Dusty Bookshelves

Tag: MIne

  • Our Cumulative Four Hands

    Our Cumulative Four Hands

    Now I write this in a pale town
    where excitement is a yellow curb.
    My dream awake
    leaps through my window
    from the highway …

    Hoping is so easy.

    You haven’t gained a day —
    Two self-fulfilling prophecies
    who don’t know how to hold each other.

    And not that we would ever get away with it”
    -Neko Case

    I had a dream a couple weeks ago.

    Mom was young and in her wedding dress, sitting on the edge of my bed w me in my childhood bedroom. The room that became Dad’s office in the years before their move out west. In my dream, it still had that wallpaper with the teddy bears in space suits raining upon the surface of the moon.

    Being in my first years of marriage still, I’m not sure how I was seeing her. Was I looking at her as dad saw her? As this woman in a beautiful bridal gown, the blushing new wife whose future he was suddenly charged to protect. Or did I identify with her instead? Seeing myself reflected in her trusting gaze at a new husband who was so suddenly tasked with holding her future?

    Regardless of who we might see ourselves as at that edge of that bed, I’m not scared of the future. I’m not scared, because I know we will be in it together, equal parts protecting and protected.

    Our cumulative four hands carrying a past that is never really the past — it always being right here, right now, walking right beside us into everything yet to come.

  • Emptiness is a complex feeling.

  • a proposed new outlook on the Borderlands

  • Normal

    Normal

    An alarm was the first thing to greet me this morning
    flashing lights and a woman’s voice
    telling me calmly to walk through the fire
    out to the cold autumn air
    and the crunchy color-turned leaves that
    covered a dozen smoldering cigarette butts

    How come there’s no gradient between
    the brisk and the burning
    the flint and the tinder
    one’s confinement and escape
    the labor required to live a life
    and the labor required to survive it.

    An alarm was the first thing to greet me this morning
    and, really,

    that just felt normal.

  • Which side am I on?

    Which side am I on?

    I am the the border wall
    between
    men \ and \ women

    the pressure point
    where masculinity is
    pinched
    hard enough to
    make a man

    cry.

  • Citizen

  • National Anthem

    National Anthem

    I used to have no boundaries.

    But now I am a country,
    and family are the citizens
    that I keep within my borders.

    All weary migrants welcome —
    tourist visas currently unavailable.

  • Precedence

    Precedence

    Broken glass rained like confetti
    on the night of the Stonewall Riot,

    and atop a glowing lamp post,
    beautiful with her dolphin smile,
    it was Marsha P. Johnson
    who threw the first brick.

    a warranted departure from her
    philosophy of “pay it no mind,”
    sparking a revolt
    when the bar tab
    came out to be way more
    than just the drinks she ordered

    That debt she paid, she paid in full:
    a broken high heel,
    a billy club to the rib,
    the chaos of a tipping point
    reached at two in the morning.

    When she
    and her friends
    (and her old lovers)
    (and the strangers she’d flirt with
    but would never charm)
    burst through those doors and

    into the streets
    into our offices,
    into our classrooms
    into our view

    they catapulted us down the aisle
    where we’d stand together before a decorated arch
    and calmly declare our relationship
    in terms never before seen:

    A marriage
    afforded the same rights and obligations
    as our parents’ before us
    and their parents’ before them.

    A link in the long line of their history,
    the first fruits to be officially named together
    on the same branch of the family tree.

    I vowed,
    then you vowed.

    and together when we walked from the altar,
    confetti rained like broken glass,

    Each of our rings
    a societal terror
    gleaming with one demand:

    Respect.

    Our everyday forward
    its own quiet revolution.

  • Great Water Rising Again

    Great Water Rising Again

    “That Friend speaks my mind,”
    S— told me
    walking north
    on the circular road through town,
    “is what you say
    when you agree with something said
    at a Quaker meeting.”

    The crosses that lined the road
    responded to her
    “Christ has risen!”
    “Jesus was buried for you.”
    “Merry Christmas! December 2009”

    We walked toward the dock,
    to our waiting boat
    poised to take us back to the mainland,
    its back cabin full
    of women in church hats
    daughters in flower dresses
    fathers in camouflage jackets
    smoking cigarettes

    Red hat glowering down,
    the mayor came out of the passenger cabin
    introducing himself while
    pointing to a map.

    This was where
    there once was a land bridge
    between two separate pieces of land
    once contiguous,
    once above
    a now-leavened bay.

    a strong man,
    weather-worn by a lifetime
    digging deep in this
    great estuary of the east.

    We took a seat starboard
    as he walked away
    to the captain’s room,
    and S— told me
    one more Quaker sentiment:

    “ ‘I stand in the way of this movement,’
    is what you say
    when you disagree

    when you want to
    halt the conversation entirely,
    but can only hope to delay it

    so you’ll have some time to prepare.”

    We sat in silence after that,
    waiting for the next thought to come

    the only sound
    an American flag hanging off the stern
    raging in the quick wind

    In time
    a silhouetted profile of land
    appeared on the distant horizon,
    and I pointed to
    the dock coming into focus

    the start of our one-hundred-mile drive.

    I looked to her to say,
    “Hey, we’re about to reach land,

    but we still
    have so long left to go.”