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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
