I hope y’all are surviving the week. Whether it’s finding beats and breaks from the ongoing dumpster fire, pawning your kid(s) onto someone for a couple hours, staring at the folding table that is taking up half your front room (me, currently), willing it to put itself away, recovering from social hangovers etc
etc
etc
Anyways, after recently lamenting with another writer friend how fraught and exhausting pitching personal essay is anymore/currently/maybe forever, I catapulted back into my own brain and was like, you have a slew of people that know, appreciate, and want to read your writing. Why not just write for them. It’s giving… duh. There is nuance to this as a person that has to play the long game of Writer That Needs Exposure (god, I hate this) but, I love it here and exposure doesn’t pay my bills (upfront) and as with most things, I will do a both/and. Stay tuned for much more specific “pitches” I will instead write here. Pieces that I am excited to write, topics I am excited to write about.
I have never really written romantic-love poems prior to Anaya. I have mostly taken any form of grief which is inherently love, bent and molded that, but I haven’t really allowed myself to write about love or being in it. I haven’t really wanted to.
At any rate, I have spent the better portion of the last year and a half finding my voice in relation to writing in love. I wrote about writing about joy, or from a place of joy last year, and I know the two to be intertwined. Where there is joy there is love, especially when it comes to the container that is our family. There is much to be joyous about, even amongst the atrocities and I find myself clinging for dear life on the coattails of our joy. Not just my family’s, but the collective. All of our joy, and all of our love. I have spent many conversations recently, and I know that I have shared here- the importance in seeking out the joys/little loves/small victories when most everything feels like sandpaper to the skin (confession: I cannot touch sandpaper, not even a nile file, without gagging). I am not a pacifist but there is only so much physical violence, especially in relation to children, that I can bare to watch. I know this means that I have a soul, I also know the horrors that exist in not being able to turn away from such things, that this is a reality for so many. I soak and observe and acknowledge. My activism, my privilege, my complacency. I educate and mobilize. I bathe and I return to the joys, the loves, because that is also just as real and most days, tangible to me.
Whether it is escapism via a book, a laydown with your beloved, a hot beverage, a bath, a creative outlet- turn into, and inwards, to your love(s), if for nothing more than to recharge and get back to.
xxx
I have never considered myself to be much of a poetry writer and I am positive I have confessed this in the past as well. That being said, when I recount all of the things, especially almost everything I have written about/for my children, I do find that most are poetic. I like this. I like learning new formats, new-to-me styles, the fact that I have unknowingly been writing poetry. Some of the pieces I return to have not only been poems all along but some of my most treasured work. Today in my workshop (Undercurrent) we discussed poems with a common thread, or poems that have the title somehow, somewhere, couched into the poem itself. I have been resistant to titling anything, ever, for always. I do not enjoy it, I find it challenging to do, but after reading/dissecting several poems with this common theme read: thread, I found myself itching to write in this way and I am glad I did. Below is a titled poem I wrote during our writing-time portion of the workshop. I hope it touches you the same ways it tickled me to write.
Where To Find Divinity
In between seasonal sheets with your beloved. A March afternoon when I watched him thumb his mother’s name on the inside of his wrist. New York City in June over champagne and oysters. Witnessing a first and last breath. Combing through gender with a wide tooth comb. Being someone’s safety. Eating with gusto in public as a fat femme. What I know now to be my last first kiss. Tucking in a toddler who sees you as The Sun. Trans community. Watching children in the snow. Frisson. Literally holding your lineage. Yesterday in the shower with him.
What is divinity if not to be witnessed.
Witness me.
On this note, and as always, thank you for being here and thank you for witnessing me.
Biggest love,
AT
Currently reading: other people’s poetry which I love like this one- Places with Terrible Wi-Fi by J. Estanislao Lopez
Currently cooking: I think I’ll make a lemony/light pasta with lots of garlic, broccoli, and ricotta with chicken for dinner. We need a micronutrient.
Cooking listening to: Anaya is rearranging the living room in order to make room for the Christmas tree. Naturally, I will be putting on Nat King Cole’s Christmas vinyl as soon as I’m done here.