i write these in my head first, carry them around. i carry you around. i carry and something builds. i try not to be in a hurry, try not to worry what i’ll lose by taking my time. if i give time the chance it helps me multiply the language it takes to write down whatever i write down.

i wanted to write you because everything hurts so much, so much that when i carry you around i want to carry you around forever. i want carrying around to be the thing. i want you to have the ease of being carried. i want to have infatigable muscles for carrying you.

i want to stand or sit or lay with my back against your back, i want us to share the weight of being by letting it melt against the other. me holding you holding me holding, etc.

i also wanted to write you because tonight i am three years sober. each year of sobriety has been pretty different for me, and this year was the year i started to see sobriety as a child in my care. something deeply precious and complex to tend. something to learn from and offer guidance. when i look at sobriety the child i remember that three years is so little time and so much time. i try to proceed accordingly.

because three years, while being so little, is also so much, i’d thought there should be so much to say. because everything is so much, i’d thought i’d need to say so much. more than anything lately, i just feel taken down to my smallest parts. maybe it’s ok to let things be small when they are.

i’ll leave you with some photos-of-late. i won’t leave you for long <3

quiet fills up the space where the words go.

one of the only truly calming things right now is when i can hear the snow start to slide off the roof and then look up and out in time to see it fall. i know this is only joyful because snow is a fact here, not an anomaly, and because of that fact the big plow always shows up on the big roads and the little plow always texts us on its way, and then all of us who live in this chopped up old house penguin walk out to our cars to clear them and move them to the little lot across the street. it’s this thing we do together. mostly we don’t talk, maybe we nod or just make eye contact, we move carefully one by one back into the freshly cleared lot. we collectively make sure there’s something down to melt the ice on the steps. the plow is swift. the whole scene brings tears, which might freeze on my face.

one of the quiet things i’m doing more and more, a kind of rare quiet nearness i had in childhood, is stitching — specifically cross stitch — learned from two of my grandmothers not in an instructive way that i recall but in watching their hands, admiring their completed works, and so as a child i started doing this too, taking along a kit to family gatherings, a way of being quiet with others, our attention on each little x and our presence in the same bubble of calm creation. always in eyeshot of the other. around the time i got sober i started stitching again, just over a thousand days ago. to hit that thousand this week has been something powerful and oddly mudane i’m also quiet about. sobriety is still hard, and it’s also boring, the kind of boring that’s a relief.

a thousand days. probably tens of thousands of stitches.

i see where stitches might go in my other work: press a needle into paper around a cluster of words, to stitch around them or stitch them out, to fuse paper to fabric, to cause ripple or a tear. press a needle through canvas where the paint dried, ornamenting it, changing it, multiplying color.

but lately, in the quiet, i follow simple patterns, pull colors as i’m told, count and stitch until my breathing evens (another rare site of calm). most recently i chose a new fabric for a bright floral folk art pattern, a kaleidoscope of tulips repeating in a circle. the fabric reminds me of a bag green coffee comes in ready to roast, rougher than i’m used to working, less bright and more loosely fibrous. it’s a reliable grid that takes a gentler hand: it means i’m learning to coax the needle through with no pressure behind it. it mean i’m learning not to pull each stitch too taut in my own tension: this requires a kind of letting go. i follow color until the pattern starts to reveal itself in my hands. i adjust the fabric in the hoop when i change colors. i let each length of color dangle to clear its twists, separate my stands with a tender intimacy i have no occasion to visit on anyone else. having never learned to use a blunted needle, i still draw from myself a sometime drop of blood.

having started actual motion on my birthday, i consider what’s turning here each year. sometimes i’m quiet for a while. sometimes, a new structure. i’d had the biggest of goatplans this time around, and then i didn’t write: i stitched. i’m learning to stitch newly all the time. i’m learning how to be here, how to talk with you and how to be with you, all the time.

here we go.1

three years and a day ago this little letter came into being, an attempt to be a goat without a plan but with some sort of momentum.1

a day ago, quietly, i turned forty-three.2

i’ve been quiet, a gift i try to give myself each year in each turn.3

the third is a quiet date i’ve made work for me.4

the quiet is a familiar state i’d like to alter a little more often.5

i’d like quiet’s roundness to lend me a hand.6

i’d like to be dizzy with something more than going around & around.7

i’d like to study roundness another way.8

i’d like to be round with all my trying.9

i go around, and i go around again. i am diligent (stubborn).10

i am stubborn (weary).11

i am weary (restless).12

i am restless (my hands are busy).13

my hands remain busy.14

i’m still trying to create the unlikely but i’m not clear on my odds.15

i go around & around.16

each circle a little odd.17

each bubble goes pop.18

each new round brilliant/fragile.19

each way of counting more complex.20

i’ve been quietly trying.21

i’ve been quiet & while i’m quiet, i try.22

i work and i want and i eat and i stretch and i wash the dishes and i shit and i speak and i ache and i read and i water the plants and the quiet of it fills the background.23

and i’ve been trying to write what’s personal by taking the person out of it.24

the trying, it’s personal.25

the trying, it’s brutal.26

the trying & the trying.27

i’ve been trying to write what’s actual by watching what parts of it move.28

i’ve been trying to determine if the moving parts are the actual parts.29

i’ve been trying to determine if the circle moves or just moves around.30

i’m the circle (i move).31

i move the circle (it doesn’t go anywhere).32

i circle me every place on the grid that gives me information.33

informed, i fall out of the circle.34

circled, i go back to the beginning.35

momentum is one way to chew the odds.36

i’d like a small but substantial favor.37

i’d like the night to fill.38

i’d like the thickness of daytime.39

i’d like all the noise of it.40

i go around & around.41

it’s personal.42

my hands remain steady.43

we go to a different part of space, guided by refrain.

we all start by saying, however we do.

we start and stop.

we stay there, saying and not saying.

we lean into our squares, make things, embelish. we listen. we lean back.

we listen in, even closer.

we lean back, all the way.

we get on the floor. we get in the floor.

we stay even longer.

/

inside of we — somewhere suspended between space and earth — i start on the floor and go down and downer. my spirit isn’t low: my body is. i pull sound around me in the form of pages, blankets, colors, loops. i fill a painted page with my own saying, roiling echo:

inside of we keep going, i carve myself the space to move. painting is also moving. writing is also moving. listening is also moving. i think about all the times this year i’ve gotten on camera in pain. i think about the painbody in motion. i think about the heart in pain in motion. i move so later i can drop the sound out and see what moving says. i get curious about my own appearance there. i look for where the pain goes from the floor: up or down or sideways or.

pain goes all ways:

some days moving is slow but long. some days writing leaves a residue:

when i’m lucky enough to be held a way holding feels right, i don’t come back to earth, not for a long time. not until i have to.

the last time in space feels a decade ago. the decade asks me questions:

do you know the second moon arrived? do you know how long it will stay?

do you know where you were a year ago? how do you hold this week’s year?

do you spend a lot of days marking years?

how does time hold you back?

how does time hold you back?

does it?

in space, according to my notes, i made lists. i was playful. i chose two colors of pen in four directions. i drew the frame before i placed the stamp. i completed sentences. i played favorites. my right arm didn’t hurt too much.

in space, some things looked & sounded like this:

slip of the page through your
fingers and the page could be
anything, could hold or repre-
sent anything. flat vibrant
reminder. easy to make a pile,
challenging to carry a box of.
time machine in slips. ink
reminder. live inside it,
carry it around in pockets, etc.
it’s the paper etcetera, the
dot dot dot. don’t let anyone
tell you something can only
have one purpose.

will you holdhave my undersound?
tomorrow we’ll have a sootheway.

brightwet
having shaved off a parcel
of skin, not ceremony or
cherub, not harm’s
curious cousin, hands out
not up, holy hoping the
transmission cuts open
goo forward and
skull base around heavy
sets
circle, circle, cuticle, crow
daddy flight pattern
fight a curve in the
grass
if you have to

back on earth, i’ve been marking the year. the year is personal and the year is global. the year is ash and light. i walk and i walk and then i don’t leave the house for thirty-seven hours. this isn’t a significant amount of time, but when i stepped out into the fall air just an hour ago i gasped. i felt bright and tired. my sharpness paused for half a second. on this hour’s conversion chart of feeling, one half a second is equal to thirty-seven hours.

time eludes me and it eludes you.

back on earth, i walked to the lake and i looked at the lake while describing to a loved one how i hope to connect through words and movement just about exactly eight days from right now. the description took four minutes, but when i went to send the recording, i’d been speaking for twenty minutes. on this hour’s conversion chart of feeling, the lake is equal to how i might ask you to move one arm into an arc.

yes, i do spend a lot of days marking years.

back on earth, it’s a particularly sharp day. i check in with my nerve pain. i check the app that tells me about my body’s circles. i check the app that tells me about my sobriety. circles are one way time can get the better of you. sobriety is more like a bulb. circles trick me with the false security of plain information. the bulb makes me squint. neither of these things come with much relief.

no, i don’t know how long anything will stay.

in space i write a poem that so definitively feels like a poem i can’t call it anything else. i often, relative to my name, want the word poet present but dashed out. everything feels like a recording of something else, heard through a wall. everything feels like talking down one’s own throat. everything feels like a list that’s fucking up its own listing. this poem felt like a poem. i have no conclusion to offer here.

when i first return from space, i notice i can’t move right away, and kind of want to scream. sometimes the charge of a room has to finish moving through your body first, and it’s looking for a way out.

if i went to space, the first thing i would do is scream.

back on earth, it’s October and i’m watching Alien. i’m (often) thinking about mothers. i’m thinking about the second moon. i’m noticing when i place the speaker under my desk the score finds my ears more easily and i wonder if i’ve been missing out on sound’s full scope of direction (of course i have). i’m keeping a chart. i’m writing WALK PLEASE on my to do list (sometimes i’m walking). i’m noticing the significant things i do on the side. i’m thinking about mothering. i wonder how Ellen Ripley was mothered.

i’m softening the week this week by painting watercolors. i am not a painter but this year i paint. i get myself to keep painting by remembering my pen: the thing about a bad watercolor is you can always write on it (there is no such thing as bad moving water and color around). i’m softening the week by adding the same line to each day’s to do list: consider partial sick day? i get myself to keep working by remembering while i can need a sick day all the time i can’t have it. the thing about sick days is the math is always bad (i keep the question mark but eventually i will take a sick day). Alien is a movie about work that considers the consequences of work. there are no sick days in space, but sometimes the charge of a room leaves you through the chest.

i’m on earth. i work and then i do what i can to erase the work from my being (the significant things i do on the side). i work and then i live on the side. i claw for the sides.

in space, you might slow dance along the edge of your desk for presence in the painful moment (all kinds of pain).

in space, you might be especially glad for floating (most kinds of floating).

in space, i pulled pattern: i did this by considering muscular load, by inching into different ways of carrying, by methodical steps back and forth across my blanked-out camera’s eyewidth. by space’s midpoint i could be a face again, not pacing but rocking, the everymoving ease better than my maxed out meds.

in space, i wrote into states of worlds (an impossible/forever task):

can this wall accomodate the angle of that fucking orange countertop under the hip, its lightning not joyful but miles of landfill & its pieces of fallen storm not even a fearful clap but the ceiling encountering bodies (memories) dread inevitable the way i know of bodies—or else i don’t. the ink of this pen will run backward off the property the way i know my hips will abandon me on the bathroom floor again. press the pen into the ground behind the larger bays thick with nothing recorded no one in the other room to call out to. this is just the scenario. this is the rough skin of fingers unsoothed because the body never changes, that orange grit never washed clear as though calling out the first time didn’t feel the most guttural (at least top 3): achievement is finally finding the true top of your lungs you child you child you.

back on earth,
i gathered with twenty-something poets to really consider the earth, to think on how it turns and how the light does and doesn’t go, to hold the equinox in ritual and connection to each other and everything else. please consider these bits that came through my notes—as prompt, as meditation, as choreography, etc—take what you like and leave the rest:

in space, you can’t do it wrong.

in space, hopefully, a portal.

in space i said:

this happy home, its quickness, fill the whole house without stepping in & cave the ribs exactly as i can’t explain—lines go thin, bodies change, love doesn’t go but love needs somewhere to go, i can explain it but i won’t but i reach from the dark of it dented, snap my plastic teeth your direction—love’s half asleep in the bellows by the low fire, whatever that is, and wherever. whichever house we occupied, the long move, that one fever, that awe. we say what is and isn’t, go when it’s time to go.

in space i took the train, it goes like this:

stop one: the waves
scoop buzz of you up into brain’s raw edge, brain go clack, a warning/a desire
put down line after line for the express purpose of [specifics]

stop two: task task task task task
pick up speck after speck of doing with my teeth
& spit the specks at this week’s loud screen

stop three: trying to make the griefstop a hopestop
i picked up the pill
& i picked up the pill
& i picked up the pill
& i picked up the pill
& i picked up the pill & i put them all down my throat that i might be a whole garden
holding

(no stop, just breaths)

(today’s ride is brought to you by the numbers 3 and 5)

in space we meet Oliver Baez Bendorf and Spencer Williams. i hope you take the time to meet them, too.

back on earth,
i’m writing about obsession while thinking about sobriety. i’m feeling more because of sharpness. there’s no cake so i dab a little honey on my tongue. i’m soothing forgetting. i’m asking questions of my hypothetical audience to help turn a square into a circle. i’m laying on the floor a lot. i’m at the laundromat, it clicks and groans. the only other person at the laundromat clicks and groans. the moon, i assume, clicks and groans, but not in this way. i am never the loudest person at the laundromat. i want obsession back.

& then i’ll see myself out.2

when i returned to New Hampshire in 2022, i sometimes said i was going home. sometimes there is an inaccurate shorthand for what you’re doing and why you’re doing it that protects you from near-constant depths. sometimes you need to stand in the shallow end, just ankles submerged, feeling the hot air of the timeline on your skin. each time i drive north through the state, i time travel.3 i look at the landscape and the landscape is my body. this is nearly impossible, and unnecessary, to explain.

in 2022, when i said i was going home, it was a little true.4

in 2022, when i said i was going home, i didn’t mean i was done going. i have continued to go. once, on another coast in another year, my brother and i scrambled up Black Butte late in the day to stare at Mount Shasta as the sun dissolved around it. when dark had settled, we walked the precarious trail back down with dim headlamps that eventually left us to trust the feeling of the ground under us and the edges of trees that interrupted the otherwise dark air. continuing to go often looks like that.

in 2024, when i say i am going home, i mean something different.

because ritual and pattern are dear to me, i am enjoying the roundness of being able to say how going has become earthen: how, in June — two exact years after my Oregon departure — i’ll go home.

when i started writing this in my head on february 145 it was called romantic for the platonic. this is also part of what it means for me to go home. a year ago, i wrote against romance. i said

when i say i am not a romantic i mean i am against romance. no, i cannot explain this to you. and i can put it this way: i am unromantic for the romantic and i am deeply romantic for the platonic.

i am a sucker for ritual and i was taught early that love’s rituals looks like this and not this.

appear here but not there.

function this way and not that way.

like many things, i knew i felt this way before the knowing bloomed, before i could feel the heft of knowing against my palm. the process of knowing is sometimes brutal: knowing love’s actual expansiveness can be a thing that tears. in the process of continuing to go not home but at least toward it in the mostly-dark, i wrote down some of what i hoped (but didn’t expect) to find in the dark.

& against all the ways i was taught love (taught what wasn’t love, dear reader), against the ways i was shaped to be a woman bound to a man by gawd and the state (shaped against every aspect of my actual shape, beloved), against all the ways i was failed by what claimed to be love & told to love it anyway, just one way, one narrow path, one one-way street (despite being born and mostly raised in NH i refuse the opportunity for a Robert Frost reference, friend) — stumbling in love’s deep dark, which is also the dark of home-going, a lighthouse. a whole shore of them.

p.s. a lot of you have been reading along this often-sporadic newsletter for a few years & i appreciate you deeply. more soon, always.

xo,

j

i am and am not at Fort Wayne.1

i am and am not writing this down: my notebook stays open on the table, beside a stack of books. sprawled on the couch under the big window, moving from my page to the pages of others. take notes, follow a thought. stare out the window while language bubbles. as the light goes, get up to light the propane wall sconces, my favorite little task here.

each time i go to my notebook, i try not to note the time. i fail a lot. it’s morning and i like knowing that i slept for twelve hours last night, but i don’t like knowing what hour connects to what light, i want to only take the light in on its own.

on the porch with a view of the trees (which is every view), which sparkle. every weekend before this has been thunderstorms (a favorite). today, the sun pours through everything. it’s summer, i guess, but the air here knows i want it to be fall.

i want to fall, into the shadows and caverns of being alone and listening.

the mosquitoes are ravenous, and do their little dance around a citronella flame. this is a kind of laughter. by now the cabin’s full of chill morning air and as much light as will enter. earlier, half-awake in the loft bed, a beacon of the earliest light came through the far window’s geometry. this may or may not have been real.

this morning, i try to recall her birthday and fail. i don’t mean to take a trail of blood to the woods with me every time but i do. every time. the bears have yet to find me.

“there are so many things you can do with your body if you can let it relax and bend to the shape of the universe” ~ Sheila Heti

at the top of the stack is Pure Colour, some of whose father passages have been making me weep. there are so many things and so many bodies and so little relaxing, bending, being the shape of where & how we are.

some things you let leak through.
some things cool on the page.

is some accumulation just writing over your own script? is some of it writing over & over the same thing? i take a crinkled roll of paper to the woods. now, it lives in the back seat of my car, still empty. it isn’t time yet.

i try to recall her birthday again, one i’d never really memorized. i also can’t recall her deathday, its door left ajar. an unfinished room. no funeral and no map for mourning.

what would i write down if it could be whispered on the page?

[some things are untranscribable.]

many times a day, hundreds maybe, and on most days, a voice in me says loudly hey are you ok once at a time, sometimes many times one after the other with overlapping tails. a part of me always wants to know if all of me is ok. a part of me never actually seems to know.

nothing starts from the bottom: it all starts in the middle.

i might drive from the middle of my sadness but the middle’s edges are unknown.

i understand, according to a science i do not really understand, that this body regenerates. the actuality of touch goes, but not its memory. the body remembers, wrecking the body’s own record of becoming new.

i understand some of us don’t return to the site of violence until some of our options have expired, knowing it is always an option to be failed.

i understand other untranscribable things. i run circles around a grove of trees.

in the cabin, i understand that no matter how wide i open the windows the outside will only come as far inside as it wants to.

i fix on what might be a dead or living little worm on the powder bulb center of a large chamomile flower in this glass jar bouquet i brought here: fresh chamomile, purple basil, chive, nasturtium. some for eating and some for beholding. something larger and else darts down a single green-purple basil leaf. it could be a creature, or a thought, or some combination of these.

i relish the simplicity of the cabin. my meals are basic & holy, prepared slowly. for this weekend’s holiness i light a candle and place a nasturtium blossom in my mouth. fire & pepper are cousins. i tear lettuce with my hands. boil water for oatmeal. ornament a bowl of soup with fresh herbs. i’ve brought a box of cookies to eat with midday hot coffee. i laugh at myself, my simple plan: a weekend of eating madeleines and flowers.

i wash the dishes with a jug of water. if it rains, i will go outside to rinse my body.

in the distance, something yips and then converts to chorus. i’m in the field, listening with my whole body.

love,

j

maybe you didn’t even make a stack1 this year because, like me, you adjust your approach a little every year because, also like me, you always fail early, and spectacularly, and maybe, you think, i’m just not doing it quite right.

maybe you’re not like me at all and you devour a book of poetry before the day peaks every day of August and for all time. good for you.

i have no beef with the Sealey Challenge. i am a Capricorn sun with a Virgo rising: i love this shit. and, all my checklists and calendars and spreadsheets be damned, i’m never really fully honest with myself about these things or why they’re important to me. or if they’re actually important to me.

a few nights ago, i laid on my bed not reading. i’d come up with another double-earth-sign plan for another sprawling project (no, i’m not gonna tell you the project, not until i’ve let it some slack and then called it back more gently), one that would require a chunk of dailiness that i know better than to ask myself for right now.

i love dailiness, and i do not want it to be another thing i sip to dull me, another sharp edge i push myself over. i do not want to wear myself down with days. i want the days to hold me so i can hold them, too.

a few nights ago, i laid on my bed not reading because i’d made this plan to read thirty days of poetry – to read, in thirty days, thirty books – and on day one i wanted to read a novel. so i laid there, legs dangling up against the air’s nothing, stubbornly not reading anything.

i woke grumpy about this, and then i saw a post from Kathleen Ossip: “I know what it’s like to feel daunted by the idea of reading a book a day. It’s quite literally impossible for many of us.” And then, what I’m already seeing folks adopt as the Ossip Challenge: “I commit to reading one poem with profound attention each day of August.”

and, like, cool! i also have no beef with the Ossip Challenge. but, with both challenges, i do have some Beyond Beef Plant-Based Crumbles.2

actually, emphasis on the crumbly part, because i really do want to be the person who reads thirty books of poetry in thirty days. but do i? really?

actually, i want to make a Sealey stack and immediately knock it over, and then i want to read the resulting mess for many months, to make stepping over the unread volumes still scattered on the floor as much a part of the process as laying among them to read. i want to commit to reading poems with profound attention and also with the dull scatter of my brain unable to let go of the fourteen things i’m thinking about at that exact moment and also with the sharp scream of tinnitus in my post-cubicle ears, hoping a phrase or two will fog the sound. i want to lay among my mess reading a novel because i made big plans to read poetry and then changed my mind. i want to slip a book of poetry under my pillow and then sleep deeply upon it, forgetting to read it until laundry day.

what i want is to commit to the practice of accumulation more than the project of it.

& when i say accumulation i do not mean filling out a list and i do not mean the checking of checkboxes and i do not even mean spreadsheets (if you know me, i know, don’t panic). this isn’t a statement against measurement. i don’t want me to throw out my tools, or you yours. 

when i say accumulation i mean sure, i tracked the miles i drove from Oregon to New Hampshire last year, but i’m just now piling the mess of that move into my palms to get a closer look at it, to understand if it fits there, and if it does, how? and if it doesn’t, why not? and where does it fit?

i don’t mean that i am measuring, exactly. i mean that i am making marks on the door frame of a doorway that opens into itself. and if i follow the marks, i can see they do not move along anything that could be called a line, and no two marks are in the same unit of measure. there is no conversion chart.

by accumulation i don’t mean having. i mean creation. i mean loving each other. i mean letting go. i mean fessing up. i mean crumbling. i mean, what am i still stacking up so i don’t see what’s behind it?

so i’m not stacking: i’m practicing, and where i practice something accumulates.

I am not like I was before.1

one year and one day ago, i stopped leaving. this is also called arrival. this is also called holding pattern.

(this is not an essay about holding.)

wait, no, it is. this is about holding.

at the beginning of the month i was holding hands with my beloved on a Quebec street & then in the middle of the month i was singing Sufjan in unison with my beloved outside of Boston & then just a few days ago my beloved and i were untethered plants in Lake Kanasatka, floating and floating, spilling and sharing words.2

i woke up today, different. i’d planned to spend the month writing with 2022: mapping, tracing, unrolling miles and their corresponding notebook sessions. i feel so different and i wanted to explain it. i wanted its evidence beyond its feeling. i wanted to be able to show you by turning pages.3

i woke up today, beholding all the wide spaces where i’d been able to feel love by rubbing my fingers together around the changed air: voices through no medium. someone hands you a fresh cup of coffee they’ve made you. someone kisses your forehead. i don’t love any less, but distance makes my fingers a dull sound.

i woke up today & then it took awhile. i was already wincing under too much light. i’d been so busy feeling so different & then we all were: we knew what was missing.

what i remember of Sinéad is that, like many things, i wasn’t supposed to know. i’d have only been ten when she tore that photo on television. it would still be years before i’d regularly sneak SNL late at night, laying before the console TV so i could still pick up the lowest volume’s forbidden words. it was 1992, and while it would take years still for me to hear her music, to see her tearing and steady anger, it would also be the year of my earliest memory of sexual abuse. now i feel so different.

my earliest memories are of difference, but not what came before it.

& after, & for many afters, i beheld Sinéad’s rage. i watched back the torn photo thrown with purpose, whispering to myself what it might mean. in my dreams, i chewed its pieces in my mouth, practicing speaking. i’d never heard anyone name what was happening to me. i’d never seen anyone who didn’t want to hurt me so angry.

i didn’t know i had anger in me. no one i could see was angry for me. no one, not yet, had offered to be angry with me.

in the past year, a lot of the driving i’ve done has been on roads worn with unsearchable memory: that is, i drive the roads and they hand me shards. i couldn’t describe it to you, but my body could. there’s no voice for it.

I am not like I was before but i am where i was before.

i drive, alone and in the company of voices, and as i listen to Sinéad’s albums today — front to back and with my full attention, the way i haven’t in years — i can see how so many of the voices i crave when i’m in motion have her threaded into them.

i want to know that anger is alive there.

i want to remember that someone showed up.

i want you to know peace, Sinéad, and to never stop thanking you.4

actual motion keeps shifting its weight, bending, collapsing, expanding. it keeps starting and starting. its engine lurches & coughs in the sun.

today is my anniversary of leaving Oregon. one of my anniversaries of leaving Oregon. some things are starting and starting. my Oregon is leaving and leaving.

today, one year ago, I started driving and didn’t stop for 4,798 miles. for the moment (& the moment changes so quickly), actual motion is a diary of actually moving.1

which is maybe what it’s been this whole time.

xo,

j

maybe it starts in snatches of vision, pinhole vignettes. a sliver of light bouncing off the timeline. the failed starts. the utter failure of starting.

that last afternoon you sit by the pool, laid out in the sun. you dive deep, paddle yourself tired. float the edge of leaving. maybe you’ll sleep. maybe you’ll leave.

it’s maybe easier to leave when you practice a lot & then leaving isn’t leaving. everything always already practice.

(it’s never easier.)

& because leaving is always a drill, you’ll be back at poolside, you’re sure of it. you savor but not as someone with goodbye’s bitter tongue.

you’ll be back for one more cemetery walk.
you’ll dive down to skim along the pool’s floor.
you’ll burn more placards to press into more sproinging soil, with buds you’ll be back to witness bear their fruit.
you’ll be a hand, plucking.
you’ll see the clover start to overtake the stones again, for one more cycle, a brilliant forest over shards.
you’'ll wake up again to put the cat on your shoulder, casting the spell that ends in one hot cup.
you’ll never actually have to say goodbye to the cat and it’s a good thing, because animals are terrible at goodbyes.

& you’ll never be a final pile of boxes in the garage, the ones you keep adjusting to get your car to sit right, begging that one tire to bear its bent fender by holding a skew. if i ask less of you. if i ask less of me.

even now, you still hover your palm a splinter of air above steering’s center and whisper thank you. you do this every day. you know a machine isn’t an animal but you know you feel kinship with a machine. you feel at home in a machine. you & this metal beast started and finally didn’t stop,

because three hundred sixty-five days ago, Oregon finally let you leave.

you practice going until you’re going, until you’re hours gone & ready to be stuck on a moutain pass, ready for mechanical failure, ready for bodily failure, ready for failure to take you to pieces again. you’re pieces already: the piece of you in the frame, the piece of you on a string, the piece of you clipped and dangling. you cast every spell you can think of. you design a circle for your hands to follow each day, each hour, every time you remember the miles under you to convert them to miles behind you.

the miles keep passing through. miles & miles of shadow, face to the sun. you cried the month of June already but on the first day your eyes are dry, your skin is wet, the sun is so hot, the summer is so sullen, your whole life in a Honda Civic,

except the boxes in the garage
except one familiar’s ash body (spirit, I keep leaving you maps)
except miles & miles of wearing the cemetery way with your feet

except you get to leave with your heart full. you get to leave your heart and take it with you. you get to drive toward your heart, and with your heart. you get to empty your heart in places you haven’t seen yet. your whole life is a muscle. your whole machine is purring. light my heart like a sparkler & send me up the mountain. we burn low, but we burn.

it’s NaPoWriMo2 and i’m failing.3 my numbers are off. my routine is slushy. my heart is beating so hard lately. no, it’s not a medical condition, it’s a human condition. it’s an anniversary month. it’s that i adore ritual. it’s that i want to be undone. i want to break the rules and for the rules to break me back.

after week two of not-poems and (gasp) poems and walks in the forest that i’ve called poems and staring at blank scraps with a pen in my hand, unmoving, and moving, no pen in sight, and shuffling between scraps and pages and screens and floors, here’s a ritual.4 here’s a way my scraps process looks sometimes. here’s what sometimes turns into not-poems, and occasionally poems. here’s how i keep a diary and then crush the diary’s lock, unweaving what’s there.

from the scrappy unwoven,

jj

scraps, a ritual (4.15.23)

begin with something trimmed away. an odd size or shape. a castaway someone’s cast in your direction. if you want, find a partner and send each other a pile. if you have time, let the scraps marinate in mundane corners of where you live or work or move or sit still. store scraps where they’ll be on hand: a bag you carry, the glove compartment of your car, the pockets of your denim. let them be there when you need them. let them be there when you don’t need them, too.

when it’s time to write, make an object of a few scraps. what kind of object? don’t think about it so hard. i fold mine into a tiny book. i leave tiny blank books everywhere, ready to be filled. i write a page, flip the page, and write the next. when is it time to write? now. (trust me.)

when your scrap-object is full, consider its other shapes. mine looks like this.

and also like this.

and this.

(see?)

when it’s time to extract language from your scrap-object, don’t be precious about it. don’t look too close. don’t be afraid to lay it out somewhere dirty. behold it, but don’t hold so tight. throw it in the air and let it land.

remember your scraps have two sides. lay them over each other. fold and re-fold their order. pull language in clumps, across folds, over and under. pull echo. pull error. pull & pull.

for example: today,5 i pulled language without making much of a mess. this is unusual for me (i like the mess of it). but the mess is always possible / the language is never done.

i might reorder my folds

did you know that i was married once? surf has spat me. ritual has fooled me. circle me in the basement. i can’t hear the ocean in my fingers.

and i might roll across my folds

i called out to sign a paper, to negotiate in pastel with no gawd. married the savior, found blood in the souvenir shop. i wanted to be alone with almost no one.

and i might abandon the folds altogether

the surf of what happened hands me a saltbottle. ring around a dumpy savior. was i married once? do you remember? no one can go that long without the shore. you keep telling me i got married. i keep waving.

(and so on)

i didn’t come here to describe to you this particular corner of my room but when i got here i realized i missed March altogether, and that i have so many half-written newsletters stored in my body, and can’t i just quit my job already and write to you over & over & over & over?

i did come here to talk about NaPoWriMo,4 which you can learn more about here & you can follow along with a hive of us at the Bloof Books blog here. this year marks twenty years of NaPo, which i stumbled into around 2007 and have participated with extremely varied success ever since.5 i’ve found that the more collectively-connected i feel, the more i write, and i’m feeling particularly tender-connected this year, with this particular April’s web extra sparkly with dew.6

(well, now i’m crying.)

while i go feel my feelings, i’ll leave you with a photo essay of this first week of April 2023, scribbling on scraps7 & weaving not-poems on the daily. if you’re working on something, NaPo or otherwise, i’d love if you’d share it with me so i can cry about you, too.

with tenderloving collaboration,

jj

scraps, seven ways (4.1.23-4.7.23)

it’s not a diary until you bleed on it: you feel the clot preparing you for loss so you can practice. it’s the lining of a feeling and the feeling has to go, the feeling has to go somewhere.

i’ve given the mess of my hand permisson.

maybe it isn’t that your face has changed so much as it’s a different quality of light hitting you from a different rise and set, maybe it’s no shape & all the slips of what we wrote down.

who left all these pages blank? who is going to read across the fold?

did you hang your hopes & dreams on that page-a-day, too? poor sucker, you love to be fooled. you love a well-planned oblivion.

i hate this part. i hate casting nets. i hate throwing a line. i hate putting a letter in the mail. these things all slip from my fingers. inside, i’m busy shedding the reminder. outside, busy preparing for preparing.

that’s it: that’s the process, folding and unfolding, trying to capture anything happening around the fold.

i’ve been writing love letters for over a month.

today doesn’t really mean anything to me, and i am a sucker for ritual, and love is a ritual i don’t understand.

when i say love here, i mean romance.

when i say romance i mean i want to say romance until the word falls apart. i want to throw romance against the wall and i want it to stick or slide. i don’t care which.

when i say romance i mean i am not a romantic.

writing love letters is like this: i thrash my arms in a Google doc that only one person gets to read, and none of the letters are addressed to that person (until they are). someone i love reads the love letters i write with my thrashing arms and adds love, too.

none of this is romantic (until it is).

when i say i am not a romantic i mean i am against romance. no, i cannot explain this to you. and i can put it this way: i am unromantic for the romantic and i am deeply romantic for the platonic.

i am a sucker for ritual and i was taught early that love’s rituals looks like this and not this.

appear here but not there.

function this way and not that way.

ritual is a thing you can tie in a knot. romance is a thing wearing the coat you like. letters are something you can put in a box and/or pull out of your oral cavity. love is carnivorous. ritual eats olives but not brine. letters can tell you the future (but won’t). romance wants to honey your best slacks. love waits in the doorway with a stiff brush.

does that clear things up?

with love (without romance),

jj

If I’ve left anything out it’s because I don’t know where it belongs. Then again some things just seem to be contributing to a pile-up of the same old emotion when they are abandoned to chronology so I abbreviate those for the sake of a rhythm.1

i spent the last month of 2022 mostly away from most things: i logged off a lot, i put a lot of things down. i didn’t write anything here, wrote a little in my notebook, a little in coffee shops. i practiced holding a pen in gloved hands while the northeast grew wet-cold & put projects into drawers.

in early December, i realized i’d forgotten about the ocean & went to the ocean. over coffee i wrote

understanding can be lonely. moving through can be lonely. being seen can be lonely? does that sound right?

& then i noted how the barista changed songs when Taylor Swift starting saying fucking a lot

& then i waded into the brisk surf to get my hands salty-wet, to press them against the back of my neck and my lips, one foot in the receding foam, one on the gelatinous sand.

the next week, i tried to write the story of my life, from the very beginning, in twenty minutes. i wrote

i have no memory
of what i have
no memory of

& wrote

the sever moment doesn’t come

with one foot in memory and the other in story.

tomorrow, i mark a month of making writing space with a beloved, the ritual of leaving language for the other to find, the space of asking each other to show up in which the showing up has no bounds and no uniform, the putting down has no load limit and wild tenderness. if a document is an open floor plan, i imagine us running around writing on and writing with, putting words on growing mounds until the mounds are falling into each other. there are no visible doorways, but we’re constantly passing from space to space, and just as constantly balancing on the invisible in-betweens.

thresholds keep showing up as a means for unearthing, unfolding, being. curiosity teeters and doors stay open. bodies occupy two rooms, maybe more. selves cleave by their own inner doorways. we’re talking edges, but middle edges. neither this nor that, and both.

yesterday, a new Gregorian year started and tomorrow i start a new age, and this day in the middle of that is the day actual motion started one year ago. after a year of newsletter-ing and month of letting go, i’m not sure where to continue and where to sever. i’m ready to take projects out of drawers, ready for the deeper caverns of writing alone & alone with others. my notebook is almost full, my desk clear & organized.

i keep reading Bernadette. i keep wondering, what do i abbreviate for the sake of a rhythm?

…what am I beginning now a work that goes off into a distance I’ve created, it was so easy, from now on I’ll start to say nothing, I’ve hidden too much already.2

if you’re still reading along, i’d love to hear from you: if i keep this moving, what moves you? how do you want to move? do you like prompts for moving/writing/thinking? do you like love letters? i feel the partial-pull of taking you into the treehouse with me every month. i also feel very quiet, and i feel the quietness of writing into a mostly-void.3

at any rate, here’s to what you brought with you & what you didn’t. here’s a gentle nudge toward more gentleness for you & for me. here’s the threshold & there we are.

you might say the poem lives here. it’s ok, you can say it. my relationship with naming remains complicated2 and your relationship with naming is yours. you see & feel & name & un-name & multi-name & strip the name clean off & apply more coats of lacquer that the name might stay, shining, to outlive us all. if i’m honest,3 i do too.

sometimes i don’t want to call anything anything.

sometimes i just want to call out.4

the past few days i’ve been letting my body sink into an acute euphoria inside a blooming pain. this is hard to explain. this is an exercise in skew & soothe.5 sometimes when i put my hand on the pain, the pain says thank you. sometimes i turn to look at the plain face of the treehouse through the window, i say i’m sorry.6

i’ve been palming wonder, and when i can’t i imagine i can remember its weight in my hand. i imagine other outcomes & try not to squirm. i imagine i am the nurse of my own survival, setting the house on fire. there is sting in this activity, and tenderness. the pain will arrive when it needs to, you said.7

there are some moments where i can’t tell if what’s rising into the air is the coffee’s steam or my own. lung capacity: one strong, hot cup. measure the beans’ weight against my torso & then grind. pour the boil through & drink what’s left.

i don’t know where i’m going with this, but i hope it’s toward you.

before this, there is the person at the junk shop who had boxed themself in while another person in the mirroring junk shop is in the process of doing the same. because of this effort to duplicate, the rooms go like this: wood, metal, glass/smoke, whimsy. everything’s story is inflated. we carry out a fish in its wrong element, handfuls of fuzz, and two unmarried pineapple halves.

as we exit, the junk shops take a collective breath.

before this, in the car, i pull two big blood clots from my nasal cavity: one into my hand and one into my throat. i don’t even have to pull the car over.8

to make a house you keep setting the table. there are rooms in your body, you know: your body can enter a room & then you can enter the room of your body. you can even do this outside.

ideally, you do this outside. sometimes, you do this in the shell of being inside, which is really just outside-askew.9

if i promise you we’re getting there, would you believe me?10