When I say thanks (again)…

Some stuff, since it’s been a while! Upcoming events at Brookdale Community College, Word Up NYC, and L’Etage Philadelphia. Happy/Sad in Philly is going to be so good, so double plug for that. I am over the moon that A Constellation of Half-Lives was selected by Beltway Poetry Quarterly as one of the top ten books of 2019. The list of other books is so stunning, I’m pretty blown away to be in that company.

Last week we had a writing and paper-making workshop at the USO Warrior & Family Center at Bethesda, and my friend and aspirational twin Joe Merritt led writing prompts. I was also co-leading an online poetry workshop for nurses with my dear friend Joy Jacobson. I got to spend some time responding to writing prompts from both of these gifted teachers, prompts derived from poems that I’m familiar with and have used to teach myself and have responded to so many times, but of course, I’d never been the person I was last week, so there were new things to say. That’s the thing, isn’t it? How we unlearn and relearn, re-order and recalibrate around the same things.

I’m reading this great book (a gift from Joy, actually), A Primer for Forgetting: Getting over the past by Lewis Hyde, which makes a case for intentional forgetting as a survival and growth strategy. It’s a beautiful beautiful book.

Joe led us through a derivative of a prompt from Michael Anthony’s American Soldier, which I originally posted years ago here: When I say I am a mother.

Online, Joy led us through Yusef Komunyakaa’s Thanks, which I posted here. Here’s my updated response to that:

Thanks to the person who smiles when I enter a strange room, who offers help when I look lost. Thanks to the kindness of the invisible: the hands that cut the fruit and package it into clear cups, to the one who steers the big bus safely between the yellow lines of the tree-lined road, the one who picks up litter on her path, and reaches high to change the bulbs on traffic lights swinging on a wire. Thanks for the capacity of my own quick hands, moving on the keyboard, over the stove, on the handle of a knife, to pick up one end to share a heavy load. Thanks for your guidance, quiet force reminding me to visit the ill, assume best intentions, make a home for myself wherever I land. I don’t know why my laughter surges so easily, why I know to put my arms around her, why I feel the most spent and alive when the shoulder of my blouse is soaked in tears, but my reason is clear: I want to love and be loved and go on my way. I thank you, my difficult life, my cold water life, my life of the sun on my shoulders and the windows down. Breathing in, I appreciate the air that moves through my nostrils and lifts my chest, expands my ribs and belly, soft from good meals and childbearing. May the poems continue to come, may even the hard things have soft edges.

And here’s my “When I say I am…” response from last week: When I say I am afraid, I am not saying that I want someone to save me. Or maybe I am, but I say it knowing that no one else ever has saved me, that I am always a little in danger, but people who promise to save me are the ones I am most wary of. I have only ever been saved by my own reflection in the eyes of people who call me family. When I say I am afraid, I am reminding myself that I am human, small, not as good as they say I am, but not as bad either. When I say I am afraid, I am not saying that I can’t go on. I’m not saying that I will give up, that I won’t make it. I’m saying I know the odds I’m up against, that I haven’t underestimated the slope of the thing I must climb, and will climb with caution. When I say I am afraid, I’m not saying that I don’t have all the answers, but that I trust that you, my beloveds, will remind me that there are a thousand ways to be afraid but also not alone. When I say I am afraid, I say it to remind you that you can be afraid too, that we can be afraid, of different things, together.