No. 0
Snow strategies I noticed from little folks
1/ move a snow chunk from one place to another, carrying it like a prized possession
2/ find the largest snow piece around you. Preferably one that’s icy so it holds together more. Lift it high over your head with both arms and smash it on the fucking ground as hard as you fucking can
3/ eat snow, I tried it and, pretty good
No. 1 (The Forager)
Everyday I’m like
Just be water Jared
Be water
And then I’m like a rock
Just splish sploshin through
Then, when I’m lifted up by others
(SHE Sent a GIF)
I remember
I’m a rock!
I’m water!
I’m both!
No. 2 (Bathers)
How nice to know what we are—
A white cat looks at fear in me
Corn kernels are drowning in the tree guard
Pharoah Sanders is playing on my AirPods.
The world is waiting
For an invisible storm:
A virus.
I remember my mother sitting by the pool
in Orlando, her toes dangling
against chlorinated blue.
Darker winds blew towards our gated community
And she wrote a poem
about waiting for a hurricane
which she said she’d submit
to the New York Times.
I can’t remember her much happier than in the
pool of this pipe dream. Perhaps
it seemed for a short moment
that disaster would crack open amber and rich liquid would spill into our waiting fingers—
We would be delivered, drenched,
into who we meant to become all along
before Clouds and Coronas lulled us
into forgetting
we are simply bathers.
No. 3 (little luv)
Everybody wants a big love
Not me
Me I want a little love
The kind with spoons and plenty of breathing and
Space surrounding my ribs and room for the holy ghost.
No. 4
When you speak the truth
The whole world vibrates
An eternal spring
No. 5
I am a pond;
Step in me.
make me splash
No. 6
I had a series of dreams*
My neck preening, creaking up softened stairs
Gaps in the filtered window sil,
spiderwebs made of trees,
Thickets of squares, filled, poured, baked and hardened... Roots suffocated by light.
*My dad kept asking me
If I wanted to go to the driving range —
I am having drinks with friends, Dad!
But do you want to go to the driving range?
I’m Having Drinks with Friends!
(And I was eating French fries, and I was having drinks)
And then the ninety—ten;
My brother and I, our bedrooms connected by a shared bathroom:
two_sinks_
between the sinks was a framed piece of sky blue paper with faded Cumuli and all caps, italic text:
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
And I always knew, I always knew there was something so wrong about that — and just this morning I figured out what.
It’s all reaction. In this telling
It’s all reaction and no agency; life;
And still today I say sorry too much
And I feel badly when I’m hurting
And I don’t know how to level the bars that keep tumbling off the sides of the table, tilting this way and that - mentally ill I tell you mentally ill - Prozac 15 mg, three million dead, unthinkable suffering, and I’m lifting undeniably, lifting my shoulders towards my spine, my neck towards God, agora towards Bezos; Zuckerborg keeps watching me shit; and I’ve got to find a new dentist.
My friend’s uncle is dying. The doctor told her that he had five months, then it was five days and he’s on morphine and fentanyl; and he’s saying he wants to die now.
He wants to walk into the river and submerge under the silken liquid but it’s illegal, it’s illegal in New York where he lives even though it’s legal in Vermont, one state over - but it’s too much of a hassle so they will just have to wait, just have to wait. Wait for the river to swell
to a higher tide.