mustard seeds

In my dream I had had enough.

Three white middle-aged men stood just inside the rear entrance to the rural supermarket harassing me. Instead of walking by I stopped beside them. "Please don't speak to me that way." I said. Their heckling grew louder, their laughter too, and I repeated myself, at least four times. Please don't speak to me that way. As I spoke I straightened my spine, pushing from my heels up toward the ceiling, teeth gritted, willing myself to project confidence, strength, poise. To emphasize, through my physicality, that I am also human. Please don't speak to me that way. Then one of the men picked up a ketchup bottle from a table behind him, one of those label-less, all-red entities sitting unwashed-for-years-probably on pizza parlors' grimy tabletops. Without warning he squirted me with it, sticky red ketchup shooting all over my face, its viscosity dripping from my hair onto my chest while the other men laughed. Like some low-budget attempt at a re-gendering of the Passion of the Christ.

I can't really describe how awful it was, standing there as this man evacuated a bottle of ketchup onto me, and instead of coming to my aid the other shoppers laughed. I don't think I said anything after that, just walked away, lurching my way past dimly lit aisles of seltzer and canned goods, still trying to look composed. I sat myself in the passenger seat of the black Honda CR-V, touched a hand to my matted red hair, mostly numb but thinking, listlessly, if anything I might have done or said would have made any kind of difference.





Earlier we were at his grandparents' house, of course they weren't really his grandparents nor was it really their house, but you know how dreams work. We kneeled in the flattened earth where a garden could be, fantasized about a barn, some chickens, pigs, a few goats--our little dream farmette. I looked worriedly at the development already encroaching on the fields around the cabin. There's a good chance, I pointed out, that it will all be gone before we have a chance to inherit it.

Love doesn't exist to meet your expectations.

I write a lot of poems in my head while I'm walking in the woods and too often, lately, I neglect to ever write them down. At the same time I am growing more comfortable with allowing things--moments, experiences, feelings, ideas, (poems)--to be fleeting. To be there and then to be gone. I may never again think about the sunset over the river today, how the sky flashed gold behind me, startling my eye such that I thought, for a moment, I was being followed.

On change and the status quo

Of course, I make the choice every day by living it.

"Work Shy" by Alex Phillips

To be poor and raise skinny children.

To own nothing but skinny clothing.

Skinny food falls in between cracks.

Friends cannot visit your skinny home.

They cannot fit through the door.

Your skinny thoughts evaporate into

the day or the night that you cannot

see with your tiny eyes.

God sticks you with the smallest pins

and your blood, the red is diluted.

Imagine a tiny hole, the other side

of which is a fat world and how

lost you would feel. Of course,

I'm speaking to myself.

How lost I would feel, and how dangerous.

 

 

 

 

 

hunting vest

Nearly every day I wonder if I am ready to say goodbye to you, or to him, and I don't know about you (or him either) but I remain hopelessly unsure. the comfort and the agony of intellectualized paralysis. all these false equivalencies, the consummate absurdity of this choice I've created for myself, which I am not making.   



I returned to the valley floor today, determined, this time, to be less afraid. When I first wrote that line in my head it went like this: I return to the valley, this time unafraid.

But that would be a lie. As I descend the tension in my chest constricts, constricts, constricts as I work to remind myself, over and over again, to be brave. It's something about being that close to the water, I think, two miles spent criss-crossing the creek via slippery stones, all those dark crevices behind and underneath boulders into which a woman hiking alone could so easily go missing, all those deep pools in which she could so easily drown.

In defense of framing a piece of art

I didn't eat for so many years. It was no way to live.


I am learning, once again, how to feed myself.


I think art is important. 

"The Thrush" by Edward Thomas

When Winter's ahead,

What can you read in November

That you read in April

When Winter's dead?

I hear the thrush, and I see

Him alone at the end of the lane

Near the bare poplar's tip,

Singing continuously.

Is it more that you know

Than that, even as in April,

So in November,

Winter is gone that must go?

Or is all your lore

Not to call November November,

And April April,

And Winter Winter—no more?

But I know the months all,

And their sweet names, April,

May and June and October,

As you call and call

I must remember

What died into April

And consider what will be born

Of a fair November;

And April I love for what

It was born of, and November

For what it will die in,

What they are and what they are not,

While you love what is kind,

What you can sing in

And love and forget in

All that's ahead and behind.