I am scraped raw. Whittled down by one breast and over a dozen lymph nodes. Perforated bones, and perforated memories. Once, a week ago, I finally turned on my computer but couldn’t figure out how to access my files. I turned it off again.

My world is tiny. A few rooms. Far fewer voices. The tinny reverberation of chronic pain, of chronic loneliness. So much shame.

When monkeys have injuries, twitches, or otherwise behave in unsettling ways, the tribe shuns them. The cowed animals live around the edges of a community. Shame begets shame: the my fault, not my fault, my fault thread chasing its tail until all the faults are knotted like a net to catch everything. It’s my fault the tide flows. It’s not my-is my fault I got cancer.

Nothing flows through with ease. Nothing is at ease except the ducks who’ve decided to overwinter, resigning to the cold.

I am who I am because of where I’ve been. But I read the present like a story written in Braille. I’m illiterate. Observing an act of communication, but ignorant of where to begin. Excluded, yet I’m grounded by my fingertips that touch the dry, slightly fuzzy paper. Maybe just knowing that it means something is enough? Maybe I’m too fatigued to unlearn enough to learn something new.

I lost a friend to cancer. She lived an ocean away, so sometimes, even now, when I speak her name some kind of gremlin wakes and claws its way up through my chest to choke my voice, to push tears up past my cheekbones to well in my lower lids. Oh god, I think. This is absurd. Is this love or guilt, or are those things even distinct from one another?

That year I thought I lost other friends, in other ways. But I’d mistaken proximity and common ground for love. There is a shame in this too—in the mistaking. So many delusions: the wishful thinking and the barricades in turn.

When my necklaces occasionally get knotted, my husband is an expert at teasing them apart. Can we really do this with our lives? Go back to the beginning and untangle the hurt from the shame?

My mother-in-law is trying to teach me to knit. It’s not going well. I’m always dissatisfied with the stitches and pull them out. This leaves the yarn crimped and frayed.

Kind of useless.

The last of this year’s wasps fly heavily in the fog. While waiting for the train, a paper wasp lands on my collar and my student wants me to swat it away. It’s fine, I say. I’m not that sweet.

I wouldn’t know if it was a queen. If so, she better be looking for a cosy place to slip into for the winter. And if not, let the worker keep looking for a bit more sugar before she’s done.

I’m not done. Just starting again, slightly out of season.

Warmly,
Ren

I am, however, doing well and will be posting again this week.

Thank you for your understanding.

Warmly,
Ren

Time has been difficult to measure this month. My heart has been beating too fast, and my breathing is still irregular. I have what is called air hunger. It’s telling of privilege that the term made me understand the desperation of hunger for the first time: the physical requirement.

My shrink tells me all of this is likely related to avoidance mania. First avoiding any complete thoughts about the new lumps in my breast, and then avoiding facing the responsibility of — no, the obligation of doing something with the reprieve. I’m still NED (no evidence of disease). So that means I’m supposed to get busy and make a difference in the world, right? I feel guilty that I haven’t already begun.

There’s the whole of the world to take in from the news apps. There’s my insignificant story.

That’s an excuse. Nothing is insignificant. I think it is a matter of picking a small story and focusing on its metaphors. A lace bug turns a leaf into a network of lines as ornate as your capillaries. A wasp takes the lace bug, saves the azalia, feeds her larvae, infects (with one yeasty bite) the grapes that will ferment into wine. Dionysus celebrates: dressing the drunken Pentheus as a spy. And his mother tears him limb from limb. His exposed bones like the vascular bundles of the azalia leaf. Agave sees her conquered lion.

Lions eat the offspring of the previous alpha. Infanticide. Yes. That story.

Sometimes the world seems like a dark circle within a dark circle within a dark circle forever and ever, amen. I think I have a story hunger. Stories that will make sense of the things I know.

Saturday I ran on the beach. Every beach run is a memento mori. I don’t know how to explain why it makes me feel calm. The beating of the waves. The screaming birds. The dead jellyfish, birds, crabs, fish.

And the absurdity! Saturday, a pineapple was left by the tide.

Funny that being that close to all the death, brings me back to life.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject—please consider sharing them in the comments on Substack. You’re welcome to link to your own relevant post.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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Dramatic Roots

Considering Micro-Mentoring?

For me, mentoring is not just about teaching established traditions—it’s also about listening and supporting each writer's unique experiences, ambitions, and style of expression…

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a year ago · 5 likes · Ren Powell

A response to the ripping
announcement from the walls
of her uterus

A baby tooth regurgitated
and wedged into the soft
behind her knee

A fungus
split and smoking

(From the chapbook “Saga”. signum edizioni d’arte. #130 in the series. In cooperation with the painter Vibeke Fuglsang Damgaard.)

Thank you for taking the time to read. The school year is nearly over, and exams are winding down. I’m looking forward to posting new work and more writing exercises after this week!

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack. And if you’ve written about this topic in a way that is in dialogue with this post, I invite you to link to your own post in the comments.

I’ll be back later this week with a process journal essay. Until then, may your week be filled with good moments.

Warmly,

Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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I still have trouble writing directly about my family because of this. Many writers tell me to just write and not think about it. I think it would be fine if I wanted to tell the story to be seen, to find a kind of affirmation of my “goodness” in all the ugliness. There’s nothing wrong with that. Writing is therapeutic, and can create a kind of community1. And I believe we, as readers, can see ourselves in other people’s sticky beginnings and their extrication and flight. An honest writer can show us what’s beyond the binary of good/bad in themselves, and in the world.

But that’s not what I need to do now as a writer. Nor is it what I want to do. The stories that I’ve pieced together from snapshots of memory—and the literal polaroid images—aren’t about me. I don’t want to tell my story; I want to tell theirs.

Or ours, from other perspectives.

I have hand-me-down facts from the women who came before me. I’m not sure if the sum of the material I’m working with is closer to legend, or to an archeological reconstruction. Like how the sparse dinosaur bones in the museum are scattered in the white plaster. Like all poetry, I hold that what I write is true, if not accurate documentation.

It is a leap of faith to trust that I will step out of the way of my own story, which is a bigger story, which doesn’t have a protagonist.

I’m toying with the idea of structuring the collection by giving each woman her wasp counterpart. One story at a time. Each in her own cell and only occasionally coming out to bash one another in the head with their antennae. I’m not sure that there’s a way to avoid the bashings. It is our nature.

In England now there is a concern that the Asian hornet, an invasive species, will cause irreversible damage to the UK’s ecosystem. A single nest can consume up to 15 kilos of insects a year: bumble bees, honey bees, indigenous wasps. Researchers believe a single queen arrived first in the West in 2004, in France. She was concealed in a shipment of Chinese pottery.2 Her descendants have spread to 15 countries. For the time being, they haven’t established themselves in Norway. It is too cold here. For now. Scientists are watching, ready to eradicate nests.

Asian hornets’ nests are shaped like teardrops. This is an image stuck in my head.

Above I wrote that the queen was concealed in a shipment. It’s something else entirely for me to say she was trapped in a shipment—which is far more likely.

I think it’s a tragic story, this queen who is taken so far from her home, who rears offspring, then offspring follow offspring so successfully, behaving as they always have, only to be hunted to extinction by the humans who brought the queen here.

I want to find it in myself to look at these creatures and genuinely love them without ignoring any aspect of their behavior. “I love you in spite of your nature.” How could that be possible? The cuckoo wasp does what she does. There’s no complex thoughts or intention of causing harm.

Hornets are hard to love. I know that. But maybe it puts things in perspective to talk about a more favored animal: I had a cat once. In the spring she would bring mice up from the basement and drop them on my bed at night. They’d jump off and run down the hall, where she’d catch them and bring them back to start again. She’d do this until they died. Then she’d go upstairs to sleep near my mother. I would need to get up and grab an empty tomato can to scoop up the little corpses. I’d set them on the porch. Usually the dogs would eat them by the time I left for school the next morning.

It took me a long time to forgive that cat for being a cat. At least the dogs didn’t let a death go to waste.

This week my students had their production exams. Just before they began we talked about knowing the whys behind their choices:

What do you want to say to the audience?
We want them think about climate change.
Why?
Because we want to inspire them to do something about it.
Why?
Because they are high school students who don’t think about the future and we need to make them see that it’s an urgent problem.

Now you can ask: “How?”

I know that an academic approach to creative work feels artificial for many writers. I try to find a way to balance the structure with the free-flowing work. One of the things I like about poetry is the structure. And one of the things I dislike about postmodernism is the idea that the reader or audience can decide for themselves what the work means.

I write with intention. If nothing else, I want to avoid ever wallowing in my own drama again. I don’t want to use my story to appeal to pathos. It’s not something I condemn, but it isn’t what I want to do. I also know that appealing to pathos gets a larger readership that I get. I’m okay with that. But I want to communicate specific ideas. I want to know my whys—all the way down to the truth.

Why?
Because people pretend that they don’t see our true nature.
Why?
Because there is no good and evil. There is nature and we need to love it.
Why?
Because nature sustains us. Every aspect of it.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject—please consider sharing them in the comments on Substack. You’re welcome to link to your own relevant post.

I’ll be back later this week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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Dramatic Roots

Call for Submissions

Call for International Submissions…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Ren Powell

Dramatic Roots

Considering Micro-Mentoring?

For me, mentoring is not just about teaching established traditions—it’s also about listening and supporting each writer's unique experiences, ambitions, and style of expression…

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a year ago · 5 likes · Ren Powell

Sacred painting’s

yellow ochre
my skirt
trimmed with lichen.

Eyes like a lighthouse
these ambiguous beacons:
Something is lost
crossing the heather:

The craggy beauty
of an old woman’s throat,
the mellow man’s joy—
brief, repeating

Something is lost
to the morning’s mackerel
as they slap Halleluiah
Halleluiah

at the soles of my feet.
To journey on the backs
of fishes, to follow
the boats to England—

but to wait,
a core of bog-burned oak
paganishly burnished
by a fisherman’s will.

(From the book compilation for Faro International Art Symposium, 2004. With a single edit, because we learn as times change, as we all grow.)

Thank you for taking the time to read..

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack. And if you’ve written about this topic in a way that is in dialogue with this post, I invite you to link to your own post in the comments.

I’ll be back later this week with a process journal essay. Until then, may your week be filled with good moments.

Warmly,

Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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A lot of people I know think that if they knew they’d die soon, they’d hurry to experience as much as possible. They’d make a bucket list. They’d do this or do that thing they’ve always said they’ll get around to doing someday.

But for now, we hoard our love—our loving—as though it were coins in a piggy bank, as though loving might cost us more than we can afford.

And we undervalue ourselves: I barely know/knew them, why would they want to get a random, loving word from me? They’ve enough in their life and they’d wonder what I wanted, what I lack that I might demand from them. Something like time, maybe. They’d pity me.

Norwegians have an expression “De har nok med sitt”: “They’ve enough with their own concerns.” Families and communities can be fortresses. Whispers and giggles are shot at outsiders like arrows through the arrowloop. Knowing this is true, I’m not feeling regret, per se, for not having tried to maintain ties with more people in my past. It’s something akin to curiosity: not a hypothetical what if? as much as an imaginary what might have happened? In an alternate world. If I’d grown into someone different.

If we all still could.

I tried to reach out to my aunt a couple of years ago on Facebook. I’d waited until after my mother’s death, so as not to put her in an awkward situation in regard to allegiances. My friend request went unaccepted for three years before I deleted my account. She died this week, after her second bout of lung cancer.

The Bible says that we’re allotted three score and ten years. My aunt got that, and a few more. The Bible also says that if we make it to four score and ten, our lives are filled with labour and sorrow.1 I’m glad my aunt didn’t have to endure another score of sorrows.

Is it possible that death can be experienced as a rush of joy? I’ve never read that. I have read that one Rinpoche2 cried out for his mother at the end.

Sometimes I wonder if I will be overcome by a resurrection of joyful memories and cry for my mother at the end. I wonder if my aunt cried out for her mother, for her estranged daughter, for her boy who died so long ago his story lives enmeshed in the marrow of all our bones.

Writing the wasp poems, I’m often distracted by trying to define family. I define it as something other than the household, beyond a “chosen family” of confidants, beyond the concept of family as a support system. Because, even in a tightly-webbed social constellation, some families are not supportive. I’m not saying it’s a moral failing. It’s just a fact. We are variable creatures, unable to read one another’s mind.

Historically, when the resources are scant, someone in the family gets bumped from the shelter. Too little food, too great an obligation. We don’t like to believe it’s true. In Norway sons were allocated by birth: the farm, the military, the church. After that? You’d try to find someone to take the kid in as an apprentice.

And girls? About 20 years before the Kennedys put an ice-pick into the brain of their too-demanding daughter, my great-grandmother dropped my 9 year-old grandmother off to work for room and board in Vermont. She then drove across country with the older sister. I have a photo of her—of my great-grandmother. I think she looks like Ma Baker. But that’s just me being romantic. “To care for”: what does it mean to you?

Families aren’t connected like branches of a tree, but mapped like constellations. Star dust all. Held together, or kept apart, by stories.

My grandmother was her own modest protagonist. Modesty is a construction, and it was central to the role she created for herself. It was the scaffolding of all the details she left unspoken. It was a tower of allusions.

Just as you can never step into the same river twice, you can never recall the same story twice. Movement is one of the seven signs of life3. Stories have a kind of life.

Our stories are sighs. They are corporal. Even reading the writing on a page, in a book, we don’t experience the fullness of the words without our lips moving, our tongue only partially restrained, our breath carrying the story into the world with intimate, involuntary utterances.

I once saw the exhibition Body Worlds in New York City. I was fascinated by the plastinate network of blood vessels in the torso. It was as delicate and beautiful as any lace. It made me wonder if the very first artist to make lace knew, subconsciously, of the pattern within us all.

I imagine stories are like this, too. Invisible to us, but like delicate lacework that begins in the brain and traces its way down our spine, into our solar plexus, wrapping our heart. The stories that I’ve heard from the women in my life, the stories that have warped like meaning in a game of whispers, from one mouth, to one ear, to the incidental bumping of other, foreign stories, flattening or rising like a relief in time—these stories are part and parcel of the body with which I move through the world.

Estranged is not the same thing as extricated.

I am a consolidation.
I am a dust devil in the desert,
coming into being
of the dirt
and the spores and the heat

writing a love letter
from and to my mother’s cursive language
from and to her mother, mother’s mother

And in the dark
I will end it all
in a rain of earth
between the yellow lines
of the highway

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject—please consider sharing them in the comments on Substack. You’re welcome to link to your own relevant post.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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If you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, or have reservations about substack, I’m always happy to accept A CUP OF COFFEE ☕.

Dramatic Roots

Call for Submissions

Call for International Submissions…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Ren Powell

Dramatic Roots

Considering Micro-Mentoring?

For me, mentoring is not just about teaching established traditions—it’s also about listening and supporting each writer's unique experiences, ambitions, and style of expression…

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a year ago · 5 likes · Ren Powell

Make me the story, I tell her;
My left ear the utterance of sea turtles
My left knee the ghost of our mother,

brittle seashell
filled with sand
My breasts becoming a memory

of her mouth’s inarticulate gestures
She makes me
She makes me

(From the chapbook “Saga”. signum edizioni d’arte. #130 in the series. In cooperation with the painter Vibeke Fuglsang Damgaard.)

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack. And if you’ve written about this topic in a way that is in dialogue with this post, I invite you to link to your own post in the comments.

I’ll be back later this week with a process journal essay. Until then, may your week be filled with good moments.

Warmly,

Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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Photo by DL314 Lin on Unsplash

The news of her death
reached me via messenger
which was fine—was best—despite what they say.

A voice cracking and metallic over the phone
would have been less gentle
and would never have allowed me
the silent window of blue felt
to sort the words into letters, into their natural anagrams

as the wind might move them, as mutations happen
in the dividing that is the multiplying
of the building blocks of living things.

Then: all that’s unpacked with the sounding
out of all the letters, one by one!

This word that begins and ends with a virginal hum,
that’s as red as her blood, red as her hair, red
as bitter as

an unsatisfying last release of a fraying thread
that should have been severed cleanly seasons ago

I am as green, as transparent, as the new season. And surprised
to find how little damage winter has wrought.

Now, running along the trail, I drive my heels into the earth
leaning hard to the left, like a heartbeat, like a chant:
Left. Left. Left, right, left. Striking
like a hammer trying to nail the memories fast
and leave them behind.

Yet the blood that pumps
through my muscles
through my vessels—through
everything that is—is still a twisted copy
of everything forgotten.

(from as-yet-unpublished WIP. 2025)

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack. And if you’ve written about this topic in a way that is in dialogue with this post, I invite you to link to your own post in the comments.

I’ll be back later this week with a process journal essay. Until then, may your week be filled with good moments.

Warmly,

Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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The play brought the novel back to me. But this time, I wasn’t struck in an intellectual way, nor did it prod me toward abstract, spiritual meditation, (“I have a story that will make you believe in God,” says Piscine Patel). It made me wonder about the stories that I choose to see.

And tell.

Here’s a story I rarely tell:

There are some stories that have no origin. That is, the first memory is a reference to to a story already incorporated into the history of your world. Somehow there from the beginning like a whisper in your mother’s blood pounding on the placenta. It’s impossible to tease the strands of conversation apart to find a moment of conscious transference.

Maybe she was sitting on the couch, and maybe I was kneeling between her legs while she was combing tangles out of my hair when she told me that she was a virgin when I was conceived. That is, she was still a virgin after the conception, and a virgin four months later walking down the aisle in a wedding dress that concealed the tiny, but insistent, life. “Special” was the word the family used. Being special was both a calling and a curse for all those years.

When the vomiting and the suspicions began, my grandmother took my mother to the doctor to confirm that her hymen was intact. “You know, your mother and your father never actually…” was a refrain I heard often, one that prefaced my grandmother’s nostalgia.

A lot of people say that science is a religion. I’m inclined to believe that it’s one that can oppose other religions, or dovetail singularly in a child’s mind.

Grandma and grandpa went to the Baptist church twice a week. Mother had stopped going when I was six. She was looking to lava lamps and little pills for her visions. I sat next to Grandma on the pew Sundays and Wednesdays, rolling the skin between her thumb and her forefinger, with my thumb and forefinger, until she shot me scornful looks. If I were lucky, Grandpa would snore and wake with a jerk, and she’d turn her scorn on him.

Snoring is sensuous, too. In its own way, I figured. Snoring has a texture not at all like the strange elasticity of Grandma’s hand, or the delicate, stippled skin on Grandpa’s arms, but like the thick terry cloth robe he wore at night when his yellowed feet were shoved into slippers, and he clinked his spoon against the ice cream dish. Not everyone in church needed to hear those intimate sounds. I understood.

Grandpa cleared his throat a lot, and grumbled about things I didn’t understand. He never commented on how “special” I was, but he made me feel special. By the time I arrived in his story, it didn’t matter to him that I wasn’t flesh of his flesh or blood of his blood. There are black and white photos of him holding me in the crook of his arm. He’s standing next to a car in a driveway I don’t recognize. Grandma must have taken the picture. I can hear her, with her clipped sentences, telling him what to do.

My grandmother was complex, I suppose. But, of the strands that made up her personality, scorn shone brightly. Her compassion was present, but sometimes you had to look for it. I always wondered why Grandpa was the one who said grace and mumbled about God’s will, though it was Grandma who insisted we go to church twice a week. There was a time when I was particularly solipsistic and believed it was her attempt to save me from the messiness of the circumstances of my birth. “Special” being a euphemism: a little tap dance in front of “bastard”.

Now I think maybe it was a tightrope walk to keep our family’s myth on the right side of the Lord. Maybe my immaculate conception was blaspheme, and I would surely destroy the family.

Maybe I did. I still think this story is about me.

At church the pastor would talk about the virgin birth, resurrections, and speaking in tongues. We never talked about any of these things at home. Once a woman stood up in the back of the congregation during the sermon and began speaking in gibberish. My grandfather was a deacon and help to usher her quickly out of the church. The pastor apologized and said that the woman had been under stress.

We never talked about her. Though I had so many questions. What was it like to be under stress? Was everyone who spoke in tongues in the Bible under stress?

Can I speak in tongues? How does one distinguish the tongues of demons from God?

Once when we were driving somewhere in Pasadena—my mother was driving, and my aunt was in the front seat—I pointed to a tall building with a cross on top. St. Luke’s Hospital. “See, I was born under that cross.” My aunt started shouting at my mother. “What are you telling this kid?” My mother shot me a scornful look.

There was a cross on the top of the building where I was born. That is a fact. When you’re telling a story, it’s that facts that will always upset people.

At 26, I meet the man who is my father, who I call my maybe father, who claims paternity. He began with, “You know, your mother and I never…”

“I know the story,” I say.

Much later he tells me that before my mother got pregnant, he found her in a clinch with some guy in a car.

I don’t ask him what happened.

That might be another story.

P.S. Fun fact (for me): The hospital where I was born is now used as a film location.

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject—please consider sharing them in the comments on Substack. You’re welcome to link to your own relevant post.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

Subscribe now

If you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, or have reservations about substack, I’m always happy to accept A CUP OF COFFEE ☕.

Dramatic Roots

Call for Submissions

Call for International Submissions…

Read more

a year ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Ren Powell

Dramatic Roots

Considering Micro-Mentoring?

For me, mentoring is not just about teaching established traditions—it’s also about listening and supporting each writer's unique experiences, ambitions, and style of expression…

Read more

a year ago · 5 likes · Ren Powell

In a crumbling apartment, a destitute former artist reflects on her failed marriage, lost lovers, and fading dreams, as she pleads with an old friend for one last chance at connection and reinvention.

Character Description

In her early 50s, Else exudes a defiant charm that barely conceals her weariness. Her once-striking beauty is weathered but still luminous. Her gestures are bold and theatrical, but there’s a fragility in her quieter moments.

Setting

The monologue unfolds in a shabby, dimly lit apartment, cluttered with mismatched, scrapped furniture and inexplicable bits of hardware. A rickety round table serves as the centerpiece, holding a half-empty bottle of absinthe, two mismatched glasses, and a sugar spoon. The walls are peeling, revealing layers of faded wallpaper, and a single window with tattered curtains lets in a faint, grimy light. The room is sparsely furnished.

________________________________________

Else

I farted. Yes. That was the end of that marriage. I thought you’d laugh. The truth is you probably would have liked him. The first time Paul saw me, I was working in a theater in New York with a tableau vivant group. Living tableaus that recreate famous paintings. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? I was Eros, wrapped in a white cloth, one tit out, powdered with flour. I looked as dry and preserved as a relic, and probably as much like a man as a woman. I was appealing, of course, to some. I think our entire relationship started off with a misunderstanding: it was obvious to me that Paul desired me, but I didn’t realize until later that he desired me as Eros.

Have another absinthe, Karl. It’s better than breakfast.

(Pause. The actress invites a member of the audience up to sit in a chair and gives them a drink. She will address the person as Karl for the rest of the monologue.)

Paul took me in at once. I thought, why not? I was free. Indigent, but free. I’d managed to get to New York after Reynard abandoned me in the middle of that awful country.

(Pause. She fills her own glass and drinks it quickly.)

I was a little lost in New York alone. I’d followed Reynard to Kentucky, and he left me while I was out tending to apple trees in his orchard, pretending to be some kind of domestic creature. I know you warned me not to go looking for Reynard in America. But I needed more than your friendship. I know now that I didn’t need more, but I needed “and.” I needed your friendship and a man who wanted to have sex with women… And, well, Reynard was good at sex. At that time, I thought friendship was just the running-up stage to sex. And even if I had accepted our friendship for what it was—I wasn’t prepared to starve. Or to be a celibate. Not then. Don’t look so surprised. Or do. I guess I should take the look on your face as a compliment. Maybe I don’t look as dead as I feel. I feel a bit like an Eros trapped in resin again. Don’t worry, I won’t take my tits out.

(Pause.)

Look. We’ve barely put a dent in it.

(Indicating that she will top off his glass if he would like.)

Karl?... (Pause.)

I’m hoping the fact that you’re here now means you’ve forgiven me for leaving you. I’ve thought of you often since we parted in Berlin.

(Pause.)

Remember how we were together in Italy? How we performed as the well-to-do every night at the cafés. Absinthe and cigarettes. Not a care in the world. You would pay for my cigarettes, even when that meant you’d be skipping breakfast the next day. That was all right, wasn’t it? We both liked the little scenes sewn onto the fabric of our lives. Sometimes we need make-believe. We need an audience to bring us to life.

Paul never could be a playmate or an audience. Of course, I didn’t know that at first. The weird thing was that Paul didn’t mind if I left home alone in a toga and a soup can bra. Which I did. He didn’t care, as long as he wasn’t going to be seen with me, or as long as he didn’t have to look at me. Paul isn’t an artist of any sort. And the artwork that he likes is, well, dead. Like the paintings in the museum. Paul is a baron, after all. I thought you’d like that. Yes, I am a baroness. Living in this hovel. Feeding the mice that live in the cupboards. I’ve become a frayed cuff on the wrist of the bloodless aristocracy.

Yes. Actually, you and Paul have much in common. He reminded me of you. Except Paul has no sense of humor whatsoever. Do you know the American expression “down on his luck”? Paul was that. Disowned by his family for disgracing them. He was broke. He tried to wear fine clothes, though. Despite the frayed cuffs of his slightly yellowed shirts. Like yours. He tried to keep up appearances. Like you did.

There was a time at the beginning when I didn’t have to ask for money. I didn’t have to ask for anything. Or give anything, unfortunately. With the Baron, it was all about what I had to withhold in his presence. The wet parts of me. Everything that had distinction of life: sweat, blood, phlegm. I held it all in until I was putrid with desires. He tried. I have to say that. He tried. At first, I thought he just preferred very young women. That it was my slight build that interested him. I shaved my body at that time, even my head. Not to please him. No. I started doing that before I met him. And it didn’t please him. He despised my body, which had until that time only been celebrated. Or ignored. It had been touched, explored, contaminated. Not always—not even often—had it been satisfying for me, but it was interesting. Even having the clap had been interesting. For all those years of man-sickness, sex had kept my belly full. But I’d never had to ask. I won’t ask.

I take what I’m given and what I find, and I create its worth by the talent of my attention. I have an artist’s eye—more than that. I have an artist’s instinct to see potential in objects, and I can imbue them with energy. I am the artist and the art object. That’s why I’ve always been good at croquis modeling. Some women just stand there, with their shallow breathing, turning pale after a few minutes, and everything goes a bit slack. Not me. It’s not about stamina, but the ability to know a good pose, not by watching, but by feeling it from the inside. It’s about the flow of transitions, the consciousness of the painter’s gaze. The painter documents. The artist experiences. True art is as transient as sex—what’s left behind, sketches or lovers, are only artifacts of the act.

You get it, don’t you? Paul never did. If I wanted him to look at me, I had to play his kind of theater. And I did. Or I tried. Until that evening when we were standing in the salon side by side, watching the sunset. It was a very bourgeois moment: when I farted. I could tell you that I didn’t mean to. But the truth is, I couldn’t be bothered not to. Men had given me money because I had sex with them. But denying my own physical being for Paul’s sake was the first time I felt like a prostitute. I was done with it. So, yes, Karl, I farted my way out of the marriage. I don’t think he was surprised. He didn’t say a word but disappeared into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him. He was gone the next morning. He went to France to join the war. I heard that his death was bloody. Wet and twisted. Nothing like the kind of artworks he liked. That’s the saddest part: even in death, he couldn’t escape the bodily gore of life.

(She tops his glass up. Toasts.)

To Paul. Turns out he wasn’t part of the bloodless aristocracy, after all.

We’ve drained it. Good. I need to leave the cupboards bare. I’m leaving for Paris now that it’s safe. I’m going to open my own modeling company and hope the artists can pay. Karl, I know we haven’t talked in a long time. It’s taken me months to dare to contact you. I really have missed you. More than I’ve ever missed a lover. And I learned a lot from Paul. I know I’ve made him out to be a dandy, he loved me as best he could, and I realized that no matter how hard we try, we can’t change who we are, we can’t change other people into what we think they should be.

I asked you to come this morning because I’d want you to come with me. To Paris. This time, I won’t ask for more than you can give. I promise. Now I understand how you love me. Or did love me, maybe. I’d like to try again as—whatever we were—and I will leave you room for your “and.” I have a little inheritance, and I can buy your cigarettes. I can be the one to let you put your head here, where my heart is, when a lover hurts you. It’s my turn to be your friend. If you’ll have me. Meet me at the docks tonight, packed or ready to say goodbye. You won’t be able to miss me. I’ll be the woman wearing a wedding cake on her head.

Absinthe and Cigarettes © Ren Powell 2024

This monologue is a result of character work for a larger work in progress, loosely based on a historical figure.

Staged reading:

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject—please consider sharing them in the comments on Substack. You’re welcome to link to your own relevant post.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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a year ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Ren Powell

Language is inherently muscular, in terms of our vocal mechanisms and breathing (ribs, diaphragm, etc), but it also carries the ghosts of our past experiences in our abs, our psoas, the muscles in our fingers.

Reading silently to oneself can be a physical experience for many people. Witnessing the story through language can cause us to feel anger in the muscles of our jaw, grief in our gut, etc.12

Our memories of physical experiences color the way we speak.

Years ago, I had the privilege of studying with the actor and acting coach Jeff Corey. His instruction was revelatory for me. I’ve always over-intellectualized everything in my life. As an actor, I’m not alone in finding this to be a roadblock to good acting. The techniques Corey used to pull me out of my head on the stage, are similar to the techniques I use with my own students now, helping them find their bodies on stage.

When working with my acting students, I ask them to find the keyword in a sentence—the word that carries the speaker’s intention. Then I ask them choose alternatives for an appropriate physical actions that might express that intention. For example, if the line is “Go to bed"!”, an actor can choose to “push” the word go, or choose to “smack” the word go.3

I ask them to physicallize the choice while saying the line: push against a scene partner, or against a chair; smack the table, smack the wall (never smack your scene partner). Then I ask them to play the scene with a still body, but an awareness of the muscle memory.

This technique often works for new actors who prepare psychologically, but “perform” inside their own heads. The goal is to take the music of the language out of the realm of the intellect, and let it rise from the immediate physical reality.

What does this have to do with writing?

One might think that, unlike an actor, the writer’s over-intellectualizing would be an advantage: being able to really dig down into the motivations and cause and effect progression of a narrative. But an intellectual presentation of a scene can be as cold on the paper, as it is on stage.

On the other hand, no one wants to read a text that is flooded with adverbs or takes colorful or obscure verbs to an extreme, tipping into unintentional melodrama, or bathos.

A writer can find the middle ground by utilizing onomatopoeia, which I believe is a form of physical action. Even when we read silently, our body is anticipating performance and has a muscle memory of the spoken word.

We have a hard-wired relationship to our mother-tongue. The plosives (b,p), the fricatives (f,th), the afficates (ch), the nasal stops (m,n), and the glottal stop (in American English it is the silent t in oral contractions like moun’ain), all carry prelinguistic meaning.4

Sounds, which I’m asking you to think of as a form of gesture, will always pull up emotional memories. Of course we can override those memories, but as writers, we can also choose to utilize them in our readers.

There’s a difference between the words rip and tear. Don’t think about it. Feel it in your mouth, and listen. Rip starts as a growl and stops with sudden explosion, as though the speaker is spitting. Tear, on the other hand, begins with a plosive effort, slides through a dipthong, and ends with a growl.

It matters whether your character rips the letter, or tears the letter. Your choice will provide insight into their personality and their emotional state.

Exercise 1

Take two pages of a text you’ve written. Going verb by verb, say each aloud a few times. Then try alternative words (spoken aloud within the context of the sentence). Observe any differences in the physical experiences and any emotional responses you may have. Does one convey emotion more accurately than the others?

Exercise 2

(This exercise is a twist on the writer’s truism “show don’t tell”.)

Look again at your verbs. Are they connected to generic information? For example:

”She pulled her pants up over her hips”, is very different from, “She tugged her pants up over her hips.”

The former doesn’t indicate difficulty, but the latter has a specific physicality that implies frustration (maybe even the texture of the pants)—without telling the reader how the character feels.

Exercise 3

Ditch (most of) your adverbs.

Consider the text you’ve been experimenting with. Are there places where changing the verbs would make the use of an adverb unnecessary?

Imagine you are writing a text that will be the foundation for an actor to use when fleshing out your character. Is much the emotional information they’ll need conveyed in the onomatopoeic content of the verbs?

NB: I’m not suggesting you use a thesaurus to find obscure words. I believe the vernacular has all we need in terms of emotion.

Good writing!

I hope you’ve found the exercise helpful. I would love to hear about any little twist you may have added, and what you discovered! Please leave a comment, or reply to the email.

Thank you for trusting me with your time!

Warmly,
Ren

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Then I’d paint my pale, thin legs—ankle-deep but rising against a gray background, stippled with browns and purples to give the illusion of texture. I would be naked, because this is the concrete room where I showered, and where we kept the chicks.

My shoulders would near the top of the canvas, my smoothly-shaded supracervical notch implying a head, just out of frame.

Maybe I would make my skin glisten with some kind of epoxy, to give a nod toward all things plastic. Protective. Packaged. Brittle.

I am the newly-washed.

You would read the painting, scanning toward darkness.

From the bottom edge as bright as yellow as the Easter Service: yellow as the daffodils on the church lawn, before they wither and good gardeners deadhead them. Yellow and white like dog-sick when the pastor talks about the thorns, and the stabbing, and the musky, spice-fragrant tomb.

Up to the concrete wall, splashed with purple, as purple as Jesus’s wounds.

We started with 100 chicks. A nice, round number. Those who were shuffled to the edges of the throng froze to death. And when those still alive began to distinguish themselves with sex characteristic—baby-yellow having faded—they were sorted for the ax or the coop.

And all I thought about come Ascension Day was “Suffer the little children come unto me.”

And still I think, “I’ve missed it.” Standing here in my shiny, new shoes, and my matching, yellow clutch.

After church, I slip off the shoes, leave the clutch in the living room, and carefully take the stairs to the basement to undress, where the floor is cold as steel, and the water tastes like moss.

And I consider painting feathers, and feathers, and feathers, rising like a tide to save me.

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack. And if you’ve written about this topic in a way that is in dialogue with this post, I invite you to link to your own post in the comments.

You can find more about my work, including my mentoring and accountability services, at renpowell.com.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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a year ago · 5 likes · Ren Powell

as we traveled in convoy
—on our way to Abu Simbel
where Ramses having been
dismantled, is pieced together
a facsimile of his parts

Because in Rhodes the transparent fish
bit our legs and every beautiful pebble
was once a jagged piece of glass

Because in Turkey my son
cooed at the kittens
sheltering from the midday
sun in a crumbling alcove
until we saw the sibling
skull, open-meated still

Because we learned too much
from the guide’s rote compliments
from the meals thrust through swinging doors
prepared by the same anonymous hands that tuck
sheets around mattresses, slide
pillows into crisp cases and
press the bluest of eyes
Medusa in our palms.

(from Mercy Island. Phoenicia Publishing. 2011)

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts—I hope that you will share them in the comments on Substack, or join the discussion in the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing can become an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another.

I’ll be back later this week with a process journal essay. Until then, may your week be filled with good moments.

Warmly,

Ren

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It was a marked contrast to the soft clicking of the squirrels, and the seesaw-singing of the small great tits in the grove.

Spring comes quietly and late to the shadows.

Two weeks ago, from the train, I saw ducklings near the reeds. But today I saw none among the mallards and hens. I counted instead three red squirrels scampering up a pine tree, and ten fiddleheads ready to unfurl at its base.

I’ve only been away a week, but have this fear of having missed so much of the season. I think that is what I’ve walked away from cancer with: this grasping at time—specifically at the Earth’s spinning through time. In time. With time.

I believe if the Earth stopped spinning we couldn’t comprehend the decaying of our bodies, and the literal circling of life on the planet would stop. Though we would notice all living things sliding out of shape like sandcastles loosening with their own weight, we’d have neither hope nor despair—since the existence of either is contingent upon a symbiotic existence. The push and the pull. Like a tide.

Life relies on movement.

The gradual thawing of ice at the lake’s edge. The sudden appearance of snowbells under the protection of the evergreen hedges. The return of the lapwings. I don’t want to miss these things I’ve either not known or have taken for granted. It’s a kind of greed, I suppose. And isn’t all greed tinged with the fear of loss?

In Romania, I was told that the storks had just returned and were building their nests on top of the streetlights. Fruit trees were newly in bloom. But I can’t imagine things any other way because “today” a robin sings in the beech tree outside the hotel window, storks nest on top of street lights, white blossoms open among the white snowflakes, and all the while a bonfire burns in the hotel’s courtyard. It’s a smell that makes me both sleepy and nervous. The wind shifts. Sparks fly. My clothes will smell like comfort and destruction for the remainder of the trip.

Of course there’s a tension between comfort and destruction. They’re also interdependent. The continual sliding of the note between the two is what makes our feelings resonant.

The buildings here are in various states of decay, but the poverty difficult to measure. Against what? A taxi driver complains about the inflation and asks my colleague and I how much money we make a year. There’s no meaningful answer to that question. And certainly not something that can be constructively discussed from the backseat of a taxi: relative wealth.

I watch a woman walk back into her concrete block house, the chickens are fanning out over the yard where she’s thrown the grain. I can’t hear the clucking through the window, but I can hear it. In the 80s, I fed chickens like that. I shovelled coal into the furnace in the mornings, before I showered and left for the school bus. We got our water from the cistern under the front porch, and conserved it in creative ways. I was rural Kentucky poor.

Relative wealth, yes: a tension between hope and compare. It’s honestly impossible to say whether I am fine with it now because I have learned, or because I have left. (No matter what I would like to claim as truth.)

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother would say into the phone, “I miss you. I wish you were here—no, I don’t. You’re better off there.” I don’t know how many times she “misspoke” with this sentence. She wasn’t talking about chickens and coal furnaces. She was talking about a better off place to belong. To be loved. She was projecting her hope in a way that made me resonant—sliding between her hope and my despair during those difficult days in a way that made me define my fears in a new way. I also understood that hope was intrinsic to love.

I don’t know that she ever found that kind of belonging for herself. Lately, I think about this a lot. How she was—for all the years I knew her—largely unmoved.

I imagine a matrix of tensions between hope and despair, between ambition and self-preservation, between faith and fear, between stasis and growth.

In Bucharest, when I reach for the non-existent seatbelt again, this taxi driver too says, “No worries.” And I remember when I would suspend my worries when I travelled. Fearless or foolhardy. I still don’t know. Travelling was a kind of fictional space, out of “real” life, and out of time. It was a place that was both dangerous and entirely make-believe. It was stepping into a novel that you knew you could put down when things got ugly.

And on the beautiful warm beaches of Spain and Greece, I’d imagine, through the lens of a single day or a single week, what it would be like to live in those places. The “If we could just…” places. Where I’d imagine that everything else in the world would stop. And this day would continue, unchanging.

Either everything or nothing changes within the parenthesis of a week away from home.

And either way, if you suspend your consideration of how the world keeps turning, you risk returning to “real” life unmoved.

With some pretty pictures.

When I travel now, I take far fewer pictures. But I enjoy the experience more—somewhere along the axis of terror and a love for the spinning Earth—for women in headscarves who feed chickens at 9 am in the last of this year’s snow flurries, for my students struggling with too many assignments and too little time. I send them my hope that they understand, or will understand, that they belong to this Spinning Earth. No matter what else they desire from this life, it begins with this inalienable belonging.

“I wish you were here.”

Photo by Andreea Pop on Unsplash

Thank you for taking the time to read.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack, or go to the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing becomes an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another. You can find more about my work, including my mentoring and accountability services, at renpowell.com.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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a year ago · 5 likes · Ren Powell

From the airport in Bucharest, we set out on the 6-hour drive along the winding roads towards Transylvania. The minivan doesn’t have seat belts. And the driver takes offense that I’m searching for one. That will be a recurring theme this week.

The sun sets before we reach the mountains. There are three men from Turkey in the row of seats behind me. They’re having an animated conversation in their mother tongue about something that keeps switching gears from playful to contentious. In front of me are three Romanians. The woman in the middle is speaking non-stop. Her voice is a strange aria. Romanian is a quick and seamless rise and fall in my ear.

Memories seep slowly into my consciousness. Lying in the backseat of a car—in those days before seat belts were the law—staring out the window at the stars in the black sky, and listening to my mother and my stepfather—to their voices only, not bothering to work out words, or even tone. Utterly uninvested, but enveloped by the mysterious business of grown-ups.

For dinner I eat polenta, which I haven’t had since I was a kid—when my mother would slice it, fry it and then pour maple syrup over it. This polenta was grilled, and served with ham hocks. It’s strange that so far from my childhood home, expecting strange foods, I get a bit of nostalgia.

The next day we visit schools, where the children sing for us. They’re wearing variations of the national costume. One blond child makes it her own with pink boots laced with pink ribbons tipped with pompoms. Another, older girl, has a sequined skirt under the traditional apron. Every song seems to have 20 verses. I’m impressed.

I’m pretty sure The Erie Canal song only had two.

They do short plays about the history of Romania. Redacted for us, I think. They recite information about their folk arts. And they dance for us. These wonderful, flowing circle dances, with asymmetrical pairings, which I think make them all the more beautiful. For just over 90 minutes, we sit on the benches, watching the children. Today, I’m so tired my ears are full of white noise and the echoes of the folk music. When I close my eyes I see the boy playing the silver tuba, tapping the blue tambourine against it with his spare hand.

After all the dancing and music yesterday, we watched a presentation by one of the students about their work with robotics—an EU project for teens that aims to put a robot into orbit around one of Mars’ moons. Then my colleague guided the students through a role-play about industry and ecology. This is why we are here. Why my colleague is here, and I’m tagging along.

But the students aren’t concerned about hypothetical pollution in the river here, they dream that this former Soviet coal mine valley will become Romania’s answer to Silicon Valley. Still, the students talked about preserving their “traditions” a couple of times. These young people are proud. And as we drove through and above the valley this afternoon, I wondered what it will look like in 20 years. In 50. What will happen to these small brick houses, most of which are crumbling. What about the picturesque haystacks, and the stray dogs? Will the people be able to raise the standard of living without attracting a McDonalds?

There’s a billboard near the cave we visit, praising Erwin Rommel, the desert fox. It’s eerie. There are things we don’t talk about with our hosts. I’m reminded of what it was like working with International PEN, when it would have been helpful to have a checklist of what was safe conversation with each nationality—or ethnic group.

One of our hosts points to the ornate houses lining the road and tells us they are Gypsy houses. In Norway we say Roma out of respect. It’s these differences that can lead to misunderstandings and assumptions. I’m assuming our host knows more than I do about the names in the local languages, and that the old translation was Gypsy, and that there’s no tension between the peoples.

But another of our hosts keeps telling people that I’m “really” an American. It’s strange perhaps that I’m so offended that she’s taking control of my narrative. Maybe I’m especially sensitive since memories of my childhood seem to be coming more often and more vividly now, and I want to put a wall between who I am now and those years when I had no agency.

All the years that I traveled often were a way for me to figure out who I am. Not in a linear way, and not in a pretty way—but eventually. Strip away the trappings of your national identity, of your habits, and your preferences for food and drink and music, and you feel naked and new. You eat trout with capers and tangerines and wonder what on earth you really ever liked best to eat.

Thank you for taking the time to read.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack, or go to the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing can be an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another. I will share yours. You can find more about my work, including my mentoring and accountability services, at renpowell.com.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

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a year ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Ren Powell

Photo by Wojciech Rzepka on Unsplash

Trolling the lake’s edge
Sending swans huffing into the reeds
(Once I caught them eating the ducklings and they’ve never forgiven me)

The catfish suck at the high notes
Percussive smacks of mistake

No, I sing, no, I sing, no

Put my nipples under the loupe
You’ll find clusters of taut-skinned cloudberries

Wear my diaphragm for a hat
And I’ll sing you into the asphalt

(from mixed states. Wigestand forlag. 2009)
preview image: Photo by Robert Woeger on Unsplash

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts—I hope that you will share them in the comments on Substack, or join the discussion in the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing can become an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another.

I’ll be back later this week with a process journal essay. Until then, may your week be filled with good moments.

Warmly,

Ren

Spread the love. It only takes a little ❤️ And if you like me, you really like me:

Subscribe now

If you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, or have reservations about substack, I’m always happy to accept A CUP OF COFFEE ☕.

What does the word good mean to you? Be good. Be a good girl. Obedient. Untainted.

There’s the cognitive dissonance, Baby.

And my mother’s accusation? A projection of her knowing what she wouldn’t know.

These aren’t riddles, but you do have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl through the burnt marijuana seeds in shag carpet to understand. There’s a sitar oozing from the turntable speaker. There’s a man grunting after a hit from the bong. Secrets are pebbles in her shoe. Secrets are the kernels of sand under the elastic of her romper.

They are the 10 year-old’s wet bed sheets.

Estranged, in the original Latin, means “not of the family”. I was not of the family—early on, as they say—I was outside the family, outside myself. The shadow self smiled, and washed the dishes, and went to school as though everything were fine.

So all those years later, when I changed my name and disappeared, it was a relief really: what looked like a deep dive into a dark pool, was a small step into tepid water. That part wasn’t hard.

Tepid is an interesting word. And it was all so anti-climatic it was a disappointment. Years of estrangement had worked both ways. Don’t we all secretly want to be chased down, grabbed by the arms and told how loved we are like in a scene from some ridiculous After School Special? Any attention is good attention. Sappy fantasies included.

Not of the family. In one way. But what is actually in those coils of DNA?

I tell my psychiatrist that I’m living my mother’s life over again. A kind of shadow spiral. My psychiatrist asks me how I’m living my mother’s life over again.

I don’t answer.

A lawyer sends me a pdf of my mother’s handwritten will. I’m not in it. I have a legal right to contest it. I think it’s funny that contest as a noun is defined as a competition to obtain something, as a verb it means to oppose something as wrong.

It’s funny in that kind of laugh or it will kill you kind of way. Who wins? And what does anyone get out of calling out the monsters under the bed. In the bed.

I print the will, ripped it into strips, put it in a blender with this mossy Norwegian water, and I make new paper out of it. Then I make collages in the shapes of wasps.

And only then do I write to the lawyer, removing myself from her obituary.

Thank you for taking the time to read.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack, or go to the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing becomes an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another. You can find more about my work, including my mentoring and accountability services, at renpowell.com.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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a year ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Ren Powell

Notes:
”Words, words, words.” is a quote from Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2.
A sentinel is a guard, but it is also something that indicates disease.
Yew tree needles are used to make a very common chemotherapy drug.

____________________

Ode on a Yew Tree 

No one told me my veins would hurt
That my fingers would trace them along my left forearm
and where once there’d been a wash of blue, 
there’d be smudged lines of black, like charcoal

No one told me that ever-after
tapping the flow of red cells and white cells 
of plasma and platelets would be so god-damned hard
that I’d wonder if I had any life to spare

My body is a furnace now 
stoked by needles, fueled by
the needles of yew trees, 
burning indiscriminately.

Once the letters flowed from my left hand, flowing
into the next, and the next, to make “Words, words, words.”
Then a pause for breath. 

The curved edge of my left hand 
would smudge the blue ink like a slow-shutter image 
of the invisible dance of that particular language.

And now, I try to learn to crochet, lying in the sick bed
when words, too, only come with the stabbing 
of a hook that might catch one and drag it
into place, but
I have too few words for pain, discomfort, amputation
to arrange on a white sheet of paper. 

Once upon a time, I studied croquis, capturing bodies
on white paper and avoiding setting defining lines at all costs
Soft charcoals, smudged edges, allow an artist to ease 
one arbitrary body part into the next 
with respect (and I mean this literally) for a whole.

There’s always a lesson in returning. The river is
familiar—the currents and the obstacles. But
the yew tree has changed me. It lines the banks
like dispassionate sentinels. 

I wade in slowly
white paper in my right hand
languages in my left

(not yet published. ©Ren Powell . 2025) Image unsplash

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts—I hope that you will share them in the comments on Substack, or join the discussion in the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing can be an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another.

I’ll be back later this week with a process journal essay. Until then, may your week be filled with good moments.

Warmly,

Ren

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a year ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Ren Powell