April 29th, 2014

After the meeting, when we broke out of the building feeling like high school kids because we were free, we decided to get food and a drink instead of going straight to the gym. This turned into hours of laughter and talk and meeting people who own spas and salt caves in West Hartford. When we walked into the gym the air that hit our lungs was stale and filled with the burning of grinding gears. The sky was so near that when we went for a run around the plaza it fell in little pieces and hit us in the eye. I rowed a boat eternally into nothing and you smiled largely like a Chesire cat, at the man who looked like your old professor, at the machines, at everything. My muscles hurt eventually and the machine that waits like an open mouth to be further separated by my legs yawned sleepily as I climbed out of it. It was 9:40 when we left and the sky was further off then, a vague distance, facing away from us and looking dreamily out into space. Earlier that day a student had jokingly kicked a chair and another student had feigned shock and said "that's a government chair" and I thought of Jamiaca Kinkaid and her government ink.  Everything is government chairs and government ink
and the large invisible hand that provides it knows neither the words we write nor the lives we live within and without these government cinder block walls.

April 28th, 2014


I poured through the day like a wave, filling every second with some essential part of me.
And by the end of it, I felt lighter, as if I had stored and hidden many little pieces under
tea cups in other people's china cabinets. Whatever is lost I don't much need now. Earlier
today I thought, one thing he left me with is a deep strain of judgement and snobbery,
like mica glistening between layers in a rock. I shiver inside when someone uses the wrong
word or the incorrect conjugation or adds an s where there should not be an s... but this
was his weight, not my own, and mica is soft and can be peeled away in layers, and so,
after teaching for 12 hours, after traffic that was so backed up I nearly fell asleep on the
stagnant highway, after being hurt and disillusioned and then also delighted by the world,
I dug my fingers into my core and peeled, layer by layer, the slick pieces of judgement
out. I danced like a person I am not. I smiled into everyone's eyes. I drank a strange
drink and touched people freely, as if there was not a thing separating all of us. And
there isn't. These divisions are not mine and I will no longer abide by them. So, come
to me, even if I have spurned you. I am not who I was this morning, and I never will be
again.


April 23rd, 2014

All the girls on the stage are vibrating with hope. I want to tell them so many
things. First, their awards matter much less than what got them the awards.
That is the only thing that will last, but they must, they MUST, make it last.
They will have many battles to fight to support and affirm and continue that
thing inside them that propelled them here. Second, there is no such thing as
beauty, or rather, it is not so predictable or contained as I used to believe.
Every single girl is lovely in her own way. Some of them only because of their
youth, but even that is a crown, though one made of flowers that will fade.
Some are sharp and their very shape is beauty, and some have both things,
though age will bring it more into focus, but since it is not a static word, beauty,
since it means too many things to mean anything, there's no use worrying over it.
Third, I want to tell them to trust all things always, but especially their own
gut. If it hurts when you lie down next to him, girl, it will always hurt. Some
pain is meant to exist as a warning. These are your nerve endings. Do not try to outgrow them.

April 22nd, 2014

A thin place. A place where we feel the breath of the other. A place in which the
sounds that exist have not come from our own lips. It comes as a whisper, a swell
of wave from far off, holy holy holy.
Meet me, you say, by the lake in the dark. The light on the water will remind you
how my love rests, without burden and luminous. Meet me, you say, where the light
breaks off in pieces at the end of the day and rests red on the horizon. Meet me, you
say, when the first seconds of sun stain the darkness white. Meet me in the moments
your will splinters and in the moments your triumph flares. I am who you seek, and
I have been waiting. Meet me, you say, in a simple place of longing, in places long
forgotten. I was there even then. Break bread and feast, but, when you break bread, let
it always be with me. For my words, my every word, recorded in letter and whispered
in your ear, are what you seek. This will be your safety, your sustenance, your strength
and your armor. My love, this table was set before you were born, before city states
shook their arms in power, before even the earth took form. I have been waiting. Be with me.

April 21st, 2014

When I spend time with Ezra sometimes it is as if I am slowly and gently touching many small porcelain animals I had on dressers as a child. There are worlds within worlds within him, and the way he picks up and puts on and smooths over his chest thoughts and perceptions interests me. He is quiet tonight, but his eyes are full of more stories than I have time to hear. My white wine has pear and orange and lychee, all of which "quietly linger" according to the menu, and it is true. Ezra's red is viscous caramel and berries. When I tell him again how deeply I have hurt, he makes a noise like the distant rush of wind through pines, a low, empathic anger at injustice and loss which is somehow without judgement. His instinct is equity and in this we are brothers. After, I sleepily move in my bed and rearrange the keepsakes and memories, all the tiny animals, on that internal shelf of the mind. It is good to remember and touch these tiny creatures of what has been, and the movement stirs up dust which shines like gold in the spears of sun through the window of the mind. And this time, this time, my hand is not even cut by the remaining shards of broken things. When I smiled at Ezra tonight, it was with more than my lips, and this somehow takes us back to a sunny river bank in a different April long ago when I was free for a moment, lying against poison oak roots on the shores of the possible.

April 19th, 2014

At first I was shy and maybe they were too, but after many thimblefulls of wine, half Pinot Noir
and half Manishevitz - and what a feat to pour both bottles, portion by portion, into the tiny glass sitting on the white table cloth without destroying anything - there was a settling in and we began to smile behind our smiles. I lived in the west end of Hartford she said There was a health food store, a wonderful theatre, and such a friendliness, an openness, that was not where I grew up in New York. I let sink in the image of this woman, young and beautiful, walking streets that I now walk. The other woman says my mother died when I was seven and a half. No one talked about it. In class when we were asked to stand and tell the names of our parents, I lied. There was such a shame in in being motherless. What I would like to know though, she says, is where your remarkable compassion comes from. My students, I stammer through a blush, and she shakes her head no before I finish my sentence no, no. It is much older and deeper in you than that. We are interrupted by everyone saying goodbye but her words, all of their words, stay with me through the night like the plumb brandy that moves through my veins like a pulsing light. Time and tribe collapses around us and we are part of a single tapestry. As we separate into the night, the fabric holds.

April 18th, 2014

Today, when I walked out of the coffee shop I looked up to see a man I had known two years ago when I was sad and drunk all the time. He was a barfly and the men I was comforting myself with were also, and so they knew each other and I by extension knew this man. I knew him in the peripheral way we recognize our own suffering in others. He was kind and cheerful and always always drunk. Very soon, the men I crowded my life with evaporated, moving away or entangling themselves with others, and I stopped fusing myself to the seats of that shadowy bar and started to notice things like the sun and myself again. I saw this man once more and he told me he was moving to the West Coast. So when I walked into the gray April afternoon from the coffee shop today and looked up to see him walking with a lovely blonde woman, I thought for a moment I had invented this. Wrapped tightly and bound to his chest was a small baby. The three squinted into the bright white of the day, moving almost as one unit, and he proudly the helm and the rudder, and I thought he might have seen me from the corner of his eye, and might have smiled in my direction, and whether or not this happened, I beamed as if the sun were out, as if the warmth of it was touching everyone. For a moment we shared the same pavement as he walked by, two ruined strangers restored and cutting paths though this sea, still.

April 17th, 2014 (Fifth period free write. Written after Maureen Seaton's Etta's Elegy)

And let us start by saying words we barely know and then taking them apart, syllable by syllable, letter by letter, and reducing the flesh to the dehydrated skins of animals and then stitching these together to make a new meaning from what is undone. We are the brave ones. We are the ones writing on a Thursday morning in the sun while a lawn mower roars its song to a sky full of blue. So walk into a world you know only some words for; walk into it bravely wearing what you have made of the deconstructed words of your life. Everything you have been is just below the surface, moving slowly like a huge sea creature below the still water. But also, everything you will become is here too, blossoming and blooming and erupting as underwater volcanoes. When all the words are in pieces like the shattered porcelain on the floor of the kitchen when you threw the plate but didn't know why, don't bother to collect the shards. It is right to break things. Even hearts. But, don't ignore the mess either. This happened. This is always happening. Everything you are is happening and never un. We are the brave ones. We gather, languageless and strong, sunned to darkness and teeth bleached with smiles, around the first fires of civilization and we look with eyes full of what will be into a sky we need no words to hold. These are the days that matter most of all. Be brave. Be strong.

April 15th, 2014

Steve says bones are not something to write about, or at least that the word bone should not be used, and I know I should listen because he is wise, but I can't resist the urge to imagine them, small or large, couched in the blood and tissue of the ephemeral, and how that will melt and allow them freedom, allow them to bleach, allow them to grind down into the powder of witch doctors or be polished into jewelry. Teeth are bones we can see - little lanterns going forth to make our name known in dark villages. The students bow their heads to the page. They write and I wonder what worlds unfold themselves on the page. In a creation myth I am creating right now the moth is esteemed because the world, in two-dimension, in pastel colors as a map of the Pangea, was carried on its back and when it had flown for a very long time to the edge of the light in a sky that was not yet the sky because there was no earth to define it, it fell to a ground that was not yet the ground and broke apart. Its blood and flesh, the indistinct blood and flesh of insect, flowed and stuck together and from these trembling clumps of once life the earth formed. It formed immediately and swiftly, and in the same amount of time it had taken the great moth to fall from the sky, tribe and village and city state rose, each a rippling muscle on the back of my hand.

April 14th, 2014 (From first period's free write. For my family)

I remember first St. Patrick's day and the way my grandmother, smelling like the heavy perfume she always wore, would come to dinner, or make dinner, and it was always corn beef and cabbage and how the beef and cabbage and potatoes would melt in my mouth and how the broth would shine with the fat from the beef and how the meat would come off in strips and maintain its elasticity through chewing even. There were green things too, but mostly it was the greening spring grass. Then, four days later, my birthday, the first, or first full day, of spring depending on the year. And then Easter. Easter. Full of hope. Easter. All redemption, past and future, hidden in a day. When I was very little it was all frilly dresses and bonnets and maybe even kid gloves. Easter is the fanciest holiday because the color scheme is soft and lovely and it is warm enough to not wear a coat. But last Easter was cold. Last Easter was gray. Last Easter was like a funeral for everything we had lost or killed. We dressed up anyway, we dressed brightly even, and when we returned from church we ate and laughed and smiled bravely while all the ghosts came around to pull at our sleeves. We squared our shoulders and sang songs that angels sing and moment by moment the past cleared from our gaze, like a thick fog burned away by the rising sun.

April 13th, 2014

Deep seeds He said. Deep seeds which are
now pushing through ground. Breaking the
ground. This was intended long ago, but now,
now it is becoming real. Now it is pushing
through ash. Remember that image from long
 ago? You didn't know how true it was, did you.
And now you must believe because you are left
with no other option. Kelly prayed Psalm 24:4
over me. I know it is both an encouragement and
a warning, and I will treat it as such. Also, she said,
your father, your father in his redeemed existence,
he is very proud of you. And I know this is true.
Ash is good for the ground. The reduction of life
bids the tiny plants to grow. A metaphor; a miracle.


April 12th, 2014

I count off, in no particular order, the dealings of my day. Why so long away?
Why comfort, satisfaction, success, do you keep yourself from me and loll
about in the shadows of my porch, or just down the road, or drinking beers
on somebody else's porch? Why are you just beyond my reach like a dandelion
seed I have been chasing through a field for so long that now the grass beneath
me is broken by huge machines whose teeth tear and pull and still I chase, just
ahead of the destruction but just behind the soft bristles of your white hair. 
There are so many things that disappoint me about me. This impulse, for one,
of chasing things I can barely see rather than noticing an entire field is being
tilled into a modern box-house development so that now I am just running for my
life and there is no time to chain myself to the trees or the loamy dirt. I am sorry
field of neglected things below my feet. I am sorry earthworms and tiny black beetles.
I am sorry that I was chasing a dandelion seed rather than searching your depth
for four leaf clovers. I am sorry your belly is eviscerated and your children are orphans.


April 11th, 2014

Yes, I know there is one last thing to give up.
By one last thing I suppose I mean more that
there is a box of tiny things that loom hugely
in my mind; a smile, a promise, a hope, an
expectation. When Pandora opened the box
what left were the things you would want to get
rid of, and what remained was hope locked in that
gilded room. Though I do not wish my misfortune
or metastasized grief on anyone else, Lord, when
you open my heart, let those things burn off as
mist, as snow rising, and, please, I beg of you,
let hope remain. I can't wait for you to see what's 
next you say bending over me gently and brushing
the hair from my teary and tired eyes.



April 10th, 2014 (from this morning's free write prompt for first period)

I was young enough to have to go to bed while it was still light out in the height of summer. Looking back, I imagine this as the longest day of the year, but I have no way of knowing if it was. I lay in my bed feeling the most sensational pressure in my body and mind, the urge and compulsion to live and be in every moment. It made my limbs stretch towards a future I was too young to even imagine. I pressed my face against the screen window and took the summer air into my lungs. The fireflies danced. The huge rhododendron outside my window seemed to move in time to the blinking, although I knew this was impossible because its roots were too deep. I imagined my father planted the rhododendron bush, in the way that you assume the world around you has been shaped and created by the parents who shaped and created you, but now I know it was older than he was at the time and that though he tended it he wasn't its author. In the neighbor's yard a bug zapper intermittently snapped at the mosquitos that came too close. The smell of grass kept me awake, as well as the idea of all that was possible in this world, this small and also huge world whose borders were the borders or my yard. I stared hard, so hard, at the fireflies and knew that I would never, ever, forget this moment. And I never did.


April 9th, 2014

As I re-bobbypinned my hair a person I didn't see flew
through the door and into a stall. I said: are you okay?
She didn't answer at first. And then said, yes. You don't
sound it. I'm not. What is it. Would you like to talk. It's just.
It's just. My brother. He may be going away for a long time.
Finally she emerges from the stall, eyes still dripping, but a
smile near her lips. And you name? Sheba she says. Nice
to meet you. I'm Leanne. I hope things work out, but I'll
pray for your family. She smiles, laughs through tears, sniffles,
wipes her tears again. As I walked out of the bathroom another
student follows and I hold the door after me and catch a glimpse
of her face. She is a foot shorter than I am and when I look over
my shoulder and down she is looking up and she smiles
gently. And that was that.

April 6th, 2014

And this morning the way the sun shone through all the windows was a taste I had been seeking and I opened my mouth and savored the dusty silence of beams. A man walks his dog. He is from the early 2000s and so is his goatee, now white, though his face is lineless and still glazed with youth. His dog stops to ponder the border of the sidewalk. His dog stops to smell the dirt. He is patient and he smiles down at the dog. I love this man and his goatee, and that is not an exaggeration. I love, and he is the manifestation of all things in this moment, and so from my second floor room my love falls on him. He feels it nearly, lifting his eyes, but he cannot see me in this room that is the same color as the light that floods it. I put back up all the poems about you that I took down. It has nothing to do with now, but I am old enough to say remember when, and to read again the love, the way it swelled and pooled and rushed in and drew out, the way it really was like an ocean full of salt and life and slowly moving plants, it was good, good, to see this and say, yes. Yes. This happened. I did not imagine it. My love, I wish you well. When the taste of your salt has finally left my mouth, I will be able to give the pith of these poems to another. But the old will remain, and I am comforted by this thought, even though I own nothing you gave me any more.

April 5th, 2014 

soon! Sweet girl, I'll arrange to conveniently be wherever you last saw your 

innocence. Maybe it was the final time you held a porcelain doll and felt the lovely 

cool skin as if it were life. Or maybe it was when you kissed him for the first time 

and felt the rug burns on your knees as you moved over him erupt into blossom and 

it felt like new life but it was only that the burn left scabs that looked like wildflowers 

so you had to wear bandaids under your jeans as you walked around the campus of your 

high school under the trees that knew and bent low to touch your cheek and say now 

you have become a woman. Now you are ancient and lovely like us. Or maybe it was the 

23rd summer which you spent hiding from the lightening under friends’ windowsills or 

maybe it’s still under that very first windowsill which was also a boat and also a whale 

and also a carriage and also a white horse.  I will wait there and whisper to you in that 

secret language you perceive only as movement through water that the weight of this 

moment will melt like soap against skin. When you feel a warmth on your cheek, smile 

at me, who you will become, and heed what I say. 

April 4th, 2014

The night was sharp and its edges were rocks around which to navigate. It was maybe because of my falseness and indulgences from the night before which knocked the Bible off the bed, or perhaps because of the words Brett and I spoke in the kitchen before retreating to our separate bedrooms. I try to love, or like at least, but the most I can honestly say I feel is curiosity, as if I'm watching. What will happen next? Brett's face breaks like water and he nods in agreement. When was the last time I said it and meant it? Surely not the length of any pairing. But no, this cannot be true. I am not the villain. I am not the villain. When I walked outside at night Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday of this week and smelled the smell of waking grass and resting blue, I remembered how much a part of the earth my veins are and felt that if I were barefoot I would feel a deeper pulse and recognize the beat. Just breathe one of my students writes you wouldn't drown if you didn't fight. I wonder if she knows how true this is. The quicksand desires at once to pull us in and support our weight. The decision lies in our muscles, but our muscles, so dumb and shining, so quick to act, betray us more than we would ever think our own bodies could. I am lucky; muscle memory ties me to the mast after all this time, but my ears are unblocked, and I hear. Oh I hear. Sometimes their voices sound like yours.

April 3rd, 2014

This morning I told the girls at the coffee shop stories of horror from my life and they
gazed wide eyed, and I laughed and ended the stories with something like, but not exactly,
no matter what happens as long as you survive it, there's always something beautiful, 
if you want to see it that is. Every black woman over the age of 70 reminds me of my
 grandmother. It has always been this way. Everything is wanting to bud, but not budding
yet, even though it is April 3rd. I have ruined this flow. I have stepped back from the
voice and started singing a song I don't like over it. I have plugged my ears with the kind
of longing that sticks to the back of your throat so that you can't even taste the wine you
bring to your lips. It is bitter and sweet, the wine. It has always been this way. Tonight I
will give your necklace, that I only wore once when I was a girl working in a coffee shop,
to Nikki and I will say it is time. And it is time. The buds will grow and break into bloom.
There is nothing that can stop this. A man down the street from me waves a white shirt
in the wind. He is shaking it out before folding it, but I look at just the right moment
to see it as a white flag. There are white flags everywhere. It has always been this way.