I wonder if you, at the back of your throat,
chew the cud of us.
Flavor gone bland, molars
working to extract some vestigial molecule of nourishment.
Does its bulk retain any memory of sunlight
at the center of the blade?
Scarecrow
Tag: love
A Frayed Knot
Sense skates over the damp oil of detangling spray. The film coats my son’s raveled mat. His head is a summer hayfield bleached gold and heavy with dew. At the tips, tendrils going to seed thin and fall away.
Down under all that flower and dust, the stalks twist into themselves. Pile up. Snarl. My fingers burrow to the base of his skull and find the nest there. I begin to brush. Starting at the ends, the gesture is one short stroke. Then another. The brush barks over the ragged rope. Its plastic bristles chatter as if scraped across a guiro’s ridged wooden belly. The boy tolerates this, gripping his nerf gun and re-reading Sunday’s comics.
CrazyTown and the Ambassadors of Acceptance
We are the compulsives. The chameleons. The deluded. The wounded.
Addicts. Bigots. Enablers. Aggressors.
Gossips. Accommodaters. Over-sharers. Fixers.
We are the guarded. And the stuck.
We are passive. People-pleasers. Avoiders. Myopic.
We envy. We compete. We keep secrets. We give up.
Liars. Caretakers. Impulsives. Fanatics.
Re-enactors of traumatic events.
Prisoners of mindsets we refuse to reject.
Continue reading “CrazyTown and the Ambassadors of Acceptance”
Can
When you can’t have what you want,
then want what you have.
That’s what They say anyway.
To me Their Zen feels too close to defeat,
and also, what about expanding?
Horizons, after all –
They have opinions on those too.
This Can Happen Here
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4“
Someone vandalizes a church and a Jewish community center in Northern Virginia. They paint swastikas on buildings and dark words over a sign supporting Muslims. This happens on the first night of Passover, at the start of the Christian holy week. The story is here.
Then the police track down a suspect. Dylan Mahone is a 20-year-old man who has found his way into white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles. A student at the community college. A neighbor who lives just blocks from the house my former partner shares with his two kids. A young man whose Facebook page drips with racism and hate and noxious fantasies of violence.
White. Christian. Educated. Male.
One of ours. One of us.
Burrowing
He slides into bed next to me, his left side far warmer than his right. His chilled skin presses in as he drinks from my heat. “Can you put your arm around me?” He asks.
“Sure, scoot down.”
A shifting. The sheets tangle and we kick ourselves back to softness. Dark lingers. December morning takes her sweet time stretching awake. We wait her out.
“It’s funny how the neck is shaped,” he says in his dreamy murmur.
“How so?”
“It’s like it’s designed exactly right so someone’s arm can fit underneath.”
Self, Beloved
The friend says the pressure to love her body is too much. “Isn’t it enough to not hate it?” This is what we are supposed to do as women. It’s yet another thing to add to the list. Love ourselves. Love our bodies exactly as they are.
That word, love. It covered my notebooks in junior high, markers and hearts. As a teenager, those four letters grew far too big for crushes. They became like currents sweeping the earth in a gusting flourish, ecstasy and aspiration with a peace sign woven into the O.
The tropospheric ribbon of script I tattooed across my days was a declaration of protest. It was a way to give voice, unformed as it was, to an infant movement. A confederacy of truth was gathering, and it was growing skeptical, maybe downright mutinous, of the dogma that ordered my inner life.
Awakening
We ink our wishes into night’s unfurling wing.
You Too
don’t need to hear it
to know it
so i say it
for him. i love you
baby
and you love me
too.
no
he says
no i don’t
i actually
hate you. Continue reading “You Too”
Cooking for One
my tongue craves skin, my skin
tongue. how to eat when the only flavor
is salt? too poor for the extravagance
of a meal served to me, i recall the logic
of giving the beloved what you want
for yourself. this woman
is her own again, my only lover
here. In the kitchen i peel
off my clothes and wrap around my hips
an oceanic gust from the cotton bolt
i brought from Zimbabwe
half this life before
and gave to a dear one who returned to me
one yard in thanks, tiny stitches,
this skirt. heat tears through
onion silk. with the long blade
i slice gold threads of ginger. oil pops
as punjabi mc strips the carapace
and wings unfold from my hips.
roil and scrape. peanut, coconut, turmeric, cumin.
cabbage, tomato, cauliflower, honey.
masala dust clings to raw arms, ribs
sweat red clay heat. mouth gorged
with song, the feeding precedes
the eating. my tongue thrills at the naked
steam curling into its hidden cells, my skin
tilts towards the kaleidoscope
of scents. i serve my beloved
a dish and she returns to me
one birth in thanks, tiny bloodbeats,
this night. the only flavor
is never the only flavor. the body can taste
every texture of loss. the body can learn
to boil sugar
from the heart.
Shannon E. Williams 