in letters
my experience is an ongoing
experiment, unwilling to stay
anywhere as stodgy as the inn
of expertise, even overnight
and every time i start in earnest
to say anything true enough
to ring, i give my meager savings
up again
putting all i know at risk to all
i have yet to understand
*
Inspired by Ann Lauterbach
and keeping
who is speaking?
this question at least
as urgent as the other
more often asked,
on what they say.
who is living?
who is allowed
or encouraged
to die?
each at least
as critical as
the issue
of how.
an urban ballet
riot of color
synchronized in one
collective act of protest
on stone steps of a locked
administration building
on a Saturday afternoon
wide-armed skirts open
petals as they spin
joy from low-hanging
smog of simmering
fear
of a life
so much before me happens
& by the time i arrive, i am
primed to recognize how
small i am
& after many years
of carrying this
imagined burden to
consider, with
considerable relief
––how
relevantly so,
and know
how fragile, too––
and yet, somehow
still here, a
spore of moss
on wet & craggy
rock to mark
this shore.
& unseen
Kitty recovers, and so do I. It’s the last week of school, a time of dizzy rush underscored by reflection. I think about endangered creatures. One among these is the flightless parrot of New Zealand, the kākāpō. Who, according to Māori legend, is a protector of the land. And I am thinking about the children.
A system built for speed cannot see the slow one, who never flew. Who, when hunted, knew to freeze. I think of her, now camouflaged in shadow—an endangered hush—now subjected to another survey. Intended to express how well we care.
But a check mark is not shelter and a rubric offers no refuge. How many shine like saints in the chill grasp of their handlers, being measured for extinction while staying faithful to their flightlessness?
I’ve learned not to trust anyone with a grand plan because I once had one, too. Now I only want to shelter who still lives. To protect a child’s right to become what they will, even if that becoming looks like myth, even if they call it pest.
I don’t know what school is, only what it is not. One metric involves how well a person can pretend to be a person deserving of award. But that is not the work.
The work is learning how to become, and some of the brightest know better than to obey.
Do it. Don’t ask. Shut up. Or we’ll fail you and humiliate your mother.
And in other news: Kids Fail Critical Thinking Tests.
Marcos liked to talk to old people. Liked to hear their lives. He couldn’t focus on any task that felt designed to domesticate his wonder. The first act of a critical mind is refusal.
Consider the ones who vanish as portraits in negative space: Now you see me. Now I disappear.
Now I am a vase, now I am two people kissing. Now neither. Now both.
You thought your five-minute survey could find me? Think again.
Ask me who I am before I speak.
Ask as if you believe I might not answer.
Ask as if you know the form of your asking matters as well as your question.
There is much I have not said. Not yet––and no, I do not plan to fly.
I live close to the earth, as I am, in these shadows, or I die.
mid-quake
when sharp reach pangs
so long for holding & what
in need of her lost, where
soft grief trills
over low branch, see her
count our cost, leaf
by fallen why
and now
pause––
