dear lidia.
I cannot begin to cite all the stars I counted on that night when the air felt more like the endings of autumn than august. Where I should begin is the digestion of home-baked high as I paddled in lung-inflated kayak in illegal waters of new york reservoir. The sun dripped on each shoulder as I felt muscles expand with intentional dig of directional ore. To enter memory and present-tense simultaneously. Stumbled swallows and the ways in which I digest silence as though it is meat: I want more of it; I feel sick from it.
The mayflies, Lidia. The adults may live for only a few days and here they are, flustered and twitching around us. Could we be part of their final hours? They lay their eggs in water and then they sink. Perhaps these stars are the bulbs of light leading the mayflies to the bottom of lakes where their offspring wait. I have no such thing as bathing suit, Lidia. But we do not need to ask permission from this salt stream. Let’s just exist as one of them.
I should mention that I have a difficult time with authority, Lidia. We are given a warning when we trespass through a part of the earth that is still earth and I wonder why deer and cockroaches don’t give us humans these tickets. They were here first. When the police want me to travel inside submission, I grow louder. I flex my underarm hair because that is where the rebellion grows. And I whip out weaponry of red, stained notebook. Got poems shaped as bullets or bullet-shaped-poems. Got mosquito-bitten ankles and I wonder if we were all just given one day to exist, how we’d trample. There’d be no time for fear.
so what else, then…….but to survive on the presence of now.
Aimee Herman 