Category: poetry

At Hellgate Canyon

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Stop. Breathe. Again. Good.
Wind whistles in endless pine trees
as your neck cranes higher to look.
-do you see it yet?-
The bright blue sky– paint from a God-hand
streaks through the gaping canyons of yourself.
Places unexplored.

Sit on the black-orange-mold-moss that scares you.
Let yourself reflect on decay, on the parts of yourself dead and dying.
Smell the lambs ear of sage offered to you,
smell the tobacco you offered underneath that,
smell the salt of your own skin underneath that.
Places unexplored.

Sit among the sound of rushing waters– the call of your own blood
bubbling underneath.
Now is the time to ask, to listen to its burbled question,
What do you want? What do you want? What do you want?
Have you stopped to actually listen to the reply?
Have you turned the corner, seen the arrow of your own heart
and the sacred sites it points to?

When you are wobbling on the silk-water of shining rocks,
will you take the steadiness of hands offered?
Embrace the chill?
Both?

Stop. Breathe. Again. Good
Smell the braid of burning sweet grass, a protection.
Love the untamed red of the unknown mountain cherry and
see the ochre faded rust on stone, the handprint swiped like blood.
Smile at the violence used to create
the unexplored gaping canyons of yourself.
Look up at the sky and the wind,
feel your neck crane.
Do you see it yet?
Do you see?

IMG_3784

 

Many thanks to Melissa Kwasny for leading us here and through the exercise that led to this poem. Needless to say, this experience has already been transformative.

Poetical

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I keep meaning to sit down and write. I have ideas. I swear! It’s just been kind of a crazy time. We get kids in a few weeks, and I’m excited to hunker down and get to work.

In the meantime, I’ve been admittedly writing poetry and fiction. Here’s a short excerpt from two poems, just to remind myself when I look back that, in these months, I was still writing.

The politics of sharing a bed is not simply about defining the boundaries of blankets.
It is the place where the intimate meets the intellectual.
Continually choosing to share space with someone,
instead of the temporary VIP invite is a difficult task.
It means seeing the other person’s body and heading not just for the destination,
but wondering at reasons why the mapmaker took this route.
It is reading the text of a mind and taking interest,
not just in the words but in the hands that wrote them.
It is knowing that beliefs come with baggage;
it is knowing the story behind the idea and caring about both.

The Politics of Sharing a Bed, 2016

Here’s the truth: I’m a storyteller.

I tell stories so I can try and make sense of myself and the world.
I teach them so that my kids can tell them, so I can better tell them myself.

And I’m terrified you’re going to ask to read some of my stories,
because I’ve written myself into some pretty dicey situations in the past.
I’ve been a storm-tossed maiden at the bow of a ship or a starry-eyed moon-catcher.
I’ve called myself warrior and flower; I’ve been betrayer and betrayed.
I’ve been beloved and beguiled and broken hearted.
In fact I had been all of things just in the five months before we met.

Storytelling, 2016

Everything is on Fire (and That’s Okay)

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It’s been over three weeks since I’ve written anything that is both personal and publishable. I keep opening the page, seeing the white box and the blinking cursor and drawing  a blank.

How do I put down what it means to systematically dismantle a life?

Not in an overly-dramatic way. Unlike my early twenties, it lacks the flair of simply setting the thing on fire and watching the flames dance in the sky. No, this has been a slow, methodical sort of burn. It’s the kind you chose to set aflame to save everything else.

It’s understanding that you need to set down your armor– there is no fight to win now. It’s removing and reimagining the parts of yourself you were so sure you knew, then realized had become foreign when you looked in the mirror. It’s knowing that you can’t use tape and glue anymore, you simply have to appreciate what was built and move on. It’s seeing that everything is on fire, but maybe that’s okay. Sometimes you have to let things burn so new things can grow.

What does it mean to rebuild a body?

How do I explain what it signified to stand alone in my room and hear only my own heartbeat? Is there a name for the tension that exists at the corner of “absolutely terrified” and “utterly excited”? I haven’t yet found language to explain what it means to know that the next few steps of your life will be frightening and difficult, but that you don’t regret them for a moment. It’s unstitching the parts of yourself you were sure were dead, only to find there is still life there and that it is blooming in spades.

There is a unique mixture of grief, fear, joy, terror, and wonder that comes from running your hands down your own body, grabbing the flesh of your hips beneath your own hands and being able to whisper, “This is mine now, only mine now,” in small, sanctified breaths; the prayer of your own newfound path ritually running through your mind.

How do you talk about rediscovery?

IMG_9688Not in the pop-queen-country-belle-diva sort of way, but within the small, undefined moments you had forgotten too. The moments where you realized  you were at the mercy of only your own whims; the simple, everyday decisions where you only have to ask, “What do I want?” I am searching for the couplets that could explain the simple pleasures of small choices. I am seeking stanzas that explain the joy of newfound agency.

The discovery is a montage, flashes of light shot through my heart: bursting into laughter on a hike, catching my breath in open ocean,  a heavy sigh of satisfied relief at the end of a long day; all the images reveal the mini-epiphany of, “Oh! That’s who I am!” and are full of a sense of wonder I thought I had lost long ago.

Is there a word for the moment between falling and flying?

I haven’t found one yet, something that properly captures the silver second where the sheer ridiculousness of what you are doing becomes perfectly clear. It’s elation and fear. It’s passionate and sensual and make-your-stomach-drop terrifying. It’s the silence in your ears before going down the big hill on a roller coaster; it’s sharp intake of breath before you hit the water from the cliff you just jumped off of.

It’s the knowledge that you cannot go back, that what lies forward is completely unknown, but that the horizon out there is full so much potential you can’t help but just start giggling like a kid seeing the ocean for the first time.

It is wild and unfettered and chaotic and perfect.

 

Joy on a Page

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To the girl hunched over the keyboard:
I sit here weary
barely able to keep eyes open
a mind troubled with adult worries.

You,
14 and all unwoven tales all unspent dreams.
You of crazy dance moves and unaware and unassuming
bliss in the exquisite creature that is yourself.
You type, crazy fast fast fast over the keyboard
smiling, laughing at the inside joke you are telling
yourself. Your fingers fly faster than the keys and
you are unable to keep up with your own
beating rabbit-heart. You make yourself
giggle, almost embarrassed at the joy and
the vulnerability you are throwing on the paper.
I hope you are marveling the way that I am.
Look with wonder at the way you are
finding yourself as you put words on paper.
Bask in the glory and cherish the light
that you unleash, splashing joy onto a white screen.
Let your heart and your own too-big
feelings melt out of your
fingers and onto the page.

Enough. 

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I will never do
Enough.
I will never give
Enough.
I will never have
Enough.
I can never be
Enough.

There is so much more
that I could do, that I could give,
that I could know.
There are always flaws, always
cracks, always empty, gaping holes.

I dip my thumb into the
vastness of all these perceived
Slights and fails. In them, there is
that human stillness–perfect, frail.

In my flaws, I find
Enough.
The holes, they let in breath–
Enough.
The cracks that let in light–
Enough.
In these broken, empty hands–
Myself.
Enough.
Enough.

It can only whisper back at us. It can no longer roar.

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It’s astounding, really, how quickly the human mind is able to go into damage control. The body is often the star of regeneration, regrowth, and healing; we celebrate the body’s ability to accept and become attached to new parts, grow back bits of ourselves that have been stolen and hacked off, or mimic the actions and feelings of a limb when we are left wanting.

The body can even take over when the worst happens. The main functions for the body itself to survive– blood-pumping heartbeats, air-filling breaths– are programmed to continue no matter what is happening in the outside world. Without choosing too, the body works within itself to make sure it keeps on living.

The human mind, however, works differently. A sponge of information, the mind rarely needs to work to attach itself to new ideas or memories. Instead, we constantly take in everything surrounding us. We are bombarded by a seemingly unending stream of images, soundbytes, voices, words, numbers opinions beliefs emotions faces tacticsideashopesstragegiesfantasiesdesires. The mind is consistently full and racing to process, file, and respond to all of these things.

When disaster–or at least an intense shake-up of the normal day’s happenings– occurs however, the mind must make a switch. There is too much going on, and it becomes like the body and begins to triage. It prioritizes the necessities that must remain with you on the other side of this moment, this temporary crisis.

The basic facts of the memory remain: the date, time and place, the clinically bare images that swoop through when you try and piece together something; the heart of the memory still beats and the lungs still take in shallows breaths of air. Maybe the eyes flutter and a slash of color or hint of scent peek through.

There are other things, though, that the mind decides is no longer safe to keep as a memory. Things that were too intense or too emotional or just too damn vivid to live on in our mind’s eye, and the mind proceeds to slowly rob us of them. Even if it’s something we may desire to keep, there are some things that are perhaps no longer worth knowing. To know them, to feel them, to wrap oneself in the blanket of that memory would be too raw, too confusing, or too painful to keep.

So it fades.

Morning comes, and the first gray-yellow rays sunshine creep in through your windows. Just as the sun comes up, it sheds light on the memories of the previous day. The colors are less vivid when stripped of their once-black background. The memory that had so powerfully ran through your mind in crazy loops, begins to slow, then walk, then fade quietly into the background. We open our eyes to reality again, and we re-align and re-adjust to what was once normal, or what now is normal. The mind accepts the occurrences of the previous day and, if possible, moves past them. When we try to recall the memory, it can only whisper back at us. It can no longer roar.

Are we angry at the mind for taking these memories away? Or, deep down, do we appreciate the mind for taking some of the responsibility off of ourselves?

Remembering is often considered such a sacred thing, something that we should be holding ourselves accountable to as often as we can. Perhaps, the mind robs us of these thoughts because it knows that, deep down, we may not really want to remember.

4 years old, but I still love this piece a lot.

Stories and Rain

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A light Mānoa rain flicks
down so lightly you can’t even
really see the drops. Just cold,
tingling moments— like stars
in the milliseconds after they explode.

Painless, perfect, they
are the seconds after the splash
of your most perfect canonball.
They are the nerves on your lips
after your first kiss comes up for air.

Here, I walk at the foot of a valley,
a long trench flowing into the urban
mouth of movement. I go, I run
I hustle I work I live and then
a light Mānoa rain falls. I pause.

I used to be terrified of things I could
not see. Ghosts, demons, beasties
were waiting, their cold, wet fingers
creeping around corners, under beds,
just outside my window.

Now, tucked into the corner of
two colliding worlds, the future
creeps its fingers up the soft cheek of
an evergreen face. A white blanket rolls
down to cover them both. They rest now.

I look up and see them. Pinpricks cover
my face. The stars, the nerves, the splash
the kiss— their magic unquantifiable and
too quick, too grazing to even be registered.
They are only even real if you take notice.

And I hold out my hand and tiny pools of
rain collect, in the creases like magic.
The terror and the wonder of the unseen
are equally real and not mutually exclusive. They
are merely waiting to be seen in the stories we tell ourselves.