FULL MOON AT 4 AM

Wide orb draped in
wool and water, 
I pause
to take a picture.
[A blot of dull black eternity
trapped in rectangle screen
lit by a faint bulb
that dangles miles
from this dog and me.]
See, fool, see!
Be swooned,
be still, be swallowed
by the open mouth of the moon.

THE SUN IN EARLY DECEMBER

The Sun in early December,

soon after breakfast, dangles

between the hills like a smooth

gold pendant pressed to the pink chest

of morning, as if she were the reflection

of herself and not the origination of reflection

and of light. A sight not of metal, nor moon, nor water,

but fire upon fire upon fire upon fire...

Oh what a sweet and simple revelation:

this realization that the origin of creation

lights my every day! Oh how I'd like to be

as beautiful, as useful, as meaningful

as the Sun in early December.

Our Second Night in the Hospital

How do you ask them, the parents of the three-month-old with the wet cough, and the wet diapers, and the wired crib, in the hospital room you now share, the small hospital room with only a wispy screen between you (a screen thin as eyelid skin), how do you ask them to please turn out the light? Or to leave? To go out past the plastered painted wall and into the white lit hall, away from their baby and away from yours. For your child who is only seven hours past high flow air and still coughing and wearing her eyes open, squinting and blinking, while her ears can't keep from ringing and her legs won't quit their kicking, her body refusing to lie flat in her bed (her inflating, deflating, holey hospital bed - a bed made for bed sores but not little bodies). Your child who won't stop screaming for her daddy. Your child who wants her freedom, but still requires confinement to this room and to her sleep, for it is nearly midnight on her second night and still she is not sleeping.

I cannot ask them to hide their wary conversations and questions about asphyxiation and deep chest congestion, if there is enough breast milk in the belly of their baby, their vomiting newborn baby with the swollen airway and the oxygen tubes torn from her face for an itch, for liberation, while machines beside her crib won’t quit their beeping.

No. I cannot ask them for anything. Not even when my toddler starts howling. Instead, I try to drown their discussions with a recording of the sea. However and unfortunately, their voices prevail as they set sail (with seeming ease) over the raspy waters of even my highest volume. So I make a tent over our mouths and it quickly fills with our warm breaths and then her hot coughs and then her hushed sobs and soon her wretched wails and feet flails. I sing hushed lullabies and pleas to weep more quietly, but still, I do not speak up.

Eventually, the nurse turns out the light and asks if everything is alright and it isn’t and so sobs fall out of me as if I am sick because I feel sick. "It's just so bright and loud and she's so overtired now. I'm afraid she's going to get sick again from not sleeping." Inhales stack inside my lungs like splintered ladder rungs, up up up, too high now to hold up and in ...

"She won't get sick again." The nurse purrs as my child lies on my body, her belly expanding my quivering belly as I try not to speak my secret too loudly for there is only a wispy screen between us and they are the parents of the three-month-old baby with the wet cough and the wet diapers, and the wired crib and I want to be helpful, but of course, this is not at all helpful.

"Are you going to sleep for your mummy?" She asks, stroking my darling's back, the back all the doctors and nurses have been pressing with their stethoscopes for two days in their searches for rattles and wheezing.

My daughter answers her question with sleeping, and with breathing that billows like a breeze into my sucking, shaky middle.

"It's hard to sleep in a hospital."

I try so hard to be silent then, to swallow this mother's bile, but after the angel in blue scrubs leaves and closes the door, I lie in the blue blinking light, hidden, while my face spreads and stiffens into a wide frown of weariness, of shuttering gasps and warm streams that wet the plastic hospital pillows beneath me. Then I hear her soft sniffles (sobs clutched by shame and freed without permission by the other mother's tortured exhaustion). She, my neighbor, is a stranger in this foreign place of bleach and medicine, but close kin to me in all this human emotion.

There is still nothing I can say, not now without sobbing, and so I say nothing at all, and we lie with the wispy screen between us, whispering our weeping, while our small sick children keep sleeping, and it feels like a kind of conversation.

For the rest of the night, she leaves off her lights and speaks in gentle murmurs. Maybe she even walks past the plastered painted wall, out into the white lit hall, to converse about her baby's survival.

I don't know.

I lie my daughter down and cover her in blankets, then I go to the other bed and wait in the shallow slumber of a tired mother’s night.

In the morning, we make our apologies through soft-spoken awkwardness as if a vulnerability were embarrassing because society tells us that vulnerability is embarrassing and not what we all need to be ok and less alone.

FOX & DOG

A million mighty flocks of snow
flakes swoop, sink, circle, soar,
all feathery, small and slow,
piling into a potter’s porcelain floor.

Up the landscape, in copper pelt cape,
she turns, black-footed fox in flight,
and she turns a sweeping escape
into a fluttering burst of rusted light.

You pull me by the arm and so we run
toward that boney orange arrow.
Oh how the wild paints and stuns!
Abandons! My eyes burn with color.

I want to drop the rope that holds you to me.
I want to drop the rope that cages you
to me and away from your history.
I want to watch you blur into the blue.

You would follow her gold fur

far and wide and into the wild, or
you would chase her until you were
red with her: this your ancient sister.


    

Earth and Music

You need me. Earth moans through wind gusts, floods, and fires. I'm tired and ill and I don't want to, but I will blow you down. I will drown you in your timber houses, in your glass skyscrapers, in your metal mobile homes. You can hide in your cement cellar bunkers, but eventually, you will need me. You will need my soil and water and sunshine and air. You will need my spirit too. 

The earth wears weapons everywhere. She has a whole arsenal. Not of police gunpowder, the daggers of terrorists or the pontificated, exaggerated lies of presidents, but of a quiet gentle roar. Love. Fill your packs, pockets and hearts with it for love fights too. It fights with newborn baby cries, fights with anthologies, with anthropologists and apologies, with scientists, stories, theater, music, parades, protests, amateur poetry, tears and time. It fights with the wandering wind, reunions, rainbows, coffee, wine, and sunshine. It fights with forgiveness and trust, empathy, connection, collaboration and philosophical conversation. It's why there are sailboats and ski slopes and air balloons, why there are round tables, picture books, paint, bicycles and violins. For we need love in all its manifestations. Without it, we will surely see the end of the human race: the deaths of seven billion broken hearts. So be beautiful and brave. Love and be loved. 

I was ingesting the news like medicine. I must take it, I thought, to deserve this life as a light-skinned American citizen. I do nothing else to help. I read and love and write. I write words for myself, and write words to be tossed and lost to the clamorous, crowded internet. I would soak my soul in the stuff, pausing occasionally to send out prayers to the sky, or God, or the ceiling, or myself. But then it became too much. Too many tragedies, too many infuriating, overwhelming, confusing tragedies. 

I'm a full-time working mom now. It is sweet and stressful and fulfilling, and busy, so very busy. Most nights, there is dancing before bathing and teeth brushing and books in bed. We call them dance parties. Soon as the speaker starts blowing out beats, I let my body react to the music, flow to the rhythms and rattle, twist, and shake. If my body is holding, hoarding, or molding any worry into my internal cracks and waterways, I address each limb and muscle and say, let it go...for this drum beat, whip it gone, shake it out, jump it up, and move it out and move on. I need sleep to live, but sleep and stress are like a child who is loved and a child who is neglected and lonely. I will not be granted awards for grinding my teeth while I sleep. I tell myself. I will not be given grants and trophies for developing heart disease and diabetes, so MOVE baby, move. Let in the music and move. No news at night, not anymore. Music and paper books, pajamas and lullabies. There is talk too and the splash and flow of sink water, sponges and soap, and the quiet clatter of porcelain dishes and glass and metal. There is laughter and story telling and most nights, we keep our cell phones away, ignored and left to purse pockets or high up on kitchen counters. Most nights, we are able to leave the world outside our windows.

I haven't been reading or receiving the Sunday newspaper. I paused delivery in early September. I didn't have the time to even sit and pull it from its plastic sleeve, but I don't know if I want it anymore anyway. This past year has felt like a tremendously long rising action of anticipation for a climax that becomes more wet with blood and saltwater with each passing day. So now I find myself hiding from the news, camping out in a small tent of daily details. But I need to remember that when I gave birth two years ago, I didn't look. I let my midwife and the doctor watch my body as it expanded and brought forth my baby, while I pushed and inhaled and exhaled and pushed and inhaled and exhaled, but maybe if I had sat up and seen my body, seen it as it took perfect (and yes, painful) care of me, I would have been less frightened. Instead, I saw the worry in my midwife's eyes, the dark insides of my own eyelids, and the hurried arrival of a c-section team. 

I'm looking for some of it again, finding people standing together for truth, dignity, kindness, and love. To watch and appreciate the world as she swallows our smog and blows her storms into our cities, and be grateful and kind to her. I see you. I see you holding us between your trees and seas and grasses. I see you growing clouds and letting down your rain. I see you melting and sweating and breaking. I see you, and I love you. 

What about their rights?

You carry lit citronella lawn lanterns. You wear polo shirts and white kkk hoods and confederate flags.  You strap black helmets to your heads and carry plastic shields and walkie talkies. You wear war paint and swastikas and faded tattoos. Some of your beards are white and frizzy. Many of your crew cuts are combed and greasy. And all of your mouths spit and spew horrific ignorance as you hold out your hands to a dead Hitler and shout,

JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US! IT'S OUR RIGHT!
JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US IT'S OUT RIGHT.
JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US IT'S OUT RIGHT. 

A few days later, I sit and close my eyes and re-imagine your rally... 

While circling the brass statue of your civil war hero, you are all suddenly surrounded by the dead. First, the spirits of the Native Americans murdered by European settlers or displaced and disgraced by American governments walk up beside you, singing their old songs of sorrow. What about our rights? They ask. Next, the ghosts of every slave who died in captivity, every lynched runaway, every innocent person of color killed by cops or angry white mobs stand like a glowing flock behind you, silencing your stupidity with their existence and presence - more human dead than you are alive. What about our rights? They ask. Last, the souls of the Jews and homosexuals murdered by Nazis soar through the sky and float above you, hovering over your heads like a cloud in a gas chamber. What about our rights? They ask. 

You believe in your supremacy, but your entire platform is literal proof that you are not above everyone else, but so very far below them.  

Charlottesville

Shrill screams, scrambling, hollering,

as the engine of a sleek silver car speeds

into persons, bodies, citizens,

into souls wearing skin:

light skin,

dark skin,

holey pored,

freckled, scarred skin,

shiny soft/ ragged calloused skin,

wrinkled, weathered, lined skin,

teenage skin, thirty two year old skin,

tight scalp skin in caps, kerchiefs and bobby pins,

dangling brown braids and tied back dreadlocks,

red, white and blond locks.

Skin inside cotton, clothing plucked by plows and stitched into denim,

tank tops, blood drenched socks, shorts, skirts, t shirts,

sneakers

slipping on

street dirt,

earlobes, eyelids, elbows,

blistered heels, flailing, flexing muscles,

spotty sunburned skin,

sweaty baby skin,

skinny pale skin,

brown round skin,

wet salty dead skin...

skin is

skin is

skin is

skin -

cells to hold breath and bones and

organs in.