Poems, Prose, Photos & the Art of Being Human
In many traditions, this long night marks the end of the solar year, the final day of increasing dark. Tomorrow our days will lengthen and a new year begins, not by calendar, but by the sun’s time.
Here’s to the cycles and the richness of dark, the silence of snow and opportunities to reflect, to sleep, and once more emerge into increasing light.
May this year bring peace, more love, more ease and safety for all. HAPPY SOLSTICE!
Three-week-old lamb always flanked by Mom and aunties.
EXPLOSION
Days after the United Nations coalesced, she slivered out in almost as many pieces as she had cells. There were cells that had surrounded the embryo created before her lungs had forced its expulsion, cells that hurled with such force one could not imagine how hard they’d tried to make marriage work yet a lifetime isn’t just love and loyalty but also kismet, and sometimes everything that can go wrong lasts beyond endurance and without right. Some cells radiated forth like the kaleidoscope that made her laugh as a girl while others were sucked into dark stars, worm holes, the Horsehead Nebula…she’d always wanted to be a horse. Only two of her cells joined like team cyclists breaking wind for the other so they could reach the crescent’s pointy tip where they stayed to play with shadow and light along the impish moon thus fulfilling what she’d have chosen if not embodied.
Thank you to the editors of Doorknobs and BodyPaint for first publishing “Explosion.”
INCEPTION
She asks,
wants him
to be the first.
As if the other
were a ripened peach,
easily bruised,
they time their movements
to the ancient
pulse of
hearts
then
seas.
Sharp tears through
hidden flesh
steal her breath.
They stop,
begin again,
relentless clock counts towards curfew.
Soothed by his hot sweet breath,
she rests in his embrace—
linear time shifts to the relative distance
between innocence and experience—
she arches,
accepts whispers
fingers
lips
as he eases her through
surmountable pain.
Her chrysalis rips,
new life emerges:
the harsh sun
scent of clary sage
wings drying in a warm breeze.
Thank you to the editors of Hot Flashes: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.
Because music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands.
Joy Harjo, from CRAZY BRAVE
DREAMING OF GRAM It was the way her eyes rolled as she flashed her pack of cigarettes while I was explaining the impact of environmental illness, as if anyone who acknowledged the body’s needs, who didn’t do what they wanted despite physical limitations, was a whiney little roach as evidenced in her smoking while sporting an oxygen tank for advanced-stage emphysema— I’d had it with the family code of fuck-your-body- till-it-drops exemplified by our matriarch so I got in her emerald eye-shadowed face framed with brilliant orange hair and said: I don’t like you and if you want me to feel anything positive about you when you die, you need to demonstrate a shred of decency now then I stepped to the other side of the bed. Perhaps she rose from where she’d crouched between bed and wall and left, but for me, she disappeared.
Thank you to the editors of riverbabble for first publishing this poem.
Years ago, my friend dreamt she was a camp counselor leading a group of children through the forest. She woke herself when she exclaimed aloud: “Trees are our friends!”
Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanley and I agree.
I was startled to see this cicada emerge from its “skin” on our outdoor chair at the beginning of the proliferation of cicadas that spread through the United States in 2021.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 