Poetry

Me reading at The Poetry Project with my feminist reading group, 10.12.17

Excerpt from ongoing project on Empire, 10.9.17



​Sometimes it’s easy to imagine a future, the future, your future. Earth and slime, abandoned cars, lakes hot in the summer and ice-covered in the winter. I try not to attach to things, but like a lot, it’s not easy. Scolding my effort, you can’t keep pretending you’re dead already, I go out looking for answers in manicured lawns and the chill of the forest. Finding neither, I use my imagination, but end up only with metaphors I’ve heard already.​​​

​Do I still have to tell you that land isn’t wealth to own? No, everyone knows that. What, then, is left to be said? I submerged my body in water and covered it in light, I ate a lot of fruit, I left a lot of messages, I felt my feelings split and split while I waited, trying so hard to be vigilant, for a sign of what would come. My longing was my shelter. Most days I felt okay.

In the Hall of Forgotten Mammals, singing through clenched lips, I mean humming, when I’m your ghost I promise not to haunt, when I’m not your bank robber I promise not to rob, when you get to the future I promise not to call. Take to the sea or take to the air, do what you can with what time is left. Face pressed to the glass, looking clear through it, I’ll keep your secret if you want, but nothing stays hidden forever. Until then find me on a ladder or with a hose, happy just to help in the dismantling.

Friends and Family

About Me!

Some of my great loves and joys include: listening to music with friends until late at night, going to scary movies with my sister at the movie theater on 3rd Avenue where the seats recline and slushies have free refills, reading in my chair by the window for hours, ideally with a seasonally appropriate candle going, and writing poetry.

I work at The Poetry Project where we host poetry readings and offer poetry workshops and publish a poetry newsletter, we’re talking all poetry all the time basically. I’m in my second year in the MALS Program in the American Studies track. It’s been a joy to be a student again, although I find myself frustrated by how a lot of scholarship works and how institutions work, and it makes me dream about a world where learning and studying for the sake of being a better person is considered a serious and valuable thing to do. I’m particularly interested in studying innocence, how innocence is represented in pop culture, how it is racialized and gendered, and how it used to control people.

I’m here for a future where the land is returned, prisons are abolished, and white supremacy is over forever. I think working towards a dream even if you’re afraid it might be impossible is a very good way to make the impossible possible. I make a lot of mistakes and missteps, but I won’t let them stop me from trying.

To the right you'll find a picture of me in front of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, basking in one of my other great joys: English Romantic Poetry.

What I'm Reading

What I'm Listening To

Some formative texts plus some future reading, in no particular order:

• The Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko. Some of my best strategies for being a white person and doing minimal harm I’ve learned from reading Leslie Marmon Silko, and some of my best dreams for the future come from this epic novel of resistance to colonialism. She painted the mural I used for my cover photo while writing this book in Tucson, Arizona. The mural has since been removed, but the picture is from her book of essays, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit. I found a scan of it online here.

• ​Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. Of course and forever, as sure as anything this book changed my life and made me a much better person.
• Utopia by Bernadette Mayer. I just finished leading a Bernadette Mayer Feminist Reading Group, and it was so much fun.  Mayer is one of my favorite poets, and revisiting this 1984 book reminded me that, in the words of another favorite poet, Diane di Prima, “you can have what you ask for, ask for/ everything”
• from Day by Fred Moten. I just picked up this chapbook at his reading with Simone White, and like everything he writes, it is staggeringly beautiful and wise. He writes, “Whiteness is the set of interpersonal relations. The only good white person stopped.”
• The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. I think this will be the first book I read when the semester ends and I have a minute to do my own reading again. That or Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed, they’re both high on my “To Read” list!
• As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This book comes out so soon and I can’t wait to read it!

I'll stop myself here, but this list could go on forever!