Good morning from Portland, where we are entering a season of light.
Here’s a few things I’ve been thinking about.
What I love about Gus
He is so damn needy. He pushes his face against me when I am on the phone too long. Give me pets. Mrawr! He is beautiful, with his slight stripes and feral eyes. He is social as cats go. He warms my side when I am taking a nap. He mewls when we go to bed. He demands the window. He is curious about the children outside, the squirrels, the ravens. He crawls onto my belly and flops down, just lets his front leg go slack and flop. He likes his dinner. He really likes his small dish of soft food. He curls in with Jade in the evenings. Jade feels happier with him. He is not a person. He is an animal. An animal that lives with us. I do not make him talk. Jade says I never made a voice for him, that all I do is make his sounds. Mrawr. My little goblin, my 3 legged wonder. I love his wounded walk. I love his purr and licks. I love how he grumps at me when I am waking up until I fill his bowl with kibble. I love his missing leg. I love his kindness, which is not kindness, it is an animal warmth.
Living on Paper
I want to live longer in paper. I have been living in some kind of notebook for years, since I was 12 years old and discovered writing. My first notebooks were the cheap spiral bound ones my grandmother would buy at the grocery store, and I would fill them, two a month for years. I graduated up to hardbound books in high school, small enough to fit in a little bag that I carried (there were no signs). For the last 3 or so years I’ve been using a combination of little pocket notebooks and whatever laptop I am in at the time, living much more in pixels than paper.
I realized a couple of weeks ago that I filled those little notebooks at the pace of about one a month, with to do lists, little poems, any stupid thought. But I never went back to them, never did the panning for gold in there. So I went into the archive and pulled out the last 3 years of notebooks, and started thumbing through them. And what wonders are there:
- A poem that I never typed, that is as good as anything else.
- A record of every book that has been suggested to me, and forgotten.
- The address to the storage locker, where every childhood picture lives, along with the code to get in, when I return to Southern Oregon.
- The movies that I watched during recovery from my orchi.
- Sigils I cast for protection, for health, to find a new job.
All forgotten. All left behind in the urge to Keep Moving Forward.
I have a bad habit of keeping moving forward, without review, without checking for things later. And I want to make my life bigger, my focus bigger, beyond today, into the future even a little bit.
So I purchased a little notebook cover, one of those ones that you can string 3 field notes into. And it now lives with me at all times. A season’s worth of paper. It’s still small enough to fit in a pocket if I want to, but now I have more space, and the ability to go back and see another month’s worth of work, live with it a while longer.
It has a pen holder, and a small folder for stickers and sticky notes. It’s bigger than my old notebook wallet, but sometimes we efficientize our lives away from delight. If you don’t delight in a leather notebook filled with potential and words, your idea of delight is not the same as mine.
Living in words is written in white correction pen on the front of the blackbook. That’s the goal. If I am out of work, then the writing life it is. And sometimes, that means being willing to be heavier and more in paper.
The Dream of the Trees: Going into Gala Mode
I am in a circle of Douglas Fir trees, the giants of my childhood. It is hot, and it is cloudy, lightning strike weather. There is a haze of woodsmoke in the air, the hot pitch smell of the trees. Everything is burnt around us. I am standing over the body of a transgender woman, her face obliterated by self harm. She is me. She is a dozen girls I know. She is young and hopeful. She is gone.
In the darkness I see the face of another girl. She was murdered in Seattle a few weeks ago. Unlike me, she got to have a trans childhood. She was a singer and well loved. Her friends and community and family treated her well. And she was murdered last month. A hate crime. And I felt the same way as when other girls have been killed, have died at their own hands, have disappeared back into closets because they are afraid: I feel scared. I mourn. I go into Gala mode.
I am in Gala mode most days right now. “In Sumerian times, priests for Inanna known as the gala were said to have been created by the god Enki to sing laments for her, one of their central roles in her temple. From the beginning of the Old Babylonian Period, their role was heavily expanded, and mourning rites originally sung by women replaced over time by members of the gala. Men who joined the priesthood in devotion for Inanna became women for all intents and purposes, adopting female names and singing in the Sumerian eme-sal dialect, reserved for feminine speakers to render the speech of female gods. The gala were heavily involved in her temples, performing elegies and lamentations, presiding over religious rites and healed and looked after the sick and poor. They were respected members of the community, closely related to the care of their community.”
I feel surrounded by suffering girls right now. The girls who have died. The girls who are struggling to make rent, begin the process of selling the only thing left of interest: their bodies. Girls who were able to thrive and live beautiful lives of welcome and art, and are murdered like we are always murdered. Girls who are turning to guns as community support, as if that won’t lead to more dead. Girls who shriek at each other for not doing enough, when all we can do is what we can do.
Everyone says that my poetry is so sad. That is because I am sad, am in lamentation mode. For the girls. For the forests of my childhood. For my old life, 10 years dead, stable as an infusion. For the womanhood I was denied for so long. For this burning world, turned into cinders by our speed and greed. The only way forward seems to be lamentation. Friends and family will keep dying. This is how life is.
But I will live. As long as my body and friends and Jade and Gus will have me. 30 short years or less, with my notebook and lamentations. With my black dresses and writing down the names of the dead.
I stand in the burning forest. I bury the girl under a pile of paper. I wake up crying in the middle of the night. I am worrying my spouse. I am worrying myself. It’s hard to be anything when you are constantly in mourning.
The Pool
I am supple as a Sumo wrestler in the water. I can easily get onto my knees, stretch in ways I never could on land. Every other morning, with the white haired women, their arms etched in new tattoos, “a gift to myself when I retired”, I plunge into the water, and tread. We’re not talking Olympic swimming. It’s glorified treading of water, with a slow steady forward momentum.
My favorite mornings are when the workers forget to turn on the stereo that plays 80s music loudly at one corner of the pool. Then all you hear is the waves made by bodies slapping their way through the surface, the steady hum of giant fans blowing the thick air around, the laughter of folks meeting in the hot tub after water zumba, complaining about their aches and pains. “Did you hear Sally died? She didn’t show up to class last week, and I went to her little place, and no one answered the door and I called the ambulance. 83. So young.”
Sometimes the rising sun cuts through the huge windows and the scraggly pine trees, and the water ripples with light. More often, it’s the light above us, casting shadows off the concrete pillars above us.
My body is now pretty constantly coated with chlorine. No matter how much I shower I carry it in my hair. I’m still nervous in the locker room, though the women are welcoming and no one has complained yet. A week ago another trans woman was shyly changing near me, and we both smiled at each other as we carefully slipped into underwear and tuck, under towels, our small small breasted bared and goose pimpled. I could tell she was happy to see me. I was happy to see her.
I think that’s it for this week. I am currently sitting in the newly renovated library. All blonde wood and round pillars. I’m happy to be alive. I’m glad you are, too.
Love and stuff,
The Poet Laureate