What the Muses Leave Behind

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.

  Finding Grace Giving Grace Being Grace       Today five cranes flew by my window East to South.   The new sun blushed with morning, and I reminisced on waking up    with you in the red metal bed that fit us like a glove, white cotton around    our whole selves as we moved as priestesses do, spent from ceremony.     We spooned still tethered in dream threads, sleep thinning with the mist outside.     How did we get so lucky?   The smooth fit of our bodies, gently finding grace.   We hope this moment will cycle back again and again ;   that we could replicate such blessed disruption as if it weren’t like the tides and the weather.     How many others among us, calling this blue green miracle, home, woke to disruption -   to a 7.8 earthquake, a thirty-eight-railcar crash, a Russian missile in the roof?   It boggles my mind, how our Great Awak...

Quietly Quitting a Long Marriage     It has been a pink thread and big stitches that basted our stories together,    a regenerative and frail connection     reliant on its care and f eed ing .       Then there is quiet quitting , a n often-forgotten way to reclaim power,    a subtle recalibration.   When marriage serves as initiation, everything is possible.   We choose the magic we make.      Subordinating conjunctions suspend the moment,   bring a discreet signpost to a thought,     dew drop unpacking light.    After, as if, because, when, where, since – here are words,   I tender to wing open a line.      When marriage serves as initiation for the fireweed years -    those days of forging ahead, slower, living from our belly -     and there is nothing to prove, what emerges ?   What falls away?  ...