I see specters
lined up behind you
she said

I seethed
but I saw them, too

not for the first time

not for the last

I felt exposed

naked skin

baby-soft  
covered in road rash

hot to the touch
fevered and delicate

seven specters
holding scepters

keeping 
my thoughts
my deeds
my dreams
in line

I see specters
lined up behind you
she said

and I saw them, too

not for the first time

not for the last

I had tried and tried
to hide 
the facts

not to show 
my hauntedness
my huntedness
how I dangled,
strangled 
by invisible thread

woven by me
and the edicts 
of seven specters

their scepters bejeweled and pointed
their silence elusive
menacing

keeping my voice still
my dagger cloaked

until the day 
I could keep them no more

my dagger bejeweld and pointed
my voice elusive
unrestrained

I sang

of the specters
and their scepters

one was sorrow

two were joy

three were girls

four mere boys

five forged silver

six soft gold

seven secrets
never to be told

I see specters 
lined up behind you
she said

specter: a visible disembodied spirit; a ghostly apparition, a ghost itself, or simply an idea that people find frightening

scepter: a staff or baton borne by a sovereign as an emblem of authority

Leave a comment

How many days 
did you consider 
leaving life
before the day 
you swallowed the pills?

Did you edge away from it 
gradually
making your way 
toward the abyss
so slowly
you couldn’t distinguish
its depth
its darkness
from the rest of the path?

Did you take three baby steps forward
then one giant step back,
your life
one long game 
of Mother, May I?

When the day came 

I was at kindergarten 
pulling rumpled dresses
from a costume box
coloring inside the lines

You were home
with two cats
a pink satin chair
Tylenol and a bottle of Thunderbird 

How many pills 
did you swallow 
at one go?
Was it a by-the-handful 
endeavor?
Or more of a 
one-by-one-lay-them-out-in-a-neat-row-on-the-bedside-table
sort of thing?

Did you take them
slowly, rhythmically
each pill clicking
past your teeth
like
prayer beads
on a string?

Did you inhale
after every
swallow?

Did you exhale at all?

And at what point 
did your breath stop altogether?

When did your head 
fall back 
on the pillow
into oblivion
arriving in
that sweet, dark place 
we all crave
at one time
or another?

But for most of us
something 
just one small thing
or someone
just one precious one
pulls us back
reigns us in
holds us close 

And we take
one giant step back
into life together

Mother, may I?
Yes, you may

But not you

You took 
one giant step forward 
into death alone 

And I’m still here living

Wondering
why I wasn’t your
one precious one

My mother’s suicide is a fact. My grief is a scar. There is no fixing it. There is only writing about it and asking you to bear witness. Both of these acts require courage, curiosity, stamina, and the willingness to pause and notice. To stay in our bodies and let the sensations come and go. To look each other in the eye. To feel the brutality of the truth, as well as its power to heal. To take baby steps. Not toward the abyss, but not exactly away from it, either.

The important part is to stick together.

Leave a comment

Perhaps you’ve noticed

me going quiet

Summer approaches

with her insistent clanging

her languid evenings

her boisterous birds

twirling me

around

and around

and around

dizzy

I fall

into Silence

rest

on a freshly mown lawn

lined with pink peonies

but Silence

doesn’t mean

I’m not

dreaming

creating

participating

Silence

means

I’m here

placing my palm

on a dead tree

inhaling pine sap

brilliant beads

still sticky

alive

fragrant

laced with memory

tinged golden

with promise

Hello faithful readers and subscribers,

I am pausing paid subscription fees until further notice. It has been a challenge to meet my goal of two posts per month, and it feels wrong to collect subscription money if I’m not sharing my writing regularly.

Thanks for understanding. And who knows? Maybe I’ll post more than ever now that I’ve given myself permission to fall silent.

Leave a comment

Carmen is a code name

Carmen is a spy

Carmen is a spider 
stealthy, creative, loathed

when she should be beloved

she cleans your house
exterminates your pests
weaves wonder with invisible titanium thread

fosters feminist ties
              braided vows 
                       ropy umbilical cords

captures meal after meal after meal

stitches sentences
               sticky textile art 

while you are sleeping
Carmen’s quiet creations collect dewdrops
they become diamonds in the dawn’s early light

meanwhile, in your bedroom
Carmen’s web wrangles the mosquito 
and saves your droning dreams
                                 your innocent skin
                                                  your sanity

To the ones who pause long enough to get to know Carmen
	to watch sparkle dance on webs
        to look past hairy legs and venomous mouth parts
        to marvel at the audacity of a creature who makes a living dangling over the abyss

Thank you.

To the ones who recoil at Carmen’s appearance in sterile, man-made spaces

To the ones who cast her out of their homes—her home?—trapped under a glass

To the ones who smash her with rigid soles—souls?
leaving guts and magic in a stain on the carpet 

Know this:

There's no getting rid of Carmen
She will return
for there are thousands
                         millions
                              billions like her

They are her sisterhood
	her offspring
	her essence
	her tomorrow

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

Soon, my parents had a baby to tend to: a twenty-acre piece of prairie near the Platte River where they were building an off-the-grid, earth sheltered house. Two more vehicles came next. One was an old, heavy-duty, pickup we called The Blue Goose, and the other was a rattly Toyota Land Cruiser. The late 1960s 40-series was very uncool by my standards, but it could handle the dirt roads out to the house site, affectionately known as “the land.”

Both of my parents, The Blue Goose, and the Toyota spent a lot of time out at the land during my adolescent years. The El Camino—like the indulgent older sister I always longed for—stood guard in town in our driveway, waiting for the day our age gap became irrelevant. When given the choice, I always opted to stay in town at the house we shared with my grandmother. Sometimes Gaga was home, and sometimes she was back east visiting my dad’s older sister and her family.

I wasn’t as annoyed by Gaga as I was by my parents. It still felt special when it was just the two of us. She had a way of relating to me—both as her youngest grandchild, her “only baby,” and also as the woman I was becoming. I’ll never forget the time Gaga wove sex into a conversation about the book she was reading. I thought I might die. I braced myself for a prudish lecture from a woman who hadn’t been physically intimate with anyone—at least to my knowledge—since she had been widowed in the 1950s. Instead, she told me how scared she was before her first time, in spite of how much she trusted and adored my grandfather. She said the act itself was extremely disappointing. Aha, I thought, so this is how she’s going to convince me not to do it. But then she looked right at me—a mischievous twinkle in her blue eyes—and told me she grew to enjoy sex immensely. I was speechless.

Most of my time with Gaga did not include conversations that flouted her presbyterian, Midwestern values. We’d watch Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy (she answered correctly before the contestants ninety percent of the time), Murder She Wrote, and Happy Days together. Our conversations consisted of her latest literary fascination, or my classes and teachers, or my niggling worries about friendships. Her advice in that department was often rooted in Christianity, but not in a preachy, heavy-handed way, “What would Jesus do?” she’d ask, then leave me to ponder my path forward.

********

I preferred staying in town whether or not my grandma was there, but once in a while my parents insisted I join them for a day of work. Work could be anything from learning how to build a cordwood masonry wall, to loading and unloading hundreds of bricks that had once paved the streets of a nearby town, but would eventually be our new floor. The reclaimed bricks cost ten cents each, and I cringed every time my parents told someone what a bargain they’d gotten. These days, I have as much nostalgia for the times my parents tore me away from my friends and forced me to help them with weird jobs as for the times The El Camino and I were left to our own devices at Gaga’s.

During high school, I ran around with a group of five other girls. We called ourselves the Six Pack. It was not a reference to our abs, but to the canned beverages we consumed on the weekends—Old Milwaukee Light when we could get it, or ‘pop’ (Dr. Pepper was my favorite) for those lazy days floating on the lake, our skin shimmering with baby oil. Sometimes the Six Pack swelled to eight when we bonded with girls from other cliques. Sometimes it shrank to three when ‘serious’ boyfriends came on the scene in tenth grade. We had secret names for the boys we had crushes on, used monikers for each other, and called our friend Kim’s Ford Gran Torino the Boogie Boat, and the El Camino the Elk. Shelly, whose family owned a car dealership, got a Chevy Camaro IROC Z when she turned sixteen. The Iroc was by far the coolest set of wheels among us.

But the summer before that, we were all still fifteen and itching to drive, pulling fun out of muggy Nebraska air. We rode our bikes to parties across town and spent a ridiculous amount of time concocting convoluted plans for post-curfew sneak-outs. On the rare occasions we followed through, we’d cruise the still neighborhoods on foot, streetlights and June bugs the only witnesses to our transgressions.

The air was ripe with possibility. We skulked, then skipped past slumbering houses. The scent of freedom made us tipsy. We could go anywhere, do anything. Nobody was watching. It never took long for our obsession with being cool girls with nefarious plans to vanish in the cloak of the night. We headed to the nearest elementary school, pumping as high as we could on the swings, zooming down the slides, saying or singing whatever popped into our heads, and giggling uncontrollably.

Summer wore on. We got bored. We got bold. Cool girl dreams collided with little girl whimsy. Our parents’ unattended cars beckoned. You passed Driver’s Ed. What could go wrong? Just take it around the block. No one will ever know. Was it the cars egging us on, or each other?

One dull afternoon, my friends and I congregated at Gaga’s. My grandma wasn’t home to lure us away from our shenanigans with homemade cookies and Sanka and conversation. It was one of those days when there was nothing to do and no place to go. The Elk winked at us from the driveway.

The neighbors’ house across the street—the one with six kids, the one where someone was always coming or going—was uncharacteristically unpeopled. Mrs. Bernie next door, who always seemed to be in her neat-as-a-pin garden, had finished her watering for the day and was inside with the air conditioning humming. The Elk winked at us from the driveway.

********

What happened next is the stuff of feel-good, coming-of-age movies and what-were-we-thinking? jaunts down memory lane. Like all Six Pack lore, the details have grown fuzzy in the forty years between then and now. Thanks to a recent reunion with my old pals, the tale has been corroborated. Everyone assured me it did, in fact, happen. Most of us were at a loss when it came to specifics, but thanks to Kim, some of the missing details have been recovered. As she talked, she struck her signature I’m-so-excited pose: donning her infectious grin and bouncing in her chair, hands poised for clapping, eyes wide and sparkling. She also said she has been anxiously awaiting El Camino, Part 2. So, without further ado, this one’s for you, Kim. I hope I’ve done it justice, and that you’ll forgive me for the poetic license I’ve taken with the dialogue.

*******

“We should take the Elk for a spin,” one of us suggested.

“Yeah, let’s go visit Kristin at work. Get a Blizzard.”

“But there’s only room for three.” I wasn’t often the voice of reason, but I was the least confident driver in the group, and I’d never taken the Elk out without Elaine or Dad in the car. A familiar knot twisted in my stomach. Was it better to let down my dad or my friends?

“In the front, but what about the back?” That was probably Gretchen, always thinking outside the box (or in this case, the cab).

The camper shell Beth and I rode under on the Boston trip was long gone. Whoever sat in the pick-up bed would be uncomfortable and exposed. I was working out how to say this without being a party pooper when someone else piped up.

“Yeah, let’s bring pillows so the people in the back can lie down if they need to!” Kim reminded us of our sneaky-drive-around protocol. Columbus was a small town. You always saw somebody you knew.

Laughter and a sense of belonging filled Gaga’s kitchen, loosening the knot in my belly. My friends’ faces radiated adventure as our plan took shape. I imagine each of us had some hesitation, but we were caught up in the excitement. There was no going back. All I had left to do was get out of sitting behind the wheel.

“What about lawn chairs? Then we can just lie down the whole time. We have some in the garage. I’ll ride in the back if someone else wants to drive.” I nailed it. My idea came off as easy-breezy and fun. Then Shelly, a true-blue friend and the most level-headed of the group, said she’d drive. (Every single one of us has a tale of Shelly coming to her rescue at one time or another).

Soon, Gretchen and I were reclining on a couple of mesh and aluminum chaise loungers in the back of the Elk. The other three were in the front. The sliding window at the back of the cab was open so the front-seat passengers could warn us when it was time to duck. Kim was our sentry. She gave us the signal when we were in danger of being spotted.

None of us remembers if we actually made it all the way to Dairy Queen. Beth and Kristin are certain neither of them were with us at all that day. At our recent gathering, Kim clarified that Kristin was at work, and another dear friend, Mindy, was the third person in the cab. Details aside, it’s a given there was giggling galore, along with growing dread that we’d get caught and get in big trouble.

Did we make it to Dairy Queen? Nobody remembers, but it’s highly unlikely, since Shelly was pulling over every block or two. This was our solution when we got spooked about approaching cars. We couldn’t risk someone we knew—or God forbid, a police car—spotting us, so Shelly would ease the Elk into a random vacant driveway to ‘hide.’

We didn’t get caught. And thankfully, we didn’t get hurt (or hurt anyone else), though Gretchen and I were disappointed that the lawn chairs didn’t live up to our expectations of comfort. There’s a reason they’re called lawn chairs, and not truck-bed chairs. I can still hear the metal-on-metal scrape and see the horror on Gretchen’s face as we braced ourselves for the next turn. No matter—that day is etched in our treasure trove of memories.

Thinking about it, writing about it, laughing about it with the Six Pack all these years later, I am a teenage girl again—flirting with freedom, returning to innocence. Today, I can close my eyes and rediscover the sensation I had riding in the back of the Elk, my sides giggle-sore. It is a feeling I’ve only experienced in the company of true friends. Giddiness blended with a deep, abiding understanding that no matter what lies around the next corner, no matter what I say or do, or how I see myself, these girls-turned-women are there for me. And what of the Camino-turned-Elk? She’s long gone, but her magic lives on.

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

I’ve heard women are vessels. Not in the childbearing way, though that is also true.

In the way our bodies hold things for ourselves and for others. ‘Things’ being violations, punishments, tears, secrets, wishes, fears. Rage. We smile stoically as they become scar tissue, as they ossify into bone. We unwittingly pass them generation to generation. Our daughters are now vessels for what we have borne. And so on.

The things I carry seep out sometimes. In the presence of friends who have become sisters, in the calm of the pages I write in the tepid light of the pre-dawn sky. Sometimes they ooze from my soles, my heels, my salty toes, filter through sand, soak with briny water, down, down, down, into the ground.

I feel lighter then, and I wonder, how much can the largest vessel of all, the first mother—the earth—hold? She keeps things for all of humanity, for plants and animals, too. But what about the things we give her that hurt too much to bear? Does she have a sisterhood like mine? Of course she does. Her sisters are the rivers and the sea, the sky and the wind, the glaciers. And don’t forget fire. She is the sister who burns off the things that can no longer be contained.

My writer and I have been playing with the earth’s sisters, noticing their power to transform. Here are some of our musings.

Ice

Not the kind we want out of our cities
the kind some of us want in our drinks

The kind we need when the earth is too burdened
to hold our yuck
when the wind is too weary to carry 
more ashes
the residue of our yuck

Better to slice through the yuck
with sharp screaming scissors
keep it in a container
drown it in water
and freeze it

The yuck
unrecognizable
in its icy prison
immobilized
stuck in a glacier
the color of twilight
 
Her darkest thoughts 
her most crippling fears 
her lethal memories 
become a thing of beauty
a thing she has created
a thing she has contained

She can hold it now
suspended in ice the color of indigo
faded blue jeans
the sky before dawn

Sky

Her honesty a reflecting pool
an offering plate for idle thoughts
for cotton candy clouds and regrets

Does she possess the shimmer of water
a life-giving force
or is the sky a drowning place
a liquid grave for sorrows? 

My questions float
on slight clouds 
on the wings of a crow 
crossing over

Will this be the beginning of a new verse?

or a repeating refrain
a round with no end
a chorus dinning in my ears
until it becomes
white noise
until I am numb to it
until I have forgotten 
how to lose myself in the sky? 

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

The red-flowering currant outside my window stood naked. I envied the plant’s shamelessness and her elegant, if haunting, scientific name: Ribes sanguineum. Her self-possessed branches pointed skyward, while I sat inert, half-heartedly coaxing my inner writer from her cozy den. We had a self-imposed deadline. El Camino, Part 2 was past due.

I should have known better. My writer hates to be rushed. Thwarted, I turned my attention to the Ribes sanguineum, admiring her bare beauty, anticipating the secrets enveloped in her tiny leaf buds, wondering if my dormant period would sync with the seasons, willing my hibernating writer to follow the currant’s lead.

I watched the Ribes’ lobed leaves emerge. Their verdant unfurling emboldened me. I let my writer be and went it alone, slapping try-hard paragraphs together, struggling to bring the essence of my adolescence to the page. Piling up words, telling, not showing. Following my nostalgia on detours. Miles stretched between each new word and the story’s crescendo. My writer rolled her eyes and curled up in a ball in the corner, leaving me to my own devices.

I threw up my hands, shoved my writer into a suitcase and took her to Costa Rica. I hoped a change of scenery would inspire her. For two weeks, she idly watched me play in the ocean and walk on the beach. We listened to the throaty calls of howler monkeys, the songs of audacious birds. Immersed in beauty, my mind slowed its anxious pace. I stopped pestering my writer. El Camino, Part 2 languished.

Now it’s mid-March, and we’ve been home for almost two weeks. My writer has not returned to the page. She’s wary. I don’t blame her. My anxiety’s back and I’m imposing deadlines again. I blame our mucky writer’s rut on the state of the world, but that only makes our wheels spin, digs us in deeper. We’re both sick of this woe-is-me narrative, this paralysis. If we wait for the world to change, if we wait until we feel better about what we’re contributing to the greater good, if we worry about our penchant for navel-gazing, we will never, ever, write again.

I whisper apologies to my writer, saying everything’s going to be all right, trying to convince her the act of writing will make us feel better. The cursor blinks its indifference. An insistent black line in a sea of drivel. We look away, stretch our eyes toward the front yard, and inhale springtime.

The sun shines hot and bright. The currant is dressed in showy pink blooms that complement her abundant foliage. A hummingbird visits one pendulous blossom after another, sipping sweet nectar, hovering at eye level for a moment before darting away. Nature’s splendor seduces us. Words flit here and there like butterflies. A few of them alight on the page.

in the company of flowers

for once

we are oblivious to our old aches

to the overreaching oligarchs

to the obliteration occurring all around us

My writer gathers word bouquets. I hold my breath. Wait for magic. Travel back in time.

I am a small child

studying sporadic wildflowers

in a mountain’s shadow

I am a schoolgirl

striking poses with abundant peonies

planted in a tidy row

An elusive noise interrupts our flow. We turn toward the whirring, mesmerized by the timeless dance of fauna and flora courting.

a tiny throat clad in ruby feathers
fancies blush-tipped petals drenched in morning sun

Ribes sanguineum

We delight in the way the plant’s Latin name encircles our heads like a lazy-day daisy chain. We picture it written in an arc of curly pink letters, mimicking the flower bending to meet the hummingbird’s expectant beak. Petal-shaped words cascade down. I resist an urge to contain them.

Ribes
sounds like rubies

Ruby
deep, dark red
precious gemstone the color of blood

Sanguineum
sounds like sangre

Sangre
Spanish for blood
like Sangre de Cristo

New Mexico Mountains, our mountains

Sanguineum
bloody

tinged with blood

the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation

Sanguineum
bloody
blood-red
bloodstained

the stain of colonialism, the dye of hegemony

Sanguineum

our hands, our fingers
tinged with blood

the blood of fearsome foreigners

the blood of neighbors, the cup of pandemonium

Sanguineum

our country, our conscience
stained with blood

the blood of “little excursions”

the blood of schoolgirls, the cup of damnation

Since when are our neighbors foreigners?
Since when are we afraid of schoolgirls?

My writer demands the truth.

Since always, I’m tempted to say, but I let the questions hover there, below damnation. I heave a sigh and turn back to the window, to the red-flowering currant. Will I ever be able to look at her without thinking of blood?

What’s in a name? Ribes sanguineum asks coyly, ruby-kissed blossoms swaying, as she stretches her fearless limbs skyward.

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

Jane Louise Ellefson, my dad’s younger sister, died on January 20, 2025. I posted this poem ten days later, but my long-time Substack followers first met her back in September of 2024, when I wrote about a couple of her Aunt Jane-isms.

I’ve been clearing clutter—sorting through photos and memorabilia, and ruthlessly discarding things I’ve kept for years that no longer serve me. It calms my nerves, makes me feel lighter, and helps me return to what matters most.

This morning, I unearthed a paper Aunt Jane had written during her time attending Saint Paul School of Theology in Minnesota back in the 1980s. Its simple title, “Credo,” along with her gorgeous line drawing, graces the cover. In addition, there are two handwritten notes. The first is to her mother, my Gaga, dated Mother’s Day 1987. The second is to me, penned in 2000. It begins “Dear Caitie,” and instructs me to “toss” it after reading. Her rationale? “We keep too much paper—but keep a thought or two instead.”

I didn’t follow directions.

Dear Aunt Jane,

This is one artifact I will never toss. Like you, it is timeless, and reading it still brings me great solace. I am sharing a bit of it with my readers, along with the hope that they will also keep “a thought or two” from your Credo and pass them on. Perhaps it will inspire us all to “reach out even to our closest neighbors” in love and solidarity.

xoxoxo,

Caitlin

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to hold this thing
It isn’t mine
It never was

My fingers give up

My thumb joints give in

My palm lies open 
	exposed and sighing

Inert stories
Calcification
Unwashed sins

I’m ready to move on

My forever mountain stands guard
	exposed and sighing

Majestic
Indulgent
Blue

It’s time to let go

My wrist rotates
	releasing 
		the too-precious stone
			
My amulet falls
	exposed and sighing

I'm trying to walk away from this thing
It winks up at me
It bends the light
	this gem that has become a burden 

                                                                                                                             CES 1/13/2026

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Invitation

How do you navigate that uncomfortable space between holding on and letting go? Do you do it gradually, like wading into a cold lake? Do you invite the water to lap at your ankles, knees, thighs, belly button? Then do you go up on your tiptoes—arms spread wide, counting “one, two, three,” sometimes all the way up to ten—before you take the plunge? Or do you embrace your decisiveness all at once, diving right in, exhilarated by she shock? It depends on the day for me, the circumstances, my perception of the preciousness of whatever it is I’m grasping. Either way, release always comes as a relief.

Leave a comment

My dad’s new love was an emblem of his flirtation with conventionality. She was sleek and silver, had air conditioning, power steering, and cruise control.

I didn’t know or care much about cars, but I was delighted to be free from the rusty 1953 Chevy truck with the homemade plywood camper shell I had passed countless hours en route from New Mexico to Old Mexico to Nebraska and back again. The ancient truck, with its conspicuous holes in the dash where a radio should have been, cemented my status as an outsider during my formative years on the Private Sector Welfare Farm. I was the girl who lived miles out of town, at the end of a dirt road, on a commune, in a log cabin without electricity and running water. I had a dad with a ponytail and no mother to speak of.

But our move in the summer of 1979 to Columbus, Nebraska, to live with my grandmother, was a fresh start. Suddenly I was plunked down in middle America, surrounded by mown lawns, and sidewalks, and neighborhood kids, and porch lights that magically came on at dusk.

I don’t remember the El Camino’s year or how long we’d lived in Columbus when my dad found his gently used treasure. In spite of his rejection of middle-class values—he was an anti-capitalist, a quasi-revolutionary, an anarchist—he loved that car. He kept it immaculate, washing and waxing it as regularly as our new neighbors attended church. He sang along to the country station late at night as we drove home from visiting my aunt in Lincoln or his girlfriend in York. I would lie on the bench seat, my head in his lap, perfectly content knowing he was, too. Feeling in that moment as though we had escaped all of the things that kept us from normalcy.

I craved all things normal as a kid. Normal was watching “Happy Days” and “The Muppet Show” and fanatically following the Huskers (Nebraska’s college football team), which we did. Normal was also having HBO, and later MTV, which we did not. Normal was going on ski vacations over spring break, wearing Nikes and shopping for clothes at Brass Buckle. We did none of these things because people who did were giving in to consumerism and capitalism, the forces that were to blame for all that was wrong with the world.

Dad’s tenderness often emerged in the climate-controlled air of El Camino. It wasn’t just the way he sang along to the radio, or the way he indulged me with a trip to the Nike outlet in Boston after he’d made it clear that name brands were off limits. It was as though we were encased in a magical cocoon, shielded from the judgements and disappointments that seemed to follow us, where even Dad’s rules didn’t always apply.

When we drove the El Camino to Boston to visit family, my dad let me bring Cheez Whiz along, the kind that comes in the can with the plastic nozzle you press to make the ‘cheese’ squirt out. I was also allowed to invite a friend. Beth and I had the time of our lives on that cross-country road trip. We rode the entire way semi-reclined under the camper shell, surrounded by pillows, blankets, and snacks. It didn’t seem to matter that my dad was proud to be the kind of road-tripper who “drove straight through,” never making hotel stops or sightseeing forays.

On the dozens of long drives I went on with Dad, if we did stop for an overnight, it was always at a friend’s or relative’s house, not a hotel, and never a resort. There may have been one or two exceptions to this rule during my entire childhood, made because my dad simply couldn’t stay awake to drive.

I think one exception was a quick layover in a motel on the Boston trip with Beth, but there wasn’t anything memorable about it. The hours we spent entertaining each other in the back of the El Camino, emerging only for bathroom breaks when my dad finally decided it was time, are what stand out.

I was borderline euphoric on that vacation. Images of the rainbow stickers and ice cream cone shoelaces bought while shopping in Boston, long days building sandcastles on the beach and non-stop giggling crowd my mind when I attempt to pinpoint what exactly it was that filled my eleven-year-old heart with glee. I had one of my best friends all to myself, a pair of baby blue Nikes, and unlimited Cheez Whiz. Or maybe the ordinary felt extraordinary under the El Camino’s spell.

The El Camino held us through hard days, too. The timeline is fuzzy on this one, but I think it happened the winter before the Boston trip. Dad and I were on a short drive across town. I have no recollection of where we were going, but I remember wondering why he chose that particular moment to tell me he and his girlfriend Mickey had broken up.

I can still see the exact street we drove on when Dad cleared his throat and said my name using his careful voice. I remember the rectangular yards we passed and their leafless, uninterested trees, the way Dad’s voice made everything drab. I bet I could still identify the nondescript, clapboard house with the screened-in porch my father parked in front of while he broke the news. I counted the house’s windows, over and over, noted a baseball-sized hole in one of the screens, wondered how many kids lived there. Anything so I didn’t have to meet his eyes.

I also remember the way my heart sank, then left my body—a deep well of dread in its place—when I understood we wouldn’t be spending any more blissful weekends in York with Mickey and her son. I had already claimed the woman as my new mom and the boy as my younger brother. Now I’d probably never see them again. Dad let the tears roll down his cheeks, put the car in drive and eased back onto the empty street. I sat there numbly wondering how our lucky streak, sparked by the appearance of the El Camino, could end so abruptly.

Maybe Dad’s enchanted automobile had another plan for us. Soon its bench seat comfortably held my him, me, and the woman who would become my bonus-mom: Elaine. To this day, I wonder if the El Camino summoned the only woman on earth who could hold her own with my larger-than-life father, forgive his shenanigans and tend to his wounded heart.

Thank you for reading. Happy New Year!

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

December’s new moon
dangles
over fallow fields

plowed, harrowed, forgotten

Creativity
rests
in loamy, dank beds

plowed, harrowed, forgotten

Impatient fingernails
scratch
at cold, dirty mounds

Quivering hands
exhume
soil-caked memories

Palmfuls of kernels
gleam with
audacious potential

Muddy hands
press seeds
back into bosom-earth

plowed, harrowed, fecund

A crescent moon
dangles
over beginnings
that used to be ends

CES 12/19/2025

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

You call this a communal, collective, egalitarian place
 
I call it a vicious battleground
          upon it we vie for my dead father’s throne 

The one you occupy now 
        carving your self righteousness into weathered wood
Shouting over me
       when I claim blood-right, birthright 
under stifled breath
       insinuating if anyone wears Dad’s crown 
              it will be me 

I learned from the best

You puff out your chest 
         frightening my fledgling self righteousness away

You cite propriety, hardship, life’s work 

Thrown, I retreat to my secret place
I fawn
I relent

Licking my wounds
Waiting for a sign
Listening for a whisper

"Comparison is the thief of joy" 

You will not take mine

Joy springs from within me 
       like meadow wildflowers
             following rain 
like clean dirt and fresh leaves 

Renewal 
as ancient 
as the story of ponderosa pines
imprinting on me 
       and me on them

My chubby, sap-sticky hands 
       making forever whorls on their skin
Their interlocking bark
      making my fingers’ first memories 

And the land beneath us
all around us 
within us

At the heart of every argument
       is the land 
A spirit
An entity unto herself

My commitment is to Her 
and Her alone

You and I are not friends
We are not equals
We are not united in purpose
though once-upon-a-time we pretended to be

You will not steal my joy

I will not let my personhood 
       be spun into shame

I will not be silenced by 
       misogyny’s meanness
I will not be intimidated by the way
you wield it
fling it around 
      its ugly tail snapping a whip's stinging song

You expect me to cower
as I did when I was a child in your house
       and you stood over your own children—my friends—
a leather belt in your hands

The day will come
It’s almost here
      peeking over the horizon 

I’ll walk away,
shoulders back,
head high
nothing in my hands
not money, nor title, nor deed

Leaving you with the throne 
gloating
giddy from the spoils of war

Leaving me with nothing 
smiling
pine sap flowing through my veins

a nothing that’s everything 
and more

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

dim days, cold nights

rain setting in

make a cocoon

use blankets or secrets or fallen leaves

muffled days, numb nights

sun angling in

make a cocoon

use calendar pages—the 24th, the 11th, the 21st

November days, November nights

memories creeping in

make a cocoon

use yarn or birthday candles or ink

CES 11/5/2025

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

October 23, 2025

Seventy-seven months ago, my dad died. Forty-one months ago, the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire incinerated the land where I grew up. Separate events, each on Mother’s Day. As if I needed another loved one to miss on that holiday.

I am raw again. Another round of fisticuffs with FEMA has left me wobbly. I’m tired, but I’m fighting. And I am writing.

Today there’s no reprieve. My grief is as raw now as was on Mother’s Day, 1976. My grief is as raw now as was on Mother’s Day, 2019. As raw as it was on Mother’s Day, 2022. As raw as it has been each time in the forty-one months since the fire that I’ve been pulled back into the ring for another round of proof-of-loss.

I know the writing I’m posting today is redundant. I’ve told this story before. But redundant is the only way I can describe my recurring ache. Redundant. Like the FEMA claim process itself. Redundant. But today, I simply do not care about redundancy. I need someone to witness my redundant grief.

The first part, “May 2023,” is a deleted scene from my meta-memoir.

I wrote the second part, “FEMA Maze: Forty-one Months Hence,” this morning.

Thanks for reading.

May 2023

I close my journal and rest my pencil beside it. Lately, pens are too permanent for the words spilling unbidden onto the page. Today they took me home to the mountains of northern New Mexico where the dusty-fresh scent of sage-meets-vanilla-pine was once palpable, then suddenly gone—replaced by a ubiquitous ashy residue.

I come back to my body slowly. My skin, open and oozing. Prickling like a head-to-toe road rash. I notice my breath, the tears drying on my cheeks. My mind, fuzzy.

The bland taupe sofa and brightly painted walls are not enough to orient me. I need to be outside. My gaze travels through the window. First to the lemon tree, then to the wild currant dancing gently in the breeze.

The fog has burned off. The sky is a washed-out cornflower blue. The morning sun highlights each shade of foliage, from the dull gray-brown-green of the California live oaks to the waxy chartreuse of the lemon and lime trees. But the colors are wrong. The sky is too pale. There’s a riot of leaves and not a single needle. The trees are too round. None stamps a pyramid on the sky. And where is the red-brown earth?

All I can see are the already goldening grasses out front, wood chips scattered around the fruit trees, pale gray driveway rocks leading to the darker gray asphalt in the street. The municipal waste bins—green, royal blue, and gray—line up like obedient soldiers, marching my soul back to reality. To this home. In Santa Cruz, California. The house I have lived in the longest. The house where my husband and I raised our children. The house I never intend to leave.

The home I wrote about in my journal today is both a physical place and a state of being. I cannot shake either one.

Ever since my childhood house burned down a year ago, I have been consumed by preserving the vision my parents had for the property when they arrived there in 1969. My brain understands this is impossible. My heart refuses to give up. It clings to the notion that if I do everything right, I will be able to secure a conservation easement and prevent the land from being developed in perpetuity.

Grasping at the notion of recompensation, I use FEMA’s claim process as an excuse to spend hours sifting through old photographs, then valuing and cataloging the possessions from these images, all of them lost to the fire. I talk on the phone with my second mom, Elaine, in Albuquerque again and again. She calls when she remembers another piece of furniture, a set of dishes, a woodworking tool kit she and Dad stored at the cabin.

I call her for cost estimates of items they bought in the ‘80s. Despite the miles between us, we grow closer and closer, our bond fortified by mourning. We both rack our brains, conjuring up the contents of rooms we’ll never see again. We laugh and cry and share “one beautiful thing” we saw or heard that day. My second mom is an expert at finding beauty in the ugliest times.

I develop shoulder and hip pain from spending hours on the computer writing Pain and Suffering Statements and filling out FEMA’s Proof of Loss forms. Elaine and I are grateful my father isn’t alive to endure the snail-paced maze of red tape President Biden promised would “make us whole” again. I close my eyes and imagine his reaction.

“Jesus, even the Democrats are a bunch of God-damned fascists. At least the Republicans admit they put the war machine above all else, instantly sending billions of dollars around the globe and cutting social programs to do it. The Democrats are just as bad. You’d think they would have learned something from the Katrina shit show, but FEMA is as ineffective now as it was then, if not more so. And the God-damned Feds lit the fire in the first place. Bureaucracy.”

Dad rolls his eyes, and pushes back his chair from the table in disdain, as if the government itself, not a licked-clean plate and a glass of red wine sit in front of him.

The image of my father punctuating his tirade with curses and drawing certain words out slowly, pulling his mouth back toward his ears in an almost-grimace, makes me smile with equal parts nostalgia and discomfort. Anyone who knew John Ellefson would agree it was nearly impossible to get through a meal without him railing against capitalism and the military-industrial complex. However, the dad who visits me since his death three years ago is much softer. This is the father who read me stories by the light of kerosene lamps and taught one of our kittens how to fetch a coiled twist-tie he dubbed “snakie.”

Dad doesn’t always talk when he visits from the great beyond, but he always comforts me. I feel his spirit reflected in the “sky-blue pink” light heralding dawn or dusk, hear his laugh after fart jokes or sophomoric double entendres, see his eyes twinkle in anticipation at every special occasion feast, and feel him hug me from the inside out when my eyes rest upon the Shaker-style desk he made me.

For all of his anarchist vitriol, my father was a tenderhearted craftsman whose creativity emerged through carpentry and woodworking. The cabin was tangible evidence of this. While other more recent and, some might argue, more refined expressions of Dad’s creativity remain, he cherished the cabin most. The first house he designed and built, he related to it as some people relate to a first love—you know the one—no matter how ill-suited, the love you never really got over.

“The New Mexico cabin,” my father said from his mountain of pillows, his oxygen machine humming in the background. It was a rare moment of semi-lucidity during his final days. Moments before, he had told me he needed his trousers and billfold. I responded by asking him where he would like to go. Later, the hospice nurse explained the phenomenon of traveling—when patients enter the liminal space between life and death—in search of their final resting place. The New Mexico cabin was Dad’s.

I never romanticized living in my father’s beloved log house the same way he did, though we both had complicated relationships with the cabin. Like a favorite childhood book resting on a shelf unopened for years, its presence had always reassured me.

Well, not always. It was as though the mountain home and I were magnets—charged particles with a powerful attraction—but when our like poles faced each other, the house repelled me and I kept my distance, unwilling to meet the memories.

Visits had become fewer and further over the years, but instead of releasing the property after Dad died, I clung to it. It was proof of his existence and a container for my early life. Unlike my father’s aging body—which had gone from superheroic to stove-up to short-of-breath, swollen and immobile in what seemed like an instant—the cabin remained immutable in my mind’s eye.

Even during the pins-and-needles month leading up to Mother’s Day 2022, when the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak Fire raged within striking distance of our acreage in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I saw the structure as I had once seen my dad. Invincible.

The horrific photos Elaine texted me in the wake of the the fateful night when the winds shifted and the fire fed on our land like an erratic, hungry beast proved me wrong. For weeks afterward, my idle mind wandered to the disaster scene. My eyes leaked, and my internal voice squawked a reel of questions and insults.

What is the matter with you? You’re such an idiot. Why didn’t you go up to the cabin when you had the chance? How could the Forest Service have been so irresponsible? Who in their right mind would start a prescribed burn under those conditions? They’re idiots. But you’re a bigger idiot. What is the matter with you?

One particularly trying afternoon, I stood at the sink, washed dishes, and stared into nothingness, condemning myself and the U.S. government for our stupidity. The hot, sudsy water felt good. As my mind began to quiet, my eyes rested on the crimson and cream blade of Dad’s college oar, displayed on the high half-wall beyond the pass-through connecting our kitchen to the living area.

Thank goodness Elaine convinced Dad to bring the oar to me in California instead of hauling it back to the cabin when they moved from Nebraska to Albuquerque several years ago.

The familiar, gold all-caps lettering—some of the first words I tried to sound out as a child—steadied me. GRAND CHALLENGE CUP. NEW LONDON. Beneath them, smaller lettering acted as a scoreboard: HARVARD 19:52 YALE 20:20.

I couldn’t see the black words near the oar’s handle from my vantage point, but they were etched in my mind—J. Ellefson No.2 UNDEFEATED, along with the champion’s gleam in his eye when he spoke of his boat’s 1959 Henley Royal Regatta victory.

Tears ran down my cheeks as I remembered the oar’s prominent place in the cabin. It was both out of place and inherent to our rugged mountain house’s aesthetic—an embodiment of my father’s struggle to reconcile his chosen counterculturist values with his middle-America meets intellectual-elite upbringing.

Inexplicably, my eyes flitted through the high windows beyond the oar, resting on two large live oak trees at the far end of our backyard. There was an opening where their canopies overlapped, framing the bright sky with a perfectly formed heart shape. It pulled me in and hugged me from the inside out. Then I heard Dad’s voice, imbued with fondness, “It served its purpose.”

Dad would never say that.

My inner skeptic resisted the message, but for the first time since I heard the news, my jaw unclenched and my heart expanded. His voice washed over me again: “It served its purpose.”

I know you’re right, Dad, but I’m not ready to let go.

FEMA Maze: Forty-one Months Hence

Haven’t I lived this day already?
or am I losing my mind?

You haven’t lost it
	it’s over there

Where?

Over there!
Making spreadsheets
        uploading photos, warranty deeds, bylaws
        dialing 505 area-code numbers
        printing bank statements
        property tax receipts

Pain and Suffering Statements
	thank God we filed those 
		how many years ago?

Personal Property Loss
Prove it
	again and again and again

But we don’t own the land
Then who does?

Aren’t we all just passing through?

My parents bought it fifty-six years ago
      we share it with four other families
           and steward it 
                and pay taxes

Prove it they say

Prove you had a right to build there
	to house your possessions in
             that modest cabin			

Erased by fire

I’m back in that modest cabin
      it's the 1970s again
	then the ‘80s, ‘90s, the aughts

But it’s 2025

Feels like 1975
       2019
             2022
                  2023

The walls closing in

Where did 2024 go?

I’m back in 1994

Lonesome for you every day
        he told me

I rolled my eyes
       until I understood

Standing at his bedside in 2019
	already lonesome for him
	though he still drew breath
	       barely
	nearly ready to go

I never would be
	ready, that is
                  for him to go

Dad, now I understand

Lonesome for you every day
	and for that cabin only you could replace
		you
                      gone, irreplaceable
	
Lonesome for you
        and for my own far-flung babies, twenty and twenty-four now

Our phone conversations like returning home
	
Each goodbye like returning home
       to a house that's an ashy memory

                                                                                                                              CES 10/23/2025

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations and to join the conversation, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Leave a comment

On the television, a man cradles a champagne bottle like a sleeping newborn

“If you open it correctly, it sounds like a lady’s heart”

A bottle uncorked, a heartbeat
      lost
           in the corseted ribcage of a lady  

In my head, a thought disobeys its jailer like a burning bra

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

My voice uncorked, a rhetorical serve
	unreturned
		in the habitual innocence of our living room

In my belly, word-stew simmers like a revolution

********

A lady’s heart
          like the lady herself
                 a figment of the patriarchy’s imagination 

The patriarchy cannot know what it will never understand

What a lady understands 

What we understand

The patriarchy granted us—straight, white, cis women—lady status 
         only to imprison us 
                    in a crumbling castle 

     Elevated us—the ladies—just enough to cleave us from our othered sisters
                                                                                              from all the othered others 
          To have and to hold, to pamper, to mold
                                                                       to contain 
                                     no reason to complain

********

They can keep their delusional fairy tale. I’m writing my own.

And when they have taken everything else from us
they will finally know 
the sound of a woman’s heartbeat

A woman’s heartbeat
does not whisper like a bottle of bubbly opened with finesse

And this is what they fear

What they have known all along 
	but will never understand

And this is what we’ve built
our own armory
	of invisible guns
		loaded, silenced, poised

And this is what they hear
the steady thump 
	of another log
		tossed on a raging fire

And this is what they dread
the pounding clang
      of glitter-clad nails 
           closing a coffin

And this is what we hear
the joyous bomp-bomp	
     of unfettered feet
	 dancing the patriarchy's eulogy

Epilogue

My husband and I discussed the t.v. comment that prompted my word stew later. Much later. After I’d already written the poem.

I shared how I seethed over the “lady’s heart” comment. He shared how he had heard it as “lady’s fart.”

Is it better for the sound of a lady’s woman’s bodily functions to be trapped above or below her corset? One is certainly more crass, as my husband pointed out. Either way, our bodies are not our own. Either way, we are silenced. And when our silencing—or the silencing of othered others—is met with silence, do we have the courage to shout?

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations, visit Bare’s Community page.

Exciting News! In our first year, Bare has donated over $700 to worthy causes. It brings me great joy to see how our collective efforts are creating a ripple effect.

Community

No Invitation today—a thank you for listening to the true sound of my heartbeat. A special shout-out to a dear friend who may recognize her own heart in a few of these lines. Thank you for the inspiration and for trusting me with your story.

Leave a comment

I can’t believe it’s been that long since I committed to baring my soul and began posting my lightly edited (sometimes unedited—yikes!) writing. As many of you know, Bare is by-product of my ongoing memoir experiment. I wanted to hold myself accountable to an audience, while taking as much time and space as I needed to write privately about my deepest wounds.

Since then, I have shared 27 Substack pieces and written over 60,0000 memoir-adjacent words. All year long, a whisper-of-a-voice has been pestering me from the space between my heart and my belly. “Could I, should I, dare I write a book?”

“Yes!” Today, my voice rings out with confidence about the path I am forging toward completion of my manuscript. Thanks to the patient wisdom of my writing coach, Reema Zamaan, and the unconditional support of other writers, friends, and family, I have reached an exciting place.

In addition to reworking old scenes and creating new ones, I am ruthlessly deleting sections—some that took eons to compose. Yes, you heard correctly, deleting is exciting! I can now envision what I couldn’t six months ago. I understand what my book is, and more importantly, what it is not. It is neither pure memoir nor pure fiction. It is not poetry (though it is occasionally lyrical with a sprinkling of whimsy). Reema coined a brilliant term for what I am creating. She calls it a meta-memoir. Stay tuned, and one of these days, you might discover why.

The poem I’m posting today is an early memoiresque musing from January, 2024. Initially, I thought it might serve as a prologue, but now I know it doesn’t fit. I am resisting the urge to edit it even as I type this sentence. Instead, I’ll use it as a time capsule. Looking back so I can continue looking forward.

New Mexico
 
 	   	 1969
	        -1912
Merely         57 years of statehood 
when John and Judy arrived 
seeking all they sought

Counterculturalists 
unwittingly following 
a centuries-long tradition 
of being wooed 
by the sacredness 
of this place

Did they sense the
stories and hearts and souls 
layered in the red earth
and crumbling adobes
flowing in the creek’s trickle 
singing with the wind 
in the ponderosa boughs?

Did my parents’ desire 
for homemaking 
in the hushed mountain air
at 7,000 feet
mimic the desires of Spanish kings 
and their Hispano land grantees
their Penitentes? 

or the desires 
of the Mexican treaty-makers
and the Anglo pioneers 
who came later
to claim this place?  

When they pictured 
the goat families 
garden plots
solitude 
on this new-to-them land 
did they also believe 
in their divine right 
to use these 120 acres as they saw fit? 

When they gathered 
four other households 
to share in their dream 
to live off the land

forsaking electricity
plumbing
paved roads
pesticides
capitalism

with the ultimate intent
to “return” the land
to the Jicarilla Apache

but only 
after they and their descendants 
were “finished” possessing it

were they blind 
to the settler colonialism
embedded in their plan? 

Or were they like me?  

so full of good intentions
so accustomed to benefiting from
whiteness
higher education
English learned from birth

so used to having options 
when things went awry 
that they were innocent 
to the impact of their actions?

 2024
-1970
     54 years of living in this body
when I arrived 
at my soul’s gate
finally brave enough 
to make sense of what lies within

As always, your readership, likes, and comments mean the world to me. Sharing my raw compositions with you has helped me develop the confidence to call myself a writer and the audacity to take on a book project. Thank you for keeping me motivated and helping me grow as an author and a human being.

Invitation

Reflect on something that was important to you a year ago. Is it still relevant to your life? Or have you moved on? What does this reflection bring up for you? What might you be looking back on next year at this time?

Leave a comment

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations and to join the conversation, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

A star is there
	when no one else is around

Winking at me
          from her pre-dawn canvas
                       washed in cold indigo
                                 her silver-white eyelashes
                                                colder still

Is it lonely out there?
	Is she scared?
                  among violent dust shards swirling in breathless air

Who holds her?

What would it take
	to span the distance
		from here to there?
		
                me a speck on a weeping orb
			her a pinprick on the the closed curtain
				of heaven’s stage 

Does she ache 
     bearing witness to earth’s despair?

Do the strangled oceans
	the thirsty forests
		the wounded cities
			cry out in pain?

Do they plead like I do?
	star light, star bright
		wishing with all my might
			before she fades into daylight

Does she miss us then?
        the star-wishers
	           when the sun’s brilliance erases hers?

Or does vanishing bring relief?

Invitation

Are you a star-wisher? What do you wish for today? (It’s okay if you don’t want to share… somebody once told me if I told my wish it wouldn’t come true).

Leave a comment

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations and to join the conversation, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

when you don't have words
     or you do 
but they can't begin to describe
     what's inside

when outside
      horror has become 
 commonplace
     (or maybe it always was)
 
so much so 
     that the world itself 
               has become 
                       one horror after another

a mosaic of monstrous mayhem 

and your silence
your complicity

my silence
my complicity

have finally run their course

time to speak out

but it's too late

is it too late?

our words as far-flung  
     as the famines we fund
fueled by the hatred we hide 
     under the folds  
          of our star-spangled pride

have our star-strangled voices died
     alongside 
                the multitudes erased by
           occupation, invasion, genocide, starvation
                  words that defy reconciliation

are we numb 
to their repetition
deaf to their call?

        Gaza
                      gauze
gaunt
               taunt
                              haunt
                                           
           blood
                 bath
     
                                    bomb
                 tomb
                                                   womb
mother       child       

                          me
                                     you
                                                     us

Invitation

Play word association. Start with a word that evokes a strong emotion. Write it down. Then list the next word that pops into your head, then the next, and so on. Do this for thirty to sixty seconds and see where you end up. What is the relationship between the first and the last word? Is there anything else you notice about the progression of the words or how you felt before, during, and after the exercise?

Leave a comment

Community

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. For a list of these organizations and to join the conversation, visit Bare’s Community page.

More Powerful Than Pistols

If perfection exists
it’s in the face of a flower
I wrote back in May, when Spring astonished me

then, amid the hum
of a No Kings crowd in my hometown
I was astonished again

two women bearing bunches of red carnations
their faces resolute with hope
their petals perfuming the air with dissent

our fingers brushing 
as one of them
handed me a stem in solidarity
our patriotic eyes chanting 

Resist

then this week 
in the pages of the LA Times
I was astonished again

hundreds gathering at an inter-faith march 
their raised fists filled with flowers
making a rainbow in the sky
carnations, sunflowers, gladiolas

their feet walking to the Federal Building
where countless beloved neighbors are caged

their fists placing soft blooms by boots of hardened men
their petals perfuming the air with prayers more powerful than pistols
their voices asking the guards how they want history to remember them 

now flowers fill concrete steps
softening square edges
their delicate, devout faces 
reminding us to fight
for a more perfect union 

If perfection exists
it’s in the face of a flower

Invitation

The word perfect is derived from the Latin perficere, meaning “to finish” or to bring to an end. In Portugal in 1974, red carnations played a role in ending a fascist dictatorship that had held power for forty-two years. Click this link to read more. 

Perfume also has Latin roots: per meaning forward or through, and fumare: "to fill with smoke or vapor" (think incense). According to etymonline,  the word perfume came into English usage in the 1530s from the French parfumer: “to impart a sweet scent to.”

What would you like to see come to an end… in your community… in your country… in the world… in yourself? 

Do you have any thoughts on—or examples of—imparting sweetness to odious situations? 

Leave a comment

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. In June, donations will go to CHIRLA. For a complete list of the organization Bare supports and to join the conversation, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community

Confidence

hiding among
trees whose families rooted
long before a road 
         cut into a mountainside 

what secrets do they know
whose histories do they hold

who named the town
nestled under ancient boughs

white letters 
on a green rectangle
Confidence

is the act of naming 
a wish 
a reminder
         of what brought settlers here

or is it why they persist
how they endure
the isolation
the frigid winters
the parched months
         when fire licks at their dreams

Santa Cruz (Holy Cross)

(Note: all the underlined words in this post are links to sources if you would like to explore a topic or a term in greater detail.)

My hometown—the place I have lived for the last thirty years—was named by Spanish missionaries. It is a beachside resort, a hippie hamlet, a quirky college town. It is also one of the most expensive places to live nationwide, and beneath the anything-goes, liberal veneer lies a pernicious I-was-here-first-ism rooted false logic, settler colonialism and white supremacy culture.

On the surface, these isms—these ills—seem to cause me no personal harm. I can bob on gentle waves, turning away from what lurks beneath, never stopping to wonder about the history of the place I call home, the lies that have become truths, the absence of facts, the absence of faces that aren’t white. (To learn more about Santa Cruz history, click this link).

Columbus is the town I called home during adolescence—Nebraska, not Ohio. There’s a history there, too. A history that extends below the paved streets on the parade route I once walked carrying a flute, then wearing a cheerleading skirt, on October days commemorating the man who “discovered America,” but never set foot in Nebraska. A history that flows from the city’s wide rivers. The Loup and The Platte. They both run south of town, near a park named Pawnee to steer the narrative in the direction the namers wanted it to go.

Naming is a curious practice—a conscious choice of what to put in and what to leave out. Mountains, for instance, how are they named?

Hermit’s Peak, near my birthplace in New Mexico, was named in 1867 after a reclusive Italian monk took up residence there. Before that it was called El Cerro del Tecolote (Spanish for Owl’s Peak), but what about the centuries prior to Spanish settlement of the region in the late 1500s? A cursory internet search yields no results for indigenous names for the mountain. Another erasure.

A different peak near my current home carries the name of a man who arrived millennia after its original inhabitants. In 1846, John C. Fremont raised a U.S. flag at its apex, replacing the name it was given during the Spanish Mission period, Gavilan Peak, with his own. (Note: Gavilan, sometimes spelled gabilan, means hawk).

But what was Fremont Peak called before European contact? Does claiming ownership of the land give you the right to name it?

The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is working to restore the sacred mountain’s indigenous name, Tooyotak, which means the place of the bumble bee in the Mutsun language. (To read Tribal Chair Valentin Lopez’s remarks on the proposed renaming, click this link).

All this musing on naming has not led me to tidy conclusions, but to more questions. Who gets to name a place? How do we decide when to change it? Do the words we attach to places reflect our world view, our values, our state of mind?
Are they passing fancies, or do they cling—seeping into the water we drink, sneaking into our psyches?

Invitation

"What's in a name?
That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
—William Shakespeare

Do you agree or disagree with Shakespeare? Would that which we call a town or a mountain by any other name smell as sweet?

Does this post spark curiosity about the names of the places you’ve lived?

Leave a comment

I believe in sharing financial abundance. 100% of subscription payments will be donated to non-profit organizations. In June, donations will go to CHIRLA. For a complete list of the organization Bare supports and to join the conversation, visit Bare’s Community page.

Community