I learned young to serve: ring the bell at Christmas, thank strangers for their change, handle hot tongs, release chicken legs onto soup kitchen plates, bag diapers and tampons, pass them to the poor, no inkling one day, I would be among them. This, I learned older: how hard it is to stand in line, […]
Of all pandemics I’ve survived, you are my favorite, teaching me what it means to be alive. Okay, I admit it, you’re the only one I’ve lived through, keeping me in my basement, (thankfully not alone), typing through Poetry Month, working from home, ordering groceries online – how much more privileged could I possibly be?
The irony of language: it’s a gorgeous word. Say it out loud: language. Say it for the sake of linguistics. Say it for the sake of auld lang syne. Say it for the sake of now, celebrating it daily, hourly, prefix, suffix, present participle, all that was and is and still could be. Let your
Turn off the morning news. Go to the old stereo. Turn on the blues. Because if anyone knows the trouble you feel it’s the songwriters, musicians, making it real, telling us what it is to be alive, how every thought has a place, how every pain has brought us closer to where we need to
Every day is fear now, blocking out potential, masking the possible, making it hard to breathe. That’s how sickness works. That’s how blame works. That’s how the world stands: silently, in the rain.
Because I could not stop for death, he kindly passed me by – he, dark winged and disappointed. Me, content with my busy pen – writing away mortality.
That time in the Mexican mountains, I said I was being followed. It wasn’t so much that you listened (though I loved you for capturing that pic, casually on the hiking trail, then later in the cantina – your face when you saw, yes, it was the same blond woman tagging along like a bad
That day you hummed the song of myself – I assume you assumed I’d fallen for it. I did. Have you felt so proud since, every atom belonging to me belonging to you? Well? Have you? Apologies to Walt Whitman
