For Donna
There’s work- where the strength we get from exercises
mimics the strength we get from being torn apart.
The small tears in your muscles mend to make stronger muscles.
Do you work the poem in your life and then show up by writing it down?
Do you work the poem on the page until you feel deranged?
Is it a spell?
Is the spell just there to be stumbled upon?
Does it need to be taught to you?
How do you show up for what this feels like?
I’m not really asking.
Anything I’d ask you’ve answered.
A couple male writers I love talk about how hard they work on their work.
This shakes me nearly to tears.
This shames me nearly to tears.
I numb my fear that I cannot work hard enough by not working.
And in other ways.
Lauren suggests, maybe we don’t have to work that hard.
Maybe that’s just a puritanical vestige.
A lock lock.
I’m never as unamerican as I think or want.
I’m still puritanical and it’s a shroud or a cloud. It’s a way to hold back.
There is a big red heart in you.
It is always clear.
The pdf is called Donna Protected but that’s not what it is.
How can a child bear to write this down?
This morning Robyn showed me a simulation of our solar system,
how it’s not a rotating disc of spinning balls. It’s spinning balls,
rotating around a spinning ball, that is SHOOTING through space.
We’re moving in vortex, not rotation.
It’s a relief! We’re going somewhere!
Each moment’s vantage point is a new one.
I see that you are beautiful, Drummer Boy.
Pa rum bum bum bum.
In my neighborhood, there’s a salon called Donna’s Sense, but it isn’t.
I don’t know what Donna’s Sense is but it feels like
if you could keep your eyes open when instinct says close them.
We teach James the body parts by their correct names, but he calls breasts “boo-boos”
because Robyn always had to caution him away
from her surgery sites and port when they were cuddling.
Watch out for my boo-boos.
Almost every day she frays an edge and starts to glimmer more.
I look and look away and look again.
My Oakland is rooftops too.
The first poem that tore me up to write
I wrote on one.
Like a movie, rain started in.
It was back when your phone was just in your apartment.
I’d go to the roof to get away from the phone, it was that kind of relationship.
And the empathy I mustered that moved me so much was barely empathy at all.
I didn’t understand anything, it turns out.
But it was one little slip in my barriers.
It was one little ache aching open a little before it closed.
I got so excited and wrote down a lot of pretty stuff to stand in for that feeling.
Before I bothered to learn anything.
The struggle continues.
I keep trying to grow up.
To make it to a rooftop like yours.
Motion-sick in a vortex because there’s no horizon to focus on.
And still the eyes not closing.
And having the music.
And somehow able to speak.
mimics the strength we get from being torn apart.
The small tears in your muscles mend to make stronger muscles.
Do you work the poem in your life and then show up by writing it down?
Do you work the poem on the page until you feel deranged?
Is it a spell?
Is the spell just there to be stumbled upon?
Does it need to be taught to you?
How do you show up for what this feels like?
I’m not really asking.
Anything I’d ask you’ve answered.
A couple male writers I love talk about how hard they work on their work.
This shakes me nearly to tears.
This shames me nearly to tears.
I numb my fear that I cannot work hard enough by not working.
And in other ways.
Lauren suggests, maybe we don’t have to work that hard.
Maybe that’s just a puritanical vestige.
A lock lock.
I’m never as unamerican as I think or want.
I’m still puritanical and it’s a shroud or a cloud. It’s a way to hold back.
There is a big red heart in you.
It is always clear.
The pdf is called Donna Protected but that’s not what it is.
How can a child bear to write this down?
This morning Robyn showed me a simulation of our solar system,
how it’s not a rotating disc of spinning balls. It’s spinning balls,
rotating around a spinning ball, that is SHOOTING through space.
We’re moving in vortex, not rotation.
It’s a relief! We’re going somewhere!
Each moment’s vantage point is a new one.
I see that you are beautiful, Drummer Boy.
Pa rum bum bum bum.
In my neighborhood, there’s a salon called Donna’s Sense, but it isn’t.
I don’t know what Donna’s Sense is but it feels like
if you could keep your eyes open when instinct says close them.
We teach James the body parts by their correct names, but he calls breasts “boo-boos”
because Robyn always had to caution him away
from her surgery sites and port when they were cuddling.
Watch out for my boo-boos.
Almost every day she frays an edge and starts to glimmer more.
I look and look away and look again.
My Oakland is rooftops too.
The first poem that tore me up to write
I wrote on one.
Like a movie, rain started in.
It was back when your phone was just in your apartment.
I’d go to the roof to get away from the phone, it was that kind of relationship.
And the empathy I mustered that moved me so much was barely empathy at all.
I didn’t understand anything, it turns out.
But it was one little slip in my barriers.
It was one little ache aching open a little before it closed.
I got so excited and wrote down a lot of pretty stuff to stand in for that feeling.
Before I bothered to learn anything.
The struggle continues.
I keep trying to grow up.
To make it to a rooftop like yours.
Motion-sick in a vortex because there’s no horizon to focus on.
And still the eyes not closing.
And having the music.
And somehow able to speak.