(no subject)
...poems for the lit kids at the close of our year together.
chantz erolin, a diagram of you would prove
futile, arrows that lean over one another
and contradict, all set in a mesh of leaf matter
and soft hearts, ripe with maggots,
across the brown ground - but you elude.
you, somewhere outside the frame,
tucked safely in your brilliance and your little-boy's laugh,
bright as a tiny bell. the laugh is louder in the safety
of our cauldron, a hurricane of relief, your wisdom older
than the split between earth & sky. & now the future leans open
like a melon. stages beckon, ego's sinister
wisps tug at your shoelaces like fawning women,
your rudder through the lattice of hands steers true. it would be easy
to coat yourself in a man's armor, keep your cocoon
a cool secret, the soft things inside you buried only
within metaphor's reach. like your father. his skin of shimmering stone.
inside his odyssey you wonder, eat chicken,
spit rhymes.
mara facile, the careful literature of you. each cloth
chosen for its color, its tight weave. you lean cautiously
towards us like a child with one hand death-gripped
on mama's petticoat, the other over the lion's fence, a butterfly
perched on its improbable palm. box turtle, in and out of the safety
of a gorgeous shell, you peek, a fire in your eyes older than bone.
the goats in your future call a peace to you, simple as the
acres that sang thoreau home: inside you lives the courage
to reach into the tragedy of the rabbit and pull her
nine dead children to birth in your gloved hand. i see wing-tips
nudging their way out the nobs of your spine, lifting your leather
jacket, they flirt the attention away from the head you hide
and burn through, in swinging wheels, in the undulations
of time that have enclosed you so many times, old soul,
that you've learned to ride them with the grace of a sailor
who knows exactly which star to follow home.
brandon reader, the red-blooded goodness of you. story-exploder, poised on the edge
of laughing off the pain of existence, but i see the fist forming inside your mind’s hand,
a rage as old as parents are, maybe, or older, as old as god would be if the christians are
right & someone bothered to ask. you know the lightning path of the question & the earth sends its twig-forks up through you. you nurse the plants. i can’t see past the love you have for the banged-up knees & knotty leaves of creation, but i can smell it through your skin: something angry, something forgiving, they battle in rounds til you are tired & want your belly to swell with the sardonic humor of it all, & for your brothers to go away, leave you alone to settle things out with the dad who can’t quite manage to be what you need, but you insist on growing up anyway, whether or not the rites are offered and any true men exist to welcome you to their fold. now a man’s voice has taken the child from your throat. the lanky years keep pulling your head further from the ground, the musculature singing with its old fitful song. i dream for you an anchor older even than the rage, a steadiness in the spirit wiser than giving up & more gratifying than the thrown fist, a peace beyond it. i see its stable shadow lean from your ankles like peter pan, a flicker that tells of the blaze.
maisie daisy, mata hari, two of a feather we are,
the sun linking hands with the strands of our hair,
you twirl the fire fearlessly til your eyelashes burn
back & then you grin, pleased to still have your teeth.
the world a juicy peach for you, sweet & ready to melt
the sunrises of dominica into the leaves that weave
among your half-dread hair. i'd like to somehow hand you
the journeys i've survived, the bridges i've slept under,
terror crystallized into one fast freight train and every
meadow i've known, & it is futile, & it is fertile,
you'll take that badger soul of yours & tunnel through
anyone who dares think they could save you from finding
your own damn way home.
isa odin, somewhere between the opera and the broad strokes
of your laughing tone, buried in the lines of story after story
is the fish-spine sharpness, your secret spy-glass. you take in
every drop of discord, the low chords of wry pain & moments
of pleasure that bring the rain down. i don't know why you hide
it, this light that is bolder than anything your careful curls could
say. it's the pure bread of being & despite your caution it bleeds
through, half-buddha in Ophelia's too-small gown you hang
on the edges of conversation, worrying a blessing down
your lithe fingertips onto the vast page. someone hung song on you
a decade ago but maybe nobody told you you can become the song,
your cicada case shredding from the incredible pressure of it coursing in you, like blood
in aorta, like pollen on a bee's nose, like a baby in the caul just on the edge
of her first day of breath. girl, the wind knows.
paul kangas. mister plaid caution, mama's boy long-lost, ready
for the love of it. you were born with fists for hands. those searchlight
eyes of yours, razor-radiant in their hunger for the soft one, the one
who will bring you everlasting arms. & then, the lonely skin tied round your
bones, & this world, with its infinite defects, the unsteady earth
that will open a root-laced mouth & swallow you whole without even
a bird-call’s warning. & the boys, their sugar tongues. & still something inside
those chuck taylors of yours is setting up shop, paul. i see it like i see
trees bud out in the springtime - a leavening in your gait, shoulders
that can hold up their weight of air - you are polishing, boy, this endless
quest of yours for the pure love, the sweet home leading your searching
hands up under the firm armor of a warrior, a warmth discovered under the cold
steel skin that feels as familiar as the ache in your holy bones, & if god be a
mirror, paul, if love be a mirror, if love be a mirror i beg of you just lift your chin up & look.
bon amie, jackie. your jigsaw soul. you sheathe yourself in a softness
to cushion the scalpel of your breaker-eyes. i see shadows everywhere
you walk. it takes but the mist to hide a mountain, but the sun does come,
girl, the sun does come, & burns it away, & in the hollows of you is the
muddy-foot girl, seething eyes inside a gentle abode. jackie, this world
was made to be free in, i want to shout to your rafters, & then grab your
sister-hand and race off through the forest of sharp twigs and impossible
blossoms, ready for the rain to bless us. you know all this already. i am
only a mouthpiece for the swan-song of the universe, which has been
singing to you every time you turn around, when you lay down at night
with your mask washed away, in the fetid & feral dreams that stew you
wildly, & the patience that comes with the break of day, your brother’s
sandstone palms, & the cage’s hinge creaking looser & looser til one
day we will only know you by your mud-leaf footprints off & away
& the distant gleam of your eyes, fully afire.
ryland marsh, what are you afraid of? i could guess, but it’s the body that
knows it, the body that remembers & resents & gleams in the slow spring
sun. & somewhere in that body a relentless heart, the one you’ve tweaked
& searched around vainly for a switch to loosen the numbness back. but you
feel us now, ryland, the days of steady nothing-here have left you whether
you like it or not, & welcome to life’s wild ride, where one day you wake
to find your heart dashed upon a stone, & the next it is singing a song in
your chest that you were born already knowing, & the body lights up into a sinewy smile because there is no forgetting this now, the dance has broken through, & the ends of
things are just beginnings now, life no long staticky tape of rigamarole &
perfection, tidy like a suburban lawn, no, this messy heart, this fucking heart
has seized back to life like a furnace, & goddamn, girl if i could only ask you
to let it, just let it, just let it keep you warm.
stuart tighe, here for the joy of it, simple as a well-carved wooden bowl,
& the wholeness the world gave you, the men who have mentored you well.
i give them thanks & wish that such sturdiness was the province of most men.
in your leaning frame i see a chuckle of enlightenment much older than any body, & a little boy too, small in his baseball jersey, bewildered & be-wondered at this heavy, weird
world.
angi zumwalde, your fire-engine hair. it springs out of you like the dragons would,
given their sweet time. a rage encased in just-nice-enough & a deeper softness wrapped
tight as swaddle within the rage, its snarl of protection enough to kill an ogre. if i dare
go near it it will open its sisiutl mouth & truth, its horrid meat-rotting breath, hit me in theface til i can make it through medusa’s python curls - i don’t believe it, this disdain that holds up half your spine. & i believe in it wholly. i believe it will save you & i believe it will crucify you, hanging on the new millenium’s chrome cross & ball & chain ankle-deep & drowning, will you open, angi? let the viscera shine through? i have no doubt in your soldier & i salute her, she is hard as leather & has earned her knocks, she can tame all but the meanest rock-slinging children & keep those who would ask far away from the soft belly, the place where truth lives and dies each day, in tides, asking, asking you to be big enough to keep all the treasure of the fierce & all the solace of surrender.
lizzie stelten, i watch you swing in halves through the school’s purple doors. there is a
deep call here that stirs the belly & then a tightening in the throat, the strain of the straw house about to blow down, hours here, hours there, & you, when you appear, like a lantern and at times a silent cyclone, a maelstrom bitter & true, with the pierce of cat’s claw in your fisted eyes and heart of a salmon, every nerve in your body saying: yes, i know where home is, & goddamnit i will get there, no matter how vast the delta, how dammed the river, where mom & dad go, how they swing together and apart again, no, there’s a solid ground sandbar forming on your sternum, a gravity from within, a new spine: you are strong enough for this.
kaelie dahle, the veil. gauzy, backlit, through it i imagine you carrying their knives, the deer in the headlights dropping off your face & for a moment i saw your bright brown heart leak through those eyes leaning across the table & the curtain parted & you let us catch you. i know you have fought, kaelie. i know adults have pitied you & fawned over your crisp white bed, & in the end you walked with a grit that will never come quite clean from your teeth, the sheer will to go beyond this welling up in you like a whale & you took their new knee, shit, whatever works to get beyond this bed & into a fresh room of well-meaning faces who have not yet hung perilously under the reaper’s knowing grin, his gentle teeth calling: give it up to me & god, kaelie, this fight could end right here, light don’t need to shine any longer than you let it, girl. & i know you know how you rose. just bring it all here kaelie, bring what is untidy & tastes like old blood. let the messy seams show their satin lining & maybe, just maybe, more than words can catch you when you leap past the white lip & let go.
azania tripp, a shy orchid lives inside you, a hologram burned onto your irises.
i see it through the practiced shrinkage, shoulders like a sinking boat. i know a fire
was born in you. it leaks through in your loyalty, your circling returns to our table
of dangerous & delicious truths. we welcome you, soft girl. we welcome you further
& further out of the shell the world built you in, adults too scared of how it would be
for you to come to the sunrise untamed, so they taught you tentative. they taught you
doubt. little firecrackers buried into the mountainside of your soul, its immensity
dwarfing their damage like scratches on a stone. oh, i beg of you to find the next edge they sewed around you & sail through it, fairy on the wind, dewy ground rising up like a lover’s kiss to your feet’s earthen soles.
whitney beck, what the heck is up with these boys & their shoddy flirtations? i wish i could say you’ll do better later, but frankly good men are hard to come by. you meanwhile astir in your quiet frame, with a set of eyes heavy with the watching, poised right on the edge of the dance & like a hunted rabbit you seize the moment to lace yourself into the throng. carefully hung on the edges of things, candlelit, you guard what is most precious in the seven veils of salome, beyond the heart, even, tucked in the dark space between lung & spine which is the last place on earth anyone will look for the truth, murky as it is, & transparent too as if it were painted on your face in neon by the blood moon, exactly what you mean to say when you look up & slyly smile.
maximillian miller, that level tone, what words you can thread through the maze of
hot pain, the nervous system’s lightning singing through the skull again and again til each breath seems to come with a native cost of shearing throb. we welcome you through the fog, max, your light cuts through it anyhow, however tired the body that continues, at all
lengths, to survive & carry you here. prophecy tucked into weary caution, the sensual
world half-buried in the mist of continuing to be. if i could i would thread you through the needle’s eye & bring you out the other side, the meadows i would pull you through by the wrist. i pray you still smell every flower, max, while they’re purple & here.
becca brown, baby blue, the questions shoot right through you
like doves. every intention you have reaches like seedlings
towards the light; you burn for god, for this land, for the impossible
grace of not harming anyone. someday i pray to slip claws
into your palm, knuckles made of brass, grass blades that harden
into whatever you need to defend your own most sacred land: the one
that lives between two sides of a cage of ribs, that tender bird
who's only yet seen blind-sliced strips of the light. red girl,
if we opened you now we would find a deeper red fisted around that
heart, listing left and right towards everyone's ails but your own.
a prayer for its expansion. a prayer that your feet root deeper into
the sweet earth so that you may know exactly where you stand and love
it for what it is, oak savannah or rolling indiana prairie, or canadian
snow, or the wet heat of georgia - wherever you go, be each footfall
a garden that strews you the same blessing you strive to give us,
the half-wise heart begging to harden into its infinitely flexible whole.
shannon hannigan, eight years now since i wandered into that room with my tie-dye shirt unaware of what would hit me, i am still reeling, & there you are at the helm, herding kittens into choirs that send shivers down every nearby spine. i don’t know how you do it year after year, fall in love with brilliant people who will inevitably leave you with children all over the globe. i pray that you turn your love inside out each morning & night, kneel down and celebrate the temple of your imperfect & exactly body & let the holy roller of day come over you like a true blessing, the kind that churches could never touch, because that is your bread, shannon! that holiness of being that you let shine through, if there is a god you have her hands, rearing scores of motherless children back towards themselves every day, a spiritual practice no one’s gonna robe you for, but i see it, lady, i see how you learned your way toward the mother you never got by becoming her, more radiant than any statue & searing as any star - there are thousands of ways to be chosen. rest your mama’s bones.
to myself, small child begging to fit into the pants of an old one, heel off. i don’t know what to say to you but words are beyond it anyhow, look at the moon if you need a winking face. the green world grown up inside you til you are all vines & blossom, a jungle that will never yield all its secrets to any one mortal. you are too big for that now, the terrain of the should-world with its broken chainlink fences fades into the distance as you race outward like the universe once did, no time to audit its choices by the choir of black-hole doubt, no, the only true rule to expand, & you do. don’t let anybody tell you they know better. eight years & you’ve circled home & nobody gets to tell you what that means, but you got these faces, kid, you came to the circle half-elder this time & half weeping heart & you were still held. & you held. this field of being must expand out of your body, rays out the solar plexus, because in your soul’s presence a deeper water fills the room. your bold moves bound to crush a few ants but life inside the lines is more death even than that. remember to let yourself breathe, that the revel of an open meadow is a lifetime’s worth of doing alone & you are here to live for nothing more or less than your own wild wisdom, whatever arms it takes you through, however many state lines you clock, the sins of god-fearers littered behind you like broken twigs & smashed barns. if the crows come to gather them let them gather, let them make a pyre of your choices & let them burn it down to ashen soil without you, cause this witch made it past the inquisition to the deeper woods & if you listen, if you only listen on the night of the full moon like a coyote you will hear what is left of her, from the alligator-dark groves everyone else is scared to breach: a laugh the size of the whole earth round.
chantz erolin, a diagram of you would prove
futile, arrows that lean over one another
and contradict, all set in a mesh of leaf matter
and soft hearts, ripe with maggots,
across the brown ground - but you elude.
you, somewhere outside the frame,
tucked safely in your brilliance and your little-boy's laugh,
bright as a tiny bell. the laugh is louder in the safety
of our cauldron, a hurricane of relief, your wisdom older
than the split between earth & sky. & now the future leans open
like a melon. stages beckon, ego's sinister
wisps tug at your shoelaces like fawning women,
your rudder through the lattice of hands steers true. it would be easy
to coat yourself in a man's armor, keep your cocoon
a cool secret, the soft things inside you buried only
within metaphor's reach. like your father. his skin of shimmering stone.
inside his odyssey you wonder, eat chicken,
spit rhymes.
mara facile, the careful literature of you. each cloth
chosen for its color, its tight weave. you lean cautiously
towards us like a child with one hand death-gripped
on mama's petticoat, the other over the lion's fence, a butterfly
perched on its improbable palm. box turtle, in and out of the safety
of a gorgeous shell, you peek, a fire in your eyes older than bone.
the goats in your future call a peace to you, simple as the
acres that sang thoreau home: inside you lives the courage
to reach into the tragedy of the rabbit and pull her
nine dead children to birth in your gloved hand. i see wing-tips
nudging their way out the nobs of your spine, lifting your leather
jacket, they flirt the attention away from the head you hide
and burn through, in swinging wheels, in the undulations
of time that have enclosed you so many times, old soul,
that you've learned to ride them with the grace of a sailor
who knows exactly which star to follow home.
brandon reader, the red-blooded goodness of you. story-exploder, poised on the edge
of laughing off the pain of existence, but i see the fist forming inside your mind’s hand,
a rage as old as parents are, maybe, or older, as old as god would be if the christians are
right & someone bothered to ask. you know the lightning path of the question & the earth sends its twig-forks up through you. you nurse the plants. i can’t see past the love you have for the banged-up knees & knotty leaves of creation, but i can smell it through your skin: something angry, something forgiving, they battle in rounds til you are tired & want your belly to swell with the sardonic humor of it all, & for your brothers to go away, leave you alone to settle things out with the dad who can’t quite manage to be what you need, but you insist on growing up anyway, whether or not the rites are offered and any true men exist to welcome you to their fold. now a man’s voice has taken the child from your throat. the lanky years keep pulling your head further from the ground, the musculature singing with its old fitful song. i dream for you an anchor older even than the rage, a steadiness in the spirit wiser than giving up & more gratifying than the thrown fist, a peace beyond it. i see its stable shadow lean from your ankles like peter pan, a flicker that tells of the blaze.
maisie daisy, mata hari, two of a feather we are,
the sun linking hands with the strands of our hair,
you twirl the fire fearlessly til your eyelashes burn
back & then you grin, pleased to still have your teeth.
the world a juicy peach for you, sweet & ready to melt
the sunrises of dominica into the leaves that weave
among your half-dread hair. i'd like to somehow hand you
the journeys i've survived, the bridges i've slept under,
terror crystallized into one fast freight train and every
meadow i've known, & it is futile, & it is fertile,
you'll take that badger soul of yours & tunnel through
anyone who dares think they could save you from finding
your own damn way home.
isa odin, somewhere between the opera and the broad strokes
of your laughing tone, buried in the lines of story after story
is the fish-spine sharpness, your secret spy-glass. you take in
every drop of discord, the low chords of wry pain & moments
of pleasure that bring the rain down. i don't know why you hide
it, this light that is bolder than anything your careful curls could
say. it's the pure bread of being & despite your caution it bleeds
through, half-buddha in Ophelia's too-small gown you hang
on the edges of conversation, worrying a blessing down
your lithe fingertips onto the vast page. someone hung song on you
a decade ago but maybe nobody told you you can become the song,
your cicada case shredding from the incredible pressure of it coursing in you, like blood
in aorta, like pollen on a bee's nose, like a baby in the caul just on the edge
of her first day of breath. girl, the wind knows.
paul kangas. mister plaid caution, mama's boy long-lost, ready
for the love of it. you were born with fists for hands. those searchlight
eyes of yours, razor-radiant in their hunger for the soft one, the one
who will bring you everlasting arms. & then, the lonely skin tied round your
bones, & this world, with its infinite defects, the unsteady earth
that will open a root-laced mouth & swallow you whole without even
a bird-call’s warning. & the boys, their sugar tongues. & still something inside
those chuck taylors of yours is setting up shop, paul. i see it like i see
trees bud out in the springtime - a leavening in your gait, shoulders
that can hold up their weight of air - you are polishing, boy, this endless
quest of yours for the pure love, the sweet home leading your searching
hands up under the firm armor of a warrior, a warmth discovered under the cold
steel skin that feels as familiar as the ache in your holy bones, & if god be a
mirror, paul, if love be a mirror, if love be a mirror i beg of you just lift your chin up & look.
bon amie, jackie. your jigsaw soul. you sheathe yourself in a softness
to cushion the scalpel of your breaker-eyes. i see shadows everywhere
you walk. it takes but the mist to hide a mountain, but the sun does come,
girl, the sun does come, & burns it away, & in the hollows of you is the
muddy-foot girl, seething eyes inside a gentle abode. jackie, this world
was made to be free in, i want to shout to your rafters, & then grab your
sister-hand and race off through the forest of sharp twigs and impossible
blossoms, ready for the rain to bless us. you know all this already. i am
only a mouthpiece for the swan-song of the universe, which has been
singing to you every time you turn around, when you lay down at night
with your mask washed away, in the fetid & feral dreams that stew you
wildly, & the patience that comes with the break of day, your brother’s
sandstone palms, & the cage’s hinge creaking looser & looser til one
day we will only know you by your mud-leaf footprints off & away
& the distant gleam of your eyes, fully afire.
ryland marsh, what are you afraid of? i could guess, but it’s the body that
knows it, the body that remembers & resents & gleams in the slow spring
sun. & somewhere in that body a relentless heart, the one you’ve tweaked
& searched around vainly for a switch to loosen the numbness back. but you
feel us now, ryland, the days of steady nothing-here have left you whether
you like it or not, & welcome to life’s wild ride, where one day you wake
to find your heart dashed upon a stone, & the next it is singing a song in
your chest that you were born already knowing, & the body lights up into a sinewy smile because there is no forgetting this now, the dance has broken through, & the ends of
things are just beginnings now, life no long staticky tape of rigamarole &
perfection, tidy like a suburban lawn, no, this messy heart, this fucking heart
has seized back to life like a furnace, & goddamn, girl if i could only ask you
to let it, just let it, just let it keep you warm.
stuart tighe, here for the joy of it, simple as a well-carved wooden bowl,
& the wholeness the world gave you, the men who have mentored you well.
i give them thanks & wish that such sturdiness was the province of most men.
in your leaning frame i see a chuckle of enlightenment much older than any body, & a little boy too, small in his baseball jersey, bewildered & be-wondered at this heavy, weird
world.
angi zumwalde, your fire-engine hair. it springs out of you like the dragons would,
given their sweet time. a rage encased in just-nice-enough & a deeper softness wrapped
tight as swaddle within the rage, its snarl of protection enough to kill an ogre. if i dare
go near it it will open its sisiutl mouth & truth, its horrid meat-rotting breath, hit me in theface til i can make it through medusa’s python curls - i don’t believe it, this disdain that holds up half your spine. & i believe in it wholly. i believe it will save you & i believe it will crucify you, hanging on the new millenium’s chrome cross & ball & chain ankle-deep & drowning, will you open, angi? let the viscera shine through? i have no doubt in your soldier & i salute her, she is hard as leather & has earned her knocks, she can tame all but the meanest rock-slinging children & keep those who would ask far away from the soft belly, the place where truth lives and dies each day, in tides, asking, asking you to be big enough to keep all the treasure of the fierce & all the solace of surrender.
lizzie stelten, i watch you swing in halves through the school’s purple doors. there is a
deep call here that stirs the belly & then a tightening in the throat, the strain of the straw house about to blow down, hours here, hours there, & you, when you appear, like a lantern and at times a silent cyclone, a maelstrom bitter & true, with the pierce of cat’s claw in your fisted eyes and heart of a salmon, every nerve in your body saying: yes, i know where home is, & goddamnit i will get there, no matter how vast the delta, how dammed the river, where mom & dad go, how they swing together and apart again, no, there’s a solid ground sandbar forming on your sternum, a gravity from within, a new spine: you are strong enough for this.
kaelie dahle, the veil. gauzy, backlit, through it i imagine you carrying their knives, the deer in the headlights dropping off your face & for a moment i saw your bright brown heart leak through those eyes leaning across the table & the curtain parted & you let us catch you. i know you have fought, kaelie. i know adults have pitied you & fawned over your crisp white bed, & in the end you walked with a grit that will never come quite clean from your teeth, the sheer will to go beyond this welling up in you like a whale & you took their new knee, shit, whatever works to get beyond this bed & into a fresh room of well-meaning faces who have not yet hung perilously under the reaper’s knowing grin, his gentle teeth calling: give it up to me & god, kaelie, this fight could end right here, light don’t need to shine any longer than you let it, girl. & i know you know how you rose. just bring it all here kaelie, bring what is untidy & tastes like old blood. let the messy seams show their satin lining & maybe, just maybe, more than words can catch you when you leap past the white lip & let go.
azania tripp, a shy orchid lives inside you, a hologram burned onto your irises.
i see it through the practiced shrinkage, shoulders like a sinking boat. i know a fire
was born in you. it leaks through in your loyalty, your circling returns to our table
of dangerous & delicious truths. we welcome you, soft girl. we welcome you further
& further out of the shell the world built you in, adults too scared of how it would be
for you to come to the sunrise untamed, so they taught you tentative. they taught you
doubt. little firecrackers buried into the mountainside of your soul, its immensity
dwarfing their damage like scratches on a stone. oh, i beg of you to find the next edge they sewed around you & sail through it, fairy on the wind, dewy ground rising up like a lover’s kiss to your feet’s earthen soles.
whitney beck, what the heck is up with these boys & their shoddy flirtations? i wish i could say you’ll do better later, but frankly good men are hard to come by. you meanwhile astir in your quiet frame, with a set of eyes heavy with the watching, poised right on the edge of the dance & like a hunted rabbit you seize the moment to lace yourself into the throng. carefully hung on the edges of things, candlelit, you guard what is most precious in the seven veils of salome, beyond the heart, even, tucked in the dark space between lung & spine which is the last place on earth anyone will look for the truth, murky as it is, & transparent too as if it were painted on your face in neon by the blood moon, exactly what you mean to say when you look up & slyly smile.
maximillian miller, that level tone, what words you can thread through the maze of
hot pain, the nervous system’s lightning singing through the skull again and again til each breath seems to come with a native cost of shearing throb. we welcome you through the fog, max, your light cuts through it anyhow, however tired the body that continues, at all
lengths, to survive & carry you here. prophecy tucked into weary caution, the sensual
world half-buried in the mist of continuing to be. if i could i would thread you through the needle’s eye & bring you out the other side, the meadows i would pull you through by the wrist. i pray you still smell every flower, max, while they’re purple & here.
becca brown, baby blue, the questions shoot right through you
like doves. every intention you have reaches like seedlings
towards the light; you burn for god, for this land, for the impossible
grace of not harming anyone. someday i pray to slip claws
into your palm, knuckles made of brass, grass blades that harden
into whatever you need to defend your own most sacred land: the one
that lives between two sides of a cage of ribs, that tender bird
who's only yet seen blind-sliced strips of the light. red girl,
if we opened you now we would find a deeper red fisted around that
heart, listing left and right towards everyone's ails but your own.
a prayer for its expansion. a prayer that your feet root deeper into
the sweet earth so that you may know exactly where you stand and love
it for what it is, oak savannah or rolling indiana prairie, or canadian
snow, or the wet heat of georgia - wherever you go, be each footfall
a garden that strews you the same blessing you strive to give us,
the half-wise heart begging to harden into its infinitely flexible whole.
shannon hannigan, eight years now since i wandered into that room with my tie-dye shirt unaware of what would hit me, i am still reeling, & there you are at the helm, herding kittens into choirs that send shivers down every nearby spine. i don’t know how you do it year after year, fall in love with brilliant people who will inevitably leave you with children all over the globe. i pray that you turn your love inside out each morning & night, kneel down and celebrate the temple of your imperfect & exactly body & let the holy roller of day come over you like a true blessing, the kind that churches could never touch, because that is your bread, shannon! that holiness of being that you let shine through, if there is a god you have her hands, rearing scores of motherless children back towards themselves every day, a spiritual practice no one’s gonna robe you for, but i see it, lady, i see how you learned your way toward the mother you never got by becoming her, more radiant than any statue & searing as any star - there are thousands of ways to be chosen. rest your mama’s bones.
to myself, small child begging to fit into the pants of an old one, heel off. i don’t know what to say to you but words are beyond it anyhow, look at the moon if you need a winking face. the green world grown up inside you til you are all vines & blossom, a jungle that will never yield all its secrets to any one mortal. you are too big for that now, the terrain of the should-world with its broken chainlink fences fades into the distance as you race outward like the universe once did, no time to audit its choices by the choir of black-hole doubt, no, the only true rule to expand, & you do. don’t let anybody tell you they know better. eight years & you’ve circled home & nobody gets to tell you what that means, but you got these faces, kid, you came to the circle half-elder this time & half weeping heart & you were still held. & you held. this field of being must expand out of your body, rays out the solar plexus, because in your soul’s presence a deeper water fills the room. your bold moves bound to crush a few ants but life inside the lines is more death even than that. remember to let yourself breathe, that the revel of an open meadow is a lifetime’s worth of doing alone & you are here to live for nothing more or less than your own wild wisdom, whatever arms it takes you through, however many state lines you clock, the sins of god-fearers littered behind you like broken twigs & smashed barns. if the crows come to gather them let them gather, let them make a pyre of your choices & let them burn it down to ashen soil without you, cause this witch made it past the inquisition to the deeper woods & if you listen, if you only listen on the night of the full moon like a coyote you will hear what is left of her, from the alligator-dark groves everyone else is scared to breach: a laugh the size of the whole earth round.