This image was drawn with great admiration from The Story of Ferdinand written by Munro Leaf & illustrated by Robert Lawson. It appears in Condition.

“Opportunity and enterprise are on the horizon, but be wary to not descend into greed and corruption. Use your ambition for good.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

CARD COUNT: 22/78

After all that work with the Major Arcana, I was relieved to pull the Ace of Pentacles:

Working with the questions raised by Major Arcana feels like weight training with transparent dumbells. It’s not that the Minor Arcana isn’t work. It just feels more direct and day to day. Its meaning can stretch across a few weeks or an hour. The opportunity a Minor Arcana card presents for reflection, honesty, and assessment depends on the moment in which it is pulled.

If I am honest, I don’t have much today. More than one opportunity has knocked at our door, and we opened it to let them in. My daughter started kindergarten this morning. She was the first in the door at the newly built elementary school around the corner. The principal took her hand, she waved goodbye, and we watched our girl pass through the doors into an entirely new experience of school. As I write, I don’t know what this day has brought for her, and my heart is down the road with her, hoping it all goes well. Some opportunities both thrill and scare, some ache. This is one of those.

At the same time, I will be starting at a new school. I will continue to teach writing at the adult learning center in our county, but I was also invited to teach a section of English Composition at our local community college. I have wanted to teach at this school for years. Between my degree and publications, I felt qualified but struggled to get my foot in the door. Qualified and ready are different things, and somewhere in me, I knew that.

However, a few weeks ago, I happened to say aloud to B that I want to help more people, that I wanted to reach more students with my instruction. Less than 24 hours later, I got a text from a friend, an employee at the college, saying they were looking for an instructor for a class that met in exactly the only window I had open. Of course, I said I was interested, and the hiring process went quickly because the class starts in two weeks. I have no time to hesitate. Despite my nerves, I will pull a syllabus together, plan my first few classes, train on these new platforms, and step into a new role in a new class.

Sometimes I feel like I am a student before I am anything else. Whether it’s the classrooms of my childhood, that of my alma mater, my poetry or my relationships, the world itself, I apply myself as completely as I can. A teacher is a student inverted, expanded, and also a witness, a steward to another’s process of transformation through learning. Opportunities exist at every moment. For my daughter and me, school is acutely in session. I reach out for it. I am here.

Final draft of the Ace of Pentacles drawn from my hand and the tiny island off the causeway pictured below:

For this card, I read A Place Beyond Shame by Ed Steck, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 by Jean Valentine, and Vernal Thaw: A Novel of Love at a Slant by Frances Cannon.

In reading these three books, I think of how opportunity comes often from the generosity of others. I can’t help but mention Dolly Parton, our extraordinary American artist, musician, and philanthropist who passed away this past week. Her talent was enormous, but her generosity was larger still. She made opportunities for so many others. Ace of Pentacles cards must have flipped happily as she passed. May we all follow her example, that our freedom, our success, leads to greater freedom and success and safety for those around us. May our ambitions lead us forward, but always looking back at who we can bring along with us, looking around at who we can lift up, and forward at who we can become. Dolly taught us that. What an icon.

Authors do this too. Each of these poets inscribe incredible opportunities for their readers. Steck is profoundly generous in this work. First, his language is stunning, unique and unrelenting, much like the horror films he references throughout the text. It’s a hybrid work that features photographs, film stills, and movie lists, amongst other surprising poetic shapes, the central-most piece being what he called a double feature. This long form poem tells the story of a community destroyed by failed industry, late capitalism, and the opioid epidemic, and specific forces those factors exerted on his family. The consequence is a horror landscape. Life becomes a horror film, a traumatic kind of throttling. The poem has two main parts that are laid alongside each other on the page in two columns that run on for thirty pages or so. It is jarring and frightening and tender and sad. To witness such things takes bravery. To write it takes bravery to the point of an almost reckless generosity. It is an opportunity to read this book, written by one who feels like the last one standing.

Full disclosure, Frances Cannon is a dear friend whose writing I have loved for years. I watched her craft this novel lovingly for a long time between states and jobs and loves. It started as autofiction and moved into near fiction and, in some parts, total fiction as she and her people became characters with lives of their own. I know it is cliche to call a book unputdownable, but I truly couldn’t close this one. I felt as though I was across the table at a dive bar with my friend as she regalled me with a story that tightened my heart with thrill and worry for her. It also documents a time and a place that no longer really exists, a Burlington, VT of our shared youth that has changed as we have changed never to return. I loved this book as I love my friend. Reading it is a generous pleasure, a real opportunity. I want to say more, but I won’t because you should read it too and experience it as I did, with breathlessness.

Below, I read Jean Valentine’s “Trust Me” to a sedum plant and the new creeping thyme I planted in the garden. I want to talk more about her, how her work moved in and out of clarity for me, but how reverent of it I became over time. These are sacred poems that have loosed themselves from narrative, reaching for something beyond it. I was often lost in the abstractions, but when I was able to latch on to something, an unseen corridor in my head opened. The morning opened. This cathedraling of a moment is something poetry can do, that Valentine does magnanimously. I am listening for the voice of Trust Me that she describes here, the other way to go, the place where one becomes a pitcher.

Methods and Practice: Vision and Revision

The life of a poem begins with inspiration and it is often, with the best poems, unclear what it wants to say. I have felt compelled to stick to the poem’s earliest impulses, to tie myself to the meanings that emerged by the end of the poem’s first draft. With this project, I am often revisiting poems that I have not read or thought of for months. In those intervening weeks, I have learned, grown, changed, and read a great deal, so the meanings that were once clear and revelatory don’t seem so any more. I have learned to let the poem grow as it will with new and deeper ideas that reflect the knowledge I gained between the first draft and the last. The old poem sometimes talks less about where it started and more about where it has ended up. Let the poem grow with you, saying what you think now versus what you thought then. Just as we become the artists that make the poem, the poem becomes what the artist has made.

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The image above appears in Day 188 from my comic series A Comic Year published 2021

“Destiny is coming at you like a strong river. The current will not stop, and neither will you. Now is not the time for answers, it is a moment for questions. The wheel is spinning and cannot be stopped. Let yourself relax into your lack of control. Be like a child—let the universe take care of you. Where you will land is unclear, but that is the truth of all life. Control is an illusion.

Remember too that the universe does not act alone. There are many forces at play, and many spirits that watch over you. Fate is a crowded room. You are not alone. Breathe in and let yourself be taken down the river.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

CARD COUNT: 21/78

After Judgement, The Tower, The Emperor, and The High Priestess, I pulled
the Wheel of Fortune.

Prior to the pandemic when I had a desk and a classroom of my own, I had a sticky note on the wall that said, “You are not the sole author of your own life.” I was around 34, a few months away from finishing the first draft of my first book. I was also dating feverishly. I approached it like a part-time job and told my friends about what I was looking for: “Wherever and whoever he is, he is late. He’s not even here yet, and we are fighting.” I shouted this to fellow Vermont writer, Anne Averyt, because I used to holler this at everyone in the pure anguish of my youth. She, much like the rest of my writer group at the time, was around 30 years my senior and looked at me with some gravity and said, “You have to stop shouting and listen.”

So I was getting it from within and without: shut up and listen. There are bigger things at work. She was right. Within that year, I finished the draft and B, the man who would become my spouse, climbed the back stairs to my apartment carrying a bottle of wine and a pair of eyebrows that lifted when he saw me. As another friend had said, Your life is already walking toward you. Enough shouting. The current will not stop and neither will you. I am not very good at this though I can sometimes get caught in its slipstream. At its most extreme application Simone Weil called it decreation. Anne Carson titled her book after the idea.

For the Wheel of Fortune, I read Decreation by Anne Carson, Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, Seeker: Traveling the Path to Enlightenment (Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious Vol. 3), and With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang. I also saw The Odyssey, a film that in its execution reminded me of the value of silence and pause.

In a 2024 interview with Cultured Mag, poet Ocean Vuong said, “The culture needs less of I like this, I don’t like that, and more of, What is it? and What does it do?” With this principle in mind, I don’t have a take on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey because I am tired of takes. It’s an enormous art object woven into a much longer legacy of the Homeric epic. What is it and what does it do? It is a film of enormous physical strain, the exertion of one’s will against and within the will of others, even that of the gods. Odysseus is not the sole author of his life. He only returns home when he empties himself of everything including self, including hope. I left the theater reminded of the heat and froth of human activity, and power and enormity of silence, rest, quiet, to allow narratives to play out toward completion and clarity.

layers and drafts of Wheel of Fortune card

Carson’s four-part title essay, “Decreation: How Women like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil tell God,” witnesses the emptying of self in three singularly devoted figures. Through her poetry, Sappho, saying “greener than grass/ I am and dead—or almost/ I seem to me./ But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty…”, achieves a state of ekstasis or “standing outside one’s self.” A root for ecstacy, everything except the now sloughs away and the frail container of the body remains to be filled with what? God? Love? A something beyond the self which occupies the vacuum, the void left by the self when it exits.

In the writing that would divide her from the 14th century church so severely that it would see her burned as a heretic, Marguerite Porete envisions her free will as the central kernel of her humanity, a gift given by god intended to be given back. The will can be returned rather than exerted, the chattering of the self, even the chattering of love is an expression and on the behalf of a self that must be annihilated. God fills whatever space is left.

And finally Simone Weil and her decreation: she said we must, “undo the creature in us,” to yield our power up to God. Null, void, naked, absent, empty, so quiet that we might not, “disturb the silence of heaven” by the beating of our hearts. There is a faith here of something greater beyond us that awaits this self-abandonment that it might saturate us completely with its own being, its own intent, that the sliver of god inside us may reunite with the collective that wavers on the edge of our knowing, our own lives.

The Song of Amergin restored by Robert Graves & read to the roots of the great willow across the parking lot.

The Wheel of Fortune reminds us of this wavering greatness and the frailty of our own control. It asks, “What if you let go and remained exactly here?” Let Jesus take the wheel as some say. And to think (or not think) about this for any length of time means to confront its practice. When do we empty ourselves out and what happens? In speaking to a paramedic or doctor, they say it happens during difficult procedures. Their training takes over, the cloud of knowing that surrounds their conscious self. No panic, just action. As a teacher and parent, I have learned how to stop thinking in the face of children in crisis. My conscious self rarely has something to contribute. It’s listening, attunement that does it, that trusts us both to find our way out of the enormous sadness or fear or rage and back together into the same room. My acting teacher taught this too. Don’t think. Listen and react. Empty yourself completely and let the character inhabit you. Meditation lets go of the self until there is the thinnest of possible boundaries between the self and the world we can sense all around us. With greater and greater skill, one can expand and deepen the vast reservoir of silence inside us.

Wheel of Fortune final draft

Wild Unknown artist Kim Krans said that some cards resist you in their creation. I thought of her this week as I drew the draft images for the Wheel of Fortune. Usually when I pull a card, ideas float in immediately. It is not long before certain colors and the overall composition start to appear in my mind. But not so with this. It appeared as a kind of uncertain mist between things. I knew I would make it. I didn’t know how or what.

What followed was a process that I have used only a few times before. I started drawing without knowing what it would be. I worked through each layer one by one as it came to me. I drew a large circle and filled it with ink. I stopped when I sensed I should. I did a color wash in the background balancing the fluid movement of each color throughout the image. I outlined each patch of color in pen. I added patterns of circles inspired by images I reviewed in Michael Benson’s Cosmographics: Picturing Space through Time and kept going, making decisions one layer at a time.

This is why I am doing this project. The tarot is a game, a tool, an art object. It is an object of self-reflection and divination. It has an uncertain history, a plethora of origins and access points. There are many decks and ways of practicing, shuffling methods, spreads. And it contains within it many of the great archetypes of the human story. The Wheel of Fortune resists me because of my relationship to control. The more I fear losing it, the tighter I grip. Engaging with this card as I have is an object lesson for the kind of control I lack and what I can discover when I remain in the moment I am in. In every profession, vocation, calling there is a way to access this presence, which is actually an absence of all the nonsense the mind conjures. We leave ourselves behind and become what’s needed for the idea to come through, for the moment to be met. Art and poetry teaches me this. Teaching teaches me this. I don’t know if it’s God, but it does feel like love.

The poem above first appeared in Funicular Magazine and appears in Condition

Methods and Practice:

I keep telling you this but don’t do anything. Don’t buy anything. Go outside and see if you can become the stag of seven tines and the hill where poets walk.

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Drawn from Diane Arbus, Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival. MD., 1970

“The High Priestess is the teacher we need. She is also a guardian of knowledge…This is because she is the guide to somewhere deeper than anywhere you have been before. To get there, one must consider both mercy and severity and act intuitively. Both intend to lift you up, though they also both intend to challenge you.

The secrets the high priestess contains may be difficult to accept. There is often hardship in crossing new boundaries. But have faith in her power, and respect it, for this is the dark teacher of dreams and her lessons should be heeded.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“She is the Queen of the borrowed light, but this is the light of all. She is the moon nourished by the milk of the supernal Mother.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

“Dressed all in white, she represents the White Goddess, a mixture of the divine feminine from all cultures. Key Concepts: Second Stage of initiation, wise women, gnosis, silence, sanctuary, the portal of the temple, guardian of the sacred keys, women’s mysteries, opener of the way at the crossroads, listening to your inner voice, discerning when to talk and when to keep silent.” - Leonora Carrington’s Major Arcana

Card Count: 20/78

I don’t know what is happening, but after the Emperor came the High Priestess:

So I begin a story of descent: ages ago in the cradle of civilization, the Sumerian goddess Inanna was the queen of heaven and the goddess of love, beloved by the people, the purveyor of a generous harvest, and she decided it was time to know the secrets of death. To explore the realm beyond her knowing, she planned to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld, to learn her ways. She disguised her intention in courtesy. She proclaimed that she descended to the great below to attend the funeral rites of Ereshkigal’s husband, the Bull of Heaven.

Unbeknownst to Inanna, Ereshkigal knew this was bullshit. It was Inanna who challenged the hero Gilgamesh to battle Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven, who instigated Gugalanna’s loss and his death at Gilgamesh’s hands. So as Inanna set herself upon the road the dead, having gathered around her the seven me, her sacred finery, her lapis lazuli and kohl-shaded eyes, Ereshkigal demanded that she be barred at the gates unless she remove her queenly adornments, that Inanna would be stripped at each of the seven gates and come before her bent low before her, her mirror. And so she did. At each gate, Inanna allowed herself to be stripped. The gatekeepers intoned, ‘Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.’ She did not turn back. She walked and walked more deeply into the underworld and appeared before her sister naked and bent. It was then that Ereshkigal set upon her the eye of death. Inanna was instantly struck dead and fell to the floor. Ereshkigal commanded that her sister be hung as a side of meat on a hook on the wall. The sacred me was gone. Inanna was dead.

Small draft of the High Priestess from pencil through ink & gouache and colored pencil layers

The story of Inanna’s descent, where she dies beneath the earth and is revived into life, renewed and more powerful than ever, endowed with the knowledge that her death conferred, is a foundational template of descent myths and the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth in human story. Sumer, located in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates (now modern day Iraq), built a civilization from an abundance of grain, observable cycles of growth, death, and return. Many stories would follow in Inanna’s footsteps—Persephone, Orpheus, even Jesus. These were followed by figures in literature like Dante.

The myths evolved from one another, but to focus on Persephone, there was one plot point in her story that it took me well into adulthood to understand. While Inanna descends once, Persephone is bound to return and return. After her abduction by Hades and the world’s collective descent into the winter of her mother Demeter’s grief, she is discovered. Before she returns to earth, she eats six pomegranate seeds (the fruit of the underworld). Some say she was tricked. Others, like Rachel Zucker in her Eating in the Underworld, said she chose to eat the seeds herself. In the continual stasis of her mother’s watch and her husband’s desire, Persephone senses she can only grow through a cyclical journeying between hell and earth, beyond and outside their reach. She spirals through the years going above and below in a powerful alchemy that is the making of the self. In our house, there is a rule: never eat fairy food. Someday I know my daughter will break it, and who she becomes to return from the beyond will be the making of her.

In previous posts, I have mentioned Jung’s spiritual, emotional, psychological upheaval in the early 20th century and at the approach of WWI. It was during this time that he conducted the explorations, writings, and illustrations that would compose his Red Book, a recovery of his lost soul from the underworld of the unconscious. What are these times but tumultuous and uncertain? Whose soul is lost? What can be done? On the small scale, a single tarot reading is an engagement with the fundamental archetypes of human story, tools of the conscious mind to retrieve what we are unable or refuse to see. This project is a many years long reading, an act of recovery and exploration, soul retrieval in the face of seemingly endless uncertainties. What’s more is I am using tools that live long in my family. No AI, no digital tools. I draw by hand to discover what the materials will reveal. Each time I face the page, it feels like a descent. I return and return. Discovery. Terror.

Here I must confess something: I tried and failed to read the White Goddess by Robert Graves. Reading is like entering a room. I open books like doors into the chambers of the unknown and unseen. Here, risks are taken and things are lost, gained, ghosts and monsters rise up to meet you. This week, the room was too crowded when I arrived. My own brain came with me, erratic, afraid, constantly chattering. There was no resolving the breathtaking anxiety that I found this week. Was it the book itself? Or the timing of its reading? I don’t know. I do know that I couldn’t hear past my own fears. My anxiety came back so forcefully that I struggled to breathe. Time is moving so quickly, the summer hot and strange, my daughter leaping through childhood, into kindergarten, and out of my arms, I could go on. I closed the door on that space, on Graves, with the promise that someday I will return.

I did read The Near and Distant World by Bianca Stone, All of Us in White by Eve Alexandra, Eclipse Season by Karin Gottshall, and All of it Singing by Linda Gregg for the recognizable chambers these poets have created. This crowd of poets, mostly contemporary Vermont poets, are friends of mine who have taught me more about being a poet than I can possibly explain. Each one is a singular voice, independent of anyone, versed in restlessness, loneliness, an aliveness of mind that I strive to emulate. I have read a poetry video for each one to share the space that each creates on the page and in the mind. Each of these poets knows the backdoors, the side passages, the hidden trapdoors to the underworld. I am not a coward, but I am comforted that I go with friends. There is a distinct and resolute solitude in each of these books. They all went alone in the dark interior of words and returned with incomparable poetry.

These are the friends I spent time with this week.

“A Bracelet of Bright Hair about the Bone” by Linda Gregg

Pastoral by Eve Alexandra

The opening poem of her None of Us in White, Pastoral is as incantatory as any poem in the collection. The book moves between tightly interwoven narratives of love gained and lost, mothering, and the death of Alexandra’s father, sensual poems rich with desire and grief, and charm poems, tiny list poems that take on the quality of punctuation and spell. I have read this book in nearly one sitting. It feels like stepping into a stream to let it carry you forward to another place entirely.

The Last Ice Age by Karin Gottshall

This is also an opening poem. Gottshall published her third collection, Eclipse Season, earlier this summer. I was very lucky to read with her at the Willowell Foundation, an intimate reading on the Walden Campus around a campfire amongst the cedar trees in a crowd of generous listeners. As she read, her brilliance and humor were captivating. This collection of poems, an intimate exploration of the death of her mother and the loneliness that followed, the life she has made in Vermont, her house, the woods, the stone, is immensely powerful. Phrases like, “my skull grows large with silence,” or “the weeds are full of Greek Mythology,” found in her poem “Tame” ring with a kind of perfect, painful truth.

Memory Palace by Bianca Stone

I first heard this poem about two years ago when Bianca read it for the Page Burner series at Waking Windows in Winooski. It was one of its earlier drafts, hot off the printer, as were all the poems she read that day, all of which would end up in her now very celebrated book, The Near and Distant World. We were all entranced even then. No one does negative capability like Bianca Stone. Coined first by Keats, negative capability measures how much an artist is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Essentially, how long can you stand it in the underworld? Each of Stone’s poems relies on its own internal reasoning, which is she follows as far as she is able, which is thrillingly far, informed along the way with her broad range of influences, the language and imagery of contemporary and classic art, biblical stories, psychoanalysis, stoic philosophy and the landscape, the cliffs behind her black house and the woods where she walks her dog Orpheus. I have loved this poem since I heard it first and feel honored to read it here.

And I may be fangirling too close to the sun here, but out of deep admiration for her craft, I asked Bianca to serve as the model for my High Priestess card. When I am trying to drum up the bravery to enter the unknown of my own poems and the distance I am willing to go to finish a drawing, the uncertainties I am willing to face in the unknown as the edges of my consciousness, I am guided by her example. In the drafts way above, I attempted to distinguish my card from the classic by decentering the figure and haloing her with pomegranates. I found the image less resolute than I wanted. I tried again. See the drafts below:

Layers of large version of High Priestess from pencil through ink & gouache layers

One of my favorite things about portraiture is that in every face, there is something that distinguishes the subject from every other face on the planet. My brother’s brow, my father’s nose, the space in the corners of my mother’s mouth when she smiles, the moment I add these to the face, the portrait goes from being any person to this particular person, this one beloved face. It is a profound pleasure. In her essay, “Joy”, Zadie Smith describes some of her daily pleasures, which includes as she puts it, “other people’s faces.” I too think of myself as a near professional gawker. I want to look and look to find every surprising curve of the eyelash, every crease made with worry or surprise. Portraiture capitalizes on that pleasure, pushes it to near worshipful attention or even love. Portraiture relies on a series of relationships—the distance between the eyes, the distance between bottom of the nose to the top of the lips, the size of the nostrils—all things we rarely look at so closely in person. It’s too much. But in drawing faces, I am allowed to do what I wish I could all the time—I drink and drink in the faces of others. Here is Bianca Stone’s, High Priestess of Vermont Poetry, a Virgil to anyone who reads her.

Final draft of the High Priestess featuring poet & friend, Bianca Stone

Methods and Practice: Celebrate your progress

Any consistent practice deserves celebration. There are plenty of reasons to stop working, and god, I am tempted by them every day. But I haven’t and I didn’t. I celebrate reaching the 20th card by collaging them all together, and I can just friggin’ look at them all. I am so proud of myself so far. I am also so happy to be making art consistently again. It has been a long walk to get here in full color.

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“The Emperor is an authority you can trust…Builder and a protector. When the ground beneath you seems to be crumbling, he will come to patch it up. He approaches life with a stoic demeanor and a seriousness towards the laws that govern both nature and society. But holds his belief with pride and wants to pass that on to you.

Do not forget to protect yourself. The Emperor has no shame about armor and shields. The world can be a brutal place, and creating a barrier between your skin and the air may be just what you need. He does this with pride—the emperor has no room for shame. He wants to see you in the world as your strongest self.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“Patriarchal authority, worldly power, structure…The number four is key to this card; it can represent structure, organization, and stability, and in mystical terms, it can refer to the four Hebrew letters—the Tetragrammaton. The Emperor also represents the four human capacities—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—that must be integrated into a whole in order to achieve a higher consciousness.” - Leonora Carrington’s Major Arcana

CARD COUNT: 19/78

There are great forces at work, so after the Tower, I pulled the Emperor:

There is something to this. In my last post, the tower came down and I thought, I need a king in here. I need a good dad. (I have a good dad. He lives in New Hampshire.) What I really mean is the internal dad, the voice of authority in my head who protects me, keeps the boundaries of my inner kingdom with certainty rather than cruelty. I am reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy to my daughter, so it was easy to imagine my inner king as Theoden King of Rohan, withered to a husk under the poisonous influence of the words of my own personal Grima Wormtongue hissing things like, “You know you’re not good enough.” Now that Grima has been tossed from the tower (carefully into a field of wild flowers where he can’t hurt anything), it was time for the inner transformation of my king, a coming back to life, not with violence but with renewed strength and bravery. Buckle in, readers, because we’re going processing.

Flirting with the Leap

Before I drew a new card this round, this is what I asked for quietly, underneath my other thoughts. When I spread out my cards, I say almost out loud, “Here I am. I am ready for whatever you got for me.” It was as though the deck heard me. I have spent years (YEARS) tending to my inner sacred feminine, cultivating it under the belief that the world is missing that kind of energy. Now comes my inner sacred masculine, a benevolent power, a protector of the vulnerable and the innocent, that which is within and without.

So many hierarchies are ready to go down. The ones on the news and in the halls of power. I am not only prepared to take down the cruel voices in my head, but also the limiting ideas of what it means to practice art, what magic composes the world and how they are connected. The act of toppling is one of surrender. Like I said, there is something to this. There is enough of the uncanny to explore the questions, to wrestle with my doubts until they bless me.

Here’s an example of what I mean: in 2020, I traveled to New Orleans with B. We had had a miscarriage the previous fall, twins that looked like two broken moons on the ultrasound. It was over beers as we grieved that we planned the trip to NOLA. Before the trip, I got the name of a clairvoyant and tarot card reader from a friend. She said I should visit this woman while down there. We went and the reader said things that still ring loudly in my head. She said that B and I both have big humanitarian hearts, and I loved that whatever her power, she could see that. When I asked her whether we would get pregnant again, she said, “Okay, let’s see,” and spread the cards, asking me to pick one. I pulled something that looked like this:

I didn’t know I was already pregnant, maybe two days along. A few weeks later, I would remember this woman as I read the positive pregnancy test. She said that I would have a daughter and that she would be fire. I did and she is. How did my hands do that? I don’t know how to explain this or how I found the emperor when I asked for him, but…

There is something to this. I don’t know what it is, but I love trying. The grand hierarchy where the rational is prized above all else has barred me from faith. Even Camus, who I have studied with great interest for the past few months, would say that I am flirting a leap beyond the rational. But I would argue that there is a difference between a leap and a step. Parts of my brain and signals in my heart recognize myself in the fragmented mirror of the tarot. That which guides my art and poetry feel the same. What is out there? What is in here? What are my limits? I continue this project as a creative and spiritual practice where I ask these questions.

What Poets Know

This time around I read Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems & Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being for the Emperor. Both authors, in their own ways, come to the same conclusions that I am coming to. Art is a practice of the mind, body, heart, and spirit. We can let it guide us through the great questions our lives pose. Rubin would say that it comes from “source,” a new agey sounding word that I cringe at ever so slightly. Fear of cringe is a tool of the oppressor, the work of my inner Wormtongue. If we are cut off from the knowledge trembling in our hearts, all our feverish feels, we lose our inner knowledge, what our intuition is trying to say to us. Instead of turning away, I turn towards. What is meant by source? Where does the work come from? My art and answers or anyone’s? What am I trying to do?

Rubin would say that all creative practice is in service of the art. We may be tempted otherwise. I even admit that I want to be known as a poet. When people say American poetry, I want them to say, “Oh yeah and then there’s Meg Reynolds...” not with praise or criticism exactly. More that I am a participant. That they know I am here. Rubin also argues that this is a very human ambition,

“As human beings, we come and go quickly, and we get to make works that stand as monuments to our time here. Enduring affirmations of existence. Michelangelo’s David, the first cave paintings, a child’s finger-paint landscapes—they all echo the same human cry. like graffiti scrawled in a bathroom stall: I was here.”

Ambition may be calibrated in service of the art over the ego. Brilliant poet Victoria Chang said the following in a recent interview with Only Poems mag (here is their Substack too):

We are here to hear each other, to speak and to listen. I am doing both. I also want to help. I want people to know that I am here, writing and trying to help, that they can come to my work for help. The poet Christian Wiman makes this argument too, below with his poem “Balm”:

A balm, a help, an effort, a practice, humble nouns that better recognize that reception is none of my business. There are so many ways I still worry about what the hell I am doing. What am I afraid of? That the academy will never welcome me as a genius. That the art hierarchy will regulate me to the bottom, the realm of cute poems about family and dogs and whatever. I do worry that no one will ever know how serious I am. Wormtongue keeps whispering in the field. I can still hear him.

What Artists Know

But this past weekend, I went to an online Tarot festival titled, “The World is Not Enough,” put on by the Invisible College, organized by poet, artist, genius Ariana Reines. In one session, Tarot artist Kim Krans read her brilliant essay where she told the story of building her Wild Unknown Tarot. After some painful struggles in the art world of NYC, she felt lost. She wanted to be admitted into the Whitney Biennial. Instead, she burned her unsold drawings in a sacrificial bonfire, drew her way into the tarot, and self-published a tarot deck that was so popular it sold out many rounds of printings and was picked up by Urban Outfitters. She wrestled with this as her friends achieved the kind of success she had once wanted. She asked herself what it meant to either make work that would end up in a gallery and then inevitably enclosed in a climate-controlled archive OR to make her work into a tarot collection and get messages from all over the world, from people saying that her art had been in their hands when they made some of the hardest decisions of their lives.

She asked, “What is art’s value? What does it mean for it to be held or beheld?” She had to let go of one dream for another. A hierarchy in her mind came down. I was enthralled but this meditation. I find myself doing the same as I worry over the accessibility and narrative quality of my poems. In revising this cycle’s poem, a piece called “Comet” about my father, I played with order in the name of elevating the work and troubling narrative. It was all very heady and perhaps overwrought. I read it to my husband, B, and he said, “It ends really abruptly,” which is the strongest opinion he has had of any of my poems for a while. It hurt.

drafts of the Emperor card this cycle.

The Utility of Poetry

This brought up another story. Once in graduate school, our workshop leader had us do an exercise where we read a brutal news article about the murder of an 11 or 12 year old boy in NYC. This boy was walking home alone from school for the first time one afternoon and he simply vanished. The article emphasized that he literally only had to walk a half a block to get home. It turned out that he was murdered by a man who lived in his neighborhood. They found the man partially because of some dentistry he had had done the day before (I don’t remember why). It was absolutely heartbreaking.

Our instructor told us to make a list of all the most surprising perspectives we could write the story from. The others in my workshop said the mom, the dad, the murderer, the boy. I said, the boy’s backpack, the stretch of sidewalk he didn’t cross because he was snatched, and the two teeth the man had had pulled the previous day at the dentist. I wrote the poem from the perspective of the teeth, which I made up and used as a conceptual rhyme to the boy’s pair of feet that they had found in the man’s freezer. The conceit of the poem was that the teeth were spared witnessing this horrible act, but we are not. We all went around and read our poems, my professors and colleagues were impressed. I was proud of myself, strangely and painfully, considering the source material.

I went home for a visit not long after my workshop, and I told my family the story. I read the poem aloud at dinner and my father looked at me and said, “I don’t know, Meg,” and shrugged his shoulders with a kind of sad resignation. I said to him later, “It is really hard for me that I am doing something beautiful, and you can’t see it.” I am still unraveling the knot of this.

When I write, I can’t forget about my dad, or my husband, and everyone who is out there with them. I don’t really want to either. I had decided somewhere in my subconscious long ago that I was going to be an Important Poet with Vision, and the kind of poems I actually make and want to make, where I experience a sense of completion and satisfaction when finishing it, are a sweet beginner effort at who I would BECOME.

It’s cool to be ambitious, but I have to be honest about who I am. I am a New England woman who comes from a long line of makers—people who cook, craft and garden, who build, who care for animals and children, who fix cars, nurse, and teach people, welders, service members, and so on. One of the key values of such people is utility. They are generous with this usefulness. My poems take on this utility. I want to write work that is mine and is also of use like a tightly woven basket, baby’s quilt, earthenware pitcher. Yes, loads of people can make those, but when you come across the right one at the right moment, it is a great comfort, an object we can depend on. What if my poems are meant to be a balm, a talisman against an overwhelming unknown, a record and amplification of our worthy humanness? It says what is and what may be preserved on the other side of chaos? What if it is meant to do the preserving?

Educator and activist Cesar A. Cruz once said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” In these times when we need all the visionary creative energy that humanity requires to work our way through the collapse of one world and birth of another, there is a real utility to art that comforts us in our collective disturbance. We do need art that says, I am here, so are you. You are not alone. A useful poem may interrupt the fear that could kill our brains and make us desperate and easy to control. A poem like this by Mark Doty:

Last week, I let go of my fears and rewrote the poem as the narrative that it is. I can never forget people, those my art wants to reach. I want to make things that fit in people’s hands.

I continue to topple hierarchies in my mind. If I can do away with the notion that my art can or should be measured by very special, very academic institutions who could proclaim its unquestionable worth, then I can also do away with the working class notion that a piece of art has to be good in order to be worth the scarce resources it took to make it and bad art (even as you are in process) is the idle work of wealthy dilettantes rather than a necessary part of the process. In other words, I can ignore the voices in my head that say, “You better get the approval to validate your specialness,” AND the voice that says, “You better make this good, Reynolds. Do not embarrass us. Do not bankrupt us. Do not waste what we have given you of which there was so little to give.”

What would it mean to write without these constraints? I write this to you after listening to Kim Krans while reading Rick Rubin and the tumbling, effusive lyric of Mark Doty after long weeks of contemplating the Tower and all the internal messages that I have outgrown and are ripe for discard. There is a flickering edge to an almost imaginable freedom. While these are all liberating, delicious ideas, I know this will feel different when it is time to actually work. How can this all be applied?

I cannot control it. I can only continue on, work like I am playing, work like I am praying, work like I will die someday. And I know how to do that.

Final draft of the Emperor. This face belongs to my father.

Methods and Practice: Direct Address

There are many moments in one’s work where you recognize a leap forward. Mine came when I started writing to someone. Somewhere about ten years ago when my writing seemed to be mired in an inescapable rut, I climbed out of it with this poem, written in a poetry workshop where I addressed the unborn daughter I hoped for in the future:

A poem with hope and utility, it speaks not to everyone, a task that felt impossible at the time, but to her, one imagined girl. The poem later appeared in the White Wall Review and my second book, Does the Earth. She may be here now, my girl, currently planning outfits made entirely of rainbows and spinning around on the living room floor, but the exercise hasn’t lost its utility. Whenever I write a poem now, there is an imagined audience of a beloved, unseen one. It lets me in and listens.

Condition is Here: Another upcoming tourdate

Very excited to be reading with the beautiful Julia C. Alter for The Ruth Stone House’s Beer and Broadsides event in August. Mark your calendars, friends and join us in the woods.

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This week’s small draft of the Tower

“…now the work you’ve done comes crashing down by cosmic forces. This may seem like a moment to give in, to let the destruction own you. But you cannot be reborn unless first you come back to the ground. The foundation of the Tower will remain, and it is on the same spot that you can begin again.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“…the rending of the house of doctrine. It illustrates also in the most comprehensive way the old truth that ‘unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.’” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

“…Although this card indicates destruction of some sort, it is a necessary dissolution of a relationship, situation or structure that is built on a false foundation. For Carrington, who was greatly concerned with the plight of the natural world, this card could also offer a dire warning indicating the danger of natural disasters, often caused by humankind’s interference or neglect…Liberation through loss…” - Leonora Carrington’s Major Arcana

CARD COUNT: 18/78

Of all the cards I was afraid to pull, I was the most apprehensive of the Tower, a card of calamity, of destruction, of the violent upending of old structures:

But here it is. Look folks, I am not going to sit here and list polycrises. You all know. I know you know. You know I know. I live in the world, the world lives in me, and the collective unconscious shudders with the innumerable insults to our soul and threats to our well-being. I could have pulled this card at any point, and it would have felt true. In his book Trauma and the Soul, Donald Kalsched recounts a time when Carl Jung sunk into a restless, unexplained depression. This was after his split with Freud, but Jung remained bewildered as to the cause and depth of his despair. Then World War I broke out and Jung said, “Of course. I sensed this.”

He did not feel immune to the collective distress that preceded the war. He was sensitive to it and I believe we all are. Whatever is and whatever is coming is visible on the almost concrete collective unconscious of social media. I feel it too. The Tower looms. Last night I watched lightning dancing on the horizon as thunderstorms rolled across the lake. Everyone else was asleep and it was me and the cat at the screen door at midnight wondering what was and is preparing to fall.

In the last three weeks, I read Homer’s Iliad translated by Emily Wilson, Memorial by Alice Oswald, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, The Absurd Man by Major Jackson, The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert, The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggermann, and Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley to understand the nature of the Tower.

In reading Simone Weil during the last cycle, I stumbled through her essay, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” and felt compelled to reread the Iliad with her ideas in mind. Fortunately, we have such gorgeous translations available to us in the form of Emily Wilson’s relatively recent work and Alice Oswald’s work of translation and extraction where she includes only the death scenes and the nature-derived metaphors to generate a slim and heartbreaking volume of death and earth. Weil loved the Iliad, thought it unmatched in scale or beauty. The central thesis of her essay is that there is no greater main character in the Iliad than the oppressive control of force. All the heroes are brutally subject to and enslaved by the pursuit of power and the exertion of force. No matter how beautiful or god-born figures like Hector or Achilles or Odysseus may be or may have been, no matter how they grieve, quake, hesitate, mourn, they compelled to fight for the notion of glory, more vital to them than their own lives or the lives of their friends, lovers, spouses, parents, or children. And what is worse is that their fates are not dependent on their own decisions, their performance on the battlefield or even their devotion to the Gods. Zeus’s scales and the whims of Olympians decide their fate.

What we witness in Iliad is the violent, vibrant, dramatic exchange of force through and on the body. Power is gained as easily as it is lost, glory and treasures doled out, and then revoked. The outcomes feel almost arbitrary and certainly absurd. Wilson notes in her introduction that no matter how lyrical the language throughout the poem, the death scenes refuse metaphor. They are gory and direct. The deaths of each soldier rings backwards through their heritage. The consequences of force bloom red through the sons of Troy and Greece. Wilson also visited military academies to further understand the culture of power and war and how Iliad still speaks to people in the armed forces. She reported that people in the military still find the Iliad to be an accurate representation of what war is like.

This brings to mind the warrior ethos espoused by the current administration—its flatness and brutality, its emphasis on aesthetics—and how it misses the point. War is an act of mutual thrall. Those who oppress, who insist on power over others, on waging war, are as excruciatingly bound to acts of war as those they wage war against. They must shred their souls to ensure victory, a victory that is always brief, uncertain, and costly. Achilles may be an efficient dealer of death, a kind of paragon of the kind of warrior culture that someone like Pete Hegseth might admire, but his life is brutal and short, riven through with suffering. His grief at the death of Patroclus fills him with the full force of grief which he translates into his own talents, that of the spear, and clogs the river with corpses. The Tower of Troy, of Hector, of Achilles and each lost son collapses unbearably under the weight of force that may only be controlled briefly before it slips into other hands.

This week’s drafts of the Tower

It is world ending. To bear this, I read Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies, a book drawn from a project Riley started in 2020 in response to a spring and summer of horrifying anti-black violence and a national reckoning with police brutality. Riley has created a prayer book for the Black community, some of which she shares on Instagram, which is where I found her work. From her introduction, “I was desperate for a liturgical space that could center Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body unapologetically.” In sci-films and fantasy, we grapple with the world ending. We witness and wonder what we would do. The reality for many marginalized communities all over the world, now and historically, and particularly the Black and indigenous communities of the United States, the world has already ended many times. American History violently toppled, transported, and built over living worlds. Some of the greatest wisdom to be had is from those that survived, those that endure, and who envision a future where we are all made safe and whole.

It is about sustaining in the meantime and working towards that future. Riley’s work is for the Black community first (her dedication “For Us” largely understood to be for the Black community for whom the project was initially conceived), and as a white woman, I recognize it as such. I take comfort in her profound wisdom while never forgetting my relationship to power, and my obligations as a white person to work towards a future where we are all safe and thriving. I read gaining both support and strength from passages like, “I don’t know what dignity is. Not cognitively. But I know what it feels like. To be loved, to receive honor, to be encountered as a human, not because of any demonstration or performance of such, but because, in mystery, your very being is a miracle, your existence a delicate stitch in the cosmos.” I also carefully consider what it might be like for my Black and brown neighbors, friends, and family members to read such a passage, what in our history and current moment would require this prayer, and what kind of systems we can build such that all of us can feel these ideas in our bones, that this compassionate regard is inherent in all we do.

Riley’s work is linked with the fundamental ideas in Brueggermann’s work which lays out the principles of prophetic ministry, how faith leaders can follow in the footsteps of figures like Moses or Jesus in critiquing what he calls the royal consciousness (that of the Pharaoh or Pontius Pilate) and energizing the people with visions of the future more in line with God’s vision. Under this is the assumption that God’s vision is one of love, compassion, safety, freedom for all people. It begins in grief. To grieve is to critique the order of power because it illuminates the suffering rendered by that order. We can grieve the consequences of poverty and recognize that capitalism requires poverty, which in turn becomes a critique of capitalism. This is distinct from charitable works that assuage the suffering. Brueggermann argues we cannot be satisfied with the balm of kindness. We grieve or bemoan the system that causes the suffering and envision what other future is possible.

This week’s final image of the Tower

So what Towers of mine must come down? What is waiting to topple within me? Why now? Throughout this spring, I toured Vermont and New Hampshire with a new book. I was and continue to be more visible than I have been in a long time. It is horrifying. A very old tower that began its construction in my childhood has been wobbling for months. The foundation was laid with remonstrations from my caregivers, “Behave yourself, Jesus Christ,” and continued to grow, brick by brick, with every embarrassment and failure and cruel bit of cultural messaging that I received. There’s a brick for weight, height, muscle tone, skin clarity, lack of grace, too-muchness, foolishiness, cringey sentimentality, selfishness, obtuseness, and so on. It’s tall and in it sits a pale figure whispering its messages before, during, and after every social engagement, reading, and presentation. It sucks the life from me. It leaves me stunned with pain. I was sent to bed many days this spring with exhaustion under its bitter advice.

We all know a cruel voice in our heads. Mine is often so loud that I am a terrible listener or too scared to take chances or push my work to greater excellence. At this point it limits me more than it refines my Megness. What makes me ready to topple it now? So many things. I blame the existentialists who help me remember that I am small and free. I blame Major Jackson and Jack Gilbert’s poems that are so gratuitously alive that they embody a painful, impassioned absurdity that humbles me into comfort. I went on vacation with my husband’s family, and everyone there is so ridiculously nice that I can no longer reasonably believe that my fears of their rejection are anything except the nonsense in my head. It’s got to come down.

Jack Gilbert’s “Gift Horses” read to my garden on this hot July afternoon

My therapist has warned me against doing it violently. I want to use thunderbolts on my own behalf. But I know it will never go away completely, and that it will fight me if I try to kill it. The warrior ethos has limited utility here. I can critique the royal consciousness that this cruelty amplifies and instead energize a vision for another future that starts in my own head. If this voice is simply demoted, redirected, I can install another voice in its place. What will it be? I don’t know. I just got started.

I did revise a poem for The Tower, but I can’t share much of it quite yet. I share instead this poem, “Return,” which was first published in Cordite Review, and appears in Condition:

Methods and Practice: Sneak reading in everywhere

You know how to do this. In order to finish The Iliad, a 600 page poem, I got up at 6 AM to read 50 pages at a time. I took a cup of coffee out to the porch and read during vacation, which meant I was interrupted by my daughter and many nieces and nephews a few times. I read in the car while Minnie napped. I read while vegetables were roasting. I just set a goal to read 50 pages a day, and I found a way to do it. There is such pleasure in this kind of discipline, treating these goals as inevitable. It got me all the way to King Priam and the mourning of Hector on a green morning here in Vermont.

Condition is Here: More events!

I have a few more events coming up this summer and fall. Check out my website for upcoming tour dates. My next event is Poetry in the Woods at the Willowell Foundation with Karin Gottshall to celebrate her new and fabulous book, Eclipse Season:

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“[It] comes to you in the brief, crystal moment right before a dream ends and consciousness begins…cries out that epiphany is here.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“...it is ‘the generative force of the earth…and eternal life.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

“Atonement and forgiveness in preparation for rebirth.” - Leonora Carrington’s Major Arcana

CARD COUNT: 17/78

In my last post, I documented the enlivening influence of the King of Wands. After that, I pulled Judgement:

Judgement, god, who needs it? Me, mostly. Me, certainly. I can explain.

It starts with what I read these past two weeks:

Simone Weil: An Anthology edited by Sian Miles, Canon by Paige M. Lewis, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Rainier translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, and How to be Perfec t by Michael Schur

Look, I am swirling right now. I don’t know how to tell you. When I read Ariana Reines work a few weeks ago, when she spoke of having mystical visions, I remembered mysticism, the idea of the poet as a mystic. Mystic: of or relating to the mysteries, one who seeks a transformative relationship divine or ultimate reality. I also read the collected work of Galway Kinnell for my last post, a poet who Edward Hirsch wrote had a practical relationship to the metaphysical. Metaphysical: of or relating to the transcendent or to a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses, the supernatural. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? I read a comic like this one by Emily McGovern:

and I think, maybe I should become a nun? This is what I do with my time. There were plenty of points in my adolescence where people may have wanted to say, “Get thee to a nunnery.” Maybe I should have gone. I am making one out of my house.

All this to say that Simone Weil, a mystic herself, came to me to amplify these ideas. In Weil’s spirituality, the act of decreation is central. It is an emptying of all that is the “I” to achieve a mystical receptivity to the divine reality both in and beyond this world. She puts it this way:

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of…Above all, our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it... all faulty connection of ideas...are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out the search. “(Simone Weil: An Anthology 6)

In this week’s poem, I made a major revision when I took Weil’s advice and removed the “I” from the poem. The opening first sounded like this,

I was 16 when I first heard the Buddhist edict, 
life is suffering, and I was so young, 
and so well-kept in denim and wheat bread, 
that I didn’t believe it. I am older now. 
I have had time to chew on this thought, 
to soften its leather in my teeth. 

I took myself out. The mystic empties herself of herself, the poem of the self to tell the story, to let the truth speak:

When they say, life is suffering, thought softens like chewed leather. 

This is what I was talking about in my last post. Ideas can only arrive when thought is held gently, or perhaps, as Weil advises bravely, not at all. Letting the spider come because you called it. Letting the moth remain briefly on a fingertip. To sense this and then read Rilke’s Book of Hours leaves me with this: “I give myself to it.”

When I arrived at Existentialism (of Sarte & Camus) in Schur’s book, I felt ready to hear ideas like, there is no God, there is no larger order of meaning, and our lives are built on our choices, which we are all free to make as we see fit. Judgement. We live and make meaning by virtue of our own judgement.

Yes, this leaves humanity suffering from a set of agonizing contradictions: 1) We can do whatever we want and our lives are as we make them BUT we are still responsible to the whole of humanity for our behavior & 2) There may be systems of larger meaning and being human is longing to know and understand this, but we are not equipped to know it. Here’s Camus:

“I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know the meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it...These two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them.”

By this logic, all life is freeingly absurd. Schur found this bleak. I found it comforting. So I am a little scavenger fish deep in the dark ocean in the pressure and cold nibbling at the incomprehensible body of a whale and the whale is enormous such that there is practically no end to it? I can eat or not eat or swim around it or come up with a million possible ways of consuming, digesting, interacting with its massiveness, and I would never run out because I am too small? There is no end? I am no big deal? None of us are? Great. There is no reason to assume that such an animal can’t be happy. Apparently Camus came to the same conclusion in his book The Myth of Sisyphus: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I love this. I can’t explain why.

Maybe it is because I am an absurd person. Let me tell you what I did last Saturday night. For months, a friend and I (we will call her Hot Sauce) have been trying to find a night to hold our semi-annual hot sauce challenge. Hot Sauce still shudders at the idea of Da Bomb, because we all tried it last time, and ended up pacing the room, breathing deep like we were giving birth to something. Hot Sauce immediately fell asleep on the couch.

This week’s draft of the Judgment card

This time, I went to the hot sauce bar on Church Street, told them about the challenge and spent $25 on a hot sauce called “Purgatory.” It comes in a little white bottle about half the size of a regular hot sauce and the tagline inscribed on the label just says, “The End.”

That evening, the challenge went as it had in the past. Myself, my spouse B, Hot Sauce and her partner D sat around the kitchen, ate charcuterie, drank Bud Lights, and asked conversation starter questions from the Delve Deck after we dipped chicken nuggets in each sauce, the questions increasing in intensity with the sauces (i.e. What isn’t a holiday that should be? What do you think happens after we die?). It was light, fun, easy. Then we got to the end. When I tell you the impact of Purgatory was immediate, I am not joking in the slightest. Everyone except D immediately stood up and just started pacing the house. B went out and stood in the rain. Hot Sauce dry heaved over the sink. I wandered the kitchen making guttural roars to psych myself into keeping it all down. D just sat for a moment in pure bewilderment and then went to our downstairs bathroom and vomited everything up. It took maybe 30 minutes for us to all settle back into our seats and kind of agree that we were pushing the limits on this being “fun”.

As we were wrapping up (we even did the last dab in Hot Ones tradition), I was cleaning the kitchen, singing along with the radio, feeling mostly okay and Hot Sauce and D headed out for the night. It was late, like midnight or so. Right as I wiped down the counter, I felt something, a kind of swim bladder of pain beginning to bloom in my belly. It was as though a layer of beer had been blocking the Purgatory from hitting my stomach, and the heat finally broke through. What I had initially felt in my mouth was burning gut deep and my body was quickly rejecting the entire effort. Once again, my will had outstripped my body. I moaned, groaned, near howled, and told B, “I don’t feel good.”

Antacids, deep breathing, water, whatever, Purgatory is the right word, emphasis on purge, which is what I did, as hard as I ever have. I threw up so hard I peed my pants. I was laughing; it was so violent. And shaking and moaning and B was afraid he would have to take me to the hospital. The mystic empties herself, indeed.

As awful as it was, there was something euphoric or clarifying about it, like the vomiting brought on by Ayahuasca or when I took misoprostol to help flush out my body after my first pregnancy failed. I will never again do it on purpose and will likely never again try that hot sauce, but I want to admit to you that I felt better. In the last few weeks, I had felt beaten down, elbowed into a kind of monotony and uselessness, as though my life had no risk, no story. How is poetry supposed to come from a mind like mine, one made of gelatin and wood chips? I made a story on Saturday though—interrupting the continuous, effortful rolling the rock of each day uphill. B, God bless him, cleaned up after me and made me a hot water bottle. I laid down, limp with relief, and fell asleep feeling clean and alive.

In her work, Simone Weil says, “Nothing in the world can stop us from being lucid,” placing a special emphasis on the human interior, how power and force can rob it from us, but how our resistance lives in the ability to preserve the interior against any forces who would take it or try to control it. AI, American government, corporations want me to love and serve them. My old hates strive toward a vigilant stasis and self-preservation. My insides belong to me. Life is absurd. There is no God. Or there is and I can’t see him. Or I am him, her, them living what they cannot without me. I am obligated to choose my own emerging toward a being that no machine could ever achieve. I do what I want as I learn what that is. I pulled the Judgement card this week. I choose to embody my own life.

This week’s final draft of the Judgement card.

Methods and Practice: Attention

How do we achieve the kind of attention Weil describes? It’s hard. Here’s what I do, however imperfectly:

1) I overwhelm myself with ideas, so I can’t always control what comes out. This week, I am processing with work of Weil, Mill, Kant, Aristotle, Sartre, Camus, Scanlon, Rilke, Lewis and many others and to hold all this in my head is unwieldy. I can’t know which of these ideas will surface in the art. Here we find another problem with AI. Not all answers come from written, perfectly formed and articulated questions. We live our questions through our actions, patterns, thoughts, feelings and then the world answers us. (RILKE AGAIN) We can’t rely exclusively on the questions we know how to ask in order to learn what we want to learn from our lives. We must tune ourselves to what Simone Weil would call the ‘supernatural poetry’ to be found in our attention. AI can’t tell me how to strengthen the knight inside my brain. I can only learn that by living. My art can only exist in its making. When AI is flooded with our ideas, it packages and produces. When I am flooded with ideas, I become and breathe. I live.

2) I let the art itself guide me. The goals are to make something not really what that something is. The poem, the piece kind of decides what it will be based on constraints of time and space. I can feel it nudging me from the inside. Between the drafts of the judgement image, I heard “Change the wings from pine boughs to long river grasses. Turn their heads towards the call of the horn.” The rightness I felt when I listened—took out the “I” in my poem, transformed the image over drafts— is why I make art. It’s a YES that extends from the interior to the exterior.

Condition is Here: I have other books too!

No news about Condition this week, which is perfect because I am headed out for vacation. To get a copy of Condition or my others books, follow the links found here. My next post will arrive in three weeks (my usual two weeks plus a week long break for family vacation) on Sunday, July 3rd.

“Action and justice. You are ready to make a move, but do so with honesty and tenacity. Let rules be your guide. Be careful not to let your energy explode; let it out with consideration.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“Dark man, friendly, countryman, generally married, honest and conscientious.”
- Rider Waite Smith Tarot

CARD COUNT: 16/78

For the first time on this project, I was visited by a king, having no idea why he had come.

Not only was this the first card that felt unfamiliar, obscured in its meaning, but as I flipped through my poems, I realized that I had no draft that corresponded to this figure. It may be worth reminding readers that in the first phase of this project, I wrote 100 poem drafts while I studied the history and symbolism of the tarot. Once I achieved critical mass, I went through my drafts alongside the traditional tarot deck and paired poems with cards based on corresponding themes. This card was different. I looked back at the draft I paired with the King of Wands and realized that it didn’t work. It made no sense. There was no correspondence, and the poem itself lacked the wild thread, that curious energy that any poem requires in order to be revised. I tried to find another, willing to shuffle the poems around to find a good match, but I had nothing that fit this card. I would have to write a new poem entirely that somehow linked itself to this king who felt like a stranger to me. While difficult, this is the purpose of the project—what am I not writing about? What aspects of the human experience, my own nature, the archetypes that compose personhood have gone unexpressed or unexplored? I found one when he arrived unbidden.

The King of Wands suggests that I am ready to lead. To lead whom? To lead them where? I let my mind loosen into a net to hold these questions. I had an example for this kind of thinking: years ago I had a period where spiders filled the background of my thoughts. I had watched the film Enemy until 2 AM one night and was so disturbed by the images of spiders (which were apparently so vital to the film that some report that the cast and crew were legally forbidden from discussing spiders with the press), that I ruminated on them continuously. The space between thoughts filled with spiders in a leggy fog around my head. One morning two days into this, the largest wolf spider I had ever seen appeared next to my bathtub as I went to step out of it. It was like a furred brown hand under the lip of the tub. It was as though I conjured it. I thanked it and begged it to leave carefully. It responded by shuddering in the direction of the door.

I have another story: after my reading at the Word Barn (God, I love that place), I found a moth on a sill in the barn. She battered herself against the glass just above the collapsed spiderwebs and the dried, light bodies of other moths. Her fate was just below her, and she moved as though she knew it. I know I anthropomorphize, but sometimes that’s a tunnel between species. I cupped my hands around her and brought her outside. When I opened my hands on the porch, she stayed on my finger for a moment, so I was able to look at her. Small, gray, shingles of brown, with a dark stripe on her shoulders, she took off out from under an apple tree into the sky.

I have said this before: I don’t know what I believe about this except to accept it as a model for how to write poems—holding an idea in your mind, not too tightly or lightly, so it stays unharmed and lets itself be felt brushing the palm. You ask the air. You call and keep calling and something will come. I held the King of Wands like a spider and a moth for two days before attempting a draft. I asked it to come to me by never forgetting it.

I also called a poem to me by reading The Collected Poems of Galway Kinnell, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Robert Bly, books by these three grounded workers of word and story.

I woke up at 6 AM to read Galway Kinnell’s poems. Here he is reciting one of his most famous poems, “The Bear”. There’s a evenness to his reading. He lets words guide his listener instead of whatever emphasis he might place with his voice on certain words or lines. It reminds me of a filmmaker friend who once told me he never wanted the musical score to teach the viewer how to feel. The film itself should do it. Kinnell’s poems transmute feeling voicelessly on the page no matter how much I like his reading.

I saw Kinnell read at the Burlington Book Fest about 15 or 16 years ago. He was a tall man and had aged as tall men age, thinning to take on the appearance of a silo hollowed and leaning with wind. He was still unfrivolous and classically, academically stylish. Even when he died a few years after that, I was still ignorant of what I had seen, a great poet, a kind of giant from a time of giants like WS Merwin, James Wright, Robert Bly, Anne Sexton, Philip Levine, Denise Levertov and others who would become lodestars. He has a permanent place in poetry and was always resolutely ambitious in the scope of his work as anyone who has read his, “Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World” can attest.

Beside him, I also read the work of another author, Roger Watters. I know Roger. He is an extremely kind man who acts as the caretaker at Ascension Church, the place that holds my husband’s small school. Roger is such a presence there that my family appears in some of his poems, poems he had gathered in a manuscript and asked me to read. Roger’s poems are highly narrative; many feature small anecdotes that struck him and kept him alive to his aliveness. He is a keen observer of his own life, which has been a good one lived by a good man. He writes about his long marriage, his grandchildren, his work, his hunting buddies, gardening, his recent heart troubles, his sister’s graceful bout with cancer, Vermont landscape and weather. One morning, after reading his work along with Kinnell’s, I found myself crying over his poems. They are well told stories between neighbors, careful observations of an attentive, loving person. If Kinnell’s poems span countries and centuries, Watter’s work attended the minute, the yard, the town, the heart.

In Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow I found a quote from William Blake: “No person who is not an artist can be a Christian.” That is to say, Christianity or spirituality requires a real engagement with being alive. The kind of exploration that poetry requires registers in all layers of the human, including the spiritual, the sacred, whatever our denominations or history. Roger, and Kinnell for that matter, are true Christians by Blake’s definition. I cried over these poems because it was such a pleasure to read work that so strongly contrasts with what social media or our current administration wants me to believe a man is or should be. Galway and Roger, both men, both poets, who both transcend their gender into their indispensable powers of observation and kindness. It’s a model for whatever leadership and masculinity I want to manifest from the unknown parts of me and, more importantly, in my poems.

So the King of Wands, this is what it means: his appearance was not a mirror. It was a projection, an offering, an invitation. It wasn’t, “You are or have been the King of Wands.” It was, “time to be the King of Wands. You are ready.” I could lead people, sure, but more importantly, I must lead the small nation of my multitudes. I can accept radically what I am making as I am making it and what’s more, I can make it in order to know it. Poetry is a living breathing animal, and I am one of its little cells keeping it alive. Everyone has a role to play and Kinnell, Watters, Bly, offer examples and artists to live in relation to, amongst them in poetry’s vast webbing.

I needed that self-assurance. When I wrote my poem this week, it was about artificial intelligence. I had a friend describe its use to me, how it can comb through data and pull forward memories, words perfectly recalled, even speech patterns in a number of recorded conversations and meeting transcripts and I felt heartsore, indignant. Memory retrieval, intuition, molding new ideas out of old mistakes, AI could solve this, sure, but what is left of thinking then? I don’t want to forfeit that over for ease. This week’s poem is about AI in teaching, how my students don’t use it, and I know they don’t use it because they still make very obvious and visible mistakes. Their mistakes are endearing and start to become methods of identification.

The first draft began this way:

My students don’t use AI. This means, I know them by their mistakes. 
Their names hum under broken syntax, their spelling underlined with 
furrowed red brows chanting disapproval. They don’t even bother 
with spell check. A small teacher in my brain calls this lazy, but the woman
I’ve become finds it endearing. I know them. They are impatient. 

As I made revisions, I realized I didn’t want AI or the words artificial intelligence in the body of the poem. I made it the title, which meant artificial intelligence became the antecedent to the pronoun “it” throughout the poem. AI is an it. Versus a living they, he, she, us. The poem doesn’t argue for its destruction as much as an honest account of its place amongst the living. Here is the revised beginning:

Artificial Intelligence

Without it, I know my students by their mistakes. Like photos in 
the developer, they take shape in a sluice of broken syntax, 
words struck with panting red slashes. Their misplaced theres and they’res take on 
the scent of human hair. 

In Bly’s Little Book, he describes our shadow as a bag into which we throw everything we are taught is unacceptable about us. We have personal shadow bags, city-wide ones, nationwide shadows that could cover the Atlantic. To grow into more of one’s self and to develop one’s art, the work, as he describes it, is to absorb the shadow and to condense into more of one’s self. AI has no shadow except the one we give it, the ones tease out of it with prompts. It’s a mirror to the current moment using a patchwork of the past. AI is not yet capable of what human minds are: the emergent reality of creation, of making it new. It rearranges the old into established, highly rational patterns. We can leap into the future. In order to do this, we eat our shadows, absorb what has been rejected in order to integrate it into us, empowering us with the energy that wants so badly to be utilized, it becomes hostile if neglected or repressed. And we must. AI presents us with our marching orders—make our work more strange, more surprising, more complete, more welcoming and integrated of our shadows, more rooted in our human experience, will wilder and more embodied forms. We must do what it cannot in order to survive it.

Below is the messy, mistake-ridden, entirely human drafting process for the King of Wands:

The image was inspired by this tree on the coast of New Zealand warped by the sheer and constant force of Arctic wind.

I wove an image of the figure into it using graphite, pen & ink, gouache and colored pencil. Here is the final image:

Methods and Practice: Mistakes

One of my favorite recent memories with my mother is fighting with her. Even with me at 41 and her at near 66, our relationship has more life in it, wants to be more and forces itself into being. We are learning how to argue better, to stay when we could run from it. It is the making of her and me, and this thing we make between us (the third thing that all relationships are). And it all comes from our mistakes and faults. She prefers quiet, and I put my foot in my mouth. I love her more because she has forgiven me and me more because I stand up to her. Why am I talking about this? We can do that for our art. Every time we mess it up, we learn something—our limits, a better way, a chink through which our voice is speaking. A Freudian slip can be an opportunity, a better line than the one we intended to write. AI doesn’t write accidents. We do. Make mistakes and then use them. They belong to you, not as darlings you kill, but runts you keep. Please keep writing bad work. Everything comes after that.

Condition is here: Quick tour update

My planned reading at the Phoenix Books in Rutland has had to be rescheduled for the fall. I am very much looking forward to traveling south to see you all then. I am open for other bookings, so please reach out!

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“Intelligent and ambitious. You are the one everyone underestimates. But you are practically boiling over with potential. You understand desire and the follies of men, and you use it to your advantage. Continue to use your intelligence to forge a space for yourself in this world.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“Application, study, scholarship, reflection; another reading says news, messages and the bringer of these; also rule, management.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

CARD COUNT: 15/78

With the season of spring comes a season of doubt. These tarot decks, which have become companions, do what they can to encourage me. I pulled the Page/Princess of pentacles, a card of potential.

Potential starts when we’re born, following and nourishing us like an organ. It enlivens us with a sense of purpose. What we can do, we will or we should or we want to or dream of.

You must understand that sometimes I don’t like poetry. Or no, that’s not it. I read it and old voices rose from the hometown of my mind. I read a line and before I even have a chance to parse what it means, I hear, “Well, that’s impossible. What does that even mean? It’s a bit dramatic. They are just showing off. I don’t understand, and they mean for me not to understand. They shut people like me out. Snobs, elitists. This isn’t for real people, people who work and contribute. This is for the idle and rich. How nice for them that they have the time for this.” All that chatter blooms like perfumed smoke in my mind, and my heart hurts. I have to calm those words before I can hear anything else, and sometimes I am too tired for it.

Because sometimes it feels true. I am much more idle than my mother, a nurse, my father, a retired autobody worker, my brother, a fireman. They spare people’s lives, hand them back livelihoods for a fair price. What is a good day’s work in the world of a poet? Such a thing happens invisibly between my work and the reader. I am not even there. There is a grand, quiet set of abstractions connected to what I do, and while I hope they are of use, I can’t promise it. I teach hoping to make up the difference. How can I explain that this does take work and energy and sacrifice? That poetry witnesses who we are beyond work, in the dark hours of the night or the breaths of rest when we lay down our tools, implements, weapons? Someone must tend to it, and sometimes I sense disappointment that that someone may be me.

Look, I am not telling you because this is a legitimate train of thought. I am telling you the territory I cross toward meaning. We all have our own.

This week I read Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice, Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson, Not a Place on Any Map by Alexis Paige, Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines, and Jane Kenyon Collected Poems published by Graywolf Press, poets and authors who have faced the language of their fear and still managed to write these books that teach me what I think about history, war, loss, love, home, and all my potential.

“My greatest prayer is for the people of conscience and the people of love to deeply search our hearts and souls in this time, and to make what we can of this search. I can promise that this is what I am engaged in.

This is what I am doing.” - Ariana Reines Wave of Blood (17)

This is what I want to do, hope I am doing, doing here. I don’t accept the premise of my own thinking. I read these writers. I have met poets. Poetry, the real risk of it, is a labor of love and inquiry. It is affirming to the soul and all that exists. “Men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there.” So it’s a wrestling match and it should be, but I want to know what the blessing is on the other side. I will die trying.

I have named a certain tenor of the noise that separates the reader, the viewer from the central gesture of a piece of art or poetry, the stuff of life and humanity there. I think back further into my familial history, the Irish and Lebanese people who crossed the Atlantic and gave up their songs, food, and poems to become Americans in Maine and Connecticut, to become white New Englanders. From a corner store in Bangor or a boarding house in Howland, through the military and blue collar work to here, where I write, I inherited a mistrust in the medium that I meet on the page. It is like the teacher who closes the door in the face of the student, the underworld whose gates remain shuttered unless you forfeit something. Whatever failures, rejections, and real, raw idiocy I experience, I return and return and return, and I meet lines like this and I am changed. I’m not sorry about this. It just is.

Above are the pencil and watercolor drafts of the Page/Princess of Pentacles

You see, my upbringing, ancestry, history all inform the shape of not only my potential, but of the fear, the fear that is there to tell us that there is something worth being afraid of in those lines. The ego wants equilibrium, homeostasis, sameness after sameness to ensure our safety. What is found in poems may kill us to know. The brain puts on its pageantry of apprehension at the barbed wire fence that borders the unknown. And yet it becomes a signal to continue onward rather than to turn away. Potential can only be made manifest through fear and by way of the god of change. Each time I sit down to read or write, I climb over the same old ramparts. I am learning to move toward the fear rather than away from it. We travel our entire lives, throbbing with pain and possibility, in an instant crossing toward what calls to us on the other side.

The final image of the Page & Princess of Pentacles

This past mother’s day, I read Ariana Reines’ reference to the question found in Bhanu Kapil’s book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” Of course Reines’ suffering is that of her mother’s and it is the same for me and the suffering my daughter will endure will be directly linked to my own. In this world, one controlled by staggeringly wealthy men, suffering is matrilineal. The starvation of my ancestors has changed the shape of our bodies, a shape for which we are punished and we punish ourselves. This is one thread. I could name many others. Our fears are intimately connected to our suffering, bone level knowledge of what our family has suffered or what cruelties have been committed in our name. In my poetry revisions this week, I contended first with the difficulties of self-representation and then delved into the limits of language, where I go to rest when all my language fails.

                                                                                    "When I brought 
my paintings home, my mother hung one over my childhood bed. 
Even with handprints reddened on my breasts, thighs, and chin, I return
here to rest. Some words still work like water, daughter, sorrow, or sleep." 

Sleep, rest, informed by care, interrupts the suffering brought on by living. When my daughter slept twenty hours a day during her infancy, most often in my arms, I remembered how my mother and her mother and ages of mothers before her gave us the rest we needed to awake and continue onward. Poems can give us this too, rest between sufferings. Beyond the challenge it presents is our growth and our rest. I will continue. I will make something of the search I make of my heart, the soul I become more certain I possess.

Methods and Practice: Rest

Have I said this before? Do take a nap. I used to get really sleepy while I was painting and would take a nap on the couch in the faculty lounge. Art professors would find me out there and just ignore me. I would fall asleep thinking about how annoying I found Jeff Koons. Just sleep if you’re tired. And for that matter, drink if you’re thirsty. Eat if you’re hungry.

Condition is here

Thank you, reader, for making it this far. My tour is winding down toward the beginning of June, but copies are still available to order. Thanks to everyone who has read the book, promoted the book, come to readings, talked to me about it, hosted me. It has been an incredible pleasure. More to come soon.

Condition and Other Conditions will continue with its next post on Sunday, May 31.

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The above poetry comic appears in my most recent book, Condition, from Inlandia Institute and was first published at the Indianapolis Review

“Dreams and wishes. What you have waited for is here, and your dreams will come to fruition. Send your hopes out to the universe and she will answer back.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“Concord, contentment, physical well-being; also victory, success, advantage, satisfaction for querent….” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

CARD COUNT: 13/78

Of course I pulled the Nine of Cups, a card of dreams:

As I mentioned in my previous post, sickness dogged me for most of the month of April. I felt grateful to be home and safe while I recovered, and my family managed without me. B made chicken soup. My daughter snuggled in to watch Lord of the Rings with me. I was alone a lot. In the comic above, I use the word oneiric, the stuff of dreams. Illness is an oneiric time that keeps you in the space between waking and sleeping, that lends the body a downward gravity that warps the room. I had to be still for much longer than I would ever let myself be otherwise. In the slowness of sickness, how it hit harder than it would have in my younger years, I dramatically contemplated my age. At what could reasonably be considered the halfway point of my life and in my convalescence, I asked myself what dreams have been accomplished and what have yet to be realized?

The distillation of years of dreaming came to a set of relatively reasonable asks: a daughter, a house, a marriage, and books, a career that makes sense to me. I hoped for trees, raspberries, peonies, lilacs. I have these. I strove and worked for them while hoping along the way that I was doing enough to support the dreams of others, and this spring, the lilacs are turning to the sun, opening thousands of purple fists. The instinct is next to ask, with everything as it is, now what? I resist the instinct to continue striving. My well being, as it is tied so securely to that of those around me, is not consistently sustained by achievements. What then? What am I doing and why am I doing it? Who am I?

These questions used to feel like accusations, but at my age, they feel more like invitations at the threshold of a shapeshifter. The Nine of Cups asked me to notice where I am now, so I may recommit to loving and living into these questions. It is through them that other dreams can be recognized and realized. And it is brave to keep dreaming now. The alternative is to despair, and we do not have that luxury.

My dreams are as inextricably linked to the American dream as my freedom is linked to that of my fellow citizens. Many others many times before us have continued dreaming in the face of such times. Yes, I have great rage, sadness, shame about the impediments to the dream of a more fully realized democracy where all of us may pursue our lives, liberties, and happiness. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act this week knocked the wind out of me even if I anticipated such a thing from this court. I have private dreams and public ones. I don’t always know how to let the former weave into and support the latter. I am learning. It is a profound and basic moral edict that we all deserve a voice in our country’s halls of power. This dream will be realized. I believe it. To believe it will guide my actions. I refuse the alternative.

I read My Mother’s Body by Marge Piercy, The Art of Description: World in Word by Mark Doty, The Essential W.S. Merwin edited by Michael Wiegers, and It’s Lonely at the Center of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood this week, all dreamers of the dream.

While all of these books wove into my thinking, each offered some particular power. Marge Piercy’s closing poem of the collection, “Six Underrated Pleasures,” praises folding sheets, picking pole beans, taking a hot bath, sleeping with cats, planting bulbs, and canning, which lead me to my own listing (watering plants, mixing paint colors, stirring soup, wiping down counters at the end of the day), reminds me of the common dreams of the domestic. Doty illuminates not only exemplary descriptive strategies, but the quality of attention such descriptive requires and how to describe something is to worship it. He quotes Emerson, “Every object rightly seen unlocks a faculty of the soul.” Our souls are burnished by our presence here, and by our ability to tell of what we’ve seen in the only way we are able to see it and to say it. Poetry is a record of this profoundly human effort.

For now, I don’t know what to say about W.S. Merwin. Whatever I could say would be inadequate. My admiration is deep. I will instead share three of his poems that take on the prophetic clarity of dreams, recall for me the sacred purpose of dreaming and of poems: to discover the truths that sleep in the body, the heart, and our lives.

My own poem this week centered around sleep and dreaming and the necessity of peace for our very survival. While I won’t share the poem here, I will share that I changed the title. For a poem in praise of sleep, it went from “Ode to Sleep” to “Against War” because ever since Trump started his tyrannical, unjust and costly war against Iran, all I can repeat is this conversation in my head, “No, we can’t have a war.” “Why not?” “Because the baby is sleeping.” “What baby?” “Any baby, all the babies. The babies are sleeping, and we can’t have a war. It is too loud. It is too violent.” In my poem, the title is doing so much work, and I let it. A small overly critical part of me might say it’s a cheap trick, but I don’t care. Also, I don’t think so. It is a question and an answer. There are sacred tenants my heart wants followed. That children are kept safe (all of them, not just mine) and that we do not disturb each other while we are sleeping. We must tend to one another’s profound vulnerabilities. A majority of the world’s sleep has gone undisturbed. It is right that this should be so and more so.

This week’s image, drawn at the approach of Friday’s full moon, employs the moon as cups at its various and cyclical phases of fullness, and contemplates sleep and the liminal, velvet space of dreaming. Above are the drafts from small pencil drawing to large gouache layering and below are photographs and art pieces by Karoline Hjorth, Park Inju, and Rose Datoc Dall that inspired its composition.

While I admire the work of artists who draw and paint using digital tools, I will always work analog. The materiality of pigment, water, gamsol, ink and graphite and their sometimes unpredictable or uncontrollable interactions provide opportunities that I wouldn’t know to replicate digitally. Here, the water pulled blue from the pen and ink layer and shifted the color of the moon. It taught me what it wanted to be. I was surprised and pleased with the consequences which landed me here:

Methods and Practice: The Writing Warm Up

Because of the way the process of this project was designed, when I sit down to write, my main purpose is revision. For each of the tarot cards, I have a previously drafted poem that I am slated to revise. Typically, I dig into it for at least two days of revision if not five or six. This results in anywhere between 10-25 pages of drafts, each iteration of the poem well documented in its Google doc with the most recent draft at the top.

This means, of course, that any new ideas for poems don’t have a real place in my writing practice. Or at least they didn’t until the past two weeks. I realized that to sit down and immediately revise felt like running a 5K from sitting. The blood isn’t always ready, the hands stiff and muscles taut. Lately, I’ve figured out how to feed two birds with one seed. I have started a new project. It contains entirely new poems, the ones that seem to be arriving just now, ones about fear and doubt, poems of the strange unconscious. I write them all in the same form—a left-justified single stanza—and they are highly narrative. They utilize all of my most well-used poetic impulses, the ones I like but am trying to work through and past to something more. In writing these, I am enlivened by their newness and readied for revisions, to infuse my revisions with fresh ideas. I pass through the comfortable, the friendly, the excitingly new into the hard and steady work. One phase of the writing process holds up another.

Condition is here: Touring Vermont and New Hampshire

This week, I continue touring Condition with a stop in Middletown Springs, VT to read at the Green Mountain Timber Frames poetry reading series. This will be followed with stops at the Norwich Bookstore to read with fabulous poets Eve Alexandra & Diana Whitney, a reading at Bookstock, Woodstock, Vermont’s literary festival, and a reading at the Word Barn in Exeter, NH with Sam Aureli & Jessica Purdy.

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The above image appears in my first book, A Comic Year, from Finishing Line Press 2021

“Comfort and completion. You have worked hard. Let yourself rest within your successes.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“They are for once almost on the surface—country life, repose, concord, harmony, prosperity, peace and the perfected work of these.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

CARD COUNT: 12/78

As the launch of Condition approached, I pulled the Four of Wands:

I don’t know how to square the correspondence I have with the cards. It is irrational, beyond me, but makes perfect sense that I would get this card exactly when I got it, when after years of writing, revising, editing, and finding a publisher for a book, after months and weeks of preparation for its launch, I would pull a card that says what I often can’t say to myself—rest. Move out of the work and worry and into the enjoyment of this. Stay here, though being seen and believed can almost hurt in its pleasure.

And a real pleasure it was. Over seventy friends and family members pushed capacity in the Deli 126 lounge to hear me talk about a book that is prodominantly about isolation, the condition of my earliest experience of motherhood. Those that would have been there then came out now and were profoundly generous in their listening. I love my community here in Vermont very much. After all the fear drummed up by the process of launching evaporated and it was a real joy in the midst of all that is.

I had every intention of finishing the work on Four of Wands on time, to finish my books, edit this week’s poem, create the drawing that I could already see so clearly in my head, and write to you all in my usual Substack post. You may notice that such a plan doesn’t sound much like rest. It wasn’t, and my body rejected it. Two days after the launch, I woke in the night with a throat on fire. Between fatigue and body aches and a truly frightening look down the tunnel of my throat, I figured I had strep. A doctor’s visit confirmed it. I was in bed for a week watching films and TV I had meant to see for a while (Sorry, Baby, Past Lives & a rewatch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy were stand outs) while I recuperated.

This is known as the let-down effect. After a lengthy stressor, cortisol drops and all the dormant inflamations flare free and run roughshod over the body. Anyone who has ever finished a semester ready for vacation only to find themselves bedridden is familiar with this. I can only compare this period with the scary immunosuppressed period I had after my daughter was born. Exhausted and afraid, having brought some wild thing free from myself, a sturdy baby, I was sick off and on and easily courted infections that would have glanced off of me before. Here I am again, having borne another book, as though I leeched its makings from my hair and teeth. I have always fought against rest because there is so much worth doing. How can I rest when another poem nudges me? When there are unread books on the shelf, dust in the corners, unmade soups, untaught classes, and so on? I am of this kind. To rest requires a dire convincing. I am sorry this is a week late. I was required to rest until my mind returned kindly to me.

My companions in this short rest season were the following books, chosen simply because I wanted to read them for the sheer pleasure of it: Life Form by Jenny Slate, The Near and Distant World by Bianca Stone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille Dungy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and The Academic Hour by Keren Katz.

I recently built another set of bookshelves for our bedroom. Now I have a set of three shelves to the right of the bed where from my pillow I could almost reach out and grab something off of them. They are organized by three genres—poetry, essay & nonfiction, and graphic novels & comics. I have a similar set of shelves on the left side of the room with my to-read poetry, nonfiction and graphic works. A majority of these books crossed the room from to-read to favorite pile in the past two weeks. They made a quick stop at my bed where I read them then stuck them on the favorite shelf where I can return to them whenever I feel tempted to scroll my phone at night looking for exactly what these books give me.

Stone’s book, The Near and Distant World, for example, I will absolutely read again. Typically when I get a copy of one of her books, I close it upon finishing and then immediately open it again for a second reading. I can’t get nearly enough with just one pass. I have worked with Stone in workshops in the past, she mentored me through poetry comics work, early artist-motherhood, and the first drafts of the poems in Condition. I have never met anyone who is so relentless true to the notion of revisions as re-visioning. Her poems dig so deeply into her own consciousness in all directions that she moves beyond herself into an electric collective.

I watched her give a talk on Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris recently as part of a series called the State of Poetry in her capacity as Vermont Poet Laureate, and she talked about how poetry is a tool to reach beyond ourselves. They are the way and the map of the way. And what is more, every time I read Stone’s work, I am gifted with new work of my own. That is the mark of art, of talent like hers, that other art springs from it. Stone does this simply by the power of her astonishing poems. And I can say as a fellow Vermont poet that she loves poetry deeply, believes in its purposes, and mentors, in whatever way she can, its vitality as a genre. She is a true laureate, an artist of distinction. This book is evidence.

My poem for the four of wands came reluctantly, but once I began, it was quick. With three days of honest revisions, I had a working draft. It is entitled “Lorica,” a Latin word for body armor and a protection prayer. In Celtic tradition, St. Patrick’s Breastplate ( Lorica Sancti Patricii) begins this way:

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.

In the absence of a formal religious tradition, I witness in myself a will toward self-protection, the way my chest tightens to protect my heart, and how closed I have been at many points throughout my life. I am grateful for this tightness and also negotiate with myself how to let it go, how to open back into my own life after fear and strain.

The impulse for “Lorica” led me here to start:

It may have appeared first, standard issue, 
contracting and loosening with the breath. 
It is impossible to know if it was acquired 
or when, in response to the steady hum
of raised voices through the wall or overhead,
the heat of visible rage or the fire that overtook
the stovetop when someone lit the grease. 
It's here and it hurts, a burn with each deep
enough breath, a limit to the broadness
of the heart underneath the family crest. 

Such a will toward self protection felt like an inheritance. Inheritances are tricky. What begins as something necessary for love and protection can outlive its usefulness and become a restraint. I knew that mine had become one when sometime in my 20’s I found myself on the other side of a women’s circle with my friend’s sister pounding on my chest as though to loosen it up. I looked her and felt nothing, like she was striking someone else’s body. The revisions improved when they moved more deeply into that story, asked,

I watch wondering what she hopes to find in there—a small invalid sovereign, 
pale and withered from lack of use?

The rest of the revisions flowed from there. Like Agnes in Hamnet, the poem becomes aware of the risks of closing the heart, prays less for protection and more for openness.

This week’s art was far more direct than usual. This winter blew down a stack of pine boughs from the trees around our house. When I was well enough, I dragged a bunch of them into our yard to lean against our big pine to form a small tree fort for our daughter. I thought it was the perfect image for the four of wands, a cool, pine-smelling place of rest. One day or two later Minnie and our neighbor friend posed in front of it. All I did was take a picture and the composition was captured.

There was a real pleasure this week in getting a sauce going on the stove and spending an hour cross-hatching pine needles here as I waited for the milk and wine to cook down. Some part of me did rest in that, reminds me that I am still safe and free enough to make some of my own happiness. I know how to do it on the cheap—basic ingredients like a thick-bottomed pot and a fistful of ancient micron pens.

Methods and Practice: Publishing Poetry

When I first began sending my work out to publishers, I really struggled with cover letters. It wasn’t until I became a reader for the Mud Season review and experienced the other side of sorting through the slush pile that I realized how they work. The poems are the most important part. Unless you have a specific vision for what to say in your cover letter or something particular to say (“I learned about your journal through this market”, “I met your poetry editors at this conference,” etc.) , it is okay to make it short and to the point. They can be purely informational.

Below is an example of the kind of cover letter I send out to literary journals:

To all those at [name of journal]:

I submit the following poems for your consideration: “poem 1”, “poem 2”, “poem 3”, & “poem 4”.

While most of these are simultaneous submissions, I will be sure to send you a message via submittable the moment any are selected by another journal.

Thank you so much for curating such a beautiful journal and for your time and thought my work.

Warmly,

Meg Reynolds

This has worked reliably after over a decade of submissions. Literary journals are often labors of love for their editors and poetry readers. They are reading thousands of submissions a year. It is a kindness to offer your work with clarity and brevity.

Condition is here: Updated Tour Dates

Condition is here and available to order. I am very proud of this book and am going on tour through Vermont and New Hampshire this spring to celebrate its newness. Below are some updated tour dates for readings I will be doing around Vermont:

If you would like me to come read at your venue, come teach in your class, or support a workshop in your space, I am happy to do so. Please feel free to contact me at meg17.reynolds@gmail.com.

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The above comic appears in my first book, A Comic Year, from Finishing Line Press 2021
*also note that I have canceled my Prime account since this comic was made. I don’t miss it.

“Hot-headed and colorful. You have a playful side, and you move with speed. But a part of you has potential for violence, and only you can reign that in.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“He is shown as if upon a journey, armed with a short wand, and although wearing armor is not on a warlike errand. He is passing mounds or pyramids. Divinatory meanings: Departure, absence, flight, emigration. A dark young man, friendly. Change of residence.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

CARD COUNT: 11/78 (new feature to keep track of my progress)

After the moon, its power and uncertainties, came the Knight of Wands:

He rode in to remind me of bravery, to choose curious, steady action over the violence of hurry and impulse, and that all this is a journey. I had a friend ask me if now was the right time to be making new work. As my third book, Condition, comes out this week, the dual efforts of working on this project while launching a new book could diminish the quality of either effort. There is a real measurable cost to multitasking. The brain flickers between the two activities rather than actually braiding one’s work all together. Promotion and writing are two very different tasks. This was a kind question from my friend that I thought about for days afterward.

Admittedly, I don’t do both at once exactly. One grounds me. The other scares me. To work now makes promotion possible. I don’t believe in the idea that you are only as good as your last book. I do believe in the idea that strength is drawn by steady attention to one’s craft. Another friend once said, “You are whatever you do every day. If you make art every day, you are an artist.”

I believe in the value of art and literature in our human community. Amongst its many purposes and efforts (absurdity, inquiry, exploration, reflection, and so on) it preserves the history of the interior and constructs visions for the future. It is why I believe the current tyrannical administrations of the world will fail—they don’t have the artists. They destroy without the vision necessary to build or create. We need artists to help us understand what is and see what is possible. No one doubts that a plumber is a profoundly important member of our community, and plumbers don’t hesitate to call themselves a plumber because it is what they do. We need them. We do doubt the necessity of art and artists.

But the world’s major religious texts are written in verse and poetry is often where we turn at moments of great transition and import (weddings, funerals, inaugurations, and so on). Art is everywhere, in what we read, watch, hold, drive in, listen to. We utilize art to create a coherent biography for both the individual and the collective. I want to help in this great effort. History will decide if I am a poet or a Poet. That is not up to me. I am aware that all the poets make the Poet more possible. For me, writing poetry and making art defines my role here. What does this have to do with the Knight of Wands? I reign my violence in with verse and take myself steadily along the road. This necessary work is my journey. May it bolster and strengthen the journeying of others, of those that lead and those that follow.

For the Knight of Wands, I read Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, The Mercy by Philip Levine, Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts, and (most of) Mythologies by Roland Barthes.

I also read Jonathan Blunk’s biography of James Wright, James Wright: a Life in Poetry alongside and simultaneous to Above the River: The Complete Poems of James Wright

I selected this cycle’s books for men whose work, thinking, lives all wrestle with profound violence (enlistment, imprisonment, poverty, war, manufacturing work, loss, discrimination, and so on) and resolve to choose the path of literature, scholarship, craft to sustain an argument for our humanity. These are authors who are inflamed with passion and power, but they give us bodies of work, real legacies honed from that strength.

Baldwin’s opening chapter of Giovanni’s Room is one of the most beautiful, captivating opening chapters I have ever read. Tucked inside it is somehow both everything you need to know to predict where the story will lead and a saturated, monumentally sad set of tensions that lead us through the rest of the book. It occupied my thinking so much that on a night out with B, it took me exactly two beers to unstoppably recite the entire plot to him, noting moments of symbolism and foreshadowing, to which he replied, “No, I don’t mind that you did that. That’s an amazing story.” It is.

To read for this project means to throw myself in the way of beauty. Baldwin, absolutely, as well as Wright. It was about a third of the way through Blunk’s James Wright biography before I realized how vital it would be to read Wright’s collected poems simultaneously. Wright was a machine. He devoured Dickens before dawn and years later could recite entire pages of these novels from the backseat of a Buick in a blizzard. Starting in high school, he read widely and voraciously, with a phonographic memory that allowed him to retain pages and pages of text that helped, along with his embodied poetic passion, lend a depth and muscularity to his poems. He sought and found a new relationship to American free verse, embedding within it the rhythms and dictions of conversational speech, particularly that of his hometown, Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, a place he loved complexly and weightily. To approach poetry and living as he did was hard on his body. He chain-smoked and drank heavily, something many artists of his area were also doing. It is also worth noting that Wright was a profoundly passionate teacher, beloved by his students and understood as deeply invested in them. He sometimes said that he was a teacher before he was a poet. I feel this sometimes too.

I resisted finishing both the biography and the collected and cried at the end of both. I read Wright’s poem “Milkweed” for the first time when I was maybe 26. I wept with recognition (I cry a lot. I accept it.) and ran down the stairs at my work to read it to my coworkers. It felt like important news. In the lines, “Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for/ Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes/ Loving me in secret,” I recognized another human being who was somehow fundamentally heartbroken and mended by the simple act of paying attention. I read this feeling again and again across this biography, this big-hearted, brilliant man who made poetry that would destroy me repeatedly in the best possible way and who would change our approach to free verse forever. I can’t completely address here what a beautiful reading experience this was. I can only recommend it to you.

Today, rather than including my poem for the Knight of Wands, a piece called “The Paramedic,” that is well-revised and near-finished, but of a tender and painful subject, I will share Wright’s poem, “To the Muse,” instead. Betts, Wright, Baldwin, & Levine, are all knights to me, travelers well out ahead of me. I look up and out for them.

To the Muse

By James Wright

It is all right. All they do
Is go in by dividing
One rib from another. I wouldn’t
Lie to you. It hurts
Like nothing I know. All they do
Is burn their way in with a wire.
It forks in and out a little like the tongue
Of that frightened garter snake we caught
At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny
So long ago.

I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up
Out of the suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you
What you know:

You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back to this world.

Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don’t have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.

It’s awkward a while. Still, it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don’t
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
Keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny.

I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn’t, I can’t bear it
Either, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring,
Muse of black sand,
Alone.

I don’t blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.

Copyright Credit: James Wright, “To the Muse” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

This week’s art work began here with the top line of closely cropped figures, followed by the bottom two images, layers of the final draft:

Anyone can see that there is a significant difference between the smaller, initial drafts and the larger final draft. I was unsatisfied with the first draft. I am becoming familiar with this feeling. I am also becoming familiar with what it means to change my work to honor that dissatisfaction. I didn’t know how to solve this problem, so I waited. I drew and colored in the first small draft on Tuesday and dreaded the larger draft on Thursday. I thought, “I can’t make that again. It is not how I feel.” I implicitly said to myself, “Solve the problem.”

There’s always a phase in some folk stories and fairy tales where the protagonist is asked to do some impossible task like spin straw into gold or sort poppy seeds from a dirt pile overnight. In many cases, some wild being enters the story to help the protagonist complete the task. The wild being lives in us. They work secretly in the houses we make of the questions in our mind. On walks, in the shower, in the morning after sleep, while we mince onions and garlic, they emerge gently, their gold spun and ready for us, the wheat threshed from the chaff. It took me a long time to know how to listen for their approach. This is the emergent quality of the human mind that they are trying to get AI to replicate—the silence of our wildness finding the unlikely solution rooted in all that we are and have ever known. S

This week, I kept the size of the figure the same and enlarged the composition around it. I saw in my mind first. In the process of creating the image, I let the wand extend like a staff or a sapling, the world tree that grows from the earth up through the canopy of the mind. It keeps us upright as we journey, whether it’s inward or outward. Both preparation and process revealed the revisions that I wanted. Ultimately, this figure takes on some of the gentleness of my spouse, the model for this image, which is something I want embedded in this collection: love for those around me.

Methods and Practice: Publishing Poetry

As I mentioned in my last post, I gave a talk recently on publishing, and plan to share my insights here across the next few posts. Below is a short list of the best advice I have received about publishing individual poems:

• Read your favorite authors and flip to their acknowledgments page. Make a list of the places they have been published and make your own publishing to do list.

• Read top 10-25 lists of best journals and make your dreamy-dream list of journals you would like to see your name in. Read those journals front to back to get to know what they look for and strengthen your work within the constraints of your own voice.

• Find new authors in these journals and follow them on social media. Read what your favorite authors are reading.

• Once you are published in one of these journals, READ the journal you appear in. Each publication is a small literary community. Get to know your pals. Follow your favorites on social media, write to them to let them know you loved their work, and build your national/international literary community.

• Submit until they do. Don’t be afraid of rejection.

• Subscribe to the Sub Club Substack for weekly news on what submissions are open when.

This is an excellent starting point. When I first started publishing my poems, I felt like I was learning an entirely new world that was unfamiliar and almost impenetrable. These few rules gave me access points that developed into an organically built relationship to this process.

Condition is Coming: Launch Party!

Next week is a big one. Condition comes out on April 1st and we celebrate here in Vermont on Friday, April 3rd at 7 PM at Deli 126 in Burlington, VT. If you are reading this and you’re nearby, I would love to see you! Books, art, a reading, conversation, cocktails, the whole thing will be a real party.

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The above comic appears in my first book, A Comic Year, from Finishing Line Press 2021

“The Moon reigns in the sky brimming with tears and mystery. But her tears are not like our own. They roll down her rocky surface and fall to earth, each containing its own dream. Right now you feel trapped in the middle of the night. The dark is so endless that all sense of the approaching morning is lost. Every action takes you deeper within yourself. Myths, wild oscillations of imagination, fears. Only intuition can guide when the light is so deceptive.

The water around you is overflowing, and your subconscious and conscious minds feel it all. Look closely at the reflection, this shadow of self—in its shimmer you will see the first hint of dawn.” - - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“Looking toward the darkness to bring out the light...The moon is the archetype of the Cosmic Mother and the rhythms and cycles of nature, reminders that the realms of darkness contain light.” - The Major Arcana of Leonora Carrington gathered by Susan L. Aberth & Tere Arcq

Three weeks ago, I pulled the sun, the moon:

But that isn’t the truth. Three weeks ago, I spread the cards of the deck in a long line across my bureau and passed my hand over it, thinking how long it had been since I had pulled a card from the major arcana. Then I pulled the sun, a card of culminating, satisfying insight. It comes at the end of a long effort or journey and proceeds the card of Judgment, where knowledge gained leads to its outcomes, to consequences and rewards.

I was happy to see it. At that moment, it felt true enough. At my age and in these times, it feels like things are constantly culminating or just about to. I looked forward to some brightness and warmth in the weeks I worked with the sun. But that is not what happened. For many reasons both personal and political, I spent the intervening weeks rolling through cycles of anxiety, resisting my worst habits, and writing my friends with my dread score on a scale of 1-10 (“hi everyone, I am at a 9. please help.”). My reasons for fear were equally real and invented and all proof that I was (if I may be extra vulnerable here) undeserving. Of what? Anything, my life, the practice of art, love and belonging, the usual. It was a long minor strain on a violin - the feeling and the counter feeling. No, you don’t. Yes, you do.

Better tarot practioners that me will recognize that this is not sun energy. It is knowledge shining through nighttime, reflected, refracted, present but unclear. As I will explain below, the art and poetry I worked on this round resisted the sun and pulled like a tide toward (what else?) the moon. It is perfect to me that the moon card would come not from a casual pull, but from behind the sun, from within my own consciousness emerging through my art. The moment that I accepted the moon as my guiding principle, my anxiety diminished.

I don’t mean to say that a small lunar god was demanding my attention and, once satisfied, let me rest. Instead, I think I needed to remember what drives this project: inquiry and expression. The moment I honored that, I felt better. I was reminded that I have agency everywhere.

For the moon, I read Robert Hass - The Apple Trees at Olema, Ada Limon - Bright Dead Things, Andrea Cohen - The Sorrow Apartments, Major Jackson - A Beat Beyond and Amy Hale - Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully because these are all scholars, poets, artists that I consider luminaries, guiding lights. I thought they were suns and they are, and I am moony here, letting the light of their insights shine off of me.

To read as much I as intend to read for this project, I get up at 6:00 AM before the rest of my family to read for an hour. Typically, I choose either poetry or more contemplative works, writing that benefits from the pourous quality of my thinking at that hour. Before the rigidness of the day claims me, I sit with poems. This means that for the past few weeks, I have spent my mornings with the work of Robert Hass. Contemporary poetry has seen many experiments with form, but it is dominated by the left justified, free verse, page-long stanza. I love this form and use it often myself. It feels like a snapshot of a human mind running the length of a thought and as someone who, to quote Miranda July, feels “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it,” poems satisfy something very particular before moving on to other offerings and favors.

However, within my own work, I worry that this form is limiting. A thought, when fully resolved, is satisfying, but if I am not careful, does it come too close to a commodity? I can’t avoid the influence of capitalism. None of us can. Despite poetry’s impossible to define value and de facto place both inside and outside of capitalism’s boundaries, there is a muscular pressure for time, even that spent making poetry, to equal money. Poems that I love best, those of Hass, Bianca Stone, Danez Smith, Ada Limon, Elizabeth Bishop, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Diane Seuss (how to stop now that I have started?), manage to sit timelessly on the page, both open and resolute, invaluable. They are thoughts that lead us to more thoughts and feelings and riotious aliveness. Poems are living things that help us live. I remind myself to resist the temptation to fully resolve each idea, image, ending. I have to keep something open, ambiguous, uncertain, where others can connect and make it their own, make poems that are ungovernable, unquantifiable, difficult to commodify.

I was reminded of this in the past few weeks where I read more long form work, work that wanders through sheer dioramas of ideas like Hass’s work does. I was reminded in reading his The Apple Tree at Olema of the pleasure of poetry, a fidelity to a profusion of language, like lingering at the table long after a meal is over. These poems are about pleasure, a full accounting of thought, memory, scholarship. Images of the landscape, food, the trevails of war, loss, divorce, questions of God and parenting, influence, the nature of artmaking itself, are all written in language celebratory in its beauty. Strangely, these poems are so long and specific and take in so much of the larger world that they impress upon the reader that these ideas are incomplete. There is so much to say, that even ten pages of poetry could never cover it all. This is just one man’s rich and unfinished accounting. The poems seem to stop from exhaustion rather than resolution. In the end, we are satisfied and small against the sheer magnitude of what living offers us.

These led me to alter my approach to revision for this week’s poem. One aspect of Hass’s work is his attention to color. All his scenery, especially that of California, is lit. Sunlight, golden and bright, white sprays of ocean, ochre, alabaster all weave into his work such that it all shimmers from within. It was the right palette for a poem I would link to the moon. Here is the first draft of my attention to color in this week’s poem:

                                               a stalk of hosta blossoms,
silver and pillared with light.

Hass’s poetry gave me permission to deepen and broaden my attention to silvers, whites, opalescence in the scenery I described:

An arcing stalk of hosta flowers, a lunar stand of nodding 
ghost pipes, a lace of mycelium, bone-white, gripping a black cake 
of bark rot, micah flake, glacier, wind lifted cornsilk, calcium,
sea urchin, the glossed armor of fish scales, mermaid’s toenail, moon 
shell wedged between blades of metamorphic rock, chalk, lichen, coral 
bones, a caul, a sheer shroud, a crowd of dogwood blossoms, phosphorus, 
a bottle of vinegar caked in river clay, river. 

In order to unify these images, I relied of various strains of alliteration—assonance and consonance both. There is an incantatory quality to this list that became the opening to the poem. This prefaces the story the poem eventually tells, which I will share in a future post.

As I struggled to recognize the driving forces behind my work during these weeks, I worked on my image for what I thought was the sun. These are the initial drafts:

When it became obvious that this was the moon, I finally relented. The art is as I am in any given moment, and it told the truth. In my final draft, I painted the moon:

This image features a face, the first obvious one of the collection, with one eye open and one closed. This comes from the opening to Donald Kasched’s book Trauma and the Soul where in the introduction he uses the image of an Inuit whalebone carving called “The Storyteller” to describe the dual views of the human mind—one outward to the material reality in which we exist and one inward to the mytho-poetic spiritual realm where we experience the fullness of the self, our history, imagination, and experiences, as well as our link to the collective unconscious. (6) The moon reminds us of both. When one is unclear, we may use the other to guide us until clarity arrives.

So I look again in both directions. Last week, when a student asked me, Why are you doing this?, it took me a minute to answer even though only a few months ago, my reasoning was clear, taking on the tenor of an elevator pitch. The question deepens as I continue into the project. Originally, it was to expand the scope of my work beyond my usual preoccupations.

My answer to the student, however, was this: I am culturally Irish Catholic. Though my family left the church a generation ago, I am not free from my longings for god, the sublime, the ineffable. My family once had a structure through which they engaged these questions. This effort of art and poetry is an exploration that I approach with humor and curiosity but ultimately a growing solemnity and seriousness. I am privileged with the freedom to do this and, with whatever time I have left, I want to explore the unanswerable questions of my human existence: what is beyond what I can know? If god, in their many transforming faces, exists, then I want them to know I looking for them, not for blessing but for knowing. I give them the love that is my attention. This project is the missing structure, a set of infinitely small sacred practices of my own invention, where I talk to whatever is within me and beyond us. And perhaps, rather than expecting an answer here, my hope is that my inquiry extends beyond the efforts of this project and into each action of my life, so that even peeling a carrot, carrying water becomes an act of presence and questioning.

Methods and Practice: Publishing

I gave a talk last week about publishing. I had so much to say about living a creative life, something I set about having with dogged attention, that I hardly got a chance to really talk about publishing. I have also very recently gone through (and am going through) the process of publishing a book, so I have a lot of fresh thoughts about it. I want to share here what I was unable to fully explain in my talk the other day.

I will start with this: what is publishing? I will use the broadest possible definition, the one employed by English teachers to describe to their students the end of the writing process. It is the point where you show someone else your work. To send it in an email is to publish to a very small audience. To publish with a major publishing house is to publish with a very large audience. I can talk in finer detail about the book and intellectual rights question, but what I want to offer more is a meditation on publication options. I encourage anyone looking to publish to think creatively within this broad definition. You may publish in the following ways (incomplete list):

Locally (state, town, community): newspapers, local lit mags, local publishers, self-publishing, zines, letterpress, flyers, poster campaigns and so on.

Nationally (country): national literary magazines, contests, blogs, book publication and so on.

Internationally (world): nationally known literary magazines, contests, book publication, and personal websites and social media (Instagram, Substack, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) and so on.

My first experiences of publication were local—a local lit mag, newspapers and small letterpress print anthologies of the work of me and my friends. They were labors of love that brought me closer to the other artists in my community who became very dear to me very quickly. Some of the happiest memories in my 20’s were the launch parties for these small, workshop driven anthologies that my friends and I put together. We hung around in a local art galleries, drank boxed wine, and listened to each other’s poems while sitting in the only seating we had, the pavement of the parking lot just outside the studio under a string of Christmas light.

This is something else I told this crowd of college students. Yes, art is often made on your own, but it isn’t entirely sustainable that way. You can make a practice that generates its own energy like a car battery vs depletes itself continuously like a gas tank. Working in community, in the case of writing, things like workshops, classes, group anthologies and small presses, sustains the creative effort. Publishing means other people, so find them, particularly those closest to you. They will surprise you, and they will help you. More on this next post.

Condition is Coming: Tour Dates

My next book, Condition, which chronicles my experience of early motherhood in the isolation of the pandemic, is available for pre-order, but will also be available at readings described in the tour dates below. Please note that this is a slightly incomplete list. I will have more as the planning continues.

*Note: I am sorry this is a week later than usual! I had anxiety. It’s better now. I will be back on my regular schedule to share my next post on Sunday March 28th.

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The above comic appears in my first book, A Comic Year, from Finishing Line Press 2021

“One seated on her couch in lamentation, with the swords over her.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

“Anguish and regret. You are stuck in a deep pit of unhappiness. The anxiety you feel has become your only companion. It will not be easy to free yourself.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

The Ten of Cups is emotional fulfillment and was followed quickly by the Nine of Swords:

This may seem counterintuitive. There is a whiplash between the two cards: joy giving way to utter lamentation. And yet, I know the ways in which one allows for the next. I once had a friend talk about it like this:

Some days, you are utterly contented like a king standing in the uppermost tower of his castle surveying his realm. Your people are happy, the crops are flourishing, and war is a distant memory. You are grateful for what you have achieved and hopeful about what is to come. You sigh gladly at the setting sun. Good for you.

But then you hear a cough behind you. You turn and one of your attendants stands quietly holding a gilded box. He says, “I thought you would like to see this.” He opens the box and in it is the worst thing you have ever done, your deepest shame and confusion, your crimes and your embarrassments, your many and multiplying wounds. They clatter in the box with a tinny disharmony. You lunge forward and slam it shut. You shout, “Why do you think I want to see that?!” and the attendant replies, “Because now you can.”

This is true on the level of the individual as well as the nation. There has never been a utopia or perfect prosperity or a true democracy in which all people have been equally cared for and represented. Any progress forward is followed by a looking backward at who now can be attended to, what mistakes we can repair, grieve or honor. What lives in our shadow, our forgetfulness that guides us toward cruelty to ourselves and others right now? When we are happy, we have the strength and power to ask these questions more readily than when we are in pain. I pulled a card of lamentation because as a nation we grieve and because, for now, my heart can take it.

For the Nine of Swords, I read Uncursing the Dark: Treasure from the Underworld by Betty De Shong Meador, Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life by Sofia Samatar, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, & The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Javier Taboada. (with Cheddar our cat)

My reasoning was this: if I am going to be in an underworld of lamentation and anxiety (and I have been) that is fundamentally difficult to extricate myself from, then I can at least mine its treasures. What can I learn from this? Meador’s book looks deeply at the Sumerian poetry of Inanna’s descent into the underworld (here is the well known Wolkstein-Kramer translation), a foundational myth that predates the descent of Persephone and the cyclical agricultural myths, such as the story of Jesus, that outline the cycles of birth, death, & rebirth. Inanna is at the height of her powers when she decides to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of death, in the great below. She is stripped of her finery, the eye of death is set upon her, she is beaten into a hunk of meat and hung on the wall, and is rescued by her friends up above. She emerges from the depths fierce and terrible, fully embodied, all knowing of life and also of death. Surviving all we manage to survive means this kind of terrible knowledge, a wisdom hardwon by facing all that is. To do otherwise is to remain in girlhood, in childhood when we are called to do and know more.

And what do we do when we know all this? How do we go on? In East of Eden, the moral and intellectual center of the book is Lee, household attendant of Adam Trask analogue to the biblical Adam, lost, loving, sad, and always trying. It is Lee who studies the story of Cain and Abel in the original Hebrew to determine the meaning of the word timshel, and concludes it means, not thou shalt, but thou mayest overcome sin. It is not an order or a prophecy but a choice. The good and evil that battles within us always presents a choice, and we are redeemed in our humanity when even through the trials of the underworld, we choose goodness, kindness, generosity, to bless when we could curse, to love when we could hate, to turn toward what we fear in ourselves, own up to it and promise to move ever forward to a more complete embodiment of the divine. We commit and commit to this most human of struggles.

In the closing of her beauty of a book, Sofia Samatar tells us that this process, whether in writing or as a human, can start anywhere, right here, right now, “…for if writing never ends, then to start right here is altogether marvelous, perfect, whoever it is, wherever it is.” This is our charge, to start again, to try again, wherever we are, in whatever darkness. We can do so lightly while never forgetting that, “…it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world.”

And of course, my world deepens and expands continuously with tomes like Rothenberg and Taboada’s anthology. It was a profound pleasure to read The Serpent and the Fire, a text that shifts permanently my understanding of what an American is, turns so many into my brethren, and widens my knowledge of our shared histories, both in and out of poetry. It amplified the feelings I had watching the Bad Bunny halftime show. I was raised with some limiting propaganda about what an American is, and I am overjoyed to expand infinitely the definition. The only authority I have is over my own heart, and its says, All are welcome. You may come in. I choose this no matter forces want to convince me otherwise. My songs join the songs of my fellow Americans, my people, which is all people.

I even welcome the fear as I resist it. In this week’s poem, The Dog, I transformed the ending. The poem is about a black dog, a common symbol in European folklore as an omen of death, an icon of depression and a sentinel of the underworld. The dog unfolds through the poem as both a symbol and a memory of the choatic animals across my lifetime. As the dog approaches, an embodied fear joins her, rising as she gets closer. Instead of me seeking out an underworld, it’s as though the underworld rises up to meet me. At first, the poem ended this way:

                                                  My skin
sprang with sweat. There is so much 
to heal. She was pulled away from me. 

As I revised, I assumed a more ready and powerful voice than I felt in the poem’s earlier drafts. I follow a brilliant historian and political content creator Amanda Nelson on this platform. She says, rightly, that we have to decide now what we will do and how we will be brave. If faced with an ICE raid in our workplace or violence at a protest, we have to decide beforehand who we are going to be. This is also the message of the nonviolent training that Civil Rights activists in 1960’s Alabama underwent. They trained on and decided who they would be in the face of Bull Connor and other racists’ horrifying, antagonistic violence. Doctors, fireman, paramedics, nurses, they all rely on their training and the decisions they made before the worst happens. To look into the fear rather than away, to make a practice of it, and come out the other side, is to prepare to be who you are no matter what occurs. This is the revised ending:

                                                                        My skin springs with 
sweat. Muscles tense, alive, inadequate. I prepare my welcome.

In the poem’s close, I practice my bravery. Whatever underworld this dogged creature brings with her, I will protect my throat and face her. Alejandra Pizarnik writes in her, ‘Of the Silence,’: “The poem is a space and it hurts.” To grow, to withstand, to see, to know is to hurt. I welcome it. It is to be alive.

I read Laura Perez’s Nocturnos this week as well, and I was profoundly inspired by her sense of composition. Each page of this book is so perfectly balanced. There is not a slip of unused or unintentional negative space. I took a lot from the page featured here to create my draft:

It’s messy, I know. Vermont is now in an underworld of snow and illness. My daughter was sick this week, so drafting this image meant trying to draw while she slept. I listened for her call or her coughing and ran my online informative writing class, drew while my students worked. So many tugs on my brain makes such a mess, but it was enough to clarify what I wanted from the image so I could produce this:

The swords here are bars, the many brutal insights that we see as so clear, as black and white, that hold us imprisoned. There are some beliefs about ourselves and the world that are old and tired and frankly just wrong, but we have held them so long, that they disguise themselves as a home when they are really a jail. We become more anxious and sad as we ready ourselves to break out. It takes great energy and bravery abandon them for a world with new and brighter color. This is an image of beforehand.

Methods and Practice: The Pause

Stop. Just stop. When things are too tight or unclear, allow time to lengthen larger than your confusion. You don’t need the answer or the perfect line. The pause is pregnant with what you will do, say, write, or make. Many poets, artists, musicians include walking, showering, and sleeping as part of their creative process. I have told you before to do nothing, but here, I say, possibly again, that the nothing, the wait, is part of it. You are catching up to yourself, your ideas are catching up to you. Give it time. Don’t hurry. It will come. It is pursuing you.

I can now hold in my hand a copy of the thing that pursued me through nights of exhaustion and days of nursing, cleaning, caretaking, and real human loneliness. Condition, my collection of poetry and images on the task of becoming a parent during the isolation of the pandemic is coming on April 1st. You can preorder your copy here.

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“The 10 of cups for me reads as a person who has reached emotional fulfillment and is ready to put their heart to work for the world.” - from @Felix-not-the-cat on this Reddit thread

“Harmony and bliss. Happiness is here, but it may not look the way you expect. Don’t seek an explosive joy; instead, appreciate the peace and notice your satisfaction. These feelings are here to last.” - The Cosmic Slumber Tarot, Tillie Walden

“Appearance of cups in a rainbow; it is contemplated in wonder and ecstasy by a man and woman below, evidently husband and wife. His right arm is about her; his left raised upwards; she raises her right arm. The two children dancing near them have not observed the miracle but are happy in their own way. There is a home scene beyond.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

After the Ten of Pentacles came the Ten of Cups:

It’s because my family was home with me, and our new cat, Cheddar, finally came out from under the bed. It was the weekend of the deep freeze that seized the eastern half of the US. Here in Vermont, the temperature circled 0° and the snowday calculator predicted no school on that Monday for the 14 inches of snow Sunday night would bring. We were home and warm, watching Over the the Garden Wall next to the space heater in the den. For days, I had been carrying dread, but I set it at the top of the stairs and settled in with my family to quietly, safely, gratefully endure the cold.

I want what I want and this is what I want for everyone. I want a warm place with people we care about. A cast of sunlight on a kitchen table with a cup of coffee in the morning. The kind of quiet the hangs between trees. A poet’s job is having vision, and that’s it: a humanity that wakes up more slowly and thinks of their children or cat or best friend, what needs planting or mending, one that is not so overwhelmingly afraid. I pray for the kind of dreams described by Octavia Butler in, “The Book of Martha.”

These thoughts drove this week’s poem. As I mentioned last week, I can’t include the entire poem, but I will share a revision of its beginning, the event that triggered it. Here is how the poem, “Petals,” which I revised for the Ten of Cups, starts:

In the foreground there are six children. 
Some hold plastic bowls and cups
while other have just their empty hands
and upturned faces. The voice of the man
holding the camera says, are you ready?
and the children nod, their eyes big and round. 
Then, with a hand on the limb above
their heads, the man shakes the branch 
of the blooming apple tree. A shudder
and hush, and the black bow divulges
its plenty over the heads of the children
in a rain of white. They run into the fall
with their open hands filling with petals
and scent. 

My spouse is a teacher who runs an outdoor preschool for children ages 18 months to five years. Set in a forest of tall pines, the school asks the children to spend the majority of each day outside. Unless it is torrentially raining or very bitter cold, they layer themselves in snowpants or rain pants or mittens and gloves, and stay outdoors amongst trees. My daughter goes to her dad’s school and once, during an emotionally intense conversation, said, “My mind goes to the woods. I hear all what you’re saying, but my mind goes straight to the woods.” She and her classmates have developed the same correspondence to the New England forests as I had as a child, respect and safety, a sense of home and embodiment.

Last spring, he sent me a video of our daughter and her classmates all standing under an apple tree in full bloom. You can see in the video how they are all fighting the impatience in their little bodies. When he shakes the branch, they activate, suddenly and profoundly alive with joy, running around catching petals in plastic bowls. Last spring was over a year into the assault on Gaza and years into the humanitarian crises in Sudan and the Congo. By way of social media, I had seen children just like these reaching upward, in their eyes an entirely different hunger, a more agonizing fight. I am not alone in looking at one child and remembering all the others, all equally as complex, worthy, beloved. What are our children being asked to prepare for? This is one of the questions the poem asks.

In revising the poem, I kept the story but condensed and opened it, hoping the reader would have more places to enter the narrative and travel more quickly to the poem’s larger concerns:

The children under the apple tree lift their faces, plastic bowls 
and empty hands. A voice asks, are you ready? They nod, eyes big and 
round. The hand shakes the blooming limb above them. Hush, and the black bough 
rains down petals. Laughing, they run into the fall to fill their hands, 
hair, bowls, and clothes. 

Many of my poems contain stories, but I intentionally make the stories more permeable through process of simplification and refinement. The image of the tree branch is reduced to a “blooming limb,” which is both shorter and more open, allowing other more complex associations to enter the poem. The poem is also woven into poetic tradition by the less-than-subtle references to this poem:

In a Station of the Metro
By Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

My critical theory professor in college, Sanford Freedman, used to recite this poem to us in his sonorous voice, and I would listen with a mix of skepticism and awe. Ezra Pound was an American modernist, but also a fascist and anti-Semite who was eventually incarcerated by the United States government for charges of treason. At the same time, he wrote this small poem that changed my understanding of what poetry is. The world of poetry accepts Pound’s contributions because of how profoundly they altered poetry’s trajectory through the introduction of modernistic principles. His ideas of what people are and should be were monstrous. His ideas of what poetry could be were expansive. He compared people to petals. In my poem, as it grows into itself, amplifies one aspect of his comparison - how delicate we are and how brief. The work is to be able to hold it all in your brain at the same time, these leaves of knowledge, and do whatever possible to build a more liberating path forward.

For the Ten of Cups, I read Technicians of the Sacred, edited with commentaries by Jerome Rothenburg, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, My House by Nikki Giovanni, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood edited by Emily Perez and Nancy Reddy & Collected Body by Valzhyna Mort

While all of these books asked me to hold more than possibly could in my head, Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred did something entirely different. The anthology is a weighty tome of sacred texts from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. The poems here were written in oral traditions, memorized, set to music, used ceremony, as myth, as history, as ecological survey, and were completely interwoven with the cultures from which they originated. In his introduction, Rothenberg emphasizes the how assumptions in words like primative or preliterate limit our ability to fully apprehend the complexity, density and import of these poems, poems that are the inciting tradition of poetry itself. In his commentaries, Rothenberg compares many of the poems collected here to the work of modernists, dada and sound poets, image poets and others to underline that any efforts of contemporary poets to recapture poetry’s strength and purpose draw directly from these existing and long established traditions of which we are all a part.

I tried to read these poems silently, but it didn’t work. I sat in my house and silently read these poems that would be spoken or sung aloud within communities as parts of daily life or for specific ceremonies. As I tried to do this, my heart pounded to the point of distraction. I honestly got anxious. It was a kind of feedback loop that made me feel like something was shouting from the inside. It was only when I started reading these poems aloud that my heart slowed, and I could absorb them. Many of these poems are not from my heritage or history, though some, specifically the European, Celtic, and Arabic poems are. But I could feel them and their intent. The power of the repetitions and meter, the leaps and associations, the breadth of their stories, could not be contained the small theater of my brain. They wanted to fill the air of my house. The great poetry, from the beginning of language to now, is an inherently oral tradition. It wants to be said. To remember this so vividly has changed me, made me remember in my skin, bones, and musculature that poetry is a physical act as much as a written work.

It led me outside to read this extraordinary poem by Aracelis Girmay from her larger work, “The Black Maria.” Here is “VIII” anthologized in The Long Devotion read to morning sunlight on the snow.

For this week’s image, I thought of a different interpretation of fulfillment. Contentment is one synonym, but I couldn’t get away from the center syllable, fill, as opposed to an emptiness or vaccum. I so often feel largely disembodied. Fear comes, and I run out of my skin. To practice living inside my body, I have to accept and withstand what all this is and what I am. To be fulfilled is hard. I had in mind a geological process of grinding all my selves together, including all those selves who have seen some shit across my life and who are seeing it right now. This week, I was a cup, many cups, filled with rock. I took a picture of myself full on to model for the image and created a repeating outline, each of myselves however toward fulfillment. It’s a harrowing thing to do, but the more times I drew my outline, the more in my body I felt. This week there are more drafts. I went through the entire process and landed on a final image (top right) but was dissatisfied. I started over, centralized the figured and used more subtle colors (bottom row).

This was all in order to land on this final image:

In order to achieve the composition and color palette, I looked at the stone walls of the ice caves not far from our home and cannot go without mentioning the work of the interdisciplinary artist Ana Mendieta, specifically, her Silueta Series. Her work blended performance and fine art, was environmental and temporal, and was steeped deeply in her explorations of culture, gender, and religion. This reference is made with great reverence for the power of her work.

Methods and Practice: Repetition

Repetition is a fundamental tool of poetry. It was one of the world’s first technologies for containing and remembering thoughts, feelings, and stories, and carrying them forward through time. It is a method for immortality. Earlier in my teaching career, I worked with many students who struggled the most in mainstream school. There were many reasons, but those struggles often meant that each of these student’s associations with school were negative on a bone-deep, brain-deep level. As teachers, we would often say the work of getting them to trust us was comparable to digging trenches, slow, laborious, and often boring. They had, in their minds, sadly, well-earned neural pathways dug deep against us. School was scary, hard, mean, or least useless, mind-numbing, irrelevant. It was work, by the power of consistency and repetition, to dig a new trench, a new pathway for their learning, and the relationship within which their learning could occur. We kept showing up, and every time, things changed.

The repeating words of a poem return to us in love, longing, rage and mourning, as in this poem by W.H. Auden upon the death of W.B. Yeats, where he repeats with weighty significance, “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.” Of course, there are millions of other examples.

Each repetition digs deeper into the mind, forges new neural pathways, establishes rhythms and receptacles for the growth of the poem. They can create a contract with the reader that the poet breaks for the purposes of humor, insight, delight or devastation. Repetition can be engaged at the level of the stanza, sentence, clause or sound. It mimics the human in the ways we repeat ourselves, take up patterns and rituals and use these internal structures to grow outward in our lives. It is a lens through which we can examine our writing. To infuse work with repetition gives it a more unshakeable structure, a solidity we see repeated everywhere and in everything.

Update: Condition is Coming

The image above appears in my book, Condition, forthcoming April 2026.

Speaking of repetition, it bears repeating my book Condition, comes out on April 1st. It concerns the experience of early motherhood, a bleary set of repetitions that spirals outward into the life of a child and a growing family. It is bizarre to be beyond the infant stage now that the daughter I documented in this text is five. And yet, she returns to me some mornings, when I go into her room to wake her and she opens her eyes without speaking and looks at me with that same expression, one of complete trust, as though I were as a part of the room as the air. She fastens me into place. To hear the beginning of this fastening, you can preorder your copy here.

Also, if you want to hear me read some of the poems from this collection and happen to be in northern Vermont, I will be reading here (RSVP here):

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The comic above appears in my book, Condition, forthcoming April 2026.

“A man and woman beneath an archway which gives entrance to a house and domain. Divinatory meanings: Gain, riches; family matters, archives, extraction, the abode of a family.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

“Stability and rewards. Enjoy the fruits of your labor. Do not compare your finery to others. Simply enjoy what you have.” - Tillie Walden, The Cosmic Slumber Tarot

For the first time, I pulled a card from the suit of Pentacles, number 10:

This is a card of plenty, of the material reality of our legacies. As Walden puts it, it can point to the fruits of one’s labor or more broadly, the consequences of everything that came before. This brings to mind this Substack and my byweekly posts. It is been about four months of a project that will take me at least three more years to complete. It is reasonable to ask, in the face of our times and all that we see cross the great desks of our consciousnesses each day, why am I doing this substack? And what in the world am I doing?

Sometimes the things I share (early drafts of poems and drawings, reflections, poem videos) feel vulnerable to the point of being profane. It is so early in the process to share what I have done. None of my other books have had such an audience this close to their beginnings. But at the same time, I take very seriously my role as a teacher. In teacher training, we are told that when students know something we’ve taught them, they can show it in many ways - repeating it back to us, demonstrating a skill, answering binary questions or multiple choice or short answer questions. But when a student truly knows something, they can turn around and teach it someone else. The knowing lives in their bones then, threads into their musculature. At that point, it doesn’t matter who taught them. The authorship of one’s teaching disappears because it becomes a part of the student. It now belongs to the student who is a teacher who is a student.

The longer I have been a teacher, the lighter my touch has become. In my classes, I set my students to their writing, and I work on my own. Every so often, someone looks up and says, “Does this look okay?” and we have what feels like a mentor-mentee conversation about the writerly process, and we go on. I map out my thinking, show them work that surprises and enlivens me, and share in their joy when they write something truthful. It feels more like an apprenticeship. And I like that better. I am preparing them as I prepare myself. I am just ahead of them on the path. Being a teacher is turning around to see who is behind us and making sure they catch up or even run out beyond us.

What’s more is that I hold the expectation that this craft, the craft of written expression, is one they are honing to live on and develop to serve both them and the community. So I’m bringing you along on this process of making this book so that we can see together what kind of thinking is required to make a book like this and how it changes you. I am immediately changed by the process. I am more kind more often. Less sharpened by what has been left unsaid. I go on with you along with me. I am not your teacher, but I do hope you learn things here that serve you.

Lastly I want to note that things in the coming weeks will shift a bit. Those of you who publish poems or anything else will be familiar with the challenges of sharing your work. Any poem or art that appear here on my Substack are technically “previously published” and are therefore ineligible for publication in other literary spaces, specifically magazines. I will be continuing to share parts of my revisions and process but fewer complete poems. I have to think strategically about how to get this collection published eventually and publishing individual poems in reputable magazines is a part of that. It pains me to change things now, but I promise there will be work here to read each week.

For this card, I read The Celtic Way of Prayer by Esther De Waal to examine the legacy of the sacred in my heritage, finished reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle to my daughter which makes use of Celtic prayers with its wild tale of legacy and ancient runes, tore through Madness, Rack, & Honey by Mary Ruefle some of whose considerable poetic legacy is laid out in her deeply clever, humorous, rapaciously intellectual, generous lectures, reread Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979 because her legacy has made its way deeply into my own poetics, read Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman for its legacy of awe and heartbreak, read Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open by Diane Seuss to see some of her works beginnings, read Mothballs by Sole Otero trans. Andrea Rosenberg, a story of the legacy of one woman’s justified rage and its reverberations through her whole family, and read David Hockney: A Graphic Novel by Monica Foggia & Giovanni Gastaldi to learn more of Hockney’s legacy in global art.

You may say these are rather loose associations with this card, and you might be right. Legacy is determined by our choices, and I wanted to read these books. If a bookshelf is a pantry, I was hungry for them. I especially wanted to read Madness, Rack, & Honey which I read years ago without annotating. This time, I dogearred liberally and underlined lines like what Ruefle wrote in her lecture “On Beginnings,” —“The poem is the consequence of its origins.” (7) Legacy is a kind of natural consequence. An honest legacy can’t be faked or constructed because the truth emerges eventually. It reveals itself based on what forces are exerted on the world in the afterward. A poem can’t lie about what it does. In examining beginnings, Ruefle flipped through hundreds of poems to read for trends in both beginning and ending lines. She found, “that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated...I encountered words that mark the last something made out of langauge that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.” (8-9) If my poems outlast me and thereby become my last words on earth, I will be glad of this sentiment, the last message I may give to my fellow humans and creatures and trees. That is a legacy.

It is bitter cold in Vermont and much of the US this week. In that freezing air, I read Christian Wiman’s “The Wind is One Force” to the ice sloshing on the edge of Lake Champlain.

This week I revised a poem entitled, “Love & Power” inspired by a quote by Barry Lopez found in his book, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World:

Love and Power

It is more important now to be in love 
than to be in power. - Barry Lopez

I have spent the start of the year counting 
my loves: peppermint coffee left behind
by my inlaws, the tightness of snow
around the house. Now I count little powers:
the key in the door, money in the bank, 
the car I inherited from my grandmother, 
which has carried me 40,000 circuitous miles, 
my muscles, ropes of response to the slightest
imbalance or demand, and the power I felt slip,
slightly, when you admitted attraction to someone.
Not a crush, but a noticing and a hunk of ice
melted at the poles, a documented collapse. 
I am tired of irrationality, the refusal to protect
what is so much larger than us, but vulnerable
in its silence and slowness. Love like moss, 
love like lichen and succulent, what need does it 
have for my protection? It is a  near delight 
to realize that it doesn’t bore me or that 
there is hurrying to do, to preserve the delicate
ecology. I will buy nothing. I will stay my exhaust.
I remain alert to its taxonomies and adaptive
behaviors. I start with the two halves 
I hold in here with the TV on low: the fear 
and the want, the having and losing
in microcosm and admission. I could stand beneath
the willow out front and burn a hole in the ground. 
Instead I wait in the egg of this hour, aflame, 
powerless, in love with you and the landscape 
that would hold me if you didn’t. My love is young
again and mewling. We have sex on the couch. 
You pass over me slow as a porthos vine, 
fast as a train. I take all of it while 
the land takes the rest. 

As I revised, I uncovered a rage I was muffling in the poem. I intellectualized and softened my anger and will toward violence. Right now, I want power to maintain my freedom against powers who believe might is right, that power is drawn from acts of excruciating violence. A banal silliness. It is human to want to answer violence with violence. However, that will only reveals at lack of complexity, creativity, patience, faith, and I have those. I was born with them, and they are sustained by love. Love and rage battle within me, as it does many of us, daily, hourly, moment to moment.*

As my drafts evolved, the impulses of the poem blocked out into two main parts - violence for 8-10 lines then countered by love for 8-10 lines in one poem-long gesture. We do not, I do not, however, reassert my values once. It is a choice I make continuously and creatively as long as I am awake. I wanted the poem to reflect that. As I revised, I highlighted all the rage lines in one color and all the love lines in another so the poem looked like two blocks stacked on top of each other. Then I took the top section, the rage section, and double spaced between each line so there would be space to weave lines from the love section into it. Instead of the poem going, rage, rage, rage, love, love, love, the revision now reads closer to, rage, love, rage, love, and so on, the poem itself batting internally to land somewhere near peace. Here is where the poem begins.

Love and Power

It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. - Barry Lopez

These times make violence sound good. Absurd visions like I’m a man with 
a shark’s head and dead Mariana trench eyes and barbell fists to 
grasp a man by his limbs, open him up completely, leave rags where 
once was a person. 

For this week’s image, I represented the Ten of Pentacles with ten concentric circles. I know that circles are more closely associated with the suit of cups, but this is what I saw in my mind, pentacles tucked in pentacles. All consequences are the result of accretion, each previous moment tucked inside our current one. Below are drafts of the image in pen and ink, colored pencil blended with Gamisol, and washes of gouache.

And the final image, darkened with pastels and threaded through with ghosts, the old gestures and presences of human souls:

Methods and Practice: Interweaving

The revision process I described above is a kind of interweaving. It required me to look at my poem and its efforts overall. My poetic practice is strongly influenced by the structure of the sonnet, particularly with the appearance of the volta, the sudden shift in viewpoint, tone, or argument, that typically appears around line 10-12 in a sonnet. I present a set of ideas and then allow the viewpoint on those ideas to change significantly, so we can understand them more fully, completely, prismatically. It is also similar to what occurs in the third line of a traditional haiku, a moment of insight by way of observation.

There are, however, other structures to be explored. By isolating each line of a poem and playing with their order allows for new and unexpected juxtapositions. It changes the moment of insight. It’s not one climatic insight, but many small insights that accumulate across the poem to a collective force, the many becoming one. It is worth experimenting with. It is fun.

Update: Condition is Coming

As I mentioned last week, my book Condition is coming out soon on April 1st. If you want to preorder your copy, here is the link to the Inlandia Institute bookstore. Order away, friends! More to come on readings and other events. If you want me to come read or teach in your classroom, workshop space, bookstore, house party, contact me here.

*Note: I finished this post hours before I heard of the death of Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis. I will finish tonight’s post with the words of his family. This post dedicated him and the protesters in Minneapolis. We see you and we are with you all. You demonstrate the best of us. Readers, if you want to help, start here.

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“Hope and celebration. You are close to success, or it has already begun. Relish its bright force in your life.” - Tillie Walden, The Cosmic Slumber Tarot

“A laureled horseman bears a staff adorned with a laurel crown; footmen with staves are at his side. Divinatory Meanings: The card has been so designed so it can convey several meanings: on the surface, it is a victor triumphing, but it is also great news, such as might be carried in state by the king’s courier; it is expectation crowned with its own desire, the crown of hope, and so on.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

Just before the holidays, I pulled the six of wands (or torches):

This is a hard one. I got it at the start of December, when after an absolutely packed week of caring for my family and friends, making art and poems, teaching, and preparing for the holidays, I pulled the card as a reward for almost finishing everything. Art, poetry, revisions, Substack, video were all done, and I was flush with the relief that comes with a deadline met. Often when I pull a card from the minor arcana, it feels less like a god and archetype the way that major arcana cards do, and more like a friend saying, hey, I see you. It is very direct. That day, my goal was a glass of wine on the couch after I settled in for a holiday weekend with my family—food made, bags unpacked, break achieved. When I pulled this card, I was hours away from that small triumph.

Now its weeks later and I am still working with the six of wands and torches, a card of hope and imminent success, wondering what a card like this could mean in a time like ours. Each day, we lose something or someone. This week, we lost Renee Nicole Good, a poet, mother, partner, beloved friend and neighbor in Minneapolis. Below, I read her poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” which won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize to the ice, which is receding beneath our nearest pine tree to reveal the earth.

This week, we joined hundreds of our neighbors in protest of her death and deaths of 31 more members of our American community at the hands of ICE as well as countless others who have suffered deeply under this agency’s twisted efforts at “safety and protection.” It is unspeakable, and yet we must speak of it, the cruelty of this rogue agency and its handlers.

In Danez Smith’s elegy for Good, they said, “The role of us poets is to witness the world.” When I choose this vocation, I did it because I love the world. It was an act of worship and an effort toward a more luminous acuity and deep questioning. I was around 20 or so, scribbling lines of poems in the margins of my students’ worksheets and reading Ginsberg on my work computer rather than organizing the mountains of paper on my teaching desk. At the time, I had some sense of where this country had been, but I didn’t know what was coming and what it would require of us, how much hard witnessing. It is an act of endurance and bravery that poets have known for centuries and that Renee Nicole Good knew.

I devote this writing to her and to all those that ICE has harmed. I am an American, and I grieve this. I don’t want this violence for us. I want reiterated the words of Renee’s wife, Becca Good, “Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.” I believe this too. So do my neighbors. We said her name as we have before as we gathered to say the names of so many others who should still be here.

This week I revised a poem that is now called “Human Nature.” It started here:

Nature


It is human nature if you say it is. 
Why shouldn’t anything be vast? 
There are rumors we should fear each 
other, and the rumors are lucrative. 
I admit my data set is small
and harmless. Of the humans I know, 
I am lucky to say I have seen little cruelty
and less blood because I have lived
in safety even in times of war, which
my country loves and believes in their most
durable idea. And yet my neighbors
are full of kindness and imagination. 
All of our gardens differ from one another. 
Marie’s zinnias are as tall as my daughter. 
Carmen’s pepper’s as small and bright
as a string of Christmas lights. The light
breaks over the roofs the same way here
as it did in Prague many years ago 
when I was half the age I am now, 
a near child, standing on a street corner
with a bunch of my guy friends
waiting for a bus. I would get 
unforgivably drunk in this city, 
but on this fresh morning, I was sober
and rested, alive to the city itself
with its beauties older than America. 
There was an old woman who was 
also waiting for the bus. She wore
a brown coat and a scarf tied around 
her head. She looked up at me 
as though she carried in her face
some part of the sun that rose between
the historic buildings and touched 
my cheek, said something in Czech. 
My friends said, I think she called you
beautiful. And I knew already. 
I took that blessing and have it 
with me still. Yes, I know what we 
have done. I carry it all. 

While I like this version and its unstructured, conversational quality, it felt more accusatory and didactic than I wanted it to be. I worry that greedy leaders get a lot of mileage out of the idea that a violent will toward self-preservation is inherent in our nature. Survival of the fittest is mistranslated as survival as the strongest, the meanest and to some, the most essential part. But that is a flat definition of fitness. And sure, strength, tenacity to the point of brutality is there, but that’s not all there is, and I witness a broader scope of natures in my own house and the small gathering of homes around us. We are lucky to live amongst kind and generous neighbors. And our strength as a species has depended on this sort of collaboration, on the ability to widen the circle of our compassion beyond our kin to other humans. Our survival will depend on widening it beyond our species.

In revising, I allowed other stories to make their way in. The poem wanders farther afield through a few towns and two countries as well as the thousands of unnamed places where I have contemplated the questions posed in the first two lines. When I finished the revisions, I wanted not just the content of the poem that reflects human nature, but also the shape, the movement of the mind from one end to the other. It is a poem less about answering definitively what human nature is, and more about squaring ourselves with ourselves. It is also an argument for the better angels of our nature, the cultivation of the rare divinity that can inhabit us sometimes and how we keep that kindness with us long after it’s shown to us.

Human Nature

Around the fire at the beginning or end of the world, we 
discuss it. Is it to love, collaborate, or to hoard? Hoarding 
hoards the dialogue, a sad vacuum. It is human nature if 
you say it is. 

For this card, I read The Kingdom of Ordinary Time - Marie Howe, Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver, Start Where You Are - Pema Chodron, The World Doesn’t End - Charles Simic, The Feminist Utopia Project - Edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff & Wren Cantata - Annie Deppe because all of these books are like dreams of what is and what could be. Approaching victory requires dreaming because they tell us what we stand for and what could happen afterwards.

Well, not all of these books were dreams. Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are was more a study of an exacting kind of presence, a full awakeness. In it, Chodron says, “Every situation is a passing memory,” (12) so in some ways, everything we experience is a dream moving through our perception. As witnessing becomes a greater and greater strain, it brings to mind Chapter 20 of this book, “The Big Squeeze.” Chodron describes this squeeze as when, “ [our] ideals [of helping others] and the reality of what’s really happening doesn’t match.” This feels about as far from victory as I can imagine. It is an established defeat before one even begins. It is the mountainous reality of what is versus what could be or what ought to be.

And yet, in Chodron’s view, this is where victory can be most assured. “It’s the rub between those two things…that causes you to grow up, to wake up 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate. The big squeeze is one of the most productive places on the spiritual path and in particular in this journey of awakening the heart.” (122) We are challenged to keep our hearts open now. We see the consequences of closing them. We are guaranteed suffering in this life, and we bring it more easily upon others when we allow ourselves to shut down, tighten, harden into cruelty. We become numb to the sentience and preciousness of other living things. To survive this squeeze with an open heart is to be alive, to live the life that is given to us and to burnish the soul. Poetry is a practice of this opening by way of language and seeing. All art makes this openness more possible. It shows us what such openness looks like and cracks open whatever coldness we have invited in and allowed to stay.

In the astonishing film Hamnet, Jessie’s Buckley’s character Agnes and her brother Bartholomew remember their mother, whom they lost as children, who was a wild woman of the forest, alive to all green things, by encouraging each other as she did to keep their hearts open. The film hinges on Agnes’s aliveness, openness even in the face of extraordinary loss. We must reevaluate our notions of victory. Victory is not dominion. We can conquer only ourselves. Victory is possible on the other side of the moment where we choose to remain alive and open in the face of what would close us and annihilate the gentle realities of our nature.

For the Six of Wands, it was this kind of victory that I contemplated as I worked through the card image, as in the drafts below. For inspiration, I looked at Hilma af Klimt’s “Altarpiece No. 1” (1915), Altarpieces: Group X, Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel,” and Nathaniel Moody’s “A Hidden Place” featured in the most recent issue of Iterant, Ruth Stone House’s literary publication.

As usual, I completed a small initial draft in pen and ink and colored pencil, then completed a larger image in mixed media including graphite, pen and ink, colored pencil, gouache, and pastels. My daughter asked about the details, the strange scribbles on the arches. I wanted this to look like something ancient and unintelligible, sacred and ascending. Victory as rising into insight, safety, past the bullshit, and the messy compost of living into something brief and infinite. It is another image on the altar of this vigil I am keeping by way of this project, to protect my soul from its own hardening.

Methods and Practice: Doing Nothing

Working was easier and more fluid after the holidays. I attribute this to days and hours of being forced to do nothing. I drank too many French 75s on New Years and took up embroidery in front of episodes of Chicago Med. Sometimes do nothing. The nothing helps. I encourage it in you when things have grown too dense and your head feels leaden and it’s been a while since you have been close to a tree. You deserve rest and lightness and need it to go on. I say this with great love to myself as much as to you.

Announcement: Condition is Coming

This week, I am ending by sharing the cover of my next book. Set for publication on April 1, 2026, here is more to know about it:

Condition is a vivid account of early motherhood during the isolation and global intensity of the COVID pandemic. “To become a parent and to write this book, I used every tool and skill at my disposal and invented new ones at the moment they were needed. I drew, wrote, slept, ate, fed, found and refound a thousand toys and small items of clothing, brushed hair, had my hair torn out, largely alone. What no one witnessed, I witnessed for myself on the page.” For Reynolds, motherhood is a strange landscape of ghosts, monsters, illness, longing, and surprise. In the absence of others, parenting is an invention and the self is an ever-changing reality. Written in poems, poetry comics, hybrid illustration, and drawn collages, Condition is a powerful collection that attests to difficult work of love and artmaking.

Advanced Praise for Condition:

Meg Reynolds is one of our boldest chroniclers of contemporary motherhood, her poems rooted in the precise language of the body, witchy and subversive, deeply sensual. In Condition, she illuminates a postpartum world during quarantine, revealing a speaker “ravenous and bewildered,” her exhaustion mixed with “animal joy.” Here, domesticity is always laced with the feral, woven with folklore and oracles, the beauty and terror of the ancient woods. Reynolds, a multi-genre artist, intersperses her own black-and-white drawings in the text to create an utterly original offering, a tapestry of mothers and daughters. Condition is incandescent, lit with primal love and rage, braided with imagination and grit.

Diana Whitney— Dark Beds (June Road Press) & Girl Trouble (CavanKerry Press)

In Meg Reynolds’ visceral alchemy of verse & sketch, bile & blood, mother & monster, animal & sacred light, we recover & recover only to be rent open & made to bear again. Here is the newborn, a thin place, fragile as wet paper, a fearsome beauty tangled with shadowy inheritance. This Condition—of rage, fear, sickness, insomnia-- coupled with joy, coupled with love–blooms strange familiar magic thanks to a craft that shines like a bruise. These are tender jewels. The gold cup, not big enough. It spills & spills.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth—A Wake with Nine Shades & Her Read: A Graphic Poem (Texas A&M University Press)

More announcements to come - a preorder link, readings, and all that, but this is to share that this book is coming. I am honored to share it with you.

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The image above appears in my book, Condition, forthcoming April 2026, and it is drawn from a page of The Bear’s Toothache by David McPhail

“Strength and home. Defend yourself and your family and work to maintain what you have. Plant your feet on the ground and stand all with bravery.”- Tillie Walden, The Cosmic Slumber Tarot

“The figure leans upon his staff and has an expectant look, as if awaiting an enemy. Behind are eight other staves standing erect, in orderly disposition, like a palisade. Divinatory meanings: The card signifies strength in opposition. If attacked, he will meet the onslaught boldly. With this main significance there are all its possible adjuncts—delay, suspension, adjournment.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

After the Five of Wands, I pulled the Nine of Wands (Torches in Walden’s Deck):

More than anything, I thought of the home. I thought of the home we make in each other and of ourselves for others. I thought of how we defend the interlocking shelters of our bodies, families, house, towns, states, countries, species, earth. It takes a lot to rouse me to boldness, but I know some things about steadiness and faith. Poetry teaches this as does teaching and love. To pull this card meant it was time to revise a poem I drafted in March of 2025 after the International Women’s Day protest we attended in Montpelier, VT. Here is the first draft of this poem:

Ceres


We celebrate International Women’s Day on the steps 
of the capitol building. The building is topped with a dome
gilded gold beaten to a cellular thinness and a statue 
of Ceres carved from laminated mahogany. She looks 
out and across the field, carrying a bouquet of wheat. 
I hold my daughter like a bouquet on my arms, 
draped languidly as I kneel on the smooth cold granite,
my back to a snow squall and surrounded by protestors. 
The sun shoulders through then disappears, the mic cuts in 
and out of speeches, and the bitter air wears us out
until we cuddled on the ground as we waited to march. 
How did Ceres hold her daughter when she emerged 
from the underworld? Without her, Ceres made 
weather like, spitting ice, sideways wind, a vacuum
of white and blue, a broad absence of green, 
the people moving slow through the sea of cold shock. 
We shake raise fists at winter, at the cyclical 
brutality of men, while a woman stands at the microphone
to sing a song about death, entering it completely
and meeting it like a friend. I rock my daughter 
like I did when she was a baby, find her brow, the only
skin exposed above her bright eyes, and give her
kisses as small as pomegranate seeds. I hunch
over her and lift my head only to howl support
for the end and use my back to block the wind.

To revise this poem, I accordioned it, expanded it outward and compressed it again, totaling 16 pages of drafts. Here is where the poem’s beginning landed after this process, which included rewriting the poem into the standard form of the collection, 16 lines of 16 syllables.

Ceres
	International Women’s Day, March 8, 2025
	Montpelier, VT

As strong as we want to appear, such a winter shocks the body. 
We are a stunned crowd on the capitol steps, shouting in the cold.
It’s a cold mothers know. 

In reading the most recent draft, I am the most satisfied with the transformation of this line:

“The building is topped with a dome
gilded gold beaten to a cellular thinness and a statue
of Ceres carved from laminated mahogany.”

to this:

“Ceres, who tops the capitol’s gilt dome, vanishes in a snow squall.”

I loved moving Ceres closer to the figures in the previous sentence. She almost joins the other glowing icons of Joan of Arc and St. Hildegard and canonizes midwives and radium girls by proximity. As to the syllable count, it requires a certain amount of trimming, and in this case, I had cut mouthfuls like “carved from laminated mahogany” altogether. And it is in this revision, form and content conspire to create meaning. I read about the Ceres statue’s making, and initially wanted to include it in the poem. However, this brought the reader inside to a warm workshop alongside the reliable density of wood, carving tools, and machines, when the environment of the poem is somewhere much colder and more exposed. In simplifying the image and dropping all that language, I kept the reader outside in a wind of s sounds (“…tops the capitol’s…vanishes in a snow squall.”). This is just one example of the power of working within form, of carefully attending to the home of the poem’s initiatory impulse. It honors you back.

I did, however, keep some version of the closing line intact. The bitter cold of that day and the urgent realities that brought us to the steps of the capitol made me think of Kathe Kollwitz, an artist I discovered because of the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser. In Rukeyser’s poem, “Kathe Kollwitz,” she utters the line,

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about

her life?

The world would split open”

I am of a generation that has watched the world split open over and over, and mothers like those in Kollwitz’s work are still doing everything they can to hold it together. I feel bodily correspondence with Kathe Kollwitz’s images of mothers and children, the arcing of the back as though you could make your body into a lean to, your skirt into a tent, your hands into gates, the last fragile boundaries and borders of protection. I think of mothers here in the States, in Gaza, in Sudan and the Congo, who are arcing against the elements to protect their children. I kept it in the poem.

I write about this feeling a lot from different angles. The video below features the poem “Milkstone,” which will appear in my forthcoming book, Condition, and was recently nominated by Sho Poetry Journal for the Pushcart Prize. In “Milkstone” I examine the size of one’s will to nourish and protect your child against their own smallness. The world is so much larger than a baby and that size difference rings like a bruise.

Our shared strengths exist to protect one another’s vulnerabilities. If a shelter is unsafe, many may wish to come here. I say may they come here. I cannot be convinced to fear those seeking shelter, and certainly not when that is what my family did just a few generations ago. From Lebanon, Ireland, China, and elsewhere, our people came here, and this is where we made our home. To unravel the frail shelters of the family or the body with segregation, exploitation, incarceration, deportation is wrong. It is not wrong to seek safety, to cross borders to find a home for you and children. And after all, as Warsan Shire states in the opening line of her stunning poem, “Home”: ‘No one leaves home/unless home is the mouth of a shark’.

In Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory, she quotes Osip Mandelstamm, that he wanted to “live in the imperative of the future perfect,” or in the “what ought to be.” That is the role of the poet and artist, to keep saying what is possible, to restore faith to people who have lost it, to provide vision for the future and to remind us of the righteousness we already know. In doing so, we have a hand in shaping the shelter of a safe future for all our children, for they are all ours.

Kathe Kollwitz, Mother with two Children, 1932-1936, bronze, Seeler 29 I.B.6.

I thought of home all week as I read the following:

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius trans. George Long, Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang, Circe by Madeline Miller, Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, Reading the Mountains of Home by John Elder, Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas by Edited by Amanda Johnston

These books, all of them, had something to say about how to become homes in ourselves. While Marcus Aurelius asks us to detach, to seek the wisdom in the feeling and then let it go, and Chang teaches how to do it, to live into and through our memory, history, attachments to find ourselves on the other side. In Crazy Brave, Harjo gives a profoundly compelling account of an artist who made a home of herself and her art. Amanda Johnston’s anthology of praise songs that literally radiates joy. It tells a story of Texas that lives within, outside, beyond, beneath and around the image of Texas and into what I feel whenever I visit. The love the people of Texas feel for their home and their communities is as big as the sky, and the poets, teachers, and activists there are fighting every day to see that someday policy will echo that love. Johnston, who is the Texas poet laureate and is a poet of ever-expanding generosity, is the founder and executive director of Torch Literary Arts, a literary organization that celebrates and amplifies that work of Black Women Writers. It is homemaking in its broadest and most courageous definition.

More Making

For the Nine of Wands card, I thought of doors as permeable barriers and homes as made first with the body. The landscape and the house become so intimate, it almost interweaves with us. To boldly defend a home is to call the self from within the house, the family, the body and into action. Below are layers and drafts as I played with this idea.

To come to the final image using goauche, pen and ink, pencil, and pastels:

Methods and Practice: Phone a Friend

As I worked this week, I tangled with doubt. It was our usual tussle. Perfectly ordinary. And as Marcus Aurelius says, “How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.” Doubt can sting though even without the surprise.

I have written here and elsewhere about my practice of regular (often daily) emails to friends with whatever I am working on. There is an image of the lone writer in a garette, but I live with a family in a community, and I love them and hate cold drafts, so the image never suited me very well. So I write most weekdays to fellow writer friend, Margaret Adams, who I love and whose work I love, to stave off loneliness and, on the some days, to show off a little.

We agree on many things, but this week when I said something disparaging about my work, and in a very New England/Boxer the Horse kind of way said, “I will just work harder.” Meg, who is brilliant, said, “I have such a strong rejection of this assessment…kindly, what? No.” It is important to have friends around to contradict the performance of toughness you are having in your head. And if I hadn’t already been writing to her, sharing basically everything I work on, and talking about the minutae of my days, I would have never been able to hear a loud NO to my self-doubt. It is okay if we can’t always do that for ourselves. That no of hers will echo for years through what doubt that has been and what will doubtlessly come.

*Please note that I will be taking a holiday break, so the next post will appear in on January 11, 2026. I hope all who are reading this (and all those that are not) have a safe and wonderful start to the new year. <3

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“Competition and struggle. The intensity in your life is palpable. Others are vying for what you want. Stay fierce, stay focused on your goal.” - Tillie Walden, The Cosmic Slumber Tarot

“A posse of youths are brandishing staves, as if in sport or strife. It is a card of mimic warfare. Divinatory meanings: Imitations, as, for example, shame fight, the strenuous competition and struggle of the search after riches and fortune. Hence some attributions say that it is a card of gold, gain, opulence.” - Rider Waite Smith Tarot

I got up early Saturday before last and pulled the Five of Wands:

It was my own fault. Though it was my husband’s turn to get up early with our daughter, instead of sleeping I stayed in bed scrolling Substack for updates on the Epstein files. This was in the few days before congress voted nearly unanimously to release them before the president signed the trasparency act into law. Now that it has happened, I wonder what I was looking for. This card, one the signifies distraction, the kind of chattering of diversions and conflicts that obfuscate the real issues, felt right and correct after what I had been feeding my mind.

It is vital that the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his entire network get justice and that those responsible for harm be held accountable. This is the most basic, decent position; it feels exhausting that it warrants saying aloud. And I am a woman in America in 2025, not hopeless but aware of what noise sounds like. I looked and looked amongst the news outlets and influencers and political pundits because I want to know what all this bluster will come to. I am impatient and perhaps naive in thinking that this will be some part of what undoes this administration. And in the meantime, the horrors persist. This administration is just a symptom, a part of one much larger mess that has its roots in our country’s long history of persisting horrors. Wands, torches, banners and flags are waved around, loudly clacking into each other, but change and accountability are slow to come. In the meantime, I want to keep my ear to what happens beneath, within, and beyond the reach of these very public rows.

So I read these:

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Thomas Merton’s When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature edited by Kathleen Deignan, Thief in the Interior by Phillip B. Williams, Maggot by Paul Muldoon, excerpts from What Work Is by Philip Levine, Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, and Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell

Much of my reading is filling in the blanks. Some of these texts are fundamental pieces of literature, cornerstones of the conversation humanity has been and is having. This appears to be a chaotic collection of voices, but really, I think of them as distinct presences in our culture that I have neglected to hear enough of. These authors are witnesses, archivists, keeners of the highest order. They order and reorder the way we think and feel about the time that is given to us. They are an anecdote to numbness and the speed of our lives that encourages it. I once heard Pulitzer Prize winning historian and graphic memoirist Tessa Hulls say that the reductive notion that history is written by the victors is bullshit and I tend to agree. History is written by those who write it. These authors are writing the subversive, public histories of both known and little known figures. That is the role of art and poetry.

For example in Thief in the Interior, I will never forget the way Williams’ poem “Witness,” employs a virtuosic set of tools and voices to eulogize Rashawn Brazell, a young man who was murdered in Brooklyn in 2005. In Williams’ poem, Brazell is deeply mourned by his mother Desire Brazell and the entirety of the borough, this young man whose case is yet to be solved, who is still awaiting justice. He was 19 years old. In Williams’ book, Brazell is remembered as a someone who wanted to go to college, who followed his mother’s footsteps in working with communities in need, who reconstructed clothes to build his own wardrobe, and who mentored younger students. Williams is masterful in his molding of word and memory to eulogize Brazell.

In reading Levine’s poems, I hear work that has always spoken on the side of the worker. Here I read the title poem “What Work Is” to an expanse of orange pine needles on a November afternoon:

While other’s may wave their sticks around, Levine writes of those waiting for work, for bread, for love, for Wagner. I am drawn to them, to us too for meaning and sustenance while current events clamor on.

Making

For the Five of Wands, I revised this initial draft of my poem entitled, “Utopia,”

Utopia


There are mornings when I wake up again
in history class. On the other side
of the room, the boys are having another debate
that is ended when one asks, what do they expect?
There’s no such thing as utopia. And they all
laugh with their visible milk teeth, the mouth-
full-of-blood laughs, at the comfort of giving up,
echoing centuries later Thomas Moore’s old 
assertions: cute, but no. Who is they?
They is legion, and I am on the other side
of the room, outside the circle, uninterested
in shouting again. At the time I asked myself, 
who else am I supposed to love? My suitors
settle an argument amongst themselves. 
One of them would become the wealthy father
of two daughters. Another would nearly take
my virginity. One would continue to be 
one of the stupidest people I had ever seen. 
Others would become powerful and forgettable. 
I am a poet now because I have always wanted
to be an unacknowledged legislator. I want
to bring my anonymous wares to the table
where no one can claim ownership, not even me,
and gather a quiet constituency like rain
in the morning after the death of someone truly 
beloved or in the midst of a love so fresh 
we’ve become foolish and ungovernable. 
I want to work at something to describe 
the cold water that filled my chest when I heard
them laughing with eyes pointed inward
at each other, to write something recognizable
to the human soul or that record whenever
the soul recognizes something. 

The ‘they’ in this poem could have been anyone. This conversation repeated itself over the course of my high school and college careers in many different classrooms. It is the indifference toward injustice that becomes painful and exhausting. It presents itself as reasonable, as inevitable. And it was amongst them that I lived, found my community and some of my earliest memories of both love and betrayal. They are as tightly woven as reeds in a basket. I too am implicated in this comfort. And that is where I landed to start this poem:

Utopia

Once in history class, the boys across the room had another 
debate that ended when one asked, What do they expect? There is no 
such thing as utopia. And they all laughed in the shadow of 
their milk teeth at the comfort of giving up.

In order to generate an image for this card, I put on my headphones and my big coat and wandered my yard for part of the afternoon. Sure, I listened to my Five of Wands Playlist, but mostly listened to Florence and the Machine’s Everybody Scream because that feels right this season. I walked around the condo complex picking up sticks from under different trees (one pine, one linden, one oak, one willow, and one apple), thanking each tree as I went. I had a bouquet by the time I was done.

To start drawing, I laid out some white paper and dropped the sticks on it. Once they were arranged in a way that felt balanced and clear, I nudged them all until they both overlaid one another and fit on to the paper, casting criss-crossing shadow and showing off their angles.

Then I drafted and layered my drawing of the sticks with disembodied hands using graphite, charcoal, pen and ink as well as a layer of gouache.

It has been years since I have drawn regularly and much longer than that since I have painted. There has been a period of rustiness, for sure. I may have to go back and redo some of my earlier cards for the sake of the collection. I am, however, feeling less rusty now. The images in my head are starting to match more closely to what I can produce. And what is even more exciting is that this is the phase where the materials start to have their say. The charcoal, which I had yet to use on one of these images, laid a thick, saturated black like that of a chalkboard. To link the image gently to the poem, I scratched across the blackness with the white chalk, overwriting it a little with lines that emphasize the directionless movement of the wands. It returns us to the classroom where these conversations occurred as precursers to what happens in boardrooms, courtrooms, and political offices and decisions are made with many voices absent.

Methods and Practice: Language or Living?

Not too long ago, I had a conversation with my workshop group about what starts a poem. Many have heard Vermont poet Ruth Stone’s account of a poem coming down the valley toward her like a train. I once heard Annie Finch talk about how she had to quiet her family to hear a poem coming to her from the grasses by a river. It is a normal thing for friends of mine to listen to each other tell stories and go, “Oh that’s a poem!”. And this interests me a great deal.

There are some poets who seem to derive their poems from a stitch of language. They will be climbing the stairs and a string of sounds lures them into the beginning of a poem. It’s to do with rhythm, repetition, diction and the augury of what we repeat to ourselves to reveal what is hidden. There is music and dream in it.

On the other hand, there are those of us who turn an eye to their lived experience in order to recognize the moments and stories that are living poems. There are some moments - obvious ones like deaths, births, weddings - where rituals and milestones create containers for meaning, prompts for reflection. It is the acknowledgement that here, on this day, everything changed. However, there are also poets who recognize that our lives are not always measured in milestones, but rather in minutes, and there are many minutes that constitute the makings of a poem. There are hours that possess a lyrical quality, where one may stand astonished at how things have changed or at things as they are, how that hour is a homunculus for one’s entire existence. This poem by Bianca Stone is one such startling example. A single minute or action is a synecdoche for a whole life.

This kind of attention has changed me completely. To live poetically means to live alive and noticing. I am always hungry for poems, so my eyes and ears, on my best days, are attuned for them, where they wait, alert and abundant the margins of a schedule. And what’s more: I continue to create the conditions that allow for that kind of persistent awareness. Less wine. More rain. The instigation for a poem is living and the language follows.

The above image appears in my book, Condition, forthcoming April 2026.

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The above comic appears in my first book, A Comic Year, from Finishing Line Press 2021

“Beauty and Lies. You are here for secrets. You are subversive and romantic, and few truly know your inner self. But they recognize the outside because you are made with style. Take the time to be more than beautiful and attempt to be vulnerable with those around you.” - Tillie Walden, The Cosmic Slumber Tarot

“Graceful, but not warlike; riding quietly, wearing a winged helmet, referring to the higher graces of the imagination which sometimes characterise this card. Divinatory Meanings: Arrival, approach—sometimes that of a messenger; advances, proposition, demeanor, invitation, incitement…” Rider Waite Smith Tarot

On Halloween night after two glasses of red blend, I pulled the Prince of Cups, which in Walden’s deck is equivalent to the Knight of Cups in the Rider Waite Smith deck:

A lot of the poetry I write is about women. I write about the lineage of women in my family, my mother, my daughter, my grandmother. I write about my friends and loved ones. Really, I write about the movement of the feminine in the world. But when I began this project, I wanted to answer the question: what I am not writing about? My writing life has centered around my obsessions, which are dominated by the feminine, which everyone (everyone) embodies in some amount. I think of the masculine and feminine as energies that anyone can in some measure embody in infinite combinations, strengths and strains, and gender is a creative act. My work is incomplete if it doesn’t take a balanced approach to exploring those energies. In an indirect way, I have neglected to think as carefully about the masculine. I have obsessed about specific men, those who have been my partners, lovers, crushes, paramores, and now my spouse, but I have spoken much less about what those men carry underneath the performance of their masculinity, both that which is genuine and that which they are pressured to perform in our culture. The contours of their humanity are admittedly less explored in my work.

This practice has quickly become a method for throwing myself in the way of beauty. I listen to music I might not otherwise, dig around in new sections of the library, become more alert to the weather and the condition of the trees to record my poetry videos, and now, I meditate on masculinity and vulnerability. The Knight of Cups is about hidden beauty and what we keep secret, the gentleness in the masculine or the strain of feminine that valences a man’s heart. One could certainly argue that we are living certain men’s stories continuously right now, and I hear that. But my education went somewhat like this - read dead men and then read living women. For this card, I had to stop and listen, not to those who are currently shouting, but those who are steadily speaking with compassion, honesty, and humility about what they know, feel, and have lost. So I read these books:

The Study of Human Life by Joshua Bennett, Bright Felon by Kazim Ali, The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere by Nicholas Triolo, Tiresias: the Collected Poems of Leland Hickman edited by Stephen Motika, The Book of Men by Dorianne Laux, 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman, & The Stranger by Albert Camus.

My reading yielded the two videos below. Just a warning about these videos: they are a little jumpy. I either didn’t have my tripod with me or the camera on my phone struggled to focus. If it bothers you, I encourage you to close your eyes to listen or focus on the steady text because both these poems are worth hearing.

I recorded Hickman’s “Virgo VIII” really early in this rotation because it hit me so hard. It was either coincidence or synchronicity, but here is what happened. I was reading in my classroom and, because Hickman’s poems are so big with these long, frenetic lines, the book itself is big with these wide white spaces. On page 31, I noticed the light dappling hard in the margins of my book. It was windy and all the maple leaves outside my classroom window were clapping about it, creating these shadows and flashes of light that cast on the page in front of me. I turned to page 32 where I found ‘Virgo VIII’ in Hickman’s previously unpublished Virgo series. In the poem, Hickman notes the chaotic dappling leaves in Ernest Sandeen’s ‘Day in June’, an account of Sandeen’s contemplation of how we perceive reality, and the ‘ever finer edge’ of understanding he hopes his children will achieve. This is an idea that seems to define his sense of fatherhood. In “Virgo VIII” Hickman conflates the leaves with his fellow passengers on the subway, a correspondence of breathings and excitations, alternately bright and shadowed.

So what happened was, I felt the light, then saw the leaves and the wind chattering through them and, yes, contemplated my place in the world, the luck at being under this light. Then I turned the page to find this poem, which is about exactly that. It is a poetic lineage of both observing leaves (think: Leaves of Grass) and of the impossible task of perceiving and communicating the nature of reality. It was a synchronicity that thrilled me. I didn’t plan on it, and it found me and made me feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

And then the weather changed. On Monday evening, Vermont got a surprise snowstorm that dumped inches of snow on Chittenden county. It took my husband and daughter over three hours to get home from school. Through the shared location feature on Google maps, I watched them circle within a mile of our house and then have to turn around as the traffic thickened, and people diverted others off the bridge into our side of town. I cycled through this watching and reheated bowls of soup for dinner, paced the kitchen. In my whole body, I felt the pull toward them, the longing and devotion that sits inside our love for each other as well as the proximity of grief. I hear this too in Joshua Bennett’s work, that huge, comprehensive, heart-outside-your-body kind of love, another vision of fatherhood. Above, I read from his “Dad Poem” series to the new snow that amazed and frightened me, made me desperate for my family’s return home. Bennett’s poems made me weep with recognition.

The above image appears in my book, Condition, forthcoming April 2026.

Making

For the Knight of Cups, I began here:

Swarm


In the strange suspended time after
my father’s mother passed away, 
the family circled a handful of boxes 
to sort through old photographs. 
A hand of black and wild pictures
revealed unknown relatives holding babies
while sitting on the wheel well of 
an old car or under apple trees. I remember most
a pictures of my father in the early 60’s,
a skinny version of my brother with the close
cropped hair of a child raised in the military
and large ears. In many pictures, he was with
his siblings, a younger sister Charlotte
and a baby sister, Teresa. What I loved about
these photographs is that while other children
look at the camera, my father as a little boy
is always looking at his baby sister,
holding her close in one photo or kneeling down
before her bassinet intent on her face. 
My father is a man of ambitious heart, 
trusting and earnest as Boxer of animal farm. 
Under a harsh and abusive pair of fathers, 
he grew into a man who my friend confessed
they were afraid of, that I was sometimes
afraid of. I am angry with America and men
for taking away his tenderness for so long. 
Sometimes it would return, briefly, when called
into service like when I sat in his lap to read
a book about field mice in the moonlight
as a rain of lilac petals fell in the yard, 
or once after our black lab thrust her face
into a bee’s nest and came away yelping,
a face already swelling with stings. 
The night after, my father, despite the many 
aches in his body from years of football, rugby, 
American boyhood, laid a futon mattress
on the floor before the dog bed and slept 
beside our dog so she wouldn’t be alone
in the night with her burn of her pain. 

The revision went on as the have so far, turning carefully over the contraints of the 16x16 shape. This time, however, based on a recommendation from my friend and fabulous poet, Eve Alexandra, referencing Terrance Hayes’ revision practice, I brought the poem to a place that felt finished. Then I wrote twenty more lines before cutting the poem back down again. I brought out ideas that I would have never found otherwise. It is easy to hide from myself while writing about family, particularly about my father. This practice reveals what would otherwise remained quiet or unspoken.

And I landed here to start:

Swarm

In a box Grandma kept in the back room where each night she folded 
herself like a sheaf of government papers, there was: a woman 
and baby on a Ford fender, girls in roadside apple boughs, her 
face nuzzled at her husband’s neck with a strange sweetness, and my dad, 
a lean five, holding his baby sister, eyes intent on her face. 

For the image, I rifled through Anne Newland’s Canadian Paintings and Drawings for inspiration and found both the work of Gathie Falk in her painting, Nice Table with Raspberries (100) and Betty Goodwin in her painting, Moving Towards Fire (120).

I drafted the image small and while I liked the composition, I wasn’t happy with the rendering. I am completely out of practice with the figure. I didn’t want the man to look so cartoonish. As a solution, I recruited Brandon to model for me and took pictures of him positioned on the floor of our basement. He was very good about it.

The image benefited a great deal from having better reference material. And what’s more is that I had to stare attentively at the body of my husband for a long time to create this image. I am historically bad at eye contact. On our first date, Brandon noticed and later told me that I wouldn’t look him in the eye. But it wasn’t my fault. I felt like I was looking at the sun or the glare of the future. Bright and nourishing and hot. It is vulnerable to give people the gaze I want to actually give them, a stare that drinks and drinks them in. So I often look away. But if I draw someone, Brandon for example, I look as long as I like. To draw someone is a form of attention which is a form of worship, seeing and rendering a person as they are versus how they appear.

Methods and Practice: Who am I talking to?

I come from a family of creative people. My mother and father are both craftspeople and artists with hundreds of photographs, drawings, paintings, woodworking pieces, sculptures and other art objects between them. My brother is hands down better at drawing than me. Because I had examples in my house, I had options when it came time to decide what my creative medium would be. I chose poetry. It felt like the same kind of choiceless choice that I had when I met and fell in love with Brandon or became a teacher. It was an extension of myself. But I did choose it. And I did so because poets were the people I wanted to talk to. To select a profession or recognize a vocation means selecting a community.

What’s more is that writing is a conversation. Whatever I have ever written about has been written about thousands of times over. Motherhood, heartbreak, trees in my neighborhood, have had their writers and will have many more. It could be a daunting idea. But if I think of Earth as a classroom where this conversation is happening, I can do what I try to do in any classroom: listen. In between what has been said is what is missing. In what has been said is what bears repeating. And in the emergent reality of this conversation, anyone can have a place. My work most recently has been to think critically about what my place is and who is around me. I am not a lone spear but a knot in a web, tugged endlessly by my connections and attachments. That is true of all of us.

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The above comic appears in my first book, A Comic Year, from Finishing Line Press 2021

“The Lovers card is here to tell you that there is a choice in front of you. Or perhaps within you. Do not be fooled in thinking that a choice is simply a road that diverges into two paths. Picture a winding staircase that goes on further than you can imagine…Dwelling within the Lovers, a guide can be found. It’s the part of you that has both grown up and stayed young. Let that guide sit with you in these decisions…Look upon your moral dilemmas as the person you want to be, for that is how you will become them.” - Tillie Walden, The Cosmic Slumber Tarot

“…thus begins the adventure, the high romance, the romance of seeking.” - Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Two week ago, I pulled the Lovers card and got to work.

The lovers card is one of decisions and relationships. Yes, it can mean choosing between two, but it can also mean choosing between many paths, people, promises, or continuing to choose what you have each day when you wake up, choosing what you have made rather than turning away or returning to old haunts or new diversions (incidentally, this is the best marriage advice I have ever heard). I listened to love songs as I contemplated this card and its implications. While the lovers card is not the only card of decisions, it is in the major arcana, which lends it a grounding force. Why did the tarot tradition choose to represent choice as a decision between two lovers with the forces of heaven and insight presiding?

Because to choose is to grieve. Choices can be simple, of course, but to choose between one thing you want and one thing you don’t want is less a choice and more a preference. It’s as common, daily, and almost effortless as coffee or tea. However, to choose between two paths that are equally compelling, two paths where love is present and where either has already begun to shape the map of the heart, means you must give up something. You can’t chase two rabbits at once. This is the kind of decision the card suggests. You also must step forward into the unknown of your decision, aware that you can’t go back. You are bound to grieve the path you didn’t choose and let it fall into disrepair. You give the forgotten path back to the wild. And what is more, when the choice appears impossible, you go on faith, the presiding light of insight or your old gods taking you almost by chance into an entirely different place.

Here is what I read this time:

Edward Hirsch 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, Oren Jay Soffer Your Heart Was Made for This, Kim Addonizio What is this Thing Called Love? & Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

Hirsch’s 100 Poems should be taught in history classes. It follows a timeline of human experience from the 17th century to now, 300 hundred years of a millenia that, as one of the anthologized poets Nicholas Christopher noted, “began with the crusades”. Hirsch has gathered many luminous examples of what poetry is uniquely able to do: give a beating heart to the reality of human grief. I remember the dates and places of the wars of our country, famine, disasters both international and domestic, but here we find the reverberation of those events on the scrim of the soul. Some books I want to read slowly, but I am glad I read this in a two week rush. It inhabited my days in a way that felt honest to the reality of history, the way that ancestors and everyone else inhabits our lives in subtle and enduring ways that we don’t always acknowledge but readily feel.

In honor of that, I read a poem that Hirsch included in this collection, Eavan Boland’s “Quarantine,” one of the finest, sparest love poems I have ever read, to the rain.

Making

This is where this card’s poem began:

Summertime


When we pulled away from the house and pointed the car north 
for a family wedding, our nice clothes, erratic with highway wind,
shook and shimmered in the back window. I snuck books 

in my backpack and promised to cheat on the moment with poems. 
I swore that I would leave my family at some random hour 
and let them wonder where I was while I closed the door 

and read, scribbled down whatever bores at my brain in the silence
between talking. But I never did. My daughter lost her water bottle
in the laundry room, a cheese plate needed arranging, my mother 

needed an eye on the arbor to make sure the sunflowers
were centered and my nana, needed to fed a wedge 
of chocolate cake and coffee. My nana, who has lost all 

but a few key phrases, God, yes. I love you. The kitchen, 
needed me to lift my daughter into her eye line 
so she could admire her. Poems are unnecessary. My living

becomes more necessary everyday, fastened into place
by chores and conversations, hugs that always feel like 
small farewells. I have lived into the middle ground,

years that teach you that your life doesn’t belong to you. 
It belongs to the cherry tomatoes so swollen with ripeness 
they threaten to waste themselves on the flagstones each morning. 

The poetry remembers where the self was as it softened 
at the edges like scraps of bread on the lake and dissolved. 
Phrases surface in the blur over the dishwasher: water smooth 

as a sheet of steel. It is easier to remember to feed her
than to hold her. Where have the loons of my childhood gone? 
The day is empty of their calling.

In order to revise I must remind myself that I am allowed to divorce the poem from its inciting narrative, to loosen it up so that it can tell whatever story it is trying to tell. Poems are not under the same obligation to be factual as other writing. I once heard Bianca Stone describe the thrill of changing the color of a car from its actual color to the color the poem needed (blue? green?). It is a thrill to recognize the way in which it serves the central gesture of the poem versus the tyranny of the story. There are parts of this poem that were altered in revision to be less real and more true.

This is a poem about the women in my family. Many of my poems are. They are the guiding relationships of my life, a matrilineal channel like a cave line. The lovers card is about choices and relationships and how these relationships and their obligations present me with daily, ordinary choices. It is how I wrestle with the choices that support them and my art and how I can choose both, my eye flickering between them and what I can make when I witness what lives between us all.

And this is where the poem’s landed this week:

Before the Family Wedding


the cheddar and berries need arranging. My mother needs an eye 
as she centers sunflowers on the arbor. Nana needs to be 
fed a wedge of chocolate cake and half cup of coffee. She 
has lost all but a few words, God, yes. I love you. The kitchen. 

The above image appears in my book, Condition, forthcoming April 2026.

For the image, I took inspiration from the color of Leonora Carrington’s card. I bought a tube of phthalo of green, prepared for the way the color dominates the field. According to Carrington, the color “marks this as the domain of the heart.”

I once got a past lives reading where the reader envisoned the structure of my lives as an apple tree laden and heavy with fruit. She said the branches were weighed down, each fruit a full life bowing toward the ground. Whatever this means, she did sense something I feel, which is to say densely populated. For the lovers card, I could have depicted two, but I instead, I drew many, the crowded, clouded reality of any decision, all below and above, burning in green.

Methods and Practice: Doomscrolling

Time became an important theme in the past two weeks. How much do we have and what do we do with it? I have watched myself forfeit much of it doomscrolling lately, in the unscratchable itch social media creates. To doomscroll is to grieve. What I learn when I do it leaves me grieving, to leave my consciousness for its amorphous digital frontier is a state of grief and longing, and I often do it when I am longing for my fellow creatures and I want to see how everyone is doing. Mostly I see strangers when I do this. The strangers are often scared or angry, which is how the algorithm is designed because fear is faster than love (it had to be) and capitalism demands a punishing pace. But when I doomscroll I know where they are. Or where they were. The faces are alive and often their children or their dogs. Even their jumping spiders. Sometimes they are not alive and I am there alone in the dark in deep mourning. There is a long and constant keen in my heart fueled by it.

Doomscrolling has carved into me. I have been hollowed out by it in a similar way that heartbreak has carved and scoured. I learned how much time I have and how capacious it is. The hour I spent doomscrolling while my family is asleep is the same amount of time as the hour I might spending peeling and chopping sweet potatoes in a way that notices their strange lightness, the way they can snap apart, the dawn color inside their earthy jackets or boiling water and breathing. In Hirsch’s collection, he notes that poet, “[Afaa Michael] Weaver has spoken of ‘interiority’ as ‘a very solid tool of resistance against working class oppression.’” (100 Poems, 458) What does doomscrolling do to the interior besides revealing its infinite size? To reclaim that territory, to witness what the attention economy is doing to it, preserves it as an unclaimable place.

And yes, I could be and have been ashamed at the way the attention economy has sucked me in and held me in its thrall. I am supposed to be smarter. But I am not. I lurk on social media without posting and absorb. My work now is to recognize the space that has been shouldered out by it and see what else I can put there. I don’t have to fill it with work. I also don’t have to give my eyes and my blood pressure to the heartless tech gods. I can fill it with simple things like night and breath, the comforting act of rubbing my feet together under the blankets and resting my hand on my love’s sleeping shoulder. And when I do give myself away to it all, briefly or not, I can see and listen to the people I see there and remind myself of their flesh and blood and think, hello, family. We are all connected. Everything I see is of me and I am of them. Separateness is an illusion. The doomscroll is a sea of us where sometimes I swim.

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