedy of the commons is bullshit, and you’re ready to stop beating a dead metaphor and move on. Monya, you’re asking, why are you so fucked up over a metaphor? Well, hypothetical reader, it’s because the discourse of the tragedy of the commons is in most contemporary climate science and climate science communication. Al Gore, the Sierra Club and James Hansen (the American scientist who first brought climate change to the attention of congress) all list overpopulation as a leading factor of climate change. And what can you do to fight climate change? If you think: recycle, don’t litter, turn off the lights, and take shorter showers, congratulations! You’ve been indoctrinated into the tragic commons mentality. And not just you; Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Nye, Crash Course kids, and the first page of youtube results for climate change for kids all have no idea how to systemically stop and combat climate change. Not littering, recycling, and driving less are common solutions listed, it’s far more rare to see climate education urging regulation on the fossil fuel industry. Solutions like decreasing the nearly $1 trillion that fossil fuel industries are subsidized internationally annually (source), or not spending $11 billion (source) on a border wall to keep out climate refugees (source) that also wrecks ecological havoc on the local ecosystems through which it cuts (source).  

And maybe you’re considering that I should be more hopeful about individual solutions. Surely there must be a middle ground between **gasp** socialism and turning off the lights occasionally biking to work. To this I reply that any focus at all on individual ways to lessen carbon emissions is a sparkly metaphoric distraction. Any time we focus on individual solutions instead of systemic change we are distracting ourselves from the problem at hand. As much as we may have convinced ourselves that reusable straws and eating vegan can make a drop in the ocean that is the work we have to do to combat climate change, it won’t change the reality of the fossil fuel industrial complex. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two thirds of all the carbon in the atmosphere has been put there by 90 corporations (link).This is the true tragedy: that we look within ourselves and at our individual actions to preserve our commons when the solution comes from systemic change and overhaul of the entire fossil fuel and global colonialist history. 

Snow in springtime

And the snow came

On the fifth day of springtime

After the birds sang in joy at the sunshine

After the maple painted the sky pink with her blossoms

And the willow shown gold with the promise of leaves

The snow came

Steady, silent, white, and biting cold

We lit the long-abandoned fireplace 

But it wasn't enough to return our fingers from cardboard to flesh

I heard the bones of the oak tree creaking

Heard the delicate green of her buds shivering in cold

The snow kept on

Whiteness covering all and muffling our dissenting protest

Until

At the end of the second day

Of snow on the sixth day of springtime

The weight of the wet, white snow became to much for the oak to bear and she

Cracked

And fell alongside the power lines

The birds were too cold to mourn. 

At the end of the world

When most people bought up toilet paper, bottled water, canned goods at the end of the world
My mother bought up floss
She bought packs upon packs, filing our bathroom cabinet and the bed beside her drawer
"When I die," She told me, her voice colored with a relief of humor,
"I want my corpse to look nice when it smiles."

In contrast, I found myself drawn to acrylic paints
I couldn't afford it, I had lost my job two weeks before
And should have been saving my money for the toilet paper, bottled water, and canned goods that were simultaneously impossible to find and impossible to afford
Or the inevitable medical attention designed to bankrupt me and all my loved ones
Instead I bought paints
Bright yellow hues, the autumnal oranges and reds of foliage,
The deep sea blues and purples, a white snow and a charcoal black
And a green like grass in the springtime (the end of the world started in the spring time).

Maybe I thought like Monet, I could eat my colors
Imagining them sugary sweet and dripping succulence by virtue of their brightness
 Maybe I felt the urge to create at the end of days
Leave a legacy of beauty like my mother's perfect, white-toothed corpse

Perhaps I was looking to make something different, to color reality less bleak
To repaint the contagion map spring green instead of the alarming red, a warning of the disease at its peak
I would rebrand the quarintine signs with pinks and yellows of springtime flowers, paint smiles back onto the faces of worried new anchors,
To paint "open" over the "closed" stores, to paint the people back onto the streets and into the stopped trains.
I paint the sky blue and the sea purple and the grass green and the whole world alive, alive once more.

Perhaps, in a world of pain and death, I just wanted to make a little more color, a little more joyful before the end.

--written in response to the covid 19 outbreak of 2020

A Tarot Reading

Five of pentacles: Today will stretch itself out in front of you, a labyrinth or labor while you grope numbly for sleep. Steel yourself against the cold. There is work to be done and spring is not here yet.

Knight of swords: Why are you fighting? When the mob comes to your door, pitchforks in hand, how will you receive them? Why is it so hard to find what you're searching for? Are you making it harder to find then it needs to be?

Four of cups: What have you been given today? What have you seen and refused today. When you spend all day with your head in the clouds, you'll have wet feet by sundown.

Gonna write you a love poem

Title is a shout-out to Sarah Berellies' "Not Gonna Write You a Love Poem" which has rather become my anthem these days. This piece is best read aloud. 

Gonna Write You a Love Song

I keep meaning to write you a love poem where I liken you to the warm breeze of spring, or the sun setting across the soccer fields, or the smell of oranges.
I would like to write these poems for you because I think they're true and also
because I have promised them

To you.

Some days it seems poet and liar are two sides of the same sparkly coin.

My friend Kristen last night, told me she values her word above almost anything. I would like to keep the promises I make
To you. I would like
To draw them from the frozen ground like snow bells and trout lilies in the springtime.
My friend Mira says that people make decisions with three centers of the body: the mind, the heart and the gut. She tells me if these centers aren't in line I will break my promises.

It’s not that I lied about wanting to write you a love poem.
It’s just that the truth
Is one of those words I can never quite see straight on.
It blurs and spreads like ink under the spilled water on your freshly finished homework after I promised to be careful with the water near your freshly done homework.

I would like
To write you a love poem

About how your pen ink blurred and spilled across the paper like curry on your carpet that night we were watching Love Actually and you made me promise
To not spill curry on the carpet and sometimes I think my life could be seen as a list of
Foods I have spilled on other people’s
Valuables and sometimes I think our love

Is the edges of the spill,
Spreading outwards and turning your carpet a little green and making it smell a little of curry forever and
Even if we break up now your carpet will never be the same

I would like to write you a love poem
And that poem would be about how you are the springtime sunshine melting the ice of my heart And I would like
To stand on the frozen pond on the cusp of spring and not break through
But the ice is rotten and I think
Poet and bad listener may be two sides of the same sparkly coin and I think about how
I promised
To write you a love poem.
But first I have to get out of this ankle deep freezing cold water.

My feet have turned blue by the time I get out of the pond and
Then I have to tumble my socks dry and then there’s dinner and homework to think of
And I have made it out of the pond but somehow I
Left my promise to write you a love poem
Where my feet cracked through the ice.

I would like to write you a love poem on creamy paper
With a real actual calligraphy pen
But I spilled the ink and it got all over everything
My paper, my desk, my phone, my hands,

My hands

Are always
Smudged
With pen ink or with marker or with good, dark earth or with a dozen other things
I have spilled and then forgotten.
I have noticed
Your hands
Are always clean
Your nails spotless
And I know there’s a poem in the way your hands are as clear
As the sunlight climbing to the golden tree-tops to make room for the night to fall across the earth
I must be the night, forever chasing you in this metaphor
Forever promising
To write you a love poem and I think
You and the night are two sides of the same sparkly coin

Ice cream on my brother’s iphone
Peanut sauce in my mother’s fancy bag
Nail polish on my best friend’s kitchen table
Milk on my dance teacher’s cat
Salad dressing all over the MET Museum's front steps
Curry on your carpet

I promised to write you a love poem.