How is your heart? And your head? And all those thoughts inside of it?
I want to say my head is empty right now but I would be lying. I WANT an empty, thoughtless brain for a little bit, but sigh, here we are.
It’s the last day of June, I was woken mid-nap by my dog’s abrupt barking, and it’s 32 degree Celsius as we speak. Yet, it is not the worst of times. Yesterday, getting ready to go to church with my love, I had a bad body image moment and broke down as I tried on my third outfit. I kept telling myself, it isn’t about what I wear as long as I put something on and just make it to church on time. But there’s a difference between telling myself something and internalising it to the point of believing it. The latter didn’t happen and I kept wiping my tears, still ready to head out the door. There’s something about the ideas of appropriateness of appearance and what could be perceived as vulgar that was eating me up. Even though I paid attention to dressing more “modestly,” I still felt a nagging sense of shame in how my body looked to others. Or maybe how it looked to me. I am not sure.
There is no lesson here. I didn’t overcome this battle yesterday. On most days, I do, but not yesterday. And while I do wish that I had emerged victorious (was tougher mentally etc etc), I am learning to give myself grace. Needless to say, we didn’t make it to church. LOL.
I am grateful for a partner who recognizes when I need to catch a break. He said there was no way we were going to go somewhere that made me cry, for whatever reason it was. So we went to the mountains instead. We drove through the touristy Pigeon Forge and ended up in Townsend, the atmosphere and our minds, both a lot cooler. We stopped by to eat a hoagie and some truffle fries, and it was downright delicious. We came back and I napped. It was a perfect day.
Some news –
I am teaching a weekly online poetry class with Brooklyn Poets!!!! Register here!
Word bank:
You center me/ seven islands birding park/ professional yapper=podcast host/ goetta (aka sausage brownie)/ secret summer menu at postmodern/ strawberry & jalapeňo crackers/ spilling secrets and laughter at Mike and Mashal’s/ cuddling w Jabba/ picnic at the park/ eating fried rice and wonton soup on the floor of my new apartment/ watching Bottoms stoned/ midwest detour/ power girl working group/ iced latte with peach cold foam/ ass matcha in clayton/ anniversary flowers/ saturday afternoon trader joe’s shopping run
Find your poem:
“Mouth” by Mona Arshi
When I was thirteen and dumb as bark and
married to a king and looked into mirrors
my mouth unwatchable my mind wandering
to the mouth you can train the mouth to
surrender itself to the eye or you can erase
the mouth through a series of thought
experiments involving lying to yourself and
the mouth employing a strategy of epigrammatic
wit in front of strangers and visitors in damp
badly lit anterooms or you can steer a mouth
through complex syntactical thickets when you
feel exposed, you can make the mouth sore with
expletives ... oh the brag of the mouth!
The mouth’s gentle implication, mouth-work
a mouth open, the King will roam
close to the mouth, land of the mouth, empire
of the mouth, oil-spill, flush-swell of the mouth.
“Lineage” by Jacqueline Johnson
My father’s father painted houses seafoam green,
colonial white, mule-bone brown.
Sea Island bred, a saltwater Geechee.
Black as they come kind of man.
His pretty eyes passed to all his children and
to generations who will never know him.
Who knows where the line begins?
The Gambia? Sierra Leone? Nigeria?
My cousin has seen five generations
pass through the Congress Street house.
My father’s father born in the 1890s,
among the first generation free of the fields.
Barely had an education, made sure
all his children went to Avery Institute;
were counted among the best of the new.
My father’s father was not considered a fighter.
Nothing like his son, hotheaded, known
for throwing his bosses overboard any ship.
My father’s father was a
soft-spoken, non-reactionary man.
Lived among the folk. Survived, made do.
My father’s father long gone before I was born.
Married to a brown, fire-brand woman.
His sons were rolling stones, husbands, and fathers.
His only daughter culled knowledge into
minds and hearts of students, leaving a legacy
strong enough to outlast her life.
Through a mirrored prism I find your face
peering from the bottom of a river
amidst swirling golden light.
Hard to tell if it is sunset or dawn where you are?
Eugene, you are not forgotten, your photo is
dusted pristine on the family mantelpiece.
“Descending America” by Cindy Juyoung Ok
In Utah I watched a crow fly across a Utah
tourism billboard as though corroborating
the state’s claim on beauty by making it more
real. The black Camry I was driving alone through
the country seemed conversely to position every
place I went as less real, motels and gas stations
concocted to move my body eastward as, in an ICU
in Seoul, my grandmother’s changed status:
virus transporting itself into pneumonia, then
coma. Before she had been admitted into
her nursing home, I had been surprised how her
neurodegenerative disorder did not mean language
was lost, but generated creatively and ordered
differently. She had more to say than ever,
though fewer wanted to listen, and she was
more often fact-checked aloud. When a pandemic
paused visits and nurses limited patient time,
her sentences shortened and scattered, sacrificed
to lengthen her physical life. The next morning,
in Colorado, the call came that she was dead,
three years of surrender to a public disease now
complete in its brutality. It was the third day
of a new year and I was still two thousand
miles from rural New Hampshire, where I was
going, and only ten thousand kilometers from her
white-flowered wide altar with her stone-carved
name and the portrait she had sat for and
chosen for this occasion, where I was not.
“In The Beginning There Were Fires” by Saba Keramati
When I was a child, I touched a red-hot stove. My mother washed my hand under cool water, kissed my burnt flesh. The skin grew back without a scar.
The pain: a memory.
Every year, more of California burns. I hear my mother’s voice in the fresh earth, asking me to come back home. I flinch from the question. It has burned a blackened heart. If I could reach back under my skin, I know I could touch it, and with my fingertip
make it crumble.
“Bird” by Tomás Q. Morín
After I fumble another conversation about love, I think,
Bird wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment, played
coy as if everyone didn’t already know what #33 would do,
daggers for eyes, soft hands ready to guide that orange ball
exactly where he said he would. I’ve taken shots before,
fear be damned, and missed more than I made,
gone up and down the court enough to know
halftime won’t fix everything.
I’m bruised, my knee barks, my shot is shit, and I
just need the bank to be open for once, for the glass to
kiss the ball back, softly. I’m always writing to you
like a last-ditch prayer, a heave from halfcourt
moving like a meteor, like I could turn this white page of
nothing into a night sky, these words constellations,
old messages that would say in a hundred different
shapes that I love you. All I ever wanted was Bird’s game,
quietly telling opponents the spot on the floor where he would
rise, after a screen and two dribbles, in the corner like a yellow
sun and let the ball fly. I’m always writing to you
to remind myself that all love poems are about the future.
Under the bright lights of this metaphor, I’m digging deep, not
vanishing when it matters most, to find the heart to take a shot
when the clock winds down to nothing. The X-Man,
Xavier McDaniel, laughs when he tells of how Bird took his heart once.
You already know you have mine when the clock says
zero my no-look mouth, my honey crossover, my silky net.
Other recommendations aka things I loved:
A movie that made me weep and ponder: The Life of Chuck
