"Character is not who you are when you try hard; 

it is who you are when there's nothing to gain."

(What I (Wish I) Learned From My Mother)

What I Learned From My Mother 

Julia Kasdorf

I learned from my mother how to love 

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand 

in case you have to rush to the hospital 

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants 

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars 

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole 

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears 

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins 

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. 

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know 

the deceased, to press the moist hands 

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer 

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. 

I learned that whatever we say means nothing, 

what anyone will remember is that we came. 

I learned to believe I had the power to ease 

awful pains materially like an angel. 

Like a doctor, I learned to create 

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once 

you know how to do this, you can never refuse. 

To every house you enter, you must offer 

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, 

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

You Deserve the World by Ally Ang

 

During this latest shiny new catastrophe,
while I lie in bed and luxuriate in the silk
of my sadness, a friend’s text lights up
my screen: You deserve the world. Not

this world, hostile and unkind, but the one
we are building in the lines of poems,
in our wildest melatonin dreams, in the dirt
of our gardens and the recipes passed down to us

in a language that we have not yet forgotten.
I catch glimpses of it in the tsunami
of voices that floods the streets after another life
is snatched from a mother’s grasp, their demands

for justice impossible to ignore. I feel it
in my friend’s deliberate knuckles massaging
coconut oil into my scalp, how their steady
hands unworry my brow. Everywhere I look,

aliveness. I open my cupboard to discover
the plump red face of a tomato that I forgot
to turn into pasta sauce, now blooming
soft tufts of mold, the stubborn insistence

of life in even the harshest conditions. I slice
the tip of my finger while chopping cloves of garlic,
and before the first drop of blood has blushed
the counter, it coagulates at the edge of the wound—

a miracle, this body, how it has already begun
to heal before I’ve even registered
the hurt. When I say You deserve the world,
what I mean is this is not the first apocalypse

we have survived. The world has ended before,
and before and before, and for some, there was
no after. We have watched its rind cracking open
like a freshly broken heart, and each time

we build and rebuild. We kiss our houseplants
on their leafy foreheads before we go
to sleep. We dress our bodies in the most
brilliant light. We dance like the empire is dying,

water the ground where it once stood, and watch
what blooms, lush and verdant, in its wake.

#letthemoonwobble

omm:

"I went out in the world and tried to find places of my own to live. I was always anxious about it. In some ways, this anxiety was a terrific motivator. Fear made me resourceful. And I had some extraordinary adventures as a result.. I will cherish the memories of these escapades forever. In other ways tho, I became more codependent than ever. On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go getter, but my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fearscape. I was neither mature, or emotionally secure, and hidden beneath my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child, constantly asking, Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe. Where do I belong? And thus began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home. 

...

That relationship blew up because all my relationships blow up. Like a thief in the night, I left that good man behind, running off to California with someone who did not belong to me. And for sure someone should have been worried about me because that relationship swiftly blew up too, I remember making desperate phone calls in San Francisco, looking for places to stay, back to New York City I came, and I slept on my friends sofa on 14th street for 6 weeks, sobbing in silence and shame, night after night, and then I ran into the next relationship and the next living situation, and the next, and the next, and then the next, I once estimated that between the ages of 20 and 48 I lived in approximately 28 different homes, and that is not everywhere I stayed, that number would be incalculable, its merely everywhere I lived, everywhere that had my actual my name on the lease or the mortgage and I never lived alone, I couldn’t bear to be alone, I couldn’t bear being alone with the open wound that was my own mind. But also I couldn’t bear the chafe and strain of intimacy. I couldn’t last anywhere and I couldn’t last with anyone. So I came and went. Colliding and separating, Roaming the planet, constantly looking for places to land and people to merge with. I sometimes used to call this behavior being a free spirit, but my wild instability was quite the opposite of freedom because I had no agency in the matter, only urgency. Also, if I was so free, why did I always end up feeling trapped? It’s because my moves were motivated by desperate situations in which I was running either towards somebody, or away from somebody else. I constantly found myself in stories that started out with passion but ended up with shame. So much shame in fact, that during those years, there were entire geographical regions I had to flee at top speed because my behavior had created dramas that made it impossible for me to remain there for another day."

 

Imagine browsing through this book on a random Tuesday evening at the MCA and discovering you're in it…

An Adventure By Louise Gluck

1.

It came to me one night as I was falling asleep 
that I had finished with those amorous adventures 
to which I had long been a slave. Finished with love? 
my heart murmured. To which I responded that many profound discoveries 
awaited us, hoping, at the same time, I would not be asked 
to name them. For I could not name them. But the belief that they existed— 
surely this counted for something? 
2.

The next night brought the same thought, 
this time concerning poetry, and in the nights that followed 
various other passions and sensations were, in the same way, 
set aside forever, and each night my heart 
protested its future, like a small child being deprived of a favorite toy. 
But these farewells, I said, are the way of things. 
And once more I alluded to the vast territory 
opening to us with each valediction. And with that phrase I became 
a glorious knight riding into the setting sun, and my heart 
became the steed underneath me.
3.

I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death, 
though why this landscape was so conventional 
I could not say. Here, too, the days were very long 
while the years were very short. The sun sank over the far mountain. 
The stars shone, the moon waxed and waned. Soon 
faces from the past appeared to me: 
my mother and father, my infant sister; they had not, it seemed, 
finished what they had to say, though now 
I could hear them because my heart was still.
4.

At this point, I attained the precipice 
but the trail did not, I saw, descend on the other side; 
rather, having flattened out, it continued at this altitude 
as far as the eye could see, though gradually 
the mountain that supported it completely dissolved 
so that I found myself riding steadily through the air—
All around, the dead were cheering me on, the joy of finding them 
obliterated by the task of responding to them—
5.

As we had all been flesh together, 
now we were mist. 
As we had been before objects with shadows, 
now we were substance without form, like evaporated chemicals. 
Neigh, neigh, said my heart, 
or perhaps nay, nay—it was hard to know.
6.

Here the vision ended. I was in my bed, the morning sun 
contentedly rising, the feather comforter 
mounded in white drifts over my lower body. 
You had been with me— 
there was a dent in the second pillowcase. 
We had escaped from death— 
or was this the view from the precipice?

 

It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided
into those who wish to move forward
and those who wish to go back.
Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving
and those who want to be stopped in their tracks
as by the blazing sword...