I know the earth is laughing
There is despair here, audacity too, and hope beyond belief. Also a bunch of recently published poems.
Would it feel good to write?
They’ll have to create new language, I think, to describe the despair we’ve invented.
We have two political parties in the United States. Both willing to support, fund and actively carry out the systemic, ruthless extermination of millions of people—human beings, children, brothers, grandmothers, entire family histories, rooted to the land—to protect and advance the capital interests of a dying empire that will burn us off the earth.
I ache for different choices.
I weep for them, I fury. I wonder at my responsibility here, at all of ours. What do these dark and violent days make of responsibility?
I want to choose love, of course I do, and my heart fills with disgust. I seek and find joy, every day I do, and I have to stop the wheel of my boiling mind from wishing grave ill on the earth’s enemies. I used to want to vote correctly, wisely. Now I want to rip my own heart out and throw it howling at the White House. And what good would it do.
I am filled these days with so much rage and disbelief at how helpless we’ve been made to feel in this world built by human hands. I’ve seen with my own eyes what’s most wretched about us, what we’re willing to do to each other. What we’re willing to do to ourselves, out of desperation, protest against the bleak future the state’s designed for us. I cannot believe what we’re asked to bear. The weight of it is astonishing.
This is the world we’ve made and there’s no way around it, we have to bear it together. God help us, we are bound to each other, thank god.
I am filled these days with so much gratitude for my life, the people in it, comrades and accomplices, bad motherfuckers willing to risk security and stability in this blood-sick, terrified, wounded world to scream for justice and not let up a single day, to live so loudly and steadfastly for liberation, and nothing but. My god I am instructed.
While I’m being honest, I should mention too, I’ve heard elders speak of transformation, the change they’ve seen in their lifetime. The wild hope they harvest. I’d be a fool to ignore it. I’d be a fool to let anger consume me entirely and all this hope I’ve inherited from every mother in my mother’s line, every woman who gave birth in this brutal world, believing her child could survive it, shape it, make it sweeter. Imagine the audacity, the brilliance of that faith. Who am I to say the world is hopeless, when all these mothers brought me here?
I’m all over the place today and you’re here too. Thank you for understanding. It’s been difficult to write lately. I’ve been hesitant to despair at you. I’ve been questioning my role. I have wanted to be a place for calm and curiosity, a moment of peace even, a little poem, a gentle provocation. But maybe more than that, by now, I’d like to be a faithful witness to the world, and tell it as best I can, as Molly once taught me—the most honest thing, the kindest way possible.
Honestly, kindly—my heart is in tatters and my mind is too. How could they not be. I struggle to stick to my rhythms and rituals. Who cares. I wake up and seek solace in seeing, in clarifying my commitments. I have no time for bullshit. I pour whatever energy I have—which is still plenty, I am still me—into the people and projects that pour into the world, and me, who is a part of it.
I stay busy. Stay moving. I’ve been on the move and I’ve been moving slow, but steady. It keeps me strong and able. Makes feeling every feeling feel somewhat sustainable.
I focus on the work and the work is good, it’s what I’m good at, and I believe in the people I roll with. This last month of movement has been so loving, also geographically expansive.
I went to Las Cruces and won $240 off my family at our most recent excuse to gather and snack and sip tequila for six hours straight—my grandmother, beautiful on purpose, still, frail, present, surrounded by what she’s made. Stopped by White Sands to convene with sunset. Watch the stars come out over an ancient land.
Drove through the Sonoran Desert with my man and my dog, threw my back out after an afternoon hiking through the hoodoos of Chiricahua, found relief in a room full of strangers and sweetie pie skaters in Tempe, Arizona. Sat on the floor the whole weekend stretching, almost never alone. Watched Gila River basket dancers lead a three year old through history. Listened to skaters from Palestine speak of leaping walls and defying occupation. Hollered. Won a handmade wood flute at a raffle after I saw it and told anyone willing to listen that flute is coming with me.
Took a plane to Chicago, which cannot keep me away, to celebrate Lemmy and their new book of poems, to scream along in a bar thick with near-thirty year olds songs from thirty years ago. I will never stop loving Chicago.
And I seen New Orleans for the very first time, how the dead live above ground, how the waters rise when it rains and a small room in the Bywater operates as a bookstore, where I found a book called Handbook for Hands that Alter as We Hold Them Out, by a poet I was not yet familiar with called Kate Schapira, who it turns out is a biophiliac essayist who writes about collective grief and climate anxiety, the very subject of Jenny’s mindbending surreal life art show which is what brought me to New Orleans in the first place. On the drive back we stopped in Shreveport, ate shawarma and spent two hours in a hot tub then watched Annihilation, which I didn’t know at the time, the poet Kate Schapira has written beautifully about.
Look at this constellation. Tell me we’re not connected—intricately, delicately, all of the time.
You can’t. You wouldn’t.
I won’t even hear it.
I’m too busy screaming.
Free Palestine.
Here are some poems I wrote that found some homes lately. It’s not much, but you can have them. The first one I first wrote in 2020 and spent three years revising. I never thought it’d see the light of day and I loved the title, so here we are.
A Few More, for the Road
Two Poems in Milk Press: One of them is called gifted and the other is dreamt a color called harvest i’m no longer hungry which just goes to show you titles can be as long or as short as you want, honestly, do what you want with your poems.
Poem in Frozen Sea: This one is called reasons not to set myself on fire. Mimsy is there, as are my lessons. Also a really nice thing about Frozen Sea, in addition to the editors’ ardent and vocal commitment to anti-imperialism and freedom of movement, is they ask all contributors for a recording of their poems, which is lovely. You can hear me read mine over there.
I really like “The Animal Eats”!
You know when you see a title that is somewhat cryptic, which is good because then you can put your own meaning on it, and you do, and it's wonderfully deep and almost a touchstone, but then you learn the real, intended meaning, and it's nothing like what you had in your mind, and the net summation of the two meanings seem to cancel each other and zero out and you are left meaningless?
This is not one of those times.
So glad to read about the origin of "The Animal Eats"! Although I only had a vague feeling of what it meant to me, reading your poem of the same title solidifies exactly how I reacted to it.
Those three words are a poem in themselves.
I am sorry to hear that writing -- and perhaps life -- has been difficult for you lately. "The world is too much with us" as Wordsworth said. Seems to be getting more and more so. As you say, railing against it seems futile. Does anyone have the answer?