Migration

Against hip, an odometer.

My bones go twenty-two miles above speed limit but no one is watching.

My blood is without signal, so the only music I hear is static and a hum of talk radio.

The check-engine light blinks against my knees and I wonder what would happen if I never turned left or right but just remained forward. Would I fall? What corporate chained coffee shop might I crash into?

It is too easy to write that I am in search of the wild I buried in Nebraska and Colorado.

It is far too complex to mention that I’ve contemplated jumping off a diving board made from rainfall and seaweed.

I threw a party for my feet somewhere between Chicago and South Dakota but they never showed up.

I collected fourteen speeding tickets while living in New York City and I never even owned a car.

When we look up and the moon is being chased by its shadow and everyone from above and below has traveled days just to see it and the one who lives beside me kisses me back into calmness while the earth grows dark like underneath soil and the water still waves even from far away and everything seems possible again.

what do you live for?

(Inspired by my students. Inspired by the writers who don’t even know they are writers, until they write.)

*

I live for that line. The combination of words that, when placed together, shake and stir minds. Knowing words are already there, waiting and breathing. Bones breaking and forming until. Until I pluck them from books or mouths and create a combination that unlocks everything.

I live for the moment all my veins and twists make sense to me. The moment my body speaks back in a dialect I can finally understand.

I live for my father, who never closed his door to me, even when I was at my worst.

I live for the book I haven’t read yet.

I live for the books I haven’t written yet.

I live for the moments I have yet to experience. And the art I’ve yet to see. And the border crossings I’ve yet to cross.

I live for my passport, which one day I will fill up.

I live to free the parts of me I have put on hold. To give them time and space to speak up. To give my body and mind a chance to re-introduce itself.

Yeah. I live for that.

is this thing on?

Check the heartbeat of your city. Are the traffic lights stuttering? Is there congestion on its street corners? How smooth is its street-flesh? When was the last time it had a full check up?

I’ve got enough calluses on my feet to remind me that I am city-living. I inhale the beautiful soot of new york and get lost. I travel without electronic directional device, so when I turn incorrectly, I ask human beings: Where am I?

Over ten years minus about six months without health insurance and this earth can be quite scary without back-up sometimes. Several people in my life have told me to intentionally get lost: Go without maps and allow yourself to study parts of the wind you weren’t expecting to meet. Three years ago, a beautiful German with the blondest of dreadlocks told me: When you make the wrong turn, it becomes right.

So I turned my maps into paper airplanes and floated onward. Careful of the cracks and and inconsistency of sidewalks, I lifted up each foot so as not to fall. I wanted to see everything and yet feared falling. Suddenly, I realized I was collecting more fears. Choking and getting sick and infections and side-effects and migraines and whooping cough and chicken pox–even though I received it in my youth and it no longer exists.

I still wanted to be aimless and hippie and hunt and exist, yet I worried about the contagion of city.

Now, I am incorporating vocabulary back into my speech such as: HMO, copay and referrals. I am searching for doctors in my plan. Suddenly, I feel like an adult because I have…..health insurance.

I have deeply mixed emotions about this body I live in. I lost the keys a few times and I’ve had to break in. So, there are cracks and creaking floorboards inside me. There are tiny slits where the mice get in. There are drafts and mold, but it seems to be rent stabilized, so here I am.

Suddenly, I feel like I can address this body in ways I have been waiting to. Ready to see some doctors. Ready to articulate my sick. Prepared to get my heart checked.

forgiving.

on the way to you

was writing verses about you
done with writing realized
was headed in the wrong direction

……Vera Pavlova  (Translated by Derek Walcott)

So instead of inserting your name against the one inch line where words go, I added mine. I have spent these months learning my way out of your presence, but it is my own that has left me this alone.

Last night, I sat beside another and we spoke about forgiveness. When your syllable came up, I could feel the noise of your teeth and spine. This used to make me curdle, but I am learning that to move on, one must move through.

There are humans out there walking out of marriages. Leaving children behind or stains of sterling silver on fingers. A poet recently asked me if I ever wanted to get married again. Again. As though I have already. And now I realize that I have. If marriage is a union, I have engaged in such. And if the opposite is separation, I have felt that as well. So would I do this again? Yes. And no. I am housed inside that no, until I forgive. All this time, I thought it was you, but it’s been me all along.

I need to forgive me.

Years ago, I traveled to the Netherlands, hunting. With weaponry of tiny red notebook (given to me by a handsome dreamer) and black ink pen, I spent every day searching for something in me to care about. I wrote poems with strangers, smoked pot with a beautiful German who gave me strict directions that life is about getting lost. Maps are meant to be written on, not listened to. He told me lost is where one is found. So each day, I hopped buses and walked new streets, misplacing direction. I gathered stories by people in need of sharing them. I ate an expensive meal with a stranger who wanted to know all about poetry and life in New York. I sang a memorial of candlelight and tears in a church. I was desperately trying to forgive all of my selves.

None of this is easy and when love leads us on, it is distracting. And terrifyingly beautiful.

I forgive you.

All this music I distract myself with and the food I fondle with my teeth and tongue and the poems and long walks in cracked air and the conversations with strangers and the ways in which I grow addicted to chaos and grey……..leads me here.

Just a few days ago, I articulated [one of] my trauma[s] into a box and sent it toward the west. I am writing my way out of these bones. Metamorphosing into something I can connect to and trust. All those years I called myself an atheist because I could not believe in myself (so how could I possibly believe in an other).

I’ve inserted my name into this meditation. Repetition will lead me forward…closer to who or what I want to believe in. A different kind of union between self and love.

alligator wine.

clouds drip away from the sun/ crowd of branches like/ skinny shivers of/ summer’s left behind.
One does not need to travel six hours to arrive at an end, but there is something about this clean air that allows room to gasp away these ghosts in my luggage.

On a Saturday night, a human with hair hungry like mine, screams out the intoxicated wails of alligators, drunk on the lust of wine.

I sing about home, harmonizing with the experimental strums of ukeleles and guitar chords.

There is so much beauty in being alone. And this does not need to be about loneliness. In fact, I am surrounded by an audience of stimulants. That grass darting out from beneath layers of snow like green, spiky freckles. That sexy hippie at food co-op. The flavor of this farmer’s market feast. This laughter, contagious and marvelous. An unzipped secret from front pocket because the space is safe now and so are the ones beside me.

On a Monday, I gather inside a room full of queers and activists. I share a story from my past, no longer present but still a part of me. Suddenly, there is a dialogue. Embrace of collarbones and tears. This is why we speak. This is why we create. This is why we travel.

 

gathering of rainbows

Follow the green bus. It has been gutted and gathers all those on the way toward (their version of) enlightenment.

What are you in search of?

Several years ago, I hunched back from weight of extensive backpack full of words and clothes over border into Amsterdam. Met poets and Germans and a beautiful psychology student and a doctor and a lesbian who told me she wanted to write like a writer. I fell in love with the foreign side of the moon. I was searching for closure from love in order to make room for more.

On an evening where everything has been watered from a full day of rain, I gaze into the eyes of a Poet who has just come back from several journeys. He tells me of his desire for lust in all forms and I mention to him my recent wanderings within various humans.

I want to gather myself into rainbows and find a hippie to love, I said. I want to burrow into the soil and smell the layers of earth that rarely get noticed. I want to be kissed by a human that understands all my silences……..

Recently, I re-opened several scars and tripped over some love and lust; there has been blood and guts that decorated many Brooklyn sidewalks. I have poem’d and performed on stages, unwrapping these layers of wounds in order to make sense of it all.

Now. I am thinking about a Canadian waterfall. I am contemplating a meditation of disemboweled behaviors and thoughts. I am considering a train ride to a French-speaking province. Or I just may root right here.

What are you in search of?

timidity of tumbleweeds

A human up north howls on a thursday, slips thunderous moon rocks from beneath tongue into poet’s sockets. There is so much symphony in your satellite, how can one focus on mathematics or meals when you exist. There is no wall there is no lean there is only congestion of solitude. What do you mean you want to slide your memory behind my knees. We walk we walk away we walk around we walk until     until there is someone who meets us  and when that someone is found, there are splinters and cocked mouths. Enter storefronts: speak about what began before the scaffold. Call out a name when you wail against another and pregnant the heart to feel sight again.

drowning(what is this water made of)

What if we were given the opportunity to choose our own diagnosis?

As a kid, I devoured books like Encyclopedia Brown, Anastasia Krupnik and Choose Your Own Adventures. The ability to go to page twelve if I want Becky to dive beneath the shark-filled waters to see if the treasure is there amazed me.

What if life could be this way?

If you want to leave all your community behind, head north for the girl who held your heart once, go to page 102.

If you are ready to go back to school and learn something that might get you a better job, go to page 70.

Ready for travel? Grab your passport and turn to page 212.

Diagnoses are similar. Some people would rather not know. They prefer heading through the entire book of themselves without interruption. Without skipping pages. Without peeking into what is to come. More specifically, they would rather not know if something grows in their body.

silence the sick and it will go away

What type of adventure am I choosing? I think I’d like to turn to page 47 and fall in love. After a few pages seeped in that, kind of like a comfortable drown, I will go back 32 pages, quit my job and take a bus trip across the country. At a rest stop, I’ll turn to page 93, where I will walk 1.3 miles to the nearest cafe, ask the woman behind the counter if I could work there and start existing for several weeks as a local. Then, I finger page 111 where I say goodbye and buy a ticket to a foreign city I’ve never been to and only speak about 12 words in their language. Here, I learn a new trade, volunteer my time and labor for free housing, write poems and humble myself through the art of missing Brooklyn’s amenities. Turn to page 303. I find religion in my soul through meditation and sworn off Internet connection. Skip to page 419 and I get married. I contemplate page 660. Rather, I peek a little at it’s projection of baby and normalcy. Then, I fall backwards onto page 123. All it says is:

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hope for. (Epicurus)

I don’t go back to page 1 or even 115. However, I decide to stay where I am and gather up my love for the present.

This borough of graffiti’d breaths and there are pigeons everywhere far more curious than I am. And what about the sunrise caught as bike wheels bring me closer to the rash of color on the sky. There are the flowers that grow in tiny gardens beside concrete stoops and bodegas at every corner selling all the oddities I might need in one place. The Museum of Modern Art. Enough farmer’s markets to keep my vegetable bin continually filled up. The surprising friendships I’ve made. Enough stages to keep my poems occupied…………..

If I took the death and water out of drown, it would turn into submersion in and inhalation of. I’d like to try this out for awhile. Complete submersion. Inhalation of New York. Maybe I’ll exhale out a book or right now I’d settle on a twenty-four hour fit of smiles. My curiosity wants me to skip some pages, but I’m going to slow down. Curb my impatience. See what waits for me as I allow it just to happen.

speak your voice, pirate

I could be on the top of this earth, testing the width of my thigh span. Perhaps my right leg grazes Colorado and left leans against Missouri. When a body sits on an airplane, pressed between window’d seat and neurotic woman studying the “idiot’s guide to buying a home”, one may notice how square everything is down below.

There are perfect right angles and circles and everything is fifty shades of brown.

In this moment, I am so close to first class I can touch the curtain separating our economic differences and breathe in their high-thread-count-upholstered seats.

How many times have I fallen in love this past week? Safe love. The kind of love that needs no explanation or physical representation. The kind of love that remains in silence.

1. miso ground into a dressing over arugula salad with edamame and beets.

2. the lizard doing push-ups on Anne U White trail in Boulder. Even this tiny creature contemplates it’s own arm strength abilities– this is simultaneously sad and charming.

3. a young boy on his way toward second year of life and all the reminders of how two moms are so much better than one.

4. an attraction between cross-genre genders/ slur of denim’d hips and mutual vests on opposite chests/ eyes greener than sun-soaked moss/ a lick of lips as though preparing them for mine/ teeth large enough to bite into my language/ a flirt/ a missed connection/

5. everyone is trying to flatten themselves away! My stomach refuses to section off into six separate packs. Instead, I channel these mountains, which are far sexier in their curves than the flat screen door pushed close to get here.

6. boy raises money to remove breasts and I am in awe of his awareness of body. What gets to stay and what impostors must go? I’m still taking inventory of this body.

7. the couple who collide due to persistent photographer with bones made of magic fairy dust, sparkling beyond manufactured flash. The ways in which love can be seen, can be pressed, can cohabitate. I want to copyright the three beautiful versions of love I got to gaze upon in order to find some of my own.

8. that deer.

9. that cafe au lait with soy milk slinking down my throat and pressing me into wide awake-ness.

10. and what if I were to mention hym again? A mouth traveling miles before the first word emerges. Engaging in topics like coffee and hormones, and stimulants like caffeine and boners. I should have asked about preferred pronoun, so I’d know the proper way to press gendered human into this poem.

11. miles. voices. lawns. gardens. drag kings. poets. and a pirate that somehow lives inside all of us because we are all just choosing our own adventure within the shapes and colors and dialects around us.

Counting Steps in a Different City

28,251 steps. I hitched a ride on my body and chose toes over wheels to guide me from beautiful house on tree-lined street toward downtown Denver.

Men sleep on rocks, which outline the Platte River. I chew on Brooklyn farmer’s market fuji apple as I whisper a poem into the air, in hopes the wind pushes it toward them. I have not seen a pigeon in twenty-four hours and the air smells of grapefruit-suckled roses and freshly cut grass.

A woman stops me on 16th street in the financial district.

“Sister,” she says. “Sister, I’m eight months pregnant.”
And she shows me a belly that could be distended from housed human or intense starvation.
“Sister, do you have anything? Can you give me something, sugar?”
I nod. Apologize. Then, I offer her a granola bar, which she aggressively declines.
The homeless are picky here, I think.

I am wearing black high top converse sneakers. Tall rainbow striped socks reaching just above my knees. Jeans cut into shorts, cuffed. A loose, white t-shirt with various shades of blue and faded lettering. And a black vest. Throughout this walk, I am whistled at and I wonder: Is it the knots of frizz in my hair that turn these men on? The stench of menstruation emitting from inside my purple underwear? The undeclared pattern of scarred incisions on my forearms?

I keep walking. 17th street and Race. St Marks Cafe, home of the best peanut butter and chocolate chip cookie that is like eating a prayer. I opt for a cafe au lait with soy milk and a square shaped raspberry scone. Outside, I sit with first coffee of the day. Notebook gathers words. When all the caffeine has moved from clear mug to pale body, I continue walking.

I head toward Colfax for Tattered Cover bookshop. I search through poetry books, feel disappointed by the lackluster erotica section and move toward gay/lesbian/women studies shelves. Excitement puffs up my body when I recognize names from NYC writers in various anthologies. When we write, we don’t always know where we may be shelved.

A visit to past home on York Street led me to feel sick with sadness. Our garden was replaced with wood chips and impersonal ceramic planters. There was a wreath on our front door. No wind chime.

I used to think: If I turn off the radio, all the music and voices will stop talking. The music will pause until I rotate the dial back on.

Life, unfortunately, doesn’t wait for us to return.

I cross streets I used to cross with black-haired pup by my side; I am alone this time. I am occasionally interrupted by my shadow or a drip of sweat traveling from neck to collarbone. Cars don’t really honk here. Homeowners water their lawns. Garbage remain in cans and off sidewalks. The wind is a meditation, rather than a disruption.

At Cheeseman Park, I search for a bench in the shade. I grab a handful of nuts from the trail mix in my backpack. Suddenly, I am no longer alone. Two squirrels are close enough to pet and I decide to share my almonds. One squirrel turns into two, then three, and suddenly I’m surrounded. I fear being hijacked for my snacks as they hop onto hind paws and move closer.

“You’ve had enough,” I say, in the high-pitched voice I often use with dogs.

They are poor listeners or they speak limited English or they abhor rules and authority. So, I decide to switch benches. The soundtrack here is so subtly peaceful and I never want to leave; sometimes, I wish I never had in the first place.