Tag: poetry

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

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

543: “Willful Forgetting” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Of course we all engage in willful forgetting all the time […] If we get a new phone number, for example, the old phone number must be forgotten or else its retention will keep rewriting the new one. Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 83

                Two days ago my love and I were at the coast, listening to the water on the rocks, the murmur and wash of the waves. Long slow dances of gravity, motion, erosion. My love said, “I love the sound,” and we stood waist deep, listening.
                Earlier that day we played Pokémon Go. It’s a game of accumulation: just now my character’s carrying 2,780 pokémon. It’s a game that, like so many of the capitalist productivity narratives I’m enmeshed in, keeps promising more, and better, and hold onto this. One of the reasons Pokémon Go keeps appealing to me is that it promises that you can catch everything, have everything, hold onto everything, level everything up. Though of course, that isn’t really what I want at all. Or rather that’s one way I’ve been taught to want, but it’s not the only one, or even the one I most often choose.
                The light played in the water. The water washed among the rocks. Of course learning—being—loving—take time. I usually think they take time because of the hours that go into love unfolding. Into learning sinking in, like water into earth. Into being. Re-reading Halberstam, I think they also take time because of the uncounted ebb/flow in which ideas wash away, get lost, mingle back into subconscious and beyond before rising up in different patterns. A wave. A sound of rock and water. I let myself forget to post this yesterday, as I sat and laughed and talked with the part of my family that is close by. This morning I sit and forget the distance between me and other parts of my family who are far off, and for a moment I forget all the miles between, like we’re looking at the clouds together. I wonder: how often do we find our way to our loves and our families, in part, by letting some things slip away?

by Azlan

535: “This Is How” (Layli Long Soldier)

                “This is how you see me the space in which to place me”
                -Layli Long Soldier, Whereas, p. 8

                Just now I’m loving reading Layli Long Soldier’s poems as instructions. Or maybe, better, as a kind of script or choreography: an invitation to move through the world in certain ways and then see what’s changed. What’s growing. This is how you see me. I’m walking these steps, steps suggested by her words.
                I think this is one of my favorite approaches to language. Well, that’s hard to say. I have so many favorites. (1. The way I called “Jarrett!” to a friend, and she heard me, and then instead of walking apart we were walking together. 2. The way Anya told me “I usually harvest the seedpods and then kind of crinkle them on a cookie tray,” and now we’ve gathered arugula seeds from the garden to plant next spring. 3. The way my partner calls “Hello honey bunches!” and I call back “of oats!” and then maybe one of us invites us out for a walk. And that’s just getting started). I think I mean that I keep hearing language described as communication, the shuttling of information—“gather the seeds this way”—and while I love that, I also love them as a path to walk. I’m not telling you what you’ll see. I’m saying, look at this space you’re in, look at it this way. “This is how you see me the space in which to place me.” What do you see?
                A script. A piece of choreography. An invitation. A reminder. A walk.

by Azlan

528: Reading to “Stay In The World” (Bec McBride)

                “If I don’t read, I get distracted from what’s important to me […] reading helps me stay in the world.” -Bec McBride, in conversation with me today

                At 11:30 this morning the world felt wonderful: Bec and I had been in the park for an hour, sitting in dappled light, catching up about our families and friends, our hurts and how we’re healing, our delights at recent cooler nights. At 5:30 today I was in a real low: a new big chunk of work had landed on my desk, crunching the work already there as it made space for itself. I didn’t know how I would handle everything. And there was something else. My mind clutched, hard knuckled. My beloved Maria José helped me pause for a moment. Helped me remember to step outside. She went with me. Crickets hopped through the grass, and we breathed.
                Lately I’ve been thinking about reading and writing as kinds of worlding. Of making world: of making our world look and feel certain ways. Every day there are so many forces pushing me to world the way they say. Today some commercials, celebrating how world is a chance to buy happiness or bask in “deserved” comfort. My hustle culture to-do list, insisting world is where nothing will ever be enough. News stories about political madmen insisting world is a war that always needs more killing. Posts from activists proposing that right now world is resisting the systems set up to consume us, while building solidarity among all those who resist toward justice. In last week’s post I read Joy Harjo: “Rain opens us, like flowers.” This evening Maria José and I stood outside. I tried to read the trees. They breathe what I exhale. I exhale what they breathe. World as a breath we share.
                For me, reading is one way to slowly, deeply, and sometimes in a momentous whoosh put meaning together. I like reading sounds and silences, movements and words. And learning from Bec, I think I read to find ways back toward the world I choose to keep help making.

by Azlan

527: “Rain opens us” (Joy Harjo)

“Rain opens us, like flowers, or earth that has been thirsty for more than a season.
We stop all of our talking, quit thinking, or blowing sax to drink the mystery.
We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.”
                -Joy Harjo, from “It’s Raining in Honolulu,” which I first saw quoted in Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

                My friends, I was writing a different Uproar post—perhaps for next week–when the wind shifted in the window and then it was raining. Clouds’ fingers dancing on the deck. Then I was outside, too, surprised and opened by how thick the water fell. Then I was crouching beneath a little tree in my backyard, making sure the rain barrel was closed, water stitching down around us, earth into sky, now into before into after. Life into life.
                Rain opens us, like flowers.
                There’s been a drought here. The plants lying down, one kind after another, beneath the dry heat. Until I see wilted ground cover like ragged carpet over hard dirt. Now I’m back inside, skin still slicked, long enough to write down that I think the plant stems will lift back up with this. Like I feel myself lifting.
                We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
                Long enough, and no longer. And back outside to feel the water soaking down, lavish, luscious, alive.
                This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.

by Azlan

523: “Comes Back” (Hap Palmer)

                “Sitting in a high chair, big chair, my chair, sittin’ in a high chair, bang my spoon!
                -Hap Palmer, “Sittin’ in a High Chair”

                “She always comes back, she never would forget me…”
                -Hap Palmer, “My Mommy Comes Back”

                This week I’ve been showing my beloved Maria José some of the places where I grew up. 
                The path outside my dad’s house, grassy now and scattered with dry pine needles, but deep with snow midwinter when I’m 9, stepping outside to help him shovel. 
                The pier at the lake where we jumped in, the cool dark breaking open to hold us.
                The beach where, at 16, I built a warm, dry little driftwood house with my best friend.
                The pool where my mom held me in the water, and later I learned to swim, somewhere back before my memory of years and ages.
                The hills where I watched tadpoles and frogs, always unsure how one becomes the other, already waist deep in the wonder of mud and algae. 
                Tonight, inside after these places, we listened to songs I remember from before I remember. I’m struck by how lush and joyous such childhood tastes of the world could be. Worlds so full of flavor. I sit with how scary, how sad, these tastes could be. I was a kid sometimes so lost. And grounding. A little more than a year after our wedding, it’s a delight to be sharing these children we were, these delights and uncertainties we’re rooted in, these places we grow.

by Azlan

522: “A Reply” (Moses Ose Utomi)

                “He never noticed that he didn’t get a reply.”
                -Moses Ose Utomi, The Truth of the Aleke, p. 37

                Have you ever talked with someone who doesn’t seem to notice your reply? Who nods, maybe, or doesn’t, and then goes straight back to what they want to say? Have you ever felt a whisper and wondered if you’re doing something like that—if you’re saying without noticing what else is said? I have. Both ways.
                Utomi’s line comes in a moment when his main character, Osi, has written and sent an important letter. And then has gotten caught up in all the other busy, important things he has to do, so he doesn’t notice that the person he wrote to never writes back. I read this and had to sit for a while. Quiet. Whirling. It shakes my ideas of writing and reading. Because the hope is that we’re communicating, yes? That we’re saying and hearing? But how much of my typing away at my keyboard is making space for what I can notice from you (and you, and you)? And how much is leading me back to my own tck tck tcking?
                I mistrust writing. Love it, too, and mistrust it. And I want in it a kind of listening. Which means I love listening practices more than I love writing practices. Which means I’m off, because last night I flew across the country to visit family, and now I want what I hear (my partner and my mom chatting near me) so much more than anything I might say.

by Azlan

507: What Happens In a Ross Gay Reading?

                “We all know nothing happens only when it happens” -Ross Gay, Be Holding: A Poem, and read tonight on April 16 in Champaign Urbana, Illinois

                Tonight I got to meet Ross Gay, author of catalog of unabashed gratitude (which my mom gave me in 2012, maybe, or 2014), author of The Book of Delights (which lived for a long time on my bedside table, and on my desk, and for a little bit in my garden), author of inciting joy (which I just got tonight), author of a lovely evening reading, as he’s a delightful and delighted person who paused several times tonight to laugh with us or laugh about what we laughed at. And in so many ways in his poems and beyond his poems Ross Gay brings my communities together.
                By which I mean that so many of the local people I’m close to were there for the reading. Old teachers of mine, and fellow students, and older students who told me “this might help you grad school” when I was starting out, and newer students to whom I’ve tried to mumble useful things, and people I work with, like Carmen who was at my house yesterday, identifying all the different plants dancing up now that it’s spring, like Nathalie who I cowrote with all last fall, like another friend, who’s made for herself the kind of work where lots of what she does is introduce people to other people they might like. A kind of work that Ross Gay’s writing does, and is, as we all got together to be part of singing it while saying and listening and laughing.
                By which I mean that these communities are not restricted to local folks here, but brings me to my mother, who gave me the book that I set aside for a while and then drank down, delighted. To my siblings (both far away) who would love parts of what Ross Gay read tonight. To my friend Dani’s mom, Lesle, who learned about (and started to love) Ross Gay after I shared a poem with Dani and Dani shared that poem with her mom. And now I’ve met Lesle and that poem is something we all share together. In this happening that is not locked to tonight’s reading, I’m also sitting with students in Oklahoma circa 2016 when I taught these poems, us all walking along to each other in Ross Gay’s words. I’m going back to old friends who’ve moved away but who walk these paths and so who I might come back to in these poems.
                By which I mean that Ross Gay, asked tonight about the acknowledgements section in his books, and about who he was feeling indebted to, talked about so many different neighbors. The ones who call over because they’re cooking something, and wonder if he wants some. The one who sent that video of a dog and a person playing Jenga because Ross Gay has a dog in the house since December. The ones who all get together to garden. And in this happening that is not just the now of one moment where one thing is happening, we bump together for a moment, but gently. Or tend the arugula that is yes now tall enough to dance when the wind tickles.

by Azlan