Poems for Mind-Clearing

I really love yoga, and I swear it keeps my head straight and I don’t know what I’d do without it. But I’m really irked by pop-performance-yoga culture, it’s so annoying. That said, I definitely do the fuck out of some yoga. I just, like, don’t have the beads or whatever. I like to be ten or fifteen minutes early and set my mat up in the front row (so I can see a sliver of sky out the window) and read a book in the heated room until class starts. To avoid conversation, yes, but also to clear the chatter in my head, and sometimes to clear the world events or other things I’m reading from my head.

Last week I finished the memoir Heavy by Kiese Laymon, which was really tough. It’s written in second person, a long letter addressed to the narrator’s abusive, talented, troubled mother. The confusion and pain he experiences as a child was written so viscerally, I could not bear to read it without my little sweet(ish) son home, preferably within arm’s reach. So I took long breaks when he was gone and then dove in last weekend when he came home. To balance the time I sent sobbing and clutching him (I’m only kind of kidding), we had a special mother-son-jam-around-weekend, which included playing living room catch with a red plastic football while listening to TED Radio Hour and Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me,which I think we will be doing a lot as we get stir crazy through the winter–highly recommend it.

So this week’s poem is one I discovered months ago and really love but haven’t shared here because ugh it’s a yoga poem. But I have to share it because ugh it’s so good.

Child’s Pose Brionne Janae

imagine your heart is just a ball you learned to dribble up
and down the length of your driveway back home. slow down

control it. plant your feet in the soft blue of your mat and release
it is hard but slowly you are unlearning the shallow pant

of your childhood. extend your body—do not reach
for someone but something fixed and fleshless and certain—

fold flatten then lift your head like a cobra sure of the sun
waiting and ready to caress the chill

from its scales. inhale—try not to remember how desperate
you’ve been for touch—yes ignore it—that hitch of your heart

you got from mornings you woke to find momma hysterical
or gone. try to give up the certainty she’d never return

recall only the return and not its coldness. imagine her arms
wide to receive you imagine you are not a thing that needs

escaping. it is hard and though at times you are sure
you will always be the abandoned girl trying to abandon herself

push up arch deep into your back exhale and remember—
when it is too late to pray the end of the flood

we pray instead to survive it.