Gratitude: May 17, 2025

Fracture

When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—

relocated they call it—

their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.

Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,

twisted knot, hot blood rivering

to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.

Just weeks before

I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain

in the twilight.

So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling

to the meadow,

to the yarrow root they dug, rocking

to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.

They were breathing what looked like gladness.

But that other mother . . .

Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.

Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.

Ellen Bass

❤️

 2-Sided Map Shows Line Where Falling Bodies Will Land

From where are we getting this information? A woman god?

I don’t think so. 

Fem greatness only ever declines on this graph

showing allowable outcomes. 

Know-it-all women decline know-it-all men 

because know-it-all men know so little it’d fit in a rice pot. 

I make my facts and data from internal sources, secret sauces.

I know better. No one knows better one’s own side of things

but knowing how to convince the true authority

on the matter that you are  

the true authority on the matter—

well…. Haven’t we all fallen for that, once?

Off-grid, between us, can you imagine knowing yourself

well enough to believe you know others as well?

This Very Dance called Every Rise, Each Fall. The one 

you must know and show in order to get anywhere in this society. 

In this stinkin’ society where you can’t even say the word

religion (doesn’t matter which) without your back

seizing up out of nowhere. I don’t know if we’re in the middle

of the ending or the beginning of some new concussion. 

I have my doubts. I think we might be fucked. 

We need some woman-greatness.

Some entity that won’t exist unless we all come together

and wish very hard for her to swim 

to our dreamy poolsides. She’d come in summer,

while everyone still wishes very hard to have a fun time.

To relax, melt in the sun, miss work. 

Float free in the water, alive-alive, not think about 

who got shot, who next, and who is right now

falling from the sky, from one side to the other one side. 

Brenda Shaughnessy 

❤️

Gratitude: May 16, 2025

One Is One

Heart, you bully, you punk, I’m wrecked, I’m shocked

stiff. You? you still try to rule the world–though

I’ve got you: identified, starving, locked

in a cage you will not leave alive, no

matter how you hate it, pound its walls,

& thrill its corridors with messages.

Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl

in your cell but I’m deaf to your rages,

your greed to go solo, your eloquent

threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.

You scare me, bragging you’re a double agent

since jailers are prisoners’ prisoners too.

Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us,

and joy may come, and make its test of us.

Marie Ponsot

❤️

Elegy

Who would I show it to

W.S. Merwin

❤️

Thirst

Another morning and I wake with thirst

for the goodness I do not have. I walk

out to the pond and all the way God has

given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,

I was never a quick scholar but sulked

and hunched over my books past the hour

and the bell; grant me, in your mercy,

a little more time. Love for the earth

and love for you are having such a long

conversation in my heart. Who knows what

will finally happen or where I will be sent,

yet already I have given a great many things

away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,

except the prayers which, with this thirst,

I am slowly learning.

Mary Oliver

❤️

(As Planned

After the first glass of vodka

you can accept just about anything

of life even your own mysteriousness

you think it is nice that a box

of matches is purple and brown and is called

La Petite and comes from Sweden

for they are words that you know and that

is all you know words not their feelings

or what they mean and you write because

you know them not because you understand them

because you don’t you are stupid and lazy

and will never be great but you do

what you know because what else is there?

Frank O’Hara)

Gratitude: May 15, 2025

 Heavy

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God

had his hand in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel,

(brave even among lions),

“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it–

books, bricks, grief–

it’s all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,

put it down.”

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

the laughter

that comes, now and again,

out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love

to which there is no reply?

Mary Oliver

❤️

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

Maggie Smith

❤️

Gratitude: May 14, 2025

How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best

“When you are trapped in a nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream.”
—Eckhart Tolle

When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.

Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.

There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—

What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?

By nighttime, I was intimate
with the difference
between tying my laces
and tuning the string section

of my shoes, made a symphony of walking
away from everything that did not
want my life to sing.

Felt a love for myself so consistent
metronomes tried to copyright my heartbeat.

Finally understood I am the conductor
of my own life, and will be even after I die.
I, like the trees, will decide what I become:

Porch swing? Church pew?
An envelope that must be licked to be closed?
Kinky choice, but I didn’t close.

I opened and opened
until I could imagine that the pain
was the sensation of my spirit
not breaking,

that my mind was a parachute
that could always open
in time,

that I could wear my heart
on my sleeve and never grow
out of that shirt.

That every falling leaf is a tiny kite
with a string too small to see, held
by the part of me in charge
of making beauty
out of grief.

Andrea Gibson

  ❤️

Instead of Depression

try calling it hibernation.
Imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.

Andrea Gibson

🙏

❤️

Gratitude: May 13, 2025

The Economy 

I didn’t love 

That I had this 

Tendency 

Toward melody 

Or the appetite for drama 

Always obvious 

In my thinking 

& in everything 

I did. I wasn’t TV 

Though I watched myself 

Sometimes passively 

As though brained or 

Bludgeoned out of the fullness 

Of my own reality. I felt 

I had to respect what seduced me 

Even if stupidly—even when it made 

Me stupid—or meant I was— 

Making of my mind a begging bowl 

Laying myself waste for the devil 

Making an innocent victim of the child within 

So ferociously did I fear 

Something adult, like sovereignty 

Survival was a big- 

Box-store-bought 

Blanket. Not wet 

But scented 

With the antiseptics 

Of the factory 

It would take days 

To air out, get it to resemble 

The picture of something homey 

And grandmother-made 

I know what it’s like to pay 

Money for such. 

The three-dimensional 

Image of things. To find 

Them feeling hollow and smelling 

Wrong. I know what it’s like. 

The imitation of life. 

I almost know what it means. 

I disciplined my own form and the thinking 

Within me. That may not be a religion 

But it is grim theology. 

The more muscle I had the better 

I felt I could contain and conduct 

The sorrow within. The smoother 

Ran my blood and lymph. 

My body dismayed me and I hated, 

Adored it. Recurrent dreams 

Of defective dolls kept coming back 

To warn me. You are not a thing. 

You are not the object against which forces 

Tilt that you cannot control. 

You are the entire subject of the world. 

Tears rolled down a cheek of stone 

My friend Terry writes about water 

And land, mother and brother 

Like a singer. I once despaired 

To her that the only endangered 

Species I had managed to speak 

On behalf of up to that moment 

Was myself. This seemed squalid 

And narrow to me. Terry said it was real 

Territory. I blinked melancholy 

Into the seething night 

Like a spotted owl in the eye 

Of a security camera 

Black and white bird without 

Offspring or prey. My body 

Is filled with plastic 

I left my mother to die 

To write these lines 

You will parry that such is a false 

Economy. But so 

Are all the other ones we live by

Ariana Reines

❤️

       “I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over
the roulette table, I recoup what I can
nothing else to shove under the nose of the maitre de jeu
nothing to thrust out the window, no white flag
this flesh all I have to offer, to make the play with
this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move
as we slither over this go board, stepping always
(we hope) between the lines”

Gratitude: May 12, 2025

Rorschach Test

To tell you the truth I’d have thought it had gone out of use long ago;

there is something so 19th-century about it,

with its absurd reverse Puritanism.

Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged

by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss

ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger?

Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear

that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way

of suppressing the snickers of an eight-year-old sex fiend, and feign cu-

riosity about the process to mask your indignation at being placed in

this situation.

Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egypt-

ian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too.

Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their

male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pil-

lars and swords out of the old brain’s unconscious.

You keep finding yourself thinking, “God damn it, don’t tell me that

isn’t a pussy!”

But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying

to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.”

The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you’re

supposed to be crazy

(and are probably proving it).

Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn’t hurt your case. Yes,

it’s some little card game you’ve gotten yourself into this time, when

your only chance is to lose. Fold,

and they have got you by the balls—

just like the ones you neglected to identify.

Franz Wright

Gratitude: May 11, 2025

Perspective via Anne Lamott ❤️

“This is for those of you who may feel a kind of sheet metal loneliness on Sunday, who had a sick or abusive mother, or a mother who recently died, or who wanted to have kids but didn't get to, or had kids who ended up breaking your hearts. If you love the day, and have or had a great mom and happy highly successful kids, skip this piece: I’m begging you.

I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother’s Day. I didn’t want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some obligatory annual display of gratitude. Perhaps Mother’s Day will come to mean something to me as I grow even dottier in my dotage, and I will find myself bitter and distressed when Sam dutifully ignores the holiday. Then he will feel ambushed by my expectations, and he will retaliate by putting me away even at a PlaceForMom.com sooner than he is planning to — which, come to think of it, would be even more reason for me to resist Mother’s Day.

But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be many mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping or sullen children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants. These mothers do not want a box of chocolate. They may have announced for a month that they are trying not to eat sugar. Oh well, eat up or risk ruining the day for everyone.

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or lost children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!”

 You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.

It should go without saying that I also hate Valentine’s Day, even those years when I’ve had a boyfriend or random husband.

Mothering perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. Meanwhile, we know that many of the most evil people in the country are politicians who have weaponized parenthood.

Don’t get me wrong: There were a million times I could have literally died of love for my son, and I’ve felt stoned on his rich, desperate love for me. I felt it yesterday when I was in despair. But I bristle at the whispered lie that you can know this level of love and self-sacrifice only if you are a parent. What a crock! We talk about “loving one’s child” as if a child were a mystical prancing unicorn. A majority of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished. They secretly believe that non-parents cannot possibly know what it is to love unconditionally, to be selfless, to put yourself at risk for the gravest loss. But in my experience, it’s parents who are prone to exhibit terrible self-satisfaction and selfishness, who can raise children as props or adjuncts, like rooms added on in a remodel. Often their children’s value and achievements in the world are reflected glory, necessary for these parents’ self-esteem, and sometimes, for the family’s survival. This is how children’s souls are destroyed.

But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them, including aunties and brothers; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, who unconsciously raised me to self-destruct; and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, including my mom, even after their passing. 

The point is, have a beautiful, wonderful Mother’s Day if it is a holiday that brings you joy, but just be conscious that for many, many people, it isn’t. Proceed thoughtfully. Deal?“

Miss you, T. ❤️

 

Gratitude: May 7, 2025

Next Time Ask More Questions

Before jumping, remember
the span of time is long and gracious.

No one perches dangerously on any cliff
till you reply. Is there a pouch of rain

desperately thirsty people wait to drink from
when you say yes or no? I don’t think so.

Hold that thought. Hold everything.
When they say “crucial”—well, maybe for them?

Hold your horses and your minutes and
your Hong Kong dollar coins in your pocket,

you are not a corner or a critical turning page.
Wait. I’ll think about it.

This pressure you share is a misplaced hinge, a fantasy.
I am exactly where I wanted to be. 

Naomi Shibab Nye 

bc it’s never too late for self-possession 

❤️

Gratitude: May 6, 2025

Red Tulips, Then Asphodel

Was I ever truly happy, like some girl in a red tank top

eating sunlight in Spring?

Hard to say. If flowers are symbols of emotions,

it’s still hard to say.

What belongs, what goes, and which way. Did I once

feel like a tulip

bending gracefully toward its own root, its own death,

the lower my head

the more beautiful? Or was I ever showy like a peony

for one wild week,

sexed fully pink without blushing. What are emotions

anyway? Flowers die

not knowing. And yet our feelings lead us down that one

path we only ever take,

deceptively edged with bloom after bloom after bloom.

Brenda Shaughnessy

🌷

Special Problems In Vocabulary

There is no single particular noun
for the way a friendship,
stretched over time, grows thin,
then one day snaps with a popping sound.

No verb for accidentally
breaking a thing
while trying to get it open
— a marriage, for example.

No idiomatic phrase for losing a book
in the middle of reading it,
and therefore
never learning the end.

There is no expression — in English, at least
— for avoiding the sight
of your own body in the mirror,
for disliking the touch

of the afternoon sun,
for walking into the long flatland
that stretches out before you
after your adventures are done.

No adjective for gradually speaking less, and less,
because you have stopped being able
to say the one thing that would
break your life loose from its grip.

Certainly no name that one could imagine
for the aspen tree outside,
its spade-shaped leaves

spinning on their stems,
working themselves into
a pale-green, vegetable blur.

No word for waking up one morning
and looking around,
because the mysterious spirit

which drives all things
seems to have returned,
and is on your side again.

Tony Hoagland

🙏

“Thank you for insulting me.

You helped me see how much I was worth.

Thank you for overlooking my humanity.

In that moment I gained power.

To be forgotten by the wider world

and the righteous religious

and the weaponized soldiers 

is not the worst thing.

It gives you time to discover yourself.”

❤️