You’ll need dental work after this one
How to take a poem to the face
My parents put me in martial arts when I was young because I was bullied a lot. I was small and loved coaxing gophers out of holes more than playing baseball with the boys. I loved beauty and art, and although I know how to throw a punch, I have rarely had to eat a knuckle sandwich that didn’t belong to my older sister.
I stood there, barefoot in my first gi, white belt gleaming in the florescents overhead. This would be my path to ninjahood. But that isn’t what happened. If it did, I wouldn’t be writing this from a couch in a one bedroom apartment. No, my first sensei told me that our most important tool was not actually a fist. And for those keeping score at home it was also not a foot to the face; but words. He said the only physical fight you really win, is the one you do not have to have. I was too young to understand the way he looked each of us in the eye and said, “Get dangerous with your words.”
Over a decade and a half later and I can honestly say he was right. I’ve been punched in the face by more poems than kicked, slapped, or pile driven. I have been bowled over by strings of sentences and heard stories that knocked me flat on my back. This one chipped a tooth and gave my heart a bruise I hope never fades.
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lillies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.
When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller
This month is National Poetry Month (if you stay till the end I have a new poem for you. It might even appear in my next collection! But more on that later). And against my agent’s wishes, I have spent almost no time on social media. Everywhere I look, something is on fire, someone is broken, and my heart is hanging by a bit of tendon and thread.
It’s a ironic choice I made on the heels of the most viral video I have ever posted. 44 Million views on a video about trees and yet our National Parks are being assaulted and the way is being opened to pillage nature in the name of profit. Half of LA burns down and there’s a baby whale with no mom that no one is allowed to go rescue. Meanwhile my friends are posting vacations and baby photos (as any normal human should). But I am left still needing somewhere to put this anger and grief.
The strangeness of life’s indifference is an injury we all must endure. Our dreams vaporize in an email dropped like a grenade, and still my best friend manages her miracle pregnancy, we lose something precious, and the jacaranda are in full bloom, forests older than memory are carved up for someone’s second yacht, and the birds who flee them are still singing. I still need a place to put this grief.
And somewhere between the time I have talked my husband’s ear off, watched a YouTube video, and cried, I hear it: the invitation of language. Language does not always change the world, poetry is not the magic wand I wish it was. But what it can do, what it does do, is give my heart somewhere to rest. The right words are like a bench to the weary traveler, it is a rest stop, a respite, on our journey to the other side of pain. So I write.
And write.
And write.
And the world does not always make sense at the end, but I find something in those words, a resilience and a courage to face the times we are given and the question of how long we have.
This National Poetry Month, I hope you find the words that set you free. And if you’re not sure where to start, I’d like to help you try.
I am hosting a virtual writing and movement workshop with my friend Jade Alectra. 30 minutes of yoga and 30 minutes of working on the craft.
Be warned when you visit this link, we watched a little too much Fight Club and got drunk on our own creative powers, but personally I prefer poets with teeth.
And until then, this has been your Love Letter from The Gutter.
“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
― James Baldwin
Oh you’re still here? Ok well I guess I better get you that poem that I talked about…
A list of things I’d come back for if I died The song my niece made up at my piano The first sip of horchata on a hot day Laguna beach in summer Straining my neck to look up at a redwood tree When we choose to forgive Baby shoes Pierogi When someone brings a dog to work My dad telling me he’s proud My moms laugh Shooting stars The way my husband softens for every animal in existence When old people hold hands Counting how many summers we have left Forgetting the number Swimming naked in the sun Making lists of all the reasons I must outlive my grief
You write beautifully.