Author: Azlan

557: “Observe”/”Nothing To Say” (Jennifer Kronovet)

“A fire hydrant
in a cemetery—

observe. And then
nothing to say.”
                -Jennifer Kronovet, from “With The Boy, On A Walk,” The Wug Test, pg. 30

                Years ago a friend told me, “Some of my favorite poetry is the kind where someone says, ‘You hear this sound? I do, too.’” At the time I was confused. But now my beloved and I have rambling through our neighborhood, talking and quiet, motoring along and lounging. And so many of the delightful moments—and there are so many delightful moments—go something like:
                “You see that bird?”
                “Listen to that leaf rustling along the street.”
                “That green’s so green.”
                “Crocuses.”
                “A bunbun!”
                “Look at that tree waving.”
                “Want to walk a little more?”
                All these stitches into being here. And in being here, being. And in being, being together.

by Azlan

556: “Lookout For Enchanted Items” (Magic Puzzle Company)

                “Our yellow-suited hero has lost their friends in a vast enchanted maze. As you work your way through the rooms, look out for enchanted items that could help in your quest…”
                -“The Mystic Maze,” Magic Puzzle Company

                My partner and I are puzzlers. We like puzzles. We like the space above the pieces, shared and sweet as we look at the colors and the shapes. (That reminds me of Donald Hall’s “The Third Thing,” which made me think about looking at something together—side by side, not face to face—as a central practice for love). We like the colors and the shapes, the chatting and the time, the frustration—where does this piece go? If you figure it out tell me. We love the click of things settling into place. No surprise I suppose that I’ve posted about puzzles before. And this month the Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve just found add layers to all these things we love.
                The three Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve done lean into Where’s-Waldo-style image searches, themed characters, and small optical illusions when the sections of puzzle can separate and recombine. I won’t try to explain the mechanism more than that. Today I’m after something about the feel. A lot of my friends hate puzzles. I think I can understand (at least some of) the reasons why. Puzzles can feel like exhaustion, a grind, a trick someone’s not telling you— “I know how this goes together, but I’m going to make you shuffle around all these nick nacks before I tell you what’s already obvious.” And I see all that. There is so much, so much serious work to be done. Not against that, but alongside it, the Magic Puzzle Company highlights what else puzzles can be. An invitation to color and shape, story and character, world and time. A treasure hunt. A joke. A series of visual puns. An adventure someone’s inviting you toward. That’s true of puzzles, I think, and it’s also a reminder for how I approach other tasks.Take splitting firewood for winter: it can be exhausting, grueling, repetitive, endless. But it can also be something else. The axe swings. Lands. The wood shivers, or splits. A woodchip flies, and a robin does too, across the sky in front of me and up into the cedar. So much enchanted in this maze.

by Azlan

555: “What Do I Toss?” (Stephen Spotswood)

                “When I began the chore of writing all this down, I found I had to keep making the same big decision over and over again. What do I keep and what do I toss?” -Stephen Spotswood, Fortune Favors the Dead, pg. 98

                It certainly does feel like a chore sometimes: sitting down to type something out, to untangle and re-tangle thoughts and images into memories and scenes, people and relationships. There is so very much to put together. Today’s applecore, waiting on the cutting board to be sliced for the compost pile. My partner talking on a zoom call. My friends, a state away, and our long phone call. The cat I’d never seen before watching me through a window. “What do I keep and what do I toss?”
                And it’s not a chore, too. Also. At the same time. A delightful both-and, with meanings branching to meanings, moments nestling into movements. Because in the apple core is the cold water as I washed the apple this morning, and the rock of the knife, cutting slices to share with my beloved, and the sweet kiss of all that sunshine gathered into apple. In my partner’s zoom call (half overheard) are ideas about representation and community and delight. That’s what she’s talking about, and we talked about that too. Including on a walk some weeks ago, the sunlight warm on my bare arms as winter lingers in the shade of the trees. My friends a state away, and also their last visit, and the next time I might visit them. I don’t keep things or toss things. Maybe that’s why it’s less of a chore. I write in circles to feel the all this inside all this, circling and inside, again and again. A cat watching me through the window. The next time I walk by it’s gone, but we’re woven together. In its fur I felt warmth, a stranger, and I also felt the warmth of a cat I knew when I was nine.

by Azlan

554: “The Bees Belong” (Ross Gay)

                “The worker unfolded the sign that said the bees belong here as much as we do, orienting it so pedestrians could read it…”
                -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, pg. 211

                From some perspectives the yard outside my front door looks a mess. Last year’s dead stems akimbo, matted brown leaves, a few crocuses pushing up. I’ve been walking by and saying hello.
                A few weeks ago a neighbor and I chatted about solitary bees. When I think about bees I usually think about hives, about honey, but as far as I understand (to that burst of brown leaves and back, maybe) most of the bees from where I live are solitary. As far as I understand (a little less far, this time) most of these solitary bees live in the ground, but some of them will snuggle up in dead stems or hollow wood. Snuggle in for winter. Until it’s warm enough to wake up. Which is one of the many reasons (my neighbor said) they’re never in too much of a hurry to tidy anything. No good to be asleep and have someone come and stack you and your bedding in the waste pile. And how sickening to be the one doing the stacking?
                I’d heard about nesting solitary bees before, but since I chatted with my neighbor, I’ve been saying hello. And listening. I haven’t seen any of them yet, so this evening when I walked by I said how are you doing. I said I’m sleepy, too. I said spring’s coming but it’s still going to freeze tonight. And they were quiet, if they’re here. I spoke softly so as not to disturb them, and then went in to make dinner and crawl inside my blankets.

by Azlan

553: Satisfied Hunger (Ava Nathaniel Winter)

                “more alive / for having satisfied a hunger.” -Ava Nathaniel Winter, Transgenesis, pg. 7

                I often think about hunger as a destructive thing, a selfish thing. I have been taught to think that way. And, I realize, to hunger that way. Hungry to consume, to take, to take away from another. Ava Nathaniel Winter reminds me: aren’t there other hungers?
                And there are. So many. I’m grateful for the reminder. For instance: today as I walked with my friend we were hungry for the conversation, for sharing it, for walking together. We were hungry for intricate patterns of hands and knees and hips and swinging arms and glances, and hungry too for the rain that scattered over us. Rain that might (I think now, reading Winter) be generous in its loving hunger for grass, for ground, for trees and creatures walking through its laughter. 
                For instance: my partner is traveling, and I am hungry for the quiet of sharing space, for the stretch in an early spring evening when the sun has gone down and the rain has picked up and we are sitting for a long time before we look over and see each other. Share that: that loving glance. I’m hungry for it, and more alive for having satisfied the hunger.
                For instance: I am so often hungry to hear my friends’ voices.
                For instance: my partner and I first read this poem out loud, together, lounged on the same floor where we often lay side by side listening to the rain. We were hungry for the poems we read: for Ava Nathaniel Winter’s words, Ai Qing’s images, Fatima Asghar’s rhythms, and so many more. Poetry for me is sometimes a hungry thing: words hungry for sound, sounds hungry for sharing. Blooming, weaving hungers, tasting growing hungers, growing like grass does, and more alive for its embraces and satisfactions. 

by Azlan

552: “Where They’re At” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “Knowing who they’re with helps them know where they’re at and where they want to be.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, pg. 53

                In some ways it’s been a hard few months, and two weeks ago my partner commented: you’ve been going for walks with people less often. So I started reaching out. Inviting friends to the park. To the neighborhoods between our houses. Asking: when’s a good time?
                Earlier today I thought about those walks while walking back to my house from a chat with four other artists. We talked about our processes, what we were making. I got to see some of their pieces, including a sculpture like a three dimensional window peering into the sky, inviting me to lean forward, to breathe, to find that we’re breathing. Our conversation returned again and again to the compassion and joy of accountability. To the power of making as part of our relationships together, of how we’re responsible to each other, of what we share.
                Knowing who I’m with helps me know where we’re at and where we want to be. Art is one way to invite that knowing. These steps. And here I am, tired, getting ready for bed, alone at my kitchen table—and walking again beneath the sky that sculpture opened.

by Azlan

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan

550: “this tree has been here” (Ada Limón)

“this tree has been here
all this time, and I didn’t notice.
I swear, I’ll try harder not to
miss as much: the tree, or how
your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets
coaxed all my colors back.”
-Ada Limón, from “The Tree of Fire,” Bright Dead Things pg. 15

                I had an argument once—call it a conversation, call it a tiff—with a friend who preferred botany to poetry, and wasn’t sure why I was reading another book. 
                “It helps me see the plants,” I said.
                “I can go outside and do that,” they said.
                “It helps me—well, appreciate them.”
                “I can go outside and do that if I want. I could go out and do that right now,” they said.
                And perhaps they could. We were sort-of roommates at the time. I went off to my room in a huff. They went off to theirs. I still think about it. I wonder what they were seeing when they went outside. We planted peas together later that year. I wonder what I meant by “see.” What Limón means by “miss.” I think—or maybe I feel: the maple that shook me today with its height and its lean and its balanced weight, that maple is so many things. A home, of course, to more creatures than I can count or name. A fountain of sap for syrup to my neighbor who taps it every year. A bare statue, this time of year, saying I sleep and also I’ll wake. An ocean of shade in humid summers when a dog and I both pause, mouths open, panting. I want to be present with more than my idea of things. A tree: it’s own wide, deep life, woven through with the breath of the windows and the growth of the bacteria along its roots. What else? What more? What colors, coaxed and alive in the interplay of bark and skin and swaying limbs?

by Azlan

549: “I Stretch My Systems” (Barbara Truelove)

                “I stretch into my systems, enjoying the frizz of electricity dancing across my nodes and the widening of my consciousness as more and more servers come online.”
                -Barbara Truelove, Of Monsters and Mainframes, p. 3

                Tonight was our little group’s second night of playing Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and in addition to dinner, laughs, chats, a crackling fire, and the game, we shared books. Bella and Margie gave us a little stack, including Of Monsters and Mainframes which I started reading as soon as they left. We tried to give Bella and Margie Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned, which they already had, and Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, which they had, and ND Stevenson’s The Fire Never Goes Out—which, wonderfully, they’d never heard of. And it’s wonderful that they were already in love with Undrowned and Jonny Appleseed. That these two books, swirling up in my thoughts as I wondered what they might like, are things they do like. Are in fact already part of the swirling thoughts through which we meet and become friends. Are part of our shared living world.
                Of Monsters and Mainframes follows a synthetic consciousness tasked with flying a spaceship, but robots in science fiction are so often about what it feels like to be human. (Truelove opens her book, “Dedicated to all those running human.exe files. Don’t forget to take a break.”)I feel myself as part of another kind of network. So many of my ideas, my values, my patterns for being are reflections, echoes, responses, continuations, gifts from people around me. I love that. Love the widening of my consciousness as consciousnesses spin.

by Azlan

548: “Thinking and Seeing” (Nick Sousanis)

                “Perception is not dispensable. It’s not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing, we expand our thinking and concept of what thinking is.” -Nick Sousanis, Unflattening, p. 81

                I’ve been making space to think by looking lately, and in looking, I’ve been finding paths of my thinking. Some thoughts in images:
                The overwhelm of this particular work week in the scatter of the kitchen table where I’m typing, the lunch bowl and rumpled napkin and loose handwritten pages and book stacks and dried mango and fingerless gloves. The overwhelm and the delight, too: these inspiring books, that sweet mango, those delicious noodles now a memory in the bowl.
                The power of warm soft touch: my partner beneath a blanket, stretched on the couch, typing her own overwhelm or inspiration. Seeing her steadies me, and when I snuggle in beside her I’ll make sure to tuck the blanket around our feet. It’s 9 degrees outside.
                Which reminds me: a squirrel’s tracks and mine and a bird’s in the bright snow. A neighbor’s red hands at the bus stop. Our shared smile-grimace-smile. The snowy road, worn to patches of cement, as we look back, waiting for the bus, trusting, trust and community infrastructure a pattern of bare trees with sleeping leaves inside and the road and the bus coming soon.
                I’ve been looking as a practice of thinking. Thinking along the paths and branches and tracks and patterns I see.

by Azlan